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 the 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.

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.