RED MARKET
Sheila Armstrong
Please – no soiled goods.
Items in good working order only.
Clothing should be washed and ironed.
Contact Agatha for more details.
THE MEN COME WITH THEIR VANS early on Saturday morning and dislodge piles of furniture like undigested chunks of bone. The pavement outside the building gradually fills up, becoming a child’s playground of tables and chair sets. The workers manoeuvre a set of bedframes – not quite a pair, but laid out top to tail they almost fit each other; a few wooden slats are missing from one but they can be easily replaced – €20 discount at most. The men unload a purple futon with beaded embellishments on the arms depicting the Virgin Mary with pink cheeks and a baby-blue shawl. The sky above is crisp and clear so far and the market will be busy this weekend; Christmas is only a week away.
The large, high-ceilinged warehouse echoes as boxes are brought in and unpacked, but as the room begins to fill up with people the noise becomes tighter and more contained. Thirteen off-brand messenger bags are carried in on a sack barrow and laid out on waiting a table. A woman untangles a pile of semi-silk scarves and hangs them from the rafters above her stall. She fills two metal racks with wedding dresses in shades ranging from grey smoke and eggshell to ivory and alabaster. A prized evening suit, made entirely out of snakeskin, is hung on a hanger above a doorframe; a man sets out a sign that reads no time wasters. Beneath it, carved out of dark wood, a chest-high statue of Freddy Mercury preens, mouth open in eternal song.
A shallow podium sits at the centre of the hall with a red tin box chained to the floor beside it. On a folding table, a stack of bidding papers sits beside a display only sign. A stout, serious woman, Marci by her nametag, places a striped throw across the podium, and arranges a set of Le Creuset roasting trays that had come in after the closure of an old café on Clanbrassil Terrace. Beside them, on a chest-high railing, she places a particularly nice pair of designer trousers that mimic the falling fabric waves of a skirt. She straightens a selection of gold necklaces on a display rack and secures the chains at the back with a cable tie.
Marci steps back to survey the scene and stretches her index fingers and thumbs, bringing them together to make a frame. She checks her watch and calls to her twin daughters, who are restless and bickering already; their classes finished for the Christmas holidays on Friday and she dreads the thought of two whole weeks off school. Finally, after conferring with a few others, Marci directs a pair of young men to wheel in an antique diving suit, complete with weighted boots. The suit is arranged on the left side of the podium; the centre is left bare. The helmet is tarnished, but the copper gleam is visible underneath, and the air around it tastes like blood.
The sun crests the roofs and the final shutters go up as Aindriú, the building manager, arrives with his teenage nephew. He shows the acne-scarred boy around the market, then sends him up to the office overlooking the open plain of the warehouse to set up his computers. The boy trips on the first of the perforated metal steps, but his uncle is kind enough to pretend not to notice. Below the office, white sheets are whipped off stalls and strong coffee is brewed in a large, scaled pot, and the hard scent of it takes the edge off the morning.
Half an hour later, a blue Berlingo takes the turn off the main road slowly, letting a pair of walkers pass in front of it, even though the pedestrian light is blinking red. The van backs up to the side of the building; parking is not yet a problem, but by noon the street will be wedged with cars and bicycles and electric scooters. George gets out and stretches his legs before walking over to a group of yawning stallholders; for the occasion, he has agreed to put on a red suit and false beard and sit outside on a marble bench. He pokes a friend in his over-hanging gut, after my job, eh, but the movement is familiar and expected, so the man dodges the full force of the jab. They laugh for a few minutes together and briefly swap stories before turning to unload the contents of the van.
The young girl’s elbows are bound together behind her back. Her shoulder blades are flattened like the wings of a moth, and her ankles are tied to her shoulders. The men carry her to the podium under Marci’s direction, and the girl is placed belly-down in the centre, in between the diving helmet and the roasting trays. The bungee cords wrapping her body are admired – you never know you need them until you really need them, isn’t that always the way? – and a few people stop to pluck the green-striped elastic out from the ridges of her skin to test the bounce. The flesh beneath them is white but blood rushes in as soon as the pressure is lifted; they snap back into a slightly different position and begin new ridges. Her thighs are held in place with heavy ratchet straps, bookended with metal clasps that are rusting around the edges. The orange bands are the strongest, the label advises, grey for medium-sized burdens, and blue for restraining small objects, 10 kilos max. The girl expands her ribcage as far as it will go to test the chafe of the binding.
George stretches and prepares to go upstairs to change into his outfit. He pauses on the steel steps up to the office, considers for a moment, and returns to the girl on the podium. His eyesight isn’t getting any better – if you’re not in, you can’t win, isn’t that it? – so he fills out a slip of paper with his name, address and bid and places it into the red box. The girl raises her head into a stiff smile for him as he walks away. She opens her mouth but only a dry, croaking sound comes out: her vocal cords have been numbed with an anaesthetic spray – customs and excise are difficult at the best of times.
*
More people begin to trickle in as the market officially opens and the crisp Saturday lengthens towards lunchtime; five, ten, twenty, and suddenly there is no more time for talking, only business. The crowds roil and flow.
A woman, stout and greying, roams the second-hand clothing aisles, searching for conversation; isn’t this lovely, who would give this away, are you here every week. Her feet are too swollen for anything but house slippers and her cardigan sleeves bulge with tissues; clean and folded in the right sleeve, used and crumpled in the left. She is deaf in one ear and announces this at every opportunity, turning her head to one side like a sparrow when she speaks. She stops to lift the lid off the largest roasting tray on the podium and look into its red-stained belly. The girl shifts amiably on her stomach to make room, but the woman has no interest in flesh today, only company. Besides, the girl’s olive skin is pale from the weeks it has been occluded in the journey, but not light enough for the red market.
Outside, imitation snow is pumped out of a machine into an area that has been cordoned off for children to flutter and pose beside life-sized cut-outs of frozen cartoon princesses. In his costume, George is doling out fistfuls of chocolate coins; knee-sitting’s out of the question these days, he winks to a watching parent who is straining to look casual. Christmas is in the air and the outdoor stalls sparkle with an assortment of angels, wooden snowflakes that smell like cedar and plastic candy canes that can be personalised with a loved one’s name.
For lunch, there is winter vegetable soup from a tureen, €5 per cup, and sourdough bread rolls €2 extra. A mobile falafel van pulls up between a solid shampoo retailer and a CBD oil stall. On a windowsill, a platter of yesterday’s pastries begins to sag in the centre; a man feeds a homemade raisin flapjack to his dog. There is watered-down mulled wine and a brazier for roasting chestnuts; the white flesh crumbles between the fingers of children, chalky and sweet.
The afternoon brings a heavy shower of rain that straddles the market for almost two hours. An awning is rolled out, but the majority of commerce moves inside. Condensation drips against the windows and the smell of wet wool becomes unbearable. The few new shoppers that appear do so only for shelter, and make repeated loops around the indoor stalls to kill time before the rain ends. Some stop to admire the girl on the podium. A student nurse fingers a foot-long scar that crests across the girl’s exposed abdomen. Pity, she thinks, the left is usually the stronger. Marci opens her palms in a helpless motion when questioned; it is difficult to get undamaged goods these days, but the stitches are neat and old; besides, the girl is in good health. The student considers as she does one more loop around the market, but she returns to put in a bid for the other kidney; her uncle has been in dialysis for years and is running out of time.
*
Evening crawls in, but closing time is jagged and uneven, depending on how cold each vendor’s feet are and what is waiting at home for dinner. Sheets are stretched over piles of kitchen utensils and bootleg DVDs; bumbags are emptied and sales totted up. The outdoor stalls are stripped bare, warned by the earlier downpour and the wet melt of cardboard on the pavement. Inside, the last browser, oblivious to the falling stutter of background hum, finishes a lazy lap around the few remaining undraped stalls.
Marci calls to her daughters to come in from the cold, and goes up the stairs to collect her things from the office. While they wait, the twins paint each other’s nails with rainbow glitter polish; they are on the index finger of the bound girl’s second hand by the time their mother returns and shoos them away. Marci taps a syringe and inserts it into the girl’s left flank, massaging the skin in concentric circles, and her eyelids begin to droop. The twins play a twisting, flailing game with colourful scarves, draping them around their heads. Marci switches off the radio as the three of them leave the warehouse, and the web of fairy lights goes dark.
Aindriú comes by to pick up his nephew and lock up for the day, calling a low halloooo across the darkened hall to be sure there is nobody left in the shadows. The boy averts his gaze from the girl on the podium as he clatters down the stairs and crosses the room to meet him. Aindriú turns the keys of the front and back doors, rattling them to be sure, then loops a thick padlock around the front gates. He drops his nephew home, but first they stop at the chipper for a battered sausage and a shared portion of chunky chips.
At dusk, starlings begin to flit to an ancient assortment of nests that sit just under the eaves; the dark smudges of mud and straw are renewed by the birds every year. Inside the silent building, the space heaters flick on, storing up warmth for the morning. The girl’s skin begins to goose-pimple under her own white sheet. Rust-coloured urine trickles down the inside of her right thigh and seeps to the edge of the podium; it will have dried completely by morning.
At midnight the building shifts as a teenager slams his fist against the corrugated iron at the back. His not-quite-girlfriend laughs; the weed has made her lightheaded although she can usually hold herself together better than he can. The boy rattles at the door-chain in a half-hearted way and sits down on a rusted pink tricycle that has remained unsellable through the long, wet summer. The girl becomes hysterical at the sight of his knees folded up to his shoulders, and she staggers against the side of the building, gasping with laughter. He manages to reach the pedals and cycles, squeaking, for a metre or two, saluting her as she slides down to her bottom, taking shrieking in-breaths and covering her eyes. He gets off the bike, managing to sit on his own testicles in the process, and she laughs harder, before dropping her cold fingers into his trousers to massage the injured pieces of him. He quivers with pain but lets her continue; his mother has stayed at home every night this week and hates the sight of her for no reason he can decipher. Inside the building, the girl’s painted fingernails catch the rising of the moon and glitter like a galaxy reflected in a dark pool of water.
Around five in the morning, a fox slinks its way through the narrow railings and makes a leisurely circuit of the outdoor area. It stops to dig a shallow hole in a pile of the imitation snow, a shock of blue-white powder under the low, orange clouds. The fox’s fur is oil-slick from the earlier rain and it screams frustration at the faint scent of a younger male that had passed by a few days before. The banshee call causes the girl to shift beneath the surface of wakefulness, but some faint kindness keeps her under.
Just before dawn, a streak-chested owl plunders the starling nests, flitting from hatchling to hatchling, pulling out grey tufts of nesting feathers and plucking red fibre from their breastbones. The new CCTV system catches the display on night-vision camera and the footage will go briefly viral online a month later as an example of nature’s brutality; Aindriú’s nephew will be able to enhance the video to the point that the quick darting of the owl’s beak becomes clear, a yellow needlepoint on the end of a darkened hook.
*
An hour after dawn on Sunday, the first van pulls up outside the gates again with more items for sale. It unloads a set of paired futons, two black bags of clothes for sorting and a stack of 1950s pornography magazines. Aindriú is late – his cat had woken him early and he had fallen back into a heavy sleep – but he appears with the keys in the time it takes the delivery men to smoke two cigarettes. More vans appear and restocking begins in earnest. The carved wooden birdhouses have been particularly popular; labelled authentic Bavarian oak but really made of plywood cast-offs from a workshop down the road.
By the time the lights come on in the building, the girl’s breath is a slow wheeze; the stretching of her arms behind her back has spread out her lungs into flattened slabs, and each inflation is an effort. White foam corners her mouth as white sheets whip off the stalls, and she has defecated on herself. Marci yawns as she walks the aisles between stalls, aiming a bottle of Febreze above her head and letting out spurts every couple of seconds. She notices the foul smell as she passes the podium and thinks for a moment – sure there’s only the rest of the day to get through – and an extra layer of lavender-scented mist falls on the strapped-down figure.
The crowds are slower this morning; the initial panicked rush of the weekend has eased. The first sale of the day is a man’s designer jacket, extra wide at the shoulders. The left-hand side of the jacket is flecked with white hairs from the previous owner’s terrier. There are a pair of reading glasses in the front pocket and a handful of glucose sweets, but the buyer will not notice until he tries it on for a friend’s commitment ceremony in February.
There is an outflow of people for Mass before 11; a skeleton crew is left to mind the stock. Bartering is suspended under strict instructions; prices are firm in the hands of caretakers. Taking advantage of the lull, small sheaves of money are folded and coins changed for notes. In the distance, the church bell sings out, mimicked by the tolling of the Angelus on the battered radio.
A part-time wigmaker arrives around lunchtime. He had seen the market on a friend’s social media feed, but the girl’s hair is shorter than is appeared in the picture and curly besides. It would brighten and smooth with some shea butter, but the lack of care shown in the shipping is annoying enough for him to leave, disappointed, without placing a bid. He pauses to look at bird’s nest of cables and dislodges a Wii controller and a disembowelled Xbox. His eldest son is showing an interest in computers, and a project could be just the thing to make him forget about the beer. His fingers trace wires, matching female to male, HDMI to SMRT. He presses his lips against an old N64 game to blow out the dust and the wet warmth of his spittle settles on the copper bars of connection.
Buried in box of tchotchkes, a set three of black minstrels in miniature with white eyes and swollen red slugs for lips. The musicians stand together in bright blue suits on a heavy plaster base, leaning out from a central point like the fronds of a plant. One bares white teeth at an old-fashioned stand microphone, another’s cheeks bulge around a trombone, while the third grips a double bass between his knees. A dark-skinned child fingers their jet-black, rounded hair; his mother slaps his hand away and drags him into the next room to measure his feet against a pair of slate-grey patent school shoes. The boy stops to stare instead at the Tupperware containers filled with penny sweets – liquorice, cola bottles, red jellies and gobstoppers.
At the podium, nobody has been brave enough to try the antique diving helmet on, despite Marci’s circus-like urgings. An installation artist, having seen it advertised on the market’s website, comes by just to inspect it, stepping around the girl’s bound ankles to get a better look. He pulls open the hinge with two fingers; the glass of the viewing pane is clouded with trapped underwater breath. But he has been anxious all week and the thought of actually bidding makes his throat tighten, so he doesn’t ask about the price and leaves instead, furious with himself. A week later, he will wake gasping in the night, having dreamt his skull had been forced up into the helmet, collapsed and become malleable, like a cuttlefish.
*
At the end of the day, the pile of porn magazines is picked up by a long-haired youth in a corduroy jacket; he likes the idea of papering the walls of his band’s practice space with breasts and penises and dark tufts of body hair. The band members will rotate in and out due to a fractious lead singer, and each will add adornments to the walls; sharpie moustaches, boot marks, and palm-blood from a snapped guitar string.
Come six o’clock, and the girl’s chest has almost stilled. Marci bends to rest the back of her hand against her cheek and raises a small makeup mirror in front of the girl’s mouth to check her breath. Moving briskly, she opens the red tin box chained to the podium, and her two young daughters help to count out the slips of paper into piles, while Aindriú’s nephew tallies the online interest from the upper office. This is the first year the market has accepted web bids; a few stakeholders were uncertain, but the offers have increased exponentially and the security questions seem have filtered out most of the time wasters.
The corpse settles and sighs as Marci removes the glittering nail varnish with white spirits, exasperated by her daughters, but feeling a gentle warmth for them all the same. Georg sweeps the boot-scuffed mess of fake snow back into a pile and has just finished hoovering it up when Aindriú returns from dropping his nephew home. Together, they go inside, hoist the girl’s body up the stairs and into the office for the final tally:
The organs have performed well, as expected, like an air fryer in Aldi! Marci jokes to Aindriú.
George has missed out on the corneas, but there has been a stroke of luck – two people have bid the same amount, and if Marci contacts them each will likely overbid again, sensing the closeness of seeing.
The girl was young, so her eggs were in demand, but the winning bid is from a fertility clinic that buys up the entire stock, although an undiagnosed case of polycystic ovary syndrome means that the eggs will underperform; three couples will weep in the night after the news is broken.
There is low demand for blood at the moment, as supplies are healthy, so hers will be drained and set aside in plastic blood-bags. In two months, a pile-up on the M50 will upset the delicate rhizome of the donation system, but it will be too late; 42 days is the shelf-life for human blood.
*
The lights in the building stay on late into Sunday night, pressing against the office windows, black shadows passing behind the frosted glass like inverted exclamation marks. Finally, the strange alchemy of flesh to coin is completed and the packages are wrapped and set aside. The numbers are totted up and divided, and divided again. A small sum of money is earmarked to be transferred back along the weaving path of the Berlingo, the shipping container, across the continent and back into a small village where two brothers will now go to school and a mother will weep every night for ten years until her heart clogs and falls to pieces while she is crossing a busy road.
In the morning, the carcass will be put in a net and anchored in the river – a small tributary of the Liffey, but hip-height in places – where bacteria and fish will whittle it down to a loose pile of flesh and bones. The pulp will be boiled in caustic soda to dissolve any remaining meat, before the marrow is extracted for later use. Sunlight is best for removing the yellowish tint from the bones, but the weather has turned foul again, so a pair of UV lamps will be used instead, and the windows of the upstairs office will be taped over with bin bags. The bones will cure and whiten in a week, and a quick polish with the finest sandpaper will make them shine.
The skeleton will be sold to a medical school where it will be reassembled and strung onto a nylon wire frame. It will sit in the back of a classroom; students will draw eyelashes on it and pose it with its hands on its hips. Eventually, the metal wires in place of tendons and ligaments will rust and the bones will come loose. The skeleton will be sent back to a new red market, in pieces, and after a scrub to clean away the scales and dust of the classroom, it will be threaded back together along new wires, fibreglass this time.
It will hang straight and true in the centre of the market, and it will shine.