The Search (6 page)

He entered the room, pulling the door shut behind him. He examined it minutely, thinking that someone might have been there in his absence, but it looked undisturbed. The bed had been made, and looked clean and tidy. Though the harsh sunlight showed the scars and spots and stains which discoloured walls and ceiling and furniture there was, he now thought, a plain honesty about the room, and it appeared cleaner than he had remembered it. He lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling with its diseased galaxy. I could stay here forever, he thought, I could lie here and do nothing. I could remain protected and sheltered here if I had enough money to pay for my hotel. He didn't want to go into the city again, into its noise and its terrors. He felt himself falling asleep in the serene light of the sun. I mustn't do that, he thought, and got up from the bed with a brisk movement. He put his things back in the case and decided that he must shave. There was no mirror in the room and he forced himself to go next door to the bathroom. After he had shaved he almost ran back into his bedroom again.

All the time he was in the bathroom he didn't want to lock the door in case someone might surreptitiously go into his room which he had left unlocked. He also wore his jacket even while he was shaving, and when he had finished, checked that he had his 30 dollars safe in his pocket. After entering the bedroom again he put his shaving gear into his case along with the rest of his things and zipped it shut. He peered out into the corridor, and then, walking quickly along it, tiptoed down the stair. All the time he was walking he was afraid that a voice would shout to him to come back: but after all he was doing nothing wrong, he had paid for his room. Yet he seemed to hear a voice saying to him: Your brother. What have you done with your brother? You're leaving him behind you. You're running away from him. Perhaps Norman had once slept in that bed he had just left, shaved in that yellowing basin. Perhaps he too had lain on the bed and stared up hopelessly at the ceiling, at the constellation of brown stains. He opened the door, case in hand, and stepped out into the bright sunshine again. He felt that he would never return safely to Canberra, that someone evil and unscrupulous was waiting for him. I won't take a taxi, he thought, I'll walk now to the bus station and wait there all day if necessary.

As he was walking along by the side of the park he saw a bald man lying on the grass, beside him an empty wine bottle which reflected the sun. It seemed to him that it was the same man as he had seen the day before and that he had not shifted his position since, as passive as an inanimate object, such as a boulder. On an impulse he walked over and
stood there looking down at him. The man was facing downward, and all that Trevor could see was his neck, which was brown and creased and tanned with the sun. His right hand was flung out carelessly from him. It seemed to Trevor for a moment that he was dead, he could see no sign of breathing. Perhaps he had been lying there dead since yesterday and nobody had noticed him. He bent down to try and see his face, as if it was perhaps Norman, and he had to identify him. He didn't want to touch the man though he could see now that he was breathing. His brother, like himself and this man, had shown signs of approaching baldness in his youth: and now he might not even know him. He bent down lower and lower, keeping his hand in his pocket where his dollars were. But all he could see was the brown neck and the right ear and the legs in their broken boots. If he had had money he would have left some with him, perhaps laid it beside him on the dry grass, but then he decided that it couldn't be his brother, that would be too great a coincidence. Suddenly, as if sensing his presence with the supernatural alertness of an animal, the man turned on his back and looked straight up at Trevor, revealing an unshaven face bloated and red with drink. Trevor smelt quite palpably the stench of alcohol pouring from him like a wind of ill omen. The yellow teeth glared as the man smiled a broken smile, a knowing leer, and one of the eyes winked at Trevor. In a terror greater than he had ever known he ran along the road past the classical fountain where the plump, blank-eyed Cupid aimed his bow out of the transparent umbrella of water, while the man, now leaning on his elbow, followed him with his red-veined eyes and made as if to shout, his obscenely naked head shining in the sun like a tomato. Trevor ran along the pavement with his case.

Nine

A
RRIVED AT THE
bus station he bought himself a ticket and sat down in one of the deep black leather chairs. A bus would be leaving at three o'clock, he was told. He bought himself some newspapers and magazines and read them voraciously one after another, satisfying some desperate hunger, while at the same time he protected the ticket which he had put in his right-hand pocket. He had a feeling that he would never get out of Sydney, that some new disaster would happen to prevent him from doing so, that perhaps his ticket might be stolen. He had already lost at least two hundred dollars in cash.

“No worries,” the man at the counter had said to him when he had enquired about the bus. “There's plenty of room.” Yet it seemed to him that he was running away though he didn't know what else to do to find his brother. Had he not tried his best? How could he be expected to do more? Nevertheless, as he sat there reading his paper the image of his brother's face shimmered in front of him.

“No I don't have any money,” he pleaded with it as if he were in a courtroom. “I can't do any more.”

He read in one of the papers that the body of a man had been found in Sydney Harbour. What if it was his brother? What if Douglas had been watching him all the time, sending him on his journey so that he himself could find Norman and settle some obscure business with him? He kept his case between his legs while people sat beside him and left to be replaced by others. If only he had kept contact with Norman all those years, if he had not been so totally absorbed in himself. Australia had become to him a frightening country on which his brother's face was painted over and over as if by a surrealist artist. The bareness of the country was making him confront all that he was. He remembered a painting he had seen by Nolan of two explorers riding on camels through a brown desert, one turned round on his horse and facing the spectator, wearing glasses, and appearing totally out of place in that landscape to which camels were native, the colour of the sand around them.

When it was time to leave he had to walk towards the bus as if into a high wind. He put his case on the rack and sat in a seat at the back. He felt a deep desire to sleep and yet had a feeling that he would be unable to do so. None of the people who had been travelling with him to Sydney was on his bus. In the seat across the aisle there was a boy with one arm in plaster and in front of him there were two women in flowery hats. As the bus made its way through one of the desolate areas of Sydney he looked through the window at the bluish houses — coloured thus by the perspex as if they belonged to the sky rather than to common earth — and thought of the heaven offered by the religionists, according to Marx. Blue clothes lines with blue ragged clothing hung in the blue calm day. Then they were out of Sydney and heading for Canberra on the open road. The landscape was as dry as ever for mile after mile. How different it was from the green landscape of home, with its mountains and glens and water. Yet it seemed to him that this dry landscape also corresponded with some deep dryness in his own heart, some sterility, a lack of simple feeling, of passion. Why had he not phoned Sheila yet to tell her of what had happened? Was there some fracture in their marriage? Surely he would have phoned her otherwise. Sheila, of course, was very different from himself: why, she would cry when she saw certain films on television. She would also rant and shout shamelessly at him. He himself no longer had this primitive strength of feeling. He didn't even seem to feel anger any more: his heart had become an almost stony thing. He took out a magazine and read an article on unemployment, then one on Afghanistan. Then he read a story which said that America had asked Australia whether she would stop her grain exports to Iran. In the end, everything was economic. Why had he himself not sent money to his brother? If someone had asked him to evaluate what had happened in Iran or Afghanistan he would have set down the arguments side by side and his conclusions would have been on the basis of the mind alone. Would it not be better to be a fanatic than to feel nothing? Would it not be better to kill in rage and pride than to be a stone?

The women in front of him were talking to each other. One was saying, “My husband couldn't come with me this time, we couldn't afford the air fares for the two of us. But I wanted to see my daughter. He understands that.”

And the other one said, “It's eight hundred pounds now, the fare, isn't it?”

The bus sped on while the driver played cassettes of pop music including ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water', and, later, ‘Send In The Clowns'. The driver didn't brake at the corners but accelerated through them. So far Trevor hadn't seen any sign which said ‘Canberra' though he had seen plenty for Melbourne. It was as if he was more homesick for Canberra than he was for Glasgow. He could not be happy till he was ensconced in his own room, till he got back to his usual routine.

Australia was such a vast place. It was the land of birds that couldn't fly, of animals that hopped like birds. It was a land of halted evolution. It was a land of jails and mates and the beguiling koala. It was a land where women were all called sheilas. He remembered the day he had visited the War Museum and had seen a diorama of Australian troops searching a village in Vietnam. He remembered the film
Apocalypse Now
which he had seen in one of the cinemas. The hero had travelled upriver into the deserts of himself to find a madman who had created his own personal inferno, skulls that dumbly ringed a jungle glade, row on row, circle on grinning circle.

When he reached Canberra he would phone Douglas and find out exactly what was going on, but from his own ground, from Canberra, from the place where he felt most secure. If only his brother had left Sydney and had found
himself a small, undemanding place! The endless road unwound before him, taking him further and further away from Norman. He had a panicky feeling that he should get off the bus and return to Sydney. He looked down to see what time it was and saw the white, naked band on the wrist where the watch had been. He would have to buy a new watch. And yet there was no one he could tell his story to. How could he tell it to Professor Hastie who would wonder what sort of relatives he had? No, he couldn't tell him, and he didn't even want to tell Sheila. It was a secret that he would have to keep with him so long as he lived, and the loss of his brother would be a doom on his heart. The smiling face under the diced cap of the Argylls smiled at him from the blue window (the sky that travelled with him) and he shut his eyes against it. He felt as if he was going to faint.

The bus sped on. On both sides of him was the monotonous, unforgiving landscape which hadn't tasted rain for months and on which the sun beat down day after day. His own days were now like that. In his work in Glasgow University his life had been a bookish routine, and now when that routine had been broken so brutally he couldn't cope. His failure irritated him as if it was of the deepest significance. If he didn't have the integrity to search for his own brother what did his lecturing signify.
CALL IN AT JANET'S
said a sign over a shop.
I AM SAILING
, said the voice on the cassette.

How alone he had always been: he had no close friends at all. In this land of mateship he was a solitary. His brother had always made friends more easily than he. Why, when Norman was visiting their cousin he would go over to the food cupboard and help himself to food without asking. He himself didn't have that spontaneity and never would have. The cousin loved Norman for it. His brother, in fact, was a better human being than himself, his generosity had flowed easily from him without calculation. He himself, on the other hand, always inspected experience very closely before using it and thus continually infected it with self. He closed his eyes, pitying himself for his isolation in this immense burgeoning land, for the fact that when he had been asked for the colour of his brother's eyes he had hesitated. Suddenly he slept.

When he woke up the sky was darkening and there were lights in the town which he passed. He peered forward and saw that they were only 50 kilometres from Canberra. He tried to remember how one converted kilometres to miles but couldn't. The two women in front of him were still talking and the boy with the arm in plaster was lolling against his seat half-asleep. When he arrived in Canberra he would take a taxi to the college, he still had enough money for that. He saw a glare on the horizon signifying a city and thought it might be Canberra but wasn't sure. He tried to read the papers he had bought but found that it was too dark to do so. It was funny that the light on these buses was so low but that might be because the distances were so much greater than in Scotland and the passengers might wish to sleep. Through the window he could see a moon, small and shrunken, and white in the sky, like a curved bone, ancient and aboriginal, and far from the main road he could see the twinkling lights of farmhouses. In another fifty years perhaps these vast spaces would be populated and Australia would no longer be what it was now, a huge land almost empty of people, except in the cities.

The boy with the arm in plaster suddenly woke up like an embalmed corpse taking on life, stared wildly about him and then pretended to examine his plaster which was scribbled over with names. An old man with a pointed beard, scholarly as a rabbi, gazed steadily ahead of him and for a moment Trevor was reminded of the German professor who sat by the pool in the college grounds studying Heine. He too had a pointed beard and seemed to read steadily all day, sitting on his frail black chair among the orange leaves of autumn while the black cat with the four new kittens prowled restlessly for birds. He tried to remember the professor's name but couldn't. They passed each other every day but with the tense self-consciousness of scholars, used more to the study than the open air, didn't speak.

There was no question about it, he had failed in his mission, he had come home with his tail between his legs, he was so frightened of what might happen to himself that he had to give up on a quest that might prove more important to him than life itself, or at least as important.

The bus careered on through the night, the driver probably wanting to go home to his wife and children. And now they had entered Canberra and he could see the landmarks by which he usually guided himself. Surely that was the Lakeside Hotel towering into the air. And that other building shaped like a bulbous minaret, what was the name of that? The ordered city met him with its ordered lights. The bus drew up at the bus station. People all began to prepare to leave it as if they were corpses wakening from the dead. He himself rushed forward to the door, and looked around him for taxis, and there they were waiting. He flagged one and climbed into it. He gave the driver the name of the college and sat in the back seat. Perhaps he should have sat in the front seat: Australia was the land of equality. Perhaps the driver wished to speak but he himself didn't want to; he felt exhausted. He watched with joy as they wound their way between the trees, past the colourful bushes, as they passed buildings on which ancient ivy grew.

When they pulled up at the door of the college he gave the driver three dollars for his fare, and an extra one as a tip. He took his case and made his way to his room as if he were rushing into hiding, into a hermitage. He was about to unlock the door when he suddenly realized that he had lost his key to this place as well. Why hadn't he thought of that, and why hadn't he remembered to hand it in when he had left? And he cursed feebly the bitter injustice of the world. He went along to the office hoping that it was still open. The girl at the desk told him that she would try to find a key and he waited idly, watching a beautiful, elegant Japanese woman who was standing in the hall reading advertisements
and posters about classical concerts and films. After a long while the girl returned and gave him a key. He turned away from the office with its slits for internal and external mail; its alarm clock lying on the desk, blank-faced and distant. He walked past the common-room where a Chinaman was standing reading a newspaper. He heard the noise of the television and saw its blue light as he passed the television room: it seemed to him that the programme was
Fawlty Towers
. He climbed the stair to his room and inserted the key in the lock. His own tables and chairs struck out at him like a blow. The room looked suddenly bare and forlorn, scantily furnished, and the books seemed to belong to someone else. He shut the door behind him and sat down on a chair like an exhausted boxer. Through the window he could see the vague white trees, trunks of the eucalyptus, ghostly in the night. He felt that this place was no longer his secret home, but rather a precarious shell floating in the darkness. Through the quietness he heard a flute being played with delicate embroidered cadences. Below him in the gathering dimness he could see the tables and seats where people would often sit till late at night clinking glasses and laughing boisterously. He saw on the table in his own room the exercise book containing the notes that he had been writing and they appeared ineffectual and senseless. He opened the partition which shut off the living room from the kitchenette and poured himself a huge whisky which he drank in one gulp.

About an hour later and befuddled with drink he took off his clothes and ran a bath. His arms were still inflamed and red and swollen with weals. He got into the bath and cleaned himself thoroughly seeing, floating on the water, black flecks like the bodies of dead fleas. It was as if he was washing himself free of all the dirtiness and sordidness of Sydney and by doing so liberating himself from his perplexities. After he had let the water run away and rinsed the bath he locked the door of the bedroom from the inside, frightened that perhaps someone would come in and attack him in his sleep. He looked down into the garden past the wire mesh that protected the window. There was here no whine of mosquitoes or other insects, there was only the silence of the night interrupted by the wavering notes of the flute. It reminded him momentarily of the sweet, forsaken notes of a bugle.