Arcadia Read Online Free PDF

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
    R OOK ’ 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