King Rich (9 page)

‘Shit,' exclaimed Vince, ‘look,' and he was stamping on the brakes.

Behind more temporary fencing, a yellow machine with something resembling a giant crab's pincer attached to its hydraulic arm was hacking and tearing at a rambling old weatherboard building. As they watched it tore off a chunk of one side, snapping timbers, and turning the chunk over to show the ancient wallpaper and the skirting boards, and bits of electrical wire hanging like veins.

‘The Ozone,' said Vince.

For a moment the name meant nothing to Annie, and then she remembered and she turned to look at Vince.

‘Come on,' he said and they got out of the car and stood like kids at the fencing. The demolition was violently pornographic. The intimate details of private rooms, of indoors, were ripped open, exposed to the gaze of the world. Innards met sunlight for the first time in a hundred years. And it was all so peremptory. The claw reached in and gripped and twisted and the building yielded. Nails and timber gave way with little more than a graunch. In ten minutes half the third floor disappeared, four or more bedrooms, the beds and wardrobes with them, ripped out, broken apart and dumped at random angles on the heap of spoil. Neither Vince nor Annie spoke.

The driver shut his machine down and climbed from the cab. A slim, surprisingly young man, clean shaven, crew-cut. He smiled at Annie and Vince, no doubt used to the theatrical
appeal of his profession. He started up a truck with another hydraulic arm on the back, this one ending in a claw. It lifted scoops from the pile and swung them onto the truck bed, where they fell with a terminal clatter, wood on metal.

On the far side of Marine Parade, a track led into the dunes. Rising beside it the shaggy dark green pyramids of a stand of macrocarpas.

* * *

In Salt on the Pier, Annie watched a hefty black-backed seagull ride the air in silence not far beyond the window, its low flat arch of wings adjusting to the wind with magisterial precision. It lay on the moving air as comfortably, more comfortably, than Annie sat now on her bent wood chair. It seemed to expend no energy, shifting its skull from side to side to oversee the chance of food from beach or fisherman.

All around her women talked, leaning in towards each other over coffee or wine or salad, dealing urgently with matters that mattered, while just above them, just beyond the glass, this sleek and faultless creature floated on the air in self-sufficient silence.

‘It's not the Ozone, but still.' Vince placed a misted glass of pinot gris in front of her. ‘Cheers.'

He opened his laptop, and a few seconds later turned the screen towards her to show the website of an outfit called Hamilton Design. He pointed at the introductory blurb.

‘Formerly known as Hamilton and Jones,' read Annie and she looked at Vince, who nodded.

‘According to the registrar of companies,' said Vince, ‘Richard Hugh Jones sold his half share of the business to his co-founder, Karl Pierre Hamilton, in 1994. Premises in Lichfield Street a block down from Ballantynes. Does that sound right?'

Annie shrugged. ‘I just remember tall windows and a view of the sky. Is the company still there?'

Vince shook his head. ‘The building, if it's standing, is inside the cordon. But Karl Pierre Hamilton shouldn't be hard to find.' He clicked on Contact Us, and up came an email address and a cell phone number.

‘And you haven't…'

‘Of course not,' said Vince. ‘All yours. You going to ring him now?'

‘Tomorrow, I think,' said Annie. She wanted to think about what she might say.

Vince looked disappointed.

‘But you've done brilliantly,' she said, ‘thank you.' And she leant across from her chair and hugged him.

The dog takes itself over to the far side of the car park roof and peers through the concrete parapet.

‘What is it, Friday?'

The dog's tail wags as Richard joins him at the wall. There's a noise of distant voices, men's voices, coming from beyond Colombo Street, beyond the fallen mess of Cashel Mall. Then they come into view, a dozen or more figures, tiny from up there on the roof of the world, scampering half-heartedly through the tongues of fallen masonry. They move and shout as though they want to be caught. Richard wants them to be caught, too. He wants the authorities to remove them, to re-establish the peace.

As if in response, half a dozen figures in New Zealand army green appear at the intersection with Colombo, cradling firearms. The men stop. The soldiers advance. Two policemen arrive. A brief discussion and the little group turns and goes back the way it came, escorted by the police, and the soldiers calmly watch them go, and Richard feels relief and his hand
on the dog's shoulder relaxes. A pain stabs through him, stabs like a heated blade through the side of his gut. He screams and bends double. The pain stabs again, searing.

Gasping, bent, he staggers, then crawls across the car park to the hotel door. The dog paws at him as he goes, alarmed by the strangeness. Out of the sunshine into the gloom of the corridor and, half blinded, Richard scrabbles at the door of the first room, but another burst of pain flings him to the floor of the corridor, writhing, clutching at his gut.

* * *

‘Do you mind if we watch the news?' said Jess, heaping carbonara onto plates. ‘There's supposed to be something about the hospital.'

But the main item was a band of thirty or so tradesmen and small business owners making a raid on the central city. They wanted access to their commercial lives and had been lobbying the emergency authorities for days, but those authorities had neither blinked nor even smiled. They had soldiers at their command and they had extraordinary powers and they saw no need for flexibility or concession.

Knowing the power of publicity, the aggrieved had alerted the television companies and so there on screen was footage of them scaling the fence on Cambridge Terrace, running across the Bridge of Remembrance and then dodging the rubble in Cashel Mall, slowing as they tired. They didn't get far but then
they hadn't expected to. A couple of cops followed them in a leisurely manner. A posse of soldiers blocked their way as they approached Colombo Street. No guns or even voices were raised. The encounter was affable and the insurgents let themselves be ushered back outside the cordon. But the point had been made.

The dour ex-soldier who'd been flown in from up north to secure the central city announced, while clearly hating to do so, that limited and escorted access to the central city would be granted to those who needed it over the coming days, though a perimeter cordon would be maintained so as to allow the authorities to maintain appropriate control, etc., etc.

‘Good on them,' said Jess. ‘Honestly, you can just see that guy seething at the thought of conceding anything. You just know the bastards would love to institute martial law, shoot on sight, string 'em up, soon have the country licked into shape. God, why are men such power-hungry bastards?'

‘Are they?' said Annie.

‘The ones in power are.'

The on-screen discussion moved to the tallest building in the city. Film of it clearly showed it was leaning at an angle of five degrees or so.

‘It could fall any time,' said the ex-soldier. ‘Or not. It's simply too dangerous to let people work in its vicinity. We are in the process of deciding how to deal with it.'

A ridiculously young reporter asked whether they'd considered blowing it up. You could hear in his voice the sense of his own importance at the job he had.

‘No decision has been reached at this moment in time,' said the ex-soldier and the reply was like a door slammed in the kid's face.

* * *

The flies rouse him. He can sense them crawling on shin and thigh. He stirs and the flies lift as a single unit, fizzing. He sees the dog, lying close, curled nose to tail. He is too weak to do anything and his eyes close again and the flies clamp back down. Evening sunshine spears through the door and reaches to his face and beyond. The dog has sensed his stirring and gets to its feet. The flies circle the dog, who snaps at them, teeth clacking as they miss. The dog bends and licks Richard's face. His eyes open. ‘Good boy,' he tries to say. His voice is a husk, a wisp. ‘Good boy, Friday.'

Feebly he reaches out with his bad left hand to touch the dog's paw, its leg, its head. The pain seems to have gone but he cannot ignore the smell and the stickiness and the flies that fizz and settle with every movement.

He is lying on his front, like a corpse flung from a window. He runs his hand slowly from the dog to his own thigh, and his hand recoils.

The noise he makes is half groan, half wail, a desperate noise. The dog looks down at him with curiosity, as he rolls onto his side, reaches for the door handle above, driven by an imperative of instinct and of horror, hauls himself to his knees,
to his feet, the flies a cloud around him, the dog snapping at them, and he pushes the door open, almost falling through it but staying on his feet by force of will, stumbling to the bathroom.

He knows the taps have long run dry but turns one on anyway. Not a trickle, not even a gasp of old air, and he props himself against the wall by the toilet and with his good right hand he unscrews the housing around the flush button on the cistern. He has to pause to rest, his head against the cool plaster. A minute and he's back at work. The housing comes loose and he wrenches the ceramic lid from the cistern. It clatters to the tiles and snaps in three big pieces and the dog leaps back in alarm. He shucks his bathrobe without looking down at it, flings it in the bath, dunks a towel in the trapped water of the cistern, soaks it deep and runs it loosely, horribly, down the inside of his thighs. One pass and it joins the robe in the bath. Another towel, and another and another.

He turns and lurches naked from the room to the room next door and again he unscrews the cistern lid and sponges at his thighs and knees. He is aware that the foulness is blood as much as shit, a sorry torrent from a failing gut, from inner organs pushed towards their point of seizure. The blood does not alarm him so much as the sense of the future. What further revulsion, what disabling indignity, awaits? Weak as water he goes to one more room, one more cistern, to clean the last scraps and stains, to make things good as far as it is possible to make them good. The dog pads along with him.

He dons a new bathrobe, white as a gull's breast, new fluffy slippers. The stench still fills the corridor, the flies still humming there, in the lance of evening sunshine, a dancing, gorging chorus sparkling black. From a maid's trolley he fetches bleach and a fierce-looking aerosol and tips the bleach over the carpet, all of it, the whole searing bottle. The flies rise in protest. He fires at them wildly with the aerosol, seeking to drive them out the door to the rooftop car park and the world beyond.

In the room on the far side of the stairwell, Richard gives the dog a bowl of Kiwi Spring water and half a dozen Tux, drinks a little water himself, then screws the top from a Johnnie Walker, sniffs at it with unaccustomed caution and sips. He traces its descent past the back of his tongue and down the gullet to drip into the gut. He sees the whisky as a kill-or-cure device, a cauterising force. Nothing happens. No protest from below, no convulsion of the gut, no startling jab of pain. He lies back on the bed and sighs and swigs the Scotch, then pats the bed beside him. Unhesitatingly the dog leaps up and fusses about him, balancing poorly on the deep sprung mattress, then circling, scratching at the duvet, flattening grass, perhaps, or hollowing the soil to form a nest, an action going back so far beyond hotels and human landscapes that Richard finds it soothing. ‘Good boy,' he murmurs as the dog settles, its spine a semi-circle, its snout folded into its rump, a self-containment from the world, and he lays a hand upon the rough fur of the dog's neck and the dog sighs like a man and thumps the duvet once with its tail, then closes its eyes. ‘Friday,' whispers Richard, ‘Friday.'

‘Steph,' said Annie into the phone, ‘it's me, Annie. I came round the other day, you remember?'

Steph remembered, but not very warmly, it seemed. Or was Annie just being sensitive? It had been her way for as long as she could remember to be overly sensitive to any hint of hostility, of dislike. It was a weakness, she knew, one that led her to concede too often, to placate so as to avoid conflict. But she was as she was. ‘I'm sorry to trouble you again, Steph, but it's just I won't be here an awful lot longer and I was wondering whether you'd had a chance to…'

‘Yes, I have, and Ben has never heard of your father. So that's that, I'm afraid. I'm sorry.'

‘Oh,' said Annie, startled by the abruptness, ‘are you sure?'

‘Am I sure?'

‘Sorry,' said Annie, ‘I didn't mean it like that. I meant… oh, it doesn't matter. But I don't suppose Ben's home from work yet, is he?'

‘I don't see…'

‘I was just wondering whether there was a time when I could ring him, I mean in the evening or something. I'd be really grateful.'

‘I've told you, Annie, my husband has never heard of your father. And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got things to do.'

‘Of course, I'm sorry.'

‘That,' called Jess coming into the kitchen, ‘didn't sound like the most productive call.'

‘Ah well,' said Annie, replacing the phone on the wall of Jess's kitchen. ‘That's that, I suppose. She said Ben had never heard of Dad.'

Jess looked at her. ‘But you don't believe her.'

Annie said nothing.

‘You don't, do you?'

‘I don't know,' said Annie. ‘She just sounded as though she didn't want me to meet her husband.'

‘Who could blame her for that?' said Jess. ‘You're not exactly ugly. But why don't you just go and ask him yourself?'

‘You mean… Oh, now you're being ridiculous.'

‘Do you want to talk to him or not?'

* * *

‘Is this legal?'

‘Being parked on the side of a public street?' said Jess. ‘Yes, oddly enough, it is. Nice pad.'

As they'd driven past the gates Annie had caught a glimpse of the two chubby girls and the rickety little boy playing on a caged trampoline. Now sitting in Jess's car with the windows down they could hear the kids' excitement, the squeals of ‘Watch me', the sudden disagreements that flared momentarily, then died back down.

Annie had longed for brothers and sisters, brothers especially. The difference it would have made. That intimacy, that sense of shared adventure. Surely the way to bring up children, as Paul had said.

People always saw Annie as competent, reliable, steady. If they'd only known that she was that way because of fear, not of anything specific, but of life itself, of getting involved, of making mistakes. Surely brothers would have cured that. Look at Paul. He had brothers and he feared nothing. Or Jess. How many brothers did she have? Three, was it? And what was there, in this world or the next, that Jess was afraid of?

Two boys on bikes came down Glandovey Road in the blue and black of Boys' High, chatting as they rode. Each wore a cycle helmet with the strap undone. Neither had a hand on the handlebars. Annie almost dissolved with envy of their nonchalance, and of the sisters they no doubt disregarded.

‘What are your brothers up to these days, Jess? Are they still around?'

‘Barry's in town. We see each other at Christmas, which is often enough. The other two are in Aussie, or at least they were the last I heard. Doug's got a couple of kids already, though the
little darlings have yet to meet their Auntie Jess. What a treat in store. By the way, do we know what sort of car lover boy here drives? Or is the great property developer coming home on a bike?'

Annie shrugged.

‘And is that him?'

A cream BMW slowed as it passed them. Annie felt her gut contracting with dread. But to her relief the car turned into a drive on the other side of the road.

‘Oh Jess, I don't think I can do this.'

‘Course you can, girl. When he pulls up at the gates you just go quietly up and say you're the woman who's looking for her dad and could he spare you five minutes to answer a few questions. What's the worst that could happen? He ignores you? He tells you to fuck off? He calls the cops? No worries. You've done nothing wrong. And besides he won't do any of those things. He'll say fine, come in, or call me at the office or whatever.'

Glandovey Road was a suburban idyll. The overall image was of green. The houses set well back from the road, curtained by mature trees casting deep late-summer shade. Glimpses of dappled lawn and half-timbered facades and vast low three-car garages, full of Japanese four-wheel-drives and European saloons.

Someone was practising the violin, a repeated scrap of Mozart – was it? – coming from an open third-floor window. A yellow rose had climbed to and around that window over who
knew how many summers. Annie thought back to Turnpike Lane, to the long cold nights and the snot-grey skies and the endless swishing traffic, its lights refracted in a cold wet urban world. Ten days or so and she'd be back among it. And down here, this side of the planet there'd be all this light, this green.

She felt an elbow, looked up. A fat black four-wheel-drive was turning in towards the gates, which were already opening.

‘Go, girl, go,' and Annie stepped out. She was maybe twenty feet from the car. She felt like an assassin. The driver's window was down. She could see Ben's face in profile. He looked so affable that courage came to her and she was on the point of calling out when the kids burst through the gate, climbed onto the running boards and clung and squealed and Annie crossed the road and walked by unnoticed as Ben nosed his vehicle, festooned with children, down the gravel drive towards the family home.

‘Don't say a word,' she said, as she got back into the car. ‘We're going home for a drink.'

But instead of starting the car Jess let out an uninhibited laugh, twisted in the driver's seat, opened her arms and gave Annie a hug that, for all the awkwardness of handbrake and steering wheel and jutting seat belt bits, was welcome. ‘You great chicken,' said Jess. ‘Way too nice.' As they drove back to Hornby Annie wondered whether she really did want to find her father. She knew now that the man she'd set out from London to find was a man of forty. A man of sixty was a different proposition. And the more she gleaned the more she
worried that it might be unwise to go further. Why might he not have remarried, had children, daughters, half-brothers and sisters to Annie, who could be approaching adulthood now? Whenever Annie pictured her father rubbing another daughter against his bristles, drawing pictures for her, telling her stories in bed, well, she coped, she was the sort of woman who coped, but she wasn't sure that she wanted to know about it. What was the point? And if he'd wanted to, couldn't he have come looking for her? Indeed, why hadn't he? None of which she said to Jess.

* * *

‘Nothing gets past the old boy,' said Annie as Jess set a hefty glass of pinot gris on the kitchen table. ‘Listen.'

‘“Dear Miss Jones,

‘“I suppose I should hardly be surprised that you did not accept my word that Ben knew nothing of your father. In your shoes I suspect I would have done the same. I will admit nevertheless to being a little disappointed.

‘“But in consequence I was wondering whether you would indulge an old man by accepting an invitation to luncheon here in Park Terrace on Friday, an invitation which I shall also extend to my great-nephew. This will afford you the opportunity to ask him face to face the very questions that I have already asked him on your behalf, and me the opportunity to enjoy once again the company of a delightful young woman. Such
opportunities, as I may have mentioned before, come rarely at my age, and almost invariably with strings attached.

‘“If you can fit this into your busy schedule, I shall pop open a bottle of eminently respectable Méthode Champenoise about noon on Friday.”'

‘Ben must have told him you were on the case,' said Jess. ‘Or his wife did. Anyway, I presume you'll go.'

Annie wasn't sure. There seemed little point. If there was anything to hide, the old boy would hardly have invited her to lunch, let alone with Ben. And besides she felt a familiar twinge of guilt for having gone behind David's back.

‘I wouldn't worry about it if I were you,' said Jess. ‘Given that family's business interests, he'll have seen and done a lot worse.'

It took Annie three attempts to write the reply. In the end she removed the apology, thanked the old man for the invitation and promised to be there.

‘Whatever you do,' said Jess, ‘don't take wine.'

Writing to Karl Hamilton of Hamilton Design proved no easier. There was a head-and-shoulders shot of him on the company website, relaxed, smiling, in an open-necked shirt, a large, soft-looking man. In the end she settled on similar factual simplicity.

Jess leant over her to read the screen. ‘Fine. He'll answer.'

Annie hovered the cursor over ‘Send'.

‘Go on,' said Jess. ‘You think too much.'

Annie remembered standing by a letter box on Stanmore Road and feeling similarly hesitant, in her hand a Valentine's
card addressed to Graham Moseley. In her memory she saw his dark eyes, his smile, his hips.

She pressed ‘Send'.

Graham Moseley had never responded. He'd probably received a dozen Valentines. Yet the thought of him had consumed her night and day for a month or more. Ah well. Love. Where was he now?

They ate in the garden, under the wrought-iron verandah. Jess brought out what she called pasta bake: chunks of fish, a grapeshot of frozen peas, slivers of apparent carrot, a glutinous white sauce that blistered the tongue, the whole thing tasting only of cheese.

The evening air was warm as a bath and dense with insects. An unseen neighbour was clipping a hedge with shears you could hear were rusty. When Annie finally put her plate aside she was assailed with the scent of jasmine.

A bottlebrush was awash with flowers, each like a punk's mohawk. Beneath the bush a blackbird chick, all but fully fledged, yet still dependent. The male fluttered in, hopped a couple of steps on the damp sparse lawn under the bush, cocked its head, stabbed at the soil, pulled up an amorphous wriggle of ooze and immediately the fledgling opened its beak to be fed.

‘Finished?' asked Jess, standing up. The blackbirds were gone before her backside left the cushion.

‘Leave all this,' said Annie, ‘I'll clear up.'

‘Sure? I need an early night. I'll be gone before you get up.'

Annie sat on in the evening warmth. A swallow darted four, five times over the patch of lawn, swerving with astonishing deftness. A skein of geese passed high overhead, a silent chevron of birds rippling across a sky that was almost white.

By an outdoor light in a corner of the verandah a spider wove a web. In little more than an hour it built a trap a thousand times the size of its own humped body. Once a series of three small aftershocks rattled the house in quick succession, shivering the ironwork. The web just gave with the world and stayed strong and the spider didn't pause in its work.

Evening sank towards night. Bees ceased to hum and fumble. The day's insects died or shrank into the slits and splits and cracks and underhangs of the house. A mosquito whined at Annie's ear. Moths batted her face. And down at her feet she heard a chink of cutlery. A hedgehog was snuffling at the congealed remnants of the pasta bake, nudging knife and fork out of the way. In the jungle of suburban Hornby Annie could hear the little beast snuffling and snorting. In the gloom she could make out its shape but no detail. She rose softly from her chair. The beast half-coiled on the instant. Annie turned on the outside light. The coil became complete, a ball of brown spikes, perfectly folded, the joins invisible, impenetrable.

Annie's movements had affected the little garden world more than the aftershocks. Slowly its life resumed. Moths besieged the light, clambering over each other in a bid to burn. Most somehow blundered past the web, fluffing its edges, blind to the narrowness of their escape, thousands of them, millions, in one small garden.

The hedgehog unfurled and scuttled off with monomaniac intensity of purpose. Scorched moths fell from the bulb and writhed on their backs, broken, spinning desperately on the polished wooden deck. Annie gathered up the crockery, came back to turn off the light, said goodnight to the world and went to bed, feeling easier of heart.