Arcadia Read Free

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,