King Rich (8 page)

The corridor ends in a heavy security door. ‘Exit via Car Park', it says, and there is a picture of a stick man running from a fire. Richard turns the handle and puts his shoulder against the door. The door opens a little and the dog squeezes through but the closing mechanism is too much for Richard and the door clangs shut. Within seconds Richard hears the dog's claws on the door, mildly at first, then with increasing vigour.

‘It's all right, boy,' says Richard through the thick door. ‘It's all right.' But the claws keep scratching. The noise chafes at Richard's head. Halfway down the corridor a rubber plant stands in a brass pot. Richard tips the pot on its side and rolls it. Gravel spills from the surface but the soil seems to be held in place by the fibrous roots. He puts his shoulder to the door and the dog shoots instantly through the gap as, with a grunt of exertion, Richard heaves the pot over the transom to prop the door open.

Richard supports himself on the door jamb, panting as the dog leaps about him in delight. He pats the dog, calms it. ‘I wouldn't leave you,' he says.

Together they step out onto the roof of the world, the top storey of five, open to the skies, a raw concrete deck and a scatter of cars. From the parapet Richard has a view up High Street. At the far end a group of men and women in suits and skirts topped with hi-vis jackets and hard hats are moving towards the Square. They go slowly, like tourists in Rome, gawping at ruins. Then they disappear behind the BNZ. Beyond it Richard can see the top of the stump that was the cathedral spire.

A bright blue Audi convertible, low-slung and costly, has been left with the roof down, its plush interior now grey with plaster dust and dotted with birdshit. Leaves and blown litter have lodged in the foot-wells. Richard tries the handle on the driver's door. Instantly the alarm sounds, ringing over the city. Richard dives back to the door, the dog with him, and they head deep into the hotel to hide. The alarm stops. Why, Richard doesn't know. Silence seeps back in. Richard's ears are pricked for footfalls, for voices. Nothing.

* * *

‘What sort of person is your mum,' said Vince, ‘if you don't mind my asking?'

Annie shrugged. ‘It's hard to say with parents, isn't it?'

‘Is it? When you're young, maybe, but I think I've got a pretty good idea now what sort of people my parents were.'

Annie smiled. She took a swig of wine. ‘She lives in Blenheim now, with a man I've met a couple of times and who seems a reasonable bloke. She bullies him. I keep in touch and all that, but to be frank it's a chore. I'd rather not. And I don't blame Dad for what he did. These days, anyway.'

‘What happened?'

‘Guess. I don't know how Mum found out he was having an affair but when she did all hell broke loose. I heard her screaming at him late that night when I'd gone to bed. I couldn't make out much of what they were saying – or shouting – but it ended suddenly with the front door being slammed shut and then there was silence. That was all.'

As she spoke Annie felt again exactly how it had been as she lay and listened and waited and heard her mother's footsteps coming up to bed. And in the morning Dad hadn't been there but her mother had said nothing and Annie had gone to school as usual.

When she'd come home that afternoon her mother had been through the house for everything associated with him. There had been framed drawings of his lining the stairs and hall. They'd all gone.

Her mother had hugged her and said that her father had betrayed them and it was just the two of them from then on and he wouldn't be coming back and Annie had cried and gone upstairs to her room and expected her mother to follow but she
didn't and Annie had lain face down on the bed crying. Later she'd stood by the window watching her mother carrying stuff out to the bonfire, carrying it out with utter determination till it was almost dark, his clothes, his shoes, his books even. She burned his books. ‘To be fair,' continued Annie, ‘she did try to be a good mum after that, for a while at least. It didn't come naturally to her, I realise now, but she did try. And she was forever buying me stuff. I think she must have struck a pretty good deal with Dad somehow, but at the time I just got on with things. And at nine you're pretty resilient. I missed Dad but I got over it.'

‘What did Rich do for a living?'

‘I've thought about that. I don't know exactly. Something to do with design, I'd guess. He took me to his office a few times. I remember big windows and angled boards that you stood at to draw on, but that's all.'

‘Could we ask your mother?'

‘No,' said Annie. ‘She doesn't know I'm in the country. And I'd rather she didn't. And besides, if she thought it would help find Dad she wouldn't tell us. I guarantee it. She's never forgiven him and she's not going to now. But it shouldn't be too hard to track down where he worked, should it? It's not as though it's last century or something.'

‘Actually,' said Vince, ‘it is. But I've got a few contacts.'

* * *

On the north side of the car park roof a shed-like construction houses the pedestrian stairs. In front of it there's a small porch where Richard establishes camp. It offers shade from sun and shelter from rain. More importantly, it makes them invisible from above. Helicopter traffic has shrunk since the first few days but several still drone in each day to hang like vast wasps over the ruins.

Richard drags out a chair and footstool and arranges them under the porch. Then a bedside cabinet that he fills with bottles, glasses, snacks and dog biscuits. On the other side of the chair he sets cushions for the dog but when he stops to sit and drink a beer, the dog curls on the concrete, its shoulder warm against his ankle, head and paw draped possessively over his foot.

Half snoozing, Richard is suddenly aware of a blather of wings. The pigeon is lurching towards his chair. Three yards away it stops to cock its head, its eye a black ball bearing. Saying calming things to the dog, Richard reaches slowly into the pocket of his dressing gown, finds crumbs and baits his claw. He makes the kissing sound he uses with the bird. It flutters up to land on the forearm, and Richard can feel it seeking a point of balance on its clenched and crippled left foot even as it pecks at the biscuit.

He adds more crumbs. Slowly, he sits forward. The bird sways and flutters its wings for balance but stays on his arm. He stands. For a moment he thinks the bird will fly but it stays with him, and he does a little tour of the car park roof with the bird perched on his arm, like some sort of debased urban falconer. He smiles at the image.

He sprinkles crumbs on the parapet, the pigeon hops off, he returns to his chair and the dog settles back at his side. He breaks the seal on a baby bottle of cabernet sauvignon, as purple as venous blood.

‘Cheers,' he says to the bird on the ledge and the dog at his feet and the world out there. ‘Cheers.' Neither bird nor dog pays any attention.

* * *

‘Listen to this,' said Annie, sitting with her laptop at the table, as Jess fussed in the kitchen.

‘“Dear Miss Jones,

‘“I am aware that the convention is to begin emails with hi, but I simply cannot bring myself to address anyone in a manner that seems to me best suited to a Californian beach. Nor do I yet feel sufficiently well acquainted with you to address you by your delightful Christian name, and I refuse to use the ugly neologism Ms.

‘“All of which, I suspect, is sufficient to identify me as the ancient you met in the apartment on Park Terrace. My day was entirely made by your visit. It is not often that an old man gets to spend an hour with a beautiful and intelligent young woman (except, that is, when the beautiful and intelligent young woman is a relative in search of money, which, I'm afraid to say, she too often is).

‘“I digress, of course, because it is expected of an old person, and because I have time on my hands. But you do not have time on your hands, I would imagine, so let me, in that unfathomable phrase, cut to the chase.

‘“I promised to find out for you whether it is possible that your father had the lease of this apartment in 1992. It is not. As I may have mentioned the family name for the apartment is the Railway Station, in that it is a place of arrivals and departures. In other words it is occupied by members of the family who are making their way either onto the world's stage or off it. I shall be the third family member to die here (assuming that the good Lord is sufficiently merciful to spare me the horrors of a rest home), following in the disciplined footsteps of my Aunt Julia and rather less disciplined ones of Cousin Charles. And several younger scions have made use of the apartment while they found their feet. Among these is my great-nephew Ben, who had the lease in his early twenties from 1989 to 1993, which rather precludes your father's being here at the same time.

‘“I am sorry to have to disappoint you, Miss Jones, particularly because I had hoped that your researches would lead to a further visit, but I cannot now see any reason that that might happen.

‘“I wish you success in your search for your father and of course if there is any way in which I can be of use, please do not hesitate to ask.”

‘What do you make of that?'

‘He sounds like a bit of a poppet.'

‘He is.'

‘If he's telling the truth, that is.'

‘Why wouldn't he be?'

‘You realise you're dealing with Christchurch aristocracy here, don't you? You won't find a public committee or a property development or an election campaign without some member of that family being in it or on it or behind it in some way. They have power. And power and the truth don't always go hand in hand.'

‘You're a cynic, Jess. The old boy couldn't have been sweeter. I've got half a mind to pay him a surprise visit in a short skirt.'

‘He sounds as though he could cope. You know who the Ben in question is, don't you?'

Annie didn't.

‘Oh, he's pretty prominent. In the family tradition he did a spell on the city council in his twenties – people always elect a name they recognise and besides he was rather pretty back then. I remember there was a fuss about young girls souveniring his campaign posters. Then, once he'd ticked off public service, he went into property development – as you do. Basically, he took over the family portfolio and doubled it, according to the media. The family trust must be one of the biggest landlords in the central city.'

Throughout this, Annie had been pecking at the keyboard. ‘Is that him?' she asked, swivelling the screen so Jess could see it.

‘Yes,' said Jess, ‘that's the one. You can see why the posters went missing. Mind you, that was at least fifteen years ago now.'

‘How do you suggest I find him? He's a long shot but at the moment he's the only shot I've got. Maybe I'll just ask the old boy where he lives.'

‘Ever heard of Google, darling?' said Jess. ‘There's officially no such thing as a secret any more.'

Glandovey Road was bent but far from broken. Some lawns and berms had sprouted molehills of liquefaction, but there were no road-lining slag heaps of the stuff, none of the smothering ruin of the east side of town. It didn't seem fair. Indeed it wasn't fair, but then, reflected Annie, the notion of fairness didn't apply in plate tectonics. Nor for that matter in the sheer fact of there being an east side and a Glandovey Road.

The house was surrounded by lawn and the lawn by tall cream walls and a metal gate. Annie pressed an intercom button in one of the pillars. But even as she did so a golden retriever came lolloping round the corner of the house. It stopped when it saw Annie at the gate, its tail plumed and horizontal.

‘What is it, Bossy?' said a female voice, and round the same corner came a woman in her thirties, wearing ironed jeans and a white T-shirt. ‘Oh, hello.'

‘Hello,' said Annie and the moment she spoke the retriever relaxed and came gambolling to the gate so that Annie could
reach between the bars and stroke its head and chin. ‘I'm sorry to trouble you, but I was just wondering whether I could have a word with Ben.'

‘Ben's at work. Could I ask what it's about?'

Annie began to explain through the grille but as the gist of the story emerged Ben's wife said, ‘I think this requires coffee, don't you?' She opened the gate, introduced herself as Steph, told Bossy to calm down, and led Annie into the vast kitchen done up in a style that, if pressed, Annie would have described as rustic French with gadgets. Steph turned dials and knobs on the Gaggia coffee machine as if in the cab of a steam train, and laid Tim Tams on a blue-ringed plate while Annie explained her mission and the series of events that had taken her to Park Terrace and Great-Uncle David.

‘What did you make of him?'

‘You can't beat old-world charm, can you?' said Annie and Steph nodded as if she had expected precisely those words, that sentiment.

‘But you still came here to find Ben,' she said.

‘He's the only lead I've got at the moment,' she said. ‘If he comes to nothing I may well have to give up. For all I know Dad could be anywhere in the world. Or dead.'

‘Oh no,' exclaimed Steph, shaking her head in vigorous sympathy so that its layered blondeness shimmered like an ad. ‘I'm sure he's not dead.'

‘Yours?' said Annie, indicating framed photos of kids on a shelf. ‘May I?' Two girls and a boy, the girls childishly chubby,
the boy thin-limbed with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a strangely bunched face, as if too many features had been crammed into too small an area. But all three kids wore the uninhibited grins of their age, posing briefly on the lawn with Bossy the dog. And here were the three of them again climbing on what had to be Ben, the girls cantilevered out on either side of his waist, the boy high on his shoulders, proud as a king. Ben was trying to smile for the camera despite the strain of supporting the three of them. A slight man in his thirties, fading already from his election poster days, his hair receding at either temple to leave a tongue of thatch above the centre of the forehead.

‘Proud dad,' said Annie, and noted how Steph seemed to bask in the words, to savour them.

The kitchen window gave a view of some tributary of the Avon, its banks impeccably shaven, well-governed exotic trees dotted along it. There were a few cracks in the plaster high up on the kitchen walls but the house seemed by and large undamaged.

‘We're lucky,' said Steph, as if reading Annie's mind. ‘When you see the TV news in the evening it doesn't seem quite fair. But what are you supposed to do? Move to Aranui?'

Steph took Annie's contact details and promised to let Ben know she'd called.

* * *

It took an hour and a half and two changes of bus to reach South Brighton. From her seat at the window Annie watched the landscape change from workable suburban affluence to something post-apocalyptic. Forced into detours by downed bridges, ruptured drains and shattered roads, the bus took her down the back ways of Avondale, Bexley, Parklands. The streets lined with bulldozed heaps of grey and sodden silt reminded Annie of photos of the trenches on the Somme. Crudely painted notices begged drivers to slow down, or urged rubber-neckers to go elsewhere. Already, after only a couple of weeks, you could tell which houses had been abandoned since the quake.

Annie alighted by the pier. On the seaward side of Marine Parade the dunes stretched down to beach and sea as they had always done, soft-edged, irregular and quite undamaged by any shaking. But across the road, in a pattern that was becoming familiar, the rigidity of the houses had taken a thumping. Here bricks had rained like lethal confetti. There a jerry-built top storey had simply been flung half off the building underneath. Annie followed duckboards through the dunes and onto the beach where the waves boomed and women were walking dogs and a few wet-suited surfers bobbed beyond the breakers. One paddled in with a wave, like some fiercely crawling insect on the water's skin, then caught a swell and rose to a crouch, to a three-quarter stand, his body lithely black, his shins and forearms white, as he rode the shifting world diagonally across the afternoon, a ten- or
fifteen-second ride of triumph and defiance before the tumble into a cold salt sea.

How many Sundays her father had brought her here to visit Grandma. She remembered buying ice creams from the van by the surf club; occasional plagues of copper blue jellyfishes that washed up and died on the beach by the million and whose air sac burst with a pop when you stamped on them; her father chatting with a woman while Annie threw a stick into the shallows for the woman's collie and every time the collie fetched the stick it took it back up the beach to drop it at the woman's feet rather than at Annie's. At a familiar stand of old man pines Annie passed back through the dunes on the duckboards that the sands had swallowed and there was Jellicoe Street, looking much as it always had but for a swarm of young people with shovels, buckets and barrows. The famous Student Army. Further down the street a loader was filling a truck with vast scoops of silt.

Annie picked her way through waiting piles of silt and dozens of cheerful shovellers to the house that Vince had so often slept at but that for her would always be her grandmother's house. In the front room there had been cake and chocolate and fizzy drink, and a lightness of mood. But when Annie was seven the afternoon teas had shrunk and Grandma stopped getting up to hug her and she wore a scarf around her head because her hair had grown thin and Dad said she was very sick. And one day when Annie put her arms around her in her chair and caught a whiff of her breath and it was foul and she said ‘Ugh' and let her go and turned away.

When she looked back her father had put an arm around his mother and laid his head against hers and Annie saw that she was quietly gulping.

‘There, there,' her father said, ‘there, there,' just as he might have said to Annie when she had stubbed a toe. And Annie had watched as the old woman sank into her son's embrace and in time had turned and smiled at Annie and asked her how she was doing at school. Though when they left she hadn't reached out to Annie for a kiss.

Mum didn't go to the funeral and didn't want Annie to go, but Dad had collected her from school at lunchtime and they drove to Lyttelton. It was the first church Annie had been in and it was made of stone and there were only half a dozen people there and Annie knew none of them, though they all seemed to know Dad. And afterwards they had gone up to the cemetery above the port and the grave had already been dug and Annie remembered watching a huge ship being nudged into its berth by tugs as men in black coats lowered the shiny expensive-looking coffin into the hole and the priest read from his black leather book. It was windy. Whirls of dust blew from the earth heaped beside the grave. And the priest threw a handful of that earth and Annie heard the clatter as it landed and watched it scatter across the lid. The mourners all threw little clods of earth as they left and her dad did too but Annie didn't want to and clung to his leg.

The house that had been light green was now a freshly painted buff. But it was still little more than the original
weatherboard cottage, a single storey divided into four rooms, and with a lean-to kitchen on the back. The basic house of New Zealand and her father had been raised there and in that room there at the back by the pear tree he had slept with a boy who would never forget.

‘You looking for a job?'

A freckle-faced girl was proffering a shovel.

‘We can share the barrow,' she said.

‘Why not?' and Annie set to work digging a foot of sodden silt from what had once been her grandmother's front lawn.

‘Is anyone living here?'

The girl thought not. Silt had not been shifted from the front door and there were few footmarks round the back. ‘Lots of people around here just moved straight out, went to stay with relatives and that.'

More students joined them, their cheerfulness infectious and the speed with which they cleared the gunk remarkable. Twenty shovels heaved it onto wheelbarrows that piled it on the street to be scooped onto a waiting truck and away. Half an hour and the garden was cleared. The body of shovellers moved on. Annie didn't follow them. Resting the shovel against a shed where she was sure they'd find it, she toured the outside of the house peering in at windows. Soiled plates in the sink, a nest of used coffee mugs. The rooms had been brightened and modernised, but Annie recognised the shape of the room where she had made her grandmother cry, and the room that
had been her father's bedroom and that had witnessed such… but every house had its history.

‘Annie.'

Vince was standing by a pile of silt on the road front. The sun gleamed on the skin of his scalp and he was clearly trying but failing to suppress a grin. He looked like a neat bald schoolboy.

‘You could do everyone a favour by turning your cell phone on once in a while. It would save old buggers like me having to hunt you down to tell you the good news.'

‘What good news?'

‘I'll tell you over a drink. My car's down there.' And he started towards Marine Parade.

‘There's no one in the house,' said Annie. ‘Don't you want to…' But he was away. Vince pressed a key fob and lights blinked on a low-slung bottle-green BMW convertible. He handed Annie into the passenger seat with mock gallantry.

Annie looked at him and smiled. ‘This would turn a few girls' heads.'

Vince snorted.

‘Oh, come on,' said Annie, ‘you're a catch and a half. Not broke, not drunk, not saddled with a beer gut, not stupid and not still married. There must be hundreds of women ready to fling themselves at you if you so much as nod in their direction.'

‘There are,' said Vince, as they pulled out onto Marine Parade, accelerating with a high-engineered growl, then slowing immediately to negotiate a missing patch of tarmac. ‘But the shame of it is I've grown into just the sort of bloke I
despise, the one that fancies women half his age. Dirty old men we used to call them when we were kids, dirty old men.'

‘I'm half your age,' said Annie.

Vince seemed not to hear her. ‘I dress nicely and talk politely but beneath the skin of the gentleman beats the heart of a lecher.'

Annie laughed.

‘No, I'm serious. Though I don't think I'm unusual. Most blokes are waging a constant battle to seem decent. One drink too many, one clumsy step and the ice cracks beneath us. It's what every bloke's movie is about, every bloke's book, every bloke's car, every bloke even. But I don't think women have ever really believed it. Or else they think they can change us.'

He looked across at Annie. ‘Sorry,' he said.

‘It's okay,' she said. ‘What's the good news?'

‘I'll tell you when we've got a drink in front of us. You've earned it after all that shovelling.'

They drove past the surf club and a stand of wind-crabbed pines, past the squat stone war memorial and the butt end of the pier that surprisingly and rather endearingly swelled to become the swish new library.

On the other side of the road, the car park of the tired little shopping mall rolled like frozen sea. Vince slowed often to negotiate drain covers popped up by the pressure of the liquefied land, or fissures in the road surface, like cracks in a crevasse, their presence advertised by a cluster of livid orange cones.

‘I was driving this thing when the quake happened,' said Vince. ‘On Moorhouse Ave, near the car yards. I didn't know what was going on at first – I had music on and I didn't hear a thing, and the shock absorbers took the violence out of it. The road ahead swelled and rolled and I felt this sort of swaying and my first thought was that I was having a stroke. It was only when cars started stopping right where they were, without pulling over, that I realised what was going on. But what I'll never forget is the tyres. There was this great blue barn of a building, stacked with racks of tyres going way up above head height. Down they came, of course, the tyres – big buggers, truck tyres, tractor tyres. Some of them must have weighed half a ton or so. And they all bounced. But they didn't bounce regularly. They bounced off to one side and the big ones were easily big enough to kill. It was like being inside some video game. It was weird. But it was also funny. I saw this woman who looked like she'd just been doing the accounts or something come out of the office to be confronted by these bouncing tyres, dozens of them, and she just stopped in her tracks, literally open-mouthed, unable to move, just staring. Then suddenly she turned and ran back into the office. And I laughed. I remember laughing. It was like a cartoon. Only lasted a moment, of course, but that's the image that comes first to me when anyone mentions the quake.'

Everyone had a quake story, Annie realised. Half a million people were somewhere when the quake struck. She felt half envious, half guilty for not having been there.