King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Annie looked around. No other couples seemed to be talking this earnestly. Indeed most sat in silence, looking across the crowded concourse, their hand luggage packed around their feet like plumply obedient dogs.

  ‘And one more thing. I’m in too far already so I might as well say it. I’m not too bad a bloke. No, I’ll rephrase that. I’m a good bloke. I know blokes pretty well. I’ve spent a lot of time with blokes. And some of them are pretty nasty and a lot of them are bloody selfish or vain or they lie a lot, especially to women. Well, I may not be the most sensitive or emotional bugger on the planet, but I’m not nasty and I won’t bloody deceive you, just as I’m not trying to deceive you now.

  ‘So, Annie, yeah, go to New Zealand, go back home and I hope you find your dad and anything else you may be looking for. And I’ll be here when you come back, and I’m yours if you want me. But if you do want me it’s on the condition that we’re going to get married and start having a whole tribe of kids. Which will probably mean you’ll have to give up work, and I’ll have to earn a heap more money and, but hell, it can’t be that hard, can it? I mean raising a family’s not exactly unheard of. No, don’t say anything. I’m glad to have got that all out. Now I’ll be off.’

  They both stood. He opened his arms to draw her in and kissed her on the lips and then folded her, pressed her against his chest and it was like being clamped in a warm cupboard. He kissed the top of her head.

  ‘You have a good flight,’ he said. ‘And email me when you get there, okay?’

  By way of a reply she squeezed herself tighter against his chest and stayed there a while, her cheek against his ribs, and then she pulled away and they stood facing each other and he stroked the sleeve of her coat and was half bashful schoolboy again and she felt a surge of affection and he said, ‘Be seeing you, Annie,’ and smiled and turned away. She stood where she was in the cafe and watched him till he reached the automatic glass doors and he turned and waved and she waved back, though she wasn’t sure that he’d have made her out. Then she turned and breathed deeply and went to join the absurdly long queue for security, at the far end of which she’d be obliged to remove her shoes.

  * * *

  Some time during the night Annie went to the toilet, then leant a while on the bulbous emergency door, peering out of the window over what was probably central southern Russia. Each settlement 40,000 feet below was visible only as a cluster of lights, joined to other clusters by roads that showed as the frailest of gossamer threads. Annie felt a sense of the world’s vastness, of all the millions down there leading lives as remote from hers as the lives of plants or antelope, people she would never meet or hear of, in landscapes quite unlike her own, yet all of them doing the same things, growing up, finding mates, starting families, raising kids. And though the plane was travelling at however many hundred miles an hour it seemed only to crawl across this landmass, this lump of territory that someone down there called home and thought was all in all.

  And when the best part of a day later, a day spent in the limbo land of long-haul air travel, Annie saw the mountains of the South Island rising out of the ocean, she had only a sense of how impossibly remote, how pin-prickishly small amid all that water was the place that she called home. Slivers of rock thrust up by the meeting of two crustal plates, slivers we think of as static and permanent only because we measure time against our own brief lives. These little islands owed their very existence to the same forces that had just afflicted Christchurch, that had ended two hundred human lives and disrupted perhaps half a million more and all in geophysical terms without doing very much at all. It made the whole of life there seem as contingent, as arbitrary and as opportunistic and as meaningless, as it obviously was. But at the same time it had to be lived. ‘When you get down,’ and Annie could hear Mrs Fernyhough’s quavery voice, ‘the house is a maelstrom of loves and hates, where you, having got down, belong.’

  Annie knew she belonged, could feel it from 40,000 feet, could feel herself being drawn, pulled by a sort of emotional gravity as the plane passed over the green ribbon of the West Coast that looked barely touched by the human beast, over the impossible white beauty of the Southern Alps, the snow of their peaks and flanks ironed by the air, then down over the foothills, the rivers of the plain gathering strength as the tributaries nosed from the countless valleys and merged in their push towards the sea, the whole thing laid out like a geography lesson. And then the great alluvial plain of Canterbury, the human presence everywhere in the quilt of paddocks, the dots of sheep, the squares of ripe wheat or barley, the toy farmhouses governing all this farmed fertility.

  The plane swung out over the ocean and came in across the heart of the city. Everyone craned to see destruction. From her aisle seat Annie caught only glimpses of seemingly undamaged roof. And then the wheels hit tarmac and the brakes gripped and suddenly the plane was a beast of the land again and Annie was home.

  The air bridge had been lined with photos of bush and was loud with recorded birdsong. Though Annie had rarely set foot in bush and had never heard such a chorus of birdsong, her heart still rose to the sound and the sense that here in the South Pacific this wasn’t Europe. It was unique, different, small but brave. And unlike Heathrow it hadn’t forgotten how to smile. Maybe it was a gimmick, but the grin and the ‘Welcome home’ from the man in passport control did something to Annie’s heart.

  She emerged into the arrivals hall through sliding glass doors that she had seen on the internet earlier that week as search and rescue teams arrived from around the world and were met with applause that had brought a lump to Annie’s throat 12,000 miles away. And there was Jess, squealing and bouncing with welcoming delight, with that overflowing vitality that had always been her trademark, her signature, her self. It was this irrepressibility that had attracted Annie in school, and the friendship, unlikely though it was, had endured. Big, forthright Jess, and she was bigger still now, whom Annie thought of as a force of nature. And now she burst around the barrier and hugged Annie with an intensity that brought smiles, Annie noticed, to the faces of the others waiting to meet the newly arrived. Had anyone ever hugged Annie with quite such absence of reserve, such commitment? Her mother? No. Paul? Rarely. Her father? Oh, it had been so long ago. She wasn’t sure that she remembered right.

  ‘So we’ve got another disaster tourist, have we?’ said Jess, releasing Annie from the hug but keeping a proprietary hand on either flank of her and studying her with unfaked interest. ‘What would you like to see first? Smoking ruins? The morgue? Two ex-cathedrals? Liquefaction? Collapsed cliffs?’

  ‘Bed,’ said Annie, ‘or rather a bottle of wine, then bed.’

  ‘Spoken like a star. Hand over that bag and follow me, my darling.’

  ‘Jess,’ said Annie as Jess steered the Ford Fiesta towards the car exit, ‘you are sure it’s all right for me to come and stay. I mean, you will say if…’

  ‘Not another word, sweetheart,’ said Jess, laying a hand on Annie’s forearm. ‘Your arrival is a blessed relief from the guilt of having a spare room and no one in it. You can stay as long as you like. It’ll be a laugh.’ And so saying she wound down her window to feed a ticket into the parking machine, found she was too far away to reach and had to get out of the car. The driver behind blasted his horn. Jess laughed, fed the ticket into the machine then turned and blew the driver a theatrical kiss.

  ‘You want to be careful,’ said Annie as Jess got back in.

  Jess snorted. ‘Relax, darling. If you take the initiative, blokes simply have no idea what to do. Now, tell me about this hunk of a Pom you’ve left behind.’

  ‘Paul? He asked me to marry him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing.’

  ‘You said no?’

  ‘I said nothing. Sort of couldn’t say yes and couldn’t say no.’

  ‘That’ll have gone down well, I bet.’

  ‘He’s remarkably tolerant. But then at the airport he suddenly launched into this speech about bein
g an ordinary bloke who just wanted dozens of kids and me pretty much chained to pram and stove for twenty years while he went out and forged an exciting career. It was such patronising, old-fashioned chauvinism that I almost said yes on the spot.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘No.’

  Jess turned to look at her.

  ‘Oh, and he said that he didn’t love me, but that by having a dozen kids and twenty years of raising them we’d find we loved each other by the end, or something.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘The possibility didn’t seem to arise. Though I suppose by then it’s too late to matter much.’

  ‘So what are you going to do about him?’

  ‘I said I’d tell him when I got back. He’s in a bit of a rush to start breeding.’

  ‘So should you be if you’re going to.’

  ‘How’s your love life?’ asked Annie. ‘Is that Irish guy still on the scene? Or has some wise doctor finally beaten down the door to your heart and is even now preparing to whisk you off to Fendalton to frighten the expensive wives?’

  ‘Neither of the above,’ said Jess. ‘But work’s good for a change. Bizarre injuries, terror, power cuts, aftershocks… It’s full on, the sort of thing you went into nursing for. Or at least I did.’

  ‘By the way,’ said Annie looking out the window at the neat houses lining the road, ‘where is it? The quake. I don’t see it.’

  ‘No, sweet pea, you won’t, not out here. In these parts it was just a bloody good shake, a bit of crockery down perhaps, the odd crack in the plaster. A couple of miles that way, however,’ and she jerked her thumb in the direction of the city centre, ‘well, you’ve seen the pictures. And as for where we were brought up, well, the word everyone’s using is munted. It’s about right. Avonside’s munted. Still, we’ll cope. Never say die and all that. Though quite what the hell you’ve come back for I haven’t a bloody clue.’

  ‘Yes, well, here I am, anyway.’

  Later, sitting outside with a bottle of shiraz, Annie felt the exhaustion of the journey stealing over her, but the late-evening warmth was a blessing, and the rich Aussie wine, and with the weatherboard house behind her and the view framed by the wrought-iron corners of the verandah, Annie felt comfortingly where she belonged.

  ‘Cheers, Jess,’ she said, ‘and thank you.’

  ‘Thank me once more and I’ll turf you out,’ said Jess. They chinked glasses. The last of the sun was streaming shadows across the lawn.

  ‘Jess, if you wanted to find someone, how would you start?’

  ‘I see,’ said Jess. She looked across at Annie with eyebrows raised. ‘Well now, have you tried finding a phone number? Old-fashioned, but you never know.’

  ‘And failing that?’

  ‘Google?’

  ‘What about medical records?’

  ‘Medical records are private.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to read them. I’d just want to know if a record existed in Christchurch, or anywhere else.’

  ‘Still private. And no, I’m not going to put my…’

  ‘Of course not, Jess, of course not.’

  They sat a while saying nothing. As Jess had said, you wouldn’t have known, here in this Hornby garden, that there had been a quake. The evening air swam with insects. ‘How am I supposed to go looking,’ said Jess, ‘if I haven’t got a name?’

  ‘I love you, Jess,’ said Annie.

  Chapter 7

  She ran her finger along the names. Stopped dead when she found his. Fifth from the right in the back row. She raised her gaze and counted and there he was aged seventeen. Annie gasped, felt her heart lurch. She could see the man in the boy. That grin, as if forged on his face by some inner warmth, the crinkle of the upper lip, those eyes. She would have recognised him without the name beneath. And what hair he had. What hair they all had. The back row looked like a Beatles convention. Great fingers-thick luxuriance, the abundance of youth as it chose to present itself in the seventh form in 1969. And it had been a windy day. High above his head a magpie had been captured forever on the point of turning in the air, looking tattered and unaerodynamic. She traced his features through the glass with her fingertip, caressed his cheek.

  The prefects sat at either end of the row of staff, but he was up the back with the unanointed. His head was framed in the blue of a summer she’d never seen, a decade before her birth.

  She made a note of the names of the boys to either side of him, then went back a year, testing herself by running her finger along the second-to-back row and found him easily. Less hair in 1968 because less senior presumably, less brave, but with the same grin and that crinkled lip. The boy to his right was different but on his left stood unmistakably the same character, with an explosion of blond frizz and a face the shape of a shield. V.P. Mahoney.

  The school had been Jess’s idea. It had survived without great damage, would reopen within days. But for the first time in its existence it would be accommodating girls, the sister school having been all but written off. They would retain, however, a virtuous Catholic separation. The boys would have the place in the mornings, the girls the afternoons.

  Everyone had so much to do to prepare for this that the secretary had simply given Annie the freedom of the place. The school photos lined a single daunting corridor of history, all screwed to the wall in dark wood frames and quite undamaged. Every photo was different yet effectively identical: a seated row of priests and masters, small boys cross-legged in shorts at their feet, and then behind them four rows of boys, rising towards the sky as they grew older. You could trace almost all of them as Annie was tracing her father from little boy to young man until pop, off they went into the world. And you could trace the priests and teachers too, as year by year they moved towards the centre of the picture and the headmaster’s throne, shedding hair as they went, gaining furrows in cheek and forehead, getting corpulent, hunched, shorter, until, after up to forty photos, pop, they too, rather more ominously, disappeared. And in every one of those forty photographs they were surrounded by an unchanging sea of youth. And if you looked along the row you could watch a pine tree growing to a different time scale, the only living thing to feature in every photograph, going in a century of snapshots from slender sapling to massive, unmissable entity, its lower boughs protruding ever deeper from the right.

  Of the four most junior teachers in 1968, the outliers on the staff row, little more than seventh formers themselves, two stayed into the twenty-first century, both of them in clerical garb. Annie made a note of their names. The last had retired, bent, bald, fat and presumably single, in 2009. That corridor held the whole of his adult life.

  She needed the names below to pick out her father in his first-year photograph, sitting quite close to the headmaster’s brogues, and in the second year when he was near the end looking abnormally earnest. It was as though he came into being as himself only in the fifth form.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  A priest or father or whatever – he was wearing a clerical collar – had stopped behind her.

  ‘Thank you, I’m fine. Though I don’t suppose by any chance… no, silly me. Of course not.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes.’ She pointed him out in the seventh form and the priest took off his glasses and leant in. ‘What hair they had then,’ he said. ‘He looks such a whole-hearted young man. I hope he… I mean I hope it isn’t the quake that brought you here.’

  ‘No, well, yes and no. I’m hoping to find someone who knows where he is.’

  The priest looked at her for a moment, then said that it shouldn’t be too hard. The old boy network was remarkable. When had she last seen him?

  ‘Twenty years ago.’

  ‘I see. I’m sorry. If I can help in any way,’ and in her notebook he wrote his name and a phone number. Just that, no Father or Monsignor or whatever it was. ‘A lot of people seem to be trying to reconnect at the moment. Perhaps in the end we’ll be grat
eful for all this in some way.’

  Her way out took her to where the front quad backed onto the playing field. Here was the pine, now casting a massive afternoon shadow across a cricket pitch. By moving around Annie found more or less the spot where the panoramic camera had been placed every year and from there she estimated where her father would have stood on a chair in his final year photograph and she stood there herself and tried to imagine and failed.

  * * *

  The central city was cordoned off. The cordon contained almost every feature that people associated with the name Christchurch – the Victorian Gothic of the cathedral, the provincial chambers, the Arts Centre, Christ’s College, the various squares, the brutalist sixties town hall, the multiply-bridged, grass-banked, winding tameness of the Avon, all of it masked from view behind barricades and soldiers, accessible only to the privileged or the powerful. Through the temporary fencing Annie had caught remote views of tower blocks with shattered windows, a hotel on a lean, fallen facades. Already there were mutterings of discontent from those whose livelihoods remained within the cordon. The authorities, it was said, were becoming arrogant, high-handed. The state of emergency, the media attention, the hard hats and hi-vis vests had made them feel like men and women of action, the inner coterie, the makers of the big decisions, and they handed down those decisions to the mob with the disdain of royal decrees.

  The north of the city around the school seemed little damaged, but the bus that took Annie east went from there into a different world, a world she’d seen on television but not grasped the scale of. Roads buckled. Houses broken. And limitless liquefaction, a heavy grey silt that had been squeezed from the land by the shaking. It dried on the edges to a gritty talcum powder that flew with slightest breeze and lodged in nose hairs and eyes and throat and in the whorls of the ear. But mostly it stayed wet and heavy, turning suburbs that had always struggled into sodden moonscapes. From the bus window Annie saw householders shovelling the stuff listlessly into barrows. She could sense the water-laden weight of every shovelful. They emptied the barrows onto heaps that had grown into ramparts, lining the road like snow drifts that wouldn’t melt.