King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Throughout this, Annie had been pecking at the keyboard. ‘Is that him?’ she asked, swivelling the screen so Jess could see it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jess, ‘that’s the one. You can see why the posters went missing. Mind you, that was at least fifteen years ago now.’

  ‘How do you suggest I find him? He’s a long shot but at the moment he’s the only shot I’ve got. Maybe I’ll just ask the old boy where he lives.’

  ‘Ever heard of Google, darling?’ said Jess. ‘There’s officially no such thing as a secret any more.’

  Chapter 15

  Glandovey Road was bent but far from broken. Some lawns and berms had sprouted molehills of liquefaction, but there were no road-lining slag heaps of the stuff, none of the smothering ruin of the east side of town. It didn’t seem fair. Indeed it wasn’t fair, but then, reflected Annie, the notion of fairness didn’t apply in plate tectonics. Nor for that matter in the sheer fact of there being an east side and a Glandovey Road.

  The house was surrounded by lawn and the lawn by tall cream walls and a metal gate. Annie pressed an intercom button in one of the pillars. But even as she did so a golden retriever came lolloping round the corner of the house. It stopped when it saw Annie at the gate, its tail plumed and horizontal.

  ‘What is it, Bossy?’ said a female voice, and round the same corner came a woman in her thirties, wearing ironed jeans and a white T-shirt. ‘Oh, hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Annie and the moment she spoke the retriever relaxed and came gambolling to the gate so that Annie could reach between the bars and stroke its head and chin. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but I was just wondering whether I could have a word with Ben.’

  ‘Ben’s at work. Could I ask what it’s about?’

  Annie began to explain through the grille but as the gist of the story emerged Ben’s wife said, ‘I think this requires coffee, don’t you?’ She opened the gate, introduced herself as Steph, told Bossy to calm down, and led Annie into the vast kitchen done up in a style that, if pressed, Annie would have described as rustic French with gadgets. Steph turned dials and knobs on the Gaggia coffee machine as if in the cab of a steam train, and laid Tim Tams on a blue-ringed plate while Annie explained her mission and the series of events that had taken her to Park Terrace and Great-Uncle David.

  ‘What did you make of him?’

  ‘You can’t beat old-world charm, can you?’ said Annie and Steph nodded as if she had expected precisely those words, that sentiment.

  ‘But you still came here to find Ben,’ she said.

  ‘He’s the only lead I’ve got at the moment,’ she said. ‘If he comes to nothing I may well have to give up. For all I know Dad could be anywhere in the world. Or dead.’

  ‘Oh no,’ exclaimed Steph, shaking her head in vigorous sympathy so that its layered blondeness shimmered like an ad. ‘I’m sure he’s not dead.’

  ‘Yours?’ said Annie, indicating framed photos of kids on a shelf. ‘May I?’ Two girls and a boy, the girls childishly chubby, the boy thin-limbed with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a strangely bunched face, as if too many features had been crammed into too small an area. But all three kids wore the uninhibited grins of their age, posing briefly on the lawn with Bossy the dog. And here were the three of them again climbing on what had to be Ben, the girls cantilevered out on either side of his waist, the boy high on his shoulders, proud as a king. Ben was trying to smile for the camera despite the strain of supporting the three of them. A slight man in his thirties, fading already from his election poster days, his hair receding at either temple to leave a tongue of thatch above the centre of the forehead.

  ‘Proud dad,’ said Annie, and noted how Steph seemed to bask in the words, to savour them.

  The kitchen window gave a view of some tributary of the Avon, its banks impeccably shaven, well-governed exotic trees dotted along it. There were a few cracks in the plaster high up on the kitchen walls but the house seemed by and large undamaged.

  ‘We’re lucky,’ said Steph, as if reading Annie’s mind. ‘When you see the TV news in the evening it doesn’t seem quite fair. But what are you supposed to do? Move to Aranui?’

  Steph took Annie’s contact details and promised to let Ben know she’d called.

  * * *

  It took an hour and a half and two changes of bus to reach South Brighton. From her seat at the window Annie watched the landscape change from workable suburban affluence to something post-apocalyptic. Forced into detours by downed bridges, ruptured drains and shattered roads, the bus took her down the back ways of Avondale, Bexley, Parklands. The streets lined with bulldozed heaps of grey and sodden silt reminded Annie of photos of the trenches on the Somme. Crudely painted notices begged drivers to slow down, or urged rubber-neckers to go elsewhere. Already, after only a couple of weeks, you could tell which houses had been abandoned since the quake.

  Annie alighted by the pier. On the seaward side of Marine Parade the dunes stretched down to beach and sea as they had always done, soft-edged, irregular and quite undamaged by any shaking. But across the road, in a pattern that was becoming familiar, the rigidity of the houses had taken a thumping. Here bricks had rained like lethal confetti. There a jerry-built top storey had simply been flung half off the building underneath. Annie followed duckboards through the dunes and onto the beach where the waves boomed and women were walking dogs and a few wet-suited surfers bobbed beyond the breakers. One paddled in with a wave, like some fiercely crawling insect on the water’s skin, then caught a swell and rose to a crouch, to a three-quarter stand, his body lithely black, his shins and forearms white, as he rode the shifting world diagonally across the afternoon, a ten- or fifteen-second ride of triumph and defiance before the tumble into a cold salt sea.

  How many Sundays her father had brought her here to visit Grandma. She remembered buying ice creams from the van by the surf club; occasional plagues of copper blue jellyfishes that washed up and died on the beach by the million and whose air sac burst with a pop when you stamped on them; her father chatting with a woman while Annie threw a stick into the shallows for the woman’s collie and every time the collie fetched the stick it took it back up the beach to drop it at the woman’s feet rather than at Annie’s. At a familiar stand of old man pines Annie passed back through the dunes on the duckboards that the sands had swallowed and there was Jellicoe Street, looking much as it always had but for a swarm of young people with shovels, buckets and barrows. The famous Student Army. Further down the street a loader was filling a truck with vast scoops of silt.

  Annie picked her way through waiting piles of silt and dozens of cheerful shovellers to the house that Vince had so often slept at but that for her would always be her grandmother’s house. In the front room there had been cake and chocolate and fizzy drink, and a lightness of mood. But when Annie was seven the afternoon teas had shrunk and Grandma stopped getting up to hug her and she wore a scarf around her head because her hair had grown thin and Dad said she was very sick. And one day when Annie put her arms around her in her chair and caught a whiff of her breath and it was foul and she said ‘Ugh’ and let her go and turned away.

  When she looked back her father had put an arm around his mother and laid his head against hers and Annie saw that she was quietly gulping.

  ‘There, there,’ her father said, ‘there, there,’ just as he might have said to Annie when she had stubbed a toe. And Annie had watched as the old woman sank into her son’s embrace and in time had turned and smiled at Annie and asked her how she was doing at school. Though when they left she hadn’t reached out to Annie for a kiss.

  Mum didn’t go to the funeral and didn’t want Annie to go, but Dad had collected her from school at lunchtime and they drove to Lyttelton. It was the first church Annie had been in and it was made of stone and there were only half a dozen people there and Annie knew none of them, though they all seemed to know Dad. And afterwards they had gone up to the cemetery above the port and the grave had already been dug and Annie
remembered watching a huge ship being nudged into its berth by tugs as men in black coats lowered the shiny expensive-looking coffin into the hole and the priest read from his black leather book. It was windy. Whirls of dust blew from the earth heaped beside the grave. And the priest threw a handful of that earth and Annie heard the clatter as it landed and watched it scatter across the lid. The mourners all threw little clods of earth as they left and her dad did too but Annie didn’t want to and clung to his leg.

  The house that had been light green was now a freshly painted buff. But it was still little more than the original weatherboard cottage, a single storey divided into four rooms, and with a lean-to kitchen on the back. The basic house of New Zealand and her father had been raised there and in that room there at the back by the pear tree he had slept with a boy who would never forget.

  ‘You looking for a job?’

  A freckle-faced girl was proffering a shovel.

  ‘We can share the barrow,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ and Annie set to work digging a foot of sodden silt from what had once been her grandmother’s front lawn.

  ‘Is anyone living here?’

  The girl thought not. Silt had not been shifted from the front door and there were few footmarks round the back. ‘Lots of people around here just moved straight out, went to stay with relatives and that.’

  More students joined them, their cheerfulness infectious and the speed with which they cleared the gunk remarkable. Twenty shovels heaved it onto wheelbarrows that piled it on the street to be scooped onto a waiting truck and away. Half an hour and the garden was cleared. The body of shovellers moved on. Annie didn’t follow them. Resting the shovel against a shed where she was sure they’d find it, she toured the outside of the house peering in at windows. Soiled plates in the sink, a nest of used coffee mugs. The rooms had been brightened and modernised, but Annie recognised the shape of the room where she had made her grandmother cry, and the room that had been her father’s bedroom and that had witnessed such… but every house had its history.

  ‘Annie.’

  Vince was standing by a pile of silt on the road front. The sun gleamed on the skin of his scalp and he was clearly trying but failing to suppress a grin. He looked like a neat bald schoolboy.

  ‘You could do everyone a favour by turning your cell phone on once in a while. It would save old buggers like me having to hunt you down to tell you the good news.’

  ‘What good news?’

  ‘I’ll tell you over a drink. My car’s down there.’ And he started towards Marine Parade.

  ‘There’s no one in the house,’ said Annie. ‘Don’t you want to…’ But he was away. Vince pressed a key fob and lights blinked on a low-slung bottle-green BMW convertible. He handed Annie into the passenger seat with mock gallantry.

  Annie looked at him and smiled. ‘This would turn a few girls’ heads.’

  Vince snorted.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Annie, ‘you’re a catch and a half. Not broke, not drunk, not saddled with a beer gut, not stupid and not still married. There must be hundreds of women ready to fling themselves at you if you so much as nod in their direction.’

  ‘There are,’ said Vince, as they pulled out onto Marine Parade, accelerating with a high-engineered growl, then slowing immediately to negotiate a missing patch of tarmac. ‘But the shame of it is I’ve grown into just the sort of bloke I despise, the one that fancies women half his age. Dirty old men we used to call them when we were kids, dirty old men.’

  ‘I’m half your age,’ said Annie.

  Vince seemed not to hear her. ‘I dress nicely and talk politely but beneath the skin of the gentleman beats the heart of a lecher.’

  Annie laughed.

  ‘No, I’m serious. Though I don’t think I’m unusual. Most blokes are waging a constant battle to seem decent. One drink too many, one clumsy step and the ice cracks beneath us. It’s what every bloke’s movie is about, every bloke’s book, every bloke’s car, every bloke even. But I don’t think women have ever really believed it. Or else they think they can change us.’

  He looked across at Annie. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘What’s the good news?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when we’ve got a drink in front of us. You’ve earned it after all that shovelling.’

  They drove past the surf club and a stand of wind-crabbed pines, past the squat stone war memorial and the butt end of the pier that surprisingly and rather endearingly swelled to become the swish new library.

  On the other side of the road, the car park of the tired little shopping mall rolled like frozen sea. Vince slowed often to negotiate drain covers popped up by the pressure of the liquefied land, or fissures in the road surface, like cracks in a crevasse, their presence advertised by a cluster of livid orange cones.

  ‘I was driving this thing when the quake happened,’ said Vince. ‘On Moorhouse Ave, near the car yards. I didn’t know what was going on at first – I had music on and I didn’t hear a thing, and the shock absorbers took the violence out of it. The road ahead swelled and rolled and I felt this sort of swaying and my first thought was that I was having a stroke. It was only when cars started stopping right where they were, without pulling over, that I realised what was going on. But what I’ll never forget is the tyres. There was this great blue barn of a building, stacked with racks of tyres going way up above head height. Down they came, of course, the tyres – big buggers, truck tyres, tractor tyres. Some of them must have weighed half a ton or so. And they all bounced. But they didn’t bounce regularly. They bounced off to one side and the big ones were easily big enough to kill. It was like being inside some video game. It was weird. But it was also funny. I saw this woman who looked like she’d just been doing the accounts or something come out of the office to be confronted by these bouncing tyres, dozens of them, and she just stopped in her tracks, literally open-mouthed, unable to move, just staring. Then suddenly she turned and ran back into the office. And I laughed. I remember laughing. It was like a cartoon. Only lasted a moment, of course, but that’s the image that comes first to me when anyone mentions the quake.’

  Everyone had a quake story, Annie realised. Half a million people were somewhere when the quake struck. She felt half envious, half guilty for not having been there.

  ‘Shit,’ exclaimed Vince, ‘look,’ and he was stamping on the brakes.

  Behind more temporary fencing, a yellow machine with something resembling a giant crab’s pincer attached to its hydraulic arm was hacking and tearing at a rambling old weatherboard building. As they watched it tore off a chunk of one side, snapping timbers, and turning the chunk over to show the ancient wallpaper and the skirting boards, and bits of electrical wire hanging like veins.

  ‘The Ozone,’ said Vince.

  For a moment the name meant nothing to Annie, and then she remembered and she turned to look at Vince.

  ‘Come on,’ he said and they got out of the car and stood like kids at the fencing. The demolition was violently pornographic. The intimate details of private rooms, of indoors, were ripped open, exposed to the gaze of the world. Innards met sunlight for the first time in a hundred years. And it was all so peremptory. The claw reached in and gripped and twisted and the building yielded. Nails and timber gave way with little more than a graunch. In ten minutes half the third floor disappeared, four or more bedrooms, the beds and wardrobes with them, ripped out, broken apart and dumped at random angles on the heap of spoil. Neither Vince nor Annie spoke.

  The driver shut his machine down and climbed from the cab. A slim, surprisingly young man, clean shaven, crew-cut. He smiled at Annie and Vince, no doubt used to the theatrical appeal of his profession. He started up a truck with another hydraulic arm on the back, this one ending in a claw. It lifted scoops from the pile and swung them onto the truck bed, where they fell with a terminal clatter, wood on metal.

  On the far side of Marine Parade, a track led into the dunes. Rising beside it the
shaggy dark green pyramids of a stand of macrocarpas.

  * * *

  In Salt on the Pier, Annie watched a hefty black-backed seagull ride the air in silence not far beyond the window, its low flat arch of wings adjusting to the wind with magisterial precision. It lay on the moving air as comfortably, more comfortably, than Annie sat now on her bent wood chair. It seemed to expend no energy, shifting its skull from side to side to oversee the chance of food from beach or fisherman.

  All around her women talked, leaning in towards each other over coffee or wine or salad, dealing urgently with matters that mattered, while just above them, just beyond the glass, this sleek and faultless creature floated on the air in self-sufficient silence.

  ‘It’s not the Ozone, but still.’ Vince placed a misted glass of pinot gris in front of her. ‘Cheers.’

  He opened his laptop, and a few seconds later turned the screen towards her to show the website of an outfit called Hamilton Design. He pointed at the introductory blurb.

  ‘Formerly known as Hamilton and Jones,’ read Annie and she looked at Vince, who nodded.

  ‘According to the registrar of companies,’ said Vince, ‘Richard Hugh Jones sold his half share of the business to his co-founder, Karl Pierre Hamilton, in 1994. Premises in Lichfield Street a block down from Ballantynes. Does that sound right?’

  Annie shrugged. ‘I just remember tall windows and a view of the sky. Is the company still there?’

  Vince shook his head. ‘The building, if it’s standing, is inside the cordon. But Karl Pierre Hamilton shouldn’t be hard to find.’ He clicked on Contact Us, and up came an email address and a cell phone number.

  ‘And you haven’t…’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Vince. ‘All yours. You going to ring him now?’

  ‘Tomorrow, I think,’ said Annie. She wanted to think about what she might say.

  Vince looked disappointed.

  ‘But you’ve done brilliantly,’ she said, ‘thank you.’ And she leant across from her chair and hugged him.