The soapies loved this valedictory clientele, this slow and gawping audience who bought bad fruit and never asked the price, who swallowed every tale a soapie told. One trader — asked a hundred times how he’d lost the last joint of his little finger — winked at his wife and told how he had found, the month before, a fruit snake in a tub of peaches.
‘It was no longer than my hand,’ he said. ‘But those fruit snakes are poisonous. One bite and you’re dead in thirty seconds. That’s if you’re fit and strong like me, and have the heart to last that long. What could I do? I took this bill hook and cut the finger off there and then before the poison reached my heart.’ At other times and other tellings, he carried out the surgery not with a bill hook but with a banana knife, a piece of glass, a razor blade, an axe, a coffee spoon. And once, ‘What could I do but hold my finger up and let my wife here bite it off? She spat it out. It landed in that carrot box. We haven’t found it yet.’
One apple trader, a man who kept a bottle by his till, lectured as he sold: ‘To bite an apple is to taste the world’s most scientific fruit. It was a falling apple that gave us gravity — though none of mine have fallen from the tree. They’ve all been picked and packed without a bruise. And here’s the apple tempted Eve. You see the blushes on its cheeks? And here are cooking apples like the ones that Einstein used in his experiments. It’s got the mass, it’s got the energy. It’s very good with cheese.’
Another found a bon viveur, or nectar bug, amongst his fruit, as swollen by juice as a ripe green grape. He held it up for all the customers to see — and, spotting children watching him, he did a sleight of hand and swapped the bug for a real grape. He tossed it in his mouth. It popped between his teeth. He poked his tongue out at the children. Squashed green flesh lay in the ladle of his tongue.
This new, naive, and richer clientele could not conceal its pleasure. Was this a circus or a marketplace? If only parking was a little simpler or the journey from the suburbs not so long, they’d do their shopping in the Soap Market every time. The fruit looked better free from cellophane. You had a chance to touch and choose exactly what you wanted. And so much choice. And much more fun — if less convenient — than the bright and covered stores they usually used, close to the office, a short walk from home, two minutes in the car. What a gift, as well, to find this patch of greenery at the market heart. There were such cheap cafes there — and bars like country bars with slatted tables, trees for shade in summer and protection in the winter, waiters and waitresses who were neither servile nor imperious. They could test the strangest drinks, and eavesdrop on a tumult of conversations, profanities, and propositions like they’d never heard before.
The buskers came, like wasps to beer. They played old songs and standards from America. It was so crowded that the Gypsy with the concertina could hardly stretch and squeeze his notes. The waiters had to carry trays of beers above their heads. The fact that Rook sat preaching doom was only further evidence that here, in this grassed and cobbled relic, life was ripe.
Some stayed all day, most of the night. In fact, in that last week between Christmas and New Year, the night took over from the day. The alcohol replaced the fruit. Trade gave way to pleasure. Some single traders ceased to trade. They did not rise at dawn to fidget over crops or fuss with decorations to their stalls. They got up late. They stayed up late. They drank like camels. Who gave a damn what fortune and the car parks held? There was a party to attend. A wake? A christening? Or both? No one had time to wonder or to care. Even those five men who’d been with Victor at his birthday lunch and were too old to take much pleasure out of noise and drink were not allowed to go home sober. How could they refuse a toast to ‘Ourselves’? And then another toast to ‘All these years we’ve shared’? And more: ‘To all our loyal customers’. ‘To the new year and the old’. ‘To Health, Wealth and Women’. ‘To Arcadia’. Quite soon they had the Gypsy and his bewitching concertina at their table and were dredging for the words and tune of
‘Are you for sale, sweet market maid?
(And if so, can I squeeze you?)
How much a kilo of your breasts?
(I’ll take a pair, so please you.)
How much for thighs?
And how much eyes?
Oh, tell me that you’re merchandise.
Sweet maid, I long to lease you.
What is your fee?
That’s fine by me!
Now settle down upon my knee,
before my missus sees you …’
These were nights too good to end, so full of sin and yet so blameless and so virtuous. The celebration would not last. On the morning of January first the market would be cleared. The hoardings and barriers would go up. The diggers and the trenchers would move in. The soil beneath the stones would be on show, flints and shattered cobbles blinking in the light for the first time in six hundred years.
Rook wished to save the cobblestones. And himself. There was no place for him in Victor’s car park, or in Arcadia. They’d not marked out a site for him, where he could trade on having been the Woodgate boy, the firebrand of the marketplace, the boss’s right-hand man, the soapies’ champion. On New Year’s Day his world would be reduced to the four small rooms of his apartment. He’d be the undisputed king of walls and furniture. He’d have no reputation on the streets. Unless, that is, he took this final chance to make his mark, to take revenge, upon the town.
On New Year’s Eve there was no room at his usual table in the Soap Market. Young men and women he had never seen before, and all the residents from thereabouts, had joined the traders, porters, drivers to celebrate year’s end and mark the closing of the Soap Market.
At seven, the mayor had come, with cameramen, representatives from the Busi Partnership, and Victor’s development and trading managers. The police had cleared a path and set up metal barriers so that the city mayor could be the first customer to shop unimpeded in the Soap Market without the pressure of a crowd. The route which he would take was set, as was the stall where he would pause, the conversation he would have with the chosen soapie, the single orange — already washed and wrapped by a town-hall official — that he would buy and peel and eat. There’d be a photo-call (‘Please bite the orange, Mr Mayor. A wider mouth. Smile!’), an interview, a walkabout, a hasty departure to give a speech to city businessmen at their annual dinner. A secretary made a note that in two years’ time, this mayor, or the next, would need to buy a second orange and eat it for the cameras to mark the opening of Arcadia.
So much for the proprieties. Now the traders were free — and glad — to dismantle and to stow their market stalls for the last time. They did not pack them in the usual way, or lay them down for rest on their trading pitches, but followed the instructions which had been sent to them from Anna in Big Vic. They folded their awnings and their trestles, packed and boxed their unsold fruit and vegetables, fixed on a numbered label, inked in their names, and carried their trading rigs to two collection points behind the bars. Victor’s lorries would arrive at dawn to take the stalls across Link Highway Red to their new car-park homes.
For once the cleansing teams could be as careless as they wished with their sweepers and their hoses. They washed the cobbles wet and black, removed the daily waste, and left the market clean for its dawn clearance. The traders joined the party in the garden, their grimy aprons and hats persuading people in the crowd that they were soapies and should be let through and served at once, much in the way that funeral crowds defer to family mourners.