Authors: Jim Crace
So when the URCU came, what could the soapies do, that undrilled coalition of beggars, fruiterers, revellers, ne’er-do-wells? Disperse? They were ‘bottled up’, to use the
phrase preferred by the URCU foot soldiers to the euphemistic ‘contained’ of their officers. Where could they go but back towards the flames? Those few who sought to leave by calmly
walking at the police were driven off with dum-dum-dump, or driven back by water jets, or knocked onto the cobbles by boots and sticks, or told – if they were too old and smartly dressed to
be struck or kicked or drenched – ‘Get back in there. You don’t come out until we say.’
The market drains – muzzled already by the leaves and peel of fruit – could not cope with the water from the hoses. The drains were hydrants, tumbling with water and not removing it.
They soaked and drowned the cobblestones. What flames there were found ducking, orange twins to dance with in the flood, and there were silver floodlamps for the dancers, too, from police and TV
helicopters whose rotaries sent frowns across the water.
The wisest men and women stood at the market’s heart, ankle-deep in water, breathless and demoralized in the smoke and clamour. Rook was there. He held his chest. He held a handkerchief to
his mouth. He felt exultant and dismayed. Who now could doubt the power and the patience of the rich? They held the ground. They held the sky. The city was all theirs. Had Rook not told the soapies
so? He looked towards the conifer of lights which was Big Vic at night. Was Victor the Insomniac looking down upon the Soap Market? Was his permission sought before the URCU squads were sent to put
a cordon round his tenants on his territory? Whoever’d given Victor his first name had chosen well. Who was the victor now?
Rook found his nebulizer. He held it to his mouth. He sucked on its fine mist. It was no match for damp and fire and night. He wished he had a desk on which to rest his head, or Anna’s
chest. He wished he had the skill to rise above all this, say twenty-seven storeys up beyond the smoke and noise and danger of the street. If Rook was silent at the centre of the storm, then Joseph
was at the typhoon’s active edge. His jacket top was thrown off. His sleeves were up despite the time of year, despite the hour. He pulled at cobblestones. He helped with flaming bottles,
upturned cars, with threats and challenges in the puddled, twenty-metre showground between the people and the police. He took his work shirt off. The smoke from the wet fires was just as gelid as
the steam and vapours of the train, the Salad Bowl Express, in which he’d bared himself at home, when he had raised the produce boxes to his head and steadied them, his face well hidden, his
body on display. Now he did not hide his face, and what he hoisted overhead and shook were fists. The noses and the foreheads pressed to glass were not rich women’s or their daughters’
on weekend shopping sprees but those of URCU; unpowdered, unpampered noses and foreheads, unpainted mouths steaming up the perspex of their shields and waiting for the order to Advance-dumdum,
Suppress-dum-dum, Arrest-dum-dump.
It was Joseph who found the stacks of unsold fruit and vegetables, as yet untouched by fire. He held a mauving loose-leafed cabbage in his hand, as light, for all its size, as a can of beer. He
was a child. He had no self-control. He ran out in the showground, hoisted the cabbage in the air with all the might that comes from years of lifting sacks. Many were the times when cutting
cabbages he’d found a damaged one and, just for fun, had launched it in the air to reach the hedge or scare the girls or break the boredom of the work. His training helped him now. The
mauving cabbage held its own against the pull of earth and seemed to hang inside the helicopter searchlight from above as if it were a pastel moon that had till dawn to land.
The men of URCU watched the cabbage arc towards them through the night. Not one amongst them knew what threat it posed, but certainly it looked more menacing than cobblestones or petrol bombs.
What escalation did it represent? How would their shields withstand a missile that was so large and pale and full of flight? The line of long shields tensed. The squad knee-ducked to halve the
impact of the foliage bomb. The cabbage, dropping now, unnerved them more than stones or flame. Four men from URCU, directly in the cabbage path, fell onto the ground in preparation for its blow.
The cabbage struck a shield square on. It hardly made a sound. A chicken’s egg could make more noise and do more harm. The cabbage fell apart. Its leaves were sheets, were flakes. The target
URCU fell onto his back and, if blushes weighed as much as stones, he would have died beneath the load.
The laughter and jeers from the Soap Market were louder even than the helicopter blades. Now everybody ran to arm themselves with fruit and vegetables. Never had shopkeepers and shoplifters been
in such harmony. They knew – this is the lesson of the insurrectionist – that ridicule and laughter are more subversive, more disarming than bullets. What can a line of soldiers do
against a fusillade of cabbages? Put down their shields and face the leaves? Hold up their shields and face the jeers?
Quite soon the air was thick with greengrocery. Potatoes were quite damaging and could be thrown further than even cobbles or bottles. Apples, pears, and avocados beat tattoos – dum-dump
– on shields. Tomatoes blooded them, or burst on blue-black overalls or overpolished boots. The comedians sent bananas through the air. ‘Like boomerangs,’ they said. Indeed, some
did return. You can’t control the tempers of young URCU men who’re made to feel like village clods. They sent bananas back. An URCU officer was uncapped by an aubergine. A courgette
caught a policeman in the corner of his eye. A TV cameraman took on his cheek the full deceit of a peach: first the tight and rubbery impact of the skin, and then the sticky embrace of the flesh,
and finally the wrinkled bullet at its heart. The peach stone split. It cut his cheek. His blood was peach juice, and his juice was blood.
Joseph indulged himself. He was a citizen at last. He held the front of stage, and worked his way through fruit. The snatch-squad leader noted him. ‘We’ll have him first,’ he
told his men. ‘The comic with the birthmark on his cheek. We’ll give that bastard birthmarks, head to toe.’ The police and press took Joseph’s photograph. They had a picture
of him with his fists high in the air. They had him holding cobbles in his hand. And cabbages. And Ogen melons. And pomegranate hand grenades.
At 1.45 a.m. the senior officer sustained a chest wound from a sugar beet. It struck him between his heart and epaulette and knocked him to the ground. What could he say, to all who’d seen
him tumbling on the cobblestones, except, ‘Enough’s enough. Go forward. Clear the market. Let them know who runs this town.’ So they were beating shields again. Each blow upon the
perspex shields took the URCU cordon one step closer to the produce-bombardiers, the upturned cars, the scorched remains of trees and stalls and bars, to vaunting, topless Joseph, and to Rook.
This is the classic public-order manoeuvre,’ explained the police PRs. Undermine resistance with a show of strength and noise. And then send in the Short Shields to arrest the
troublemakers. And then send up the canisters of Green Grief, the gas that blinds the rioters and dyes them green and makes them weep and grimace like Picasso’s Cubist lovers. And then mop
up.
They griefed the centre of the market first. The police – though they had masks – did not wish to gas their own advance. Rook kicked a canister away. His legs and shoes took on the
airborne moss. His skin turned ghostly, applewhite, while Grief, as light and volatile as gnats, rose to his waist, his chest, his throat, his eyes. It was a pity all the lemons had been used as
missiles. Lemon juice, rubbed on the face, is some protection against gas.
Rook felt for safety. He found a car. He crouched. His eyes and chest were tight. Rioters should not mix drink and gas. Asthmatics should shun crowds. He clutched the front tyre of the car. He
alternated handkerchief and nebulizer at his mouth. He coughed. But coughing did not clear his chest. The sticky sputum that landed on the cobblestones and on the rubber tyre and in his hand was
lining from his lungs. Its release left him raw. It hurt to swallow smoke and Grief. It hurt to barter oxygen with CO
2
. His bellows wheezed and tightened if they were opened wider than a
crack. He had to pant as quickly and as shallowly as marsh frogs do, his chest distended, his lungs migrating to his throat, his upper orifices strung like candle-tops with waxy phlegm.
The country people say a dying man is concentrated in his thoughts. He sees the heights and depths of life ranged before him like coloured beads on a Chinese abacus. He’s deft and
concentrated, accounting for his faults and triumphs. ‘The dying never lie,’ they say. But Rook was lying to himself. His abacus was ranged only with the whitest beads. His thoughts
were hardly concentrated. His brain was in his throat, buffeted by outer, wicked air and inner, pinioned breath, now damp with bubble blood and overladen with the weight of mucus. His tongue and
nails and lips were blue. He sweated and he trembled as he sank from sleep into coma. But then, perhaps, he was not dying after all. The rain, the breeze, the slight protection of the car, the
gas-repellent sheet of water which cushioned cobbles (and in which he now fell forward, his cheek and ear submerged) might dampen down the asthma and save Rook from the suffocating embraces of the
air. Perhaps he stood a chance, for help was close at hand.
What did the market look like, now that the police had broken ranks and were intent, like running boys with flocks of seagulls on the beach, to cause disordered flight amongst the trapped and
agitated crowds? Helmets moved amongst bare heads. Soapies grouped, regrouped, broke up like antelope before the snapping jackal truncheons of the police. It seemed that URCU – far
outnumbered by the crowd – were deadened men who had no pity and no fear. They went to work as if their orders were to complicate the mayhem of the night, not bring it to an end. Joseph was
fleeing for his life. He’d already taken blows to his bare shoulder and his back. The Short Shields had him marked. They knew his face. His torso had been photographed. He was the prize stag
in the herd. ‘Get the one without the shirt!’ He ducked and dived between the people and cars as lightly as he’d done when he’d played tag with other boys between the
orchard sheds and trees when he was young. His life had led to this. He had a plan: to find an open car and force his way, between the springs and cushions of the rear seats, into the boot. Where
else was there to hide or go? The URCU had the soapies bottled up, their clothing steeped in green, reduced by Grief from revellers to snivellers.
Joseph had tried two dozen doors before – exactly this – he stumbled over Rook. He recognized the face, the cough, the leather jacket that he wore. He sat Rook up.
‘What’s up?’ he said, too dull to find dramatic words. Rook did not speak. His eyes were shut. One ear was full of water. The other one was stained with Grief. He was unconscious
now. The best of luck to him. To be unconscious is God’s way of settling the lungs. He did not fight the inner or the outer air. He breathed more shallowly, more evenly, less frequently.
Joseph placed him with his back against the wheel arch. Rook’s head and chest fell forward. His diaphragm forced heavy air into his upper lungs. By chance, his breathing pipes were tipped at
just the angle for recovery. Joseph beat him on the back. The blows expelled damp sods of air.
‘Come on. Wake up,’ said Joseph. ‘I want my money now.’ He slapped Rook’s face. The colour of his cheeks had turned from green to pink.
‘Give. Give,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your bonfire. Now you’ve got to pay for it.’
Rook was peaceful now. Too comfortable to wake and speak. He made a noise that found a passage through his nose. It was the noise that athletes make when marathons are run. It was a snore of
restitution. It repaid the debt of oxygen. Joseph’s slaps and blows – who knows? – had saved Rook’s life.
Joseph had no time to spare. He heard the heavy boots close in, the cries of pain, the lifeless impacts made by sticks on men and cobblestones on shields. This place of safety by the car’s
front wheel could not last long. He tugged on Rook’s coat. It would not shift, not speedily at least. He took his ‘nife’ from his trouser pocket. He placed it at Rook’s
stooped back. He did not say a word, but opened up the leather purse of Rook, along the jacket’s backbone seam, the woollen shirt beneath, as if this were no man but some slain goat. The
knife cut from the inside out. It meant no harm to Rook. He was not hurt, just robbed. Joseph pulled off the left half of the jacket and the shirt, by the sleeves. And then the right half too. He
checked the inner pockets, found the outline of Rook’s wallet, and would have cut the pocket out, but Short Shields were too close. He stooped and ran again – and as he ran he pulled
the two half-jackets with their half-shirt linings on his arms and round his shoulders. His leather jacket had a stripe of flesh down the centre of his back. His muscled torso had only partly
disappeared. He looked like some stage-punk, prepared for surgery.
Rook was not aware that Joseph had come or gone, or what he’d done to save his life. He felt the cold of New Year’s dawn and all the fires put out and no shirt or jacket on. He
shivered when he became conscious. He was startled by the noise and by his semi-nakedness. He almost stood, and as he almost stood two URCU saw his lack of clothes. He was the one without the
shirt. They pulled Rook up. They hit his legs and then his back with swinging blows. They put the handle of their batons in his ribs and pressed. They kicked him in the face and testicles, their
boots scooping water from the ground and skidding on Rook’s skin. They were well trained. It was a rule that policemen who were obliged to assault a suspect on the street would not arrest the
man, but leave him to be found by other officers. The two that roughed up Rook were wise enough to roll him on the ground and disappear.
Joseph, split in two, Rook’s wallet on his heart, found a car at last of which the window could be forced. It took him half a minute to get in. Another half to squeeze into the boot. He
was appalled at being trapped like that, but hoped that he was safe. Indeed he was. No one was checking boots, while there were people still free in the marketplace. Joseph curled up in the
darkness. Once he felt the car rock violently as someone outside was thrown against the frame. He heard one cry. But mostly he heard nothing, except the pulse inside his ears, his nervous breath.
He did not hear, six cars away, the cough and splash as Rook rolled over for his last time, his dead face half-submerged on market cobblestones.