Days (35 page)

“Hit someone? Linda, what
has
come over you?”

“Nothing bad, Gordon, so don’t give me that disapproving frown. I just think I’ve learned, at last, how much I’m capable of. What’s the phrase? My full potential. I’ve discovered my full potential.”

“By hitting someone?”

“Like I said, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You came here with negative expectations. Don’t try to deny it, Gordon, you did. You came here convinced you were going to have a rotten time. That’s why you were so bad-tempered in the taxi. And what happens? You break a mirror and cut yourself. Whereas I came here firmly convinced that today was going to be the greatest day of my life. And guess what? It is. What does that tell you, Gordon? It tells
me
that we make our own luck in this life. It tells me that attitude governs outcome. And that’s such a simple lesson, and yet so many people could do with learning it.”

The glow is gone from her face. A hard, imperious expression has taken its place, her facial muscles becoming taut again, as if not designed to stay relaxed for long. The old Linda is back, and Gordon is strangely relieved to see her return. He was finding the somewhat slightly dazed Linda who was letting him make the decisions for both of them not a little unnerving.

“These noodles are horrible,” she says, setting the carton of chow mein aside. “Why did you make us eat noodles?”

That’s
more like it. Gordon feels like leaning over and kissing the woman he knows and loves, and envies, and fears. Instead he merely copies her, setting his chow mein aside.

“You’re right. The chicken is rubbery.”

Equilibrium restored, order returned to his world, Gordon resolves to keep a very close eye on his wife for the rest of the afternoon. Since it seems that he has no choice but to remain in Days, he would rather spend the time with her than off on his own.

It will be safer that way.

For both of them.

30

Hell
: according to Islamic belief, Hell is divided into seven distinct regions, for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sabaeans (a pagan cult who worshipped Orpheus as a god), Zoroastrians, idolaters, and hypocrites.

12.51 p.m.

M
UNGO AND
C
HAS
escort Sonny down the flight of access stairs that connects Sonny’s apartment to the roof (each brother’s apartment has one). At the foot of the stairwell, Mungo uses his knee to nudge open the door to the hallway, and they manhandle Sonny through.

Their entrance startles a cleaning woman. Hurriedly stowing away her spray-polish and dustcloth, she slips past the three of them with a bob of her head and exits by the apartment’s main door.

Sonny is slung between his brothers, his arms looped around their necks. He didn’t actually need their support for the journey down from the roof, but since they were kind enough to offer it, it would have been rude to refuse. Besides, Mungo was quite insistent that he accompany them in this manner, almost as if he didn’t trust Sonny to make it down the stairs unaided. And Mungo is angry with him, and when Mungo is angry with you, it is best just to do as he says.

Recognising his own apartment, Sonny chants, “Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig,” then adds, “Drink, anyone?”

“This way,” Mungo says to Chas grimly.

They march Sonny into the living room and dunk him down on one of the marshmallow sofas.

“Bar’s over there, help yourselves,” says Sonny, waving in the wrong direction. He slumps over onto his side.

Mungo grabs a fistful of blackcurrant-purple lapel and yanks him upright, splitting seams.

“Hey, careful of the suit,” says Sonny, inspecting a tear in the underside of his jacket sleeve. With ruffled dignity, he smooths out the creases Mungo has put in his lapels.

Mungo, meanwhile, lowers himself down onto the edge of the basalt-slab coffee table so that he is sitting directly opposite Sonny. Splaying his hands on the hillocks of his bare thighs, he hunkers forward, arms akimbo.

“Look at me.”

Sonny attempts to bring Mungo’s face into focus, but it is difficult. Mungo’s face is a moving target swaying in every direction, up, down, left, right, back, forth. Hard to get a fix on.

A firework ignites in the left half of Sonny’s field of vision, the force of the detonation slamming his head sideways. The pain arrives a second later, swelling the left side of his face like acid seeping into a sponge.

“Ow,” he says, gingerly touching his cheek. “What did you do that for?”

The pain subsides, to be replaced by tingling numbness. The numbness takes the shape of Mungo’s open hand, so clearly defined Sonny thinks he can feel the imprints of individual fingers.

“Now look at me.”

This time Sonny has more success in focusing on his eldest brother’s features.

“If you drop your gaze for a moment, I will hit you again. Understood?”

Sonny nods.

“Good. Now tell me a couple of things. First, did you go downstairs dressed the way you are for any other reason than to look an absolute prize idiot?”

Sonny launches into a spirited defence of his choice of outfit, but Mungo silences him by raising a hand, the same hand that slapped him.

“I don’t want to listen to any long convoluted explanations. A simple answer: yes or no?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I don’t know.”

“The public sees so little of us,” says Chas, “that we have to make the best impression we can each time. Therefore you looking like an idiot makes us look like idiots, too.”

“Precisely,” says Mungo. “Which leads me to my next question. We watched you via the Eye talking to the Heads of Books and Computers. What did you say to them? The abridged version, if you will.”

“I adjucidated... I adjuti– I acudjidated...”

“Adjudicated.”

“I adjudicated in favour of Computers.”

“You did? You’re quite sure about that?”

“Yes.”

Mungo glances round at Chas. “Not a complete disaster, then.”

“Did anyone give you any grief, Sonny?”

“Not as far as I recall. They did talk to me for a long time.”

“Yes, we saw that.”

“But I decided by...” Sonny thinks it would be better not to mention the means by which he made his decision. “By how you told me to decide.” Yes, the method is immaterial. The important thing is that, by luck, he arrived at the right result.

“I wouldn’t advise lying to me, Sonny,” says Mungo. “I’m going to check into this later and ask both heads of department for a report, so make sure of your story now. If it doesn’t tally with what I find out later...”

A sudden dismal chill descends on Sonny, and he debates whether to own up about using his Osmium to settle the dispute. Perhaps if he dresses it up in heroic terms and says he used the card like Alexander the Great used his sword to cut through the... cut through the... the Something-or-Other Knot. What was it called? The Guardian Knot? That’s not it. Something like that, but... No good, he can’t remember. He doubts Mungo will go for it anyhow. It wasn’t very professional of him, he has to admit, though he was under pressure and both heads of department did seem to have a point and he really couldn’t think of any other way to choose between them and besides, it always used to work perfectly well in pubs...

He will just have to hope Mungo doesn’t find out about it. The heads of department probably won’t mention it. They wouldn’t dare say anything that would show a Day brother in a bad light, would they? Not if they value their jobs.

“That’s my story,” says Sonny, “and I’m sticking to it.”

“All right.” Mungo draws a deep breath and lets it go as a long sigh. “Well, youngest brother. It seems you haven’t disgraced yourself as badly as I thought. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve let me down – let us all down – by going back on your word and drinking before you went downstairs.”

Sonny feels this isn’t the time to mention the loophole he found in their bargain. Mungo would not take it well.

“Moreover,” Mungo continues, “you’ve abused the trust of your brothers and tarnished our reputation, and that’s something I take a very dim view of. Were Thurston and the others to learn about your behaviour, I’m sure the view they would take would be even dimmer. But I’m going to do you this favour. I’m not going to tell them. Neither is Chas. This is going to remain our secret. And in order for it to remain our secret, I need you to stay down here for the rest of the afternoon. Drink, sleep, watch daytime fucking television, I don’t care what you do, just as long as you stay out of the Boardroom. Chas and I are going to tell our brothers that we visited you here after our game and found you sober but in a celebratory mood. Got that? You were a good boy, you did as you were told, you didn’t touch a drop before you went downstairs, but then afterwards, when you came back here, you decided you were free to indulge, so you did. Therefore, should anyone check up on you this afternoon and find you three sheets to the wind, you will have got that way
after
Chas and I left you. Is that clear?”

Sonny is confused by the tenses Mungo is using but thinks he has the gist of it. He nods.

Mungo says, “This is the last time I am ever going to do anything like this for you again. From now on you are on your own. You and you alone are going to have to take responsibility for your fuck-ups. I am washing my hands of you.”

Sonny nods once more.

Mungo’s tone and expression soften – a little. “Sonny, ever since Dad died, I’ve tried to raise you the way he would have wanted, but it hasn’t been easy. For any of us. We’re Day brothers, but that doesn’t mean we’re not human too. We do the best we can but sometimes our best isn’t good enough.” He lays his other hand – his non-hitting hand – on Sonny’s knee. “So I’m begging you. For the last time. Clean up your act. Straighten yourself out. We want you to help us run the store. We need you. We need to be Seven.”

The tears catch Sonny by surprise, springing from his eyes in a sharp, burning squirt. He asks himself why he is crying, and realises that he is crying because Mungo loves him and he is unworthy of that love. He is a cockroach, an amoeba, a speck, a useless piece of matter stuck to the bootheel of humanity, and yet his brother still loves him.

“I’m sorry, Mungo,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. Everything’s my fault. Everything. If it wasn’t for me, Dad would still be here, Mum would still be here...”

Mungo hears Chas tut softly.
Not this again.

“Sonny,” Mungo says, “you know as well as I do that you weren’t to blame for that.”

“But if she hadn’t had me...”

“It was an accident. These things happen.”

“But why did he choose me? Why not her? Why me over her?” These last sentences are hacked out of Sonny in a series of choking coughs. His cheeks are glazed with tears, and his fingers clutch convulsively at his trouser legs. His entire body is wracked with shudders, as though his despair is a physical thing, a parasite trying to squirm its way out.

“Dad believed he was doing the right thing,” Mungo says, words of cold comfort he has uttered countless times before. “He never forgave himself.”

“Or
me
,” Sonny wails. A bulb of yellow mucus droops out of one nostril. He reels it back in with a sniff. The tears continue to pour. “He never forgave
me
. The way he used to look at me. The way you sometimes look at me. The way
everyone
looks at me.”

“Sonny...”

Sonny slumps over onto his side again, bringing his knees up to his chest, burying his face in his hands. “Everyone knows what I did, and everyone hates me for it,” he sobs through his fingers. “Why did he let me live, Mungo? Didn’t he realise what he was doing? Didn’t he realise what he was condemning me to?”

Mungo can’t answer that. Truth to tell, he has never found it easy to accept the way their father acted over Sonny’s birth.

He recalls taking tea one afternoon with their mother in the mansion drawing room, when she was six months pregnant with Sonny. She was lying propped up against a landslide of cushions on the oak sill of the drawing room’s huge bay window, her upper body framed in profile against a diamond-paned vista of the mansion lawns in autumn. He remembers that she looked as regal as ever, for Hiroko Day had com from a Japanese family of good stock and had been brought up to hold herself well whatever the circumstances, but that she also looked tired, drawn, uncomfortable, mother-to-be heavy, and old, much too old. She had been in her late twenties when Mungo was born, and Mungo was now only a few weeks away from his twenty-first birthday.

No one else was around, and in response to a casual enquiry about her health, his mother stroked her swollen belly thoughtfully for a while before replying, “It would break your father’s heart if I didn’t have this child.” It was not the answer to the question Mungo had asked but the answer to a question she had been asking herself.

“But why not adopt?”

“Not part of your father’s plan, Mungo,” said his mother. “Not part of the deal he struck with himself when he founded the store. For your father’s filial cosmology to be complete all seven of his sons have to be his and my flesh and blood.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You know, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I was secretly hoping for a daughter. Amniocentesis says it’s going to be yet another boy, of course. As if I could bear the great Septimus Day anything but the boys he requires. But a daughter...” A gentle smile played about her mouth. “That would have been my little act of rebellion.”

“But it’s dangerous, isn’t it? I mean, the doctors recommended that you...” Mungo was not at ease discussing such matters with her. “You know.”

“Terminate,” said their mother. “Oh yes. And your father, grudgingly, accepted that recommendation as wise, and gave me permission to go ahead. But the way he looked at me when he said that, the pain in his eye...” She smiled ruefully at her firstborn, and shifted around on the cushions to get comfortable. “I know how much he wants this child. What else can I do except give him what he wants? Since when has anyone ever refused Septimus Day anything?”