This was the chance for Joseph, obscured and dramatized by the gelid mists of dusk which pirouetted on the platforms with the sweating vapours of the train, to take his work shirt off and parade for them along the station like a boxer, bare and muscular and young. He’d rest the produce boxes on his head and steady them with his arms raised. He felt his body looked its best that way, his muscles stretched, his stomach as flat and hairless as a slate. Besides, in such a pose, his face was hidden by his arms, and Joseph knew his face was not well made. The noses and the foreheads at the glass were powdered, painted, sweet-smelling. Their shapes were good, symmetrical, each ear adorned with rings, the hair poised for a weekend in the city. Joseph’s nose and forehead were not so ornamental, not ugly but uncouth through work and poverty and innocence. The corners of his mouth were cracked from sun and sweat. His nose was pitted from the scabs he’d picked. One central tooth was gone. One cheek was blemished by a birth-stain, cherry-coloured, cherry-shaped. His chin was far too heavy and his face too drawn to benefit from the thin moustache that he was growing. His was a rural face. But his body, give or take a scar or two, was smart enough for town. He dreamed of the day when he would press his own nose to the steamy glass and glide away on the Salad Bowl Express. He worked, saved his wages, sent for his On the Town suit, and planned his escapade.
He was not bright. He could not name exactly what it was he sought in town. But it was privacy. In town he’d sit inside a bar at noon, three-quarters full of drink, a woman on his arm, his lighter lifted to her cigarette, and no one there would know his name, or where he lived and worked, or who his family were, or how he coped when he was just a metre high at school, or that he had a magpie reputation there for theft. In town he’d flourish in the privacy of crowds, in the monkish cells of tenements, in streets. His neighbours would be strangers. They’d hardly nod. He’d be a mystery to them. They’d only know the things he chose to tell. And — safely, without fear of what the village folk would say — he could choose to tell his city neighbours lies. In any case, the truth of Joseph did not match the suit. He wore it for the first time on the Thursday evening — the day before Victor’s birthday lunch — over his khaki working shirt, his black field-boots, and helped to load the produce boxes on the Salad Bowl Express. The women pressed their perfect noses to the glass. This time he did not strip to show his working muscles. His suit was on parade. When the klaxon blew to mark the train’s departure, Joseph lifted his final load — a plastic travel-tank marked URGENT: LIVE FISH — and stowed it in the corner of the goods car which carried Victor’s name. And there Joseph stayed, as quietly as a slug in fruit, until the Salad Bowl Express set off for town. Smudge-suited, ticketless, naive, Rook’s ne’er-do-well migrated from the world of plants and seasons to the urban universe of make-and-take-and-sell.
He found a cigarette to smoke, and there was fruit for supper. His couchette was four sacks of spinach leaves. He could not shift the sliding door to urinate upon the line. Besides, he did not want some cousin’s tittle-tattle friend to look up from his hoe or spade to watch the train go by and catch a sight of Joseph hosing the dusk. He wanted just to disappear and be forgotten, not be remembered — immortalized — as the locomotive pisser in a village joke. But men have shallow, porous bladders which nag and leak. A shaking train is torture when they want to piss. Why suffer, Joseph thought. It crossed his mind to urinate onto the apples or the greens. But he had spent too many years attending to them in the fields to treat the crops like that. More fun, more logical, to add a little water to the fish. He unscrewed the cap which sealed the tank. He knelt, unzipped the trousers of his suit, and put his mushroom in the hole. The ten perch, used to hand-feeding with protein biscuits in Victor’s stock pool, gawped and butted at his penis end, but when his bladder got to work they fled into the cooler, blander depths.
Joseph found blander depths as well. He dozed until the countryside was gone and woke to find the last dregs of the night made watery by suburban lights. He shivered at the window of the goods car and looked for signs of poverty and waste, of power and indifference, of wealth and sex and violent energy, for signs of destiny. His eyes were sharp for tall and optimistic buildings, and tall and optimistic girls, for flashing neon lights and fancy cars. The suburbs, though, were fast asleep and, much like any habitation at that hour, showed little appetite for day. A few small cars were on the move, obeying the traffic lights and not the logic of the almost empty streets. A cyclist held the centre of a road. Once in a while, in houses and apartments, a curtain pattern was illumined from within by someone half asleep, and out of bed, and taking last night’s final piss or their first coffee of the day. The lights in rows of private shops fell squarely onto pavements; their goods were on display for cats and bats.
Joseph was struck by all the stillness of the city night. A country night is just as busy as the day, but here there were no trees to bend before the wind. The signposts did not move. The clouds — if they were racing through the sky — were doing so invisibly, blacked out by streetlamps, put out of sight by electric light. Rain fell like country rain, but underlit, theatrically. It could not soak into the earth. It slid down tiles. It skirted round the angles of each brick. It raced through gutters, dropped down pipes, consigned itself to drains, turned roadside conduits into streams with discarded snack packets as the sails of its racing dhows. It ducked through iron sumps. It under-navigated roads in airless culverts and joined the curling traffic of water below the town, where sewers emptied into sluices and sluices discharged their flood into much slower and more muscular arteries of water. And thence into the mains. And thence into the reservoir, the treatment plant, the aqueduct, the pipe, the tap, the coffee pot, and down the sink as giddy waste.
It took a simple mind like Joseph’s to wonder how it was that city rain was so enslaved. He was not bright enough to ask himself, as low-rise housing blocks and sleepy boulevards gave way to warehouses, shunting yards, high-rise offices, and morning’s curdy light, how he could hope to soak into the city’s ground, how he could stay afloat and unenslaved when so many young men, just like him, had been unfooted, swept away, down gutters, into drains, by the careless rapids and the all-embracing floods of city life. He did not have the time or temperament to care.
His train arrived at dawn. The van doors were thrown back by porters. It was easy for Joseph — much used to being inconspicuous — to merge in with the workers there, three trays of lettuce balanced expertly on his head, and make his entry into town. And then? What then? He put the trays of lettuce with all the other produce in a market van. When it drove away through early breakfast traffic slower than a country cart, slower than a thaw, he followed it, through streets more futile and more aimless than even he had hoped for, to the Soap Market. Of course. Where else would such a hidebound country boy end up?