The laughter and jeers from the Soap Market were louder even than the helicopter blades. Now everybody ran to arm themselves with fruit and vegetables. Never had shopkeepers and shoplifters been in such harmony. They knew — this is the lesson of the insurrectionist — that ridicule and laughter are more subversive, more disarming than bullets. What can a line of soldiers do against a fusillade of cabbages? Put down their shields and face the leaves? Hold up their shields and face the jeers?
Quite soon the air was thick with greengrocery. Potatoes were quite damaging and could be thrown further than even cobbles or bottles. Apples, pears, and avocados beat tattoos — dum-dump — on shields. Tomatoes blooded them, or burst on blue-black overalls or overpolished boots. The comedians sent bananas through the air. ‘Like boomerangs,’ they said. Indeed, some did return. You can’t control the tempers of young URCU men who’re made to feel like village clods. They sent bananas back. An URCU officer was uncapped by an aubergine. A courgette caught a policeman in the corner of his eye. A TV cameraman took on his cheek the full deceit of a peach: first the tight and rubbery impact of the skin, and then the sticky embrace of the flesh, and finally the wrinkled bullet at its heart. The peach stone split. It cut his cheek. His blood was peach juice, and his juice was blood.
Joseph indulged himself. He was a citizen at last. He held the front of stage, and worked his way through fruit. The snatch-squad leader noted him. ‘We’ll have him first,’ he told his men. ‘The comic with the birthmark on his cheek. We’ll give that bastard birthmarks, head to toe.’ The police and press took Joseph’s photograph. They had a picture of him with his fists high in the air. They had him holding cobbles in his hand. And cabbages. And Ogen melons. And pomegranate hand grenades.
At 1.45 a.m. the senior officer sustained a chest wound from a sugar beet. It struck him between his heart and epaulette and knocked him to the ground. What could he say, to all who’d seen him tumbling on the cobblestones, except, ‘Enough’s enough. Go forward. Clear the market. Let them know who runs this town.’ So they were beating shields again. Each blow upon the perspex shields took the URCU cordon one step closer to the produce-bombardiers, the upturned cars, the scorched remains of trees and stalls and bars, to vaunting, topless Joseph, and to Rook.
This is the classic public-order manoeuvre,’ explained the police PRs. Undermine resistance with a show of strength and noise. And then send in the Short Shields to arrest the troublemakers. And then send up the canisters of Green Grief, the gas that blinds the rioters and dyes them green and makes them weep and grimace like Picasso’s Cubist lovers. And then mop up.
They griefed the centre of the market first. The police — though they had masks — did not wish to gas their own advance. Rook kicked a canister away. His legs and shoes took on the airborne moss. His skin turned ghostly, applewhite, while Grief, as light and volatile as gnats, rose to his waist, his chest, his throat, his eyes. It was a pity all the lemons had been used as missiles. Lemon juice, rubbed on the face, is some protection against gas.
Rook felt for safety. He found a car. He crouched. His eyes and chest were tight. Rioters should not mix drink and gas. Asthmatics should shun crowds. He clutched the front tyre of the car. He alternated handkerchief and nebulizer at his mouth. He coughed. But coughing did not clear his chest. The sticky sputum that landed on the cobblestones and on the rubber tyre and in his hand was lining from his lungs. Its release left him raw. It hurt to swallow smoke and Grief. It hurt to barter oxygen with CO2. His bellows wheezed and tightened if they were opened wider than a crack. He had to pant as quickly and as shallowly as marsh frogs do, his chest distended, his lungs migrating to his throat, his upper orifices strung like candle-tops with waxy phlegm.
The country people say a dying man is concentrated in his thoughts. He sees the heights and depths of life ranged before him like coloured beads on a Chinese abacus. He’s deft and concentrated, accounting for his faults and triumphs. ‘The dying never lie,’ they say. But Rook was lying to himself. His abacus was ranged only with the whitest beads. His thoughts were hardly concentrated. His brain was in his throat, buffeted by outer, wicked air and inner, pinioned breath, now damp with bubble blood and overladen with the weight of mucus. His tongue and nails and lips were blue. He sweated and he trembled as he sank from sleep into coma. But then, perhaps, he was not dying after all. The rain, the breeze, the slight protection of the car, the gas-repellent sheet of water which cushioned cobbles (and in which he now fell forward, his cheek and ear submerged) might dampen down the asthma and save Rook from the suffocating embraces of the air. Perhaps he stood a chance, for help was close at hand.
What did the market look like, now that the police had broken ranks and were intent, like running boys with flocks of seagulls on the beach, to cause disordered flight amongst the trapped and agitated crowds? Helmets moved amongst bare heads. Soapies grouped, regrouped, broke up like antelope before the snapping jackal truncheons of the police. It seemed that URCU — far outnumbered by the crowd — were deadened men who had no pity and no fear. They went to work as if their orders were to complicate the mayhem of the night, not bring it to an end. Joseph was fleeing for his life. He’d already taken blows to his bare shoulder and his back. The Short Shields had him marked. They knew his face. His torso had been photographed. He was the prize stag in the herd. ‘Get the one without the shirt!’ He ducked and dived between the people and cars as lightly as he’d done when he’d played tag with other boys between the orchard sheds and trees when he was young. His life had led to this. He had a plan: to find an open car and force his way, between the springs and cushions of the rear seats, into the boot. Where else was there to hide or go? The URCU had the soapies bottled up, their clothing steeped in green, reduced by Grief from revellers to snivellers.
Joseph had tried two dozen doors before — exactly this — he stumbled over Rook. He recognized the face, the cough, the leather jacket that he wore. He sat Rook up. ‘What’s up?’ he said, too dull to find dramatic words. Rook did not speak. His eyes were shut. One ear was full of water. The other one was stained with Grief. He was unconscious now. The best of luck to him. To be unconscious is God’s way of settling the lungs. He did not fight the inner or the outer air. He breathed more shallowly, more evenly, less frequently. Joseph placed him with his back against the wheel arch. Rook’s head and chest fell forward. His diaphragm forced heavy air into his upper lungs. By chance, his breathing pipes were tipped at just the angle for recovery. Joseph beat him on the back. The blows expelled damp sods of air.
‘Come on. Wake up,’ said Joseph. ‘I want my money now.’ He slapped Rook’s face. The colour of his cheeks had turned from green to pink.
‘Give. Give,’ he said. ‘You’ve had your bonfire. Now you’ve got to pay for it.’
Rook was peaceful now. Too comfortable to wake and speak. He made a noise that found a passage through his nose. It was the noise that athletes make when marathons are run. It was a snore of restitution. It repaid the debt of oxygen. Joseph’s slaps and blows — who knows? — had saved Rook’s life.
Joseph had no time to spare. He heard the heavy boots close in, the cries of pain, the lifeless impacts made by sticks on men and cobblestones on shields. This place of safety by the car’s front wheel could not last long. He tugged on Rook’s coat. It would not shift, not speedily at least. He took his ‘nife’ from his trouser pocket. He placed it at Rook’s stooped back. He did not say a word, but opened up the leather purse of Rook, along the jacket’s backbone seam, the woollen shirt beneath, as if this were no man but some slain goat. The knife cut from the inside out. It meant no harm to Rook. He was not hurt, just robbed. Joseph pulled off the left half of the jacket and the shirt, by the sleeves. And then the right half too. He checked the inner pockets, found the outline of Rook’s wallet, and would have cut the pocket out, but Short Shields were too close. He stooped and ran again — and as he ran he pulled the two half-jackets with their half-shirt linings on his arms and round his shoulders. His leather jacket had a stripe of flesh down the centre of his back. His muscled torso had only partly disappeared. He looked like some stage-punk, prepared for surgery.