King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Dedication

  To my mother, Joy

  Chapter 1

  A woman is screaming. The hotel doorman, a Sikh, has forced a metal bar between the doors of the lift.

  ‘Be peaceful, madam,’ he shouts through the crack, ‘be peaceful.’

  ‘Can I help?’ says Richard. He says it before he knows he will say it. Without looking up, the doorman indicates the bar. Richard’s bad hand protests as he seizes it.

  Another aftershock. The floor of the hotel lobby rolls like the sea. Bottles and glasses crash and scatter. The woman’s screaming becomes a continuous wail.

  ‘Heave, sir,’ says the doorman. The doors of the lift part a few inches. Richard can see the woman’s hair. She is kneeling on the floor of the lift, as if praying. She looks up, her face wrenched by terror, her teeth bared like a baboon’s.

  ‘Hold on, sir,’ says the doorman, seizing a chair and wedging it into the gap between the lift doors, just before Richard’s strength fails.

  ‘We are coming, madam. We are coming. You are all right. You are all right.’

  He puts his hand through the gap above the chair. The woman reaches out.

  Richard heaves on the bar again. The doors open a fraction wider. The doorman pushes the chair deeper into the gap, twisting it. The chair back snaps. The gap narrows again. The woman whimpers.

  A cough rises in Richard’s chest. Rises and keeps rising. He is seized by coughing, bent double over the bar, all strength gone. There is only reflex, only the primal urge to live. He crumples to the floor, knees to chest, foetal. A racking, panicked shudder and the blockage shifts. Richard lies gasping, drained, weak as cotton thread, his vision blurred and dotted with darting lights. Another brief bout of coughing.

  When he looks up a man in uniform is helping with the lift. The doorman’s turban, royally purple, shaded with plaster dust, has begun to unfurl at the back. They have the doors a foot open, a planter wedged into them. They are reaching in, handing out the woman. She is blubbing and limp. The doorman bends, scoops an arm under her knees, another beneath her back and lifts her like a bride, across the lobby and out the revolving door, as another aftershock, a smaller one, sets the long lights swinging.

  ‘You all right, Granddad?’

  Still lying on his side, Richard nods.

  ‘Come on, I’ll help you out,’ and the man in uniform – fireman? policeman? – offers a hand.

  Richard shakes his head, gets to his knees, looks up and tries to smile. ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I’ll follow you. Go on. You’re needed out there,’ and he gestures past the lobby restaurant tables, some overturned, some still bearing the abandoned remains of meals, past the bar and the smashed bottles and the fallen ceiling tiles to the revolving door and the street beyond. Through a cracked plate-glass wall he can see a scatter of rubble, of fallen facade, a half-buried car. ‘Go on, I’ll be fine. You’re needed.’

  The revolving door graunches as the man forces his way out.

  Sirens are sounding outside, but in the hotel there is calm. Behind the bar the optics are still fixed to the wall and the glass-fronted fridges are stacked. Richard flips the cap off a Steinlager, still cold and beaded, and drinks. He feels the stuff seep into his tissues. Bottled God, someone called it. Bottled God. He drinks again. The jangle of the moment softens a little, its sharp edges dulled.

  Through the tall glass he can see people walking quickly, dusted with plaster, others uncertain where to go. It’s like an ants’ nest kicked. He ought to be out there, ought to be helping. He slides beers into the pockets of his coat, goes to the revolving door, glass and crockery crunching underfoot, and pushes. The door shifts a foot, then sticks. He pushes but it doesn’t shift. He pulls but it doesn’t shift. Except for the sirens all is quiet. It seems that everyone has left the building. The guests, the porters, the receptionists, the chambermaids and waiters and bar staff, the duty managers who have so often emerged to move him on, to threaten him with the police, have fled. Richard retreats into the hotel.

  ‘Exit’ says a green sign above a door, with a picture of a stick figure running. Beyond the door the carpet stops and Richard is backstage on luxury. A staircase of bald concrete with painted metal handrails, zigzagging up, self-replicating and unadorned to the top of the tallest building in the city.

  Down here they must have run, not twenty minutes ago, perhaps five hundred people fleeing the swaying building, down this shaft, the building’s spine. He remembers a middle-aged woman in a hotel robe lurching onto the street, with wet hair and bare feet and veins on her legs like great purple worms. Her eyes were wild, her breasts pendulous. She just stood on the pavement gasping until a younger woman went to her and led her away around a corner.

  Richard sets a foot on the first concrete step. He pauses after the first flight, breathing, looking down at his left hand on the metal rail. How old it looks, a reptilian claw.

  One more flight, another pause for rest. When he pushes open a door, concrete reverts to carpet and the mezzanine lounge. A pot of tea still standing on a low table. He lays his palm against its metal flank. It’s faintly warm.

  An unbroken glass wall gives a view of High and Cashel. Half a dozen men are clearing rubble off a green car. Its cabin is staved in, crumpled. He can see where the rubble fell from, the Edwardian pediment three storeys up. Half of it is still up there, held by some temporary balance of forces. Urn shapes, fashioned from plaster or concrete or stone, placed there by men on wooden scaffolding, to fall, a century later, as murderous rain.

  A man signals to the others to pause, reaches in through a gap in the rubble, reaches into the car, bends his head and shoulders into the gap to reach further, emerges, says something to the others and they move off down High Street and out of sight.

  Richard draws a beer from his pocket. As he flips off the cap with the handle of a teaspoon, his forefinger rasps against the cap’s crimped edge. The skin tears. He swigs at the beer, then studies the white tear of skin, watches the old thick blood slowly well beneath it, to form a bulb, a little grape, a droplet that courses suddenly down the side of his hand. He sucks at the tiny wound, tastes his dim metallic blood, presses the finger against the flank of his coat to stem the leak.

  There is no one in the street. Sirens are wailing a few blocks away but here, nothing. The air is granular with dust. An hour ago the street was lunchtime crowded. People with duties, matters on their mind, and in almost every skull a sense of the day ahead, the day mapped by need and habit, the afternoon of work, the journey home, the shopping, dinner, the evening of television or family or income tax return or fixing
the motorbike, or mowing the lawn in the long summer light. All of it gone, erased in a moment, all the certainty, the sense of future time, the sense of control of an accustomed passage through the valley of the days; the whole social edifice fallen like the pediment opposite, now not even rubble, just gone, wiped by a single shrug of the rocks below. Richard drinks from his beer.

  A few blocks away a plume of black smoke. From time to time knots of people hurry by on the street below, stepping round the litter of rubble, looking around at the sights, unwilling tourists of destruction. A woman appears on high heels, dressed for the office, a cell phone clamped to her ear. As she turns the corner of Cashel and High she stops abruptly, stops both walking and talking, and stares at the staved-in car.

  She goes to it, touches the bonnet, peers inside, puts the cell phone back to her ear, speaks briefly, then takes photos with the phone, five, six, seven shots, touring the car, crouching to get an angle. She stands a moment, undecided, then strides swiftly back the way she came.

  And from the other direction, a little girl. Wild-eyed, lost, perhaps seven or eight years old in a simple blue dress and Richard goes to the window and bangs on the glass. The girl has stopped, is looking around. Richard bangs again. She looks up, sees him. He raises both hands, as in a gesture of surrender, telling her to stay where she is, he’ll come and get her. She bursts into tears and turns to run the other way just as a man in a suit comes running round the corner and the girl sees him and runs at him and leaps into his arms and clamps her chest against his, her head over his shoulder, and wraps her legs around him, a baby ape, and father and daughter stand there fused and rocking.

  The girl’s head lifts from the father’s shoulder and he wipes the hair from her eyes and, still in his arms, she turns and points towards the first-floor window where Richard drops below the sill and does not move. Until he hears the footsteps, heavy booted footsteps on the stairs.

  Chapter 2

  Paul and Annie lay under two duvets in the flat in Turnpike Lane, she on her side with her knees drawn up, he with his knees drawn up behind hers, his chest against her back, the pair of them like forks in a cutlery drawer. His left arm draped over her breast. On the radio alarm clock the pips for six o’clock and the cultured voice of a newsreader.

  Annie’s eyes popped open on the instant. Her legs swung off the bed. Naked, she stepped into the little sitting room and turned on the television. Pictures of people panicking in rubble-strewn streets. Of a collapsed building on fire. Of car-swallowing silt on suburban roads. Of sniffer dogs clambering over twisted metal.

  She stood and stared, hugging herself in the cold, dark little room, her eyes fixed on the images of disorder from the other side of the world.

  Paul appeared behind her and fitted a robe over her shoulders and wrapped his arms around her and pressed against her, an erection rapidly wilting in the small of her back. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Look, it’s River Road, that’s our house, look, there, that one,’ and she moved towards the screen to point at a weatherboard villa two beyond the split and broken one centre stage. But River Road became the mayor in an orange jacket saying things to a cluster of thrust microphones. Behind him a white pancaked building and parked fire engines, their lights flashing.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ and she leant into him, her eyes still on the screen.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ he said, detaching himself and turning on the lights and the gas fire on his way to the kitchenette. Christchurch yielded after two minutes to a flood in Bangladesh. She turned the television off and picked up the phone but paused for a moment. The sight of River Road had evoked a flood of disconnected bit-part memories of childhood, all coming in a rush – a one-armed greenish doll, statuesque herons in the shallows, doing nothing then suddenly, fiercely and profitably stabbing, her father coming home from work and throwing her up and catching her and rubbing her against his bristles, her first prick, huge and purple, dramatically and briefly revealed to her alone at the bus stop on Stanmore Road by a man with a beard, the sun, New Zealand’s summer sun that seemed to bite an inch into the skin of your arm, your shoulders. Scones with raisins. Watching from her bedroom window her mother feeding a bonfire and the smuts rising.

  Annie dialled a number, was surprised to get through.

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’

  ‘Darling. So you’ve heard. I didn’t know when I could decently ring you. Course I’m all right. Blenheim is a long way from Christchurch, or have you been away so long you’ve forgotten?’

  Annie let this pass, along with quite a lot of isn’t-it-terrible-poor-Christchurch stuff that followed, and that contrasted somewhat with her mother’s excited, animated tone.

  ‘We’ve got a meeting of the wine club in an hour and we’re going to see what we can do to help, you know, in our own little way.’

  ‘You’re not going to send them wine,’ said Annie.

  ‘I shall ignore that comment, dear.’

  ‘I saw River Road on the telly. It looked, well…’

  ‘I know, dear, I know. Did you see old Bateman’s place, miserable old sod that he was, but still… And that dog of his, great brute used to leap up at the fence and scare the living daylights out of me, and it wasn’t as though it was much of a fence either, though I suppose it’s long gone now, the dog, that is, thank God. Old Bateman, too, I’d guess.’

  Huddling towards the gas fire for warmth, Annie gripped the edge of the little low table she had perched on. ‘Mum, do you know if Dad’s still in Christchurch?’

  Paul put a cup of tea beside her, placed his great engineer’s hand on the top of her head briefly. She didn’t look up, intent on the about-to-burst silence on the other side of the world.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No he isn’t or no you don’t know?’

  ‘No, I bloody well don’t know and no, I bloody well don’t care. And if you don’t know by now why I bloody well don’t care I…’

  Annie only half listened to what followed, listened more to the tone of it, the building self-righteousness, the indignation, the self-pity, all fuelled by a sense of injustice that had swollen over the years through repetition and simplification into a story of black-and-white betrayal.

  ‘All right, Mum, all right,’ said Annie as she felt the pressure easing.

  And after a couple of oil-on-watery I’m-glad-to-know-you’re-safes she put the phone down.

  Paul’s frame filled the doorway to the world’s smallest and coldest bathroom. ‘You all right?’ She could hear the hopelessly inadequate shower already running, slopping against the plastic curtain that, if you didn’t actively keep the best part of an arm’s length between you and it, loved nothing better than to wrap itself around your flesh and cling.

  Was that ‘You all right?’ an actual enquiry about her wellbeing or was it what you said when you knew it wasn’t all right but you wanted the other person to agree to pretend it was all right so that you could get on with your own stuff such as having a shower and going to work, which, of course – Annie was nothing if not fair, a weakness – Paul had every right to do?

  Or was it, more complicatedly, a role Paul was playing, knowing, unconsciously, or semi-consciously, that the right thing to say on seeing distress was ‘You all right?’, without any particular concern other than to feel he was doing the right thing, thereby maintaining the notion, the semi-fictional scaffolding of partnerliness, and allowing them to move on to whatever the next scene in the play might be, and hoping it wouldn’t be tears because then he really would be late for work. Oh God.

  It rarely was with Annie. She smiled and nodded.

  * * *

  Because it had happened to people who spoke English and who were predominantly white and who had several proper television cameras and who lived in buildings that, bar the tin roofs, could almost be described as houses, the earthquake had registered on the Great British consciousness. So Annie’s customers, several of whom were more or less aware of he
r provenance, did plenty to keep it front and centre of her mind all morning.

  ‘You’re from down that way, aren’t you, Australia and that?’ said an old dear in a coat apparently manufactured from carpet. ‘No one you know hurt?’ she added hopefully.

  ‘Not that I know of, Mrs Penaluna. Now, you’re to take two of these before breakfast and another two before tea, dinner, before your evening meal. It’s all spelt out on the label. All right?’

  ‘Yes, dear, and thank you. Not surprised you all come over here. Safer, like. I mean if it’s not earthquakes it’s spiders the size of a mouse. I seen them on the telly, hanging around in the lav. Turned my stomach, they did.’

  Annie spent her lunchtime at the computer in the pharmacy office, where she found screeds of disaster porn, the most catastrophic images seized on and reiterated by every news-gathering agency in the globe. To most people the name Christchurch would mean nothing, but the pictures would grasp their attention, would form part of the day’s intake, to be replaced tomorrow by similar images from somewhere else. Annie found more and better pictures of River Road, old Bateman’s place slumped and all but split in two, the garden buried under what she was learning to call liquefaction. Had he really had a dog? She remembered no dog. She’d so wanted a dog when she was little, a cute puppy. Dad had too, but Mum was immovable. ‘Filthy creatures.’

  Up to two hundred people were feared dead, most of them in the two collapsed buildings downtown. But she could find no list of names.

  Chapter 3

  ‘I’ve got sixpence,’ hums Richard as he waits, ‘jolly jolly sixpence,

  I’ve got sixpence, to last me all my life.

  I’ve got tuppence to spend and tuppence to lend

  And tuppence to take home to my wife.’

  He has listened to the boots working their way down the building, can hear them now on the floor above, thumping along corridors. Doors open, voices boom. Down the stairwell they come again. Richard sees the base of the door swing open. Two pairs of boots, black, polished, fawn trouser cuffs.