The Search Page 7

  As he was leaving he noticed the till. He pressed a few buttons and the cash-drawer sprang open. He helped himself to a few notes and some change, pushed the till shut and stuffed the money into a pocket.

  Outside the street was flooded with shadow. Only the third storeys and above were still in the sharp-angled sunlight. Newspapers and bags of garbage were piled up, awaiting collection on the sidewalk. Nearby, rustling in the breeze, were lengths of film that had obviously overflowed from a dustbin. The further he walked the more film there was, coiling round his feet, twitching like two-dimensional snakes. He picked up one of the strips and held it up to the light, the brown shine turning immediately to brilliant colour. The film showed a man walking down an old street. All the other strips were blank or damaged: nothing to be seen. He coiled the original strip loosely around his arm and walked on until he came to a bar. Just inside the door was a flashing pinball machine. He walked round the bar and took a beer from the fridge, helped himself to a sandwich from beneath a glass lid.

  Alternating between mouthfuls of beer and sandwich he hoisted himself on to the bar, feet resting on a stool. He held the film up to the light, squinted at the sequence of images. Peering closely he saw it was not a street but a bridge with elaborate decorations. The last few frames, as far as he could make out, showed the man stopping at a pay-phone at the far side of the bridge. As soon as he put the length of film down on the bar it curled up reflexively like a threatened animal.

  It was almost dark by the time he left the bar. Sleepy, unsure of his bearings, clutching his bag of clothes, he began looking for a place to stay the night. He ignored the smaller houses: in this unusual position he could treat himself to somewhere lavish. Now that it was evening the city seemed almost ordinary, like an especially quiet Sunday night when people had retreated indoors.

  A telephone was ringing in the distance. As he turned a corner the ringing got louder: the pay-phone across the street. The intervals between rings became longer and longer the closer he moved to the phone. It was unnerving, a payphone ringing like this. One day there would be a superstition about how it was bad luck to pick up a phone ringing randomly. Superstitions needed centuries to establish themselves. He walked past the phone, resisting the temptation to answer, but the ever-expanding lasso of rings continued to encircle him as he moved away. He felt like he had refrained from waking someone in the grips of a nightmare. When he was almost out of earshot he hesitated, unsure if it was still ringing, and walked back towards the silent phone.

  At the far end of a cul-de-sac he let himself through a groaning iron gate. A line of cypresses ran along the side of a path which stretched to a low wall at the other end of the garden. Too tired to investigate the grounds, he walked round the edge of the house. He came to a large patio with a sun umbrella and chairs. An open door led to a conservatory, full of plants he recognized but couldn’t name: leaves, stems. He walked in through the humid air of the plants and into the house, cautious, still unused to this licence to go where he pleased. He peered into living and dining rooms and made his way upstairs.

  The bathroom was exactly what he had hoped for: a large oval bath, thick towels hanging on chrome rails. Pink and green bottles of lotion gave the air a sweet sensual smell. He twisted the hot tap and steaming water cascaded immediately into the bath. In the bedroom next door he took off his new clothes and chucked them on the floor. On a bedside cabinet was a framed wedding photo: a couple on the steps of a country church, making their way through a snow-storm of confetti. At the edge of the photo was a woman he thought was Rachel, throwing confetti, laughing. Her hair was different, she looked heavier: impossible to tell for sure. Next to her was a man whose face was obscured by the blurred arm of another confetti-throwing guest.

  Walker took the photo into the bathroom. The feel of hot water, fresh idl on his back. Through the pebbled window he could see a square of dark-blue sky which, like the glass of the photo, was becoming saturated with steam. He dismantled the frame and took out the photo, hoping to find something written on the back. Nothing. He lay back in the dreamy steam of the bath, holding the photo in damp fingers, staring.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He had no idea of the time when he awoke: the shutters were open but heavy curtains excluded the light which gushed in when he drew them back. He could see the red-tiled roofs of the town, washing lines and TV aerials. From here the buildings appeared jammed so closely together that there seemed scarcely to be any roads separating them. In the distance hills basked under a calm sky.

  It was so bright outside that he walked into a pharmacy for a pair of sunglasses that made the faded pinks and oranges of the buildings flare up darkly beneath the brown-blue sky. There were details everywhere. It was impossible to miss anything. A NO LITTERING sign with lovers’ initials scratched into the paintwork. A beer can crushed flat in the road. A shutter banging in the wind. A dust-smeared window. A spectrum-smeared puddle.

  He came to a garage whose forecourt was crowded with second-hand cars. From the office he took several sets of keys, one of which fitted a red Ford. He manoeuvred out of the garage and drove to a grocery where he loaded up with provisions. Then, threading his way through the narrow streets, he headed out of town.

  Soon he was driving along winding country roads. Hedges, fields sloping into distant hills, grazing clouds. Every couple of miles a field of rape flared yellow in the sunlight. Pulling clear of a bend he saw a chapel up ahead. He stopped the car outside the gate and walked around the squat building, the tilting gravestones.

  Flowers twitched by the old walls. Brown earth, the petals, purple and blue, moving in the wind. Walker pulled open the door and stepped into the hymn-book mustiness of the church. Rows of benches, an eagle lectern, organ pipes. A stained-glass window threw a blur of colour in the middle of the aisle, highlighting the V-patterned dustprint of a shoe, Carver’s shoe.

  The sun had passed behind a cloud and when he stepped outside it was cool and dull. He took the wedding photo from his pocket and positioned himself where, he guessed, the photographer must have stood. The stonework around the entrance, the hinges on the door, even the gangling arm of a rose bush – all these details matched.

  He climbed back in the car, tapping the steering wheel with one hand, fingering his ear-lobe with the other. So Carver had slipped ahead of him . . . He pulled out a map and studied possible routes. He was now close to the map’s eastern border but, quickly discarding other options, it seemed certain that Malory, and Carver after him, had headed still further east. He twisted the key in the ignition and drove. In an hour he had passed beyond the edge of the map.

  Slowly the landscape changed, becoming drier, less fertile, empty. He stopped at every gas station and asked about Carver. Twice in the next twenty-four hours he was told that a man exactly answering his description had bought gas a couple of days earlier. Driving a blue Olds, travelling with two other men.

  ‘Any idea where they were heading?’

  ‘Only one way they can head,’ said the pump attendant, wiping a sleeve across his forehead and pointing east.

  He continued driving, the landscape reducing itself to nothing, a flatness that existed only to have a road built through it. He passed through a region devastated by shelling. All around were bomb craters, rusting shellcases, burnt-out vehicles. Desert suggested the denudation of a landscape to a state of nothingness, but here the desert had been pulverized into something else, less than desert. Bombs had blown the desert apart but, since there was nothing to be blown apart, what remained was ruined emptiness.

  Later he saw a yellow smudge over the horizon: a town. He drove past white houses and the entrances of large woody drives and private roads. In the city itself orange trees and palms lined litterless roads. He pulled over at a bar with tables outside. A few people were reading papers, people who didn’t need jobs. There was an identical bar across the road. The menu listed dozens of different juices, lush combinations of exotic fruit, each so delicious tha
t it took a massive exertion of will not to drain the glass in two seconds flat – and even then you ended up downing it in under ten.

  ‘What’s the name of this town?’ he asked the waitress who was slim and gorgeous.

  ‘Juice Town,’ she said, smiling and scooping up a tip from the table next to him.

  It was a good name. Everyone drank juices and ate perfect fruit and was brown and thin and fit – except for those who worked out at the fruit-processing plant. For them life was hell. They hated the sight of mangoes, kiwis and kumquats and spent their time getting wasted on cheap beer in the dangerous bars of the city’s south side.

  The waitress – her name was Nadine – told him all this when he ordered his second juice cocktail. He had driven in to Juice Town through the white suburbs and would be leaving through the sprawling black ghetto. It wasn’t safe to drive there after dark; it was best to stay the night and head off first thing in the morning. He could stay at her place, she said. If he wanted to.

  Her shift finished two hours later. Walker drove, Nadine gave directions. She was studying architecture and her apartment was cluttered with records, catalogues and a large drawing-board. Sketches lay flattened on the drawing-board or curled up on the floor around it. Nadine singled out a few for Walker’s inspection and then wandered off. They were studies of gargoyles with rabid teeth and bulging eyes, peering through a sleet of charcoal. While Walker was looking through them she called from the bedroom to put on a record. The sound of the shower came on.

  Her albums were scattered over the floor. As he picked through them he realized he had never seen any of the things Rachel owned: her books, her tapes, useless things she had bought on holiday. Only a few of her clothes.

  Walker put on the record that was on the turntable, an Indian singer called Ramamani whose name meant nothing to him. Her voice filled the room like all the happiness and all the forgiveness there could ever be.

  Nadine emerged a few minutes later, wrapped in a towel, her hair streaming wet. He kissed her on the neck and she let the towel drop to the floor.

  He left early, in the grey half-light. He spent his life leaving. The idea of home, for Walker, had always lain perpetually in the future. That was what had made prison bearable for him, the indefinite deferment of the present. Waiting for his life, for the consequences of his actions, to begin or to end, whichever it was.

  None of the juice bars were open yet. The streets got gradually worse, the houses more decrepit. The only places open were grim twenty-four-hour cafés. Houses gave way to shacks and where before phone lines had connected smart apartment blocks to each other, here washing lines linked each shack to the next. The road became more pot-holed until it abandoned any claims to being a surfaced road and resigned itself to being a dry brown track the width of a freeway.

  The sun had struggled over the blue mountains in the distance, made even more beautiful by the misery they looked down on. To the right was the giant fruit-processing plant. It sprawled for miles, like a city in its own right. The road curved towards it and then pulled away again. Walker’s side of the road was practically empty but as he left the fruit factory behind the traffic coming towards him swelled in volume. Cars and buses, men walking in the cold dawn of a hot day. At a set of lights he waited nervously as a thin gang of youths stared from a sidewalk corner. He gripped the wheel, expecting a rock to come crashing through his windshield. Then the lights changed and he moved on.

  There seemed no end to the ghetto and the further he went the worse the housing became. Soon there weren’t even shacks, just lengths of corrugated iron or plastic sheets lashed together to provide a notion of shelter. It got worse and worse and then – although it didn’t get any better – it got less and less until, with the sun easing itself into the morning, he found himself surrounded by scrubland. Even this scrubland was touched by the misery which each year intruded further into it but then the clumps of burnt cans and dismal plants gave way to the flat expanse of desert, the simple angles of sun and sky.

  It grew warm; he wound down the window, propped his arm on the door.

  Early afternoon, the road forked. No sign. Walker stopped the car and got out. Both options were identical. The surrounding silence was immense and empty. He crouched down and tried to decipher the criss-crossed traces of tyre patterns. Kicked by a breeze, a faded coke tin rattled across the ground. Standing up again he could see the residue of marks curving off to the left. He returned to the car and moved off, adding tracks of his own, leaving them.

  He had driven for sixty featureless miles when he passed a sign warning of road works. As he drew closer he saw that the work was being done by a chain-gang. Rifles, guards, the sullen rhythm of picks and spades. The real purpose of a chain-gang, Walker saw now, was to serve as a warning to any potential felon who happened to drive past. Pairs of eyes turned towards him as he slowed and stopped. Nothing else changing, only the tension spreading like sweat. As soon as he opened the door a guard cocked his rifle and aimed it straight at Walker’s face. The sound of shovels and picks died away until a guard gestured to the men to keep working. The air was brittle with hate and fear. The guards wore aviator shades. Walker’s reflection ricocheted from one pair to another. He raised his hands high. The glasses of the guard nearest him showed the horizon. Desert and sky, no room for anything between them, not cruelty even or punishment.

  ‘I wanted to . . .’ Surprised at the dryness of his mouth, he cleared his throat and began again. ‘I just wanted to know what the next town up the road is.’

  The gang had stopped working again and this time the guards did nothing about it. All eyes were turned on Walker. He heard gum being chewed. Sweat dripped and sizzled on the parched ground. The sun throbbed in his eyes.

  ‘The next town,’ he repeated.

  ‘Next town is Sweetwater,’ said the guard nearest him.

  ‘Also, I wanted to know if a blue Olds had passed this way in the last couple of days.’

  ‘Back in the car,’ the guard said, knowing his power was diminished by words.

  ‘I just –’

  ‘Back in the car.’

  Walker nodded and turned around, hands still raised. As he made his way to the car one of the prisoners caught his eye and nodded, yes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sweetwater was a dismal town. Walker stayed there only long enough to discover that Carver was heading for Eagle City. He was numb from driving but had to keep going, had to keep Carver in range or run the risk of losing track of him for good. It was a long haul and by the outskirts of Attica, a vast sprawling city, barely a hundred miles from Sweetwater, both Walker and the car were coming apart under the strain. Second gear was only intermittently available; fourth had given up completely so he whined along in third, keeping to sixty despite the roar of complaints from the engine. Walker was exhausted. He missed the turn-off for the Attica orbital and was being sucked into the city. One highway fed into another until he found himself on a six-lane freeway that curved and arched, dipped over other larger freeways. The volume of traffic, the speed and the size of the roads, all filled him with a surge of indifferent excitement: just keeping up with the flow of traffic made you feel like you were racing ahead. Cars slipped back and forth between lanes, moving over all six lanes in the space of half a mile and then making their way back. The road signs – bright blue, huge white letters inscribed on an idl sky – showed no destinations, only the names of other smaller or larger freeways which in turn led to other freeways. To Walker, frazzled by tiredness, caught up in this relentless flow, the idea of houses began to seem quaint, ridiculous. He passed over another coil of roads and felt as if he and the other drivers were electrons in a huge laboratory model, flying particles of energy. Arrival or departure meant nothing, all that mattered was to keep hurtling along with everyone else. Even the idea of pulling off for gas contradicted the fundamental principle at work here: keep moving.

  The freeway had now increased to eight lanes which were splittin
g in two like a long grey zipper coming undone. Walker kept his foot planted to the floor and pulled away to the left, the car shaking and buffeting around him. Soon the freeway fed into another even faster one. Cars swerved and slalomed across the road. Ten lanes of traffic howled and roared along.

  Initially Walker had intended keeping to the left, but two and then three lanes of traffic had somehow squeezed between him and the hard shoulder and now he was engulfed in a white-water torrent of cars. He caught glimpses of other drivers, ashen and pale as if they had surrendered themselves to an activity over which they had no control. Nose to tail at sixty miles an hour. Walker’s engine was screaming and rattling; he was sure he could smell burning. He tried fourth gear, thought for a moment he had it and then realized he was freewheeling. Tried to slip the stick back into third but third had locked like a gate. Feeling the first surges of panic he allowed the gearstick to float into the free space of neutral and then tried to ease it as gently as possible into fourth, hoping to take the gearbox by surprise. When that failed he grabbed the stick with his left hand and wrenched it hard. A shriek from the gearbox. He was losing speed. Cars were flashing lights in his mirror. He tried fourth, third again, second – nothing. As he slowed he saw angry faces in the cars lashing by his window. To stop here was a crime. It went against the fundamental reason for being on the road, contravened something so basic as to horrify and frighten those who witnessed it.