Days (6 page)

The line chirrups for the best part of two minutes and no one picks up. Master Sonny is either deliberately ignoring the ringing of his portable intercom or incapable of hearing it. Perch confidently suspects the latter. In fact, he would not be surprised if Master Sonny were presently lying on the floor of his bathroom, curled around the pedestal of a vomit-spattered lavatory, comatose. It would not be the first time Perch has gone downstairs to wake him and found him in such a position.

Replacing the receiver, Perch permits himself the merest twitch of a smile. The prospect of rousing Master Sonny from his alcohol-induced stupor fills him with no small pleasure.

Perhaps the glass-of-cold-water-in-the-face method again...

6

Seventh Heaven
: a state of serene, transcendent bliss.

8.01 a.m.

T
HE QUIET HALF-HOUR.

Over the dollar-green marble floor of the entrance hall Frank goes, over the smooth opal-and-onyx cobbles of the Days logo mosaic, past banks of lifts waiting with their doors open, past conga-lines of wire shopping trolleys, past parked rows of motorised shopping carts, beneath an unlit chandelier like a waterfall captured in glass, towards the parade of arches that afford access to the store proper.

He is trying to work out how many times he has crossed this hall and at the same time trying to remember when he started trampling the jewelled logo beneath his feet instead of skirting it respectfully as most people do. The answer to the first question runs into so many thousands that he swiftly and incredulously abandons the calculation. The answer to the second is easier: he started walking over the logo instead of around it the day he realised that he could, that there was no specific rule against doing so, that all that kept people off the circle of precious stones was their belief in the sanctity of wealth – a belief he had ceased to share, or, more accurately, realised had never been part of his personal credo.

This was around the time when he first started to notice that he had lost his reflection. The loss was so gradual, in fact, it was only in retrospect that he realised that it had occurred at all. Every day he would look in the mirror and a little bit more of himself would be absent, and every day he would dismiss this as a trick of the light or the mind – to acknowledge it as an empirical fact would have been to entertain madness. Eventually, however, the truth was impossible to deny. He was forgetting what he looked like and who he was. He was slipping away, slowly, in increments.

The day that he became aware of this was the same day that he dared to set foot on the jewelled mosaic, and also the same day that the idea of leaving Days first stirred in the furthest reaches of his mind. He can almost pin down the genesis of his decision to quit to the moment he first rested his right foot on the tip of the opal semicircle and was not fried to a crisp by a lightning bolt from Mammon’s fingertip.

Arriving at the arches, Frank halts, takes out his wallet, and yet again unsheathes his Iridium. Each arch is fitted with a set of vertical stainless steel bars two centimetres thick that slot snugly into the lintel. The uprights between the arches have terminals mounted on them at waist-level. The terminals are conical, with oval screens and chrome shells. Each invites Frank in large green letters to insert his card into its slot. He does so with the one nearest to him, and the screen swiftly bitmaps a Days logo, then runs a green message across it:

CARD INCORRECTLY INSERTED

PLEASE TRY AGAIN

Frank removes the ejected card, flips it over so that its logo is facing up, and reinserts it, tutting at his own carelessness.

A new message appears:

HUBBLE, FRANCIS J.

EMPLOYEE #1807-93N

ACCOUNT STATUS: IRIDIUM

CARD NO.: 579 216 347 1592

This is erased and replaced with:

LOG-ON TIME: 8.03 A.M.

HAVE A GOOD DAY’S WORK, MR HUBBLE

The card is ejected again, and the stainless steel bars of the arch to the left of the terminal retract upwards with a sharp pneumatic burp. He passes through, returning the card to his wallet. He knows metal detectors are scanning him, but as he has nothing metallic on him larger than his house keys and his fillings, alarms do not whoop. The bars descend again smoothly and swiftly like mercury rushing down transparent pipes.

The quiet half-hour.

As far as Frank is concerned the time between now and 8.30 is sacred. The store is still, its overhead lights at half-power. The night watchmen have gone off duty and the shop assistants have not yet arrived. Days is neither closed nor open but somewhere in between, in a semi-lit limbo of transition. Neither one thing nor the other, neither darkened and empty nor bright and bustling, the place is perhaps at its most honest. Everything it has to offer is laid bare beneath the dimmed bulbs. Nothing is hidden.

If you enter Days by the North-West Entrance, the first department you find yourself in is Cosmetics. As Frank begins to cross the department, he is aware of making a mental note of his impressions, recording what he is seeing as though he is a human video-camera. Frank the man is at one remove from Frank the creature of habit, who would normally stroll through the quiet half-hour in a meditative state, letting his thoughts flow and free-associate. He is observing himself like an anthropologist studying a primitive tribesman. What is he doing now? He is passing between a display of skin-care products in pastel-coloured packaging and a range of lipstick testers racked in individual cubbyholes like miniature missiles in silos. What is he thinking? He is thinking how large this room is – like all the departments in Days, a little over two hundred metres long on each side – and yet how cramped it feels, and how the counters, laden to above eye-level, form a honeycomb maze in which it only takes a moment to lose all sense of direction. How does he feel? He is remembering his first day at Days and the awe that filled him as he stepped through one of the arches with his card still in his hand – back then it was a Platinum – to find himself actually on the floor of the world’s first and (he was thrilled to think) foremost gigastore. He still feels a trace of that awe now but it is no more than a sedimentary deposit, like limescale, that would be more trouble than it’s worth to scrub away. Mostly he just feels a kind of silent emptiness.

All of which he dutifully files away for the benefit of the Frank Hubble of the future, for the man he is going to be as of tomorrow, the secret wanderer adrift in the immensity of America.

From Cosmetics, he has the choice of going either south through the Perfumery or east through Leather Goods. A pungent miasma of ten thousand different musks hangs perpetually over the Perfumery, strong enough to make your eyes water. The combined stench of hectares of cured cowhide in Leather Goods is marginally less stomach-turning, so Frank goes east, then jinks south into the Bakery. Deliveries of fresh bread have not yet arrived but the yeasty aroma of yesterday’s batch still lingers in the air. Chilled cabinets loaded with pastries, pies, croissants, and bagels hum with full-bellied delight.

The next department is the Global Delicatessen. The Global Delicatessen is divided into subsections, each of which sells the specialities of a different country’s cuisine from a counter decked out in stereotypically traditional style. For example, chapatis, samosas and bhajis can be found within a scale-model Taj Mahal made of painted chipboard, while pastas of every imaginable shape and colour are stored in jars in a mock-up of a room from a Florentine palazzo, complete with peeling stucco walls and exposed brickwork. An ersatz Bavarian market square offers sauerkraut and dozens of varieties of bratwurst, a
faux
French village square with boxed orange-trees and a
bar-tabac
backdrop has stalls where browsers may sample escargots, bouillabaisse and onion soup before buying, and trestle tables in a pseudo Greek fishing village groan with hummus, baklava, cabanos sausage and a wide assortment of olives – black, green, stuffed, dried. And so on. At opening time, each subsection will be staffed by shop assistants decked out in the appropriate national costume.

To the east lies the malodorous hell that is the Fromagerie, but Frank steers well clear of the connecting passageway and continues south through the Global Delicatessen to the Ice Cream Parlour. The air in the Ice Cream Parlour is chilled by over three hundred glass-lidded freezer cabinets. They contain tubs of ice cream that run the gamut of flavours from the traditional (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry) to the unlikely (rhubarb crumble with custard, spearmint’n’saveloy, lox and cream cheese, tapioca with a hint of violet), most of which are also available as frozen yoghurts, sorbets, and granitas. Frank draws his overcoat tightly about himself and bustles through, his exhalations wisping behind him like a gossamer scarf.

One more department lies between him and the building’s heart. The Confectionery Department is a sweet-toothed child’s vision of heaven and an honest dentist’s vision of hell. Candy canes reach to the ceiling, jar upon jar of foil-wrapped toffees and fudges line the walls, and pyramids of handmade truffles wait on refrigerated shelves to be selected, boxed and weighed. Fistfuls of lollipops sit on countertops like gaudy bunches of flowers, plaited lengths of liquorice wind around the cash registers like electrical cables, and sticks of Days-brand rock – half white, half black, with the name of the store running all the way through in lime green – glisten in their cellophane wrappers. Pear drops, acid drops, and cough drops are available by the half-kilo. The polychromatic kaleidoscope of allsorts, jelly beans, and dolly mixtures on display would give a chameleon a heart attack. There are butterscotch rectangles, nougat triangles, and lumps of marzipan in every shape under the sun. There are gobstoppers, chews, and mints from mild to infernal. And there is chocolate – chocolate of every shade from pitch black to milk white, with a hundred grades of brown in between. Bitter, sweet, bittersweet, studded with nuts, raisins, nuts
and
raisins, from cubes as small as dice to slabs as large as tombstones... There is so much sugar in the air, just inhaling could send you into a diabetic coma.

Beyond Confectionery, Frank arrives at his destination, the goal of his south-eastward trek through the store. It is the hoop that encircles the Menagerie. Each floor has one, a broad, annular esplanade that offers shoppers somewhere to sit and rest between purchases, and also provides a shortcut from one corner of the store to the other. Furnished with pine benches and potted plants, mainly philodendra and succulents, and floored with white marble, the hoops would appear to be oases of calm and repose amid the relentless, hectic sell-sell-sell of the departments. Restaurants and cafeterias reinforce this impression. It should be noted, however, that the benches are few and far between, that the service in the restaurants is swift and perfunctory, and that the snacks served in the cafeterias are, to put it mildly, inedible.

The Red Floor hoop is deserted. The entire atrium, all the way up to the great glass dome, is silent except for the rustle of foliage, a faint trickle of running water, and the occasional animal-cry, all from the Menagerie.

Frank crosses over to the parapet that runs around the hoop’s inner edge, rests his forearms on the guardrail, and leans out. Craning his neck until his windpipe stands proud like a bent arm, his Adam’s apple its elbow, he peers up at the dome some hundred and twenty metres above him.

The dome’s gyration, like the wheeling of the stars across the sky, is too slow for the human eye to detect. Frank knows that its revolutions are cunningly geared so that, whatever the season, the unsmoked half is always aligned with the sun, but he has never been able to fathom why Old Man Day opted for this arrangement when a static and completely clear dome would have been far cheaper to construct and would do the job of illuminating the atrium just as well, if not better. Yes, the bicoloured dome acts like a giant logo, stamping the imprimature of Days on the entire building, and yes, as a technological achievement it is deserving of admiration, but as far as Frank is concerned all the dome’s twenty-four-hour rotation does is serve as an unwelcome reminder of the incremental, inexorable passing of each day. And according to the dome, every day is divided perfectly into equinoctial halves, twelve hours of light, twelve hours of darkness. According to the dome, every day is the same.

Frank lowers his head and looks across to the rising tiers of floor half a kilometre away, then down through the gauze of monofilament mesh and the gridwork of irrigation pipes to the Menagerie.

The Menagerie’s canopy, which begins about five metres below where Frank is standing, is an undulating vista of palms with here and there a fern pushing up sharply between the fringed fronds. Bushy epiphytes cling to the trees’ trunks, and in clearings Frank can make out orchids and bamboos clustering around their roots. The manmade tropical forest gives off a humid, steamy aroma, its jungle jade flecked with flickering leaf-shadows.

Over to the west, a macaque shrieks in the treetops. Something else closer to Frank replies with a series of stuttering laughs –
yak-yak-yak
– that develops into a full-throated whooping. The macaque offers its territorial argument again, and the whooping creature falls into submissive silence. There is a flash of whirring scarlet between the leaves: a parrot darting from one branch to another. Something small like a rabbit skitters through the undergrowth. A big electric-blue butterfly comes bumbling up to the net, flaps stupidly against it for a while, then swirls back down into the green. A thousand other insects softly sing and trill, a high-pitched glee club that will, once the store opens, be swamped by the din of voices and footsteps. Frank half-closes his eyes and lets the Menagerie’s soothing susurration fill his ears. This he
will
miss, no doubt about it. On many a morning, the prospect of these few brief ruminative moments spent gazing down on the Menagerie’s canopy before the madness of the day begins has been the only reason he has been able to find to drag himself out of bed.