by Joe Bennett
‘I can,’ said Annie.
‘You’re sweet,’ said Ben.
His story was twenty years old but he’d never had the chance to tell it. It poured from him. Living with Rich hadn’t been easy. Once the family found out, they’d leant on him. Uncle David was the patriarch even then. He’d worked on Ben subtly, pretending to sympathise, but sowing seeds in his head, tempting and manipulating. Underneath that mannered formality and old-world charm beat a heart of pure self-interest.
‘Money became a worry. Rich gave almost everything to Raewyn and you. But then the business started to flounder. Karl used to come round for serious meetings sometimes. Have you met him? Lovely man, but he got depressed. Rich and he were partners but basically Karl was the businessman and Rich did the drawings. But this was the early nineties. Computers were just starting. Rich was a pen and pencil guy. And the company fell out of favour in town. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle David had something to do with it.
‘If I hadn’t had the flat for next to nothing we’d have struggled. It didn’t seem to bother Rich much, but it got to me. I suppose I was used to not having to think about money. It was sort of always there, not flashed around of course, but like a big cushion always behind you, the family stash. Rich said time spent worrying over money was time wasted, and he was probably right, but I was young and I wasn’t strong and I worried. And then, well, you know about his accident.’
‘Was it an accident?’
Ben sighed, paused. ‘God, I hope so, Annie, I bloody hope so, but I just don’t know. A jogger found him on the side of the road, down the far end of Salisbury Street, near the Barbadoes cemetery. His left hand and wrist had been crushed, run over by a car probably, bones broken. A raft of internal injuries, some of them serious, and his face had been smacked so hard the jaw was broken. He’d lost a couple of teeth and others were loosened. The cops said it was a hit and run. But I don’t see how it could have been and no one’s ever been done for it. Do you want me to stop?’
Annie shook her head, not quite trusting her voice.
‘I didn’t know where he was. When he didn’t come home I thought he’d just got drunk. It was only when Karl rang the next day that I worried. Karl got onto the cops and tracked him down in hospital. We went to see him together.
‘They’d had to operate to save his hand, and the docs were worried about his insides, his liver and kidneys and that. But they had to wait for the swelling to go down.
‘I went in every day for a week. With his jaw as it was he couldn’t speak so I’d just tell him things. Sometimes I just read to him. Robinson Crusoe, would you believe? There was an old copy in the nurses’ room. Rich seemed to love it. If the other patients were asleep I’d hold his hand under the blanket, his good hand. The other one looked done for, despite the operation. He was a wreck, Annie, a real bloody wreck.’
Annie had been looking down into the grey Formica of the leaner, hearing only the words, unaware of anything else. She glanced up now.
The bar had begun to fill. The working day was coming to an end and professionals, young and not so young, were dropping in, people in suits and shoes. The cell phone couple and the gambler had gone. River Queen was bleeping desperately for attention.
‘Ben,’ exclaimed a loud, wiry-haired lawyer type, glass of red in hand. ‘Oh, sorry, am I interrupting something?’ He ran his eyes swiftly over Annie, and gave Ben a hint of a smirk of approval.
‘Roger, mate,’ said Ben, ‘good to see you. We must catch up. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?’
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ said Annie. ‘You wouldn’t want Uncle David to know about this.’
‘Oh Annie,’ said Ben, ‘he’ll know already. Or within the hour at any rate. You’ve no idea what this city is like. But don’t worry. I’m in credit these days. And besides, that’s pretty well it. I was reading to Rich one afternoon and he put his good hand over the book and I stopped and he gestured for a pen. I found one and he got me to hold the book open while he wrote on it. Of course he was left handed, so with his right he wrote like a four-year-old. “Bye,” he wrote in great big clumsy letters. I laughed. He was tired and I’d stayed too long. I kissed him on the forehead and left. And the next day he’d gone, discharged himself.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve often asked myself. I don’t know. Pride, maybe, hating to be confined, looked after. But I knew he wasn’t coming back to me. Now he really was broken down. He didn’t want to inflict that on me. And I think he suspected that he’d got me into trouble with the family. That’s what the “Bye” meant. And then of course things started to happen in my life. Great-Uncle David was all reason and kindness and full of suggestions. And I did a bit of work and finished my degree. And Steph virtually flung herself at me and she was good, funny company and everyone loved her and she came emphatically from the Christ’s College/St Margaret’s side of the tracks, and everyone liked us as a couple and, oh, it was easy, Annie, and I’m not a strong guy. And I love my kids. I bloody love my kids.’
He smiled. ‘I seem to have gone on a bit. Sorry.’
‘Ben, do you know where Rich is?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he’s alive?’
Ben paused, then shook his head.
* * *
On Lincoln Road the rush-hour traffic was nose to tail, frustrated by a forest of road cones steering it around drain covers thrust up by the quake. Annie was surprised by how unsurprised she had been by Ben’s story. It was as if she had known it from the moment she saw him in the car outside his house. Every subsequent detail had confirmed it, from Steph’s frostiness to old David’s bombast, and Annie had merely been waiting for the truth to push its snout out, sniff the air and then emerge to show its form.
The truth of Ben’s words had been incontestable. He spoke of kindness, brightness, selflessness. Though she doubted she was much closer to finding her father, if indeed he was alive, Annie felt pleased she’d come. She had discovered a part of his life that she hadn’t known before, something to put under her pillow back in wintry London.
How tired she felt. It was warm early evening and she must have drunk close to a bottle of wine since midday. Now as she took a minute or more to negotiate the intersection with Moorhouse Avenue, a lone pedestrian in vehicle-land, where all was exhaust fumes and gritty air and car yards with plastic bunting and the airborne anger of engines, she felt drawn to the coolness of the softly dappled world under the trees of South Hagley. Crossing the footbridge over the stream that was little more than a trickle now in late summer, she lay gratefully down in the shade of a small oak. She lay on her back, crossed her feet at the ankles, closed her eyes and breathed slowly. In the membrane of her eyelids she saw the veins of tiny blood, sensed the pink thinness of skin, its translucent frailty, made of heat and light like the leaves of the oak, sensed the whole random mud-stirred arbitrariness of it in the sun through the leaves and the warmth of the ground and the pulse of the blood in her flesh. Tiredness stole at her mind, veiled it, shut it down.
Snuffling. A small tongue against her cheek. She was instantly awake and sitting upright.
‘Bingo,’ came a woman’s distant urgent voice. ‘Come here, Bingo.’
Bingo was a whippet, now cringing several yards away from Annie, a hunched and shivering beast, little more than a skeleton in skin, but one that could outrun the wind.
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.
Chapter 25
‘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.