Arcadia (31 page)

Rook sketched for them a future made from rotting unsold fruit, and yellow leaves, and roots gone soft and pliable. No one would last the two years ‘in the wilderness’, Rook said.
That was Victor’s masterplan – to shed the soapies so that he could have Arcadia himself. But Rook was talking to nobody. His bitter punditry, his ironies, made people turn their backs,
and seek out less bilious company. And company like that was not in short supply. By mid-December the marketplace was frolicsome. For once the centre of our city was in vogue. Perhaps it was not
paradise, but then neither was it hell. The soapies knew of better places and much worse. Who’d volunteer, they wondered, to live, along with twenty million others, in Mexico City in ghettos
so dirty and so packed that roaches fled to the countryside and pig ticks came to town? Or in Hong Kong, where, it was said, apartments were so small and public space so scarce that should you wish
to twist around in bed at night you’d have to take the ferry and twist around in mainland China? Who’d spend a single night by choice in London? Half the population there could only
sleep with pills. Who’d want to breathe the air of Tokyo – where the holy mountain of Fuji was no longer visible through the smog? Or drink the waters of Detroit, where the Rouge River
was so thick with effluent that in infrared satellite pictures it showed up as solid ground? Who’d swap our modest traffic jams for those great constipations in LA? Compared to these great
towns, the unromantic modesty of our city centre was cause for gratitude.

As December drew to its end so everybody in the city came to see the market for the final time. They brought their children. They blocked the streets with cars. They bought their token
vegetables, their memento fruit, and wandered in between the stalls remarking how engaging marketplaces were. Cellophane directed them. They did what they were told. They treated him with more
respect than he had ever known. They stood transfixed to watch him swing his arms or block the passage of a wayward van.

The soapies loved this valedictory clientele, this slow and gawping audience who bought bad fruit and never asked the price, who swallowed every tale a soapie told. One trader – asked a
hundred times how he’d lost the last joint of his little finger – winked at his wife and told how he had found, the month before, a fruit snake in a tub of peaches.

‘It was no longer than my hand,’ he said. ‘But those fruit snakes are poisonous. One bite and you’re dead in thirty seconds. That’s if you’re fit and strong
like me, and have the heart to last that long. What could I do? I took this bill hook and cut the finger off there and then before the poison reached my heart.’ At other times and other
tellings, he carried out the surgery not with a bill hook but with a banana knife, a piece of glass, a razor blade, an axe, a coffee spoon. And once, ‘What could I do but hold my finger up
and let my wife here bite it off? She spat it out. It landed in that carrot box. We haven’t found it yet.’

One apple trader, a man who kept a bottle by his till, lectured as he sold: ‘To bite an apple is to taste the world’s most scientific fruit. It was a falling apple that gave us
gravity – though none of mine have fallen from the tree. They’ve all been picked and packed without a bruise. And here’s the apple tempted Eve. You see the blushes on its cheeks?
And here are cooking apples like the ones that Einstein used in his experiments. It’s got the mass, it’s got the energy. It’s very good with cheese.’

Another found a bon viveur, or nectar bug, amongst his fruit, as swollen by juice as a ripe green grape. He held it up for all the customers to see – and, spotting children watching him,
he did a sleight of hand and swapped the bug for a real grape. He tossed it in his mouth. It popped between his teeth. He poked his tongue out at the children. Squashed green flesh lay in the ladle
of his tongue.

This new, naive, and richer clientele could not conceal its pleasure. Was this a circus or a marketplace? If only parking was a little simpler or the journey from the suburbs not so long,
they’d do their shopping in the Soap Market every time. The fruit looked better free from cellophane. You had a chance to touch and choose exactly what you wanted. And so much choice. And
much more fun – if less convenient – than the bright and covered stores they usually used, close to the office, a short walk from home, two minutes in the car. What a gift, as well, to
find this patch of greenery at the market heart. There were such cheap cafes there – and bars like country bars with slatted tables, trees for shade in summer and protection in the winter,
waiters and waitresses who were neither servile nor imperious. They could test the strangest drinks, and eavesdrop on a tumult of conversations, profanities, and propositions like they’d
never heard before.

The buskers came, like wasps to beer. They played old songs and standards from America. It was so crowded that the Gypsy with the concertina could hardly stretch and squeeze his notes. The
waiters had to carry trays of beers above their heads. The fact that Rook sat preaching doom was only further evidence that here, in this grassed and cobbled relic, life was ripe.

Some stayed all day, most of the night. In fact, in that last week between Christmas and New Year, the night took over from the day. The alcohol replaced the fruit. Trade gave way to pleasure.
Some single traders ceased to trade. They did not rise at dawn to fidget over crops or fuss with decorations to their stalls. They got up late. They stayed up late. They drank like camels. Who gave
a damn what fortune and the car parks held? There was a party to attend. A wake? A christening? Or both? No one had time to wonder or to care. Even those five men who’d been with Victor at
his birthday lunch and were too old to take much pleasure out of noise and drink were not allowed to go home sober. How could they refuse a toast to ‘Ourselves’? And then another toast
to ‘All these years we’ve shared’? And more: ‘To all our loyal customers’. ‘To the new year and the old’. ‘To Health, Wealth and Women’.
‘To Arcadia’. Quite soon they had the Gypsy and his bewitching concertina at their table and were dredging for the words and tune of

These were nights too good to end, so full of sin and yet so blameless and so virtuous. The celebration would not last. On the morning of January first the market would be
cleared. The hoardings and barriers would go up. The diggers and the trenchers would move in. The soil beneath the stones would be on show, flints and shattered cobbles blinking in the light for
the first time in six hundred years.

Rook wished to save the cobblestones. And himself. There was no place for him in Victor’s car park, or in Arcadia. They’d not marked out a site for him, where he could trade on
having been the Woodgate boy, the firebrand of the marketplace, the boss’s right-hand man, the soapies’ champion. On New Year’s Day his world would be reduced to the four small
rooms of his apartment. He’d be the undisputed king of walls and furniture. He’d have no reputation on the streets. Unless, that is, he took this final chance to make his mark, to take
revenge, upon the town.

On New Year’s Eve there was no room at his usual table in the Soap Market. Young men and women he had never seen before, and all the residents from thereabouts, had joined the traders,
porters, drivers to celebrate year’s end and mark the closing of the Soap Market.

At seven, the mayor had come, with cameramen, representatives from the Busi Partnership, and Victor’s development and trading managers. The police had cleared a path and set up metal
barriers so that the city mayor could be the first customer to shop unimpeded in the Soap Market without the pressure of a crowd. The route which he would take was set, as was the stall where he
would pause, the conversation he would have with the chosen soapie, the single orange – already washed and wrapped by a town-hall official – that he would buy and peel and eat.
There’d be a photo-call (‘Please bite the orange, Mr Mayor. A wider mouth. Smile!’), an interview, a walkabout, a hasty departure to give a speech to city businessmen at their
annual dinner. A secretary made a note that in two years’ time, this mayor, or the next, would need to buy a second orange and eat it for the cameras to mark the opening of Arcadia.

So much for the proprieties. Now the traders were free – and glad – to dismantle and to stow their market stalls for the last time. They did not pack them in the usual way, or lay
them down for rest on their trading pitches, but followed the instructions which had been sent to them from Anna in Big Vic. They folded their awnings and their trestles, packed and boxed their
unsold fruit and vegetables, fixed on a numbered label, inked in their names, and carried their trading rigs to two collection points behind the bars. Victor’s lorries would arrive at dawn to
take the stalls across Link Highway Red to their new car-park homes.

For once the cleansing teams could be as careless as they wished with their sweepers and their hoses. They washed the cobbles wet and black, removed the daily waste, and left the market clean
for its dawn clearance. The traders joined the party in the garden, their grimy aprons and hats persuading people in the crowd that they were soapies and should be let through and served at once,
much in the way that funeral crowds defer to family mourners.

The cobbled oval which surrounded the garden and the bars was emptier than it had ever been. The new arrivals took advantage of the space to park their cars close to the bars. It only took one
car to brave the medieval cordon of the cobblestones, for a hundred, then five hundred more to follow. You did not need a ticket there. You parked for free. There was a short-lived symmetry in this
– a car park lost to marketeers below Big Vic, a car park gained in market space at the centre of the old town.

The Soap Market gleamed. The windscreens and the roofs of cars caught, tossed back, the street and building lights. The cars were silky, sated beetles, nesting on the corpse while it was wet and
warm. The wise drivers put their windows up, retracted their radio aerials, locked their cars before they headed for the bars. They did not like the look of those men and women who hung around, the
beggars and the drunks, the homeless, jobless, feckless, hopeless, ancient men, the ones who counted cobblestones as bed, the petrol sniffers overawed by such a choice of petrol tanks.

Where would the nighttime soapies sleep that night? Where were their nests? Where could they light their fires? They called to Rook, the ones that knew his face. ‘What’s going
on?’ they asked. The quieter ones just walked around between the cars with nowhere else to go. Some tried the handles of saloons. Some pulled off petrol caps and dined on vapour. Some sat on
bonnets passing bottles, bothering the passers-by for cash or cigarettes. It was too late to think of somewhere else. This was a home to them, and they were as nervous and volatile as if they were
bereaved.

Rook stood and watched, debating with himself whether now was the time – before he grew too troublesome – to go back home, to see the old year out, soberly, alone, in bed. He was not
well. The evening damp was sitting on his chest. His head was crammed. He felt close to tears. Then he saw Joseph for the fourth and final time. The boy was sitting with his back against the
smaller pile of stalls, asleep. The only sleeper there. Rook could not resist the opportunity. He leant to wake the boy.

‘It’s me,’ Rook said, the Devil shaking Faust. Joseph’s nose was running. His eyes were wet. He smelt of alcohol and fuel. He could not hold his head up straight. His
breath could bubble paint. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ Rook searched his pockets, found his wallet, and produced the ten half-notes. ‘You have your halves, I hope? I’ll
give you my halves tonight. I’ll make you rich if …’ If you can shake a wand and make the market whole again. If you can mug me back my job. If you can kidnap Anna from Big Vic
and place her in my bed. If you can trick the lines to leave my face, the grey to leave my hair, and make me young and dressed in black again. If you can stop the city in its tracks.

‘If what?’ asked Joseph, half awake. Rook tapped the stack of trading stalls with his toe.

‘We’ll have a bonfire, eh?’ he said. ‘To end all this, to see the old year out.’ He produced a book of matches – free from the Excelsior – and dropped
them into Joseph’s hand. ‘Set fire to all this wood and canvas. And then the other pile as well. That’s all you have to do. It’s money for nothing.’

‘What for?’

‘Just do it. Either you burn that or I’ll burn these.’ He flexed the ten half-notes he held. He put them back inside his wallet. ‘Wait ten minutes. Do your job. Then find
me here tomorrow. Start the new year ten thousand richer than today.’

Rook would not go home to sleep soberly or alone that night. He wished to see what mayhem he could cause. But he would need an alibi. He must be seen, a noisy innocent, when the fires began. He
made his way between the cars. He pushed a passage through the crowds until he reached the scuffed winter lawns of the Soap Garden. He got himself an empty glass in time for midnight, and as the
toasts for Health and Wealth were offered to the crowds Rook was the noisiest respondent, like the worst of sinners at a mass. He called out madly. He made ironic toasts for Victor, for Arcadia. He
stood on tables, made a nuisance of himself with women, traders, young men in garish clothes. He let them know his name. ‘I’m Rook, and this is my backyard.’ He was unforgettable.
No one noticed that there was orange dawn rising from the west, with clouds of smoke. And no one turned to sniff the old and woody smell that comes from country hearths and bakeries and forest
fires.