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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.
     
    “D AYS P LAZA N ORTH- W EST. Days Plaza North-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.
    There are train stations at all four corners of Days Plaza and a bus route runs around its circumference, with a single stop midway along each edge. This means that the shopper arriving by public transport has to walk at least half a kilometre to reach the store. The shopper travelling by taxi or private car is better served. Taxi-only approach roads lead up to turning circles outside the store’s four entrances, while beneath the plaza lie seven storeys of subterranean car park with lifts that emerge in the entrance halls. The logic behind such an arrangement is faultless, if you have the mind of a retailer. Shoppers who know they are going to have to carry their goods home by hand will ration their purchases, concentrating on smaller, lighter and generally less expensive goods. The inconvenient location of the train stations and bus stops encourages them to use cars and taxis instead. Cars and taxis have plenty of room inside to store purchases. And car parks are, of course, an additional source of revenue.
    Frank walks alongside the approach road to Days with his eyes averted, not just to shield them from the stinging particles of grit that are being tossed about by the wind but so that he won’t have to look at the building. Even so, he can sense it looming ahead of him, a mountain made of brick. The plaza seems to slope down towards it, as though the weight of the world’s first and (reputedly) foremost gigastore has warped the surrounding surface of the planet, although it is possible that this is simply some architectural conceit intended to make your footsteps quicken the closer you come to the store.
    As Frank nears the north-western corner of Days, he at last dares to look up at the building that has dominated his life for thirty-three years. Its perspectives are dizzying,