The waitress paused so that the point of what she said was not missed or weakened by the laughter that she caused or by the noise of Rook’s disruptive sneezes. Then she said, ‘And no one ever knew the cause of death. Though they took the body to a hospital and experts cut the old girl up to see what they could see. The reason is that spoonwood doesn’t leave any traces. Except a rash inside the mouth.’ She turned to Rook. ‘You’d better watch yourself,’ she said.
Rook did not hear. He sneezed again. He looked as pale as chalk. It seemed his tongue and mouth were drier, and more blunted, than they ought to be, though whether this was caused by laurel sap or by the juice of orange he could not tell. He helped himself to water from a jug on the traders’ table and rinsed his hands. He took the shot they offered him, gargled with the spirit, and spat it out into a drain. He rubbed the stinging corners of his lips. He wiped his tongue on the cuff of his jacket. His mouth was now his most self-conscious part. Rook cursed his luck. He knew the signs of asthma on the march. His sense of smell had failed. His nails — dug in his palms — left deep red weals which would not clear. ‘You’ll live,’ the waitress said. ‘It takes more than a lick of spoonwood to harm a man your size.’
Rook placed his pyramid of cakes beside him on the ground. This time the sneeze gathered in his upper nose and fizzed but did not detonate. He took deep nostril breaths to try to burst the bubble forming in his head. He started breathing through his mouth. He sucked in air. He beat his chest as if he’d eaten too much cheese and stomach wind was warring with his heart. The more he tried to let the sneeze go free, the more it burrowed into him, and spread. His sputum was like lard. These were the times he missed his parents most. They coped with him when he was small. They’d ignite an asthma firework for him at the table and let him inhale smoke, his head inside the cowling of a blanket or a towel. They’d massage him. They’d soothe his chest with balsam brewed from cloves and juniper and peppermint. They had been dead for fifteen years.
At first, the market men were unconcerned, amused that Rook was making such a fuss. They did not understand what asthma was or how the trigger of the laurel sap and smell had so alarmed Rook’s lungs. His breathing now was panicky and spasmed. The tree of passages, the branches, twigs, and sprays, which served the air sacs in his lungs, were swollen. They were almost blocked. He had to cough. His chest had shrunk. He did not understand what anyone was asking him.
He could have died. The waitress beat him on the back. She struck him with the rounded heel of her right hand between his shoulderblades. She thought he’d got a scrap of twig or leaf lodged in his throat and that he should bring it up or choke. Her blow knocked Rook onto his knees. It marked his back. He coughed up pinkish phlegm. ‘That’s right,’ she said. His lips, his fingernails, his tongue, his feet were turning violet. His face was mauve. She struck him once again. He had the sense, and luck, to roll this time onto his back so that, unless she took it on herself to punch him in the stomach or the ribs, or kick him on the ground, he was more safe. In fact, he found it easier to breathe flat out upon his back beneath the traders’ table. The air went in and out more freely. The tidal ebb and flow increased. He pinkened, gasped a little less, then sneezed. His mind was clear. He understood. He’d been exposed. The grass. Some pollen. The orange juice. The laurel leaves. Some rural irritant had stressed his city lungs.
He felt his pockets in the hope that he had brought his nebulizing spray. It was not there. He’d left it in the top drawer of his desk. He was too careless with himself. He should have known. The garden was no place for him. He couldn’t wait to reach Big Vic and his nebulizer’s balsamed mist. He would have hailed a taxi for the journey back, but there were none. No car or taxi, no ambulance, could ever reach the garden during trading hours. The market was impenetrable except by foot or porter’s barrow. Rook took a napkin and wiped the beads of sap from the laurel stems and then he took the sheets of a discarded newspaper and wrapped them round the bunch. He held them downwards so that he did not share their oxygen.
‘It’s greenery for Victor’s birthday chair,’ he said. ‘To decorate it.’
The traders watched him blankly, without warmth. Rook looked at the waitress, expecting that she’d understand. She was a country girl, after all. But no. Her eyes were just as blank. She’d never heard of dressing birthday chairs. Now Rook’s discomfiture, his sense of foolishness, was changing from embarrassment to irritation and regret: irritation that the men were so open in, first, their mirth and then their coolness at his expense, regret that he was not where he belonged, sitting side by side with them, and laughing at the ink-stained stiffness of some other clerk on trifling errands for his boss, made paranoid and breathless by a dab of laurel sap. For what could be more foolish or banal than these tasks of greenery and cakes, which earlier had seemed to Rook to promise so much freedom and amusement? And what could be more demeaning than the panicked, public face of adult asthma?
Rook took his foliage and his cakes through the maze of market stalls. The journey back, out of the innards of the city, seemed less ordained than the route he had followed in, towards the Soap Garden. He wove a clumsy passage through the shopping crowds, hampered and encumbered with his gleanings and his purchases. He felt displeased, and fearful too. Already he was at the market edge. The banana and the jackfruit men were ready with their knives. The Man in Cellophane waved him on impatiently. Beyond, there was the district of his birth. Beyond, there were the boutiques of Saints Row, Link Highway Red, the ne’er-do-well, Big Vic. Rook walked, half dreaming, from the old town to the new.
4
ROOK’S NE’ER-DO-WELL was called Joseph. His broken nails and weatherbeaten neck and hands were all he had to show for three years of work on one of Victor’s farms. He’d purchased the cream and crumpled suit from a catalogue. Its light, summer style was marketed as On the Town. The fashion model in the catalogue had been sitting on a bar stool with his sunglasses hooked inside the breast pocket of the jacket. One hand — the one with a single, gleaming ring — was resting on his knee, palm up. The other held the barmaid by the wrist. The gold watch on his arm showed the time as five to midnight, or five to midday. There was a bottle of muscatino on the bar and strangely, promisingly, three glasses, as if another woman had just left, or was expected soon. Or, perhaps, the glass was waiting there for Joseph.
When the parcel with the suit arrived, Joseph had cut the picture from the catalogue and put it in the breast pocket as if to equip his clothing with a pedigree and, more than that, an aspiration. The model’s empty, upturned palm, the drama of the barmaid’s wrist caught by the strong hand of the man, exactly matched Joseph’s notion of the casual spontaneity of city life where day and night were all the same, where drink and wealth and women were within easy reach. What else was there to fill his mind each day? Trenching orchards, driving tractors, mucking fields, cutting cabbages, boxing plums was not the work to satisfy a youth like Joseph. The muscles that had hardened in the fields had made him vain. And vanity is stifled in the countryside — the rain, the overalls, the solitary work for little pay, make sure of that.
The only chance he had to flex and strut was at the station every cropping day when he went to load the produce onto trains. Mostly they were goods and freight trains, passing slowly through soon after dawn or late at night, and Joseph’s vanity hardly noticed in the dark. But once a week, at 7.10 on Thursday evenings, the Salad Bowl Express, as it was called, stopped at the station with passengers weekending in the city, on shopping sprees or love affairs or binges, or just touring the sights. On Thursday evenings rich women and their daughters pressed their foreheads and their noses to the sleeper-carriage glass to watch the men load on the trays of strawberries or cress or endives, fresh for the busy weekends of hotels and restaurants. Some passengers lowered the Pullman windows to buy fruit in cornets of twisted leaves from country girls whose own weekend did not begin until the moon came up on Saturday.