King Rich

by Joe Bennett

  He breaks the seal on the pinot noir with a dozen tiny and all but simultaneous metallic clicks. In the island of silence they are great noises. So, too, are the glugs of air through the thick liquid as he pours three glasses, huge balloons that chime when touched together like frangible bells. He swirls the wine as the tasters do and breathes in the autumn fruit of it, the sense of bottled ripeness. It evokes something he cannot quite find the truth of, a memory perhaps, a flash of sun and water somewhere. But he cannot hold the image still to see it, to know the time and place, and the more he tries to do so, the more it fades.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says aloud, and he puts down the glass and lays a hand on the cold hard hands of the mannequins to either side. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says again. ‘Cheers.’

  The wine on his tongue sparks the same vague image of a high country lake and sunburnt grass, but again the memory blurs and fades. ‘Cheers,’ he says again in the here and now.

  He sips. The taste is less intense, the memory a little further off. He’s sinking. The dog is snoring. ‘Friday,’ he says, ‘Friday,’ and an eye opens and its brown depths catch a gleam of candlelight. ‘Friday,’ and the tail beats the duvet, which is all Richard wants and it almost makes him cry. But he will not cry. He will try not to cry. There is no call for crying.

  ‘Here,’ he says to his left, to his right, and he wrestles to remove the plastic cap from a tube of Pringles, and then the paper seal, and he is surprised by his own weakness. When he has the tube open he has to pause to regain breath and clarity of mind. Fatigued, undone, by a tube of chips and he snorts at the thought. The snort becomes a cough that bends him double, his forehead pressed against the cool, thick tablecloth.

  When he can trust his breathing again he opens his eyes. Just beyond lies a Christmas cracker. Without thinking he feeds one end of the cracker into his claw and grips the other with his right and pulls, but he is not strong enough.

  He lays the cracker on the table and with a knife he cuts through the bands that bunch the wrapping at either end. The thing unrolls to reveal an explosive strip, a roll of orange tissue and a joke on a curl of paper. He holds it to a candle, squints up close. ‘What’s green and hairy and goes up and down? A gooseberry in a lift.’

  He unrolls the tissue paper and it becomes a flimsy crown. He tries to place it on the dog’s head but the dog paws it away. He puts it on his own head and giggles. ‘I am the king, Friday,’ he says, ‘I am the king.’ But even as he speaks he is aware of a great weariness, can feel a stupor creeping up on him. As host he decides that the end of the party is now. He pours port into thimble glasses, then taps a knife against a wine glass to get the crowd’s attention.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says, standing between the mannequins on whose plastic flesh the candlelight throws little whorls and gleams. He leans on the table for support. ‘Ladies and gentlemen.’ From the pile of duvets the dog looks up at him with a single mildly curious eye.

  He pauses. He is not sure of what to say. He looks around at the mannequins, the dog, the bottles and glasses and at the distant margins of the room all lost in gloom. ‘A toast,’ he says.

  His voice has thickened. Collecting himself, he raises his glass to his right and to his left. ‘To Ben,’ he says, ‘and Annie.’ He drains the glass and holds it for the last sweet drop to drip onto his tongue. And he waits to see if more words will come but they do not. ‘To Ben,’ he says again, ‘and Annie.’ And then he sits and pours another glass of port and drains it as he drained the first.

  His eyelids are heavy with sleep. He gets down on his knees and awkwardly he lies beside the dog and flips a fold of the duvet over his legs and torso and rolls onto his side and reaches out with his good right hand and lays it gently on the dog’s shoulder. The beast stirs and shifts a little, stretches all four legs out simultaneously as if to rid them fully of the day’s exertions, sighs with deep finality and sinks to proper sleep. Richard draws his knees up slowly till they enfold the dog’s haunches. The candlelight flickers on the dog’s rough fur.

  ‘Good night,’ he says, ‘Good night.’ And he lets his eyelids fall. He can smell the dog’s warmth.

  Chapter 36

  ‘Do you think we should Nugget our faces?’

  ‘No,’ said Annie. She was not feeling brave. For all Ben’s talk of virtuous intentions she was scared. And it was so hard to fake innocence. As she and Ben walked up Fitzgerald Avenue after leaving the grim little pub on St Asaph Street she felt as if she had the word ‘criminal’ stamped on her forehead. When they passed soldiers on patrol she was surprised they didn’t immediately train their guns on her.

  The gin she’d drunk had not lived up to its courage-inducing reputation. Had they had no criminal intentions she’d have smiled and said hello to the soldiers and shared a joke with them. But now it was all she could do to walk. It was as if the sense of guilt got between her and her autonomic functions. Even breathing became forced and self-conscious.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait till later? Till two or three, maybe.’

  But they’d been through all this in the pub. The best time was when the pubs shut around eleven. That was when there would be most people about and they would be least obtrusive. And also when the soldiers were most likely to be occupied by the antics of drunks, who were sure to find a fence they weren’t allowed to climb and soldiers with guns protecting it an irresistible combination.

  North of Cashel they shrank into the shadows and became officially furtive. A police car passed and a foot patrol of soldiers. Annie wanted to giggle. It was like bad television. But she was pleased to be doing it with Ben. ‘I owe a lot to Rich,’ he’d said in the pub. ‘Including the courage to do something like this. He always said doing the right thing was easy, so long as you were sure it was the right thing. This is the right thing.’

  They were skulking among cheap native shrubs now, by an outfit called Shox ’n’ Lube.

  Annie felt Ben’s hand reaching for hers in the darkness. ‘You all right?’ he asked and by the light of a passing car she caught a glimpse of his teeth and hollowed eyes and cheekbones that stripped him of half his years.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and they dashed together across the first half of Fitzgerald Avenue, paused a moment under the trees on the median, heard and saw no reaction and dashed again. At the fence, as planned, Annie jumped to hook an arm over the top while Ben boosted her from below and all but threw her over before vaulting over himself and together they ran the last few yards out of the range of the street light and crouched beneath a tall brick wall. They were in. Panting in the inky dark, Annie felt the thrill of trespass.

  ‘Come on,’ said Ben. They had two blocks to travel, had agreed the route, poring over a map on the sticky pub leaner. A man with a stained pioneer beard had asked if they were planning a bank robbery and Annie had been grateful he’d been too intent on his own wit and too deep into his third jug to notice her awkwardness.

  They edged down the lanes and the sides of buildings. They were beyond street lights now. The high half-moon cast faint shadows, like ink stains washed into a shirt. They were not far from River Road but Anne knew nothing of this warren of buildings and dingy businesses. It was spectacularly quiet. They both started as a cat dropped over a fence. It landed on a sheet of corrugated iron. They heard the soft thud of the paw-pads, the tiny scratch of the claws.

  It was as if they were the first people there, a post-industrial Adam and Eve. They passed a yard of dead engines with the smoko room wide open, cups smashed on the concrete floor, the battered cream-coloured Zip still bolted to the wall like a boiler from the Titanic.

  Ben was deft. He led the way down black alleys, made gates swing silently. He’d have made a good burglar.

  At Barbadoes Street they were like shy forest animals on the edge of a clearing, peering out from the shadow of an alley to look up and down the expanse of road. Fallen facades still blocked the pavement, fanning out like scree slopes. A parked Mercedes had be
en half flattened by masonry, its long sleek nose jutting out of the heap but its boot and back wheels buried, as if stamped on when trying to flee. And there was less than nobody about.

  On the far side of Latimer Square the charred spine of the CTV building stood as an awkward memorial to over a hundred dead, cordoned off by high fences while the authorities sought to lay blame. But whoever that blame was laid on, the dead were dead. The paper told stories of people who had nipped out for a sandwich that saved them.

  Ben and Annie went north, keeping to the dark fringes, skirting any spaces. Some buildings had already been bulldozed, the materials that shaped them now heaped and jumbled. Annie feared that the hostel, which seemed so rickety in the photo, would have gone too, her father’s last home dragged down by hydraulic pincers to be dumped without thought on the back of a truck. But when they rounded the junction with Armagh Street there it stood, sprawling and unlovely. Weatherboard stained by leaks in the spouting. Ancient metal fire-escapes, their last flight hauled up off the ground against burglary. The building filled most of the section. The rest was given over to drains and concrete and weeds that grew skinny and dusty.

  A temporary fence had been slung up around the hostel but it was token only. Ben lifted a section aside and they stepped onto the porch. On the door were scrawls in aerosol, the graffiti code of search and rescue. Plastered over that, a red sticker of condemnation. It was an offence even to approach it. There was a combination lock on the door but someone had smashed the frame, and the door opened to a push of fingers. In the dark hall, a smell of rats. Just doors to rooms, some of them broken open, and stairs presumably to more.

  ‘Do we have a room number?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Upstairs, the landlord thought. That’s all he could remember.’

  As their eyes widened to the gloom they climbed the stairs to find a communal kitchen with a toaster and a microwave the size of a tomb, a stove with a frying pan still on it, and a tall old fridge. Annie pulled open the fridge door, then slammed it shut again. Even in that fraction of a second she’d noticed that it was divided into a dozen or so compartments, each with its own hinged door and clasp to which a padlock could be fitted.

  A corridor to the right was lined with windows on one side, half a dozen doors on the other. At the far end a door marked ‘WC’ and another ‘Shower’. In the corridor the ends of the floor boards had been painted, while the middle remained bare and blond where a strip of carpet had never been replaced.

  Ben pushed on the first door. A free-standing wardrobe. A crudely plumbed sink. A small chest of drawers. A bed on which an unzipped ancient sleeping bag lay scrunched in the position where it had last been thrown off. No sheet. At the head of the bed a stained pillow. On the chair beside the bed a small ceramic elephant, its trunk curled back in trumpeting defiance. Beneath the window half a dozen empty bottles. Dom Pedro Ruby Port.

  Annie looked enquiringly at Ben.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, but he opened the wardrobe. Two thick jackets on hangers. What might have been trousers thrown in below. Ben pulled out a jacket, held it up.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  The next door had been kicked open, presumably by search and rescue, shattering the flimsy jamb. Another narrow bed and dark old wooden wardrobe. Beside the bed what seemed to be a seventies radiogram-cum-dressing table, though the mirror had gone. Annie pulled open a drawer of wood veneer. In the drawer a couple of notebooks. She took them to the window sill and the thin light of the moon. In the notebooks pencil drawings. Of birds and animals. Of Ben. Of her.

  Chapter 37

  He wakes before dawn. Though he does not move he knows the dog has sensed his waking, but it, too, stays where it is, breathing with the deep rhythm of the night. From where he lies he can see a narrow line of gallery windows. And framed in one of them a bright half-moon. And with sudden clarity he remembers lying one night on the bank of the Tekapo River, the smooth stones at his back still warm from the day’s sun, and the moon seemed huge and clear, and he could make out the pockmarks of the craters, each one a testament to chance, the random collision of stuff with stuff out there in the bowling alley of the cosmos. He loved the thought then, as he loves it now, of things happening to happen on such a scale, in the great belittling emptiness. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he whispers to the dog, and is rewarded with a single swing of the tail against the duvet.

  ‘Good boy,’ he says and he tries not to think ahead, not to think to the morning that is coming, but rather to lie here and watch the moon as it slides now towards the window frame and inch by inch is eaten by the wall. He watches it for half an hour and it is gone, is just a hint of a glow in the dark glass corner.

  He drowses, letting himself for once drift backwards on little puffs of memory, drift backwards to the dangerously golden moments. He pauses before waking his daughter, pausing to gaze on her impossibly unblemished face, unpocked by the collisions of chance and time, faultless of skin and composition, so innocent, so vulnerable. He watches her as he watched the moon this morning, gazing at time passing on her flesh. And then gently wakes her and sees her face still folded with sleep, and she is entirely trusting, casting her arms around his neck and letting herself be lifted from the bed, her head lolling on his shoulder. And as he scoops his arms beneath her he feels the warmth of the bed, the warmth that she has left upon the sheets.

  And lying broken on the floor of a broken hotel, side by side with a dog, he smells his daughter, feels again the texture of her flesh.

  Enough. He rolls and reaches out and tips half a miniature of Stolichnaya onto his tongue. And soon it works as it has always worked and he drifts.

  He is at the river again, a different river, under trees, and it is afternoon and they are lying on a blanket laid on sparse grass and sand. Ben’s on his back, looking up through half-closed eyes at the dapple of light through the leaves. And he is lying on his side and watching Ben in profile, his hair and eyebrows, nose and lips and chin. Ben’s flesh is tanned honey brown from the bicep to the hand. Richard sees again the prominent veins on the forearm, the taut curve of muscle above the elbow, the swell of the chest, the barred butterfly of the ribs shielding heart and lungs and then the soft concavity of the milk-white belly and the arch of the spine that rises to meet it. A little line of glistening blond stomach hair stretches from the belly button to the waistband of his shorts.

  Ben knows that he is being studied, turns once to look across and smile. Richard fetches a notebook from the tent and sits on a camp stool. He doesn’t know how long the drawing takes, knows only that he draws with a certainty of line that doesn’t often come. And when it is done, in pencil, it is done and he has held something of that random spot of place and time for ever. Or whatever is for ever for a man.

  Chapter 38

  A window had been left open. The room did not smell strong. But there was so little there. A single bed, an ashtray, a bin liner of clothes clean from the laundrette but overdried and scrunched into a bundle, two op-shop jackets as worn by dead husbands, a pair of battered training shoes, another of grandpa slippers, the heels on both worn in at the same angle. The radiogram had no plug, the ancient wires just ripped from the wall in some hotel refit. In the wardrobe half a bottle of vodka of a brand Annie didn’t recognise. In the ashtray, a dozen long-dried butts of thinly rolled tobacco.

  Annie tried all the drawers. Ben looked under the bed, on top of the wardrobe. Nothing.

  They sat on the bed. No sheets. A striped and hollow mattress. A shiny purple eiderdown. The pillows, a pair of floral sofa cushions.

  They flicked through the pages of the notebooks. One was mainly pictures of Annie. Another mainly Ben. Ben sitting, lying, standing, sleeping, clothed, naked, showering.

  Annie looked around the barren nothing of a room.

  ‘Come here,’ said Ben. His neck smelt of soap and wine. Annie felt the silence of the city centre. Over his shoulder she could see the half-moon low in the corner of the window.
Next door was a yard full of second-hand whiteware. A twin tub gleamed in the moonlight.

  ‘Shall we go?’ said Ben.

  ‘Do you think we should take these?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if he comes back?’

  ‘The place is coming down.’

  ‘We’ll leave a note,’ she said. And she looked for a pen or pencil, found nothing, went to the next room along, and returned with a ballpoint.

  She tore an unused page from the back of the one of the books. ‘Dad, Rich,’ she wrote. ‘We came to look for you. We took the drawings. We love you.’ She added her name and contact details and Ben did the same. And then she folded it in half and wrote ‘FOR RICHARD JONES’ on the front and underlined it and placed it prominently on the derelict radiogram under the corner of the ashtray so that it wouldn’t blow away.

  Chapter 39

  Summer has ended. The night takes longer to dissolve into day. Richard watches the window lighten above him, through shades of grey to almost white. Light reveals the mannequins, the candelabrum, the bulbous stalactites of wax, the remains of drinks and snacks, the opened cracker.

  Richard rolls onto his side and then, with some difficulty, kneels. He is woozy with weakness and he stays a while on all fours, his head hanging. The dog waits and watches, used to the slow progress, the long moments of pause.

  Like a mountaineer taking on the next pitch of rock, Richard lifts his head, seizes the edge of the table with his good hand and hauls himself to his feet with a grunt. Pain stabs at him in half a dozen places but pain is a known companion. It is the weakness that troubles him. He has to make it to the car park roof.