King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  A noise to Annie’s left and she swung around to glimpse the cat slithering over the fence. How different was the world at night, in Hornby, in Turnpike Lane, in Malawi, anywhere. We are so firmly day’s creatures, putting such faith in our eyes, that when the light fades our other senses overcompensate and prickle our skin.

  As Annie got back into bed she thought of her mother arriving. And that was that for sleep. Thoughts swelled in the darkness, rolled around and around. Annie lay on her right side, her left side, her back, her front. She kicked the duvet off her legs. She thought of birds flying, of open places she’d loved, of the Mackenzie Country where the tussock waves like skinny wheat and the roads are lined with lupins, images that she had used for years as tracks to follow till they faded into the different landscape of sleep, but nothing would do. She tried telling herself that it really didn’t matter, that she could cope, would cope, that under the gaze of the moon it was a nothing, a triviality, that people were dying in a thousand places as she lay there and fretted about meeting her mother, that a week from now she’d have forgotten about it, would be astonished it had ever concerned her. But the pillow grew hot, the bed itchy, and the nightdress ruched around her flesh.

  At five she gave up, lay on her back open-eyed and tried to think it through. It was guilt. She had deceived her mother, had come to New Zealand without telling her. She’d been wrong to do so. Annie rehearsed the arguments for the defence: that she was here on a mission that her mother would despise, that she was here only briefly, that she was in a different part of the country, that her mother had deceived her about her father’s fate, that her mother was manipulative and selfish, that she, Annie, was over thirty and had been dutiful all her life. But though they all made sense they did not begin to outweigh the simple fact of her own wrong.

  She heard Jess’s alarm go off, followed a few minutes later by footsteps to the bathroom. Daylight cruelly fringed the curtain. The toilet flushed. The next thing Annie knew it was nine o’clock.

  Chapter 26

  The scaffolders had finished work on the stage. It stood skeletal on the parched turf of North Hagley, rock-concert size. A breeze picked up and dust devils flickered round the base where the turf had been worn to a crumble of earth. Men were now at work fitting plywood flooring and stretching vast blue tarpaulins to form the arch of a roof. Others ran spools of electrical cable out of vans full of electronics and laced them through and under and tied them to the metal frame with little plastic straps.

  Stretching out in front of the stage, the space for the crowd, the congregation, was huge, several football pitches worth of sun-browned grass. The paper had speculated that fifty thousand or more would attend, one in eight of the city’s population. But it did not suggest why. Was it a sense of community, a religious hunger of some sort, a need for consolation, or just a free concert with celebrities to gawp at?

  Ministers of the Crown would be there, up to and including the prime minister, ministers of every faith from Islam to Mormon, the ubiquitous mayor, leaders of the armed services, of the rescue services, of the police, pop musicians, classical musicians, all had been asked and all had said yes. And validating the whole strange exercise, poor Wills, condemned to a life of just such strange exercises, to playing a role from here to eternity. ‘What very strange creatures we are,’ thought Annie.

  Across the river, she identified the balcony where an old man had sought to flatter and deceive her. But she could see no sign of him.

  When she stepped into the ward Karl saw her immediately and smiled and beckoned her with his good arm. He seemed less tense, more mellow, though still strung up with and screwed into an array of medical paraphernalia.

  ‘Are you allowed chocolates?’ said Annie, pulling packages from her Santorini bag. ‘There’s fruit as well, though. Just in case. How are you feeling? It was good of you to ask me back. I’m sorry we…’

  ‘Annie.’ As he reached out his hand to take hers, she realised she had been gabbling. ‘Thank you for coming. Denise doesn’t know I’ve asked you back. Yes, I know you went to see her and I can imagine what she said. I asked you here just to apologise. In my current condition I’ve become more emotional but that’s no excuse. No, no, Annie, let me finish. I owe it to your dad. He meant, he means, a lot to me. Though before you ask I don’t know where he is. But I’ll answer any questions you’ve got. Tell me what you know.’

  When Annie mentioned Ben, Karl visibly relaxed.

  ‘I wasn’t sure how much you knew. That makes things easier.’

  Karl had met her father at art school in Auckland. It was the early seventies and teaching representative drawing or indeed formally teaching anything was considered Victorian and repressive. ‘We learned nothing,’ said Karl. ‘To pass the course you just had to keep breathing for three years. Rich just about managed that.’

  As Annie had noticed before, when old friends spoke of her father, they bathed in the memories, smiled at them, seemed to shed the burdens of age. But then again, perhaps that was true of all reminiscing. The memory is a kind editor, compressing yesterday into a wad of rich experience, squeezing from it all the tedium and the routine, all the stuff that today seems crammed with. And though memory doesn’t dump the bad stuff, it draws the sting from all but the worst of it and plays it for laughs.

  Short of money like all students, Karl and Richard had formed a sign-writing company, jazzing up shop fronts. ‘There are still a couple of places on K Road that are a Hamilton and Jones design circa 1971. We both had ideas but your dad did the painting. He had a brave hand. At his best, a few strokes of the brush and he’d be done.’

  After art school, qualified for nothing but fearing less, they’d gone together on the more or less compulsory OE, shared a flat in London with an ever-shifting cast of young Australasians, and even done design work on a few shop fronts on the Earls Court Road. A Kombi van took them round Europe and Asia Minor at a time when it seemed so much easier to go from place to place. ‘Though today’s kids will probably be saying the same thing forty years from now. The older I get, the more I think the world changes less than we do. To the young the world is always full of promise, don’t you think, Annie?’

  Annie said something noncommittal, not wanting to break the narrative.

  They’d parted ways for a while. Richard had spent time in North Africa but both had ended back in Christchurch the following year, where they founded an official business entity, Hamilton and Jones, Graphic Designers. ‘Your dad was no businessman. I handled that. But he could draw, and he had a knack of fitting the design to the customer. He read them better than they often read themselves and drew the stuff they hadn’t known they wanted till they saw it. And we were young enough to be seen as magazinish, trendy, cutting edge.’

  Business went well, they hired staff and Karl married Denise. Richard would have been best man but he and Denise had clashed from the start. For a wedding present he gave them a drawing of a cat melting over a fence, done with half a dozen strokes of a charcoal pencil.

  ‘I told Denise it was from an aunt in South Africa. She loved it, hung it in the hall at home. She often shows it off.’ Karl chuckled strongly enough to rattle his metal girdle.

  A nurse looked across from her station. Karl waved.

  What had this big, soft man ever seen in Denise? She must have been a demanding wife. But people walked into marriage with their eyes open. Had Karl wanted someone to control him as clearly as Denise would have wanted to do the controlling? Annie didn’t know.

  ‘If your father had a weakness, it was sex. Nothing odd about that in a man, of course, but Rich seemed to need it. And he loved to walk on the wild side, as it were. You want me to go on?’

  Annie nodded.

  ‘When we were at art school it was still illegal to be gay. Can you believe that? Jesus, back then gay still meant cheerful. But if you knew where to look it was all over the place and Rich knew where to look and he actually seemed to enjoy the danger of it.

&nbs
p; ‘He was like that for as long as I knew him. And when we got to London he just dived right in. He’d try anything. Some of the stories he told, honestly, a conventional chap like me could hardly credit them, and I doubt I got to hear a tenth of what actually went on. He settled down a bit when we got back here and went properly into business – he’d had a bit of a scare in Morocco, he told me, and besides he wasn’t quite so young and reckless any more – but still, when he walked into the office one Monday morning and asked if I’d be his best man, it came as a shock. I met Raewyn that same week. She was a stunner, your mother.’

  Annie had seen the photos – androgynous, skinny, waifish, frayed jeans, the defining late-seventies look.

  ‘She was pregnant, of course, with you, several months gone.’

  Karl paused, and looked at Annie enquiringly. She nodded.

  ‘Your dad was never in love with Raewyn, but with you it was love at first sight. He’d bring you to the office for the morning as soon as you could crawl, and we had a little playpen built for you. And he did some great work when you were little. It was his creative peak, I think. We did so well, thanks to you, we had to move into new premises.’

  ‘With tall windows,’ said Annie.

  Karl smiled. ‘Yes, sash windows. They gave wonderful light. Happy times. Then he met Ben. He told me about it from the start. That was another thing about your dad – I never knew him tell a lie. It was as if the idea of lying didn’t occur to him. He said he was in love and he was going to tell Raewyn. I begged him not to. I was pretty sure how she’d react. I got him to hold off for a week or two. I thought the affair with Ben would fade. All the others had.’

  And here Karl faltered. Annie heard the catch in his voice, looked up and could sense the emotion welling inside him just as it had the last time she’d been there. She took his hand.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Take your time.’

  She could see Karl doing battle within himself, fighting down a surge of distress, the mat of hair on his chest heaving as if alive.

  A nurse padded over, straightened a sheet. ‘Everything all right, Mr Hamilton?’

  Karl smiled at the nurse. The way she had addressed him, as if he were a vulnerable child, seemed to make him pull himself together. She moved on.

  ‘I told Denise,’ said Karl suddenly. He looked straight at Annie, as if he’d overcome some hurdle and wanted her to see it. Annie looked back at him, puzzled.

  ‘I told Denise about Rich and Ben.’

  It was only then that Annie grasped what he meant. She shook her head in surprise and squeezed Karl’s hand. ‘It’s all right, Karl,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. Raewyn was bound to find out. If it hadn’t been Denise, it would have been someone else. Besides, if it was anyone’s fault it was Dad’s. He had the affair.’

  Karl looked at her directly. ‘Denise couldn’t stand Rich. He was too dangerous for her. She’s a very conventional woman. She’d have seen it as her duty to tell Raewyn. I should have known.’

  Annie wasn’t so sure about duty. She imagined Denise phoning, or even coming round to River Road, pulsing with the excitement of being the bearer of bad news. And that would have been the day she remembered with such clarity, the day from which she dated the rest of her life, the day when she’d come home from school in her summer cotton uniform of green and white check.

  She saw again from her bedroom window her mother feeding the bonfire at the foot of the garden, seething with anger, unapproachable, unappeasable, dragging clothes from the house, a brown jacket being flung onto the fire and assuming in midair the shape of half a man, its arms outspread, then landing on the flames and flaring within seconds, to be followed by trousers, socks, shoes, books, everything tainted with the touch of the betrayer.

  ‘It’s all right, Karl,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  He closed his eyes but held on to her hand. And he sighed, heavily, a couple of times. She squeezed his hand again. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ve tired you.’

  His eyes popped open. ‘Don’t even think of going,’ he said.

  Chapter 27

  He plaits three bathrobe sashes into a rope. It takes him half the morning. He tests the rope for stretch, then ties it to the mannequin arm. He knots two napkins together at the corners, his gnarled left hand a hindrance in this finer work.

  ‘Here, boy, here, Friday,’ and the dog, with a touch of wariness, comes to be stroked and whispered to. He tells the dog to sit before he lifts a front paw and slides it through a slit between the knotted napkins. Then the other paw through the same slit. The dog does not feel constrained, does not struggle.

  The man takes the free ends of the napkins and ties them together over the dog’s back. With a little persuasion the dog accepts this and the tying of the free end of the sash rope to the napkin harness.

  ‘Okay, Friday, let’s go.’ Richard stands and shuffles towards the middle of the room. The dog comes at his side and he keeps a hand on the dog’s neck and the strain comes on. ‘Come on, boy, come on,’ he whispers, and as he hopes the dog braces a little against the broad napkin harness stretched across his chest and the rope does not stretch as the one sash stretched, and he urges the dog on with encouragement and he adds his own puny strength to the dog’s and there is a noise and the mannequin shifts in its shelving, balks as if wedged and then both the mannequins come free together, the arm of one wedged invasively between the legs of the other in a parody of intimacy. They clatter to the floor and the dog looks around in alarm, but Richard calms and whispers and soon the dog is happy to haul the two entwined figures across the expanse of carpet to the centre of the room and the place settings.

  Richard rewards the dog with Tux. He drags his seat across to where the mannequins lie together, head to toe, the female arm between the male legs. He sits beside them, and as gently as he can he eases them apart, lays them side by side on their back. Both are slim and svelte and bald, with smooth bumps where crotch or breasts would be.

  Chapter 28

  ‘Rich never held a grudge. He knew what had happened but he didn’t reproach me. It was a while before he even told me that he’d been kicked out, that he’d moved in with Ben. He wanted my advice on what to do about you.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘You were his only reason for ever staying with Raewyn and now he couldn’t see you. Raewyn had screamed at him to leave, calling him every name under the sun, threatening to tell you you had a pervert for a father unless he just went away and stayed away. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  ‘I didn’t know what to say. And besides, I had enough on my plate at the time. Business was way down. Several big contracts had fallen over, all at once. It was as if the town had turned against us. We had to lay off staff. Money was tight. And Rich was distracted. It didn’t help. It was the lowest time between us. And he started to drink. He’d always liked a drink, but this was different. Lunchtime too. In the early days we’d often drunk at lunch, just for the hell of it, because we could. And sometimes we’d do great stuff in the afternoon. But this was different. This wasn’t celebration. It was joyless. It was drinking for the sake of drinking.

  ‘He could still draw, of course, but there was less and less call for his sort of stuff. Computers were just coming in and the industry was changing but he didn’t want to know. He wasn’t interested. One afternoon I told him not to bother coming in next time he drank at lunchtime. He’d had a bottle at least. He didn’t get angry – I don’t ever remember him angry. He just said, “Sorry, Karl,” and walked out.

  ‘After that he only stayed till lunch each day. I probably should have done more but I had young kids and I was worried about the business and Denise didn’t always make things easier and, well, things slid. And then of course there was, well, you know about the accident.’

  Annie nodded and listened as Karl told how they’d tracked her father down in hospital, how broken in spirit he’d seemed.

  ‘Was it an accident, Karl?’<
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  Karl didn’t look at her. He paused, looked at the far side of the ward, looked down at his hands, at the medical devices that held him in place. He sighed. ‘I don’t see how it could have been, Annie. It seemed so precise and cruel. And the story of the hit and run seemed unconvincing. But in the end I just don’t know. The police seemed satisfied and what was I supposed to do?

  ‘The curious thing was that business picked up after that. It was as if the city suddenly remembered we existed. Not that that was any use to Rich. Of course he still owned half the company but he made it clear even with his jaw wired up in hospital that he wanted nothing more to do with it. I argued for a while but in the end I bought him out. It was a substantial sum of money, paid in instalments while you grew up. Almost all of it went to Raewyn by direct debit. The lawyers set it up.’

  When she looked back Annie could see there had always been money around. Raewyn had only ever worked part time but the car was often changed and always newish. Decorators came in one year, new carpet in another. They hadn’t gone without.

  Karl was clearly tiring. His injuries were severe, worsened when he was dug from the rubble in Lichfield Street and lifted onto a stretcher. He would limp, apparently, for the rest of his life.

  ‘Just one last question then I’ll leave you in peace,’ said Annie, glancing over at the nurse, seated at her desk engrossed in some sort of paperwork. ‘That was, what, seventeen years ago. Have you seen him since?’

  Karl nodded. ‘I think so, twice.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘It was hard to be sure,’ and he felt for her hand again, whether to reassure her or to comfort himself Annie wasn’t sure. ‘Once in the Square, by the old post office, and I called out to him but he went off down an alley onto Hereford. I followed him but he was gone.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But the second time he did. On Cashel Street this time, on the corner with High, where the kids hang out and skateboard. And I’m sure he recognised me and deliberately went away. This time I didn’t follow.’ Karl paused. ‘He looked old, Annie, seriously old. Older than he was.’