Days (31 page)

But perhaps he only imagines this. Perhaps it is just something his brain, in its skull-bound isolation, invents while his legs drive him aimlessly through the over-familiar, never-changing storescape. Perhaps, after thirty-three years of pounding the same floors, going over and over the imprints of his own footsteps, wearing the Days-logo carpets thin with his soles, he is simply displacing his pent-up frustrations on to others.

And as he keeps on walking and nothing keeps on happening, Frank feels himself veering down once again into the pit of wraiths inside him, into that well of milling, voiceless creatures who writhe heedlessly around one another like a knot of mating snakes. Loud and clear he hears the unspoken summons as they call to him with goldfish-gaping lips and begging eyes, saying in their inarticulacy that this is the place to be, down here in anonymity, down here where there are no individuals, where your name will be Legion, where you can be just one of many, where the configuration of meat and bone that is Frank Hubble will cease to have significance. Withdraw, withdraw. Pull yourself in like a snail into its shell and never come out again.

How easy it would be to answer that call. He knows of other Ghosts who did succumb. There was Falconer a few years back, who came to believe that he was genuinely invisible and arrived for work one morning stark naked, thinking that no one would notice. (He was pensioned off quickly, quietly, without fuss.) There was Eames, who failed to come in two days running, and was found at his apartment, sitting in a corner of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjamas and hugging his knees and rocking to and fro, staring vacantly into space, drooling. And then there was Burgess, who went on a killing-spree through the store, shooting four customers dead and wounding another six before security guards brought him down. No one could have predicted that any of these loyal, hard-working Tactical Security employees would all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, snap the way they did, but they did, and another few months at Days and that is probably what will happen to Frank, too. One morning he will wake up and won’t feel the urge to get out of bed or feed himself or clothe himself or go anywhere. It will all be too much effort. They will find him like Eames, lying in bed, catatonic. Down among the wraiths. Down among the wraiths for ever.

That would be his future for sure, were he not going to do something about it today; were he not going to tender his resignation to Mr Bloom in – a discreet glance at his watch – three quarters of an hour’s time.

Three quarters of an hour of slow time. Forty-five oozing minutes. Two thousand seven hundred syrup-seconds measured out in steady footfalls in the protracted somnambulistic dream-random of Nothing Happening at Days.

26

Heptathlon
: a seven-event Olympic contest consisting of 100 metres hurdles, shot put, javelin, high jump, long jump, 200 metres sprint, and 800 metres race.

12.15 p.m.

A
COLD, BRISK
wind snaps across the rooftop, whipping between the huge vents that rise like ships’ funnels and warp the air with their hot exhalations, whistling around the blockish lift-heads that poke up at regular intervals, tousling the pollarded trees and potted shrubs of the sunken garden, wrinkling the surface of the swimming pool, and rattling the chainlink fence that encloses the tennis court.

Mungo, on the tennis court, extends his arms upwards, grunting pleasurably at the fluent meshing of his biceps, triceps, and laterals. Linking his fingers, he swivels his torso from the waist. The wind pricks gooseflesh from his bare legs. It feels good to be out of the Boardroom. Not that Mungo dislikes immersing himself in the day-to-day concerns of the running the store, far from it. He relishes the daily mental challenge. But out here or down in the gym, where the only exertions he has to make are physical – that is when he is at his happiest.

Chas, at the other end of the court, is leaning louchely on the end of his racquet, one leg crossed over the other. He is dressed in crisp white shorts and a pale-pink polo shirt, with a cream woollen jumper slung around his neck, the sleeves knotted. His long fringe is flapping this way and that in the wind. He yawns provocatively, but Mungo, ignoring him, continues with his warm-up routine, crouching down for a hamstring stretch.

The yawn having failed, Chas continues to feign boredom by gazing around, first at the sky, then at the city that crowds beyond the lip of the roof, huddled and brown and inferior all the way to the sun-hazed horizon. After a while he returns his gaze to his eldest brother, to find that he has completed his limbering up and has begun jogging on the spot.

“Ready at last?”

“Ready.”

“About time too. I was beginning to lose all feeling in my toes.”

“Ten a point?” says Mungo, picking up his racquet and unloading a ball from his pocket. Mungo, on account of his seniority, always serves first.

“Let’s make it twenty. I’m feeling confident today.”

“Confident or extravagant?”

“I’m a Day. Extravagance is my middle name.”

Mungo steps back to the baseline, bounces the ball a couple of times on the smooth green clay of the court, and winds himself up to unleash a devastating serve. The balls skims the corner of the service box and rockets into the chainlink fence, ricocheting with a loud clattering shimmer.

“Nice one,” says Chas, having made no move to intercept the serve. He crosses to the other side of his baseline. “Fifteen-love.”

“And twenty down.”

“It’s only money.”

Of Mungo’s next three serves Chas makes the effort to return only the one that is delivered virtually to the head of his racquet. Mungo counters the half-hearted return easily, volleying the ball into the opposite corner from where Chas is standing.

As they change ends, Mungo remarks, “I see you’ve decided to take it easy today.”

“Lulling you into a false sense of security, big bro.”

Chas’s serves are deceptively languid, the ball leaving his slow-rising racquet at lightning speed even though its only propulsion is a tiny, last-minute flick of the wrist. Mungo lunges to make the returns, pounding across the clay. The rallies are lengthy, the ball traversing the net seven, eight, and on one occasion eleven times. Chas wins. Mungo aces the next game, but by now he is huffing heavily and his heart is beating hard, while Chas hasn’t even begun to perspire.

They meet at the net.

“Do you know what I think about sometimes when I’m up here?” says Chas. Chas has a tendency to draw out the intervals between games so as to spread out the minimum amount of physical effort over the maximum period of time. It is a habit Mungo tolerates only because none of his other brothers will play tennis with him.

“I’ve no idea,” Mungo replies, thumbing sweat from his eyebrows. “I only know that the way you play leaves you a great deal of time for thinking.”

“I think of a castle and the village that lies beyond its ramparts. I think of the seven of us as feudal barons taking our tithes from the peasants around us.”

“I knew you should never have read PPE at university.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the arrangement is a bad one. I’m just saying that it’s been going on for centuries. We’re all of us hostages to history, conforming unconsciously to social archetypes laid down long ago.”

“Whatever gets you through the night, Chas. Your serve.”

The next game goes to deuce. Chas wins the advantage point, and with a backhand of elegant insouciance clinches the game.

“Don’t start celebrating yet,” says Mungo. “You still owe me nearly a hundred.”

Chas puts up a fight for the next game, but Mungo’s mighty serve wins through.

As they meet again at the net, Chas says, “It’s a crazy person who would resist you, Mungo.”

Mungo looks at his brother askance. “I take it you’re not just referring to my game.”

Chas nods, pleased that his subtext has been noted. “You did a brave thing this morning. I mean, you always stand up for Sonny, we’ve accepted that, and in a perverse way it’s quite admirable. But this morning you really stuck your neck out for him. For a while there Thurston and Sato looked fit to shit.”

“It was a gamble, I admit.”

“I’ll say. If it had backfired...”

“The rest of you would have locked Sonny up in his apartment and thrown away the key.”

“Something like that.”

“It’s what Dad would have wanted.”

“Sonny locked up?”

“The integrity of the Seven preserved.”

“At all costs?”

“At all costs. Why else would he have gone to the effort of having seven of us?”

“As I recall, it was our mother who went to the effort. All Dad did was calculate due dates and bribe doctors to make sure that each of us arrived on the correct day of the week. He was an odd sort, Dad, really, when you think about it.”

“He was a visionary,” says Mungo, as if this excuses everything.

“A visionary with only one eye. What do you call that? A semi-visionary? A monovisionary?”

“That was all part of his vision,” says Mungo. “Now, are we going to stand here flapping our lips all day or are we going to play tennis?”

“Are you offering me a choice?”

“No.”

“Attaboy. That’s the Septimus Day in you talking.”

Mungo breaks Chas’s serve and holds his own. Chas, for all that he exploits the vagaries of the wind to make his shots unpredictable, cannot compete with Mungo’s dogged determination to reach the ball no matter where it bounces.

“Four-two, two-four,” says Mungo, hurdling the net. “I hope you’ve got your card to hand, because by my reckoning you’re over a hundred and fifty in the hole.”

“All according to plan, Mungo. I keep this up, and you’ll become overconfident and start making mistakes.”

“As if.”

Chas laughs, holding the net down to step over it. “God, you really are a chip off the old block. The same unswerving conviction in yourself, the same absolute refusal to contemplate the possibility of failure.”

“To contemplate failure is to court failure.”

“Well said, ‘Septimus’. But would you, I wonder, gouge your own eye out in order to prove a point?”

Mungo considers this. “Probably not, no. I need depth of field so that I can keep trouncing you at tennis.”

“Seriously. Would you ever go that far?”

“Our father was an exceptional human being,” Mungo replies. “He did what he felt he had to do. He made what he considered the appropriate sacrifice to ensure the success of his venture. If I was in his shoes, gambling millions of other people’s money on a project as insanely ambitious as Days, and I thought – no, I firmly believed – that removing my left eye with a pen-knife was going to make the difference between triumph and disaster, who knows, perhaps under those circumstances I’d do it. An offering to Mammon, a few moments of agony in return for a lifetime of success – I don’t know. A fair deal? I don’t know.”

“But he also did it to prove that it could be done, as a test of will.”

“It was both a test of will
and
a propitiatory offering to the gods of commerce. In Dad’s eyes – eye – will and fate were inextricably linked. ‘Fate isn’t what happens to you, it’s what you make happen.’ Isn’t that what he used to say? And let’s face it, he certainly made this place happen. When he first dreamed up Days, investors were hardly beating a path to his door waving blank cheques at him. He had to browbeat people for every single penny, he had to
force
them into believing in him. And the same goes for fate, or the gods of commerce, or Mammon, or whatever you want to call it. The divine order of things. Dad had to show the universe how determined he was, how far he was prepared to go in order to get his way, and he did, and it worked. Whether I’d be able to convince myself that it would work for me, I’m not sure.”

“Oh, I can picture you doing the same,” says Chas blithely, knowing that there is nothing his older brother likes more than to be compared favourably with their father. “I can picture you kneeling in the middle of an empty tract of wasteland you’ve just purchased, looking around at the land that your building is going to occupy, knowing as you do so that this is the very last time you are going to have the use of both eyes. The boarded-up shopping arcade on one side, the row of short-lease charity shops and thrift shops on the other, all to be demolished soon to make way for your dream – the dream set out on the blueprints flapping in the mud around your feet. I can imagine you digging the small, shallow hole that is shortly going to contain a part of you, and then taking the pen-knife out of your pocket, unclipping the largest blade, and bracing yourself as you bring it up to your left eye...”

Chas seems to take a gleeful delight in rehearsing the details of their father’s act of self-mutilation. Mungo, however, only shudders. “You may be able to imagine it,” he says. “I can’t. Which suggests that I lack our father’s capacity for making sacrifices, and therefore that I’m nothing like him.”

“Sacrifices? What do you call the way you stick up for Sonny if it isn’t a sacrifice?”

“Losing the esteem of one’s brothers is hardly as painful as losing an eye, Chas, and esteem can always be recovered, whereas an eye can’t. Enough of this. We have to be back in the Boardroom for lunch soon. You to serve, again.”

During the next game, perhaps spurred on by the memory of their father, Chas evinces an increased enthusiasm for victory. He uses every trick he knows to make Mungo’s life difficult, from high lobs to low backspin grounders. He feints powerful shots that barely trickle over the net and launches volleys across the court masterfully, but somehow Mungo manages to reach every ball, however unreturnable it seems, and snatch it across the net, always recovering in time to respond to the next of Chas’s challenges. Throughout the game he grins and pants like a happy dog.

Deuce is reached, and continues interminably. Mungo enters a delicious delirium of effort, grunting explosively with each swing of his racquet, and Chas in his own way becomes engrossed in the game too, frowning like a chess grandmaster as if each exchange of shots is a conundrum he has to solve. Neither of them is aware that they have been joined on the rooftop by a spectator who, slumped against the chainlink fence with his face pressed into the diamond-shaped holes, is following the back-and-forth of the game with a glassy, ill-focused interest.