The Search (3 page)

Three

H
E ARRIVED IN
Sydney at ten o'clock at night and wasn't prepared for the size of the city. Why, it was at least as big as London and probably bigger, with tall buildings thrusting aggressively into the sky, a jungle of lights. In relation to Canberra it had a powerful, pushy air. From the bus station he took a taxi, giving the name of the hotel, which at first the driver couldn't find. They drove around a park while the driver kept saying,

“I can't see it, mate. Are you sure it's on Elizabeth Street.” For a moment Trevor was terrified he had made a mistake till he checked the address in his book.

“I was definitely told Elizabeth Street,” he said, and eventually after they had driven two or three times round the park he was the first to see the name, the Australia Hotel, among the other competing signs on the street. It surprised him that the entrance was so small and insignificant, since the name itself sounded so grand.

When he eventually pressed the bell he heard a disembodied voice speaking to him, asking him to identify himself, for the door was locked. After he had said who he was the door opened slowly, creaking gently as it did so, and, as he entered, it shut behind him. What on earth was this? He felt as if he was entering a dilapidated prison. The building was like a slum in Glasgow.

“Sixth floor,” the voice had said.

By main force he pushed open the door of an ancient lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor, rising as if he were inside an old metallic coffin. How did this place have the nerve to call itself the Australian Hotel: why, it was like a grimy midnight tomb. The lift door opened and he found himself at what appeared to be a reception desk behind which sat a young, dark-skinned man with a moustache.

“The tab from the Tourist Bureau?” the man said, and Trevor handed the tab over, all the time looking uneasily about him. Planks of wood were leaning against the ancient wall: it was as though he had interrupted workmen in shoring up the building. He felt tense and frightened.

“We like our guests to pay in advance,” said the dark-skinned man. “How long are you staying for?”

“A week,” said Trevor, not knowing until then what answer he would give. He felt extremely tired after his long journey and nearly fled down the stairs. Why should he be asked to pay a week in advance for such a grimy place? But at the same time he was afraid that if he changed his mind he would be able to find no accommodation elsewhere at such a late hour. He took the required money out of his wallet and handed it over.

“Will you be wanting breakfast?” said the man.

“Yes,” said Trevor, “half-past eight if that is convenient.” His voice sounded strange to himself, almost echoing and nervous.

The man made a note on the pad in front of him and Trevor re-entered the lift. It was while he was travelling funereally down to the floor on which his room was that he suddenly realized that he hadn't been given a receipt for his money. But he didn't feel able to return and ask for one. There was something overwhelmingly seedy about the hotel, something almost derelict and evil. He felt that it was a place where transients and vagrants stayed and in his fevered imagination it became a den where knife fights were common, where screams were heard from the desperate and the weak, where there were sudden explosions of violence. A vision of the college rose up in front of him with nostalgic intensity, and he saw a man sweeping leaves from the lawn and dumping them into a wheelbarrow. The man moved with rustic, timeless slowness.

He wished that there was someone whom he could talk to, confide in, some third person who would be able to confer reality on the flickering world in which he now seemed to be living, some disinterested judge who would be sane and ordinary and clear-thinking. As he scurried along the flaking corridor to his room, he noticed scars on doors, and once he had a glimpse of a huge negro in shirt sleeves coming out of a bathroom. When he had opened the door of his room with the key he had been provided with, he immediately locked it behind him, shivering uncontrollably. Sweating profusely he sat down on the only chair in the room, leaving his small case on the floor beside him.

He looked around him. There was a cracked basin fitted into the wall, but when he ran the water it made a thunderous stuttering noise as he washed his face which was streaming with perspiration. The walls and ceiling were spotted with brown stains as if there was some disease haunting the room, some sordid plague. As he sat down he heard a high, piercing whine like that of a mosquito. He went to the window to peer out but it was covered with wire netting, though it was partially open. Across from him he could see a dark building which looked like a factory.

He felt suddenly in desperate need of a pee but at the same time was frightened lest he might be waylaid in the corridor, for he felt himself, in his feverish fear, surrounded by secret, violent people. Throughout the whole hotel there was an ominous, palpitating silence. Eventually he couldn't contain himself any longer, opened the door carefully and seeing no one crept into the adjacent bathroom where there was a dirty shower and a toilet around which there were old, damp, dirty papers.

After peeing he returned quickly to his room and locked the door again. He was angry that he had found himself in such a place, angry that he had paid in advance. He sat down on the bed and considered. Now that he had paid in advance he would have to wait there for a week. On the other hand might it not be better to sacrifice the money he had
already paid and find a better hotel? Still, he wasn't rich and if he found his brother destitute he would need all the money he had in order to help him. He should have phoned Sheila, that's what he should have done, but some instinct made him decide against doing so. He had half expected that there might have been a phone in his hotel room but there wasn't. And he didn't want to speak to that dark-skinned man again, climb to the sixth floor in that creaking hearse-like lift, and ask him where he could phone from.

Now for the morning. He would have to find the Births, Marriages and Deaths office, and discover if his brother's name was on the list of those who had died. How far back did their records go? And what if his brother had given a wrong name to the police as Douglas had suggested he might have done? What if the police had covered up his death, if he had in fact died in a cell? Were the police in Sydney as violent as they appeared to be in other countries? He tried to think if he had read anything about them in newspapers or magazines but couldn't remember any references to them.

Slightly dizzy with tiredness and tension he heard the liquid burble of a police car followed by the whine of an ambulance racing through the night and was aware of the weight and randomness and resonance of the city around him, busy and impersonal, with its cargoes of separate people. What if something happened to him here? He hadn't told anyone where he was staying, and if anything happened he didn't think that anyone would be intelligent enough to contact the Tourist Bureau. He cursed himself for being so stupid as not to have left an address behind him in Canberra. He had had a whole day to make his preparations and he had omitted a precaution as obvious as that. The room oppressed him and the whine of the mosquito, if that was what it was, was getting on his nerves. What were these marks on the walls, brown, almost obscene, a strange astronomy of dirty stars? He shivered, thinking that this might be the sort of place his brother would be used to. No, much worse than this.

He undressed slowly and got between the sheets which seemed to be clean enough. But then would one be able to see fleas with the naked eye?

He wished that he had a drink but then thought of his brother and decided that he didn't want one. He took a book from his case and tried to read it but couldn't concentrate. Then he took out a magazine and tried to read that. It was called
The Bulletin
and there was an article in it about oil drilling, and whether it should be permitted along the Barrier Reef. He glanced through the story without much interest.

What in fact would he discover in the morning? Would he find that his brother was indeed dead? Please God let that not happen, he prayed. He had a vision of his brother dead in a foreign land, buried in a desert across which the wind and sand swirled continually. He saw him in a nameless grave, unilluminated, drab. He looked down at himself as he lay in the bed, white and shrouded. And then he thought of Sheila again. That had been the worst: but what could they have done about it? Nothing. It had happened, and that was all that could be said about it. And it had been the reason why his brother had gone to Australia. At the time both he and Sheila had decided that it had been the fortunes of war, but how had Norman felt about it all?

As he lay there staring up at the spotted ceiling, scenes from the past unwound in front of his eyes. His brother, at the wedding, generous as always with drink, was growing more and more obstreperous. He himself was trying to calm him down, thinking at the same time how uncultured he was, how boorish, how exhibitionist and extravagant. He had the strange sensation that his brother had actually been in the very hotel he himself was now in, that he had slept in the same bed, that at that very moment he was watching him and smiling like that fellow Douglas.

As there was no bedside lamp he had to get up to put out the light at the wall switch and then creep back across the bare room in his bare feet. He lay in the darkness thinking, and after a while slept.

Four

I
N THE MORNING
as the sun streamed in through the wire-netted window the room suddenly seemed less threatening, more ordinary. Even the furniture — such as it was — didn't appear so scarred, and the whining of the mosquito, if such it had been, had ceased. But when he looked down at his arms he saw that they were covered with big red weals. My God, he thought, how did this happen? It must have been fleas or mosquitoes. He must find a chemist and buy some sort of antidote. He felt suddenly dirty in spite of the bright new sunlight around him. When there was a knock at the door and a man wheeled his breakfast in he almost mentioned the fleas or mosquitoes in his frustration and fury, but then prudently decided against doing so.

After eating his cornflakes and toast, and drinking his tea, he resolved to go out immediately. Locking the door carefully behind him — after he had wheeled the tray with the breakfast things out of the room — he descended by the stairs rather than enter the old rickety lift which had seemed so much like a cage or a coffin. He opened the main door on to the dazzle of a fine warm morning. As he walked down Elizabeth Street by the side of the park he was caught up in the rush of people hurrying to their work, many of them in shirt sleeves and shorts, looking relaxed yet purposeful. It was as if he had become part of a natural moving world again.

He made his way in the direction of the harbour for he had found out from his map of the city where the offices of Births, Marriages and Deaths were. Ahead of him he saw tall, powerful buildings and was gripped by a sense of their dizzying solidity. Why, there must be at least 60 floors in some of these offices. He glanced to his right into the park and seeing a bald man lying face down on the grass, a bottle beside him, suddenly shivered. His own brother might be like that, abandoned, derelict, helpless. The only consolation was that the weather never seemed to be cold, not even in the autumn, and there was hardly ever any rain. His brother would have been worse off in Glasgow.

His arms itched and the red weals looked angry and swollen and he stopped at a chemist's shop and asked the man behind the counter if he could do something about them.

“Fleas, sir, that's what they are,” said the chemist. Trevor almost told him about the hotel but decided not to in case there might be trouble which he couldn't afford to become involved in. After he had left the chemist's he put the ointment, which he had been given, on his spots, feeling dirty and soiled as he saw the tall, long-legged, tanned men and women striding past him to their work.

At last he arrived at the building he was seeking and saw that the office he required was on the eighth floor. He entered a lift with a lot of chattering girls who seemed to be clerkesses and typists. The lift flickered with lights like a huge computer and he finally emerged on to the correct floor. A sign said
NO SMOKING
but he saw as he went into the office that three girls were standing beside a desk smoking and talking in animated tones, while casually examining their nails.

“I have an inquiry to make,” he said to a young girl who was sitting in front of a typewriter. “I want to know whether a relative of mine, a brother in fact, is dead. I was told recently that he had died. I am only in Australia for a short while.”

She gazed at him unsmilingly and he almost shouted, “Can't you see that it is my brother I am talking about.” It seemed to him that the whole world should share his own sorrow.

“If you wait here for a moment I'll see about it,” said the girl, and left him. As he waited he saw people standing at ledges filling in forms of different colours, some pink, some blue. He imagined that some of the documents might be in connection with births rather than deaths, blue for boys and pink for girls, and again he was desolated with sorrow. Perhaps he was the only person there inquiring about a death.

The girl came back and indicated a man who was standing behind a desk.

“I would like you to fill in a form,” said the man. “We want to know why you are investigating the death of your brother.”

“I was told …” Trevor began.

“I know,” said the man, who appeared to Trevor to be remote and unsympathetic. “But we have a policy of not releasing information to just anyone. I hope you can understand why that should be. You're not Australian? You're here on holiday?”

“No,” said Trevor, “I'm not Australian. I'm Scottish.”

“Well,” said the man, “I know that in Britain you impose fewer checks. But you can easily see that problems are involved. For example you could be looking for your brother for financial gain. That's why we wish you to fill in this form. We'll let you know in a few days.”

“In a few days,” said Trevor in an agitated manner. “I thought you would let me know today. I'm only in Sydney till tomorrow morning,” he lied. “I'm here from Canberra and I've got to go back tomorrow morning. I am working in a college there.”

“We'll see what we can do then,” said the man, “if you fill in the form.” He's taken a dislike to me, thought Trevor, he won't come back, he won't bother looking for the information. In any case what evidence have I that Norman was ever in Sydney, was ever in a police station? He filled in the form which asked him about his relationship with the
presumed deceased. I am his brother, thought Trevor, I am searching for him simply because he is my brother, I do not expect financial gain, I have no ulterior motive. How could I profit from him if he has no money? And he was suddenly convinced that Norman was dead. As he handed the man the form his heart was beating furiously and he had broken out in a sweat. This man, he thought, looks so callous, he doesn't realize what this means to me, he has never been in the same situation, how can he possibly understand? I should have sent Norman money, he thought, I should have tried to find him. But I was too occupied with my own selfish interests. And now perhaps this man guesses all this. He felt naked and ashamed in the office in which the three girls were still talking.

“So we went to this restaurant,” one of them was saying,” and we had this marvellous fish, bream I think it was.” The others looked at her with polite disinterest. The rest of the world continues its existence, thought Trevor, it's only I who am standing here in a daze of sorrow waiting for that bureaucrat to examine his macabre records. He saw a woman happily filling in a pink form. Who would have known when Norman was born that he would end up in Australia? One of the girls poured out smoke from a discontented mouth.

Suddenly the man was there in front of him. How had he so quickly searched the records? They must have a computer, that was the only possibility. He had a paper in his hand and at that moment Trevor knew with desolate certainty that his brother was indeed dead and that this bureaucrat whom he had never met in his life till now was about to tell him the most dreadful news. It must be Norman's death certificate that he was holding in his hands. But even while Trevor stood there in a daze the man was saying,

“We have no record at all of your brother's death.”

“What? What?” said Trevor in amazement and confusion.

“I said there is no record.”

Suddenly Trevor began to babble almost hysterically, “Are you sure? Is there any possibility that he could have been buried under another name? Someone said,” and he brought the words out with difficulty, “that he had died in a police cell.”

“There is no chance of that at all,” said she man, whom Trevor could now see was humane and compassionate, and indeed glad that his brother was not dead. “None at all. He would have been identified by someone. He would have been traced. If he had a record they would have his fingerprints. No, he is not dead. He certainly didn't die here.”

Trevor felt like shouting with joy and embracing the man: the world was beautifully managed after all, the bureaucrats had their place in it, they toiled among the records, it was necessary for them to be dispassionate like surgeons, accurate and conscientious. They could be like angels bearing good news.

The man was holding out the paper towards him. “That is your certificate stating that as far as our records show he isn't dead.” And he named a fee which Trevor hardly heard as he pulled out his wallet. He would have given the man all the money he had.

More carefree than he had felt for a long time he put the certificate in his wallet and left the office, to be replaced by a fat man who was making an inquiry of his own. But as he was descending the stairs he knew that he couldn't leave it at that. His brother was apparently not dead — that he must now accept — but his responsibility did not end there. He might be living in poverty and destitution. He felt himself as a white knight sent by an irrevocable and mysterious destiny to save him. Surely he must have been sent to Australia for that very reason, surely there was a profound, enigmatic fate that had directed him on this mission. He climbed the stairs and went back.

“Is there a Missing Persons Bureau at the Police Station?” he asked. The man gave him an address and Trevor thanked him. This time he decided to take the lift and descended smoothly in the large box with its flashing lights to the ground floor.

He took a taxi to the Missing Persons Bureau and was more talkative than he usually was.

“This is a big city you have here,” he said to the taxi driver.

“It's big enough. I was born and bred here and there's still parts of it I don't know.”

“It seems bigger than London,” said Trevor. “And yet the people look more relaxed.”

“You Scotch?” said the taxi driver.

“That's right. I'm here from Canberra.”

“Canberra, eh?”

“Do you like living in Sydney?” Trevor enquired.

“Greatest city in the world. I've never been out of it.”

When the taxi drew up at the police station Trevor gave the driver a tip though he knew that tips were not expected nor looked for.

“That's your place there,” said the taxi driver. “Have a good day.”

Certainly so far it had been a good day, thought Trevor, for he had at least discovered that his brother was alive. Nevertheless he might find out bad news at the Bureau. Was it after all the case that, as Douglas had said, his brother had a police record? Had he been in a cell? Had he been a thief?

Told by a guard on the ground floor that the office was higher up, he took a lift and got out. He knocked on the door of the office and found a detective there.

He told him his story and the detective listened politely and attentively, now and again asking a question. He seems friendly enough, thought Trevor, he doesn't look like the sort of person who might beat a drunk or thief to death. But how did one recognize that kind of person? After all in a big city where policemen confronted violent criminals they themselves were likely to become violent in self-defence.

“How long since you actually heard from him?” said the detective who was a big man in shirt sleeves.

“About eighteen years ago,” said Trevor. “I realize that is a long time ago but I was neglectful and I had much else to do. I didn't keep in touch. I should have tried to write but latterly I didn't have an address to write to.”

The detective gazed at him without comment. “I suppose it's because he's in his shirt sleeves,” Trevor thought, “that he looks so harmless and relaxed.”

At the same time it occurred to him that for a job of this kind they would pick a friendly, affable person.

“Can you tell me what he looks like? Height, details like that,” said the detective, drawing a note pad towards him.

Trevor hesitated for a moment. What had his brother looked like? Had his eyes been blue? Yes, blue, surely they had been blue. Distinguishing marks? Had there been any? He couldn't remember any. He gave his brother's height as five feet eight, though he wasn't sure. He added lightly, “He may be going bald now. There's baldness in the family.”

The detective didn't smile but asked him for his brother's date of birth.

“He's two years younger than me,” said Trevor. “That will make him thirty-nine.” Thirty-nine? Was his brother really thirty-nine? He thought of him as an eternal twenty. Somehow he couldn't imagine Norman as thirty-nine.

Date of birth?

It was sometime in April surely. But Trevor couldn't remember the exact day. Had there been some joke about Shakespeare? Had he been born on the same day as Shakespeare had been?

“No,” he said at last. “I can't remember. It was some time in April.”

“But then,” he added, “he might not have given his real name.”

“Why not?” said the detective.

“Well, to be perfectly honest,” said Trevor in a burst of candour, “I heard that he might have died in the cells here.”

“Go on.”

“That's what I was told. A man got in touch with me in Canberra. He said that a Pole had told him that my brother had died in the cells here. He said that the Pole had been at one time in the same lodgings as my brother. The Pole's name was …” Forgetting the name Trevor took out his address book in which he had copied it down.

“Sikowski, that was the Pole's name according to my informant.”

“I see,” said the detective equably. “When was this supposed to have happened?”

“You mean, when was I told?”

“No, when was he supposed to have died in the cells?”

“Recently,” said Trevor. “But my informant told me that this Pole might have been lying, for some reason of his own.”

Was he imagining it or had the detective become more watchful after hearing his last statements?

“And how did this man get in touch with you?”

“I was giving a talk on the radio,” said Trevor. “He heard my name and my accent and he thought I might be related to this Norman Grierson whom he had known.”

“He phoned you?”