King Rich
Page 21
On the stairs he puts both hands on the rail, and lets gravity take him down a step at a time. His thighs seem to have become absurdly weak, like the spindle-legs of a newborn colt. To keep himself going he counts off the twelve steps in each flight. There are six flights. The dog is all patience. Richard talks as he goes.
‘You’re to go, see? Do you understand, Friday?’ says Richard, speaking in bursts between breaths. ‘You’re a good dog and you’re not old. Okay? Do you promise now, dog? Do you promise?’
From the landing below him the dog looks up and cocks its head to one side.
‘Where are the rabbits, Friday? Find the rabbits. Find the warm hearts. Ahhh,’ as he half misses a step and his ankle buckles and he has to cling hard to the rail as his hip swings into it. The shock spears through him and a fierce new pain erupts in his haunch.
But they have reached the car park floor, the corridor of catastrophe, the bleached carpet and the door propped open, framing a slice of parapet and sky of thrush-egg blue. The dogs bounds for the outside world, pisses prodigiously on the first concrete buttress and Richard again feels wonder at the creature’s patience. He lurches in the dog’s wake, supporting himself on the wall to ease the weight on his hip.
It is early yet. He lowers himself into his seat, ginger with the pain and weak from the descent, and takes a Gordon’s from his pantry. He drinks straight from the miniature bottle, urging it to the bits that crave it.
Through the parapet he can see down Cashel Street to the Bridge of Remembrance. Despite the hour people are crawling about the temporary grandstand.
The dog tours the rooftop as diligently as on the first day, asserting its own presence, scouring for sign of others, as if this concrete floor hoisted fifty feet into the air were its wild and vital territory. The dog does not tire of its own way of being, and not for one second does it doubt. Richard feels a surge of envy and of admiration and of love and he calls the dog who looks up in slight surprise then pads across.
Richard sits forward to stroke the dog and the pain flares in his hip. He cries out and the dog starts at the noise. But Richard swings his legs together and sits up straight and the pain recedes and he puts out an arm and the dog comes in close and lays its head on his lap and looks up into Richard’s eyes.
And Richard sighs and runs his hand repeatedly down from the dome of the dog’s skull along the ridge of its neck and between the softened shoulders and as he does so the dog shuts its eyes and Richard talks in a whisper and then he places his head against the dog’s head, skull of a beast against skull of a beast, and he stays that way for some seconds and then he kisses the dog on the top of its head, his lips pressed against a few of the billion shining hairs. And Richard takes a Tux from the pocket of his dressing gown and the dog takes it gently in those jaws that can crush bone and with an effort that makes him groan Richard stands and lurches towards the door into the hotel.
The brass pot that holds the door open has weathered and dulled, the soil dried and shrunk, though the rubber plant seems as synthetically glossy as before. By pulling on the plant’s stem Richard tilts the pot till it falls and rolls away. He leans back against the door to stop it closing. The dog has finished the Tux and is standing in front of him.
Richard has no more biscuit. He reaches out and strokes the dog’s head once. ‘Sorry, boy,’ he says, ‘but sit. Sit, Friday, sit.’
Puzzled by the tone and the oddness, the dog lowers its rump slowly to the concrete, eyes on Richard. When Richard starts to withdraw inside the dog makes to follow him but ‘Sit,’ says Richard again and the dog stops. Richard closes the door between him and the dog.
He slumps against the wall in the corridor and sinks slowly to the floor. He is affected with a grinding sense of dread. He meant to climb to the penthouse, to sit overlooking the city and to drink himself to sleep. But he isn’t sure he has the strength for the climb. And here’s as good as anywhere.
There is a pane of toughened glass let into the middle of the door. But he doesn’t have to stand and look through it. He knows the dog is still there.
For the first few minutes the dog is silent. And Richard too. He all but holds his breath. Then comes the first faint whimper. He tries to shut his ears. The whimper feeds upon itself and grows in volume like the sawing of some mawkish violin, before collapsing into the silence of disappointment, of betrayal.
The silence then is as bad as the noise. Worse. After perhaps a minute, Richard catches the first mouse-squeak of renewed reproach and again the whining builds like a self-sustaining wave. When he hears the scratch of claws on the door Richard almost cries out. But he wills himself to stay quiet. The dog must lose hope.
The scratching becomes a frantic two-pawed scrabbling at the door. Richard can hear the claws tearing through the surface of the paint. He jams his hands over his ears but still feels as much as hears the scratching and the whining, which again subside to little, then to nothing.
Richard feels as quietly as possible in the pockets of his robe. Half a vodka miniature. With infinite caution he unscrews the cap and places it so gently on the bristle carpet and he tips the little bottle to his mouth and feels as much as tastes the vodka on his tongue and throat and suddenly he is coughing, bent over and spluttering, and even in his gagging distress he can hear the claws against the door again, their redoubled effort, and the whining that’s as clear as speech.
The cough fades. Richard levers himself up onto his feet, groaning as pain licks through his hip. The dog is frantic at the noise, rasping with its claws, half whimpering and half barking at the barrier between them.
Richard staggers down the corridor and through a smoke door into the stairwell. In a room beyond he finds an unplundered mini-bar and stuffs the pockets of his robe and falls onto the bed and lies there, face down. And he realises that he is listening. That he is straining to hear the dog. He can hear nothing. He is unsure what to do. Some nameless emotion that is neither despair nor fear is grinding at his heart.
He rolls onto his back, sits up against pillows, drinks a Scotch and listens. He is too far away to hear the dog but he listens. He waits. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, haggard, attentive, on his head a crown of orange tissue paper. His mind is out there on the car park roof. He wonders how long he has. He urges himself to stay where he is. The dog will up and leave, he tells himself. It will. It must.
He sits on the bed and drinks at intervals for he doesn’t know how long. His hip aches fiercely and he tries to concentrate on that, but every time he lets up in his vigilance he finds his legs swinging off the bed, being drawn towards the car park and he has to force himself to stay by an act of will that he knows will buckle in the end.
And it does. Back he goes, numbed by drink. He stops short of the closed door and listens. Nothing. He creeps the last yards, hunched and leaning on the wall, straightens, counts to five, says ‘Please’, and looks through the inset pane. The dog is not at the door. It is not where he told it to sit. The dog has gone. It is as he hoped. And he has never felt so alone.
The dog is by his chair under the awning, its nose aligned to the door and its eyes open and it has seen his face at the glass and its ragged plume of a tail has swung with joy and the dog is up on its feet and coming to the door and Richard’s heart surges with forbidden feeling. He leans on the handle and the door swings open and he stumbles through it and falls to the floor and the dog is all over him, licking his face and whimpering with joy.
‘Friday,’ says Richard, ‘Friday.’ And he is laughing.
Chapter 40
It was Vince’s idea to go to watch the hotel blown up.
‘You know you want to,’ he said when he picked her up. And Annie acknowledged she was curious. Would it be formal, with a front row of dignitaries in suits, or would it be merely an entertainment for the ghoulish masses, a violent flip side to the memorial service?
Jess had been on night shift and was not to be woken. Annie felt mean for feeling relieved. B
ut it was so much easier to leave a written note of thanks than to hug and say goodbye, even with her oldest friend. No dithering or awkwardness, no lapsing into dishonest formulae.
A fence-lined corridor had been let into the cordon, from Rolleston Avenue to the river. The crowd walking towards the Bridge of Remembrance seemed in a festival mood. It consisted mainly of fathers and kids, all clearly excited by the bang to come. An ice cream van had managed to get to the Durham Street corner and was doing good business in the Sunday sunshine.
The grandstand soon filled up. Importance was attached only to the theatrically mounted plunger and the little dais beside it. The kid in the wheelchair was already there, being wheeled about and greeted, his grin a slice of the purest joy. A man who was presumably his father pushed him up a ramp towards the grandstand and he waved like a film star to the crowd and those who were looking were delighted to wave back. Some called his name.
Most of the hotel was plainly visible, and the angle it was leaning at. Would it fall in on itself as the World Trade Center had done? The planes had flown out of just such a sky of late-summer blue as this one. On that extraordinary morning, now a decade past, Annie had spent hours in front of the television, held by something awful in the heart, the same thing as had drawn this happy holiday crowd to watch a demolition.
Between the grandstand and the central city the Avon came as a slight surprise, its shallow, spring-fed burble just going on its way regardless, ready to take the punts of finger-trailing tourists on whatever day they happened to return.
The doomed boy, still beaming, had been wheeled to his position. A local radio personality was calling the countdown to midday. Annie felt a nudge in her side. Vince was pointing to the end of Cashel Street, where a mongrel had appeared inside the fence. Others had seen it too. There was a slight buzz of chatter on the bleachers.
The dog was a safe distance from the explosion but Annie’s heart still went out to it. The noise would terrify it. Perhaps an official would fetch it out, or one of the security guards. But no one seemed to be moving. Then the dog went back up Cashel Street, disappearing behind rubble.
‘One minute!’ cried the radio personality.
Annie half stood up but Vince put a hand on her arm. ‘It’s a long way away,’ he said.
Those in the crowd who’d seen the dog seemed already to have forgotten it. They snuggled in towards the climactic moment, grew quieter.
‘Thirty seconds.’
Annie wasn’t looking at the hotel. She was scanning the fence for the dog. And there it was again, behind the fencing like a zoo exhibit.
‘Twenty seconds.’
The dog barked, one, two, three times. Annie heard the barks clear above the swelling countdown. No one else seemed to.
‘Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve.’ Perhaps a thousand people were calling the numbers.
‘Eight, seven, six.’ The dog looked across the river at the grandstand then it disappeared up the street again. The kid had both hands on the plunger, his little stick elbows raised in readiness like bat-wings, his face a mask of concentrated joy. Annie couldn’t see the dog.
‘Three, two, one,’ and the kid all but lifted himself from his chair with his vigour. Down went the plunger and innocuous puffs burst from halfway up the building, like bullet pocks. A second or so later came the noise of the blast. The building teetered, ruptured at base and waist, was held airborne by the habit of inertia, then down it went in one accelerating rush. And it had gone, disappeared behind other buildings, a devastating conjuring trick. In its place rose a seemingly self-generating cloud of smoke and rubble dust, a brown and swelling bloom.
The dog was back against the fence, fear-struck by the blast, its ears flattened against its head, its tail whipped between its legs. The crowd was no longer looking. The radio celebrity thanked everyone for coming, announced how much the sponsored demolition had raised for medical research, said kia kaha and goodbye and people were gathering things and filing down the planking steps, talking excitedly. Annie stood and let them pass, as a squat security guard in a yellow jacket crossed the Bridge of Remembrance and Oxford Terrace.
‘We should get to the airport,’ said Vince.
‘Hang on.’ Annie watched as the guard unhitched two segments of fencing and knelt in the gap to attract the dog. The dog came cautiously but when the guard went to take its collar the dog withdrew. The guard followed.
‘Hang on,’ Annie said again.
Moments later the guard ran back into view, talking urgently into the radio on his lapel, and beckoning as he did so and a pair of paramedics appeared from under the grandstand and went running across the bridge, their medical bags swinging. They followed the guard through the fence and out of sight. No sign of the dog. And almost immediately they heard the siren and other security guards were clearing the fencing off Oxford Terrace to let the ambulance through and it drew up with fierce theatricality at the end of Cashel Street just as a paramedic emerged through the fence. She spoke to the driver of the ambulance. And though they still unloaded a gurney from the back and wheeled it up Cashel Street and out of sight, they did so without any sense of urgency.
* * *
A bright and frosty morning, and London sparkled as they flew in from the east down the silver worm of the Thames. In the Terminal 3 arrivals hall Annie picked out Paul almost immediately. She waved. When he saw her he performed a sort of comic shrug, his palms facing upwards at shoulder height, his head cocked slightly to one side, his eyebrows raised in unmistakable enquiry.
Annie smiled.
Acknowledgements
Finlay Macdonald and Jim Gill for their faith, and Anna Rogers for her peerlessly tactful editing.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
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First published in 2015
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Copyright © Joe Bennett 2015
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