King Rich (16 page)

‘Of sorts?'

‘You wouldn't call it exclusive, Annie. Basic, more like. I did a bit of research and found the landlord. About a dozen men lived there at any one time. Sort of one step above the street.'

Annie spread her fingers over the screen to magnify the image. She tried to imagine her father stepping through the concrete nothing of a front yard, up those little steps to the shingled porch, opening the front door. But she struggled. She had no image for him. Probably bearded, drinking, and surely alone, or he would not have been there.

‘I want to go and see it.'

Vince shook his head. The place was inside the cordon on Madras. He'd got the picture off Google Street View.

‘The landlord said Rich kept himself to himself. Paid his rent in cash. And drank. That was the sort of place it was. Everyone drank, he said. The building's munted, is going to be
demolished. He seemed pretty pleased about that. I suspect it was a bit dodgy tax-wise or rent-act-wise or whatever.'

Annie could think of nothing much to say. It was as if she'd been hauling in a net and as more and more of it had come in over the stern of the boat it was becoming clear that the final catch would be negligible, a wretched disappointment, barely worth putting to sea for. Annie felt at that moment, ground down, oppressed by circumstance.

‘I suppose I'd better start making tracks for the airport.'

‘I'll drive you,' said Vince.

She had expected him to offer and had made up her mind to decline. She needed to confront her mother alone.

‘Are you sure?' she said.

It takes a while to find the clothes he needs. He refuses to skimp or make do or accept second best. He drinks as he goes for strength, for numbness, but sparingly, hoping to keep his judgement long enough, his discernment. Too much, he knows, and he will err, will make choices he'll regret. The dog finds the exercise of no interest, but tags along.

He is easier to clothe – jeans and a white singlet. He lays them on a chair in the corridor. For her he wants the simplest summer dress, a young woman's shift. He tries a dozen rooms but he finds only complicated stuff, stuff cut to hide the flaws of older wealthy women, stuff cut to flatter the fat, to mask the damage done by time, by chance and by excess. The old have all the money. The young have only flesh and hope.

He has to climb to another floor and then another before he finds a wardrobe holding two simple dresses, one grey, one crimson, sleeveless, light, plain, cut from the silkiest stuff. They weigh almost nothing. To choose between them he needs
daylight. He drapes both over his arm and heads outside to the roof of the car park. The corridor still smells of bleach, and he shudders at the memory, skirting the damage to the carpet, careful to keep the dresses from dragging.

The brightness of the sun is briefly blinding. His eyes water, are slow to adjust. But as his vision clears he notes the smooth elegance of the dresses against the gnarled flesh and then that the dog has stiffened, is looking away towards the sea. And even as he swings his gaze to look he hears the thump of the helicopter.

‘Here, Friday, come,' he calls, taking shelter under the concrete overhang. The dog is reluctant to relinquish its view, but he calls insistently, puts sternness in his voice and the dog comes. They have hidden several times thus as choppers toured the central city, carrying who knows what dignitaries or gawpers, all getting their fix of ruin. He unscrews a miniature vodka, a blaster, a hit.

The helicopter comes ever nearer, the pulse of its engine changing nature and tempo, becoming just noise, ever greater noise, noise to shrink from. It is hovering over the building. The downdraught sends scraps of rubbish swirling on the roof, fills and flutters the dresses on his arm, would steal them if he didn't clamp them down. The noise is head-filling, maddening and the dog is barking furiously. It escapes from his grip on the collar and dances out to the heart of the car park, barking up at the belly of the machine.

‘Here, Friday, here,' but the noise is too great and the dog is defending their world and unbiddable with instinct.

And as if warned off by the dog, the chopper takes its noise a little further away, tours around the building, it seems, as if inspecting it, and when Richard judges from the noise that it has reached the far side he emerges from under the overhang and hurries as best he can across the rooftop, still with the dresses on his arm. The dog follows him through the door and waits while he leans heavily against a wall, panting.

The noise pulses through the building, threatening it with violence by vibration, as if to carry on the work the earthquake started, where noise and movement and violence are all part of the one destructive thing. The helicopter stays hovering around the building. Richard withdraws into one of the still untouched guest rooms, closes the curtains, drains a Scotch and lies on the bed, curling foetal, pulling a duvet over him. He gestures to the dog and it leaps up beside him and sits and pants but even though he lays a calming hand on the dog's shoulders and says soft words the dog will not lie down, will not relax and curl. Richard buries his head under the pillows. The noise and movement still find a muffled way through.

And then he hears and feels a further noise, and it takes a moment for him to recognise that he has heard and felt it before, knows what it is. They are drilling again, drilling deep into the walls of the building. Only now the drill is above them, and not far above, perhaps three floors above.

He feels a growl surge in the dog's throat, like the purr of a cat but swelling with threat and the will to fight.

‘Shhh, Friday, shhh.'

His mind is racing to make sense of drilling both below and above.

‘They're drilling at our bones, dog, they're drilling at our bones.'

And then he does make sense of it and it's like a short, hard punch.

‘Oh, Friday,' he says, ‘oh, Friday.'

They drill on three sides. It does not take long. The drill stops and soon the helicopter engine changes note and sheers away and quiet seeps back into the building like a balm.

‘You'll be all right, Friday,' whispers Richard, in the newfound silence. And still on the bed he chucks the dog under the chin. ‘You'll be just fine, I promise.'

And despite everything he feels his throat swell with feeling and his old eyes blink and he gulps twice and then he rolls onto his side and he lays an arm over the dog's shoulder and he buries his wet face in the dog's neck and his body heaves like a child's. But it does not last long. And soon he is asleep.

Entry to the domestic terminal took Annie through a knot of smokers, between a brace of fiercely fragrant lavatories and past a bronze plaque to some forgotten minister of transport before leading her to the narrow sloping concourse and a seat to await her mother's flight.

A four-year-old stared at the arrivals gate through which, Annie guessed, he was expecting to see his mother come. A woman who had to be his grandmother stood behind him, her expression strained, her manner suggesting she would not be overwhelmed with grief when the moment came to give the child back. Suddenly, the boy shot forward with a noise like a wail and a broad-hipped woman of thirty-something, arriving in a stream of passengers, knelt when she saw him and those behind her had to step around her as her darling flew into her body and wept with relief. Grandma kept a reserved distance, her face a mask.

Sitting next to Annie, a woman of perhaps fifty glanced up occasionally at the gate and then back to a word-finder puzzle
in a cheaply printed magazine that consisted only of puzzles. She sucked at a blue Bic ballpoint. Then, without any outward display, she slipped the puzzle into her bag, stood and fell into step with a passing man of a similar age. They did not touch. He wore a fawn zip-up jacket and trousers so neutral they were barely even fawn. He towed an overnight bag. Annie watched the couple's backs as they disappeared towards the luggage claim. As far as she was able to tell, they did not speak.

They had to be married. Such apparent indifference, such complete disregard of the other, could stem only from long familiarity, from the habituation of partnership. Perhaps it betokened the sort of loving trust where nothing needed to be said, where two had become one, where they were fused at the emotional hip and had achieved a sort of Zen-like calm together against a hostile world. But it hadn't looked like that. It had looked, Annie thought, like the very antithesis of loving trust, like weary resignation. As if each embodied for the other the essence of disappointment. The bad choice that had hardened, through hope, and habit and self-delusion, into permanence. That was it, for ever, for them both. They'd make do with it somehow. And besides, there was no point in trying to start again at their age. I mean to say, who'd be interested?

A light on the board indicated that the Blenheim flight had landed. Annie went to stand half hidden by a coffee kiosk, without quite choosing to do so or acknowledging her desire to see before she was seen, to gauge mood and manner. She
wished, momentarily, that she'd brought Vince with her rather than accepting his offer to wait with the car.

Her mother's sunglasses were ornate, her jeans stretchily clinging, her boots expensive. The loose white top was well chosen to mitigate a minor hoop of middle-aged fat. All in all she didn't look bad.

‘Hello, Mum,' said Annie, stepping forward.

‘Darling,' she said, and she let go of the little bag she was towing and delivered the sort of hug that Annie had seen several times in the last fifteen minutes, the half-hug, the apparent hug, the self-conscious event in which the arms reach around and the heads go to one side of each other but the hips hold back for any of a hundred different wordless reasons.

‘Such a surprise.'

That Annie had obediently come to the airport? That Annie was in New Zealand? Either way the line was drenched in manipulative irony. Annie felt a stirring of revolt that she quelled with the ease of long practice. It was easier just to ride it out. Though she had more or less made up her mind not to apologise. Or at least not to begin with an apology.

They followed the procession to the baggage reclaim, a low and underlit hall where the newly reunited stood in awkward limbo, between the greeting and the welcome busy world beyond.

Annie almost asked about the weather in Blenheim then bit it back. The conveyor belt did its warning bleep and little orange lights flashed and then it jerked into scaly life. She and a
hundred others stared at a single bag left from a previous flight as it rounded the hairpin bend before disappearing through the heavy plastic flaps.

‘So how's it going?' Her mother spoke with a breezy brightness, suggesting not only that she knew she held the cards, but that she would enjoy playing them in her own sweet time.

‘Well,' said Annie, ‘it rather depends on what you mean by “it”.'

‘Oh God, here we go.'

Annie sighed. ‘Why are you here, Mum? I mean, what have you come down for?'

‘Isn't it enough to want to see my one and only darling daughter?' And she turned to Annie, her eyebrows raised theatrically above the sunglasses.

Annie turned back towards the hatch that had started to spew luggage.

‘Of course, if you'd rather I hadn't come. If you'd rather I went straight back to Blenheim, you've only got to say. Don't worry that you snuck back into the country without telling the person who gave birth to you and brought you up singlehandedly. I'm sure there'll be a plane back tonight or tomorrow morning. I wouldn't want to get in the way of your search for the darling daddy who loved us so much that he left us for another woman. I mean, it's fine by me if you want to go raking up the past but it does feel a bit rich when I spent ten years bringing you up on my own…'

‘I know about Dad now, Mum.'

Raewyn took off her sunglasses. ‘Oh, you do, do you? So that dirty little cat's out of the bag now. Fine. Are you pleased? Do you think that somehow justifies everything? And have you considered for one moment how it might have been for me twenty years ago, when I was just about the last person in town to learn that my husband was having a fling with some rich little nancy boy half his age, some pretty…'

‘Mum, can this wait?'

Half a dozen people were staring in unashamed delight, and twice that number were listening.

‘Oh, I don't see why it should. You brought it up. And of course the little pervert had to come from one of the most prominent families in town, as you've no doubt uncovered in your grubby little researches, which made it just about the juiciest bit of gossip going in certain circles. No one gave a thought for the deserted wife, though, did they, nor a thought for what she did to keep any word of it from her daughter's ears. Oh no. And I can't see myself being thanked for any of it at this late stage, even though every single thing was done with you in mind so that you could have as normal a childhood as possible despite the way that bastard had betrayed the pair of us. That one there.' She was pointing at a hefty Samsonite case in light blue. And in unthinking obedience Annie stepped forward and heaved it from the belt.

‘Thank you, darling. Where to from here?'

Annie stared at her mother. Did she really expect that accommodation, transport, an itinerary had been arranged?

‘Oh, for God's sake. The look on your face, darling. I wouldn't dream of imposing on you or interfering with your little muck-raking expedition. Just show me the bloody taxi stand and I'll get out of your hair. No, no, give it to me. I'm not too old to pull my own suitcase.'

Taxis snaked for a hundred yards, their drivers trained to stand by the bonnet and smile for the newly competitive market. Her mother walked past the two Indian drivers at the head of the queue, who both smiled at her and said ‘Madam' while gesturing towards their empty cars like butlers, and handed her bag to a short white man in a black V-necked sweater that had given up the fight with his gut and hung around it in inelastic folds like the valance round a bed.

‘Oceanview Terrace, Mount Pleasant,' she said.

‘Are you staying with Denise?'

‘Oh, listen to Madam Detective. And your point?

‘No, nothing.'

‘Denise and I happen to have remained friends. Is there something wrong in that? As a matter of fact, she was the one who gave me the idea of coming down, darling. She very kindly suggested I might enjoy the show.'

‘The show?'

‘You know, darling, the memorial thingy, in Hagley Park. We're going together. They've got some very big names, and Wills, of course, not that I expect such things will interest you now you're so sophisticated and international. Anyway, darling, I'm sure you've got more important things to do than stand
chattering with your dear old mum. You have my number. It's been such a pleasure to catch up.'

Brilliantly she leant forward for another half hug. Annie acquiesced. As he got into the car, the driver grunted at the compression of his gut.

Her mother's window came down.

‘Oh and darling, there's more to bringing up kids than drawing a few ducks. As I hope you're about to find out. And if you do manage to find him, by the way, I'm told he may not be in the best of shape. But, ah well. Reaping and sowing and all that. Mwah, mwah.'