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 that 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.