King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  ‘Stay.’

  Windows on this side of the building have popped in the aftershocks, burst from their frames by the twisting and the strain, going off like gunshots, followed some seconds later by a distant tinkle of shards reaching the street, shards to slice open a skull. Richard settles himself at an empty window frame, his backside propped on an easy chair, his left hand laid upwards on the sill like a crab’s claw, reddish-blue and hardened, a little mound of crumbs in the palm. The right hand waits, charged with more crumbs to toss and tempt with.

  It is early days in Eden. The air is sweet and warm and the world is quiet but the only birds to come are the urban invaders, the birds that came with the people who built the city. The starlings are gangsters in flashy suits, strutting like hit men on the far edge of the sill, their sword-beaks jabbing at each other in perpetual squabble. But they are cowards, greater cowards than the house sparrows, who for all their being just dowdy balls of fluff and feather, hop past the gangster brutes and are rewarded for their courage with fat-laden crumbs, crumbs to fire a sparrow’s tiny high-revving heart. But they remain shy of the claw. They hop to within inches of it, then pause, and Richard holds his breath and wills himself not to cough, but they sense somehow that the hand is animate, that it constitutes a threat. None has yet pecked from it.

  In twenty minutes the starlings have cleaned up the more distant scatter, the sparrows the near stuff. Twice Richard has tossed out replenishments with his good hand and the birds have withdrawn, hopped back with instantaneous, precisely synchronised alarm. Richard becomes immersed in the birds, the chance-driven miracles, miniature feathered dinosaurs with hollowed bones, Darwin’s brilliant, pointless children.

  A city pigeon lands heavily on the sill, disturbing the warring starlings. Greyish brown, it has one good pink foot and one that’s clenched to a sort of upturned fist, so the bird lurches as it crosses the sill towards the crumbs. It pauses only once to cock its head and eye Richard’s hand as if for final confirmation, then unhesitatingly it takes the last two drunken steps and stoops to peck. And through the hard, scarred and puckered skin Richard feels the insistent little hammer of the beak, and the muscles of his face turn up the corners of his lips and lift his grey and whiskered cheeks and crease the flesh around his eyes and the dog who you’d have said was sleeping senses something changing and flicks up its eyes to see the man is smiling and it thumps its tail and the birds take off. As one.

  Richard sighs as the tension of concentration slides from him and throws the last of his crumbs through the window frame. ‘Good boy, come here,’ though the dog has anticipated the call and has his head already against Richard’s thigh and is being patted in the luxuriant fur of its neck.

  ‘A cigarette, Friday, a glass of wine, and then tea time, I think.’ He jams a Rothmans into the V of his claw, lights it and draws on it cautiously, wary of the paroxysms of coughing that twice have left him curled on the floor too weak to move for minutes. Once Friday pawed at his shoulder as he lay weak and incapable, pawed with such vigour that he tore a hole in the shiny parchment of Richard’s skin and drew blood that soaked into the thick pile of his dressing gown.

  The wine seeps goodness into him. He can feel easing of something in tissues far down in his body and his mind. It is not the first drink of the day but it is the first to tip him over the base level of need into the zone of pleasure. The knack is to stay there as long as possible, for the dog as much as for himself.

  ‘Fetch the lead,’ says Richard and the dog lollops across the room and drags the dressing gown belt from the handle of the door. ‘Good boy.’ Richard stubs out the cigarette on the window sill, takes the belt from the dog and with a little gasp heaves himself onto his feet. And down the corridor they go, man and dog.

  Crossing the foyer troubles Richard. The plate-glass frontage gives onto the street. He is sure that a cordon has been set around the inner city, but he has seen police and soldiers patrolling within it and men and women in hard hats and bright vests. There would need to be only one of these on Cashel as he and Friday crossed the foyer and that would be that. They’d be found. They’d be chivvied from the place like vermin. So he keeps the dog on the lead and to the extent that he is capable of scuttling he scuttles across the foyer, and through the bistro restaurant and into the dark kitchen beyond. Where, for the first time, Richard is aware of a background hint of a smell, a suspicion of sweet rot.

  Unleashed, the dog goes straight to the stainless steel double doors of the wardrobe-like fridge. Richard opens them, inhales and closes them immediately. ‘Shit.’

  The dog sits. Richard notices and three seconds later he laughs, laughs loud and the dog’s tail wags and, still laughing, Richard pats the dog’s head but his laugh becomes a cough and he bends, still coughing, and lays his head against the cool of the stainless steel workbench. ‘Jesus,’ he mutters as the cough finally subsides and a wave of weakness runs through his arms and back and legs, so strong a wave that he almost falls to the ground. ‘Jesus.’

  He stays there until the dog’s head pushes against his thigh and he reaches down to stroke it.

  ‘Oh Friday,’ he says, ‘you’ll be the death of me,’ and he smiles to himself, but is careful not to succumb again to laughter. While he waits for a little strength to return, he runs the dog’s ear between finger and thumb as if assessing its silkiness.

  He scours through drawers till he finds a long carving fork and he clamps a tea towel over his mouth and nose and opens the fridge and with the fork he flicks out one, two, three, four steaks. Even as he prongs them he can sense that they have become slimy and the sound of them slapping onto the floor makes his gorge rise. But the dog is undismayed, ingesting them with greedy gulps, its back arched with the urgency of the effort.

  Richard goes to the back door with a cigarette, sucking at the cauterising, throat-catching, smell-masking bitterness of smoke. Late afternoon and beneath a scatter of birdsong he can hear, he thinks, the distant sound of traffic. The dog licks the last traces of flesh from the floor, then looks up at Richard, searching for a hint of further food or play, gathers nothing, is unconcerned and goes rootling around the yard in search of smells of interloper dogs or cats or anything that breathes. The evening is thick with summer insects. Swallows dance and weave between and around and over the deserted buildings, silhouetted like distant fighter planes, carving the air to commit a thousand insect murders.

  Dust and soil and crud have collected in a corner of the yard to one side of the door. And already it is tinged with green, with the all but unstoppable will to life. Richard props the door open with a stool and searches for dinner. There’s the cupboard of eggs, and the bags of onions. The spuds have begun to sprout. The pans and plates he’s used for previous meals still lie on the benches. Such mess he’s made in so few days.

  He pulls a fresh frying pan from the wall hook and fills it with an inch of olive oil and sets it on the gas. He snaps the fleshy sproutings off two potatoes and cuts them into chip-sized pieces. As he works he becomes aware of the smell of rotting meat and he ties a tea towel round his mouth and nose like an old-style bank robber, but he soon finds himself defying the cloth, breathing in as deep as he can in a bid still to detect the putrefaction, as if the senses resist deception, are aware that their job is to read the world for him. He dumps the tea towel and lights another cigarette.

  From the lobby bar he fetches a bottle of Johnnie Walker, pours a slug, takes a swig and feels the earthy burn of it, the old fake fire. The oil is close to boiling. He drops the chipped potatoes in. The oil soars and bubbles, threatening to overflow the rim. Richard goes outside and smokes until the chips are done, then drains the pan over a vast commercial sieve and showers the chips with salt, and drenches them with white wine vinegar because he can’t find malt and tips them onto a platter and goes back outside. Dusk is coming. A few late swallows still wheel in silhouette against a pink and orange sky. He blows on a chip and bites cautiously into it. And he’s a boy on
Brighton beach.

  Chapter 10

  ‘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.’

  Chapter 11

  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.