Days (12 page)

The four living mannequins, who bear scant familial resemblance to one another, are talking animatedly over their meal. Their conversation is relayed to the window-shoppers through loudspeakers mounted on either side of the window and angled toward the audience. Every utensil they use and every item of clothing they wear has a price tag dangling from it, and the family are careful to refer to the cost and the quality of any product they come into contact with. As Linda watches, the actress playing the mother gets up and goes to the sideboard. There, she slices some oranges in half, first holding up the cutting board so that everyone can have a good look at it (and its price tag), then making a great show of the sharpness of the knife, running the ball of her thumb along the blade and pretending to give herself an accidental nick. Laughing, she sucks at the imaginary wound. Her stage family laugh along with her.

When she finishes cutting the oranges, which she assures her family are the freshest and finest on offer anywhere, she holds up a Days-brand electric orange squeezer, showing off its attractive, ergonomic styling and its easy-to-disassemble, easy-to-clean components. In fact, she liked the squeezer so much she bought two, one in white, one in beige. Her family are equally admiring of both. Son demands to be allowed to squeeze the oranges, and excitedly scampers up to the sideboard and starts turning the orange halves to juice. Mother looks on proudly, saying, “See, it’s so straightforward and safe, even a child can use it!”

Meanwhile, Father is complimenting Daughter on her hairdo. She shows him how easy it is to put your hair up in a chignon with a loop device which she just happens to have with her at the breakfast table and which is available exclusively from the Styling Salon Department at Days. Father is fascinated by the simple yet cunning implement. He strokes his thinning crown and says that he would do something similar with
his
hair, if only he had enough. Daughter finds the joke unbelievably hilarious, giggling and slapping her father’s forearm in an oh-you! way.

Linda wonders if she might not buy that loop device. She will, if nothing else, visit the Styling Salon Department and bring herself up to date on the latest tools of the trade.

Mother and Son, returning to the table with a jug of delicious, freshly squeezed orange juice, give the other two members of the family looks of amused confusion, which sends Father and Daughter into paroxysms of conspiratorial glee.

Then an elderly neighbour comes in by the front door, stage right, clutching a bottle of pills which she simply
has
to tell the family about. She reminds them of her
terrible
back pains, bending double, clapping a hand to her lower lumbar region and wincing. It used to feel as though someone was stabbing knitting needles into her spine. Mother shakes her head compassionately as she recalls what miseries the poor dear suffered. But then Elderly Neighbour’s face brightens. She taps the lid of the bottle of pills and says that after just five days on these, she noticed a significant improvement. Mother can scarcely believe it. “Just five days and you noticed a significant improvement?” Elderly Neighbour nods enthusiastically. She straightens her back. “See? The pain is all gone.”

The family – and the window-shoppers – gaze at the bottle of pills as though it contains water from Lourdes. Elderly Neighbour holds it up with the label and Days logo showing, so that no one watching can be under any misapprehension as to where these miracle-working analgaesics can be purchased.

Linda finally manages to tear her gaze away from the scene, only to find her attention roving to the other displays, each of which is equally absorbing in its own way. Families, couples, flat-sharing friends, holidaymakers at a tropical resort, women at a beauty parlour, workers in an office, fitness enthusiasts in a gym, schoolchildren in a classroom, swimsuit-clad sunbathers basking on a narrow strip of sand and bronzed by a battery of arc-lights, thespians all, theatrically sing the praises of the items of merchandise that surround them in a cornucopic clutter.

Up until at least the age of eight, Linda used to think that the people in the displays lived there all the time. Never mind that her mother insisted that they were just actors and actresses, Linda remained firmly convinced that when the people inside the windows walked off-stage they carried on being who they were on another hidden part of the set – a belief which survived long after the truth about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy was out.

Remembering this childhood misapprehension now, she feels both affection for the naive creature she was and amazement that, given her upbringing, she had any illusions left at all by the time she was eight. But then Days has always been a magical place for Linda. Every Advent, she and her mother would make the pilgrimage here to see the Christmas displays. On cold December afternoons, wrapped up in so many layers of clothing that she could hardly move her limbs, she would hold her mother’s hand tight as they strolled from one window to the next. It was impossible for them to circumnavigate the building completely, ten kilometres being much too far for a child to walk in a single afternoon, but every year, as Linda grew taller and stronger, they would cover a little more of the distance than previously, and as they walked they would stop at any window that caught their eye and gaze in at a wintry outdoors set with leafless trees and drifts of fake snow or a cosy, firelit interior scene where the living mannequins would be busy decorating the hearth or wrapping gifts or singing carols, scenes of domestic harmony utterly unlike the sullen Christmases at Linda’s house, with her father stomping and grumbling like Ebeneezer Scrooge for the entire festive season and moaning at Linda’s mother whenever she tentatively broached the subject of having relatives over for lunch on Christmas Day or getting Linda the bicycle they had been promising her year after year, calling her a sentimental old cow or a swindling bitch.

Those trips to Days are among the few happy memories Linda has of her childhood. Her mother, no doubt because she was free of her husband’s debilitating influence, would talk and laugh with a brightness and lightness in her voice Linda never heard at any other time of the year, and as the two of them rode the bus home afterwards through the deep-blue dark, they would discuss which window was the best and how this year’s displays compared with last year’s and what might have been in the windows they were unable to reach and what novelties they might look forward to seeing next year. And those were the only times that Linda could reassert her claim that one day she would have an account at Days and receive nothing from her mother in reply but a slow, sweet, and, in retrospect, sad smile.

“Gordon,” Linda says softly, and her husband starts and blinks, unaccustomed to hearing his name spoken with such tenderness. “Let’s go in, shall we?”

She slips her hand into his and tugs him toward the steps. She wishes her mother was alive to see her now, her mother who never had faith in anyone because she was never allowed to have faith in herself. She wishes her mother could see how believing in yourself makes anything possible.

They mount the steps and pass through the entrance doors. The hallway makes Linda gasp. Photographs she has seen have not prepared her for the real thing. Bustling with customers. The lifts disgorging new arrivals. The lofty ceiling. The sea-green marble floor. The chandelier. The mosaic of precious stones, too beautiful to pass by. The Trivetts pause at its perimeter, and Linda gazes down in awe at the twin semicircles of opal and onyx.

“Wish I’d brought a hammer and chisel with me,” says Gordon.

Linda tells her husband not to be vulgar. That’s precisely the sort of thing a Days customer
doesn’t
say.

A woman approaches them. Her jacket and skirt are a matching dollar green, and around her neck she wears a silk scarf with tiny Days logos printed on it, pinned at her throat with a cloisonné Days-logo brooch. Her hair, Linda notes, is hennaed. It doesn’t match her dark eyebrows, and anyway, no one’s hair is naturally that red. A skilful job, nonetheless, and the way the woman wears it scraped back offsets the roundness of her face, giving her the appropriate air of authority and efficiency. The ID badge attached to her breast pocket says that her name is Kimberly-Anne. Below her name is her employee barcode.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” says Kimberly-Anne, gesturing at the jewel mosaic. If her smile were any brighter you would need sunglasses to look at it.

Linda nods.

“Is this your first visit to Days?”

“It is,” says Linda. She is too entranced by the floor mosaic to be annoyed that her and Gordon’s inexperience is apparently so obvious to everyone.

“Then let me tell you a little bit about finding your way around the store. First of all, you’ll need this.” Kimberly-Anne hands them a booklet from the small stack in her hand. “It contains maps to all six floors, showing every department and indicating where the cloakrooms, lifts, escalators, and restaurants are. Usually we advise newcomers to plan out a route beforehand so that they can visit all the departments they need to with less risk of getting lost, but you look like intelligent people, you probably won’t have to do that.”

Linda graciously thanks her for the compliment.

“The next thing you have to consider is something to put your purchases in. We have a range of options available. Would you care to accompany me?”

Before either of the Trivetts can answer, Kimberly-Anne is striding off in the direction of the motorised carts and shopping trolleys. Linda turns to Gordon, he shrugs, and they follow her.

Kimberly-Anne leads them to one of the motorised carts, an electric buggy that seats two, with a large cubic volume of open boot space at the rear. She waves her hands over it like a conjuror’s assistant demonstrating the apparatus for the next trick.

“A cart is the most comfortable and convenient way of getting around Days,” she says, “and is complimentary to all Osmium and Rhodium customers.”

“That’s not us,” says Linda, flattered by the implicit assumption that she and Gordon look like the sort of people who could hold one of the two highest accounts.

“Then for a small hire-charge –”

“We don’t need one,” says Gordon. He looks at his wife. “Well, we don’t.”

Kimberly-Anne indicates the phalanxes of gleaming wire trolleys. “Then how about a trolley instead? Every wheel guaranteed to turn without wobbling or sticking, and complimentary to all Palladium and Iridium customers.”

“That’s not us either,” Linda admits, a touch ruefully. “But it might be a good idea to hire one.”

“Linda,” says Gordon under his breath, “we haven’t been here five minutes, you’ve already made a large dent in our account, and now you want to make a larger one. I thought you said we were going to be careful.”

Linda vaguely recalls saying something to that effect, once, before their application was accepted. “Fair enough, the taxi was an extravagance,” she replies, “but a shopping trolley is a necessity.”

“It’ll only encourage us to buy more than we can afford.”

To appease her husband, Linda relents. “How about one of those?” she asks Kimberly-Anne, pointing to some tall stacks of wire handbaskets.

“Of course,” says Kimberly-Anne. “Free to anyone with a Platinum or Gold account.”

“Platinum or Gold.”

“That’s right.”

“Not Silver.”

Kimberly-Anne’s smile loses a degree of candlepower. “Not Silver, no. Silver account-holders may hire a handbasket for –”

“You mean we have to pay to use a basket?” exclaims Gordon.

Kimberly-Anne flinches but quickly recovers her composure and her smile, although the latter is perceptibly dimmer now.

“Silver and Aluminium account-holders
are
expected to pay a nominal charge in return for the use of any of the available carrying devices,” she says.

“It won’t kill us to hire a basket, Gordon,” Linda insists. “We can afford it.”

“That’s not the point. They shouldn’t be charging us for something that should by rights be free. That’s extortion. Daylight robbery.”

“Gordon, the Day brothers don’t run Days for the fun of it. This isn’t a charitable concern. This is a business, and the purpose of a business is to turn a profit. Isn’t that so, Kimberly-Anne?”

Kimberly-Anne nods warily, not certain if it is wise to agree with one customer at the expense of another, even when the other customer is obviously in the wrong.

“There’s a difference between turning a profit and ripping people off,” grumbles Gordon. “Come on. We’ll do without.”

He is heading for the arches before Linda can stop him. She apologises to Kimberly-Anne, whose smile has by now been reduced to a feeble one-amp flicker, and hurries after her husband.

Catching up with him, she hisses, “You embarrassed me awfully back there, Gordon.”

Gordon does not reply, merely strides purposefully up to an arch and waits for her to join him there with their card.

An obliging guard shows Linda how to insert the Silver into the wall-mounted terminal and gain admittance. Linda is so annoyed with Gordon that neither the sight of their names appearing on the terminal screen (confirmation that they belong here) nor the sight of the bars retracting to let them through thrills her. Luckily, her anger also means that she forgets about the pepper spray in her handbag and is thus spared the anxiety she would otherwise have felt over smuggling it through the metal detectors.

Then they are on the shop floor.

12

Covetousness
: another of the Seven Deadly Sins.

9.05 a.m.

S
TILL SMARTING OVER
his cowardly behaviour in Mr Bloom’s office, Frank takes a lift from the Basement to the Red Floor, then rides a double-helix strand of escalators, zigzagging up through the levels. As one escalator after another lifts him higher and higher, a vague, dismal dread settles in his stomach. The prospect of the day ahead, with its tedium, its irritations and its unpredictable dangers, is a gloomy one, scarcely alleviated by the knowledge that for him it is going to be the last of its kind. His thoughts start to clot like bad milk, and he literally has to shake his head to disperse them. Eight hours, he tells himself. Less, counting breaks. Less than eight hours of this life to go, and then he is a free man. He can grit his teeth and endure the job for another eight hours, can’t he?