The Search (4 page)

The lead was a flimsy one: the phone number from Malory’s hotel bill. He dialled again – amazingly the phone still worked – but, as before, got the high tone
indicating it had been disconnected. His only option was to trawl through the phone book for Meridian until he found the address. He had nothing else to go on.

A post office near the hotel had directories from all over the country. The directory for Meridian was one of the thickest in the rack. The only way to go about it was systematically. He found
an empty table and got started. It was mind-numbing work, requiring an appalling amount of concentration, more boring than anything he had ever done. After two hours he got to G. The law of
averages meant that he should find the number before M. Most likely he would get to it at W. His eyes felt like a microscope. If his thoughts wandered off he went back a couple of columns and
resumed his trudge through the book, forcing himself to think of nothing.

He found the number under M, under the name of Malory: Joanne Malory. He cursed himself for his stupidity in not looking there first. Checked three times, unable to believe that he had found it,
then jotted down the address. Back at the hotel he lay on the bed and shut his eyes, columns of numbers marching through his head. He dozed and dreamed of numbers.

The telephone woke him – the manager of the hotel wanting to know if he was staying another night. It was six o’clock, way after check-out. Walker stared at the digits on the
telephone, adding them up across and down. Apologized, said he was leaving immediately.

It started raining sixty miles out of town. An hour later the rain was falling so heavily that it was impossible to see the road ahead. One wiper had given up and twitched
helplessly in the downpour. Walker bent forward, peering through the windshield at a truck swimming towards him. The windshield was ablaze with light and then, as the truck passed, there was a
blind drench of spray. He braked and felt the car slither, the wiper clearing a segment of visibility.

He must have missed a sign or taken a wrong turning: either way he was lost. He clutched the wheel with one hand and skimmed through the radio, hoping for some kind of confirmation of where he
was. An old song came and went in a sea-spray of static. He twisted the dial a fraction and a chubby voice said storms were ravaging the region. Storms and gale-force winds. Police advised people
to stay home unless absolutely necessary, to drive with extreme caution. Several rivers had broken their banks, many minor roads in the region were flooded, the something bridge was down. The main
roads between Belford and Oakham, Queenstown and Nelson, Darlington and Sable were closed.

These towns meant nothing to Walker. No mention was made of Meridian or Kingston. The way the announcer talked of ‘the region’ without specifying which region, made him feel more
lost than ever, as if he were nowhere, not even in the middle of nowhere, on the
edge
of nowhere, stranded between nowhere towns. The voice announced that we would now return to
‘Melody through Midnight’ and Walker snapped the radio off.

Lightning jarred the darkness. There was a long silence, so long it seemed like the silence itself was waiting, and then thunder crashed all around. Easing through a curve he felt both
right-side wheels bump off the road and begin dragging the car into whatever lay beyond. He hauled the car back on to the road but minutes later the same thing happened again – with the right
wiper gone he could see nothing of what was happening over that side. It was dangerous to keep going and even more dangerous to stop: the first car to come by would plough straight into him.

He glanced down at the fuel gauge. Depending on the gradient the needle swung between the red strip indicating things were getting bad and the E indicating they couldn’t get any worse. The
rain eased off and then came pounding back, harder than ever. Here and there the road was flooded and the car plunged through the waiting lakes. He moved his face closer to the windshield as the
road curved left. Immediately beyond the bend a tree was lying half across the road. He veered round the trunk and crashed through flailing branches. Lightning jagged down towards a church or tower
in the distance.

Later, long after he had given up hoping for such a thing, he drove past a turn-off and signpost. He slid to a halt and backed up. The rain was so heavy he had to wind down the window to make
out the sign, startled by the noise of the storm hammering on the roof, hissing. Seventy miles ahead was the town of Flagstaff; ten miles off to the right was a town called Monroe. He cranked up
the window, turned right. Even ten miles seemed optimistic: for the last twenty minutes the needle had been stretched out horizontally, only momentarily twitching from E. The engine was sounding
worse and worse. By the outskirts of Monroe it was like the last drops of coke being sucked through a straw.

He drove into town along the main drag, past the water-logged forecourt of a darkened gas station. Black ponds had formed around every drain, sometimes stretching from one side of the street to
the next. A faulty light in a shop blinked off and on. He parked opposite the only place that was open, the Monroe Diner. Killed the engine and listened to the rain, the wind creaking through
signs. He pulled a coat from the back seat and cracked open the door. The rain sounded like fat frying in a pan. He plunged his foot into a puddle and levered himself out of the car. Waded across
the street.

Every face turned on him as he entered, the glare that passes for welcome in bars all over the world. He felt like a traveller who stops at a tavern in Transylvania and asks if anyone knows the
way to Castle Dracula. Shook his hair and rubbed his feet on the crew-cut mat. Behind the bar a woman was pouring beer into an angled glass.

She smiled ‘Hi’ as he perched himself on a stool by the bar. ‘What would you like?’

‘Hi. Coffee, please.’ Even before he asked for it, coffee was implicit in the idea of shelter offered by the diner.

Once he was sat at the bar no one took any notice of him. His hair dripped on the counter and into his coffee. 34 He ordered food, looked around. A dozen people, mostly alone or in pairs. Every
now and again the window bleached white by lightning. The barwoman brought his food, asked where he was heading.

‘I’m on my way to Nelson,’ he lied reflexively. ‘I got lost in the rain some way back.’

‘That’s what it’s like this time of year. Never rains but it pours. Never pours but it floods. And it always rains.’

‘And you have rooms here?’ Walker was scooping up his food American-style, using just the fork, talking and chewing.

‘For one? For one night?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s no problem. Matter of fact, it wouldn’t be a problem if you wanted rooms for eight people for a week.’

Walker paid for everything and took a beer upstairs. The room was on the top floor. He spent twenty minutes standing under a shower that was not quite hot enough, then sat on the edge of the
bed, drinking beer and thinking about tomorrow, wrapped in a towel. Clothes drying over a fan-heater.

He finished the beer and walked over to the window, the town hunkered down under the rain. A car eased along the main street, slowed, pulled into the parking lot beside the diner. Walker flicked
off the light and went back to the window. The car had disappeared from sight but he could see puddles stained red by the tail lights. Then the lights were switched off and there was the slam of
doors opening and closing. He pulled on his clothes, warm from the heater, damp. He tossed a few things from the bathroom into his hold-all and moved out into the corridor, locking the door behind
him. A sign said emergency exit. It had not been used in a long time and he had to wrench it noisily open. The fire escape was behind the neon welcoming you to the Monroe Diner. He pulled the
emergency door shut and zig-zagged down the rusted steps. Rain purpled and greened around him. Hanging from the lowest rung he dropped to the wet tarmac. He moved round the parking lot to the car
he had seen from his window. By now they would be on their way up to his room. All the doors were locked. He scanned the ground, found a large stone. Lightning flashed lazily. When the thunder came
he hurled the stone through the driver’s window. As he opened the door the interior light flashed on for a moment, a dim echo of lightning. He swept glass from the seat, pulled the ignition
wires from the steering column. As soon as he touched them together the engine sparked into life.

He edged round the diner and out on to the rain-slick street. Two hundred yards down the road he flicked on the headlights. In a film now, he thought to himself, someone hidden in the back seat
would put a gun to his head and whisper, ‘Freeze.’ Suddenly nervous, he looked over his shoulder, almost disappointed to find no one there.

Wind and rain howled through the broken window. He was chilled from his damp clothes. Twenty miles out of town he pulled over and clambered awkwardly into a sweater and jeans.
He stretched the wet shirt over the broken window. It bulged and sagged and made no difference, but with dry clothes and the heater blowing he felt better.

As soon as he was warm he became sleepy. When he felt himself nodding off he slapped his face and turned off the heater until he was cold and alert, miserable again. Alternating between shivers
and yawns. There was no question of stopping – he had to put as much distance as possible between himself and Carver before morning. Assuming it was Carver. He went over the scene back in
Monroe and realized that for all he knew the occupants of the car were simply travellers who had decided to rest up for the night instead of pressing on through the storm. Rather than being a
stroke of luck that he had been at the window as the car drove in, it could equally have been whatever was the opposite of a stroke of luck – he was too tired to think of the word, maybe
there wasn’t one – that they came along when they did and set off his paranoia like an alarm. Shit! He pounded the steering wheel and accidentally sounded the horn. He reassured himself
by playing the scene over again, this time focusing on his reactions – on how it hadn’t occurred to him even for a moment that the car hadn’t come for him. Even if they
didn’t convince, the double negatives at least obscured the issue. Anyway, there was no going back. There was no going back but either way, he thought, going back over the same question
again, he should get rid of the car as soon as he could – but wherever he left it it would still point in his direction. As soon as they found the car, any lead he had built up effectively
counted for nothing – but he couldn’t abandon the car in an unfindable place without marooning himself. The relentless orbit of thoughts tired him but at least, he reasoned, setting off
the whole process again, at least it kept him from falling asleep.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. When he could barely keep his eyes open he pulled off the road and squelched up a narrow lane. He turned off the engine, climbed over the seat and curled
up in the back.

Rain hammered on the roof of his dreams.

He was woken by the alarm of bird calls, a wet sun squinting through branches. He opened the door and pissed yellow into the trees. All around was the slow drip of last
night’s rain. His mouth was dry and he cupped a few drops in his hand to moisten his tongue.

He touched the loose ignition wires and the engine came to life immediately, heaving clear of the suck of mud. Back on the road the sun shone hard through the windshield. In
the distance was a blue line of mountains.

A sign said
MERIDIAN
120
MILES
. The highway glistened.

Meridian, as the thickness of the phone book had suggested, was a big city. He drove downtown and parked the car beneath the track of the Elevated Train. It was a perfect spot
to leave the car: abandoned vehicles were strewn all around, many already stripped down to rusty frames as if picked clean by vultures. Walking away he looked into the back of a burnt-out station
wagon and noticed the remains of a road atlas: a core of red highways, smoke-grimed, becoming charred, leading to ashes.

He bought coffee and a street plan. Rampart Street was eight stops along the line but after so long in the car he preferred to walk. He followed the El, walking beneath the giant concrete legs
that strode through the city. The sun streamed through the track, cross-hatching the ground with shadows. Patches of sky blazed through the angles of wood and metal. Every ten minutes a train
thundered overhead, obliterating everything. In his childhood the future had been depicted in terms of white capsules zipping noiselessly along rails suspended over the efficient life of a gleaming
city. What had actually resulted was graffiti-mottled trains rattling over a landscape of rusting vehicles that no one wanted.

Rampart was a dilapidated street running parallel to the El, a couple of blocks to the south, number seventeen a faded one-storey place. A green-and-yellow FOR RENT sign added colour. He tried
the bell and waited. A bird, bright as a goldfish, was perched on the phone line. Walker clambered over a fence and made his way round the back. Wooden steps led up to a door which opened when he
tried it. He looked around and moved inside, shutting the door behind him, eyes adjusting. A tap dripping. He walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. Mail was piled up by the front door,
junk mostly, a couple of letters and – he recognized the handwriting instantly – a card from Malory. Two lines: ‘Hope this reaches you before you move. Thanks for
everything.’ Unsigned, postmarked Iberia, the date too smudged to read.

There was nothing in any of the ground-floor rooms. Upstairs, the bathroom cabinet was empty except for a yellow beaker. His face in the mirror was pimpled with mould. There were two bedrooms,
one with a bare double, the other with a single and an old desk. When he opened a closet metal hangers jangled briefly. A tingle of déjà vu. He shut the door and opened it again,
hoping he could define the sensation more exactly but this time there was nothing.