Days (42 page)

Eye?

Mr Hubble, are you OK?

As well as anyone can be who’s just had a face-full of pepper spray.
Frank dabs at his eyes with a dry corner of the handkerchief.

She was carrying pepper spray on her?

I don’t think she just found it lying around, Eye.

Well, don’t you worry. We’ll have another Ghost there in no time. Unless, of course, you feel up to collaring her yourself.

I’ve other fish to fry. Which way did the perpetrator go?

Um, afraid to say I lost him. Mr Bloom was more concerned about you.

Mr Bloom?

Yeah, he’s right here. Want a word?

No time. Perhaps later. Right now I’m going after that perpetrator.

Leave him to us, Mr Hubble. We’ll deal with him.

I’m not letting him get away. Which way did he go?

Well, last I saw, he was heading north. I’ll get another Tactical operative onto it.

No
, says Frank, holstering his gun.
I can catch him. This fellow has put me to a lot of trouble. It’s only fair that I should be the one who nails him.

But you can’t see where you’re going. That stuff that woman sprayed you with...

I know this store like the back of my hand. I could find my way around it blind. But I’m not going to be blind. You’re going to be my eyes, Eye.

2.20 p.m.

L
INDA PICKS UP
Gordon’s glasses, without which he always looks so puzzled and forlorn, so babyish, and gently settles them on the bridge of his nose, looping the arms around his ears. Then she inspects the cherub clock. Its glass cover is cracked in two, and its jolted movement has stopped, leaving its hands frozen at eighteen minutes past two. She heaves a sigh, for the clock and for herself.

The greatest day of her life.

Or it would have been, if...

If what? If Gordon had moved out of the Ghost’s way? She can’t blame him for that.

If she hadn’t bought the pepper spray from the taxi driver? Possibly. But even without it, she would still have attacked the Ghost. She honestly thought the man was about to put a bullet in her husband’s head. What wife, in those circumstances, wouldn’t leap to her husband’s defence?

That is what she will tell whoever comes to arrest her, although she doubts it will do much good. The fact remains that she attacked a Days employee, and for that she and Gordon are going to lose their account. They are going to be banned from the premises for life... and yet for some reason Linda doesn’t care. She doesn’t care that she is going to have to explain to Margie and Pat and Bella why she and Gordon are never going to visit Days again (perhaps she will think up a lie to tell them, perhaps not). She doesn’t care that she and Gordon may have to move to another street, another suburb, even another city, to get away from the knowing looks and the sly, insinuating comments of acquaintances and neighbours. None of that matters. All that matters is the man lying on the floor in front of her, the sandy-haired, baby-faced, bespectacled man who came to her rescue in Third World Musical Instruments, who appeared just when she needed him, and who, in turn, needed her protection and was given it.

Gordon groans again, stirring. His eyes flutter open. He blinks up at her. Focusing on her face, he braves a smile.

“Not dead then?” he croaks.

“Not yet,” Linda says. “But when we get back home, I’m going to kill you.”

It takes him a moment or two to realise that she is joking.

37

Christ on the Cross
: during the Crucifixion, Christ spoke seven times.

2.24 p.m.

T
HERE IS NO
pain.

At first, it is a simple statement of fact. Despite the tennis-ball-sized exit cavity in his abdomen, all Edgar can feel down there is an awful, unnatural coldness, a freezing/burning sensation like ice. His breathing is constricted, but miracle of miracles, there is no pain.

There is no pain. And as he pushes the trolley from Clocks into Stationery, and from Stationery into Newspapers & Periodicals, and as the pins-and-needles coldness creeps upwards into his chest, Edgar tries not to think about the damage inside him, how much of him may have been ruined beyond repair. He tries to ignore the dark stain slicking over the waistband of his trousers down towards his crotch. Above all, he tries to ignore the hole, with its fringe of gore and shredded shirt, but it is hard to resist looking at it. That is
him
. That is
his
torn flesh. That bulge of something yellow-pink and glistening peeking out of the wound is one of
his
internal organs, which he was never supposed to see.

He is faintly aware of people ahead of him stepping aside, looking perplexed then horrified. He is faintly aware of gasps and little screams arising around him as he goes. But the main thing is that there is no pain.

And then suddenly there
is
pain, and Edgar staggers under the sheer stupefying
wrongness
of it. It feels as though someone has reached inside him and twisted his guts around their fist. His feet become tangled. He nearly falls, but recovers, saved by his grip on the trolley push-bar. Just one department to cross. One department between him and Books. A couple of hundred metres. He can make it.

There is no pain
. Now it becomes a silent incantation, to be repeated by the mouth of the mind through gritted mental teeth.
There is no pain, there is no pain
. And although there
is
pain – fearsome pain, sheets and sheets of it sweeping through him like wind-gusted rain – the chant sees to it that there is no pain where it counts: in his head, in the brain that drives the body. For as long as his brain insists that there is no pain, his body will not succumb.

And there, up ahead, framed in the connecting passageway to Books – there she is. Waiting for him, her arms folded across her chest. Scanning this way, scanning that. Kurt and Oscar beside her. She knew which direction he could be coming from. Of course she did. She is Miss Dalloway.

Oscar spots him first, and points him out to the others.

there is no pain there is no pain there is no pain

And Edgar can already hear the compliments that Miss Dalloway is going to pour over him like honey.

there is no pain

And then he sees Oscar’s jowls sag and his double chin become quadruple, and Oscar says something to Miss Dalloway, and Miss Dalloway’s bony hands fly to her mouth.

thereisnopain

And Edgar is no longer breathing. He is hiccuping air in, in, in, but none of it seems to be reaching his lungs. He covers the last dozen metres through a vacuum, through silence, through weightlessness, his legs spasming in an autonomous approximation of running.

There is pain. There is all the agony in the world, and it is concentrated inside him, a vast, white-hot furnace in his belly.

“I made it,” he wants to tell Miss Dalloway, but there is too much pain.

His hands slip from the push-bar. His legs cycle through empty space. The carpet looms like a wall. Newspapers & Periodicals revolves around him, as though he has become the still centre of the turning universe. He is lying on the floor, staring up into striplights. Miss Dalloway is near. She takes hold of his hand, and her face appears above him haloed with light. She is by far the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. Her usually stern expression has melted into one of such sublime, supreme tenderness that he is convinced that she has been transfigured, that she has become a saint. No, not a saint. An angel. She looks how an angel must look to a soul in hell.

He hears the sound of every book he has ever read closing.

And then there really is no pain.

2.25 p.m.

M
ISS
D
ALLOWAY LETS
Edgar’s limp hand fall gently to the floor. With the tips of her thumb and index finger, she draws his eyelids down over his empty eyes. With the same index finger she touches his lips, as though to stop any recriminations he might have for her, even in death. Softly shaking her head, she gets to her feet, standing upright but a few sorrow-stooped centimetres short of her full height.

“Who did this?” Kurt spits out angrily. “Was it the Technoids? Say the word and we’ll get them, Miss Dalloway. We’ll make them pay.”

“Have no fear, Kurt, the hour of vengeance
is
at hand,” Miss Dalloway replies, her voice as controlled as a laser beam. “Now, quickly. Go and round up the others. Divide yourselves up into four teams and post one team at each entrance. No one is to enter the department, under any circumstances. Is that clear? No one.”

“Clear,” says Kurt. “But what–”

“Just do as I tell you.”

Kurt turns and hurries back into the department.

“What
is
going on, Miss Dalloway?” Oscar asks, looking down in trembling-lipped disbelief at Edgar’s body.

“The end, Oscar. The bitter end.”

Miss Dalloway strides over to where the trolley coasted to a halt, propelled by Edgar’s dying fall, a metre inside the connecting passageway. She inventories the contents quickly. Wire and clock, present and correct. Thou good and faithful servant.

A sob clutches her throat. She forces it down with a hard swallow, takes hold of the trolley push-bar, and orders Oscar to follow her.

2.25 p.m.

H
ANDS HELD OUT
in front of him at chest height to fend off against obstacles, Frank lurches through Stationery, looking like a mime pretending to be drunk, or a drunkard attempting mime.

The department, to his inflamed, streaming eyes, is a kaleidoscope of distorted shapes and smeary colours. It is hard to tell what is near and what is far, what is sharp-edged and what is soft, what is living and what is inanimate. The Eye helps out with a constant running commentary, alternately coaxing and warning – “A row of filing cabinets to your left, that’s it, a customer a few metres ahead, there, that’s good, a ninety-degree turn to the right coming up, you’re doing good, Mr Hubble, you’re doing fine...” – but nonetheless the pursuit of the perpetrator has become a tortuous succession of stops and starts, bumps and knocks, angles and trajectories, corners and rebounds. At one point the screen-jockey refers to Frank as a human pinball in the world’s largest pinball machine, and even Frank cannot be annoyed by the flippancy, because that is exactly how it feels.

Still he perseveres, still he staggers on, with every banged elbow, every barked shin, his determination to catch his quarry increasing.

2.28 p.m.

H
ER MOVEMENTS URGENT
yet precise, hurried yet efficient, Miss Dalloway finishes assembling the bomb. Cutting off four lengths of wire from the spool, she strips a centimetre of the insulating rubber from the end of each with her teeth, then uses two of the lengths to join the contacts of the flashbulb to the stem of one of the alarm clock’s bells and to the striking hammer. Holding the detonator by these wires, she lowers it into the mouth of the keg until the Roman candle is just above the fertiliser-and-paraffin mixture, firing end pointing downwards. Then she screws the cap of the keg back on so that the wires secure the detonator in place.

The alarm clock is fully wound up and telling the correct time. Miss Dalloway is pleased to note that the Clocks Department’s dedication to temporal accuracy remains undiminished. It is nearly half-past two now. A quarter of an hour should do it. She rotates the alarm-setting control until the alarm hand is pointing to the third of the three increments between II and III. Then she tapes the clock tightly to the top of the keg, on its back so that the alarm-setting control cannot be readjusted. The clock ticks softly and steadily.

Now she takes the remaining two lengths of wire and uses them to link the battery to the striking hammer and the bell stem.

The bomb is primed. The final minutes of her life are numbered.

“Oscar?”

Oscar comes to attention. “Miss Dalloway?”

Unable to resist the urge to hug him, she wraps her arms around his shoulders. Startled at first, Oscar quickly succumbs to the unwarranted gesture of affection, and reciprocates, slipping his good arm around his head of department’s narrow waist. She presses his fleshy cheek to the sharp ridge of her collarbone. Oscar breathes in the cool, fresh-laundered smell of her jumper.

“Oh, Oscar,” Miss Dalloway says. “You’ve always been my favourite. You know that, don’t you?”

Oscar shudders with delight from head to toe.

“And I’ve always hoped it’ll be you who takes over the reins when the time comes for me to step down.”

Oscar thinks he is about to faint with joy.

“Will you do that for me, Oscar? Will you look after my department? Make sure the brothers never try to close it down? Resist them to your last breath?”

Oscar can barely choke out his assent. “Of course, Miss Dalloway. Of course.”

“I knew I could count on you.”

He tries to raise his head to ask a question, but she simply presses him harder to her chest and starts stroking his hair. If he looks into her eyes, he may realise what her real intentions are. He may try to stop her, talk her out of it.

“I’ve put in a memo to the brothers exonerating you from all involvement in what I’m about to do, and recommending you as my replacement,” she says. “Whether those philistines pay attention is anyone’s guess, but hope springs eternal.”

“I’ll do the very best I can, Miss Dalloway. I’ll do you proud. But of course, you’ll always be just a phone-call away, should I need advice. I mean, I can never hope to manage everything by myself, not without your help. I won’t know where to start.”

Miss Dalloway closes her eyes. No tears. She vowed to herself. No tears.

“You will, Oscar,” she says. “You will.”