Perfect Day

carpet. The pile is short and there’s a dense pattern of birds in trees with deep pink blossom. He trails his hands against the pile. The coarse dry texture beneath his fingertips brings a rush of memories.
    He lies on his stomach, with the carpet smell filling his nostrils, making his eyes smart.
    Kate lies on her front beside him.
    ‘Where do you want to fly to?’ she whispers.
    The black brogues of a sales assistant tap across the shop floor towards them and stand, pointedly, at the edge of the carpet.
    ‘Can I help you?’
    Alexander looks up. The sales assistant is awkward and young, like a teenager going for an interview in a borrowed suit.
    ‘We’re just looking, thank you,’ says Alexander.
    ‘You’re not supposed to walk on the carpets.’
    ‘We’re not walking,’ Kate chimes in.
    The sales assistant doesn’t move.
    ‘Oh well,’ Kate says, getting up and brushing invisible dust from herself , ‘we must fly!’
    She takes Alexander’s hand, pulls him up, and they walk away together giggling stupidly like children who’ve got a joke their teacher isn’t aware of.
    In the adjacent department are beds with squares of plastic at the foot of the mattress to protect them from shoppers’ shoes, and more beds made up with designer bedlinen .
    ‘If I were rich,’ says Kate, ‘I don’t know whether I’d go for bright colours, like that’ — she points towards a counterpane of checkered Indian cotton in vivid emerald, purple and orange — ‘or pure white cotton. What do you think?’
    ‘If you were rich, you could have both,’ he points out.
    ‘In films, they always have white, don’t they? It’s good taste, isn’t it?’
    ‘It’s probably so that the actors’ faces show up better,’ he suggests.
    ‘I never thought of that!’ she says. ‘How about this one?’
    It’s white with little flowers embroidered around the edges like a Swiss cotton handkerchief.
    ‘Fancy sleeping on that,’ she says. ‘You’d feel like a princess, but I bet it’d be ruined in a machine.’
    ‘I suppose a princess would have staff to take care of the washing,’ says Alexander.
    ‘Fantasies are funny like that, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘I mean, you can get quite serious about them, can’t you, even though you know they’re never going to happen.’
    ‘Can you?’
    He watches her hand caressing the pure white cotton. She looks across the bed at him. Their eyes meet.
    There are very few customers around and the only two visible staff are so busy talking about their plans for the weekend that he doesn’t think they’d notice if he and Kate were to climb under the huge soft white duvet. He really wants to hold her again. So much energy is contained in her small frame, holding her feels like being recharged.
    They both look away again.
    ‘Shall we get the lift down?’ she says.
    ‘All the way back down to earth?’ he says.
    ‘All the way back down to earth,’ she echoes, wistfully, unaware that he’s teasing her.

    The doors of the lift take a long time to close. When they finally do, he turns to Kate, and suddenly they’re kissing. The sensation of touching her lips, cupping her elfin face in his hands, feeling her firm little body against his, is the most delicious relief from a craving which spirals into urgency to kiss deeper, hold tighter, push back against the lift wall.
    When the lift bumps to its destination, he opens his eyes and finds his face right up against the mirror behind her.
    For a moment, he does not recognize himself.
    The doors open. A woman with a pushchair is waiting to get in. Kate and Alexander exit the lift on either side of her.
    They’re in a department full of speakers and televisions and DVDs. For a moment Kate is lost, and then her face clears.
    ‘Oh, we’ve overshot. This is the basement. There’s the bookshop over there.’
    He watches the swing of her narrow hips, the slim legs, the improbable boots on her feet as she heads off on another mission.
    Three large flat silent screens beside him show a burnt-out train with the rescue services milling around the debris. The picture cuts to close-up and a reporter’s interviewing a man wearing a neon-yellow jacket over his suit, and a hard hat. Then it cuts to a Westminster studio where a minister is sitting in front of a picture of Big Ben. Alexander cannot hear what’s being said but he knows it’s the same sad old story about lessons having to be learned that never are. In the studio the one