Arcadia (16 page)

Aunt was quite certain, as she dragged her nephew by his finger to the marketplace, of two things – that Em was waiting in her usual place, that Em had perished in the fire. Or else a
nightmare mixture of the two – that they’d find Em, her blackened palm outstretched, her thin, charred back propped up against the usual snag tree on the edges of the Soap Garden.

If they’d found Em, alive and well, their future would have been the past. They would have gone back ‘home’, to the countryside in May. At worst the springs and cushions of a
swelling hedgerow are better bedding than the embers of a city fire. But his mother was elsewhere, and Aunt was not nostalgic for the pains and pleasures of the earth. She sat cross-legged all day
at Em’s worn pitch. She’d give her sister till the night to resurrect herself and then she’d set about the task of finding once again a nesting box. Aunt did not try to put her
nephew to the breast, or beg from passers-by. Victor was left to shuffle in the garden and the marketplace at will. At last. He loved and hated what he saw. He felt like we all feel when
we’re first left at school – condemned to a freedom that at first seems narrower and more enclosed than the cell that’s family and home. The market paid him little heed, except to
bruise and buffet him, and startle him with noise and colour.

His aunt was not a callous woman. She guessed the worst when Em did not show up. Her eyes were damp despite herself. But nor was she the sort to mope. If Em had disappeared, had died, was lost,
had fled without her son, was lying in a pauper’s ward scorched and bruised by smoke and truncheons, then still the world went round, and breakfast followed dawn, and shitting followed food,
and life went on. She gave her old straw cloche a whirl. She primped its dog-eared dog-rose sprigs in felt. She made its deep brim curl and grin and made a face herself to match. She wiped her eyes
and, dutifully, checking one last time for Em, she went in search of Victor; and then, her nephew clinging to her back, she headed for the town.

Street luck is what the city excels at. Aunt’s hat (a little passé now), her smile, the boyish burden on her back, attracted comment from the livelier of the men she passed. One
followed her – a man about her age, but dressed much older and in the bar-room style with patent shoes and collar studs, a soft homburg, trousers with a centre crease, a jacket of the latest
cut with sloping pockets and long revers.

‘What’s that you’ve got on your back?’ he asked. ‘The kid must have seen that hat and thought he’d take a donkey ride!’ She answered cheek with cheek.
She said the kid was paying for his ride. She was a human tram. ‘Jump up, if you can find the fare,’ she said (and winked). ‘There’s room inside for a little one.’

‘There’s more to me than meets the eye,’ he said, matching winks with Aunt. ‘Want to see? Hold on a bit …’

‘What bit exactly should I hold?’

‘Your tongue!’ he said.

They called him Dip, though he was known by many other names. His speciality was crowds. He’d dip a hand and make off with your purse and the most you’d feel would be a sense of loss
and an unaccustomed lightness in the pocket. He could unclip brooches, take watches out of fobs and replace them with stones of matching weight, remove a banknote from a billfold and then put back
the fold, swap a necklace for a length of string, steal (it was said) the glasses off your nose. Hard luck the lady who took a helping hand off Dip, who let him take her arm to cross the street or
welcomed his assistance with the too-high step to board a tram. One hand at the elbow left one hand free to browse the handbag or the purse. Tough luck the well-heeled man who hovered in the street
when Dip walked by. It only took the slightest nudge from him, a stumble, an apology. The man would never guess his pockets had been searched and emptied, his tram fare and silver tie clip stolen,
his saint medallion removed.

At first, Dip’s interest in Aunt had been professional. A woman forced to give a piggyback to a tired child might have an unattended purse or, perhaps, an outer pocket which he could open
up with just one brushing cut from the pivot blade of his pig-sticker. He’d been surprised when she drew close how young she was. And poor. And to his taste. He liked these country girls,
their jollity, their give-as-good-as-take, their duelling repartee. This one was plump and scruffy, it was true. Beneath the disguise of the broad-rimmed cloche, her forehead and her upper cheeks
were dry and pocked like grapefruit skin. But she had level eyes, a playful face, a comic angle to her chin, and – Dip, like every other man, had fantasies too strange to name – she
satisfied his liking, his desire, for girls in hats. He’d never met a woman before who wore her hat with more flirtatiousness than Aunt. One glimpse of that had put his rhubarb up.

‘Please let me help,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry him. Where to?’

She shrugged: ‘Who knows?’

‘What’s your boy’s name?’ he asked.

‘Victor … and, anyway, he isn’t mine. You go and tend your own potatoes. It’s not your business who he is.’ That’s what she said, but what she thought was
something else: This man is sent to us to take the place of Em. She let Dip take the boy from off her back and lift him in a flying angel onto his shoulders.

‘Where to?’ he asked again.

She told him all about the fire and Em and what their life had been; and telling it, she buried it, still warm. Life was too blunt and short to waste it on the dead.

Dip was enthralled by how Aunt span her hat whenever she was lost for words. He held his breath, as if his lungs were as fragile as frost, when she recounted how the men in bars had tossed their
coins in her hat-brim to win themselves short glimpses of her legs. Here was a woman, he was sure, who was a gift from heaven and from hell. He jangled stolen coins in his pocket and hoped that he
would get a chance to toss them too.

His room, he said, was near. So near that he could smell the market fruit from it. He offered her some floor.

‘And what about the kid?’ she asked.

It’s true, he thought. The kid is in the way. But then, he’s small and young. He’ll sleep. And when he sleeps? Who knows what might occur?

They put ‘the kid’ to sleep, and then they set to work. Aunt did her best to seem experienced, though, truth be told, she’d never suffered this intimacy before. She knew about
it, naturally, but only in the way of comic patter, the sexual flirting that it took to beg some coins from a man, the flush and stillness that settled on them when her legs were on display and she
was trading winks and innuendo.

Some Princesses – the prostitutes, the opportunists – had kept them all amused one night with stories of their clientele. How one old boy had paid good cash to watch a girl spit on
his feet. How others wanted armpits licked (‘My wife would never kiss me there!’) or asked for entry by the tradesman’s door, or took their pleasure spiced with oaths the like of
which would shock the guardians of hell. How the teenage sons of bourgeoisie were brought by uncles, godfathers, family friends to girls like them to ‘taste the fruit’ but more often
begged for mercy and their innocence; or wept; or failed ‘to stiffen the worm’; or changed their minds when they found out what, how and where, it all involved; or came into their
underclothes before their trouser buttons were undone; or wet themselves.

Aunt was prepared for oddities. She was prepared, in fact, to be amused. Hilarity, it seemed from what the Princesses had said, was the stablemate of making love, and Dip had shown that he liked
fun. But she soon found herself more startled than amused. Dip’s kisses were the colonizing kind. His hands – those hands so used to slipping gently and unnoticed into pockets, tucks
and folds – seemed suddenly to lose their expertise. His fingers – adept in crowds at unloosening, unfastening, unbuttoning – were trembling at the strings of the nightcloth which
she still wore beneath her coat. He seemed uncertain how to deal with the clips on his braces. He tried to pass his hands through solid cloth. He seemed unable, or unwilling, to push his trousers
down without Aunt’s help. His breathing had become so uneven and so laboured that Aunt began to think that they had better stop before the poor man had a fit and her new dream of moving in
with a good and handsome city thief was ended with a death. His temperature was fluctuating. His face was red. His levity, his measured confidence – those two characteristics which had made
Dip so attractive to Aunt – had disappeared. Instead here was a man who did not seem able to form a simple sentence, but was behaving with the blunt and charmless urgency of a child denied
the breast. Indeed, quite soon his mouth was partly on her breast, and partly chewing on her cotton undershift. One hand pulled her heavy coat and nightcloth to her waist; his other hand was pushed
too tightly – and was trapped – beneath his trouser band, beneath his underclothes.

One gentle shove from Aunt would have sent this Dip toppling like a trussed piglet onto the bare floorboards of his room. But Aunt was in no mood to shove. Despite her bafflement, she was at
least gratified to be the centre of attention, to be the focus of Dip’s ballet buffo. It kept the grief of sisterhood at bay. She let him slide onto the mattress, his sinking head pressed to
her chest … her abdomen … her stomach … her crutch … her thighs … her knees. She let him put his tongue between her toes. She laughed and laughed. No wonder
prostitutes were such a jolly breed.

‘Undress,’ he said. ‘But not the hat.’

N
OW DO YOU SEE
the charm of cities? None of this adventure could have happened on the village green where Aunt and Em had first played tip-and-kiss with
boys. There were no flirting, pocket-picking strangers to encounter there, in patent shoes and collar studs, with private rooms. The only available men were cousins all. Or neighbours’ sons.
Or daft. They were as solid and as passionate as trees, as heroic and original as farmyard hens. That is to say they were all dull and without sin; their only privacy was sleep and shit. But city
air makes free – and country pullets can become street cockatoos or fighting birds or songsters once they’ve shaken hayseed from their wings. So, Aunt and Dip, two village souls gone
free and wild in city streets, could no more pass each other by than cats can pass a dish of cream.

The dipping and the begging became less urgent. They lived on love and bed. These were sufficient for a while. So when they woke, curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch,
Dip breathing through the filter of Aunt’s hair, Aunt folded like an infant in his arms, it was not often long before they found themselves embracing face to face or delving in the blankets
for a breast, a testicle, a pinch of fat. Sex was breakfast for these two. It fuelled them for the day. Sometimes they breakfasted at leisure, no stone unturned. At other times Aunt merely turned
away and let Dip wriggle into her, to puff and quiver, for a minute at the most, at her buttocks and her back. Aunt did not care for breakfast much. Her appetite for love grew with the day. But she
was content to let Dip make use of her after dawn, so long as – in the afternoons, at night – he’d do what she desired.

Each day they washed with water from a jug which Aunt had filled from the public fountain the evening before. They dried themselves on air. They dressed in their best, only clothes, and walked
out into town not like the cockroaches they were, but eagerly and hand-in-hand. They had to eat. Aunt dealt with that. She knew which market men would happily part with bruised fruit, which
bakeries threw out collapsed or wounded loaves, where trays of eggs were stored and could be reached by someone small and agile like herself, where it was easiest to snatch the bread or chops off
diners’ plates in restaurants.

They needed money, too. Youth and love are spendthrifts both. Here Dip’s expertise gave them an undulating income. One day he’d lift a wallet with enough inside to last the week; and
then a week would pass and all he’d get would be ‘blind purses’ containing buttons, tokens, keys, eau de Cologne, but not one coin. Dip did not choose his victims well. He’d
rather pick their pockets comically so that Aunt – his witness from across the street – would be amused. He did not concentrate. He was on show. He took it as a challenge to remove a
worthless glass and metal brooch from the lapel of a stern-faced, clucking woman, and lost all taste for lucrative yet humdrum theft. Aunt satisfied the predator in him. The time would come when
he’d insist that she stayed in the room when he went out to work. He’d say she soured his good luck. But in those months when they first met he did not care if business was not good. A
note or two, some silver change, would be enough to reunite their hands while they, leaving Victor in the room with blankets for his toys, went off to find a bar.

Aunt had a liking for the clear, cheap, country spirit known then as glee water, but now, of course, tamed and bottled by the drink barons and marketed as Boulevard Liqueur. It did not take a
lot to make her drunk. One shot, and she would lay her hat and head on Dip’s shoulder, her hand upon his knee, her foot on his. Two shots, and she would press her lips against his ear and say
what they’d do to pass the time when they got home, if Victor were asleep. She’d be a ‘Princess’ and she’d let him buy her for the afternoon. She’d be as hard as
nails for him. Or else they’d make imagination manifest: ‘Let’s sit apart and masturbate.’ Or else, ‘Let’s buy some honey, Dip. We’ll put it on and lick it
off. I’ll put some on my breasts and you can feed off me …’ Or else, ‘Do you want to do me in my hat? I’ll do a show for you. You toss-and-pitch and watch. For every
coin that you land inside the brim I’ll take something off.’

Once, when she had watched Dip lifting purses from the smarter ladies of the town, she asked, ‘Why don’t you try to burgle me?’: ‘Just like we’re in a crowd,’
she said. ‘You come up and dip your hands inside my clothes and try to find my purse.’ For Aunt the narrative of sex, the scene, the characters, were seldom twice the same. Her passions
were theatrical. She cast herself in parts in which the heroine was more slender and had better skin than her, in which she was in charge, desired, insatiable, amused, in which she could transcend
herself, become any one of those grand or glamorous women on the street.