King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  Annie could just picture the look of earnest entreaty on Ben’s face.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ she said.

  And she was also rather keen to see Prince William.

  Chapter 33

  It is not going to happen today. Something else is, and it is not hard to guess what. From early in the morning guards, soldiers and men in dark suits have been touring the empty, ruined streets below. From the car park roof Richard has watched them, the distance lending a sense of absurdity to their scouring of a world too large and various for them ever to render it safe.

  Two sniffer dogs on long leads are being shown down High Street, the dogs’ tails raised like masts, their noses assessing doorways and rubble piles in moments, reading the brew of the air as fast as thought and finding nothing of interest, and moving on, towing their handlers. A man in a boiler suit raises the manhole covers in the road for the dogs to sniff down and dismiss.

  The suits and security look up at the hotel and other streetside buildings but send no one in to sweep them room by room, aware that the task is vast and the risk small. But once a stretch of street has been gone over by the men and dogs a squaddie with a gun is posted at either end to do what soldiers have always done, which is to stand and wait. There’s one now at the rubble-scattered corner of High and Cashel by the entrance to the Westpac bank.

  Richard withdraws under his overhang, and the dog curls beside. A gap in the concrete railing lets him see along the route to Cathedral Square. He drops a hand to feel the dog’s rough fur and has a strong sense of nowness, of a good sweet morning and his own frailty within it. And he feels a mild curiosity to see the size and manner of the dignitary party. The dogs and soldiers and thoroughness suggest importance, head-of-state importance even.

  To add to the sense of occasion, music has been wafting from the direction of the park since mid-morning, gusting in intensity with the strength of the breeze, recorded music, tunes Richard recognises, the sort of anodyne standards that might keep a crowd vaguely anaesthetised while they await some live event. Richard, too, feels drowsy. There is less difference now for him between sleep and wake. At night he lies on his back and is aware of time passing, of the dog breathing in and out beside him. Yet during the day he often sits and drifts into filmy racing dreams with other rules of time and space and consequence.

  The noise of wings opens his eyes now, wings beating and then settling. The pigeon is back, lurching across the bright-lit concrete on its clenched left stump. The bird’s tail has lost a snatch of feather. Two wing feathers hang at unaerodynamic angles. And between the wings, above what are effectively the shoulder blades, there’s a patch of bare skin, bereft of feathers, yellowish grey and dotted with blood. Richard senses movement to his left and a gull lands on the parapet and settles its wings, a meaty black-backed gull, its chest like a Viking prow, its yellow bill a pruning hook.

  Richard reaches out to where he keeps his supplies of booze and Tux and snack food, and the pigeon flaps its wings and half hops, half flutters away in alarm. The gull, too, flaps its wings as if to take off but then resettles.

  Richard crumbles a biscuit and scatters it on the concrete between himself and the pigeon. Again it retreats in alarm and does not come forward to eat. It looks uncertain, weak on its one good foot. And then it topples. It falls to one side and lies, hopeless, down. The gull cocks its head, assessing, then hops lazily from the parapet and comes towards the pigeon on great webbed feet. Feebly Richard lobs the rest of the biscuit at the gull. It falls well short. The gull hops briefly into the air, then stands and studies Richard. The pigeon lies on its side in the sun and does not move.

  ‘Hotel California’ wafts across the city. The gull stands and waits. The pigeon looks dead. The dog gets up and lollops over to clean up the scraps of biscuit with a prehensile tongue. The gull takes three steps into the breeze and rises onto the air, flaps huge wings once, twice, thrice and is suddenly riding the sky, twenty, fifty feet up, twisting its head to peer down at the man and the bird and the dog. It circles and watches, and then with a rippling tilt of its wing-span it arcs and flies back down. As it nears the parapet it pulls up against the air till it all but stalls and it lands as lightly as a leaf.

  The dog noses the pigeon. The bird comes weakly to life, flapping its wings but unable to get itself to its feet. It shifts on its side, like a swatted fly.

  Voices, and they are on the way up High Street, a party of a dozen or more in glowing orange vests and hard hats the colour of daffodils. Token clothing, worn not as protection against the destructive forces of the world but in propitiation of them, a charm against disaster.

  From seven storeys up Richard can sense deference in the way the people are arranged around and behind the focal figure. That figure is clearly being led through the scenes of destruction but is required by status to appear to be doing the leading.

  The pigeon is lying still, one wing outstretched in spastic uselessness. The dog has lost interest. The gull has not. Again it has left the parapet and is waddling towards the dying bird. Its intent is unmistakable. Richard makes to stand. There’s a spear of pain, a new one, just up under the ribs on the right. He groans and jack-knifes forward, his right hand shooting to the point of pain, kneading it, pressing in towards innards, organs, who knows what. The pain comes in waves. Richard is absorbed by the pain. There is room for nothing else in his world – birds, dogs, nothing.

  The waves weaken and recede. He breathes, nervously, relaxes, winces, relaxes more, unfurls a little, opens his eyes. The gull is stabbing at the pigeon with its hooked beak. It pierces the flank and the pigeon flaps a wing.

  Richard tries to rise but sits back down. He shouts at the gull. The dog looks up. ‘Friday,’ says Richard and he waves towards the gull and the dog looks at him but not at the gull. There’s a wine glass beside his chair and Richard flings it and it shatters and the stem skims across the concrete at the bird. The gull grips the pigeon by the neck, spreads its wings, walks into the breeze and up onto the air. But after ten strokes of those vast wings the weight of the bird proves too much and it falls from the gull’s beak onto the bonnet of the Audi and lies still. The gull circles. The dog looks at Richard, unsure of the nature of this game.

  With an effort Richard rises to his feet. His head swims. When he looks up again the gull is about to settle on the Audi. He shouts and waves his arms but he is too far away and the gull eyes him without alarm. The dog seems not to understand. Richard sets off towards the car, feels himself swaying, is afraid he’ll faint and drops to his knees. The dog dances and fusses round him, eager to play.

  From down on the ground he can see the gull on the car’s bonnet. It ducks its head and comes up with a beak full of fluff, which it leaves to the wind, and then ducks again and again and again. Richard crosses the car park on all fours, the dog beside him. Richard is panting. The old skin of his left hand has torn on the concrete and blood is seeping from a knuckle. He uses the car’s front bumper to get himself back on his feet. The gull takes off.

  The pigeon flutters one wing but its guts are exposed and ruptured. Richard covers the bird’s head with his good hand, holds the body down with the other and stretches the neck till he feels the click of the separating spine. The bird gives a single, weak convulsion. Richard lays his head on the car’s bonnet, feels the warmth in the painted metal.

  Strength of a sort returns slowly. He looks at the dead bird in his hands. Blood has matted the breast. He strokes the tip of his index finger down the ruff of feathers at the bird’s neck, parti-coloured and soft and light as thistledown. He stretches a wing, admires the fan of feathers, the articulation of thin and hollow bone. The bead of the eye, the one good claw, so wiry, scaly and reptilian, the other bunched and useless like his own. He takes the corpse to the parapet and lets it drop. With one wing half-extended it scythes in the air and swings away from the building’s flank and then back, as the circling gull swoops lazily down towards it.

  A ute is park
ed down there. Two men in blue overalls are studying a plan or something on the bonnet. The pigeon lands some thirty feet away. Neither man appears to notice. They fold the plan and fetch some gear from the back of the ute and walk towards the entrance of the hotel.

  At the other end of High Street the guided party is standing in a semi-circle behind the central figure. Richard washes his hands with a bottle of Kiwi Spring. The PA system in the park plays ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ebbing across the city on the breeze.

  Chapter 34

  ‘My mother’s here somewhere,’ said Annie. ‘She came down from Blenheim specially. She sees it as a free concert, I think.’

  ‘So do the kids,’ said Ben.

  Annie smiled. The kids and her mother were right to some extent. It was billed as a memorial service, but there was an atmosphere, if not of festival, at least of picnic. Lovely early-autumn weather and thousands had come from all over the city with rugs and baskets and were now sitting on the bleached grass listening to the Woolston Brass Band, smart in their uniforms, striking just the right note. They stood for military reassurance, the triumph of order, the continuation of old Christchurch, values so much more substantial than the froth of mere entertainment. But they were still entertaining.

  Ben’s kids had accepted her with simplicity. ‘Rachel, Clare, Hamish,’ Ben had said, ‘this is Annie.’ And they’d chorused ‘Hi, Annie’ on cue and that was that. No ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Why are you here?’ Just ‘Hi, Annie,’ and if Annie proved to be good company then Annie proved to be good company.

  The girls treated little Hamish as a sort of doll or mascot. They fussed over him, held him a lot, dragged him about. He seemed devoted to them. He was a skinny thing, the muscles on his arms like knots in string and the skin that covered them abnormally translucent. ‘Can we get Hamish some ice cream, Daddy?’ said Rachel. ‘Please, he’s hot.’ And they pushed him towards Ben like Exhibit A.

  ‘Okay,’ said Ben, ‘but just for Hamish, mind.’

  ‘Oh Da-a-ad,’ the girls exclaimed together, stretching it out into three delighted syllables of mock admonition. Ben grinned and handed over money and the girls whisked Hamish away between them.

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Ben, ‘I spoil them.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Annie. ‘And they’re lovely.’

  The significant people were massing around and on the distant stage, their movements projected on vast screens to either side. When the search and rescue team crossed the stage to take their seats some spectators stood to cheer and clap, and others joined in until the whole crowd was on its feet and the ovation had acquired a self-swelling momentum. In one way, Annie reflected, they were an understandable subject of applause – they held no political office, were merely ordinary people doing an extraordinary job, taking risks to save lives. What could be more virtuously worthy?

  At the same time, it was like applauding traffic cops or Inland Revenue. They had only done what they’d been trained to do and were paid to do. But still, it felt good to stand and clap and cheer. It felt like a positive assertion of something.

  As did the flags. The place was thick with them, the red and black of Canterbury predominating – most plastered with the word ‘Crusaders’ – a few examples of the national flag, which no one in London could distinguish from the Australian, and on a hundred makeshift banners a phrase to be found nowhere else in the former British Empire. ‘Kia kaha,’ the flags said in big letters painted or sewn onto bedsheets.

  A military helicopter swung in over the park and landed back beyond the crowds, who then turned to the screens to see the hatch on its green flank open and Prince William step out. A minute later he walked off the screen and onto the stage. The applause swelled.

  A lone piper played a lament and the crowd stood and fell silent.

  ‘Do you know,’ whispered Ben, ‘I think this is going to work.’

  The screen showed a video of the central city. The crowd watched in near silence, gasping at the images, the recognisable facades half fallen, the interiors exposed, the familiar buildings lying as their constituent parts, the space they’d held within their walls now open to rain and sunlight. When the soundtrack sank and the screen faded to black, the whole of city, it seemed, was silent for a while. A priest of some kind stepped to the microphone. His words were apt for the occasion but the intensity of the moment fell. And children leaked steadily from the crowd towards the ice cream van and the swings and an even more remote but still eminently visible bouncy castle.

  ‘Happy birthday, Annie,’ said Ben. She turned to him in surprise. ‘It is today, isn’t it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I didn’t get you anything. I’m sorry. But I’m really glad you came. To Christchurch, I mean.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Annie.

  The priest reached the end of his time at the microphone and a murmur of excitement started through the crowd and spines stretched as the people craned to see. And when Prince William began to speak there was silence.

  He talked of the world’s awe at Christchurch’s resilience, and the crowd accepted the flattery. He quoted his grandmother in a line that was clearly designed to make tomorrow’s headline. ‘Grief,’ he said she said, ‘is the price we pay for love.’ And in the kiwi-feather cloak that women had looped around his shoulders he said ‘Kia kaha’ in the accent of an English public school and then sat down. It was a model of how to do it.

  Politicians and others trooped to the microphone and said brief considered things, but the job of the service had been done.

  Annie didn’t feel the urge to sing along with Dave Dobbyn but quite a few of the crowd did, in a way that they rather noticeably hadn’t with the hymns.

  ‘So what have you got planned for the rest of your birthday?’

  Annie shrugged. She hadn’t really thought of it as a birthday. Paul had rung her that morning. Her mother pointedly hadn’t. And she had not expected anyone else to know.

  ‘It was sweet of you to ask me along. I might have moped,’ she said, though she was fairly confident she wouldn’t. ‘There was one thing I’d have liked to do, though,’ and she told Ben about the hostel on Madras where Richard had lived.

  ‘I wish I could have gone there.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘But it’s in the central city, the red zone.’

  ‘So?’ said Ben. He looked suddenly boyish. ‘Why not? You’d be doing no harm. What would Rich have done? You know how he felt about authority. And besides, what’s the worst that could happen?’

  ‘But I wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘But I’m coming too,’ he said.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ The kids were back and more seemed to have happened to them in the last ten minutes than happened to an adult in a week and it was all of paramount importance, the narration only pausing when Hayley Westenra stepped up to sing ‘Amazing Grace’.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ said Rachel, and the girls pointed Hamish towards her and held him still. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he duly repeated, though Annie wasn’t convinced.

  At the end the screens showed Prince William leaving the stage and stopping to talk to the bereaved and the broken, bending solicitously over wheelchairs, saying the right things, and by taking frail old hands in his young strong ones maybe curing a disease or two.

  The crowd seemed satisfied and cheerful as it drifted towards Deans Avenue, not wrung out by emotion, but not thwarted either, not feeling short-changed. The organisers seemed to have got it about right.

  ‘Yoo hoo, darling.’

  Annie wasn’t the only person to look up but she was the only person to recognise her mother and Denise. Denise turned away when their eyes met, but Raewyn was heading through the crowd like a yacht cutting across the wind.

  ‘Shit,’ she said to Ben, ‘my mother.’

  Before Ben could speak Raewyn was among them.

  ‘This is Rachel, and Clare and Hamish,’ said Annie and the kids chorused hello. They were standing in a knot, a
n island around which the crowd flowed. Raewyn seemed oblivious to the obstruction they were causing.

  ‘Wasn’t Hayley nice?’ she said and she looked from Annie to the kids for corroboration.

  ‘I’m the father,’ said Ben, stepping forward with his widest smile, and he introduced himself using his full name. Raewyn took the proffered hand, then registered his identity.

  ‘I see,’ she said, ‘I see. I’m so sorry to have intruded. Happy birthday, darling.’

  And she was gone.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ben.

  ‘You’re not supposed to swear,’ said Rachel.

  Chapter 35

  At dusk he lights the candelabrum, creating an island of light in the centre of the room, animating the faces of the two dressed mannequins, glinting off the cutlery, the long array of glasses, the cellophane wrappers on the biscuits, the chocolate’s silver foil. And the margins of the room are lost in the murk, might as well not exist. Richard smiles at the effect, at the little oasis of festivity and commemoration in a wide dark world.

  He sits between the mannequins and pours a beer on his right, a white wine on his left. For himself, a hard, sharp, anaesthetic vodka. His guts are not good. The pain keeps stabbing him like a narrow heated blade, then slowly melting. He raises his glass in silent pledge and drains it, feeling the good and necessary warmth.

  The dog has played his part, has curled on the pile of duvets at their feet and is dreaming already. His paws are paddling the air and his chest and cheeks inflate to emit the strange, endearing whoops that pass for barking when a dog’s asleep. And as the dream progresses the candlelit fur of the dog becomes ever more animated, more frantic, the barking coming faster and more desperate until Richard stretches out a slipper and lays it gently on the dog’s flank and though the dog does not appear to wake the contact calms him slowly, as if it lanced the dream and drained it of its fear and conflict. Soon the dog’s breathing is as deep and calm and orderly as the in and out of waves on a beach. Still with his foot against the dog’s live flank, Richard sits very still. He can hear the candle flames burning with the faintest hiss. Beyond the margins of their light there might be only interstellar space.