Arcadia (30 page)

By day, Arcadia was much discussed among the marketeers. Of course. Surveyors were at work, and questionnaires were circulated. Inspection ditches had been dug across the grass in the Soap
Garden. Women wearing ID badges sat on stools to monitor and graph pedestrian usage of the different market sectors. Outline proposals and planning certificates were displayed – as law
decreed – at focal points. The marketeers were bemused, but flattered, too, by all the attention they received and by the consultation meetings and the Soapie Parliament that Victor promised
them. They had agreed amongst themselves that there was little point in fighting progress with more demonstrations or with petitions. What power had a line of people or a list of names against the
will of money to be spent? No, they would be modern citizens. That is to say, they would suppress their passions and hope to profit from their pragmatism. The boss had given them his word. The
demonstration on the mall had winkled Victor from his lair. He’d stood amongst them in the rain and what he’d said had been a challenge: change your ways and prosper.

They imagined working under glass: warm in winter, cool in summer, dry and windless, weather-free. There’d be the same old camaraderie but air-conditioned. The fruit and vegetables would
survive, be crisp and firm, be sellable, a few days longer. There would be less waste, and what waste there was would make a profit, too. Pig farmers on the edge of town would pay a fee for each
full bag. The soapies saw themselves driving freely in vans. They’d save on porters’ fees. They’d save on time. There’d be disruptions, naturally. How would they manage
during building work? But, all in all, the traders were buoyant. In fact, they were impatient. They were tired of being soapies: make us Arcadians, and quickly.

Rook’s bitter auguries did not alarm them. It did not matter how disgruntled Rook might be. Con was the man to listen to, and he, though cautious, shared the view that they had less to
fear from progress than from torpor. Rook had fooled him with his jeremiac prophecies, ‘All this will disappear’, ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets
like me’. Con now was more inclined to trust the word of Victor. It angered him that Rook was such a fixture in the marketplace and in the bars. Had he no self-respect? Had he no tact? If
Arcadia would put an end to Rook, then that was fine by Con. Rook preached his words of warning, but anyone could see, and smell, that his views were distilled in alcohol and flavoured with the
bitters of regret. The time would come when all his kind, the nighttime nestlers, the parasites, the idlers, would be swept away. Welcome the day!

It took a little less than twelve months for the Busi Partnership to complete their plans and raise a Bill of Quantities and put out the building tender. Architecture is a bureaucratic art
– and
Markitecture
, as some comic christened the attempts to marry art and trade, was doubly bureaucratic because each detail had to satisfy the pocket and the eye, the aesthete and
the businessman.

Victor provided offices in Big Vic for Signor Busi’s younger colleagues. The Philosopher Among Journeymen was not involved. He’d been persuaded to spend the winter in New York; the
weekends in Manhattan, the weekdays upstate at Cornell where he had been appointed Comstock Visiting Professor in Art and Design. He gave sermons there on the Italian Masterbuilders –
Giovanni Michelucci, Franco Fetronelli, and himself.

Busi’s colleagues wished he had not promised to make space for Victor’s birthday statue. They were the modern school and saw no point in statues that were, they said, ‘as
sentimental as Capo di Monte figurines, but without the benefit of dwarfishness’. They wanted something glass or plastic, something steel, something big and time-honoured in concrete, a
symbol of Arcadia. But they were stuck with
Beggar Woman and Her Child
, style 1910, in bronze.

Victor had insisted on where the statue would be placed: at that entrance to Arcadia which was the closest to the Woodgate district, halfway between where Em had begged and died.

‘Perhaps we could persuade a builder’s truck to back up and wreck it,’ one architect suggested. ‘We’d have a modern sculpture then,
Flattened Woman and Her
Child
.’

My God, how they were bored by meetings, and evenings spent in their hotels, and all the budget-bullied cutbacks from their plans which were required, and which themselves required new plans,
new calculations, work. They did not like our city. Newcomers seldom do. They are not literate in what leads where, or how and when. These architects hoped they’d never need to know our city
well. Their main desire was
Do the Job, and Home
. They set a day, the first day of the year, when building work on Arcadia – two years of it – would start. So New Year’s
Eve would close the market and the decade down.

There was a problem. You did not need to be a space-time engineer to spot a two-year gap between the closure of the Soap Market and the opening of Arcadia. Those rash and early promises that
builders and merchants could work in concord, the market stalls amongst the scaffolding, trade amongst construction, could not be kept. Were they naive, or mischievous, these undertakings? How had
anybody ever thought that tomatoes by the kilo could be compatible with six-tonne shovels and ballast lorries and men in safety hats? No one on site! That was the builder’s sensible demand.
It only needed some old lady laden down with cabbages and onions to take a fall or take a bruise from building work and she’d be shopping for a lawyer and for damages before her bruise was
brown. So Victor’s managers were told they had to relocate the market stalls for at least two years.

Victor himself was sent a memorandum – but what did he employ managers for? Besides he only had to look out of his window to see the perfect and the only answer to the two-year gap. There
were open fields of tarmac, parking for the mall’s nine thousand staff and more for visitors. Two areas, three hectares each, were underused. They were too far from offices, and windswept,
dirty from Link Highway Red which passed close by. Blue whisker herb and smog-nettle had taken purchase in the tarmac, making do with lime from the painted parking grids and puddled rain for soil.
At night this was where lovers came and prostitutes who traded from the kerb, with rocking cars and peeping Toms parked asymmetrically for privacy. By day it was as empty as a prison yard. With
access from the highway and, for pedestrians, by tunnel, this was the perfect place for market stalls. Good news for everyone involved. Or so Big Vic would have the world believe.

People are ready to be fooled. That’s optimism. ‘This is the price you have to pay for Arcadia,’ the stallholders were told, when they were trying to make light of their
predicament, their exile to the car park. ‘If you want your share of wealth then you must expect to take some risks, to suffer inconvenience. We’re talking business here, not
charity.’

Who told them that? Why, Rook, of course. He was amused to tease them with their foolishness, their gullibility. Why had they ever thought that Victor’s plan was some crusade to make them
more secure and wealthier?

‘Con led you down a cul-de-sac,’ he said. ‘You may be sure
he
’ll turn out fine. They’ll keep him sweet and quiet at any cost. The last thing that they want
is trouble on the mall again – so Victor’s men will take good care of Con. He’ll get prime site, you’ll see. But what about the little traders, the ones who don’t make
noise but just scrape by, selling from the backs of vans? Or those who’ve got five kids to clothe? Or those …’ Rook was drunk and smart enough to make an endless list in which
the only one who showed a profit from the move into the car-park site was Con.

No one doubted Rook was mischievous. He’d ducked and weaved too many times before. He’d broken free and realigned too frequently for any of his alliances to count for much. But
it’s a fact that even fools and drunks and liars can sound alarms. What does it matter who shouts fire, or how, so long as there are flames? Here, then, was the Soap Market in its final
weeks. It seemed the same as it had always been. There were no closing sales. No bargains to be had. Fresh food has a shelf life of a day, a little more in wintertime. There were no stocks to clear
because in produce markets stocks are cleared each day and replenished overnight. But there was something stale upon the air, more pungent than the market waste or the odour of too many people in
one place. This was the putrefaction of resolve, the enfeebling of that prod-and-nudge which got the traders from their beds each day at five to bargain with the wholesalers, which gave them pride
and pleasure in the stall-top patterns they could make with what they had to sell, which made them cheeky, cheerful, quick with repartee. Now they did not wake with an appetite for work. They did
not relish the day. They were offhand with fruit and customers. It did not matter which of these were bruised or handled without care. They left the business in the hands of sons and nieces and
stood in circles, hands dug deeply into pockets, shoulders down, to hear the latest rumour or hard news about their prospects between the market and Arcadia.

The bars and restaurants which fringed the Soap Garden had most to fear. There’d be no place for them in Victor’s car park. They’d been promised leases in Arcadia, and there
was compensation to be paid, negotiated by lawyers from Big Vic. They’d have to look for premises elsewhere. But for two years? What landlord would let his premises for just two years? Theirs
was a quandary impossible to solve – to move, to stay, to wait and see? Yet, as the new year drew closer, so the market mood transformed again. Business boomed at all the bars. The marketeers
were thirsty all day long. They stayed at tables, stood at counters, found perches on the weathered stones around the medieval washing fountains. You’d think they had no work to do, and had
no end of cash. You’d think they were in celebratory mood, the noise they made, the bottles that they drank. Theirs was a carnival of despair, the despair of those whose rafts draw closer to
the weir and see both the tumbling dangers and the placid pools beyond. No one is fool enough to swim, yet none looks forward to the rocks.

Of course, they played the game of
If
. What if they moved as docilely as lambs and did their best at what they did the best, that is, sell fruit and vegetables to people in the town, no
matter where? Would car-park profits be the same as those made in the Soap Market? By spring, would they be smirking at the fears they’d had and wishing, secretly, for Arcadian delays so they
could stay and flourish in the car park? What if, what if they’d stood their ground and said, We stay!? These cobblestones are ours. We don’t want risks and challenges. We want the
market as it is. What if that Rook, that braggart Rook, that told-you-so, had not been sacked and still held Victor’s ear on their behalf? Would he have stopped Arcadia, as he now claimed?
What if old Victor had not lived to be so old?

Rook was Cassandra now, the unregarded prophet whose truth was trash. He and Anna were no longer friends. A woman of her age does not need ballast of his kind. She kept away, and when she
thought of Rook she flushed with anger not with love. As he grew freer of Big Vic so she became more part of it, more loyal to work which now she thought of as ‘career’. She wished the
boss to favour her and so, of course, ambition ruled her tongue.

‘I have a name for you,’ she told Victor. ‘Remember what you said? The name of who it was leaked Signor Busi’s plans. You said I should enquire. I’m certain it was
Rook, the day that he was sacked. He went into your room, I’m sure. He used the photocopier … I have informants in the Soap Market. They say he boasts about the theft.’ She knew
the timing made no sense, that Rook had gone before the plans arrived. But she guessed – and hoped – the old man’s memory was logically unsound. He’d not know one month from
the next when both these months were over one year old.

Victor rewarded her with nods. He was content to believe the thief was Rook. He would not have to endure the awkwardness of sacking someone else.

‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘We harmed him more than he harmed us, I think.’ He was ready now to turn to other matters. But Anna knew that silence would not earn much
from Victor. She had betrayed a one-time friend, at no cost to that friend, perhaps, but still, it was a real sin and sins should stir up wind: ‘Rook’s workload has transferred itself
to me in this past year. I’ve worked here now for seven years. I wonder if …’

‘We’ll see,’ he said, but it was clear to him what he would do. Anna, when all was said and done, was already Victor’s eyes and ears. She did what Rook had done, except
she knew the innards of Big Vic more closely than she knew the Soap Market. What could that matter now? He’d send a memorandum to her, giving her Rook’s job, Rook’s salary,
Rook’s desk, Rook’s access to his suite, his apartment, his rooftop hermitage. He almost gave her the news right then, by word of mouth. But he resisted such intimacy, and asked that
she present the cheques and documents to sign. He was not fond of gratitude. Gratitude was not the same as debt. You could not settle gratitude by cheque.

So Rook and Anna were lieutenants in opposing camps. So what? They did not meet again, or even glimpse each other on the street. Their streets were not the same. And Rook would soon be off the
streets for good. There was bitterness between them, unexpressed. Rook saw that Anna’s name was where his name had been, on letters to the traders from Big Vic, on market documents.

‘Don’t trust that woman,’ he warned them, shocked at the ease with which he told such lies. ‘She’s loyal to no one but herself.’ She was the one, he said,
who’d given Busi’s plans to Con. What should they make of that? The woman who had chanced her job by stealing documents was now promoted to Victor’s personal aide, the old
man’s buffer and his fixer. In Rook’s version, everything was clear. It had all been a plot. ‘Don’t underestimate that man. He planned your demonstration on the mall. He had
the press on hand. He had his speech prepared. No doubt that PR monkey laboured over it for weeks and rehearsed each word with Victor. “The market’s getting taller”? Oh, yes? And
who is standing there out in the rain while Victor makes his pretty little speech and promises to make you rich? Sweet Anna, that is who. His parlourmaid. Who was it chaperoned old Busi at the
Excelsior? Who was it, actually, who sacked me from my job? Who’s now ensconced in my old chair? Anna goes from strength to strength while you, poor fellows, pack your bags on New
Year’s Eve for two years’ hard labour at the gulag car park in the frozen wastes of New Town.’