Free Arcadia by Jim Crace Page A

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
    T HE 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