Days (36 page)

“But the risk involved,” said Mungo. “A woman your age...”

“No one’s forcing me to go through with this pregnancy, Mungo,” said their mother, not sternly. “No one except myself.”

And Mungo remembers, even more vividly, the night Sonny was born – a Sunday night, of course. When the college porter conveyed to him the news that their mother had gone into labour, Mungo went straight round to Chas’s digs, and together they drove the hundred kilometres home through driving rain in Chas’s sports convertible, running red lights and breaking speed limits all the way. A police car pulled them over for doing a hundred and eighty k.p.h. on the motorway, but all it took was a flash of their Osmium cards and a promise to the officer that they would arrange a Days account for him, and they were on their way again. The promise was forgotten as soon as the police car’s flashing blue lights were out of sight.

They arrived home to find the mansion a flurry of anxious doctors and midwives. It didn’t take long to establish that there were complications with the birth. The baby was not coming out the right way. Their mother was haemorrhaging. Their mother was in danger, and the best medical help money could hire was helpless. Either the baby lived or she lived. It was one or the other. It could not be both. Their mother, drugged but lucid, had said she was prepared to sacrifice herself for the child. It was up to their father whether her wish should be granted.

They found the old man pacing the floor of his study. His eye-patch was lying on the desk. It was not the first time Mungo and Chas had seen him without it, but it was still hard to avoid staring at the sealed lids of his left eye, sunken and puckered like the mouth of someone who has resolved never to speak again.

“I don’t know what to do,” their father said in a hoarse, haggard whisper. “The doctor said even if she lives through this, she’ll never be able to bear another child. This is my last chance.”

The founder of the world’s first and (as if it mattered at that moment) foremost gigastore was foundering, torn between the woman he loved and the child who would, he believed, ensure the future of his store. He looked desolately at his two eldest sons. “I don’t know what to do!”

To this day Mungo still isn’t certain which terrified the old man more – the mortal danger his wife was in, or the fact that, after a lifetime of confident, correct decisions, he was, for the first time, paralysed by uncertainty.

“Well, which is more important to you,” he said to the old man, as angrily as he dared, “Mum or Days?”

Septimus Day could not answer that.

The decision was made eventually. A crisis point was reached, and the obstetrician in charge asked their father which it was to be, the mother or the child.

Gravely the old man told him.

He was never the same again. From that day on, he slipped into a long slow twilight of depression. He withdrew from the world, divested himself of responsibility for running the store, neglected all but the most fundamental of his personal needs (eating, bathing, sleeping), and restricted contact with his sons to those didactic dinnertime monologues in which he rambled through his obsessions as if trying to justify them to himself, reminding himself with his cries of “
Caveat emptor!
” of the price at which he had bought his dream.
He
was the buyer who should have been beware.

Gradually, one by one, the old man unpicked the threads that tethered him to life, until there was nothing left to hold him here, and when he reached that point, too proud to commit suicide by any of the grisly traditional methods, he waited instead for his own body to call it a day. It could have been a heart attack, it could have been a stroke, but in the event it was cancer, and when it came it was spectacularly devastating, spreading swiftly from his liver to other organs like dry rot, eating away at him from the inside out. And it is Mungo’s belief that their father willed this death upon himself. He had, after all, brought a gigastore into existence by the power of will alone. He removed himself from existence the same way. A slow suicide.

None of the brothers has ever laid responsibility for either the old man’s decline or their mother’s death at Sonny’s feet. Not overtly, at any rate. That would be like blaming the deer in the middle of the road for murdering the driver who kills himself swerving to avoid it. All the same, the link between Sonny’s birth and their parents’ deaths is undeniable, and sometimes it has been easy to make more of Sonny’s indirect guilt than fairness might permit. Sometimes, indeed, the brothers have taken a vindictive pleasure in doing so. The contempt latent in their nickname for Sonny – the Afterthought – has never been that well disguised, and over the years, as Sonny has increasingly disgraced himself, it has become harder and harder for them to damp down their feelings of resentment.

Mungo knows this because he has had those feelings himself. He has, perhaps, kept them under better control than his brothers, but as he looks at the laughably dressed creature writhing on the sofa in front of him, the words of compassion he spoke just a moment ago ring hollow. What he really wants to say is, “You killed our parents, Sonny. You may not have meant to, but you did, as surely as if you put a gun to their heads and pulled the trigger. It might have been Dad’s decision to let you live at our mother’s expense, but if you had been an easy birth, if you hadn’t – typically – insisted on making life awkward for everyone, she would have survived and the old man would not have hated himself to death...”

And if that’s how
he
feels, he who has interceded on Sonny’s behalf on more occasions than he can remember, and who has only now abandoned his efforts to get his brothers to accept their youngest sibling as an equal, if that is how he truly feels, then the loathing the others must harbour deep down for Sonny must be awesome indeed.

“Bear in mind what I’ve said, Sonny.” Mungo pushes his hands down on his thighs to lever himself upright. “Stay put.”

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere,” says Chas.

They leave Sonny curled on the sofa in a foetal clench of sorrow and self-pity. And Mungo also leaves there, in Sonny’s apartment, any last vestigial traces of compassion he might have had for his youngest brother.

Whatever torments Sonny faces now, he faces alone.

31

Septempartite
: divided or separated into seven parts.

1.21 p.m.

E
DGAR GAZES MOROSELY
up at the floor-indicator light as it flicks from red to orange, his chin resting on the push-bar of the trolley he has just hired.

He is not so blindly loyal to Miss Dalloway that he cannot see that what she has asked him to do may well end up costing him his job. His job and, if he is lucky, nothing more. And it seems a terrible shame to be jeopardising what he hoped would be a lifelong career in gigastore retail. It seems, in fact, insane. But to Edgar, as to his fellow Bookworms, Miss Dalloway is more than merely the head of the Books Department of Days. She is an initiate into the Mysteries of the printed word, a Sibyl who speaks in the tongues of quotation, a warrior-priestess steeped in the lore of literature, and to serve her is to serve the ghosts of every man and woman who ever set pen to paper in the hopes of achieving immortality; to earn her approval is to earn the approval of all the poets and authors and essayists whose souls are embedded in the works they wrote.

The floor indicator winks from orange to yellow.

Edgar has no desire to return to the menial level of employment – petrol-station attendant, bar work, telesales – which he endured while waiting for his interview at Days, but there are, he realises, some things more important than a mere job. A tradition – a principle – is at stake. That, surely, is worth any sacrifice. Although he wonders if he will think so tomorrow, when he is signing on for the dole.

The floor indicator goes from yellow to green, there is a soft
ping
, and the same female voice that announces the lightning sales over the public address system informs Edgar – in less strident, more confidential tones – that he has reached the Green Floor. The lift doors slide apart, and Edgar manouevres the trolley out and sets off in the direction of Electrical Supplies.

1.29 p.m.

“A
FTERNOON,
”
SAYS THE
sales assistant in Electrical Supplies, a well-bellied man whose girth strains the waistband of his dollar-green overalls. “Just that then, is it?”

Edgar lays the spool of rubber-insulated wire on the counter. His throat is suddenly terribly dry. He manages to wheeze out, “Just this, yes.”

The sales assistant runs his scanning wand over the spool’s barcode sticker. “Staff discount, of course.” He has spotted Edgar’s ID badge. “A handsome five per cent.”

“Handsome,” echoes Edgar. It’s an employee in-joke.

“Card?”

Edgar takes out the Platinum and passes it over, deliberately (though, he hopes, not obviously) obscuring Mrs Shukhov’s name with his thumb.

In the event, as Miss Dalloway predicted, the fact that Edgar is an employee means that the sales assistant does not scrutinise the card. Instead, scarcely glancing at it, he swipes it through the credit register and hands it back.

1.30 p.m.

T
HE CREDIT REGISTER
flashes the information encoded in the card’s magnetic strip down to the central database in Accounts, where Mrs Shukhov’s account is checked, its validity assessed, its status confirmed, all in a fraction-of-a-second flutter of silicon synapses.

An anomaly is noted, and a message is sent back to the credit register, scrolling across its two-line readout:

CARD REPORTED LOST/STOLEN

SECURITY HAS BEEN ALERTED

Security has, in fact, not been alerted at the time the message is sent, but by the time it arrives at its destination in Electrical Supplies, a second message
has
reached the Security CPU, giving details of the card and the location of the department in which it has been improperly used.

Two seconds have elapsed since the card was swept through the reader. The sales assistant is still returning the card to Edgar. His eyes have registered the message on the credit register’s readout but the information it contains has not yet percolated all the way along his optic nerves to his brain. Meanwhile, in the hyperaccelerated world of computer time, a third message is already winging its way from Security to the Eye, fizzing along the fibre-optic connection as a speeding pulse of light.

The message is routed to the first available on-line terminal in the Eye. By now, Mrs Shukhov’s card has left the sales assistant’s hand and is firmly lodged between Edgar’s thumb and forefinger, and the sales assistant’s brain has processed the series of hieroglyphs displayed on the credit register’s readout and interpreted them as a set of formal symbols denoting concrete and abstract concepts – in other words, words.

A second later the same process takes place between the eyes and brain of a screen-jockey in the Eye. The message from Security, which is important enough to have been highlighted in red and enclosed in a blinking box, is transmuted in the screen-jockey’s cerebral cortex into an instruction. His response, when compared with the speed of information technology, is slow.

Standard operating procedure in a situation such as this is for the screen-jockey to locate and alert a guard in the vicinity of Electrical Supplies, which he would do by tapping a command into the terminal mounted on his chair arm and calling up the position of every guard within a three-department radius of that department, as provided by the transponders in their Sphinxes. From the section of floorplan that would instantly map itself out on his screen, he would select the guard closest by, contact him, and inform him of the probable felony in progress.

However, before the instruction to begin typing can begin its journey from the screen-jockey’s brain to his hands, it is belayed by the appearance on his screen of a subsidiary message, a corollary to the first from Security.

This one says:

CARD FLAGGED

SPECIAL ATTENTION:

TACTICAL SECURITY OPERATIVE HUBBLE, FRANCIS J.

EMPLOYEE #1807-93N

The screen-jockey, rereading the message, sucks on his teeth, then calls up Link Dial mode and enters the Ghost’s employee number – also the call-number of his Eye-link – in the prompt box.

The screen-jockey then leans back in his wheeled chair, bends the mic arm of his headset so that the pick-up is to one side of his mouth, and gropes behind him for the cooler box on the floor that holds several cans of his favourite carbonated drink, a sugar-saturated, highly-caffeinated Days-brand concoction rumoured to pack a greater stimulant punch than a fistful of amphetamine.

“Old Hubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble again,” he murmurs to himself as he pops the ringpull on a cold-sweat can. “Just my luck.”

1.30 p.m.

E
DGAR IS PLACING
the spool of wire in the trolley when the sales assistant says, softly, “Hold on a minute.”

“What’s up?” says Edgar, aiming for innocence but achieving only a querulous falsetto.

“Let’s have a look at that card again. I think there’s been a mistake.”

Edgar swings the trolley around.

“Wait,” says the sales assistant, baffled. “I
said
, I think there’s been a mistake. Where do you think you’re going?”

His first attempt to grab Edgar is foiled by his voluminous belly, which butts up against the edge of the counter, so that even at full reach there is still a gap of several centimetres between his fingertips and Edgar’s sleeve. With some discomfort he leans further over, but his miss has given Edgar the opportunity to start pushing.

By the time the sales assistant has made it round to the front of the counter, Edgar is well away, haring down an aisle of fuses, the spool of wire bouncing and rattling around inside the trolley basket.