Arcadia (6 page)

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.

R
OOK 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.