Free The Search by Geoff Dyer Page A

acquired an internal logic; their purpose remained elusive but they formed a path, a route, led
somewhere. With such a map he could find his way back.
    In the morning he walked past a shop with a row of used bicycles chained up outside. The shop was run by an old man who claimed to have ridden in the Tour. Walker indicated a
bike he liked and the old man unlocked the chain and extricated it from the row: ten-speed, dropped handlebars, light enough to be picked up easily with one hand. Walker rode it around the block
and asked the old man what he wanted for it.
    ‘You’ve read those stories about a knight on his charger?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You seen Westerns? The cowboy on his horse?’
    Walker nodded.
    ‘Now it’s you on that bike. A clear line of descent. Seventy-five buys you the bike and the ancestors.’
    ‘What about just the bike?’ said Walker, but as far as the old man was concerned the deal was clinched already.
    Walker paid up, lashed his bag to the rack and pedalled off.
    ‘So long, cowboy,’ called the man who had once ridden in the Tour, stuffing Walker’s money into his pocket.
    The morning’s chill still clung to the air but after riding for fifteen minutes he felt fine. He headed out of town, the volume of cyclists diminishing steadily as he went. The road was
flat and ran alongside a river with fields stretching away on the other side.
    For lunch he bought bread, fruit and water and sat down to eat behind the goalpost of a deserted football pitch. A breeze rustled the bushes beyond the touchlines. The goal was smudged with
dried mud where the ball had ricocheted off crossbar and posts. The goalmouth and centre circle were dry and bare, pock-marked by studs. Chewing and swallowing, he imagined some archaeologist of
the future re-creating sequences of play and estimating the scores of games played here from the patterns of stud-marks on the pitch.
    In the middle of the afternoon he came to a bridge, rising high and golden in the blue sky. As he drew closer he saw that what he had taken to be the ripple of hot air was actually the bridge
itself rippling in the air. It undulated gently as if a wave were passing through it, as if its burnished girders were made not of steel but of some highly elastic material.
    He stopped at the edge of the bridge, watching it rise and fall rhythmically, breathing. There was no traffic. A sign said BRIDGE CLOSED and a barrier blocked the carriageway. He manoeuvred his
bike round the barrier and walked out on to the bridge. At first, although he could see the bridge undulating ahead of him, the cables growing taut and slack with strain, he hardly felt any
movement. Then, as he moved out over the river, he felt the road shifting beneath his feet like a ship on calm seas. There was no sense of danger. He looked at the bridge’s flowing reflection
in the river below. He dropped a stone over the edge and watched it fall and splash, vanish. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a bird swoop down and glide low over the river. After a few minutes
he got on his bike and cycled over the shifting hills and dips. The sun strobed through the stanchions and cables rearing above him.
    When he had crossed to the far side he looked back at the bridge rising and falling in the blue air.
    That night he slept by the roadside and cycled on as soon as the sun shuddered clear of the horizon. Late in the afternoon, his legs wobbly after so long on the bike, he rode
into a city where there were no people, only streets – narrow, cobbled, crossed by even narrower streets that led to rain-damp alleys and dead-ends. Torn posters advertised political meetings
and sporting events. There were parked cars but no sign of the people who drove them. A few shops had their shutters pulled down but most were open for business as usual. As he opened the door of a
pâtisserie a little bell rang like a wind-chime. The shelves were half-empty with bread and cakes. He took a croissant that tasted as