King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Oh God, thought Annie. ‘Many happy returns,’ she said and she reached out and patted the old man on the shoulder, as one might pat a child. His shirt felt damp and clammy. ‘I’d love to stay and chat but I really must be off.’

  From the look on his face it was impossible to tell whether she’d repaired the damage she’d done, whether he’d forgotten her sharpness. She hoped so. The best you could do in this world, she supposed, was to avoid causing unnecessary pain. Though why it was always she and others like her who did the avoiding… Well, she had no answer but to flash the old man a smile, turn and walk away. Was it really his birthday? She doubted it. But better, by far, to go along, to pretend.

  Still with time on her hands, she followed the loop of the Avon through the park, looking across the weed beds and the gravel bottom sprinkled with beer bottles to the botanic gardens it enclosed. Sunlight shafting through foliage lit patches of water to an old green gold. She glimpsed an eel nosing under the far bank, a grey-faced heron poised immobile and intent. She stopped to watch, stood as still as the heron.

  Seventy-seven. Did anyone get to seventy-seven well? He’d been to 95,000 feet in an American plane. You didn’t invent detail like that. He must have been someone, as it were. And a husband? A father? Most men were, weren’t they? His kids then, now forty, fifty years old, families of their own, did they know where Dad was on what may have been his birthday? Did they know he was accosting strangers with stories in a park? And if they did, did they care?

  The heron bent towards the water with infinite slowness. Patience, that was the quality. The bird stabbed the water and came up with a fingerling held crosswise in its beak, wriggling but hopelessly pinned. With two flicks of practised deftness the heron aligned the fish with its gullet and swallowed it whole and wriggling, down the long and pretty throat to where it would writhe, briefly, in gastric juices, and then die.

  Vince was waiting in the foyer of the public hospital. With him a tall grey-haired woman in dark linen trousers and a white shirt.

  ‘Mrs Hamilton,’ said Vince. ‘Denise.’

  ‘We’ve met before,’ the woman said without smiling, or offering her hand, ‘though you wouldn’t remember. You were two. How’s your poor mother?’

  In the lift to the fifth floor, Denise stood facing the doors, as if willing them to open.

  Annie flashed a look at Vince, who gave her the faintest of shrugs. It wouldn’t have been hard for Vince to find Denise, but why was she here now? Annie sensed again a web of stuff, of complexity. But then, it had been twenty years. A lot happens in twenty years.

  The fifth-floor corridor was the essence of deepest hospital, the linoleum uniquely cushioned, swabbed and squeaky, and the smell of disinfectant. A high-sided cot bore a load of scrawny age, white haired and shrunken, propelled by a porter in pastel pyjamas. Nurses with strong calf muscles, a white-coated doctor toting the stethoscope that Annie always suspected them of wearing as a badge of status. Why did nurses never have one? Were they not allowed to use them? Their heraldic device was the fob watch inverted.

  Somewhere in this warren of a building, Jess would be cheerfully bullying staff and patients for their own good, making things happen, scrubbing the world with her energy and forthright courage.

  Denise led the way, striding past wards and windows and dispensaries, and sanctuaries for nurses only, and rooms where patients sat in dressing gowns and stared at televisions, and a waiting area where three couples in their sixties sat in outdoor clothes and it wasn’t immediately clear which of each pair was sick.

  They stopped outside a ward. ‘Would you mind?’ said Denise, gesturing to them to wait in the corridor, and she went in without waiting for a reply.

  ‘She insisted,’ whispered Vince. ‘I could hardly say no.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ They turned to the window overlooking Hagley Park. In the distance she could make out the vast acreage of netball courts, where she’d spent so many winter Saturday mornings in what seemed now like another world. And as she’d played on one particular Saturday twenty years ago, had her father lain up here all broken and alone, unvisited perhaps?

  ‘Darling,’ said Denise in an overloud, oversolicitous voice, ‘this is Annie, Raewyn’s daughter, you remember? She’s come all the way from England,’ and she gestured to Annie to step forward, as if directing a play.

  Karl looked like a patient in a cartoon. One leg was plastered and held off the bed by wires and ratchets, and round his hips was a sort of metal girdle, a shiny immobilising clamp. Threaded metal rods with wing-nuts on them appeared to pass directly through the clamp and into his flesh and presumably bone. It was hard to look at.

  ‘Annie,’ he said, and he smiled softly, and held out a hand to her, which she took as if to shake but he just laid it across her palm and kept it there, holding hands as little children are supposed to do, though Annie couldn’t remember ever having done so.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ he said and Annie remembered him, remembered the size of him, the shape of his mouth. She remembered him standing against tall sash windows, windows full of sky, and other men sitting on stools at angled drawing boards. He’d been wearing green corduroy trousers, ribbed like a ploughed paddock, and an open-necked shirt. The neck of his pyjamas now framed a forest of hair, a simian mat of it, greyish and swirled like seaweed.

  ‘It’s your birthday soon,’ said Karl. ‘Am I right?’

  Annie looked at him in a surprise that threatened to become pleasure.

  ‘Rich always took the day off. He had it written into a contract. I thought it was a joke at first. I mean we were friends. We didn’t have to put stuff like that into contracts. But he meant it, and he kept to it, even after, well…’

  He turned his head a little towards his wife. She looked tart, pursed, tense.

  Annie watched as he seemed to struggle with his thoughts. His face darkened and then seemed almost to crumple.

  ‘I’m sorry, Annie. I did what I could. But nothing did any good.’

  ‘You did everything anyone could do,’ said Denise. Sitting on the other side of the bed, she had kept a proprietorial hand on her husband’s forearm. She patted the forearm now, as one might comfort a child. ‘No one could have done more.’

  ‘It was all such a shame.’

  ‘What was?’ said Annie. ‘What was such a shame?’

  But the big man on the bed had closed his eyes and he was gulping.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Denise, standing up and taking command. ‘No, that’s it, I knew this would happen. I must ask you to leave now. Now.’ And she turned, eyes wide, and shooed Annie and Vince away from the bed. ‘Go now, please, just go now,’ and as the two of them retreated she pulled the curtain round the bed. From behind it there came a sort of long moan, a strange, keening sound, almost a wail. A nurse clip-clopped past them at speed and slid through the curtain.

  Denise emerged. ‘Go,’ she said fiercely, ‘I said go. The pair of you. You’ve seen the state he’s in. You’ve seen what you’ve done. I want you to leave now.’ She advanced on Annie and Vince flapping at them with her hands as if shooing geese, forcing them back into the corridor and then down it.

  ‘I’m sorry if…’ Annie began but Denise was having none of it, and they went, Vince leading the way through swing doors that gave onto a set of stairs. The doors closed behind them. Denise didn’t follow.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Vince.

  Chapter 20

  ‘A tube of delight,’ he says, sitting back and fitting the cigarette into a crook of his left hand. ‘Not that you approve, eh Friday? But you fit the world better than we do. You’re happy here, aren’t you, you dumb brute?’ And the dog responds to his tone by looking up into his face with eyes the colour of old furniture.

  Richard sucks at the smoke with caution. Coughing threatens his bowels. Infirmity he can cope with. But his bowels appal him.

  The dog is licking at Richard’s calf, persistently, firmly. The flesh tingles. Richard leans forward,
holds the dog’s head away to one side, and studies the wound of sorts on side of the calf. Not a cut, just a split, like a lipless mouth. It isn’t the first time he has noticed it. He doesn’t know why it doesn’t hurt. He presses the edge with his finger and a bead of thick fluid, maggot-coloured, forms in the heart of the lesion, swells as he presses until the dog licks it away, cleans the wound, the breach in his flesh. Richard is intrigued, not alarmed. Gently he tries easing the two edges apart. At the top of the lesion the skin is mica-like in texture and it tears suddenly with a little stab of pain and a rivulet of blood follows the path of least resistance down his calf until the dog cleans that away too with a single muscular slurp of the tongue.

  ‘Good boy,’ says Richard. ‘And the women went to wash the corpse…’ He giggles to himself, pulls a miniature from his pocket and unscrews the cap and raises it to his lips without looking and he knows immediately from the dirty petrol smell that it is Scotch and he savours the burn on tongue and throat and the sense of calm, the quenching of fires of unease.

  He surveys the room. He has achieved little and it has taken hours. To move a single table takes an effort and then a rest, a drink, a regaining of breath and courage. But there is now at least the suggestion of a party, four tables brought together in the centre of the room and covered with starched white cloths, their folds still clearly visible. And Richard knows where he will find the cutlery and stemware, the decorations, the trimmings. But he has done enough for the day. It must be noon or so. He will take Friday to the car park roof and then if it is warm enough he’ll sleep there beneath the little overhang, though if the wind is keen he’ll go to a room.

  ‘Here, boy,’ he says as he raises the Scotch again to drain it, ‘here, Friday,’ and without looking down he feels the dog slide in beneath his left hand, soft fur against hard flesh. He strokes the dog and tips the little bottle and then he feels the dog stiffen, straightening its frame, suddenly alert. He senses the surge of a growl in the dog’s throat. ‘What is it, Friday? What is it, boy?’ but even as he whispers he hears the drilling start.

  * * *

  ‘But why was he so upset?

  ‘Search me,’ said Vince. ‘One minute he was holding Annie’s hand and telling her when her birthday was and the next he was blubbing like a baby. And that’s when she stepped in and shooed us out. Though she’d clearly been dying to do that from the start. Sausages are ready, by the way.’

  ‘What was all that about “I did what I could”?’ said Jess, laying out cutlery and crockery on the garden table.

  ‘That’s what he kept saying, and she kept saying it back at him. Which would seem to imply that it hadn’t worked, whatever it was and whatever it was trying to achieve.’

  ‘Or that he actually hadn’t done everything he could and was feeling guilty about it,’ said Jess, pouring wine into three glasses. ‘So, where to from here? Annie?’

  Annie didn’t know. She had been touched by Karl’s reaction to her visit, by the soft but insistent grip of his hand, by the way he remembered her birthday, by the sheer strength of the emotion that her father’s memory had aroused, but she didn’t feel she had any right to go back to the hospital and question him further. She didn’t like upsetting people at the best of times and he was clearly in a condition that didn’t need more upsetting.

  ‘If you don’t like these, you don’t like food,’ said Vince, placing a plate of split and glistening sausages on the faux-rustic table. And Annie sensed in him once again a sort of prissiness, a neatness that was both appealing and slightly distancing. It was there in the way the sausages had been arranged on the plate, in the garnishing of parsley tufts from Jess’s garden, in the cleanness and softness of his hands, the cut of his trousers. It had even been there, she thought, in those distant school photos. You could tell from the tie at the collar, from the better-ordered hair, that Vince would never quite be the one to let himself go, that he might ride pillion with anarchy for a while but in the end he’d dismount. Her father though, well, that hair of his.

  ‘As I saw it,’ said Vince, ‘the old boy clearly felt that he actually could have done more to help Rich. And she clearly felt he’d done too much. In other words, he liked your dad, she didn’t. Agree, Annie?’

  Annie thought she did, on balance. But she wasn’t sure it got them very far. Nothing much had got them very far. Detective work in real life wasn’t like detective work on TV. The pieces of the puzzle didn’t arrive neatly and sequentially and nor did they seem to lead to any solution. Indeed any additional piece of information seemed just as likely to complicate the mystery as to clarify it.

  ‘Do you know anything for sure?’ asked Jess. And over the course of a plate of Le Traiteur sausages, a bowl of mixed salad and two bottles of chardonnay they agreed that the only things they knew for sure were that Annie’s father and Karl Hamilton had gone into business together the year before Annie was born, that Richard and Raewyn had got married six months before Annie was born, and, thanks to Vince’s research, that the business had prospered throughout the 1980s, employing half a dozen draughtsmen until around 1990, when things started to unravel. Richard had an affair and either left home or was kicked out.

  ‘Do we even know that for sure,’ asked Vince, ‘that he had an affair?’

  ‘Mum was pretty emphatic about that, and she certainly played the part of a woman scorned.’

  ‘And since then,’ said Vince in conclusion, ‘we know only that he suffered some sort of accident and underwent surgery, that he gave as his address a flat belonging to a prominent local family who claim never to have heard of him and that Karl bought him out of the business some time after that. Since then, nothing. For seventeen years.’

  Silence. From over the fence on the warm, thick evening air came the uniquely cracked voice of Gene Pitney, ‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’, transparently faked emotion from long before Annie was born.

  ‘Is he dead?’ said Jess. ‘Sorry, Annie, but it’s got to be faced.’

  ‘No,’ said Vince. Annie shrugged. She’d entertained the thought, of course. Sixty didn’t have to be old – Vince wasn’t old. But Vince wasn’t her father.

  ‘Do you want to go on?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Annie. ‘But I’m not sure what leads we have left. I’m going for lunch with the old boy on Park Terrace tomorrow and he’s promised to drag Ben along. But if they had anything to tell me they’d have told me by now and if they were trying to hide something they would hardly have asked me to lunch. And I don’t think we should really go and upset Karl again. Which leaves Denise. And she clearly didn’t want to see us in the first place.’

  ‘But why?’ said Vince. ‘There has to be a reason for feelings that strong. If you don’t go and see her, Annie, I will. I’ve got the address.’

  Annie smiled. ‘I’ll go,’ she said.

  ‘Have you thought, by the way, of putting a missing person ad in The Press, or even talking to a journalist? Someone out there must know something.’

  ‘Yes, but Mum might see it. Or one of her friends who’d be only too pleased to tell her. And I really don’t want her to know I’m here.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Vince, smirking. ‘Which is why I kept your name out of it. Is there any more of that chardonnay?’

  * * *

  The bus went only three-quarters of the way up Mount Pleasant. It was a remarkable journey. Larger and newer houses had crept up the hill, and the larger and newer the houses the greater the damage: panoramic windows split into vast shards; slab concrete walls thrown to Pisa-ish angles; plaster finishes torn like fabric; breeze-block walls with zigzags through them. On the corner of Oceanview Terrace a house was held up by three wooden buttresses each ending in a free-standing cube of concrete. But from right up there on the outer edge of the Lyttelton volcano you still looked out over the glitter of the Pacific, with nothing but water between you and Chile. And gulls rode the wind.

  A vast macrocarpa hedge, trimmed rectangular, and
an arch cut through it with a wrought-iron gate. The path led down to the hefty white house, a thing of tilt slabs and plate glass and a triple garage with a swimming pool on top of it. The pool looked to be empty but the house seemed not too badly damaged. Annie made herself not hesitate before ringing the bell. Denise came swiftly to the door. Trousers and shirt again, pearls, expensively cut hair and immaculate make-up.

  When she saw Annie her face seized.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘I thought…’

  ‘I know,’ said Annie, ‘and I’m sorry to trouble you. But I didn’t want to upset your husband again and I would like to find my father and clearly you know something I don’t, so here I am.’

  The living room was as Annie would have expected. Modish spare furniture, plain white walls, a slate-coloured carpet, a magazine-like cleanliness and a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the ocean and had somehow survived the quake. Denise didn’t offer a drink. Annie’s spine didn’t touch the back of her chair.

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ said Denise, ‘how your father behaved towards his own family, but I find it impossible to forgive what he did to us. Karl bent over backwards to help him and yet he still…’

  ‘Please,’ said Annie, ‘can we begin at the beginning?’

  There followed a series of questions from Annie and answers from Denise, who soon warmed to the task of putting her venom into words. She’d been suspicious of Richard from the outset when Karl had gone into business with him, but business was business and Karl said Richard had flair and anyway she was preoccupied with their children, three of them, all little and there wasn’t much money around.

  Annie had already noted the portraits on the piano, done in chalk and pastel, the kids’ eyes unnaturally bright, the lashes lengthened, cheeks plumped, the easy lure of sentiment. Annie sensed, knew, that if she ever had kids she’d succumb to it too. Those kids on the piano would be Annie’s age and more, would be parents themselves by now. Denise had been surprised but relieved when Richard had done the right thing by a noticeably pregnant Raewyn. Karl had been best man. Annie’s birth had seemed to put Richard on the right track at last and for half a dozen years in the early eighties business had prospered. Karl had been able to take on staff and all seemed well.