Metro Winds (46 page)

He looked through a leather ledger before consulting with his secretary, and after some negotiating, we agreed that he should have a modest retainer for a week. If after that time his enquiries had produced no promising clues, our contract would end. If he did find a lead, I would pay him a hundred dollars a day there-after, including expenses, until he found my shadow or my money was gone.

I gulped a little at the size of his daily fee, but a modest, hard-working life has enabled me to put aside a very good sum, and to comfort myself, I reckoned that ten thousand dollars spent on finding my shadow would still leave ample for my old age, and perhaps would even run to a restorative trip to the Greek Islands in the off-season after it was all over, so that my shadow and I could re-evaluate our relationship.

Perhaps it seems absurd to go to such lengths, but I was desperate.

Unfortunately, after a week, the investigator could report nothing. He confessed that my inability to remember when I had lost my shadow was a stumbling block. I blushed when he spoke of this, for his words seemed to me to suggest that I had been negligent. Though I continued to argue that the loss could only have happened a little before I noticed it, he clearly doubted me, and made me doubt myself. Brooding over what he'd said, it struck me that I could not remember the last time I had noticed my shadow. I ran my mind over the days before my retirement, and then the weeks and months leading up to it. Finally, frantically, I began to run my mind over the preceding years, but still I could not recall seeing my shadow on any specific occasion. I envisaged all the bright sunny days I had lived through, from forest walks in the autumn to a dip in the blazing summer heat, to no avail.

I could recall seeing my reflection many times, but not my shadow. I told myself at one point that, after all, it was only a shadow, and then was chilled, for perhaps it was just such carelessness that had driven it off. If that were so, I vowed remorsefully, I would show how much I valued it by the fervour of my search.

Fortunately my retirement meant I had no appointments or ties to hold me back. In fact, the investigator had the gall to suggest a link between my retirement and the day I noticed my shadow missing. Ridiculous, especially since he could not substantiate his notion with anything aside from the most simplistic chronological link. Was he suggesting my retirement had provoked the departure of my shadow, I demanded? He bridled at my tone, and though we parted politely, I did not go back to him.

‘Behind there, gardens,' the taxi driver said, nodding at a high wall slashed with graffiti. I wondered why the garden was walled. Perhaps it was a zoological garden and some sort of wildlife dwelt in it. I saw the driver watching me.

‘Gardens,' I said. But I was thinking of my shadow, the hunt for which had brought me across the world. In my own country the search had come to seem farcical, yet my sense of loss and desperation had grown. Finally it came to me that there was little tolerance for or interest in shadows in my country, with its excess of sunlight and brightness. Even the violent abuses committed upon its shores were like the violence of a depraved toddler, mindless acts motivated by primitive fears and incomprehension; they were devoid of true darkness. My shadow would never have remained there. It would have sought out an older, deeper place with crannies and corners where darkness fermented and ripened.

One evening not long after my last encounter with the detective, I was sitting in the communal television room of my boarding house and the person with the remote control changed channels. I found myself watching the end of a documentary in which the camera showed a series of views of an ancient city. The last shot was of a cracked wall, where a child's shadow walked along the shadow of another wall, beneath a scrolling list of names. The documentary ended abruptly and I gave a cry of disappointment.

‘What is that place? Do you know where it is?' I asked the other residents seated about in the mismatched chairs. A flat-faced, sombre-eyed man grunted that he ought to know, since he had been a child there before the occupation, before his parents had escaped and emigrated. I asked if they understood shadows in that place. It was a risky question, but there was a surreal quality to the light in the room which allowed it.

‘There was a time when people had to
be
shadows there,' the man said.

My landlady reproached me for my selfishness when I told her of my intended journey. ‘What would your grandmother think?' She had known my grandmother and had taken me in on her account. Now she was affronted by my decision to leave, as only a woman like her can be, a woman whose masochism was so convoluted that she regarded everything that occurred in the world as somehow directed at her. Nothing that happened, not a car crash in another city in which a stranger died, nor the razing of a park to build a racecourse, nor the swearing of a drunk weaving from a pub, was exempt from being gathered into her aggrieved personal worldview. Of course it was a stunningly self-centred, even socio-pathic way to regard the world.

I answered mildly that, if anything, my grandmother would understand best what I was doing, for she had been a woman of incredible wisdom. Spitefully, my landlady observed that it must have been the weight of all that wisdom that cracked her mind open like an egg. She meant to abash me, for it was true that my grandmother had been quite insane at the end of her life, but instead I remembered with sudden wonder how, not long before the end, she had appeared to become disorientated. She was always imagining she was in the house of her father, no matter where she was; that my home, or the hotel or mental institution or public toilet, were somehow connected to it, if she could just find the right door. She frequently exclaimed over a picture or vase, insisting that it had been moved from the mantelpiece in her father's study, or from the hall table, and worrying that it would trouble him.

‘It is very vexing when things are moved around,' she would sigh and scrub at her forehead fretfully with a tiny clenched fist.

Only now, in this moment, did I understand that her apparent confusion was an awareness of links that had been buried under life, hidden from reason. Children see these links between things very clearly, I believe. It is why they weep at one stranger and smile at another. So do the elderly, some of whom slough off reason with the same gusto with which many of them throw off their clothes, welcoming back the Eden-like simplicity and clarity of childhood. My grandmother's confusion had been nothing less than a deeper seeing of the world, and the documentary had suggested to me that finding my shadow might require such vision. That frightened me, because such a manner of seeing cannot be learned or simulated, for that which allows one to see such links of necessity blinds one to other things. Nevertheless, I vowed that at least I would follow this one strange clue without question.

The airport was very crowded, or so it seemed to me, but perhaps it is always like that in the international terminal. I presented my ticket and little bag to the departure desk, feeling unexpectedly exhilarated. I thought of a quote I had read on my desk calendar the day I left work.
What does not kill you makes you stronger.
It can only have been a warning, for it had been little more than an hour later, walking to the tram stop in bright afternoon sunlight, when I had noticed the absence of my shadow.

I stared down at the ground in front of me, feeling the sun pouring on the back of my head and shoulders. I turned and looked up, intrigued and puzzled, to find out what other light sources could have erased my shadow. Then I noticed that the shadow of the light pole alongside me fell on the ground and up the wall. With a feeling of unreality, I held up a hand to the wall, but it cast no shadow.

I rushed home, staggering with terror, clutching my briefcase loaded with the paraphernalia from my emptied desk.

Another taxi swerves across in front of us, forcing the driver to run over the tramlines. The cobbles make the wheels drum under the seat, and I close my eyes, remembering intimately the way I was pressed into my seat as the plane left the earth and launched itself into a long, drawn-out, vibrating dusk in which the sun seemed to hang for hours half submerged by the horizon.

I decline the proffered tray of food, despite my hunger, and resolve to treat the long flight as a period of fasting and mental preparation for my search. I accept only water, as if I were on a religious pilgrimage. Night falls, and twelve hours later it is still night. I feel, disembarking into a day so darkly overcast and befogged, as if I have entered an endless night that will not be broken until I am reunited with my shadow.

Inside the terminal all is chaos because of the fog. People exclaim and speculate and there is talk of long delays for connecting flights. When a man from my flight complains, the woman at the transfer desk explains reproachfully that we were lucky to have been permitted to land at all. I step forward and name my destination and there is a flicker of interest in her weary eyes.

‘That's becoming very popular. Some say it is the Paris of the 1920s all over again.' Her vowels are so plump they are like fruit waiting to be picked.