King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  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.

  Chapter 18

  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 peop
le 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.

  Chapter 19

  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 depart
ure.

  ‘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.