King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  They had to be married. Such apparent indifference, such complete disregard of the other, could stem only from long familiarity, from the habituation of partnership. Perhaps it betokened the sort of loving trust where nothing needed to be said, where two had become one, where they were fused at the emotional hip and had achieved a sort of Zen-like calm together against a hostile world. But it hadn’t looked like that. It had looked, Annie thought, like the very antithesis of loving trust, like weary resignation. As if each embodied for the other the essence of disappointment. The bad choice that had hardened, through hope, and habit and self-delusion, into permanence. That was it, for ever, for them both. They’d make do with it somehow. And besides, there was no point in trying to start again at their age. I mean to say, who’d be interested?

  A light on the board indicated that the Blenheim flight had landed. Annie went to stand half hidden by a coffee kiosk, without quite choosing to do so or acknowledging her desire to see before she was seen, to gauge mood and manner. She wished, momentarily, that she’d brought Vince with her rather than accepting his offer to wait with the car.

  Her mother’s sunglasses were ornate, her jeans stretchily clinging, her boots expensive. The loose white top was well chosen to mitigate a minor hoop of middle-aged fat. All in all she didn’t look bad.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ said Annie, stepping forward.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, and she let go of the little bag she was towing and delivered the sort of hug that Annie had seen several times in the last fifteen minutes, the half-hug, the apparent hug, the self-conscious event in which the arms reach around and the heads go to one side of each other but the hips hold back for any of a hundred different wordless reasons.

  ‘Such a surprise.’

  That Annie had obediently come to the airport? That Annie was in New Zealand? Either way the line was drenched in manipulative irony. Annie felt a stirring of revolt that she quelled with the ease of long practice. It was easier just to ride it out. Though she had more or less made up her mind not to apologise. Or at least not to begin with an apology.

  They followed the procession to the baggage reclaim, a low and underlit hall where the newly reunited stood in awkward limbo, between the greeting and the welcome busy world beyond.

  Annie almost asked about the weather in Blenheim then bit it back. The conveyor belt did its warning bleep and little orange lights flashed and then it jerked into scaly life. She and a hundred others stared at a single bag left from a previous flight as it rounded the hairpin bend before disappearing through the heavy plastic flaps.

  ‘So how’s it going?’ Her mother spoke with a breezy brightness, suggesting not only that she knew she held the cards, but that she would enjoy playing them in her own sweet time.

  ‘Well,’ said Annie, ‘it rather depends on what you mean by “it”.’

  ‘Oh God, here we go.’

  Annie sighed. ‘Why are you here, Mum? I mean, what have you come down for?’

  ‘Isn’t it enough to want to see my one and only darling daughter?’ And she turned to Annie, her eyebrows raised theatrically above the sunglasses.

  Annie turned back towards the hatch that had started to spew luggage.

  ‘Of course, if you’d rather I hadn’t come. If you’d rather I went straight back to Blenheim, you’ve only got to say. Don’t worry that you snuck back into the country without telling the person who gave birth to you and brought you up singlehandedly. I’m sure there’ll be a plane back tonight or tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your search for the darling daddy who loved us so much that he left us for another woman. I mean, it’s fine by me if you want to go raking up the past but it does feel a bit rich when I spent ten years bringing you up on my own…’

  ‘I know about Dad now, Mum.’

  Raewyn took off her sunglasses. ‘Oh, you do, do you? So that dirty little cat’s out of the bag now. Fine. Are you pleased? Do you think that somehow justifies everything? And have you considered for one moment how it might have been for me twenty years ago, when I was just about the last person in town to learn that my husband was having a fling with some rich little nancy boy half his age, some pretty…’

  ‘Mum, can this wait?’

  Half a dozen people were staring in unashamed delight, and twice that number were listening.

  ‘Oh, I don’t see why it should. You brought it up. And of course the little pervert had to come from one of the most prominent families in town, as you’ve no doubt uncovered in your grubby little researches, which made it just about the juiciest bit of gossip going in certain circles. No one gave a thought for the deserted wife, though, did they, nor a thought for what she did to keep any word of it from her daughter’s ears. Oh no. And I can’t see myself being thanked for any of it at this late stage, even though every single thing was done with you in mind so that you could have as normal a childhood as possible despite the way that bastard had betrayed the pair of us. That one there.’ She was pointing at a hefty Samsonite case in light blue. And in unthinking obedience Annie stepped forward and heaved it from the belt.

  ‘Thank you, darling. Where to from here?’

  Annie stared at her mother. Did she really expect that accommodation, transport, an itinerary had been arranged?

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. The look on your face, darling. I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you or interfering with your little muck-raking expedition. Just show me the bloody taxi stand and I’ll get out of your hair. No, no, give it to me. I’m not too old to pull my own suitcase.’

  Taxis snaked for a hundred yards, their drivers trained to stand by the bonnet and smile for the newly competitive market. Her mother walked past the two Indian drivers at the head of the queue, who both smiled at her and said ‘Madam’ while gesturing towards their empty cars like butlers, and handed her bag to a short white man in a black V-necked sweater that had given up the fight with his gut and hung around it in inelastic folds like the valance round a bed.

  ‘Oceanview Terrace, Mount Pleasant,’ she said.

  ‘Are you staying with Denise?’

  ‘Oh, listen to Madam Detective. And your point?

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Denise and I happen to have remained friends. Is there something wrong in that? As a matter of fact, she was the one who gave me the idea of coming down, darling. She very kindly suggested I might enjoy the show.’

  ‘The show?’

  ‘You know, darling, the memorial thingy, in Hagley Park. We’re going together. They’ve got some very big names, and Wills, of course, not that I expect such things will interest you now you’re so sophisticated and international. Anyway, darling, I’m sure you’ve got more important things to do than stand chattering with your dear old mum. You have my number. It’s been such a pleasure to catch up.’

  Brilliantly she leant forward for another half hug. Annie acquiesced. As he got into the car, the driver grunted at the compression of his gut.

  Her mother’s window came down.

  ‘Oh and darling, there’s more to bringing up kids than drawing a few ducks. As I hope you’re about to find out. And if you do manage to find him, by the way, I’m told he may not be in the best of shape. But, ah well. Reaping and sowing and all that. Mwah, mwah.’

  Chapter 31

  Something seems to be happening at the far end of Cashel Street, near the Bridge of Remembrance. But from the car park roof it is hard to know.

  Climbing to the penthouse to look takes half the morning. He is aware of waning energy and tries to harbour it. The dog has long since reached the top and waits for him there, its head flopped over the top step, dozing but from time to time opening an eye when it hears Richard sitting heavily to rest, or pulling himself back to his feet with a gasp of exertion.

  As he gains the last step Richard smiles at the dog and lays his good hand on the skull, and massages the bone through the skin. But he is feeble as a newborn, drained of all strength, light-headed with weakness, and inside the pe
nthouse he all but falls into the window chair and his eyes close and he lets a sort of nothingness come over him, not sleep but a sort of withdrawal of the senses, an absence.

  He is not sure how long he drowses but when the dog pushes against the side of the chair and up underneath his dangling hand it is as if the senses switch back on slowly one by one, like an old television taking a flickering minute to get its valves and circuits running. His thighs ache from the climb. He drinks a little water. It prompts a craving for anaesthetic booze, for the sense of it seeping into sore tissues and blurring past and future into an out-of-focus present. He pours a fat slug of vodka, adds a slightly smaller slug of Kiwi Spring water. The surface of the drink has a swirl of iridescence. He sniffs at the glass. Even the smell is good, relieving, purging the channels, clearing the way.

  The first sip spreads and melts over the tongue and says yes and good morning to the back of the throat. It cannot be bad to like something this much, to be so grateful for it, to it. He turns to the window and now he can see what is happening there at the far end of Cashel Street, by the Bridge of Remembrance, just beyond the fence. They are building. Workmen shrunk to toys by distance are clambering over scaffolding. As he sips Richard watches the grandstand grow. There is no mistaking the way it is facing.

  ‘A day or two,’ he says to the dog. And he smiles at the dog’s delight in his voice and its wise ignorance of anything that might be happening in a day or two.

  ‘You are a good boy,’ he says, and as he speaks he feels as happy as the dog.

  Richard makes himself eat. He needs energy to do the few things that he has to do. But the square of chocolate sits heavy on his tongue, its sweetness clashing with the vodka clarity of his palate. He is scared he might gag, and if he gags he’ll cough and if he coughs he fears it might trigger worse because cough and guts and bowel seem all connected within this ruinous frame of his.

  The chocolate has softened on his tongue. He sluices it down with a sudden fling of vodka. It stays down. He does not cough. Nothing happens.

  ‘We’d better go, dog,’ he says. ‘Things to do.’

  * * *

  He chooses the grey dress. It seems the simplest, the most innocent. The material is silk-like in its softness and fineness. Wool? Synthetic? Some exotic animal fibre? He does not know but is pleased by the way it slithers over the head and arms of the mannequin and hangs from the shoulder, gathers slightly just below the waist like a flapper’s dress from the twenties, then flares again, but subtly. When the dog brushes against the dress the material sways before settling. How good she’d look in a breeze. Propped on a chair back, Richard blows at the skirt but his breath is thin and weak and the material hardly moves and he knows that if he blew harder the cough would come. But the dress is good, a dress for a young woman, for a slip of a girl all sinuous and lithe and bright with hope, before the world has got to her. She goes barefoot.

  Both mannequins have only a suggestion of facial features, the merest bumps and mouldings in the buff material to indicate that here a nose would be and there the eyes. This pleases him. It lets him see what he wants to see: the puckish nose, the bright-lit eyes.

  Fitting jeans on the other mannequin is less dignified. The legs don’t flex at the knee so Richard bunches the jeans on the floor as if they’d simply been undone at the waist and allowed to fall. He lifts the naked form upright and snuggles the feet into the piled legs of the jeans and raises the cloth up over shins and thighs and crotch while struggling to keep the figure standing. Once, when it slips against his shoulder and lurches to one side, Richard says sorry.

  The jeans he chose are wrong. He has to scour another half a dozen rooms for others, is cursed again by the age and girth of hotel residents. But he persists and a pair he finds on the floor above are just the thing, tailored by age, faded at the knee from flexion and wrinkled at the crotch. When he has slid them up the legs, the waistband nestles on the narrow hips. And as with the dress, the cloth does not hug or cling, but lies on the sweet bulge of the buttock then falls below all perpendicular and good and soft, like a stage curtain. The look has the erotic simplicity that he hoped for. He tops it with a singlet, a simple cotton vest, quite new and brightly white, and rich to the touch of fingertips. He can remember when his groin responded to such tactile cloth, to the promise of the flesh beneath.

  Neither mannequin has joints. This will be a standing party then, though later his guests might recline. It does not matter. He removes the chairs from his feasting place. Now, in the centre of the banqueting hall, the three tables stand like a plush and polished island, laid with the crockery and the cutlery and the array of glasses to which he’s added three synthetic roses from the cupboard and a silver-gilt candelabrum with five white candles.

  And the dog now has two bowls by its bed, one already primed with Kiwi Spring, the other to hold, albeit briefly, a dinner of Tux.

  Back out on the car park roof, Friday fossicks while he lies back with late-afternoon wine. Somehow the dog finds interest in what seems a barren world. Though it is only hours since they were here and nothing can have changed, the dog tours with intense attention the concrete walls and buttresses, and the parked cars thick with settled dust.

  Richard drowses in the warm afternoon. How long has he been in this building? He is aware that he has quite lost track and he is equally aware that it doesn’t matter.

  An arch of cloud lies over the city, the nor’west arch. Beyond it the sky is a pale blue-gold. In the silent city the air is late-summer heavy. When the breeze comes as it comes now it is with near tropical warmth on the skin. And on it Richard catches a strain of something, of shouting is it, or music? He rouses a little, looks at the dog but it seems to have noticed nothing untoward, nothing to impinge on a dog’s consciousness.

  Again a waft of breeze and again a snatch of noise borne across the city from the direction of Hagley Park. The crackling of big loudspeakers, a gout of rock music, and then, absurdly clear as a gust of wind comes, ‘Testing, one, two, three.’

  Chapter 32

  Jess had gone to work. The Press was on the kitchen table, two faces looking up at Annie. One was nine years old, freckled and beaming, an ideal front-page image, a heart-warmer, hope-giver and paper-seller. You had to read the text to learn that the child was suffering from a degenerative condition. Unless a miracle occurred, divine or scientific, in a dozen years he’d be imprisoned in a body that didn’t work. He wouldn’t be able even to smile. Another decade or less and he’d be dead. But for now he was as happy a little boy as could be found in the city: he had the job of pressing a plunger that would bring down a building on a Sunday morning, just a few hours before Annie flew home.

  The other face was the royal one, the prince they called Wills, pictured at the airport being greeted by the usual suspects, the men in suits, and the women in hats who never usually wore hats. How many hundred thousand hats bought specially for the occasion and never worn again would greet Wills in his official lifetime?

  How was it that the magic dust of royalty continued to work in the twenty-first century? For it did work, clearly and indisputably. Even the crudest rock musician whose success was founded on defying, or at least appearing to defy, every sexual, social or narcotic convention, became a smiling yes-ma’am puppy dog when asked to the palace to have some sort of decoration pinned to his ageing chest.

  The last time William had been to New Zealand it had been with his fairy-tale mother. How many times had even Annie, who was three at the time, seen the picture of him playing with a Buzzy Bee on the lawn at Government House, Charles looking awkward in a suit, and Diana looking overblown and eighties-ish? Since then he’d undergone the sort of intensive training that a guide dog undergoes, and he’d become his office.

  That morning he would be taken on a greatest-hits disaster tour, consoling selected victims as he went. Then he’d be shown around the red-zoned central city, before his appearance at the memorial service in Hagley Park, where he would act
as proxy for his grandmother, the highest of high priestesses, whose juju was the greatest juju of them all. We might scoff at credulous medieval peasants who sought the king’s touch to cure disease, but what was the royal presence for in Hagley Park if not to do its bit to heal some 80,000 shaken souls (including, admittedly, some starstruck but unshaken ones like Annie’s mother)?

  The rest of the paper, which Annie read with a bowl of muesli, reflected a growing discontent. A few weeks now since the big one and the excitement of the trauma had worn off. Most people to the north and west of the city had resumed a life that didn’t diverge too widely from the one they led before. Their suffering was little more than inconvenience. But where the quake had raised and lowered land, had snapped the spines of homes, had buried suburbs under tons of silt, had shattered pipes and rendered streets impassable, it seemed that the authorities were overwhelmed, insurance companies cynical and nothing much was being done to make things any better. The letters to the paper were no longer expressing wonder at resilience, or gratitude for the kindness of strangers, but were beginning to grumble.

  Annie felt a twinge of guilt. In the time she’d been back she’d done half an afternoon of shovelling silt in Brighton and that was that. She’d shunned the damaged areas, been preoccupied with her own affairs. But then again, she reflected, she was probably typical. Most of us find enough difficulty with what is in front of us.

  Her phone rang. ‘Annie, it’s me, Ben.’

  Annie was surprised by her surge of pleasure.

  ‘I’d like you to meet my kids,’ he said. An image of them rose in Annie’s head, swarming round Ben’s car in Glandovey Road, grinning like the boy on the front page. ‘They want to go to the thing in the park this afternoon. Prince William’s the drawcard, of course. Would you like to join us? Please say yes. We’re taking a picnic. And no, before you ask, Steph won’t be there. But yes, I’ve told her and she’s fine with it. So what about it?’