2
QUITE SOON he was a different Rook, not yet the firebrand that he’d been when young, not quite the wagging spaniel of the office block, but someone more relaxed than both. His pace had slowed. He strolled. His tie was loose. His shoulders dropped. His birdlike chest no longer heaved for air. There was no tension here, in public space, except the amiable and congested tension of the streets which kept the traffic and pedestrians apart, which made atonal harmonies with honking motor horns for brass, and news-stand yodellers as vocalists, and percussion from the beat of leather shoes on stone. Now Rook’s main quests upon this street of salons, boutiques, and restaurants, were oddballs, cronies, pretty girls, anyone to stare at, or anything to buy. He was on the lookout, yes, but not for thieves and trouble any more, not for the fellow in the cream and crumpled suit. Rook no longer gripped his keys. Somewhere between the new town and the old his ne’er-do-well had disappeared, swallowed raw by the pavement multitude.
Untutored in the waltz, the simple quick-quick-slow of passing through a crowd, Rook’s country shadow had been blocked by waiting cars and errand bikes, thwarted by citizens on opposing routes, stopped in his path by shopping bags, and kids, and snack-or-bargain carts. He’d been delayed by brochure touts and leafleteers, tackled at the knees and chest by rubbish cans, hydrants, signs, post boxes, newspaper stands. He’d been bumped and buffeted by the selective tidal chaos of the street which unfooted and swept away those newcomers who did not understand its current or its flow. This was a city at full pelt.
As Rook maintained his pace unerringly and blunder-less, the young man in his suit – whose name you’ll know before the day is out – was left, a stray, unable even to spot his quarry’s browsing head amongst the unremitting throng of citizens. He stopped and window-shopped himself, waylaid by seagull flights of lingerie, by jewels thrown out across a bed of sand as carelessly as stones, by chocolate truffles displayed like jewels on satin trays, by terraces of boots and shoes, by all the sorcery of Look, Don’t touch. He pressed his back against the window glass expecting eyes to look him up and down, and disapprove. But there were none. The only eyes that stared at him were in the plaster mannequins. They looked out, day and night, as if they dreamed the street, and all the passers-by were figments in the glass.
Who can resist the privacy of crowds? A crowd is people, freely voting for themselves. Rook’s shadow joined the crowd and went with it along Saints Row, around the Tower Square, and back again, until it beached him amongst the pavement tables of a bar. He sat. He’d sit until a waiter came, and then he’d hurry off again. He was not bored. The street was cabaret, with mime, and all the spoken badinage delivered stagily, in a whisper or a shout. He’d stay there for a while, he thought, and then go back to where he’d spotted Rook, where there were never crowds, in the ill-lit tunnel under Link Highway Red. That was the perfect spot for the ambush that he planned.
Rook, meanwhile, had gone beyond the bustle of the boutique street. He’d skirted round the boundaries of the Mathematical Park where flower beds were cut for every shape – an octagon of primulas, a perfect circle for begonias, roses in triangles and squares – and Pythagorean climbing frames and wooden seats designed impossibly like Mo¨bius strips. Now Rook was walking through the neighbourhood where he was born and raised, the Wood-gate district of our city.
Where were the wooden gates that gave the place its name, those medieval, oaken sentries to what had been an ancient town? Burned down, seventy-four years before, when Victor was a child of six. The incendiarists – so it was said – were city councillors who wanted to ‘better’ what had become a low-rent district of beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. Their improving additions were terraces of five-storey blocks – one floor retail, one floor wholesale, two floors apartments, attic, cellar, stables, yard, high rent. In their haste, they’d followed, not replaced, the charred and muddled labyrinth of medieval streets. The Woodgate district was then, and still was on Victor’s eightieth, best suited to the horse. Those narrow stable yards and culs-de-sac, those twisting alleyways that locals called the Squints, were scarcely wider than a mare is long. No motor vehicle could turn about inside the Squints. They were too tight and modest for the cussed constipation of the car.
The Woodgate neighbourhood had its vehicles, of course. A town must breathe, and there were straighter, wider ways which offered access to the Squints and provided Rook a fast, straightforward route to cakes and greenery. Now he was walking down the road, four mares in width, where he was raised. There were parking bays where he’d once played asthmatic ball-and-tag. The building where his parents had leased a flat was let to businesses – a barber on the pavement floor, an accountancy above, and then three floors of warehousing. The room which Rook had shared with a brother for ten years was wall to wall with mats and phaga rugs, and druggets from Kashmir. An asthmatic’s fibrous nightmare.
Neighbourhood was not the word. There were no longer neighbours there. At night the barbers and accountants, and the warehousemen, went home by car and bus and train to suburbs out of town. At night the Squints were dark and dead. But still the buildings were the ones Rook had known when he was small. There were no demolitions yet. And still there was a faint smell in the air, beneath the odour of the cars and the scent of secretaries, of ancient fire. And rotting vegetation, too, as if the area had been built against the odds on the sweet and sour of a swamp. For these were the borders of the Soap Market. The smell, an airborne punch of cabbage stalks, figs, olives, beet … had belched and yawned along these streets and down these Squints for six hundred years. The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. So, of course, was Rook. Rook soup would taste as much of fruit as meat. Just like the merchant’s monkey in the song,
His testicles were mango stones,
(Quite normal in the Apes);
His cock was courgette on-the-bone.
He Shat Fresh Grapes
For all his coolness and his suits, Rook was a market boy, a Soapie through and through. His mother and his father made it so. His parents had rented a market stall and too frequent were the days when they’d encourage Rook to miss school and help them stack and sell their wares. He did not know, perhaps, the shape of continents or algebra when he was ten, but he could tell – by smell, by patina, by shape (no easy task) – a Trakana cherry from a Wijnkers, and know, before he broke the skin, which aubergines were soured, which peas had greyed inside their pods.
So it was in a sentimental mood that Rook, on Victor’s celebration day, walked the familiar hundred metres between his old home and the market rim beyond which, as yet, the colonizing barbers, the accountants, and warehousemen, had made no mark. The canyoned pattern of the city ended here in a huge 0-shaped, cobbled court, which could not be circled – Rook could guarantee – by a shallow-winded boy on a bike in less than fifteen minutes. Except for those few low-rise restaurants and bars in the Soap Garden which formed the centre of the 0, all buildings in the court were wood and canvas market stalls. The place was open to the sky, and could have been a medieval harvest fair. Except that Big Vic – as Victor’s office block was known – and the other high-rise monoliths of the new town cut off the market from the skyline hills, and fast and heavy traffic on the Link Highways beat drum rolls across the awnings and the roofs.
Inside the oval, there were no parking bays, traffic lights, or ordered flows. The marketeers parked where they chose, or where the Man in Cellophane (who took it madly on himself to block and beckon traffic) directed them. Their trucks and vans choked paths and access streets. Their barrows and their porter sleds were left where they were used. The wooden produce trays, the emptied sacks, the pallets, bins, and panniers which had held vegetables and fruit were piled and stacked unevenly, discarded like the crusts and rinds and eggshells of an outdoor meal. It was safe haven for a sprinting criminal pursued by police in cars.
The odours here were less opaque than those whic
h spilled out, windborne, into the streets beyond. To walk amongst the stalls, eyes closed, would be to test one’s nose for all the subtleties of countryside and food. The practised nose – like Rook’s – could tell when barrows of potatoes were pushed by or where the garlic nests were hung or whether medlar fruit had bletted long enough and now were fit to eat, or when (the softest, then the foullest scents of all) guavas were for sale, or durians. But why would anybody want to close their eyes? No gallery of modern art could match the colours there, the tones, the shapes, the harmonies and conflicts on the stalls.
The yellow stars were babacos; the Turkish turban was a squash; the pile of honeydews were rugby footballs begging for a kick; redcurrants, clinging fatly to their spindly strigs, burst and bled; zucchini from Sardinia retained their orange, tissue flowers and peeped out of their boxes like madly coiffeured snakes. And dead snakes, sometimes, as green and cold as watermelons, could be found coiled thinly round mangoes or cantaloupes. And thrips and ticks and lice and grubs and flies, the living things that make a living out of market fruit and market crowds. The roaches, bugs, and weevils that share our meals and beds.
The first traders, on the outskirts of the market, were the bananamen, the specialists in Musaceae. They did not wish to penetrate too far into the maelstrom of the stalls. The snags of fruit weighed far too much to move around, ten, twenty overlapping hands perhaps, each with a dozen fingers to the hand, and each fibrous stem damp and heavy from refrigeration on the seas, from journeying, from ripening, from growing sweet. Bananas were mostly sold in bulk from off the back of vans. They sold them by the hand, and not by number or by weight. The bananamen stood by, foul-mouthed, lascivious, and raucous with their yellow-penis jokes. Their fleshy plantains were rewarded with the biggest laughs, the deepest blushes. These traders were the butchers of the marketplace. They each were ready with a knife, like senators at Caesar’s death, to cut the hand selected by the customer expertly from the stem. Every knife, and every trader’s tongue, was as sharp as limes.
Beside them was the jackfruit van – one jackfruit always sliced in half and cubes cut out so that anyone could test the flesh for creaminess and age. And then the melons and the yams, the gourds, the Herculean beets, the pumpkins, the pyramids of cabbages and swedes. Each had its pitch, exactly and invisibly marked out. God help the reckless cabbage that strayed or rolled into the sovereign kingdom of the yam. God help the greengrocer who scrumped his neighbour’s space.
So old and honoured were the patterns of the trading pitches that Rook, or so he claimed, could have walked as sure-footed as a village cat between the produce and the stalls to the Soap Garden at the market’s heart without a glance to either side or to his feet. But Rook was not the man to pass unnoticed or unnoticing through such a place. His eyes were Victor’s. This was his boss’s empire, the place that made him rich. This market was the keystone to the solid arch of Victor’s wealth. Wealth can disappear unless it’s watched and husbanded. So Rook was more alert than he had been all day. He watched to see which soapies called out his name and waved, which ones had customers and which had none, what new faces were portering or helping out with sales, who scowled, who hid, who turned away as if they’d never seen his face before, who bid him wish the boss a pleasant birthday lunch, what fruits there were, what vegetables were new, who had no right to be there and yet was.
At times, Rook simply stood and stared in wonder at the wit and artistry for sale and on display – the plump, suggestive irony of roots, the painted, powdered vanity of peaches, the waxen probity of lettuce leaves, the faith implicit in the youth and readiness of onion sets, the senility of medlars (eaten only when decayed), the seductive, bitter alchemy of quinces which young men bought to soften women’s hearts. Who could pass unfeeling through such splendour? Who could resist an orange from the pile? Not Rook. He pushed up against the paper trimmings of a stall. Before him were the peaks of citruses, the best, most flawless fruit built into perfect ziggurats with prices marked on flags. There were common blonds and bloods and navels – oranges from twenty nations of the world; Cuban green griollas, the yellowish valencias from Spain, the red sanguinas grown on the southern slopes of the Atlas. Not just oranges in peaks, but foothills too of bergamots, lemons, limes, kumquats, and the infinite variety of mandarins. And all this summer landscape edged in boulders made from grapefruit, shaddocks, and half-caste pomelos. The fruiterer had made a passing masterpiece of oranges. He’d added, too, a fringe and diadem of lights, the colour and the shape of citruses. No matter how they shone they were eclipsed. No light was bright enough to glow more cheerfully than fruit. No packaging could better them or sing their praises louder than themselves.
Rook made his choice and took an orange from the cheapest pile. Its peel, it’s true, was blemished, dirty almost. There was a brownish lunar landscape on its outer crust. The price was low. But for Rook, who knew his oranges, such blemishes were marks of juice and sweetness. An orange so discoloured is an orange which has ripened in the heat, in countries or in seasons where the nights are warm and bruising. An orange so discoloured would have slaked its daytime thirst upon the perspiration of the moon. Rook held his purchase up, and searched for a few coins. The fruiterer just clicked his tongue and shook his head to signify there was no need for Rook to pay, that he should take this orange as a gift.
Rook scalped the orange at its pig with his teeth. He spiralled off the peel and ate, stepping back and stooping to save his shirt-front from the juice. The flesh left fluorescent lacquer on his lips and chin; the pith made anchovies of flannelette beneath his nails. He let the peel fall to the ground as he walked. The detritus of fruit, the husks and pods and skins, the blowsy outer leaves of salad, the blown parsley sprigs, were not considered litter there, but God-given carpeting for cobblestones.
Rook loved it all, this market world, this teeming concourse of cobbles. What good, he wondered, would it be to own this land, as Victor did, and yet not have the legs or lungs to browse amongst the smells and tints and sounds? Yet don’t be fooled. Our Rook was not at ease. The market boy was now a predator. What made Victor a millionaire – the rents on market stalls, the ‘seeds-to-stomach’ stranglehold on wholesale and supplies, the canning and bottling plants – had made Rook wealthy, too. His wealth was surreptitious, though. No penthouses for Rook. No limousines. No coddled fish for lunch. No Rolexes or La Martines. His money was the kind you couldn’t spend too openly and couldn’t bank. It was the kind that came in cash four times a year, slipped to him in a paper bag with a mango or some grapes or handed over at a bar, a cylinder of notes – all used – and held by rubber bands.
Compared to the trading rents which Victor charged, Rook’s ‘service fees’ were small, a modest tithe for peace of mind from every market trader there. A guarantee against eviction. A small amount to pay for Victor’s ear. ‘Pitch money’, it was called. A sweetener for Rook: vinegar for those who paid. You could see it on the faces of the men who came to Rook just then – his chin still damp with orange juice, his eyes alight, alert – to make their summer payments for their pitches.
One man peeled off his payment like a sinner giving alms. Another passed his ransom concealed inside his palm. A handshake did the trick. A third – the soapie known as Con – shook openly and tauntingly a sealed envelope in Rook’s face, with Rook’s name written large and red on it for all to see. Others saw the payment as a trade. They paid, then mentioned problems that could be fixed, if only Rook would talk with Victor. The price of olives was too high. The pears were bruised by the new mechanical pickers that Victor used. The contractors who hosed the market down at night were playing games with the water jet and damaging the decoration on the stalls. ‘Please let old Victor know our troubles. He can’t fix what he doesn’t know. And – please – wish Victor Happy Birthday from us all.’ What was unspoken but accompanied all the cash that Rook received was this: Long may you rot in Hell.
What should we make of Rook, then, as he, shamefaced, propri
etorial, pushed through the shoppers and the porters in the medieval alleyways of wood and canvas, of trestles, awnings, stalls, and booths, of global colours, smells, and tastes, and reached the bars and lawns of the Soap Garden? That he was bad? Or shrewd? Or simply, like the rest of us, a weakling when it comes to cash?
3
WHEN ROOK arrived at the sunlit respite of the Soap Garden, there were no seats. The bars were full. The lawns were packed with porters and with the low-paid women who weighed, wrapped, and sold the city’s purchases. Their bosses occupied the shaded chairs. Keeping a fruit or vegetable stall is not an unremitting task. There is free time.
At that hour of the morning, the soapies came for coffee-and-a-shot and to fix and chalk their prices for the day. Some turned away or sank into their seats when they saw Rook. Some watched him blankly. One or two – the older, more successful ones, the ones invited to Victor’s birthday lunch – stood up and waved at him to indicate that he should join them at their table, that they’d be honoured if he’d drink a shot with them. But Rook had Victor’s chair to decorate and Anna’s cakes to buy. He’d join them later, when his tasks were done. He went first to the cake-and-coffee stand and chose a dozen cakes from their display – four fruit, four cream, four chocolate. Rook leaned against the stand and studied all the sales girls on the lawns and then the foliage of the garden while his cakes were gift-wrapped in a cardboard pyramid and tied with red and silver tape.
Of all the trees and bushes in the garden, the burgher laurels seemed the best for Victor’s birthday chair. Their leaves looked supple, shiny, washable. Besides, their branches were within easy reach and, unlike the roses and the snag trees which lined the lawns, they posed no problem for the naked hand. Rook chose a laurel which grew against the railings of the medieval washing place and threw its shadow across the worn stone sinks, the emaciated gargoyles on the fountains, the cluster of grotesques which nuzzled at the basin rim. Rook, made devil-may-care by his passage through the market, was in no mood to be unnerved by rules or inhibitions. He simply grasped a slender laurel branch, and tugged as if he expected it to snap like celery. His hands slipped, ran free, and stripped the leaves, together with the fledgling buds which roosted at each node. What was that smell?