The Search by Geoff Dyer Page B

could return. All this shit just so he could fuck her. Like a story he’d heard in prison, using up the nothing
days.
    He had come to a network of steam-drift streets, crowded with cafés, bars and clubs. He walked past a club where a new kind of music was playing loudly. A bottle smashed a few yards in
front of him. Whoops of laughter and a voice calling out: ‘Sorry, man, just an accident.’ Walker looked up to a second-floor balcony: a guy with his arms around a giggling woman, the
pair of them so huge it seemed likely that the next thing to come down would be the balcony itself. ‘Take a full one with my apologies,’ he said, letting a beer bottle drop from his
hand. Walker caught it, twisted off the top and took a gulp, held it up appreciatively. He smiled and walked on, pleased with himself for catching the bottle, ears ringing with the laughter of the
pair on the balcony.
    Pounding from the entrances to clubs, different kinds of music thumped together in a disjointed beat. The streets were littered with vomit, glass, even, Walker realized with revulsion, a bloody
clump of teeth. A drunk lurched towards him, his face reeling yellow and blue in the flash of lights. His hands were on Walker’s lapels. Walker began pushing him away but already his battered
mouth was spraying words: ‘He’s in Despond. That’s where you’ll find him. He’s waiting for you.’
    From across the street a guy came crashing through the window of a bar. The shower of glass held a thousand scattered glimpses of the scene before falling like hail over the figure sprawled on
the sidewalk, blood laking around him. The drunk had let go of Walker, had vanished in the boozesodden crowd. Walker looked round, could see no sign of him. There was a cheer from the bar and then
silence, passers-by standing clear as the guy on the sidewalk dragged himself to his knees, shambled to his feet. He swayed uncertainly, gazing into the bar until a stool came spinning through the
window and knocked him back into the angled grit of glass. Another cheer from the bar. This time he didn’t have the strength to get to his feet and he crawled away from the window on his
hands and knees. Another stool came sailing out, followed by a chair, glasses and more stools, the remains of the window. The man sagged under the bombardment and lay motionless, one arm curled
protectively around his head, surrounded by a broken mass of furniture. A dapper man from the bar stepped through the window frame and stood over him, counting him out – one-ah, two-ah
– all the way to ten until he waved his arms to declare the bout oyer and stepped back through the window. All around from the street and bar were whoops, cheers and applause until people
drifted away.
    Walker moved on, replaying the drunk’s few words over and over. The crowds thinned out. He came to the river and gazed across at an area of derelict buildings. The girders and pillars of
burnt-out tower blocks showed stark against the sunset. Something in the nature of skyscrapers suggested that these bare skeletons of metal represented the final flourishing of their vertiginous
aspiration: this is how they had been intended to look.
    The river was dappled red by the sun as Walker made his way along the tow-path. Further along the path was barricaded off and he entered the fringes of the Latin Quarter. Lines of washing hung
between cramped balconies, the late silhouettes of birds were hemmed in by the redness of the sky. Preoccupied with the drunk’s startling appearance Walker had been paying little attention to
exactly where he was. He had been told to be careful in certain parts of the Quarter at night and became abruptly anxious. A pair of youths in ripped jeans and biker jackets appeared from around a
corner, nodded as they passed by.
    Top-floor windows glowed furnace-red but it was growing dark in the narrow streets. Walker glanced round and in the shadows behind him thought he detected a figure