Arcadia Read Online Free PDF Page B

midnight, or five to midday.
There was a bottle of muscatino on the bar and strangely, promisingly, three glasses, as if another woman had just left, or was expected soon. Or, perhaps, the glass was waiting there for
Joseph.
    When the parcel with the suit arrived, Joseph had cut the picture from the catalogue and put it in the breast pocket as if to equip his clothing with a pedigree and, more than that, an
aspiration. The model’s empty, upturned palm, the drama of the barmaid’s wrist caught by the strong hand of the man, exactly matched Joseph’s notion of the casual spontaneity of
city life where day and night were all the same, where drink and wealth and women were within easy reach. What else was there to fill his mind each day? Trenching orchards, driving tractors,
mucking fields, cutting cabbages, boxing plums was not the work to satisfy a youth like Joseph. The muscles that had hardened in the fields had made him vain. And vanity is stifled in the
countryside – the rain, the overalls, the solitary work for little pay, make sure of that.
    The only chance he had to flex and strut was at the station every cropping day when he went to load the produce onto trains. Mostly they were goods and freight trains, passing slowly through
soon after dawn or late at night, and Joseph’s vanity hardly noticed in the dark. But once a week, at 7.10 on Thursday evenings, the Salad Bowl Express, as it was called, stopped at the
station with passengers weekending in the city, on shopping sprees or love affairs or binges, or just touring the sights. On Thursday evenings rich women and their daughters pressed their foreheads
and their noses to the sleeper-carriage glass to watch the men load on the trays of strawberries or cress or endives, fresh for the busy weekends of hotels and restaurants. Some passengers lowered
the Pullman windows to buy fruit in cornets of twisted leaves from country girls whose own weekend did not begin until the moon came up on Saturday.
    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