The waitress — her name was Nadine — told him all this when he ordered his second juice cocktail. He had driven in to Juice Town through the white suburbs and would be leaving through the sprawling black ghetto. It wasn’t safe to drive there after dark; it was best to stay the night and head off first thing in the morning. He could stay at her place, she said. If he wanted to.
Her shift finished two hours later. Walker drove, Nadine gave directions. She was studying architecture and her apartment was cluttered with records, catalogues and a large drawing-board. Sketches lay flattened on the drawing-board or curled up on the floor around it. Nadine singled out a few for Walker’s inspection and then wandered off. They were studies of gargoyles with rabid teeth and bulging eyes, peering through a sleet of charcoal. While Walker was looking through them she called from the bedroom to put on a record. The sound of the shower came on.
Her albums were scattered over the floor. As he picked through them he realized he had never seen any of the things Rachel owned: her books, her tapes, useless things she had bought on holiday. Only a few of her clothes.
Walker put on the record that was on the turntable, an Indian singer called Ramamani whose name meant nothing to him. Her voice filled the room like all the happiness and all the forgiveness there could ever be.
Nadine emerged a few minutes later, wrapped in a towel, her hair streaming wet. He kissed her on the neck and she let the towel drop to the floor.
He left early, in the grey half-light. He spent his life leaving. The idea of home, for Walker, had always lain perpetually in the future. That was what had made prison bearable for him, the indefinite deferment of the present. Waiting for his life, for the consequences of his actions, to begin or to end, whichever it was.
None of the juice bars were open yet. The streets got gradually worse, the houses more decrepit. The only places open were grim twenty-four-hour cafés. Houses gave way to shacks and where before phone lines had connected smart apartment blocks to each other, here washing lines linked each shack to the next. The road became more pot-holed until it abandoned any claims to being a surfaced road and resigned itself to being a dry brown track the width of a freeway.
The sun had struggled over the blue mountains in the distance, made even more beautiful by the misery they looked down on. To the right was the giant fruit-processing plant. It sprawled for miles, like a city in its own right. The road curved towards it and then pulled away again. Walker’s side of the road was practically empty but as he left the fruit factory behind the traffic coming towards him swelled in volume. Cars and buses, men walking in the cold dawn of a hot day. At a set of lights he waited nervously as a thin gang of youths stared from a sidewalk corner. He gripped the wheel, expecting a rock to come crashing through his windshield. Then the lights changed and he moved on.
There seemed no end to the ghetto and the further he went the worse the housing became. Soon there weren’t even shacks, just lengths of corrugated iron or plastic sheets lashed together to provide a notion of shelter. It got worse and worse and then — although it didn’t get any better — it got less and less until, with the sun easing itself into the morning, he found himself surrounded by scrubland. Even this scrubland was touched by the misery which each year intruded further into it but then the clumps of burnt cans and dismal plants gave way to the flat expanse of desert, the simple angles of sun and sky.
It grew warm; he wound down the window, propped his arm on the door.
Early afternoon, the road forked. No sign. Walker stopped the car and got out. Both options were identical. The surrounding silence was immense and empty. He crouched down and tried to decipher the criss-crossed traces of tyre patterns. Kicked by a breeze, a faded coke tin rattled across the ground. Standing up again he could see the residue of marks curving off to the left. He returned to the car and moved off, adding tracks of his own, leaving them.
He had driven for sixty featureless miles when he passed a sign warning of road works. As he drew closer he saw that the work was being done by a chain-gang. Rifles, guards, the sullen rhythm of picks and spades. The real purpose of a chain-gang, Walker saw now, was to serve as a warning to any potential felon who happened to drive past. Pairs of eyes turned towards him as he slowed and stopped. Nothing else changing, only the tension spreading like sweat. As soon as he opened the door a guard cocked his rifle and aimed it straight at Walker’s face. The sound of shovels and picks died away until a guard gestured to the men to keep working. The air was brittle with hate and fear. The guards wore aviator shades. Walker’s reflection ricocheted from one pair to another. He raised his hands high. The glasses of the guard nearest him showed the horizon. Desert and sky, no room for anything between them, not cruelty even or punishment.
‘I wanted to. .’ Surprised at the dryness of his mouth, he cleared his throat and began again. ‘I just wanted to know what the next town up the road is.’
The gang had stopped working again and this time the guards did nothing about it. All eyes were turned on Walker. He heard gum being chewed. Sweat dripped and sizzled on the parched ground. The sun throbbed in his eyes.
‘The next town,’ he repeated.
‘Next town is Sweetwater,’ said the guard nearest him.
‘Also, I wanted to know if a blue Olds had passed this way in the last couple of days.’
‘Back in the car,’ the guard said, knowing his power was diminished by words.
‘I just —’
‘Back in the car.’
Walker nodded and turned around, hands still raised. As he made his way to the car one of the prisoners caught his eye and nodded, yes.
CHAPTER NINE
Sweetwater was a dismal town. Walker stayed there only long enough to discover that Carver was heading for Eagle City. He was numb from driving but had to keep going, had to keep Carver in range or run the risk of losing track of him for good. It was a long haul and by the outskirts of Attica, a vast sprawling city, barely a hundred miles from Sweetwater, both Walker and the car were coming apart under the strain. Second gear was only intermittently available; fourth had given up completely so he whined along in third, keeping to sixty despite the roar of complaints from the engine. Walker was exhausted. He missed the turn-off for the Attica orbital and was being sucked into the city. One highway fed into another until he found himself on a six-lane freeway that curved and arched, dipped over other larger freeways. The volume of traffic, the speed and the size of the roads, all filled him with a surge of indifferent excitement: just keeping up with the flow of traffic made you feel like you were racing ahead. Cars slipped back and forth between lanes, moving over all six lanes in the space of half a mile and then making their way back. The road signs — bright blue, huge white letters inscribed on an idl sky — showed no destinations, only the names of other smaller or larger freeways which in turn led to other freeways. To Walker, frazzled by tiredness, caught up in this relentless flow, the idea of houses began to seem quaint, ridiculous. He passed over another coil of roads and felt as if he and the other drivers were electrons in a huge laboratory model, flying particles of energy. Arrival or departure meant nothing, all that mattered was to keep hurtling along with everyone else. Even the idea of pulling off for gas contradicted the fundamental principle at work here: keep moving.
The freeway had now increased to eight lanes which were splitting in two like a long grey zipper coming undone. Walker kept his foot planted to the floor and pulled away to the left, the car shaking and buffeting around him. Soon the freeway fed into another even faster one. Cars swerved and slalomed across the road. Ten lanes of traffic howled and roared along.