The Search

CHAPTER SEVEN

Buildings, people, streets and shops: beyond that Alemain had little to recommend it — especially since Walker had such trouble finding his way around.

He had picked up a street plan at the station and set off for the Am Ex office. For an hour now he had been pacing the streets, scrutinizing the map at almost every corner, but was still nowhere near his destination. The smaller streets were not shown on the map but it was detailed enough to reveal that he was lost. This was the true purpose of maps: without one it was impossible to say with certainty that you were lost, with one you knew you were lost.

Walker persisted for a long while, becoming steadily more frustrated as streets changed name, distances expanded or contracted and expected turnings and landmarks failed to appear. Gradually he became convinced that the map bore no relation to his surroundings. The fact that here and there reality and representation corresponded was entirely coincidental. It took Walker a long time to accept this: so entrenched was his faith in the integrity of maps that his first reaction was to assume that the map was right and the city somehow wrong. The whole point about a map was that it was a more or less accurate representation of reality. He had heard of towns where streets and buildings were being demolished and built so fast that maps, lagging behind reality, were obsolete by the time they were printed, but this map either deliberately distorted reality or ignored it.

He threw the map away and walked on. Once he had got used to the idea that the town was not as the map had led him to expect, it was surprisingly easy to find his way around.

At the Am Ex office a pretty Chinese woman trotted off to look for his mail. A minute later she came back with the letter he had sent from Usfret. He thanked her and headed back to the station, caught the next train to Avlona.

He had noticed bicycles being wheeled on to the train at stations en route, but when it pulled into Avlona he was surprised at how many people had bicycles. As he walked towards the centre of town, cyclists were coming and going in all directions. All around was the angular flash and blur of spokes and frames.

It was a warm spring afternoon and Walker dawdled on his way to the Am Ex office. Relieved to be somewhere pleasant after Usfret and Ascension, he decided to spend the rest of the day there, even though the letter from Usfret was waiting for him. He walked back out into the last sunshine of the day. Leaves fluttered like bunting.

Outside a bric-a-brac store he spun a squeaking rack of postcards. An old photograph of London caught his attention. It was taken in the nineteenth century when London was a teeming and bustling centre of commerce and trade — but the city was deserted. Walker puzzled over the image for several minutes before realizing that the long exposure time had emptied the scene of all moving objects: people, trams, horses.

He walked and considered what to do next, where to go. Again, when he looked back, this moment would represent another important shift in the nature of his search for Malory. For the first time he had formulated the question in terms of where he should go rather than where Malory had gone. It was not that the question of Malory’s whereabouts no longer mattered — but that question had been absorbed so totally into his own decision-making process that he no longer needed to ask it. It was as if the only way of duplicating Malory’s movements was to anticipate them. Inevitably he would make mistakes but these mistakes might lead him to the right track eventually. The right path might be, precisely, a culmination of mistakes, of detours. As soon as you recreated it on a map or set it down in a book, even the most idiosyncratic random movements acquired an internal logic; their purpose remained elusive but they formed a path, a route, led somewhere. With such a map he could find his way back.

In the morning he walked past a shop with a row of used bicycles chained up outside. The shop was run by an old man who claimed to have ridden in the Tour. Walker indicated a bike he liked and the old man unlocked the chain and extricated it from the row: ten-speed, dropped handlebars, light enough to be picked up easily with one hand. Walker rode it around the block and asked the old man what he wanted for it.

‘You’ve read those stories about a knight on his charger?’

‘Yes.’

‘You seen Westerns? The cowboy on his horse?’

Walker nodded.

‘Now it’s you on that bike. A clear line of descent. Seventy-five buys you the bike and the ancestors.’

‘What about just the bike?’ said Walker, but as far as the old man was concerned the deal was clinched already.

Walker paid up, lashed his bag to the rack and pedalled off.

‘So long, cowboy,’ called the man who had once ridden in the Tour, stuffing Walker’s money into his pocket.

The morning’s chill still clung to the air but after riding for fifteen minutes he felt fine. He headed out of town, the volume of cyclists diminishing steadily as he went. The road was flat and ran alongside a river with fields stretching away on the other side.

For lunch he bought bread, fruit and water and sat down to eat behind the goalpost of a deserted football pitch. A breeze rustled the bushes beyond the touchlines. The goal was smudged with dried mud where the ball had ricocheted off crossbar and posts. The goalmouth and centre circle were dry and bare, pock-marked by studs. Chewing and swallowing, he imagined some archaeologist of the future re-creating sequences of play and estimating the scores of games played here from the patterns of stud-marks on the pitch.

In the middle of the afternoon he came to a bridge, rising high and golden in the blue sky. As he drew closer he saw that what he had taken to be the ripple of hot air was actually the bridge itself rippling in the air. It undulated gently as if a wave were passing through it, as if its burnished girders were made not of steel but of some highly elastic material.

He stopped at the edge of the bridge, watching it rise and fall rhythmically, breathing. There was no traffic. A sign said BRIDGE CLOSED and a barrier blocked the carriageway. He manoeuvred his bike round the barrier and walked out on to the bridge. At first, although he could see the bridge undulating ahead of him, the cables growing taut and slack with strain, he hardly felt any movement. Then, as he moved out over the river, he felt the road shifting beneath his feet like a ship on calm seas. There was no sense of danger. He looked at the bridge’s flowing reflection in the river below. He dropped a stone over the edge and watched it fall and splash, vanish. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a bird swoop down and glide low over the river. After a few minutes he got on his bike and cycled over the shifting hills and dips. The sun strobed through the stanchions and cables rearing above him.

When he had crossed to the far side he looked back at the bridge rising and falling in the blue air.

That night he slept by the roadside and cycled on as soon as the sun shuddered clear of the horizon. Late in the afternoon, his legs wobbly after so long on the bike, he rode into a city where there were no people, only streets — narrow, cobbled, crossed by even narrower streets that led to rain-damp alleys and dead-ends. Torn posters advertised political meetings and sporting events. There were parked cars but no sign of the people who drove them. A few shops had their shutters pulled down but most were open for business as usual. As he opened the door of a pâtisserie a little bell rang like a wind-chime. The shelves were half-empty with bread and cakes. He took a croissant that tasted as if it had been fresh-baked that morning. Took two more and walked out of the shop, still chewing, flakes of pastry falling to the floor. The street was divided sharply into sunlight and a tide of shadow inching towards the opposite wall. Riding along the cobbled streets was so awkward that he left the bike where it was, propped against the shop window.

He came to a large square. In the middle was a water fountain, a statue of a dragoon or fusilier wading through it, sword raised above his head. He wore a cloak, armour breastplate and knee-length leather boots — under one of which was trapped a flapping fish: not a dragon or serpent but a playful and, apparently, undistressed fish. Despite the raised sword there was no suggestion that this aggressive posture indicated any ill-will towards the fish. He just happened to be brandishing a sword and treading on a fish which squirmed good-humouredly beneath his feet, as if it were being tickled rather than squashed.

Walker dunked his head in the bubbling water, his face level with the bemused eye of the fish. Fingered back his wet hair, feeling the cold drips on his neck and shoulders. The shadows cast by the buildings on one side of the street climbed the walls of those on the other. He hoped to come across some indication of what had happened here but apart from the absence of people everything was completely normal.

Halfway down a street of expensive shops he went into a place called Hombre. He flicked through rows of jackets and trousers and then stripped off and unwrapped a pair of underpants. Next he extricated a shirt from the pins, cardboard and cellophane and put that on, then a pair of cotton socks hanging on a rail. He tried on a suit jacket which fitted perfectly. The trousers were too big round the waist so he took a pair from the suit that was the next size down. He took his time choosing a tie, finally deciding on one that was a sober grey with light spots. In the basement he found a pair of suede shoes with thick soles — comfortable, easy to run in. Back upstairs he picked out another shirt, extra pairs of underpants and socks, a sweat-shirt and a pair of cotton trousers which he crammed into a bag. His old clothes seemed like sour-smelling rags now and he dumped them in a bin.

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.