The laughter and jeers from the Soap Market were louder even than the helicopter blades. Now everybody ran to arm themselves with fruit and vegetables. Never had shopkeepers and shoplifters been in such harmony. They knew – this is the lesson of the insurrectionist – that ridicule and laughter are more subversive, more disarming than bullets. What can a line of soldiers do against a fusillade of cabbages? Put down their shields and face the leaves? Hold up their shields and face the jeers?
Quite soon the air was thick with greengrocery. Potatoes were quite damaging and could be thrown further than even cobbles or bottles. Apples, pears, and avocados beat tattoos – dum-dump – on shields. Tomatoes blooded them, or burst on blue-black overalls or overpolished boots. The comedians sent bananas through the air. ‘Like boomerangs,’ they said. Indeed, some did return. You can’t control the tempers of young URCU men who’re made to feel like village clods. They sent bananas back. An URCU officer was uncapped by an aubergine. A courgette caught a policeman in the corner of his eye. A TV cameraman took on his cheek the full deceit of a peach: first the tight and rubbery impact of the skin, and then the sticky embrace of the flesh, and finally the wrinkled bullet at its heart. The peach stone split. It cut his cheek. His blood was peach juice, and his juice was blood.
Joseph indulged himself. He was a citizen at last. He held the front of stage, and worked his way through fruit. The snatch-squad leader noted him. ‘We’ll have him first,’ he told his men. ‘The comic with the birthmark on his cheek. We’ll give that bastard birthmarks, head to toe.’ The police and press took Joseph’s photograph. They had a picture of him with his fists high in the air. They had him holding cobbles in his hand. And cabbages. And Ogen melons. And pomegranate hand grenades.
At 1.45 a.m. the senior officer sustained a chest wound from a sugar beet. It struck him between his heart and epaulette and knocked him to the ground. What could he say, to all who’d seen him tumbling on the cobblestones, except, ‘Enough’s enough. Go forward. Clear the market. Let them know who runs this town.’ So they were beating shields again. Each blow upon the perspex shields took the URCU cordon one step closer to the produce-bombardiers, the upturned cars, the scorched remains of trees and stalls and bars, to vaunting, topless Joseph, and to Rook.
This is the classic public-order manoeuvre,’ explained the police PRs. Undermine resistance with a show of strength and noise. And then send in the Short Shields to arrest the troublemakers. And then send up the canisters of Green Grief, the gas that blinds the rioters and dyes them green and makes them weep and grimace like Picasso’s Cubist lovers. And then mop up.
They griefed the centre of the market first. The police – though they had masks – did not wish to gas their own advance. Rook kicked a canister away. His legs and shoes took on the airborne moss. His skin turned ghostly, applewhite, while Grief, as light and volatile as gnats, rose to his waist, his chest, his throat, his eyes. It was a pity all the lemons had been used as missiles. Lemon juice, rubbed on the face, is some protection against gas.
Rook felt for safety. He found a car. He crouched. His eyes and chest were tight. Rioters should not mix drink and gas. Asthmatics should shun crowds. He clutched the front tyre of the car. He alternated handkerchief and nebulizer at his mouth. He coughed. But coughing did not clear his chest. The sticky sputum that landed on the cobblestones and on the rubber tyre and in his hand was lining from his lungs. Its release left him raw. It hurt to swallow smoke and Grief. It hurt to barter oxygen with CO2. His bellows wheezed and tightened if they were opened wider than a crack. He had to pant as quickly and as shallowly as marsh frogs do, his chest distended, his lungs migrating to his throat, his upper orifices strung like candle-tops with waxy phlegm.
The country people say a dying man is concentrated in his thoughts. He sees the heights and depths of life ranged before him like coloured beads on a Chinese abacus. He’s deft and concentrated, accounting for his faults and triumphs. ‘The dying never lie,’ they say. But Rook was lying to himself. His abacus was ranged only with the whitest beads. His thoughts were hardly concentrated. His brain was in his throat, buffeted by outer, wicked air and inner, pinioned breath, now damp with bubble blood and overladen with the weight of mucus. His tongue and nails and lips were blue. He sweated and he trembled as he sank from sleep into coma. But then, perhaps, he was not dying after all. The rain, the breeze, the slight protection of the car, the gas-repellent sheet of water which cushioned cobbles (and in which he now fell forward, his cheek and ear submerged) might dampen down the asthma and save Rook from the suffocating embraces of the air. Perhaps he stood a chance, for help was close at hand.
What did the market look like, now that the police had broken ranks and were intent, like running boys with flocks of seagulls on the beach, to cause disordered flight amongst the trapped and agitated crowds? Helmets moved amongst bare heads. Soapies grouped, regrouped, broke up like antelope before the snapping jackal truncheons of the police. It seemed that URCU – far outnumbered by the crowd – were deadened men who had no pity and no fear. They went to work as if their orders were to complicate the mayhem of the night, not bring it to an end. Joseph was fleeing for his life. He’d already taken blows to his bare shoulder and his back. The Short Shields had him marked. They knew his face. His torso had been photographed. He was the prize stag in the herd. ‘Get the one without the shirt!’ He ducked and dived between the people and cars as lightly as he’d done when he’d played tag with other boys between the orchard sheds and trees when he was young. His life had led to this. He had a plan: to find an open car and force his way, between the springs and cushions of the rear seats, into the boot. Where else was there to hide or go? The URCU had the soapies bottled up, their clothing steeped in green, reduced by Grief from revellers to snivellers.
Joseph had tried two dozen doors before – exactly this – he stumbled over Rook. He recognized the face, the cough, the leather jacket that he wore. He sat Rook up. ‘What’s up?’ he said, too dull to find dramatic words. Rook did not speak. His eyes were shut. One ear was full of water. The other one was stained with Grief. He was unconscious now. The best of luck to him. To be unconscious is God’s way of settling the lungs. He did not fight the inner or the outer air. He breathed more shallowly, more evenly, less frequently. Joseph placed him with his back against the wheel arch. Rook’s head and chest fell forward. His diaphragm forced heavy air into his upper lungs. By chance, his breathing pipes were tipped at just the angle for recovery. Joseph beat him on the back. The blows expelled damp sods of air.
‘Come on. Wake up,’ said Joseph. ‘I want my money now.’ He slapped Rook’s face. The colour of his cheeks had turned from green to pink.
‘Give. Give,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your bonfire. Now you’ve got to pay for it.’
Rook was peaceful now. Too comfortable to wake and speak. He made a noise that found a passage through his nose. It was the noise that athletes make when marathons are run. It was a snore of restitution. It repaid the debt of oxygen. Joseph’s slaps and blows – who knows? – had saved Rook’s life.
Joseph had no time to spare. He heard the heavy boots close in, the cries of pain, the lifeless impacts made by sticks on men and cobblestones on shields. This place of safety by the car’s front wheel could not last long. He tugged on Rook’s coat. It would not shift, not speedily at least. He took his ‘nife’ from his trouser pocket. He placed it at Rook’s stooped back. He did not say a word, but opened up the leather purse of Rook, along the jacket’s backbone seam, the woollen shirt beneath, as if this were no man but some slain goat. The knife cut from the inside out. It meant no harm to Rook. He was not hurt, just robbed. Joseph pulled off the left half of the jacket and the shirt, by the sleeves. And then the right half too. He checked the inner pockets, found the outline of Rook’s wallet, and would have cut the pocket out, but Short Shields were too close. He stooped and ran again – and as he ran he pulled the two half-jackets with their half-shirt linings on his arms and rou
nd his shoulders. His leather jacket had a stripe of flesh down the centre of his back. His muscled torso had only partly disappeared. He looked like some stage-punk, prepared for surgery.
Rook was not aware that Joseph had come or gone, or what he’d done to save his life. He felt the cold of New Year’s dawn and all the fires put out and no shirt or jacket on. He shivered when he became conscious. He was startled by the noise and by his semi-nakedness. He almost stood, and as he almost stood two URCU saw his lack of clothes. He was the one without the shirt. They pulled Rook up. They hit his legs and then his back with swinging blows. They put the handle of their batons in his ribs and pressed. They kicked him in the face and testicles, their boots scooping water from the ground and skidding on Rook’s skin. They were well trained. It was a rule that policemen who were obliged to assault a suspect on the street would not arrest the man, but leave him to be found by other officers. The two that roughed up Rook were wise enough to roll him on the ground and disappear.
Joseph, split in two, Rook’s wallet on his heart, found a car at last of which the window could be forced. It took him half a minute to get in. Another half to squeeze into the boot. He was appalled at being trapped like that, but hoped that he was safe. Indeed he was. No one was checking boots, while there were people still free in the marketplace. Joseph curled up in the darkness. Once he felt the car rock violently as someone outside was thrown against the frame. He heard one cry. But mostly he heard nothing, except the pulse inside his ears, his nervous breath. He did not hear, six cars away, the cough and splash as Rook rolled over for his last time, his dead face half-submerged on market cobblestones.
10
WHEN JOSEPH HEARD the ambulance siren, he re-emerged from the warren of the boot. He squeezed into the rear of the car, and peered out on semi-darkness. Dawn was a narrow silver bar across the windscreen. Already it had reached the edge of town and was advancing with the first trams along the boulevards. The upper storeys of Big Vic could not be seen. Low cloud enclosed them. New Year’s Day would be a rainy one.
The few officials and the policemen that remained in the Soap Market had their backs to Joseph. They did not see or hear him open the passenger door and step out onto cobblestones. A pulse of icy light was flung out by the ambulance like an irrigation sprinkler watering a field. Joseph ducked each time the beam swept by, as if he feared a drenching in the light. Joseph thanked St Joseph, the Patron of the Holy Corpse, the Undertaker of Our Lord, that he was well enough to leave the marketplace by foot and not by ambulance. He’d made it through to the new year without the beating he deserved. His only bruise was in the muscles of his shoulder, from throwing too much fruit.
There’d been a thousand injuries between the midnight and the dawn, though some of those had been administered at police HQ, in the privacy of cells. But there had only been one death. The corpse had not been found until the market site was cleared of drunks and revolutionaries. They might as well pump air into a brick as try the kiss of life. Rook would have blushed at being caught like this, flat on his back in water, naked from the waist up, his chest a splintered prow, his stomach just a touch too plump for one so slight and vain. The market boy had died the market death, his back on cobbles, green from Grief, discarded like a bruised courgette, and looking now as dull and common as the stones which were his mortuary. Here was a most unlikely Martyr for the Cause – though, as time would prove, his name was good for martyrdom. Not easy to forget. We all remember Rook.
Joseph recognized the face, but did not wait to see the body wrapped inside the body bag. He stole a broom which had been left leaning on the side panels of an URCU truck. He soon became just one of dawn’s sweepers, brushing up the missile debris for little pay and less respect. He was invisible. He swept his way across the cobblestones, past URCU men, reporters from the papers, gawpers on their way to work, young men returned to claim (they hoped) their unburned cars. He swept towards the market edge, towards the exit where the banana vans had been but were no more. He joined the early morning New Year crowd, his severed clothes hardly noticed by the late-for-work, the late-to-bed. He made his way through the squints and alleys of the Woodgate district, uncertain whether he was rich or poor. Perhaps Rook’s death had been a cunning way to keep the two halves of the banknotes forever separate, as disunited as the clothes upon his back.
Joseph found a place to stop at last, a graveyard in a cul-de-sac with high tombstones and cypresses, and two plane trees, the perfect citizens surrounded by the sloughed-off litter of their toxic bark. There were no spectators, except for pigeons, and a pack of feral dogs. He pulled Rook’s wallet from Rook’s jacket and went through the spoils. He laid them out before him on cold stone. A photograph of Anna, inscribed ‘Let’s meet and talk’. A set of keys. The ten odd halves of the ten one-thousand notes. An ID card with a photograph of Rook, a grainy square in grey and black, expressionless, with – below – Rook’s home address, his status ‘Single Male’, and his signature in neat green ink. A folded advert from a catalogue, the model on the stool, the barmaid in his grasp, the suit, the unattended glass. Five untorn fifty notes. A contraceptive. Credit cards. A throat spray of some kind.
Joseph only kept the money and the keys. He lifted up a slab of stone and put the empty wallet and the rest beneath. If ever he had need for contraceptives or had a customer for stolen credit cards then he could find this stone again. He memorized the mossy name upon the stone, but the feral dogs would snout the wallet out as soon as he was gone. Already he had memorized the address on Rook’s ID card, and set off looking for a bed and an inheritance.
He’d seen that Rook was ‘Status: Single Male’ and knew there was a chance that Rook’s home would be undefended. What better way to spend the dawn on New Year’s Day than use the dead man’s keys, and find some shelter, warmth, some food, some sleep between four walls?
He found a parcel of deliveries in the entrance hall of Rook’s apartment block. He tucked the parcel under his arm and took his time upon the stairs. What could be more normal at that time of day than deliveries? If anybody met him on the stairs they’d take him for an errand boy, a scruffy, docile errand boy of the usual kind. He met no one. He found Rook’s door and tried the keys. Two locks. Two sets of teeth unclenched. The locks obeyed the keys. He was inside. This was the dream he had when he was loading produce onto trains: the day would come when he came home to his apartment in a city. He closed the door on everything. He’d never known such perfect carpentry or such a calm as this. He went from room to room. He opened every cupboard, every drawer. He looked inside the fridge. He did not touch, or eat, or steal. That could wait. He knew what he was searching for. A roll of clear tape. He found it in a wicker basket with some scissors. He sat down at the table and, breathing through his nose for better concentration, made for himself, from twenty half-notes – his and Rook’s – a fortune and a future.
The police would say they found him looting Rook’s apartment. Already he had stolen, it would seem, a parcel of antique books intended for the collector in the attic rooms. They said that every drawer and cupboard had been opened and all Rook’s valuables had gone. They said he planned to strip the place, that his accomplices would come with vans to take the furniture, to make off with the fridge and television set, the knick-knacks that were Rook. Who knows? Joseph was not a saint, though in a way he’d been a hero of a kind, for half a night at least.
They had his picture in the first newspapers of the year, but not for burglary. Not yet. They had him semi-naked on page one, his arms raised up, an aubergine in hand. He was ‘The Face of Discontent’, ‘The Market Rioter’. He shared the page with Rook. The headline was ‘Man Dead in City Violence’, and underneath reporters reproduced what they’d been told by police, how ‘groups of Trotskyists and anarchists, trained by foreign radicals and at secret camps in Germany, have been identified as orchestrating the disturbances’. The dead man’s name had not been learnt officially, but on the street the word had spread that URCU
men had bludgeoned him to death. He was an ‘activist’, an innocent, a man who simply wished to voice his fears. The police had hit a thousand heads the night before. They’d hit this one too hard.
No statements came from URCU. They were beyond the press. But police PR was doing what it could to give the corpse a name, to find the cause of death. They had their answers by midday. The marketplace had witnesses. A trader had seen a semi-naked Rook go down and not get up. He’d seen the URCU pair run off. The police had rioted, he said, ‘not us’. He made his statement to the radio and to a journalist from the sentimental left-wing press. So Rook became a martyr to the cause. The man who’d been top brass in Victor’s palace; the man who’d left Big Vic on principle because he feared for the Soap Market, the man who had fought off-stage against Arcadia, the man who was a trader’s son himself, this market boy, had been brought down – ‘assassinated’ was the word – by police clubs and boots. Coincidence? Wake up! They’d sought him out, the rabble-rousers said. They’d marked him down for death.
The chief of police had hardly slept. He and the mayor and two financiers had celebrated the new year long after their wives had been driven home. They’d smoked the butt and drunk the dregs. Their waking tempers were not sweet. Their throats were raw with talk and smoke and spicy food. The chief was nonplussed by the headlines in the morning paper. Where was the ‘sudden order’ he’d requested in the night? He’d sobered up to find a scandal on his hands. A middle-aged man was dead, and rumour on the run. How long before some busybody asked, ‘Where was the chief of police when his men were clubbing citizens to death?’ He took some comfort from hurried medical reports that the ‘victim’ (a mistake, he thought, to have used that word) had died from respiratory failure – ‘asthma, possibly’. But there were broken bones and bruises, too. His ribs had sixteen fractures. His testicles were torn. His back and legs were ribbed and grilled with bruises. His scalp was peeled by blows from boots. There were sole marks on his cheeks. His nose was pointing east-south-east. A vehicle had crushed the corpse’s knee. If this was asthma then this man’s lungs deserved a trial and punishment, and we all courted death each time we sneezed.