25

 

Seven-League Boots: ogre’s boots donned by the fairy-tale hero Hop-o’-my-Thumb, enabling him to walk seven leagues (approximately 34 kilometres) at a stride.

 

 

12.00 p.m.

 

AT THE TURNING point of the day, high noon, after an hour of fruitless wandering without so much as a sniff of a possible perpetrator to break the monotony of department after department after department, Frank has walked himself into a state of dulled lethargy.

Nothing is happening. Around him customers are ambling, browsing, pausing, lingering, staring, discussing, comparing, matching, calculating, considering and acquiring, while sales assistants are smiling, bobbing, bowing, suggesting, hinting, agreeing, detagging, scanning, checking, bagging and returning. Nothing is happening but the give-and-take of commerce, as elemental and eternal as the ebb and neap of the tide, and Frank has nothing to do except plod from one department to another, through the various vectors of Days, his legs carrying him along in a mindless, relentless forward-urge. Every so often he checks in with the Eye. Anything nearby? Anything that requires his presence? Each time the answer comes back the same: nothing. The Eye sounds quieter than usual, its background hubbub subdued, as though down there in that screen-lit Basement chamber they are experiencing their own doldrums.

Frank’s trail crosses and recrosses itself as he proceeds through the immensity of Days, covering ground purely for the sake of covering ground, because that is what he is paid to do. He walks neither towards any particular goal nor to put distance between him and anything but simply to rack up the kilometres. There is no finishing line ahead, no Sodom behind, just the journey itself, the act of going. He travels hopefully, never to arrive.

Riding a lift, he is still moving.

Idling by a display, he is still moving.

Standing on an escalator, he is still moving.

Waiting until a traffic jam of shoppers clears so that he can continue down an aisle, he is still moving.

Hovering at the entrance to a fitting room to make sure that customers come out wearing the same clothes they had on going in, he is still moving.

Still moving, moving and still, as though his thirty-three years as a store detective have built up an inner inertia that pushes him on even when stationary. If his legs suddenly stopped working, perhaps deciding that they had had enough, that they had covered several lifetimes’ worth of distance, far more than their fair share, and they refused point-blank to go another step – if that happened, he feels that somehow his body would be unable to remain at rest. The accumulated momentum of thirty-three years of day-long walking would propel him onwards for ever, like a space probe sailing effortlessly through the void, endlessly, without entropy, into infinity.

Time slows when nothing is happening, and thoughts spit in all directions from Frank’s becalmed brain like sap-sparks from a smouldering log. His head fills with a babble of his own creation, a stream-of-consciousness monologue so loud and inane that he has, in the past, wanted to put his hands over his ears and yell at himself to shut up.

Simply talking to someone else might help relieve the mental pressure, but Ghosts are discouraged from unnecessary communication with other employees while on duty. Ghost Training, in fact, teaches you to have as little contact as possible with your co-workers, for to open your mouth is to draw attention to yourself. As for customers, in the unlikely event that one should mistake you for a fellow shopper and attempt to strike up a conversation, the terser your replies are, the better. The four main attributes of a good Ghost are, as the Ghost’s Motto says, silence, vigilance, persistence, and intransigence. The greatest of these is silence. Silence at any price, even at the cost of being driven insane by your brain’s unconscious blather.

Sometimes when he passes a fellow Ghost, Frank thinks he can see in the other’s face a reflection of the look that must be on his own. Beneath the Ghost’s affected impassiveness, in the eyes, he thinks he can discern a barely-restrained yearning to uncork a head-full of bottled-up thoughts, preferably in banter, failing that as a scream.

But perhaps he only imagines this. Perhaps it is just something his brain, in its skull-bound isolation, invents while his legs drive him aimlessly through the over-familiar, never-changing storescape. Perhaps, after thirty-three years of pounding the same floors, going over and over the imprints of his own footsteps, wearing the Days-logo carpets thin with his soles, he is simply displacing his pent-up frustrations on to others.

And as he keeps on walking and nothing keeps on happening, Frank feels himself veering down once again into the pit of wraiths inside him, into that well of milling, voiceless creatures who writhe heedlessly around one another like a knot of mating snakes. Loud and clear he hears the unspoken summons as they call to him with goldfish-gaping lips and begging eyes, saying in their inarticulacy that this is the place to be, down here in anonymity, down here where there are no individuals, where your name will be Legion, where you can be just one of many, where the configuration of meat and bone that is Frank Hubble will cease to have significance. Withdraw, withdraw. Pull yourself in like a snail into its shell and never come out again.

How easy it would be to answer that call. He knows of other Ghosts who did succumb. There was Falconer a few years back, who came to believe that he was genuinely invisible and arrived for work one morning stark naked, thinking that no one would notice. (He was pensioned off quickly, quietly, without fuss.) There was Eames, who failed to come in two days running, and was found at his apartment, sitting in a corner of his bedroom, dressed in his pyjamas and hugging his knees and rocking to and fro, staring vacantly into space, drooling. And then there was Burgess, who went on a killing-spree through the store, shooting four customers dead and wounding another six before security guards brought him down. No one could have predicted that any of these loyal, hard-working Tactical Security employees would all of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, snap the way they did, but they did, and another few months at Days and that is probably what will happen to Frank, too. One morning he will wake up and won’t feel the urge to get out of bed or feed himself or clothe himself or go anywhere. It will all be too much effort. They will find him like Eames, lying in bed, catatonic. Down among the wraiths. Down among the wraiths for ever.

That would be his future for sure, were he not going to do something about it today; were he not going to tender his resignation to Mr Bloom in – a discreet glance at his watch – three quarters of an hour’s time.

Three quarters of an hour of slow time. Forty-five oozing minutes. Two thousand seven hundred syrup-seconds measured out in steady footfalls in the protracted somnambulistic dream-random of Nothing Happening at Days.