Arcadia (27 page)

‘I’ll let you get to bed,’ Anna said.

Signor Busi stood and slowly straightened. His stomach squalled. He took her hand. ‘Good night, my dear,’ he said. ‘It has been a great pleasure.’ He watched her leaving
for the line of taxis in the street, the bell boy and the file of papers at her side. She walked triumphantly.

She really is the most enticing woman, Signor Busi thought as he began the journey to his room.

Rook was now sitting up in bed. ‘How did it go?’ he asked again. Anna pointed to the bedroom door. A yellow file, fat with plans and papers, leant against the frame.

‘Have faith in me,’ she said. Why should she tell him any more. Let him imagine what he wished. Rook did not betray his lack of faith in her. His conscience was not clear but smudged
with two grey marks where he had placed his knees.

They sat in silence for a while, Anna at the mirror, Rook in bed, each with secrets to preserve, but only one of them felt sure enough to smile.

R
OOK SMILED AT
C
ON
. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Because, unless we talk, your market stall will fall to bits.’ His arms were up and stretched. ‘All this will disappear.’

‘Get lost.’ Con smiled at Rook, but his smile was lipless. It did not crease his eyes or pack his cheeks. It was tight. It elevated ‘Get lost’ from curt indifference to
chilling malediction. The smile dismissed Rook as a man not worthy of contempt. But Rook was not dismissed. He put his hand out to stop Con packing for the night. He had counted on Con’s
hostility. He’d hoped for it. It would not do if Con was a conciliator who preferred
What’s done is done
to the bald
Get lost
. Rook rubbed a finger and a thumb to mime the
crumbling of a solid into dust.

‘Get lost,’ said Con. ‘I’ve work to do.’

‘But not for long,’ said Rook. ‘You’ll soon be out of work and rattling round the streets like me. Except you won’t have the savings I’ve got to make your
unemployment pleasant.’

‘You’re farting through your mouth,’ said Con, but he was enticed enough to stop his efforts with his stall and turn to look Rook in the face.

Rook had prepared his speech. ‘Pay attention,’ he said, as if the trader were a six-year-old. ‘Don’t be a fool. We’ve more in common than you think … and
I’m not blaming you.’

‘Not blaming me? For what?’

‘For that stupid scuffle with the country boy, and all your poke and squeak with Victor. For losing me my job. What do you think?’

‘You can blame yourself for that,’ said Con. He’d not bother to deny that he’d launched Joseph on the fumbled attempt to repossess his pitch payment. Why should he? It
was reclamation, just and fair. He did not understand what ‘all your poke and squeak with Victor’ might be or why he should be blamed for Rook’s dismissal. Nor did he care. Rook
was despicable, he thought, but as harmless as a snake that having lost its venom makes do with hiss. It did not matter what Rook knew about that farce with Joseph in the walkers’ tunnel. How
could Rook damage Con now that he was, by all accounts, truncated from his boss for good?

‘You had it coming, and you got off lightly,’ he said. ‘I should have sent four boys, not one. You’d be on crutches now. Why should I feel guilty? I’m only sorry I
wasn’t there myself.’

‘Don’t play the hero,’ said Rook. ‘If I was holding grudges I wouldn’t be here at all. I’d fix you privately. I’m here to help you out. Not that you
deserve my help.’

‘Get lost.’

Rook wrapped his fingers round his keys. How he despised this man, his smell, his clothes, his tight and unforgiving face. But Rook had to persevere. His only route was Con. He put the yellow
file of duplicate designs from the Busi Partnership on the trader’s stall, amongst the bruised fruit and the waste that Con would jettison. He took the top drawing out. There were the melting
glass meringues, the starfish corridors, the indoor trees, the relocated cobblestones in wash and watercolour. There was the legend: ‘A
RCADIA
– a
sketch’.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s what dear Victor has in mind for you.’

Now Rook was free to make his speech. He told how Victor was not satisfied with profits from the marketplace, how he’d been prompted by his bankers and his strategists to build, how Signor
Busi and Arcadia had won the old man’s ear – and eye. An easy task because Victor was demented with old age, indigestion, and his obsession with a statue of some kind: ‘A mother
and a child, would you believe. And not a statue of himself!’

Rook made the most of his regrets that he was no longer in Victor’s pay. It was his view, he explained with patient irony, that since the one man who knew the Soap Market ‘from the
inside out’ had been removed from Victor’s side, then Victor had been free to run amuck.

‘I protected you,’ he said. ‘Maybe you didn’t like to pay for that, but I protected you – and see what’s happened now that the Soap Market has got no one to
speak for it inside Big Vic.’ He punched the drawings. ‘There’s a press conference in three days’ time,’ he said. ‘They think they’ve got the only set of
plans. But your man Rook has earnt his pay and got a second set.’ Rook recalled for Con the chilling boasts of Busi, ‘There’s nothing to preserve’, ‘We level off and
take away’, ‘We start from scratch’.

‘I don’t hold out much hope for you or this, unless you organize, unless you defend yourself. Yourselves,’ concluded Rook. He’d said enough. He pushed the file of papers
towards Con.

‘Why me?’ asked Con. ‘Why not one of those old windsocks you hang out with in the bar?’

‘Because they’re windsocks, like you say. Limp when things are fine, and when it’s stormy full of air. But you, you’re not a windsock; you’re one of life’s
malcontents. You’re not afraid of fights. You were the only one to give me any trouble over payments for your pitch. The only one from what? … from two hundred and eight stallholders.
You’re one in two-o-eight. You, Con, are a natural troublemaker. And may you be in Heaven for an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.’

‘All right, so I’m a malcontent. Then why not you? You’re the maestro amongst mischief-makers. You’ve got the plans. You know the innards of the man. God knows,
you’ve got enough spare time to organize a global war. Why me?’

Rook spoke with passion now. He was not obliged to equivocate with abstracts. He spoke of his damaged reputation in the marketplace, how he might still be seen as Victor’s eyes and ears,
as some double agent whose loyalties were as brief and unpredictable as shooting stars. Or else the word would be that the sacked factotum of the millionaire, disgruntled, venomous, was using
marketeers to settle his own scores. The press and television would make a meal of that. They loved bad motives. They preferred an intrigue to the simple justice of a cause.

Or else no one would trust him. The older traders would not forget how Rook’s blinking leadership a dozen years before had been so readily tranquillized by Victor’s cheque. His
appeasement had impoverished everyone but himself. Unless they were as forgetful and forgiving as chastised dogs they would suspect him.

‘Besides,’ said Rook, ‘I’ve got to stay out of sight. That architect has seen me with … the person from Big Vic who stole the plans for you. I can’t name
names. The less you know of that the safer she, or he, will be. With luck they won’t trace the leak. But if Busi sees me with the plans he’ll make connections. He’s slow and
foreign but he’s not stupid. Our routes to Victor and to Busi will be blocked and our informant will get sacked, at best. As things stand our sharpest weapon is surprise. What do you
say?’

Con did not say a word. He gathered up the papers on his stall. He pushed them in his bag together with his newspaper, his change of shirt, his takings for the day. He’d sleep on it. Then,
next morning, he would call a meeting of the marketeers and take directions, not from Rook but them.

He set to work dismantling his stall. He was dispirited by what he’d heard, though, normally, when work was at an end and home was near, he felt at his most contented. He wished that
Victor’s man – he could not think of Rook in other terms – would take the hint and leave. He’d said his piece. He’d mixed his poison. He ought to disappear. But Rook
seemed keen to stay. He was smiling, even; the same smile with which he’d burdened Con before they spoke.

Rook took the end of Con’s stall and helped him lift it from the trestles. He packed the produce boxes to one side. He unhooked the green and yellow awning and began – inexpertly,
incorrectly – to fold the canvas. His hands and fingers were as soft and clean as soap. Con took the bulky canvas and unfolded it. He stowed it once again, so that it made an almost perfect
square. He stood on it to clear the air. ‘I don’t need help,’ he said.

Rook shrugged. ‘We all need help.’

‘Get lost,’ said Con and, as he had his back to Rook, allowed himself the briefest smile, but one which packed his cheeks and creased his eyes and put his lips on show. It was true
what Rook had said. He relished fights. He was the one in two-o-eight.

V
ICTOR AND
Signor Busi were taking breakfast on the 28th when Con and his two hundred colleagues set out from the Soap Garden. Press cameramen and a
television unit from the local studios were there to film the marketeers’ procession to Big Vic.

Rook, in his role of unacknowledged puppet-master, had made the phone calls to the press on his own initiative. Even though he was not fool enough to join the demonstrators, he watched them from
his usual cafe table and was pleased. Two hundred out of two-o-eight was good, though not all the men and women there were stallholders. Some were porters, some were soapie wives and sons. Others
represented the cafes and the bars that Victor wished to level to the ground. There were some customers, too – a dozen men and women from restaurants and small hotels in the Woodgate district
who bought fresh produce from the Soap Market and liked the cheaper prices. They all feared change. Yet they believed that change could be confronted and repelled. Remember how the residents of
Stephens Well, a small and wealthy suburb, had beaten back developers, or beaten them down at least. They’d forced the architects to lop three storeys from the top of their new office block
because it cast a shadow on the suburb’s private park for forty minutes every day. That contravened the ancient Law of Light. Consider how the city’s conservation groups had stopped the
widening of roads when widening would bring down trees. Trees of that age and size were protected by the Sylvan Ordinances of 1910. The marketplace had trees and light as well. So there was
hope.

Rook drank his coffee, and peered at everyone who passed. His newspaper was spread out across his lap, unread and wet. It did not matter what the headlines were, or what the world was coming to,
or that, if NASA got it right, an asteroid, one kilometre in width and travelling at 74,000 kilometres per hour, would ‘wing’ the Earth at noon, missing the Soap Market (also one
kilometre in width) by an astronomically narrow half a million kilometres of space. His mind was focused on the detail of his life and not Eternity. Here – within a stone’s throw
– he and the soapies were confronted by a danger they could witness, understand and quantify in human measurements. Here was a space they could protect.

Of course the market did not close. The marchers all had partners, deputies, or family to defend them from a trading loss. Each stall was open and the crowds were much the same as on any other
day, at least on any other day that rained as hard as this. The demonstrators used their placards as screens against the rain. They pulled on hats. The television unit clothed its camera in a
plastic hood. Someone had thought to bring a drum and he was ordered to the front by Con. They set off through the marketplace a trifle sheepishly, routed and regrouped by Cellophane. He’d
never known such ordered crowds, such unity, before.

It’s difficult to concentrate on grievances when all around are friends. Con had a dozen leafleters. The Soap Fund – a reserve to pay for traders’ funerals or help out widows
or support those injured at their work – had provided money for paper and printing. The leaflet showed the Busi sketch in ink and wash of Arcadia. Its black and Gothic banner was
‘Arcadia? Who pays?’ – and then it listed, with more regard for impact than for grammar, ‘
You
, the shopper …
Me
, the trader …
Us
, the
citizens …
Them
that value history and tradition.’

When they had regrouped, at the Mathematical Park, to enter Tower Square and curve round with the traffic into Saints Row, the leafleters set to work, walking in the road to press their message
on to drivers, dodging through the pavement crowds. The crowds, in fact, had slowed to let the traders through. They had no choice. Their umbrellas made it difficult to negotiate a passage through
the squints and alleys of a throng. It only takes a drum to cause the gawpers in the street to stand and watch, or to make those drivers with a little time to spare twist at their steering wheels
to see what the drum might signify. Once a few had stopped to look, then everybody slowed. The usual speeding lava of the streets had cooled. Then there were horns and tempers. Pedestrians, blocked
on the pavements by the ones who stopped to watch, spilled out onto the street and tried to hurry on between the cars and vans and gusts of rain. A courier motorcyclist bumped up on the pavement,
and tried to clear a passage for himself.

The soapies could not find an easy way. Only the drummer, whose pulse and drumsticks seemed to threaten anyone that blocked his path, proceeded with much speed. The camera crew and the
photographers walked backwards through the traffic. Their lenses squared the scene and transformed this hapless chaos, unintended and shortlived, into an act of scheming anarchy. Marching in a
traffic jam to the formal beat of drum and to the blatant discord of car horns, the protest had undermined itself. It could hardly move. The rule of modern cities is that wheels and legs must keep
on moving or keep out of town. At least they should keep separate. They should observe the segregations of the kerb.