Days (29 page)

“Damn Master Sonny!” Miss Dalloway snaps. “Damn him, damn his brothers, damn the whole sorry lot of them! If they think they can get away with treating a loyal employee like this, they’ve got another think coming.”

“But we’ve lost.”

“Lost, Oscar?
Lost
? On the contrary. In the words of John Paul Jones” – Miss Dalloway is incandescent with righteous rage; her fury is awesome in its purity – “‘I have not yet begun to fight.’”

It is midday.

23

Seventh Avenue
: a street in New York City, part of which is nicknamed “Fashion Avenue” – also known as the “garment centre.”

12.00 p.m.

M
IDDAY FINDS
L
INDA
Trivett in Ties on the Blue Floor, rummaging through her handbag for her shopping list. She needs to find the catalogue serial number of the tie she wants to buy for Gordon, because the department has turned out to be too full of merchandise for her to track it down unaided. There are ties everywhere. Ties dangling like jungle lianas from wires suspended across the ceiling. Ties hanging on rotating stands. Ties knotted around the necks of torso mannequins. Ties snugly rolled in presentation boxes. Ties interleaved on the walls head to tail, like long, thin segments of a huge silky quilt. Ties snaking around pillars in candystripe swirls. A wilderness of ties, in which Linda has about as much chance of locating the one she wants as she does of locating a specific grain of sand in a desert.

Still, it is fun to look, and she has been looking for over quarter of an hour, roaming the aisles, running her fingers over the merchandise, admiring. Yes, letting Gordon go off on his own is the best thing she could have done. She would never have had this luxury to browse (and, of course, the tie would not be a surprise) were he still tagging along behind her. Without him she can wander where she wants and linger as long as she likes over any items that happen to catch her eye, free from the insistent, nagging pressure of his impatience. She misses him, really she does. She would love to be able to spend the entire day with him, because the taste of triumph is that much sweeter when shared with another, but she acknowledges that the temporary separation is for the best, and she suspects that, in the future, marital harmony will be best maintained if she and Gordon visit Days apart rather than together.

Wherever he is, she hopes he is safe and enjoying himself.

At last she unearths the slip of paper containing the serial numbers of the tie, the cherub carriage clock, and the other items on her shopping list. She approaches a nearby sales assistant.

“Excuse me, please. I’m looking for a particular –” She stops mid-sentence.

“A particular what, Madam?

Linda smiles. “Never mind. I’ve just found it.”

“Isn’t that always the way, madam?” says the sales assistant. “The moment the plumber arrives, the tap stops dripping.”

Linda laughs, thanks him, and goes over to the rack she spotted where, among others, hangs the coin-motif tie.

“Attention, customers.”

She glances up. How exciting. Another lightning sale. There was one only half an hour ago in Farm Machinery, and although a swift examination of the leaflet map showed Linda that she was four floors up and on the opposite side of the building from that department, she was tempted to make a dash for it all the same. Seeing other shoppers spin on their heels and head off, she felt a tug, an instinctive pull.
I could go too
, she thought.
I am part of the pack, I could run with them.
Fortunately she retained sufficient presence of mind to realise that her small, well-tended plot of garden at home was unlikely to be improved by the deployment of heavyweight agricultural equipment. Had the sale been in another department – any other department – she might well have gone.

She listens attentively.

“For the next five minutes there will be a twenty per cent reduction on all items in Ties. I repeat, for the next five minutes only, all items in Ties will be marked down by twenty per cent. Ties is located in the south-eastern quadrant of the Blue Floor and may be reached using the banks of lifts designated G, H and I. This offer will be extended to you for five minutes only. Any purchases made after that period will retail at full price. Thank you for your attention.”

Linda looks around to see which way other shoppers are going to move. She will join them this time. Race with them, hunt down that bargain. Yes.

The faces she sees are taut and anxious.

Then she hears the sales assistant she just talked to whisper under his breath, “Oh shit.”

Then it dawns on her.

The announcement said Ties.

Here. The sale is
here
.

The emotion that wells up in Linda Trivett then is too pure and blinding to sully with a name. It surges through her in a great white wave, clarifying her thoughts, sharpening her senses, purging her of uncertainty. She knows what she has to do, but more than that, she knows that this is what she was
born
to do. Never has she felt such an undiluted sense of purpose before. It races through her veins, as cold and clear as a subterranean stream. Deep in her being she is suddenly connected with all that is and all that was and all that is meant to be.

Trembling in the throes of epiphany, she snatches the coin-motif tie from the track and casts about for the nearest sales counter. The announcement said twenty per cent off. A whole fifth. Other shoppers are grabbing merchandise, seizing ties by the handful. She can hear a faint rumbling from afar. Twenty per cent. Quickly, thoughtlessly, she turns and plucks another three ties from the rack. One has a squadron of blue pigs with wings embroidered on it, another is printed with close-typed rows of random binary-code sequences that form a sort of variegated polka-dot pattern, while the third is a duplicate of the tie with the coin motif already in her hands. Well, after all, Gordon always wears a tie to work. He can never have too many. She looks around again for a sales counter, and in doing so catches sight of the first bargain-hunters as they come stampeding in through the nearest connecting passageway.

In they charge, like the Mongol Horde sweeping across a plain, wielding Days cards instead of scimitars and their gaping mouths silent where the troops of Genghis Khan would be screaming battle-cries, but their eyes just as wild, their intent just as clear. And Linda with her fistful of ties doesn’t step cowering out of their way but holds herself steady, erect, ready to meet them. These are
her
ties, and no one shall have them except her.

The customers in the vanguard of the charge reach her, and unresisting she lets their impetus carry her along. She has glimpses of teeth and well-coiffed hair, whites of the eye and flashing jewellery, clutching fingers and bulky shoulderpads, and suddenly a fist flails out of nowhere and catches her a glancing blow to the cheekbone, and someone stamps with elephant force on her foot, but still she rides along with the mob, struggling to keep herself upright and planting an elbow in someone’s ribs and a knee in someone else’s thigh, while the air around her head resounds with the whipcrack of ties being snatched from stands.

A shove from behind sends her stumbling forwards, her teeth clacking painfully on her tongue, the ties nearly spilling from her grasp. She wheels around to find a woman with a shoddily home-bleached frizz of hair waving a chrome-coloured card at her and yelling, “Those are mine! I have a Palladium! You have a Silver! My Palladium trumps your Silver! Those are
my
ties!”

“No, they’re not, they’re mine,” Linda replies calmly, “and the last person I’d to give them up to is a stingy little bitch with an inch of root showing and abominable split ends.”

The bottle-blonde roars like a lioness and makes a grab for the ties. Linda’s response is as swift as it is savage. Stepping back, she swipes the woman’s legs out from under her with a scything kick – a physical feat which she would never have been able to pull off under normal circumstances but which, in the heat of the moment, she executes with perfect and ferocious accuracy.

As the bottle-blonde goes down she makes an ineffectual grab for Linda’s blouse, but Linda leaps nimbly aside, batting her hands away.

“Bitch!” the bottle-blonde wails, prone on the floor.

“Slut!” Linda yells back, as the flow of bargain-hunters sweeps her away once more.

Like a swimmer in a crowd-torrent Linda is borne thunderously along, until suddenly, dead ahead, through a gap in the seethe of customers, she sees a sales counter, and she heaves herself toward it, at the same time groping for the clasp of her handbag with her free hand. How long has it been since the sale was announced? How many minutes? One? A thousand? Buffeted left and right, Linda propels herself up to the sales counter, at the same time fumbling her card out. She squeezes in sideways between two other customers and thrusts the ties into the face of the sales assistant, a young man barely out of his teens who, according to his ID badge, is a first-year trainee.

“These!” she cries. “Now!”

“He was about to serve
me
,” one of her neighbours asserts crossly. “Isn’t that right?”

The sales assistant blinks in uncertainty. He is terrified, close to tears. Who can blame him, all these red, raging faces surrounding him, bellowing at him?

“
I
was next,” someone else insists.

The sales assistant gyrates plaintively from one customer to another. Whom should he serve? Whom?

Linda stretches her free hand across the counter, grabs him by the lapel, and yanks him close.

“Serve me or it’s your job.”

That galvanises him. He takes the ties and the card off her, which causes the customers on either side gasp and gripe and grumble and glare their resentment. Linda responds with a serene sneer.

If only they knew this was her first ever lightning sale. Then they would
really
have something to complain about.

And as the sales assistant runs his scanning wand over the four ties one after another and swipes Linda’s Silver through the credit register, Linda nurses a warm, spreading glow of contentment.

She beat the other customers fair and square. She has a real talent for this.

24

Dance of the Seven Veils
: the erotic dance performed by the title character in Wilde’s play
Salome
to entertain Herod before the beheading of John the Baptist.

12.00 p.m.

M
IDDAY FINDS
G
ORDON
crouched with his back to a mirror. A pair of Iridium cards are being waved to and fro mere millimetres from his face. The rainbow coruscations at play across the cards’ surfaces are hypnotically beautiful. Not so beautiful is the smear of blood staining one edge of one of the cards.
His
blood.

The blood comes from a throbbing, burning wound in the palm of Gordon’s right hand, and there is more of it, warm and sticky, trickling down his fingers and dripping off the tips. It feels as though his hand has been slashed to the bone, but, much as he would like to, Gordon doesn’t dare examine the cut.

The pair of Burlingtons who have cornered him in this dead-end aisle in Mirrors move in closer, snickering. Their Iridiums fan a breeze across Gordon’s cheeks as they weave their hypnotic cobra dance around his face. He can see how sharp their edges have been filed, razor-sharp, and thinking of the damage edges so sharp could do to him, a dull little whimper escapes his throat.

He didn’t even mean to be in this department, that’s the awful irony of it. If it hadn’t been for the woman in Pleasure. If it hadn’t been for Rose...

And despite the pain and the paralysing fear of the moment, Gordon feels a faint, residual flush of lust as he recalls his first glimpse of Rose – Rose in the clinging pink nylon gown that sinuously emphasised her curves and contours, flowing over her naked body like cloudy pink water over a riverbed of worn-smooth rocks. He remembers how the dark ovals of her nipples loomed alluringly through the gauzy material, and he remembers the intoxicating perfume of her smile, and the way she boldly took his hand and said, like a teacher to a little boy, “Come on then, let’s see what we can do with you.” Words that sent a shockwave of images – possibilities – through his brain. He remembers it all clearly, even though it seemed to take place a lifetime, and not just a few minutes, ago.

He hadn’t meant to set foot in the Pleasure Department either, but the muted red glow emanating from its entrance caught his eye as he was wandering by, and a waft of sweet incense drew him inquisitively in, past an at-attention security guard whose expression, he thinks now, did have something of a knowing smirk about it.

Having no sense of where he was in the store, and without the map to guide him, Gordon was at first unable to fathom what could possibly be sold in this department. In front of him a pair of long bare partition walls reached all the way to the opposite entrance, with bead-curtained doorways set into them on either side at regular intervals. Cubicles of some sort. Two similar rows ran off to the right and the left. There seemed to be no sales assistants about, and if it hadn’t been for the pungent, aromatic smoke purling from ornate silver censers that hung from the ceiling on silver chains, Gordon might have thought the department had been abandoned or was in the process of being refurbished.

He was about to turn and ask the guard where this was when he became aware of muffled sounds issuing from several of the cubicles. His initial thought was that these were the grunts and gasps of people trying on outfits several sizes too small. It seems ridiculous now, but that is honestly what he first took the sounds to signify – that the cubicles were fitting rooms, and that in each there was a fat person struggling to get into clothing intended for someone thinner. It made a kind of sense. It was only after listening more closely for several moments that Gordon realised that the sounds were coming in pairs, each grunt matched to a reciprocal grunt, each gasp to an answering gasp, a rhythmic, guttural strophe and antistrophe interspersed with random sighs, squeals, and moaned obscenities.