Days Read online

  Well, he will have to deal with that when it happens. For now, he has today – a Thursday – to contend with.

  He inserts a slice of bread into a chrome pop-up toaster which, with its vents and lines, calls to mind a vintage automobile. On the counter beside it sits a portable television set, which he switches on. Both toaster and television, needless to say, have the back-to-back D’s of the Days logo stamped on their housings.

  The television is programmed so that whenever it comes on it automatically tunes in to the Days home-shopping channel. A pair of wax-faced women of indeterminable age are rhapsodising over a three-string cultured-pearl choker from the Jewellery Department, while a computer-generated simulation of the interior of the world’s first and (possibly) foremost gigastore planes sea-sickeningly to and fro behind them.

  With a click of the remote control, Frank cuts to a news channel, and watches a report on the construction of the world’s first terastore in Australia – official title: the Bloody Big Shop. Intended to serve not just Australia and New Zealand but the Pacific Rim countries and South-East Asia as well, the Bloody Big Shop is an estimated eighteen months from completion but still, in its skeletal state, challenges its immediate neighbour, Ayers Rock, for size.

  The toaster jettisons its load of browned bread. In one corner of the slice a small semicircle of charring backs against an uncooked counterpart. This is the corner Frank butters and bites first.

  Frank does not eat much. He doesn’t even finish the toast. He pours himself another coffee, turns off the television and heads for his dressing room.

  Down a high-ceilinged hallway he passes doors to rooms he seldom uses, rooms whose immaculate and expensive furnishings would be under several inches of dust were it not for the ministrations of a cleaning lady Frank has never met. Shelves of books he hasn’t read line one side of the hallway, while on the other side paintings he barely notices any more cover the wall. A fussy-fingered interior decorator from Days chose the books and the paintings and the furnishings on Frank’s behalf, making free with Frank’s Iridium card. Frank has not yet paid off the sum outstanding on the card, so when he resigns he will have to surrender almost everything he owns back to the store. This will be no hardship.

  His Thursday outfit is waiting for him in the dressing room, each individual item hung or laid out. Frank put the trousers of his Thursday suit in the press the night before, last thing before he went to bed. The creases are pleasingly sharp.

  He dresses in an orderly and methodical manner, pausing after each step of the process to take a sip of coffee. He puts on a cool cotton shirt with a blue pinstripe and plain white buttons, and knots a maroon silk tie around his neck. He dons a charcoal-grey jacket to match the trousers, and slips a pair of black, cushion-soled brogues built more for comfort than elegance over the navy socks on his feet. Then he addresses himself to the full-length mirror that stands, canted in its frame, in one corner.

  Patiently he pieces himself in.

  The clothes help. The clothes, as they say, make the man, and decked out in the very best that the Gentlemen’s Outfitters Department at Days has to offer, Frank feels very much made. The crisp outlines of the suit fall readily into place. The tie and shirt and shoes fill out the gaps. Frank’s head, neck and hands are the last to appear, the hardest to visualise. God help him, sometimes he can’t even remember what his face looks like. Once it manifests in the mirror, its familiarity mocks his faulty memory, but in the moments while he struggles to recall just one feature, Frank honestly fears that he has finally winked out of existence altogether, slipped sideways into limbo, become a genuine ghost as well as a professional one.

  He makes a point of fixing the time – 6.34 – in his mental souvenir album. At 6.34 every workday morning, give or take a minute, he has stood here newly dressed in an outfit every piece of which carries a label into which is woven a matched pair of semicircles, one black, one white, above the washing and ironing instructions. Tomorrow morning he will not be standing here. In one of the dressing-room wardrobes a packed suitcase waits. The fluorescent pink tag attached to its handle bears a flight number and the three-letter code for an airport in the United States. A first-class plane ticket sits on top of the suitcase. Tomorrow at 6.34 a.m. Frank will be aboard a silver-tinged shuttle jet, soaring above the clotted clouds, following the sun. One way, no return.

  He pauses, still unable to conceive how it will feel to be hurtling away from the city, all connections with the only place he has ever called home severed, no certainties ahead of him. A tiny voice inside his head asks him if he is crazy, and a larger, louder voice replies, with calm conviction, No.

  No. Leaving is probably the sanest thing he has ever done. The scariest, too.

  Returning to the kitchen, Frank pours himself his third coffee, filling the mug to the brim as he empties the pot of its last drops.

  Halfway through drinking the final instalment of his breakfast-time caffeine infusion he feels a twinge deep in his belly, and happily he heads for the bathroom, there to succumb to the seated pleasure of relieving his bowels of their contents, which are meagre, hard and dry, but nonetheless good to be rid of. Each sheet of the super-soft three-ply lavatory paper he uses is imprinted with ghostly-faint pairs of semicircles. When he was much younger, Frank used to treat the Days logo with almost religious reverence. As an icon, its ubiquitousness indicated to him its power. He was proud to be associated with the symbol. Where before he might have balked at such an act of desecration, now he thinks nothing of wiping his arse on it.

  In the bedroom again, he straps on his sole sartorial accessory, a Days wristwatch – gold casing, patent-leather strap, Swiss movement. Before he slips his wallet into his inside jacket pocket, he checks that his Iridium card is still there, not because he expects it to have been stolen but because that is what he has done every morning at 6.41 for thirty-three years.

  He slides the Iridium from its velvet sheath. The card gleams iridescently like a rectangular wafer of mother-of-pearl. Holding it up to the light and gently flexing it, Frank watches rainbows chase one another across its surface, rippling around the raised characters of his name and the card number and the grainily engraved Days logo. Hard to believe something so light and thin could be a millstone. Hard to believe something so beautiful could be the source of so much misery.

  He returns the card to its sheath, the sheath to his wallet. Now he is ready to leave. There is nothing keeping him here.

  Except...

  He spends his second “spare” minute wandering around the flat, touching the things that belong to him, that tomorrow will not belong to him. His fingertips drift over fabrics and varnishes and glass as he glides from room to room, through a living space that, for all the emotional attachment he has to it, might as well be a museum.

  How he has managed to accumulate so many possessions, so many pieces of furniture and objets d’art, is something of a mystery to Frank. He can vaguely recall over the past thirty-three years handing over his Iridium to pay for purchases which took him all of a few seconds to pick out, but he is hard pressed to remember actually buying the individual items – this Art Deco vase, say, or that Turkish kilim – let alone how much they cost. No doubt the Days interior decorator was responsible for obtaining and installing many of the pieces Frank has no memory of acquiring, but not all. That’s how little the transactions have meant to him, how unreal they have seemed. He has bought things reflexively, not because he wants to but because his Iridium has meant he can, and now he is mired in a debt that will take at least another decade of employment to work off.

  But as he cannot bear the thought of another day at Days, and as what he owns has no value to him, not even of the sentimental kind, he feels no qualms about his decision to tender his resignation today. To quit, as the Americans would say. (So direct, Americans. They always find a succinct way of putting things, which is why Frank is looking forward to living among them, because he admires those qualities in others he finds la
cking in himself.) He has calculated that by repossessing the flat and all that is in it, his employers ought to consider the debt squared. And if they don’t, then they will just have to come looking for him in America. And America is a very big place, and Frank can be a very hard man to find.

  His tour of the flat is complete. It is 6.43, and he has pushed his timetable to its limit. There can be no more procrastinating. He takes a black cashmere overcoat from the coat rack by the flat door and flings it on. The door clicks softly open, snicks snugly shut. Frank steps out onto the landing, part of a central stairwell that winds around a lift shaft enclosed in a wrought-iron cage. He keys the Down button by the lift gate, and there is a whine and a churning of cogs from deep down in the shaft. The cables start to ribbon.

  2

  The Corporal Works of Mercy: in some Christian denominations, seven specific acts of charity that render physical aid.

  6.52 a.m.

  IT TAKES FRANK five and a half minutes to walk from his building to the train station. In his first few years at Days it used to take him four. Age hasn’t slowed him. He still has the legs of a twenty-year-old. But his stride has lost its spring.

  At the station’s automated newsstand he inserts his Iridium into the slot and makes his selection. The newspaper flops into the chute and he extracts it. His Iridium is debited and ejected. A similar procedure buys him a return ticket and a styrofoam cup of coffee.

  Through the turnstile he goes, and up the stairs to the platform, where a dozen commuters are standing and every so often casting hopeful glances along the tracks. Like Frank, they all have newspapers and hot beverages and invisible yokes. Their faces he knows well, and he has learned names to go with some of the faces by eavesdropping on their desultory conversations. He and they are old warriors, brothers and sisters in arms who have fought this daily battle for more years than they would care to think. To his surprise, Frank is saddened to think that this will be the last time he will be sharing their company. He moves along the platform, murmuring an inaudible goodbye to each person under his breath. One or two of them glance up from their newspapers as he passes, but the majority do not.

  He takes his place by a wooden shelter whose burnt-ivory paintwork has been almost entirely obliterated with graffiti. A chilly breeze stirs the grit on the platform’s asphalt surface and sends discarded sweet-wrappers and crisp-packets scuttering. Weeds shiver fitfully between the rust-encrusted iron sleepers. Finally an incomprehensible announcement burbles from loudspeakers that sound as if they are made of soggy cardboard, and, to everyone’s relief, the tracks begin to sing.

  The train comes rollicking in, grinds to a halt, and gapes its doors. Frank finds himself a seat. The doors close, and the train hunks and clanks away from the platform, cumbersomely gathering speed. The rolling stock is so old it could probably qualify as vintage. The carriages squeal and sway, their wheels shimmying on the rails; the seat fabric smells of burnt oranges, and the windows are a smeary yellow.

  Frank knows he has thirty-one minutes, barring hold-ups, to read his paper and drink his coffee, but today he delays doing either in order to cast his eye around the carriage and fasten details in his memory. The tattered corner of a poster advertising a Days sale long since finished. The empty beer can rattling to and fro across the dun linoleum flooring. The slogan scrawled in blue marker pen, “fuk da gigastor” – a sentiment Frank has some sympathy with. The synchronised jerk of the passengers’ heads, mirrored by the twitch of the handstraps that hang from the ceiling. The sulphurous glide of the city.

  He will not miss this. He will not miss any of this.

  The daily paper no longer contains much to interest him, if it ever did. He buys and reads it out of sheer habit. Nothing that happens in this country concerns him any more. All the news seems old. The unrest, the disputes, the crime, the prevaricating of the politicians, the pontificating of the clergy, the intriguing of the royals... it has always been this way for as long as he can remember, and longer. Nothing in the news changes except the names.

  But America – something is always happening in America. A hurricane that leaves thousands homeless, a serial killer who leaves dozens dead. A trial that spectacularly acquits the defendant, a civic official who spectacularly turns down a bribe. Huge salaries, huge tragedies. Everything on a larger scale. Two gigastores, for heaven’s sake! Not that a gigastore is necessarily a mark of greatness, but as the only continent to sport two of the things, North America has to be marvelled at.

  Frank expects that he will visit both Blumberg’s, N.Y. and Blumberg’s, L.A., if for no other reason than professional curiosity. He intends to traverse the entire country coast to coast in trains and cars and buses, secretly observing the nation and its people. In a land that size, losing himself will not be difficult; nor will it be unprecedented. America teems with lost souls who rove its emptiness, who love its emptiness. Perhaps among them, among a secret sub-nation of nobodies, he will find fellowship and a home.

  As for so many other people, this country is used up for him. Dried out. Husked. As for so many other people, there is nothing here for him any more except years of work, a brief retirement, and an unremarked death. This country has grown mean in spirit. This country has lost nearly everything it used to have and has become fiercely, greedily protective of the little it has left. This country, fearing the future, has turned its eyes firmly on the past. This country is no longer a home to its inhabitants but a museum of better days.

  A voice that manages to sound bored even though it is only a recording announces the name of the approaching station twice. The train slows and comes to a halt, carriage banging into carriage like a queue of cartoon elephants butting up against one another’s behinds. A scrawny girl in torn jeans and an engulfing anorak enters the carriage. She ambles along the aisle and plumps herself down in the seat next to a matronly woman. By means of a snort and a peremptory flap of her gossip magazine, the woman conveys to the girl that there are plenty of other perfectly good seats available, but the girl is not intimidated. She does not move, merely looks sullen and cunning.

  Frank, feeling a familiar prickling at the nape of his neck, watches.

  Sure enough, the train has hardly begun to move again when the girl’s hand sneaks across the chair arm towards the clasp of the matronly woman’s handbag. The girl’s face remains a slack mask of indifference, her bored gaze elsewhere. She is good, Frank will grant her that. She has learned her job well, and probably the hard way, from beatings she has received when her fingers have not been nimble enough or her feet fleet enough. He knows what she is after, too. Sell a Days card on the black market and you will be eating well for a couple of weeks. (Sell one to an undercover police officer and you will be eating prison food for a couple of years.)

  Peeking surreptitiously over the top edge of his newspaper, he follows the progress of the theft. The girl’s hand, as it stealthily undoes the handbag clasp and delves in, seems not to belong to her. It seems to be operating of its own accord, an independent, spider-like entity. The matronly woman remains unaware that her handbag is being rifled, its contents being blind-assessed by expert fingertips. She is completely absorbed in the article she is reading and in the hangnail she is doggedly chewing.

  Frank waits until the girl’s hand emerges. There! A glimmer of silvery-grey plastic flashing across the chair-arm, vanishing almost the instant it appears.

  Frank stands up, sets his newspaper down in his seat, strides across the aisle, grasps a handstrap, and bends down over the girl, fixing her with his grey gaze.

  “Put it back,” he says.

  She looks at him blankly; in that blankness, defiance.

  “I’m giving you one chance to put it back. Otherwise I pull the communication cord and summon the transport police, and you can explain to them what this woman’s Days card is doing in your pocket.”

  At that, the matronly woman frowns. “Are you talking about my Days card?”

  “Well?” says Frank to th
e girl, not breaking eye-contact.

  She continues to glare back at him, then slowly lowers her head and sighs. Reaching into her pocket, she produces the card.

  “S’only a crappy old Aluminium anyway.”

  The woman gasps, although it is unclear whether this is in surprise at the sight of her card in the girl’s hand or in mortification at the broadcasting of her status as the holder of the lowest denomination of Days account. She snatches the card off the girl and hastily thrusts it back into her handbag.

  The train is slowing. The name of the next station is announced twice.

  “Get off here,” says Frank, stepping back.

  The girl gets up and hipsways along the aisle towards the nearest door, tossing her hair.

  “And you’re just going to let her walk away like that?” the woman demands of Frank. “She stole my card. She should be arrested. Stop her!” She addresses herself to the whole carriage. “Somebody stop her!”

  No one makes a move.

  “You got your card back,” Frank says. “If you want her arrested so badly, stop her yourself.”

  The doors open, and, insolent to the last, the girl gives Frank and the woman a cocky little wave before alighting.

  “Well!” the woman exclaims.

  Frank heads back to his seat. The doors close and the train begins to pick up speed. A sudden lurch catches him off-balance and he sits down heavily, crushing his newspaper. He slides the paper out from under his backside and smoothes it flat on his lap. Before he resumes reading, he glances back at the matronly woman.