Days (34 page)

“Then what have I got to lose? I already
am
nobody.”

“And you think that leaving will make you somebody?”

“It can’t hurt to try.”

“I admire your courage, Frank, but in case you haven’t noticed, it’s a grim old world out there. It’s fine if you’re rich – it’s always been fine if you’re rich – but if you’re not, it’s a struggle from start to finish, with no guarantee that the struggling is going to get you anywhere. That’s why gigastores have become so important to people. With their rigid rules and their strict hierarchies, they’re symbols of permanence. People look on them as refuges from the chaos and undependability of life, and whether, in practice, that’s true or not, that’s what Days and Blumberg’s and the Unified Ginza Consortium and the EuroMart and all of them represent. The rest of the world may be going to hell in a handcart, but the gigastores will always be there.”

“Why would I forsake the life of luxury and the security that Days has brought me and throw myself out into a harsh and uncertain world? That’s what you find so hard to understand, isn’t it? Why fly the gilded cage, unless I’ve gone mad?”

“Whatever hardships you have to endure in here, Frank, they can’t be any worse than what you’ll find out there.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The waiter brings the main course and clears away the two bowls of soup, one wiped clean, the other untouched. He returns a moment later with a cheese-grater and some parmesan. Mr Bloom requests that his pasta be sprinkled liberally. The waiter obliges, and then leaves without thinking to offer Frank the same service. Frank is so used to this kind of accidental oversight that he doesn’t even notice.

Mr Bloom gets straight to work with a fork. After a few mouthfuls he gestures at Frank’s plate and says, “Aren’t you going to eat anything? It’s very good.”

“I’m not that hungry.”

Sensing that his eagerness for his food might be considered insensitive, Mr Bloom reluctantly sets down his fork, a bandage of fettuccine wrapped loosely around its tines.

“Listen, Frank. I want you to think this over a bit more. Compare how much you stand to lose with how little you can hope to gain. You spend the rest of the afternoon weighing up what I’ve said, and then come and see me at closing time. If by then you haven’t changed your mind, I’ll accept your decision and see if I can’t try to negotiate some kind of severance settlement with Accounts. Not a likely prospect, I grant you, Accounts being the tight-fisted bastards they are, but I may be able to swing something. If, however, you
have
changed your mind, then it’ll be as if this conversation never happened. Fair enough?”

“I don’t see what difference a couple of hours will make.”

“Probably none at all,” Mr Bloom admits, picking up his fork again. “But you never know. Now, you may have got away with ignoring your minestrone but I will not tolerate a plate of excellent fettuccine puttanesca going to waste. Eat!”

Frank heaves his sagging shoulders and complies. And anyone looking at the two of them, Frank and Mr Bloom, as they sit facing one another, quietly forking pasta into their mouths, would take them for a pair of old friends who have run out of things to say but who still find pleasure in each other’s company. But then, no one is looking at two drab, ordinary, middle-aged men in a restaurant that is patronised by the famous and the beautiful and the notorious.

29

Seven Years’ Bad Luck
: according to superstition, the penalty for breaking a mirror, seven years being the length of time the Romans believed it took for life – and thus the ruined image of life – to renew itself.

12.48 p.m.

G
ORDON FINDS THE
way to his and Linda’s prearranged meeting point more by luck than judgement. Wandering from department to department in a state of shock, his sense of direction, fortunately, does not desert him.

Linda is waiting outside the entrance to the Lighting Department, clutching a small Days bag in one hand. Gordon is three and a half minutes late, and the fact that she refrains from commenting on this would, under any other circumstances, be cause for alarm. When Linda fails to pick up on a fault, it usually means she is already brooding on another pre-existing fault, one far more serious, which she will let him know about only after making him sweat a while wondering what else he has done wrong. At that precise moment, however, Gordon’s main concern isn’t Linda’s scorn; his main concern is getting out of Days as quickly as possible.

“Let’s go home, shall we?” are the first words out of his mouth as he draws up to her, shielding his eyes against the golden glare radiating from the connecting passageway.

The same light seems to lend Linda’s face a balmy, seraphic glow. “What happened to your hand, Gordon?”

“It’s nothing. So? Home, eh?”

“Let me take a look.”

Reluctantly, Gordon lets her examine his wounded hand.

As soon as he regained his composure after his hasty exit from the Mirrors Department, he found a cloakroom and cleaned up his wounds at the basin. Once he washed the caked blood off his hand under the cold tap, he was surprised to find the cut in his palm both shorter and shallower than it felt. What he imagined to be a deep gash turned out to have barely broken the skin. A lot of blood for very little actual damage. It still hurt like buggery, but not as badly as when he had assumed that the hand was lacerated to the bone.

And it was while he was in the cloakroom bandaging the hand with his handkerchief and inspecting the nick in his eyelid in the mirror above the basin that he asked himself whether or not he should tell Linda the truth about his injuries. He had a pretty good idea what she would say if he informed her that he had been assaulted and insulted by a pair of teenagers. “You mean you just stood there and let them threaten you? Two boys? You didn’t fight back? You let them say those things to you and you didn’t give back as good as you got?” That is what
she
would have done in his shoes. Nobody, not even a Burlington brandishing a sharpened Days card, abuses Linda Trivett and gets away with it – as many an uncivil shopkeeper and talkative cinemagoer has discovered to their cost. No doubt about it, Linda would have stood her ground, head held high, and given the Burlingtons the tongue-lashing of their lives. She might even have seen them off, browbeating them into retreat. That fierce indomitability of hers is what Gordon loves about her the most, and envies about her the most, and fears about her the most.

And (he decided in the cloakroom) there was another reason why lying would be a good idea. Confessing his cowardly behaviour in Mirrors would be one thing. He could probably live with the shame. But if, even jokingly, he were to mention to Linda about his close encounter in the Pleasure Department, his life would not be worth living. Even though nothing actually happened in that red-lit cubicle, it so nearly did, and Linda would hear the guilt in his voice. She would smell it on him, the way a lioness can smell fear.

So, all things considered, it would be better to forget both those unfortunate episodes, and the easiest way to do that would be to act as if they had never happened, and the easiest way to do
that
, he concluded, was to lie. Drawing a veil over his cowardice in Mirrors would mean he could also draw a veil over his close shave in Pleasure, the lesser omission legitimising the greater. If he could come up with a cover story clever enough, both events would remain secrets he could carry with him to the grave.

So he racked his brain, and came up with a cover story, and it went like this. He was in Mirrors, looking for something to go above the mantelshelf over the fireplace in the lounge. (Yes, that was good. It would show he did care after all about the living space they shared.) And he had a little accident. He tripped on the join between two sections of carpet, stumbled, and put out a hand to break his fall. The hand landed on a small shaving mirror, and the mirror snapped. Hence the cut in his palm. (It would be a good idea to laugh here. Laughing at his own clumsiness would appeal to Linda. Self-deprecation always goes down well with her.) At the same time, extraordinarily enough, a tiny fragment of glass flew up as the mirror broke and hit him in the eye. His glasses would have protected him but – would you believe it? – they had slipped down his nose as he tripped. Luckily for him, the fragment only nicked his eyelid. A few millimetres higher and he might have been left like Septimus Day. Ha ha ha ha ha!

Not the most plausible of explanations, perhaps, but it was the best he could come up with in the time available, and the only way he could think of to account for both wounds. And as he made his way to the rendezvous, he rehearsed the story over and over in his head until he was halfway to believing that it was the truth.

Now, as he nervously allows Linda to untie the handkerchief bandage, he regales her with his fabrication, cunningly placed laughter and all, interrupting himself only once in order to let out an involuntary hiss of pain as her fingers probe the edges of the cut a little too firmly.

She lets go of his hand just as he reaches his conclusion: “...A few millimetres higher and I’d have been left like Septimus Day. Ha ha ha ha ha!”

For an agonising moment Linda makes no reply. It would not surprise Gordon to find out that his wife possesses the forensic skills to distinguish between a cut caused by a shaving mirror and any other kind. Then she says, “You’ll live,” and starts refastening the makeshift bandage. “But we should maybe think about getting hold of some sticking plaster and antiseptic ointment from the Medical Supplies Department.”

“It can wait till we get home.”

She peers at his eyelid. “And also have a doctor look at your eyelid, just in case.”

“Right.” Finding it hard to believe that Linda has swallowed the story whole, because she is normally a sensitive lie detector, Gordon decides to risk sounding out a further reaction. “It was incredible bad luck.”

“Broken mirrors usually are,” she replies vaguely. “Now, shall we go and find ourselves some lunch? According to the map, there are places to eat in the hoops.”

No courtroom-style cross-examination? Not even a quizzically raised eyebrow? Is it possible that he can have got away with it?

No, there is something not right – something decidedly un-Linda – about her lack of suspicion. And as Gordon trots alongside his wife in the direction of the Red Floor hoop, he notices that the lambent serenity in her face, which he assumed to be a reflection of the glow of the Lighting Department, is not fading as they leave that department behind. It is her own expression. The glow is coming from within her. And her gestures aren’t as abrupt as usual. She no longer walks in a series of tight, quick steps – her strides are long and graceful. And her voice seems to have lost much of its customary brittleness.

He can’t for the life of him fathom what can have brought about this change in her. The Days bag means she has made a purchase, but a mere purchase alone can’t explain it. Perhaps the store has a tranquilising effect on certain customers.

They emerge onto the hoop, into the flare of sunlight glancing off white marble flooring. The air, cleaned by the green lungs of the Menagerie, is appreciably fresher and sharper than the dead conditioned air in the departments, and is laced with food smells from the kiosks and cafés.

After they have dutifully spent a few minutes admiring the Menagerie, Gordon asks Linda what she would like to eat, and she surprises him by letting him decide.

The cheapest foodstuff on offer seems to be Chinese noodles, so Gordon tentatively suggests those. Linda says Chinese noodles will be fine, and hands Gordon their card. And so Gordon Trivett makes his first purchase at Days: two helpings of chicken chow mein, plastic chopsticks an optional extra.

They take the cartons of chow mein to the nearest unoccupied bench, and eat sitting side by side, gazing up at the rainbow tiers of the atrium.

“It’s like being inside some great big hollow cake,” Gordon murmurs.

He is resigned to Linda telling him what a crass remark he has just made, but she merely nods.

Very
strange.

“So what did you get?” he asks, gesturing at the Days bag.

“See for yourself. A present for you.”

“A present?” Gordon puts his chopsticks down, wipes his fingers on a paper napkin (another optional extra), opens the bag, and peers in.

“There was a lightning sale,” Linda says. “I was right in the middle of it.”

Gordon reaches into the bag and takes out the four ties, arranging them in a row along his thigh. “All for me? Why so many?”

“Don’t you like them?”

“I like the coin ones.”

“Really?”

“Really.” And he means it, he genuinely does like them, and he is touched that she went to the trouble of buying the ties for him, all of them, even though he, in effect, is the one who is going to be paying for them. “But did you really need to buy four? And why two with the same pattern?”

“It was a lightning sale, Gordon. You grab what you can get. And they were at twenty per cent off. That means the fourth one was almost free.”

“Almost.”

“I don’t think you quite realise what I went through to get those for you. I
fought
for those ties.”

“Fought for them?”

Linda shakes her head sadly. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand. If you haven’t been in a lightning sale, you won’t know what I’m talking about.” She says this with grave authority, like a hoary, battle-scarred war veteran reminiscing about his time in the trenches.

“From what I’ve heard about lightning sales, I’m not sure I
want
be in one.”

“It was an incredible experience, Gordon. I can’t really put it into words. It was as though I’d been asleep for years and suddenly an alarm bell rang in my soul and I was awake, I mean truly
awake
.” She becomes animated at the memory. Sparks scintillate in her eyes. “I’m tingling all over just thinking about it. Look at my arm.” Gordon does. The hairs on her arm are standing on end. “It was quite scary, actually,” she goes on, “but thrilling too. There was a lot of noise and confusion. I think I might have hit someone... Some of what happened is a bit hazy... But I got what I went in there for, that’s the main thing.”