Free Arcadia by Jim Crace Page B

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