Days

by James Lovegrove

  There are train stations at all four corners of Days Plaza and a bus route runs around its circumference, with a single stop midway along each edge. This means that the shopper arriving by public transport has to walk at least half a kilometre to reach the store. The shopper travelling by taxi or private car is better served. Taxi-only approach roads lead up to turning circles outside the store’s four entrances, while beneath the plaza lie seven storeys of subterranean car park with lifts that emerge in the entrance halls. The logic behind such an arrangement is faultless, if you have the mind of a retailer. Shoppers who know they are going to have to carry their goods home by hand will ration their purchases, concentrating on smaller, lighter and generally less expensive goods. The inconvenient location of the train stations and bus stops encourages them to use cars and taxis instead. Cars and taxis have plenty of room inside to store purchases. And car parks are, of course, an additional source of revenue.

  Frank walks alongside the approach road to Days with his eyes averted, not just to shield them from the stinging particles of grit that are being tossed about by the wind but so that he won’t have to look at the building. Even so, he can sense it looming ahead of him, a mountain made of brick. The plaza seems to slope down towards it, as though the weight of the world’s first and (reputedly) foremost gigastore has warped the surrounding surface of the planet, although it is possible that this is simply some architectural conceit intended to make your footsteps quicken the closer you come to the store.

  As Frank nears the north-western corner of Days, he at last dares to look up at the building that has dominated his life for thirty-three years. Its perspectives are dizzying, but what always strikes him is not so much the gigastore’s size as the quantity of bricks used in its construction. There must be billions of them, and each was laid by hand, each individually trowelled with mortar and positioned by a workman who patiently pieced together his segment of the puzzle, making his unacknowledged contribution to the enormity of the whole. Time, wind and weather have pitted and pocked the bricks’ surfaces, and the mortar that binds them is crumbling, but Days still stands, the dream of one man, the handiwork of thousands.

  Window-shoppers are huddled, as always, one deep, occasionally two deep, beneath the huge display windows, long straggling lines of them running unbroken except at the loading bays, which are located midway along each edge of the building. Most of them are awake now. Some are picking at pieces of sandwich and morsels of pie that they have hoarded overnight. (Each evening, charity workers come and distribute food, water, and soup among the window-shoppers, a practice the Days administration tolerates without condoning.) Others are going through their personal exercise routines, flexing the night’s stiffness out of their joints. A few have taken to the shrubberies to relieve themselves, and the rest are staking out their patches, unfurling moth-eaten blankets in front of their favourite windows and weighing down the corners with bulging, tattered Days carrier bags. Nearer to nine o’clock, unless the sky clouds over and it looks like rain, more window-shoppers – ones who have homes – will arrive, but by then the best places will have been taken. These other window-shoppers bring picnics, chairs, tables, families, friends with them to watch the displays, but they are not hardcore, all-weather devotees like those who spend their entire lives in the vicinity of Days, who eat and sleep in the gigastore’s shadow. Tradition has it that window-shoppers are former customers who for one reason or other have been banned from the store, but this has never conclusively been proved.

  At present, each window is draped inside with a pair of heavy green velvet curtains which sport the black and white halves of the Days logo on either side of their adjoining hems.

  As Frank arrives at the corner of the building, a few of the window-shoppers look up, nod to him, and look away again. They recognise him not by his face – few people remember Frank’s face – but by his demeanour. They recognise him as one of their own, one of the overlooked, the disregarded, the discounted.

  He closes his nose to the smell the wind wafts his way, the reek of unwashed clothing and bodies.

  A pair of guards wearing quilted jackets and fur-lined caps with Days logos on the ear-flaps are stationed at the top of the shallow flight of steps that leads up to the North-West Entrance. Hopping up the steps, Frank greets them both, showing them his Iridium. One of the guards takes the card and peers at it, at the same time adjusting the weight of the rifle strapped to his shoulder. There is no need for a visual check on the card, but he examines both sides of it just the same, several times, until, satisfied that it doesn’t look like a fake (as if a skilful forgery would be detectable to the human eye), he turns and swipes it through the slot of the lock unit set into the frame of the pair of doors behind him. He punches in a seven-digit code on the lock unit keypad, and seven bolts within the doors shoot back in quick succession from bottom to top, their ascending clanks like notes in a rising scale. The handle on the left-hand door is a black semicircle, on the right-hand door a white semicircle. Their verticals meet flush when the doors are closed. Grasping the left-hand handle, the guard hauls back on it.

  Frank nods his thanks, takes back his card, and steps through the open doorway. The door is closed behind him, and the bolts slide to in reverse order, descending the scale.

  5

  Seven Names of God: the seven Judaic names for the Divinity – El, Elohim, Adonia, YHWH, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai, and Zeba’ot.

  8.00 a.m.

  IMMEDIATELY NORTH OF the glass dome on top of Days lies a flat-roofed, one-storey penthouse complex. At the southern end is a heptagonal room joined to the rest of the complex by one of its seven points. Within the heptagonal room resides the store’s brain: the Boardroom.

  Inside the Boardroom, a circular table seven metres in diameter sits at the centre of a spread of lush dollar-green carpet. One half of the table is ash, the other half ebony, and situated at one end of the join between the two halves, recessed snugly into the wood, are a computer terminal and a telephone.

  Seven chairs are positioned equidistantly around the table. Each is different and reflects the character and disposition of the person who regularly occupies it. One is an ornate gilded throne; another is a wing-backed armchair comfortably upholstered with padded vermilion leather; a third is designed along Art Nouveau lines with a narrow seat and a straight back composed of staggered rectangles in the manner of a Frank Lloyd Wright window; and so on.

  At eight o’clock, the venetian blinds that cover the triptych of windows at the Boardroom’s southern end rise automatically, furling upwards to reveal an unhindered view of the base of the rotating dome. Currently the dome’s clear half fills the windows, although a crescent-shaped sliver of its dark half is visible in one corner and will encroach more and more on the clear portion as the day wears on.

  Opposite lie four oak-panelled walls, completing the heptagon. On one there hangs a gilt-framed, lifesize portrait of none other than the fonder of Days, Septimus Day himself. Septimus long ago passed through life’s great checkout, but still he glares imperiously down on the Boardroom and all that takes place within it with his good right eye glittering, its patched partner menacing. Anyone who knew Old Man Day thinks the artist has captured his likeness very well indeed. Chillingly well.

  Set into the adjacent wall at chest height is a brass panel sporting a hinged knife switch of the kind Victor Frankenstein throws in old horror movies in order to animate his Creature, except that this one is seven times as large and requires a ceramic handle the size of a baseball bat to operate it. At present the switch stands upright in the Off position with the detached handle clipped next to it on the panel.

  Each of the two remaining oak-panelled walls carries a bank of sixteen monitors arranged in a four-by-four grid. Their screens show computer-generated composites of the Days logo set against a dollar-green background.

  A balding, prim-looking man in a butler’s livery of shirtsleeves and a horizontally pinstriped waistcoat opens the
pair of large doors that bridge the apex of the angle formed by the two monitor-bearing walls. Turning around, he grasps the handle of a serving trolley the size of a hospital gurney and hauls it backwards into the Boardroom. Seven heavy silver salvers press the trolley’s wheels deep into the carpet, making it an effort to pull.

  Reaching the centre of the room, the manservant leaves the trolley and goes round the table moving each chair one place clockwise, setting its feet in the indentations left by the previous chair. Then he returns to the trolley and repeats the journey, depositing a salver on the table in front of each seat. This second circuit of the table completed, he guides the trolley out of the room. He returns a minute later with another trolley, this one bearing a silver teapot, a bone-china teapot, three stainless steel coffee pots (one of which contains hot chocolate), a tall glass jug of orange juice, a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic water, lemon slices on a dish, and an ice-bucket carved from a solid chunk of malachite, plus assorted cups, saucers, and tumblers. Once again he circumnavigates the table, placing the appropriate beverages in front of the appropriate chairs. If he experiences a twinge of disapproval as he sets the gin, tonic, lemon, and ice before the gilded throne, he hides it well behind the pinched, impassive mask of a family retainer of long standing who has learned over the years not to betray a hint of emotion either in or out of the presence of his employers.

  The manservant, whose name is Perch, pauses to take out a gold fob watch. He flips up the lid, nods approvingly at the time, returns the watch to his waistcoat pocket, and wheels the second trolley out of the Boardroom.

  A short corridor takes him past the head of a spiral staircase and along to the kitchen. He parks the trolley, goes over a couple of the finer points of the lunchtime menu with the chef, then makes his way on long, soft-stalking legs into an adjoining chamber which he has come to consider as his office, although it is also a repository for all the silverware – the cutlery, snuff boxes, cuspidors and humidors – which it is his duty to polish to brilliance once a month. He seats himself at a small oaken desk on the blotter of which rests an intercom fashioned as a replica of an antique black Bakelite telephone, complete with rotary dial, plaited brown flex and clawed brass cradle. He lifts the receiver and dials 1.

  The line chirrups a few times, then there is a click of connection.

  “Master Mungo,” says the old retainer.

  “Morning, Perch,” comes the reply. There is the sound of wind and lapping water. Mungo is out by the rooftop pool.

  “Good morning to you, sir. Breakfast is served.”

  “Another couple of lengths and I’ll be along.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Perch taps the cradle and dials 2.

  “Master Charles.”

  A young woman answers. “Chas is in the shower.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Bliss. Who are you?”

  “Madam, you should not be using Master Charles’s intercom.”

  “Chas told me to pick it up,” the girl replies tartly.

  “Then would you kindly inform Master Charles, madam, that breakfast is served.”

  “Okey-dokey. Will do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No trouble. ’Bye.”

  Perch taps the cradle again and dials 3.

  “Master Wensley.”

  A sleep-furred voice responds. “God, is that the time already, Perch? I’ll be up there quick as I can. Keep my devilled kidneys warm, will you? There’s a good fellow.”

  Perch dials 4.

  “Master Thurston.”

  “Already here, Perch.”

  “My apologies. I didn’t hear you come up the stairs.”

  “That’s all right. These eggs are tasty.”

  “I’m most gratified, sir.”

  “Pass my compliments on to the catering staff.”

  “That I will, sir. I’m sure they will be most gratified, too.”

  Perch dials 5.

  “Master Frederick.”

  “How’s it going, Perch?”

  “Well, sir.”

  “Papers arrived yet?”

  “I shall check, sir. If they have come, I shall have them waiting for you at your position.”

  “Great stuff. See you in a mo.”

  Perch dials 6.

  “Master Sato.”

  “Perch.”

  “Breakfast is served.”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Perch taps the cradle, hesitates, then, drawing on all his reserves of self-control (and they are deep), dials 7.

  The line chirrups for the best part of two minutes and no one picks up. Master Sonny is either deliberately ignoring the ringing of his portable intercom or incapable of hearing it. Perch confidently suspects the latter. In fact, he would not be surprised if Master Sonny were presently lying on the floor of his bathroom, curled around the pedestal of a vomit-spattered lavatory, comatose. It would not be the first time Perch has gone downstairs to wake him and found him in such a position.

  Replacing the receiver, Perch permits himself the merest twitch of a smile. The prospect of rousing Master Sonny from his alcohol-induced stupor fills him with no small pleasure.

  Perhaps the glass-of-cold-water-in-the-face method again...

  6

  Seventh Heaven: a state of serene, transcendent bliss.

  8.01 a.m.

  THE QUIET HALF-HOUR.

  Over the dollar-green marble floor of the entrance hall Frank goes, over the smooth opal-and-onyx cobbles of the Days logo mosaic, past banks of lifts waiting with their doors open, past conga-lines of wire shopping trolleys, past parked rows of motorised shopping carts, beneath an unlit chandelier like a waterfall captured in glass, towards the parade of arches that afford access to the store proper.

  He is trying to work out how many times he has crossed this hall and at the same time trying to remember when he started trampling the jewelled logo beneath his feet instead of skirting it respectfully as most people do. The answer to the first question runs into so many thousands that he swiftly and incredulously abandons the calculation. The answer to the second is easier: he started walking over the logo instead of around it the day he realised that he could, that there was no specific rule against doing so, that all that kept people off the circle of precious stones was their belief in the sanctity of wealth – a belief he had ceased to share, or, more accurately, realised had never been part of his personal credo.

  This was around the time when he first started to notice that he had lost his reflection. The loss was so gradual, in fact, it was only in retrospect that he realised that it had occurred at all. Every day he would look in the mirror and a little bit more of himself would be absent, and every day he would dismiss this as a trick of the light or the mind – to acknowledge it as an empirical fact would have been to entertain madness. Eventually, however, the truth was impossible to deny. He was forgetting what he looked like and who he was. He was slipping away, slowly, in increments.

  The day that he became aware of this was the same day that he dared to set foot on the jewelled mosaic, and also the same day that the idea of leaving Days first stirred in the furthest reaches of his mind. He can almost pin down the genesis of his decision to quit to the moment he first rested his right foot on the tip of the opal semicircle and was not fried to a crisp by a lightning bolt from Mammon’s fingertip.

  Arriving at the arches, Frank halts, takes out his wallet, and yet again unsheathes his Iridium. Each arch is fitted with a set of vertical stainless steel bars two centimetres thick that slot snugly into the lintel. The uprights between the arches have terminals mounted on them at waist-level. The terminals are conical, with oval screens and chrome shells. Each invites Frank in large green letters to insert his card into its slot. He does so with the one nearest to him, and the screen swiftly bitmaps a Days logo, then runs a green message across it:

  CARD INCORRECTLY INSERTED

  PLEAS
E TRY AGAIN

  Frank removes the ejected card, flips it over so that its logo is facing up, and reinserts it, tutting at his own carelessness.

  A new message appears:

  HUBBLE, FRANCIS J.

  EMPLOYEE #1807-93N

  ACCOUNT STATUS: IRIDIUM

  CARD NO.: 579 216 347 1592

  This is erased and replaced with:

  LOG-ON TIME: 8.03 A.M.

  HAVE A GOOD DAY’S WORK, MR HUBBLE

  The card is ejected again, and the stainless steel bars of the arch to the left of the terminal retract upwards with a sharp pneumatic burp. He passes through, returning the card to his wallet. He knows metal detectors are scanning him, but as he has nothing metallic on him larger than his house keys and his fillings, alarms do not whoop. The bars descend again smoothly and swiftly like mercury rushing down transparent pipes.

  The quiet half-hour.

  As far as Frank is concerned the time between now and 8.30 is sacred. The store is still, its overhead lights at half-power. The night watchmen have gone off duty and the shop assistants have not yet arrived. Days is neither closed nor open but somewhere in between, in a semi-lit limbo of transition. Neither one thing nor the other, neither darkened and empty nor bright and bustling, the place is perhaps at its most honest. Everything it has to offer is laid bare beneath the dimmed bulbs. Nothing is hidden.

  If you enter Days by the North-West Entrance, the first department you find yourself in is Cosmetics. As Frank begins to cross the department, he is aware of making a mental note of his impressions, recording what he is seeing as though he is a human video-camera. Frank the man is at one remove from Frank the creature of habit, who would normally stroll through the quiet half-hour in a meditative state, letting his thoughts flow and free-associate. He is observing himself like an anthropologist studying a primitive tribesman. What is he doing now? He is passing between a display of skin-care products in pastel-coloured packaging and a range of lipstick testers racked in individual cubbyholes like miniature missiles in silos. What is he thinking? He is thinking how large this room is – like all the departments in Days, a little over two hundred metres long on each side – and yet how cramped it feels, and how the counters, laden to above eye-level, form a honeycomb maze in which it only takes a moment to lose all sense of direction. How does he feel? He is remembering his first day at Days and the awe that filled him as he stepped through one of the arches with his card still in his hand – back then it was a Platinum – to find himself actually on the floor of the world’s first and (he was thrilled to think) foremost gigastore. He still feels a trace of that awe now but it is no more than a sedimentary deposit, like limescale, that would be more trouble than it’s worth to scrub away. Mostly he just feels a kind of silent emptiness.