Arcadia (34 page)

W
HEN
J
OSEPH HEARD
the ambulance siren, he re-emerged from the warren of the boot. He squeezed into the rear of the car, and
peered out on semi-darkness. Dawn was a narrow silver bar across the windscreen. Already it had reached the edge of town and was advancing with the first trams along the boulevards. The upper
storeys of Big Vic could not be seen. Low cloud enclosed them. New Year’s Day would be a rainy one.

The few officials and the policemen that remained in the Soap Market had their backs to Joseph. They did not see or hear him open the passenger door and step out onto cobblestones. A pulse of
icy light was flung out by the ambulance like an irrigation sprinkler watering a field. Joseph ducked each time the beam swept by, as if he feared a drenching in the light. Joseph thanked St
Joseph, the Patron of the Holy Corpse, the Undertaker of Our Lord, that he was well enough to leave the marketplace by foot and not by ambulance. He’d made it through to the new year without
the beating he deserved. His only bruise was in the muscles of his shoulder, from throwing too much fruit.

There’d been a thousand injuries between the midnight and the dawn, though some of those had been administered at police HQ, in the privacy of cells. But there had only been one death. The
corpse had not been found until the market site was cleared of drunks and revolutionaries. They might as well pump air into a brick as try the kiss of life. Rook would have blushed at being caught
like this, flat on his back in water, naked from the waist up, his chest a splintered prow, his stomach just a touch too plump for one so slight and vain. The market boy had died the market death,
his back on cobbles, green from Grief, discarded like a bruised courgette, and looking now as dull and common as the stones which were his mortuary. Here was a most unlikely Martyr for the Cause
– though, as time would prove, his name was good for martyrdom. Not easy to forget. We all remember Rook.

Joseph recognized the face, but did not wait to see the body wrapped inside the body bag. He stole a broom which had been left leaning on the side panels of an URCU truck. He soon became just
one of dawn’s sweepers, brushing up the missile debris for little pay and less respect. He was invisible. He swept his way across the cobblestones, past URCU men, reporters from the papers,
gawpers on their way to work, young men returned to claim (they hoped) their unburned cars. He swept towards the market edge, towards the exit where the banana vans had been but were no more. He
joined the early morning New Year crowd, his severed clothes hardly noticed by the late-for-work, the late-to-bed. He made his way through the squints and alleys of the Woodgate district, uncertain
whether he was rich or poor. Perhaps Rook’s death had been a cunning way to keep the two halves of the banknotes forever separate, as disunited as the clothes upon his back.

Joseph found a place to stop at last, a graveyard in a cul-de-sac with high tombstones and cypresses, and two plane trees, the perfect citizens surrounded by the sloughed-off litter of their
toxic bark. There were no spectators, except for pigeons, and a pack of feral dogs. He pulled Rook’s wallet from Rook’s jacket and went through the spoils. He laid them out before him
on cold stone. A photograph of Anna, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. A set of keys. The ten odd halves of the ten one-thousand notes. An ID card with a photograph of Rook, a
grainy square in grey and black, expressionless, with – below – Rook’s home address, his status ‘Single Male’, and his signature in neat green ink. A folded advert
from a catalogue, the model on the stool, the barmaid in his grasp, the suit, the unattended glass. Five untorn fifty notes. A contraceptive. Credit cards. A throat spray of some kind.

Joseph only kept the money and the keys. He lifted up a slab of stone and put the empty wallet and the rest beneath. If ever he had need for contraceptives or had a customer for stolen credit
cards then he could find this stone again. He memorized the mossy name upon the stone, but the feral dogs would snout the wallet out as soon as he was gone. Already he had memorized the address on
Rook’s ID card, and set off looking for a bed and an inheritance.

He’d seen that Rook was ‘Status: Single Male’ and knew there was a chance that Rook’s home would be undefended. What better way to spend the dawn on New Year’s Day
than use the dead man’s keys, and find some shelter, warmth, some food, some sleep between four walls?

He found a parcel of deliveries in the entrance hall of Rook’s apartment block. He tucked the parcel under his arm and took his time upon the stairs. What could be more normal at that time
of day than deliveries? If anybody met him on the stairs they’d take him for an errand boy, a scruffy, docile errand boy of the usual kind. He met no one. He found Rook’s door and tried
the keys. Two locks. Two sets of teeth unclenched. The locks obeyed the keys. He was inside. This was the dream he had when he was loading produce onto trains: the day would come when he came home
to his apartment in a city. He closed the door on everything. He’d never known such perfect carpentry or such a calm as this. He went from room to room. He opened every cupboard, every
drawer. He looked inside the fridge. He did not touch, or eat, or steal. That could wait. He knew what he was searching for. A roll of clear tape. He found it in a wicker basket with some scissors.
He sat down at the table and, breathing through his nose for better concentration, made for himself, from twenty half-notes – his and Rook’s – a fortune and a future.

The police would say they found him looting Rook’s apartment. Already he had stolen, it would seem, a parcel of antique books intended for the collector in the attic rooms. They said that
every drawer and cupboard had been opened and all Rook’s valuables had gone. They said he planned to strip the place, that his accomplices would come with vans to take the furniture, to make
off with the fridge and television set, the knick-knacks that were Rook. Who knows? Joseph was not a saint, though in a way he’d been a hero of a kind, for half a night at least.

They had his picture in the first newspapers of the year, but not for burglary. Not yet. They had him semi-naked on page one, his arms raised up, an aubergine in hand. He was ‘The Face of
Discontent’, ‘The Market Rioter’. He shared the page with Rook. The headline was ‘Man Dead in City Violence’, and underneath reporters reproduced what they’d
been told by police, how ‘groups of Trotskyists and anarchists, trained by foreign radicals and at secret camps in Germany, have been identified as orchestrating the disturbances’. The
dead man’s name had not been learnt officially, but on the street the word had spread that URCU men had bludgeoned him to death. He was an ‘activist’, an innocent, a man who
simply wished to voice his fears. The police had hit a thousand heads the night before. They’d hit this one too hard.

No statements came from URCU. They were beyond the press. But police PR was doing what it could to give the corpse a name, to find the cause of death. They had their answers by midday. The
marketplace had witnesses. A trader had seen a semi-naked Rook go down and not get up. He’d seen the URCU pair run off. The police had rioted, he said, ‘not us’. He made his
statement to the radio and to a journalist from the sentimental left-wing press. So Rook became a martyr to the cause. The man who’d been top brass in Victor’s palace; the man
who’d left Big Vic on principle because he feared for the Soap Market, the man who had fought off-stage against Arcadia, the man who was a trader’s son himself, this market boy, had
been brought down – ‘assassinated’ was the word – by police clubs and boots. Coincidence? Wake up! They’d sought him out, the rabble-rousers said. They’d marked
him down for death.

The chief of police had hardly slept. He and the mayor and two financiers had celebrated the new year long after their wives had been driven home. They’d smoked the butt and drunk the
dregs. Their waking tempers were not sweet. Their throats were raw with talk and smoke and spicy food. The chief was nonplussed by the headlines in the morning paper. Where was the ‘sudden
order’ he’d requested in the night? He’d sobered up to find a scandal on his hands. A middle-aged man was dead, and rumour on the run. How long before some busybody asked,
‘Where was the chief of police when his men were clubbing citizens to death?’ He took some comfort from hurried medical reports that the ‘victim’ (a mistake, he thought, to
have used that word) had died from respiratory failure – ‘asthma, possibly’. But there were broken bones and bruises, too. His ribs had sixteen fractures. His testicles were torn.
His back and legs were ribbed and grilled with bruises. His scalp was peeled by blows from boots. There were sole marks on his cheeks. His nose was pointing east-south-east. A vehicle had crushed
the corpse’s knee. If this was asthma then this man’s lungs deserved a trial and punishment, and we all courted death each time we sneezed.

‘Come up with something better,’ the chief of police instructed his aide. He was in luck. The officers who went to Rook’s address to tell his next-of-kin, if he had
next-of-kin, found Rook’s apartment violated, the keys left hanging in the lock. They found the ne’er-do-well asleep, his elbows on the table, his birthmark cushioned by the newly
reunited notes. They recognized the face – the boy in all the photographs, the crazy anarchist from German insurrection camps. Within a day they had the evidence that they required. Two
witnesses had seen this Joseph kneeling at Rook’s side. One swore he’d noticed blows rained down on Rook, slaps to the face, punches to the back ‘consistent with the bruises on
the corpse’. The other said he’d seen a knife. He thought it was a knife. It gleamed. But, no, he could not be certain there was not something blunt as well. A cobblestone, perhaps. The
ground was strewn with broken cobblestones. A broken cobblestone can tear a testicle and fracture sixteen ribs.

What chance had he? He was the one in the photographs, assaulting policemen with vegetables and fruit. Just the sort to pick on someone middle-class, respectable, like Rook. Perhaps at first he
only sought to steal a jacket for disguise, but then – ever the feckless, opportunist thief, so everybody from his village claimed – he’d seen the wallet and he’d killed for
it. The prosecution case was clear. Here were two men who’d seen it all. Here was the stolen jacket and the shirt, in halves, on Joseph’s back. Here was a ‘nife’. Here were
the black field boots with which he’d bludgeoned Rook. The muddy imprint from them marked the victim’s face. Here was the accused man, fresh from the murder, in Rook’s home, a
fortune in his hands. And his defence? Joseph only had deranged and farfetched explanations – the mugging in the underpass, the severed notes, the lighting of the fire – to show why he
and Rook weren’t foes, but partners.

V
ICTOR, AS USUAL
, had not gone early to his bed on New Year’s Eve. His night-time wanderings from room to room in Big Vic had distorted fitfully
the perfect conifer of lights. Just short of midnight he had gone out on the roof to clear his lungs by jettisoning and melting phlegm in the potting compost of his plants. The country people
always cleared their lungs on New Year’s eve: ‘Spit out bad debts,’ they used to say if they were merchants, or ‘Last year’s spit for next year’s spring,’
if they were working on the land. The merchants spat like pellet guns; the farmers dropped their phlegm onto the soil like bakers adding egg to cake.

Victor was not obliged to spit alone on New Year’s Eve. He could have chosen company. There’d been the usual annual invitation to be the mayor’s guest at the
businessmen’s banquet. But Anna had sent off Victor’s annual regrets and his donation to the Widows’ Fund. He said he was too old to celebrate the passage of another year.

‘You’re there in spirit,’ Anna said, flourishing the widows’ cheque for him to sign.

Yet being on his own as all the city clocks struck twelve was not entirely to Victor’s taste. He had been tempted to suggest that Anna ought to stop behind and join him for a drink –
but why embarrass her. She was not family. Her duties ended at the office door.

On the twelfth stroke he’d almost gone down in his lift to shake the hands of those tall men in uniform who kept Big Vic secure right round the clock. He need not hold a conversation with
these men, a modest gratuity would satisfy. For once, he felt regret that Rook had gone. The man was neither honest nor efficient, it was true, but he was more like family. A flippant nephew, say,
determined to amuse. And he was skilled – Victor acknowledged this – at catering for veterans. That birthday meal that Rook had organized had been the highlight of the year, just like
the village parties he had known and never known. He hummed the march from
La Regina
which Band Accord had played that early summer’s day upon the roof. The coming year would make him
eighty-two. Would he be there to celebrate?

The midnight roof was cold. But then old men are always cold, like fish. It’s heat they cannot bear, and noise, and sudden movements close at hand. He shivered but was glad to be outside
– almost the only ‘outside’ in his life, these days – liberated from the humming equanimity of air-conditioners. The wind snatched at his spit and tugged his dressing-gown.
He hurried through the darkness to the greenhouse door and found the switch to light two meanly powered orange bulbs, the ‘forcing lamps’ of market gardeners. The orange light expelled
the night. The glass leaked wind. It moaned and chattered in its frame. Two liquid-gas heaters kept the winter greenhouse warm. They kept his specimens alive and made the winter temperate for
succulents, for palms, for greenfly and for bugs.

He found low staging for a stool. He found the brandy bottle, amongst the liquid feeds and aphid sprays. He spat again. He spat for spring. And then he filled his mouth with brandy from the
bottle. Its fierceness numbed his mouth. He drank more manically, determined to gulp down the medicine, the sleeping draught. He held the bottle up against the light. It looked like melted beeswax.
He took his medicine until the brandy was lower than the bottle’s label. Enough to make him moan and chatter to himself in unison with window frames. Victor was neither hot nor cold. He was
the temperature of plants. He pressed his nose upon the glass, staring out at first towards the outskirts and the hills. There were no stars, just damp and glass and greenhouse algae acting as a
screen against the night. He heard the fire sirens at his back. He turned to see the flames, the incandescent trees, the unprecedented sight of car lights on the market cobblestones. At first he
could not place the flames. He could not place them geographically or in time. The oblongs of greenhouse glass made the distance two-dimensional. It was a film, a flaring, fading early colour film,
the print besmirched by water, algae, fumes. Here was a scene brought on by sleeplessness and drink. Here was a scene that was familiar. He dared not blink. He had to concentrate to bring the
memory back. The flames were old and watery. But, at his bidding, people had appeared, and sound. There was an old straw hat. The smell of bread and urine. The disconcerted snufflings of sleepers
on bare boards. The sirens were his mother’s screams, the screams of Princesses on fire, of people separated from their homes, the screams of rain-soaked timbers made dry and hot too swiftly
by the fire.