Days

by James Lovegrove

  In they charge, like the Mongol Horde sweeping across a plain, wielding Days cards instead of scimitars and their gaping mouths silent where the troops of Genghis Khan would be screaming battle-cries, but their eyes just as wild, their intent just as clear. And Linda with her fistful of ties doesn’t step cowering out of their way but holds herself steady, erect, ready to meet them. These are her ties, and no one shall have them except her.

  The customers in the vanguard of the charge reach her, and unresisting she lets their impetus carry her along. She has glimpses of teeth and well-coiffed hair, whites of the eye and flashing jewellery, clutching fingers and bulky shoulderpads, and suddenly a fist flails out of nowhere and catches her a glancing blow to the cheekbone, and someone stamps with elephant force on her foot, but still she rides along with the mob, struggling to keep herself upright and planting an elbow in someone’s ribs and a knee in someone else’s thigh, while the air around her head resounds with the whipcrack of ties being snatched from stands.

  A shove from behind sends her stumbling forwards, her teeth clacking painfully on her tongue, the ties nearly spilling from her grasp. She wheels around to find a woman with a shoddily home-bleached frizz of hair waving a chrome-coloured card at her and yelling, “Those are mine! I have a Palladium! You have a Silver! My Palladium trumps your Silver! Those are my ties!”

  “No, they’re not, they’re mine,” Linda replies calmly, “and the last person I’d to give them up to is a stingy little bitch with an inch of root showing and abominable split ends.”

  The bottle-blonde roars like a lioness and makes a grab for the ties. Linda’s response is as swift as it is savage. Stepping back, she swipes the woman’s legs out from under her with a scything kick – a physical feat which she would never have been able to pull off under normal circumstances but which, in the heat of the moment, she executes with perfect and ferocious accuracy.

  As the bottle-blonde goes down she makes an ineffectual grab for Linda’s blouse, but Linda leaps nimbly aside, batting her hands away.

  “Bitch!” the bottle-blonde wails, prone on the floor.

  “Slut!” Linda yells back, as the flow of bargain-hunters sweeps her away once more.

  Like a swimmer in a crowd-torrent Linda is borne thunderously along, until suddenly, dead ahead, through a gap in the seethe of customers, she sees a sales counter, and she heaves herself toward it, at the same time groping for the clasp of her handbag with her free hand. How long has it been since the sale was announced? How many minutes? One? A thousand? Buffeted left and right, Linda propels herself up to the sales counter, at the same time fumbling her card out. She squeezes in sideways between two other customers and thrusts the ties into the face of the sales assistant, a young man barely out of his teens who, according to his ID badge, is a first-year trainee.

  “These!” she cries. “Now!”

  “He was about to serve me,” one of her neighbours asserts crossly. “Isn’t that right?”

  The sales assistant blinks in uncertainty. He is terrified, close to tears. Who can blame him, all these red, raging faces surrounding him, bellowing at him?

  “I was next,” someone else insists.

  The sales assistant gyrates plaintively from one customer to another. Whom should he serve? Whom?

  Linda stretches her free hand across the counter, grabs him by the lapel, and yanks him close.

  “Serve me or it’s your job.”

  That galvanises him. He takes the ties and the card off her, which causes the customers on either side gasp and gripe and grumble and glare their resentment. Linda responds with a serene sneer.

  If only they knew this was her first ever lightning sale. Then they would really have something to complain about.

  And as the sales assistant runs his scanning wand over the four ties one after another and swipes Linda’s Silver through the credit register, Linda nurses a warm, spreading glow of contentment.

  She beat the other customers fair and square. She has a real talent for this.

  24

  Dance of the Seven Veils: the erotic dance performed by the title character in Wilde’s play Salome to entertain Herod before the beheading of John the Baptist.

  12.00 p.m.

  MIDDAY FINDS GORDON crouched with his back to a mirror. A pair of Iridium cards are being waved to and fro mere millimetres from his face. The rainbow coruscations at play across the cards’ surfaces are hypnotically beautiful. Not so beautiful is the smear of blood staining one edge of one of the cards. His blood.

  The blood comes from a throbbing, burning wound in the palm of Gordon’s right hand, and there is more of it, warm and sticky, trickling down his fingers and dripping off the tips. It feels as though his hand has been slashed to the bone, but, much as he would like to, Gordon doesn’t dare examine the cut.

  The pair of Burlingtons who have cornered him in this dead-end aisle in Mirrors move in closer, snickering. Their Iridiums fan a breeze across Gordon’s cheeks as they weave their hypnotic cobra dance around his face. He can see how sharp their edges have been filed, razor-sharp, and thinking of the damage edges so sharp could do to him, a dull little whimper escapes his throat.

  He didn’t even mean to be in this department, that’s the awful irony of it. If it hadn’t been for the woman in Pleasure. If it hadn’t been for Rose...

  And despite the pain and the paralysing fear of the moment, Gordon feels a faint, residual flush of lust as he recalls his first glimpse of Rose – Rose in the clinging pink nylon gown that sinuously emphasised her curves and contours, flowing over her naked body like cloudy pink water over a riverbed of worn-smooth rocks. He remembers how the dark ovals of her nipples loomed alluringly through the gauzy material, and he remembers the intoxicating perfume of her smile, and the way she boldly took his hand and said, like a teacher to a little boy, “Come on then, let’s see what we can do with you.” Words that sent a shockwave of images – possibilities – through his brain. He remembers it all clearly, even though it seemed to take place a lifetime, and not just a few minutes, ago.

  He hadn’t meant to set foot in the Pleasure Department either, but the muted red glow emanating from its entrance caught his eye as he was wandering by, and a waft of sweet incense drew him inquisitively in, past an at-attention security guard whose expression, he thinks now, did have something of a knowing smirk about it.

  Having no sense of where he was in the store, and without the map to guide him, Gordon was at first unable to fathom what could possibly be sold in this department. In front of him a pair of long bare partition walls reached all the way to the opposite entrance, with bead-curtained doorways set into them on either side at regular intervals. Cubicles of some sort. Two similar rows ran off to the right and the left. There seemed to be no sales assistants about, and if it hadn’t been for the pungent, aromatic smoke purling from ornate silver censers that hung from the ceiling on silver chains, Gordon might have thought the department had been abandoned or was in the process of being refurbished.

  He was about to turn and ask the guard where this was when he became aware of muffled sounds issuing from several of the cubicles. His initial thought was that these were the grunts and gasps of people trying on outfits several sizes too small. It seems ridiculous now, but that is honestly what he first took the sounds to signify – that the cubicles were fitting rooms, and that in each there was a fat person struggling to get into clothing intended for someone thinner. It made a kind of sense. It was only after listening more closely for several moments that Gordon realised that the sounds were coming in pairs, each grunt matched to a reciprocal grunt, each gasp to an answering gasp, a rhythmic, guttural strophe and antistrophe interspersed with random sighs, squeals, and moaned obscenities.

  When the penny finally dropped, the quietly rational part of his mind which usually assesses loan risks and calculates interest percentages simply said, Well, it’s a business deal like any other, isn’t it? A straightforward exchange of commodities, even as somethi
ng unruly and libidinous stirred within him.

  He didn’t realise the woman was standing by his side until she addressed him, saying, “Welcome to the Pleasure Department, sir.” The woman in her diaphonous rose-pink gown. The woman who then took his hand and said the words that unleashed a torrent of pent-up fantasies – all the positions he had never attempted with Linda, all the acts he had never dared ask her to perform, all the deeds he had pored sweatily over in novels and magazines but never, in his very limited sexual experience, actually tried. Dazed by the enormity of the horizons suddenly opening up before him, and giddy with the reek of incense, he meekly let the woman lead him down the left-hand row of cubicles and usher him into one. There, as the bead curtain rattled back into place behind him, he took stock of the narrow single bed, the table groaning with all manner of lubricants, prophylactics, and alarmingly-shaped rubber devices, and the credit register mounted on the wall adjoining the next cubicle, which was shuddering with the exertions of the transaction taking place on the other side.

  The woman asked him his name, and he told her, and he asked her hers, and she said he could call her whatever he liked, and looking at the colour of her gown he said, “Rose,” and she said, “Then Rose I am.”

  And then she said, “Gordon, what kind of account you have?”

  And he said, “Silver.”

  And trying to disguise her pity, Rose said, “I’ll be honest with you, Gordon, there’s not a lot I’ll do for a Silver.” And he must have looked crestfallen because she then said, “But we can still have some fun, can’t we? If we’re imaginative.”

  And he said, “Yes.”

  And with that, she removed her gown, just like that, slipping the shoulder-straps off with a shrug, letting it slither down and crumple around her feet, and there she stood, naked and pink in the low red light, her arms outstretched, completely open about her nudity, unlike Linda, who clutches an arm across her breasts whenever Gordon walks in on her while she is taking a bath, and who will only make love with the lights out. And she was trim and firm where a woman should be, voluptuous where a woman should be, majestically so. Quite unlike Linda.

  And she said, “Out with it, then,” and Gordon blindly and obediently began fumbling with his fly, and she said, “No, not that,” and laughed. “Your card.”

  And he said, “My wife...”

  And she said, “Ah, your wife. Seven-year itch, is it?”

  And he said, “No. My, um, my wife has our card.”

  And Rose laughed again, coldly this time, and said, “Then, Gordon, you had better leave, because without your card you don’t get anything. And I should warn you that if you try to take something that you can’t pay for, I can have a guard here in three seconds flat to arrest you.” She indicated a red emergency button fixed to the wall above the bedhead.

  “Arrest me?”

  “For taking goods without payment. Shoplifting, Gordon.”

  And Gordon nodded numbly, and Rose said, “Off you go then. Another time, perhaps.”

  And she bent to put her gown back on, and Gordon turned and fled. Bursting through the bead curtain and sprinting down the row of cubicles, ashamed and embarrassed and guilty and desperate to get out of the department as quickly as possible, he ran, and for a while it seemed that the row of cubicles would never end and that he would have to keep running for ever, and then suddenly he was in Mirrors, and blushing madly – because everyone must have known where he had just been and what had happened to him there, it must have been written all over his face – he foundered deeper into the department, losing himself amid a dizzying myriad of reflected Gordons, furtive, manic Gordons, flustered, panicked Gordons, until he found himself running towards himself and he realised he had stumbled into a dead end, and skidding to a halt before his likeness he turned, only to be confronted by a pair of gormlessly grinning Burlingtons, and before he could say anything something blurred through the air towards him, and not knowing what it was he instinctively raised a hand to protect himself, and felt his palm scorch...

  And now he tries to speak again, to ask the Burlingtons what they want with him, why are they doing this to him, why him, but again all that comes out of his mouth is another fear-filled, knock-kneed little whimper, which the taller of the two Burlingtons is quick to mimic, compounding the humiliation. This Burlington, the one who cut Gordon, has a long horselike face and long horselike teeth exaggerated by the tapering inadequacy of his lower jaw. The other has been even less well served by the limited genetic scope of upper-class in-breeding. His forehead is low and his eyes close-set, his protruding lips are rippled like the mouth of a clam, and his skin is so wattled with acne scabs and scars that it looks like burgundy leather. Where his comrade is gangly and tall, this one is short and squat, but their half-black, half-bleached buzzcuts and their matching uniform of gold moiré jacket, black drainpipe trousers, and designer trainers lessen the physical differences between them, making them look, in a strange, scary way, almost like twins.

  Gordon scans around desperately for help, but this section of the department is deserted and all he can see is his predicament reflected back at him from a dozen different angles, each image a variation on the same theme: that of two Burlingtons cornering a hunched, white-faced figure whose spectacles are askew and whose breathing is coming in heaving, irregular shudders and the fingers of whose right hand are barber’s poles of blood. And it almost seems possible to Gordon that if, in the mirrors, one of the two razor-sharp Iridiums were to suddenly whir through the air and carve a gash in his reflection’s throat, it wouldn’t be him that would gargle to death on his own blood but an inverted Gordon safely tucked away in looking-glass land. It is a crazy thought, but no crazier than the grotesque insanity of his present situation.

  The first Burlington sneers down at Gordon speculatively, saying, “This is the kind of riffraff they’re letting in these days? This is the sort of jumped-up nobody we have to share our store with?” He snorts. “Pathetic.”

  “Pathetic,” his comrade agrees.

  “Please,” Gordon says, risking another whimper but managing, at last, to find his voice, or at any rate a pale imitation of same. “Let me go. I promise I won’t report you to anyone, I’ll just be quietly on my way. Please.”

  “Bit of a nasal twang there,” the taller Burlington remarks, leaning back. “What do you think, Algy? Something in the service industries? Middle management?”

  Algy, clearly selected as a friend and sidekick because he possesses no opinions of his own, merely chuckles and nods.

  “Please,” says Gordon. “I’m just a customer like yourself.”

  “Got it now. Banking or insurance. Possibly accountancy, but I’m betting on banking or insurance. That servile note in the voice, that horrible job’s-worth whine.”

  “I’m the loans manager for a branch of a major national clearing bank,” Gordon intones, neither defiantly nor defensively but because it is the truth.

  “And you’ve saved up all your hard-earned pennies to become a Days account-holder, and – don’t tell me – wifey’s chipped in by taking on extra work, because it’s all about bettering yourselves, isn’t it? It’s all about clawing your way up the ladder.”

  “It was Linda’s idea,” Gordon whispers.

  “But don’t you see, you four-eyed nonentity?” The Burlington clamps a hand around Gordon’s throat and shoves his head back against the mirror with a surprisingly resonant clack of skull against glass. He inserts the bloody Iridium beneath the left-hand lens of Gordon’s spectacles and skewers the corner into Gordon’s eyelid, pricking out a droplet of blood. “There is no ladder. That’s just a lie dreamed up to give your insignificant little lives hope and meaning, to make you work your fingers to the bone for your precious Aluminiums and Silvers, but it doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference. You’re born boring, lower-middle-class drones, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

  “Er, Rupert?”

  “Not now, Algy,�
�� says the taller Burlington, still staring fixedly into Gordon’s face. “I’m busy.”

  “Um... Rupert, I really think you should let him go.”

  Rupert sighs testily. “What is it, Algy? What could be more important than a demonstration of the class system in action?”

  He glances up into the mirror behind Gordon’s head and his undersized chin plummets.

  There is a guard. He is holding Algy by the collar of his jacket. His other hand is resting on the grip of his hip-holstered pistol.

  Instantly Rupert lets go of Gordon and steps smartly back, the sharpened card vanishing from view. Gordon staggers and wheezes, one hand flying to his neck to palpate his tender throat.

  “Morning,” says Rupert to the guard, from sneering snob to guilty schoolboy in no time flat.

  “Afternoon, actually,” says the guard.

  “Sorry. Afternoon. My friend and I were just, er... just helping this fellow with directions. Appears he’s lost. Took a wrong turn somewhere.”

  “Is that so? How thoughtful of you.”

  “We thought so too.”

  Gordon tries to force words out through his traumatised trachea but it isn’t possible to make sense of the hoarse, moist clucks his throat produces. Luckily, the guard has seen all he needs to see.