Days (39 page)

Such is the mood, gloating and festive, when Mr Bloom enters, having been alerted as soon as the maul broke out. His arrival brings an immediate calm, like the entrance of a teacher into an unruly classroom. The screen-jockeys scurry back to their posts and adopt attitudes of concentration. Some start muttering into their headset mics as though in the middle of conversation with security operatives on the shop floor.

Mr Bloom glances up at the nearest screen showing the fracas, then looks around the room. “I trust reinforcements have been called in.”

Straight away half a dozen of the screen-jockeys are contacting guards on the Yellow Floor and on the floors directly above and below.

Mr Bloom turns back to the screens. Reduced to a series of fuzzy black-and-white images, the hand-to-hand combat looks like something out of an old Buster Keaton movie. But there is real pain up there, real anger and suffering, and Mr Bloom wonders briefly – but only briefly – if Frank, in his determination to leave Days, might not have the right idea after all.

2.03 p.m.

L
INDA WILL PROBABLY
never realise it, and if she does she would never admit it, but had Gordon not delayed her in Candles she would probably right now be in the thick of the fighting. Instead, the precious seconds he cost her with his sudden, inexplicable lapse into Neanderthal-husband behaviour mean that she reaches the lightning sale after the violence has already taken hold. What confronts her as she rushes in through the connecting passageway from the next-door Periphery, Ethnic Arts & Crafts, is not the rowdy rough-and-tumble she remembers, with such delight, from Ties. What confronts her is naked savagery: men and women with their faces contorted in vicious scowls, beautiful artefacts of teak and bamboo and reed and clay and steel being swung and broken, and blood – blood pouring from cuts, blood spattering the dollar-green carpet – and the injured staggering and rolling, clutching their wounds. Here, two customers are going at each other with Chilean rainsticks, parrying and thrusting with the rattling lengths of dried cactus like two fencers. Here, a woman is trying to force a nose flute up another woman’s nasal passage. And over here, a pair of maracas are being rammed violently up between a man’s legs, causing him to sag to his knees in wordless, white-faced agony. This is not healthy, aggressive competition for bargains but nothing less than communal insanity, a rhymeless, reasonless free-for-all. And something inside Linda, something sufficiently uncorrupted by Days, recoils at the sight. While other shoppers push by, eagerly throwing themselves headlong into the throng, she hesitates. She knows that a once-in-a-lifetime bargain is waiting for her somewhere in the midst of the bellicose mob in front of her. She can all but hear it crying out to her above the clang-twang-bang of musical weaponry. Desire sways her forward; caution sways her back.

Then a woman running past grabs the sleeve of Linda’s blouse, and, in a spirit of kamikaze comradeship, hauls her into the department. Perhaps Linda is not as unwilling to become involved as she thought, because she allows herself to be dragged several metres before it occurs to her that she might like to make this decision for herself. She digs her heels in and the sleeve tears, but the woman is swallowed up by the crowd before Linda can remonstrate. Her best blouse!

At the edge of the tumult Linda loses the sense of perspective she had in the connecting passageway. At close quarters, all she can see are raking fingernails and flying fists, gouging thumbs and snarling grins. Then something small and wet slaps against her cheek, sticking there. She picks the object off. It is a tooth, still with a shred of gum attached.

That’s it. Tossing the tooth aside with a disgusted shudder, Linda begins to pace backward, away from the chaos, moving slowly so as to be unobtrusive, not wanting to catch anyone’s eye. As far as she can tell, you don’t have to attack anyone in order to be attacked yourself. People already embroiled in the fighting are rounding on newcomers and laying into them as if they are old antagonists in a long-running feud. Still she hears the siren-song of her bargain urging her to dive in and battle her way through to it, but the sound is faint now, and becoming fainter, disappearing beneath the rising cacophony of pain and abused musical instruments.

Suddenly, as though an invisible membrane enclosing the crowd has burst, the fighting spills towards her. A man charges at her with a zither, fully intending to drive one blood-smeared corner of it into her skull. Stumbling backward, Linda catches his wrists and twists his arms aside, so that the zither glances off her temple. There is a hot gush of breath on her cheek. The man is screaming at her, spouting an incoherent stream of obscenities. He brings the zither back up. The trapezoid instrument wavers centimetres from Linda’s face. The man’s wrists are sinewy, slippery in her grasp, but she doesn’t let go. He is bigger than her, stronger, but she is damned if she is going to let him hurt her.

In a vivid flash, she recalls seeing her parents in a very similar pose. She had been lying in bed listening to the argument downstairs rage for the best part of an hour until finally, unable to sleep, she had sneaked out of her bedroom and gone and sat on the staircase. Peering timorously through the banisters, she had seen her father, scarlet-faced, pacing about the living room, snorting and cursing and, between snorts and curses, accusing her mother of all sorts of things: of never listening to him, of failing to understand his needs, of not showing him sufficient respect as her husband and as the breadwinner of the family. Her mother was saying nothing in her own defence, no doubt because she thought the accusations too absurd to merit a response; instead, she simply sat there while her husband worked himself up into a frenzy, until at last, unable to bear her silence any more, he lunged at her as if to strangle her. Reacting with a quickness that suggested she had been expecting something like this to happen, Linda’s mother caught his wrists before his hands could connect with her throat and, bracing them away from her, trembling, arms rigid, she began talking softly, soothingly, to him, the way you do to a fierce dog.

The two of them remained locked together like that, a frozen tableau depicting anger versus reason, until, slowly, as Linda’s mother’s words penetrated her father’s haze of rage, he began to back off. She did not let go of his wrists until she felt sure he had calmed down. She (and Linda) then watched him cross the room to the fireplace, both of them expecting him to say he was sorry, as he usually did at this point, for he was not wholly without a conscience, not entirely a hostage to his own desires. The apologies he tendered after any kind of dispute might have been mumbled and grudging, but at least served as an admission that he had been out of line.

On this occasion, however, he had not yet calmed down and was not about to apologise. His anger had temporarily subsided, but it was seeking a new outlet, and quickly found one.

He snatched down the carriage clock with the cherub feet and weighed it speculatively in his hand. Linda and her mother both realised what was about to happen but both were powerless to do anything about it. They could only look on in appalled disbelief as he drew back his arm and hurled the clock against the nearest wall.

He bent to pick up the clock and inspected it. Even from the staircase Linda could see that the glass covering its face had a crack in it, a clean, jagged line coming down from one corner like a lightning bolt. Once again her father drew back his arm and dashed the clock against the wall. This time, something inside the clock came unsprung with an audible twang, and one of the cherub feet snapped off. Once more he picked up the clock and, shaking it beside his ear, grinned as its innards rattled. Then he raised it up above his head and threw it to the floor. Glass sprayed out in slivers. Another of the cherubs went flying.

The clock lay on its side on the carpet, a sad, dented, disfigured thing. Linda had to resist the urge to cry out, “Leave it alone!” Couldn’t he see that it (and she and her mother) had had enough? Clearly not, because the next thing he did was raise his foot and stamp on the clock, once, twice, and then again and again, repeatedly.

The clock had been well made, but it could only take so much punishment. It wasn’t long before, beneath the pounding of her father’s foot, its casing gave way and gleaming metal movement parts spilled out – cogs, flywheels, escapement, a coil of spring.

Linda’s father looked down at what he had done, then up at his wife, his smug, self-satisfied expression that of an infant that has got out of eating an unwanted meal by tipping the bowl onto the floor.

“One day,” he said, “I’m going to do the same to you, you bitch.”

With a quiet, mournful dignity, Linda’s mother set to picking up the pieces of the clock, and Linda, tears in her eyes, padded back to her room, and there, in bed, cried herself to sleep.

In the event, her father never made good on his threat. In fact, not once during the course of their marriage did he actually land a blow on his wife, though this was perhaps as much due to her quick reactions as to his reluctance. Nevertheless, the possibility was always there that one day his rage would grow too great to be vented in insults or placated by carefully chosen words, and this meant that Linda’s mother had to tread cautiously around the house at all times, a habit Linda herself learned to emulate, even though it was her mother who always took the brunt of her father’s temper. He was the sullen, angry planet around which they, two moons, a larger and a lesser, silently circled, and when he finally walked out on them and went to live in another city with another, younger woman, it was as though they had been freed from his gravitational pull. They felt lighter for his absence.

Understandably, Linda grew up fearing men, believing that they were all like her father, liable to turn on you at the slightest excuse. This led to a series of awkward, superficial, unconsummated affairs which earned her a reputation in her social circle as a frigid man-hater. It wasn’t until she met Gordon that she at last understood that not all men were made the way her father had been; that some of them could be meek and mild and – yes, no harm in admitting it – malleable.

The memory of the destruction of the cherub clock gives Linda the boost she needs. In the man with the zither’s distended, filth-spewing face she sees an echo of her father’s, and resentment and revulsion well up inside her, lending her strength. With a grunting shriek, she thrusts him away. He totters back, arms windmilling, and his zither strikes a nearby customer in the neck. This other customer wheels around. He has a balalaika in his hands. He swings it like a club. It smashes the man with the zither square in the face, strings first. A spiky open chord sings out, and parallel slashes across the man with the zither’s nose and cheekbones bead crimson and start to run.

Linda starts to run, too.

Her sense of direction has been thrown and she has no clear idea which way the connecting passageway to Ethnic Arts & Crafts lies. She can see nothing except people, but she can detect a current to their movement, a flow. Bargain-hunters are still pouring into the department; therefore, if she heads the opposite way, counter to them, like a salmon swimming upstream, she will get to where she wants to go.

A fine plan in theory, but the inrush of shoppers is an almost solid wall of bodies, pushing her back. She has to force her way through them, wedging a shoulder or a leg into every gap she sees. Several times her feet are swept out from under her and she nearly goes down, saving herself by clinging onto someone’s arm or clothing, desperately recovering her footing before the owner of the arm or clothing shakes her off. She knows that if she falls she will most likely be trampled.

At some point during her struggle to reach the exit she hears, dimly, the end of the sale being called out over the PA system, and she entertains the vain, vague hope that, as it did in Ties, the announcement will bring a halt to the proceedings. But no one else seems to hear or, more to the point, to care. The fighting continues unabated, the bargain-hunters keep on coming, and Linda has to carry on pushing against the tide, enduring the knocks and thumps that come her way, gritting her teeth and not retaliating because her goal is getting out in one piece. Everything else is secondary to that.

It begins to seem hopeless. Wave upon wave of bargain-hunters crashes against her. The undertow of their single-mindedness tugs at her. The effort it takes to resist is draining. Linda feels as though she has jumped off the rail of a foundering ocean liner and is trying to swim away against the pull of the vortex created by the sinking ship. For all her striving she doesn’t appear to be making any progress. Her reserves of energy are ebbing. It would be easier, her tiring limbs tell her, just to give in and let herself be sucked back into the maelstrom. She has failed to obtain her bargain, whatever it was. Someone who deliberately passes up an opportunity like that (a quarter off!) doesn’t deserve to get anything else she wants.

She decides to abandon the attempt to escape from the department and let the flood of bargain-hunters take her where it will.

And in that moment of letting go she thinks of Gordon, who all his life has allowed events to happen to him, who has never once tried to improve his circumstances of his own accord but has invariably adapted, complied and compromised. And for the first time in their marriage she understands why. To choose the path of least resistance has always seemed to her a sign of weakness. The root of her strength has been her willingness to stand firm no matter how overwhelming the odds. But sometimes there is a strength in admitting defeat. Rigid defiance is admirable but not necessarily, in every situation, wise.

She thinks of Gordon, and there in front of her, as if somehow conjured into being by the power of her imagination,
is
Gordon. Gordon extending a hand to her. Gordon shouting, “Grab a hold, Linda!”

She takes his hand, and he hauls her toward him, and together they form a small island around which the torrent of bodies breaks and diverges. Standing, embracing, husband and wife ride out the onslaught.