King Rich

To my mother, Joy

A woman is screaming. The hotel doorman, a Sikh, has forced a metal bar between the doors of the lift.

‘Be peaceful, madam,' he shouts through the crack, ‘be peaceful.'

‘Can I help?' says Richard. He says it before he knows he will say it. Without looking up, the doorman indicates the bar. Richard's bad hand protests as he seizes it.

Another aftershock. The floor of the hotel lobby rolls like the sea. Bottles and glasses crash and scatter. The woman's screaming becomes a continuous wail.

‘Heave, sir,' says the doorman. The doors of the lift part a few inches. Richard can see the woman's hair. She is kneeling on the floor of the lift, as if praying. She looks up, her face wrenched by terror, her teeth bared like a baboon's.

‘Hold on, sir,' says the doorman, seizing a chair and wedging it into the gap between the lift doors, just before Richard's strength fails.

‘We are coming, madam. We are coming. You are all right. You are all right.'

He puts his hand through the gap above the chair. The woman reaches out.

Richard heaves on the bar again. The doors open a fraction wider. The doorman pushes the chair deeper into the gap, twisting it. The chair back snaps. The gap narrows again. The woman whimpers.

A cough rises in Richard's chest. Rises and keeps rising. He is seized by coughing, bent double over the bar, all strength gone. There is only reflex, only the primal urge to live. He crumples to the floor, knees to chest, foetal. A racking, panicked shudder and the blockage shifts. Richard lies gasping, drained, weak as cotton thread, his vision blurred and dotted with darting lights. Another brief bout of coughing.

When he looks up a man in uniform is helping with the lift. The doorman's turban, royally purple, shaded with plaster dust, has begun to unfurl at the back. They have the doors a foot open, a planter wedged into them. They are reaching in, handing out the woman. She is blubbing and limp. The doorman bends, scoops an arm under her knees, another beneath her back and lifts her like a bride, across the lobby and out the revolving door, as another aftershock, a smaller one, sets the long lights swinging.

‘You all right, Granddad?'

Still lying on his side, Richard nods.

‘Come on, I'll help you out,' and the man in uniform – fireman? policeman? – offers a hand.

Richard shakes his head, gets to his knees, looks up and tries to smile. ‘I'm fine,' he says. ‘I'll follow you. Go on. You're needed out there,' and he gestures past the lobby restaurant tables, some overturned, some still bearing the abandoned remains of meals, past the bar and the smashed bottles and the fallen ceiling tiles to the revolving door and the street beyond. Through a cracked plate-glass wall he can see a scatter of rubble, of fallen facade, a half-buried car. ‘Go on, I'll be fine. You're needed.'

The revolving door graunches as the man forces his way out.

Sirens are sounding outside, but in the hotel there is calm. Behind the bar the optics are still fixed to the wall and the glass-fronted fridges are stacked. Richard flips the cap off a Steinlager, still cold and beaded, and drinks. He feels the stuff seep into his tissues. Bottled God, someone called it. Bottled God. He drinks again. The jangle of the moment softens a little, its sharp edges dulled.

Through the tall glass he can see people walking quickly, dusted with plaster, others uncertain where to go. It's like an ants' nest kicked. He ought to be out there, ought to be helping. He slides beers into the pockets of his coat, goes to the revolving door, glass and crockery crunching underfoot, and pushes. The door shifts a foot, then sticks. He pushes but it doesn't shift. He pulls but it doesn't shift. Except for the sirens all is quiet. It seems that everyone has left the building. The guests, the porters, the receptionists, the chambermaids and waiters and bar staff, the duty managers who have so often
emerged to move him on, to threaten him with the police, have fled. Richard retreats into the hotel.

‘Exit' says a green sign above a door, with a picture of a stick figure running. Beyond the door the carpet stops and Richard is backstage on luxury. A staircase of bald concrete with painted metal handrails, zigzagging up, self-replicating and unadorned to the top of the tallest building in the city.

Down here they must have run, not twenty minutes ago, perhaps five hundred people fleeing the swaying building, down this shaft, the building's spine. He remembers a middle-aged woman in a hotel robe lurching onto the street, with wet hair and bare feet and veins on her legs like great purple worms. Her eyes were wild, her breasts pendulous. She just stood on the pavement gasping until a younger woman went to her and led her away around a corner.

Richard sets a foot on the first concrete step. He pauses after the first flight, breathing, looking down at his left hand on the metal rail. How old it looks, a reptilian claw.

One more flight, another pause for rest. When he pushes open a door, concrete reverts to carpet and the mezzanine lounge. A pot of tea still standing on a low table. He lays his palm against its metal flank. It's faintly warm.

An unbroken glass wall gives a view of High and Cashel. Half a dozen men are clearing rubble off a green car. Its cabin is staved in, crumpled. He can see where the rubble fell from, the Edwardian pediment three storeys up. Half of it is still up there, held by some temporary balance of forces. Urn
shapes, fashioned from plaster or concrete or stone, placed there by men on wooden scaffolding, to fall, a century later, as murderous rain.

A man signals to the others to pause, reaches in through a gap in the rubble, reaches into the car, bends his head and shoulders into the gap to reach further, emerges, says something to the others and they move off down High Street and out of sight.

Richard draws a beer from his pocket. As he flips off the cap with the handle of a teaspoon, his forefinger rasps against the cap's crimped edge. The skin tears. He swigs at the beer, then studies the white tear of skin, watches the old thick blood slowly well beneath it, to form a bulb, a little grape, a droplet that courses suddenly down the side of his hand. He sucks at the tiny wound, tastes his dim metallic blood, presses the finger against the flank of his coat to stem the leak.

There is no one in the street. Sirens are wailing a few blocks away but here, nothing. The air is granular with dust. An hour ago the street was lunchtime crowded. People with duties, matters on their mind, and in almost every skull a sense of the day ahead, the day mapped by need and habit, the afternoon of work, the journey home, the shopping, dinner, the evening of television or family or income tax return or fixing the motorbike, or mowing the lawn in the long summer light. All of it gone, erased in a moment, all the certainty, the sense of future time, the sense of control of an accustomed passage through the valley of the days; the whole social edifice fallen
like the pediment opposite, now not even rubble, just gone, wiped by a single shrug of the rocks below. Richard drinks from his beer.

A few blocks away a plume of black smoke. From time to time knots of people hurry by on the street below, stepping round the litter of rubble, looking around at the sights, unwilling tourists of destruction. A woman appears on high heels, dressed for the office, a cell phone clamped to her ear. As she turns the corner of Cashel and High she stops abruptly, stops both walking and talking, and stares at the staved-in car.

She goes to it, touches the bonnet, peers inside, puts the cell phone back to her ear, speaks briefly, then takes photos with the phone, five, six, seven shots, touring the car, crouching to get an angle. She stands a moment, undecided, then strides swiftly back the way she came.

And from the other direction, a little girl. Wild-eyed, lost, perhaps seven or eight years old in a simple blue dress and Richard goes to the window and bangs on the glass. The girl has stopped, is looking around. Richard bangs again. She looks up, sees him. He raises both hands, as in a gesture of surrender, telling her to stay where she is, he'll come and get her. She bursts into tears and turns to run the other way just as a man in a suit comes running round the corner and the girl sees him and runs at him and leaps into his arms and clamps her chest against his, her head over his shoulder, and wraps her legs around him, a baby ape, and father and daughter stand there fused and rocking.

The girl's head lifts from the father's shoulder and he wipes the hair from her eyes and, still in his arms, she turns and points towards the first-floor window where Richard drops below the sill and does not move. Until he hears the footsteps, heavy booted footsteps on the stairs.