King Rich (7 page)

The old red brick building on the corner of Bealey Avenue and Park Terrace was cordoned off with more Fahey fencing. What had it been? Private hospital? Old folks' home? Annie somehow associated it with unwellness and money. But its flanks were ripped open with great sheer lines through the brickwork, running higgledy-piggledy down three or more storeys like black veins, so that you felt that you could push the whole thing over with a stick. The contrast with the other side of the road was stark, almost comic. There the huge willows still swept down to drag on the surface of the Avon as if nothing had happened. Ducks swam, and on the far side of the river, a pair of joggers trotted side by side through the stand of pines. ‘Keep calm and carry on' had already become the half-ironic motto of the whole traumatic business, but jogging? Couldn't that energy be put to slightly better use? Annie had read in the paper that morning so many stories of suffering from the east of the city and a growing discontent with the authorities.
But then again, she wasn't exactly shovelling up liquefaction herself.

The apartment block stood. Glass shrouded, and expensively overlooking the park, it had an eighties feel to it. An orange sticker on the door announced that it had undergone an engineering check and was provisionally deemed safe to occupy. No names alongside the bell pushes, just apartment numbers. Annie pressed 4A.

‘Yes?' Even in that single syllable Annie heard the unmistakable voice of Canterbury money, of high country stations and horses and moleskins and collars turned up on Aertex shirts.

Annie had given no thought to what she would say.

‘I'm sorry to trouble you,' she began, discovering that her mission was hard to summarise plausibly. ‘My name's Annie Jones. I'm looking for my father.'

‘Your father?'

‘Yes, you see…'

‘I can assure you, Miss Jones, that your father is not here. There is no one here except me.'

‘But he used to live here, I think, Flat 4A, twenty years ago. If I could just come up and ask you a few questions. I promise not to take up too much of your time. It's just that…'

To Annie's surprise the buzzer rang and she was able to push open the heavy door.

When Annie emerged from the lift an elderly man was waiting at the door of 4A. He was leaning on sticks. Despite
the authoritative voice he was shrunken and bent almost at a right angle at the waist. ‘I'm sorry,' were his first words. ‘I fear I may have been rude to you. It was unchristian of me. But we are all a little stressed at the moment so I hope you will forgive me. My name is David. Won't you come in?'

And so saying he turned with some difficulty on his sticks and led Annie into the apartment. The pace they went at allowed Annie an abundance of time to take in the smell of furniture polish and the line of empty picture hooks and the rips in the wall linings in corners and above the door frames. She tried to imagine her father living here, walking this corridor. It did not somehow seem his sort of place.

‘Were you here for the quake?' she asked as David sat at the table, grimacing a little as he did so. He wore a neatly tied tie, but there was half an inch of air between his collar and the folded leather of his neck. White hairs bristled from his nostrils.

‘Yes,' he said, ‘I was. It was a little dramatic. This place sways rather alarmingly. But the authorities in their wisdom assure us it is safe and it is quite amazing what one can get used to. And besides, people have been so kind. Even the young ones of whom it is easy to despair. You should have seen the mess in here, but now, look at it.' And he gestured to the kitchen, which was indeed clean and neat, though a partly opened cupboard revealed the shortage of crockery.

‘Is there anything you need?' asked Annie but David insisted that he had plenty of people keeping an eye on him. ‘My family, for better or for worse, is impossible to escape. It is sewn
into the very fabric of this city. I can't walk down a street in Christchurch without meeting a relative. So no, thank you, you are kind, but I want for nothing. Now, what was all this about your father? He has gone missing in the quake? And why do you imagine he might be here?'

Annie told him. He listened intelligently.

‘It's none of my business of course,' he said when she had done, ‘but why are you looking for him now? Why not five years ago, ten? What's special about now? Was it the quake or…'

‘I don't know. I've asked myself the same question. It may be because I'm thinking of getting engaged, but it feels more complicated than that.'

The old man looked at her thoughtfully.

‘I hope you find your father, Miss Jones,' he said, ‘but I fear that I can do little to help you. There has to be some error in the hospital records. This flat, you see, has been in our family since the day it was built and as far as I am aware it has been used exclusively by family members from the very first. Indeed, within the family it has become known jocularly as the Railway Station. In that everyone who uses it is on his or her way somewhere else. Sometimes it is the young about to board a train to God knows where, and sometimes it is the old such as myself on their last ride to the inevitable terminus. I can make enquiries for you, of course, but I very much doubt that your father ever set foot in it. And I for one have no memory of any family connection with a Richard Jones, though our family is extensive, to say the least, and as various as all families are.'

Annie conceded that it seemed unlikely that her father had ever lived here. How could he have afforded it, to start with?

‘Perhaps,' said David, ‘if you left me an email address I could let you know if I uncover anything.'

‘You're on email?' said Annie. ‘Oh, I am sorry. That was rude of me. I shouldn't have been surprised.'

‘Now we have each been rude to the other,' said David, and Annie laughed.

* * *

Everyone in the ward at Princess Margaret Hospital was old. No one was talking. All those who were awake watched Annie as she made her way to the far end. Mrs Yeats was sitting upright in bed, and she too was watching Annie. She looked shrunken and fragile, an impression only emphasised by the bruise that had drained to cover a quarter of her face, presumably from when she fell.

‘Hello, Mrs Yeats.'

Annie's words seemed only to alarm the old woman. And as Annie moved closer Mrs Yeats nervously clutched at the blanket edge, furled it up over her chest. She avoided looking Annie in the eye.

‘It's me, Annie.' She spoke quietly, aware that hers was the only voice in the whole long ward. ‘Annie. I came to see you, remember? We had tea.'

The wrinkled profile continued to stare across the ward, the fingers playing with the blanket's hem.

‘Mrs Yeats? I've brought your house key.'

‘Where's Sid?' And the old woman turned with awful, frightened eyes to look straight at Annie with a sort of desperation. ‘Where's Sid?'

Annie tried to take Mrs Yeats' hand but it shrank back under the blanket. Annie, afraid that the old woman was going to cry or try to get up, got up herself. ‘Don't worry, Mrs Yeats,' she said, ‘everything's going to be fine.'

Half a dozen old women watched her walk back down the middle of the ward. The nurse took charge of the door key. ‘Though I don't think she'll have much use for it,' she said. ‘Do you know if there are any relatives?'

Annie mentioned the possibility of a son in Canada. The nurse shook her head.

‘Don't worry,' she said, ‘we'll find her somewhere.'

‘He was beautiful, your father.'

‘I know, I've seen the photos.'

‘They don't show the half of it. In the sixth and seventh form he was just stunning. You couldn't take your eyes off him. Up till then he'd been nothing special to look at, but something happened to make him physically different and you could see people reacting to his beauty. They were just drawn to him, charmed by him. But some guys hated it. It drove them crazy. As if it was somehow wrong for a bloke to be that bloody beautiful.'

The remains of the noodles Vince had cooked lay on the table behind them. They'd sunk into easy chairs in the front room, looking out over Christchurch as dusk thickened. Vince was doing as he'd promised. ‘I'll cook you a dinner and tell you everything,' he'd said. ‘If that's not too boring.' It wasn't. Indeed there was something good, something soothing, about sitting in the half light with nothing asked of her but to listen. It was like being read to.

‘We were in the Square one night, and we were talking to these two girls and just laughing and that, and this pair of first fifteen guys we both vaguely knew ask us what we're playing at. “Come on,” I say to Rich, “let's go,” but Rich just smiles at them and says “It's okay, it's cool,” and turns back to the girl we were talking to and then one of the guys thumps him.

‘He wasn't a big guy, your dad, and he went down but he was more or less okay, just a bit groggy, and the girls had a go at the other guys and kept them off while I got Rich away, but that's what was going on. Those blokes sensed his beauty and hated it. Don't ask me why. It's the saddest thing.

‘Rich and I had been mates for years. We knew instinctively what the other guy was thinking or what he might do. But in that last year at school the whole intensity went up a notch. For me at least, though for him too, I think – I hope. Do girls have friendships like that? Do women? I don't think my wife did.'

‘Yes and no,' said Annie. ‘But go on.'

‘That last year we were inseparable. Everything was vivid. It was as if whatever we were doing mattered, was of epic scale. I remember so much that happened then, remember it in colour over forty years later. Whereas I couldn't tell you anything that happened last week.

‘It was that gap between the end of childhood and the start of everything else. We spent most of it surfing. Rich lived in Brighton. His mum was lovely. Dad wasn't around. Dead or divorced, I didn't know and never asked.

‘We had these old long boards and if you got it right you rode like a king. This was the sixties, remember, all freedom and the Beach Boys and it felt like the dawn of the world. It was always going to come to an end, but that was part of the wonder of it. Come February he was going north to art school. And I was going the other way, to Otago.

‘And there was this one particular afternoon and we were in the water and Rich caught a wave and stood and he was silhouetted against the sky, and I can see him now, so lean and handsome and I felt this sort of crushing in my chest. It was so sudden and so strong.'

Vince paused. He had been looking out across the city as he spoke, but now he looked across at Annie.

‘I've never told anyone this,' he said.

‘You know you don't have to,' said Annie.

‘Oh, but I want to. I used to be ashamed of it, or at least scared of someone finding out. But that wore off and since then I've sort of hugged it to myself as a secret, something private and vivid and good. But telling Rich's daughter feels like the right thing to do.'

Annie looked at him. He seemed happy, this sixty-year-old man reliving memories from before she was born, happy.

‘We ate fish and chips on the dunes that evening and our shadows stretched thirty, forty yards across the sand and dunked our heads in the sea. And then we went up to the Ozone – the landlord there would serve anyone – and we bought a bottle of port, Sailors' Port it was, I can still see the label, and we were
heading back to the dunes through this line of macrocarpas, when I heard Rich call. When I turned he wasn't there and he called again and I looked up and there he was in the tree, grinning. He reached down to haul me up and I can see and feel now how we gripped each other's wrists. His wrist was thin but he had long, strong fingers and veins on his forearms. We climbed high into the tree, higher than I would have dared to go alone.

‘From up there we looked out over the dunes and the sea to one side and Brighton on the other and the headlights of cars moving along Marine Parade. And we sat each in the crook of a branch with our backs against the trunk and we passed the port between us and drank from the bottle and I don't remember that we said much. It was just magical up there, overlooking the world, and that brilliant sense of no one knowing we were up there.

‘Rich lit a cigarette and when he struck the match his face lit from below like some Halloween lantern, only beautiful, and he saw me looking and he smiled and blew out a cloud of smoke. Pall Mall was the brand he smoked. For as long as I smoked, I smoked Pall Mall. I'm boring you.'

‘No,' said Annie, ‘you're not boring me. The opposite in fact.'

‘We finished the bottle and swung down out of the tree like gibbons, letting go of one branch without knowing where the next one lay below. It must have been midnight or so, I don't know, but Brighton was silent and the moon was so bright it
cast shadows. It felt like we owned the world. And through the dunes you could feel the thump of the waves.

‘We crept into the house to avoid waking Rich's mother. I'd stayed there a hundred times, sleeping on a mattress pulled out from under his bed. But that night when the door of the bedroom shut behind us, Rich spread his arms and smiled. Even then a part of me wanted to back out, a part of me was shouting no and he must have felt it in the muscles of my back and he just held me and eventually I relaxed and I ran my hands over his back and without saying anything we got undressed and into bed.'

He looked up. Annie held his gaze but said nothing, not wanting to break the spell.

‘When eventually Rich fell asleep he was lying across my arm, and I could feel the rise and fall of his breathing, and in the half dark I stared at the features of his face, the smooth skin of his shoulder and chest. The curtain was thin and the window beyond was bright with moonlight and I didn't want to sleep and though I lost feeling in my arm I kept it there as long as I could without waking him. I can remember it all with such clarity. It was as though I knew this moment would matter to me more than any other. Though in the end, of course, I fell asleep.

‘When I woke in the morning, we were wrapped around each other. I can remember precisely the feeling of how nice it was to wake up pressed against someone else. The feeling lasted about two seconds. Then the guilt came. I was seized with guilt. There's the world for you. Guilt.

‘I knew, there and then, just knew we'd be found out. Rich was still sleeping. I wanted to kiss him but I didn't dare. I didn't regret what we'd done. But I dreaded being found out. And I was sure we would be. I peeled his arm from my chest and slid out of bed. Our clothes were scattered together on the floor. I dressed as quietly as I could.

‘Rich's mum was already banging around. I liked her but I didn't want to face her then. I listened at the door till she went to the bathroom. I turned for one more look at Rich. His eyes were open. He was smiling. “See you, Vince,” he said. “Take it easy.”

‘I was wound up so tight I felt I was going to snap and he looked so relaxed I half wanted to throw myself back into bed or burst into tears or scream or something but I didn't.

‘“Yeah,” I said or something like that, and I just turned and left and let myself out the front door. And it seemed to me extraordinary that Brighton was still there and unchanged. I somehow felt the world ought to have been altered by what we'd done. It should have been a different place.

‘I got a bus back into town. I remember blushing on the bus because I was sure people knew. And I've never told anyone. Except you. His daughter. You've got to laugh. Now, at any rate. You've got to laugh now.'

Vince paused. ‘That was the last time I saw Rich.'

‘What, ever?'

Vince nodded. ‘I thought I'd wait for him to ring. He didn't. There were no mobile phones back then, of course. There were
only a couple of days before I headed south to varsity and I had lots of stuff to do. Then I got on a train and went south. And he presumably went north. And that was that. I got immersed in a new life and I got a girlfriend and it was all new and different. When I came home for the first holiday I rang Rich's place and his mum told me he'd got a flat up north and I wrote down the phone number. But I never rang it. There seemed no point at the time. I always sort of assumed we'd catch up again one day.'

‘That's sad,' said Annie.

Their glasses were empty. Night had settled over the city. No lights had come on in the centre of town.

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Vince. ‘I don't know.'