Seeing his ripped trousers, bloodied hands and ashen face, the hotel desk-clerk asked if he had been in an accident.
‘Not quite,’ he said, leaning on the lift button.
‘You need first-aid box?’
‘Could you bring it up?’
‘Si, si.’
Back in his room he took off his shirt and shoes and filled a bath. His trousers were stuck to his knee, swollen, hurting. He eased himself into the stinging water and lay soaking before floating them off. There was a knock at the door — the clerk — and Walker called out to just leave the box on the bed, everything was fine, thank you.
Luxuriating in the feel of hot water over his limbs, bruised but still intact, he went over the scene again and again: the car stalking him, the white charge of headlights, the flashing reflection of the windshield, the roof sliding beneath him, almost clearing it perfectly until he clipped his toe like an athlete hitting a hurdle and falling to the road in the wake of exhaust and noise. It was amazing that he had got away so lightly: grazes, gravel in his hands, a cut knee — but nothing, nothing really. .
It had been Carver in the car, he was convinced of that. He reached a hand out of the water and touched the chain Rachel had given to him. Smiling to himself, he thought of Kelly standing in the midst of devastation, naked except for the stone around his neck and his indestructible shorts. He felt elated, partly by the mere fact of survival, partly by the reappearance of Carver which was as reassuring as it was threatening. It meant he was still in the race, still on course.
He hauled himself out of the bath and reached for the towel. He climbed into bed, easing his knee gingerly between the sheets.
Tomorrow, first thing, he would head to Despond.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He arrived there at midday, his knee stiff and tender from the cramped confines of the coach. It turned out to be a grim desert town lacking any distinguishing characteristics — which made it all the more puzzling that not only had Malory come here but he had spent longer here than any of the other places he had been. There was nothing to detain even the most thorough visitor, but almost everyone Walker asked had some recollection of Malory. Slightly bemused by the suggestion that he might have left town, they said he was sure to be around some place — as if he had just stepped outside to get a bite to eat and would be back in a few moments. The prospect of being so close to Malory should have excited him but Walker felt oddly deflated, as if he hardly cared.
Each night he ate at the bus station diner and then went back to his motel room and watched TV. One evening a guy gnawing ribs at the bar suggested he try a rooming house over in the east of the city — Malory was living there, last he’d heard. Walker resolved to head over there the next morning but when it came to it he could not face the prospect of the long journey across town, seizing on the dull ache in his knee as an excuse. Later that week, when he did drag himself over, nobody at the boarding house had ever heard of a guy called Malory. He hung around a few more days and decided it was pointless to spend any more time there: Malory had left, he was certain of that. Tomorrow he would do the same.
The next morning, however, he found he had no urge to leave and once again dawdled the day away. By evening he was furious with himself for having squandered yet another day and made up his mind to leave town first thing in the morning. The following day he loitered his time away until the evening when — as on each of the nights to follow — he was seized with a feverish determination to leave. His resolution was always particularly acute after a few drinks; then it seemed inconceivable that so much time had already gone by like this. What was so difficult about leaving? All he had to do was pack up his stuff and turn up at the bus station. Nothing could have been easier. Tomorrow he would leave. So intense was his desire to be up and on the move that he had trouble getting to sleep. His thoughts paced the room as he hatched wild schemes to make up for the time he had wasted in Despond. It took hours to get to sleep and by the time he woke the bus had already left. Every night he was filled with resolution and every morning he was devoid of energy. A couple of times he woke early, looked at his watch and saw that if he got up now he could catch the bus but, on each occasion, he felt so drowsy, so worn out by his mental exertions of the night before, that he was unable to face the effort of getting out of bed into the greyish cold. Instead he turned over, loving the fart-warmth of his bed, and slept on until the sun had climbed into the lunchtime sky.
When he did get up it was with a feeling of contentment which turned to disappointment in the afternoon and which, by the evening, had mounted to a frantic urge to leave. The longer this went on the worse it became: the more urgently he wanted to leave at night the less inclined he felt to do so in the morning.
As time went by even the normal chores of the day came to seem burdensome. The more time he had the less he did with it. During his first few days in town he had done exercises but soon the thought of a sit-up exhausted him. He began to lose track of time. He no longer changed his sheets, stopped washing his clothes. For food he had relied on fruit and biscuits and all-day breakfasts at the diner, but now he dropped the fruit and made do with biscuits and breakfasts. Since he gnawed biscuits throughout the day he could see little point in cleaning his teeth. Why bother when he would be munching biscuits again in five minutes? The same with shaving: what was the point when you’d have to do it again in a day’s time? Some days he lay in bed all morning, thinking how satisfying it would be to be a junkie, to have that sense of purpose each day, knowing you had to score. In another way he was glad to be spared the effort: even going to the shops was an exertion he dreaded. Sometimes he sat for upwards of an hour, needing to piss but unable to force himself out of the chair and into the dismal bathroom. He took to sleeping in the afternoons — far and away, he decided, the best part of the day. He loved waking up and — for a few moments — not knowing where or who he was. Then his head gradually enclosed itself around his thoughts and, still clinging to the fond memory of sleep, he became slowly aware of the first faint rumblings of what by the evening would be a bearable despair.
Each day the sun came up and the sky blued over and darkened again until sunrise the next day. Walker rarely thought of Malory. The whole idea of trying to find him seemed a waste of time and energy he didn’t have. Besides, he realized, rummaging through his stuff one afternoon, he had lost the documents Malory was supposed to sign. Not that he cared one way or the other. And Carver? He’d probably bump into him in a bar somewhere in town. They’d get drunk together, play pool and talk about what a lot of fucking bollocks it had all been.
Occasionally he picked up the dictaphone and listened to the soundings he had taken so that the motel room was filled with the faint noise of other rooms. Several times he turned on the machine, thinking it might be worth recording his current condition. Unable to think of anything to say, he muttered, ‘Fuck it,’ and clicked it off. He lay where he was and pulled out the photo of Rachel. He had spent whole days like this in prison, staring at the image of a woman, numb with longing. He looked at her hair, her eyes. Reached for the phone and dialled her number. The machine did not click on. After eight rings the tone became bleak. In case she was just coming through the door he let it ring another ten times, hoping that when she got back she could tell that he had called, furniture and walls preserving his message. Then he just let it ring, the phone pressed to his head like a pistol, her picture in his hands.