The Search Page 5

  He was so immersed in listening that the click of the tape coming to an end sounded like a door slamming.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In the morning, slightly hung-over, he caught a bus to Friendship. Having fulfilled his commitment to retracing Malory’s exact route – pointlessly – he bought a ticket for the onward journey to Usfret.

  The bus did not leave for several hours. He wandered round the city and then ate lunch in a café run by identical twins, one cooking, the other serving, both smiling the whole time. Someone had left a paper behind, folded inside out, exposing the crosswords and classifieds. The crossword had been completed and the ferry times to Ascension had been ringed in a small display ad. Walker rearranged the pages and skimmed the main items while eating his food. The only article he read right through was about the reconstruction of a dead man’s face. Several people had died in a fire at a railway station and one of the bodies had remained unidentified. From the remains a forensic expert had built an impression of what the dead man had probably looked like, right down to his hair style. Six months later no one had come forward to identify him. He had vanished and it made no difference, no one noticed: a man who didn’t matter to anyone except himself, maybe not even to himself. A man who owed nobody anything.

  Weighed down by eggs and grits, Walker left the café and headed back to the bus station. There was something strange about the city but he was unable to work out what. Then it came to him. There were no trees or pigeons or gardens. Yet all around were the sounds of leaves rustling and the beating of wings, the cooing of departed birds. He was so shocked that he stood at a street corner, listening. The effect was unsettling, less because it was so odd than because he was unable to decide whether it was depressing or uplifting: depressing because these things were absent or uplifting because, though absent, their sound remained. Thinking of the tape he had listened to last night he set the dictaphone on a wall and inserted the blank cassette. Pressed Record and let the machine soak up the sounds all around.

  He had time, just before the bus left, to buy a pack of five blank tapes.

  The bus station at Usfret was the size of a small city, a shanty town in its own right. Buses from all over the country converged and departed in a scene of relentless chaos. Buses roared in and out continually, drivers jockeyed for position, horns blaring. Conductors called and joked to each other, children who had climbed on to sell drinks leapt down into the dust, clutching crates of empty bottles.

  Signs warned of pickpockets and every few moments Walker felt a body shove suspiciously into him. He asked where you could get taxis and a white-haired man, lacking a hand, gestured vaguely with his stump.

  Walker set off in the general direction, not properly understanding where he was supposed to be heading. He needed a piss and found a toilet that smelled like the source of all epidemics in history. Over the years the city had sprawled further and further until it had ruined the surrounding land and this lavatory was a microcosm of the same process. The toilet had become progressively more clogged with effluent until it had encroached on to the floor, spilling out of the door and eventually forming ghettos of excrement and toilet paper for yards around. Walker tried to avoid looking but it was impossible to resist the conclusion that everyone here had more or less chronic diarrhoea the whole time: every conceivable kind of human shit was here – except that which suggested the normal working of healthy bowels. Even to piss here seemed as risky as drinking contaminated water. Everything was contaminated, even your sight.

  He continued walking until he came to an area that seemed almost deserted compared with the bedlam of the main station. Old men levered themselves along on crutches. Dogs and men nosed through sprawling mounds of rubbish. Strewn all around were rusted tins, bottles and rags. Rubbish had acquired the permanence and character of architecture. There was so much rubbish that the idea of litter meant nothing. The landscape was made of litter – not defiled by it – and the litter was defiled by a film of oil oozed over everything by convoys of buses. Even the mud underfoot seemed composed of oil which had been compacted hard and pressed into the ground by the passage of time and tyres, as if the process which formed it three million years ago were slowly beginning again.

  Walker had definitely come the wrong way: quite abruptly there were no more buildings, only coaches heading off across a wasteland of iron mud. It was strange that this sprawling city should so abruptly give way to nothing. He had assumed that the centrifugal crowding of the city had flung people to the edges, but now he wondered if it weren’t the other way round, if the surrounding emptiness had not impelled people centripetally to the centre of the town. So elemental was the fear bred by that emptiness that people wanted to crowd together in the filth of the city. The more crowded and debased their circumstances the more reassured they felt, as if living five or six to a room were actually one of the comforts the city promised.

  As if in obedience to exactly this impulse Walker began making his way back towards the station. The sky was brilliant blue. Groups of men stood round burning braziers as the hot sunlight of the afternoon began turning quickly to the chill of evening. Two turbaned men tossed dice on to a handkerchief spread on the ground. Walker asked where to go for a taxi and they pointed off to the left. Several times youths asked Walker if he needed help and he muttered that he was OK, moving away if anyone persisted in offering assistance. He tried to look as if he were at ease and knew exactly where he was going, but thieves the world over must have been so familiar with this routine he wondered if it were not a more useful ploy to look helpless, terrified and lost. Perhaps then people would leave you alone. The only truly safe course was to have less than anybody else – but here everyone seemed worse off than everyone else. Even possessing a set of healthy limbs was to enjoy a position of relative privilege and therefore vulnerability.

  He found the taxi rank on the edge of the station, next to a vast market. The driver was unwilling to leave until he had a full load of passengers and Walker sat wearily in the back of a dilapidated Mercedes, shoving himself a little further into the corner every time someone else climbed in. A woman was squeezed up next to him, clutching bags of bulging shopping. As the car turned a corner one of her bags spilled over and fruit and vegetables went rolling across the floor. Walker bent down to help retrieve things and saw that an egg box had come open and one egg had smashed over his shoe. As soon as he saw it he was overwhelmed by a feeling of giddiness. The woman apologized and began dabbing clumsily at his shoe with a clump of tissues. Walker forced himself to smile, insisted it didn’t matter. He breathed deeply, opened and closed his eyes, waiting for this sudden surge of giddiness, of vertigo, to pass.

  Once he had booked into a hotel Walker sent a letter to Malory. In fact he sent ten of them, putting blank sheets of paper in envelopes and sending them to him care of American Express in towns he may have passed through. On each of the envelopes he wrote ‘Please forward if necessary’. If he had nothing else to go on – no idea of where Malory had gone next – he could stop at each of the towns and ask if there was any mail for him, Alex Malory. Nine times out of ten the letters would be waiting but occasionally, he hoped, they would have arrived at a place Malory had actually passed through. If the mail had been picked up, then Malory had been there between the letter’s arrival and Walker’s own. If they were sent to a place Malory had already left, it was possible that he would have arranged to have letters forwarded. In this way the letter served as a kind of tracking device, an advance scout.

  Beyond that he had little idea what to do in Usfret, a dirty, crowded, sour-smelling town. He walked the streets looking for – for what? For a sign that Malory may have passed through, an indication of where he had gone. He felt pointless, absurd – and then, on his second day in the city, he saw Malory.

  Walker was heading towards Americas Square in the middle of the city. As he got nearer to the square the streets became more and more crowded. In the Spanish quarter, where some kind of fiesta wa
s in progress, it became difficult to move. That was as nothing, however, compared with the crush that Walker found himself in twenty minutes later in the area around the square itself. The streets here felt like the packed terraces of a soccer stadium. By the time Walker saw it was hopeless – that he would never get to the square – it was impossible to extricate himself from the crush; he could go only in the general direction of the crowd. In places – by the entrance to subway stations especially – the crowd had congealed completely. People trying to get out of the subway found the exit plugged by crowds attempting to come in. A woman lost her footing and disappeared from sight. It seemed certain she would be trampled underfoot but she emerged, ashen, weeping, a few seconds later.

  The crowd was not uniformly dense and as long as you abandoned all volition and went where the crowd willed, a degree of movement was possible. After the crush around the food stalls Walker found himself in a less compacted part of the crowd. Stumbling through the undergrowth of feet which trod and tripped over his own, he took brief faltering steps. Up ahead a man was trying to manoeuvre his bicycle through the crowd – and there, right next to him, was Malory. The realization passed through Walker like a shock. It couldn’t be but it was, he was sure. The very randomness of the sighting, the almost instinctive recognition, was virtual proof of that. Walker yelled out above the hubbub of the crowd, ‘Malory!’ A dozen faces turned round, Malory’s among them. There was a brief surge and the faces turned immediately away. He yelled again and this time more people turned back – but not Malory, who seemed to be making an effort to move through the crowd. Walker shoved his way past the bodies in front of him. Malory was moving with the general flow of the crowd, not straining to get ahead but maintaining a steady ten yards between himself and Walker. Elbowing his way more aggressively, incurring curses and retaliatory shoves, Walker closed the gap to three yards. Malory continued moving forward, so calmly that the surrounding people would not have guessed he was trying to get clear of the figure barging and squirming behind him. The calm was deceptive, for Walker saw now that every time a slight gap opened in the crowd Malory used that opportunity to gain a few yards’ advantage. There was a ripple of shoving and stumbling ahead of Walker and he saw Malory abruptly stranded in a pack of bodies. The crowd formed contour lines which had bunched themselves tightly around Malory, but Walker was still able to move relatively easily. He barged through the scrum of bodies, his arms coming clear of the surface of shoulders like a swimmer’s. A wave of shoves passed through the crowd. Malory tottered but people were packed so tight around him that it was impossible to fall. Using his arms like a wedge and then slipping into the gap, Walker moved within two yards of Malory but here the crowd was so dense that no movement was possible. Panic was spreading. There was another shove from behind. Three people disappeared from sight, initiating a counter-surge which sent everyone lurching in the other direction. Walker lost his footing but was immediately wedged upright by the press of bodies from the other side. He glared round and joined in the shouts of recrimination, aware that by elbowing his way through the crowd he had helped set up the ripples and currents of panic which were threatening to engulf him. Malory was only a yard away. Walker’s arms were pinned by his side; if he could have raised them above the pack of people he could have reached out and touched his shoulder. For five minutes they remained like this, the crowd like a vast millipede, swaying on tiny legs which were always about to collapse beneath it. Surges and counter-surges rocked through the crowd until the crush began to ease. Malory moved a few steps and then another yard. Walker stumbled forward and then found himself penned in again. Moments later he was able to move, but all the time the distance between himself and Malory was increasing. It was like being in an ocean: currents and eddies, powerful rip-tides, sucked you in the opposite direction to that in which you wanted to go. This worked well for Malory, who moved whichever way the current took him, but for Walker it made the task of following him impossible. Where the crowd urged Malory in one direction, a few moments later it tugged Walker away in the other. Malory was ten yards clear now and it was impossible to beat a path through to him. There was another surge and Walker was swept further from Malory, forced to the other side of a row of parked cars. He felt a hard shove in the back. Stumbled and grabbed the shoulder of the woman in front, almost dragging her to her knees. He regained his balance and looked round but there was no sign of Malory in the spot where he had last seen him.

  Monitoring footage of the scene, police gradually dispersed the crowd but Walker remained trapped for several hours more. By any normal standards it was still fantastically crowded but eventually he stumbled into his hotel, shocked by the empty expanse of the lobby.

  He was exhausted, his muscles ached and his back and arms were bruised. Soaking in a bath he went over and over the day’s events until he began doubting whether it was actually Malory he had seen. And even if it had been, Walker was now as far away from him as ever. The fact that he had been within a yard of Malory meant nothing.

  These doubts were reinforced the next day when he called Rachel. She had just spoken to a man in Port Ascension, a friend of Malory’s who was sure he had seen him there.

  ‘He wanted to know if I had a number for him.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘I spoke to him this morning. Just a couple of hours ago. He left a number.’

  Walker wrote the number down. ‘And what was the name of the town?’

  ‘Port Ascension. Do you think he might be there?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said absently. Ascension . . . Ascension. He tried to place the name and then remembered: the ferry times in the newspaper. A coincidence – but without coincidence life didn’t happen. Coincidence was destiny broken down into its smallest unit.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, sorry.’

  ‘You don’t sound very optimistic.’

  ‘I thought I saw him yesterday.’

  ‘You saw Alex?’

  ‘I’m not sure now. I could easily have been mistaken. The more I think about it the less sure I am . . . I think of you a lot.’

  ‘I know. I’m smiling when I think of you, Walker.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I like thinking of you.’ Walker smiled into the phone. They listened to each other breathing. A few seconds later they hung up.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The sea was rough, the boat smelled of oil and bad food. For as long as Walker could remember he had been disappointed by boats: something to do with the thickness of the metal, the size of the bolts; the way everything was covered in a thick skin of paint, the way you had to struggle through low self-closing doors, the way the toilets were always awash with water. He stood on deck and was surprised by how quickly he became bored watching the land receding, the frantic gulls. Even the sea was disappointing. Grey, cold.

  He went below deck to get some food but everything looked too foul to eat. A smell of french fries and eggs emanated even from the bolognese sauce congealing in a brightly lit tin. He wandered to the lounge where people were already asleep on the floor – the seats all had arm-rests to prevent people stretching out on them. No effort had been spared to make the crossing as miserable as possible.

  Soon people were vomiting all over the ship. The smell of sick was impossible to dissociate from the reek of the food cooking in the galleys. Walker thought he might throw up himself and went back on deck. The air was full of spray. To the disappointment of those lined up at the stern, cameras at the ready, darkness fell without a sunset.

  Walker remained on deck and took a sounding – as he suddenly, under the nautical influence, began to think of the recordings he made with the dictaphone. Later, listening back to the recording, he was surprised to find how the sounds of gulls and wind, the slap of waves, evoked not the grim reality of the crossing but the romantic ideal of a sun-soaked cruise.

  The boat docked at dawn the next morning. Walker joined a li
ne of people shuffling towards immigration officials, borrowing pens to fill in disembarkation cards. ‘Purpose of visit’: Walker hesitated, scribbled ‘Tourism’ and gave the Grand Central Hotel – glimpsed over the shoulder of another passenger – as the place he would be staying. He waited at the yellow line until the port official waved him forward – the sullen, bored, omnipotent wave of frontier staff the world over. Walker said, ‘Hi,’ handed over his card, waited. Without looking up the guy consulted a huge log-book, let it fall shut and said, ‘Over there.’