The Search (9 page)

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.

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.

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.

Initially Walker had intended keeping to the left, but two and then three lanes of traffic had somehow squeezed between him and the hard shoulder and now he was engulfed in a white-water torrent
of cars. He caught glimpses of other drivers, ashen and pale as if they had surrendered themselves to an activity over which they had no control. Nose to tail at sixty miles an hour. Walker’s
engine was screaming and rattling; he was sure he could smell burning. He tried fourth gear, thought for a moment he had it and then realized he was freewheeling. Tried to slip the stick back into
third but third had locked like a gate. Feeling the first surges of panic he allowed the gearstick to float into the free space of neutral and then tried to ease it as gently as possible into
fourth, hoping to take the gearbox by surprise. When that failed he grabbed the stick with his left hand and wrenched it hard. A shriek from the gearbox. He was losing speed. Cars were flashing
lights in his mirror. He tried fourth, third again, second – nothing. As he slowed he saw angry faces in the cars lashing by his window. To stop here was a crime. It went against the
fundamental reason for being on the road, contravened something so basic as to horrify and frighten those who witnessed it.

As a last attempt he switched the engine off, waited a few seconds, switched on again and tried second gear – nothing. Fourth – nothing. He was down to twenty miles an hour, three
lanes from the left, four from the right, cars rushing by on either side. Only now that he was coming to a halt did he fully appreciate the speed of traffic all around. Cars were flashing blurs of
metal. He flicked on the hazard lights but nothing happened: it was as if the car had experienced a massive coronary and died instantaneously. He tightened the seat belt as the car drifted to a
halt. Cars were swerving to avoid him, bearing down and then indicating frantically and pulling out into another lane. He saw a truck moving towards him, heard the squeal of brakes, saw it filling
the rear window. Braced himself for the impact, raised his legs clear of the steering wheel and at the last second the truck veered, screeching to the left. It was like being a coconut in a shy.
All he could do was wait for the smash of impact. Huge seconds passed. Already thirty cars had zoomed by and narrowly missed. Swerving clear, a car clipped his trunk and nudged the Ford around so
that it was now at a slight angle to the flow and presented a bigger target. A van grazed the back bumper and tugged Walker round until he was at right angles to the traffic. A third car ploughed
into the front left fender. A rending sound of metal, a drizzle of glass and then still another crash as something thundered into the back. A blur of movement. The seat belt bit into him as the
car, entangled with another, was shunted forward. He looked up and saw that the Ford had been completely turned around and was now facing into the oncoming traffic.

He flicked open his seat belt and clambered into the back. There was another crunch and the whole of the front seat was a jagged concertina of metal. The car had caved in around him as if it
were being scrapped. Another vehicle piled into the one that had hit him, and then another until Walker was protected from the impact by the buffer of vehicles joining the pile-up. Oil began
spurting from a ruptured pipe. The smell of petrol.