Joseph was struck by all the stillness of the city night. A country night is just as busy as the day, but here there were no trees to bend before the wind. The signposts did not move. The clouds – if they were racing through the sky – were doing so invisibly, blacked out by streetlamps, put out of sight by electric light. Rain fell like country rain, but underlit, theatrically. It could not soak into the earth. It slid down tiles. It skirted round the angles of each brick. It raced through gutters, dropped down pipes, consigned itself to drains, turned roadside conduits into streams with discarded snack packets as the sails of its racing dhows. It ducked through iron sumps. It under-navigated roads in airless culverts and joined the curling traffic of water below the town, where sewers emptied into sluices and sluices discharged their flood into much slower and more muscular arteries of water. And thence into the mains. And thence into the reservoir, the treatment plant, the aqueduct, the pipe, the tap, the coffee pot, and down the sink as giddy waste.
It took a simple mind like Joseph’s to wonder how it was that city rain was so enslaved. He was not bright enough to ask himself, as low-rise housing blocks and sleepy boulevards gave way to warehouses, shunting yards, high-rise offices, and morning’s curdy light, how he could hope to soak into the city’s ground, how he could stay afloat and unenslaved when so many young men, just like him, had been unfooted, swept away, down gutters, into drains, by the careless rapids and the all-embracing floods of city life. He did not have the time or temperament to care.
His train arrived at dawn. The van doors were thrown back by porters. It was easy for Joseph – much used to being inconspicuous – to merge in with the workers there, three trays of lettuce balanced expertly on his head, and make his entry into town. And then? What then? He put the trays of lettuce with all the other produce in a market van. When it drove away through early breakfast traffic slower than a country cart, slower than a thaw, he followed it, through streets more futile and more aimless than even he had hoped for, to the Soap Market. Of course. Where else would such a hidebound country boy end up?
The time was six fifteen. The bustle of the market as the traders fixed their pitches for the day was not the world of catalogues. But Joseph’s mission was quite clear. City folk were easy pickings. Rich and careless. Weak. Those pampered noses on the carriage glass could sneeze banknotes. Those clerks and secretaries in their cars had gaping wallets, purses, cash to spare. He’d never had the chance to steal off strangers before. It would be easy, he could tell. He’d not be caught. He wouldn’t have to turn his village pockets out for every city coin that got lost. He had no face. He had no name. He had no reputation. It was his lucky day.
He’d known such careless crowds at country fetes and auctions, so all the bump and jostle of the Soap Market was nothing new to him. He was not lost, or overawed. The stalls and market paths had logic. That distant office building on his right gave him his bearings. He knew that empty barrows wheeled by porters led to the outskirt streets where produce vans were parked. The country boy is used to mapping routes, in hop plantations, forests, in the pleats of fields, in mazes made from furrows, fences, dykes. So Joseph stored and sifted signs – the stall that sold shallots, the music of a radio, the trader with the piebald beard, the Man in Cellophane, the diadem of coloured lights, the breeze – to keep a tab on where he was, and where he’d need to run, or hide, if he should chance upon some luck.
He was surprised, it’s true, by such a city landscape, fashioned out of repetition and conformity, with matching buildings and matching streets and people dressed the same. He was surprised there were no gradients, no sea, no streams, no fertile land. Some fool had built this city on the flat between the pebble and the clod where nothing grew except the appetite. Some fool, in fact, had built this city on the worst of sites. Where was the fish-stocked estuary, the river bridge, the sheltered harbour, the pass between two hills, the natural crossroads in the land where ancient settlements were meant to be? Where was the seam of coal to make the city rich? Where were the hummocks and escarpments to make the city safe? Where was the panoramic view to make the city spiritual, a holy place? What made this thirsty, ill-positioned city – too southerly to benefit from hops, too northerly for grapes – so rich and large? The answer crowded him at every step. It caught his shins. It bustled him from side to side. The marketplace! A city with no natural virtues is reduced to trade. Seas, rivers, hills, coal seams make fishing, farming, metal-bashing, tourist cities. But cities like ours have little choice except to buy and sell and deal, except to do what Joseph planned to do, to make a living out of theft.
If he had been a wiser man, he would have waited for a while before he embarked on his chosen trade. It was too early for the careless shoppers. The only people in the market at that time were marketeers. This was their habitat. This web was theirs. They noted him – not as a thief, but as a scrumper, one of those who came to breakfast gratis on the fruit. He was never unobserved. And so his luck ran out. He’d seen his chance. The soapie Con had moved an envelope with the one red word ‘Rook’ written on it to the back pocket of his trousers so that he could bend and lift more easily. It wagged invitingly as its owner embraced a sack of carrots. Joseph was fast and skilled, but obvious. His fingers wrapped round ‘Rook’. He got the envelope – but not before three voices had called out a warning, ‘Look out, Con!’ Con’s hand shot back and caught Joseph by his trouser leg. He fell. In seconds he was pinioned to the ground. A crowd had formed. His suit was stained by soil and fruit and leaves. He took the first kick of the day.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ Con said, already seeing opportunities for cashing in on this young fool’s misfortune.
So there was Joseph, a few hours on, paying for his short-lived, bungled life of petty crime by undertaking the ‘contract robbery’ of a man called Rook. Was this the big-time opportunity he’d dreamed about? Was this – so soon – his golden chance? As instructed, he’d first dogged Rook along the mall, to get to know his face. And now he waited for his return in the tunnel under Link Highway Red. He squatted on his haunches, smoking, and studying the picture Con had given him – a snapshot of a market stall. The man amongst the vegetables and fruit was a younger Rook, smiling, scarf unknotted at his throat, his clothes all black. Here was the man to ambush, frighten, rob. Con’s promise was, as he despatched young Joseph to do his business on the mall, that Rook – as he returned from the Soap Market to Big Vic, and not before – would carry money, hidden, maybe, but cash and notes in large sums. There would be an envelope as well, the one he’d failed to steal. Brown, sealed with tape, and marked in red with Rook’s name. Con showed the envelope again to Joseph. ‘Remember it,’ he said. ‘The man you’re looking for will have this somewhere on him as he heads back to work.’ All Joseph had to do was wave his knife and take the envelope, unopened, back to Con’s market stall. Anything else he found on Rook was his to keep. If he did this task efficiently, there’d be no police involved. The pocket-snatching rashness in the marketplace would be forgotten. Joseph’s identity card, which Con had confiscated as security, would be returned. ‘Perhaps, there’d be a proper job for him as well. What job? Con wouldn’t say, except ‘a market job, a job where muscles like the ones you’ve got won’t do you any harm’.
Joseph, now out of cigarettes and more hungry in the walkers’ tunnel than he had been upon the streets, once more fixed Rook’s much younger face onto his memory, and then bent more eagerly to study a second picture in the oscillating light – the illustration from the clothing catalogue. Now he and the model in their matching suits were cousins, at the very least. The longer Joseph stared at all its appetizing detail – the suit, the upturned hand, the third and unattended glass – the more certain he became that soon he would be drinking at the bar.
Quite soon Joseph was tired of sitting on his haunches in the gloom. He was hungry, damp, and desperate for nicotine. He was embarrassed, too, by the way the elderly woman who had passed him in the tunnel did so with such n
ervousness and haste that she had missed the pleasant smile he’d given her. He’d never met a woman of that age before who did not know his name and family, who did not stop to swap a word or two. He called after her. At first a cheerful greeting. Then abuse. She did not turn. She did not seem to hear. Perhaps she was the sort that hates the young.
He was impatient now to prove himself a citizen. He walked towards the daylight spilling down the steps from the street in the hope of spotting Rook amongst the faces in the crowd. Much easier to follow Rook and rob him from behind. But as he turned to mount the stairs he saw Rook descending, in his path, three steps above. His victim was not looking well. He held his chest. The pallor on his face suggested fever or anxiety. He was breathless, too, from walking fast and from carrying through crowds what looked like burgher laurel branches and a ribboned box, a pyramid, which, thought Joseph, promised riches of some kind. That was the moment Rook and Joseph met. Rook, recognizing who it was, alarmed and startled, stepped aside to let his ne’er-do-well climb past. But Joseph did not move. He let Rook step a pace or two into the stench and echo of the tunnel, then placed his left arm round Rook’s thin throat and held him – plus a bunch of laurel – as tightly as the model held the bar girl’s wrist. ‘I’ve got a knife,’ he said. And to prove that he was honest in his way, he held the flick-knife, last used to stop tomatoes at their crowns, in his right hand and sprang it open just a little distant from Rook’s nose.
‘Drop the box,’ he said.
Rook let the pastries fall.
‘Now empty all your pockets, one by one. The jacket first.’
Rook pulled out the envelopes with both hands, the rolls of banknotes, all the pitch money he had received that day. He held the money up and out, at arm’s length, as unthreateningly as he could and as distant from the knife as his shoulders would allow.
‘It’s yours,’ he said. But Joseph had no hand free to take possession. One arm was pressed against Rook’s throat. The other held the knife.
‘Just drop that too.’
Rook let the money go. The envelopes and banknotes, more money than Joseph had ever seen before, fell on the pyramid of cakes. Con’s envelope was in the pile.
‘The trousers now,’ he said. Rook emptied both pockets and turned their innards out like a schoolboy caught with sweets. ‘Let’s see what’s there.’
Once more Rook held out his hands at arm’s length. He held a handkerchief, his staff pass, his keys, and just a little change.
‘Keep that,’ Joseph said, and liked the sound of it, the style, the generosity. He released Rook from his grip, and stepped away. The laurel branches fell amongst the booty at his feet. ‘Turn round. Back off.’
Rook turned to face the robber and his knife. He moved two steps away and waited. The ‘Keep that’ spoken by the youth had told Rook what he had hoped, that the knife was for display and not for cutting throats or stabbing chests. The ‘Keep that’ meant ‘Live on’. Rook’s fear made way for irritation and for shame that he had let this ill-dressed, ill-shaped hick make such a fool of him on this of all days, when he’d already – unaided, uncoerced – made himself a public fool. He wrapped his fingers round his keys. He let the bevelled end of one long key poke out beyond his knuckles. He bit his lower lip – not fear, but anger on the boil. He felt a little sick, a little drunk, a little like a brute. It was not hard to take one long step forward as Joseph bent to gather up the envelopes and cakes, to fix his eye on that birthmark in cherry red, and strike this young man in the face with knuckles and with keys.
Rook meant to hit him on the nose or chin, but missed. He struck him on his forehead, just above the left eye’s overcliff. The key’s sharp end went in. It broke the skin and left a fleshy pit like those left by the beaks of jays in pears. Rook struck again. This time his fist caught Joseph on the ear. Again the jay had left its mark, but raggeder this time. A tear. A bloody one. The third blow came from Rook’s right foot and left an imprint of the street on Joseph’s suit and a crescent-shaped bruise on Joseph’s chest. He toppled forward, winded, shocked. He crushed the cardboard pyramid. His face was pressed against the laurel leaves, though there was no marzipan to scent his fall. The laurel stems, in fact, no longer smelt. There is no permanence in plants. Their sap, their colours, and their odours drain, disperse. The only smell was tunnel dirt. The taste was blood, and tears. He’d wake up soon. He’d find the blood came from a forehead wound. The blood was running down his face. The tears were blood. The laughter-lines around his eye, his lips, his hair-line on one side, the lapel and shoulder of his suit, were marked in red. The picture from the catalogue and the photograph of Rook fell from his pocket, faces up.
Rook’s final blow was to Joseph’s hand. He kicked the knife away. That kick was delivered with a cough. Rook’s throat and chest were heaving like a gannet’s. Joseph got up and, empty-handed, ran up the flight of stairs, into the light and safety of the street. God bless the street.
Rook gathered up the things that he had dropped: the banknotes, the envelopes, his staff pass, the flattened box of flattened cakes. He picked up Joseph’s knife as well. He closed its blade and dropped it in his pocket with his keys. The laurel branches were too battered now for Victor’s chair. He kicked them against the tunnel walls. He was surprised at how calm he felt, despite his breathlessness. First, the restoration of his nebulizer. Then, champagne.
He felt no anger for the country boy. That scrap with him had been too short and undramatic for lasting animosity. The asthmatic turbulence that Rook had suffered at the table in the Soap Garden had done more damage than the fight. The mockery had hurt him more. If only those old friends of his – the greengrocers with whom he’d grown up – had seen the scuffle in the tunnel and how the street in Rook had put to flight the mugger with the knife. If only they had witnessed what he’d done. Violence is the perfect repartee, he thought. More dignified, more eloquent than words. He felt in touch again, with boyhood, streets, the town, the universe of labouring. He felt excited, eager for the day. He felt as tough and sentimental as a movie star. He couldn’t wait to share a cake with Anna. He couldn’t wait to use his fists again.
Rook stooped to recover one last dropped banknote from the tunnel floor. It was moist with Joseph’s blood. Next to it was the clipping from the catalogue, covered by the photograph which Con had given Joseph. Rook looked at Rook, perplexed. He had not seen that photograph for years. How could it have fallen with his money there? Perhaps some trader, who had paid his pitch money that day, had put the photo with the cash. Why? Some arcane rebuke to Rook, no doubt. Some accusation from the past. It was the sort of petty rebuff he’d expect from bitter, unforgiving men like Con. Rook picked the photo up. The suit, the model, and the barmaid, which had been hidden underneath, were now on show. He took a closer look. He recognized the bar, perhaps? The model’s face? He put both pictures in a pocket with the knife. He knocked the detritus of laurel from his coat and trousers and headed for the steps.
Rook made his way back to Big Vic and, clumsy and encumbered though he was, he could not disguise the hint of hopscotch in his step as he walked across the coloured marble flagstones of the windswept, empty mall. Around him, out of sight, the bankers banked, expeditious every instant of the day; dollars became lira, became marks; commodities and futures bobbed and ducked in value, unobserved; screens conversed in numbers on fibre-optic cables like gossips at a garden fence. Above, a restless matrix with its lights like traffic headlamps in the rush sent out its electronic information into town. The stock report. The city news. A flood in Bangladesh. A birthday greeting for the boss. A puff for Fuji Film. Traffic junctions to avoid. Fly Big Apple – Fly Pan Am.
Rook reached security at last. The automatic doors swept him into processed air. He showed his pass. He tightened his tie at his collar, and summoned the old man’s private lift. While he waited for it to fall the twenty-seven storeys of Big Vic, he picked himself a fine bouquet of plastic branches from the gleaming, sapless, perfect folia
ge of the atrium. He did not have to tug or cut. Each leaf, each twig and branch, was fixed by sleeve joints. The real, reconstituted bark was stuck to moulded trunks with velcro pads. The soil was soil with nothing much to do, except to fool the people of the town.
5
ROOK PUT the final touches to the room, while the waitresses and kitchen staff prepared the settings and the food for Victor’s lunch. His buoyancy had not been punctured by the tightening of his tie, by the dull proprieties of going back to work. He’d dropped the scuffed and battered pyramid of cakes on Anna’s desk and simply said, in response to her surprise, ‘I had to fight for these!’
Anna asked no questions. She simply filled her lungs with air and closed her eyes and said, ‘Such gallantry!’ Her persiflage was sweet. It was a tease. It was the kind of irony that Anna knew would work on men. Men were clockwork toys when it came to love and sex. You wound them up, you faked a phrase or two; they marched, they danced, they beat their drum. It was her plan to fake some satisfaction, if she had the chance, with Rook. Why not? He was not married. She was now divorced. She was only older than him by a year. He was not short of cash and might have fun if he could spend his money and his time with her.
Rook was an oddball, yes. But oddballs had their appeal for Anna. She liked the stimulation and surprise of men who lived beyond the grid. She liked Rook’s secrecy. She was not fooled by his sardonic ways. What kind of man, with power such as his, would spend the morning on the streets and come back laden with squashed cakes and a bunch of plastic leaves? A man worth knowing, she was sure. So Rook and Anna left it brewing in the air that their flirtations would bear fruit, and soon, before it was too late, before the heightened passion of the day, its sap, its colours and its scents had drained and dispersed for good. Let Victor have his birthday first. Let champagne loosen tongues and dilate hearts. Then let Rook and Anna stay on late, to sort out papers, say, to tidy up, to joust among themselves as the evening and the office blinds came down. They’d spoken not a word, but they were old and wise enough to comprehend the promise and the charge of ‘Such gallantry!’