Arcadia (14 page)

She told Victor, too, some other time when he demanded ‘Village Talk’, how he had come about.

‘We thought you up,’ she said, ‘one Sunday afternoon.’

It was September and the mushrooms on the beech cobs were getting high and tasty. ‘Your Dad and me went out to fill a basket. And then – we’d only been married for two months
– we had, you wouldn’t understand, a kiss and cuddle there and then. It had to be that time because I know that when we took the mushrooms back we found a birth-bug in amongst them.
That’s a sign, for sure, that you’ll get fat with child. Your Dad hung a key on a string above my tummy. It swung clockwise, that’s how we knew you were a boy. Anticlockwise is
for girls. We picked on Victor as your name straight away. You never were an
it
to us; you were always a
he
. You always had a name. Though your grandad on your father’s side
– he thought he knew a thing or two. He said it had to be a girl, anticlockwise was for boys, we were muddled up. He got a pair of scissors and a knife. He hid them underneath two bits of
cloth on two kitchen stools. He put the stools side by side right in the middle of the scullery. He called me in. He said sit down. Your dad was there. Your aunt was? … no, she’d left
already for the maiding job in town. Your grandfather said, “Select a stool, the one that seems the best for you, the one that’s calling you by name. Go on, sit down.” I sat down
on the scissor stool. “That settles it,” he said. “The baby’s going to be a girl. The knife’s a boy. The scissors are for girls.” They neither of them got to see
you born. Both dead. His father first, then yours. When you were born I saw the key was wiser than the stool. I dreamt one night your grandad came back from the dead to see the baby girl. He got a
shock. He saw your little dinkle there. I said, “What kind of clockwise girl is that, she’s got a knot between her legs?” I gave your thing a little push. “What’s that
then, Pa?” “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and then, “I wouldn’t want it on my eyelid as a wart.” ’

She told these stories to her son. He took them in, eyes shut, laid out across her lap. He did not understand the half of what she said, a quarter of the words. What could it mean, the key was
wiser than the stool? That knives are boys and scissors girls? And rain was pips and pods? And sea was saddle? A normal child of four or five would think it all a strange and – finally
– a tiresome game, to bend words in a way that was confusing and not funny. Kids of that age would know the shorthand of the street, the beg and tell of play, the arrow accuracy of simple
words. They’d know how smell and shape and distance made sense of sound, how words were rounded, focused tools which served the moment, did the job, and left no waste. But as we know, Victor
was no normal child. For him the words his mother spoke were two-dimensional, a sheet of sound, a shallow wash of stories from his mother’s village and the past. He had no role to play except
to keep his head and body still, and listen hard.

He did not know – despite his age – the trick of speaking sentences or how to make his mark with words. He had not learnt to shout, or tease, or burble rhythmic nonsenses like other
children do. On those few times – at night or when his aunt was minding him – when he was spoken to by strangers or Princesses or by the family from whom they hired their room, he could
not form replies. He could not speak. He was in that respect, and others, too, a baby still. He was comforted by breast. He did not have the skill to feed himself. His bladder and his bowels had
open gates. Anything he chanced upon – an apple core, a pin, a cockroach case – he tested with his mouth. He was not happy on his feet. He never ran. He could not dress himself or tie
the laces on his shoes. You would not guess he had a temper, or that he wanted anything beyond the milk, the honey, and the whispers that seemed to keep him calm.

In one respect, Victor, in those years before our city was hustled like so many others into war and weaponry, was more adult than his years. He had, at least, a muscular and exercised
imagination; that is to say the tales his mother told confused him, yes, but still they entered him and filled his mind as music enters infants far too young to grasp its geometric principles, its
hieroglyphs, its rhythmic cunning. So when Em retold Victor for the third?, the thirteenth? time how he had come about – ‘we thought you up amongst the mushrooms’ – he
formed a picture in his head concocted from the wooden tubs of mushrooms which he knew in the marketplace and the single mushrooms which dropped and rolled from time to time within Em’s reach
at her station on the approaches to the Soap Garden. He saw himself a pink but ragged mushroom, odorous, peaty, one day old. The basket was his crib. It was a frozen fairy tale for him, an
illustration from a children’s book. The tighter that he pressed his eyes together the clearer the image was; the larger and the pinker the mushroom; the rounder, the smoother, the waxier the
forests and the fields which were the backdrops to his ‘thinking up’. The world of passersby, of market porters, trundling barrowloads of cauliflowers, fruit, which Victor saw when his
mother did not talk and he was tempted to turn his head and lift his lids a little, was chaotic and without pattern when compared to that village world he structured from his mother’s
words.

The irony was this, the richness of his life was richness second-hand. His mother’s childhood and her adolescence in the village landscape was made shiny and intense by distance and by
time. It was Victor’s milk and honey now. He fed on it. It kept him quiet and still and satisfied. He was a country boy. The city was the dream. He opened half an eye to fall asleep. He woke
to find the nightmares crowding in. He dozed, caressed by Em’s refurbished better times, and by higher skies and fresher winds and more magical conjunctions than any city could provide.
Imagine what an inner world – bright and sanitized – a boy would make of all this country talk, curled up as warmly and as darkly as a sparrow in a wolf’s mouth. It would be
nowadays, what? a theme park marketed as Rural Bliss? The film-set for a country musical? The sort of hayseed Kansas encountered on the road to Oz?

How could a child not be charmed by rural nights when skies were punctured by white stars, and dreams disturbed by falling fruit in orchards where the plums and pears and oranges grew side by
side in such harmony that it would seem they shared the branches of one tree? How could he resist the baffling cussedness of grandpa’s anticlockwise cottage door?: Put the key upside down
into the backward lock. Turn it the wrong way. And lift! What boy would not desire a village party feast, with a table placed outdoors, or set his heart upon a birthday chair decked and garnished
in the finest greenery to be his country throne?

‘I promise you,’ Em told her son, ‘that when the warmer weather comes we’ll put our things into a bag and walk back home.’ She rolled the candle stub across his
cheek. ‘We’ll put a light to this. We’ll lie awake at night and listen to the apples drop. When you are six you’ll have a leafy birthday chair.’ She meant it, too
– though it was clear that Victor was not strong enough to walk much further than the market rim.

She could not carry him. He was too big and badly ballasted. But she was clear what they would do. At night the marketeers left wooden trolleys parked in the cobbled alleyways between the
dormant trading mats and baskets. She’d help herself to one. The market owed her that. She knew which one to take. A trader who was kind to her and gave her fruit and greens when they were
cheap possessed a painted cart which was not unlike a child’s perambulator. It had solid rubber tyres and, when he pushed it, it seemed quite light and manoeuvrable.

‘That’s your carriage passing by,’ she’d tell her son. ‘It’s full of winter melons now – but soon you’ll be travelling in it like a little
king.’ Em smiled as sweetly as she could at her innocent benefactor and the means of her escape. It was not theft to take this cart from such a kindly man. She’d cushion it for Victor
with all their clothes and they’d set off at night. She was not the sentimental sort, nor given to ungrounded optimism, yet at those moments when her mood was grey or stormy she could calm
herself with just the thought of Victor in the cart at that point where the trams and city stopped and turned, and where blue fields began.

I
T WAS AT DAWN
, in fact, in May, when Victor was a month short of his sixth birthday, that Em at last gained freedom from the town. More freedom than
she’d bargained for. She was asleep, and warm enough to have pushed her blanket back and stretched her naked arms beyond the pillow and her head. Her forehead was red and wet with
perspiration. Her nose was blocked and whistling when she breathed. She had not been well. A cough had kept her sitting up until the early hours. The floorboards and the blankets puffed stale air
and dust. The room was heavy with the smell of damp clothes and candle smoke and sleep. If she awoke she’d find her head was aching, a ring of pain which was most fierce and unforgiving
behind her eyes and in the shallow dell between the tendons of her neck.

Victor had slept, of course. Or lain still, at least, throughout the night. But when the morning light started to infiltrate the room’s single whitewashed window glass, he sat up and
crawled across the floorboards to the pot. He straddled it on hands and knees and spread his legs. He pissed like donkeys piss but with less steam. He had a donkey’s aim as well, and wet the
floor a little. He watched his urine sink into the wood and make dramatic grains in what had been a grey and lifeless board. He called for Em to wake and see the patterns that he made. When she did
not wake he kicked the pot – in irritation – with his heel, so that the triple waters of the night were spilled.

It was in part an accident, but one which suited him. He knelt and rocked upon his hands to watch the family waters as they sought the cracks and contours. The stewed-apple smell of urine. The
apple yellow-green of bladder juice. He let the fluid swell and flow and soak. He let it coil and curl round knots of wood. The snoozer snake again. He watched the stream gain power on the floor
until it reached the impasse of a raised timber. It formed a pool; it leaned and strained and then set off at a new angle. It had almost reached Aunt’s shoulder when Victor pulled her arm to
wake her up. He called, ‘Water down!’ His words made Aunt sit up in alarm and look around, expecting ceiling leaks or Judgement Day. Em was too tired to wake for leaks or Judgement Day.
The best that Aunt and Victor could do was watch the urine seep away, as Em slept on and coughed.

‘We’d better wash it down,’ Aunt said at last. ‘Get the water can.’ She dressed him in a pair of knee-length trousers and a jacket, no underclothes, no shoes, and
put on her own coat and hat above her nightcloth.

‘We’ll see if we can earn ourselves a nice fresh loaf, as well,’ she said.

Together they went down the stairs, Aunt first, then Victor, bumping on his bottom down each step. They left the water can beside the tap in the yard and went outside. They walked along the
central street, nipped narrow by the district’s pair of wooden gates, into a squint too rough and angular for carts or crowds. There was a bakery two streets away. The first loaves of the day
were cooling in their tins. The men who sold them on the city streets from shallow raffia trays were gathering to load their merchandise and check that all the bread they took was free of
pockmarks, burns, and splits. The loaves with blemishes would not be sold and so the traymen made the baker take them back into his shop. There’d be disputes. And sometimes, when a loaf was
badly deformed or split enough to earn the name of Devil’s Hoof, the baker would toss it to the pigeons or to the early vagrants waiting there. Most mornings all they had to breakfast on was
smell, though even the odours of a fresh, warm loaf are more filling than the scents of other streets where there are riches but no food. As luck would have it that day, the ovens had not let the
baker down. His yeast had risen evenly. His dough had not bubbled into caves, or cloven like a devil’s hoof, or browned in patches. It all looked good and saleable and – with flour
priced the way it was – expensive, too.

Aunt would not carry Victor, though he lobbied her for a piggyback. She made him walk, but let him hang onto her arm or hold her hand. He seemed unnerved to be out on the street and not pressed
closely to his mother. He was free – if he wanted – to do what any other boy would do, that is to run ahead into the smell of bread which beckoned them. They moved through the almost
empty, almost daytime streets, between two smells. The smell of loaves. And, now, behind them, out of sight, the smell of burning wood.

Which Princess knocked the candle over, or struck the careless match, it is hard to say. The girls themselves all blamed it on the one they liked the least, or else said arsonists (in the
landlord’s pay) or some spurned man or neighbours with a grudge had set the attic room alight. Who said that candlelight was luck?

Why there should be matches, candles, arsonists in the apex of that building at dawn no one could readily explain. But what was sure was that there was fire and smoke. By the time the first
Princess had woken, the flames had found a carriageway of draughts and were unrolling like a lizard’s tongue across the room. Less surreptitious, simpler flames climbed walls and snapped
their lips at curtains and at paint. The smoke at first was almost white and then, when the fire had reached the Princesses’ mattresses and their clothes and had brewed sufficient heat to
peel the blackened paint off window ledges, the smoke became heavier and darker. It was laden with the ash and dust which had been buoyed and agitated by the flames. Its colour now was blacker than
the worst burnt loaf. It smelt and tasted like a new-shod horse.

The Princesses, when they woke – or were woken with a shake – did not stop to check the cause of the fire. Already they could hardly breathe, and one or two, the screamers there, had
singed their throats. They ran, not for water to put out the fire, but for fresh air and safety in the street. The stairs were narrow. There were falls, and breakages. A young girl broke her
begging wrist (and made a fortune out of that for the nineteen months she kept the bandage and the splint in place). Another broke her neck, and almost died before she reached the bottom step. But
not one Princess was licked by too much flame. Nor did any one of them get left behind, curled up in blankets, to suffocate in the airless caverns hollowed by the heat. They banged on doors as they
went down into the lower levels of the building. They raised their neighbours out of bed, but no one took it on themselves to check in every room that there was not a pet cat or a sleeping child
that should be saved. They simply passed the message on, and messages are bound to end when they reach deaf or hidden ears. Once the refugees had reached the street, and looked around to check the
faces there and comfort those who were blackened or distressed, no one noticed Em was not amongst the crowd. In fact, some swore they saw her standing there, with Aunt and Victor, breakfasting on
bread.