King Rich (18 page)

‘My mother's here somewhere,' said Annie. ‘She came down from Blenheim specially. She sees it as a free concert, I think.'

‘So do the kids,' said Ben.

Annie smiled. The kids and her mother were right to some extent. It was billed as a memorial service, but there was an atmosphere, if not of festival, at least of picnic. Lovely early-autumn weather and thousands had come from all over the city with rugs and baskets and were now sitting on the bleached grass listening to the Woolston Brass Band, smart in their uniforms, striking just the right note. They stood for military reassurance, the triumph of order, the continuation of old Christchurch, values so much more substantial than the froth of mere entertainment. But they were still entertaining.

Ben's kids had accepted her with simplicity. ‘Rachel, Clare, Hamish,' Ben had said, ‘this is Annie.' And they'd chorused ‘Hi, Annie' on cue and that was that. No ‘Where are you from?' or ‘Why are you here?' Just ‘Hi, Annie,' and if Annie
proved to be good company then Annie proved to be good company.

The girls treated little Hamish as a sort of doll or mascot. They fussed over him, held him a lot, dragged him about. He seemed devoted to them. He was a skinny thing, the muscles on his arms like knots in string and the skin that covered them abnormally translucent. ‘Can we get Hamish some ice cream, Daddy?' said Rachel. ‘Please, he's hot.' And they pushed him towards Ben like Exhibit A.

‘Okay,' said Ben, ‘but just for Hamish, mind.'

‘Oh Da-a-ad,' the girls exclaimed together, stretching it out into three delighted syllables of mock admonition. Ben grinned and handed over money and the girls whisked Hamish away between them.

‘I know, I know,' said Ben, ‘I spoil them.'

‘Nonsense,' said Annie. ‘And they're lovely.'

The significant people were massing around and on the distant stage, their movements projected on vast screens to either side. When the search and rescue team crossed the stage to take their seats some spectators stood to cheer and clap, and others joined in until the whole crowd was on its feet and the ovation had acquired a self-swelling momentum. In one way, Annie reflected, they were an understandable subject of applause – they held no political office, were merely ordinary people doing an extraordinary job, taking risks to save lives. What could be more virtuously worthy?

At the same time, it was like applauding traffic cops or Inland Revenue. They had only done what they'd been trained
to do and were paid to do. But still, it felt good to stand and clap and cheer. It felt like a positive assertion of something.

As did the flags. The place was thick with them, the red and black of Canterbury predominating – most plastered with the word ‘Crusaders' – a few examples of the national flag, which no one in London could distinguish from the Australian, and on a hundred makeshift banners a phrase to be found nowhere else in the former British Empire. ‘Kia kaha,' the flags said in big letters painted or sewn onto bedsheets.

A military helicopter swung in over the park and landed back beyond the crowds, who then turned to the screens to see the hatch on its green flank open and Prince William step out. A minute later he walked off the screen and onto the stage. The applause swelled.

A lone piper played a lament and the crowd stood and fell silent.

‘Do you know,' whispered Ben, ‘I think this is going to work.'

The screen showed a video of the central city. The crowd watched in near silence, gasping at the images, the recognisable facades half fallen, the interiors exposed, the familiar buildings lying as their constituent parts, the space they'd held within their walls now open to rain and sunlight. When the soundtrack sank and the screen faded to black, the whole of city, it seemed, was silent for a while. A priest of some kind stepped to the microphone. His words were apt for the occasion but the intensity of the moment fell. And children leaked steadily
from the crowd towards the ice cream van and the swings and an even more remote but still eminently visible bouncy castle.

‘Happy birthday, Annie,' said Ben. She turned to him in surprise. ‘It is today, isn't it?'

She nodded.

‘I didn't get you anything. I'm sorry. But I'm really glad you came. To Christchurch, I mean.'

‘So am I,' said Annie.

The priest reached the end of his time at the microphone and a murmur of excitement started through the crowd and spines stretched as the people craned to see. And when Prince William began to speak there was silence.

He talked of the world's awe at Christchurch's resilience, and the crowd accepted the flattery. He quoted his grandmother in a line that was clearly designed to make tomorrow's headline. ‘Grief,' he said she said, ‘is the price we pay for love.' And in the kiwi-feather cloak that women had looped around his shoulders he said ‘Kia kaha' in the accent of an English public school and then sat down. It was a model of how to do it.

Politicians and others trooped to the microphone and said brief considered things, but the job of the service had been done.

Annie didn't feel the urge to sing along with Dave Dobbyn but quite a few of the crowd did, in a way that they rather noticeably hadn't with the hymns.

‘So what have you got planned for the rest of your birthday?'

Annie shrugged. She hadn't really thought of it as a birthday. Paul had rung her that morning. Her mother pointedly hadn't. And she had not expected anyone else to know.

‘It was sweet of you to ask me along. I might have moped,' she said, though she was fairly confident she wouldn't. ‘There was one thing I'd have liked to do, though,' and she told Ben about the hostel on Madras where Richard had lived.

‘I wish I could have gone there.'

‘You should.'

‘But it's in the central city, the red zone.'

‘So?' said Ben. He looked suddenly boyish. ‘Why not? You'd be doing no harm. What would Rich have done? You know how he felt about authority. And besides, what's the worst that could happen?'

‘But I wouldn't dare.'

‘But I'm coming too,' he said.

‘Daddy, Daddy.' The kids were back and more seemed to have happened to them in the last ten minutes than happened to an adult in a week and it was all of paramount importance, the narration only pausing when Hayley Westenra stepped up to sing ‘Amazing Grace'.

‘She's beautiful,' said Rachel, and the girls pointed Hamish towards her and held him still. ‘She's beautiful,' he duly repeated, though Annie wasn't convinced.

At the end the screens showed Prince William leaving the stage and stopping to talk to the bereaved and the broken, bending solicitously over wheelchairs, saying the right things,
and by taking frail old hands in his young strong ones maybe curing a disease or two.

The crowd seemed satisfied and cheerful as it drifted towards Deans Avenue, not wrung out by emotion, but not thwarted either, not feeling short-changed. The organisers seemed to have got it about right.

‘Yoo hoo, darling.'

Annie wasn't the only person to look up but she was the only person to recognise her mother and Denise. Denise turned away when their eyes met, but Raewyn was heading through the crowd like a yacht cutting across the wind.

‘Shit,' she said to Ben, ‘my mother.'

Before Ben could speak Raewyn was among them.

‘This is Rachel, and Clare and Hamish,' said Annie and the kids chorused hello. They were standing in a knot, an island around which the crowd flowed. Raewyn seemed oblivious to the obstruction they were causing.

‘Wasn't Hayley nice?' she said and she looked from Annie to the kids for corroboration.

‘I'm the father,' said Ben, stepping forward with his widest smile, and he introduced himself using his full name. Raewyn took the proffered hand, then registered his identity.

‘I see,' she said, ‘I see. I'm so sorry to have intruded. Happy birthday, darling.'

And she was gone.

‘Bloody hell,' said Ben.

‘You're not supposed to swear,' said Rachel.

At dusk he lights the candelabrum, creating an island of light in the centre of the room, animating the faces of the two dressed mannequins, glinting off the cutlery, the long array of glasses, the cellophane wrappers on the biscuits, the chocolate's silver foil. And the margins of the room are lost in the murk, might as well not exist. Richard smiles at the effect, at the little oasis of festivity and commemoration in a wide dark world.

He sits between the mannequins and pours a beer on his right, a white wine on his left. For himself, a hard, sharp, anaesthetic vodka. His guts are not good. The pain keeps stabbing him like a narrow heated blade, then slowly melting. He raises his glass in silent pledge and drains it, feeling the good and necessary warmth.

The dog has played his part, has curled on the pile of duvets at their feet and is dreaming already. His paws are paddling the air and his chest and cheeks inflate to emit the strange, endearing whoops that pass for barking when a dog's asleep. And as the
dream progresses the candlelit fur of the dog becomes ever more animated, more frantic, the barking coming faster and more desperate until Richard stretches out a slipper and lays it gently on the dog's flank and though the dog does not appear to wake the contact calms him slowly, as if it lanced the dream and drained it of its fear and conflict. Soon the dog's breathing is as deep and calm and orderly as the in and out of waves on a beach. Still with his foot against the dog's live flank, Richard sits very still. He can hear the candle flames burning with the faintest hiss. Beyond the margins of their light there might be only interstellar space.

He breaks the seal on the pinot noir with a dozen tiny and all but simultaneous metallic clicks. In the island of silence they are great noises. So, too, are the glugs of air through the thick liquid as he pours three glasses, huge balloons that chime when touched together like frangible bells. He swirls the wine as the tasters do and breathes in the autumn fruit of it, the sense of bottled ripeness. It evokes something he cannot quite find the truth of, a memory perhaps, a flash of sun and water somewhere. But he cannot hold the image still to see it, to know the time and place, and the more he tries to do so, the more it fades.

‘It doesn't matter,' he says aloud, and he puts down the glass and lays a hand on the cold hard hands of the mannequins to either side. ‘It doesn't matter,' he says again. ‘Cheers.'

The wine on his tongue sparks the same vague image of a high country lake and sunburnt grass, but again the memory blurs and fades. ‘Cheers,' he says again in the here and now.

He sips. The taste is less intense, the memory a little further off. He's sinking. The dog is snoring. ‘Friday,' he says, ‘Friday,' and an eye opens and its brown depths catch a gleam of candlelight. ‘Friday,' and the tail beats the duvet, which is all Richard wants and it almost makes him cry. But he will not cry. He will try not to cry. There is no call for crying.

‘Here,' he says to his left, to his right, and he wrestles to remove the plastic cap from a tube of Pringles, and then the paper seal, and he is surprised by his own weakness. When he has the tube open he has to pause to regain breath and clarity of mind. Fatigued, undone, by a tube of chips and he snorts at the thought. The snort becomes a cough that bends him double, his forehead pressed against the cool, thick tablecloth.

When he can trust his breathing again he opens his eyes. Just beyond lies a Christmas cracker. Without thinking he feeds one end of the cracker into his claw and grips the other with his right and pulls, but he is not strong enough.

He lays the cracker on the table and with a knife he cuts through the bands that bunch the wrapping at either end. The thing unrolls to reveal an explosive strip, a roll of orange tissue and a joke on a curl of paper. He holds it to a candle, squints up close. ‘What's green and hairy and goes up and down? A gooseberry in a lift.'

He unrolls the tissue paper and it becomes a flimsy crown. He tries to place it on the dog's head but the dog paws it away. He puts it on his own head and giggles. ‘I am the king, Friday,'
he says, ‘I am the king.' But even as he speaks he is aware of a great weariness, can feel a stupor creeping up on him. As host he decides that the end of the party is now. He pours port into thimble glasses, then taps a knife against a wine glass to get the crowd's attention.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' he says, standing between the mannequins on whose plastic flesh the candlelight throws little whorls and gleams. He leans on the table for support. ‘Ladies and gentlemen.' From the pile of duvets the dog looks up at him with a single mildly curious eye.

He pauses. He is not sure of what to say. He looks around at the mannequins, the dog, the bottles and glasses and at the distant margins of the room all lost in gloom. ‘A toast,' he says.

His voice has thickened. Collecting himself, he raises his glass to his right and to his left. ‘To Ben,' he says, ‘and Annie.' He drains the glass and holds it for the last sweet drop to drip onto his tongue. And he waits to see if more words will come but they do not. ‘To Ben,' he says again, ‘and Annie.' And then he sits and pours another glass of port and drains it as he drained the first.

His eyelids are heavy with sleep. He gets down on his knees and awkwardly he lies beside the dog and flips a fold of the duvet over his legs and torso and rolls onto his side and reaches out with his good right hand and lays it gently on the dog's shoulder. The beast stirs and shifts a little, stretches all four legs out simultaneously as if to rid them fully of the day's exertions,
sighs with deep finality and sinks to proper sleep. Richard draws his knees up slowly till they enfold the dog's haunches. The candlelight flickers on the dog's rough fur.

‘Good night,' he says, ‘Good night.' And he lets his eyelids fall. He can smell the dog's warmth.