“I feel such a fool,” Mrs Shukhov confides to Gould.
“All right then,” says Morrison, seating himself at his desk. He brisks his palms together. “No more time-wasting, Mrs Shukhov, eh?”
“Yes, of course,” says Mrs Shukhov. “I really am very sorry. About everything.”
“Fine. Now, for Mr Hubble’s benefit, I’m going to recap what little information I’ve managed to glean so far. The lady here, Mrs Carmen Andrea Shukhov, née Jenkins, is, or I should say was, the proud holder of a Platinum account. On Tuesday last, she happened to mislay her card, and for reasons she is just about to reveal to us did not report it missing and request a replacement, as you or I might have done, but chose instead to embark – with, I might add, a singular lack of success – on a career of five-fingered discounting. A decision made all the more curious by the fact that her account is in an acceptably healthy condition. No outstanding debts, and still some way below its limit.” Morrison gestures at the lists of dates and figures scrolling up the screen of his terminal, a record of every transaction carried out with Mrs Shukhov’s Platinum since its issue. With a single keystroke, he pulls up a second list. “Same goes for her bank account, which receives a handsome credit on the first of each month from an offshore account held in the name of a Mr G. Shukhov. Housekeeping, I take it, Mrs Shukhov?”
“Actually, maintenance.”
“You and Mr Shukhov are no longer together.”
“Not for over a decade. After the divorce, Grigor remained in Moscow, I came back home. We met and married while I was working out there. We had a few good years together. We lived in a gorgeous apartment in a converted mansion on Tverskaya, and Grigor looked after me well, and promised to continue to look after me even after the marriage fell apart. He was always generous with his money. The problem was, I wasn’t the only woman who benefited from his generosity.” The bitterness is buried so deeply in her voice as to be almost undetectable.
Mrs Shukhov goes on to explain that a condition of the divorce settlement was that her entitlement to the money depended on her not holding down a paying job of any description. The result was that she came to rely on the monthly payments, a decision she regrets now but which at the time seemed eminently sensible. If the alternative to living on a nice monthly stipend for no effort is working full-time for less money, probably a great deal less, who but a lunatic would opt for the latter?
“Then last month the payments suddenly stopped, and that, basically, left me up the creek without the proverbial paddle. No source of income and no prospect of being able to find a source of income in the immediate future.”
“Ah,” says Morrison, referring again to the screen. “Yes, they did stop, didn’t they? Why was that, Mrs Shukhov?”
“Because Grigor himself stopped.”
There is a moment of uncertain silence.
“Dead,” she clarifies. “A heart attack. Sudden, massive, instantly fatal. Brought on, no doubt, by one of those gymnastic floozies he was so fond of, or by a glass too many of vodka, most likely a combination of the two.”
“My condolences,” says Gould sincerely.
Mrs Shukhov waves the sympathy away with a flap of her hand. “No need. Grigor and I hadn’t had any contact, apart from through our lawyers, for years. I mourned his loss long before he died. To me he was already a memory.”
“Even so.”
“An old wound. Besides, I’m currently too busy being angry with him to be sad. Leaving me high and dry like that, without a penny to my name! Silly, I know, but that’s how I feel about it. How dare he not make provision for me in case of his death. Although, if I’m to be honest with myself, it’s as much my fault as his. I ought to have known he’d leave no assets, no capital, nothing. That’s the kind of man Grigor was. His philosophy was live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself. That’s what charmed me so much when I first met him – his lack of worry, his pleasure in whatever was in front of him wherever he might be, his delight in the moment. I was working at Novi GUM at the time, taking groups of foreign customers around, mainly tourists from Western Europe. It was a stressful job, and Grigor was so carefree. The perfect antidote.”
Morrison can’t resist an opportunity to trot out the old joke about Russia’s only gigastore. “Novi GUM – they changed the name, they rebuilt the store, but there still isn’t anything on the shelves.”
“Not true, Mr Morrison, not true,” says Mrs Shukhov. “Yes, the place was hopelessly disorganised when I was there, definitely. A shambles compared to most other gigastores, and you couldn’t buy anything you wanted, not like here. But that was part of its attraction, that uniquely Russian atmosphere of amiable chaos. Like the country itself, a huge old bumbling institution that somehow, almost in spite of itself, muddles through. At the very least Novi GUM, in my day, was full of surprises. How many gigastores can you say that about?”
Certainly not this one, thinks Frank, a man neck-deep in the mire of routine.
“Every day there was a chance you could round a corner and come across something that wasn’t there the night before,” Mrs Shukhov goes on. “Sometimes, without warning, whole departments would swap around. Whichever department needed extra floorspace got extra floorspace, that was how it worked. A strangely democratic game of musical chairs, which made my job more difficult but also kept me from getting bored and falling into a rut. What was available depended on what the management could get hold of, you see. One day the store might take delivery of ten thousand pairs of chopsticks, the next it might be a hundred gross of ping-pong balls, the next several tonnes of tinned baby food. There was never any rhyme or reason to it, but people bought the stuff because the feeling was, ‘Well, you never know when chopsticks or ping-pong balls or baby food might come in handy.’ Which, I suppose, only goes to prove old Septimus Day’s point about whatever can be sold will be bought and vice versa. One morning, I remember, they cleared out the Hall of Samovars and wheeled in this huge woolly mammoth which someone had chiselled out of the Siberian ice. It had been stuffed and mounted on a car chassis. On a car chassis, can you believe it!” She chuckles at the recollection, shaking her head. “A day later it was gone and the samovars were back. Somebody bought it, some museum I expect. I don’t know who but museum curators would have a use for a stuffed woolly mammoth on wheels, do you?”
“I’ve heard Novi GUM is run much more efficiently these days,” says Gould.
“Since the mafia took it over? Probably. Grigor always used to say that the whole of Russia would move over to a black market economy eventually, and he was right. He used that to his advantage, naturally. He was in the fur trade, and there fur isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity, so he did well for himself. And for me. This is all somewhat off the point, isn’t it?”
Morrison has to agree. “Somewhat.”
“What you really want to know is why I didn’t report the loss of my card.”
“Well, I think you’ve explained that already, in so many words. You didn’t report it because you were concerned that, since your ex-husband’s alimony payments had ceased, Days wouldn’t issue you with a replacement.”
“Concerned? Terrified, more like. And without my Platinum, how would I live? More to the point, who would I be?”
“And you were right. Not only would the store have refused to replace the card until a suitable level of income had been re-established, but even if you hadn’t lost it, your account would automatically have been suspended as soon as its limit was reached. But there’s still one thing that puzzles me.” Morrison glances at his terminal. “The last transaction carried out on the card took place the day before yesterday, the day you say you lost it, Tuesday. You bought, let me see, a Russian phrasebook.”
“And I was going to buy a one-way plane ticket to Moscow next. I still have friends back there, and under the circumstances it seemed like the best place for me to be.”
“You weren’t by any chance planning on doing a bunk?” Gould asks, raising an e
yebrow.
Mrs Shukhov confesses that she was.
“You’d never have got away with it,” Morrison states with authority. “Days would have caught up with you. In fact, there’s every chance you would have been stopped at the airport before you could leave the country. Nothing, Mrs Shukhov, but nothing, comes between Days and a debt.”
Frank knows the truth of this. There is a clause in the disclaimer form which states that should a customer die owing more on his account than can be recovered from immediately accessible funds, the store is entitled to scoop the remainder from his estate, plus any legal expenses incurred during this process, the store’s needs taking precedence over those of the relicts named in the deceased customer’s will. Not even death is an escape from Days.
“Well,” says Mrs Shukhov with a light shrug, “you can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“But back to the point,” says Morrison. “You say you lost the card two days ago.”
“And rotten luck it was too. I can’t for the life of me think what happened to it.”
“So tell me – how did you get in this morning?”
And at that Mrs Shukhov gives a broad, clever grin, and suddenly Frank thinks he has the answer. It is an unlikely answer, to be sure, but one that fits all the facts.
“She’s been hiding out inside Days,” he says.
Mrs Shukhov blesses him with a gracious, approving nod. “How astute of you, Mr Hubble.”
“But surely...” Morrison grapples with the concept and comes off worst. “No, there has to be some other explanation.”
“That’s why she needed the contact lens solution,” says Frank, “and why she looks and smells the way she does.”
“Blunt,” Gould mutters to Mrs Shukhov.
“Let’s be kind and call it pointed,” Mrs Shukhov mutters back.
“No, it’s ridiculous,” Morrison insists. “How could she? The night watchmen... The Eye...” He swings his head from side to side as though trying to evade a persistent fly.
“Believe me, Mr Morrison, it wasn’t easy,” says Mrs Shukhov, “but you’d be surprised what you can do when you have no fear of the consequences.”
And she explains.
As soon as she noticed her card was missing, she realised that whether it had been handed in by some honest person or pocketed by some unscrupulous person, it didn’t matter; either way, she wasn’t going to see it again. She retraced her steps anyway, hoping against hope that she would come across it lying on the floor somewhere, peeking out from under a counter perhaps. She spent the whole afternoon looking for it, in a state of silent, panicked disbelief.
Then suddenly it was closing time, and she knew that if she walked out of the store that evening she was never going to be allowed back in again. And at that moment she stopped and said to herself, “So why not stay?”
At first she found it hard to believe that she could have come up with such an idea, but the more she thought about it, the more deliciously audacious, and at the same thoroughly sensible, it seemed. After all, if she got caught, what was the worst that could happen to her? She would be thrown out and forbidden to return. So what had she got to lose?
She didn’t know whether she would have the courage to pull it off, but she decided it would be a shame not to try, so she asked herself where would be the best place to spend a night in Days, and the answer that came to her was both logical and childlike in its simplicity. Where would anyone spent a night in Days but in the Beds Department on the Orange Floor?
So, while other customers were making their way to the exits, Mrs Shukhov made her way to Beds. There, she loitered in one of the show bedrooms, waited until she was sure that all the sales assistants were looking in the other direction, then knelt down and crawled beneath a four-poster with a long counterpane that went all the way down to the floor. Huddled beneath the bedsprings, curled up on the carpeted floor, she heard everyone leave, the store close, silence fall. Soon, in spite of everything, she was asleep.
At this point Gould cannot help breaking into a smile, although she does her best to hide it by lowering her head and putting her hand to her mouth. Morrison, meanwhile, scratches one cheek sceptically. Frank just says one word: “Uncomfortable.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Mr Hubble,” says Mrs Shukhov. “From about four in the morning onwards I was bursting for a pee, but I didn’t dare creep out and go and look for a Ladies, not with all those guards with torches roving around, and I’m too well brought up to go on the spot, so for five long hours I had to lie there with my legs crossed and my teeth gritted. Nine o’clock couldn’t come soon enough, let me tell you. Even then, I decided to put off emerging for another quarter of an hour, because I’m sure it would have raised a few eyebrows among the sales assistants in Beds if someone were to miraculously appear in their department only seconds after opening time.”
“No one saw you crawl out?” says Gould.
“I was very cautious. Also very lucky.”
“Very lucky,” says Morrison. “What happened then?”
Then Mrs Shukhov beat a path to the nearest Ladies, did her business, washed as best she could in the basin, smartened herself up, and went out and spent the whole day wandering around the store.
Once she had settled into the idea of being a stowaway of sorts, it was fun. She tested out various perfumes, partly to cover up the fact that she had slept in her clothes and hadn’t had a bath, but also because it amused her. A nice salesgirl in Cosmetics did her make-up for free, and shortly after that, while looking at casserole dishes in Kitchenware, she was propositioned by a young female customer – the first time something like that has happened to her, and very flattering, although not her thing at all. She browsed, she meandered, she tried on shoes and hats, and when she got hungry she headed for the food departments and filled up on free samples, picking and moving on, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, until her stomach stopped growling. In short, she did everything that she could have done as a legitimate account-holder except make a purchase, and no one was the least suspicious because as long as she looked and behaved like a customer, as far as everyone was concerned she was a customer.
Mrs Shukhov pauses a moment to collect her thoughts, and in that moment Frank notices how self-possessed she has become during the telling of her tale. Something radiates out from her towards her audience of three, in particular (Frank feels) towards him. He can only suppose it is her confidence, drawn to his lack of that same quality like a current sucked along a wire from the positive to the negative terminal of a battery. It gives her a regal air, lending her attractive looks a deeper, truer beauty. He listens with a more attentive ear.
It was an exciting day (Mrs Shukhov continues), though tiring, too. At one point in the afternoon she sat down in a plush leather recliner to rest her feet for a moment, and the next thing she knew a sales assistant was shaking her and telling her to wake up. She had been out for half an hour, but the fellow was very kind about it and told her that people were dropping off in his chairs all the time.
“Do you know, I think on my travels I took in every single department there is,” Mrs Shukhov proudly tells them, “including the Peripheries, and I’ve never dreamed of visiting the Peripheries before. For me there’s never been much call for departments like Single Socks or Buttons & Shoelaces or Used Cardboard. All that walking! My legs are still stiff.” She rubs her calves emphatically. “Although Mr Hubble here probably thinks nothing of covering such distances.”
Frank, not knowing how to respond, inspects the uppers of his shoes and says nothing.
“Shall we hurry this along?” says Morrison. “I think Mr Hubble wants to get back to work.”
“There isn’t much more to add,” says Mrs Shukhov, with just a hint of a pout. “When closing time came round again, I went back to Beds, making sure I’d emptied my bladder thoroughly first, and I did the same as the night before, crawled under that four-poster while no one was looking. After the sales assista
nts had gone home I raised the counterpane a chink to let in some light and brushed up on my Russian with the help of my new phrasebook – I used to be fluent, you know – till I fell asleep. I slept pretty well, except that I was woken up at about two in the morning by somebody with a vacuum cleaner. Fortunately for me, whoever it was didn’t do their job properly and vacuum under the beds, otherwise I might have been in trouble. I went back to sleep again, woke about six, and as I was lying there waiting for opening time, it occurred to me that if I had a mind to it and was careful, I might be able to keep it up indefinitely, this game of living secretly inside Days. There was nothing to stop me, or so I thought.
“It turned out that there was one thing. I hadn’t taken my contact lenses out in almost forty-eight hours, and they were starting to dry out and become painful. I’m blind as a bat without them, so I knew that if I was going to continue as a stowaway I had to get hold of some contact lens solution. I mulled the problem over while eating breakfast on the hoof in the Bakery and the Global Delicatessen – how to get hold of a bottle of contact lens solution without my Days card – and in the end I came to the conclusion that there was only one way. You know the outcome of that, and, well, here I am. A convicted shoplifter. My little escapade at an end.
“To be honest with you,” she adds, “I’m relieved. Despite what I said just now, even if I had got away with my crime, realistically I doubt the game of stowaway could have gone on for longer than about a week. Sooner or later one of the sales assistants in the food departments was bound to think it strange, the same woman coming along and stuffing her face with samples day after day, and there’s only so much a lady of a certain age can do with one set of clothes and a cloakroom basin before her appearance degenerates to a level unbecoming of a Days customer. But you know, apart from the shoplifting bit, which I hated, I enjoyed it. It was a thrill. For a decade my life has been too easy. I needed a challenge, and the past couple of days have been, if nothing else, certainly that. And if the chance ever arose, I’d do it again, like a shot.”
Days Page 18