King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  The back garden would have upset Mr Yeats. The lawn stood tall and brown and had gone to seed, the little orchard a couple of seasons unpruned, littered with the remains of rotting fruit. Had there really been no children? Annie thought she remembered talk of a son, gone overseas – to Canada, was it? Did he not keep an eye out for his widowed and feeble mother? It wasn’t hard, surely, even from that distance.

  Weeds had pushed up through the cracks in the patio. Two standard roses in tubs were in need of deadheading. Had Annie ever known Mrs Yeats’ Christian name? She thought not. She’d been Mrs Yeats, no, ‘Nice Mrs Yeats’, throughout Annie’s childhood.

  Annie tapped on the glass of the French doors with a single knuckle and kept tapping even as she was taking in the sight of Mrs Yeats’ thin old legs lying inert on the floor with one knee drawn up as if frozen in the act of running on her side. Her torso was hidden by the sofa. Annie knocked harder, tried the handles.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Mr Butts, who also tried the handles and shook the windows, then turned his back to the doors and shoved his elbow through a pane, reached through the shards, turned a key and they were in.

  Mr Butts knelt beside Mrs Yeats and leant in over her and for one absurd moment Annie thought he was about to deliver the kiss of life with those extraordinary teeth of his, but Mrs Yeats was breathing, and had suffered no obvious injury. By the time the ambulance arrived, they had her sitting against the side of the sofa, propped up with cushions.

  She looked dazedly around at Annie, at Mr Butts, at the paramedic.

  ‘Where’s Sid?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Yeats, it’s me, Annie. You’ve had a little fall, but you’re going to be fine.’

  Mrs Yeats looked at Annie in bewilderment. ‘Where’s Sid?’ she said. ‘He’ll be wanting his tea.’

  ‘Sid’s in the garden,’ said Annie. ‘He’ll be along shortly.’

  When the ambulance had gone with Mrs Yeats on board Annie didn’t know what to do about the house. Mr Butts did. He cleaned up the glass, tacked a square of hardboard over the broken pane, donned mask and paper suit and cleaned out the downstairs toilet with remarkable speed and thoroughness, locked the place from the inside and emerged from the front door with a key that Annie promised to deliver to Mrs Yeats in hospital.

  And when Annie tried to pay him for his time he wouldn’t hear of it, backing away with his hands raised as she tried to put the notes in his pocket.

  ‘Poor old dear,’ he said. ‘I’ve got half a mind to come back with a blaster and get rid of that for her,’ and he cast a look of contempt at the ‘Rodik94’ and shook his head.

  ‘Bless you,’ said Annie, and she kissed him on the cheek and his round face broke into a snaggle-tooth smile. Then he got into his van and drove away. Diagonally across the van’s back doors were the words ‘Cleaner Butts!’

  The sun glittered bright on the river. Canada geese had gathered on the bank near the huge old willow with the split trunk. Their crap littered the grass. She did not remember the geese from her childhood. Perhaps they had arrived only in the recent weeks, the pioneers of a reversion to nature. If left alone, the geese and ducks and weeds and grass would see off even the taggers, would reclaim the place for their own form of warfare.

  More accustomed now to the broken city, and somehow emboldened by the drama with Mrs Yeats, Annie lifted apart two sections of the fencing around her childhood home.

  The shaded path down the side of the house was the same mossed concrete she remembered, ending in a gate whose catch she could have operated blindfold. Less had happened to the back garden. Lawn, fruit trees on the long brick wall, and at the bottom end where the bonfire had burned stood vegetable patch, tomatoes and sweet corn fat and ready to harvest amid yellowing leaves.

  An ugly conservatory had been pinned onto the back of the house. Annie tried the doors. Locked. She didn’t much mind. She made a shading tube of her hand and peered through the glass. There was nothing to see. What had been her childhood home was someone else’s now. There were no such things as ghosts.

  * * *

  Richard wedges the door open with the bar stool, and heads for Manchester Street. He is wearing fluffy slippers, a pair of trackpants that say ‘BARKERS’ down one leg in large letters, and a hotel dressing gown, tied with a sash. The lane is perhaps thirty yards long, flanked on one side by some windowless commercial building and on the other by a fence of corrugated iron painted off-white. At the end of the lane Richard peers tentatively around the corner.

  To the south he can see almost to Moorhouse Avenue. Cars line the road, left since the quake, now grey with rubble dust. In places the facades of buildings have shot tongues of brick or masonry halfway across the road. Red traffic cones denote a way for vehicles to negotiate the chaos, but no vehicles are moving. Nothing is moving.

  Across the road the small convenience store looks not too badly damaged, though plaster and masonry have fallen from the second floor. A Chinese guy ran it, Richard remembers. Bald as a vulture, his cheeks dotted with skin cancers, he was forever sweeping the floor and the pavement with his plastic broom. That broom was his trademark, his stage prop, his identity. He would sometimes level it at Richard like a gun, and sight down the handle and pretend to pull the trigger. ‘Lazy man, drink man,’ he’d say to Richard, ‘lazy man, drink man,’ but he would be smiling and if Richard had money he would sell him tobacco readily enough. How would he be coping away from his empire?

  Richard struggles through the chunks of plaster and rubble. His slipper soles are little more than sheets of fluffy cardboard, slowing his progress, and here in the street he is hopelessly exposed. He wishes he had brought the Johnnie Walker.

  The shop’s front door is locked, even though the window to its left is shattered, great chunks of it missing, and others hanging from the frame like the blades of guillotines. Richard smiles to think of the man locking it amid the chaos.

  Richard steps through the broken window. Glass crunches underfoot. The floor is littered with cans and packets and bottles and there is the smell of rats or mice here too. Someone has been here before him. The doors that hide the temptation of tobacco from the underage and the recently quit hang open and the racks have been stripped.

  ‘Dog food,’ says Richard to himself, ‘dog food.’

  A noise behind him, a crunch of glass. Richard’s heart leaps like a cat in a cage. And a gust of fear goes through him even as he turns and sees the dog.

  He clutches at the shelving for support, his breath coming fast. ‘Friday,’ he gasps, ‘for fuck’s sake.’ And the dog could not have been more pleased. It fusses around him, its bare paws seemingly untroubled by the broken glass. Richard reaches down with his good hand and mauls the dog’s neck and back.

  There’s a small bag of Tux and a ten-kilo sack. He wants the sack but can barely lift it, let alone carry it all the way back. He calls the dog and makes it stand and with a grunt he heaves the sack up into his arms like some swaddled baby and lays it lengthwise along the dog’s spine, keeping a grip on the plastic handle to share the load. The dog writhes in protest.

  ‘No, Friday, no. Steady, boy, steady.’

  With a hand on the sack to keep it stable, Richard urges the dog back out over the litter of broken glass, and onto the pavement and still there is no one there. As they cross the road the sack slips from the dog’s back before Richard can stop it.

  ‘Friday,’ says Richard, ‘come on, boy.’ But though the dog stays near it will not let him replace the sack. They are exposed in mid-road.

  Richard hooks his claw through the handle and hauls, dragging the sack over the tarmac, the noise upsetting, scary. Worn by the friction, the sack starts to fray at the base and biscuits spill onto the road. With an effort Richard flips the sack over, lifts it into his arms and carries it like a bride the last few yards to the safety of the alley, then leans panting against the fence of corrugated iron, too weak to go further. He fears a coughing fit.

  The dog has alread
y found the spilled biscuits.

  ‘Here, Friday, here.’ But the dog ignores him.

  Richard drags the sack a few yards, stops to pant and lean, does another few yards. In time he reaches the kitchen door, lugs the sack over the threshold and sits a while to recover. Then he goes back down the alley for the dog.

  ‘Oi.’ The voice is loud and male. The dog looks up and stays looking up at a point further down Manchester Street.

  Richard turns and heads for the hotel in a gasping, lurching trot.

  ‘Oi,’ calls the voice again. ‘Here, boy.’

  Just before the hotel the dog passes Richard and dives in through the kitchen door, a Tux in its mouth. Richard shoves aside the bar stool and closes the door as quietly as he can. Despite the scurry of rats’ feet and the stench of putrefaction, Richard sags against the work surface, his breath coming fast and shallow, the blood pounding in his ears.

  He thinks he hears boots outside in the alley but if he does they turn and go away again quite soon. And everything returns to quiet in the hotel. And he has most of a sack of dog biscuits.

  Chapter 12

  The old red brick building on the corner of Bealey Avenue and Park Terrace was cordoned off with more Fahey fencing. What had it been? Private hospital? Old folks’ home? Annie somehow associated it with unwellness and money. But its flanks were ripped open with great sheer lines through the brickwork, running higgledy-piggledy down three or more storeys like black veins, so that you felt that you could push the whole thing over with a stick. The contrast with the other side of the road was stark, almost comic. There the huge willows still swept down to drag on the surface of the Avon as if nothing had happened. Ducks swam, and on the far side of the river, a pair of joggers trotted side by side through the stand of pines. ‘Keep calm and carry on’ had already become the half-ironic motto of the whole traumatic business, but jogging? Couldn’t that energy be put to slightly better use? Annie had read in the paper that morning so many stories of suffering from the east of the city and a growing discontent with the authorities. But then again, she wasn’t exactly shovelling up liquefaction herself.

  The apartment block stood. Glass shrouded, and expensively overlooking the park, it had an eighties feel to it. An orange sticker on the door announced that it had undergone an engineering check and was provisionally deemed safe to occupy. No names alongside the bell pushes, just apartment numbers. Annie pressed 4A.

  ‘Yes?’ Even in that single syllable Annie heard the unmistakable voice of Canterbury money, of high country stations and horses and moleskins and collars turned up on Aertex shirts.

  Annie had given no thought to what she would say.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ she began, discovering that her mission was hard to summarise plausibly. ‘My name’s Annie Jones. I’m looking for my father.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yes, you see…’

  ‘I can assure you, Miss Jones, that your father is not here. There is no one here except me.’

  ‘But he used to live here, I think, Flat 4A, twenty years ago. If I could just come up and ask you a few questions. I promise not to take up too much of your time. It’s just that…’

  To Annie’s surprise the buzzer rang and she was able to push open the heavy door.

  When Annie emerged from the lift an elderly man was waiting at the door of 4A. He was leaning on sticks. Despite the authoritative voice he was shrunken and bent almost at a right angle at the waist. ‘I’m sorry,’ were his first words. ‘I fear I may have been rude to you. It was unchristian of me. But we are all a little stressed at the moment so I hope you will forgive me. My name is David. Won’t you come in?’

  And so saying he turned with some difficulty on his sticks and led Annie into the apartment. The pace they went at allowed Annie an abundance of time to take in the smell of furniture polish and the line of empty picture hooks and the rips in the wall linings in corners and above the door frames. She tried to imagine her father living here, walking this corridor. It did not somehow seem his sort of place.

  ‘Were you here for the quake?’ she asked as David sat at the table, grimacing a little as he did so. He wore a neatly tied tie, but there was half an inch of air between his collar and the folded leather of his neck. White hairs bristled from his nostrils.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I was. It was a little dramatic. This place sways rather alarmingly. But the authorities in their wisdom assure us it is safe and it is quite amazing what one can get used to. And besides, people have been so kind. Even the young ones of whom it is easy to despair. You should have seen the mess in here, but now, look at it.’ And he gestured to the kitchen, which was indeed clean and neat, though a partly opened cupboard revealed the shortage of crockery.

  ‘Is there anything you need?’ asked Annie but David insisted that he had plenty of people keeping an eye on him. ‘My family, for better or for worse, is impossible to escape. It is sewn into the very fabric of this city. I can’t walk down a street in Christchurch without meeting a relative. So no, thank you, you are kind, but I want for nothing. Now, what was all this about your father? He has gone missing in the quake? And why do you imagine he might be here?’

  Annie told him. He listened intelligently.

  ‘It’s none of my business of course,’ he said when she had done, ‘but why are you looking for him now? Why not five years ago, ten? What’s special about now? Was it the quake or…’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve asked myself the same question. It may be because I’m thinking of getting engaged, but it feels more complicated than that.’

  The old man looked at her thoughtfully.

  ‘I hope you find your father, Miss Jones,’ he said, ‘but I fear that I can do little to help you. There has to be some error in the hospital records. This flat, you see, has been in our family since the day it was built and as far as I am aware it has been used exclusively by family members from the very first. Indeed, within the family it has become known jocularly as the Railway Station. In that everyone who uses it is on his or her way somewhere else. Sometimes it is the young about to board a train to God knows where, and sometimes it is the old such as myself on their last ride to the inevitable terminus. I can make enquiries for you, of course, but I very much doubt that your father ever set foot in it. And I for one have no memory of any family connection with a Richard Jones, though our family is extensive, to say the least, and as various as all families are.’

  Annie conceded that it seemed unlikely that her father had ever lived here. How could he have afforded it, to start with?

  ‘Perhaps,’ said David, ‘if you left me an email address I could let you know if I uncover anything.’

  ‘You’re on email?’ said Annie. ‘Oh, I am sorry. That was rude of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised.’

  ‘Now we have each been rude to the other,’ said David, and Annie laughed.

  * * *

  Everyone in the ward at Princess Margaret Hospital was old. No one was talking. All those who were awake watched Annie as she made her way to the far end. Mrs Yeats was sitting upright in bed, and she too was watching Annie. She looked shrunken and fragile, an impression only emphasised by the bruise that had drained to cover a quarter of her face, presumably from when she fell.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Yeats.’

  Annie’s words seemed only to alarm the old woman. And as Annie moved closer Mrs Yeats nervously clutched at the blanket edge, furled it up over her chest. She avoided looking Annie in the eye.

  ‘It’s me, Annie.’ She spoke quietly, aware that hers was the only voice in the whole long ward. ‘Annie. I came to see you, remember? We had tea.’

  The wrinkled profile continued to stare across the ward, the fingers playing with the blanket’s hem.

  ‘Mrs Yeats? I’ve brought your house key.’

  ‘Where’s Sid?’ And the old woman turned with awful, frightened eyes to look straight at Annie with a sort of desperation. ‘Where’s Sid?’

  A
nnie tried to take Mrs Yeats’ hand but it shrank back under the blanket. Annie, afraid that the old woman was going to cry or try to get up, got up herself. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Yeats,’ she said, ‘everything’s going to be fine.’

  Half a dozen old women watched her walk back down the middle of the ward. The nurse took charge of the door key. ‘Though I don’t think she’ll have much use for it,’ she said. ‘Do you know if there are any relatives?’

  Annie mentioned the possibility of a son in Canada. The nurse shook her head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘we’ll find her somewhere.’

  Chapter 13

  ‘He was beautiful, your father.’

  ‘I know, I’ve seen the photos.’

  ‘They don’t show the half of it. In the sixth and seventh form he was just stunning. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Up till then he’d been nothing special to look at, but something happened to make him physically different and you could see people reacting to his beauty. They were just drawn to him, charmed by him. But some guys hated it. It drove them crazy. As if it was somehow wrong for a bloke to be that bloody beautiful.’

  The remains of the noodles Vince had cooked lay on the table behind them. They’d sunk into easy chairs in the front room, looking out over Christchurch as dusk thickened. Vince was doing as he’d promised. ‘I’ll cook you a dinner and tell you everything,’ he’d said. ‘If that’s not too boring.’ It wasn’t. Indeed there was something good, something soothing, about sitting in the half light with nothing asked of her but to listen. It was like being read to.

  ‘We were in the Square one night, and we were talking to these two girls and just laughing and that, and this pair of first fifteen guys we both vaguely knew ask us what we’re playing at. “Come on,” I say to Rich, “let’s go,” but Rich just smiles at them and says “It’s okay, it’s cool,” and turns back to the girl we were talking to and then one of the guys thumps him.