He found low staging for a stool. He found the brandy bottle, amongst the liquid feeds and aphid sprays. He spat again. He spat for spring. And then he filled his mouth with brandy from the bottle. Its fierceness numbed his mouth. He drank more manically, determined to gulp down the medicine, the sleeping draught. He held the bottle up against the light. It looked like melted beeswax. He took his medicine until the brandy was lower than the bottle’s label. Enough to make him moan and chatter to himself in unison with window frames. Victor was neither hot nor cold. He was the temperature of plants. He pressed his nose upon the glass, staring out at first towards the outskirts and the hills. There were no stars, just damp and glass and greenhouse algae acting as a screen against the night. He heard the fire sirens at his back. He turned to see the flames, the incandescent trees, the unprecedented sight of car lights on the market cobblestones. At first he could not place the flames. He could not place them geographically or in time. The oblongs of greenhouse glass made the distance two-dimensional. It was a film, a flaring, fading early colour film, the print besmirched by water, algae, fumes. Here was a scene brought on by sleeplessness and drink. Here was a scene that was familiar. He dared not blink. He had to concentrate to bring the memory back. The flames were old and watery. But, at his bidding, people had appeared, and sound. There was an old straw hat. The smell of bread and urine. The disconcerted snufflings of sleepers on bare boards. The sirens were his mother’s screams, the screams of Princesses on fire, of people separated from their homes, the screams of rain-soaked timbers made dry and hot too swiftly by the fire.
He drank more brandy, finished what was left. He stood and looked more closely at the market flames. He wiped the glass clean with his dressing-gown. The film was three-dimensional at last. The flames waved and beckoned to him — the ancient and dramatic call to warmth that is so eloquent at night. The fires seemed close when viewed through dewy glass, so close, he thought, that they could have been candles mounted on the roof-top parapet. Victor blinked the candles into distant fire. He sent them off. He brought them close again. Now he saw his mother in the glass, packing her possessions in a canvas bag and strapping her only child across her chest with a shawl. She threw some grains of maize across the doorstep of their country home. She lit a single candle and left it — for too short a time — standing at the centre of their wooden table. She closed the door.
When Victor focused once again, his mother’s table was alight. The door was orange flame. She could not keep the fire away. She could not stop the timbers cracking. She called for Victor. He was gone. She went down on her hands and knees. She could not breathe. She curled up in the smoke and flame. She did not know if he was safe or dead. They’d find her well-cooked body in the morning, the rain its undertaker. They’d find a blanket for her, a morgue, a box. They’d give her earthen eyelids in the common grave. Victor blinked the fire back into candle. He blinked up tears, but then old men are used to having water in their eyes without good cause. It’s part of growing old. Besides, the heating of the greenhouse let out fumes, and fumes are just as sure as sentiment to make men weep.
By now the helicopters were aloft. Their searchlights left Victor in no doubt — once he had wiped the past away and focused on the night — that there was trouble in the Soap Market. The helicopters sobered him. They were a match for brandy and self-pity and for the apprehension that he felt. He left the orange bulbs to burn. He chanced the rooftop wind and made his way to bed. For once he slept quite readily. He did not dream or need to wake to urinate. When dawn came, his body on the mattress formed an arthritic question mark, his right ear on the pillow, his torso curved, his knees and legs brought up for comfort. His question was — Why do I feel so scorched and dry?
It was New Year’s Day and — not for the first time in his life — Victor was plagued by an anxiety which he could not name. Who’s dead? What’s dead? he asked himself. What could the fires and helicopters mean? He had a hollow in his chest that only getting out of bed could displace, that only going out into the town and seeing for himself could fill. He tried to conjure up his mother’s face, but failed. He saw his aunt. But more than Aunt he saw the market as it was when he was young and poor. He sat cross-legged upon the ground. A tray of eggs at his feet. There were no customers. It seemed that this imagined market was piled with produce — but, when he looked more closely, the sacks and bags, the spuds and watermelons, turned to corpses. There were a thousand bodies on the ground. The cobblestones were corpses too, as still and stiff as graveyard flesh, as implacable as eggs.
So it was, when Anna came on New Year’s Day to rehearse his duties for the week, Victor was prepared.
‘You’ve heard the news,’ she said. He shook his head. She showed the morning papers and the police reports. Joseph straddled the front page, ‘The Market Rioter’. And naturally there was an unnamed corpse. A man of middle age, stripped naked to the waist, softened, bruised and split like an old banana by the beating he’d received.
‘I had a dream like this,’ he said. ‘I dreamed this death.’
‘It’s not a dream,’ she said, unnerved that he should mention dreams. ‘It’s pandemonium downstairs. The phones are smoking — traders, press, the police, the architects, the building contractors. Arcadia will have to wait a day. I don’t think we can go in with clearance gangs until they’ve buried that poor man at least.’ She pointed at the sub-heading, ‘Man Dead in City Violence’.
‘Condolences are due, perhaps,’ he said, ‘if he has family. Please organize a cheque for me to sign.’
She made a note. ‘It’s all in hand,’ she said, ‘though there are problems to be solved.’
‘Please specify.’
‘Such as, the market stalls. They are all destroyed. What will the traders use tomorrow when the car-park site opens? The city must be fed.’
Victor did not seem alarmed. It was his view that merchants have to cope. They did not need their trestles to do trade. They were the sort who’d sell fruit off the floor or from their vans and be content so long as money bruised their thighs. He might have been alarmed, perhaps, if fire and riot had reduced Arcadia to rubble on the ground. Yet no damage to Arcadia was done, or could be done. Not for a while at least. The riot was benign as riots go. A riot on an empty building site could do no harm.
He shrugged at Anna, as if to say, Don’t worry me with trifles. But what he said was this: ‘It would be diplomatic, don’t you think, if I went down to show my face?’ The shrug was meant to hide his awkwardness.
‘Down where?’
‘To the Soap Market. Where else?’ And then, ‘I feel I ought to demonstrate concern. But privately, you see. No need for fuss. Or press. I simply want to satisfy myself, with my own eyes, that all is well.’
It was the early afternoon when Victor’s black Panache was backed up to the entrance to Big Vic. ‘The old man’s going out,’ the chauffeur had been told. He hardly had the time to air the car, to polish off the dust. Security held the rubber-neckers back as Victor came out of the lift, with Anna at his heels. Her new winter coat was black and long and astrakhan. His coat was alpine wool, and grey and fifteen years of age. They knew how cold it was on New Year’s Day, and how the wind could grip the knees and thighs, how rain could bounce off paving stones, how colds and rheumatism were unforbearing muggers on the street.