‘I’ll find some time later for these,’ he said, and joined them at the table once again to add his monumental awkwardness to theirs.
They tried in vain to open up some windows and let some town air in. But all windows higher than the second floor were double-glazed and safety-sealed and only activated by a call to the building’s brain, the high-tech deck of chips and boards which regulated everything from heating to alarms. They tried to resurrect the country lunches that they had shared when they were younger, middle-aged, and vying for crops and produce at the smalltown auctioneers. They tried to sing along with all the sentimental tunes dished up for them by Band Accord. They tried to grow animated rather than just sleepy with the alcohol they’d drunk. But the office suite was deadening. The headaches and the rheumatism which had made such progress, nurtured by the formal tension of the lunch, deepened their discomfort and the furrows on their brows. Their coughs could no longer reach and clear the tickling dryness in their throats. Their eyes were smarting. Their faces were as red and vexed as coxcombs. Conditions there were perfect for a heart attack or stroke.
Victor sat as deadened as his guests, not by the onslaught of the offices – he was used to that – but by the discomfort that he felt in company. He’d never had the conversation or the animated face to make himself or the people round him feel at ease. He had no repartee, no party skills, no social affability. What kind of city man was he that did not relish the light and phatic talk, the spoken oxygen of markets, offices, and streets? He did not care. He did not need to care. A boss can speak as little as he wishes, and stay away from markets, offices, and streets. Truth to tell, he did not even relish the joshing and the drink-emboldened flattery that his guests – between their coughs and flushes – were exchanging at the table. He mistook their talk for trivia. He took their wheezing and their creaking and the damp heat on their foreheads as the wages of their sinful lives, their drinking, smoking, family lives, their lack of gravitas. He looked on them with less kindness, less forgiveness, less respect than he had looked upon the yellow aphids that he’d killed that day.
Victor’s own breathing – papery and shallow at the best of times – had become distressed by the cigarettes and the one pipe smoked with the brandy after lunch. His stomach too was just a little restless from the fish.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, and stood, his brandy glass in hand. His guests stood, too, as promptly as they could, expecting toasts.
‘Fresh air,’ said Victor, his sentence shortened by a cough. ‘Let’s go to the roof.’
He led them in a halting, single file across the room to where his private lift waited for his summons. The three accordionists, instructed to ‘accompany’ proceedings until instructed otherwise, tagged on, their instruments strapped on their chests like oxygen machines. The waitress with the brandy – dutiful, uncertain – followed on. And last of all, the cats. They crowded in as best they could. The lift was meant for one. It shook a little on its hawsers as the old men and accordions wheezed in unison, and stumbled intimately against each other on the ascent to the 28th. But when they had emerged beneath the arch of fessandras into the air and foliage of the rooftop garden, the greengrocers breathed deeply, swallowed mouthfuls of the dirty but unfettered air, turned their faces to the sun and wind, and looked out across the city and the suburbs to the blue-green hills, the grey-green woods, beyond.
The Band Accord stood at the door, their mood transformed. The new note that they struck was sweet and sentimental. They played the sort of joyful harvest tunes that make you dance and weep, their grace notes jesting with the melody. The weaving cheerfulness of the accordion could make a teacup dance and weep. It is the only instrument strapped to the player’s heart. Its pleated bellows stretch and smile.
The guests spread out, at ease, delighted, cured all at once by the magic of the place, invigorated by the care and passion bestowed on every plant that grew on that rooftop. The centrepiece, so different from the sculptured water in the mall, was a pond surrounded by a path of broken stone. There were no fish, but there were kingcups, hunter lilies, flags, and – hunched over, like a heron – the shoulders of a dwarf willow, providing shade for paddling clumps of knotweed and orange rafts of bog lichen. There were shrubs all around, some in clay pots, some in amphoras coloured thinly with a wash of yellow plaster, some in raised beds. A wooden pergola, heavy with climbing roses, honeysuckle, creepers, led towards the greenhouse. The traders followed Victor there and rubbed the leaves of herbs and primped the seedlings like owners of the land.
The Band Accord was summoned to the greenhouse door. ‘Play on, play on.’ The waitress poured more brandy. The old men passed the glasses round like schoolboys on an outing, making sure they kept for themselves the fullest glass. They all found a place to rest or sit. Some upturned pots, a wooden bench, some low staging for the plants, made perfect seats. The cats made the most of the dry and practised hands, the bony laps, the strokes and preening that were on offer. The waitress was a little flustered by the flirting helpful hands which aided her with drinks. The two stout ladies of the band and their slimmer friend, on the other hand, were serenading this impromptu glasshouse gathering with the smiles and gestures of the most intimate nightclub. ‘To Victor!’ And someone added, ‘May you grow new teeth.’
Everybody raised a glass and once again the band squeezed out the Birthday Polka. Everybody sang the words and passed their glasses for more drink. Victor stood to say eight words, no more, of thanks. ‘Just like the village parties, gentlemen,’ he said, promoting the deceit that he had sap for blood, that he was just a countryman at heart. ‘Your health.’ He looked out for the second time that day towards the garish awnings of the marketplace. Before he’d had a chance to sit, he added one more toast, ‘Our town!’ He swept his hand towards the market, as if to wipe the townscape clean. He would have said, if he had been a more loquacious man, ‘Before I die I’d like to clear all that! To start afresh. A marketplace. A building worthy of our town.’ Instead, he said (he could not help himself), ‘To business, gentlemen.’ Again they lifted glasses up, and drank. ‘I trust your businesses are well. No problems that you want to talk about?’ No one was in the mood to answer him. They shook their heads and laughed, as if the very thought of problems was a joke.
‘Well, then,’ said Victor. ‘That is as it ought to be. Rook’s paid enough by me to solve and settle problems …’
‘By us as well …’ The man who spoke had meant it as a joke. He’d never stopped to think before whether Rook’s pitch payments were transactions that he shared with Victor. Too late to wonder now.
‘By you as well?’
‘It’s nothing much. A gratuity for everything he does.’
‘What does Rook do that is not already funded by his salary?’
Victor saw discomfort all round. He read it perfectly. No wonder Rook thought the Soap Market was paradise. The market termites droned for him. The man was taking bribes. Victor knew at once what he must do to this extortionist and how – a timely gift – it served his longterm purpose perfectly. A man like that, a man who served himself before his boss, a man, moreover, who could not be trusted should a market-renovation plan be contemplated, could not expect to keep his job. There was no wickedness in that. It was a duty for a boss to let the shyster go, just as it was the task of gardeners to rid themselves of bugs.
‘How much exactly do you pay?’ he asked. Again, there were no volunteers to speak. They did not wish to seem the victims of dishonesty, or collaborators in deceit. Victor took a notebook from his jacket, and a pen. ‘Jot down the size of payment that you make to Rook,’ he said. ‘I would not wish my friends to pay more than they ought.’ Of course, they did as they were told.
Downstairs, one floor below, Rook and Anna judged – as all seemed quiet in Victor’s office suite – that the time was right to seat their boss in his birthday chair, amongst the gleaming foliage, and to raise their glasses in a toast. The chair was carried from the ant
eroom. The drinks were poured. More champagne, naturally. The chair was placed at the centre of the lobby outside Victor’s suite where they presumed the birthday lunch was – quietly – still in progress. Rook stood behind the chair, a smile composed already on his face. Anna knocked on Victor’s door, and entered. The only sound and movement in the room came from the air-conditioning.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said to Rook. He came and stood beside her at the door and looked where she was pointing, at the table, at the olive pips, the undrained glasses, the stubbed cigar, the detritus of orange peel and fruit skin and undigested fish. Anna laughed, and – doing so – she dropped her head momentarily onto Rook’s shoulder.
‘They must have doddered to the roof,’ he said, and put his arm around her waist. He felt elated and uneasy. The empty room, the woman’s reassuring waist, the birthday chair, unoccupied and foolish in the middle of the lobby, were not what he had planned.
‘Let’s drink the champagne anyway.’ He turned his back on Victor’s door and sat himself amongst the plastic foliage of the birthday chair, satirically, defiantly. He lifted up his glass until Anna, standing at his knees, was still and silent and composed. She raised her glass as well. ‘Ourselves!’ she said. ‘Ourselves … ourselves … ourselves … ourselves …’
7
THE MARKET WAS as good as gone, and so was Rook. Decisions had been made, that day. The skyline of our lives was changed. Five halting traders, a band, a waitress, and the boss took air and brandy on Big Vic’s garden roof, while, on the 27th floor, Rook and Anna grew tipsy and engrossed with lesser things. There’d be a romance (How we love that word!), one death at least (We’re not so keen); there’d be distress and devilment upon the streets, some fortunes made and lost – and all because a dry old millionaire, alive too long, a little drunk, had fallen foul of that ancient sentimental trap, the wish to die yet linger on.
When Victor offered up his glass and said, ‘Our town!’ perhaps the toast was not for what there was but for what he saw in his mind’s eye, the prospects and the dreams. His hand swept up across the distant cityscape. He wiped the market off, as if he was simply clearing steam from glass and looking on the hidden clarity beyond, his place in history.
The story, though, that was running through the city by that midnight was not the one that would change lives and landscapes – unless you were a fish. The story that amused the traders and the porters as they gathered in the Soap Garden for their final coffee-and-a-shot, that so obsessed the chatterlings, the social consciences, the bleeding hearts, the evangelists of social change who talked into the night, was the story of Victor’s coddled fish. The fish at Victor’s party – or so the midnight edition of the next day’s city paper claimed – were better treated than his guests. Ten fresh and living perch were taken from the station to his offices. ‘By cab!’, was the report. Their plastic travel-tank was lifted by porters onto the cab’s rear seat and the driver was instructed to go no faster than a hearse. Live perch, it seemed, could lose their sweetness and their bloom if sloshed about like lunchtime bankers in the backs of cabs. Their flesh would flood and stress and, no matter what the chef might do, would disappoint at table, clinging apprehensively to the bone and tasting faintly bitter.
The cabbie – a little stressed himself, and bitter too at what he took to be a joke at his expense – adjusted his rear-view mirror so that he could drive and watch the yellowed water in the tank. He was used to spying into women’s laps that way. He’d earned a little cash a week or two before when he had spied a politician’s hand rest briefly in a woman’s silken lap. The woman was an actress, not the politician’s wife, and the cabbie sold both names to me. You will not mind, I know, if briefly, after introductions, and having kept myself discreet thus far, I step back into shadow. This story is not mine, at least not more than it is every citizen’s. I am – I was – a journalist. My byline was the Burgher. I was, at this time, the mordant, mocking diarist on the city’s daily.
On Victor’s birthday, the cabbie phoned me once again and sold the story of the fish tank too. ‘By God,’ he said, ‘I swear the water smelt of piss.’ Here was, I felt … the Burgher felt … an amusing illustration of the oddity of millionaires, but only worth a quarter of the fee – and half the column space – that the Burgher’s budget could afford for hands in laps. The paper ran the story in the Burgher column, on the back page, with a cartoon – a cab completely full of water, bubbles, weed; a snorkelled diver at the wheel; a periscope; and at the street corner a well-dressed perch, fin urgently raised, calling, ‘Victor’s, please – and hurry, he’s expecting me for lunch!’
Nobody would have the nerve to show the piece to Victor. Such gossip and such jokes would only baffle him. But Rook was in the mood for gossip and cartoons. As usual, as a Friday treat, he’d bought the midnight paper from the operatic huckster on the street below his apartment. He had taken the paper back to bed with him, with coffee, brioches, and cubes of melon, and had shown it to Anna as if the joke on Victor would wear thin, the newsprint fade, unless she woke and read the paper then. She’d left her glasses in her bag, and where her bag was, amongst the urgent chaos of their clothes, their shoes, their coats, they were not sure. So Rook removed his slippers and his gown and rejoined Anna in his bed to read the Burgher’s words aloud. Their laughter led to kisses, and their kisses to the passion of the not-so-young in love. A breeze from the open window rustled and disturbed the pages of the paper which had been thrown carelessly and hurriedly upon the floor. Their faces reddened, their bodies swollen with embraces, their mouths limp and tenacious, they ended their working day much as a thousand other couples did beneath the roofs and chimneys of the town, their cries and promises soon lost amid the hubbub of the traffic and the revellers and the calls of traders in the alleys, avenues, boulevards, and streets. The wind. The countless noises in the lives of cities. The climax of the night. The recklessness of sleep.
The marketplace was resting, too, though not silently. The stalls and awnings had been packed away – some in padlocked wooden coffins, five metres long; some decked and lashed like rigging on a boat and riding out the stormless doldrums of the night; some wigwamed carelessly and stacked like bonfire wood. It looked as if a squall had struck, reducing all the trading vibrancy of day to sticks and cobblestones. The noise came mostly from the cleansing teams, the men in yellow PVC whose job it was to operate the sweep-jeeps, brushing up the vegetable waste, the paper bags, the scraps and orts of the Soap Market like prairie harvesters, and then to uncap the hydrants and bruise and purge the cobblestones with sinewed shafts of pressured water. The quieter group – men, women, kids – foraged for their supper and their bedclothes, gleaning mildewed oranges, snapped carrots, the occasional coin, cardboard sheets, and squares of polythene before the brushes and the jets turned the market’s oval benevolence to spotlessness.
Quite soon the cleansing gangs would go. The night folk of the Soap Market would secure their nighttime roosts. Dismantled stalls and awnings – once the water has run off – provide good nesting spots for people without homes. Cellophane Man – his clinging suit refreshed and thickened by the cellophane he found discarded in the marketplace – stood, vacuum-wrapped, to watch and organize the final vehicles of night. The drinkers had their corner. They did not sleep at night, but sat in restless circles, sharing wine or urban rum and fending off the dawn with monologues and spats. The shamefaced women there, fresh out of luck and cash, kept to themselves, and, desperately well-mannered, slept sat up, their arms looped through their bags, their minds elsewhere. Only the young stretched out – the youths who’d come to make their marks away from home and had ended up as city dips, or tarts, or petrol-sniffers. Some – like Joseph – had just arrived. The Soap Market was their first bedsit, and still they hoped that day would bring good luck. Indeed – again – where else would Joseph be but here? Not sitting at a bar, for sure. The pockets of his summer suit were empty still. Emptier, in fact. He’d lost his clipping from the c
atalogue. He’d dropped his knife. He’d come off worse with Rook. He slept – young, stretched out – with spinach as a pillow and a mattress made of planks.
At least he slept. For all the bad luck of the day he still retained the knack of easing tiredness, relieving disappointment, with a little sleep. At first he was unnerved by lights and noise; the engines and the headlamps of motorbikes ridden by spoilt young men drawn to the dismantled market by the fun that could be had at speed on cobblestones, and with the ‘trash’ who drank and slept there. But soon the town went quiet – no hoots or yelps to puncture night. He’d lain and watched the city darken as the last few lights in homes and offices had been switched off by insomniacs and caretakers and automatic timing switches. The only lights that did not dim were streetlamps and the silent conifer of silver bulbs which stood, unswaying, twenty-seven storeys high above the town. This Tree of Lights was Big Vic at rest. The block’s computer told which bulbs to shine, and when. It was the perfect fir – except that those who cared to stare might see at night a firefly at the summit of the tree, as Victor – without the knack of sleep – wandered through his apartment and his office suite, marked as he moved from room to room by lamps and lights outside the fir-tree’s grid.