Arcadia (4 page)

‘That’s it! It’s marzipan,’ he said, translating. ‘I wonder if it tastes.’ He put a broken laurel stem into his mouth.

The waitress laughed and said, ‘That’s poison, that is. Don’t you know? You don’t suck that.’ She pointed at the beads of sap which were swelling like water
blisters where the wood had snapped.

‘How should I know? I’m not a countryman,’ said Rook, and sneezed again. It was his boast that he would wither out of town. He wouldn’t last five minutes away from
traffic fumes or crowds.

The waitress was the sort to stand and talk, mulishly deaf and blind to summonses from older, less flirtatious men at other tables.

‘Those spoonwood leaves,’ she said, using once again the country term, ‘are poisonous. You’ll run both ends.’ Encouraged by their laughter, she embarked upon a tale
of how the women in her village used once to boil the poison out of laurel leaves. They’d soak the poison into bread, she said, to bait the rats and mice: ‘A woman my grandma knew made
chicken soup with laurel seeds and laurel sap. They’d use it as fox bait. Or for killing crows. She fed it to her bloke by mistake. He had his bum and stomach pointing at the toilet pan for
near enough a week, and then he died. The soup had poisoned him. Nice way to go.’

‘Ive eaten soup like that here,’ said Con, and winked. This time their laughter was prolonged. They knew this waitress had a second job. She was the kitchen girl as well.

‘Bang goes your chance of ever breakfasting with me,’ she said to Con, and then pressed on with what she had to say about the laurel tree: ‘My aunt, she had a neighbour who
wanted to inherit a little apple orchard when his grandma died. Except she wouldn’t die. The older she got the fitter she became. So this man and his wife, they asked the granny round for
supper. She got the spoonwood soup. She was shaking like a cow with qualsy before she’d eaten half a bowl. But she was tough. Her heart and stomach were made of wood. They had to pinch her
nose and force some second helpings down her throat. Then that was that. She’d gone. He got her apple trees.’

The waitress paused so that the point of what she said was not missed or weakened by the laughter that she caused or by the noise of Rook’s disruptive sneezes. Then she said, ‘And no
one ever knew the cause of death. Though they took the body to a hospital and experts cut the old girl up to see what they could see. The reason is that spoonwood doesn’t leave any traces.
Except a rash inside the mouth.’ She turned to Rook. ‘You’d better watch yourself,’ she said.

Rook did not hear. He sneezed again. He looked as pale as chalk. It seemed his tongue and mouth were drier, and more blunted, than they ought to be, though whether this was caused by laurel sap
or by the juice of orange he could not tell. He helped himself to water from a jug on the traders’ table and rinsed his hands. He took the shot they offered him, gargled with the spirit, and
spat it out into a drain. He rubbed the stinging corners of his lips. He wiped his tongue on the cuff of his jacket. His mouth was now his most self-conscious part. Rook cursed his luck. He knew
the signs of asthma on the march. His sense of smell had failed. His nails – dug in his palms – left deep red weals which would not clear. ‘You’ll live,’ the waitress
said. ‘It takes more than a lick of spoonwood to harm a man your size.’

Rook placed his pyramid of cakes beside him on the ground. This time the sneeze gathered in his upper nose and fizzed but did not detonate. He took deep nostril breaths to try to burst the
bubble forming in his head. He started breathing through his mouth. He sucked in air. He beat his chest as if he’d eaten too much cheese and stomach wind was warring with his heart. The more
he tried to let the sneeze go free, the more it burrowed into him, and spread. His sputum was like lard. These were the times he missed his parents most. They coped with him when he was small.
They’d ignite an asthma firework for him at the table and let him inhale smoke, his head inside the cowling of a blanket or a towel. They’d massage him. They’d soothe his chest
with balsam brewed from cloves and juniper and peppermint. They had been dead for fifteen years.

At first, the market men were unconcerned, amused that Rook was making such a fuss. They did not understand what asthma was or how the trigger of the laurel sap and smell had so alarmed
Rook’s lungs. His breathing now was panicky and spasmed. The tree of passages, the branches, twigs, and sprays, which served the air sacs in his lungs, were swollen. They were almost blocked.
He had to cough. His chest had shrunk. He did not understand what anyone was asking him.

He could have died. The waitress beat him on the back. She struck him with the rounded heel of her right hand between his shoulderblades. She thought he’d got a scrap of twig or leaf
lodged in his throat and that he should bring it up or choke. Her blow knocked Rook onto his knees. It marked his back. He coughed up pinkish phlegm. ‘That’s right,’ she said. His
lips, his fingernails, his tongue, his feet were turning violet. His face was mauve. She struck him once again. He had the sense, and luck, to roll this time onto his back so that, unless she took
it on herself to punch him in the stomach or the ribs, or kick him on the ground, he was more safe. In fact, he found it easier to breathe flat out upon his back beneath the traders’ table.
The air went in and out more freely. The tidal ebb and flow increased. He pinkened, gasped a little less, then sneezed. His mind was clear. He understood. He’d been exposed. The grass. Some
pollen. The orange juice. The laurel leaves. Some rural irritant had stressed his city lungs.

He felt his pockets in the hope that he had brought his nebulizing spray. It was not there. He’d left it in the top drawer of his desk. He was too careless with himself. He should have
known. The garden was no place for him. He couldn’t wait to reach Big Vic and his nebulizer’s balsamed mist. He would have hailed a taxi for the journey back, but there were none. No
car or taxi, no ambulance, could ever reach the garden during trading hours. The market was impenetrable except by foot or porter’s barrow. Rook took a napkin and wiped the beads of sap from
the laurel stems and then he took the sheets of a discarded newspaper and wrapped them round the bunch. He held them downwards so that he did not share their oxygen.

‘It’s greenery for Victor’s birthday chair,’ he said. ‘To decorate it.’

The traders watched him blankly, without warmth. Rook looked at the waitress, expecting that she’d understand. She was a country girl, after all. But no. Her eyes were just as blank.
She’d never heard of dressing birthday chairs. Now Rook’s discomfiture, his sense of foolishness, was changing from embarrassment to irritation and regret: irritation that the men were
so open in, first, their mirth and then their coolness at his expense, regret that he was not where he belonged, sitting side by side with them, and laughing at the ink-stained stiffness of some
other clerk on trifling errands for his boss, made paranoid and breathless by a dab of laurel sap. For what could be more foolish or banal than these tasks of greenery and cakes, which earlier had
seemed to Rook to promise so much freedom and amusement? And what could be more demeaning than the panicked, public face of adult asthma?

Rook took his foliage and his cakes through the maze of market stalls. The journey back, out of the innards of the city, seemed less ordained than the route he had followed in, towards the Soap
Garden. He wove a clumsy passage through the shopping crowds, hampered and encumbered with his gleanings and his purchases. He felt displeased, and fearful too. Already he was at the market edge.
The banana and the jackfruit men were ready with their knives. The Man in Cellophane waved him on impatiently. Beyond, there was the district of his birth. Beyond, there were the boutiques of
Saints Row, Link Highway Red, the ne’er-do-well, Big Vic. Rook walked, half dreaming, from the old town to the new.

R
OOK
’
S
NE
’
ER-DO-WELL
was called Joseph. His broken nails and
weatherbeaten neck and hands were all he had to show for three years of work on one of Victor’s farms. He’d purchased the cream and crumpled suit from a catalogue. Its light, summer
style was marketed as
On the Town
. The fashion model in the catalogue had been sitting on a bar stool with his sunglasses hooked inside the breast pocket of the jacket. One hand – the
one with a single, gleaming ring – was resting on his knee, palm up. The other held the barmaid by the wrist. The gold watch on his arm showed the time as five to midnight, or five to midday.
There was a bottle of muscatino on the bar and strangely, promisingly, three glasses, as if another woman had just left, or was expected soon. Or, perhaps, the glass was waiting there for
Joseph.

When the parcel with the suit arrived, Joseph had cut the picture from the catalogue and put it in the breast pocket as if to equip his clothing with a pedigree and, more than that, an
aspiration. The model’s empty, upturned palm, the drama of the barmaid’s wrist caught by the strong hand of the man, exactly matched Joseph’s notion of the casual spontaneity of
city life where day and night were all the same, where drink and wealth and women were within easy reach. What else was there to fill his mind each day? Trenching orchards, driving tractors,
mucking fields, cutting cabbages, boxing plums was not the work to satisfy a youth like Joseph. The muscles that had hardened in the fields had made him vain. And vanity is stifled in the
countryside – the rain, the overalls, the solitary work for little pay, make sure of that.

The only chance he had to flex and strut was at the station every cropping day when he went to load the produce onto trains. Mostly they were goods and freight trains, passing slowly through
soon after dawn or late at night, and Joseph’s vanity hardly noticed in the dark. But once a week, at 7.10 on Thursday evenings, the Salad Bowl Express, as it was called, stopped at the
station with passengers weekending in the city, on shopping sprees or love affairs or binges, or just touring the sights. On Thursday evenings rich women and their daughters pressed their foreheads
and their noses to the sleeper-carriage glass to watch the men load on the trays of strawberries or cress or endives, fresh for the busy weekends of hotels and restaurants. Some passengers lowered
the Pullman windows to buy fruit in cornets of twisted leaves from country girls whose own weekend did not begin until the moon came up on Saturday.

This was the chance for Joseph, obscured and dramatized by the gelid mists of dusk which pirouetted on the platforms with the sweating vapours of the train, to take his work shirt off and parade
for them along the station like a boxer, bare and muscular and young. He’d rest the produce boxes on his head and steady them with his arms raised. He felt his body looked its best that way,
his muscles stretched, his stomach as flat and hairless as a slate. Besides, in such a pose, his face was hidden by his arms, and Joseph knew his face was not well made. The noses and the foreheads
at the glass were powdered, painted, sweet-smelling. Their shapes were good, symmetrical, each ear adorned with rings, the hair poised for a weekend in the city. Joseph’s nose and forehead
were not so ornamental, not ugly but uncouth through work and poverty and innocence. The corners of his mouth were cracked from sun and sweat. His nose was pitted from the scabs he’d picked.
One central tooth was gone. One cheek was blemished by a birth-stain, cherry-coloured, cherry-shaped. His chin was far too heavy and his face too drawn to benefit from the thin moustache that he
was growing. His was a rural face. But his body, give or take a scar or two, was smart enough for town. He dreamed of the day when he would press his own nose to the steamy glass and glide away on
the Salad Bowl Express. He worked, saved his wages, sent for his
On the Town
suit, and planned his escapade.

He was not bright. He could not name exactly what it was he sought in town. But it was
privacy
. In town he’d sit inside a bar at noon, three-quarters full of drink, a woman on his
arm, his lighter lifted to her cigarette, and no one there would know his name, or where he lived and worked, or who his family were, or how he coped when he was just a metre high at school, or
that he had a magpie reputation there for theft. In town he’d flourish in the privacy of crowds, in the monkish cells of tenements, in streets. His neighbours would be strangers. They’d
hardly nod. He’d be a mystery to them. They’d only know the things he chose to tell. And – safely, without fear of what the village folk would say – he could choose to tell
his city neighbours lies. In any case, the truth of Joseph did not match the suit. He wore it for the first time on the Thursday evening – the day before Victor’s birthday lunch –
over his khaki working shirt, his black field-boots, and helped to load the produce boxes on the Salad Bowl Express. The women pressed their perfect noses to the glass. This time he did not strip
to show his working muscles. His suit was on parade. When the klaxon blew to mark the train’s departure, Joseph lifted his final load – a plastic travel-tank marked
URGENT: LIVE FISH
– and stowed it in the corner of the goods car which carried Victor’s name. And there Joseph stayed, as quietly as a slug in fruit, until the Salad Bowl
Express set off for town. Smudge-suited, ticketless, naive, Rook’s ne’er-do-well migrated from the world of plants and seasons to the urban universe of make-and-take-and-sell.

He found a cigarette to smoke, and there was fruit for supper. His couchette was four sacks of spinach leaves. He could not shift the sliding door to urinate upon the line. Besides, he did not
want some cousin’s tittle-tattle friend to look up from his hoe or spade to watch the train go by and catch a sight of Joseph hosing the dusk. He wanted just to disappear and be forgotten,
not be remembered – immortalized – as the locomotive pisser in a village joke. But men have shallow, porous bladders which nag and leak. A shaking train is torture when they want to
piss. Why suffer, Joseph thought. It crossed his mind to urinate onto the apples or the greens. But he had spent too many years attending to them in the fields to treat the crops like that. More
fun, more logical, to add a little water to the fish. He unscrewed the cap which sealed the tank. He knelt, unzipped the trousers of his suit, and put his mushroom in the hole. The ten perch, used
to hand-feeding with protein biscuits in Victor’s stock pool, gawped and butted at his penis end, but when his bladder got to work they fled into the cooler, blander depths.