Arcadia (2 page)

You note he did not choose to take a car. There was a man on duty at the doors who would have been glad to summon one, a taxi or a chauffeured company Panache. Rook was valued there as much as
Victor’s perch – if not a little more – and he was not expected to take his chances on the street. But he preferred to walk. And who would know? Five minutes and he would be
amongst the crowds, indistinguishable from all those other duplicates in office wear on worktime errands in the city. What could be sweeter than to pass unrecognized amongst familiar strangers, or
to proffer half a nod, a shadow smile, to passers-by whose faces rang a bell? What democracy! – to dodge and jostle, tadpoles in the stream. But first he had to walk the hot and empty
cloisters of the mall where the noise of distant traffic was waylaid by architectural water. It fell and fountained, day and night, with a rhythmic certainty no mountain stream could match. Rook
did not pause, despite the heat and solitude, to sit beneath the award-winning lamp posts on the mall, or to play elaborate hopscotch on the coloured marble flagstones.

He chose a route which freed him from the shadows. He fixed his eye ahead, upon the skyline, where the unaspiring towers of the ancient town competed for light and oxygen with the mantis cranes
of building sites and the skeletal scaffolding of half-completed office blocks, draped for modesty in flapping plastic skirts. Rook said he loved to see the cranes perched overhead. He loved it
best, at Summerfest, when all the cranes were hung with streamers and with lights and there were fireworks. Then, for once, the streets were duller, darker than the night sky. He liked his city
noisy, teeming, dressed in black. He saw himself as lean and black, a cliché creature of the night. Indeed, that’s partly why our Rook was known as Rook: the black clothes that he wore
when he was young and on the streets. The rook-like nasal cawing of his laugh, too, his love of crowds, his foraging, his criminality. But more than that: the puff-chested, light-limbed posture of
a bird.

They said he’d made his money out of Victor – that Victor, childless, heirless, treated Rook like a son and settled money on him in lieu of love. A cheque was Victor’s version
of a kiss. ‘Money is the best embrace,’ he said. But there the gossip amongst the secretaries and clerks was way off mark. Victor – for all his years and for all his understanding
of the blandishments of money, of how people could be purchased and caressed by cash – paid Rook a salary, no more. And Rook was wise enough to keep his office fingers clean. He knew how
frayed and slender was the leash which tied him to the old man’s purse, and, indeed, how loosely that leash was now held, how easily his boss could let the leash go free. For two men who
spent so much time together, they shared few sentiments or loyalties. Rook’s cheerfulness should not be taken as fondness for his boss or work, but more as his device for filling in the
silences which were the heavy furniture of their daily intercourse. Victor did not appreciate Rook’s special knack of levity, his disregard of silence, his subversion of proprieties, his
aggravating idleness. Victor’s simple creed was this: until a man agrees to dedicate himself to work, then he will not be rich, or valuable, or admirable, or – best of all – at
peace.

Yet Rook was rich, there is no doubt. A poorer man would not pass up the offer of a limousine. It takes a man who’s certain of his wealth to choose to walk when he could ride. It also
takes a man who’s used to streets, whose heels have eyes, to know when he is being followed and by whom. As those dismissive, automatic doors rotated Rook into the unconditioned air, a
fellow, hardly in his twenties, with a cream and crumpled summer suit, detached himself from the hard shadows amongst the quirks of a colonnade and followed him onto the mall, keeping, catlike, to
the sunless walls. He sauntered like a truant, faking interest in the fountains, the street lights, avoiding joins and fissures in the coloured marble flagstones. Here is, his manner meant to say,
an innocent abroad. It said, instead, here is a ne’er-do-well at large. Stay clear. Watch out. Protect your pockets when you walk.

Rook’s ne’er-do-well was fresh in town. His nails were cracked like slate. His hands and neck were scorched. His eyes were streaming from the windborne grit and dust which pecked and
spiralled at his face. He hadn’t learnt the city trick of squinting as he walked. He was jubilant at being there and far from home, and lost, and poor, and free. He had in his pocket an old
flick-knife that’s spring was slow and temperamental. No cash. Sometime, on Victor’s birthday, he’d come face to face with Rook. Who’d come off worse? He was an optimist,
though in the end, of course – unless there was murder on his mind – a boy like him was bound to come off worse. At best, there would be poverty ahead, and drink, and crime, and selling
sex and favours in the street. At least while he was young. And then just poverty and drink.

If we were looking for two poles-apart to represent good fortune and bad luck we could not better these two men, the fixer and his shadow, as they ducked into the walkers’ tunnel and
passed below Link Highway Red which separated the old town from the landscaped decks and platforms of the new. It was a tunnel built for beatings or for rape or for the urgent emptying of bladders
or as a refuge from the rain and night for people without roofs. Pillars provided dark recesses for loiterers. Its low lighting winked and buzzed, failed at intervals or flared like photographic
bulbs. The paper litter scooped and fluttered like a pigeon, trapped and fretful. The smell was urine mixed with street.

Rook thought his shadow might close the gap between them underground and there would be a tussle for his wallet, or he’d be cornered for ‘a loan’. He walked a little faster
then, and breathlessly. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, so that any punches thrown by him would be hard and heavy. He was glad to see the daylight spilling down the steps at the far end of
the tunnel and to hear the pavement clack of women’s heels, the vendor bells, the shop-front tannoys touting bargains for the town, the doors and horns and brakes of cars.

Q
UITE SOON
he was a different Rook, not yet the firebrand that he’d been when young, not quite the wagging spaniel of the office block, but
someone more relaxed than both. His pace had slowed. He strolled. His tie was loose. His shoulders dropped. His birdlike chest no longer heaved for air. There was no tension here, in public space,
except the amiable and congested tension of the streets which kept the traffic and pedestrians apart, which made atonal harmonies with honking motor horns for brass, and news-stand yodellers as
vocalists, and percussion from the beat of leather shoes on stone. Now Rook’s main quests upon this street of salons, boutiques, and restaurants, were oddballs, cronies, pretty girls, anyone
to stare at, or anything to buy. He was on the lookout, yes, but not for thieves and trouble any more, not for the fellow in the cream and crumpled suit. Rook no longer gripped his keys. Somewhere
between the new town and the old his ne’er-do-well had disappeared, swallowed raw by the pavement multitude.

Untutored in the waltz, the simple quick-quick-slow of passing through a crowd, Rook’s country shadow had been blocked by waiting cars and errand bikes, thwarted by citizens on opposing
routes, stopped in his path by shopping bags, and kids, and snack-or-bargain carts. He’d been delayed by brochure touts and leafleteers, tackled at the knees and chest by rubbish cans,
hydrants, signs, post boxes, newspaper stands. He’d been bumped and buffeted by the selective tidal chaos of the street which unfooted and swept away those newcomers who did not understand
its current or its flow. This was a city at full pelt.

As Rook maintained his pace unerringly and blunder-less, the young man in his suit – whose name you’ll know before the day is out – was left, a stray, unable even to spot his
quarry’s browsing head amongst the unremitting throng of citizens. He stopped and window-shopped himself, waylaid by seagull flights of lingerie, by jewels thrown out across a bed of sand as
carelessly as stones, by chocolate truffles displayed like jewels on satin trays, by terraces of boots and shoes, by all the sorcery of
Look, Don’t touch
. He pressed his back against
the window glass expecting eyes to look him up and down, and disapprove. But there were none. The only eyes that stared at him were in the plaster mannequins. They looked out, day and night, as if
they dreamed the street, and all the passers-by were figments in the glass.

Who can resist the privacy of crowds? A crowd is people, freely voting for themselves. Rook’s shadow joined the crowd and went with it along Saints Row, around the Tower Square, and back
again, until it beached him amongst the pavement tables of a bar. He sat. He’d sit until a waiter came, and then he’d hurry off again. He was not bored. The street was cabaret, with
mime, and all the spoken badinage delivered stagily, in a whisper or a shout. He’d stay there for a while, he thought, and then go back to where he’d spotted Rook, where there were
never crowds, in the ill-lit tunnel under Link Highway Red. That was the perfect spot for the ambush that he planned.

Rook, meanwhile, had gone beyond the bustle of the boutique street. He’d skirted round the boundaries of the Mathematical Park where flower beds were cut for every shape – an octagon
of primulas, a perfect circle for begonias, roses in triangles and squares – and Pythagorean climbing frames and wooden seats designed impossibly like Mo¨bius strips. Now Rook was walking
through the neighbourhood where he was born and raised, the Wood-gate district of our city.

Where were the wooden gates that gave the place its name, those medieval, oaken sentries to what had been an ancient town? Burned down, seventy-four years before, when Victor was a child of six.
The incendiarists – so it was said – were city councillors who wanted to ‘better’ what had become a low-rent district of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. Their improving
additions were terraces of five-storey blocks – one floor retail, one floor wholesale, two floors apartments, attic, cellar, stables, yard, high rent. In their haste, they’d followed,
not replaced, the charred and muddled labyrinth of medieval streets. The Woodgate district was then, and still was on Victor’s eightieth, best suited to the horse. Those narrow stable yards
and culs-de-sac, those twisting alleyways that locals called the Squints, were scarcely wider than a mare is long. No motor vehicle could turn about inside the Squints. They were too tight and
modest for the cussed constipation of the car.

The Woodgate neighbourhood had its vehicles, of course. A town must breathe, and there were straighter, wider ways which offered access to the Squints and provided Rook a fast, straightforward
route to cakes and greenery. Now he was walking down the road, four mares in width, where he was raised. There were parking bays where he’d once played asthmatic ball-and-tag. The building
where his parents had leased a flat was let to businesses – a barber on the pavement floor, an accountancy above, and then three floors of warehousing. The room which Rook had shared with a
brother for ten years was wall to wall with mats and
phaga
rugs, and druggets from Kashmir. An asthmatic’s fibrous nightmare.

Neighbourhood
was not the word. There were no longer neighbours there. At night the barbers and accountants, and the warehousemen, went home by car and bus and train to suburbs out of
town. At night the Squints were dark and dead. But still the buildings were the ones Rook had known when he was small. There were no demolitions yet. And still there was a faint smell in the air,
beneath the odour of the cars and the scent of secretaries, of ancient fire. And rotting vegetation, too, as if the area had been built against the odds on the sweet and sour of a swamp. For these
were the borders of the Soap Market. The smell, an airborne punch of cabbage stalks, figs, olives, beet … had belched and yawned along these streets and down these Squints for six hundred
years. The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. So, of course, was Rook. Rook soup would taste as much of
fruit as meat. Just like the merchant’s monkey in the song,

For all his coolness and his suits, Rook was a market boy, a Soapie through and through. His mother and his father made it so. His parents had rented a market stall and too
frequent were the days when they’d encourage Rook to miss school and help them stack and sell their wares. He did not know, perhaps, the shape of continents or algebra when he was ten, but he
could tell – by smell, by patina, by shape (no easy task) – a Trakana cherry from a Wijnkers, and know, before he broke the skin, which aubergines were soured, which peas had greyed
inside their pods.

So it was in a sentimental mood that Rook, on Victor’s celebration day, walked the familiar hundred metres between his old home and the market rim beyond which, as yet, the colonizing
barbers, the accountants, and warehousemen, had made no mark. The canyoned pattern of the city ended here in a huge 0-shaped, cobbled court, which could not be circled – Rook could guarantee
– by a shallow-winded boy on a bike in less than fifteen minutes. Except for those few low-rise restaurants and bars in the Soap Garden which formed the centre of the 0, all buildings in the
court were wood and canvas market stalls. The place was open to the sky, and could have been a medieval harvest fair. Except that Big Vic – as Victor’s office block was known –
and the other high-rise monoliths of the new town cut off the market from the skyline hills, and fast and heavy traffic on the Link Highways beat drum rolls across the awnings and the roofs.

Inside the oval, there were no parking bays, traffic lights, or ordered flows. The marketeers parked where they chose, or where the Man in Cellophane (who took it madly on himself to block and
beckon traffic) directed them. Their trucks and vans choked paths and access streets. Their barrows and their porter sleds were left where they were used. The wooden produce trays, the emptied
sacks, the pallets, bins, and panniers which had held vegetables and fruit were piled and stacked unevenly, discarded like the crusts and rinds and eggshells of an outdoor meal. It was safe haven
for a sprinting criminal pursued by police in cars.