The tourists take their coffee and their photographs, with views across the rebuilt medieval washing place towards the thickest foliage of Arcadia. The camera with a narrow lens can take a photograph which shows just water, washing place, and leaves, a flash of cockatoo, a beam of sun. Arcadia, so framed, could be a part of Yucatán or Abyssinia. It’s true the tourists cannot sit and pose amongst the resurrected gargoyles or the repaired stone, or trail their fingers in the water as they smile on film. A man in uniform is there to see they don’t. ‘What next,’ he’ll say, if they protest. ‘Let people touch the water, then they’ll want to wash their feet in it? Swim in it? Piss in it?’ He’s down there now. I see him prowling at the water’s edge, a two-way radio reverberating in his hand. He helps and points, reproves and redirects. He shows where handicapped visitors can find the courtesy wheelchairs, where children can be left in the Jungle Crèche while parents or au pairs shop and take a snack in the Picnic Basket, the Texas Pantry, or the Hunger Monger. No eating on the hoof, of course. It is not done to take an apple or an orange from your bag and munch it as you browse. There’s pith and skin and core to clear. No dining on a sandwich that you’ve bought outside. There’s paper then, and crust. No cigarettes, except inside the bars. This is the price you pay.
Yet, Arcadia is a triumph. Let’s admit it. It weathers as I watch; it settles in. There is no complacency, just the swagger and ambition that cities flourish on. I’d stand here happily – glass in hand, alone – all day, and not be bored, and not grow tired, and not be stifled by its flamboyant uniformity, by its recreant geometry, by its managed cheerfulness. Give me the chance. Give me the time. Give me the bottle and the glass. I’d sooner look upon Arcadia than anything in town. Yet I’m obliged to socialize. The room is filling now, and we are making phatic conversation, amongst the vines and birds. We put the world to rights. We are as vehement about the rain as we are sanguine and ironic with politics and trade. We do not merchandise our gossip, yet – not till our sixth or seventh glass.
When we have eaten, swapped our formal news, we leave the table and our muddied plates to stand in groups about the room, to stand in pairs in conversation as we look out through the bird-stained glass at birds or through the cleaner glass at Victor’s earthly paradise. What must we look like, standing here engrossed in our last drinks? I press my nose against the glass, twenty metres up above the market concourse, and watch those citizens, those purchasers below. I look, no doubt, like Victor looks, up on the rooftop garden of the 28th. I look like every suited grandee looks: untouchable, untouched. Yet, this I know, as I grow older, I must descend the stairs and join the populace before my day is done. The city claims its citizens before they die. The taxi cabs are full of younger men. The trams – soon to be replaced by subway trains – are slow with pensioners who cannot find their money or their step. The streets these days are for the old and weak and poor. I’ll leave no monument to me. No bar or restaurant, no market hall will bear my name. My book, if I survive to see it done, will have my name in print – but think how big my name in print will be compared to Victor’s name, a banner on the cover. My labours print his mark more deeply on the town. His labours press me deeper in.
So the lunch is done, and we go back to work or home, a little drunk and overfed. I’ve time to wander in Arcadia. I fool myself this is research, that everything I see is Victor manifest. Certainly it is not dull, though Victor manifest should be more dull than this. It is a work of art and industry and arrogance, but, then, where would our city be without these three? We’d be a village still. Arcadia hunches its four backs against the town, the sky, the world. Who, passing through its halls, its barrow-vaulted sub-lit aisles of glass, can tell or care if it is night or day, or north or south, or spring, or windy, wet or bright? Arcadia is – that word again – Invulnerable.
I take the route, along one trading corridor, which would have led from the old bars to the edge of the Woodgate district. I am besieged by colour and by smell. There is no wind or cold, and any sun that filters through is bounced by angles, shed by glass, and spread by glossy walls as if it were the bogus light of theatres. The music and the smells are piped: fresh bread with Paganini; oranges augmented by the quintets of Osvaldo Bosse. I cannot hear the birds. Even the humidifiers – roaring in the heavens of the building’s carapace – are silent at ground level. The fountains cast their strands of water as quietly as a jug pours milk. The traders do not shout. They do not cry their wares. They have found out what only now I discover for myself, that – removed from wind and open air – man-made sounds are quails. They cannot fly. They cannot travel far. They tremble on the ground. No screeching indoor parakeet can pierce a flight path with its cry. Any raucous marketeer evangelizing fruit would find no echo to endorse his claims. At best, the sound he’d hear – if he were close enough – would be the sullen impact of his voice on toughened glass.
Though the noises of Arcadia are flat, the fruit and vegetables have never seemed so polished and so uniform. The traders, beneath their matching awnings, seduce the passers-by with produce of the gene-bank and the science farm, enhanced by Spray-Dew, Frost-Ban, and by packaging. Recessed orange lights warm and flatter every radish, every grape, every hybrid superfruit. Together with the onions and the swedes, are Kingquats, a kumquat bigger than a plum and every part of it – the peel, the pith – is edible. And there are orange grapes, and bananas from Barbados shaped like avocado pears. And avocado pears without a stone. And lab-grown lettuces (red or green or white). And glasshouse broccoli with flower-heads as big and tight as cobblestones, achromatic rhubarb force-grown under fluorescent lights, and bio-technic aubergines which some chemist-gardener has artificially bloated in dioxide pods. Young men in search of romance can still buy their loves a courting quince, just as before, but more romantically presented in a silver nest with a heart-shaped, perfumed top. Each purchase has its plastic bag, each plastic bag its coloured logo for Arcadia; each coloured logo is a dancing apple with a hygienic, grub-free smile.
If I were rich I could buy jewellery and suits from boutiques which trade side by side with salad stands. If I were ill I could select a dozen cures for my maladies from the fresh herb shop; some adder buckthorn for my bowels (recalcitrant), some juniper for failing sight, some camomile to help me sleep, some cuckoopint to keep alert my hope of finding love, some mistletoe as sedative, some poisoned laurel sap for the new Burgher’s gin. If I liked fungi (I do not) I’d have the choice of fifty sorts from Mycologia, The Mushroom Shop. Should I prepare a fritto misto for my supper from an edible bolete? Or should I select a honey mushroom or a chanterelle?
If I were looking for a gift, a set of gaudy stamps from the philatelists might take my fancy. A first edition (slightly stained) of dell’Ova’s Truismes, complete with margin notes by Pierre Loti’s bastard son. A pair of hand-made gloves. A pastry-house with stucco-marzipan and flaked walnut tiles. A T-shirt printed with my name, or any name I choose. A postcard hologram of Arcadia. Or I could light a candle for the birthday of a friend. The Market Chapel is a shop and pays the usual rent, so needs to sell as many candles as it can. Nothing is cheap, of course. Don’t rummage for your bargains here. Arcadia is built to shake out pockets, unzip wallets, cash cheques, debit bank accounts. It is a monumental Dip. Victor has created the perfect cash machine. The traders pay, on top of rents, percentages to Victor, too, like feudal peasants paying ‘overage’ on everything they sell. You see, Arcadia observes tradition after all. Something medieval is preserved intact! (If I were still the Burgher, there’d be a paragraph in this.)
Is there not cause to celebrate this new diversity, this innocent variety of goods, despite the claims of oracles and pamphleteers who say our city’s in decline – and money is the force? Yet how could those greengrocers who once traded out of sacks and boxes in the Soap Market meet the rents and standards of Arcadia? They had to modernize or close up shop. Every shop that dosed was taken up within a day, by businessmen whose visions were much looser
and much wider than the soapies they replaced. Who needs so many outlets for a grape? One grape these days is much like all the rest. It makes good sense to let a market such as this diversify.
You only have to see the crowds to know these changes work. See how the middle classes flock from shop to shop, a bunch of parsley in their bags along with a batik headscarf that they’ve bought, and a piece of blue goat’s cheese. See those valet-attended dowagers braving arthritis and discretion in the couturières. See how the bars and restaurants are packed with men and women who never used the windswept bars in the old Soap Market for fear of chaos and antipathy. See the foreign faces here; the tourists who have come to witness what Fodor calls ‘the city’s triumphant fusion of modernity and tradition, order and spontaneity, Life and Art, business and entertainment’.
Of course, you will not see the night-time soapies here. The bye-laws say there can be no loitering, no unlicensed trading, no begging, no entertainment without a permit, no vehicles (including skates and skateboards), no animals (except for guide dogs), no unrestricted access to the sort who clutch a bottle or whose dress and cleanliness would strike a sour note. ‘Shop in Safety at Arcadia’, the adverts say. ‘Attended parking for two thousand cars’. There is no need to taste the city air at all, for those who drive, then shop, then drive. But who’s so fearful of the city air that they dare not venture into the open forecourts which surround Arcadia? Here an open market still survives – three stalls of fruit (no vegetables), with staff in rural uniforms of dirndl skirts, straw hats, and clogs. There’s a take-a-number, wait-your-turn lunch stand. There are greenstone benches, and official buskers more impromptu and eclectic than the bands and string quartets inside.
I browse amongst the pushcarts there. Their tenants are the city’s fireside artisans. I have the choice of jam or wooden beads or necklaces or cameos. One man sells woven bags. A woman and her dog have candles of a thousand kinds. Another deals in landscape prints and postcards of the town. I have the choice of riding on the garish carousel (restored from an original) or touring the old town by pony and trap, or visiting, with a bag of feed, the pigs, rabbits, goats, and llamas of City Farm. I also have the choice of sitting here, bathing in the bounce-light of Arcadia, or going back to work. I would return to work, except that life is comforting here, and entertaining too. It’s fun to watch the browsers shop, to watch the drama of the doorstaff turning back a drunk or turning out a bearded man with leaflets and a coat weighed down by badges. It’s better fun than work to watch the ‘flamingoes’ operate their upturned litter scoops so that the market site is clean enough – if it were not against the market law – to sit upon the ground and doze.
It is, of course, the spirit of research and not distaste for work that takes me strolling round the wind-stroked, whistling outer rim of Arcadia. The Glass Meringue indeed. The Lobster Trap. The See-through Octopus. The Pumpkin. It has a hundred names. But one has stuck amongst those people rarely let inside or rarely rich enough to browse and buy. They call the place Fat Vic. It’s Big Vic’s plumper sibling. One stands, one squats. They are the city’s strangest twins.
I come at last to Victor’s birthday gift, the statue cast in bronze, commissioned by the merchants of the Soap Market. The move amongst the bleeding hearts, some time ago, to pull it down and put a statue up for Rook, has come to nothing. Victor’s birthday gift survives. A woman sits cross-legged before a bowl. The artist has welded real coins inside. The woman has an infant at her breast. Its eyes are open wide, and fixed upon Arcadia. There was a time when children clambered over her, when office-workers used the plinth for lunch, when young men wrote the names of their sweethearts in felt-tip along the woman’s arms, or coloured in her nipple, darkly. But, pretty soon, they railed her and her infant in. The statue’s called The Beggar Woman and Her Child, but we all know it as The Cage.
So this is Em. And this is Victor, an infant at the breast. They are so still, you’d think their abject happiness could never end. Yet end it did. In flames. And here she – resurrected – is. Too rigid now to take the painted cart, piled high with melons – honeydews, casabas, cantaloupes, and musks – and far too late to set off, as she had promised, towards the city hems where blue fields match the sea-blue sky, with her small son her only passenger. I have the first line of his life: ‘No wonder Victor never fell in love.’
2
I’M IN THE MOOD to take my time. I walk across the last few patterned slabs and cobblestones of Arcadia and head off into town. The Woodgate pavements are old and cracked and buckled. They are ideal for puddles, weeds, and saunterers. I peer down squints and alleyways. They seem more festive than they used to. Perhaps the presence of Arcadia has enlivened them. They are not back streets now, but brisk with bars and antiques shops, and second-storey studios.
You cannot park. The wardens and the police make sure of that. How can they stop the soapies, though? At first it was just one or two – disgruntled fruiterers who’d been displaced from Fat Vic’s corridors. They had to work and feed their families, and so they set up shop in backs of vans and parked across the kerbstones in dead-ends, blind alleys, culs-de-sac, providing low-grade, cheaper fruit for those in too much hurry for Arcadia. Quite soon there were a bunch of makeshift stalls, some coloured awnings set up at the backs of vans, some trays of produce set out on the pavement. You’ve never seen such rugged mushrooms, such unselected fruit, such tattered sugar-snaps, such unwaxed oranges, such blemished pears, such unwrapped chard – poor man’s asparagus – and mulberries and radicchio still moist with country rain, already past their best, so cheap.
Quite soon, of course, the displaced market had a name – Soap Two, just like a film. You think its characters are dead, and then the sequel comes along, as lively as the first. So now we see that it’s not true that ‘cities swallow up the small’, that ‘soufflés only rise the once’. The pygmies flourish on the street. I used to think that buildings were all that could endure in cities. But people, it would seem, endure as well. They hang on by their nails. They improvise. They kick. They leave a legacy which is not brick or stone.
The first to come and trade are well established now. They have their clientele, their daily pitches, their regimens. Some clever spark has improvised some light for dawn, and after dusk. Soap Two trades into the night when Arcadia is shut and under guard. The soapie trading light is pilfered from the streetlamps, by an illegal wire connected and undone a dozen times a day as uniforms approach. Who’ll get the bill? Who cares! Not Cellophane. He does not give a damn. He is untouched by bills. He’s shielded by the corset of his cellophane. He waltzes, as sheenily as a stage sardine, through the market all day and all night long. Sometimes he takes it on himself to direct the traffic as it squeezes past the stalls. Sometimes he lies down in the street to block the passing cars. He begs. He steals. He shouts obscenities. I’ve never heard such words before. He kicks the windfalls from the trading stalls. He’s always at the market’s edge, a cellophane commissionaire. As Soap Two expands then so he moves out from the core, to summon people in. It does not matter what their business is, or if they have no cause at all to pack into the streets. He simply hopes to share – and complicate – the ecstasy of crowds.
Now the Woodgate district, once so lifeless and depressed, is as noisy and congested, lively and unsafe, as the Soap Market used to be. Merchandise is stacked in piles which challenge sense and physics – towers of potatoes, conifers of oranges, trembling with every passerby. The makeshift market flourishes on noise and filth and rain. It would even flourish – and it does – on poverty. ‘All Life is Here’, according to the market chauvinists, a claim no one would make for Arcadia, with its policed doors, its creed of Safety from the Streets, its ban on pimps and tramps and tarts and bag-ladies, street vendors, rascals, teenagers, drunkards, dogs. All life is here, despite the wind, the rain, the airborne dust, the litter at my feet.
The New Age meal I ate at the Buffers’ lunch has left me hungry still. I buy one sleepy pear. I
ts skin is bruised and weather-beaten like a ploughman’s face. The trader comes down from his perch on the bonnet of his car. He leaves a conversation with a friend, and his meal half-eaten on the metal, his teeth-marks in the boiled egg; the ripped white loaf, the plastic flask of over-sweetened coffee. He wipes my one pear on his trouser leg to take away the marks of harvesting. He pirouettes it in a paper bag. He twists the paper bag a pair of ears. He takes my cash. I take the fruit. I’m free to eat it when I want. I eat it now. My chin is wet. I cannot walk and eat efficiently. I stand back from the crowd, against a wall between a bistro and an odd-job shop to watch the man in cellophane cause mayhem with the cars. I cannot say where I prefer to eat, Soap Two, Fat Vic. The prospect of them both seduces me. I’m free while there is sap inside my legs to make my choice. I am not Invulnerable. Thank God for that. I am not Victor and too old and dry to be at ease down here. He’ll have a book (perhaps) to celebrate his life. Arcadia. A statue, too. But all his pears, I guess, are brought by train and taxi to Big Vic. He takes life on a plate. He has a serviette. He cannot simply – as I do now – toss the sodden paper bag which held the pear to the ground and find a warming corner for himself.
There is a little sun which falls directly on my face, my shirt, the damaged pear. I eat it now. I eat it now. The eye, the core, the stalk are given to the pavement, and flattened by ten thousand feet, as everyone is flattened by the town when they are done, when they are waste.
The sun is fully out for just an instant. It is radiant, then it is gone. The blocking bollard which has kept the weather dry has moved before the wind. The time has come for it to rain. It’s hard and sudden as it always is in our city. It drizzles in the countryside but here the rain is bouncing berries on the roofs of cars. The squints and alleys cannot cope with this. They flood. They overflow. Their drains are blocked with cabbage leaves, handbills, discarded pith and peel. The pavements turn to green and slimy rinks of foliage. To walk on them is to gamble with your bones. What should we do but huddle underneath the awnings that are there, but gather in the doorways to the shops, or sit in cars, or seek refuge – and a drink – inside a bar?