The Search by Geoff Dyer Read Free Book Online Page A

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,