‘I’m talking to you.’
‘No you’re not.’ Walker moved around him but Carver gripped his arm, hard. They were the same height.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘No.’ Walker tugged his arm free.
‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Lancelot. Everything she said to you was shit. Everything you hoped she was saying was shit. You think you have to go through all this shit just so you can fuck her?’
Walker concentrated on not moving, on letting nothing show.
‘You want to learn the hard way, don’t you?’ said Carver.
‘I don’t even want to learn.’
This time Carver let him walk away. He had only gone a couple of steps when Carver called out after him, ‘Hey, Lancelot!’
Walker kept moving and a second later something landed quietly in front of him. He looked down and saw a thin chain coiled up on the floor like a silver snake. He was able to check the urge to pick it up but, involuntarily, he reached up to his neck to check that his own chain was still there. Then walked towards the lift, the chain like grit beneath his foot.
Back in his room he crammed Carver’s words to the back of his mind, concentrated instead on the question of how he had known who and where he was. It was possible that he had just been followed here — but it was more likely that Rachel’s phone had been tapped. And the chain. . Abruptly he remembered why he had recognized Carver: the party, the guy he had bumped into. He picked up the phone to call Rachel and put it down again immediately. He could feel sweat trickling down his ribs, a nerve twitching in his jaw. All this shit just so he could fuck her. He hurled the phone across the room. Looked around for something else to smash but instead sat down abruptly. Forced himself to stay perfectly still, slowly emptying his mind of everything. He remained like that until he had lost any sense of time, began to lose any sense of being the agent of his thoughts. Then, in the ensuing vacancy, he allowed his thoughts to re-form, focusing purely on the practicalities of picking up Malory’s trail, on nothing else.
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.