Authors: Jim Crace
Anna tried to clear a path, but did not have the voice or strength to cut into the crowd. But when the press arrived a minute or so later, packed into Big Vic’s main lifts, the crowd was
soon pushed back and Victor was identified by cameramen and journalists who wished to winkle from him some idea of what he meant to say to the soapies on the far, wet side of the revolving
doors.
Now Security did its work. It cleared a path. It made the staff give way. It made the pressmen step aside, and let Anna, Victor, and the breathless publicity manager whose face they knew,
proceed towards their confrontation on the mall. Rank, age, and power, and the circling quarters of the automatic doors – too fast and intimate for more than one high-ranker at a time, or so
the doorman judged – conspired to send the old man, first and singly, into the rain. The taxi captain knew his boss’s face. He’d been at Big Vic since the start. He hurried over
with a black umbrella and followed Victor as he crossed from private territory into the public domain of the mall. There was no sudden wind. The sun did not break through to mark this unaccustomed
meeting between the subjects and their distant king. The rain was democratic and it fell as dully everywhere – except that Victor was not wet. He had his canopy, and now a retinue of three
– Anna, PR, and the umbrella man.
The stout commissionaire – the one who had escorted Rook out of Big Vic with such inflexible diplomacy – took it on himself to block the building’s exits. If the boss was on
the mall, then it became Victor’s private place and no one could presume the right to go outside and join him there unless they had appointments to do so. The newspaper and the television
cameramen had to press their lenses to the rain-splashed, tinted glass, while the soundmen and the scribes stood by helplessly or made the best of their imprisonment by interviewing Signor
Busi.
Victor’s hearing suffered in the air and light. He was surrounded by the banners and the slogans of the marketeers, but he could not make sense of what they said. The news that he was
Victor had somehow spread. It rippled every placard there. It made each demonstrator briefly vehement in preparation for the quiet they knew must come. They crowded him. They waved their placards
and their leaflets – and, one or two, their fists. If only Victor could have separated sound from sound he would have understood the essence of their anger, that a man who lived in grandeur
in an office penthouse on a business mall could, by decree, destroy their livelihoods, could build on them, could sweep them up and bin them out like worthless market waste.
‘Who speaks for you?’ he asked.
They pushed Con forward and made him stand square on to Victor so that the rain which ran off the black umbrella splashed at his feet.
‘You have been misinformed,’ Victor told the man. ‘You’ve been misled.’ He took the leaflet from the trader’s hand. ‘I don’t know how you got hold
of this.’ He pointed at the illustration of Arcadia, taken from Busi’s confidential plans. ‘But had you been more patient you would have heard the good news that we have prepared
for you. “Arcadia? Who pays?”, your leaflet asks.’ He put his finger to his chest. ‘I pay. Who else? Sixty million US dollars it will cost, but not one dollar of that comes
from you. I take the risk. I tremble at the bills. And who will benefit from this? Who will have dry and permanent premises? Who will no longer need to put up and pack away the stalls each day? Who
will no longer need to barrow in the produce from the market edge, but will have storage space and access for the lorries and dumper lifts to bring the produce to the stalls?’ He spread his
arms to encompass everybody there. He promised them that he would not betray his ‘market friends’. He spoke of meetings where all the details would be hammered out and all their worries
could be voiced. He suggested there should be liaison every week, and a trading parliament inside Arcadia on which the marketeers could have their representatives, their ministers.
Victor looked around to check there were no journalists, and then he spoke again the words that had worked so well earlier that day.
‘The market’s getting taller, that is all,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty years of age. I’ve seen it grow. When I was just a kid and your fathers and grandfathers were
the traders there, they put their produce out on mats and sat like Buddhists on the cobblestones. When we brought in raised stalls, the sort you use and seem to love today, your fathers rioted.
They said they were a modern curse. They said no one would buy from stalls. But market stalls have made you wealthier. And now we have Arcadia with all its beauty and its benefits. Everyone will
want to buy their produce there. Not just the poor. The wealthy too. Why else would I agree to invest so much in you? To make us all as poor as our grandfathers were? My friends, have faith.
Arcadia will make you rich.’
Now Con was saying something in reply. Though Victor could not make out all his words, he knew the mood had changed. The placards were gripped less resolutely. After all, the boss himself had
come out. He’d treated them as colleagues. He’d promised them meetings, safeguards, parliaments. And what he said made sense. Why would he wish to damage market trade? Their business
made him rich.
Victor made a show of shaking hands, and then he turned about with Anna and the umbrella in his wake and re-entered Big Vic. He would not talk to journalists. His publicity manager (now
surrounded by the traders) was paid for that. He felt immensely tired and disconcerted. It was not age, but anger that such private plans as his should suffer from such scrutiny, from press, from
public, from market traders, and that despite his eminence and wealth he had to barter in the open air as if he were a boy of seven dependent on a tray of eggs.
He shared the lift with Anna. He said, ‘Now I suppose you’d better see to it that meetings are arranged. We must be democrats.’ He held up Con’s leaflet for closer
scrutiny. ‘Those plans were confidential. Someone’s leaked.’ He looked at Anna. Looked straight through her. ‘Find out who leaked,’ he said. ‘Give me the name,
it doesn’t matter who, or what it costs. He gets the sack.’
For a moment Anna almost gave the boss a pair of names, her own and Busi’s. Would the old man reward her for her honesty? Would he send Busi home, Arcadia and all? She doubted it. But
then, why should she take the blame? There was another name, a guilty name. Rook was the man, and he was safe from anything that Victor might do. You cannot sack a man when he is sacked. If she was
ever cornered, then Rook would be the name to help her out, to keep her safe, to earn rewards. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said.
Victor ordered sweetened tea and waited for it, standing at the window of his office suite. The mall was almost clear. A broken placard lifted slightly in the wind. A few of Con’s blue
leaflets were plastered to the marble flagstones by the grease and rain. Unhurried soapies stood in a circle by the fountains, as unimpassioned in their manner as a crowd of football fans
discussing their team’s uninspiring draw.
The evening paper ran the photograph of comic revolution on the streets, the policeman and the trader beating skins. The Burgher, on an inside page, led with some gossip about a writer and his
wife. His seventh item had the heading, ‘Victor’s Glass Meringue’, and comprised one long-winded feeble joke – I must admit – at the expense of cakes and architects
and millionaires. But the frontpage headline read ‘You have been misled’. The newspaper group for which the Burgher worked had financial interests in Arcadia and the trading wings of
Victor’s companies. It did not wish the old man any harm.
T
HIS IS THE
sorcery of cities. We do not chase down country roads for fame or wealth or liberty. Or romance, even. If we hanker for the fires and fevers
of the world, we turn our backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out crowds. Who says – besides the planners and philosophers – that we don’t love crowds or relish contact in the
street with strangers? We all grow rich on that if nothing else. Each brush, each bump, confirms the obvious, that where you find the mass of bees is where to look for honey.
The conspiracy is this, that we – the seemly citizens – obey the traffic lights, observe timetables, endure the shadows and the din. We do not cross, or park, or push, or jump the
queue, or trespass, except where we are ordered to. We wed ourselves to work and tickets. We ebb and flow with as much free will as salt in sea. Yet we count ourselves more blessed, more liberated
than the country dwellers whose tumult is a tractor and a crow, whose ebb and flow is seasons, weather, meals. And why? Because we townies are the only creatures in the universe to benefit from
chains, to make our fortunes from constraint, to wear the chafing, daily harnesses of city life as if they are the livery of plutocrats.
Who is more harnessed, then? The docile banker whose life is squared and mapped and calibrated, or the vagabond? Which of these two is more blessed with power and with wealth but is most likely
to observe the bulls and firmans of the street? Who is the lag and who the libertine? Yet who would be a vagabond by choice? What ploughman would not hope to be a trammelled plutocrat? We flock in
to the city because we wish to dwell in hope. And hope – not gold – is what they pave the cities with.
So Joseph, then, was happier than Rook. His life was more uncomfortable, of course. But he was rich with hope. He had more empty years ahead, more possibility, while Rook now knew that he was in
decline. Rook’s harnesses had been unloosed. His city held for him few promises, few hopes. What was he but an unemployed, unmarried, and unhealthy man, a firebrand turned to ash? Who’d
take him on? What woman, what employer, what company of friends, what neighbourhood? He looked for sentimental comfort now, the first quest of the middle-aged. His life orbited round Anna, her
gossip, what news she had of Victor and Big Vic. He was resigned to witnessing Arcadia.
Of course, he spent each morning at his table in the Soap Garden, drinking fewer coffees than previously, but more spirits and – foolishly – even smoking a cheroot. You could count
on him to join in cards or dice or dominoes, and to win or lose more recklessly than most. He rested on his bed most afternoons, but did not sleep. He took no pleasure in the radio or television.
He did not read (except the evening news). He rarely cooked a meal more complicated than some soup or egg. At first he met with Anna every night. She slept with him. She had her own drawer and a
suitcase in his apartment. Her blouses and her cardigans shared hangers with his trousers. She used his razor on her legs. He used her perspiration sprays. They talked of selling both their homes
and pooling what they had to buy a quieter, larger place a little out of town. They’d buy a car with the profit. They’d take a holiday – in Nice or Istanbul or Amsterdam.
He’d look for work, he said, but did not look. He promised he’d bring brochures from the travel firms, but he forgot. He would not visit valuers to discover what the flat was worth, or
what sort of home the two of them could buy on the outskirts of the town. He only
talked
of how their life would be if they lived as a pair. His only act of union was in bed.
Within a month or two, Anna felt she needed more time on her own. She was too tired after work for Rook’s invasive restlessness. She enjoyed, instead, the short bus journey to her own
home, the respite of the empty rooms, the opportunity to sit alone in casual clothes with no demands beyond the television set. So she took to meeting Rook only on Wednesday nights and at the
weekends. Rook was not pleased, of course, but Anna’s half-time absence suited him to some extent. It left him free to drink and smoke and gamble at night as well as day.
In time Anna’s Wednesday visits became less welcome. She wanted only to relax, to recuperate from work, to cook, make love impassively, sit up in bed with silence and a magazine. She did
not wish to go out in the streets, take snacks in bars, make love more frequently, more rapidly, more testingly. The sexual hold she had on Rook was episodic and capricious. To indulge it was to
end it. The moments of their greatest unity – their mouths and chests and genitals wrapped humidly together, their hands spread on each other’s backs, their legs in plaits – were
the moments, also, when Rook became absolved of her. That is the turpitude of men and love. Rook’s orgasms unharnessed him. They transformed him, in an instant, from a man obsessed with Anna
and the universe of bed to one impatient to pull his trousers on and walk, alone and passionless and free, out into town. He’d leave her less rewarded than a prostitute. At first, she would
get out of bed with him, to wash and dress and rush outside when all she wanted was a massage and some tea, a shower and some sleep. But Rook always led her to the Soap Garden as if it had the only
bars in town.
‘Why don’t you sleep out with the beggars and the alcoholics in the market?’ she asked. It appeared to Anna that Rook was obsessed, but not with her. He only wished, it seemed,
to woo the Soap Market and its garden before they disappeared for good.
If Anna had been more certain of herself she could have taken charge of Rook. She could have gripped him by the wrist, as if he were a child, and led him to the valuers or to the travel firms or
to employment agencies. She could have banned him from the market bars. He was weak enough to do what he was told. Instead she made do on his half portions. What choice was there? She made excuses
for him.
One Wednesday night, he would not settle down to sleep, despite embraces on the counterpane and the post-coital sedative of sheets. He dressed again. He said he had to buy some milk. He needed
some fresh air. He couldn’t breathe. She waited for him, but could not fight off sleep. When he returned, the broken noise of traffic from the street made clear that it was long past
midnight. She did not need to ask him where he’d been.
She did not come on Wednesdays any more, and he was glad of that. When all the bars were shut he liked to join the vagrants in the marketplace. He liked to stare into their box and carton fires
and share with them a song, a cigarette, a cob of roast maize, a throat of wine, a curse. They did not guess from how he dressed – his leather coat was old and bothered – that he was
rich. They merely counted him as one of those, down on their luck but not yet down-and-out, who drank with them when all the bars were shut. They did not know, they did not care, what happened to
him when he left. For all they knew he had a niche not far from theirs. In a corner of the marketplace, perhaps. Or in the sink estates – a tram’s ride out of town – where what
had not been vandalized had never worked, where ground-floor flats were tinned up with corrugated sheeting, where staircases and lifts were urinous and dangerous and dark. No one among them knew
about Arcadia. When Rook described the changes that would come it did not move them more than any other drunken, midnight speech. Why should they be alarmed? The distant future made no difference
to them. They only waited for the bottle, still half a circle from their grasp. They only hoped the wood would last till dawn.