Arcadia by Jim Crace Read Free Book Online Page B

expeditious every instant of the day; dollars became lira, became marks; commodities and futures bobbed and ducked in value,
unobserved; screens conversed in numbers on fibre-optic cables like gossips at a garden fence. Above, a restless matrix with its lights like traffic headlamps in the rush sent out its electronic
information into town. The stock report. The city news. A flood in Bangladesh. A birthday greeting for the boss. A puff for Fuji Film. Traffic junctions to avoid. Fly Big Apple – Fly Pan
Am.
    Rook reached security at last. The automatic doors swept him into processed air. He showed his pass. He tightened his tie at his collar, and summoned the old man’s private lift. While he
waited for it to fall the twenty-seven storeys of Big Vic, he picked himself a fine bouquet of plastic branches from the gleaming, sapless, perfect foliage of the atrium. He did not have to tug or
cut. Each leaf, each twig and branch, was fixed by sleeve joints. The real, reconstituted bark was stuck to moulded trunks with velcro pads. The soil was soil with nothing much to do, except to
fool the people of the town.

5
    R OOK PUT the final touches to the room, while the waitresses and kitchen staff prepared the settings and the food for Victor’s lunch. His buoyancy
had not been punctured by the tightening of his tie, by the dull proprieties of going back to work. He’d dropped the scuffed and battered pyramid of cakes on Anna’s desk and simply
said, in response to her surprise, ‘I had to fight for these!’
    Anna asked no questions. She simply filled her lungs with air and closed her eyes and said, ‘Such gallantry!’ Her persiflage was sweet. It was a tease. It was the kind of irony that
Anna knew would work on men. Men were clockwork toys when it came to love and sex. You wound them up, you faked a phrase or two; they marched, they danced, they beat their drum. It was her plan to
fake some satisfaction, if she had the chance, with Rook. Why not? He was not married. She was now divorced. She was only older than him by a year. He was not short of cash and might have fun if he
could spend his money and his time with her.
    Rook was an oddball, yes. But oddballs had their appeal for Anna. She liked the stimulation and surprise of men who lived beyond the grid. She liked Rook’s secrecy. She was not fooled by
his sardonic ways. What kind of man, with power such as his, would spend the morning on the streets and come back laden with squashed cakes and a bunch of plastic leaves? A man worth knowing, she
was sure. So Rook and Anna left it brewing in the air that their flirtations would bear fruit, and soon, before it was too late, before the heightened passion of the day, its sap, its colours and
its scents had drained and dispersed for good. Let Victor have his birthday first. Let champagne loosen tongues and dilate hearts. Then let Rook and Anna stay on late, to sort out papers, say, to
tidy up, to joust among themselves as the evening and the office blinds came down. They’d spoken not a word, but they were old and wise enough to comprehend the promise and the charge of
‘Such gallantry!’
    Rook took the plastic branches, a roll of sticky tape, some string, into the office storeroom and began to fix them to the back-rest of an antique wooden chair. The moulded twig ends protruded
through the spindles of the chair and made the decoration amateurish, and rushed. Rook tried to bite off lengths of string so that he could tie the twig ends back. But the string was just as tough
and artificial as the greenery. He searched the shelves for scissors – and then remembered the knife he’d picked up in the tunnel, the flick-knife that the clumsy, birthmarked mugger in
that too-large suit had dropped.
    The too-large suit! The thought of it, ill-fitting, grimy, badly made, was all it took to solve the mystery of the second picture Rook had found amongst the debris in the pedestrian underpass.
So that was what he’d