Days

by James Lovegrove

  “That’s not the point, Gordon. A quarter off – that’s the point.”

  “But if we don’t buy anything, we’ll save a whole lot more.”

  “Please, Gordon.” There is nothing endearing or enticing about that “please”. Gordon has heard swear words phrased more sweetly. “I want you to come with me. I want you to see for yourself.”

  “And I don’t want you to go.”

  Linda does a double-take. “What did you just say?”

  That’s the question Gordon is asking himself too: What did I just say? But he can’t pretend nothing came out of his mouth. He spoke clearly enough. “I don’t want you going there to buy something we don’t need.”

  Linda gives an unpleasant bark of a laugh. “Very funny, Gordon. All right, I’ll see you back here in, what, ten minutes?”

  She turns to leave, and Gordon, as if a passenger in his own body, sees his hand reach out and grab hold of the strap of her handbag, and hears himself say, “I mean it.”

  Linda halts and looks slowly round, first at his hand, then at his face, puzzled.

  “Listen, Linda. You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep buying things just because everyone else is buying them.”

  A growing rumble of voices and footsteps reverberates through the departments surrounding Third World Musical Instruments.

  “You can’t because we can’t afford it. If you carry on the way you’re going, we’ll be paying off our debt to the store for the rest of our lives.”

  Linda continues to glare at him, but he has the tiger by the tail. He can’t let go.

  “We have to keep things in perspective. We don’t belong here. We’re not a part of this place like everyone else is. Remember what the taxi-driver said this morning? He said we looked fresh-faced, innocent. He said regular Days customers have permanently wary and jaded expressions. That’s not us. I don’t want that to be us.”

  Linda’s upper lip draws back from her teeth in a sneer. No one, but no one, tells her what she can or cannot do.

  “If you go to this sale, Linda, that’s it. I’m taking my name off the account. I can do it. You know I can. Quite frankly, I’m beginning to wish we never applied for the card in the first place. It was a mistake. We can be just as happy without it. Being a Days customer isn’t the be-all and end-all. Think: we’ll be able to buy all those things we’ve had to do without for five years. We’ll be able to live like ordinary people. How about it, Linda? Eh? How about we give it up as a bad idea?”

  The blackmail threat clinches it. Linda realises that her husband has gone quite mad.

  “Gordon,” she says with acid politeness, “take your hand off me.”

  Gordon does as he is told.

  “And wait here. I won’t be long.”

  She goes a few steps, then stops and turns.

  “Oh, and Gordon? You wouldn’t dare take your name off the account. You don’t have the guts.”

  “I do,” Gordon says under his breath, but what is the use in talking to yourself if you know you are lying?

  2.01 p.m.

  THIRD WORLD MUSICAL Instruments used to deal, as its name suggests, exclusively in tools of Euterpean expression from the poorer regions of the globe, but, when the Folk Music Department was displaced from the Violet Floor, evolved into a repository for all musical instruments not served by the standard classical repertoire.

  Since the department is on one of the lower floors and the discount on offer is larger than usual, the lightning sale is better attended than most. By the end of its first minute a hundred-odd bargain-hunting customers have arrived, and as the second minute ticks to a close another hundred or so find their way in via the department’s three entrances. There is jostling and shoving in the aisles, and the occasional strum or hollow bonk can be heard as a Senegalese kora bumps against a Chinese flowerpot drum or a pair of Moroccan clay bongos accidentally strike the strings of an Indian israj, but by and large tempers remain in check, the bargain-hunters perhaps inspired by the beauty and fragility of the merchandise to treat it, and each other, with respect.

  By the end of the third minute, however, customers are finding themselves crammed around the sales counters with little room to move or breathe, and with the pressure mounting as more and yet more bargain-hunters enter the department it isn’t long before the relative orderliness of the crowd disintegrates, to be replaced by animosity, which rapidly gives way to naked aggression. Without warning, several dozen fights break out at once, a spontaneous upwelling of violence. At the majority of lightning sales altercations between individuals are given a wide berth, a pocket of non-interference in which the antagonists can settle their differences, but in this instance there isn’t space for the skirmishes to remain isolated. Hence it isn’t surprising that some angry blows should miss their intended targets and land on unwitting third parties. Nor is it surprising that these third parties, understandably aggrieved, and feeling that such unprovoked aggression should not go unpunished, but not always able to locate their assailants in the throng, should decide that visiting retribution upon another innocent is better than not visiting retribution upon anyone at all.

  And so, like the confusion of ripples caused by a handful of stones being cast into a pond, the violence spreads out through the crowd, strike demanding counterstrike, retaliation triggering further retaliation, one confrontation sparking off another, chain reactions of violence overlapping and cross-colliding, until in almost no time at all every customer in the department is grappling with another customer, as in a bar-room brawl in a movie Western, although instead of a tune plinked on a honky-tonk piano (inevitably truncated when the piano-player, too, is dragged into the mêlée), this fight boasts the rather more exotic accompaniment of drums, xylophones, didgeridoos, maracas, castanets, timbales, flutes, pipes, gongs, and miscellaneous other stringed, woodwind and percussion instruments colliding haphazardly with one another and with various portions of the human anatomy, an improvised soundtrack of arrhythmically and sometimes insistently generated notes which no critic would describe as great music but which, as a background score to widespread score-settling, could hardly be bettered.

  The Eye, per standard operating procedure, is observing the sale, and a couple of Ghosts and a handful of guards are in attendance, but the violence erupts so swiftly that there is little anyone can do to halt it. One of the Ghosts, in fact, is caught up in the free-for-all almost before she is aware that it has begun. When all is frenzy, when everyone to everyone is a faceless, anonymous enemy, congruity is no camouflage, and the Ghost finds herself besieged on several sides at once. Her principal assailant is a customer brandishing a Jew’s harp like a stubby dagger, and although his first stab succeeds only in tearing a slash in the Ghost’s jacket, that is enough to convince her to draw her gun. In the madness of the moment, however, the customer, not recognising the sidearm for what it is, thinking it just another unusual item of merchandise, fearlessly swats it out of her hand. The gun hits the floor, is accidentally kicked by a passing foot, and goes skidding under a podium, and the customer resumes his attack. Unarmed, the Ghost is far from defenceless, but in the heave and buffet of bodies it takes her longer than it otherwise might to subdue the customer, and by the time she finally manages to bring him howling to his knees, her face and wrists are bleeding from a number of shallow cuts and scrapes.

  The guards, meanwhile, do their best to stem the influx of customers into the department, but they have their work cut out for them. More and more shoppers are arriving at the sale, and for every one the guards prevent from entering another three slip past unhindered. The violence, far from deterring the bargain-hunters, has the opposite effect. If people are fighting, goes the thinking, then the bargains on offer must be worth fighting over, ergo they must be great bargains. And so the demented atonal sonata of strums and bongs and plucks mounts in a crescendo, counterpointed by sporadic splintering cracks of breaking wood and snaps of sundered catgut and human yelps and howls in every register. />
  One might regard it as a clash of cultures, iktara meeting bodhran, moszmar being deployed against oud, ocarina warding off blows from djembe. One might equally regard it with an ironically zoological eye, as lion drums and monkey drums and guiro frog boxes and cow bells and water bird whistles are used to give vent to bestial urges. And then again, one might simply view the proceedings with world-weary dismay, as instruments crafted to inspire finer feelings – lutes, dulcimers, panpipes, Tibetan meditation bells, Chinese harps and the like – are pressed into service for untranquil, belligerent ends.

  Down in the Eye, however, the only emotion evoked by the fighting is glee, as the traditional cry of “Shopping maul!” goes up and every screen-jockey not otherwise engaged tunes in to watch. The security cameras in Third World Musical Instruments were switched from automatic to manual just before the sale began so that they wouldn’t fuse a servomotor trying to keep track of every source of activity in the department, and the scenes they now show – a sea of battling bargain-hunters seething to and fro, display stands being flattened, sales assistants cowering behind their counters while stock scatters and shatters around them – give rise to whoops and cheers. The screen-jockeys start laying odds: how many casualties; how long before the mayhem dies down; whether Strategic Security will resort to a baton charge or gunfire; estimates as to the total cost of the damage. Chairs shuttle back and forth across the Basement chamber as bets are agreed on with a handshake.

  Such is the mood, gloating and festive, when Mr Bloom enters, having been alerted as soon as the maul broke out. His arrival brings an immediate calm, like the entrance of a teacher into an unruly classroom. The screen-jockeys scurry back to their posts and adopt attitudes of concentration. Some start muttering into their headset mics as though in the middle of conversation with security operatives on the shop floor.

  Mr Bloom glances up at the nearest screen showing the fracas, then looks around the room. “I trust reinforcements have been called in.”

  Straight away half a dozen of the screen-jockeys are contacting guards on the Yellow Floor and on the floors directly above and below.

  Mr Bloom turns back to the screens. Reduced to a series of fuzzy black-and-white images, the hand-to-hand combat looks like something out of an old Buster Keaton movie. But there is real pain up there, real anger and suffering, and Mr Bloom wonders briefly – but only briefly – if Frank, in his determination to leave Days, might not have the right idea after all.

  2.03 p.m.

  LINDA WILL PROBABLY never realise it, and if she does she would never admit it, but had Gordon not delayed her in Candles she would probably right now be in the thick of the fighting. Instead, the precious seconds he cost her with his sudden, inexplicable lapse into Neanderthal-husband behaviour mean that she reaches the lightning sale after the violence has already taken hold. What confronts her as she rushes in through the connecting passageway from the next-door Periphery, Ethnic Arts & Crafts, is not the rowdy rough-and-tumble she remembers, with such delight, from Ties. What confronts her is naked savagery: men and women with their faces contorted in vicious scowls, beautiful artefacts of teak and bamboo and reed and clay and steel being swung and broken, and blood – blood pouring from cuts, blood spattering the dollar-green carpet – and the injured staggering and rolling, clutching their wounds. Here, two customers are going at each other with Chilean rainsticks, parrying and thrusting with the rattling lengths of dried cactus like two fencers. Here, a woman is trying to force a nose flute up another woman’s nasal passage. And over here, a pair of maracas are being rammed violently up between a man’s legs, causing him to sag to his knees in wordless, white-faced agony. This is not healthy, aggressive competition for bargains but nothing less than communal insanity, a rhymeless, reasonless free-for-all. And something inside Linda, something sufficiently uncorrupted by Days, recoils at the sight. While other shoppers push by, eagerly throwing themselves headlong into the throng, she hesitates. She knows that a once-in-a-lifetime bargain is waiting for her somewhere in the midst of the bellicose mob in front of her. She can all but hear it crying out to her above the clang-twang-bang of musical weaponry. Desire sways her forward; caution sways her back.

  Then a woman running past grabs the sleeve of Linda’s blouse, and, in a spirit of kamikaze comradeship, hauls her into the department. Perhaps Linda is not as unwilling to become involved as she thought, because she allows herself to be dragged several metres before it occurs to her that she might like to make this decision for herself. She digs her heels in and the sleeve tears, but the woman is swallowed up by the crowd before Linda can remonstrate. Her best blouse!

  At the edge of the tumult Linda loses the sense of perspective she had in the connecting passageway. At close quarters, all she can see are raking fingernails and flying fists, gouging thumbs and snarling grins. Then something small and wet slaps against her cheek, sticking there. She picks the object off. It is a tooth, still with a shred of gum attached.

  That’s it. Tossing the tooth aside with a disgusted shudder, Linda begins to pace backward, away from the chaos, moving slowly so as to be unobtrusive, not wanting to catch anyone’s eye. As far as she can tell, you don’t have to attack anyone in order to be attacked yourself. People already embroiled in the fighting are rounding on newcomers and laying into them as if they are old antagonists in a long-running feud. Still she hears the siren-song of her bargain urging her to dive in and battle her way through to it, but the sound is faint now, and becoming fainter, disappearing beneath the rising cacophony of pain and abused musical instruments.

  Suddenly, as though an invisible membrane enclosing the crowd has burst, the fighting spills towards her. A man charges at her with a zither, fully intending to drive one blood-smeared corner of it into her skull. Stumbling backward, Linda catches his wrists and twists his arms aside, so that the zither glances off her temple. There is a hot gush of breath on her cheek. The man is screaming at her, spouting an incoherent stream of obscenities. He brings the zither back up. The trapezoid instrument wavers centimetres from Linda’s face. The man’s wrists are sinewy, slippery in her grasp, but she doesn’t let go. He is bigger than her, stronger, but she is damned if she is going to let him hurt her.

  In a vivid flash, she recalls seeing her parents in a very similar pose. She had been lying in bed listening to the argument downstairs rage for the best part of an hour until finally, unable to sleep, she had sneaked out of her bedroom and gone and sat on the staircase. Peering timorously through the banisters, she had seen her father, scarlet-faced, pacing about the living room, snorting and cursing and, between snorts and curses, accusing her mother of all sorts of things: of never listening to him, of failing to understand his needs, of not showing him sufficient respect as her husband and as the breadwinner of the family. Her mother was saying nothing in her own defence, no doubt because she thought the accusations too absurd to merit a response; instead, she simply sat there while her husband worked himself up into a frenzy, until at last, unable to bear her silence any more, he lunged at her as if to strangle her. Reacting with a quickness that suggested she had been expecting something like this to happen, Linda’s mother caught his wrists before his hands could connect with her throat and, bracing them away from her, trembling, arms rigid, she began talking softly, soothingly, to him, the way you do to a fierce dog.

  The two of them remained locked together like that, a frozen tableau depicting anger versus reason, until, slowly, as Linda’s mother’s words penetrated her father’s haze of rage, he began to back off. She did not let go of his wrists until she felt sure he had calmed down. She (and Linda) then watched him cross the room to the fireplace, both of them expecting him to say he was sorry, as he usually did at this point, for he was not wholly without a conscience, not entirely a hostage to his own desires. The apologies he tendered after any kind of dispute might have been mumbled and grudging, but at least served as an admission that he had been out of line.

  On this occasion, however
, he had not yet calmed down and was not about to apologise. His anger had temporarily subsided, but it was seeking a new outlet, and quickly found one.

  He snatched down the carriage clock with the cherub feet and weighed it speculatively in his hand. Linda and her mother both realised what was about to happen but both were powerless to do anything about it. They could only look on in appalled disbelief as he drew back his arm and hurled the clock against the nearest wall.

  He bent to pick up the clock and inspected it. Even from the staircase Linda could see that the glass covering its face had a crack in it, a clean, jagged line coming down from one corner like a lightning bolt. Once again her father drew back his arm and dashed the clock against the wall. This time, something inside the clock came unsprung with an audible twang, and one of the cherub feet snapped off. Once more he picked up the clock and, shaking it beside his ear, grinned as its innards rattled. Then he raised it up above his head and threw it to the floor. Glass sprayed out in slivers. Another of the cherubs went flying.

  The clock lay on its side on the carpet, a sad, dented, disfigured thing. Linda had to resist the urge to cry out, “Leave it alone!” Couldn’t he see that it (and she and her mother) had had enough? Clearly not, because the next thing he did was raise his foot and stamp on the clock, once, twice, and then again and again, repeatedly.

  The clock had been well made, but it could only take so much punishment. It wasn’t long before, beneath the pounding of her father’s foot, its casing gave way and gleaming metal movement parts spilled out – cogs, flywheels, escapement, a coil of spring.

  Linda’s father looked down at what he had done, then up at his wife, his smug, self-satisfied expression that of an infant that has got out of eating an unwanted meal by tipping the bowl onto the floor.

  “One day,” he said, “I’m going to do the same to you, you bitch.”