Arcadia (13 page)

So why should Aunt and Em not count themselves as blessed in having Victor? Why should they not take care to put him to good use, and love him still, and love him all the more? They liked the
independence that he gave. They did not know – he did not know – that they had robbed him of his liberty, that their ribcages were for him two sets of prison bars, their arms his
warders, their breasts his sedatives.

They went about their business, dawn till dusk, and ploughed a life. Quite soon – within a year and a half, when Victor was three, with teeth – they had harvested enough to move
downstairs, below the attic rooms where the changing cast of Princesses had made the sisters ill at ease. They rented one small room in a crowded family apartment. It was their own. There was a tap
and a small coal stove that they could use in the raised courtyard at the back. There was a communal but a proper toilet too, in an outhouse. The sisters took their turn in emptying the
‘honey can’ when it was full. Was this the ‘citizenry ’ that they sought? There was no time to ask. There was no time to sit like sisters, face to face, and knit a
conversation from the warming wool of gossip, hope, and love. Em had to be at work before the traders took their breakfasts in the bars. Aunt had to be at work until the restaurants had closed and
all the rich and drunk had gone back home. So Victor grew weaker, older, a city child whose landscape was all ribs and cloth and honeyed, female flesh. The stones and mayhem of the street were ever
at his back, a hidden world imagined only from its hums and dins and choruses.

What does a small boy know, a child that – by this time – is barely four? A toddler who has yet to crawl? A little smothered lad? A boy who is trained to do nothing but drape and
nuzzle like a bean-sized joey in its mother’s pouch? How could young Victor tell that this routine of facing flesh all day was not normality? He was no revolutionary in bud, no mystic with a
notion of a patterned world. He was just worm – a mouth, an arse, a readiness to bend. He sought the softest earth, the warmest way, the stone that had no jags, the twilight safety of the
breast. He had no choice. They’d got him trained, just like a dog. He knew that if his head went up and turned towards the lights, a hand much stronger than his head would push him back. He
knew that if he spat the nipple from his mouth and raised his chin to cry he would not get what he was crying for, unless he wanted pinches on his legs or Aunt to hold his nose.

He had no general sense of smell. The cloying odours of the honey and the herby alkalescence of the breast blanked out the city smells, the horses and the fruit, the men with pipes, the scent,
the woodsmoke, the urine, and the puddled rain. His eyes were clinkered with the grit of too much sleep. The underlids were sore from lack of air and exercise. They did not focus well in light
– and streamed at night when he was fed with solids in the oval, orange thrall of candlelight. His legs and arms had not grown strong. They’d had no chance to punch and kick the air.
His hands were good for nothing needing pull or grip. He lived for sound alone. His mouth was sealed – but his ears were free and open to the world. He knew the market cries, the trundle of a
porter’s cart, the curses of the men weighed down by baskets of crops, the whistles of a happy man. He knew the tucks and folds of Em’s sweet murmurs from the challenge and the
bounciness of Aunt’s street voice. He knew them, but could not clothe them with a shape or form. They were just sounds to him. Sound is air made tangible. No one flourishes on air alone.

As he got older, heavier, so Em and Aunt got tired of harvesting the streets. It was less fun, living in their shrunken home, away from all the toughness and the jollity of the Princesses above.
The sisters got on well enough because they hardly met, because they hardly talked. And just as well. If they had met and talked more frequently they would have found what many siblings find when
they have fled the nest, that sharing parents is no guarantee that temperaments are also shared. The only thing they did as family was sleep together, sharing mats, with Victor in between. Their
bodies were the rails of Victor’s cot.

Aunt took the boy onto the streets with less enthusiasm as he grew older, as he passed four. He weighed too much. His body was too long; when he was ‘feeding’ his feet found
footholds on her knees. It made no sense to carry him, but Aunt was not prepared to sit with Victor on her lap all day, a fixture on some restaurant steps or at the entrance to a bar, waiting for
the harvest to make its way to her. She was the sort who liked to move about, to have a stage, to work (she said) ‘my mouth and not my bum’. She tried to keep him entertained, yet keep
him also blind and nuzzling at her chest. She had not learnt the sentimental skills of entertaining kids. They liked crude noises, little nonsense rhymes, and songs with simple choruses. What kind
of child would understand or like Aunt’s running commentary on the world, the adult jokes, the cynicism of her words as she earned money on the streets?

‘This one’s a soft touch,’ she would say, as she – with Victor held aloft – approached a woman sitting, waiting, at a table in the garden of a tea salon.
‘Look at that coat! She’s good for a fifty at the very least.’ And then, ‘A twenty! God, she’s tight. Look at her little walk. You’d think her bum was made of
tin. Her boyfriend’s out of luck tonight for sure …’

Or else, ‘Hey! This fellow’s giving me the eye. Suck, Victor, suck. It turns ’em on. Hold tight. I’ll give my hat a little twirl. And show my teeth … Aha!
He’s got his rhubarb up. What did I say? Two fifties and a wink. I bet his wife don’t know he’s got “expenses” in the town like me. She’d have a fit if she could
see her little chap’s so loose with cash.’ Or else, ‘Oh dearie dear, here’s a fellow looks as if he’s wee’d on nettles and doesn’t like the potpourri. His
lady’s stood him up, I bet, or else his boss has stood him down. “Hey, mister! Put some silver on the baby’s eye. Whatever’s wrong will turn out right!” Well, well,
we’re not surprised. He’d rather that we went away. It would appear he does not wish to give to charities like us.’ Or (Aunt’s step and manner quickened as she saw men
outside a bar), ‘Smiles on parade. This lot are drunk enough to spit cash in my hat!’

The truth is, Victor grew to like his aunt’s brash tones, despite his inability to understand the words. He liked the way she walked the streets and joined in badinage and arguments and
helped herself – and him – to uneaten titbits from restaurants. He began to lift his head more often now or find a sideways view onto the world of streets and bars. Aunt did not care
enough to push him back to feed. She’d tired of having sticky honey on her blouse, of having this stretched infant invade her clothes. Life was more comic and more profitable if she just put
him down inside a restaurant gate and let him topple under waiters’ feet while she did routines with her tongue and hat. Here was an education of a kind. He learnt about the legs of chairs,
and shoes. And once – the final straw – he learnt that tablecloths could move, if tugged. He learnt, too, what fun it was to have a bowl of lukewarm noodles smash onto the floor.
He’d never had a toy so wonderful as noodles and the broken bowl. The mistress of the restaurant, of course, was not charmed by Victor’s play, or by the mess of tablecloth and food.
‘I do not care to see you back in here,’ she told Aunt, as Victor draped the noodles round his fingers. ‘Not unless you’re eating à la carte. Get off our premises.
Remove yourselves. Go back into the haystack where you belong. No beggars here. Understand? If you don’t want to eat, stay on the street.’

She took Aunt by the arm and pushed her towards the doorway.

‘And don’t forget the kid,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t have a kid. It’s not his fault. Look at the state of him! What kind of person lets their little boy crawl
on the floor like that? You shouldn’t even have a kid if you can’t live respectably …’

‘All right,’ said Aunt, to stifled laughter from the clientele, as Victor stretched the noodles in his hands, as Victor squashed the noodles on his legs. ‘No need to work up
blisters on your lips.’

‘That could have been a bowl of soup,’ Em said, when Aunt recalled their escapades that night. ‘You could have scalded him!’ The time had come, it seemed to Aunt, when
her sister was a hindrance in her life. Victor, too. He had lost her more than she could earn if she were on her own. At four, at almost five, the boy was far too big for comfort. More frequently
she failed to turn up at the marketplace to take the child off Em. Or else she said, ‘Why don’t you keep the kid and stay here longer? You’ll get more. You’re his proper
mum, and people aren’t fooled by me. Not any more.’

So Victor lost the chance he’d had with Aunt to lift his head more frequently, to glimpse the world with one eye shut, to study feet and floors. He was back, full time, where he belonged,
an outsized infant on his mother’s breast. He was confined again.

A
ND WHAT OF
E
M
? How did she feel? How did she fill her time? She thought of nothing else but getting home, though
home
was not the five-by-five she shared with Aunt, but the sagging country cottage with a yard and thatch and pigs where she herself was raised, or the saddlemaker’s rented workshop where she had
snubbed her husband’s candle out. Just as Victor came to live on fictions of the countryside, so Em looked back upon the village she had known. She made a tinselled paradise of it. It was the
marketplace transformed, the ranks of vegetables, the fruit, strewn loosely in arcadia. It was a world where everything was ripe and colourful and sweet and free. It was a buffed and shiny version
of the village she had known before her husband had – both country phrases –
earth as eyelids
, and his
eternal freehold on a narrow strip of land
.

How wonderful the city had once seemed, how promising. But now she felt that she had reached her highest rung and that her city life was in descent. How long would it be before she was as
blunted by the foraging for food and cash as those other mothers she had met? The ones who hired their children out. For what? They dared not ask. The ones who used creams and grease and face
ointments to make their kids seem daft or ill or menacing. The ones who kept their ageing babies on the breast by stunning them with pods of opium or mandrax tea.

A country beggar such as her must have good looks or youth or, at least, a helpless infant to hook the passers-by. She’d lost her looks. Her hair was now as lifeless as the leaf tuft on a
pulled beetroot. Her clothes sat on her like a saddle on a goat’s back. Em was so thin – said Aunt, who had a phrase for everything – that her belly-button and her backbone
kissed, and squeaked. She’d lost her youth, as well. Five years and more of city life could take the paint off carriages or stunt a country oak, make flowers grey, drain country faces of
their rosy brightness and etch in lines as ploughs put furrows in a field. She’d still got Victor. What use would he be when he grew? He was only helpless now because she and beggaring had
kept him so. How long before he turned his back on her and said, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ve spent too long already in your lap. I’m going to open my eyes and stretch my legs and
see this city for myself.’

Small children ran past Em when she was begging in her usual spot, children who were younger than Victor but already had loud voices and strong legs and who were never still. Yet Victor, as he
aged, moved with less frequency, not more. He was inert, as if these years of falsifying on his mother’s breast had robbed him of pluck.

Em knew that you could train or trick a chicken to lay down dead, as motionless as stone. She’d seen it done when she was young. It was a common village trick. You pushed the chicken to
the ground. You held its wings. You pressed its beak into the dust, and drew a hard and short and rapid line in coal, or chalk, or channelled in the soil, out from its beak end. The hen was
hypnotized. It was geometrically transfixed. It could not lift its beak clear of the line. You had to rap the chicken’s beak to make it stand again and take part in the world. They said that
without this liberating rap upon its beak the chicken would just fade away, pressed to the dust by weights that could not be seen or touched. What should Em do to lift the weights from
Victor’s head? She feared that he would fade away as well, made weak and thin by too much breast and too much mother’s lap, his rigid, geometric life. Her only remedy – given that
to stay in town meant begging could not end – was to retrace the journey out of town. To walk back down the boulevards until the tram tracks reached the turning gear, and metalled roads grew
narrower and rutted, and drains were ditches, and gas streetlamps no longer held their sway amongst the stars or repelled the flimsy light of dawn.

‘The first thing you’ll see beyond the blue of manac beans,’ she told her son, her palm outstretched, his hands both tucked and curled beneath her shawl, ‘is how our
village seems to have a mind that’s all its own. The river there, it doesn’t run fast and straight, not like the drains and culverts of the city do. The river takes its time. It’s
like a snoozer snake. That’s the slowest snake there is. It coils between the fields so slowly that you never see it move. Or else it moves, but only when our backs are turned, at night
perhaps, on days when it is raining pips and pods and we are kept indoors. Except your father never stayed indoors. He used to love the rain and stand in it. To get the smell of leather out, he
said. He’d wash the leather and the tannin out of him with rain, and let it run off down the gutters of the lane into the snoozer snake, then downriver till the smell and dye on him was swept
right out to sea. That’s what he said, “Right out to sea,” though we were nowhere near the sea. I loved it when your father spoke like that. It made the sea seem ours. It smelt
like the saddles that your father made.’

Em told Victor what fun they had – would have – in fields, at harvest time, with all the fattest rabbits, the lizards, and the snakes trapped in the last stands of the corn, how
captured rabbits could be skinned and salted for the pot, how lizards could be raced or made to shed their tails, how harmless snakes could cause distress when dropped in people’s laps or
hidden in a grandma’s drawer. She told him how the packers used to – for a laugh – put a snoozer in the top of apple barrels and send them both to market. ‘To this Soap
Market here maybe,’ she said. They’d laugh themselves as wet as cress at what the market men would do when they dipped in their hands to pull out pippins and reinettes and found the
fleshy, yellow fruit of snake.