Geoff Dyer - The Search

Walker turned to the guy next to him and asked about the game. He was thick-set, missing a couple of teeth and wearing a check work shirt, happy to converse in the peculiar idiom of booze — telling and never asking. This was fine by Walker, especially when it turned out that he came to this bar every night after work, regular as clockwork. Hour of overtime and in here by eight o’clock five nights a week.

‘What about the other nights?’

‘Those nights I get here a little earlier,’ he laughed, coughing. They shook hands; the guy told him his name was Branch.

‘Ever been tempted to trace your roots?’ asked Walker. His new drinking companion didn’t bother laughing. Walker bought Branch a beer, still sniggering quietly at his joke. Branch showed no sign of buying him one back so Walker ordered a couple more and asked if he happened to remember speaking to a friend of his who’d come here a couple of months back when he was in town. The friend, as a matter of fact, who’d recommended this bar to him, he said, and went on to describe Malory.

Branch stopped chewing and siphoned off half his beer. Bar conversations were like this: sometimes it was difficult to tell if the person you were talking to was deep in thought or sinking into a stupor.

‘Yeah. Maybe I do recall him.’

‘Actually, I might even have a picture of him. Yeah, here you go. I’ve been carrying this picture around for months and never quite threw it away.’

Branch held the paper like he was gripping a fellow by the lapels.

‘About two months ago, was it?’

‘Exactly. To the day practically.’

‘Yeah, I remember him.’ He handed back the photo. ‘We spoke a while.’

‘What about — I mean, do you happen to remember what you spoke of?’

‘Pretty much what everybody talks about.’

‘Did he — I don’t suppose he mentioned where he was heading to, did he?’

‘Matter of fact he did — if it’s the fellow I’m thinking of. Or leastways he asked if I knew when the bus to Usfret left.’

‘And you told him?’

‘I told him there was only one every three days and he’d missed that. Told him the best thing he could do was take the bus to Friendship and get a bus from there.’

‘Usfret, right. He must have been on the way to see Joanne, his sister.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

‘Did he say he was going to get the bus like you said?’

‘Didn’t say but he certainly seemed grateful for the information.’ ‘

And did he say how long he was going to stay for or where he might go after that?’ Walker was conscious that he was overplaying his hand, pushing too hard.

‘How come you’re so interested in him?’

‘Oh, I just wanted to catch up with him.’

‘Folks say that, it generally means he owes them money. Either that or they want to kill him.’

Walker laughed unconvincingly. ‘Not me.’

‘You a cop?’

‘No.’

‘Tracker, huh?’

‘No, I’m just a friend. A friend on his way to Friendship,’ said Walker: his second joke of the evening.

‘Shit,’ said Branch, not in anger or derision, just to bring this phase of the conversation to an end. Walker glanced up at the television: the score was up into four figures now. He bought Branch a final beer and hurried back to his hotel.

The desk clerk looked patiently through the bus timetables while Walker breathed beer fumes over him. Unlike Malory, Walker was lucky with the buses — one left straight for Usfret the next morning. He could even book a ticket right there, at the hotel. Walker said yes straightaway, then, when the ticket was half-written, told the clerk to hold on for a while, he had just remembered a couple of things he might have to do.

‘No problem,’ said the desk clerk, tearing the ticket wearily in two.

Back in his room Walker tried drunkenly to organize his thoughts, lurching from one possibility to the next. Getting the express meant that he would gain some time on Malory since obviously, assuming the guy in the bar was right, he had simply gone to Friendship to get the bus to Usfret. Looked at like that there was no point in going to Friendship. But. . But if from now on there were going to be fewer and fewer external clues to go on, then he was going to have to rely more on thinking himself into Malory’s shoes. In that case the more exactly he managed to repeat Malory’s moves the easier it would be to duplicate the choices he had made. Tracking Malory was not going to be like a game of snakes and ladders where he could leap forward five places. He could do that but something he came across in those five missed spaces might prove more important than the one he landed on.

He phoned down to reception, told them to book him a ticket to Friendship. As he was getting ready for bed, sorting through his bag for his toothbrush, he came across the dictaphone and tossed it on to the bed. Lying there a few minutes later, he switched on the tape. Nothing. He flipped the tape over and fast-forwarded, almost to the end, in case there was a brief message tucked into the last minute of the tape. He turned down the volume so that the hiss was less pronounced and let it play noiselessly. Or not quite noiselessly. . He switched off the machine, ejected the tape and inserted the blank cassette that had come with the machine. Pressed Play. He listened for a few moments, ejected that tape and played the other one. Yes, there was nothing to hear but there was a distinct difference in the quality of the silence. It was not a blank tape but a recording in which there was nothing to hear, a recording of silence. He listened intensely and realized that the tape was not as devoid of noise as he had first thought. Certain noises were conspicuous by their absence: it had not been made in the countryside — there was no sound of birds, no hedgerow rustle. Fiddling with the bass and treble controls to minimize hiss but retain clarity of sound, he strained his ears to penetrate the ambient silence and hunt out the faintest hint of other sounds. It was strange and difficult, sitting there, trying to shut out the silence of the room in order to decipher the silence of the tape. Doubly difficult since straining his ears like this made him aware of the obtrusive sounds that composed the silence around him. The machine had come with a small set of headphones and with these he was able to cocoon himself inside the silence of the tape. He could hear a faint rattle, like blinds shifting in a breeze, a bell chiming in the distance, the swish and murmur of traffic, the gurgle of pipes, maybe rain.

He was so immersed in listening that the click of the tape coming to an end sounded like a door slamming.

In the morning, slightly hung-over, he caught a bus to Friendship. Having fulfilled his commitment to retracing Malory’s exact route — pointlessly — he bought a ticket for the onward journey to Usfret.

The bus did not leave for several hours. He wandered round the city and then ate lunch in a café run by identical twins, one cooking, the other serving, both smiling the whole time. Someone had left a paper behind, folded inside out, exposing the crosswords and classifieds. The crossword had been completed and the ferry times to Ascension had been ringed in a small display ad. Walker rearranged the pages and skimmed the main items while eating his food. The only article he read right through was about the reconstruction of a dead man’s face. Several people had died in a fire at a railway station and one of the bodies had remained unidentified. From the remains a forensic expert had built an impression of what the dead man had probably looked like, right down to his hair style. Six months later no one had come forward to identify him. He had vanished and it made no difference, no one noticed: a man who didn’t matter to anyone except himself, maybe not even to himself. A man who owed nobody anything.