Days

by James Lovegrove

  All of which he dutifully files away for the benefit of the Frank Hubble of the future, for the man he is going to be as of tomorrow, the secret wanderer adrift in the immensity of America.

  From Cosmetics, he has the choice of going either south through the Perfumery or east through Leather Goods. A pungent miasma of ten thousand different musks hangs perpetually over the Perfumery, strong enough to make your eyes water. The combined stench of hectares of cured cowhide in Leather Goods is marginally less stomach-turning, so Frank goes east, then jinks south into the Bakery. Deliveries of fresh bread have not yet arrived but the yeasty aroma of yesterday’s batch still lingers in the air. Chilled cabinets loaded with pastries, pies, croissants, and bagels hum with full-bellied delight.

  The next department is the Global Delicatessen. The Global Delicatessen is divided into subsections, each of which sells the specialities of a different country’s cuisine from a counter decked out in stereotypically traditional style. For example, chapatis, samosas and bhajis can be found within a scale-model Taj Mahal made of painted chipboard, while pastas of every imaginable shape and colour are stored in jars in a mock-up of a room from a Florentine palazzo, complete with peeling stucco walls and exposed brickwork. An ersatz Bavarian market square offers sauerkraut and dozens of varieties of bratwurst, a faux French village square with boxed orange-trees and a bar-tabac backdrop has stalls where browsers may sample escargots, bouillabaisse and onion soup before buying, and trestle tables in a pseudo Greek fishing village groan with hummus, baklava, cabanos sausage and a wide assortment of olives – black, green, stuffed, dried. And so on. At opening time, each subsection will be staffed by shop assistants decked out in the appropriate national costume.

  To the east lies the malodorous hell that is the Fromagerie, but Frank steers well clear of the connecting passageway and continues south through the Global Delicatessen to the Ice Cream Parlour. The air in the Ice Cream Parlour is chilled by over three hundred glass-lidded freezer cabinets. They contain tubs of ice cream that run the gamut of flavours from the traditional (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry) to the unlikely (rhubarb crumble with custard, spearmint’n’saveloy, lox and cream cheese, tapioca with a hint of violet), most of which are also available as frozen yoghurts, sorbets, and granitas. Frank draws his overcoat tightly about himself and bustles through, his exhalations wisping behind him like a gossamer scarf.

  One more department lies between him and the building’s heart. The Confectionery Department is a sweet-toothed child’s vision of heaven and an honest dentist’s vision of hell. Candy canes reach to the ceiling, jar upon jar of foil-wrapped toffees and fudges line the walls, and pyramids of handmade truffles wait on refrigerated shelves to be selected, boxed and weighed. Fistfuls of lollipops sit on countertops like gaudy bunches of flowers, plaited lengths of liquorice wind around the cash registers like electrical cables, and sticks of Days-brand rock – half white, half black, with the name of the store running all the way through in lime green – glisten in their cellophane wrappers. Pear drops, acid drops, and cough drops are available by the half-kilo. The polychromatic kaleidoscope of allsorts, jelly beans, and dolly mixtures on display would give a chameleon a heart attack. There are butterscotch rectangles, nougat triangles, and lumps of marzipan in every shape under the sun. There are gobstoppers, chews, and mints from mild to infernal. And there is chocolate – chocolate of every shade from pitch black to milk white, with a hundred grades of brown in between. Bitter, sweet, bittersweet, studded with nuts, raisins, nuts and raisins, from cubes as small as dice to slabs as large as tombstones... There is so much sugar in the air, just inhaling could send you into a diabetic coma.

  Beyond Confectionery, Frank arrives at his destination, the goal of his south-eastward trek through the store. It is the hoop that encircles the Menagerie. Each floor has one, a broad, annular esplanade that offers shoppers somewhere to sit and rest between purchases, and also provides a shortcut from one corner of the store to the other. Furnished with pine benches and potted plants, mainly philodendra and succulents, and floored with white marble, the hoops would appear to be oases of calm and repose amid the relentless, hectic sell-sell-sell of the departments. Restaurants and cafeterias reinforce this impression. It should be noted, however, that the benches are few and far between, that the service in the restaurants is swift and perfunctory, and that the snacks served in the cafeterias are, to put it mildly, inedible.

  The Red Floor hoop is deserted. The entire atrium, all the way up to the great glass dome, is silent except for the rustle of foliage, a faint trickle of running water, and the occasional animal-cry, all from the Menagerie.

  Frank crosses over to the parapet that runs around the hoop’s inner edge, rests his forearms on the guardrail, and leans out. Craning his neck until his windpipe stands proud like a bent arm, his Adam’s apple its elbow, he peers up at the dome some hundred and twenty metres above him.

  The dome’s gyration, like the wheeling of the stars across the sky, is too slow for the human eye to detect. Frank knows that its revolutions are cunningly geared so that, whatever the season, the unsmoked half is always aligned with the sun, but he has never been able to fathom why Old Man Day opted for this arrangement when a static and completely clear dome would have been far cheaper to construct and would do the job of illuminating the atrium just as well, if not better. Yes, the bicoloured dome acts like a giant logo, stamping the imprimature of Days on the entire building, and yes, as a technological achievement it is deserving of admiration, but as far as Frank is concerned all the dome’s twenty-four-hour rotation does is serve as an unwelcome reminder of the incremental, inexorable passing of each day. And according to the dome, every day is divided perfectly into equinoctial halves, twelve hours of light, twelve hours of darkness. According to the dome, every day is the same.

  Frank lowers his head and looks across to the rising tiers of floor half a kilometre away, then down through the gauze of monofilament mesh and the gridwork of irrigation pipes to the Menagerie.

  The Menagerie’s canopy, which begins about five metres below where Frank is standing, is an undulating vista of palms with here and there a fern pushing up sharply between the fringed fronds. Bushy epiphytes cling to the trees’ trunks, and in clearings Frank can make out orchids and bamboos clustering around their roots. The manmade tropical forest gives off a humid, steamy aroma, its jungle jade flecked with flickering leaf-shadows.

  Over to the west, a macaque shrieks in the treetops. Something else closer to Frank replies with a series of stuttering laughs – yak-yak-yak – that develops into a full-throated whooping. The macaque offers its territorial argument again, and the whooping creature falls into submissive silence. There is a flash of whirring scarlet between the leaves: a parrot darting from one branch to another. Something small like a rabbit skitters through the undergrowth. A big electric-blue butterfly comes bumbling up to the net, flaps stupidly against it for a while, then swirls back down into the green. A thousand other insects softly sing and trill, a high-pitched glee club that will, once the store opens, be swamped by the din of voices and footsteps. Frank half-closes his eyes and lets the Menagerie’s soothing susurration fill his ears. This he will miss, no doubt about it. On many a morning, the prospect of these few brief ruminative moments spent gazing down on the Menagerie’s canopy before the madness of the day begins has been the only reason he has been able to find to drag himself out of bed.

  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 tigress, 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.

  MEANWHILE, 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.