Free The Search by Iain Crichton Smith

night, he thought; they, or he, must have taken me here and dumped me. He supposed that there must have been two people, not one: for all he knew one of them might have been his own brother. He passed his hand across his face and felt the stubble that had grown during his period of unconsciousness.
    And then as he swayed by the fountain it came to him with a frightening shock that his wallet was gone. Very carefully and as if willing its reappearance he put his hand inside his breast pocket. The wallet wasn’t there.
    He stood there sweating profusely in the heat of the foreign sun trying to reassemble himself as if he were a piece of broken machinery. He was in Sydney and he had no money. What was he going to do? Could he sneak back to the hotel and take out his case without being seen? But then he had no money to pay his fare back to Canberra and couldn’t find his return ticket which must also have been in his wallet. He tried his other pockets frantically but he could find nothing, he had been comprehensively robbed. Even his watch was gone from his wrist leaving a white band on the flesh, and he didn’t even know what the time was. He felt naked and trembling and panicky in the day. What if he couldn’t get back to Canberra again, what if he had to stay in Sydney for the rest of his life? Who would lend him the money to return home (for he thought of Canberra as home)? Could he possibly ask the man in the hotel to phone on his behalf to Canberra? But then he didn’t know the people in the bank very well nor did he know the professor well enough to ask him for money. And what would the latter think of his grimy, surrealistic story?
    So this was what it was like to be destitute in a world that didn’t owe one a living, that was in the end merciless and glaring and indifferent. So this was what it was like to be totally on one’s own.
    He felt in his breast pocket again as if it were possible that he had made a mistake, that his wallet was there after all, but there was no doubt about it, it had irretrievably gone. He didn’t even feel anger against those who had robbed him, it was as if from the moment that he had left Canberra this state of destitution had been predetermined.
    The world was immense and pitiless around him and even now his attitude towards the people he saw walking down the street had changed; they seemed to him to belong to a world different from his own. Nevertheless he couldn’t stand there all day, he must act. If he couldn’t do something soon he might remain passively there forever. Money, that was what he needed. Thank God he had been careful enough to leave his passport in his case in his room in Canberra: at least he hadn’t lost that. He looked down at his arms which were swollen and red with raw weals and then at his trousers which had lost their crease and looked rumpled. One of the worst things that had happened was the disappearance of his watch: without it he felt naked and disoriented. He stared down at the pale band which its removal had left on his arm: it was like the mark you saw when you lifted a stone and peered underneath it.
    Still slightly unsteady on his feet, he left the fountain and began to walk away from the park and it was as if he was leaving behind him a refuge. People walked up and down the street staring straight ahead of them. He felt that he must appear stripped and dispossessed, but no one took the slightest notice of him. Ahead of him he could see the door of his hotel but he didn’t want to go through it. He tried to think if there was any money in his case and then remembered that there wasn’t. Why had he been such a fool as to carry so much money on his person? Or why hadn’t he converted his money into travellers’ cheques? But it was too late now.
    And then he stopped and considered. An idea came to him. Would it not be the best thing to go to the Salvation Army office and see that woman Mrs Tennant and