Days

by James Lovegrove

  And it seems that the knife switch’s contacts, through which all the power in the store flows, are crackling in their eagerness to be connected.

  “Five,” says Thurston. “On my mark. Four.”

  And the brothers can feel a vibration through the soles of their shoes, a low bass drone like the humming of a million bees.

  “Three.”

  And each fancies he can hear a stunned hush as of a thousand breaths being held.

  “Two. One. And pull!”

  It takes the combined strength of all six of them, with Mungo performing the work of two, to haul the switch down from its upright position. The brothers grunt and gasp as they lever it through horizontal on its squealing hinges, and push and keep pushing until its two brass prongs are nearly touching the contact clips. One more shove, with all the effort they can muster, and the switch slides home.

  They let go at once. The lights in the Boardroom dim, then brighten again.

  “My brothers,” says Thurston, shaking out his aching right arm, “we are open for business.”

  10

  Hebdomad: in some Gnostic systems, a group of seven “divine emanations”, each personifying one of the seven then-known planets of the Solar System; collectively, the whole sublunary sphere.

  9.00 a.m.

  IN ALL SIX hundred and sixty-six departments, the lights go from half strength to full, bathing the counters and displays of merchandise in brilliance.

  At each of the four corner entrances the bolts in the doors shoot back and a handful of waiting shoppers swarm forward. The guards, for whom opening time means night shift’s end, hold the doors open for them and usher them through, a courtesy that largely goes unremarked. The guards then head indoors themselves.

  In the hallways, the lifts to the car parks are summoned down.

  Escalators on every floor, frozen in place, start to crawl.

  Outside, the window-shoppers, who have been growing increasingly agitated and excited as nine o’clock has neared, sigh with one voice as the curtains in the windows part.

  The green LEDs on the closed-circuit cameras that scan every square centimetre of the shop floor come alight. Signals flash along the cables threaded through the spaces between the walls, a fibre-optic web whose thousands of strands radiate throughout the store. All the cables originate in the Eye, a long, low bunker in the Basement where several dozen half-shell clusters of black-and-white monitors occupy all the available wallspace, each cluster attended by a screen-jockey in a wheeled chair. The only light in the chamber comes from the monitors and the screens of the terminals affixed to the chairs’ arms: flickering, sickly, blue-grey. The screen-jockeys begin speaking into their headset microphones, at the same time unwrapping Days-brand chocolate bars and popping the ringpulls on cans of Days-brand soft drink.

  The two banks of monitors in the Boardroom also come on. Fuzzy bands of static jump down their screens simultaneously, then stabilise and resolve to show different corners of different departments. The images start to change, switching at random between feeds, one after another at seven-second intervals, a hypnotically shifting televisual collage.

  Sales assistants take their places, adopting practised expressions of mild, polite interest. Floor-walkers stand ready to greet the first influx of customers. Promotional reps tense, poised to pounce with their samples and testers.

  Oblivious to all this activity, the creatures in the Menagerie continue to go about their business, secretly beneath the jungle’s green canopy.

  11

  The Seven Joys of Mary: namely the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the adoration of the Magi, the presentation in the temple, the finding of the lost child, and the Assumption.

  9.03 a.m.

  THE TAXI PULLS up to the turning circle outside the South-East Entrance, and Linda, imagining a carriage arriving at a stately home, hears the crackle of gravel beneath iron-banded wheels rather than the thrum of tyre-tread on tarmac. As the taxi comes to a halt at the foot of the steps, she extends the Silver to the driver between two fingers, flourishing it beside his left ear. He takes the card and stuffs it into the meter with the air of one who has handled Palladiums and even Rhodiums in his time and for whom a mere Silver holds no mystique. Gordon butts open the door and swings his legs out. Standing up, he straightens a crick out of his spine and turns to look at the window-shoppers, who are already in thrall to the displays.

  The taxi driver, tapping keys on the meter, tots up the cost of the fare, plus the pepper spray, plus tax, plus tip, and announces the total, the steepness of which surprises Linda. Reminding herself, however, that she is the co-holder of a Days Silver account, she adopts a serene smile and signs the authorisation slip without a murmur. The taxi driver hands her back the card and wishes her a safe day’s shopping, laying emphasis on the word “safe”. She thanks him and climbs out into a gust of wind that sways her with its unexpected force. The taxi pulls away.

  Bowing her head, Linda mounts the steps, clutching the Silver in both hands. At the top, she divests herself of her taped-up plastic mackintosh and folds it into a neat square package which she stuffs into her handbag. The wind knifes through her blouse, stippling her skin with gooseflesh and making her shiver. Looking round to see what has happened to Gordon, she finds him still staring at the window-shoppers. She trots back down, calling his name.

  Gordon does not respond.

  “Gordon,” she urges. “Come on.”

  But Gordon is mesmerised. Whether by the sight of clumps of ragged, hunched, wind-blown human beings sitting or squatting or reclining before the one-storey-high windows along the edge of the building, or by the displays themselves, Linda cannot tell, but as she reaches his side, she finds her eye drawn to the window immediately to the left of the South-East Entrance, and all at once her eagerness to enter the store melts away, to be replaced by rapt, acquiescent fascination.

  A window display can attract a crowd anything up to a hundred strong. Some are more popular than others, but even the least well attended regularly draw audiences of two or three dozen. The window-shoppers have a tendency to drift from one to the next as the whim takes them, but certain displays have devoted followers who stay with them from opening time to closing time. There is no rhyme or reason why one display should command greater loyalty than another, since they are all essentially alike. But then, popularity is as much a product of the herd instinct as it is of superior quality.

  The display Linda is watching isn’t among the best attended but boasts a respectable number of fans. The window-frame forms the proscenium arch to a set dressed to look like the interior of a typical suburban home, comprising a well-appointed living-room-cum-dining-room and, at the top of a flight of stairs, a recessed upper-level master bedroom with bathroom en suite. Through the ground-floor windows can be seen a backdrop diorama of a garden with a neatly-mown lawn ending in flower beds and a fence. The interior of the house is decorated in no particular style, unless an abundant, disorganised profusion of furnishings, ornaments, and gadgets can be called a style. The rooms are crammed with knickknacks, bric-a-brac, baubles, trinkets, and high-tech appliances, in the midst of which a family of four – father, mother, teenage daughter, young son – are eating breakfast.

  The four living mannequins, who bear scant familial resemblance to one another, are talking animatedly over their meal. Their conversation is relayed to the window-shoppers through loudspeakers mounted on either side of the window and angled toward the audience. Every utensil they use and every item of clothing they wear has a price tag dangling from it, and the family are careful to refer to the cost and the quality of any product they come into contact with. As Linda watches, the actress playing the mother gets up and goes to the sideboard. There, she slices some oranges in half, first holding up the cutting board so that everyone can have a good look at it (and its price tag), then making a great show of the sharpness of the knife, running the ball of her thumb along the blade and pretending to give herself an
accidental nick. Laughing, she sucks at the imaginary wound. Her stage family laugh along with her.

  When she finishes cutting the oranges, which she assures her family are the freshest and finest on offer anywhere, she holds up a Days-brand electric orange squeezer, showing off its attractive, ergonomic styling and its easy-to-disassemble, easy-to-clean components. In fact, she liked the squeezer so much she bought two, one in white, one in beige. Her family are equally admiring of both. Son demands to be allowed to squeeze the oranges, and excitedly scampers up to the sideboard and starts turning the orange halves to juice. Mother looks on proudly, saying, “See, it’s so straightforward and safe, even a child can use it!”

  Meanwhile, Father is complimenting Daughter on her hairdo. She shows him how easy it is to put your hair up in a chignon with a loop device which she just happens to have with her at the breakfast table and which is available exclusively from the Styling Salon Department at Days. Father is fascinated by the simple yet cunning implement. He strokes his thinning crown and says that he would do something similar with his hair, if only he had enough. Daughter finds the joke unbelievably hilarious, giggling and slapping her father’s forearm in an oh-you! way.

  Linda wonders if she might not buy that loop device. She will, if nothing else, visit the Styling Salon Department and bring herself up to date on the latest tools of the trade.

  Mother and Son, returning to the table with a jug of delicious, freshly squeezed orange juice, give the other two members of the family looks of amused confusion, which sends Father and Daughter into paroxysms of conspiratorial glee.

  Then an elderly neighbour comes in by the front door, stage right, clutching a bottle of pills which she simply has to tell the family about. She reminds them of her terrible back pains, bending double, clapping a hand to her lower lumbar region and wincing. It used to feel as though someone was stabbing knitting needles into her spine. Mother shakes her head compassionately as she recalls what miseries the poor dear suffered. But then Elderly Neighbour’s face brightens. She taps the lid of the bottle of pills and says that after just five days on these, she noticed a significant improvement. Mother can scarcely believe it. “Just five days and you noticed a significant improvement?” Elderly Neighbour nods enthusiastically. She straightens her back. “See? The pain is all gone.”

  The family – and the window-shoppers – gaze at the bottle of pills as though it contains water from Lourdes. Elderly Neighbour holds it up with the label and Days logo showing, so that no one watching can be under any misapprehension as to where these miracle-working analgaesics can be purchased.

  Linda finally manages to tear her gaze away from the scene, only to find her attention roving to the other displays, each of which is equally absorbing in its own way. Families, couples, flat-sharing friends, holidaymakers at a tropical resort, women at a beauty parlour, workers in an office, fitness enthusiasts in a gym, schoolchildren in a classroom, swimsuit-clad sunbathers basking on a narrow strip of sand and bronzed by a battery of arc-lights, thespians all, theatrically sing the praises of the items of merchandise that surround them in a cornucopic clutter.

  Up until at least the age of eight, Linda used to think that the people in the displays lived there all the time. Never mind that her mother insisted that they were just actors and actresses, Linda remained firmly convinced that when the people inside the windows walked off-stage they carried on being who they were on another hidden part of the set – a belief which survived long after the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was out.

  Remembering this childhood misapprehension now, she feels both affection for the naive creature she was and amazement that, given her upbringing, she had any illusions left at all by the time she was eight. But then Days has always been a magical place for Linda. Every Advent, she and her mother would make the pilgrimage here to see the Christmas displays. On cold December afternoons, wrapped up in so many layers of clothing that she could hardly move her limbs, she would hold her mother’s hand tight as they strolled from one window to the next. It was impossible for them to circumnavigate the building completely, ten kilometres being much too far for a child to walk in a single afternoon, but every year, as Linda grew taller and stronger, they would cover a little more of the distance than previously, and as they walked they would stop at any window that caught their eye and gaze in at a wintry outdoors set with leafless trees and drifts of fake snow or a cosy, firelit interior scene where the living mannequins would be busy decorating the hearth or wrapping gifts or singing carols, scenes of domestic harmony utterly unlike the sullen Christmases at Linda’s house, with her father stomping and grumbling like Ebeneezer Scrooge for the entire festive season and moaning at Linda’s mother whenever she tentatively broached the subject of having relatives over for lunch on Christmas Day or getting Linda the bicycle they had been promising her year after year, calling her a sentimental old cow or a swindling bitch.

  Those trips to Days are among the few happy memories Linda has of her childhood. Her mother, no doubt because she was free of her husband’s debilitating influence, would talk and laugh with a brightness and lightness in her voice Linda never heard at any other time of the year, and as the two of them rode the bus home afterwards through the deep-blue dark, they would discuss which window was the best and how this year’s displays compared with last year’s and what might have been in the windows they were unable to reach and what novelties they might look forward to seeing next year. And those were the only times that Linda could reassert her claim that one day she would have an account at Days and receive nothing from her mother in reply but a slow, sweet, and, in retrospect, sad smile.

  “Gordon,” Linda says softly, and her husband starts and blinks, unaccustomed to hearing his name spoken with such tenderness. “Let’s go in, shall we?”

  She slips her hand into his and tugs him toward the steps. She wishes her mother was alive to see her now, her mother who never had faith in anyone because she was never allowed to have faith in herself. She wishes her mother could see how believing in yourself makes anything possible.

  They mount the steps and pass through the entrance doors. The hallway makes Linda gasp. Photographs she has seen have not prepared her for the real thing. Bustling with customers. The lifts disgorging new arrivals. The lofty ceiling. The sea-green marble floor. The chandelier. The mosaic of precious stones, too beautiful to pass by. The Trivetts pause at its perimeter, and Linda gazes down in awe at the twin semicircles of opal and onyx.

  “Wish I’d brought a hammer and chisel with me,” says Gordon.

  Linda tells her husband not to be vulgar. That’s precisely the sort of thing a Days customer doesn’t say.

  A woman approaches them. Her jacket and skirt are a matching dollar green, and around her neck she wears a silk scarf with tiny Days logos printed on it, pinned at her throat with a cloisonné Days-logo brooch. Her hair, Linda notes, is hennaed. It doesn’t match her dark eyebrows, and anyway, no one’s hair is naturally that red. A skilful job, nonetheless, and the way the woman wears it scraped back offsets the roundness of her face, giving her the appropriate air of authority and efficiency. The ID badge attached to her breast pocket says that her name is Kimberly-Anne. Below her name is her employee barcode.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” says Kimberly-Anne, gesturing at the jewel mosaic. If her smile were any brighter you would need sunglasses to look at it.

  Linda nods.

  “Is this your first visit to Days?”

  “It is,” says Linda. She is too entranced by the floor mosaic to be annoyed that her and Gordon’s inexperience is apparently so obvious to everyone.

  “Then let me tell you a little bit about finding your way around the store. First of all, you’ll need this.” Kimberly-Anne hands them a booklet from the small stack in her hand. “It contains maps to all six floors, showing every department and indicating where the cloakrooms, lifts, escalators, and restaurants are. Usually we advise newcomers to plan out a route beforeha
nd so that they can visit all the departments they need to with less risk of getting lost, but you look like intelligent people, you probably won’t have to do that.”

  Linda graciously thanks her for the compliment.

  “The next thing you have to consider is something to put your purchases in. We have a range of options available. Would you care to accompany me?”

  Before either of the Trivetts can answer, Kimberly-Anne is striding off in the direction of the motorised carts and shopping trolleys. Linda turns to Gordon, he shrugs, and they follow her.

  Kimberly-Anne leads them to one of the motorised carts, an electric buggy that seats two, with a large cubic volume of open boot space at the rear. She waves her hands over it like a conjuror’s assistant demonstrating the apparatus for the next trick.

  “A cart is the most comfortable and convenient way of getting around Days,” she says, “and is complimentary to all Osmium and Rhodium customers.”

  “That’s not us,” says Linda, flattered by the implicit assumption that she and Gordon look like the sort of people who could hold one of the two highest accounts.

  “Then for a small hire-charge –”

  “We don’t need one,” says Gordon. He looks at his wife. “Well, we don’t.”

  Kimberly-Anne indicates the phalanxes of gleaming wire trolleys. “Then how about a trolley instead? Every wheel guaranteed to turn without wobbling or sticking, and complimentary to all Palladium and Iridium customers.”

  “That’s not us either,” Linda admits, a touch ruefully. “But it might be a good idea to hire one.”

  “Linda,” says Gordon under his breath, “we haven’t been here five minutes, you’ve already made a large dent in our account, and now you want to make a larger one. I thought you said we were going to be careful.”