There was a shout from the roof. Raising his head and looking back between his arms he saw his pursuers rush to the edge. They tried to prise the pole free of the gap in the wall but Walker’s weight had jammed it in further. He continued moving, hand over hand, pulling with his shoulders, pushing with his legs, hauling himself away. He felt the pole quiver as they began heaving it free of the gap, followed by a jarring crash as they let it fall back on to the top of the wall. The impact shook his legs free and left him hanging by his hands. For a second he dangled uncontrollably and then, setting up a rhythm, began moving again, hand over hand. Glancing back he saw them standing on the wall, trying to tug the pole sideways, towards the edge. With a final heave they wrenched it the remaining inch and out over the alley. Walker made a grab for the building. The scaffolding pole whipped past his shoulder, sheered away beneath him. His fingers curled over the wall. Another crash from the alley below. He scrambled on to the roof and looked back. For a moment the four of them stood there, Walker and his three pursuers, not moving.
‘Listen,’ Carver called, pausing for breath. ‘We should talk. We can help each other.’
Walker gulped in mouthfuls of air. Carver was talking again, silhouetted against a sudden burst of sunlight.
‘We want the same thing. We know where Malory is.’ Walker had got his breath back, was on the brink of listening. He turned and walked along the row of roofs. Carver was calling, ‘Wait. Walker, wait.’
Walker kept moving, heard Carver shouting, ‘This is your last chance, Lancelot. You’re a dead man.’
Walker tried an entrance to the emergency stairs. It was locked but the frame and door were so rotten that one kick smashed a hole. He reached through and unlatched the door, lowered himself on to the steps. He charged down the stairs and out into the swarm and din of the street. A taxi pulled up nearby. Walker barged past a waiting executive and wrenched the door open, lunged in.
Back at the Grand Central he piled his stuff into a bag. His only concern was to get away from Ascension. Where he went next didn’t matter. But even as he thought this he wondered also if flight might not be the best form of pursuit, the best way of finding Malory. Malory’s movements were so random that perhaps he too should abandon any plan. He hurried to the station and bought a ticket to Alemain, the closest town to which he had sent his speculative mail.
He arrived at the station with time to spare: the train did not leave for fifteen minutes and passengers were not yet being allowed on board. He drifted round the concourse, half expecting to catch a glimpse of Carver. At least half the people here, it seemed, were either following or being followed. Perhaps it was so many people wearing hats that contributed to this impression. Anywhere else a hat looked like an affectation but here, in a railway station, it was part of the standard luggage of travel, a kind of ancillary ticket. The chance to wear a hat with impunity was probably one of the things that preserved the romance of train journeys.
As he made his way towards the platform he passed a Photo-Me booth and ducked beneath the curtain. It was as good a place as any to hide from view but, without intending to, he found himself spinning the stool down as far as it would go and paying in coins, posing for four sudden snaps of the flash. Clambering out of the booth he saw a woman reading a tabloid stroll towards him. An Asian girl went into the booth. He looked at the clock and at the sign that said ‘Photos Delivered in Four Minutes’. All around this sign were sample photos of smiling couples, smiling and serious individuals. One strip showed a black and white couple kissing and pulling faces — you could do what you wanted in the relative privacy of the booth; the machine didn’t care, it recorded but didn’t notice. Ugly or beautiful, tall or short, everyone came out the same way.
After only a couple of minutes the pictures arrived. He moved towards the machine but saw they were of a woman, the woman reading the paper, who reached down and took them.
The developing times were cumulative, so he had another four minutes to wait — more like five probably — and it was now exactly four minutes to. The train’s departure was being announced. Two minutes clicked by. He looked up at the clock, glanced down at the little metallic cage where the photos arrived and set off for the train. He had gone two steps when he thought he heard a faint rustle from the booth. He hurried back, checked the empty tray and ran for his train.
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.