Days (7 page)

The Menagerie is neither zoo nor conservation project. It is, quite simply, an elaborate cage. Animals are shipped in from around the world on demand and stored in the Menagerie temporarily until their purchasers can make arrangements to have them picked up. The store’s policy on selling wildlife displays a refreshing lack of zoological prejudice. It doesn’t matter if an animal is on the endangered species list or as common as dandruff, if a customer desires it and has the wherewithal to pay for it, it can be his.

Nothing stays in the Menagerie for long. The macaque, for instance, will be gone by tomorrow. Later today, trained sales assistants will venture into the manmade jungle clad in protective gear and toting tranquilliser-dart rifles, close in on the little monkey, put it to sleep, and present it in a cage to its new owner, an industrialist who wants to give his daughter an unusual pet as a gift for her thirteenth birthday. The Menagerie’s only permanent residents are the insects, who form an integral part of its ecosystem. But since they breed quickly and are cheap to replace, they too are for sale.

In short, the Menagerie is just another department, like any in the store. Yet to Frank, who has spent his entire life as a city dweller, the Menagerie’s lush green abundance is intoxicatingly alien, an exotic symphony of sight and sound and scent. Charged with secret life, the Menagerie is a city of Nature, where the bustle of industry goes on invisibly, and territory is claimed, and transients come and go, a daily round of business that carries on seemingly regardless of the store that encloses it.

Of course this autonomy is an illusion. The Menagerie is as dependent on Days to support it as Days is on the world outside. Without regular irrigation and climate control, the vegetation would die. Without the vegetation, the insects would die. Without the insects and vegetation, the smaller mammals would die. Without the smaller mammals, the reptiles and larger mammals would have nothing to hunt and eat while they wait to be recaptured and sent to their new homes; they would have to be fed directly by the sales assistants, and that would contradict the ethic behind the Menagerie. Old Man Day planted a jungle at the heart of his store for a reason: to symbolise the commerce of Nature, to show that preying and feeding on others is an accepted part of the natural order, perhaps even to justify the very foundation of Days. The Menagerie is a manifesto on a grand scale, a point lavishly made – and Frank knows this, and yet still it is more than metaphor to him. Somehow, with a gorgeous green eloquence, it speaks of truths that are not so easily interpreted. With the sighs of its flora and cries of its fauna it addresses a part of the soul not concerned with gaining and acquiring. After all these years, Frank still does not understand what the Menagerie is trying to say, but like a nursing infant who responds to the tone of his mother’s voice, if not the sense of her words, he loves to listen all the same.

Through his serenely half-closed eyes Frank glimpses a white shape moving amid the blur of green. He inclines his head and focuses.

A white tiger has come stalking into a clearing fifteen metres below him and twenty metres away. A white tig
ress
, to be exact. She was captured in the dwindling Rewa forest of India only last week and is soon to be transferred to the private collection of a French rock star at a cost somewhere in the region of a million album sales.

A beautiful creature – her pelt spectrally pale between its black flashes, her eyes a light, lambent blue, her tail gently curved, uptilted and coat-hanger stiff – she walks with an unhurried grace on sinewy legs across the clearing to one of the several streams that meander through the Menagerie, pumped directly from the city’s ring main. At its edge she stops, bends her head, and begins lapping languorously at the water with her thick pink tongue, pausing every so often to lick stray droplets from her whiskers and chin.

Frank watches her, transfixed. With her markings and colouring she is like some beast out of mythology, a ghost tiger whose ancestors doubtless inspired many a tall tale around the jungle campfire. Even the sight of her mundanely drinking water, her eyes slitted in contentment, sends chills up his spine. He wonders what it would be like to be standing down there beside her, to inhale her tiger smell and run his fingers over her glossy fur and feel the warmth and muscle of the living animal beneath.

Abruptly, the tigress breaks off from her drinking, lifts her head, and sniffs the air. Her pink nostrils gape and contract rapidly, opening and closing like a pair of tiny mouths, as her head bobs higher and higher, tracing the path of the scent, until, finally, she fixes her gaze on its source: Frank.

She stares at him without blinking. He stares back. She looks puzzled, and takes a few more deep, flaring sniffs. Her eyes narrow to azure almonds. Frank does not move.

The moment of contact stretches on, and on, and on.

8.16 a.m.

M
EANWHILE, UP IN
the Boardroom, Thurston Day greets his older brother Mungo and his younger brother Sato as they enter the room together. Neither is surprised to see Thurston already in his seat (a typist’s chair with smooth-running castors and a fully adjustable, spine-sparing backrest). Thurston is usually first into the Boardroom even when it isn’t his day of chairmanship, punctuality and punctiliousness being the principle character traits of Septimus Day’s fourth son.

Thurston asks Mungo how his swim was, and the oldest Day brother runs a hand through his still-damp hair and replies that it was very pleasant indeed. A crisp morning, steam rising from the surface of the pool, twenty lengths instead of the usual fifteen. Thurston then asks Sato if he slept well, and Sato, folding his body like a praying mantis’s forelegs into the tall, slender, Frank Lloyd Wright chair, thanks his brother for his kind enquiry and is delighted to be able to inform today’s chairman that he enjoyed a very restful night’s sleep indeed.

Satisfied, Thurston turns his attention back to the terminal at his elbow, which is displaying today’s sales figures at the Unified Ginza Consortium in Tokyo, correct as of U.G.C. closing time, eight o’clock this morning.

Sato’s movements are nimble and delicate as he pours himself a cup of jasmine tea from the bone china pot in front of him then removes the lid of the salver beside it to reveal a peeled hardboiled egg, a bowl of coleslaw, a plain roll, and a bowl of bean curd and fried seaweed. Of all the brothers, he is the one who has embraced the eastern side of their mixed Caucasian/Asiatic heritage. Mungo’s breakfast is considerably heartier and more occidental. Along with a litre of orange juice in the glass jug, Perch has served him a rare rump steak, scrambled eggs, hash browns, four rashers of bacon, a pile of granary toast ten centimetres high (each slice lathered in crunchy peanut butter), a vanilla-flavoured protein shake, and, if Mungo is still hungry after all that, a bowl of muesli. Not surprisingly, Mungo is a robust figure. Swimming has broadened his shoulders to the width of the average doorway and lunchtime games of tennis and evening workouts in the brothers’ private gym have toned his waist and legs. He exudes health from every pore of his taut, unpimpled skin.

Thurston, by comparison with his fitness-fanatic sibling, looks hunched, meek, and anaemic. While he sports the brown eyes, glossy dark hair and olive-tinged complexion common to all the sons of Septimus Day, his jaw is narrow and his cheeks are hollow and his wrists are so thin that Mungo could encircle them both at once with his thumb and forefinger. Thurston wears small round spectacles and favours high collars and thin, plain ties. But he is not as timid as he appears. When it comes to business matters, none of the Day brothers can match Thurston for aggression or ruthlessness. Thurston closing a deal is like a hawk swooping on its prey. Equally, if the wholesale cost of coffee beans, say, rises a couple of per cent, Thurston will be the first to suggest that Days hikes up the retail price twice that amount. Conscience is a weakness in any businessman, and Thurston cannot abide weakness.

Sato, though ascetic in his tastes, favouring that which is elegant yet simple, shares his brothers’ passion for increased profits and their love of the wealth generated by the massive store beneath them. For Sato, however, it is not what money can buy that attracts him. Someone with his income could own anything they wanted, but Sato prefers his life to be as uncluttered with possessions as possible. Rather, it is money in the abstract that he finds enthralling. The principle of money. The theory of it. Sato lives for the accumulated sales total at the end of the week, which is also, by happy coincidence, his day of chairmanship. Come Saturday evening, as he sits in front of the terminal watching takings from every department float up on the screen, Sato is in his personal nirvana. Even if he cross-references the weekly total against those of the other gigastores and finds that once again the store’s figures have fallen well short of those achieved by its international rivals, a league table habitually headed by the Great Souq in Abu Dhabi and Blumberg’s, N.Y., he is never annoyed or envious, merely fascinated by the divergent differences. Money is merely numbers to Sato, and numbers obey the laws of mathematics, and the laws of mathematics constitute a system as elegant and as simple as you could wish for.

As Sato takes the first few nibbles of his seaweed and bean curd, using the chopsticks provided by Perch, and Mungo launches ferociously into his feast with fork and serrated knife, Fred arrives, clutching an armful of newspapers taken from Perch, whom he happened to intercept at the top of the spiral staircase. There is nothing Fred likes more than his morning papers (three tabloids, two broadsheets, and a couple of internationals). Like his brothers, he seldom leaves the premises. The Boardroom, the roof with its amenities – swimming pool, tennis court, jogging track, paved garden – and the Violet Floor where each brother has a private apartment, constitute the limits of their existence, and while they do venture down onto the shop floor occasionally and off the premises
very
occasionally, they prefer to stay within those limits. It is safer that way.

Fred’s morning papers are his lifeline to the outside world, a tube through which he can breathe air from outside and so avoid being suffocated by his circumstances. Undoubtedly he is happy with his life and would not swap being a co-owner of Days for anything, but without his newspapers and, in the evenings, his cable television, the cloistered existence he and his brothers lead would surely drive him nuts.

Fred bids his three siblings good morning and takes his seat between Thurston and Sato, dumping the pile of newspapers on the table in front of him. His chair suggests a perhaps unconscious desire for freedom. It is a folding canvas chair of the type traditionally used by explorers and movie directors. Fred’s longish hair, stubbled chin, and gaudy Aztec-patterned shirt reflect the same desire. His breakfast, however, is pure childhood comfort food: pre-sugared corn flakes, hot chocolate, and toast with butter and strawberry jam.

Fred opens one of his tabloids and is just starting to peruse the gossip columns when Wensley waddles in. Wensley has dressed hastily in his anxiety to reach his breakfast before it goes cold. One shirt-flap dangles beneath his voluminous belly, and he is walking on stockinged feet, clasping his shoes to his chest. He is breathing hard from mounting the spiral staircase.

Barely acknowledging his brothers’ greetings, Wensley crosses to the table and plumps himself down in the wing-backed chair. Its vermilion-upholstered padding sighs beneath his weight. He plucks the lid off his slaver, snatches up his knife and fork, and starts urgently scooping mouthfuls of devilled kidney between his pillowy, liver-coloured lips, losing several morsels to the bushy goatee that surrounds them. In addition to the kidneys, Wensley’s meal consists of four soft-boiled eggs, kedgeree, a mound of fried potatoes drenched in ketchup and brown sauce, a pile of pancakes with maple syrup, and two hunks of white bread smeared with dripping, plus a jug of cream and twenty grammes of refined sugar for his coffee.

Mungo can seldom resist ribbing his less health-conscious younger brother. “Enough cholesterol there for you, Wensley?”

Wensley barely pauses from his eating to reply, “I’ll work it off.”

“Work it off? How? You’ve never taken a stroke of exercise in your life.”

“Nervous energy,” says Wensley, patting his mouth with a linen napkin.

“No one’s
that
nervous,” says Mungo with a grin.

“Are you genuinely worried about my well-being,” retorts Wensley, “or is the source of your concern the fact that, were I no longer here, we would no longer be Seven?”

“A bit of both, to be honest.”

“Ah, fraternal love and self-interest. For a son of Septimus Day the two are one and the same.” Wensley pops one of the soft-boiled eggs into his mouth whole, shell and all. His cheeks bulge, there is a muffled crunch, and then he swallows the egg in one go with a huge, unhealthy-sounding gulp. “Am I not correct?”

Mungo has to laugh. “Point well made, Wensley. Point well made.”

Sixth to arrive for breakfast is Chas, the second eldest and by far the best-looking of the brothers. In Chas the genes of Septimus Day and his wife, Hiroko, commingled to create the most aesthetically pleasing product they could, endowing him with lustrous eyes, a cleft chin, a square jaw, hair that no matter how it is brushed always seems to fall the right way, cheekbones a male model would kill for, an excellent physique that unlike Mungo’s does not require intensive maintenance, sharp dress sense, and a firm grasp of the social graces. Chas is generally thought of as the “face” of the Days administration. He it is who goes to meet wholesalers personally when meeting wholesalers personally is absolutely unavoidable, and he it is who is most often called upon to mollify a disgruntled distributor via video conference or telephone and head down to the shop floor when a problem need sorting out. What Chas lacks in business acumen he more than makes up for in charm. When the facts won’t swing an argument the Day brothers’ way, Chas’s silver tongue usually will.