King Rich (10 page)

Dawn finds him on his back. As he wakes, a tongue of sun, oblique through the window, lies slantwise up his body, and without moving he studies what it illuminates, as if it were a court exhibit. The distant toenails, thickened and yellow-grey, like aged dried resin. Each foot a fan of bones and tendons, so close to skeletal, yet topped with a feeble tuft of hair, a faint, ridiculous primate legacy. His shins gleam like cracked old Sellotape.

The bathrobe maps the contours of his midsection until the rift of the lapels reveals the sternum, sallow, sown with scrubby hair, like bleached badlands. He surveys it all with indifference, surprised by its tenacity, this all-but-gone thing. He looks on it as one might an insect on its back faintly stirring its legs by reflex, but without hope or purpose, awaiting only the moment of expiry or the quick thoughtless jab of the bird's beak. This husk, this bone bag.

Friday, curled on the counterpane, has woken with his waking, and without unfurling is watching him be. He reaches
out and lays a hand on the dog's flank, feels the ribs through the fur and skin, the healthy warmth, hears the dog's tail beat against the bedclothes once, twice.

‘Friday, Friday,' he says and the dog slithers off the bed and stretches, a long, loosening concave arching of the skeleton from back legs to hips to spine to shoulders and neck.

‘Oh Friday,' he says and smiles despite himself. With a sigh he swings his legs off the bed and stands but he is feeble and he sits back down, his hands on his thighs. He is acutely conscious of his breathing, and dizzied by what feels like a stream of little bubbles in the head.

‘Patience, dog,' he whispers, because to speak any louder would take energy. ‘Patience.' But the needs of the dog oblige him and he heaves himself to his feet, keeping a hand on the bedside table. He slides bone-fan feet into fluffy slippers, and shuffles towards the door, not raising those feet, one hand out to steady himself at all times, against the wardrobe door, the wall, the back of a chair.

Sunshine does not reach into the corridor. He misses the warmth on his flesh, and he struggles to open the fire door on either side of the stairwell. On the second of these doors, the dogs stands on its hind legs and scrabbles with its front paws and its extra weight helps and the door opens on what he thinks of with a shudder as the corridor of catastrophe.

Flies still. Despite the bleach. Not in such appalling abundance, but attendant, hateful. He shuffles past the scene of collapse, drawn to the bright-lit frame of the doorway, grateful
that the rubber plant is still blocking open the heavy door. And they are out on the rooftop again, and his flesh, like a lizard's, drinks at the warmth of the sun.

The dog wanders down the ramp to piss, sniffing at the walls and concrete as it goes to check for evidence of interlopers in the night, and finding something of interest on the way, to sniff at protractedly and then to cock a leg above, to overscent.

Richard grips the back of the chair, wheezing a little. It comes to him that this is where and how he will betray the dog. He will shift the planter and the heavy door will fall shut with him on one side and the dog on the other. And then, he tells himself, he will withdraw deep inside the building, will put walls and doors between himself and dog. Every dog is a pragmatist. If scratching and whining do not work, in the end the dog will stop scratching and whining and will go elsewhere. The key will be to go beyond earshot.

It will not be long. He has Tux for perhaps another week. But he could not mount another raid on the convenience store, even if he wanted to.

While waiting for the dog now, he sits at his little concrete shelter, his head in the shade, his legs in the sun. He pours Evian into Friday's bowl, and some into a glass. To which he adds, after thought, a miniature of vodka. It is the purest drink, wisest for a fragile morning. He is aware of drained strength.

A flutter, a beating, a brief clamour of wings and the pigeon lands unsummoned on the rooftop by his chair, lurches to the dog's bowl and dunks its beak. Richard watches as it drinks,
not raising its head to tilt the water down its throat as other birds do, but sucking at it with its beak immersed for several seconds. He admires the petrol sheen of the bird's neck, the layered loveliness of its wing feathers. He crumbles a little biscuit on the arm of the chair. The bird cocks up a round black eye, assessing, seemingly unworried, then crouches and launches easily upwards to peck at the crumbs.

Friday, his reconnaissance done, comes loping towards them. ‘Sit,' says Richard when the dog is still a few yards away and it pauses in puzzlement. ‘Sit,' he repeats and with infinite slowness the dog lowers its haunches, its eyes scanning Richard for some explanation of this strange behaviour. Richard offers none till the dog's rump touches concrete, then he smiles. ‘Good boy,' he says and lobs a chunk of biscuit.

He pops a chunk into his own mouth at the same time, and lets his saliva soften it before he takes it on with what remain of his teeth. When he swallows he is surprised by the almost immediate sense of gained strength. The blind urge to get better, to re-establish wellbeing, hard-wired into the flesh, uninfluenced by the will. He raises his glass, and the bird, without alarm, hops down and conducts a rocking club-footed tour of the area around the chair, and Friday, now familiar with the idea, lets it be and drinks instead, sloppily, noisily, wastefully, from his bowl of mineral spring water that people once brought all the way from France.

* * *

Jess had gone to work. Annie peeped into her room. A double bed, the sheets royal blue, the duvet flung in a heap. It screamed not just of living alone, but of expecting to continue living alone.

Annie took her coffee onto the verandah. The web by the light was tattered and sagging, its edges ragged and two large holes torn into it. Annie touched its stickiness, shook her finger, and the spider stirred, half unfurling itself from a corner of the woodwork then pausing, reassessing, shrinking back into its crack in the world.

The phone rang. ‘Have you heard from Hamilton yet?' asked Vince.

She was mildly surprised that she hadn't. And besides, she didn't see how anyone could ignore the simple personal appeal of her quest. A daughter seeks her father.

‘He's in hospital,' said Vince.

Vince was clearly a far more diligent and effective sleuth than she. Karl Hamilton, it seemed, had been at lunch in Cashel Mall when the quake struck. They'd had to dig him out. A crushed pelvis and sundry other injuries. He would be in hospital for a while yet.

‘How on earth do you find this stuff out?'

‘I'm learning as I go,' said Vince, but with more than a hint of smugness. ‘A late participant in the information revolution. Anyway, do you want to go and see him?'

Did she? She was no longer sure.

‘Annie?'

‘Sorry, yes, just thinking. Is he visitable? I mean, can we just breeze in?'

‘According to his wife, yes. He's bored stiff.'

‘His wife?'

‘Yes, I rang her. Lives in Mount Pleasant. But don't worry, I just said I was an old business contact. Apparently he's strung up in traction and there's only so much daytime television a man can cope with. Will you go? Because I will if you don't.'

* * *

On the floor above the car park roof Richard is in search of bottled water for the dog. He finds it in a conference centre along with data projectors and spiral notebooks and hotel-branded ballpoints and cupboards packed with paraphernalia: boxes of gilt candelabra; a disco mirror ball; a set of fashion mannequins with curved plastic bodies; Christmas decorations and a Santa Claus outfit; half a dozen banjos; a dozen parasols still in their original plastic wrappers.

Beyond the conference centre, double doors open onto a grand hall or auditorium, abandoned in the process of being set for a banquet, with round tables spread about the floor, and thick, stiff tablecloths spread over them, now wearing a dandruff of plaster. Friday scours the corners, the skirtings, perhaps the first dog ever to walk this floor. Richard sits at a table, tired from the ascent of two flights of stairs. The dog finds nothing of interest.

‘Shall we throw a party?' says Richard.

The dog's ears prick at the tone of voice and its eyes brighten.

‘You can be guest of honour, Friday. It's a sad dog that doesn't love a party.'

And Richard laughs and coughs and hunches over the table, spluttering, and a sudden stab in the gut makes him fear for his bowels. But they hold, and in time he sits up again and reaches into the pocket of his robe and chooses at random from the miniatures jostling within it and fishes out a Gordon's. His fingers tremble as he raises it to his lips and sips it neat.

‘The Last Supper, Friday. What do you reckon?'

And with the gusto of his kind Friday gives every sign of approving.

Prince William was coming. He had been dispatched on a condolence tour of bits of the former empire that had been thumped by calamity. Christchurch was his last stop. He would be taken on a tour of the central city, a place still forbidden to those who lived or worked there, and he would be guest of honour at a memorial service in North Hagley Park. They were building the stage for it now.

On her way to the hospital Annie was typically early. Though it was now officially autumn, the sun retained the intensity it rarely seemed to achieve in Turnpike Lane, biting at her forearms with carcinogenic seduction. Annie loved it. Who was the character in a Mansfield story, stuck in a London winter, whose whole being unfurled and reached towards the memory of sunshine, the idea of warmth?

Three trucks stood by Victoria Lake, scaffolding poles on their flatbeds, wiry men tossing them onto the grass with a clang. Was that a wolf whistle? She looked around. A skinny
guy in jeans and singlet on the back of the truck was smirking at her.

She couldn't remember when she'd last heard such a whistle, and as for one aimed at her, well, she'd never been the type. She'd always supposed it was something to do with her height, the curly hair that she kept cropped short, her long, quick stride. In her experience, the women men whistled at, or used to, were doll-like creatures who flaunted breast and hair and hips but who were also small enough to be dominated or protected. But what was the guy on the truck expecting? Why bother? Did he imagine it was a compliment? Or was there some sort of irony to it?

But the man did not seem troubled by any thoughts of this nature, indeed by thoughts of any nature. He had apparently forgotten Annie already – that was more true to form – and was now blithely and usefully lobbing clamps onto a pile, each landing with a satisfyingly metallic clunk.

With time to kill Annie took a seat by the little artificial lake to watch the stage being built, the stage that in a few days' time would be trodden by a future king.

That king was engaged to be married. His Kate, who would not be accompanying him on this tour, had done what a million girls had fantasised about, especially when William was at university and briefly boy-band beautiful. (Though how rapidly that beauty had faded. His hair had thinned, his cheeks had lost their roses and month by month you could just see him becoming his own heavy-jawed uncle. It had been almost cruel to watch.)

Kate nevertheless remained in the role of Cinderella, that most enduring piece of mental furniture for girls. At home in London now, preparing for their wedding and imprisoned by a phalanx of telephoto lenses in the street below like a machine-gun battery trained on her night and day for the rest of her life, Kate was about to embark on the good ship
Happily Ever After
. Just as William's mother had.

Annie had been in the sixth form when Diana died. On Avonside Drive, half a world away from Paris, girls clung to each other and wept. Jess had openly scoffed at their red-eyed misery in a way that Annie admired but would not have dared. But the mournful had drawn succour from each other, feasting off each other's emotion and generating something close to a firestorm of grief, or at least of the symptoms of grief. But for what? What precisely were they mourning? Annie hadn't known then and didn't now.

All she did know was that it was part of the same odd emotional dependence that made William's visit the opportunity for a memorial service. Though many had said that it was too soon, that the feelings remained raw, that there were still scraps of flesh unretrieved in the burnt rubble of one building.

‘May I?'

An old man in trackpants was gesturing at the bench.

‘Of course,' said Annie and she hitched her tote bag needlessly a little closer to demonstrate her acceptance. The man lowered himself towards the bench but with six inches still to go gravity
proved stronger than the muscles of his thighs and his backside finished its brief descent in a sudden rush, a plummet. He gave a little gasp. Annie felt the planks of the bench flex and rebound, like some sort of indecent and intimate connection.

The man was breathing heavily, leaning forward with his fists on his knees. Annie waited. She looked away to where the workmen were still lobbing clamps from truck to grass, but the start of a conversation clearly hung in the air between her and the old man, awaiting only his recovery from the exertion of sitting.

‘Buried a friend last week,' he said, and rather than turning his head to look at Annie he swivelled the whole of his body, as if his neck were a single bone.

‘Oh,' said Annie, ‘I'm sorry,' and she began to plan her departure.

‘You've got to wonder where he is.'

‘Indeed,' said Annie.

‘I mean we were told as kids that heaven was up there,' and he pointed briefly and with some difficulty skyward, seemingly restricted in his movements as if not just his neck but most of his skeleton was somehow fused. ‘But I've been up there, and there was no one there, well at least up as far as 95,000 feet.'

He started to breathe heavily and fast and Annie was alarmed until she realised he was laughing. Again he swivelled his frame to look at her, to see how well his wit was going down. Despite herself, Annie tried to look as if it was going down nicely. It did not feel convincing to her, but it seemed to satisfy him.

‘US Navy fighter jet,' he said. ‘Nineteen seventy-eight. Ninety-five thousand feet and nobody up there. Not a soul,' and the man resumed his heavy-breath chuckle.

‘I see,' said Annie.

‘And if you started to dig, right here,' and he scrabbled briefly on his knees with his fingers as if playing a snatch of Chopin, ‘and you kept on digging right through the centre of the earth, if that was possible, which it isn't, of course, as we know' – he paused to breathe a bit, to recover – ‘do you know where you'd pop up on the other side, do you know where our antipodes is?'

‘Portugal,' said Annie and instantly regretted it.

The man did not reply. He was clearly accustomed to conversations that were effectively monologues, that required from his audience only expressions of assent. Annie had shot him down. She could feel him striving to reinflate the balloon of his self-confidence.

Why could she not have let him bore her for a bit more and then slip away? Why did she have to wound? She was as bad as he, really, well no, not quite… ‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘I must be going.' She stood.

‘I'm seventy-seven today,' the man said. He said it as if playing a picture card. And he looked up her in rigid appeal, his eyes reverting to liquid, his mouth pulled slightly open, his teeth ruinous.

Oh God, thought Annie. ‘Many happy returns,' she said and she reached out and patted the old man on the shoulder, as one
might pat a child. His shirt felt damp and clammy. ‘I'd love to stay and chat but I really must be off.'

From the look on his face it was impossible to tell whether she'd repaired the damage she'd done, whether he'd forgotten her sharpness. She hoped so. The best you could do in this world, she supposed, was to avoid causing unnecessary pain. Though why it was always she and others like her who did the avoiding… Well, she had no answer but to flash the old man a smile, turn and walk away. Was it really his birthday? She doubted it. But better, by far, to go along, to pretend.

Still with time on her hands, she followed the loop of the Avon through the park, looking across the weed beds and the gravel bottom sprinkled with beer bottles to the botanic gardens it enclosed. Sunlight shafting through foliage lit patches of water to an old green gold. She glimpsed an eel nosing under the far bank, a grey-faced heron poised immobile and intent. She stopped to watch, stood as still as the heron.

Seventy-seven. Did anyone get to seventy-seven well? He'd been to 95,000 feet in an American plane. You didn't invent detail like that. He must have been someone, as it were. And a husband? A father? Most men were, weren't they? His kids then, now forty, fifty years old, families of their own, did they know where Dad was on what may have been his birthday? Did they know he was accosting strangers with stories in a park? And if they did, did they care?

The heron bent towards the water with infinite slowness. Patience, that was the quality. The bird stabbed the water
and came up with a fingerling held crosswise in its beak, wriggling but hopelessly pinned. With two flicks of practised deftness the heron aligned the fish with its gullet and swallowed it whole and wriggling, down the long and pretty throat to where it would writhe, briefly, in gastric juices, and then die.

Vince was waiting in the foyer of the public hospital. With him a tall grey-haired woman in dark linen trousers and a white shirt.

‘Mrs Hamilton,' said Vince. ‘Denise.'

‘We've met before,' the woman said without smiling, or offering her hand, ‘though you wouldn't remember. You were two. How's your poor mother?'

In the lift to the fifth floor, Denise stood facing the doors, as if willing them to open.

Annie flashed a look at Vince, who gave her the faintest of shrugs. It wouldn't have been hard for Vince to find Denise, but why was she here now? Annie sensed again a web of stuff, of complexity. But then, it had been twenty years. A lot happens in twenty years.

The fifth-floor corridor was the essence of deepest hospital, the linoleum uniquely cushioned, swabbed and squeaky, and the smell of disinfectant. A high-sided cot bore a load of scrawny age, white haired and shrunken, propelled by a porter in pastel pyjamas. Nurses with strong calf muscles, a white-coated doctor toting the stethoscope that Annie always suspected them of wearing as a badge of status. Why did nurses never have one?
Were they not allowed to use them? Their heraldic device was the fob watch inverted.

Somewhere in this warren of a building, Jess would be cheerfully bullying staff and patients for their own good, making things happen, scrubbing the world with her energy and forthright courage.

Denise led the way, striding past wards and windows and dispensaries, and sanctuaries for nurses only, and rooms where patients sat in dressing gowns and stared at televisions, and a waiting area where three couples in their sixties sat in outdoor clothes and it wasn't immediately clear which of each pair was sick.

They stopped outside a ward. ‘Would you mind?' said Denise, gesturing to them to wait in the corridor, and she went in without waiting for a reply.

‘She insisted,' whispered Vince. ‘I could hardly say no.'

‘It doesn't matter.' They turned to the window overlooking Hagley Park. In the distance she could make out the vast acreage of netball courts, where she'd spent so many winter Saturday mornings in what seemed now like another world. And as she'd played on one particular Saturday twenty years ago, had her father lain up here all broken and alone, unvisited perhaps?

‘Darling,' said Denise in an overloud, oversolicitous voice, ‘this is Annie, Raewyn's daughter, you remember? She's come all the way from England,' and she gestured to Annie to step forward, as if directing a play.

Karl looked like a patient in a cartoon. One leg was plastered and held off the bed by wires and ratchets, and round his hips was a sort of metal girdle, a shiny immobilising clamp. Threaded metal rods with wing-nuts on them appeared to pass directly through the clamp and into his flesh and presumably bone. It was hard to look at.

‘Annie,' he said, and he smiled softly, and held out a hand to her, which she took as if to shake but he just laid it across her palm and kept it there, holding hands as little children are supposed to do, though Annie couldn't remember ever having done so.

‘Let me look at you,' he said and Annie remembered him, remembered the size of him, the shape of his mouth. She remembered him standing against tall sash windows, windows full of sky, and other men sitting on stools at angled drawing boards. He'd been wearing green corduroy trousers, ribbed like a ploughed paddock, and an open-necked shirt. The neck of his pyjamas now framed a forest of hair, a simian mat of it, greyish and swirled like seaweed.

‘It's your birthday soon,' said Karl. ‘Am I right?'

Annie looked at him in a surprise that threatened to become pleasure.

‘Rich always took the day off. He had it written into a contract. I thought it was a joke at first. I mean we were friends. We didn't have to put stuff like that into contracts. But he meant it, and he kept to it, even after, well…'

He turned his head a little towards his wife. She looked tart, pursed, tense.

Annie watched as he seemed to struggle with his thoughts. His face darkened and then seemed almost to crumple.

‘I'm sorry, Annie. I did what I could. But nothing did any good.'

‘You did everything anyone could do,' said Denise. Sitting on the other side of the bed, she had kept a proprietorial hand on her husband's forearm. She patted the forearm now, as one might comfort a child. ‘No one could have done more.'

‘It was all such a shame.'

‘What was?' said Annie. ‘What was such a shame?'

But the big man on the bed had closed his eyes and he was gulping.

‘That's it,' said Denise, standing up and taking command. ‘No, that's it, I knew this would happen. I must ask you to leave now. Now.' And she turned, eyes wide, and shooed Annie and Vince away from the bed. ‘Go now, please, just go now,' and as the two of them retreated she pulled the curtain round the bed. From behind it there came a sort of long moan, a strange, keening sound, almost a wail. A nurse clip-clopped past them at speed and slid through the curtain.

Denise emerged. ‘Go,' she said fiercely, ‘I said go. The pair of you. You've seen the state he's in. You've seen what you've done. I want you to leave now.' She advanced on Annie and Vince flapping at them with her hands as if shooing geese, forcing them back into the corridor and then down it.