‘That should do the trick,’ he said. ‘Revolution ends before cigar, I think.’
On public holidays, such as New Year, he explained, it was not easy to solve problems of this kind. District policemen, it seemed, were in short supply at such a time. The ones that were not working on the New Year’s shift were either out of town or drunk or celebrating on the street. But there were young men in the barracks who’d been on duty all night long, denied a drink, denied cigars, denied festivities. Let loose a bored detachment from the Urban Rapid Control Unit, the chief assured the other guests, and there would be — he sought a phrase which could be both manly and dispassionate — ‘sudden order on the streets’. How simple it felt, amid such comfort and such company, to settle revolutions with a phrase. He called the waitress. He placed his two-word note upon the tray and sent her off whence she had come to activate his aide and URCU.
The district police had been extemporary. Their blows had been offhand, and improvised. Their strategy was unrehearsed. They were the jazzmen of the law. But URCU were the classicists, contrapuntal, harmonized, notated, drilled. Their last note was implicit in their first. And their first note was this: a barrack klaxon call that in less than four minutes filled the barrack yard with two hundred and twenty men, selected for URCU duties because their deference, their height, their eagerness to please suggested they were loyal to orders and to masters rather than to class. Kitted out in Impact Hats and blue-black riot overalls and keen to stretch their limbs after an evening spent crouched over dominoes, letters home, and boot polish, they listened to instructions (‘Suppress, contain, arrest’) with the queasy eagerness of footballers at a pre-match briefing. Defenders had been issued with long transparent, perspex shields. The strikers, divided into eight snatch-squads of six, had short shields, nightsticks made out of toughened PVC, and lighter boots for running swiftly and for kicking with numbing accuracy. The specialists had short-barrelled weapons, or plastic-baton launchers, or canisters of gas, or dogs — and — perks for the elite — hip-flasks of rum to keep them warm and reckless until their specialities were called upon. Someone set up the URCU ‘anthem’ beating on his shield, the unforgiving sound of PVC on perspex. In seconds every shield was shivering in unison. Dum dum dum-dum-dump. Dum. Dum. Dum-dum. Dump!
URCU rode across the city in their Sweepers — blue-black riot coaches (to coordinate with overalls), their fishnet windows grilled, their foremost fenders prowed and aproned like snow-ploughs. Soon there would be field toilets, civilian backup units, refreshment vans for officers and ranks, the paramedics, the parasites. Already trams and traffic had been stopped from entering the older parts of town. Already marksmen with infrared night-sights were seeking out the attic rooms in those offices and homes which looked down on the fringes of the Soap Market. Camera crews, from police and television, buzzed and hovered like carcass bees. Police radio wavelengths were as overloaded and as chattering as a telephone line sagging with its swifts and swallows on summer’s last warm day. Here was a city at full stretch, able — as only cities are — to Suppress, Contain, Arrest the chaos of the human heart as if it were as fettered and as mindless as a tram.
So when the URCU came, what could the soapies do, that undrilled coalition of beggars, fruiterers, revellers, ne’er-do-wells? Disperse? They were ‘bottled up’, to use the phrase preferred by the URCU foot soldiers to the euphemistic ‘contained’ of their officers. Where could they go but back towards the flames? Those few who sought to leave by calmly walking at the police were driven off with dum-dum-dump, or driven back by water jets, or knocked onto the cobbles by boots and sticks, or told — if they were too old and smartly dressed to be struck or kicked or drenched — ‘Get back in there. You don’t come out until we say.’
The market drains — muzzled already by the leaves and peel of fruit — could not cope with the water from the hoses. The drains were hydrants, tumbling with water and not removing it. They soaked and drowned the cobblestones. What flames there were found ducking, orange twins to dance with in the flood, and there were silver floodlamps for the dancers, too, from police and TV helicopters whose rotaries sent frowns across the water.
The wisest men and women stood at the market’s heart, ankle-deep in water, breathless and demoralized in the smoke and clamour. Rook was there. He held his chest. He held a handkerchief to his mouth. He felt exultant and dismayed. Who now could doubt the power and the patience of the rich? They held the ground. They held the sky. The city was all theirs. Had Rook not told the soapies so? He looked towards the conifer of lights which was Big Vic at night. Was Victor the Insomniac looking down upon the Soap Market? Was his permission sought before the URCU squads were sent to put a cordon round his tenants on his territory? Whoever’d given Victor his first name had chosen well. Who was the victor now?
Rook found his nebulizer. He held it to his mouth. He sucked on its fine mist. It was no match for damp and fire and night. He wished he had a desk on which to rest his head, or Anna’s chest. He wished he had the skill to rise above all this, say twenty-seven storeys up beyond the smoke and noise and danger of the street. If Rook was silent at the centre of the storm, then Joseph was at the typhoon’s active edge. His jacket top was thrown off. His sleeves were up despite the time of year, despite the hour. He pulled at cobblestones. He helped with flaming bottles, upturned cars, with threats and challenges in the puddled, twenty-metre showground between the people and the police. He took his work shirt off. The smoke from the wet fires was just as gelid as the steam and vapours of the train, the Salad Bowl Express, in which he’d bared himself at home, when he had raised the produce boxes to his head and steadied them, his face well hidden, his body on display. Now he did not hide his face, and what he hoisted overhead and shook were fists. The noses and the foreheads pressed to glass were not rich women’s or their daughters’ on weekend shopping sprees but those of URCU; unpowdered, unpampered noses and foreheads, unpainted mouths steaming up the perspex of their shields and waiting for the order to Advance-dumdum, Suppress-dum-dum, Arrest-dum-dump.
It was Joseph who found the stacks of unsold fruit and vegetables, as yet untouched by fire. He held a mauving loose-leafed cabbage in his hand, as light, for all its size, as a can of beer. He was a child. He had no self-control. He ran out in the showground, hoisted the cabbage in the air with all the might that comes from years of lifting sacks. Many were the times when cutting cabbages he’d found a damaged one and, just for fun, had launched it in the air to reach the hedge or scare the girls or break the boredom of the work. His training helped him now. The mauving cabbage held its own against the pull of earth and seemed to hang inside the helicopter searchlight from above as if it were a pastel moon that had till dawn to land.
The men of URCU watched the cabbage arc towards them through the night. Not one amongst them knew what threat it posed, but certainly it looked more menacing than cobblestones or petrol bombs. What escalation did it represent? How would their shields withstand a missile that was so large and pale and full of flight? The line of long shields tensed. The squad knee-ducked to halve the impact of the foliage bomb. The cabbage, dropping now, unnerved them more than stones or flame. Four men from URCU, directly in the cabbage path, fell onto the ground in preparation for its blow. The cabbage struck a shield square on. It hardly made a sound. A chicken’s egg could make more noise and do more harm. The cabbage fell apart. Its leaves were sheets, were flakes. The target URCU fell onto his back and, if blushes weighed as much as stones, he would have died beneath the load.