King Rich (14 page)

Annie made soft kissing noises and rubbed her thumb and finger together as if offering food. Nervously the dog crept
towards her, allowed itself to be stroked gently under the long sharp jaw.

‘I'm so sorry,' said the woman as she panted onto the scene. ‘He's only a pup.'

‘It's okay,' said Annie, ‘I like dogs, don't I, Bingo?' and she ran a finger down the dog's spine, the ribs like a toast rack.

* * *

A copy of
The Press
lay on the bus seat and on the front page a picture of the leaning central city hotel, under the headline, ‘What am I bid?'

The proceeds from the auction of the right to press the plunger would go to the mayoral fund. And a raised stage would be backed by a temporary grandstand on the riverbank near the Bridge of Remembrance.

The bus was virtually immobile on Riccarton Road. Annie took the cell phone from her Santorini bag and while she waited for it to power up stared idly out of the window. The pavements teemed. The mall car park was packed and a dozen vehicles toured it on the off chance, like opportunist predators. The quake had done nothing, it seemed, to diminish the urge to consume.

She turned a page of the paper and there was Vince. He was neatly dressed, his shirt open at the neck, posed for the camera, half smiling and cornily holding his old school photo, under the headline, ‘Best friend sought after 40 years.' Inset into the photo
and hopelessly blurred was a blow-up of Vince and Richard in the back row with their 1969 hair, and just visible in the air above them the wind-thrown magpie. Though the text made no reference to Annie, she felt within her gut a worm of unease.

The phone came to life with a series of bells and squeals. Though Annie's year of birth fitted her just within the generation that the advertisers considered ‘tech-native', she did not see herself that way. She could manage the hardware, could intuit her way around a screen, but she would never love the stuff for itself, nor would she ever consider it fundamental to her life, a part of the way she lived. Her two-year-old phone was already considered retro by some of her friends, as if by retaining it she were making a statement.

She scrolled through the list of messages. Vince had repeatedly tried to get in touch. Jess twice. There was a text from Paul and one from, oh Jesus, her mother. As she brought it on screen Annie felt a gulp of something close to dread. ‘Call me,' it said. That was all. Though Annie knew that there would have been an exclamation mark if her mother had known how to type one.

Later would be soon enough for Mum. She brought Vince's number up, then decided not to call. She wasn't sure enough of how she felt. She brought up Paul's text. Though technologically astute, Paul wasn't known for using the medium's communicative potential. ‘Hi, Annie. Mother on tail. Good luck. P.'

And Annie felt suddenly like a schoolgirl, back on River Road, polite, deferential and scared.

‘But he had every right to do it,' said Jess. ‘I don't see what your problem is. Your dad
was
his best mate, and he hasn't seen him for forty years. And since the quakes Vince is not the only one to feel that time may be shorter than we think and that if you want to do something, now's not a bad time to do it. And he's kept you out of it.'

‘Yeah but…'

‘But what, Annie? Are you scared that he might actually find him? Is that it?'

‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘Then what's the problem?'

Annie wasn't sure. It was partly, she knew, the appropriation. This was
her
cause, her mission. She didn't want it diluted. A shameful selfishness, but there was no denying it lurked within her. But there was another reason for her unease at what Vince had done, something to do with its public nature. It simplified and coarsened what was a purely private quest. And then,
of course, as Jess suggested, the publicity did bring a greater likelihood of learning what it might be easier, in the long run, not to learn.

‘I just wish he'd asked, that's all,' Annie said weakly.

‘And you'd have said no. Here, love,' said Jess pushing the bottle across the table, ‘have a drink and stop worrying for once. You always were a worrier, you know, even at school. It had its uses, I'll admit. You acted as a sort of handbrake on some of the wilder stuff and you did sometimes usefully see difficulties before they arose. But you specialised in difficulties that were never going to arise.'

Annie smiled and poured what she promised herself would be the last drink of a long day. ‘You could have done with worrying a little more yourself.'

‘And a fat lot of good that would have done,' said Jess. ‘Now shall I be blunt?'

Annie laughed. ‘As opposed to your usual subtle and delicate?'

‘Thank you,' said Jess. ‘Look, there are three possibilities. You could go home without finding your dad, which may be the path of least resistance but it gets nobody anywhere. You could find he's dead. Or you could find him alive. What Vince has done is reduce the chances of the first and increased the chances of the other two and I say good on him. If he unearths some uncomfortable truths, would you really rather not know them? You're a big girl now, Annie. Now if you want some good news read the text I sent you while I fetch dinner.'

Jess swung her legs off the recliner and stood with a grunt of exertion. Annie noticed the bulk of Jess's calves, peppered with a few days' growth of black stubble, and felt a welling of affection for this woman, this friend of so many years. Like Annie she was just past thirty and good at her job and single and childless. Unlike Annie, she had no offer of marriage and children and was in danger of passing the point where either would become unlikely. And if she didn't marry, if she didn't have kids, if she just went on going on, being good at her job, an aunt to some, a friend to others, a forthright nurse who chivvied thousands back to health, was that enough? Or did it simply not matter? ‘However you use it, it goes,' she thought.

‘Twice-cooked melting pork belly,' announced Jess. The smell of spices brought a place to mind that Annie couldn't quite identify.

‘You spoil me, Jess,' she said.

‘Oh for God's sake,' said Jess. ‘I like eating and I like cooking and you give me the excuse to do both. So shut up and eat. I hope it's okay. I saw it on the telly and my mouth watered so much I almost drowned. If you don't like it, don't tell me.'

Then it came to Annie: Gerrard Street, Soho, main thoroughfare of Chinatown, where the red ducks hung by their hundreds in the windows, their necks coiled like question marks.

At the touch of a knife the melting pork melted, the meat fibres drenched through with fat and spices. They gorged in silence for a while.

‘You haven't read the text I sent you, have you?' said Jess. ‘I'll save you the trouble. Karl's asked for you, Karl Hamilton, you know, all banged up in orthopaedics.'

‘Why?' Annie looked up from her plate in surprise.

‘Search me. But he wants you to visit without the dreaded Denise. Or Vince, for that matter.'

‘Did you go up and bully him?'

‘Perish the thought, sweetheart, I have my standards. No, Jenny from orthopaedics was talking to him after you'd gone and she knew I knew you and well, that's what he wants. I said you'd be sure to pop along tomorrow morning. Did I do right?'

She'd done right. As Annie was taking plates to the kitchen her phone rang. ‘Mum,' said the screen. Annie let it ring. It was too late in the day and Annie had heard too much from Ben for it not to affect her attitude, her tone of voice. And she did not want an argument. Annie never wanted an argument. Even so as the phone rang its eleven rings she felt ill at ease. Blood was blood. Mother left no message.

The phone rang again over coffee. ‘Vince,' said the screen. She wasn't sure that she wanted to talk to him either, but she reasoned that she would have to at some stage and now was as good a time as any.

‘Annie,' said Vince before Annie could say any of the things she had a mind to say, ‘I'm sorry. Your mother's on her way.'

‘On her way? What, here? Now?'

‘Tomorrow. She's flying down tomorrow.'

‘She doesn't know I'm here, does she?'

Annie heard the hesitation. ‘Shit,' she said. Behind her on the sofa she heard Jess laugh.

* * *

‘One of her friends, apparently,' said Annie as she poured the coffee, ‘saw Vince's thing in the paper, and let Mum know. And she put two and two together, rang her darling daughter in London, and got an evasive boyfriend on the phone. So she rang Vince, saying only she was an old friend of the family and she knew Richard had a daughter and suggested Vince went looking for her, whereupon Vince of course spilt the beans and there we are.'

‘When does the eagle land?'

‘Tomorrow afternoon.'

‘Are you going to see her?'

‘I don't have much choice, do I?'

‘Sure you do. You're a free and independent adult.'

But even as Jess was speaking Annie was shaking her head. She knew she could no more not go to meet her mother than she could rob a bank. It was baseline morality, first principle stuff. The right thing. Where it came from didn't matter. ‘Well,' said Jess, ‘I'm a free and independent adult and she's not staying here.'

‘Oh, I wasn't…'

‘I didn't like her when we were kids, Annie, and I'm not going to give her the chance to start making a better impression on me now.'

Annie said nothing.

‘Oh, for God's sake,' exclaimed Jess, bursting into laughter, ‘it's only your bloody mother. And you're thirty years old. Come on, sweetheart.'

Despite herself, Annie smiled and then she laughed.

* * *

At three Annie woke. The night was stuffy, oppressively humid. Her head ached, her mouth was dry and she needed the bathroom. With a sigh she stood up. Jess's bedroom door was open. Rich, reverberant snoring. Aspirin, a glass of iced water from the fridge, and feeling the need for some uncontained air, Annie unlocked the back door and stood in her nightdress in the garden as a mad woman might. Light, fast-moving clouds streamed either side of an almost full and almost orange moon.

A noise to Annie's left and she swung around to glimpse the cat slithering over the fence. How different was the world at night, in Hornby, in Turnpike Lane, in Malawi, anywhere. We are so firmly day's creatures, putting such faith in our eyes, that when the light fades our other senses overcompensate and prickle our skin.

As Annie got back into bed she thought of her mother arriving. And that was that for sleep. Thoughts swelled in the darkness, rolled around and around. Annie lay on her right side, her left side, her back, her front. She kicked the duvet off her legs. She thought of birds flying, of open places she'd
loved, of the Mackenzie Country where the tussock waves like skinny wheat and the roads are lined with lupins, images that she had used for years as tracks to follow till they faded into the different landscape of sleep, but nothing would do. She tried telling herself that it really didn't matter, that she could cope, would cope, that under the gaze of the moon it was a nothing, a triviality, that people were dying in a thousand places as she lay there and fretted about meeting her mother, that a week from now she'd have forgotten about it, would be astonished it had ever concerned her. But the pillow grew hot, the bed itchy, and the nightdress ruched around her flesh.

At five she gave up, lay on her back open-eyed and tried to think it through. It was guilt. She had deceived her mother, had come to New Zealand without telling her. She'd been wrong to do so. Annie rehearsed the arguments for the defence: that she was here on a mission that her mother would despise, that she was here only briefly, that she was in a different part of the country, that her mother had deceived her about her father's fate, that her mother was manipulative and selfish, that she, Annie, was over thirty and had been dutiful all her life. But though they all made sense they did not begin to outweigh the simple fact of her own wrong.

She heard Jess's alarm go off, followed a few minutes later by footsteps to the bathroom. Daylight cruelly fringed the curtain. The toilet flushed. The next thing Annie knew it was nine o'clock.

The scaffolders had finished work on the stage. It stood skeletal on the parched turf of North Hagley, rock-concert size. A breeze picked up and dust devils flickered round the base where the turf had been worn to a crumble of earth. Men were now at work fitting plywood flooring and stretching vast blue tarpaulins to form the arch of a roof. Others ran spools of electrical cable out of vans full of electronics and laced them through and under and tied them to the metal frame with little plastic straps.

Stretching out in front of the stage, the space for the crowd, the congregation, was huge, several football pitches worth of sun-browned grass. The paper had speculated that fifty thousand or more would attend, one in eight of the city's population. But it did not suggest why. Was it a sense of community, a religious hunger of some sort, a need for consolation, or just a free concert with celebrities to gawp at?

Ministers of the Crown would be there, up to and including the prime minister, ministers of every faith from
Islam to Mormon, the ubiquitous mayor, leaders of the armed services, of the rescue services, of the police, pop musicians, classical musicians, all had been asked and all had said yes. And validating the whole strange exercise, poor Wills, condemned to a life of just such strange exercises, to playing a role from here to eternity. ‘What very strange creatures we are,' thought Annie.

Across the river, she identified the balcony where an old man had sought to flatter and deceive her. But she could see no sign of him.

When she stepped into the ward Karl saw her immediately and smiled and beckoned her with his good arm. He seemed less tense, more mellow, though still strung up with and screwed into an array of medical paraphernalia.

‘Are you allowed chocolates?' said Annie, pulling packages from her Santorini bag. ‘There's fruit as well, though. Just in case. How are you feeling? It was good of you to ask me back. I'm sorry we…'

‘Annie.' As he reached out his hand to take hers, she realised she had been gabbling. ‘Thank you for coming. Denise doesn't know I've asked you back. Yes, I know you went to see her and I can imagine what she said. I asked you here just to apologise. In my current condition I've become more emotional but that's no excuse. No, no, Annie, let me finish. I owe it to your dad. He meant, he means, a lot to me. Though before you ask I don't know where he is. But I'll answer any questions you've got. Tell me what you know.'

When Annie mentioned Ben, Karl visibly relaxed.

‘I wasn't sure how much you knew. That makes things easier.'

Karl had met her father at art school in Auckland. It was the early seventies and teaching representative drawing or indeed formally teaching anything was considered Victorian and repressive. ‘We learned nothing,' said Karl. ‘To pass the course you just had to keep breathing for three years. Rich just about managed that.'

As Annie had noticed before, when old friends spoke of her father, they bathed in the memories, smiled at them, seemed to shed the burdens of age. But then again, perhaps that was true of all reminiscing. The memory is a kind editor, compressing yesterday into a wad of rich experience, squeezing from it all the tedium and the routine, all the stuff that today seems crammed with. And though memory doesn't dump the bad stuff, it draws the sting from all but the worst of it and plays it for laughs.

Short of money like all students, Karl and Richard had formed a sign-writing company, jazzing up shop fronts. ‘There are still a couple of places on K Road that are a Hamilton and Jones design circa 1971. We both had ideas but your dad did the painting. He had a brave hand. At his best, a few strokes of the brush and he'd be done.'

After art school, qualified for nothing but fearing less, they'd gone together on the more or less compulsory OE, shared a flat in London with an ever-shifting cast of young Australasians,
and even done design work on a few shop fronts on the Earls Court Road. A Kombi van took them round Europe and Asia Minor at a time when it seemed so much easier to go from place to place. ‘Though today's kids will probably be saying the same thing forty years from now. The older I get, the more I think the world changes less than we do. To the young the world is always full of promise, don't you think, Annie?'

Annie said something noncommittal, not wanting to break the narrative.

They'd parted ways for a while. Richard had spent time in North Africa but both had ended back in Christchurch the following year, where they founded an official business entity, Hamilton and Jones, Graphic Designers. ‘Your dad was no businessman. I handled that. But he could draw, and he had a knack of fitting the design to the customer. He read them better than they often read themselves and drew the stuff they hadn't known they wanted till they saw it. And we were young enough to be seen as magazinish, trendy, cutting edge.'

Business went well, they hired staff and Karl married Denise. Richard would have been best man but he and Denise had clashed from the start. For a wedding present he gave them a drawing of a cat melting over a fence, done with half a dozen strokes of a charcoal pencil.

‘I told Denise it was from an aunt in South Africa. She loved it, hung it in the hall at home. She often shows it off.' Karl chuckled strongly enough to rattle his metal girdle.

A nurse looked across from her station. Karl waved.

What had this big, soft man ever seen in Denise? She must have been a demanding wife. But people walked into marriage with their eyes open. Had Karl wanted someone to control him as clearly as Denise would have wanted to do the controlling? Annie didn't know.

‘If your father had a weakness, it was sex. Nothing odd about that in a man, of course, but Rich seemed to need it. And he loved to walk on the wild side, as it were. You want me to go on?'

Annie nodded.

‘When we were at art school it was still illegal to be gay. Can you believe that? Jesus, back then gay still meant cheerful. But if you knew where to look it was all over the place and Rich knew where to look and he actually seemed to enjoy the danger of it.

‘He was like that for as long as I knew him. And when we got to London he just dived right in. He'd try anything. Some of the stories he told, honestly, a conventional chap like me could hardly credit them, and I doubt I got to hear a tenth of what actually went on. He settled down a bit when we got back here and went properly into business – he'd had a bit of a scare in Morocco, he told me, and besides he wasn't quite so young and reckless any more – but still, when he walked into the office one Monday morning and asked if I'd be his best man, it came as a shock. I met Raewyn that same week. She was a stunner, your mother.'

Annie had seen the photos – androgynous, skinny, waifish, frayed jeans, the defining late-seventies look.

‘She was pregnant, of course, with you, several months gone.'

Karl paused, and looked at Annie enquiringly. She nodded.

‘Your dad was never in love with Raewyn, but with you it was love at first sight. He'd bring you to the office for the morning as soon as you could crawl, and we had a little playpen built for you. And he did some great work when you were little. It was his creative peak, I think. We did so well, thanks to you, we had to move into new premises.'

‘With tall windows,' said Annie.

Karl smiled. ‘Yes, sash windows. They gave wonderful light. Happy times. Then he met Ben. He told me about it from the start. That was another thing about your dad – I never knew him tell a lie. It was as if the idea of lying didn't occur to him. He said he was in love and he was going to tell Raewyn. I begged him not to. I was pretty sure how she'd react. I got him to hold off for a week or two. I thought the affair with Ben would fade. All the others had.'

And here Karl faltered. Annie heard the catch in his voice, looked up and could sense the emotion welling inside him just as it had the last time she'd been there. She took his hand.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘Take your time.'

She could see Karl doing battle within himself, fighting down a surge of distress, the mat of hair on his chest heaving as if alive.

A nurse padded over, straightened a sheet. ‘Everything all right, Mr Hamilton?'

Karl smiled at the nurse. The way she had addressed him, as if he were a vulnerable child, seemed to make him pull himself together. She moved on.

‘I told Denise,' said Karl suddenly. He looked straight at Annie, as if he'd overcome some hurdle and wanted her to see it. Annie looked back at him, puzzled.

‘I told Denise about Rich and Ben.'

It was only then that Annie grasped what he meant. She shook her head in surprise and squeezed Karl's hand. ‘It's all right, Karl,' she said, ‘it's all right. Raewyn was bound to find out. If it hadn't been Denise, it would have been someone else. Besides, if it was anyone's fault it was Dad's. He had the affair.'

Karl looked at her directly. ‘Denise couldn't stand Rich. He was too dangerous for her. She's a very conventional woman. She'd have seen it as her duty to tell Raewyn. I should have known.'

Annie wasn't so sure about duty. She imagined Denise phoning, or even coming round to River Road, pulsing with the excitement of being the bearer of bad news. And that would have been the day she remembered with such clarity, the day from which she dated the rest of her life, the day when she'd come home from school in her summer cotton uniform of green and white check.

She saw again from her bedroom window her mother feeding the bonfire at the foot of the garden, seething with anger, unapproachable, unappeasable, dragging clothes from the house, a brown jacket being flung onto the fire and assuming in
midair the shape of half a man, its arms outspread, then landing on the flames and flaring within seconds, to be followed by trousers, socks, shoes, books, everything tainted with the touch of the betrayer.

‘It's all right, Karl,' she said. ‘It's not your fault.'

He closed his eyes but held on to her hand. And he sighed, heavily, a couple of times. She squeezed his hand again. ‘I'd better go,' she said. ‘I've tired you.'

His eyes popped open. ‘Don't even think of going,' he said.