“Linda...”
She smiles at him, a little sadly. “Just a dream, Gordon. Just a dream.”
“Well, as long as that’s all it remains.” He resumes massaging.
But as the plan slowly evolves in her mind, Linda thinks that yes, it will be possible. It will take time, but eventually she should be able to talk Gordon round. Patience and perseverance are her strong suits. She will win him over. It may take another five years, it may take even longer, but so what? In the end it will be worth it.
And this time she isn’t going to settle for a Silver. When they qualify for an account at the EuroMart, Linda Trivett is going to accept nothing less than a Gold.
43
Libra: the seventh sign of the Zodiac, represented by a pair of scales.
5.00 p.m.
CLOSING TIME WAS announced a quarter of an hour ago, and again five minutes ago, and with the third and final announcement, at five o’clock exactly, those customers who haven’t yet started making for the exits begin to do so. They descend in the hallway lifts to the seven levels of car park and disperse to their vehicles, or file peaceably out of the four entrances with their ballast of carrier bags, emerging into a world tinted saffron by the setting sun. Stragglers, hoping to make one last purchase before they leave, are hustled out of the departments and shepherded towards the exits by guards.
Sales assistants reckon up the day’s sales and transmit the totals up to the Boardroom. In the produce departments food is covered or, if likely to rot or go stale overnight, binned.
The heavy velvet curtains close inside the window displays, bringing to a close the real-time soap operas. The window-shoppers, glutted on vicarious consumerism, sigh and smile in mild dismay, and gather up their belongings. Those who have homes to go to, go, while those who have made the base of the building their home settle down for the night.
Staff put on their overcoats and make their way down to their cars or out to the train stations and the bus stops. It would, in every respect, have been a typical day, but for the explosion mid-afternoon, which set off a wave of excitement that has yet to die down completely. Employees, like customers, are still exchanging stories about their experiences – where they were, what they were doing, when the bomb went off. Rumours, naturally, abound. The one that holds most currency is that terrorists were responsible. Certain other rumours concerning the Books Department have been widely discounted. Several people know someone who knows someone in Computers who swears that Security has rounded up all the Bookworms and arrested them – but that sounds like just the sort of thing a Technoid would say. And it has been mentioned by more than one source that the Head of the Books Department was the one who detonated the bomb, and that she was killed in the explosion. But a Days employee trying to blow up the store? Surely not!
All the rumours, factual and fanciful, are duly passed on by the employees coming off-shift to the night watchmen and janitorial staff coming on-shift. The consternation felt in the immediate aftermath of the bomb has, through the mysterious alchemical processes of time, been transmuted into exhilaration. In retrospect, it was quite exciting, really, to have been inside the store during a real live terrorist attack. The night-shift employees are left in no doubt that they have missed out on something thrilling and rare.
A repair crew is brought in, on overtime rates, to mend the Menagerie net. Butterflies and birds are escaping through the rifts caused by the two falling employees, and though the repair crew set to work quickly, Menagerie staff will be busy tracking down and recapturing rogue merchandise for the next week or so.
The lights dim all over the empty store.
5.22 p.m.
FRANK CLOSES THE door to his locker and picks up the carrier bag containing his mud-caked clothes and shoes. He is dressed in an exact replica of his original outfit, correct down to the rubber-soled brogues and the maroon silk tie. With his hair dried and combed, he looks freshly pressed, new-minted.
He casts his eye around the locker room, not expecting to feel nostalgia, and, as expected, not feeling any. But then this isn’t necessarily going to be the last time he stands here, gazing on these two rows of unremarkable steel doors with their padlocks and vents.
He turns and walks out into the corridor, where Mr Bloom is waiting for him.
“Everything OK?” Mr Bloom asks. “The clothes, I mean. They fit all right?”
“They’re fine. Thank you for getting them. You will, of course, transfer the cost to my account.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“I insist.”
“Frank, after what you’ve been through today –”
“Please, Donald.” There is an edge of resentment in Frank’s voice. “I don’t want to owe anyone anything.”
“You’ll always owe Days.” Mr Bloom sugars the remark with a laugh.
“I think I’ve paid off that debt,” Frank replies, absentmindedly itching at the parallel rows of fish-scale scratches on the backs of his hands, left there by Miss Dalloway’s fingernails.
They walk side by side towards the staff lift, Mr Bloom slowing his pace to match Frank’s stiff, awkward gait. Several times Mr Bloom looks as if he is on the point of asking something.
Frank finally saves him the trouble. “No, I don’t know yet about leaving. I’m still thinking about it.”
“That’s an improvement, at least. At lunchtime, you were dead set.”
“Don’t go looking for significance in my words that isn’t there, Donald. All I’m saying is that something has happened, something that... Well, I can’t really explain it.”
They reach the lift.
“For what it’s worth, Frank,” says Mr Bloom, pressing the Up button, “I’ve put in a recommendation to the brothers to allow you to retire on full pension, no penalties, if you so desire. In fact, I was hoping to have received an answer from them before you left, but obviously they’ve a lot else to deal with. The insurance company, for one. Still, after what you did for them today, they can hardly refuse. That’s how things stand, at any rate. You can stay on, or, if the brothers agree, you can retire with all debts discharged and no strings attached.”
The lift arrives.
“So, what’s it going to be?”
Frank steps through the open doors, and turns around, setting the bag of soiled clothing at his feet.
He looks at the only man in the world he might possibly consider a friend.
“Donald,” he says, “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”
The doors shut.
5.31 p.m.
HE STEPS OUT into the evening. The darkening air smells sweet, which is surprising considering he is downwind from several hundred unwashed window-shoppers. The sweetness, perhaps, is not in his nose but in his mind, the air smelling that way simply because it is not the air inside Days. It is air that belongs to the whole of the rest of the planet, and the sweet smell is freedom and limitless possibility.
There are reporters at the foot of the steps, and they are interviewing employees as they leave. Some outside broadcast vans are parked in the turning circle; more are arriving. Arc lights probe, cameras jut, boom microphones intrude, as the bombing incident yields to the surgery of telejournalism.
Bidding goodnight to the guards, Frank sets off down the steps. He notes the woman standing at the foot of the steps, but taking her to be one of the reporters, walks straight past her.
“Deliberately ignoring me, Mr Hubble?” says a polite, familiar voice.
Frank stops. Turns.
Mrs Shukhov takes two tentative steps towards him.
“The guard told me you’re a creature of habit,” she continues, smiling. “Always arrives and leaves by the north-western entrance, she said.”
“You,” Frank says slowly, “have put me to a great deal of trouble.”
She can’t interpret his tone. Anger? Or sly mockery? His face offers no clues. “Well, I apologise if –”
“No. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t
have known.” The corners of Frank’s mouth give an almost imperceptible twitch.
“Are you teasing me, Mr Hubble?”
“I have no idea. Am I?”
Mrs Shukhov sighs. “Why do men always have to make things so awkward?”
A thought occurs to Frank. “Mrs Shukhov, you weren’t by any chance waiting for me, were you?”
“A glimmer of intelligence! There’s hope for you yet, Mr Hubble.” She takes another two steps towards him. He remains where he is, a stranger to the patterns of this verbal and physical dance. “I was wondering if you might like to go for a cup of coffee with me,” she says. He frowns. “If that’s all right,” she adds hastily. “I mean, if I’ve overstepped the mark, say so. If there’s some rule you people have about fraternising with disgraced customers, or if you just don’t want to, I’ll understand.”
“Let me get this straight. You’d like me to go for a cup of coffee with you?”
“Or something stronger, if you’d prefer.”
“No, coffee would be... would be all right.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It isn’t a no.”
Mrs Shukhov rolls her eyes. “Honestly! I’m sure if I looked ‘obtuse’ up in a dictionary, the definition would be just one word: men.”
5.53 p.m.
AT THE EDGE of Days Plaza, Frank and Mrs Shukhov cross the road, which is clogged with commuter traffic. The dusk has reached that stage when half the vehicles have their headlights on and half do not. The moon, in half-phase, glimmers in the purple sky, its left side dark, its right mottled ivory. Looking up at it, Frank thinks, No, Days does not own the night. At least, not yet.
Up a narrow street on the opposite side of the road he and Mrs Shukhov find a café, with plastic tables and chairs in front taking up most of its allotment of pavement, overlooking a litter-choked gutter. Inside, the café is about quarter full, and a pleasant but not especially enthusiastic waitress invites the two new patrons to choose where they want to sit. Mrs Shukhov selects a booth, and she and Frank slide in on opposite sides of the formica-topped table and make themselves comfortable on the padded bench-seats.
Frank looks around him at the framed, faded posters of continental beach resorts and foreign landmarks, at the potted plant straggling up a fan-shaped trellis by the door to the kitchen, at the other diners chatting or solitarily inspecting evening newspapers. It would be a lie to say he is not nervous. He hasn’t been inside a public café since his early twenties.
“So,” says Mrs Shukhov, resting her elbows on the table.
“So,” says Frank, his mind turning over. Conversation. “So,” he says again. Then: “Your eyes. Your eyes aren’t as red as when I last saw them. Saw you.”
Mrs Shukhov feels encouraged that he is at least looking in the right region. “That guard – Gould was her name? – Gould went up and bought me a contact lens case, some cleaning solution, and even a bottle of eye drops. At her own expense. What with that and you standing up for me in Processing... well, I’m wondering what I could have done to deserve such kindness.”
“So you can see all right?”
“Can’t see a thing,” she replies, laughing. “My lenses are in my handbag. I’m surprised you didn’t notice me squinting and peering all the way over here.”
“I’m having a little eye trouble myself at the moment.” The pepper spray’s residual itch is still unpleasant. His eyeballs feel sandpapery in their sockets.
“They do look somewhat pink. Perhaps you’d like to use my eye drops.”
“Perhaps.”
“Did you know that, except for our eyes, everything we show to the world is dead?” says Mrs Shukhov. “Our skin, hair, nails, even the insides of our mouths – we sheathe ourselves in a casing of dead tissue in order to protect our flesh and inner organs from the ravages of oxygen, and the only living parts of ourselves we show one another are the irises of our eyes, seen through our corneas. That’s why eye-contact is important, both between strangers and between friends, because that way we can demonstrate to each other the truth of ourselves, the life rather than the death.”
“Interesting.”
“Isn’t it? I read that in some scientific journal in Newspapers & Periodicals yesterday.”
“It’s good to know you didn’t completely waste your time.”
“Mr Hubble,” says Mrs Shukhov, shaking her head, “I wish you’d hold up a flag or wink or something when you’re being ironic. Humour as dry as yours is hard to detect.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. I like it. I was simply remarking.”
“Actually,” Frank says, rising, “if you don’t mind, Mrs Shukhov, I would like to take you up on that offer of eye drops.”
“Of course.” Mrs Shukhov roots around in her handbag and produces a small, conical plastic bottle with the Days logo prominent on its label. “And please – call me Carmen.”
Frank takes the bottle and heads for the cloakrooms.
The gents cloakroom smells strongly of industrial bleach and pine air freshener, and less strongly of urine. Frank bolts the door and approaches the basin warily. He lowers his head as if in supplication, and leaning on the basin, peers slowly up into the speckled, tarnished mirror.
There is his reflection, just as it was in the cracked glass of his Sphinx’s screen. Immediately appearing, without having to be willed into existence. Solid, stable, and staring back at him – a reversed Frank in a reversed café cloakroom, large as life, there, inarguably, indubitably there.
He looks at himself from the side. He looks at himself down his nose. He looks at himself from up under his eyebrows.
He doesn’t want to ask how this miracle has happened, because to question it would risk destroying it, like a boy bursting a soap bubble in his eagerness to capture it. But he knows it has something to do with the white tigress.
The white tigress neither overlooked him nor spurned him. With her sniffing inspection and the elusive purr that followed, she accepted him.
She accepted him into the restless green commerce of the Menagerie. She said, in effect, “Here, and in the forests where I came from, things come and go. Predator preys on prey. Herbivore feeds on plant, carnivore feeds on herbivore. That is how it is. Everything is useful to something else. Dead plant matter, living creatures – everything has its purpose and its place. Everything grows to be destroyed so that something else may grow again. The natural order is an eternal to and fro, a give and take, a buy and sell. And you have known this. All along, though you may not have realised it, you have known this.”
Miss Dalloway tried to kill him. The tigress killed Miss Dalloway.
Give and take. To and fro.
And the tigress accepted him. Understood him. Comprehended him.
And he realises that congruity is not, as he has believed, a curse. He remembers the tigress’s camouflage, how she blended into her surroundings, but still remained powerful, potent, lethally efficient. Congruity is a question of fitting in to exactly the right degree, not too much, just enough. Being a part but also apart. There is a balance to be struck, a line to be walked between two extremes, a thin grey area, a narrow shadow of overlap. Over thirty-three years he forgot where it is and how to find it, that’s all.
He squeezes a couple of the drops into each eye, and the lingering irritation of the pepper spray is relieved.
With one last glance at himself in the mirror, Frank leaves the cloakroom.
Mrs Shukhov has taken the liberty of ordering coffee for both of them. Two full cups sit steaming on the table. Frank finds himself searching for something that isn’t there. He quickly realises what it is. A Days logo. There are no Days logos on the cups and saucers.
He sits and takes a grateful sip. It may not have been made using the finest beans money can buy, but it is still the best coffee he has ever tasted.
Conversations ripple around the café. The street outside is growing dusky. The streetlamps come on, shedding a hard orange l
ight. You can feel it: the city drawing in on itself like a closing flower.
Opposite him Mrs Shukhov – Carmen, her name is Carmen – holds herself erect. Good posture. Handsome features. She is waiting for him to speak. Wanting him to speak.
He thinks he will tell her about his day. It has, even by Days standards, been a hellish one. He thinks he will tell her about the lengths he had to go to in order to keep his promise to recover her Platinum, about his pursuit of the Bookworm, and the bomb. Who knows? Somewhere along the way, using his dry humour, he may even be able to amuse her.
Tomorrow, things may change or things may stay the same. Tomorrow, he may fly off to America or he may simply turn up for work as usual. For now, there is this evening, and a woman who is intrigued by him, who wants to fathom him. Tomorrow, when it comes, will take care of itself.
And Days will always be there.
The thought is strangely comforting.
Days – constant, immutable, enduring, too huge and solid to change – will always be there.
44
Shiva: in orthodox Judaism, the period of seven days of mourning for a parent, spouse, brother or sister
6.00 p.m.
SIX O’CLOCK!
Perch leaps to his feet. He was so busy preparing tomorrow’s menu and compiling a list of groceries to be bought that he completely lost track of time.
He hastens out of his office. The kitchen is empty and clean. The brothers prefer to cook their evening meals for themselves in their apartments and eat them on their own, a necessary antidote of solitude after spending the entire day in one another’s company. Thus the catering staff have, as usual, tidied up and gone home.
Normally by six the only brother left in the Boardroom is he whose day of chairmanship it is, working late to fulfil his duty of collating the sales figures and passing on the total to a press agency which will then disseminate it to the media. Perch intends to ask Master Thurston for the full story about the explosion earlier. A news item on the radio an hour ago mentioned that reports were coming in about an incident at Days. No details had been confirmed as yet, the newscaster said, but she promised to keep the public informed as the story developed. Rather than wait for the media to grope their way slowly to the truth, Perch will get it straight from a Day brother himself – one of the small perks of being intimate with the owners of the first and (what else would he say?) foremost gigastore.
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