Days Read online

  She is staring at him, shaking her head. Only after she feels he has been exposed to enough of her scorn does she turn back to her magazine and her hangnail.

  No, there really is nothing for him here.

  3

  Pride: one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

  7.24 a.m.

  LINDA TRIVETT HAS been lying awake since shortly after five, watching the glow that frames the bedroom curtains brighten. It is too late now to pretend that she is going to go back to sleep. She is far too excited for that, anyway. In fact, she didn’t think she was going to get off to sleep at all last night, and took a couple of pills to help her, little expecting them to work, but they did. Gordon, not surprisingly, needed no pharmaceutical assistance. As if it were just any other evening, he closed the book Linda had borrowed for him from the library (a self-help manual on assertiveness) after, as usual, managing less than a page of it, then set the book down on the bedside table, placed his spectacles on top, turned out the bedside light, rolled over, and started snoring almost straight away.

  He is still snoring now, a grating suck-and-snort rhythm that Linda has almost, but not quite, trained herself to ignore. Lying there with a pillow bunched up under his head, a lock of his thin, sandy hair snagged on one eyebrow and a line of drool leaking from his slack mouth onto the pillowcase, he looks like a child. Sleep has eased years from his face.

  Linda, experiencing a twinge of tenderness – but not love; she knows Gordon too well to feel love for him – reaches over and gently brushes the lock of hair back into place.

  She climbs out of bed carefully so as not to disturb him, even though it would take a near-miss with a Howitzer to wake Gordon once he slips into REM. Putting on a velour dressing gown over her nightdress, she goes down to the kitchen and makes herself a cup of tea.

  She can scarcely believe that today has finally arrived. She has been looking forward to this morning ever since, just over a week ago, she and Gordon learned by post that their application for a Days account had been accepted and that their Silver card would be arriving later that same day. Linda cancelled her hairdressing appointments and stayed home just so that she could be there to greet the courier when he came. That was an event to set the neighbours’ tongues wagging: a Days courier pulling up in front of their house, resting his motorbike on its kickstand, unbuttoning the holster on his sidearm, and with wary glances to the left and right walking up the garden path to knock on the front door and hand over the bulky, securely wrapped parcel he was carrying in the pouch slung over his shoulder. Linda saw net curtains twitch all along the street as she signed for the package and the courier strode back to his bike, doing up the chin-strap of his half-white, half-black helmet.

  How she managed to hold off opening the parcel until Gordon came home from work Linda has no idea. Her self-control astounded her, and disappointed Margie and Pat and Bella, all of whom dropped by that day on various pretexts, hoping to catch a glimpse of an honest-to-goodness Days Silver. Margie and her husband had applied for an Aluminium and were still waiting to hear if they had been accepted, so she was the one who stared at the package with the greatest envy.

  “A Silver,” she sighed. “We’ll never manage Silver on Tim’s salary.”

  It occurred to Linda that on the amount the packing plant paid Tim they would be lucky if they could manage Aluminium. It was a touch smug of her to think that, perhaps, but if she couldn’t be smug then, when could she?

  She said, “Well, the bank did give Gordon a small pay-rise recently, and add to that what I get from my hairdressing...” She shrugged, as if that was all there was to obtaining a Days Silver.

  It wasn’t. Her shrug belied five years of struggle, of hard graft, of sacrifice and self-denial and self-discipline, of pennies pinched and corners cut and weekends worked. Five years of clothes mended to last beyond their natural lifespan, of evenings spent in instead of being enjoyed out, of winters endured with the thermostat turned down low, of Christmases without a tree or decorations and with only the most modest of gifts exchanged. Five years of repeatedly postponing the decision to have children, children being such a financial liability. Five years, until she and Gordon had at last scraped together the minimum collateral required to qualify for a Silver. (They could, of course, have opened an Aluminium account as soon as the new grade was introduced, but Linda decided they should continue saving up for the Silver because a Silver was what they had set their hearts on and, more to the point, an Aluminium was common, in both senses of the word.)

  And was it worth it? Of course it was! Anything was worth the moment she and Gordon sat down together, tore away the parcel’s plain brown wrapping, and took out a Days catalogue and a slim envelope.

  The catalogue was vast, as thick as three telephone directories, with the edges of its onionskin-thin pages colour-coded in six rainbow bands, one for each of the six shop floors still in service, Red to Indigo.

  Gordon straight away began leafing through it. Linda, meanwhile, carefully slit open the envelope with a kitchen knife, delved in, and extracted a Days Silver.

  A Days Silver with their names on it in embossed capitals.

  The ecstasy she felt then as she held the card in her hands, angling it from side to side and watching the light flash across its surface and across the ridges of the letters that spelled out GORDON & LINDA TRIVETT – oh yes, any amount of hardship was worth that.

  She proposed that they visit the gigastore the very next day, but Gordon pointed out that until they had signed and returned the disclaimer form enclosed with the card and had received acknowledgement of its receipt from the store, they were still not permitted to pass through the doors of Days.

  He read out the form aloud, mumbling as he skated over paragraph of dense legal jargon, which he promised to look at more closely later. Basically the form seemed to be saying that Days could not and would not accept liability for anything that might happen to the Trivetts while they were on the premises, and that should the Trivetts break any of the rules mentioned “heretofore and herein” they would not be in a position to seek indemnity or reimbursement from the store.

  Linda listened patiently but none too attentively, and as soon as Gordon finished reading, signed her name next to his on the dotted line at the bottom of the form with a thrilled, quivering hand.

  The next morning she posted off the form, along with the passport-sized photographs of herself and Gordon required for security purposes. The acknowledgement slip came back two days later.

  That was last Saturday morning, and the moment the acknowledgement slip arrived, Linda suggested to Gordon that they visit the store right then. If they left immediately, they could be there by opening time. Gordon said he wasn’t ready. He complained of a headache. He had, he said, had a hard week. And besides, he had heard stories about Days on a Saturday. Stories about packed floors and wrestling crowds, scuffles and riots and even deaths.

  Linda replied that she had heard stories like that about Days on every day of the week, and had chosen to discount them as rumours, or at any rate exaggerations of the truth spread by people without Days accounts who are all too ready to condemn what they cannot have. But she had to admit that Gordon did look a little haggard, so she gave him the benefit of the doubt and proposed that they go to Days on Monday instead. Gordon pointed out that he couldn’t afford to take a day off work, not if they were to maintain the level of income necessary to keep the use of the card, so therefore if they went, it would have to be on a Saturday or not at all. Linda replied that Saturdays were her busiest – and therefore most lucrative – hairdressing days, and that if he took a day off sick he got paid, whereas she did not. And anyway, had he not just objected to visiting Days on a Saturday on the grounds that it would be too dangerous? He couldn’t have it both ways. Either they risked the Saturday crowds or they went on a weekday.

  It occurred to her then, although she did not comment on it, that Gordon seemed to be making up excuses not to go at all. Surely he wasn�
��t getting cold feet? After all this time and effort?

  So she suggested Tuesday. She could, she thought, just about hold out till Tuesday.

  Gordon, predictably, repeated his claim that he couldn’t under any circumstances take a weekday off, to which Linda, her patience wearing thin, retorted that in that case she was going to go on her own. Much as she wanted Gordon to come with her on her first trip to Days, she simply could not wait until next Saturday.

  That did the trick, as she had known it would. No way was Gordon going to let her loose in Days on her own with their card. He sighed and suggested a compromise: this coming Thursday.

  And so Thursday it was, and Linda, magnanimous in victory, took her husband by the hand and, giving her best approximation of a knowing, lascivious grin, led him upstairs to the bedroom and there bestowed on him the Special Treat usually reserved for his birthday and Christmas Eve. And though the deed, as always, left a bad taste in her mouth (both figuratively and literally), it was worthwhile. When she returned from having rinsed out with mouthwash in the bathroom, Gordon was looking less defeated, more contented, as he lay flat out and naked on the bed.

  And now, as she sits in the kitchen sipping her tea on this Thursday morning which she thought would never arrive, Linda feels like a child on Christmas Day. In about an hour she is going to call her scheduled two blue rinses and a demi-perm and tell them that Gordon has a virulent ’flu and that she feels she ought to stay home and look after him. Then she is going to call the bank and tell the manager the same story: Gordon will not be coming in today, the ’flu, probably that twenty-four-hour strain that has been doing the rounds, he should be fine by tomorrow if he stays home today and gets some rest. She would ask Gordon to make the call himself, but he is the world’s worst liar and would only make a hash of it, umming and ahhing and interspersing his sentences with feeble, unconvincing coughs. Besides, coming from the concerned wife, the lie will possibly sound more authentic.

  Gordon hasn’t taken a day off sick in as long as Linda can remember, not even when he has genuinely been feeling under the weather. These days no job is safe, and even if, like Gordon, you work as a loan adviser at a small local branch of a large national bank – money-lending being one of the few growth industries left in these days of high unemployment and low income – missing a day can still mean the difference between employment and the dole queue. Not only that, but for the past few weeks Gordon has quietly been trying to curry the manager’s favour. The assistant manager is leaving soon to take over the running of another branch, and Linda has her eyes firmly set on the vacated post for her husband. He, however, instead of simply going up to the manager and demanding the promotion (which he fully deserves), has adopted the tactic of working hard and waiting and hoping. No matter how many times Linda has told him that nothing comes to those who wait and hope, that at the very least he should be dropping hints, but that preferably he should just come right out with it and ask, he has so far failed to pluck up the courage to do anything so forceful and positive. He would much rather believe that his diligence will be noted and duly rewarded. The poor, deluded innocent.

  The Days catalogue is lying opposite Linda on the kitchen table. She heaves it towards her, marvelling yet again at the size of it. It needs to be this large, since it purports to list, and in many instances depict, every single item available at Days.

  Every single item? Linda, in spite of herself, finds the claim hard to swallow. Days is supposed to be able to sell you anything you can possibly want, anything in the entire world. That is the store’s motto, which can be found on the cover of the catalogue beneath the name of the store and its famous logo, in small type: “If it can be sold, it will be bought, and if it can be bought, it will be sold.” That is the principle on which Septimus Day founded the store all those years ago, and the pledge which Days upholds to this day. (Linda has read the potted history of the store on the inside front cover.) But how can a catalogue, even one as immense as this, contain everything, every piece of merchandise in existence? It just isn’t possible. Is it?

  In the week that she has had the catalogue Linda has been able to peruse less than a quarter of it, but she has managed to pick out a number of items she would like to buy. She hoists the huge tome open and flips through to a section she has bookmarked with a slip of paper. Ties. Dozens of men’s ties blaze up at her from a photo spread that illustrates just some of the thousands of items of men’s neck apparel listed on adjacent pages. Linda has circled a dark green silk kipper with a repeating pattern of coins and made a note of its serial number. Gordon needs to jazz up his image. When it comes to clothing, his penchant for the plain and the simple is all very well, but a bit of excitement, a dash of colour to offset his sartorial conservatism, would not go amiss. She may never be able to persuade him to wear, say, a bright shirt, but she might just manage to get him to try out an interesting tie, particularly if, like the one she has chosen, it has a thematic connection to his job. And who knows, perhaps the tie will alert the branch manager to a facet of Gordon’s character that Linda has for a long time known exists, or at any rate believed exists, or in fact (let’s be honest here) hoped exists. She is sure Gordon used to be an exciting person once. When they were courting, and in the early days of their marriage, he was bold, spontaneous, impulsive, even dashing... wasn’t he? Surely he was. And still is. It is simply that over the years this side of him has become buried beneath an accretion of responsibilities and concerns, like a ship’s hull becoming encrusted and weighed down with barnacles. Now that they have their Days card, that is about to change. Everything is about to change.

  She flips on through the catalogue to the Clocks section, where she finds another item which she is fully intent on buying today.

  In itself the carriage clock is nothing special. A reproduction of an antique, its brass casing boasts sections of Gothic filigree laced over panels of dark blue glass, and instead of feet the clock rests on the backs of four winged cherubs, whose stubby arms hold trumpets to their lips and whose cheeks bulge with the effort of blowing. These are nice enough features, but there are many other more ornate and more beautiful examples of horology on display. However, the clock happens to be an exact copy of one that Linda’s parents once owned, an heirloom that had been passed down the distaff side of the family, from Linda’s great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother. It used to sit in pride of place on the mantelshelf in the living room, and her mother devotedly used to keep it wound up and, twice a year, give it a thorough polish to bring up the gleam of the brass. It was, perhaps, the most elegant thing the family owned, certainly the object with the most sentimental value... until the day Linda’s father saw to it that Linda never got to inherit it.

  The moment she came across the picture of the reproduction clock in the Days catalogue, Linda understood that she had been offered a second chance to possess something which she had been deprived of by an act of cheap, casual malice while she was still a child. It was almost as if the clock had been waiting in the catalogue’s pages for her to discover it, and as soon as she laid eyes on it, she knew it had to be hers. She had no choice in the matter. And though she has earmarked several other items for purchase today, even if she buys nothing else, she is determined that she will not leave Days without the clock, for her, and the tie, for Gordon.

  It is 7.37 according to the digital timer on the oven. In a few minutes she will go back upstairs and wake Gordon, but for now she is going to enjoy her tea, the peace and quiet, and the sweet tingle of anticipation in her belly.

  Today, she is confident, is going to be the greatest day of her life.

  4

  The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: the Egyptian pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the statue of Zeus by Phidias at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the lighthouse on the island of Pharos at Alexandria.

  7.37 a.m.

  “DAYS PLAZA NORTH-WEST. Days Plaza N
orth-West.”

  Frank clambers to his feet, folds and pockets his newspaper, and makes his way down the carriage with his empty coffee cup in one hand, his body angled against the train’s deceleration.

  Out on the platform he meticulously disposes of the cup in a litter bin. No one else has disembarked except him. It is too early for shoppers and too early for most employees. On the other side of the platform a pair of janitors are waiting for the train going the opposite way. The backs of their green overalls are emblazoned with Days logos the size of dinner plates. They talk quietly and sombrely together. As Frank trots down the stairs to the ticket hall he recognises a Days night watchman slogging up the other way. If the night watchman is as tired as he looks, it has been a long night indeed.

  Exiting the station onto Days Plaza, Frank is hit full in the face by a powerful gust of wind that momentarily staggers him. The store generates its own microclimate, its two-and-a-half-kilometre flanks funnelling the air currents that swirl around it into long sheeting vortices that collide at each corner and explode outwards, spiralling across the plaza in all directions, making the ornamental shrubberies shudder and the fountains’ plumes bend sideways and overshoot their bowls.

  Frank squares his jaw, lowers his head like a bull, and sets off across the plaza. His coat tails whip and flap about his legs and his hair is threshed this way and that. The gusts may not be cold but they are insistent and mean. The plaza’s trees have grown up sickly and stunted as a result of their constant bullying.