King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  ‘Anybody here? Hello? Hello?’

  The boots pause for a reply.

  ‘You do in there,’ says a voice. ‘See you in the lobby,’ and one pair of boots turns and heads back through the door. The other man steps behind the breakfast bar and pulls open the door to the kitchen beyond, then lets it close again without passing through. Richard could reach out and touch the leather toe cap, could tie the laces together. He wills himself not to breathe, not to cough. The chiller door beside him opens, a hand and shirtsleeve reaches in, takes out an apple juice, then disappears from view. Richard hears the metal perforations yield as the man unscrews the cap, and the glugging of air through liquid as he drinks. The cap drops to the floor and spins and comes to rest a foot from Richard’s face, then the kitchen door opens again and the boots walk through. From beyond comes the sound of more doors being opened and shut, then the boots return, the juice bottle clatters into a bin, and the boots head to the door and Richard hears them down the stairs. Voices from the lobby below, then the graunch of the revolving doors.

  Only as he relaxes does Richard realise that he has clenched his right fist, has dug the nails into his palm. He waits a minute, two minutes. Distant sirens still, the wail of some sort of three-tone alarm, but no voices. Bracing a foot against the cooler, Richard half slithers, half crawls like a lizard out from under the counter. He raises himself onto all fours and stays there, slowly rotating his neck to ease the ache, then reaches up for the counter edge and hauls himself to his feet. The beer he takes from his pocket has warmed a little. He flips the cap off, not daring yet to go back to the chillers in the lobby.

  In an upholstered chair set well back from the window he hoists his boots onto a coffee table and ranges his three remaining beers beside him. The afternoon sun picks out sparkles of plaster dust. The room warms. He closes his eyes. Another aftershock jolts them open. The building groans and shudders. But already Richard’s senses have attuned to a shaken world and he does not get out of the chair.

  When he wakes the sun has dropped away to the side of the building. His throat is familiarly dry. The tap in the bar delivers a still-cold stream of water with which Richard sluices his throat and face.

  In a dark corridor on the floor above half the doors stand open. By some instinct of caution Richard shuns the rooms nearest the stairs, goes as far as 107, pushes open the door. A wheeled suitcase with a grey ribbon tied to its handle lies open on the strapped rack. Underwear folded, socks, a laptop and a duty free carton of Rothmans. The bed is made. In the wardrobe two suits, four shirts. In the mini-bar, abundance. Baby bottles of Johnnie Walker, Stolichnaya, mixers, a full-size bottle of cabernet sauvignon. In the knee-high fridge Heineken, Steinlager, pinot gris.

  Richard wrestles the pillows from the bedspread, stacks them, places a Scotch and dry and a packet of peanuts on the bedside table and flops onto the mattress with a little gasp. He drains a third of the tumbler. He tears at the foil packet but it resists. He bites the corner and pain sears through a right front tooth. Sickened, he holds still while the pain wanes, studies the packet, finds an indentation in the foil, tears at it with his crabbed fingers and the foil tears meekly, neatly open and he tips nuts into his mouth, keeping them to the left side. How deft the mouth is, how fast to learn. The nuts grind down to a salty paste, which he rinses away with an anaesthetic swig of Scotch. Richard sighs with the ease of it, the softness of the bed, the blessing of the booze. How many rooms are there? He pictures the building from the outside, the tallest in the city. He watched it being built. No need to compute. There are rooms for the rest of his life.

  The Scotch, a frisbee-sized biscuit and half the cab sav later, the edges of the world softened, Richard heaves himself to the bathroom. As he pisses – a hesitant start, a brief jet, a pause, a dribble, another pause that he knows to be a delusory conclusion – he sways slightly and braces his bad hand against the wall above the cistern, his head against his bicep. He smells the ripeness of his coat. No eight-year-old girl, however lost or stricken with fear, would bury her face in that. On the shelf, shampoo and gels in little bottles and a stack of white towels. A wash bag in patterned leather, a razor protruding. A toothbrush.

  Turned to maximum, the shower soon runs warm. Richard’s coat falls to the floor, a bottle in the pocket thudding. He sits on the end of the bed to remove boots and socks, sits up too fast and has to pause to allay the dizziness. He stands to let his trousers and underpants fall, hauls his shirt over his head, grabs the Stolichnaya from the mini-bar, turns towards the bathroom and sees himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stares at the body. It is years since he saw it all plain. The breasts like empty piping bags; the belly slumped in corrugations; the sparse grey hair of groin and thigh as nest to that shrunken withered dick, the vastly pendulous lop-sided balls. The scrawn of thigh and the familiar red and purple uselessness of his left hand dangling like Hook’s claw. ‘Jesus,’ says Richard and he raises the vodka to his lips. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God.’ He drinks.

  He stays in the shower till his fingertips shrivel, laving his flesh with random miniatures of gel and shampoo and conditioner. He towels himself with a deep white fluffiness, sets a gin on the bedside table and slides between the sheets. The luxury is a cocooning wonder. Richard could almost cry at its embrace. The things money can buy. Softness. Comfort. Ease of the flesh. He is asleep before he can even reach for the gin.

  Chapter 4

  When she’d arrived in London Annie had fallen in love with the Tube. She loved the scheme of the Tube map, giving her a template for the city, a way of grasping its hugeness, its thirty-times-as-big-as-Christchurch-ness. She loved being able to burrow underground and then re-erupt into the light and air wherever in the city she wished, from Hyde Park to Plaistow in half an underground hour. What places, what impossibly resonant names lay within its purlieu. And how it would have delighted old Mrs Fernyhough. In her final week of teaching after forty years at Avonside Girls’ High she had offered a battered copy of the Albatross Book of Verse to any girl in Annie’s class who wanted one. ‘They’ll only be gathering dust after I’ve gone,’ she’d added with undisguised bitterness.

  As if in corroboration only half a dozen girls had taken up her offer and Annie suspected that several of those had done so only out of sympathy. But her own copy had gone everywhere with her, had almost been enough to persuade her to a degree in English, until her own innate pragmatism and her mother’s forthright opinion persuaded her otherwise.

  Still, with its blue boards and its impossibly thin paper, it was the one book Annie had brought with her to London, and it felt as if she was taking it home. At eight one morning shortly after she’d arrived, Annie had taken the Tube to London Bridge, had climbed up past the reeking bus station and onto the bridge solely to watch the crowd flow over it. She had not been disappointed. The head-down hordes on a grey London morning poured like something geographical. ‘I did not know death had undone so many,’ she murmured as they streamed past her and she felt close to the heart of something.

  Eliot’s lines had been the second and last that she’d pinned on her bedroom wall. Yeats had been first. ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ her mother had said. It had been enough to blow some of the magic from the words.

  With Eliot, it was ‘Do you have to be quite so morbid, dear?’, which was somehow better. All the same, after that Annie preferred to keep the book by the bed and memorise lines that sang to her, holding them tightly to herself like treasures, never opening the vault to her mother’s thin gaze.

  But now, of course, after a year in the city, as she marched towards King’s Cross on a February evening after work, dark at half past five, head down and thinking of home, she knew she had joined the contingent of the undone. The crowd she was part of was sucked down the steps into the Tube station like water down a drain. The platform was six deep with the undead, the bright-lit train when it came alr
eady crammed to the window glass, flesh pressed against flesh, faces held fiercely in neutral, faking impassivity. The squeeze aboard. The whistle, the doors failing to close and whooshing back, twice, three times, then finally she and a thousand unknown souls were sealed inside. And with the lurch of starting, Annie felt the usual tremor of premonitory claustrophobia. What if the power were to fail and the train stop dead between stations, and she and the thousand strangers crushed together in the… She dismissed the thought, put herself mentally elsewhere, in River Road.

  The images she had seen that morning had stirred so many older ones, bright with childhood.

  She recalled her father lifting her out of bed one winter morning, saying, ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ and carrying her to the window. Still in his arms, she parted the curtains and saw nothing special, the trees, the river, the road, and she swivelled and looked into his face, and he wore a serious look and said, ‘Look again’ and then she saw them, the ducks, scores, perhaps hundreds of ducks, grey and brown, most still roosting on the bank, heads swivelled, beaks buried under wings, ducks to the edge of River Road.

  ‘They’ve come to see Annie,’ said her father, smiling, and he folded her tighter in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘Can I feed them?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. It’s what they’re expecting. You mustn’t let them down,’ and in pyjamas, dressing gown and gumboots she’d gone out with her father into the frozen morning and woken the ducks with a hail of thrown bread, and soon she was wading through ducks.

  ‘Did they really come to see me?’ she asked over the toastless breakfast table.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said her father, ‘they have flown from every continent on earth to be fed by the Princess of River Road.’

  Later her mother casually let it slip that the ducks came into town at this time every winter because the duck shooting season had begun. Annie thought she had already known that.

  Turnpike Lane was winter dark. Lights refracted on the wet asphalt. People went bent against the weather. At the all-purpose Asian store the tiered cascade of fruit and vegetables announced implausibly that somewhere on the planet there was warmth enough for growth.

  In a recessed doorway just beyond Poundland a youth sat in a nest of old duvets, a dog curled beside him. How, in this weather, how? The days would be bad enough but the nights! She found the thought of it, as always, untenable, painful to consider. At the same time she was aware that she had never done a thing to help beyond dropping a few coppers in a plastic bowl. The sympathy was instinctive in her. The practical charity, the active doing of good, was beyond her. It was fear, of course. Her admiration for the likes of the Sally Army was limitless. But it went unexpressed.

  With an inward smile of relief she remembered it was Tuesday, Paul’s squash night. She’d have the flat to herself, could curl in solitude on the sofa, the gas fire on, reading perhaps, drinking soup, watching soaps, whatever. The deliciousness of being alone, of not having to be anyone but unfettered self, dragged her past the little park with its winter-bald trees, like gesturing trolls, and its fenced playground with the stranger danger notices, and into Hampden Road.

  The terraced houses on either side had not been generously sized when built a century or so ago. Yet every one of them was now split into two, an upstairs and a downstairs flat. In the shared front yard, effectively filling it, two bicycles belonging to the Laotian couple downstairs were chained together and to the drainpipe. Last summer Annie had put out a planter of azaleas. Someone stole the azaleas that first night. The planter within a week.

  Even as she opened the door that blocked off the stairs to their flat, a door the frailty and shoddiness of which never ceased to affront and amaze her, that this thing should have been bought and sold as a door, a barrier between the safety of home and the hostility of a world beyond, this thing of hardboard tacked to a frame of what seemed to be balsa, a door that any weakling of a burglar could simply stick his fist through, she knew immediately that Paul was home. She sagged. First at the luxury of solitude snatched from her, and second at the thought that, well this could hardly be it, could it, could hardly be that much-mentioned brilliance, love. To come home tired to your lover, your partner, your soul mate, for God’s sake, at the end of a dreary winter’s day should be, according to the script, a tonic, a joy. With it there should come a sense of wholeness and unity, and a real sense of coming home, like sinking into a warm bed. Not a disappointment.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, as Paul appeared at the top of the stairs, gently smiling. She let him fold her in his arms and kiss the top of her head.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘how was your day?’

  And maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that, she thought, as she smelt the bolognese – it was more or less the only thing he cooked, but he cooked it well – and in the kitchen the table was laid and there were candles and a bottle of wine and, of all things, and suspiciously, napkins. She looked straight at him and he smiled his big schoolboy smile, which came out only when he knew he’d done something deserving of praise.

  ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘after this morning, you know, the earthquake back home and that, I thought, well, you could probably do with something. You know, something nice.’

  ‘Oh Paul,’ she said, ‘and on your squash night.’

  ‘Squash was cancelled,’ he said.

  * * *

  ‘No,’ he said, as she made to clear the empty plates from the table, the little bowl of freshly grated parmesan, ‘leave them. My treat tonight.’ He refilled her glass – a Waipara pinot noir. He really had gone to some trouble.

  As he filled the sink to wash up she admired his simple heft, the V of his back, the long strong thighs. Professional, level-headed, kind in a clumsy blokish sort of way, faithful – and she couldn’t imagine him ever deceiving her if he wasn’t – and endowed with a British passport, Paul was emphatically what her mother would have called ‘a keeper’. Though Annie wasn’t her mother.

  ‘Don’t you want to watch the news?’ he said when she made to dry the dishes. In the sitting room she curled on the sofa in front of the cinema-sized screen. Christchurch led the bulletin still, the morning after the day before. The ghoulish cameras had had time to scour the city for the most affecting images, the fallen spire, the rubble-crushed cars, the survivors white with plaster dust, parents finding children, the hotel on a Pisaish lean, office workers being lowered from the windows of a tower block, houses with a side missing, the interiors open to the world, children sitting in Latimer Square near the smoking remnants of the building where their mother was entombed. An aerial shot of the east of the city showed how the Avon, the gentlest and prettiest of little rivers, willow-lined and duck-paddled, had half reclaimed its swampy floodplain. A hundred and fifty years of human effort had been shrugged off, without great effort, a mere flick of the earth like a swish of a horse’s tail and well, we all know we are mere ticks on the earth’s flanks, but to see this happen to somewhere she knew, the place that nurtured her, felt to Annie like something bitterly different, like a sense of certainty lost.

  In interviews edited for maximum emotion, she heard the frightened weep and the excited burble, while those in authority spoke with a gravitas that masked their delight in being in authority in a disaster, in being listened to and looked to for information and orders. Thanks to television, she had a god-like view of the event that was unavailable to those at the heart of it. For them, Annie sensed, the grieving kids, the trapped and the freed, the suddenly homeless, it was just a present-tense mess, the here and now of being alive. And she felt impotent.

  When the quake gave way to unrest in Tunisia – Bangladesh had sunk rapidly in the rankings – Annie turned the television off and sat staring at the blank screen, imagining what it must be like to be there right now, in River Road, the central city, anywhere in her home town. The frame of the sofa squeaked as Paul sat beside her. She leant into his chest and his arm encircled her and a paw cupped her shou
lder.

  ‘Thanks for the dinner,’ she said, nestling, ‘it was lovely. Just what I needed.’

  ‘You all right?’

  That standby line again, indicative of both his kindness and his bafflement. He seemed to have little idea what feelings she might have, and he clearly didn’t want to know the detail, but in his own sweet way he cared, or, at the very least, he wanted her to be happy rather than sad. Which on the scale of emotional complexity was at the primitive end, but whoever said that complexity was a virtue?

  She nodded and sank deeper into his hug. ‘It’s just… oh, I don’t know…’

  ‘You think you ought to be there,’ he said.

  In her surprise she turned to look into his face. He held her gaze without blinking

  ‘So why don’t you, then?’

  ‘Now you’re being silly. What good am I going to do? And what about work? And it’s not exactly cheap flying home, you know.’

  Paul shrugged and drew her back against him.

  ‘But you’re right in one way. I do feel, I don’t know, sort of guilty for not being there. I mean it’s home, where I was brought up. And it’s like seeing your childhood smashed to bits.’

  She looked away from him towards the blank screen, thoughts whirring.

  ‘The first thing they teach you at engineering school,’ said Paul after a pause, ‘lesson one on day one, is that nothing lasts for ever. Nothing’s permanent. Everything you build is going to fall down eventually. You’re just delaying chaos for a bit, that’s all. It won’t last. Everything’s ephemeral. In the long run entropy wins all the battles.’

  ‘Really?’ said Annie.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No, I mean is it really the first thing they teach you at engineering school?’

  ‘It should be,’ said Paul.

  She laughed.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ said Paul.

  She said and did nothing. Just stayed in his arms, both of them looking towards the black depth of the television screen.