Now the Woodgate district, once so lifeless and depressed, is as noisy and congested, lively and unsafe, as the Soap Market used to be. Merchandise is stacked in piles which challenge sense and physics — towers of potatoes, conifers of oranges, trembling with every passerby. The makeshift market flourishes on noise and filth and rain. It would even flourish — and it does — on poverty. ‘All Life is Here’, according to the market chauvinists, a claim no one would make for Arcadia, with its policed doors, its creed of Safety from the Streets, its ban on pimps and tramps and tarts and bag-ladies, street vendors, rascals, teenagers, drunkards, dogs. All life is here, despite the wind, the rain, the airborne dust, the litter at my feet.
The New Age meal I ate at the Buffers’ lunch has left me hungry still. I buy one sleepy pear. Its skin is bruised and weather-beaten like a ploughman’s face. The trader comes down from his perch on the bonnet of his car. He leaves a conversation with a friend, and his meal half-eaten on the metal, his teeth-marks in the boiled egg; the ripped white loaf, the plastic flask of over-sweetened coffee. He wipes my one pear on his trouser leg to take away the marks of harvesting. He pirouettes it in a paper bag. He twists the paper bag a pair of ears. He takes my cash. I take the fruit. I’m free to eat it when I want. I eat it now. My chin is wet. I cannot walk and eat efficiently. I stand back from the crowd, against a wall between a bistro and an odd-job shop to watch the man in cellophane cause mayhem with the cars. I cannot say where I prefer to eat, Soap Two, Fat Vic. The prospect of them both seduces me. I’m free while there is sap inside my legs to make my choice. I am not Invulnerable. Thank God for that. I am not Victor and too old and dry to be at ease down here. He’ll have a book (perhaps) to celebrate his life. Arcadia. A statue, too. But all his pears, I guess, are brought by train and taxi to Big Vic. He takes life on a plate. He has a serviette. He cannot simply — as I do now — toss the sodden paper bag which held the pear to the ground and find a warming corner for himself.
There is a little sun which falls directly on my face, my shirt, the damaged pear. I eat it now. I eat it now. The eye, the core, the stalk are given to the pavement, and flattened by ten thousand feet, as everyone is flattened by the town when they are done, when they are waste.
The sun is fully out for just an instant. It is radiant, then it is gone. The blocking bollard which has kept the weather dry has moved before the wind. The time has come for it to rain. It’s hard and sudden as it always is in our city. It drizzles in the countryside but here the rain is bouncing berries on the roofs of cars. The squints and alleys cannot cope with this. They flood. They overflow. Their drains are blocked with cabbage leaves, handbills, discarded pith and peel. The pavements turn to green and slimy rinks of foliage. To walk on them is to gamble with your bones. What should we do but huddle underneath the awnings that are there, but gather in the doorways to the shops, or sit in cars, or seek refuge — and a drink — inside a bar?
I cannot quite escape the rain, despite the umbrella which my neighbour holds. My suit is sodden at the shoulder. My socks and shoes are wet. My forehead sweats with rain. The entertainment never ends. The weather is a ballet for the streets. But then there is a more substantial dancer too. Cellophane is kicking water in the air. He thinks we’re going to throw him coins for the show. He bows. And as he bows the rainbow arches up, connecting the old town and the new. It is a bridge beyond the wit of architects reflected in the glass of Big Vic and Arcadia. The rainbow relishes windows. There is no need to draw conclusions, though. We all know rainbows start and finish everywhere, that they are simply sun, shining from behind to trick the light from falling rain, if we look east in the middle afternoon towards the dealing shower of the day. They are not omens — but they are signs that it is safe to walk onto the streets again. The rain has almost done.
My face and eyes are wet. I have to frown and squint for focus as I pass between the glare and darkness, as I cross streets and circumscribe the puddles, as I avoid collisions with people and with cars. So many people with so many purposes. Too many people to know well.
I would not wish to be too grand for streets. To be removed from them is to lose the blessing of the multitude. The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows, it is said, by those who spend their lives in contemplation of their monuments, and those for whom the shadow life is better than the real. But most of us who live in cities die and take our shadows to the grave. We don’t outlive the masonry or glass. It’s said that great men have the grandest tombstones, too, and throw the longest shadows even after death. The cemeteries prove the truth in that. But I prefer to think that worms and damp and degradation are open-minded democrats which treat us all the same. We are all citizens at last. At least until we are all soil.
I make my mark upon the city, too. My living mark. I stretch my legs as best I can and set off slowly down the street. My rainy footprints on the pavement will soon dry, but footprints and the thousand sodden paper bags which held a thousand pears, the eyes, the cores, the stalks, the rinds of daily life, are more substantial — are they not? — than shadows. They swell the middens of the town.
There are people, wet and poor, who walk the pavements with a skip as if the puddles and the cracks are civic birthday gifts. And there are many whistlers around. My legs are old. That’s all that holds me back from skipping on the spot or kicking up a puddled loop of rain. My tongue’s kept busy by the scrap of pear skin lodged between my teeth. That’s all that stops me sucking in our city air, and whistling.