In the summer there was hardly space for all the dispossessed and homeless who came to roost in the dripping troughs and crevices of the Soap Market. Why sleep indoors, in derelicts or hostels or up against the bricks and tiles of bridges, subways, underpasses? Why squat in dark, abandoned flats — your only privacy an unused mattress up against the window or the door — when it’s July and there’s no rain and the sun has been so fierce by day that all the midnight, city air is swollen with the heat?
There was no need to light a fire from packing debris, but there were fires because the poor are always cold in spirit and need the optimistic mesmerism of the flames to take them through the night, to help them kindle just a little desperate joy amongst such misery. Some of the fires would not last long. Their purpose was to shed a canopy like bulbs shed light, making rounded rooms with walls of melting night for children who could not sleep without the fantasy of ‘home’. Some fires would burn till dawn, topped up by sleepless residents whose thirst for alcohol could not be blunted by their desperation or fatigue. One fire gave light for noisy games of cards. Another was the fire where spuds and sweetcorn, gleaned from the market floor, were ember-baked on skewers made from cycle spokes. Another warmed the singers’ throats — the singing broken up by coughs, those two most humble sounds of human life becoming tangled in the mouth. In this, their simple warmth and light and sound, the night-time soapies were the closest citizens in town to the earth’s enduring elements. They understood what every moth must understand, that flame is enemy and friend. Some found in it good cause to smile, but others were expressionless or else astonished beyond words by the scalding visions that the flames revealed. But mostly people sat or slept alone, disgruntled, shamed, made volatile and distant by a life which cast them as the rootless, parasitic clinker weeds amongst the steady stems of native bedding plants. Some slept on cobbles, statuesque, their heads upon their knees, their arms looped round their legs. Some curled on cardboard mattresses with pillow-sacks, or nested in the timber and the canvas of the market stalls. Women — rarer, older than the men — looped their arms through plastic bags of clothes and dozed, or pretended to. To seem asleep was their frontier against the raids and sorties of the town. It gave them some respite from their pain — their swollen feet, necrotic toes, their boils, and coughs, their migraines and their chills. Men talked in voices that were stripped to wire, or muttered madly to their chests, or carried their misfortune squarely, cleanly, without shame. Until they slept, that is. Who could tell the shameless from the lost, when all of them seemed just as thin and innocent and urinous beneath the duvet of the night?
Rook walked as quickly as he could between the starvelings and the vagabonds, the gangrels and the drunks. He was an easy target for their wit or for the begging hands which waved at him or tugged his trouser cuffs, or for their savage mutterings. He did not like the market when the awnings and the stalls were felled, and when the ripe and appetizing daytime colours of the crops were replaced by the moistened greys of night. He did not look when he heard oaths or offers. It was not wise to be waylaid by their ill-luck. If he gave cash or time to one, then all of them would rush to him like mallards in the park, pecking for a crust.
Ahead he spotted three young men, as awkward on their legs as day-old foals. They called him to them, but he did not go. He could not quite unscramble what they said. But he was certain he knew what they held inside their paper cups, their shallow plastic trays, their makeshift dishes. These were what people nicknamed the Taxi Cabs, clumsy, noisy, slow, and fuelled by petrol. They sniffed whatever petrol they could steal. They did not care that nowadays the petrol contained an Anti-Sniff. ‘Danger’ warned the stickers on the petrol caps. ‘Ethyl Mercaptan’. It smelt of skunk. So what? The boys smelled just like skunks themselves. It did not dull their appetite for fuel, not even if the Anti-Sniff made them nauseous, hyperactive, violent. It blocked their tongues, and caused them to tremble like crones and greybeards made helpless by a stair or kerb.
Rook did not lift his head to face the Taxi Cabs; or even to trade signals with Cellophane who was still on his feet and summoning Rook, ‘This way. This way. Then right. And straight ahead,’ as if Rook were a van that’s passage blocked the marketplace. He chose a route which took him to the market’s edge, near the house where he had lived when young. He liked to walk those streets and look up at the cluttered windows of the carpet salesmen. Was that cracked glass the same that he’d pressed his face against, what? thirty years ago and more? for private, hawk-eye glimpses of the local girls? His mind was already set on women. The July heat, the weeks since he’d last slept with Anna, made him wonder what he’d do if some young woman bedded down on polythene amongst the cobblestones asked for money in return for sex. He did not trust himself. He was afraid.
He walked a little quicker now, the touch of panic and arousal at his heels. He almost stumbled over Joseph, sleeping at the market edge amongst the padlocked carts and barrows. The mugger’s face was busy with its dreams. It was not proud or shy in sleep, but blinked and gaped and made no secret of its missing tooth, the cherry birth-stain on its cheek, the pitted craters on its nostrils and its chin, the meagre, ill-advised moustache, the crusty scar above the eye where he’d been wounded by a key. The skin was just as cracked but not as bronzed as it had been when he’d fled the countryside by Salad Bowl Express. The city life had whitened him. He looked as harmless and as dull as bread.
What made Rook feel again as tough and sentimental as a movie star? Was it the triumph of his fists, that time so long ago? Was it the residue of how he felt about old Victor, Anna, Con? Or just his dreadful appetite for girls transformed to violence when he saw the sleeping boy?
He thought he’d wake him with a kick. But what if Joseph yelled? The mob would come. He’d have a tottering circle made from drunks and Taxi Cabs. Rook was tempted to drop a coin in the open mouth and creep off to watch the boy awake, or choke. Instead, he searched his pockets for the knife. He sprung the blade and squatted at Joseph’s side. Just like a father with an oversleeping child, he squeezed Joseph’s ear lobe, a parent’s trick to open up the eyes. He waved the knife across his face, and said, ‘It’s Joseph’s “Nife” — without the K. Is this your property?’ He lay the flat blade on the young man’s nose.
‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘We owe each other favours, don’t we? Don’t shake your head. Don’t move. I gave you that.’ Rook pointed at the scar. ‘And you’ve scarred me. I ought to hand you over to the police. At least you’d have a decent place to sleep …’
Joseph sat up. He recognized Rook’s face at last, despite the lack of tie and suit. He was not frightened by the knife or anything this thin-faced man might do. His own face was wide enough to take more scars. He did not care. He’d snap this man in half for waking him. He’d punish him for being rich when he was poor. Rook stood and backed away, the knife less certain in his hand.
‘Have you got money?’ Joseph asked.
‘What’s that to you?’