Arcadia by Jim Crace Page B

wherever they could find a place amongst the dozing market baskets or at the back of bars. They were not rich. Of
course they were not rich. How could they be on gleanings? But they survived, sustained by charity, by the prospect of Em’s sister chancing by, by the certainty that the city would provide
abundantly, by the sense of awe they felt at being at the centre of such a boisterous web, by the dislocated optimism of those whose lives are trembling at the gate.
    Was Victor happy? So far, yes. He fed contentedly. He slept. His domain was his mother’s lap. Her nipples were his toys. But then the muscles strengthened in his neck and arms. He grew
bored with suckling. He wanted to lift his head to look around at all the movement and the colours in the streets. He fell back startled from the breast when he heard Em calling out, ‘Lady,
Lady!’ or when the hubbub of the crowd seemed more eloquent and urgent than the beating of his mother’s heart. He found he liked those moments best when he was upright on his
mother’s knee and she was belching him, separating the suckling oxygen from the milk that he had swallowed and which was causing jousting mayhem in his gut. She had one hand flat on his
chest, supporting him. The other tapped and played a gentle bongo on his back between his fragile shoulderblades. Or else she beat her tune, not with her fingers on his back, but with the cracked
and greying candle stub which she would only light again when she had somewhere to call home. Her son’s short neck was creased in tidal ripples of baby fat. His mouth was hanging open,
waiting for the upward storm of warm and milky wind. Some passing men made clicking noises with their tongues for him, or comic, pouting kisses with their lips. Sometimes a dog ran by. Or older
children. Always the market offered entertainment to the child – a porter with teetering crates of onions on his wooden cart, an argument, a snatch of song, some shoving between friends, and,
almost constantly by day, the casual, tangled flow and counter-flow of citizens in search of romance, fortune, pleasure, food. At times the street around the parasol was quiet and empty, but then
Victor found a butterfly to watch or sharp-edged sunlight winking on a broken neck of glass or the flexing toes of his own feet, or spilt water – parting, joining in its halting, bulbous
progress through the cobblestones.
    Once he’d belched he would have stayed most happily, his head laid back upon Em’s chest, his hands encased in hers, a dozing spectator. But there was money to be earned. His
mother’s breasts were Victor’s lathe, his workbench, the family spinning wheel. Em put her small son to her breasts. She put his mouth onto her nipple and she held him there, whispering
and pigeoning into his ear to make him calm. It was a hopeless task. A growing child will not stay calm and supine all day long. A child is put upon this earth to raise its head and stretch its
legs and grab. Em sang him lullabies. She told him country tales. She reminisced about her husband, Victor’s dad. But Victor did not care. The docile, suckling infant grew less tractable. His
stomach became distended and would not clear with belches. His testicles and inner thighs became encrusted with a bitter rash, its scaling plaques and lesions made angrier by the baby’s water
and his stools. He cried when he was wrapped inside his swaddle clothes. He thrashed his legs and pushed his fists into himself.
    Em knew what should be done. A nappy rash is not the plague. It only takes a little air, some white of egg, and patience for the rash to clear. She begged an egg and broke it into the half-skin
of a discarded orange. She put tiny poultices of orange pith, glistening with albumen, onto her son’s sore thighs and testicles. She stretched his legs and let him lie, naked from the waist
down, across her lap. The sun and breeze were free to sink and curl between his legs. Young Victor –