Days (30 page)

When the penny finally dropped, the quietly rational part of his mind which usually assesses loan risks and calculates interest percentages simply said,
Well, it’s a business deal like any other, isn’t it? A straightforward exchange of commodities
, even as something unruly and libidinous stirred within him.

He didn’t realise the woman was standing by his side until she addressed him, saying, “Welcome to the Pleasure Department, sir.” The woman in her diaphonous rose-pink gown. The woman who then took his hand and said the words that unleashed a torrent of pent-up fantasies – all the positions he had never attempted with Linda, all the acts he had never dared ask her to perform, all the deeds he had pored sweatily over in novels and magazines but never, in his very limited sexual experience, actually tried. Dazed by the enormity of the horizons suddenly opening up before him, and giddy with the reek of incense, he meekly let the woman lead him down the left-hand row of cubicles and usher him into one. There, as the bead curtain rattled back into place behind him, he took stock of the narrow single bed, the table groaning with all manner of lubricants, prophylactics, and alarmingly-shaped rubber devices, and the credit register mounted on the wall adjoining the next cubicle, which was shuddering with the exertions of the transaction taking place on the other side.

The woman asked him his name, and he told her, and he asked her hers, and she said he could call her whatever he liked, and looking at the colour of her gown he said, “Rose,” and she said, “Then Rose I am.”

And then she said, “Gordon, what kind of account you have?”

And he said, “Silver.”

And trying to disguise her pity, Rose said, “I’ll be honest with you, Gordon, there’s not a lot I’ll do for a Silver.” And he must have looked crestfallen because she then said, “But we can still have some fun, can’t we? If we’re imaginative.”

And he said, “Yes.”

And with that, she removed her gown, just like that, slipping the shoulder-straps off with a shrug, letting it slither down and crumple around her feet, and there she stood, naked and pink in the low red light, her arms outstretched, completely open about her nudity, unlike Linda, who clutches an arm across her breasts whenever Gordon walks in on her while she is taking a bath, and who will only make love with the lights out. And she was trim and firm where a woman should be, voluptuous where a woman should be, majestically so. Quite unlike Linda.

And she said, “Out with it, then,” and Gordon blindly and obediently began fumbling with his fly, and she said, “No, not
that
,” and laughed. “Your card.”

And he said, “My wife...”

And she said, “Ah, your wife. Seven-year itch, is it?”

And he said, “No. My, um, my wife has our card.”

And Rose laughed again, coldly this time, and said, “Then, Gordon, you had better leave, because without your card you don’t get anything. And I should warn you that if you try to take something that you can’t pay for, I can have a guard here in three seconds flat to arrest you.” She indicated a red emergency button fixed to the wall above the bedhead.

“Arrest me?”

“For taking goods without payment. Shoplifting, Gordon.”

And Gordon nodded numbly, and Rose said, “Off you go then. Another time, perhaps.”

And she bent to put her gown back on, and Gordon turned and fled. Bursting through the bead curtain and sprinting down the row of cubicles, ashamed and embarrassed and guilty and desperate to get out of the department as quickly as possible, he ran, and for a while it seemed that the row of cubicles would never end and that he would have to keep running for ever, and then suddenly he was in Mirrors, and blushing madly – because everyone must have known where he had just been and what had happened to him there, it must have been written all over his face – he foundered deeper into the department, losing himself amid a dizzying myriad of reflected Gordons, furtive, manic Gordons, flustered, panicked Gordons, until he found himself running towards himself and he realised he had stumbled into a dead end, and skidding to a halt before his likeness he turned, only to be confronted by a pair of gormlessly grinning Burlingtons, and before he could say anything something blurred through the air towards him, and not knowing what it was he instinctively raised a hand to protect himself, and felt his palm scorch...

And now he tries to speak again, to ask the Burlingtons what they want with him, why are they doing this to him, why him, but again all that comes out of his mouth is another fear-filled, knock-kneed little whimper, which the taller of the two Burlingtons is quick to mimic, compounding the humiliation. This Burlington, the one who cut Gordon, has a long horselike face and long horselike teeth exaggerated by the tapering inadequacy of his lower jaw. The other has been even less well served by the limited genetic scope of upper-class in-breeding. His forehead is low and his eyes close-set, his protruding lips are rippled like the mouth of a clam, and his skin is so wattled with acne scabs and scars that it looks like burgundy leather. Where his comrade is gangly and tall, this one is short and squat, but their half-black, half-bleached buzzcuts and their matching uniform of gold moiré jacket, black drainpipe trousers, and designer trainers lessen the physical differences between them, making them look, in a strange, scary way, almost like twins.

Gordon scans around desperately for help, but this section of the department is deserted and all he can see is his predicament reflected back at him from a dozen different angles, each image a variation on the same theme: that of two Burlingtons cornering a hunched, white-faced figure whose spectacles are askew and whose breathing is coming in heaving, irregular shudders and the fingers of whose right hand are barber’s poles of blood. And it almost seems possible to Gordon that if, in the mirrors, one of the two razor-sharp Iridiums were to suddenly whir through the air and carve a gash in his reflection’s throat, it wouldn’t be him that would gargle to death on his own blood but an inverted Gordon safely tucked away in looking-glass land. It is a crazy thought, but no crazier than the grotesque insanity of his present situation.

The first Burlington sneers down at Gordon speculatively, saying, “This is the kind of riffraff they’re letting in these days? This is the sort of jumped-up nobody we have to share our store with?” He snorts. “Pathetic.”

“Pathetic,” his comrade agrees.

“Please,” Gordon says, risking another whimper but managing, at last, to find his voice, or at any rate a pale imitation of same. “Let me go. I promise I won’t report you to anyone, I’ll just be quietly on my way. Please.”

“Bit of a nasal twang there,” the taller Burlington remarks, leaning back. “What do you think, Algy? Something in the service industries? Middle management?”

Algy, clearly selected as a friend and sidekick because he possesses no opinions of his own, merely chuckles and nods.

“Please,” says Gordon. “I’m just a customer like yourself.”

“Got it now. Banking or insurance. Possibly accountancy, but I’m betting on banking or insurance. That servile note in the voice, that horrible job’s-worth whine.”

“I’m the loans manager for a branch of a major national clearing bank,” Gordon intones, neither defiantly nor defensively but because it is the truth.

“And you’ve saved up all your hard-earned pennies to become a Days account-holder, and – don’t tell me – wifey’s chipped in by taking on extra work, because it’s all about bettering yourselves, isn’t it? It’s all about clawing your way up the ladder.”

“It was Linda’s idea,” Gordon whispers.

“But don’t you see, you four-eyed nonentity?” The Burlington clamps a hand around Gordon’s throat and shoves his head back against the mirror with a surprisingly resonant clack of skull against glass. He inserts the bloody Iridium beneath the left-hand lens of Gordon’s spectacles and skewers the corner into Gordon’s eyelid, pricking out a droplet of blood. “There
is
no ladder. That’s just a lie dreamed up to give your insignificant little lives hope and meaning, to make you work your fingers to the bone for your precious Aluminiums and Silvers, but it doesn’t make any difference.
It doesn’t make any difference.
You’re born boring, lower-middle-class drones, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

“Er, Rupert?”

“Not now, Algy,” says the taller Burlington, still staring fixedly into Gordon’s face. “I’m busy.”

“Um... Rupert, I really think you should let him go.”

Rupert sighs testily. “What
is
it, Algy? What could be more important than a demonstration of the class system in action?”

He glances up into the mirror behind Gordon’s head and his undersized chin plummets.

There is a guard. He is holding Algy by the collar of his jacket. His other hand is resting on the grip of his hip-holstered pistol.

Instantly Rupert lets go of Gordon and steps smartly back, the sharpened card vanishing from view. Gordon staggers and wheezes, one hand flying to his neck to palpate his tender throat.

“Morning,” says Rupert to the guard, from sneering snob to guilty schoolboy in no time flat.

“Afternoon, actually,” says the guard.

“Sorry. Afternoon. My friend and I were just, er... just helping this fellow with directions. Appears he’s lost. Took a wrong turn somewhere.”

“Is that so? How thoughtful of you.”

“We thought so too.”

Gordon tries to force words out through his traumatised trachea but it isn’t possible to make sense of the hoarse, moist clucks his throat produces. Luckily, the guard has seen all he needs to see.

“Perhaps it would be better if you left us now, sir,” he tells Gordon, politeness itself. “The boys and I have some private matters to discuss. I have to demonstrate to them how the class system really works.”

Gordon needs no further prompting.

As he scurries away, he hears Rupert the Burlington say, “Look, can’t we sort this out like rational human beeeEEEYARRGHHH!”

Then there is only the sound of fists smacking flesh, and awful cries.

25

Seven-League Boots
: ogre’s boots donned by the fairy-tale hero Hop-o’-my-Thumb, enabling him to walk seven leagues (approximately 34 kilometres) at a stride.

12.00 p.m.

A
T THE TURNING
point of the day, high noon, after an hour of fruitless wandering without so much as a sniff of a possible perpetrator to break the monotony of department after department after department, Frank has walked himself into a state of dulled lethargy.

Nothing is happening. Around him customers are ambling, browsing, pausing, lingering, staring, discussing, comparing, matching, calculating, considering and acquiring, while sales assistants are smiling, bobbing, bowing, suggesting, hinting, agreeing, detagging, scanning, checking, bagging and returning. Nothing is happening but the give-and-take of commerce, as elemental and eternal as the ebb and neap of the tide, and Frank has nothing to do except plod from one department to another, through the various vectors of Days, his legs carrying him along in a mindless, relentless forward-urge. Every so often he checks in with the Eye. Anything nearby? Anything that requires his presence? Each time the answer comes back the same: nothing. The Eye sounds quieter than usual, its background hubbub subdued, as though down there in that screen-lit Basement chamber they are experiencing their own doldrums.

Frank’s trail crosses and recrosses itself as he proceeds through the immensity of Days, covering ground purely for the sake of covering ground, because that is what he is paid to do. He walks neither towards any particular goal nor to put distance between him and anything but simply to rack up the kilometres. There is no finishing line ahead, no Sodom behind, just the journey itself, the act of going. He travels hopefully, never to arrive.

Riding a lift, he is still moving.

Idling by a display, he is still moving.

Standing on an escalator, he is still moving.

Waiting until a traffic jam of shoppers clears so that he can continue down an aisle, he is still moving.

Hovering at the entrance to a fitting room to make sure that customers come out wearing the same clothes they had on going in, he is still moving.

Still moving, moving and still, as though his thirty-three years as a store detective have built up an inner inertia that pushes him on even when stationary. If his legs suddenly stopped working, perhaps deciding that they had had enough, that they had covered several lifetimes’ worth of distance, far more than their fair share, and they refused point-blank to go another step – if that happened, he feels that somehow his body would be unable to remain at rest. The accumulated momentum of thirty-three years of day-long walking would propel him onwards for ever, like a space probe sailing effortlessly through the void, endlessly, without entropy, into infinity.

Time slows when nothing is happening, and thoughts spit in all directions from Frank’s becalmed brain like sap-sparks from a smouldering log. His head fills with a babble of his own creation, a stream-of-consciousness monologue so loud and inane that he has, in the past, wanted to put his hands over his ears and yell at himself to shut up.

Simply talking to someone else might help relieve the mental pressure, but Ghosts are discouraged from unnecessary communication with other employees while on duty. Ghost Training, in fact, teaches you to have as little contact as possible with your co-workers, for to open your mouth is to draw attention to yourself. As for customers, in the unlikely event that one should mistake you for a fellow shopper and attempt to strike up a conversation, the terser your replies are, the better. The four main attributes of a good Ghost are, as the Ghost’s Motto says, silence, vigilance, persistence, and intransigence. The greatest of these is silence. Silence at any price, even at the cost of being driven insane by your brain’s unconscious blather.

Sometimes when he passes a fellow Ghost, Frank thinks he can see in the other’s face a reflection of the look that must be on his own. Beneath the Ghost’s affected impassiveness, in the eyes, he thinks he can discern a barely-restrained yearning to uncork a head-full of bottled-up thoughts, preferably in banter, failing that as a scream.