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.
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.