King Rich (19 page)

‘Do you think we should Nugget our faces?'

‘No,' said Annie. She was not feeling brave. For all Ben's talk of virtuous intentions she was scared. And it was so hard to fake innocence. As she and Ben walked up Fitzgerald Avenue after leaving the grim little pub on St Asaph Street she felt as if she had the word ‘criminal' stamped on her forehead. When they passed soldiers on patrol she was surprised they didn't immediately train their guns on her.

The gin she'd drunk had not lived up to its courage-inducing reputation. Had they had no criminal intentions she'd have smiled and said hello to the soldiers and shared a joke with them. But now it was all she could do to walk. It was as if the sense of guilt got between her and her autonomic functions. Even breathing became forced and self-conscious.

‘Shouldn't we wait till later? Till two or three, maybe.'

But they'd been through all this in the pub. The best time was when the pubs shut around eleven. That was when there
would be most people about and they would be least obtrusive. And also when the soldiers were most likely to be occupied by the antics of drunks, who were sure to find a fence they weren't allowed to climb and soldiers with guns protecting it an irresistible combination.

North of Cashel they shrank into the shadows and became officially furtive. A police car passed and a foot patrol of soldiers. Annie wanted to giggle. It was like bad television. But she was pleased to be doing it with Ben. ‘I owe a lot to Rich,' he'd said in the pub. ‘Including the courage to do something like this. He always said doing the right thing was easy, so long as you were sure it was the right thing. This is the right thing.'

They were skulking among cheap native shrubs now, by an outfit called Shox 'n' Lube.

Annie felt Ben's hand reaching for hers in the darkness. ‘You all right?' he asked and by the light of a passing car she caught a glimpse of his teeth and hollowed eyes and cheekbones that stripped him of half his years.

‘Yes,' she said and they dashed together across the first half of Fitzgerald Avenue, paused a moment under the trees on the median, heard and saw no reaction and dashed again. At the fence, as planned, Annie jumped to hook an arm over the top while Ben boosted her from below and all but threw her over before vaulting over himself and together they ran the last few yards out of the range of the street light and crouched beneath a tall brick wall. They were in. Panting in the inky dark, Annie felt the thrill of trespass.

‘Come on,' said Ben. They had two blocks to travel, had agreed the route, poring over a map on the sticky pub leaner. A man with a stained pioneer beard had asked if they were planning a bank robbery and Annie had been grateful he'd been too intent on his own wit and too deep into his third jug to notice her awkwardness.

They edged down the lanes and the sides of buildings. They were beyond street lights now. The high half-moon cast faint shadows, like ink stains washed into a shirt. They were not far from River Road but Anne knew nothing of this warren of buildings and dingy businesses. It was spectacularly quiet. They both started as a cat dropped over a fence. It landed on a sheet of corrugated iron. They heard the soft thud of the paw-pads, the tiny scratch of the claws.

It was as if they were the first people there, a post-industrial Adam and Eve. They passed a yard of dead engines with the smoko room wide open, cups smashed on the concrete floor, the battered cream-coloured Zip still bolted to the wall like a boiler from the
Titanic
.

Ben was deft. He led the way down black alleys, made gates swing silently. He'd have made a good burglar.

At Barbadoes Street they were like shy forest animals on the edge of a clearing, peering out from the shadow of an alley to look up and down the expanse of road. Fallen facades still blocked the pavement, fanning out like scree slopes. A parked Mercedes had been half flattened by masonry, its long sleek nose jutting out of the heap but its boot and back wheels
buried, as if stamped on when trying to flee. And there was less than nobody about.

On the far side of Latimer Square the charred spine of the CTV building stood as an awkward memorial to over a hundred dead, cordoned off by high fences while the authorities sought to lay blame. But whoever that blame was laid on, the dead were dead. The paper told stories of people who had nipped out for a sandwich that saved them.

Ben and Annie went north, keeping to the dark fringes, skirting any spaces. Some buildings had already been bulldozed, the materials that shaped them now heaped and jumbled. Annie feared that the hostel, which seemed so rickety in the photo, would have gone too, her father's last home dragged down by hydraulic pincers to be dumped without thought on the back of a truck. But when they rounded the junction with Armagh Street there it stood, sprawling and unlovely. Weatherboard stained by leaks in the spouting. Ancient metal fire-escapes, their last flight hauled up off the ground against burglary. The building filled most of the section. The rest was given over to drains and concrete and weeds that grew skinny and dusty.

A temporary fence had been slung up around the hostel but it was token only. Ben lifted a section aside and they stepped onto the porch. On the door were scrawls in aerosol, the graffiti code of search and rescue. Plastered over that, a red sticker of condemnation. It was an offence even to approach it. There was a combination lock on the door but someone had smashed the frame, and the door opened to a push of fingers. In the dark
hall, a smell of rats. Just doors to rooms, some of them broken open, and stairs presumably to more.

‘Do we have a room number?'

Annie shook her head. ‘Upstairs, the landlord thought. That's all he could remember.'

As their eyes widened to the gloom they climbed the stairs to find a communal kitchen with a toaster and a microwave the size of a tomb, a stove with a frying pan still on it, and a tall old fridge. Annie pulled open the fridge door, then slammed it shut again. Even in that fraction of a second she'd noticed that it was divided into a dozen or so compartments, each with its own hinged door and clasp to which a padlock could be fitted.

A corridor to the right was lined with windows on one side, half a dozen doors on the other. At the far end a door marked ‘WC' and another ‘Shower'. In the corridor the ends of the floor boards had been painted, while the middle remained bare and blond where a strip of carpet had never been replaced.

Ben pushed on the first door. A free-standing wardrobe. A crudely plumbed sink. A small chest of drawers. A bed on which an unzipped ancient sleeping bag lay scrunched in the position where it had last been thrown off. No sheet. At the head of the bed a stained pillow. On the chair beside the bed a small ceramic elephant, its trunk curled back in trumpeting defiance. Beneath the window half a dozen empty bottles. Dom Pedro Ruby Port.

Annie looked enquiringly at Ben.

‘I don't think so,' he said, but he opened the wardrobe. Two thick jackets on hangers. What might have been trousers thrown in below. Ben pulled out a jacket, held it up.

‘No,' he said.

The next door had been kicked open, presumably by search and rescue, shattering the flimsy jamb. Another narrow bed and dark old wooden wardrobe. Beside the bed what seemed to be a seventies radiogram-cum-dressing table, though the mirror had gone. Annie pulled open a drawer of wood veneer. In the drawer a couple of notebooks. She took them to the window sill and the thin light of the moon. In the notebooks pencil drawings. Of birds and animals. Of Ben. Of her.

He wakes before dawn. Though he does not move he knows the dog has sensed his waking, but it, too, stays where it is, breathing with the deep rhythm of the night. From where he lies he can see a narrow line of gallery windows. And framed in one of them a bright half-moon. And with sudden clarity he remembers lying one night on the bank of the Tekapo River, the smooth stones at his back still warm from the day's sun, and the moon seemed huge and clear, and he could make out the pockmarks of the craters, each one a testament to chance, the random collision of stuff with stuff out there in the bowling alley of the cosmos. He loved the thought then, as he loves it now, of things happening to happen on such a scale, in the great belittling emptiness. ‘It doesn't matter,' he whispers to the dog, and is rewarded with a single swing of the tail against the duvet.

‘Good boy,' he says and he tries not to think ahead, not to think to the morning that is coming, but rather to lie here and
watch the moon as it slides now towards the window frame and inch by inch is eaten by the wall. He watches it for half an hour and it is gone, is just a hint of a glow in the dark glass corner.

He drowses, letting himself for once drift backwards on little puffs of memory, drift backwards to the dangerously golden moments. He pauses before waking his daughter, pausing to gaze on her impossibly unblemished face, unpocked by the collisions of chance and time, faultless of skin and composition, so innocent, so vulnerable. He watches her as he watched the moon this morning, gazing at time passing on her flesh. And then gently wakes her and sees her face still folded with sleep, and she is entirely trusting, casting her arms around his neck and letting herself be lifted from the bed, her head lolling on his shoulder. And as he scoops his arms beneath her he feels the warmth of the bed, the warmth that she has left upon the sheets.

And lying broken on the floor of a broken hotel, side by side with a dog, he smells his daughter, feels again the texture of her flesh.

Enough. He rolls and reaches out and tips half a miniature of Stolichnaya onto his tongue. And soon it works as it has always worked and he drifts.

He is at the river again, a different river, under trees, and it is afternoon and they are lying on a blanket laid on sparse grass and sand. Ben's on his back, looking up through half-closed eyes at the dapple of light through the leaves. And he is lying on his side and watching Ben in profile, his hair and eyebrows,
nose and lips and chin. Ben's flesh is tanned honey brown from the bicep to the hand. Richard sees again the prominent veins on the forearm, the taut curve of muscle above the elbow, the swell of the chest, the barred butterfly of the ribs shielding heart and lungs and then the soft concavity of the milk-white belly and the arch of the spine that rises to meet it. A little line of glistening blond stomach hair stretches from the belly button to the waistband of his shorts.

Ben knows that he is being studied, turns once to look across and smile. Richard fetches a notebook from the tent and sits on a camp stool. He doesn't know how long the drawing takes, knows only that he draws with a certainty of line that doesn't often come. And when it is done, in pencil, it is done and he has held something of that random spot of place and time for ever. Or whatever is for ever for a man.

A window had been left open. The room did not smell strong. But there was so little there. A single bed, an ashtray, a bin liner of clothes clean from the laundrette but overdried and scrunched into a bundle, two op-shop jackets as worn by dead husbands, a pair of battered training shoes, another of grandpa slippers, the heels on both worn in at the same angle. The radiogram had no plug, the ancient wires just ripped from the wall in some hotel refit. In the wardrobe half a bottle of vodka of a brand Annie didn't recognise. In the ashtray, a dozen long-dried butts of thinly rolled tobacco.

Annie tried all the drawers. Ben looked under the bed, on top of the wardrobe. Nothing.

They sat on the bed. No sheets. A striped and hollow mattress. A shiny purple eiderdown. The pillows, a pair of floral sofa cushions.

They flicked through the pages of the notebooks. One was mainly pictures of Annie. Another mainly Ben. Ben sitting, lying, standing, sleeping, clothed, naked, showering.

Annie looked around the barren nothing of a room.

‘Come here,' said Ben. His neck smelt of soap and wine. Annie felt the silence of the city centre. Over his shoulder she could see the half-moon low in the corner of the window. Next door was a yard full of second-hand whiteware. A twin tub gleamed in the moonlight.

‘Shall we go?' said Ben.

‘Do you think we should take these?'

‘Yes.'

‘And if he comes back?'

‘The place is coming down.'

‘We'll leave a note,' she said. And she looked for a pen or pencil, found nothing, went to the next room along, and returned with a ballpoint.

She tore an unused page from the back of the one of the books. ‘Dad, Rich,' she wrote. ‘We came to look for you. We took the drawings. We love you.' She added her name and contact details and Ben did the same. And then she folded it in half and wrote ‘FOR RICHARD JONES' on the front and underlined it and placed it prominently on the derelict radiogram under the corner of the ashtray so that it wouldn't blow away.

Summer has ended. The night takes longer to dissolve into day. Richard watches the window lighten above him, through shades of grey to almost white. Light reveals the mannequins, the candelabrum, the bulbous stalactites of wax, the remains of drinks and snacks, the opened cracker.

Richard rolls onto his side and then, with some difficulty, kneels. He is woozy with weakness and he stays a while on all fours, his head hanging. The dog waits and watches, used to the slow progress, the long moments of pause.

Like a mountaineer taking on the next pitch of rock, Richard lifts his head, seizes the edge of the table with his good hand and hauls himself to his feet with a grunt. Pain stabs at him in half a dozen places but pain is a known companion. It is the weakness that troubles him. He has to make it to the car park roof.

On the stairs he puts both hands on the rail, and lets gravity take him down a step at a time. His thighs seem to have become absurdly weak, like the spindle-legs of a newborn colt.
To keep himself going he counts off the twelve steps in each flight. There are six flights. The dog is all patience. Richard talks as he goes.

‘You're to go, see? Do you understand, Friday?' says Richard, speaking in bursts between breaths. ‘You're a good dog and you're not old. Okay? Do you promise now, dog? Do you promise?'

From the landing below him the dog looks up and cocks its head to one side.

‘Where are the rabbits, Friday? Find the rabbits. Find the warm hearts. Ahhh,' as he half misses a step and his ankle buckles and he has to cling hard to the rail as his hip swings into it. The shock spears through him and a fierce new pain erupts in his haunch.

But they have reached the car park floor, the corridor of catastrophe, the bleached carpet and the door propped open, framing a slice of parapet and sky of thrush-egg blue. The dogs bounds for the outside world, pisses prodigiously on the first concrete buttress and Richard again feels wonder at the creature's patience. He lurches in the dog's wake, supporting himself on the wall to ease the weight on his hip.

It is early yet. He lowers himself into his seat, ginger with the pain and weak from the descent, and takes a Gordon's from his pantry. He drinks straight from the miniature bottle, urging it to the bits that crave it.

Through the parapet he can see down Cashel Street to the Bridge of Remembrance. Despite the hour people are crawling about the temporary grandstand.

The dog tours the rooftop as diligently as on the first day, asserting its own presence, scouring for sign of others, as if this concrete floor hoisted fifty feet into the air were its wild and vital territory. The dog does not tire of its own way of being, and not for one second does it doubt. Richard feels a surge of envy and of admiration and of love and he calls the dog who looks up in slight surprise then pads across.

Richard sits forward to stroke the dog and the pain flares in his hip. He cries out and the dog starts at the noise. But Richard swings his legs together and sits up straight and the pain recedes and he puts out an arm and the dog comes in close and lays its head on his lap and looks up into Richard's eyes.

And Richard sighs and runs his hand repeatedly down from the dome of the dog's skull along the ridge of its neck and between the softened shoulders and as he does so the dog shuts its eyes and Richard talks in a whisper and then he places his head against the dog's head, skull of a beast against skull of a beast, and he stays that way for some seconds and then he kisses the dog on the top of its head, his lips pressed against a few of the billion shining hairs. And Richard takes a Tux from the pocket of his dressing gown and the dog takes it gently in those jaws that can crush bone and with an effort that makes him groan Richard stands and lurches towards the door into the hotel.

The brass pot that holds the door open has weathered and dulled, the soil dried and shrunk, though the rubber plant seems as synthetically glossy as before. By pulling on the plant's
stem Richard tilts the pot till it falls and rolls away. He leans back against the door to stop it closing. The dog has finished the Tux and is standing in front of him.

Richard has no more biscuit. He reaches out and strokes the dog's head once. ‘Sorry, boy,' he says, ‘but sit. Sit, Friday, sit.'

Puzzled by the tone and the oddness, the dog lowers its rump slowly to the concrete, eyes on Richard. When Richard starts to withdraw inside the dog makes to follow him but ‘Sit,' says Richard again and the dog stops. Richard closes the door between him and the dog.

He slumps against the wall in the corridor and sinks slowly to the floor. He is affected with a grinding sense of dread. He meant to climb to the penthouse, to sit overlooking the city and to drink himself to sleep. But he isn't sure he has the strength for the climb. And here's as good as anywhere.

There is a pane of toughened glass let into the middle of the door. But he doesn't have to stand and look through it. He knows the dog is still there.

For the first few minutes the dog is silent. And Richard too. He all but holds his breath. Then comes the first faint whimper. He tries to shut his ears. The whimper feeds upon itself and grows in volume like the sawing of some mawkish violin, before collapsing into the silence of disappointment, of betrayal.

The silence then is as bad as the noise. Worse. After perhaps a minute, Richard catches the first mouse-squeak of renewed reproach and again the whining builds like a self-sustaining
wave. When he hears the scratch of claws on the door Richard almost cries out. But he wills himself to stay quiet. The dog must lose hope.

The scratching becomes a frantic two-pawed scrabbling at the door. Richard can hear the claws tearing through the surface of the paint. He jams his hands over his ears but still feels as much as hears the scratching and the whining, which again subside to little, then to nothing.

Richard feels as quietly as possible in the pockets of his robe. Half a vodka miniature. With infinite caution he unscrews the cap and places it so gently on the bristle carpet and he tips the little bottle to his mouth and feels as much as tastes the vodka on his tongue and throat and suddenly he is coughing, bent over and spluttering, and even in his gagging distress he can hear the claws against the door again, their redoubled effort, and the whining that's as clear as speech.

The cough fades. Richard levers himself up onto his feet, groaning as pain licks through his hip. The dog is frantic at the noise, rasping with its claws, half whimpering and half barking at the barrier between them.

Richard staggers down the corridor and through a smoke door into the stairwell. In a room beyond he finds an unplundered mini-bar and stuffs the pockets of his robe and falls onto the bed and lies there, face down. And he realises that he is listening. That he is straining to hear the dog. He can hear nothing. He is unsure what to do. Some nameless emotion that is neither despair nor fear is grinding at his heart.

He rolls onto his back, sits up against pillows, drinks a Scotch and listens. He is too far away to hear the dog but he listens. He waits. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, haggard, attentive, on his head a crown of orange tissue paper. His mind is out there on the car park roof. He wonders how long he has. He urges himself to stay where he is. The dog will up and leave, he tells himself. It will. It must.

He sits on the bed and drinks at intervals for he doesn't know how long. His hip aches fiercely and he tries to concentrate on that, but every time he lets up in his vigilance he finds his legs swinging off the bed, being drawn towards the car park and he has to force himself to stay by an act of will that he knows will buckle in the end.

And it does. Back he goes, numbed by drink. He stops short of the closed door and listens. Nothing. He creeps the last yards, hunched and leaning on the wall, straightens, counts to five, says ‘Please', and looks through the inset pane. The dog is not at the door. It is not where he told it to sit. The dog has gone. It is as he hoped. And he has never felt so alone.

The dog is by his chair under the awning, its nose aligned to the door and its eyes open and it has seen his face at the glass and its ragged plume of a tail has swung with joy and the dog is up on its feet and coming to the door and Richard's heart surges with forbidden feeling. He leans on the handle and the door swings open and he stumbles through it and falls to the floor and the dog is all over him, licking his face and whimpering with joy.

‘Friday,' says Richard, ‘Friday.' And he is laughing.