King Rich (6 page)

‘A more distinctive surname would have helped,' said Jess. ‘Do you know how many Joneses there are in the South Island?'

‘Sorry,' said Annie, though she'd always rather liked the ordinariness of it. She'd been surprised to find Jess still up, sitting at the kitchen table, a cat splayed on her lap.

‘Was his middle name Hugh?'

Annie shrugged.

‘Born 1952, which would make him fifty-nine or sixty. Would that be about right?'

Annie nodded.

‘No GP record but a hospital admission, June 1992, after what seems to have been a traffic accident. He was a bit of a mess. Here, see for yourself.'

Annie scanned the notes made in Jess's expansive handwriting, the dots over the i's appearing as circles.

Suspected kidney damage, a broken rib, heavy bruising in the groin area and emergency surgery had been needed to
save his left hand. Annie felt weak with sympathy, even at this distance.

‘Your dad, if it is your dad, discharged himself after one week against medical advice,' said Jess. ‘Does that sound like him?'

Annie wondered a moment. Had that been how he was? ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I was a kid. He was my dad. I mean dads are different when you're a kid, aren't they?'

And hers had been the dependable presence of loving kindness. But scarcely human. As a girl she couldn't have imagined him being afraid, or unwise or hesitant or doubtful or worried or any of the things most people are most of the time. Or injured in any way. Did all kids see their dads like that? Even the weak ones, the distant ones, the cruel ones? She didn't know.

‘Was there anything else on file?'

‘Just an address, and you didn't get it from me,' said Jess, handing over another scrap of paper. ‘You didn't get anything from me. How did you go with your sleuthing?'

‘I found his best mate from school, who hasn't seen him since they left. He claims to have slept with my dad.'

‘I wouldn't worry too much about that,' said Jess. ‘Young guys do it all the time. Hormones.'

‘But he really loved my dad, I think. And he's nostalgic for when he was young, free, happy or whatever. He's made his pile, had his divorce and is wondering what the point of it all was. So he's delighted I've brought him something to do. Nice guy.'

‘Sounds like he's got you halfway into bed already. Talking of which, I've got an early start in the morning.' Jess lifted the cat off her lap, kissed it and placed it in a padded wicker basket by the log-burner. ‘Night night, Sherlock,' she said to Annie. ‘I won't wake you in the morning. Finish the bottle.' Annie listened to Jess's slippered feet trudge heavily down the floorboards of the hall. The toilet flushed. A tap ran. Then silence.

It was midday in London and her body clock was still as much there as in Christchurch. She turned again to the sparse file of notes. The address Jess had given her was central, on Park Terrace. A flat by the look of it. She'd go there tomorrow.

Nineteen ninety-two. She'd have been in her last year at intermediate. They'd often played netball at Hagley Park. From the courts you could see the hospital. Could it have been that one Saturday morning while she and her friends squealed with excitement under the empty winter trees, and their breath misted their air and they pulled on those stiff cotton bibs and their thighs below their skirts were pink with the cold, her father had been lying in a hospital bed almost within earshot?

She pictured him sitting up in bed, drawing a picture perhaps for a nurse. But the face she'd given him, she knew, was not the face of the forty-year-old he would have been, nor even the face she'd known him by, the details of which had become vague. It was the face of the boy in the school photo. Though she did remember precisely the way he held a pencil, the deft economy with which he drew, the picture taking shape in just a few lines. He held the pencil in his left hand.

At the kitchen table Annie opened Jess's laptop. The Hugh might make a difference. ‘Richard Hugh Jones, Christchurch' she typed and in less than a second the hundred thousand-strong list of hits had taken shape on her screen, already ranked in decreasing order of accuracy. To Annie it was still a form of magic, impossibly brilliant and yet also sinister, threatening. How was it possible to escape it?

But her father seemed to have done so. She found nothing new, nothing she hadn't seen and dismissed before. Where was he? For some reason she felt more strongly now that he was out there. But if Google couldn't find him, what chance did she have?

The cat erupted from the basket and was out through its door before Annie felt the shake. Then it was as if the house had been gripped from below by some impossible force. It threatened everything. Annie knew she should go to a doorway at least but she found herself pinned, gripping the table edge, wide eyed, paralysed by forces that dwarfed her and the house and the city. The fear was existential. The quake lasted perhaps a dozen seconds, a rolling subterranean thunder, a growl of the gods. Annie wasn't sure that she breathed during it.

‘Welcome to Christchurch,' Jess shouted down the hall. ‘You all right, sweet pea?'

‘Shit,' said Annie. ‘Was that pretty big?'

‘Four point five or so. We're all seismometers now. Night night.'

The pigeon is on the sill already, waiting. As Richard and the dog approach it edges back towards the open air, lurching on its club foot. But it does not take off. From a yard away Richard tosses crumbs. The bird goes straight to them, pecking without concern. Richard can hear the noise of its beak tap-tapping on whatever shiny synthetic stuff the sill is made of. Boffins somewhere trained a pigeon to sit inside a missile and steer it by pecking on a video screen. If the missile was ever fired, the pigeon died.

At a word from Richard, the dog settles on the floor. Moving slowly, Richard seats himself at the window and slides his claw towards the bird. Its head cocks to eye the crumbs in the palm and it lurches forward and pecks and Richard feels the blunt stab of the beak against his damaged flesh. Slowly he raises the right hand and the bird looks up but does not withdraw. Richard lays a trail of crumbs up the inside of his left forearm, like a powder fuse. The pigeon doesn't hesitate,
stepping onto the palm so that Richard feels its weight for the first time. That weight is less than the bird's apparent plumpness would suggest. A million feathers clothe the pigeon's neck, overlapping with impossible precision, adjusting without effort to every movement, insulating, independently intricate, collectively astonishing, much more than a miracle, on the neck of a dowdy, crippled, urban pigeon.

As the pigeon pecks its way up his forearm, rocking and balancing on the pallid skin, Richard slowly lifts the hand from the sill. The pigeon shifts for balance but is not alarmed.

Starlings and sparrows have come to the sill. With his right hand Richard scatters more crumbs close to the claw, too close for the starlings to dare. The pigeon leaves his arm and pecks at the crumbs, two sparrows hopping about it, just beyond range of its beak. Together they clean the sill in a minute. When Richard makes to stand, the sparrows and starlings erupt into the air at the first hint of movement. The pigeon, more cumbersome, but also more at ease, limps to the edge of the sill before dropping onto the air and a long swoop that Richard follows with his eyes before, with a few strong beats, it rows to the broken parapet of the Edwardian building across the road.

‘Good boy,' says Richard to the dog, to the world and tosses a piece of biscuit down the corridor for the dog to chase.

The smell in the kitchen has worsened. Richard wants to gag, but he defies his nausea to feed the dog. Holding his breath, he opens the fridge and there's a sudden scampering and a blur of furry bodies, slithering over the door sill, dropping to
the floor and diving under tables, ovens, anywhere. The dog pounces and a rat screams momentarily as the dog throws it into the air and pounces again as it lands and shakes it once, twice, snapping its back and letting it fall. The rat wheezes and briefly scrapes at the air with its paws and then is still and silent.

The dog is already looking around for more, standing taller, head held alert and alive, fired by instinct, pure ancestral dog, happy in killing and keen to kill again. The rats have fled, but the smell of them lingers, melding with the smell of putrefaction. Richard feels a surge of dread, of Eden sullied, and he takes the Johnnie Walker outside.

He sits on a bar stool no doubt put there by kitchen hands who smoked, as the dog continues scouring the kitchen for rats. Will the rats rise through the building? How will he feed the dog? How long can a dog cope on a mini-bar diet, on Pringles, peanuts and Cookie Time biscuits? And what about himself? He pulls at the Scotch, and watches from the door as the dog, brimming with hope, sniffs at the skirtings, at the cracks and crannies down which the rats slithered. It is preoccupied, engrossed, oblivious.

* * *

Mr Butts the cleaner was waiting in a van. And taggers had visited. Across the pastel weatherboards of Mrs Yeats' house was a screaming signature in purple, black and fluorescent orange. ‘Rodik94' it said, in violent swastika-like lettering as jagged as
the rents in the riverbank. Annie felt a surge of resentment, of anger. And a tinge of fear.

‘I'd string them up, I would,' said Mr Butts getting out of his van and indicating the tagging. He was a strongly built man in white overalls, with the sort of buck teeth that orthodontics no longer allowed to flourish. ‘The little bastards,' he said. His forthright indignation was a tonic.

They knocked on the front door but got no response. Annie peered in through the kitchen window. The bench looked as clean as when she'd finished with it the other day, but there was no sign of Mrs Yeats.

They unlatched the gate just as Rodik94 must have done to get at the side wall. The nerve, the intrusiveness of it.

The back garden would have upset Mr Yeats. The lawn stood tall and brown and had gone to seed, the little orchard a couple of seasons unpruned, littered with the remains of rotting fruit. Had there really been no children? Annie thought she remembered talk of a son, gone overseas – to Canada, was it? Did he not keep an eye out for his widowed and feeble mother? It wasn't hard, surely, even from that distance.

Weeds had pushed up through the cracks in the patio. Two standard roses in tubs were in need of deadheading. Had Annie ever known Mrs Yeats' Christian name? She thought not. She'd been Mrs Yeats, no, ‘Nice Mrs Yeats', throughout Annie's childhood.

Annie tapped on the glass of the French doors with a single knuckle and kept tapping even as she was taking in the sight of
Mrs Yeats' thin old legs lying inert on the floor with one knee drawn up as if frozen in the act of running on her side. Her torso was hidden by the sofa. Annie knocked harder, tried the handles.

‘Bloody hell,' said Mr Butts, who also tried the handles and shook the windows, then turned his back to the doors and shoved his elbow through a pane, reached through the shards, turned a key and they were in.

Mr Butts knelt beside Mrs Yeats and leant in over her and for one absurd moment Annie thought he was about to deliver the kiss of life with those extraordinary teeth of his, but Mrs Yeats was breathing, and had suffered no obvious injury. By the time the ambulance arrived, they had her sitting against the side of the sofa, propped up with cushions.

She looked dazedly around at Annie, at Mr Butts, at the paramedic.

‘Where's Sid?' she said.

‘Mrs Yeats, it's me, Annie. You've had a little fall, but you're going to be fine.'

Mrs Yeats looked at Annie in bewilderment. ‘Where's Sid?' she said. ‘He'll be wanting his tea.'

‘Sid's in the garden,' said Annie. ‘He'll be along shortly.'

When the ambulance had gone with Mrs Yeats on board Annie didn't know what to do about the house. Mr Butts did. He cleaned up the glass, tacked a square of hardboard over the broken pane, donned mask and paper suit and cleaned out the downstairs toilet with remarkable speed and thoroughness,
locked the place from the inside and emerged from the front door with a key that Annie promised to deliver to Mrs Yeats in hospital.

And when Annie tried to pay him for his time he wouldn't hear of it, backing away with his hands raised as she tried to put the notes in his pocket.

‘Poor old dear,' he said. ‘I've got half a mind to come back with a blaster and get rid of that for her,' and he cast a look of contempt at the ‘Rodik94' and shook his head.

‘Bless you,' said Annie, and she kissed him on the cheek and his round face broke into a snaggle-tooth smile. Then he got into his van and drove away. Diagonally across the van's back doors were the words ‘Cleaner Butts!'

The sun glittered bright on the river. Canada geese had gathered on the bank near the huge old willow with the split trunk. Their crap littered the grass. She did not remember the geese from her childhood. Perhaps they had arrived only in the recent weeks, the pioneers of a reversion to nature. If left alone, the geese and ducks and weeds and grass would see off even the taggers, would reclaim the place for their own form of warfare.

More accustomed now to the broken city, and somehow emboldened by the drama with Mrs Yeats, Annie lifted apart two sections of the fencing around her childhood home.

The shaded path down the side of the house was the same mossed concrete she remembered, ending in a gate whose catch she could have operated blindfold. Less had happened to the back garden. Lawn, fruit trees on the long brick wall, and at
the bottom end where the bonfire had burned stood vegetable patch, tomatoes and sweet corn fat and ready to harvest amid yellowing leaves.

An ugly conservatory had been pinned onto the back of the house. Annie tried the doors. Locked. She didn't much mind. She made a shading tube of her hand and peered through the glass. There was nothing to see. What had been her childhood home was someone else's now. There were no such things as ghosts.

* * *

Richard wedges the door open with the bar stool, and heads for Manchester Street. He is wearing fluffy slippers, a pair of trackpants that say ‘BARKERS' down one leg in large letters, and a hotel dressing gown, tied with a sash. The lane is perhaps thirty yards long, flanked on one side by some windowless commercial building and on the other by a fence of corrugated iron painted off-white. At the end of the lane Richard peers tentatively around the corner.

To the south he can see almost to Moorhouse Avenue. Cars line the road, left since the quake, now grey with rubble dust. In places the facades of buildings have shot tongues of brick or masonry halfway across the road. Red traffic cones denote a way for vehicles to negotiate the chaos, but no vehicles are moving. Nothing is moving.

Across the road the small convenience store looks not too badly damaged, though plaster and masonry have fallen from the
second floor. A Chinese guy ran it, Richard remembers. Bald as a vulture, his cheeks dotted with skin cancers, he was forever sweeping the floor and the pavement with his plastic broom. That broom was his trademark, his stage prop, his identity. He would sometimes level it at Richard like a gun, and sight down the handle and pretend to pull the trigger. ‘Lazy man, drink man,' he'd say to Richard, ‘lazy man, drink man,' but he would be smiling and if Richard had money he would sell him tobacco readily enough. How would he be coping away from his empire?

Richard struggles through the chunks of plaster and rubble. His slipper soles are little more than sheets of fluffy cardboard, slowing his progress, and here in the street he is hopelessly exposed. He wishes he had brought the Johnnie Walker.

The shop's front door is locked, even though the window to its left is shattered, great chunks of it missing, and others hanging from the frame like the blades of guillotines. Richard smiles to think of the man locking it amid the chaos.

Richard steps through the broken window. Glass crunches underfoot. The floor is littered with cans and packets and bottles and there is the smell of rats or mice here too. Someone has been here before him. The doors that hide the temptation of tobacco from the underage and the recently quit hang open and the racks have been stripped.

‘Dog food,' says Richard to himself, ‘dog food.'

A noise behind him, a crunch of glass. Richard's heart leaps like a cat in a cage. And a gust of fear goes through him even as he turns and sees the dog.

He clutches at the shelving for support, his breath coming fast. ‘Friday,' he gasps, ‘for fuck's sake.' And the dog could not have been more pleased. It fusses around him, its bare paws seemingly untroubled by the broken glass. Richard reaches down with his good hand and mauls the dog's neck and back.

There's a small bag of Tux and a ten-kilo sack. He wants the sack but can barely lift it, let alone carry it all the way back. He calls the dog and makes it stand and with a grunt he heaves the sack up into his arms like some swaddled baby and lays it lengthwise along the dog's spine, keeping a grip on the plastic handle to share the load. The dog writhes in protest.

‘No, Friday, no. Steady, boy, steady.'

With a hand on the sack to keep it stable, Richard urges the dog back out over the litter of broken glass, and onto the pavement and still there is no one there. As they cross the road the sack slips from the dog's back before Richard can stop it.

‘Friday,' says Richard, ‘come on, boy.' But though the dog stays near it will not let him replace the sack. They are exposed in mid-road.

Richard hooks his claw through the handle and hauls, dragging the sack over the tarmac, the noise upsetting, scary. Worn by the friction, the sack starts to fray at the base and biscuits spill onto the road. With an effort Richard flips the sack over, lifts it into his arms and carries it like a bride the last few yards to the safety of the alley, then leans panting against the fence of corrugated iron, too weak to go further. He fears a coughing fit.

The dog has already found the spilled biscuits.

‘Here, Friday, here.' But the dog ignores him.

Richard drags the sack a few yards, stops to pant and lean, does another few yards. In time he reaches the kitchen door, lugs the sack over the threshold and sits a while to recover. Then he goes back down the alley for the dog.

‘Oi.' The voice is loud and male. The dog looks up and stays looking up at a point further down Manchester Street.

Richard turns and heads for the hotel in a gasping, lurching trot.

‘Oi,' calls the voice again. ‘Here, boy.'

Just before the hotel the dog passes Richard and dives in through the kitchen door, a Tux in its mouth. Richard shoves aside the bar stool and closes the door as quietly as he can. Despite the scurry of rats' feet and the stench of putrefaction, Richard sags against the work surface, his breath coming fast and shallow, the blood pounding in his ears.

He thinks he hears boots outside in the alley but if he does they turn and go away again quite soon. And everything returns to quiet in the hotel. And he has most of a sack of dog biscuits.