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 catalogue. 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.
It was his birthday night. He’d had too much to drink. One glass at his age was too much. His stomach growled. The pissed-on perch was drowning in champagne. Walking seemed to ease the wind which pressed against his chest. He belched to let the champagne free. He knew that in his office desk there were sachets of kaolin to still his gut. He found them, and he found the portfolio of drawings, too, the artist’s working notes for the sculpture that his contemporaries seemed keen to force on him. He carried the portfolio to the water fountain in the lobby outside his office suite. He tipped the dry and powdered kaolin into his mouth like a child with sherbert and washed it down with water from the fountain. The coldness of the water dislodged the pains inside his chest. He belched again. He felt quite well at last. Not sick, at least. Not faint.
Victor put down the sheaf of drawings and looked at each. Romantic, formal pieces sketched in chestnut pastels. A market vendor weighing out his fruit. A girl with grapes and flowers. A porter with three produce trays on his head. And then — alarmingly — a drawing of his past: a beggar woman with a suckling child, her hand outstretched, the gift of apple balanced on her palm. He sat, he almost fell, into an aged wooden chair pushed in shadow up against the lobby wall. He looked and looked at what he took to be a drawing of his mother and himself … what, almost eighty years before? His head was flooded now, his face was drained. This was the statue that he’d have. He’d make his mother once again. He’d put her back. He knew exactly where she should sit and beg in bronze, between the Soap Market and the garden. At last, the implications of his sweeping hand that afternoon upon the roof became more clear. He’d start afresh, just as his accountants had advised. He’d build a market worthy of the statue. A market like a cathedral, grand and memorable. A market worthy of a millionaire. He would outlive himself in stone. His mother would outlive herself in bronze. It made good business sense, though no doubt Rook would not approve. He’d fight for Paradise.