The crowds were thickening, drawn by the smoke. Some men were trying to breach the line of police. They lived in houses close to the burning building. They knew that fire had legs and wings and that their rooms and homes were next in line. They’d only come onto the street to see what all the fracas was and, when they knew, to find a certain place of safety for their families. They’d found themselves expelled, pushed back from their front stairs, spectators to the colonizing heat.
‘Let’s fight the fire,’ they begged. ‘At least let us go home and save a thing or two, before it all goes up in smoke.’
‘Keep back,’ the policemen said.
Their commandant did not organize a chain of buckets or send for nurses from the sanatorium, or for the water pumps. He sent instead for mounted policemen and another van of men. This was his district and he knew that trouble on the streets would be a black mark in his book.
It was not long before the word was out that the city councillor who’d recommended, just a week before, that tenements like these should be brought down to earth by fire had got his way. How was it that the police were there, at dawn and in such numbers? Why was it that no one was allowed to investigate or to fight the fire? The police, the politicians, the nobs and profiteers who wanted all the city to themselves had come before the sun was up to make a furnace for the poor. It was not only hotheads in the crowd who now found cobblestones and staves or started pushing against the policemen’s chests. The neighbourhood – in both respects – was now inflamed. They’d beat themselves like moths against the cordon of the law to get nearer to the flames.
If there was fighting to be done, then districts such as this were good for volunteers. Young men with little else to do got out of bed and ran into the street. Beggars, hawkers, prostitutes, the unemployed, the young, the criminals, the men and women with grudges and with principles, in fact the sort who had scores to settle with the city and the police, were glad to add their lungs and muscles to the throng. The crowds were driven from the rear by rumours and by the more mature of troublemakers who, hanging back, felt safe to bruise the air with threats and insults. Their curses and their slogans, lobbed at the riot from the rear, caused punches, cobbles, bricks to be thrown at the front.
Riots are like fires. They look their best at night. They smoulder and they flare with greater drama when the sky is dark. They beckon and they mesmerize. This breakfast riot was short-lived. The city had no need of it. It had its work to do, its schedules and appointments to address, its daylight hours to endure. Those men – and the few women – hurrying down the pavements at that hour on their way to work had only time to poke their noses down the narrow lanes where they could see the police and smoke and hear the curses of the neighbourhood.
If this had been at dusk, not dawn, with all the duties of the day despatched, then only the most innocuous, the wariest, would pass the mayhem by. That’s something every beggar knows – that breakfast times are dead, that crowds proliferate when work is done and time is no longer money. At dusk the riot would have spread out of the narrow lanes, beyond the burning tenements. It would have helped itself to food and clothes through the broken glass of windows. It would have picked on men in carriages or cars and taken wallets, watches, hats, and paid for them with beatings. It would have toppled tram-cars, and started new and spiteful fires in districts where the residents were rich. But it was dawn, and spite was still abed. The police soon gained control with their horses and their truncheons and their farmdog expertise in splitting herds and cutting out the single troublemaker from the pack.
Five buildings burned. The Woodgate district lost its wooden gates. But only Em was killed. The tiles and timbers of the tenement fell all around her like the trees had fallen once across her village lane, that other breakfast time when the winds had stretched the memory and bent the tallest, oldest pines beyond endurance. The sun fell onto the cobbles of the street for the first time in who-knows-how-many? years. The fire-shortened tenements had cleared a path for it. It thinly penetrated smoke and waltzed like light on water as the wind gathered, turned and spread the ashy air.
The crowd were now subdued. The ones whose homes were outside the police lines went home. The unlucky ones stayed put. And waited. They prayed the wind would settle down and let the fires die. The residents of the five damaged buildings would be happy now to see the wind and flames whip up so that their grief could spread itself throughout the town, so everybody would know what it meant to wake at dawn in purgatory, and without blame, and with no hope of heaven as reward. But there is no patterned justice to the wind or rain. And rain there was, quite soon. It made the timbers steam. It dampened spirits. It cleared and cleaned the streets, so that the rivulets of rain which sped along the gutters took off the ash and dust which had so recently settled.
Em had been roasted and then dusted by the ash. The rain was her undertaker. It showered her. It made her cold and shiny almost, as ready as she could ever be for her discovery two hours later by, at first, a pair of dogs and then a sergeant in the police. By noon they’d brought a box for her. It was not easy to lift her body from the rubble. She was too well cooked. Her flesh was falling from the bone. They wrapped her in a blanket then and lifted her. They kept her in the city morgue, in ice, and out of sight. But no one came and so they gave her earthy eyelids in the common grave and put her on the register as ‘Woman, unidentified’.
Aunt still was calm. She knew where she should rendezvous with Em. The marketplace, of course. Em’s place of work. Her pitch where she had sat with Victor on her breast, palm out and up and heavy with coins.
‘You have to walk yourself,’ she said to Victor. ‘I’m not a donkey. Walk!’ She made him stand. She held his hand. ‘Come on. She’s waiting for us. Walk a little way, and then I’ll let you have a ride.’
Victor was shocked. Not by the fire, and not by fears of losing Em. But by the clutter and the hardness of the streets, by the smoke and horses, by the anger and the weeping, by his aunt’s strange mix of harshness and attention, her calmness and her urgency.
When he was eighty and looked back, it seemed to Victor that this was his first unfettered image of the town, that up till then he’d only glimpsed the city streets. At most he’d seen those dislocated country views of fruit in carts, of vegetables displayed on stalls, of shoppers, traders, bar loafers, from the waists down. He did not like what he was seeing now. He clung to Aunt’s hand and her skirts. His cheeks were wet. His chest was shaking, partly from the morning cold and partly from the bubble sobs which he could not suppress. He walked – a little gawkily, of course. He was still young. He was not strong – and wished that he could be elsewhere. His head was full of countryside; the snoozer snake, the falling fruit, the little king returning home in a carriage made for melons, the burning, lucky candle on the step, the birthday chair that’s legs were saplings, that’s back was green and woven like a wreath.
7
WHEN VICTOR WAS an older, richer man, a twenty-six-year-old with property and prospects and – already – half a grip on all the riches of the Soap Market, he found the time and sentiment to search the city archives for the bound and brittle volumes in which the local newspapers were preserved. He knew the year and month that Em had disappeared. He knew there’d been a fire and still retained the snapshot memory of being lifted to Aunt’s back and watching flames and scarves of smoke across her shoulder.
It was a morning’s work to find the thumbnail news item, amid reports of city trade and gossip and a world gone mad with war: ‘Five tenement houses frequented by itinerants, prostitutes, and beggars were fired during dawn disturbances yesterday in the city’s Woodgate district. Several rioters were detained and charged with assault and theft following attacks on police, fire officers, and local trading premises. The disturbances were initially occasioned, it is reported, by rivalry between criminal groups. The body of an unidentified woman was removed from the debris.’ The single-column headline was BREAKFAST ARSONISTS DETAINED.
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But at the time Victor had no apprehension that his mother might be harmed. His aunt had said, ‘Come on, she’s waiting for us.’ His only fear was that he would be obliged to walk too far, before his aunt rewarded him with the donkey ride she’d promised on her back. He tugged her hand, so that his walking dragged on her. But she was tough and unlike Em. His tugs earned harder tugs from her. Her grip on his small hand was only soft if he matched steps with her. The instant that he slowed or faltered she bunched his finger bones. ‘Keep up,’ she said. Or, ‘Quickly now.’ He had to run to keep in step. Four trots of his to match her single stride. He’d rarely run before, except in play, and then the distance had been little more than wall to wall in their small room. He hadn’t realized the urgency, the clumsiness of speed, or how painful it could be.
Who knows what ants or termites feel when boys or bounty hunters kill the queen? Their structures fall apart. The soft, iron magnet lets her fleshy filings go, so even those far from the nest who have not witnessed the sacking of the royal chamber or seen the assassin’s needle impale the queen go listless-haywire at the instant of her death. Looking back, it seemed to Victor that the world that day was a pandemonium of ants, and ants without a queen. How else could he make sense of city streets, or cars and trams and carriages, of random, indiscriminating sounds, of pavement anti-patterns in which bodies flocked and fled like cream turned in a whisk, of Aunt once madly kind and now so rushed and unforgiving?
Aunt was quite certain, as she dragged her nephew by his finger to the marketplace, of two things – that Em was waiting in her usual place, that Em had perished in the fire. Or else a nightmare mixture of the two – that they’d find Em, her blackened palm outstretched, her thin, charred back propped up against the usual snag tree on the edges of the Soap Garden.
If they’d found Em, alive and well, their future would have been the past. They would have gone back ‘home’, to the countryside in May. At worst the springs and cushions of a swelling hedgerow are better bedding than the embers of a city fire. But his mother was elsewhere, and Aunt was not nostalgic for the pains and pleasures of the earth. She sat cross-legged all day at Em’s worn pitch. She’d give her sister till the night to resurrect herself and then she’d set about the task of finding once again a nesting box. Aunt did not try to put her nephew to the breast, or beg from passers-by. Victor was left to shuffle in the garden and the marketplace at will. At last. He loved and hated what he saw. He felt like we all feel when we’re first left at school – condemned to a freedom that at first seems narrower and more enclosed than the cell that’s family and home. The market paid him little heed, except to bruise and buffet him, and startle him with noise and colour.
His aunt was not a callous woman. She guessed the worst when Em did not show up. Her eyes were damp despite herself. But nor was she the sort to mope. If Em had disappeared, had died, was lost, had fled without her son, was lying in a pauper’s ward scorched and bruised by smoke and truncheons, then still the world went round, and breakfast followed dawn, and shitting followed food, and life went on. She gave her old straw cloche a whirl. She primped its dog-eared dog-rose sprigs in felt. She made its deep brim curl and grin and made a face herself to match. She wiped her eyes and, dutifully, checking one last time for Em, she went in search of Victor; and then, her nephew clinging to her back, she headed for the town.
Street luck is what the city excels at. Aunt’s hat (a little passé now), her smile, the boyish burden on her back, attracted comment from the livelier of the men she passed. One followed her – a man about her age, but dressed much older and in the bar-room style with patent shoes and collar studs, a soft homburg, trousers with a centre crease, a jacket of the latest cut with sloping pockets and long revers.
‘What’s that you’ve got on your back?’ he asked. ‘The kid must have seen that hat and thought he’d take a donkey ride!’ She answered cheek with cheek. She said the kid was paying for his ride. She was a human tram. ‘Jump up, if you can find the fare,’ she said (and winked). ‘There’s room inside for a little one.’
‘There’s more to me than meets the eye,’ he said, matching winks with Aunt. ‘Want to see? Hold on a bit …’
‘What bit exactly should I hold?’
‘Your tongue!’ he said.
They called him Dip, though he was known by many other names. His speciality was crowds. He’d dip a hand and make off with your purse and the most you’d feel would be a sense of loss and an unaccustomed lightness in the pocket. He could unclip brooches, take watches out of fobs and replace them with stones of matching weight, remove a banknote from a billfold and then put back the fold, swap a necklace for a length of string, steal (it was said) the glasses off your nose. Hard luck the lady who took a helping hand off Dip, who let him take her arm to cross the street or welcomed his assistance with the too-high step to board a tram. One hand at the elbow left one hand free to browse the handbag or the purse. Tough luck the well-heeled man who hovered in the street when Dip walked by. It only took the slightest nudge from him, a stumble, an apology. The man would never guess his pockets had been searched and emptied, his tram fare and silver tie clip stolen, his saint medallion removed.
At first, Dip’s interest in Aunt had been professional. A woman forced to give a piggyback to a tired child might have an unattended purse or, perhaps, an outer pocket which he could open up with just one brushing cut from the pivot blade of his pig-sticker. He’d been surprised when she drew close how young she was. And poor. And to his taste. He liked these country girls, their jollity, their give-as-good-as-take, their duelling repartee. This one was plump and scruffy, it was true. Beneath the disguise of the broad-rimmed cloche, her forehead and her upper cheeks were dry and pocked like grapefruit skin. But she had level eyes, a playful face, a comic angle to her chin, and – Dip, like every other man, had fantasies too strange to name – she satisfied his liking, his desire, for girls in hats. He’d never met a woman before who wore her hat with more flirtatiousness than Aunt. One glimpse of that had put his rhubarb up.
‘Please let me help,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry him. Where to?’
She shrugged: ‘Who knows?’
‘What’s your boy’s name?’ he asked.
‘Victor … and, anyway, he isn’t mine. You go and tend your own potatoes. It’s not your business who he is.’ That’s what she said, but what she thought was something else: This man is sent to us to take the place of Em. She let Dip take the boy from off her back and lift him in a flying angel onto his shoulders.
‘Where to?’ he asked again.
She told him all about the fire and Em and what their life had been; and telling it, she buried it, still warm. Life was too blunt and short to waste it on the dead.
Dip was enthralled by how Aunt span her hat whenever she was lost for words. He held his breath, as if his lungs were as fragile as frost, when she recounted how the men in bars had tossed their coins in her hat-brim to win themselves short glimpses of her legs. Here was a woman, he was sure, who was a gift from heaven and from hell. He jangled stolen coins in his pocket and hoped that he would get a chance to toss them too.
His room, he said, was near. So near that he could smell the market fruit from it. He offered her some floor.
‘And what about the kid?’ she asked.
It’s true, he thought. The kid is in the way. But then, he’s small and young. He’ll sleep. And when he sleeps? Who knows what might occur?
They put ‘the kid’ to sleep, and then they set to work. Aunt did her best to seem experienced, though, truth be told, she’d never suffered this intimacy before. She knew about it, naturally, but only in the way of comic patter, the sexual flirting that it took to beg some coins from a man, the flush and stillness that settled on them when her legs were on display and she was trading winks and innuendo.
Some Princesses – the prostitutes, the opportunists – had kept them all amused one night with stories of their clientele. How one old boy had paid good cash
to watch a girl spit on his feet. How others wanted armpits licked (‘My wife would never kiss me there!’) or asked for entry by the tradesman’s door, or took their pleasure spiced with oaths the like of which would shock the guardians of hell. How the teenage sons of bourgeoisie were brought by uncles, godfathers, family friends to girls like them to ‘taste the fruit’ but more often begged for mercy and their innocence; or wept; or failed ‘to stiffen the worm’; or changed their minds when they found out what, how and where, it all involved; or came into their underclothes before their trouser buttons were undone; or wet themselves.
Aunt was prepared for oddities. She was prepared, in fact, to be amused. Hilarity, it seemed from what the Princesses had said, was the stablemate of making love, and Dip had shown that he liked fun. But she soon found herself more startled than amused. Dip’s kisses were the colonizing kind. His hands – those hands so used to slipping gently and unnoticed into pockets, tucks and folds – seemed suddenly to lose their expertise. His fingers – adept in crowds at unloosening, unfastening, unbuttoning – were trembling at the strings of the nightcloth which she still wore beneath her coat. He seemed uncertain how to deal with the clips on his braces. He tried to pass his hands through solid cloth. He seemed unable, or unwilling, to push his trousers down without Aunt’s help. His breathing had become so uneven and so laboured that Aunt began to think that they had better stop before the poor man had a fit and her new dream of moving in with a good and handsome city thief was ended with a death. His temperature was fluctuating. His face was red. His levity, his measured confidence – those two characteristics which had made Dip so attractive to Aunt – had disappeared. Instead here was a man who did not seem able to form a simple sentence, but was behaving with the blunt and charmless urgency of a child denied the breast. Indeed, quite soon his mouth was partly on her breast, and partly chewing on her cotton undershift. One hand pulled her heavy coat and nightcloth to her waist; his other hand was pushed too tightly – and was trapped – beneath his trouser band, beneath his underclothes.