Days

by James Lovegrove

  She stops talking, clears her throat, smiles.

  “Well, that’s a pretty tale you’ve spun for us, Mrs Shukhov,” says Morrison. His face hardens. “Now how about the truth?”

  “That is the truth,” says Mrs Shukhov firmly, with just a hint of a pout. “Why would I make something like that up?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised the nonsense some shoplifters come up with in the hope that I’ll be lenient with them and let them off with a warning,” says Morrison. “Yours, I admit, is definitely not the run-of-the-mill hard-luck yarn I’m used to hearing. Starving children, dying grandmothers, sisters with leukaemia, that’s the usual standard of sob-story I get. Yours at least has the virtue of originality. Not that that makes it any more credible.”

  “But –”

  “Now look, Mrs Shukhov, I’ve been fair with you. I’ve played along. I dragged Mr Hubble away from his break because you asked me to. I’ve been as co-operative as can be. The least you can do is co-operate back.”

  “I am co-operating! I haven’t denied that I shoplifted, have I? In fact, I admitted it, and I’ll admit it again if you want me to. I shoplifted! There you have it. A confession. Throw me out and banish me for ever.” A fuschia spot of indignation blooms on each of Mrs Shukhov’s cheeks. “For God’s sake, what could I possibly hope to gain by lying? I only told you what I told you just now because... well, partly because I’m quite pleased with myself, I’m not ashamed to admit it, but also because I thought you and a senior member of the security staff might be interested to hear about certain loopholes in your apparently not-so-infallible security system. But honestly, if I’d known you were going to react like such a pompous ass, I’d have kept my mouth shut.”

  “If you want my opinion,” Frank says, pointedly glancing at his watch (the time is three minutes past eleven, and his break is very definitely over), “her story sounds plausible enough.”

  “Thank you, Mr Hubble.” Mrs Shukhov lets her hands fall into her lap and fixes Morrison with a defiant glare.

  “And I think you, Morrison,” Frank continues, “ought to make out a detailed report concerning Mrs Shukhov’s activities, with her help, and then file it to the heads of both divisions of security. That’s what I think.”

  His soft tones carry a deceptive weight, like a feather landing with the force of a cannonball. Morrison blusters, because he has to in order to save face, but inevitably relents. “Well, if you really think it’s necessary...”

  “I do. I also want you to get Accounts to flag her card, in case someone tries to use it.”

  “Of course.” Morrison recovers some of his composure. “I was going to do that anyway.”

  And then Frank does a strange thing. An impulsive thing. The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. “And have the Eye contact me if the card is used.”

  Morrison eyes him curiously. “What for?”

  “If someone has appropriated Mrs Shukhov’s card, I want to personally supervise their apprehension.”

  That sounds good, but it isn’t standard operating procedure, and Morrison’s doubtful look says he knows it. There is no reason why Frank has to be present for that particular arrest. Any other Security operative could do the job just as well.

  So why did he just say what he said? Even Frank isn’t quite sure, and he is alarmed by the rashness of the action, quite out of character. He supposes he did it because, regardless that Mrs Shukhov is a shoplifter, he admires her. He admires her nerve, stowing away in the store like that. Desperate she might have been, but it was still a plucky thing to do. He feels sorry for her, too, and who can begrudge him a small act of decency towards a woman who has earned both his admiration and his compassion? Besides, given that he has just half a day left at Days, chances are he will not be here when the card is used, if it is used.

  Realising this considerably reduces his alarm.

  “Well, I’ll do as you request,” says Morrison, making a note on his computer, “although I’d like to go on record here as saying that it is somewhat irregular.”

  “I think it’s a very nice gesture,” says Gould.

  “So do I,” says Mrs Shukhov. “It’s reassuring to know that Mr Hubble himself will be personally responsible for recovering my card.”

  Frank pretends to ignore the meaningful look that passes between the two women.

  “Am I needed for anything further?” he says to Morrison.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “Then if you’ll all of you excuse me, I should have been back at work well over five minutes ago.”

  He bolts for the door, but cannot avoid taking one last glance at Mrs Shukhov. Her bloodshot gaze, strangely serene, holds his.

  “Grigor would have liked you, Mr Hubble,” she tells him quietly. “He liked everybody, but you he would have singled out for special attention. He called people like you ‘compass needles wavering from north.’”

  “And that means...?” says Frank, poised in the doorway.

  “You think about it,” says Mrs Shukhov.

  On the way back upstairs he does think about it.

  A compass needle has no choice but to point to magnetic north. It may waver on its axis as if attempting to point elsewhere, but in the end it will always fix itself in that direction. Was Mrs Shukhov implying that his fight against the path his life has taken is in vain?

  He doesn’t know. He wishes he knew. Maybe she is wrong. He hopes so.

  20

  The Seven Sacred Books: the seven major works of religion – the Christian Bible, the Scandinavian Eddas, the Chinese Five Kings, the Muhammadan Koran, the Hindu Three Vedas, the Buddhist Tri Pitikes, and the Persian Zendavesta.

  11.06 a.m.

  MISS DALLOWAY SNEERS at the boxes of software that have been placed just inside one of the entrances to her department.

  It is a familiar tactic. First, a few innocuous items of computer paraphernalia appear – an exploratory foray. Then, if the incursion is not swiftly nipped in the bud, a display stand follows. Then, suddenly, as if by magic, there is a computer there too, gleaming with keyboard and monitor and hard drive. Sometimes, if the Technoids are feeling especially bold, a complete workstation – desk, chair, computer, printer with stand – is wheeled covertly into her department, to occupy space which rightly belongs to hardbacks and paperbacks, novels and works of reference, coffee-table books and discounted titles.

  A familiar tactic indeed, wearying in its predictability, and ordinarily Miss Dalloway would go up to the group of Technoids who are slouching and grinning in the connecting passageway between her department and theirs, no-man’s land, and she would shout at them, perhaps pick up their merchandise and hurl it at them, send them running. Ordinarily that is what she would do, but this morning she is content just to sneer, refusing to be provoked. For the moment at least, she is going to turn a blind eye to their deeds.

  The Technoids, crackling in their tight white polyester shirts, their breast pockets bristling with ballpoint pens, jeer at her anyway.

  “What’s wrong, Miss Dalloway? Aren’t you going to swear and throw stuff?”

  “Maybe she’s finally getting the message. That’s our floorspace.”

  “Careful, lads. She may set one of her darling Bookworm boys on us.”

  “Ooh, a Bookworm! I’m scared!”

  “Why, what’ll he do? Read us some poetry and bore us to death?”

  Their goading, however, is confounded by her apparent indifference, and lacks conviction. If nothing else Miss Dalloway is usually good for a tirade of baroque threats, but today she just isn’t rising to the bait, and that confuses and disappoints the Technoids. Consequently they resort to a time-honoured ritual for baiting Books Department employees: chanting the words, “Dead wood,” over and over.

  “Dead wood. Dead wood. Dead wood. Dead wood.” The chant gathering speed. “Dead wood, dead wood, dead wood, dead wood.” Growing in volume, until soon it resembles the rhythmic whoop of apes. “Dead wood dead woo
d dead wood dead wood!”

  But today not even this elicits a response from Miss Dalloway. Instead, the Head of Books merely turns on her heel and strides away, and as she disappears from view between two tall bookcases, the Technoids fall silent and look at one another as if to say, “What do you suppose has got into her then?”

  As the bookcases rise around her, enfolding her like a pair of embracing arms, Miss Dalloway feels shoulders that she didn’t realise were taut slacken and hands that she didn’t realise were fists unclench. The bookcases, old guardians, are a comforting presence – bulwarks, fortifications. A huge weight of wood (no plastic here, nothing so ephemeral), they bear the eternal verities of the printed page ranked cover to cover, forming dense walls of words, and around their bases books litter the floor in unruly stacks; on their shelves, books hide behind books; on the steps of their wheeled ladders, books balance precariously. The sweet clove smell of ageing paper wafts over Miss Dalloway as she moves through her realm, and gradually the Technoids’ insults are soothed away, though not forgotten. Nothing the Technoids do is ever forgotten.

  She threads her way among the bookcases, a tall woman, narrow and bony. She walks with a birdlike precision, picking her way around piles of merchandise and browsing customers with long ostrich unfoldings of her tweed-trouser-clad legs. Everything about her, from her flat chest to her tight mouth, says iron and impenetrability; her flinty eyes and bunned black hair, iron and impenetrability. She is forty-five years old, looks fifty-five, feels sixty-five. She is not a woman you would want to have as an enemy, nor one you would much like to have as a friend – her passions are too intense, too internalised, too focused, to make her easy company. But she is, for all that, a worthy Head of Books.

  She reaches the heart of the department, the information counter, where a dozen young men are waiting for her. Her faithful subordinates. Her darlings. As one they raise their faces towards her, like chicks in the nest when the mother bird returns with a worm. Glad as the sight of them makes her, Miss Dalloway purses her lips tighter still, crushing any possibility of a smile.

  “What do you want us to do, Miss Dalloway?” one of the young men asks, a gloomy-looking lad with a bulging forehead like a cumulonimbus cloud. “Do you want us to go and sort them out?” It is evident from the way he poses the question that he doesn’t relish the prospect of a physical altercation but is nonetheless ready to carry out whatever orders his head of department gives.

  “That won’t be necessary, Edgar. Not yet.”

  “I could set up a dumpbin there,” offers another – poor, plump Oscar, who, as a result of a run-in with the Technoids a couple of weeks ago, is wearing a cast on his forearm. It started out as name-calling across the connecting passageway, escalated to pushing and shoving, and climaxed in a brawl, with Oscar in the thick of it. Poor, brave boy.

  “Thank you, Oscar,” says Miss Dalloway, “but for now we’re going to sit tight and wait. Master Sonny will be down within the hour, and whichever way he resolves the matter will govern our next move. ‘Our patience will achieve more than our force’ – for now.”

  “What chance do you think we have of getting that floorspace back, I mean legitimately?” asks another of the Bookworms.

  “I can’t say, Mervyn. The best we can hope for is that Master Sonny hears the strength of our argument and judges fairly.”

  It isn’t much comfort to her dear worried darlings, but Miss Dalloway herself isn’t convinced that the arbitration will go their way and, much as she would like to, she cannot project an optimism she doesn’t feel. Her misgivings are many, but principal among them is the concern that although she has right on her side (about that she is convinced), she isn’t going to put her case across as charismatically as Mr Armitage, Head of Computers, will put his. She has never had much skill as a diplomat, largely because she has never had to be much of a saleswoman. She is firmly of the belief that books should be bought on their own merits, without hype or pressure tactics, and so hard sell is anathema to her and her department, whereas in Computers hard sell is all customers get from the moment they cross the threshold. And so Miss Dalloway fears that, the rightness of her cause notwithstanding, Mr Armitage’s polished, coaxing, genial style will prove more appealing to Master Sonny than any fervent, impassioned pleading on her part.

  She wishes her uncertainty and anxiety were not so transparent to her darlings, she wishes she could spare them worry, but she can’t, so instead she orders them back to work. Work is the eternal balm for the troubled mind.

  “Mervyn, some of the titles in the Mystery section have got out of alphabetical order. Salman, the Bargains table needs tidying up. Oscar, there’s a customer over there who looks like he needs serving. Colin, you and Edgar set out that delivery of atlases in the Travel section. The rest of you all have things to do. Off you go and do them. Come on, chop-chop!”

  She claps her hands, and they scatter obediently. They would die for her. They would.

  Miss Dalloway retires to her desk, which is tucked away in a corner of the department more book-strewn than most, and which is sheltered on one side by piles of hardbacks which rise to form a teetering, haphazardly stacked crescent three metres high. The desk is an antique cherrywood monster with scroll feet and deep drawers. On it sits the only computer Miss Dalloway will permit in her department. If it was up to her she would do without the machine – nothing wrong with pen, paper, and typewriter, in her view – but she is obliged to use the computer in order to submit inventories and accounts, carry out stock-taking, and send and receive internal memoranda. It’s a handy enough tool in its way, but Miss Dalloway cannot for the life of her understand the mystique, the hysteria, that seems to surround anything even remotely computer-related. All this talk of cutting-edge technology when there exists already a piece of technology so honed, so refined over the ages, so wholly suited to its task, that it can only be described as perfect.

  A book.

  As a source of easily retrievable information, portable, needing no peripheral support systems, instantly accessible to anyone on the planet old enough to read and turn a page, a book is without peer. A book does not come with an instruction manual. A book is not subject to constant software upgrades. A book is not technologically outmoded after five years. A book will never “go wrong” and have to be repaired by a trained (and expensive) technician. A book cannot be accidentally erased at the touch of a button or have its contents corrupted by magnetic fields. Is it possible to think of any object on this earth more – horrible term – user-friendly than a book?

  Dead wood. The Technoids’ chant echoes dully, hurtfully through her head.

  That, alas, is how the majority of people, not just Technoids, regard books: not simply as artifacts made of pulped tree but as obsolete things, redundant, in need of paring away. Dead wood. It’s cruel, and no less so for being true. More and more these days people are deriving their entertainment and education from electronic media, the theatre of the screen replacing the theatre of the mind as the principle arena of the imagination. That is understandable, in that it requires less effort to look passively at visual images than to synthesise one’s own mental images from the printed word. Yet how much more intense and indelible in the memory than a computer graphic is the mental picture evoked by a skilled writer’s prose! Take the pleasure of being led through a good story well told and compare it with the multiple choices and countless frustrating U-turns, reiterations, and dead ends of the average computer game or “interactive” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) CD-Rom – no contest. By simple virtue of the fact that it takes place on a machine, digital entertainment is cold and clinical, lacking tactility, lacking humanity, whereas a book is a warm, vibrant thing that shows its age in the wear and tear of usage and bears the stamp of its reader in fingerprints and spine creases and dog-ears. On a winter’s night, beside a blazing log fire, with a glass of wine or a mug of hot chocolate to hand, which would you rather snuggle up with – a computer or a book? A
construct of plastic and silicon and wires that displays committee-assembled collages of text and image premasticated into easy-to-swallow chunks, or the carefully crafted thoughts of a single author beamed almost directly from mind to mind through the medium of words?

  Oh, Miss Dalloway knows in her heart of hearts that it is wrong to single out computers (and Computers) as the source of her department’s woes when there are dozens of other factors contributing to the decline in popularity of the printed word, but it is better to have an enemy that is concrete, visible, and conveniently close-to-hand than to rail vainly against the growing indifference of the entire world. And so, for better or worse, she has chosen Computers (and computers) as her enemy. Or rather, her enemy was chosen for her by a callous, thoughtless decision made eighteen months ago in the Boardroom of Days.

  And that is another reason why she does not feel confident that the imminent arbitration will go her way. The Day brothers run their store electronically, dispensing their edicts and e-memos from on high, and none of them has, to her knowledge, ever expressed a particular fondness for the literary arts, unless you count Master Fred’s love of newspapers, which Miss Dalloway does not. (Newspapers, in her view, can barely be described as literate, let alone literary.) The Day brothers were the ones who handed over part of her department to Mr Armitage and his Technoids. How can she expect them to be on her side?