King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Eventually the bus turned back towards the centre of town. How its suspension coped with Pages Road Annie wasn’t sure. She got off on Stanmore and went north on foot towards the Avon. It was clear that weatherboard buildings had fared better than those built of block or brick. Brick, in particular, was hopeless, undone by its own rigidity. The mortar cracked, the bond was lost and down came whole murderous frontages. On the corner of Worcester Street a flat above a shop lay open to the world, pictures on the walls and a pair of green armchairs still aligned to a fat, old-fashioned television. Two rooms along stood a single bed, its brightly patterned duvet ruched and crumpled from the last careless waking now more than a week ago. It and other ruins were all fenced in by yet more free-standing fencing. How much of this had she already seen? Where had it been beforehand? Did every city have miles of it in store awaiting disasters? And a vast cache of traffic cones? There had to be thousands of cones on the streets of the city, a forest of witches’ hats that had erupted almost overnight like some sudden orange fungus. Who organised all this? Who planned it? Or had the authorities merely reacted as everyone else had reacted to this sudden surprise? Because people did react. Immediately and instinctively they had dealt first with what was around them, then the circle had widened to family and basic needs, and then they had started to look wider still, at their streets and their suburbs, and they had begun the business of cleaning up. And some had acted with enormous kindness. University students, most of whom lived in the relatively unscathed north and west, had formed a volunteer army of young strong limbs, touring the south and east with shovels and wheelbarrows in search of liquefaction to be shifted, drains to be cleared, gardens to be disinterred, any jobs that needed strength and youth and hope to put things right.

  For a moment Annie didn’t recognise the aftershock for what it was. Then she half heard, half felt the rumble underfoot. With no walls to magnify the sound and movement, and nothing overhead to fall or break, it did not feel threatening. There was give and bend in the natural world. But a woman on the other side of Stanmore stopped and pulled her little daughter to her and looked around like a deer on the plain that has sensed a predator. The woman’s eyes met Annie’s across the road and she smiled but the smile was stretched like wire.

  The bridge over the Avon, and Annie leant against the iron parapet. Before her lay the view she’d seen on television in Turnpike Lane, the hundred or so yards of the world where much of her childhood had happened. There was nowhere she would ever know more intimately. River Road.

  The river seemed wider and shallower, though she doubted that could be so. Ducks and Canada geese floated on the rippled surface. The big willows still stood, trailing twigs in the water like finger bones, but the grass bank had slumped in places and in others it had simply split, like torn skin. The road was humped and twisted, the footpath too, which now supported a cluster of three portable toilets in orange and white. There was old Bateman’s place, a stucco villa on a raised concrete pad that had all but split in two. Just beyond it, the house she’d grown up in. There was no one about. As she stepped down off the bridge ducks grumbled and slid into the water, and the Canada geese glided pointedly to the other bank.

  She stood across the road from her childhood home. The two storeys of weatherboard had been recently painted but in roughly the same shade of cream. There was the bedroom window from which she’d looked down on the ducks one winter morning twenty-something years ago. The front garden was neater than it used to be, the front door now blue. She couldn’t remember what colour it had been. She was surprised by how little emotion the place aroused. She would have liked to see the back garden, long and narrow, with a wall of espaliered fruit trees, but the only way in was down the side of the house and she didn’t like to unhitch the fencing.

  Annie sensed movement in a kitchen window of the neighbouring house. An old woman was filling a kettle at the sink. Annie thought, yes, she was sure, and she shouted and waved but the woman’s stooped back had turned away to plug in the kettle. Across the road and through the little iron gate – still the same one with the latch she remembered, though much rusted now. Then she tapped on the kitchen window. The woman turned, her eyes widened by alarm.

  ‘Mrs Yeats, it’s me, Annie, from next door. Remember me, Annie?’

  The old woman was staring.

  ‘Annie,’ mouthed Annie again, exaggerating the syllables, ‘next door. Can I come in?’

  The alarm in the old woman’s face subsided a little. A few moments later the door opened on a security chain.

  ‘Yes,’ she said through the gap, ‘what is it? What do you want?’

  ‘Mrs Yeats, it’s me, Annie, from next door, Raewyn’s daughter, you remember, all those years ago.’

  The old face looked worn with time and care, but the fear had waned.

  ‘Annie, you say,’ and she fumbled with the chain. ‘Come in, Annie,’ and the door opened. How tiny she had become, tiny and bent and frail.

  There was a putrid smell in the hall and the living room was a wreck. Ornaments, books, pictures lay scattered. The television had fallen on its face. By the main window the floor sloped where the concrete beneath had split and subsided. Between floor and skirting board lawn was visible.

  Only one chair looked to have been used. Surely there had been a Mr Yeats, a quietly cheerful man forever in the garden. Annie swept ceiling plaster from the sofa.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea, dear?’ said Mrs Yeats. Her hair was pitifully thin, the scalp shining through. ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Let me make it, Mrs Yeats,’ and Annie and she was on her feet before the old woman could protest. ‘And I’m Annie. We lived next door, years ago.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mrs Yeats.

  On the kitchen bench stood a box of Bell’s tea bags, a sliced loaf and a butter dish. In the fridge a litre of milk, still within its use-by date, and half an onion that looked to have been peeled and saved before the quake. The pantry shelves had leapt on their brackets and the meagre provisions been thrown to the floor. It seemed from the smell that a bottle of vinegar had broken and a split bag of flour had caked everything in a ghostly volcanic ash.

  ‘So how are you coping?’ said Annie as she poured the tea.

  ‘Oh, all right, dear. We’ve got the water and power back on now so everything’s fine. No need to worry about me. There’s others worse off.’

  ‘Has anyone been to see you?’

  ‘Like who, dear?’

  Had there been children, grandchildren? Annie couldn’t remember and didn’t like to ask. Mrs Yeats seemed to divine her thoughts. ‘But don’t you worry about me. I don’t need much at my age. I’ll get along just fine.’

  It took Annie an hour or so to bring some order to the kitchen, despite Mrs Yeats’ protestations. She shifted the pantry heap with brush and cloth, straightened the shelves on their brackets and placed on them the few cans and packets she managed to save. She cleaned the floor of the pantry and then of the kitchen as a whole with a mop and Handy Andy. How we all cling, thought Annie, to the brands we’re brought up with, the familiar furniture of our lives.

  The source of the foul smell proved to be the toilet off the hall. Annie gagged as she opened the door, took one glance and closed it again. Promising that she would get someone to see to it, she took Mrs Yeats out to the Portaloos on the street and showed her how to use them.

  ‘I wondered whose they were,’ said Mrs Yeats. ‘I didn’t like to, you know.’

  How many more Mrs Yeats were there in the city, Annie wondered, as the bus to Hornby battled the broken roads, old people who had been discarded? Only in the wealthy Western world could such a thing happen. For the first time in the history of the species the old had become encumbrances. We neglected them, segregated them even in walled villages of their own kind with minders to look after them, benign concentration camps, leaving to the young the actual world beyond the walls.

  * * *

  ‘Is the
sewer working?’

  ‘No,’ said Annie.

  ‘Then if you tell me the address we can see about getting a Portaloo delivered.’

  Annie explained that Portaloos had already been delivered. Rather she was concerned for Mrs Yeats’ general wellbeing, living on her own at that age in a damaged house and in an almost deserted street.

  In which case, the woman replied sympathetically but firmly, it was not the council’s business. Perhaps Annie could try the local medical centre.

  Annie did. But because she was not a relative they would not tell her whether Mrs Yeats was on their books and nor did they make house calls for the purpose of assessment. Had Annie tried the Red Cross?

  Annie hadn’t and for the moment she didn’t. But within a few calls she found a commercial cleaner, a Mr Butts, who was willing to accompany Annie to River Road to address the fouled toilet and generally render the place more habitable.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Mr Mahoney?’

  ‘Vince,’ he said, smiling and holding out his hand. Despite herself Annie had been half expecting a seventeen-year-old, a youth with an explosion of snowy hair. The man in front of her was sixty years old. He had the scrawniness of one who has kept himself fit but whom the years have still bitten. He was as bald as a cue ball.

  She’d first rung a retired teacher who hadn’t remembered her father and had seemed to resent the intrusion. In the background she’d heard the sound of a television quiz show. Then she got a wrong number brought about by a coincidence of names and initials. But her third call had found a former pupil who unhesitatingly recalled her father. ‘Rich,’ he said, ‘we knew him as Rich.’

  Rich had been good at art and running, but he and Rich had never been close. ‘His great mate,’ said the man, ‘was a boy with blond hair – Mahoney, that was it, Vince Mahoney.’ And Annie could hear the smile in the man’s voice, more than a smile, an ache at the memory of boyhood and energy and hope. ‘Yep, Vince is the boy you want to talk to. He and Rich were pretty well inseparable.’ Annie had loved that use of boy. Vince, like all of them, would be sixty-ish.

  And when she’d rung him he too had sounded delighted to have been blown out of the flatness of late middle age and into the gold-bathed memories of youth. ‘Rich’s daughter, eh?’ he’d exclaimed. ‘Well I never.’ The note of surprise was unmistakable.

  Vince Mahoney had proved eager to meet, indeed had invited her to his home on Hackthorne Road. ‘Just watch out for the road cones,’ he’d said.

  He’d not been wrong. The cones along Cashmere Road around Princess Margaret Hospital were a forest of dwarf orange, reducing early-evening traffic to little more than walking pace. Liquefaction had spurted from the Heathcote’s banks but Annie saw none of the wholesale inundation there’d been in the east.

  On Hackthorne Road the damage to buildings seemed arbitrary. One stone-built 1920s house, which any real estate agent would have dubbed a residence, was an obvious write-off, its front porch sagging down the hill, its walls rent and ruined, its roof line skewed. But two doors up stood Vince’s weatherboard villa, trim, recently painted and apparently undamaged.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said when Annie commented. ‘I’ve been embarrassingly lucky. I lost a bit of crockery and the books fell off the shelves and that was about it. I’ve made a donation to the mayoral fund as a sort of half thank you, half apology and half guilt offering. If you can have three halves, that is,’ and he grinned and looked straight at her. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you, Annie.’

  The books were back on the shelves now and everything was impeccably in order, with a sense that that was how it always had been.

  ‘It’ll be nice to talk of something other than the quake,’ he said. ‘Here’s something for you to look at while I fetch the drinks.’ And he handed her a picture frame with what looked like a scrap of golden paper pinned behind the glass, and a cellophane booklet of perhaps a dozen photographs. Most were black and white, the rest in colour that had faded to tints. All were of her father. Had Vince put it together that day specially for her?

  Here he was by a stream in flared jeans, on the apex of a tin roof, sitting back against the brick chimney and clutching a beer, pillion on a motor scooter, smiling with that inner radiance, his arm draped over the shoulders of Vince on what looked to be South Brighton beach, both of them wearing old-fashioned swimming togs, like cut-off shorts. And Annie felt an ache in her chest that wasn’t far from pain.

  She had no photos of her father. Not one. Mum had got rid of them, burned them, down the end of the garden at River Road. She’d hauled out everything associated with her father and flung it on the fire, smoke and little smuts of ash rising over the fruit trees and Annie had just stood and watched from her bedroom window, holding the curtain to the side of her face. The curtain was pink with a paisley pattern.

  ‘I can get copies made, if you like.’ Vince was standing before her holding out a glass of wine.

  ‘Oh, would you? Oh, yes, please.’

  ‘What do you make of the thumbnail sketch?’

  ‘The what?’

  Vince gestured at the picture frame. Behind the glass was what turned out to be, on closer inspection, the front of a Benson & Hedges cigarette packet, and in the space below the brand insignia Annie could make out a few lines or indentations in the gold surface.

  She shrugged.

  ‘It’s a cat. We were in the pub, the Zetland, because they didn’t ask too many questions, and someone wondered why a thumbnail sketch was called a thumbnail sketch so Rich drew that with his thumbnail. I kept it in my wallet for years.’

  Annie looked at him.

  ‘They were the best days of my life, Annie. Everything since has been dull in comparison.’

  All Annie knew was what Vince had told her on the phone. How they’d been friends at school but then Vince had gone south to varsity while her father had gone up to Auckland and that had been that, all over.

  ‘Believe me, Annie, you don’t want to know what a blameless career in stainless steel looks like. I had a marriage of sorts, two nice kids, one boy, one girl, of course, brought up in Sydney and Singapore and anywhere else that stainless steel took me, before going back to Auckland and an amicable divorce that neither of us regrets.’

  ‘And the kids?’

  Vince shrugged. ‘I wasn’t much of a dad, Annie. I tried, and I’d have died for either of them, and I was a good provider, but it was their mother that raised them really. One’s in Auckland, the other Brisbane. They’ve both got kids. I visit. But I’m not much of a granddad either, as it happens. No one minds when I leave. No, really, I’m not kidding.’

  ‘And your ex?’

  ‘Remarried. Happily. Fifteen years we did together and apart from the kids it’s left nothing with me. Not as much as one night in the Zetland in, what, 1968, or thereabouts. But hey, no complaints.’

  Vince had taken early retirement. He did ‘a bit of consulting’, sat on a couple of boards, but didn’t really need to work. ‘I’m sixty, Annie. When I was a kid, sixty was the end. You put your slippers on as soon as you could after that and became an officially old person and waited to die. But I feel fine. I’ve kept myself fit, I go running, I even play squash. I just don’t know why. What’s the point? I mean there’s a good chance I’ve got thirty years in front of me and at the moment I don’t want them. I’ve led my life, for better or worse, had my kids, made my money and now there’s nothing for me to do. I’ll level with you, Annie. I welcomed the quake. It was something happening. And I’m only sorry in a way that it didn’t do more damage to my life, didn’t force me out of the path of least resistance. But at least it put me in touch with you.’ And he smiled, rather boyishly.

  ‘Do you want to help me find my dad?’ said Annie.

  ‘Try and stop me,’ he said.

  * * *

  The known facts were listed down the left-hand side of the sheet of A3. They weren’t many. Year of birth, mother’s Christian name (Meg) but not fa
ther’s, name and dates of secondary schooling (but not primary). The rest was all speculation or a possible plan of campaign, apart from an oil smear from a piece of battered cod and a sickle-shaped stain from the foot of a wine glass.

  ‘Do you think we’ll find him?’ asked Annie. ‘We know so little.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked,’ said Annie. They had drunk a bottle and a half of Rook’s Lane shiraz. ‘Do you think we’ll find him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vince. ‘I do. It’s hard to hide these days. And besides, in business I’ve always found that if you believe you’re going to succeed, you tend to succeed. If you don’t believe, you won’t. And more to the point, thank you, Annie.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’m looking forward to tomorrow.’ And he opened his arms to offer her a hug. He smelt of fish and chips and eau de Cologne and shiraz.

  ‘I slept with your dad once,’ he said.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Chernobyl,’ says Richard, laying the crumb trail on the window sill. ‘I saw it on the telly. It’s the new Eden. Bears and birds and flowers and everything flourishing but no people. The cleansed earth. What do you think, Friday? The city heals itself. You’ll have to fight for your living. No more sponging off the master species. No more sucking up to Homo sapiens. You’ll have to go out and be a dog again. Join a pack, maybe. Hunt. How does that sound?’

  And it clearly sounds good to the dog because his tail sweeps the floor, and Richard tosses him a chunk of mini-bar biscuit, which he leaps and captures in midair.

  ‘Now, you know the drill, Friday.’ Richard gestures downwards with his palm and the dog lies slowly, folding itself to the floor, then lowering its head onto its paws but not quite relaxing, retaining a little of the weight of the head with the muscles of the neck, ready to stand, ready to respond.