The cobbled oval which surrounded the garden and the bars was emptier than it had ever been. The new arrivals took advantage of the space to park their cars close to the bars. It only took one car to brave the medieval cordon of the cobblestones, for a hundred, then five hundred more to follow. You did not need a ticket there. You parked for free. There was a short-lived symmetry in this — a car park lost to marketeers below Big Vic, a car park gained in market space at the centre of the old town.
The Soap Market gleamed. The windscreens and the roofs of cars caught, tossed back, the street and building lights. The cars were silky, sated beetles, nesting on the corpse while it was wet and warm. The wise drivers put their windows up, retracted their radio aerials, locked their cars before they headed for the bars. They did not like the look of those men and women who hung around, the beggars and the drunks, the homeless, jobless, feckless, hopeless, ancient men, the ones who counted cobblestones as bed, the petrol sniffers overawed by such a choice of petrol tanks.
Where would the nighttime soapies sleep that night? Where were their nests? Where could they light their fires? They called to Rook, the ones that knew his face. ‘What’s going on?’ they asked. The quieter ones just walked around between the cars with nowhere else to go. Some tried the handles of saloons. Some pulled off petrol caps and dined on vapour. Some sat on bonnets passing bottles, bothering the passers-by for cash or cigarettes. It was too late to think of somewhere else. This was a home to them, and they were as nervous and volatile as if they were bereaved.
Rook stood and watched, debating with himself whether now was the time — before he grew too troublesome — to go back home, to see the old year out, soberly, alone, in bed. He was not well. The evening damp was sitting on his chest. His head was crammed. He felt close to tears. Then he saw Joseph for the fourth and final time. The boy was sitting with his back against the smaller pile of stalls, asleep. The only sleeper there. Rook could not resist the opportunity. He leant to wake the boy.
‘It’s me,’ Rook said, the Devil shaking Faust. Joseph’s nose was running. His eyes were wet. He smelt of alcohol and fuel. He could not hold his head up straight. His breath could bubble paint. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’ Rook searched his pockets, found his wallet, and produced the ten half-notes. ‘You have your halves, I hope? I’ll give you my halves tonight. I’ll make you rich if …’ If you can shake a wand and make the market whole again. If you can mug me back my job. If you can kidnap Anna from Big Vic and place her in my bed. If you can trick the lines to leave my face, the grey to leave my hair, and make me young and dressed in black again. If you can stop the city in its tracks.
‘If what?’ asked Joseph, half awake. Rook tapped the stack of trading stalls with his toe.
‘We’ll have a bonfire, eh?’ he said. ‘To end all this, to see the old year out.’ He produced a book of matches — free from the Excelsior — and dropped them into Joseph’s hand. ‘Set fire to all this wood and canvas. And then the other pile as well. That’s all you have to do. It’s money for nothing.’
‘What for?’
‘Just do it. Either you burn that or I’ll burn these.’ He flexed the ten half-notes he held. He put them back inside his wallet. ‘Wait ten minutes. Do your job. Then find me here tomorrow. Start the new year ten thousand richer than today.’
Rook would not go home to sleep soberly or alone that night. He wished to see what mayhem he could cause. But he would need an alibi. He must be seen, a noisy innocent, when the fires began. He made his way between the cars. He pushed a passage through the crowds until he reached the scuffed winter lawns of the Soap Garden. He got himself an empty glass in time for midnight, and as the toasts for Health and Wealth were offered to the crowds Rook was the noisiest respondent, like the worst of sinners at a mass. He called out madly. He made ironic toasts for Victor, for Arcadia. He stood on tables, made a nuisance of himself with women, traders, young men in garish clothes. He let them know his name. ‘I’m Rook, and this is my backyard.’ He was unforgettable. No one noticed that there was orange dawn rising from the west, with clouds of smoke. And no one turned to sniff the old and woody smell that comes from country hearths and bakeries and forest fires.
The first to warm their faces and their hands upon the flames were the market’s night-guests. Their nests were going up in smoke, but they were cheerful with the light and colours reflected in all the windscreens of the marketplace. They squatted on their haunches with their bottles and let their faces redden with the drink and heat. They cheered as flames collapsed the tepees made from wood and canvas. The heat compacted and sent its front-row audience back down the aisles of cars where it was darker, safer, less intense.
The crowd was growing. Late arrivals who had parked on pavements in the Woodgate district and who were too elated by the date and time to go back home, were making for the market bars when they were blocked by smoke and fire and crowds. They were not alarmed. The midnight fire was not a threat to them. It only marked the closing of the market or the closing of the year. It gave a cheerful touch to New Year’s Eve. The drunks and beggars pestered them for cigarettes and one or two lit up their cigarettes with embers from the fires.
The fire itself was changing mood. It spat. It was exasperated, and trapped. Fires by their nature sink and spread. They smoulder at their edges and colonize the land around. But cobbles do not burn. They kept the fire at bay. The heat grew angrier, but it could not do much except startle everybody there with the pistol shot of cobbles splitting underneath the fire and timber detonating.
There’s a winter city wind we call the Midnight Wheeze. The night-time warmth of city life is dragged up by the moon, and colder country air is sucked in underneath, along the pavements and the alleyways and the tram routes, and blows till dawn. It and the fires made rendez-vous. They waltzed. Their gowns flew up and sent out puffs of heat. The flames were animated now. They dipped and reached, they stretched, recoiled, as the wind shadow-boxed the night. The smallest of the fires had stretched the furthest — and, at last, it held on to the leafless twigs of two snag trees which grew behind a bar. It turned them black. The flames had hardly touched. But those who watched saw fifty airborne smokers draw on fifty cigarettes as the twig tips drew in wind and glowed as redly as an owlet’s eyes. The cigarettes caught fire. The flames now skipped like elves amongst the branches, feasting on the bark. The revellers in the Soap Garden looked up to see two trees on fire and giving voice to wind as trumpets do. Already twigs were falling onto roofs, and roofs were chattering with debris and shrugging noisily at the sudden warmth. Already insects filled the air. And there were rats and bats and cockroaches that sought to flee the flames.
The wind now turned. It let the trees collapse. It blew back on the marketplace where the crowd had grown quieter, less amused. The fires hissed. Flames curled like Chinese waves and broke onto the bonnets and the windscreens of the nearest cars. A tongue of heat blackened, shrank, a linen football flag that some young man had tied to the radio aerial of his creaky van. It scorched the chrome on ancient bumpers, drew acrid smells from new ones moulded out of plastic.
Rook saw the trees go up, and he was gripped with guilt and fear and exhilaration. He ran, when everybody ran, to see what happened. He joined in the panic, whipped it up, agreed with, echoed every shout from every trader who read conspiracy in every flame, in every car, in every stranger’s face. ‘They’ve burnt our stalls!’ Too late to recover anything. Too hot and dangerous. ‘They’ve set fire to us now,’ though who ‘They’ were, they did not say. ‘They’ were the mayor, and architects, and businessmen, and Victor. ‘They’ were the men who came at dawn to ‘start from scratch’.