Days (38 page)

“You may ask your question now,” she tells Oscar.

“It isn’t a question, really,” Oscar replies. “It’s more of a...” He scratches his plaster cast distractedly. “Are you making what I think you’re making?”

“That, Oscar, depends on what you think I’m making.”

“Well, in the keg – that’s fertiliser and paraffin, right?”

“Correct. High-nitrate fertiliser and paraffin, with some salt added to stabilise the mixture. Although it remains, of course, highly volatile. Hence my care in handling it.”

“Yes,” says Oscar, thinking that this has got to be a practical joke, but then remembering to whom he is talking. Whatever Miss Dalloway does, she does in earnest. “Then that...” He gestures at the makeshift-looking contraption she has just assembled from the Roman candle, matches and flashbulb.

“Is the detonator,” the Head of Books confirms. “Like the deflagrating device itself, concocted from common-or-garden household items, all of which, as you are aware, were purchased on the premises. A neat irony, don’t you agree? Days harbouring all the elements necessary for me to inflict my revenge upon it.”

“Neat, yes,” says Oscar, numbly. “So the clock and the wire that Edgar’s getting...?”

“Will form the timer with which I will be able to trigger the explosion.”

Oscar barely manages to choke out his next question. “Miss Dalloway, you’re not going to blow up the whole store, are you?”

“Oh no, Oscar,” says Miss Dalloway. She gives a light, dreamy little laugh – a strange sound coming from this particular woman. “Don’t be silly. What I’ve made here isn’t nearly powerful enough for that. No, not the whole store. Just a portion of it. One department. One particular department.”

“Computers,” Oscar whispers.

“My little genius,” says Miss Dalloway fondly.

33

The Chicago Seven
: seven defendants who were convicted of conspiracy to incite a riot at the U.S. Democratic Party’s National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

2.00 p.m.

“A
TTENTION, CUSTOMERS.
F
OR
the next five minutes there will be a twenty-five per cent reduction on all items in Third World Musical Instruments. I repeat, for the next five minutes...”

Linda was reaching into her handbag even before the echo of the announcement’s seven-note overture had begun to fade. Now she pulls out the map booklet, flourishes it open, flicks through to the department index at the back, and on hearing the words “Third World Musical Instruments” finds T and runs her finger down the column:

Tableware Red

Tanning Equipment Blue

Tapestries Orange

Tea Orange

Teddy Bears Green

Telecommunications Yellow

Theatrical Supplies (see also Costumes) Indigo

Third World Musical Instruments Yellow

“Yellow,” she says with hushed excitement. “It’s on this floor, Gordon.”

“Oh?” replies her husband cautiously.

“...Instruments is located in the south-east quadrant of the Yellow Floor...”

Linda flicks to the double-page floorplan for the Yellow Floor, excited to think that she is already a step ahead of everyone else. “And I have a feeling we’re
in
the south-east quadrant.”

“Oh?” says Gordon again, more cautiously.

“This offer will be extended to you for five minutes only.”

“Yes, here we are. Look.” She jabs a finger at the map. “Next to Clocks. And Third World Musical Instruments is in the Peripheries. It’s three departments away. Three departments, Gordon!” She orients the map and points. “That way. No, wait a moment.” She turns the booklet around. “
That
way.”

“Thank you for your attention.”

“We can make it!” She pulls on her husband’s forearm. “Gordon, it’s a
sale
. Come on! You’ll love it!”

Around them other shoppers are also consulting their maps and starting to move, gravitating in the direction Linda indicated, breaking from a walk into a run. It is as though a wind is sweeping through the Candles Department, one that only affects people and doesn’t disturb the flames that flicker in votive ranks all around, on chandeliers, candelabra, and seven-stemmed menorahs. Gordon plants his feet firmly on the floor, determined to resist, to be like those flames, unmoved.

“Linda, neither of us knows how to play any kind of musical instrument, let alone one from the Third World.”

“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.

T
HIRD
W
ORLD
M
USICAL
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.