Now he was ready to go out. He searched his wardrobe and he found the black leather jacket he’d once worn. The skin was scuffed and greying and the cuffs had split, but still it fitted, and the zip was good. The leather smelt a little of the marketplace, and the lining was stained beneath the arms and in the middle of the back from working sweat. He did not have the working trousers or the shirt to match – but he had dark and casual office clothes, and these he wore. He felt transformed. The jacket set him free. He had resurrected the man he’d been a dozen years before. He transferred his keys and wallet, his nebulizer, the Joseph ‘nife’ from his suit into the zipped pockets of the leather jacket. He tidied the apartment, read the notes that Anna had left, put her snapshot on the mantelshelf, and went into the town.
It was just a week since Victor’s birthday lunch, a week in which he’d rediscovered love, and lost his job, and soared and plummeted, one hundred metres, twenty-seven floors, onto the street. All in all he felt winded and invigorated, like some shaken boy who’s just stepped safely from a switchback ride. He set off for the Soap Market. The sooner he was seen amongst the stalls and soapies the better for his shaken self-esteem.
He walked between the banks of vegetables and fruit without a greeting or a glance. He was not snubbed. He was not recognized, at first. His leather coat was a disguise. It made his walk more bearlike, from the shoulders, hands in jacket pockets, collar up. The suited Rook had seemed a little taller, more loose-limbed, and walking from the hip. But once he sat amongst the traders at a bar in the Soap Garden, his face was known. He heard the whispers, and caught the glances and the nods. The waiter was his usual pleasant self, but waiters do not count. The market workers – the porters and the salesgirls – did not speak to him, but then they never had. He’d been too grand. He’d been the old man’s nuncio, his representative on Earth.
Rook did his best to seem relaxed. But he was not relaxed enough to hold his cup steady with one hand. He shook so badly that the sugar for his coffee trembled in the spoon. He wished he had a newspaper with which to shield himself. He wished that he could hide behind a cigarette without the smoke occasioning a fireball in his chest. Part of him feared that he would see one of the birthday guests, some arthritic merchant on a stick, and feel obliged, compelled, to make a scene. But mostly he feared what the market men might do to him now that he was stripped of office. He feared their jeers, their ironies, the jabs and punches they might give to him, and with good cause. Those modest tithes, those sweeteners, which Rook had levied every quarter and for which he’d guaranteed clean access to the boss’s ear, were now revealed as money down the pan. Rook was further now from Victor’s ear than any soapie in the market. He was the only one whose contact with the boss was limited to ‘the mediation of lawyers’.
Mid-morning, though, is not the time for arguments or scenes. The market was too busy and the traders too immersed in chalking prices for the day to spend much time on Rook. It was no secret, naturally, that he had lost his job – but no one there was certain why. The five old men were keeping quiet. Old men have enemies enough, and take more pleasure out of secrecy – their greenhouse secret with the boss – than spreading tales amongst the market hoi polloi. So Rook was noted, but not judged. The men who never cared for Rook, did not abhor him more or less because – or so the rumour was – he’d lost his job. Why would they like him any less because he was dismissed? The traders did not know the social protocol. His misfortune was, perhaps, good news for them. It might save them money. Who could tell? But then, there’d be new Rooks, and tougher ones whose pitch fees were less modest. They’d rather stick with their asthmatic. He was not loved but he was witty in his way and had the common touch. He had, at least, sprung from the marketplace. He’d robbed them, true, but done no lasting harm. Such is the vagrant logic of the street that Rook was almost popular with his old foes, just as a bully’s popular when he releases captives from his grip.
Those who’d been on good terms with Rook and considered the pitch payments to be bribes initiated by themselves, felt just as proprietorial now about their ‘man at Victor’s ear’, despite the fact that their man had been sacked. Indeed, they even felt a little guilty that their market cunning might have been the cause of Rook’s dismissal. They felt a little fearful, too. What might the old man do? They judged it best to wait and see. But there were one or two – the younger ones, the ones who’d had less coffee and more shot – who went across to Rook. They shook his trembling hand. ‘A bad business,’ they said, inviting Rook to reveal exactly what had occurred with Victor. And then to end the silence, ‘Let us know if you need any help.’ Or they put a shot down on the table and invited Rook to stun his bad luck with a little drink.
So Rook still had a welcome in the marketplace, somewhere to pass his time while he decided how to spend his life. He came each morning, exchanged a repertoire of gestures with Cellophane Man, who stood as usual at the market edge directing people, trolleys, vans, and sat amongst his allies there. If they enquired, ‘Come on, what did you do to get the push?’, he told no lies. But neither did he tell the truth. He was good at keeping quiet and hinting with his mouth and eyes that he was innocent of blame. Within a few days the market men behaved as if he’d never been their go-between, or in their pay, or they in his, and just enjoyed his dry sarcasm and his cawing, nasal laugh when he told stories of the boss amongst his cats and insects on the 28th. Market memories are short so long as debts are settled fast. A lasting grudge is one that’s waiting to be cashed.
Rook wandered through the alleys and the lanes of vegetables and fruit with fresh eyes now. He need not be as watchful as before, noting prices, faces, infringements of the market code. He need not be prepared to take pitch payments, surreptitiously, or listen to complaints about the price and quality of olives or pears. If he pushed through the crowds to the peaks and canyons of a citrus stall, no fruiterer would simply click his tongue and shake his head to signify ‘No need to pay!’ He was the public now and he was ruled, like anybody else, by the market creeds which one trader – tired of scrumpers or being asked for credit – had chalked up on his stall: ‘No Loot, No Fruit’, and ‘We take IOUs, but only in cash!’
Rook was content to be a simple shopper, thumbing, like all the other shoppers there, but with more blatant expertise, the skins of fruit to check their readiness. Or plucking one leaf from pineapple tufts and judging by its reticence the softness of the core. Or testing whether pod-beans would snap or bend between his fingers. Or lifting melons to his nose and knowing, from the smell, the reasty from the ripe. Or scratching new potatoes with his nails to see how well the blistered skins would lift. He knew the trick of listening to cabbages: the hearty ones were silent in the ear. He understood the colours of the carrot, and how the reddest roots were soapiest and only good for stews. You could not confuse him with a waxy pear, or with mushrooms ‘dirtied’ with a spray. A butcher might make a fool of Rook with some false cut, some trick with bone or fat, but no one in the Soap Market had greater, wider skill with fruits and roots and leaves.
Why waste such expertise? Why couldn’t he return from whence he’d come – the smart son of a marketeer – and become a marketeer himself, a soapie for the second time? Because of Victor? Because he was a snob, who having laboured at a desk was not prepared to rise at five to bend and lift and sell? Because he was too old to mend his ways? He was not rejuvenated by the thought of merchant Rook, his thin and greying head peering from behind a gleaming splash of fruit, his fortune measured out in paper bags. But neither was he much seduced by the alternative – a Rook with nothing much to do except to sit and age and spend. If only he could find the heart – and shamelessness – to lift a pen, a telephone, and answer Anna’s calls to him, then, maybe, having nothing much to do but spend would seem less mournful.
Rook hoped to meet her on the street, by chance. He was alert for her, for any word of her. Anna’s was the only face, he thought, from which he could get pleasure. For sure, he d
id not hope to see his mugger once again. The boy – whose ’nife’ he still possessed – had no importance in his life. Yet, on the morning of Rook’s tenth visit to the market bar, he encountered Joseph for the second time. The youth was barrowing red sacks of onions, three at a time, from an open truck which was parked amongst the vans and cars at the market edge. Rook was not pleased to see these two adversaries of his in such a partnership, with Joseph working for the man who’d always treated Rook with cold disdain. He was perplexed at first. He could not think what chance, what scheme, what machination, had brought these two together. But his confusion could not last because the moment that he focused on the strangeness of it all, he realized the truth. Rook did not need to draw himself a map. The mugging and the sacking of two weeks before now made full sense. Details that had escaped him returned in trusses and in clusters. Rook remembered now how Con had shaken the sealed envelope of pitch money so tauntingly in his face, a challenge on his lips. Then, within two hours at the most, Joseph – armed with a photograph, a knife – had tried … tried what? Tried at Con’s behest to resecure the envelope. And having failed to resecure it with a knife, what had Con done? He’d made a call, or sent an unsigned note, that afternoon to Victor. And here was Joseph, still in Con’s employ. And here was Rook, disinherited, without a job to do. Those five blameless party guests! Those harmless, dry old men! Rook found it grimly comic that he’d dreamed of tracking down and wiping out such innocents. So now he knew who’d caused this chaos in his life. If he had half a chance he’d see to it that Con was sent the bill.
But, for the moment, it was Joseph on his mind, not Con. He’d beaten Joseph once before; he’d beat him yet again. So when a few days later Rook spotted him in the Soap Market, he determined they should speak. It was quite late and dark. It was that summer’s warmest night and the city had its sleeves rolled up and could not sleep. For once, Rook had outstayed the waiter’s welcome at the market bar. The Soap Garden was becoming his backyard. He and three other men had played domino dice until all the other empty chairs and tables had been stacked and the bar staff had changed into their own clothes.
The barman closed the shutters and rinsed the final glasses and left the four men in the midnight July gloom to finish off their game. Rook was the last to leave. He was not skilled at dice and he had chanced his stake on one hot throw. He’d won, against three lukewarm throws from his companions. They’d settled up in thousand notes, and Rook had ten of them, folded in the pocket of his leather coat, as he set off for home.
The sweep-jeeps and the men with hoses had been at work and what had been a dusty, waste-strewn space, cluttered with dismantled stalls and flattened produce boxes, was now as gleaming and as scrubbed as a spray-washed shingle beach – except that night-time beaches reflect the white lights of the sky, and smell of medicine, and perform a nocturne, made from water, wind, and stone. This washed place smelt more of soup. It honked the jazz of traffic horns and voices in the summer night. It was lit by the yellow, oblong constellations of distant windows in offices and rooms where no one had the energy, in such a heat as this, to pull the blinds or go to bed.
In the summer there was hardly space for all the dispossessed and homeless who came to roost in the dripping troughs and crevices of the Soap Market. Why sleep indoors, in derelicts or hostels or up against the bricks and tiles of bridges, subways, underpasses? Why squat in dark, abandoned flats – your only privacy an unused mattress up against the window or the door – when it’s July and there’s no rain and the sun has been so fierce by day that all the midnight, city air is swollen with the heat?
There was no need to light a fire from packing debris, but there were fires because the poor are always cold in spirit and need the optimistic mesmerism of the flames to take them through the night, to help them kindle just a little desperate joy amongst such misery. Some of the fires would not last long. Their purpose was to shed a canopy like bulbs shed light, making rounded rooms with walls of melting night for children who could not sleep without the fantasy of ‘home’. Some fires would burn till dawn, topped up by sleepless residents whose thirst for alcohol could not be blunted by their desperation or fatigue. One fire gave light for noisy games of cards. Another was the fire where spuds and sweetcorn, gleaned from the market floor, were ember-baked on skewers made from cycle spokes. Another warmed the singers’ throats – the singing broken up by coughs, those two most humble sounds of human life becoming tangled in the mouth. In this, their simple warmth and light and sound, the night-time soapies were the closest citizens in town to the earth’s enduring elements. They understood what every moth must understand, that flame is enemy and friend. Some found in it good cause to smile, but others were expressionless or else astonished beyond words by the scalding visions that the flames revealed. But mostly people sat or slept alone, disgruntled, shamed, made volatile and distant by a life which cast them as the rootless, parasitic clinker weeds amongst the steady stems of native bedding plants. Some slept on cobbles, statuesque, their heads upon their knees, their arms looped round their legs. Some curled on cardboard mattresses with pillow-sacks, or nested in the timber and the canvas of the market stalls. Women – rarer, older than the men – looped their arms through plastic bags of clothes and dozed, or pretended to. To seem asleep was their frontier against the raids and sorties of the town. It gave them some respite from their pain – their swollen feet, necrotic toes, their boils, and coughs, their migraines and their chills. Men talked in voices that were stripped to wire, or muttered madly to their chests, or carried their misfortune squarely, cleanly, without shame. Until they slept, that is. Who could tell the shameless from the lost, when all of them seemed just as thin and innocent and urinous beneath the duvet of the night?
Rook walked as quickly as he could between the starvelings and the vagabonds, the gangrels and the drunks. He was an easy target for their wit or for the begging hands which waved at him or tugged his trouser cuffs, or for their savage mutterings. He did not like the market when the awnings and the stalls were felled, and when the ripe and appetizing daytime colours of the crops were replaced by the moistened greys of night. He did not look when he heard oaths or offers. It was not wise to be waylaid by their ill-luck. If he gave cash or time to one, then all of them would rush to him like mallards in the park, pecking for a crust.
Ahead he spotted three young men, as awkward on their legs as day-old foals. They called him to them, but he did not go. He could not quite unscramble what they said. But he was certain he knew what they held inside their paper cups, their shallow plastic trays, their makeshift dishes. These were what people nicknamed the Taxi Cabs, clumsy, noisy, slow, and fuelled by petrol. They sniffed whatever petrol they could steal. They did not care that nowadays the petrol contained an Anti-Sniff. ‘Danger’ warned the stickers on the petrol caps. ‘Ethyl Mercaptan’. It smelt of skunk. So what? The boys smelled just like skunks themselves. It did not dull their appetite for fuel, not even if the Anti-Sniff made them nauseous, hyperactive, violent. It blocked their tongues, and caused them to tremble like crones and greybeards made helpless by a stair or kerb.
Rook did not lift his head to face the Taxi Cabs; or even to trade signals with Cellophane who was still on his feet and summoning Rook, ‘This way. This way. Then right. And straight ahead,’ as if Rook were a van that’s passage blocked the marketplace. He chose a route which took him to the market’s edge, near the house where he had lived when young. He liked to walk those streets and look up at the cluttered windows of the carpet salesmen. Was that cracked glass the same that he’d pressed his face against, what? thirty years ago and more? for private, hawk-eye glimpses of the local girls? His mind was already set on women. The July heat, the weeks since he’d last slept with Anna, made him wonder what he’d do if some young woman bedded down on polythene amongst the cobblestones asked for money in return for sex. He did not trust himself. He was afraid.
He walked a little quicker now, the touch of panic and arousal at hi
s heels. He almost stumbled over Joseph, sleeping at the market edge amongst the padlocked carts and barrows. The mugger’s face was busy with its dreams. It was not proud or shy in sleep, but blinked and gaped and made no secret of its missing tooth, the cherry birth-stain on its cheek, the pitted craters on its nostrils and its chin, the meagre, ill-advised moustache, the crusty scar above the eye where he’d been wounded by a key. The skin was just as cracked but not as bronzed as it had been when he’d fled the countryside by Salad Bowl Express. The city life had whitened him. He looked as harmless and as dull as bread.
What made Rook feel again as tough and sentimental as a movie star? Was it the triumph of his fists, that time so long ago? Was it the residue of how he felt about old Victor, Anna, Con? Or just his dreadful appetite for girls transformed to violence when he saw the sleeping boy?
He thought he’d wake him with a kick. But what if Joseph yelled? The mob would come. He’d have a tottering circle made from drunks and Taxi Cabs. Rook was tempted to drop a coin in the open mouth and creep off to watch the boy awake, or choke. Instead, he searched his pockets for the knife. He sprung the blade and squatted at Joseph’s side. Just like a father with an oversleeping child, he squeezed Joseph’s ear lobe, a parent’s trick to open up the eyes. He waved the knife across his face, and said, ‘It’s Joseph’s “Nife” – without the K. Is this your property?’ He lay the flat blade on the young man’s nose.
‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘We owe each other favours, don’t we? Don’t shake your head. Don’t move. I gave you that.’ Rook pointed at the scar. ‘And you’ve scarred me. I ought to hand you over to the police. At least you’d have a decent place to sleep …’
Joseph sat up. He recognized Rook’s face at last, despite the lack of tie and suit. He was not frightened by the knife or anything this thin-faced man might do. His own face was wide enough to take more scars. He did not care. He’d snap this man in half for waking him. He’d punish him for being rich when he was poor. Rook stood and backed away, the knife less certain in his hand.