The Search (6 page)

‘No problem,’ said the desk clerk, tearing the ticket wearily in two.

Back in his room Walker tried drunkenly to organize his thoughts, lurching from one possibility to the next. Getting the express meant that he would gain some time on Malory since obviously,
assuming the guy in the bar was right, he had simply gone to Friendship to get the bus to Usfret. Looked at like that there was no point in going to Friendship. But . . . But if from now on there
were going to be fewer and fewer external clues to go on, then he was going to have to rely more on thinking himself into Malory’s shoes. In that case the more exactly he managed to repeat
Malory’s moves the easier it would be to duplicate the choices he had made. Tracking Malory was not going to be like a game of snakes and ladders where he could leap forward five places. He
could do that but something he came across in those five missed spaces might prove more important than the one he landed on.

He phoned down to reception, told them to book him a ticket to Friendship. As he was getting ready for bed, sorting through his bag for his toothbrush, he came across the dictaphone and tossed
it on to the bed. Lying there a few minutes later, he switched on the tape. Nothing. He flipped the tape over and fast-forwarded, almost to the end, in case there was a brief message tucked into
the last minute of the tape. He turned down the volume so that the hiss was less pronounced and let it play noiselessly. Or not quite noiselessly . . . He switched off the machine, ejected the tape
and inserted the blank cassette that had come with the machine. Pressed Play. He listened for a few moments, ejected that tape and played the other one. Yes, there was nothing to hear but there was
a distinct difference in the quality of the silence. It was not a blank tape but a recording in which there was nothing to hear, a recording of silence. He listened intensely and realized that the
tape was not as devoid of noise as he had first thought. Certain noises were conspicuous by their absence: it had not been made in the countryside – there was no sound of birds, no hedgerow
rustle. Fiddling with the bass and treble controls to minimize hiss but retain clarity of sound, he strained his ears to penetrate the ambient silence and hunt out the faintest hint of other
sounds. It was strange and difficult, sitting there, trying to shut out the silence of the room in order to decipher the silence of the tape. Doubly difficult since straining his ears like this
made him aware of the obtrusive sounds that composed the silence around him. The machine had come with a small set of headphones and with these he was able to cocoon himself inside the silence of
the tape. He could hear a faint rattle, like blinds shifting in a breeze, a bell chiming in the distance, the swish and murmur of traffic, the gurgle of pipes, maybe rain.

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

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
was 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.