Days (22 page)

He wonders if the store will look and feel any different from the way he remembers, and suspects that things will have stayed pretty much the same. Days is like a granite mountain, through sheer size resisting everything but the most incremental changes. The departments will be the same, the sales assistants will be the same, the customers will be the same...

Abruptly, the whistled tune dies on Sonny’s lips. He remembers only too clearly the last time he was downstairs. It was the day he returned from his final term at university, and instead of using the private lift from the car park to the Violet Floor he decided to ride the escalators up to the Indigo and take the lift from there. It was meant to be a kind of triumphal homecoming procession, and with his entourage of security guards Sonny certainly felt the part of the heroic soldier returning from some distant conflict, until he became conscious of the stares of the customers he passed. Dozens of pairs of strangers’ eyes turning, being brought to bear on him.

He dismisses the memory with a shudder. He is older now, wiser, and anyway, it’s only to be expected that a son of Septimus Day should be an object of curiosity.

Except there seemed to be more than curiosity in the customers’ stares. They were looking at him as if they knew everything there was to know about him and hated what they saw.

He would say that his imagination was conspiring to play tricks on him had he not also seen that same look in his brothers’ eyes from time to time. Occasionally, he would see it in his father’s eye, too. Every now and then at the dinner table he would catch the old man watching him very carefully. His schoolmates, too, had it in certain lights. And his fellow undergraduates. A look with actual weight, exerting a tangible pressure on the object of scrutiny.

A look of accusation. A look of resentment.

At that, a subtle scratching begins in Sonny’s head.

The scratching sound is made by a creature which Sonny imagines has claws like a rat’s, claws that carry all kinds of festering infections beneath their white crescent sharpness. He knows that it does not pay to listen to that creature’s soft, insinuating scurry, or to let it come too near with its talons. He refocuses his attention on the task at hand.

A fiery ginger camel-hair number? Uh-uh. Nope.

A baggy green-and-orange woollen tartan jacket with matching trousers? Only if he has a pair of clown shoes and a squirting buttonhole flower to go with it.

He delves on through the racks, trying not to think about the purpose for which he is searching out a suit, trying to think only of the positive aspects of the responsibility that has been thrust upon him, the fact that it shows that his brothers are prepared to take him seriously at last.

But the creature, having emerged from its lair, will not be sent back there so easily. In wainscot whispers it reminds Sonny of the mother’s love he never knew, and of the envy he used to feel when other boys at school were picked up for exeats by their parents – both parents, both smiling, a hand-shaking father, an embracing mother – while he had to make do with a hired chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, grim and vigilant. It speaks to him of the basic right granted to almost every other living thing but denied him, and it hisses the sibilant name of the one to blame for his deprivation.

“No.” Sonny has to dredge the word up out of himself. The sky-blue nylon suit he is holding trembles. He clenches his eyelids shut and presses his forehead against the edge of a shelf bearing folded pullovers, a narrow line of pain. His upper teeth slide out to gnaw his lower lip.

Everything that moments ago was rosy and delightful crumbles away. His enthusiasm for the task ahead is gone with a pop, like a floating soap bubble jabbed by a killjoy’s fingertip. He attempts to recover the mood of optimism – the feeling of near-invulnerability – that had him waltzing out of the Boardroom and down the spiral staircase and along the corridors of the Violet Floor to his apartment, but it is ruined beyond repair, and the act of trying to recapture it only damages it further.

And now the creature – an emotion Sonny cannot give a name, a patchwork beast of doubt and guilt and paranoia – is scuttling and snuffling around yet more busily.

What if the task his brothers have set him is a hopeless one? What if the dispute proves impossible to arbitrate? What if they
intend
for him to fail? After all, if he fails, that will justify once and for all their lack of faith in him. No longer will they have to hunt around for excuses to deny him equal status. A disaster downstairs will give them all the proof they need that he is unreliable. It will be an example they can trot out whenever he campaigns for a fair crack of the whip in the future. “But Sonny,” they will say, “look what happened the last time we gave you something to do. Look what a mess you made of
that
.”

The suit slips from Sonny’s fingers, billowing to the floor, forming a rumpled silky puddle of sky blue.

There is a way to get rid of the nagging creature, banish it back to its lair. A guaranteed method. Tried and tested.

But he made a deal with his brothers.

He imagines them laughing at him right now, their faces around the table: Sato tittering, Fred chortling, Thurston chuckling almost soundlessly, Wensley hurrh-hurrhing throatily, Chas gently snickering, Mungo guffawing with authoritative gusto. Laughing at him because they never really expected him to keep his half of the bargain. Laughing because he was a fool to try.

And he pictures customers and employees staring at him as if he is half god, half madman. Whispers passing behind cupped hands: “Do you see that? That’s Sonny Day. The Afterthought. If it hadn’t been for
him
...”

He must have been mad to agree to go downstairs sober, with all his nerve endings exposed, raw to the world, without the extra lucidity and calmness that a drink or two brings.

No, the conditions Mungo laid down were completely unreasonable, and Mungo knew it. His brothers want him to screw up the arbitration, that’s all there is to it. They have deliberately put him in an impossible situation. If he isn’t drunk, he won’t have to courage to go downstairs, and if he goes downstairs drunk, he will have reneged on the deal. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

The creature in his head is hopping from foot to foot with all the glee of a crow that has alighted on fresh carrion. Its talons tick-tack on the inside of Sonny’s skull, a sound like sinuses cracking.

He could silence it in seconds. All he has to do is go to the bar in the living room, pour himself a measure of something (anything), pour himself another, and keep on pouring. In no time the creature will be gone.

Which is exactly what the creature wants. It crawls out from its lair with the sole purpose of tormenting him into drinking it back into submission. Allowing the creature into his head means it has one kind of weakness to feast on, exorcising it with booze offers it another kind. The creature doesn’t care. Either way, it gets its fill of frailty.
His
frailty.

But he made a deal, and what kind of Day brother is he if he can’t make a deal and stick to it? What kind of son of Septimus Day?

At that precise moment, the old man’s opinion on the subject of deals come zinging to the forefront of Sonny’s thoughts.

“A contract improperly worded deserves to be broken.”

And he can see again, as if it were only yesterday, his father seated at the head of the dining table, bent nearly double over his plate with didactic fervour, spearing his point home with a thrust of his fork in the air.

“If one party fails to specify down to the finest detail what is required, the other party has the right, if not the duty, to take advantage of such carelessness.”

And then the thump of fist on rosewood, making everything on the table jump, and the familiar oath:

“
Caveat emptor!
”

All very well and fine, sound advice, but with his brothers there was no written contract, just a simple verbal agreement.

“If, perhaps, you leave that drink in front of you unfinished,” Mungo said, “and we had Perch come in and take away the gin bottle...”

Even when Sonny clarified the conditions, the deal sounded no less watertight. “All I have to do is not drink the rest of this bottle.” No room for manouevring there.

Or is there?

“All I have to do is not drink the rest of this bottle.”

Of
this
bottle.

No one said anything about any other bottle.

“Sonny,” Sonny Day says to himself, “you are a genius.” He raises his forehead from the shelf and opens his eyes. “A grade-A, certified genius.”

The creature is rubbing its grubby paws together, obscenely gratified.

Sonny turns and stumbles out of the wardrobe, out of the bedroom. Down a broad corridor wanly illuminated by skylights he hurries, until he reaches a large chamber that used to be the Wickerwork Department before it was absorbed into Handicrafts on the Blue Floor, and which now serves as his living room. The decor is entirely of Sonny’s choosing. Cream-coloured shagpile carpet covers the floor like an ankle-deep layer of milk froth. Chairs and sofas upholstered in white suede, marshmallow-plump, are arranged around a sheared slab of basalt a metre thick and three metres square that serves as a coffee table, its polished surface strewn with magazines, handheld electronic puzzles, and gimmicky executive toys. A state-of-the-art home entertainment system takes up virtually one entire wall, stacks of matt-black units clustered around a television set the size of a chest of drawers. A parade of picture windows offers a widescreen view of the city most ordinary citizens would give all they owned to have – roads busy with twinkling traffic, sun-warmed buildings basking shoulder to shoulder. Kept at bay by Days Plaza, at this remove the city actually looks like a pleasant place to live.

One corner of the living room is taken up by the bar, a dipsomaniac’s dream built of glass bricks and mirrors, with stainless steel stools and rack upon rack of bottles inverted over optics. Sonny heads for it like a homing missile. Grabbing a tumbler, he hesitates, momentarily bewildered by the choice before him. Every type of spirit is represented by several brands. Which should he have? He selects one at random, thinking,
What difference does it make? Booze is booze.
A shot of cinnamon-spiced vodka glugs into the glass. The optic bubbles greasily. What the hell, make it a double. He chugs it down at a swallow.

The rest of this bottle.

Idiots. They thought they had him on a hook, but he has outsmarted them, has found a way to wriggle off. He tosses another six measures of the vodka down his gullet in quick succession, toasting his brothers one after another with furious sarcasm. The result is as swift as it is magnificent. A warm, rising tide of confidence engulfs him from belly to brow.

Oh yes, this is better. Much, much better.

The old man would definitely be proud of him, there’s no doubt about it.

There’s no doubt about anything at all.

19

Commit the Seventh
: break the Seventh Commandment, i.e. commit adultery.

10.51 a.m.

F
RANK HAS SENT
innumerable shoplifters down to Processing, but he has never actually had cause to go there himself. There’s a first time for everything, he supposes. Even on your last day at work.

As he makes his way through the Byzantine twists and turns of the Basement corridors, it strikes him as fitting that a shoplifter’s last few minutes on the premises should be spent down here. How better to drive home to the criminal the full consequences of his crime than by leading him out of the bright, bustling departments, filled with people and opulence, down to a functional, stuffy layer of grey duct-lined corridors and confined spaces sandwiched between the seven storeys of the store and the seven levels of underground car park? For in this drab limbo, this dimly-lit interzone, the shoplifter is granted a foretaste of what he can expect from the life that awaits him, a life without Days: a monotonous tangle of dead ends and drudgery.

Processing turns out to be a plain, rectangular chamber, one side of which is partitioned off into a row of glass-fronted, soundproofed interview booths. Three shoplifters waiting their turn to be processed sit on wooden benches facing away from the booths – their fates, so to speak, behind them, sealed. They are paired off with the security guards who escorted them down and who will remain with them, a constant hip-joined presence, right up until the moment of eviction. They make for ludicrously mismatched couples – stiff-spined guards, slumped shoplifters. One of the shoplifters is quietly sobbing. Another, clearly a troublemaker, sits hunched forward with his hands manacled behind his back. There is a bruise below his right eye, swollen and puffy, pale yellow turning to black. “I was going to pay for it,” he keeps telling the guard, over and over, as if honesty can be earned by insistence. “I was going to pay for it. I was going to pay for it.”

Obtrusive to no one, Frank glides past the booth windows. Through one of the large double-glazed panes he spies a familiar profile, but he continues to the end of the row before turning back, mildly vexed. For some reason he was expecting it to be the arrogant ponytailed professional who summoned him here, not sore-eyed, dishevelled Mrs Shukhov.

He taps on the door to the booth in which Mrs Shukhov is sitting. Also inside are the guard Gould and a short, trim, sandy-haired man in a Days dollar-green suit, the employee in charge of Mrs Shukhov’s processing. All three look up. Mrs Shukhov smiles, but Frank ignores her. The processor rises from his desk and steps out of the booth for a quiet word.

“You’re Frank Hubble?” he asks in frowsty Celtic tones. The name on his ID is Morrison, and if his tie were any more tightly knotted, it would be strangling him.

Frank says, “I hope you appreciate what an imposition this is.”

“I do, but she was being difficult. She
had
to have you here.”