Hunters in the Dark Read Online Free Page B

suited to a city like that. He had always wanted a quiet life with his books and a hint of woodland and sea out the window. Too quiet and withdrawn, his parents had decided. They ceased preaching to him about his ambitions. He didn’t have any.
    One had to have a future. But, as it happened, he didn’t have one. The drawn-out economic crisis was gradually overwhelming the once eternal-seeming middle class and eroding it day by day. He was one of the eroded. His parents were barely middle class anyway. His father had been a customs official at Gatwick Airport. Their money was in a converted council house. The only thing that Robert had in his name was the fact that he had always wanted to be a teacher. He went every day to his little provincial schoolroom and stood in front of a blackboard and drew diagrams illustrating the connections between great English writers and kept the kids awake with the occasional sharp word. But to what end? It was little more than ventriloquy. Every day there was a long walk home to a cottage with odorous carpets and a kitchen with a hot plate. An evening playing YouTube videos and old jazz and waiting for something to come on the TV. The sweet bird of youth, in his case, had nowhere to perch and had not taken flight to begin with. His youth was a wingless dodo. One could go on and on and that bird would still not sing. You waited for life to begin and yet for some reason it did not begin. It hesitated while you wondered about the risks. You stood in the wings of your own play, afraid to walk onto the boards and begin.
    He had a sense, meanwhile, that the country’s fortunes were not going to recover for a very long time, perhaps centuries. He was never going to be as comfortable as his father, or even his grandfather. The machine of progress had begun to go backward, and like an Irish navvy a century ago he was better off emigrating. Only there was nowhere to emigrate to. Nowhere that would take him in and give him employment. The world which had once been wide and commodious with America on the horizon had gradually become small and anxious and walled-off. His parents didn’t understand it, and neither in a way did he.
    —
    The embankment lamps came on. How had the day passed so quickly? The swallows were out. Along the roads came the bulbs of pushcarts. It must have been that most surprising thing, contentment, an onset of happiness. The happiness that never is.
    The bridge was alive with motodops. The hive stirred and he felt as if his childhood had been returned to him. Only twenty-eight, and there was no reason ever to feel otherwise. So what a con his life had been up to then, burdening him with things that were not his, and how long it had taken him to find a place which disburdened him. But there it was. Now it was the first cool hour and the phone shops on the far side of that road and the clinics with their blue crosses—Clinic Nouvel!—were as alive as little bazaars. He got up and walked back the way he had come. In front of the guardian lions and the cannons was a pedestrian bridge, people lounging over the river. Below, blossoming cafés, outdoor tables, the thin, elegant young men in their clinging ironed shirts. A place called the River where the handsomer set gathered, the fans stirring a hundred paper napkins. The nights here were soft and aimless and endless. He walked back into the town center. On the pavements, families drinking cans of winter-melon tea with straws. On the televisions, Khmer music and soap operas and the children transfixed. There were fairy lights strung across the streets and beggars hanging by the river wall moving toward him as if they knew already how soft and young his thoughts were. They came out of the darkness with toys and books about Pol Pot and the eternal words
one dolla
.
    He moved through the twilight quietly until he was at the White Rose on Street 2, a place marked in all barang guidebooks. It was empty so he went to the first-floor