Arcadia

1

NO WONDER Victor never fell in love. A childhood like the one he had would make ice cubes of us all. He lived on mother’s milk till he was six, and then he thrived on charity and trade.

On the day that he was eighty, Victor dined on fish. He loved fish best. As he had scaled and silvered with old age, so his taste for fish had grown. Ten live perch from his own stock pool arrived that morning at the station and were driven by cab in a plastic travel-tank to his offices. The kitchen staff were used to Victor and his coddled fish. They planned to cook them steeped in apple beer, and serve them cold with olives from his farm. There would be champagne too — the boss’s own. And fruit, of course. All this for just five birthday guests. Greengrocers every one, spud-traders, bean-merchants, middlemen in fruit — and each of them, like Victor, old and slow and hard of hearing. There were — at his request — no gifts, no cards, no cake. He would not tax himself — or any of his staff — with speeches. What old men want is peace and informality, and the chance to talk amongst themselves like smutty boys.

He said he wanted a simple country meal. The fiction in his mind was this: that he would sit surrounded by his friends beneath a canvas awning. There’d be white cloths on a shaky trestle. A breeze. The guests would push off their slippers and rub their bare toes in the dust. They’d twist round on their stools and spit olive stones in the air. Some cats and chickens would take care of crumbs and perch skins. With just a little teasing and some cash, the cook’s fat son would play plump tunes on his accordion. That was Victor’s ideal birthday meal. Simple, cheap, and attainable for country people living earthbound on a farm, say, thirty years ago; but a dream beyond the reach of cheques and fax machines for a man whose home is twenty-seven storeys and a hundred metres up, with views all round, through tinted, toughened glass, and tinted, toughened air, of office blocks and penthouses and malls.

Nevertheless, the man we knew as Rook had done his best to cater for old Victor’s dreams. White tablecloths were easy to locate. Rook had the cats. The breeze was air-conditioning. The old men could shake their slippers off and rub their toes in carpet wool. They could spit their olive pips at waitresses. Why not?

They’d have to go without the chickens, reasoned Rook. Victor could not have free-range hens clucking amongst his halting guests. He was not Dalí, yet. The accordions were booked. The agency had arranged a band of three, two sisters and a friend. Perhaps, thought Rook, he ought to spray the elevator with aerosols of field dung, or play recorded birdsong on the intercom. He’d have the boss in tears. He’d have the boss in tears, in any case. He had resolved to indulge Victor for the day. He planned to dress a birthday chair for him in greenery, just like they used to in the village where Victor was born. Just like the chair in Leyel’s Calendar of Customs: Plate XVII, a fogged black-and-white photograph of a small boy from the twenties, beaming, tearful, overdressed in breeches and a waistcoat, amid the birthday foliage of a high-backed seat. Victor could have the same. Office Security and Caretaking would disapprove — but, surely, Rook could decorate a chair without the building grinding to a halt. A little greenery would do no harm.

So that was Rook’s day arranged. It made a change from simply standing by as the old man inked his mark on cheques and papers or pointed his icy nose at the latest trading journals or — more warmly — at Alkadier’s Illustrated Guide to Greenhouse Coleoptera, which was his bed and desk and lavatory companion. Besides, it released Rook onto the streets for a while. His greatest joy, to let his tie hang loose, to dodge and stroll amongst the people of the city. But earning wages all the time, bleeding Victor’s purse, bleeding purses everywhere.

There was a city garden, at the heart of the crop market and not far from Victor’s, where there were roses, laurels, and all sorts of green-grey, stunted shrubs. It used to be the public washing square, and was known still to all the locals as the Soap Garden. With a logic more poetic than functional, the market which engulfed the garden was known, too, as the Soap Market, though soap was not on sale. The bludgeoned medieval scrubbing stones and the gargoyle fountains of the washing square were still there, though protected from the people by a fence. Seats and tables spilled out into the garden from the many adjacent market bars. And there were lawns, a cake-and-coffee stand, and shrubbery that would make a perfect dressing for a birthday chair. I could send a chauffeur or a clerk, it’s true, thought Rook. But on sunny days like this there were girls spread out across the grass — more and prettier than he’d ever meet in country lanes. Why waste such prospects on a clerk?

He told Anna, the woman who ran the outer rooms, hired and fired the staff, and controlled the door to Victor’s office suite, that there were ‘arrangements to be made’ and that he’d be gone two hours at the most. ‘Bring back a cake for me,’ she said. She was no fool. She knew Rook well. She’d known him hurry out before on urgent morning calls, then caught him sitting idly in his room with nothing on his desk but crumbs. He was not the sort to play the grandee if the staff included him in their gossip or their pleasantries. He did not have a reputation there for hard work, or pride. He was Victor’s buffer — and his fixer — that was all. Boss said; Rook did. Though what Rook did and fixed was anybody’s guess.

Anna liked the teasing mystery of Rook. Her pleasure showed: her voice amused, her face a little flushed and kindled. She wondered if she would dare to share a cake with him, their mouths and tongues contesting every crumb. They’d been so close to that a thousand times before — his hand upon the waistband of her skirt or pinching at her flesh, his breath upon her neck, as they stood in line at the coffee or the copying machine; her hand, just playfully, on his, when side by side each morning, when hip to haunch at Anna’s desk, they checked the agenda of Victor’s day. If this was love, then it was wise, not youthful love, not timid love, not blind romance. And if this was simply passion and no more, then it was in good hands, for Rook and Anna were both old — and young — enough to make the most of passion while time was on their side. For Anna there was pouching beneath her chin, some lines and bruising at the eyes, a softness to her stomach and her thighs, some parchmenting of skin along her inner limbs, the loss of buoyancy, and more, to tell her daily, every time she washed or dressed or ran, that she was over forty and that she should dare to change her motto from the Careful Does It of her youth to Yes and Now and Here.

For Rook the signs of ripening were much the same, plus listless hair that was blanching at the temples and an asthmatic’s prow-like chest as evidence that, underneath the lively tie and shirt, his lungs were shallow and distressed. He saw himself as lean and weightless. His mind was lean. The expression on his face was lean. But — naked in the shower or in bed — his leanness was exposed as thinness. But still he was a tempting, enigmatic man, not dry or beaten like the other men she knew. Anna dared to look him in the eye and contemplate the cake — and more — that they could share. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, not quite aloud, her fingers church-and-steepled at her chins, her spirit moistened by the prospects of the day. Yes, yes. Yes here. Yes now. Rook recognized himself in her. He smiled at Anna and he asked, ‘Just name your cake. What can I tempt you with today?’ She said she wanted a Viennese with fruit and cream. That would go well with the best champagne which she expected the boss to press upon his personal staff so they could toast him at his birthday lunch. Rook promised to fix it. What he’d do was this. He’d see to it that all the people working in the outer rooms got cakes and drink. They’d join the aged greengrocers in celebrating Victor’s eighty years. The staff could eat a cake, he thought, without the building grinding to a halt, though buildings-grinding-to-a-halt appealed to him.

Thus Rook, on that summer Friday in our city, was armed with errands to gather cakes and greenery, as he descended the hundred metres and the twenty-seven floors by Victor’s private lift and walked towards the open air through the pampered, plastic foliage of the atriums which flared and billowed from the building like quilted valances of glass. He showed his face and his Staff Pass at the tasselled rope and stepped between the wings of a revolving door. THESE DOORS ARE AUTOMATIC, announced the sign. It was a warning and a boast: These Doors are Greater and More Permanent than You. They simply swept him in a rotating triangle of processed air into the sun and breeze beyond. All security ended there.

You note he did not choose to take a car. There was a man on duty at the doors who would have been glad to summon one, a taxi or a chauffeured company Panache. Rook was valued there as much as Victor’s perch — if not a little more — and he was not expected to take his chances on the street. But he preferred to walk. And who would know? Five minutes and he would be amongst the crowds, indistinguishable from all those other duplicates in office wear on worktime errands in the city. What could be sweeter than to pass unrecognized amongst familiar strangers, or to proffer half a nod, a shadow smile, to passers-by whose faces rang a bell? What democracy! — to dodge and jostle, tadpoles in the stream. But first he had to walk the hot and empty cloisters of the mall where the noise of distant traffic was waylaid by architectural water. It fell and fountained, day and night, with a rhythmic certainty no mountain stream could match. Rook did not pause, despite the heat and solitude, to sit beneath the award-winning lamp posts on the mall, or to play elaborate hopscotch on the coloured marble flagstones.

He chose a route which freed him from the shadows. He fixed his eye ahead, upon the skyline, where the unaspiring towers of the ancient town competed for light and oxygen with the mantis cranes of building sites and the skeletal scaffolding of half-completed office blocks, draped for modesty in flapping plastic skirts. Rook said he loved to see the cranes perched overhead. He loved it best, at Summerfest, when all the cranes were hung with streamers and with lights and there were fireworks. Then, for once, the streets were duller, darker than the night sky. He liked his city noisy, teeming, dressed in black. He saw himself as lean and black, a cliché creature of the night. Indeed, that’s partly why our Rook was known as Rook: the black clothes that he wore when he was young and on the streets. The rook-like nasal cawing of his laugh, too, his love of crowds, his foraging, his criminality. But more than that: the puff-chested, light-limbed posture of a bird.

They said he’d made his money out of Victor — that Victor, childless, heirless, treated Rook like a son and settled money on him in lieu of love. A cheque was Victor’s version of a kiss. ‘Money is the best embrace,’ he said. But there the gossip amongst the secretaries and clerks was way off mark. Victor — for all his years and for all his understanding of the blandishments of money, of how people could be purchased and caressed by cash — paid Rook a salary, no more. And Rook was wise enough to keep his office fingers clean. He knew how frayed and slender was the leash which tied him to the old man’s purse, and, indeed, how loosely that leash was now held, how easily his boss could let the leash go free. For two men who spent so much time together, they shared few sentiments or loyalties. Rook’s cheerfulness should not be taken as fondness for his boss or work, but more as his device for filling in the silences which were the heavy furniture of their daily intercourse. Victor did not appreciate Rook’s special knack of levity, his disregard of silence, his subversion of proprieties, his aggravating idleness. Victor’s simple creed was this: until a man agrees to dedicate himself to work, then he will not be rich, or valuable, or admirable, or — best of all — at peace.

Yet Rook was rich, there is no doubt. A poorer man would not pass up the offer of a limousine. It takes a man who’s certain of his wealth to choose to walk when he could ride. It also takes a man who’s used to streets, whose heels have eyes, to know when he is being followed and by whom. As those dismissive, automatic doors rotated Rook into the unconditioned air, a fellow, hardly in his twenties, with a cream and crumpled summer suit, detached himself from the hard shadows amongst the quirks of a colonnade and followed him onto the mall, keeping, catlike, to the sunless walls. He sauntered like a truant, faking interest in the fountains, the street lights, avoiding joins and fissures in the coloured marble flagstones. Here is, his manner meant to say, an innocent abroad. It said, instead, here is a ne’er-do-well at large. Stay clear. Watch out. Protect your pockets when you walk.

Rook’s ne’er-do-well was fresh in town. His nails were cracked like slate. His hands and neck were scorched. His eyes were streaming from the windborne grit and dust which pecked and spiralled at his face. He hadn’t learnt the city trick of squinting as he walked. He was jubilant at being there and far from home, and lost, and poor, and free. He had in his pocket an old flick-knife that’s spring was slow and temperamental. No cash. Sometime, on Victor’s birthday, he’d come face to face with Rook. Who’d come off worse? He was an optimist, though in the end, of course — unless there was murder on his mind — a boy like him was bound to come off worse. At best, there would be poverty ahead, and drink, and crime, and selling sex and favours in the street. At least while he was young. And then just poverty and drink.

If we were looking for two poles-apart to represent good fortune and bad luck we could not better these two men, the fixer and his shadow, as they ducked into the walkers’ tunnel and passed below Link Highway Red which separated the old town from the landscaped decks and platforms of the new. It was a tunnel built for beatings or for rape or for the urgent emptying of bladders or as a refuge from the rain and night for people without roofs. Pillars provided dark recesses for loiterers. Its low lighting winked and buzzed, failed at intervals or flared like photographic bulbs. The paper litter scooped and fluttered like a pigeon, trapped and fretful. The smell was urine mixed with street.

Rook thought his shadow might close the gap between them underground and there would be a tussle for his wallet, or he’d be cornered for ‘a loan’. He walked a little faster then, and breathlessly. He wrapped his fingers round his keys, so that any punches thrown by him would be hard and heavy. He was glad to see the daylight spilling down the steps at the far end of the tunnel and to hear the pavement clack of women’s heels, the vendor bells, the shop-front tannoys touting bargains for the town, the doors and horns and brakes of cars.

2

QUITE SOON he was a different Rook, not yet the firebrand that he’d been when young, not quite the wagging spaniel of the office block, but someone more relaxed than both. His pace had slowed. He strolled. His tie was loose. His shoulders dropped. His birdlike chest no longer heaved for air. There was no tension here, in public space, except the amiable and congested tension of the streets which kept the traffic and pedestrians apart, which made atonal harmonies with honking motor horns for brass, and news-stand yodellers as vocalists, and percussion from the beat of leather shoes on stone. Now Rook’s main quests upon this street of salons, boutiques, and restaurants, were oddballs, cronies, pretty girls, anyone to stare at, or anything to buy. He was on the lookout, yes, but not for thieves and trouble any more, not for the fellow in the cream and crumpled suit. Rook no longer gripped his keys. Somewhere between the new town and the old his ne’er-do-well had disappeared, swallowed raw by the pavement multitude.

Untutored in the waltz, the simple quick-quick-slow of passing through a crowd, Rook’s country shadow had been blocked by waiting cars and errand bikes, thwarted by citizens on opposing routes, stopped in his path by shopping bags, and kids, and snack-or-bargain carts. He’d been delayed by brochure touts and leafleteers, tackled at the knees and chest by rubbish cans, hydrants, signs, post boxes, newspaper stands. He’d been bumped and buffeted by the selective tidal chaos of the street which unfooted and swept away those newcomers who did not understand its current or its flow. This was a city at full pelt.

As Rook maintained his pace unerringly and blunder-less, the young man in his suit — whose name you’ll know before the day is out — was left, a stray, unable even to spot his quarry’s browsing head amongst the unremitting throng of citizens. He stopped and window-shopped himself, waylaid by seagull flights of lingerie, by jewels thrown out across a bed of sand as carelessly as stones, by chocolate truffles displayed like jewels on satin trays, by terraces of boots and shoes, by all the sorcery of Look, Don’t touch. He pressed his back against the window glass expecting eyes to look him up and down, and disapprove. But there were none. The only eyes that stared at him were in the plaster mannequins. They looked out, day and night, as if they dreamed the street, and all the passers-by were figments in the glass.

Who can resist the privacy of crowds? A crowd is people, freely voting for themselves. Rook’s shadow joined the crowd and went with it along Saints Row, around the Tower Square, and back again, until it beached him amongst the pavement tables of a bar. He sat. He’d sit until a waiter came, and then he’d hurry off again. He was not bored. The street was cabaret, with mime, and all the spoken badinage delivered stagily, in a whisper or a shout. He’d stay there for a while, he thought, and then go back to where he’d spotted Rook, where there were never crowds, in the ill-lit tunnel under Link Highway Red. That was the perfect spot for the ambush that he planned.

Rook, meanwhile, had gone beyond the bustle of the boutique street. He’d skirted round the boundaries of the Mathematical Park where flower beds were cut for every shape — an octagon of primulas, a perfect circle for begonias, roses in triangles and squares — and Pythagorean climbing frames and wooden seats designed impossibly like Mo¨bius strips. Now Rook was walking through the neighbourhood where he was born and raised, the Wood-gate district of our city.

Where were the wooden gates that gave the place its name, those medieval, oaken sentries to what had been an ancient town? Burned down, seventy-four years before, when Victor was a child of six. The incendiarists — so it was said — were city councillors who wanted to ‘better’ what had become a low-rent district of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. Their improving additions were terraces of five-storey blocks — one floor retail, one floor wholesale, two floors apartments, attic, cellar, stables, yard, high rent. In their haste, they’d followed, not replaced, the charred and muddled labyrinth of medieval streets. The Woodgate district was then, and still was on Victor’s eightieth, best suited to the horse. Those narrow stable yards and culs-de-sac, those twisting alleyways that locals called the Squints, were scarcely wider than a mare is long. No motor vehicle could turn about inside the Squints. They were too tight and modest for the cussed constipation of the car.

The Woodgate neighbourhood had its vehicles, of course. A town must breathe, and there were straighter, wider ways which offered access to the Squints and provided Rook a fast, straightforward route to cakes and greenery. Now he was walking down the road, four mares in width, where he was raised. There were parking bays where he’d once played asthmatic ball-and-tag. The building where his parents had leased a flat was let to businesses — a barber on the pavement floor, an accountancy above, and then three floors of warehousing. The room which Rook had shared with a brother for ten years was wall to wall with mats and phaga rugs, and druggets from Kashmir. An asthmatic’s fibrous nightmare.

Neighbourhood was not the word. There were no longer neighbours there. At night the barbers and accountants, and the warehousemen, went home by car and bus and train to suburbs out of town. At night the Squints were dark and dead. But still the buildings were the ones Rook had known when he was small. There were no demolitions yet. And still there was a faint smell in the air, beneath the odour of the cars and the scent of secretaries, of ancient fire. And rotting vegetation, too, as if the area had been built against the odds on the sweet and sour of a swamp. For these were the borders of the Soap Market. The smell, an airborne punch of cabbage stalks, figs, olives, beet … had belched and yawned along these streets and down these Squints for six hundred years. The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. So, of course, was Rook. Rook soup would taste as much of fruit as meat. Just like the merchant’s monkey in the song,

His testicles were mango stones,

(Quite normal in the Apes);

His cock was courgette on-the-bone.

He Shat Fresh Grapes

For all his coolness and his suits, Rook was a market boy, a Soapie through and through. His mother and his father made it so. His parents had rented a market stall and too frequent were the days when they’d encourage Rook to miss school and help them stack and sell their wares. He did not know, perhaps, the shape of continents or algebra when he was ten, but he could tell — by smell, by patina, by shape (no easy task) — a Trakana cherry from a Wijnkers, and know, before he broke the skin, which aubergines were soured, which peas had greyed inside their pods.

So it was in a sentimental mood that Rook, on Victor’s celebration day, walked the familiar hundred metres between his old home and the market rim beyond which, as yet, the colonizing barbers, the accountants, and warehousemen, had made no mark. The canyoned pattern of the city ended here in a huge 0-shaped, cobbled court, which could not be circled — Rook could guarantee — by a shallow-winded boy on a bike in less than fifteen minutes. Except for those few low-rise restaurants and bars in the Soap Garden which formed the centre of the 0, all buildings in the court were wood and canvas market stalls. The place was open to the sky, and could have been a medieval harvest fair. Except that Big Vic — as Victor’s office block was known — and the other high-rise monoliths of the new town cut off the market from the skyline hills, and fast and heavy traffic on the Link Highways beat drum rolls across the awnings and the roofs.

Inside the oval, there were no parking bays, traffic lights, or ordered flows. The marketeers parked where they chose, or where the Man in Cellophane (who took it madly on himself to block and beckon traffic) directed them. Their trucks and vans choked paths and access streets. Their barrows and their porter sleds were left where they were used. The wooden produce trays, the emptied sacks, the pallets, bins, and panniers which had held vegetables and fruit were piled and stacked unevenly, discarded like the crusts and rinds and eggshells of an outdoor meal. It was safe haven for a sprinting criminal pursued by police in cars.

The odours here were less opaque than those which spilled out, windborne, into the streets beyond. To walk amongst the stalls, eyes closed, would be to test one’s nose for all the subtleties of countryside and food. The practised nose — like Rook’s — could tell when barrows of potatoes were pushed by or where the garlic nests were hung or whether medlar fruit had bletted long enough and now were fit to eat, or when (the softest, then the foullest scents of all) guavas were for sale, or durians. But why would anybody want to close their eyes? No gallery of modern art could match the colours there, the tones, the shapes, the harmonies and conflicts on the stalls.

The yellow stars were babacos; the Turkish turban was a squash; the pile of honeydews were rugby footballs begging for a kick; redcurrants, clinging fatly to their spindly strigs, burst and bled; zucchini from Sardinia retained their orange, tissue flowers and peeped out of their boxes like madly coiffeured snakes. And dead snakes, sometimes, as green and cold as watermelons, could be found coiled thinly round mangoes or cantaloupes. And thrips and ticks and lice and grubs and flies, the living things that make a living out of market fruit and market crowds. The roaches, bugs, and weevils that share our meals and beds.

The first traders, on the outskirts of the market, were the bananamen, the specialists in Musaceae. They did not wish to penetrate too far into the maelstrom of the stalls. The snags of fruit weighed far too much to move around, ten, twenty overlapping hands perhaps, each with a dozen fingers to the hand, and each fibrous stem damp and heavy from refrigeration on the seas, from journeying, from ripening, from growing sweet. Bananas were mostly sold in bulk from off the back of vans. They sold them by the hand, and not by number or by weight. The bananamen stood by, foul-mouthed, lascivious, and raucous with their yellow-penis jokes. Their fleshy plantains were rewarded with the biggest laughs, the deepest blushes. These traders were the butchers of the marketplace. They each were ready with a knife, like senators at Caesar’s death, to cut the hand selected by the customer expertly from the stem. Every knife, and every trader’s tongue, was as sharp as limes.

Beside them was the jackfruit van — one jackfruit always sliced in half and cubes cut out so that anyone could test the flesh for creaminess and age. And then the melons and the yams, the gourds, the Herculean beets, the pumpkins, the pyramids of cabbages and swedes. Each had its pitch, exactly and invisibly marked out. God help the reckless cabbage that strayed or rolled into the sovereign kingdom of the yam. God help the greengrocer who scrumped his neighbour’s space.

So old and honoured were the patterns of the trading pitches that Rook, or so he claimed, could have walked as sure-footed as a village cat between the produce and the stalls to the Soap Garden at the market’s heart without a glance to either side or to his feet. But Rook was not the man to pass unnoticed or unnoticing through such a place. His eyes were Victor’s. This was his boss’s empire, the place that made him rich. This market was the keystone to the solid arch of Victor’s wealth. Wealth can disappear unless it’s watched and husbanded. So Rook was more alert than he had been all day. He watched to see which soapies called out his name and waved, which ones had customers and which had none, what new faces were portering or helping out with sales, who scowled, who hid, who turned away as if they’d never seen his face before, who bid him wish the boss a pleasant birthday lunch, what fruits there were, what vegetables were new, who had no right to be there and yet was.

At times, Rook simply stood and stared in wonder at the wit and artistry for sale and on display — the plump, suggestive irony of roots, the painted, powdered vanity of peaches, the waxen probity of lettuce leaves, the faith implicit in the youth and readiness of onion sets, the senility of medlars (eaten only when decayed), the seductive, bitter alchemy of quinces which young men bought to soften women’s hearts. Who could pass unfeeling through such splendour? Who could resist an orange from the pile? Not Rook. He pushed up against the paper trimmings of a stall. Before him were the peaks of citruses, the best, most flawless fruit built into perfect ziggurats with prices marked on flags. There were common blonds and bloods and navels — oranges from twenty nations of the world; Cuban green griollas, the yellowish valencias from Spain, the red sanguinas grown on the southern slopes of the Atlas. Not just oranges in peaks, but foothills too of bergamots, lemons, limes, kumquats, and the infinite variety of mandarins. And all this summer landscape edged in boulders made from grapefruit, shaddocks, and half-caste pomelos. The fruiterer had made a passing masterpiece of oranges. He’d added, too, a fringe and diadem of lights, the colour and the shape of citruses. No matter how they shone they were eclipsed. No light was bright enough to glow more cheerfully than fruit. No packaging could better them or sing their praises louder than themselves.

Rook made his choice and took an orange from the cheapest pile. Its peel, it’s true, was blemished, dirty almost. There was a brownish lunar landscape on its outer crust. The price was low. But for Rook, who knew his oranges, such blemishes were marks of juice and sweetness. An orange so discoloured is an orange which has ripened in the heat, in countries or in seasons where the nights are warm and bruising. An orange so discoloured would have slaked its daytime thirst upon the perspiration of the moon. Rook held his purchase up, and searched for a few coins. The fruiterer just clicked his tongue and shook his head to signify there was no need for Rook to pay, that he should take this orange as a gift.

Rook scalped the orange at its pig with his teeth. He spiralled off the peel and ate, stepping back and stooping to save his shirt-front from the juice. The flesh left fluorescent lacquer on his lips and chin; the pith made anchovies of flannelette beneath his nails. He let the peel fall to the ground as he walked. The detritus of fruit, the husks and pods and skins, the blowsy outer leaves of salad, the blown parsley sprigs, were not considered litter there, but God-given carpeting for cobblestones.

Rook loved it all, this market world, this teeming concourse of cobbles. What good, he wondered, would it be to own this land, as Victor did, and yet not have the legs or lungs to browse amongst the smells and tints and sounds? Yet don’t be fooled. Our Rook was not at ease. The market boy was now a predator. What made Victor a millionaire — the rents on market stalls, the ‘seeds-to-stomach’ stranglehold on wholesale and supplies, the canning and bottling plants — had made Rook wealthy, too. His wealth was surreptitious, though. No penthouses for Rook. No limousines. No coddled fish for lunch. No Rolexes or La Martines. His money was the kind you couldn’t spend too openly and couldn’t bank. It was the kind that came in cash four times a year, slipped to him in a paper bag with a mango or some grapes or handed over at a bar, a cylinder of notes — all used — and held by rubber bands.

Compared to the trading rents which Victor charged, Rook’s ‘service fees’ were small, a modest tithe for peace of mind from every market trader there. A guarantee against eviction. A small amount to pay for Victor’s ear. ‘Pitch money’, it was called. A sweetener for Rook: vinegar for those who paid. You could see it on the faces of the men who came to Rook just then — his chin still damp with orange juice, his eyes alight, alert — to make their summer payments for their pitches.

One man peeled off his payment like a sinner giving alms. Another passed his ransom concealed inside his palm. A handshake did the trick. A third — the soapie known as Con — shook openly and tauntingly a sealed envelope in Rook’s face, with Rook’s name written large and red on it for all to see. Others saw the payment as a trade. They paid, then mentioned problems that could be fixed, if only Rook would talk with Victor. The price of olives was too high. The pears were bruised by the new mechanical pickers that Victor used. The contractors who hosed the market down at night were playing games with the water jet and damaging the decoration on the stalls. ‘Please let old Victor know our troubles. He can’t fix what he doesn’t know. And — please — wish Victor Happy Birthday from us all.’ What was unspoken but accompanied all the cash that Rook received was this: Long may you rot in Hell.

What should we make of Rook, then, as he, shamefaced, proprietorial, pushed through the shoppers and the porters in the medieval alleyways of wood and canvas, of trestles, awnings, stalls, and booths, of global colours, smells, and tastes, and reached the bars and lawns of the Soap Garden? That he was bad? Or shrewd? Or simply, like the rest of us, a weakling when it comes to cash?

3

WHEN ROOK arrived at the sunlit respite of the Soap Garden, there were no seats. The bars were full. The lawns were packed with porters and with the low-paid women who weighed, wrapped, and sold the city’s purchases. Their bosses occupied the shaded chairs. Keeping a fruit or vegetable stall is not an unremitting task. There is free time.

At that hour of the morning, the soapies came for coffee-and-a-shot and to fix and chalk their prices for the day. Some turned away or sank into their seats when they saw Rook. Some watched him blankly. One or two — the older, more successful ones, the ones invited to Victor’s birthday lunch — stood up and waved at him to indicate that he should join them at their table, that they’d be honoured if he’d drink a shot with them. But Rook had Victor’s chair to decorate and Anna’s cakes to buy. He’d join them later, when his tasks were done. He went first to the cake-and-coffee stand and chose a dozen cakes from their display — four fruit, four cream, four chocolate. Rook leaned against the stand and studied all the sales girls on the lawns and then the foliage of the garden while his cakes were gift-wrapped in a cardboard pyramid and tied with red and silver tape.

Of all the trees and bushes in the garden, the burgher laurels seemed the best for Victor’s birthday chair. Their leaves looked supple, shiny, washable. Besides, their branches were within easy reach and, unlike the roses and the snag trees which lined the lawns, they posed no problem for the naked hand. Rook chose a laurel which grew against the railings of the medieval washing place and threw its shadow across the worn stone sinks, the emaciated gargoyles on the fountains, the cluster of grotesques which nuzzled at the basin rim. Rook, made devil-may-care by his passage through the market, was in no mood to be unnerved by rules or inhibitions. He simply grasped a slender laurel branch, and tugged as if he expected it to snap like celery. His hands slipped, ran free, and stripped the leaves, together with the fledgling buds which roosted at each node. What was that smell?

He took more care with the second spray. He bent it downwards at its base, and tried to twist and break it off. It snapped but was too green and sinewy to separate cleanly. He tore it free. He held it by its broken stem, satisfied that it would do for Victor’s chair. Quite soon he had a thick papoose of laurel sprays resting on his arm.

Rook was bemused, not by the cussedness of laurels, but by the odour of the exposed wood, a cooking, kitchen smell both unnerving and familiar. He smelt his fingers and then put his nose to the fractured branch. ‘What’s that?’ he asked himself, and sneezed. He walked across the grass to the group of traders on the patio of a bar. They were all men that he knew by name, and all about Rook’s age, not old or rich enough to dine on Victor’s fish. They’d all been market boys together, kicking turnip-balls amongst the lettuce leaves, made shrewd and tough beyond their years by labouring for Dad. They’d all been comrades in the market strike a dozen years before. The noisy pair were brothers; bananas were their trade. The balding one was Spuds, a shapeless idle man with wife and kids to match. Another was the man called Con whose envelope of hard-earned cash was in Rook’s jacket pocket and who now held court with his account of how, at dawn that day, he’d very nearly had his pockets picked. He stopped mid-sentence when he spotted Rook. He’d already seen the fellow once too often for the day, a thousand times too often for a life. This was the man, this Rook, who’d betrayed the soapies, who’d led the produce strike and then abandoned it for pay and privilege at Victor’s feet, as if fine sentiments were not as fine as cash. That man’d barter every tooth inside his head, he thought, but said, ‘Watch out. Here comes the apple grub.’ Con was not the understanding sort. He’d gladly throttle Rook. He’d gladly shake out every golden tooth. He’d pay to have it done.

The others were more forgiving. They might still have been Rook’s intimates if it weren’t that they were always in his debt. ‘Pitch’ payments had cost Rook a thousand friends. They smiled at his approach, but not with generosity or welcome. It was simply that their childhood friend looked rather foolish to their male, no-nonsense eyes: one suited arm weighed down by foliage; the fingers of the other hand entwined in the fussy, dainty packaging of cakes.

Rook leant against their table and he sneezed again: a clearance of the nostrils and a shout of matching force and volume.

‘What is that smell?’ he asked, wiping his eyes with his sleeve and placing the laurel amongst their cups and glasses. They passed the broken branch around the table and put their noses to the wood. They scratched their heads. Their noses knew that smell so well, but their tongues could not locate the name.

‘Like coconut,’ said one.

Another thought it smelt like cake. They called their favourite waitress to their aid. She hardly had to smell. ‘It’s marchpane,’ she said, using the country word for marzipan. She handed back the laurel branch to Rook. Once more he held it to his nose. The girl was right. He smelt the eggs, the sugar, and the almond paste as perfectly as when he was a child and helping mother mix and shape the birthday treats, the balls, the stars, the leaves of marzipan.

‘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.

4

ROOK’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.

Joseph found blander depths as well. He dozed until the countryside was gone and woke to find the last dregs of the night made watery by suburban lights. He shivered at the window of the goods car and looked for signs of poverty and waste, of power and indifference, of wealth and sex and violent energy, for signs of destiny. His eyes were sharp for tall and optimistic buildings, and tall and optimistic girls, for flashing neon lights and fancy cars. The suburbs, though, were fast asleep and, much like any habitation at that hour, showed little appetite for day. A few small cars were on the move, obeying the traffic lights and not the logic of the almost empty streets. A cyclist held the centre of a road. Once in a while, in houses and apartments, a curtain pattern was illumined from within by someone half asleep, and out of bed, and taking last night’s final piss or their first coffee of the day. The lights in rows of private shops fell squarely onto pavements; their goods were on display for cats and bats.

Joseph was struck by all the stillness of the city night. A country night is just as busy as the day, but here there were no trees to bend before the wind. The signposts did not move. The clouds — if they were racing through the sky — were doing so invisibly, blacked out by streetlamps, put out of sight by electric light. Rain fell like country rain, but underlit, theatrically. It could not soak into the earth. It slid down tiles. It skirted round the angles of each brick. It raced through gutters, dropped down pipes, consigned itself to drains, turned roadside conduits into streams with discarded snack packets as the sails of its racing dhows. It ducked through iron sumps. It under-navigated roads in airless culverts and joined the curling traffic of water below the town, where sewers emptied into sluices and sluices discharged their flood into much slower and more muscular arteries of water. And thence into the mains. And thence into the reservoir, the treatment plant, the aqueduct, the pipe, the tap, the coffee pot, and down the sink as giddy waste.

It took a simple mind like Joseph’s to wonder how it was that city rain was so enslaved. He was not bright enough to ask himself, as low-rise housing blocks and sleepy boulevards gave way to warehouses, shunting yards, high-rise offices, and morning’s curdy light, how he could hope to soak into the city’s ground, how he could stay afloat and unenslaved when so many young men, just like him, had been unfooted, swept away, down gutters, into drains, by the careless rapids and the all-embracing floods of city life. He did not have the time or temperament to care.

His train arrived at dawn. The van doors were thrown back by porters. It was easy for Joseph — much used to being inconspicuous — to merge in with the workers there, three trays of lettuce balanced expertly on his head, and make his entry into town. And then? What then? He put the trays of lettuce with all the other produce in a market van. When it drove away through early breakfast traffic slower than a country cart, slower than a thaw, he followed it, through streets more futile and more aimless than even he had hoped for, to the Soap Market. Of course. Where else would such a hidebound country boy end up?

The time was six fifteen. The bustle of the market as the traders fixed their pitches for the day was not the world of catalogues. But Joseph’s mission was quite clear. City folk were easy pickings. Rich and careless. Weak. Those pampered noses on the carriage glass could sneeze banknotes. Those clerks and secretaries in their cars had gaping wallets, purses, cash to spare. He’d never had the chance to steal off strangers before. It would be easy, he could tell. He’d not be caught. He wouldn’t have to turn his village pockets out for every city coin that got lost. He had no face. He had no name. He had no reputation. It was his lucky day.

He’d known such careless crowds at country fetes and auctions, so all the bump and jostle of the Soap Market was nothing new to him. He was not lost, or overawed. The stalls and market paths had logic. That distant office building on his right gave him his bearings. He knew that empty barrows wheeled by porters led to the outskirt streets where produce vans were parked. The country boy is used to mapping routes, in hop plantations, forests, in the pleats of fields, in mazes made from furrows, fences, dykes. So Joseph stored and sifted signs — the stall that sold shallots, the music of a radio, the trader with the piebald beard, the Man in Cellophane, the diadem of coloured lights, the breeze — to keep a tab on where he was, and where he’d need to run, or hide, if he should chance upon some luck.

He was surprised, it’s true, by such a city landscape, fashioned out of repetition and conformity, with matching buildings and matching streets and people dressed the same. He was surprised there were no gradients, no sea, no streams, no fertile land. Some fool had built this city on the flat between the pebble and the clod where nothing grew except the appetite. Some fool, in fact, had built this city on the worst of sites. Where was the fish-stocked estuary, the river bridge, the sheltered harbour, the pass between two hills, the natural crossroads in the land where ancient settlements were meant to be? Where was the seam of coal to make the city rich? Where were the hummocks and escarpments to make the city safe? Where was the panoramic view to make the city spiritual, a holy place? What made this thirsty, ill-positioned city — too southerly to benefit from hops, too northerly for grapes — so rich and large? The answer crowded him at every step. It caught his shins. It bustled him from side to side. The marketplace! A city with no natural virtues is reduced to trade. Seas, rivers, hills, coal seams make fishing, farming, metal-bashing, tourist cities. But cities like ours have little choice except to buy and sell and deal, except to do what Joseph planned to do, to make a living out of theft.

If he had been a wiser man, he would have waited for a while before he embarked on his chosen trade. It was too early for the careless shoppers. The only people in the market at that time were marketeers. This was their habitat. This web was theirs. They noted him — not as a thief, but as a scrumper, one of those who came to breakfast gratis on the fruit. He was never unobserved. And so his luck ran out. He’d seen his chance. The soapie Con had moved an envelope with the one red word ‘Rook’ written on it to the back pocket of his trousers so that he could bend and lift more easily. It wagged invitingly as its owner embraced a sack of carrots. Joseph was fast and skilled, but obvious. His fingers wrapped round ‘Rook’. He got the envelope — but not before three voices had called out a warning, ‘Look out, Con!’ Con’s hand shot back and caught Joseph by his trouser leg. He fell. In seconds he was pinioned to the ground. A crowd had formed. His suit was stained by soil and fruit and leaves. He took the first kick of the day.

‘You’ll pay for this,’ Con said, already seeing opportunities for cashing in on this young fool’s misfortune.

So there was Joseph, a few hours on, paying for his short-lived, bungled life of petty crime by undertaking the ‘contract robbery’ of a man called Rook. Was this the big-time opportunity he’d dreamed about? Was this — so soon — his golden chance? As instructed, he’d first dogged Rook along the mall, to get to know his face. And now he waited for his return in the tunnel under Link Highway Red. He squatted on his haunches, smoking, and studying the picture Con had given him — a snapshot of a market stall. The man amongst the vegetables and fruit was a younger Rook, smiling, scarf unknotted at his throat, his clothes all black. Here was the man to ambush, frighten, rob. Con’s promise was, as he despatched young Joseph to do his business on the mall, that Rook — as he returned from the Soap Market to Big Vic, and not before — would carry money, hidden, maybe, but cash and notes in large sums. There would be an envelope as well, the one he’d failed to steal. Brown, sealed with tape, and marked in red with Rook’s name. Con showed the envelope again to Joseph. ‘Remember it,’ he said. ‘The man you’re looking for will have this somewhere on him as he heads back to work.’ All Joseph had to do was wave his knife and take the envelope, unopened, back to Con’s market stall. Anything else he found on Rook was his to keep. If he did this task efficiently, there’d be no police involved. The pocket-snatching rashness in the marketplace would be forgotten. Joseph’s identity card, which Con had confiscated as security, would be returned. ‘Perhaps, there’d be a proper job for him as well. What job? Con wouldn’t say, except ‘a market job, a job where muscles like the ones you’ve got won’t do you any harm’.

Joseph, now out of cigarettes and more hungry in the walkers’ tunnel than he had been upon the streets, once more fixed Rook’s much younger face onto his memory, and then bent more eagerly to study a second picture in the oscillating light — the illustration from the clothing catalogue. Now he and the model in their matching suits were cousins, at the very least. The longer Joseph stared at all its appetizing detail — the suit, the upturned hand, the third and unattended glass — the more certain he became that soon he would be drinking at the bar.

Quite soon Joseph was tired of sitting on his haunches in the gloom. He was hungry, damp, and desperate for nicotine. He was embarrassed, too, by the way the elderly woman who had passed him in the tunnel did so with such nervousness and haste that she had missed the pleasant smile he’d given her. He’d never met a woman of that age before who did not know his name and family, who did not stop to swap a word or two. He called after her. At first a cheerful greeting. Then abuse. She did not turn. She did not seem to hear. Perhaps she was the sort that hates the young.

He was impatient now to prove himself a citizen. He walked towards the daylight spilling down the steps from the street in the hope of spotting Rook amongst the faces in the crowd. Much easier to follow Rook and rob him from behind. But as he turned to mount the stairs he saw Rook descending, in his path, three steps above. His victim was not looking well. He held his chest. The pallor on his face suggested fever or anxiety. He was breathless, too, from walking fast and from carrying through crowds what looked like burgher laurel branches and a ribboned box, a pyramid, which, thought Joseph, promised riches of some kind. That was the moment Rook and Joseph met. Rook, recognizing who it was, alarmed and startled, stepped aside to let his ne’er-do-well climb past. But Joseph did not move. He let Rook step a pace or two into the stench and echo of the tunnel, then placed his left arm round Rook’s thin throat and held him — plus a bunch of laurel — as tightly as the model held the bar girl’s wrist. ‘I’ve got a knife,’ he said. And to prove that he was honest in his way, he held the flick-knife, last used to stop tomatoes at their crowns, in his right hand and sprang it open just a little distant from Rook’s nose.

‘Drop the box,’ he said.

Rook let the pastries fall.

‘Now empty all your pockets, one by one. The jacket first.’

Rook pulled out the envelopes with both hands, the rolls of banknotes, all the pitch money he had received that day. He held the money up and out, at arm’s length, as unthreateningly as he could and as distant from the knife as his shoulders would allow.

‘It’s yours,’ he said. But Joseph had no hand free to take possession. One arm was pressed against Rook’s throat. The other held the knife.

‘Just drop that too.’

Rook let the money go. The envelopes and banknotes, more money than Joseph had ever seen before, fell on the pyramid of cakes. Con’s envelope was in the pile.

‘The trousers now,’ he said. Rook emptied both pockets and turned their innards out like a schoolboy caught with sweets. ‘Let’s see what’s there.’

Once more Rook held out his hands at arm’s length. He held a handkerchief, his staff pass, his keys, and just a little change.

‘Keep that,’ Joseph said, and liked the sound of it, the style, the generosity. He released Rook from his grip, and stepped away. The laurel branches fell amongst the booty at his feet. ‘Turn round. Back off.’

Rook turned to face the robber and his knife. He moved two steps away and waited. The ‘Keep that’ spoken by the youth had told Rook what he had hoped, that the knife was for display and not for cutting throats or stabbing chests. The ‘Keep that’ meant ‘Live on’. Rook’s fear made way for irritation and for shame that he had let this ill-dressed, ill-shaped hick make such a fool of him on this of all days, when he’d already — unaided, uncoerced — made himself a public fool. He wrapped his fingers round his keys. He let the bevelled end of one long key poke out beyond his knuckles. He bit his lower lip — not fear, but anger on the boil. He felt a little sick, a little drunk, a little like a brute. It was not hard to take one long step forward as Joseph bent to gather up the envelopes and cakes, to fix his eye on that birthmark in cherry red, and strike this young man in the face with knuckles and with keys.

Rook meant to hit him on the nose or chin, but missed. He struck him on his forehead, just above the left eye’s overcliff. The key’s sharp end went in. It broke the skin and left a fleshy pit like those left by the beaks of jays in pears. Rook struck again. This time his fist caught Joseph on the ear. Again the jay had left its mark, but raggeder this time. A tear. A bloody one. The third blow came from Rook’s right foot and left an imprint of the street on Joseph’s suit and a crescent-shaped bruise on Joseph’s chest. He toppled forward, winded, shocked. He crushed the cardboard pyramid. His face was pressed against the laurel leaves, though there was no marzipan to scent his fall. The laurel stems, in fact, no longer smelt. There is no permanence in plants. Their sap, their colours, and their odours drain, disperse. The only smell was tunnel dirt. The taste was blood, and tears. He’d wake up soon. He’d find the blood came from a forehead wound. The blood was running down his face. The tears were blood. The laughter-lines around his eye, his lips, his hair-line on one side, the lapel and shoulder of his suit, were marked in red. The picture from the catalogue and the photograph of Rook fell from his pocket, faces up.

Rook’s final blow was to Joseph’s hand. He kicked the knife away. That kick was delivered with a cough. Rook’s throat and chest were heaving like a gannet’s. Joseph got up and, empty-handed, ran up the flight of stairs, into the light and safety of the street. God bless the street.

Rook gathered up the things that he had dropped: the banknotes, the envelopes, his staff pass, the flattened box of flattened cakes. He picked up Joseph’s knife as well. He closed its blade and dropped it in his pocket with his keys. The laurel branches were too battered now for Victor’s chair. He kicked them against the tunnel walls. He was surprised at how calm he felt, despite his breathlessness. First, the restoration of his nebulizer. Then, champagne.

He felt no anger for the country boy. That scrap with him had been too short and undramatic for lasting animosity. The asthmatic turbulence that Rook had suffered at the table in the Soap Garden had done more damage than the fight. The mockery had hurt him more. If only those old friends of his — the greengrocers with whom he’d grown up — had seen the scuffle in the tunnel and how the street in Rook had put to flight the mugger with the knife. If only they had witnessed what he’d done. Violence is the perfect repartee, he thought. More dignified, more eloquent than words. He felt in touch again, with boyhood, streets, the town, the universe of labouring. He felt excited, eager for the day. He felt as tough and sentimental as a movie star. He couldn’t wait to share a cake with Anna. He couldn’t wait to use his fists again.

Rook stooped to recover one last dropped banknote from the tunnel floor. It was moist with Joseph’s blood. Next to it was the clipping from the catalogue, covered by the photograph which Con had given Joseph. Rook looked at Rook, perplexed. He had not seen that photograph for years. How could it have fallen with his money there? Perhaps some trader, who had paid his pitch money that day, had put the photo with the cash. Why? Some arcane rebuke to Rook, no doubt. Some accusation from the past. It was the sort of petty rebuff he’d expect from bitter, unforgiving men like Con. Rook picked the photo up. The suit, the model, and the barmaid, which had been hidden underneath, were now on show. He took a closer look. He recognized the bar, perhaps? The model’s face? He put both pictures in a pocket with the knife. He knocked the detritus of laurel from his coat and trousers and headed for the steps.

Rook made his way back to Big Vic and, clumsy and encumbered though he was, he could not disguise the hint of hopscotch in his step as he walked across the coloured marble flagstones of the windswept, empty mall. Around him, out of sight, the bankers banked, expeditious every instant of the day; dollars became lira, became marks; commodities and futures bobbed and ducked in value, unobserved; screens conversed in numbers on fibre-optic cables like gossips at a garden fence. Above, a restless matrix with its lights like traffic headlamps in the rush sent out its electronic information into town. The stock report. The city news. A flood in Bangladesh. A birthday greeting for the boss. A puff for Fuji Film. Traffic junctions to avoid. Fly Big Apple — Fly Pan Am.

Rook reached security at last. The automatic doors swept him into processed air. He showed his pass. He tightened his tie at his collar, and summoned the old man’s private lift. While he waited for it to fall the twenty-seven storeys of Big Vic, he picked himself a fine bouquet of plastic branches from the gleaming, sapless, perfect foliage of the atrium. He did not have to tug or cut. Each leaf, each twig and branch, was fixed by sleeve joints. The real, reconstituted bark was stuck to moulded trunks with velcro pads. The soil was soil with nothing much to do, except to fool the people of the town.

5

ROOK PUT the final touches to the room, while the waitresses and kitchen staff prepared the settings and the food for Victor’s lunch. His buoyancy had not been punctured by the tightening of his tie, by the dull proprieties of going back to work. He’d dropped the scuffed and battered pyramid of cakes on Anna’s desk and simply said, in response to her surprise, ‘I had to fight for these!’

Anna asked no questions. She simply filled her lungs with air and closed her eyes and said, ‘Such gallantry!’ Her persiflage was sweet. It was a tease. It was the kind of irony that Anna knew would work on men. Men were clockwork toys when it came to love and sex. You wound them up, you faked a phrase or two; they marched, they danced, they beat their drum. It was her plan to fake some satisfaction, if she had the chance, with Rook. Why not? He was not married. She was now divorced. She was only older than him by a year. He was not short of cash and might have fun if he could spend his money and his time with her.

Rook was an oddball, yes. But oddballs had their appeal for Anna. She liked the stimulation and surprise of men who lived beyond the grid. She liked Rook’s secrecy. She was not fooled by his sardonic ways. What kind of man, with power such as his, would spend the morning on the streets and come back laden with squashed cakes and a bunch of plastic leaves? A man worth knowing, she was sure. So Rook and Anna left it brewing in the air that their flirtations would bear fruit, and soon, before it was too late, before the heightened passion of the day, its sap, its colours and its scents had drained and dispersed for good. Let Victor have his birthday first. Let champagne loosen tongues and dilate hearts. Then let Rook and Anna stay on late, to sort out papers, say, to tidy up, to joust among themselves as the evening and the office blinds came down. They’d spoken not a word, but they were old and wise enough to comprehend the promise and the charge of ‘Such gallantry!’

Rook took the plastic branches, a roll of sticky tape, some string, into the office storeroom and began to fix them to the back-rest of an antique wooden chair. The moulded twig ends protruded through the spindles of the chair and made the decoration amateurish, and rushed. Rook tried to bite off lengths of string so that he could tie the twig ends back. But the string was just as tough and artificial as the greenery. He searched the shelves for scissors — and then remembered the knife he’d picked up in the tunnel, the flick-knife that the clumsy, birthmarked mugger in that too-large suit had dropped.

The too-large suit! The thought of it, ill-fitting, grimy, badly made, was all it took to solve the mystery of the second picture Rook had found amongst the debris in the pedestrian underpass. So that was what he’d recognized. Once more Rook found the piece of catalogue and scrutinized the faces and the bar. No other recognition, now. Except, bizarrely, for that suit. Rook smiled at On the Town, at its frugal price and style, at the implication that the early photograph of Rook himself had come not with pitch payments as he’d thought, but from the pockets of the young man’s suit. He’d been no chance encounter, then, but targeted. This lad had known, and God knows how, that he would carry cash in quantity between the old town and the new. But how the ageing photograph tied in with that he could not tell. Some opportunist soapie? Some maverick inside Big Vic? Some oddball with a pettifogging grudge? Who knows exactly who one’s foes might be?

Rook held the knife out, sprang the blade and set to work on cutting string and strapping back the plastic twigs. It was then he spotted the eleven worn letters scratched inexpertly on the handle, ‘JOSEPH’S NIFE’. He felt he’d like the chance to hand the flick-knife back, not to make amends for the kick he’d landed and the cheating fist of keys which had inflicted such a bloody face, but for the chance to find out who’d set this ‘Joseph’ up, and why. But for the moment he was glad to have the knife at hand, to put its blade to proper use for Victor and his chair. The decoration now was neater. Only leaves were on display. It looked as if the stained, antique wood of the chair, long dead, had undergone a resurrection of some kind, had put down roots and put out foliage, like the farmer’s magic chair of fairy tales. A little spit and polish was all it took to finish off the job. The spit took off the office dust. The polish — a Woodland-scented aerosol — put back the colour and the sheen. Rook’s handkerchief buffed up the waxen glimmer of the leaves.

He’d promised there’d be cats for Victor’s lunch. They were a part of Victor’s dream. The boss himself had three, to chase off pigeons from the roof. Rook had arranged that they should be brought down to the office suite. They’d settled in, two on the sofa, one underneath the desk. The tablecloth was white, exactly as required. The air-conditioning provided just sufficient breeze. In the visitors’ lobby the three musicians of the Band Accord were practising the country dances they would play for Victor. The fruit and cheeses were in place. The champagne was on ice. Rook went through to the inner room and Victor’s desk. He telephoned the chef. The perch were cooked and already steeped and cooling in the apple beer. The waitresses were standing by. The five old greengrocers were seated, subdued and patient, in the atrium below, waiting for the summons to the lift. Rook carried Victor’s birthday chair into the anteroom. He placed it with its back against a wall, so that the tiara of leaves faced into the room, and the disenchanting clutter of plastic, string and sticking tape could not be seen.

When the call came that lunch was ready to be served and that his friends — his guests — were already waiting in his suite, Victor was in his rooftop greenhouse on the 28th, examining the yellow aphids which congregated in a ruly crowd on the underleaves and along the infant stems, a congregation of busy wingless females plus a single ant which feasted on their honeyed excretions. Victor hesitated with his spray. He almost cared for insects more than plants — but not quite. These aphids were too common to be lovable. He showered them with toxic milk. The ant, he spared. How high, he wondered, would he have to build to rise beyond the pigeons and the flies, to reach above the aphids and the ants? Forty? Fifty storeys? Would there be oxygen enough up there for vegetables to thrive, for bees to come and pollinate his plants? He looked out through the lichened, mildewed glass, northwards, beyond the mall, the highway and the high-rise stores, towards the old town, and the suburbs, and the hills. Skyscrapers are the skyline optimists. They have the first light of the dawn, the final warmth of day. They get the flattened, cartographic view of towns, the neat geometry of north, south, east and west.

Victor knew his city like a hawk knows fields. The innards of the city were laid bare from the 28th floor, from what was once the Summit Restaurant of Big Vic but now, because the Summit diners could not stomach the swaying flexibility of skyscrapers in wind, was private garden. Innards are chaos and a mystery to any but the practised eye. In time, with study, Victor had got to know the spread-out entrails of the streets. He knew the bones and organs of the town — the university, the stadium, the graveyards, and the parks. He knew the Bunkers where poor, delinquent townies lived in blocks as packed as hives. He knew the yellows and the ochres of the public buildings, the grand works of the eighteenth-century trading potentates, the book-end buildings of the police headquarters where once the low-rise slums had been.

The routes and patterns were quite clear. No river — but a line of pylons and the railway halved the town, and link highways made a rhombus as a frame containing both these halves. The rhombus, in the midday summer heat, dangled from the city’s flight and swoop of motorways like a box which swings on ribbons. Beyond the box? The groundscraper mansions of the wealthy, crouching behind the thick masonry of security walls. The suburbs and their trees. Out-of-town commercial centres with fields of tarmac for the cars. A threatened cul-de-sac of countryside, earmarked as building land.

Victor liked the grey and green of boulevards the best, where lines of trees and central lawns plunged living splinters into the city’s skin. He liked the city humming to itself: the cheerful plumes of smoke which came from rubbish tips and factories and crematoriums, the distant drone of traffic, the cadences of wind.

The suburbs of the city from the 28th through Victor’s less than perfect eyes were patterned fabric, not quite alive, though shimmering like shot silk in greens and greys and browns. Nearer to the eye, the striped and garish awnings of the market, dignified only by the grey-green of the Soap Garden with its few two-storey trees, seemed capricious and unnatural, set at the centre of the old town’s patterned stratagems of startled roofs with their exclamatory chimney pots.

Victor did not like the marketplace. He did not like its awnings and disorder. He did not like its crowds, so dense that taxis could not pass. He disapproved of truck-back trading, of noise and inefficiency, of waste. He’d not been to the market now for seven years — too old, too frail, too numbed by life — but he could see it every day, a garish blockage at the centre of the city which spurned both logic and geometry. He’d put it right. Why not? What else could old men do? He’d stood inside his greenhouse now for fifteen minutes at the very least. Three times enough for him to earn the money for a month in Nice, a car, a year’s supply of clothes. His farms and markets, his offices and shares, his merchant capital crusading in a dozen countries, a hundred towns, earned fortunes by the minute. Thirty millions a month. Morocco’s health and education budget in a year. Enough to build a dream in bricks. Or stone. Or glass.

His accountants and advisers had been working on him for a year or more. The marketplace, they said, was out of date. It did not earn enough for such a central site. It was — compared to canneries and bottling plants — a poor outlet for fruit. There’d been hints from the city government that if he were to seek approval for a plan to renovate, or move the market elsewhere, say … then, there would be no fight. No fight, indeed! Victor was not so foolish as to think there’d be no fight if he were to tinker with the marketplace. He knew what soapies were, an awkward bunch, opposed to any change on principle. Well, that’s Rook’s job, he thought, to keep the soapies quiet. Yet Victor would not share his thoughts with Rook. He did not trust the man to hold his tongue. He did not trust his judgement or his loyalty. Rook was no businessman. What businessman would be so sociable? What businessman would settle for such a salary as Rook and for so long? What businessman could see the market operate and not be shocked at its trading nonchalance? But Rook, he loved the Soap Market. He loved its crowds. He’d said as much: ‘It’s paradise for me.’ And Victor thought, If that is paradise, that regimented, noxious crush, that milling battlefield of chores and errands and anonymity, then that’s the paradise of termites.

Old Victor took his stick and walked quite steadily between the pots of young peppers and tomatoes towards the lift. And lunch. He paused to rub out with his thumb the greenfly on the fessandra bushes which grew in sentinel pots at the roof-top door. He wiped the mush of bodies on the lintel, wheezed, coughed, and spat a practised splash of phlegm into the pot compost. It glistened for a moment like the gummy, silver residue of slugs. ‘Good luck,’ said Victor, to himself. That’s what all good farmers said when they spat in the soil. The luck was for the soil and for the spitter, too. The luck that Victor wished upon himself was this: that he would live into his nineties, long enough to make his lasting, monumental mark upon the city. His age was not an enemy. In fact, the day that he was eighty seemed the perfect moment to begin the spending of his millions. He had no family to leave it to. He had no debts. What should he do, then? Leave it all to charities, and tax, and undeserving skimmers-off like Rook? Or play the geriatric fool and plough the crop back in?

Eighty was the age for second childhoods, so they said. He’d never had his first. He’d never been a boy. He’d only been a baby and a man. So let’s commence the childhood now, he thought. Let’s be an old man full of impulse, prospects, hope. Let’s lay the bitterness aside and die at peace. He spat again — more to clear his lungs than to win more luck than he deserved — into the compost of the second pot.

6

VICTOR’S SIMPLE DREAM of celebrating eighty years in country style could not come true. The air inside Big Vic lacked buoyancy. It was heavy and inert. It was soup. Dioxides from the air-conditioning; monoxides from the heating system; ammonia and formaldehydes from cigarettes; ozone from photocopiers; stunning vapours from plastics, solvents, and fluorescent lights. What oxygen remained was drenched in dust and particles and microorganisms, mites and fibres from the carpeting, fleece from furniture, airborne amoebi from humidifying reservoirs, cellulose from paper waste, bugs, fungi, lice. The air weighed too much and passed too thickly through the nostrils and the mouths of the guests at Victor’s lunch. They coughed and sneezed and grew too hot. Their eyes began to water, their heads to ache, the rheumatism in their knuckles and their knees to grumble. Big Vic was sick. Contagious, too. It shared its sickness speedily with these old traders, these outdoor men, as they waited for their boss. They blamed their wheeziness, their migraines and their lethargy on nerves. They blamed their dry mouths on embarrassment at the prospect of what had been described on their printed invitation cards as ‘a relaxed birthday lunch for a few close friends’. Relaxed? Not one of them could be relaxed in Victor’s company unless there was a deal to close or market business to be done. Close friends? Were they the closest friends that Victor had? It made them smile, the very thought of it.

But then, who else could he have asked if not these five? He had no family, as far as anybody knew. There were no neighbours on the mall. This was not, after all, the countryside, where people lived so close at hand and in such sodality that they were free and glad to sit in overnight to ease the passage of a corpse, to be the wedding guest, to aid with births or weeping, to help an old man puff his eighty candles out.

‘We’re here,’ one ageing soapie remarked, ‘because there’s no one else.’

‘We’re here,’ another said, ‘because, these days, we have to do what Victor wants. We’re here because we haven’t got the choice.’

It was true they’d been more intimate, at one time, when Victor’s empire was as small as theirs and his unbroken dryness had been seen as irony, his silences as only childlike, not malign. But now he was the ageing emperor and they the courtiers, obsequious, fearful, ill at ease. Indeed, the whole lunch had been arranged as if this old man were a medieval ruler, addicted to the indulgences and flattery of everyone who crossed his path. He’d been met, as he stepped out of the bright lights of his lift into his office suite, by quiet applause. A respectful corridor was formed for him, so that he could make his progress to the table without the hindrance of his old colleagues. Three accordionists accompanied him across the room with the March from La Regina, the bellows of their instruments white and undulating like the young and toothy smiles of the staff who had gathered at the door.

The snuffling trader guests closed in when Victor passed and formed his retinue. A waiter or a waitress stood at every chair, except for Victor’s. Rook stood there, like the prince-in-waiting or the bastard son in some fairy tale, clapping both the music and the man. Even Victor felt emotions that, though they did not show, were strong enough to make him sway and lean more heavily upon his stick.

They begged, of course, that Victor should sit down, and then they clapped some more. He asked for water, but surely this was the perfect moment for champagne. Trays of it were brought, for Victor and his guests, for all the workers in the outer rooms. Even the accordionists were given glasses of champagne, though hardly had their nostrils fizzed with the first sip than they were called upon to play — and sing — the Birthday Polka. So Victor sat, the Vegetable King, surrounded by employees, waiters, clients, acquaintances, and cats, each one of them dragooned to serve him for the afternoon, as two stout ladies and their friend pumped rhapsodies of sound and celebration round the airless room. Those few who knew the words joined in. The others hummed or simply stood and grinned.

There was an instant, when one of the three cats jumped up amongst the cheeses and the fruits on the table and put its nose into the butter dish, when it seemed that village ways had made the journey into town. But Rook’s raised eyebrow and his nod brought that fantasy and the cat’s adventure to an end. A waiter, none too practised in the ways of cats, removed the creature from the butter, lifting it clear by its hind legs as if it were a rabbit destined for the pot.

The music ended. Rook nodded once again, and all the staff, following the details of his memo to them earlier that day, left Victor’s room and returned to their screens, their telephones, their desks, their manifests of trade in crops. The Band Accord played — largamente — at the far end of the room. The guests sat down to the silent whiteness of the tablecloth, while the waitresses served the coddled fish. Rook, bidding everybody Bon appetit, left Victor to hold court and joined Anna and her staff for flattened cakes — and more champagne — in the outer rooms. Later on, when Victor had been softened by the meal, he’d enter with the birthday chair.

The meal, in fact, was not as perfect as the cook had hoped. The perch, despite their freshness, were just a little high, a touch too bladdery. They had not travelled well. Only one guest, his palate bludgeoned by the pipe he smoked, dispatched his fish with any appetite. The rest concealed their daintiness by making much of savouring the olives and the bread, or filling up on cheese and fruit. They turned the perches’ bones and mottled skin to hide the flesh they could not eat.

It was not long, of course, before the meal was finished and the waitresses had cleared the dishes, leaving the old men, freed by champagne and liqueurs, to follow the informal agenda of the birthday lunch and reminisce. There’d be no gifts or speeches. That was Victor’s stated wish. His hearing was not good enough, despite his humming, temperamental hearing aid, for gifts and speeches. But stated wishes of that kind are only code for something else. No one demands the gift they want. Instead they say, ‘No need. No fuss. I’m happy just to see you here.’ So Victor’s friends had done their best to translate the old man’s code. What gift would please a frail and childless millionaire about to embark upon his ninth decade? Something you cannot buy, of course. They’d had grim fun, these five ageing traders, identifying all those things that can’t be bought and which were lost as men got old. Good health. Good looks. Teeth, hair, and waists. The pleasures of the bed. Patience. Energy. A fertile place in someone’s living heart. Control of wind and bladder. All these were gone and way beyond the sway of credit cards. What then for Victor’s birthday gift? A place in history? Esteem? These must be earned, not bought.

‘A statue, then!’ The suggestion had been meant in jest. A statue to the vanity of age. But the idea was better than the jest, and soon had the old traders nodding at its aptness. They’d place a statue with a plaque in the Soap Garden. They’d raise the funds through subscription. All the traders in the marketplace would want to give. A good idea. A public gift to the city to mark the old man’s birthday. They’d had some drawings done by the woman who had cast a bronze statue (for the entrance of the new concert hall) of the city senators who died on lances in 1323. They liked her work. These senators were men in pain. Those lances were as straight and cruel as Death’s own finger. The hands which sought to stem the wounds or pull out the lances by their shafts were hands like mine or yours, except a little larger and in bronze. This was no abstract metaphor. She was no artist of the modern school. She’d talked to them in terms they understood: payments, contracts, completion dates, the price of bronze. Despite his spoken wishes, then, there was a shortish speech, a gift. The five old men presented Victor with the artist’s drawings. ‘They’re just ideas,’ they said. ‘You choose. We’ll see your statue is in place before you’re eighty-one.’ Victor did not make a speech. He nodded, that is all, and put the portfolio of drawings on his desk.

‘I’ll find some time later for these,’ he said, and joined them at the table once again to add his monumental awkwardness to theirs.

They tried in vain to open up some windows and let some town air in. But all windows higher than the second floor were double-glazed and safety-sealed and only activated by a call to the building’s brain, the high-tech deck of chips and boards which regulated everything from heating to alarms. They tried to resurrect the country lunches that they had shared when they were younger, middle-aged, and vying for crops and produce at the smalltown auctioneers. They tried to sing along with all the sentimental tunes dished up for them by Band Accord. They tried to grow animated rather than just sleepy with the alcohol they’d drunk. But the office suite was deadening. The headaches and the rheumatism which had made such progress, nurtured by the formal tension of the lunch, deepened their discomfort and the furrows on their brows. Their coughs could no longer reach and clear the tickling dryness in their throats. Their eyes were smarting. Their faces were as red and vexed as coxcombs. Conditions there were perfect for a heart attack or stroke.

Victor sat as deadened as his guests, not by the onslaught of the offices — he was used to that — but by the discomfort that he felt in company. He’d never had the conversation or the animated face to make himself or the people round him feel at ease. He had no repartee, no party skills, no social affability. What kind of city man was he that did not relish the light and phatic talk, the spoken oxygen of markets, offices, and streets? He did not care. He did not need to care. A boss can speak as little as he wishes, and stay away from markets, offices, and streets. Truth to tell, he did not even relish the joshing and the drink-emboldened flattery that his guests — between their coughs and flushes — were exchanging at the table. He mistook their talk for trivia. He took their wheezing and their creaking and the damp heat on their foreheads as the wages of their sinful lives, their drinking, smoking, family lives, their lack of gravitas. He looked on them with less kindness, less forgiveness, less respect than he had looked upon the yellow aphids that he’d killed that day.

Victor’s own breathing — papery and shallow at the best of times — had become distressed by the cigarettes and the one pipe smoked with the brandy after lunch. His stomach too was just a little restless from the fish.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, and stood, his brandy glass in hand. His guests stood, too, as promptly as they could, expecting toasts.

‘Fresh air,’ said Victor, his sentence shortened by a cough. ‘Let’s go to the roof.’

He led them in a halting, single file across the room to where his private lift waited for his summons. The three accordionists, instructed to ‘accompany’ proceedings until instructed otherwise, tagged on, their instruments strapped on their chests like oxygen machines. The waitress with the brandy — dutiful, uncertain — followed on. And last of all, the cats. They crowded in as best they could. The lift was meant for one. It shook a little on its hawsers as the old men and accordions wheezed in unison, and stumbled intimately against each other on the ascent to the 28th. But when they had emerged beneath the arch of fessandras into the air and foliage of the rooftop garden, the greengrocers breathed deeply, swallowed mouthfuls of the dirty but unfettered air, turned their faces to the sun and wind, and looked out across the city and the suburbs to the blue-green hills, the grey-green woods, beyond.

The Band Accord stood at the door, their mood transformed. The new note that they struck was sweet and sentimental. They played the sort of joyful harvest tunes that make you dance and weep, their grace notes jesting with the melody. The weaving cheerfulness of the accordion could make a teacup dance and weep. It is the only instrument strapped to the player’s heart. Its pleated bellows stretch and smile.

The guests spread out, at ease, delighted, cured all at once by the magic of the place, invigorated by the care and passion bestowed on every plant that grew on that rooftop. The centrepiece, so different from the sculptured water in the mall, was a pond surrounded by a path of broken stone. There were no fish, but there were kingcups, hunter lilies, flags, and — hunched over, like a heron — the shoulders of a dwarf willow, providing shade for paddling clumps of knotweed and orange rafts of bog lichen. There were shrubs all around, some in clay pots, some in amphoras coloured thinly with a wash of yellow plaster, some in raised beds. A wooden pergola, heavy with climbing roses, honeysuckle, creepers, led towards the greenhouse. The traders followed Victor there and rubbed the leaves of herbs and primped the seedlings like owners of the land.

The Band Accord was summoned to the greenhouse door. ‘Play on, play on.’ The waitress poured more brandy. The old men passed the glasses round like schoolboys on an outing, making sure they kept for themselves the fullest glass. They all found a place to rest or sit. Some upturned pots, a wooden bench, some low staging for the plants, made perfect seats. The cats made the most of the dry and practised hands, the bony laps, the strokes and preening that were on offer. The waitress was a little flustered by the flirting helpful hands which aided her with drinks. The two stout ladies of the band and their slimmer friend, on the other hand, were serenading this impromptu glasshouse gathering with the smiles and gestures of the most intimate nightclub. ‘To Victor!’ And someone added, ‘May you grow new teeth.’

Everybody raised a glass and once again the band squeezed out the Birthday Polka. Everybody sang the words and passed their glasses for more drink. Victor stood to say eight words, no more, of thanks. ‘Just like the village parties, gentlemen,’ he said, promoting the deceit that he had sap for blood, that he was just a countryman at heart. ‘Your health.’ He looked out for the second time that day towards the garish awnings of the marketplace. Before he’d had a chance to sit, he added one more toast, ‘Our town!’ He swept his hand towards the market, as if to wipe the townscape clean. He would have said, if he had been a more loquacious man, ‘Before I die I’d like to clear all that! To start afresh. A marketplace. A building worthy of our town.’ Instead, he said (he could not help himself), ‘To business, gentlemen.’ Again they lifted glasses up, and drank. ‘I trust your businesses are well. No problems that you want to talk about?’ No one was in the mood to answer him. They shook their heads and laughed, as if the very thought of problems was a joke.

‘Well, then,’ said Victor. ‘That is as it ought to be. Rook’s paid enough by me to solve and settle problems …’

‘By us as well …’ The man who spoke had meant it as a joke. He’d never stopped to think before whether Rook’s pitch payments were transactions that he shared with Victor. Too late to wonder now.

‘By you as well?’

‘It’s nothing much. A gratuity for everything he does.’

‘What does Rook do that is not already funded by his salary?’

Victor saw discomfort all round. He read it perfectly. No wonder Rook thought the Soap Market was paradise. The market termites droned for him. The man was taking bribes. Victor knew at once what he must do to this extortionist and how — a timely gift — it served his longterm purpose perfectly. A man like that, a man who served himself before his boss, a man, moreover, who could not be trusted should a market-renovation plan be contemplated, could not expect to keep his job. There was no wickedness in that. It was a duty for a boss to let the shyster go, just as it was the task of gardeners to rid themselves of bugs.

‘How much exactly do you pay?’ he asked. Again, there were no volunteers to speak. They did not wish to seem the victims of dishonesty, or collaborators in deceit. Victor took a notebook from his jacket, and a pen. ‘Jot down the size of payment that you make to Rook,’ he said. ‘I would not wish my friends to pay more than they ought.’ Of course, they did as they were told.

Downstairs, one floor below, Rook and Anna judged — as all seemed quiet in Victor’s office suite — that the time was right to seat their boss in his birthday chair, amongst the gleaming foliage, and to raise their glasses in a toast. The chair was carried from the anteroom. The drinks were poured. More champagne, naturally. The chair was placed at the centre of the lobby outside Victor’s suite where they presumed the birthday lunch was — quietly — still in progress. Rook stood behind the chair, a smile composed already on his face. Anna knocked on Victor’s door, and entered. The only sound and movement in the room came from the air-conditioning.

‘They’ve gone,’ she said to Rook. He came and stood beside her at the door and looked where she was pointing, at the table, at the olive pips, the undrained glasses, the stubbed cigar, the detritus of orange peel and fruit skin and undigested fish. Anna laughed, and — doing so — she dropped her head momentarily onto Rook’s shoulder.

‘They must have doddered to the roof,’ he said, and put his arm around her waist. He felt elated and uneasy. The empty room, the woman’s reassuring waist, the birthday chair, unoccupied and foolish in the middle of the lobby, were not what he had planned.

‘Let’s drink the champagne anyway.’ He turned his back on Victor’s door and sat himself amongst the plastic foliage of the birthday chair, satirically, defiantly. He lifted up his glass until Anna, standing at his knees, was still and silent and composed. She raised her glass as well. ‘Ourselves!’ she said. ‘Ourselves … ourselves … ourselves … ourselves …’

7

THE MARKET WAS as good as gone, and so was Rook. Decisions had been made, that day. The skyline of our lives was changed. Five halting traders, a band, a waitress, and the boss took air and brandy on Big Vic’s garden roof, while, on the 27th floor, Rook and Anna grew tipsy and engrossed with lesser things. There’d be a romance (How we love that word!), one death at least (We’re not so keen); there’d be distress and devilment upon the streets, some fortunes made and lost — and all because a dry old millionaire, alive too long, a little drunk, had fallen foul of that ancient sentimental trap, the wish to die yet linger on.

When Victor offered up his glass and said, ‘Our town!’ perhaps the toast was not for what there was but for what he saw in his mind’s eye, the prospects and the dreams. His hand swept up across the distant cityscape. He wiped the market off, as if he was simply clearing steam from glass and looking on the hidden clarity beyond, his place in history.

The story, though, that was running through the city by that midnight was not the one that would change lives and landscapes — unless you were a fish. The story that amused the traders and the porters as they gathered in the Soap Garden for their final coffee-and-a-shot, that so obsessed the chatterlings, the social consciences, the bleeding hearts, the evangelists of social change who talked into the night, was the story of Victor’s coddled fish. The fish at Victor’s party — or so the midnight edition of the next day’s city paper claimed — were better treated than his guests. Ten fresh and living perch were taken from the station to his offices. ‘By cab!’, was the report. Their plastic travel-tank was lifted by porters onto the cab’s rear seat and the driver was instructed to go no faster than a hearse. Live perch, it seemed, could lose their sweetness and their bloom if sloshed about like lunchtime bankers in the backs of cabs. Their flesh would flood and stress and, no matter what the chef might do, would disappoint at table, clinging apprehensively to the bone and tasting faintly bitter.

The cabbie — a little stressed himself, and bitter too at what he took to be a joke at his expense — adjusted his rear-view mirror so that he could drive and watch the yellowed water in the tank. He was used to spying into women’s laps that way. He’d earned a little cash a week or two before when he had spied a politician’s hand rest briefly in a woman’s silken lap. The woman was an actress, not the politician’s wife, and the cabbie sold both names to me. You will not mind, I know, if briefly, after introductions, and having kept myself discreet thus far, I step back into shadow. This story is not mine, at least not more than it is every citizen’s. I am — I was — a journalist. My byline was the Burgher. I was, at this time, the mordant, mocking diarist on the city’s daily.

On Victor’s birthday, the cabbie phoned me once again and sold the story of the fish tank too. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I swear the water smelt of piss.’ Here was, I felt … the Burgher felt … an amusing illustration of the oddity of millionaires, but only worth a quarter of the fee — and half the column space — that the Burgher’s budget could afford for hands in laps. The paper ran the story in the Burgher column, on the back page, with a cartoon — a cab completely full of water, bubbles, weed; a snorkelled diver at the wheel; a periscope; and at the street corner a well-dressed perch, fin urgently raised, calling, ‘Victor’s, please — and hurry, he’s expecting me for lunch!’

Nobody would have the nerve to show the piece to Victor. Such gossip and such jokes would only baffle him. But Rook was in the mood for gossip and cartoons. As usual, as a Friday treat, he’d bought the midnight paper from the operatic huckster on the street below his apartment. He had taken the paper back to bed with him, with coffee, brioches, and cubes of melon, and had shown it to Anna as if the joke on Victor would wear thin, the newsprint fade, unless she woke and read the paper then. She’d left her glasses in her bag, and where her bag was, amongst the urgent chaos of their clothes, their shoes, their coats, they were not sure. So Rook removed his slippers and his gown and rejoined Anna in his bed to read the Burgher’s words aloud. Their laughter led to kisses, and their kisses to the passion of the not-so-young in love. A breeze from the open window rustled and disturbed the pages of the paper which had been thrown carelessly and hurriedly upon the floor. Their faces reddened, their bodies swollen with embraces, their mouths limp and tenacious, they ended their working day much as a thousand other couples did beneath the roofs and chimneys of the town, their cries and promises soon lost amid the hubbub of the traffic and the revellers and the calls of traders in the alleys, avenues, boulevards, and streets. The wind. The countless noises in the lives of cities. The climax of the night. The recklessness of sleep.

The marketplace was resting, too, though not silently. The stalls and awnings had been packed away — some in padlocked wooden coffins, five metres long; some decked and lashed like rigging on a boat and riding out the stormless doldrums of the night; some wigwamed carelessly and stacked like bonfire wood. It looked as if a squall had struck, reducing all the trading vibrancy of day to sticks and cobblestones. The noise came mostly from the cleansing teams, the men in yellow PVC whose job it was to operate the sweep-jeeps, brushing up the vegetable waste, the paper bags, the scraps and orts of the Soap Market like prairie harvesters, and then to uncap the hydrants and bruise and purge the cobblestones with sinewed shafts of pressured water. The quieter group — men, women, kids — foraged for their supper and their bedclothes, gleaning mildewed oranges, snapped carrots, the occasional coin, cardboard sheets, and squares of polythene before the brushes and the jets turned the market’s oval benevolence to spotlessness.

Quite soon the cleansing gangs would go. The night folk of the Soap Market would secure their nighttime roosts. Dismantled stalls and awnings — once the water has run off — provide good nesting spots for people without homes. Cellophane Man — his clinging suit refreshed and thickened by the cellophane he found discarded in the marketplace — stood, vacuum-wrapped, to watch and organize the final vehicles of night. The drinkers had their corner. They did not sleep at night, but sat in restless circles, sharing wine or urban rum and fending off the dawn with monologues and spats. The shamefaced women there, fresh out of luck and cash, kept to themselves, and, desperately well-mannered, slept sat up, their arms looped through their bags, their minds elsewhere. Only the young stretched out — the youths who’d come to make their marks away from home and had ended up as city dips, or tarts, or petrol-sniffers. Some — like Joseph — had just arrived. The Soap Market was their first bedsit, and still they hoped that day would bring good luck. Indeed — again — where else would Joseph be but here? Not sitting at a bar, for sure. The pockets of his summer suit were empty still. Emptier, in fact. He’d lost his clipping from the catalogue. He’d dropped his knife. He’d come off worse with Rook. He slept — young, stretched out — with spinach as a pillow and a mattress made of planks.

At least he slept. For all the bad luck of the day he still retained the knack of easing tiredness, relieving disappointment, with a little sleep. At first he was unnerved by lights and noise; the engines and the headlamps of motorbikes ridden by spoilt young men drawn to the dismantled market by the fun that could be had at speed on cobblestones, and with the ‘trash’ who drank and slept there. But soon the town went quiet — no hoots or yelps to puncture night. He’d lain and watched the city darken as the last few lights in homes and offices had been switched off by insomniacs and caretakers and automatic timing switches. The only lights that did not dim were streetlamps and the silent conifer of silver bulbs which stood, unswaying, twenty-seven storeys high above the town. This Tree of Lights was Big Vic at rest. The block’s computer told which bulbs to shine, and when. It was the perfect fir — except that those who cared to stare might see at night a firefly at the summit of the tree, as Victor — without the knack of sleep — wandered through his apartment and his office suite, marked as he moved from room to room by lamps and lights outside the fir-tree’s grid.

It was his birthday night. He’d had too much to drink. One glass at his age was too much. His stomach growled. The pissed-on perch was drowning in champagne. Walking seemed to ease the wind which pressed against his chest. He belched to let the champagne free. He knew that in his office desk there were sachets of kaolin to still his gut. He found them, and he found the portfolio of drawings, too, the artist’s working notes for the sculpture that his contemporaries seemed keen to force on him. He carried the portfolio to the water fountain in the lobby outside his office suite. He tipped the dry and powdered kaolin into his mouth like a child with sherbert and washed it down with water from the fountain. The coldness of the water dislodged the pains inside his chest. He belched again. He felt quite well at last. Not sick, at least. Not faint.

Victor put down the sheaf of drawings and looked at each. Romantic, formal pieces sketched in chestnut pastels. A market vendor weighing out his fruit. A girl with grapes and flowers. A porter with three produce trays on his head. And then — alarmingly — a drawing of his past: a beggar woman with a suckling child, her hand outstretched, the gift of apple balanced on her palm. He sat, he almost fell, into an aged wooden chair pushed in shadow up against the lobby wall. He looked and looked at what he took to be a drawing of his mother and himself … what, almost eighty years before? His head was flooded now, his face was drained. This was the statue that he’d have. He’d make his mother once again. He’d put her back. He knew exactly where she should sit and beg in bronze, between the Soap Market and the garden. At last, the implications of his sweeping hand that afternoon upon the roof became more clear. He’d start afresh, just as his accountants had advised. He’d build a market worthy of the statue. A market like a cathedral, grand and memorable. A market worthy of a millionaire. He would outlive himself in stone. His mother would outlive herself in bronze. It made good business sense, though no doubt Rook would not approve. He’d fight for Paradise.

What better time to start than then and there? Decide. Remove all obstacles. Proceed. Victor took his memo pad and wrote a note in pencil on it. For Anna. She could deal with Rook. A less generous man would call the police, and let them sort it out. But, no, let Anna do the job. That’s what he paid her for.

Victor was glad — relieved — to have this task with which to fill his ninth decade and so engrossed by every touch and mark upon the artist’s page that he neither saw nor felt the plastic foliage pressing on his back.