Arcadia Read Free Page A

best suited to the horse. Those narrow stable yards
and culs-de-sac, those twisting alleyways that locals called the Squints, were scarcely wider than a mare is long. No motor vehicle could turn about inside the Squints. They were too tight and
modest for the cussed constipation of the car.
    The Woodgate neighbourhood had its vehicles, of course. A town must breathe, and there were straighter, wider ways which offered access to the Squints and provided Rook a fast, straightforward
route to cakes and greenery. Now he was walking down the road, four mares in width, where he was raised. There were parking bays where he’d once played asthmatic ball-and-tag. The building
where his parents had leased a flat was let to businesses – a barber on the pavement floor, an accountancy above, and then three floors of warehousing. The room which Rook had shared with a
brother for ten years was wall to wall with mats and phaga rugs, and druggets from Kashmir. An asthmatic’s fibrous nightmare.
    Neighbourhood was not the word. There were no longer neighbours there. At night the barbers and accountants, and the warehousemen, went home by car and bus and train to suburbs out of
town. At night the Squints were dark and dead. But still the buildings were the ones Rook had known when he was small. There were no demolitions yet. And still there was a faint smell in the air,
beneath the odour of the cars and the scent of secretaries, of ancient fire. And rotting vegetation, too, as if the area had been built against the odds on the sweet and sour of a swamp. For these
were the borders of the Soap Market. The smell, an airborne punch of cabbage stalks, figs, olives, beet … had belched and yawned along these streets and down these Squints for six hundred
years. The housing bricks and paving stones, they said, could boil down into soup; the place was steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit. So, of course, was Rook. Rook soup would taste as much of
fruit as meat. Just like the merchant’s monkey in the song,
    His testicles were mango stones,
(Quite normal in the Apes);
His cock was courgette on-the-bone.
He     Shat     Fresh     Grapes
    For all his coolness and his suits, Rook was a market boy, a Soapie through and through. His mother and his father made it so. His parents had rented a market stall and too
frequent were the days when they’d encourage Rook to miss school and help them stack and sell their wares. He did not know, perhaps, the shape of continents or algebra when he was ten, but he
could tell – by smell, by patina, by shape (no easy task) – a Trakana cherry from a Wijnkers, and know, before he broke the skin, which aubergines were soured, which peas had greyed
inside their pods.
    So it was in a sentimental mood that Rook, on Victor’s celebration day, walked the familiar hundred metres between his old home and the market rim beyond which, as yet, the colonizing
barbers, the accountants, and warehousemen, had made no mark. The canyoned pattern of the city ended here in a huge 0-shaped, cobbled court, which could not be circled – Rook could guarantee
– by a shallow-winded boy on a bike in less than fifteen minutes. Except for those few low-rise restaurants and bars in the Soap Garden which formed the centre of the 0, all buildings in the
court were wood and canvas market stalls. The place was open to the sky, and could have been a medieval harvest fair. Except that Big Vic – as Victor’s office block was known –
and the other high-rise monoliths of the new town cut off the market from the skyline hills, and fast and heavy traffic on the Link Highways beat drum rolls across the awnings and the roofs.
    Inside the oval, there were no parking bays, traffic lights, or ordered flows. The marketeers parked where they chose, or where the Man in Cellophane (who took it madly on himself to block and
beckon traffic) directed them. Their trucks and vans choked paths and access streets. Their barrows and