Days

by James Lovegrove

  Linda vaguely recalls saying something to that effect, once, before their application was accepted. “Fair enough, the taxi was an extravagance,” she replies, “but a shopping trolley is a necessity.”

  “It’ll only encourage us to buy more than we can afford.”

  To appease her husband, Linda relents. “How about one of those?” she asks Kimberly-Anne, pointing to some tall stacks of wire handbaskets.

  “Of course,” says Kimberly-Anne. “Free to anyone with a Platinum or Gold account.”

  “Platinum or Gold.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not Silver.”

  Kimberly-Anne’s smile loses a degree of candlepower. “Not Silver, no. Silver account-holders may hire a handbasket for –”

  “You mean we have to pay to use a basket?” exclaims Gordon.

  Kimberly-Anne flinches but quickly recovers her composure and her smile, although the latter is perceptibly dimmer now.

  “Silver and Aluminium account-holders are expected to pay a nominal charge in return for the use of any of the available carrying devices,” she says.

  “It won’t kill us to hire a basket, Gordon,” Linda insists. “We can afford it.”

  “That’s not the point. They shouldn’t be charging us for something that should by rights be free. That’s extortion. Daylight robbery.”

  “Gordon, the Day brothers don’t run Days for the fun of it. This isn’t a charitable concern. This is a business, and the purpose of a business is to turn a profit. Isn’t that so, Kimberly-Anne?”

  Kimberly-Anne nods warily, not certain if it is wise to agree with one customer at the expense of another, even when the other customer is obviously in the wrong.

  “There’s a difference between turning a profit and ripping people off,” grumbles Gordon. “Come on. We’ll do without.”

  He is heading for the arches before Linda can stop him. She apologises to Kimberly-Anne, whose smile has by now been reduced to a feeble one-amp flicker, and hurries after her husband.

  Catching up with him, she hisses, “You embarrassed me awfully back there, Gordon.”

  Gordon does not reply, merely strides purposefully up to an arch and waits for her to join him there with their card.

  An obliging guard shows Linda how to insert the Silver into the wall-mounted terminal and gain admittance. Linda is so annoyed with Gordon that neither the sight of their names appearing on the terminal screen (confirmation that they belong here) nor the sight of the bars retracting to let them through thrills her. Luckily, her anger also means that she forgets about the pepper spray in her handbag and is thus spared the anxiety she would otherwise have felt over smuggling it through the metal detectors.

  Then they are on the shop floor.

  12

  Covetousness: another of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  9.05 a.m.

  STILL SMARTING OVER his cowardly behaviour in Mr Bloom’s office, Frank takes a lift from the Basement to the Red Floor, then rides a double-helix strand of escalators, zigzagging up through the levels. As one escalator after another lifts him higher and higher, a vague, dismal dread settles in his stomach. The prospect of the day ahead, with its tedium, its irritations and its unpredictable dangers, is a gloomy one, scarcely alleviated by the knowledge that for him it is going to be the last of its kind. His thoughts start to clot like bad milk, and he literally has to shake his head to disperse them. Eight hours, he tells himself. Less, counting breaks. Less than eight hours of this life to go, and then he is a free man. He can grit his teeth and endure the job for another eight hours, can’t he?

  On a whim he gets off at the Blue Floor. There is never any pattern to Frank’s working day once the store opens except the timing of his breaks, which are staggered with those of his fellow Ghosts so that at least eighty per cent of the Tactical Security workforce is out on the shop floor at any given moment. He travels at random, letting impulse and the ebb and flow of events direct him. The difference between the hours leading up to opening time and the hours after is the same as the difference between waking thought and dreaming – a matter of control. Frank surrenders himself to the random.

  Finding himself in Taxidermy, he wanders through to Dolls, from there to Classic Toys, and from there to Collectable Miniatures, staying with a knot of customers, then latching on to a lone browser, then hovering for a while beside an open cabinet of temptingly pocketable hand-painted thimbles.

  He keeps an eye on customers carrying large shoulder-bags, customers with rolled-up newspapers clutched under their arms, customers with long coats on, customer pushing prams with blanket-swaddled toddlers on board. They could all be perfectly innocent. They could all be as guilty as sin. His job is to hope for the former but always suspect the latter.

  He watches a customer engage a sales assistant in conversation, and immediately he starts looking around for an accomplice. It is an old pro trick. While one shoplifter diverts the sales assistant’s attention, his partner makes the boost. In this instance, however, it seems that the customer is on his own, and is genuinely interested in some Meissen figurines.

  Then a pair of Burlingtons swan past, and Frank moves off silently in their wake.

  The Burlingtons are a cult of spoilt teenage boys who parade their parents’ wealth like a badge of honour, wearing the glaringly expensive designer trainers, the crisp white socks, the tight black trousers, and the gold-moiré blouson jackets that are the unofficial uniform of their rich-kid tribe. These two, it transpires, are on the hunt for rare baseball cards, and Frank dogs them so closely that he could, if he wanted to, raise his hand and stroke the fuzz of their close-shaved hair, half of which has been dyed black, half bleached blond.

  The Burlingtons lead him into Showbusiness Souvenirs, where he detaches himself from them in order to circulate among the displays of stage costumes, old props, production stills, foyer cards, autographed publicity shots of long-faded stars, and crumbling movie and concert posters preserved behind clear perspex.

  The centrepiece of Showbusiness Souvenirs is a locked, reinforced-glass case that holds, among other things, a pair of incontinence pants soiled by an internationally renowned rock’n’roll star during his drug-sodden twilight years; the polyp removed from a former US president’s lower intestine; the skull of a universally despised yet unfathomably successful blue-collar comedian; the steering wheel from the car fatally crashed by a screen legend; a blunted bullet retrieved from a dictator’s shattered head by a souvenir-seeking soldier at the climax of a successful coup d’etat; the stub of the last cigar ever smoked by an unusually long-lived revolutionary leader; a specimen of blood extracted post mortem from the body of a notoriously bibulous politician and decanted into a phial disrespectfully labelled “100% Proof”; a preserving jar containing the aborted foetus of the love-child begotten by an actress and a prominent member of the clergy; a razor-thin cross-section of a famous theoretical physicist’s brain sandwiched between two plates of glass; and a framed arrangement of pubic-hair clippings from various porn-film artistes. All of the above items are accompanied by certificates testifying to their authenticity.

  A ponytailed man in a navy blue suit is loitering beside this cabinet of curiosities, and at the sight of him Frank’s nape hairs start to prickle, as they did at the sight of the girl on the train.

  There is nothing intrinsically suspicious about what the ponytailed man is doing. Plenty of people linger over the collection, gazing at the rare and expensive mortal mementoes with disgust or fascination or a ghoulish combination of the two. And he isn’t exhibiting any of the tics and mannerisms that usually prefigure an act of store-theft. His casual air seems genuine. He isn’t aiming surreptitious glances at the sales assistants or other customers, one of the “flagging” signs Frank was trained to recognise. His breathing is controlled and steady. But Frank doesn’t always go by visual clues alone.

  Frank would be surprised if over the course of his thirty-three-year career he hadn’t developed an in
stinct about shoplifters. In the same way that older deep-sea fishermen can somehow sense where the big shoals are going to be and experienced palaeontolgists sometimes seem to know that a patch of ground will yield fossils even before the first spade has struck soil, Frank can identify a potential shoplifter almost without looking. It is as if thieving thoughts send out ripples in the air like a stone cast into a pond, subtle fluctuations which he has become attuned to and which set alarm bells ringing in his subconscious. It is not the most reliable of talents, and has been known to mislead him, but as a rough guide it is right far more frequently than it is wrong.

  The closer he gets to the ponytailed man, the deeper his conviction grows that the man is planning to steal something. Possibly not from this department, and certainly not from the case in front of him, not unless he is carrying a sledgehammer or a set of skeleton keys, but soon, very soon. The man is pausing here to prepare himself mentally, turning his intentions over and over in his head. Outwardly he betrays not the slightest sign of anxiety or anticipation. A professional.

  When the ponytailed man finally moves away from the glass case, Frank falls in behind him and follows him like a silent second shadow.

  They proceed out of Showbusiness Souvenirs in tandem, the suspect unsuspecting of his pursuer. Their course takes them away from the centre of the building, and the further from the atrium they go, the less frequented, less splendid, and less brightly illuminated the departments become. Soon they arrive at the dim and dusty perimeter departments known as the Peripheries.

  A kind of commercial vortex holds sway on the floors of Days: the closer you get to the centre of the building, the more popular the departments become. The most heavily in-demand departments with the fattest profit margins are clustered around the tiered hoops overlooking the Menagerie, while, at the opposite end of the retail scale, the departments that constitute the Peripheries are consigned to the far-flung edges by the slightness of their sales figures. The only exception to this rule is the Red Floor, which, being the one floor every customer has no choice but to visit, consists of nothing but in-demand departments.

  Conditions in the Peripheries are commensurate with their lowly status. You might expect them to enjoy windows and a view to compensate for their remoteness and for the fact that they are accessible from only three adjacent departments – in the case of those at the corners of the building, only two – instead of the usual four, but though the Peripheries possess exterior walls, the exterior walls are solid. No windows on the shop floor of Days means no outside world to distract the customers within from their shopping. The only natural light to be found anywhere in the store enters via the clear half of the dome, a semicircular gift of sunshine to nourish the chlorophyll of the Menagerie.

  The Peripheries specialise in commodities that are obscure, exotic, inessential, or just plain arcane. Some of the items on offer are of great value, but buyers are few and far between, hence trade is always slow and sales figures always low.

  Quiet, intense, obsessive men and women, all experts in their particular fields, staff the counters here, and so absorbed are they in their daily round of cataloguing recondite items of stock and rearranging merchandise according to abstruse personal systems that they barely notice when the ponytailed man passes. When Frank ghosts by a few paces behind, his rubber-soled shoes padding softly on the carpeted floor, they fail to notice at all.

  Through Used Cardboard, through Occult Paraphernalia, through Vinyl & 8-Track, through Beer Bottles, the quiet, leisurely chase continues. If the ponytailed man pauses for a moment to inspect some piece of merchandise, Frank pauses to inspect a piece of merchandise, too. If the ponytailed man slackens or quickens his pace, Frank slackens or quickens his. If the ponytailed man scratches his earlobe or purses his lips, Frank finds himself reflexively copying the action. He becomes the ponytailed man’s doppelgänger, matching him move for move, gesture for gesture, in split-second-delayed symmetry.

  At one point, in Nazi Memorabilia, the ponytailed man glances behind him, and catches sight of a man dressed as smartly as you would expect a Days customer to be dressed, a man intently inspecting a display of Luftwaffe uniform insignia, a man in every respect unremarkable, unmemorable. A second after he has glimpsed Frank’s face, the ponytailed man has forgotten it. When, a department later, he happens to look over his shoulder and catch sight of Frank again, he doesn’t even register that this is the very same person he saw before.

  On they go, shadower and shadowee, possible perpetrator and Ghost, until they reach Cigars & Matchbooks.

  As the ponytailed man passes through the connecting passageway to this particular department, there is an all but imperceptible stiffening of his spine, and Frank knows in his gut that this is where the suspect is going to make his play.

  He utters a subvocal cough to activate his Eye-link.

  Eye, says a male screen-jockey.

  Hubble.

  Mr Hubble! What can I do for you?

  The connection is so clear that Frank can hear other voices in the background, keyboards rattling, the trundle of chair-wheels across linoleum, a muted but urgent warble of activity underpinned by the cicada whine emitted by hundreds of heated cathode-ray tubes – the ambient hubbub of the Eye leaking through into his ear.

  I’m on Blue, trailing a possible into Cigars & Matchbooks.

  Cigars & Matchbooks? Cor, strike a light, guv! The screen-jockey giggles at his own joke. Eye employees and their tiresome sense of humour are aspects of the job Frank will definitely feel no nostalgia for in his retirement.

  He’s a white male. About a metre eighty. Medium build, I’d say seventy-five to eighty kilos. Early thirties. Suit, tie. Ponytail. Two small hoops in right earlobe.

  Hang on. A ferocious tapping of keys. Cigars & Matchbooks, Cigars & Matchbooks... OK, got him. Corporate non-conformist type.

  If you say so. I think he’s a professional. I don’t recognise the face, but that doesn’t mean a thing.

  Early bird, isn’t he?

  The early bird catches the worm unawares. Or so he hopes.

  Nice one, Mr Hubble. That was almost funny.

  Eye, please just get on with what you’re supposed to be doing.

  Actually, says the screen-jockey with a school-playground inflection, I’ve already triangulated him.

  A quick upward glance confirms this. The security camera above Frank’s head is locked on to the ponytailed man, following his every movement. In another corner of the ceiling a second camera also has a fix on him. Swivelling on their armatures, the two cameras track his progress like a pair of accusing fingers.

  I can’t see you yet, Mr Hubble, the screen-jockey adds.

  I’m about ten metres behind.

  Oh yes. It’s so easy to miss you lot. Want me to start recording?

  Yes, I do.

  Okey-doo. Smile and say cheese.

  Please, says Frank, striving to inject a note of impatience into his ventriloqual drone.

  Sor-ree, says the screen-jockey, and mutters to a colleague, off-mic but loud enough for Frank to hear, I’ve got old Hubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble.

  His colleague offers a sympathetic groan.

  Frank says nothing, and two seconds later the short-wave automatically cuts the connection in order to conserve its tiny lithium cell.

  The Cigars portion of Cigars & Matchbooks resembles the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club, with magazine-strewn coffee tables and green-shaded lamps, dark-framed etchings on the oak-panelled walls and bookcases lined with old volumes of the kind bought by the metre. Lounging on the buttoned-leather furniture, their feet resting on footstools, customers – predominantly male – make their selections from humidors held open for them by liveried sales assistants. Some, unable to wait until they get home to sample their purchases, have lit up and are sitting back contentedly puffing out plumes of smoke, idly leafing through a periodical or admiring the shine on their toecaps.

  The Matchbooks portion, which once boasted t
he floorspace of an entire Violet Periphery department to itself, now occupies a partitioned-off area roughly a tenth of the size it used to enjoy. When the Day brothers took over the Violet Floor for themselves, Matchbooks was merged with – though perhaps the correct phrase should be absorbed by – Cigars, and in order to adapt to its reduced circumstances, most of its existing stock was sold off and its staff whittled down to one. It could have been worse. Those displaced Violet departments that could not be found a natural lodging on a lower floor, which constituted the majority, were simply closed down and deleted from existence.

  The smells of cigar smoke, cardboard, and sulphur mingle and tingle in Frank’s nostrils as he trails the ponytailed man towards the burnished mahogany rolltop desk that serves as Matchbooks’ sales counter. Along the way the ponytailed man pauses to admire several of the matchbooks mounted in clear vinyl wallets on the partition walls. He’s a cool one all right; so relaxed and confident Frank could almost believe that this is one of the occasions when his instinct has let him down.

  Except the man’s eyes are unfocused. He doesn’t look at the matchbooks he is supposed to be examining, only goes through the motions of looking, his thoughts elsewhere. Another giveaway sign, obvious if you have been trained to recognise it.

  At last he approaches the mahogany desk. The sole remaining Matchbooks sales assistant is a man whose white hair and sallow, wrinkled features put him somewhere in the same age bracket as Frank. The name on his ID badge is Moyle, and at present his attention is absorbed by the matchbook he is examining through the jeweller’s loupe screwed into his right eye-socket. The ponytailed man ahems to attract his attention. He ahems again, and this time Moyle notices. He looks up, the loupe dropping expertly into a waiting cupped hand.

  “Sir,” he says. “How may I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a birthday present for a friend of mine. He’s into matchbooks.”