King Rich (17 page)

Something seems to be happening at the far end of Cashel Street, near the Bridge of Remembrance. But from the car park roof it is hard to know.

Climbing to the penthouse to look takes half the morning. He is aware of waning energy and tries to harbour it. The dog has long since reached the top and waits for him there, its head flopped over the top step, dozing but from time to time opening an eye when it hears Richard sitting heavily to rest, or pulling himself back to his feet with a gasp of exertion.

As he gains the last step Richard smiles at the dog and lays his good hand on the skull, and massages the bone through the skin. But he is feeble as a newborn, drained of all strength, light-headed with weakness, and inside the penthouse he all but falls into the window chair and his eyes close and he lets a sort of nothingness come over him, not sleep but a sort of withdrawal of the senses, an absence.

He is not sure how long he drowses but when the dog pushes against the side of the chair and up underneath his dangling hand it is as if the senses switch back on slowly one by one, like an old television taking a flickering minute to get its valves and circuits running. His thighs ache from the climb. He drinks a little water. It prompts a craving for anaesthetic booze, for the sense of it seeping into sore tissues and blurring past and future into an out-of-focus present. He pours a fat slug of vodka, adds a slightly smaller slug of Kiwi Spring water. The surface of the drink has a swirl of iridescence. He sniffs at the glass. Even the smell is good, relieving, purging the channels, clearing the way.

The first sip spreads and melts over the tongue and says yes and good morning to the back of the throat. It cannot be bad to like something this much, to be so grateful for it, to it. He turns to the window and now he can see what is happening there at the far end of Cashel Street, by the Bridge of Remembrance, just beyond the fence. They are building. Workmen shrunk to toys by distance are clambering over scaffolding. As he sips Richard watches the grandstand grow. There is no mistaking the way it is facing.

‘A day or two,' he says to the dog. And he smiles at the dog's delight in his voice and its wise ignorance of anything that might be happening in a day or two.

‘You are a good boy,' he says, and as he speaks he feels as happy as the dog.

Richard makes himself eat. He needs energy to do the few things that he has to do. But the square of chocolate sits heavy
on his tongue, its sweetness clashing with the vodka clarity of his palate. He is scared he might gag, and if he gags he'll cough and if he coughs he fears it might trigger worse because cough and guts and bowel seem all connected within this ruinous frame of his.

The chocolate has softened on his tongue. He sluices it down with a sudden fling of vodka. It stays down. He does not cough. Nothing happens.

‘We'd better go, dog,' he says. ‘Things to do.'

* * *

He chooses the grey dress. It seems the simplest, the most innocent. The material is silk-like in its softness and fineness. Wool? Synthetic? Some exotic animal fibre? He does not know but is pleased by the way it slithers over the head and arms of the mannequin and hangs from the shoulder, gathers slightly just below the waist like a flapper's dress from the twenties, then flares again, but subtly. When the dog brushes against the dress the material sways before settling. How good she'd look in a breeze. Propped on a chair back, Richard blows at the skirt but his breath is thin and weak and the material hardly moves and he knows that if he blew harder the cough would come. But the dress is good, a dress for a young woman, for a slip of a girl all sinuous and lithe and bright with hope, before the world has got to her. She goes barefoot.

Both mannequins have only a suggestion of facial features, the merest bumps and mouldings in the buff material to indicate that here a nose would be and there the eyes. This pleases him. It lets him see what he wants to see: the puckish nose, the bright-lit eyes.

Fitting jeans on the other mannequin is less dignified. The legs don't flex at the knee so Richard bunches the jeans on the floor as if they'd simply been undone at the waist and allowed to fall. He lifts the naked form upright and snuggles the feet into the piled legs of the jeans and raises the cloth up over shins and thighs and crotch while struggling to keep the figure standing. Once, when it slips against his shoulder and lurches to one side, Richard says sorry.

The jeans he chose are wrong. He has to scour another half a dozen rooms for others, is cursed again by the age and girth of hotel residents. But he persists and a pair he finds on the floor above are just the thing, tailored by age, faded at the knee from flexion and wrinkled at the crotch. When he has slid them up the legs, the waistband nestles on the narrow hips. And as with the dress, the cloth does not hug or cling, but lies on the sweet bulge of the buttock then falls below all perpendicular and good and soft, like a stage curtain. The look has the erotic simplicity that he hoped for. He tops it with a singlet, a simple cotton vest, quite new and brightly white, and rich to the touch of fingertips. He can remember when his groin responded to such tactile cloth, to the promise of the flesh beneath.

Neither mannequin has joints. This will be a standing party then, though later his guests might recline. It does not matter. He removes the chairs from his feasting place. Now, in the centre of the banqueting hall, the three tables stand like a plush and polished island, laid with the crockery and the cutlery and the array of glasses to which he's added three synthetic roses from the cupboard and a silver-gilt candelabrum with five white candles.

And the dog now has two bowls by its bed, one already primed with Kiwi Spring, the other to hold, albeit briefly, a dinner of Tux.

Back out on the car park roof, Friday fossicks while he lies back with late-afternoon wine. Somehow the dog finds interest in what seems a barren world. Though it is only hours since they were here and nothing can have changed, the dog tours with intense attention the concrete walls and buttresses, and the parked cars thick with settled dust.

Richard drowses in the warm afternoon. How long has he been in this building? He is aware that he has quite lost track and he is equally aware that it doesn't matter.

An arch of cloud lies over the city, the nor'west arch. Beyond it the sky is a pale blue-gold. In the silent city the air is late-summer heavy. When the breeze comes as it comes now it is with near tropical warmth on the skin. And on it Richard catches a strain of something, of shouting is it, or music? He rouses a little, looks at the dog but it seems to have noticed nothing untoward, nothing to impinge on a dog's consciousness.

Again a waft of breeze and again a snatch of noise borne across the city from the direction of Hagley Park. The crackling of big loudspeakers, a gout of rock music, and then, absurdly clear as a gust of wind comes, ‘Testing, one, two, three.'

Jess had gone to work.
The Press
was on the kitchen table, two faces looking up at Annie. One was nine years old, freckled and beaming, an ideal front-page image, a heart-warmer, hope-giver and paper-seller. You had to read the text to learn that the child was suffering from a degenerative condition. Unless a miracle occurred, divine or scientific, in a dozen years he'd be imprisoned in a body that didn't work. He wouldn't be able even to smile. Another decade or less and he'd be dead. But for now he was as happy a little boy as could be found in the city: he had the job of pressing a plunger that would bring down a building on a Sunday morning, just a few hours before Annie flew home.

The other face was the royal one, the prince they called Wills, pictured at the airport being greeted by the usual suspects, the men in suits, and the women in hats who never usually wore hats. How many hundred thousand hats bought specially for the occasion and never worn again would greet Wills in his official lifetime?

How was it that the magic dust of royalty continued to work in the twenty-first century? For it did work, clearly and indisputably. Even the crudest rock musician whose success was founded on defying, or at least appearing to defy, every sexual, social or narcotic convention, became a smiling yes-ma'am puppy dog when asked to the palace to have some sort of decoration pinned to his ageing chest.

The last time William had been to New Zealand it had been with his fairy-tale mother. How many times had even Annie, who was three at the time, seen the picture of him playing with a Buzzy Bee on the lawn at Government House, Charles looking awkward in a suit, and Diana looking overblown and eighties-ish? Since then he'd undergone the sort of intensive training that a guide dog undergoes, and he'd become his office.

That morning he would be taken on a greatest-hits disaster tour, consoling selected victims as he went. Then he'd be shown around the red-zoned central city, before his appearance at the memorial service in Hagley Park, where he would act as proxy for his grandmother, the highest of high priestesses, whose juju was the greatest juju of them all. We might scoff at credulous medieval peasants who sought the king's touch to cure disease, but what was the royal presence for in Hagley Park if not to do its bit to heal some 80,000 shaken souls (including, admittedly, some starstruck but unshaken ones like Annie's mother)?

The rest of the paper, which Annie read with a bowl of muesli, reflected a growing discontent. A few weeks now since
the big one and the excitement of the trauma had worn off. Most people to the north and west of the city had resumed a life that didn't diverge too widely from the one they led before. Their suffering was little more than inconvenience. But where the quake had raised and lowered land, had snapped the spines of homes, had buried suburbs under tons of silt, had shattered pipes and rendered streets impassable, it seemed that the authorities were overwhelmed, insurance companies cynical and nothing much was being done to make things any better. The letters to the paper were no longer expressing wonder at resilience, or gratitude for the kindness of strangers, but were beginning to grumble.

Annie felt a twinge of guilt. In the time she'd been back she'd done half an afternoon of shovelling silt in Brighton and that was that. She'd shunned the damaged areas, been preoccupied with her own affairs. But then again, she reflected, she was probably typical. Most of us find enough difficulty with what is in front of us.

Her phone rang. ‘Annie, it's me, Ben.'

Annie was surprised by her surge of pleasure.

‘I'd like you to meet my kids,' he said. An image of them rose in Annie's head, swarming round Ben's car in Glandovey Road, grinning like the boy on the front page. ‘They want to go to the thing in the park this afternoon. Prince William's the drawcard, of course. Would you like to join us? Please say yes. We're taking a picnic. And no, before you ask, Steph won't be there. But yes, I've told her and she's fine with it. So what about it?'

Annie could just picture the look of earnest entreaty on Ben's face.

‘I'd be delighted,' she said.

And she was also rather keen to see Prince William.

It is not going to happen today. Something else is, and it is not hard to guess what. From early in the morning guards, soldiers and men in dark suits have been touring the empty, ruined streets below. From the car park roof Richard has watched them, the distance lending a sense of absurdity to their scouring of a world too large and various for them ever to render it safe.

Two sniffer dogs on long leads are being shown down High Street, the dogs' tails raised like masts, their noses assessing doorways and rubble piles in moments, reading the brew of the air as fast as thought and finding nothing of interest, and moving on, towing their handlers. A man in a boiler suit raises the manhole covers in the road for the dogs to sniff down and dismiss.

The suits and security look up at the hotel and other streetside buildings but send no one in to sweep them room by room, aware that the task is vast and the risk small. But once a stretch of street has been gone over by the men and
dogs a squaddie with a gun is posted at either end to do what soldiers have always done, which is to stand and wait. There's one now at the rubble-scattered corner of High and Cashel by the entrance to the Westpac bank.

Richard withdraws under his overhang, and the dog curls beside. A gap in the concrete railing lets him see along the route to Cathedral Square. He drops a hand to feel the dog's rough fur and has a strong sense of nowness, of a good sweet morning and his own frailty within it. And he feels a mild curiosity to see the size and manner of the dignitary party. The dogs and soldiers and thoroughness suggest importance, head-of-state importance even.

To add to the sense of occasion, music has been wafting from the direction of the park since mid-morning, gusting in intensity with the strength of the breeze, recorded music, tunes Richard recognises, the sort of anodyne standards that might keep a crowd vaguely anaesthetised while they await some live event. Richard, too, feels drowsy. There is less difference now for him between sleep and wake. At night he lies on his back and is aware of time passing, of the dog breathing in and out beside him. Yet during the day he often sits and drifts into filmy racing dreams with other rules of time and space and consequence.

The noise of wings opens his eyes now, wings beating and then settling. The pigeon is back, lurching across the bright-lit concrete on its clenched left stump. The bird's tail has lost a snatch of feather. Two wing feathers hang at unaerodynamic
angles. And between the wings, above what are effectively the shoulder blades, there's a patch of bare skin, bereft of feathers, yellowish grey and dotted with blood. Richard senses movement to his left and a gull lands on the parapet and settles its wings, a meaty black-backed gull, its chest like a Viking prow, its yellow bill a pruning hook.

Richard reaches out to where he keeps his supplies of booze and Tux and snack food, and the pigeon flaps its wings and half hops, half flutters away in alarm. The gull, too, flaps its wings as if to take off but then resettles.

Richard crumbles a biscuit and scatters it on the concrete between himself and the pigeon. Again it retreats in alarm and does not come forward to eat. It looks uncertain, weak on its one good foot. And then it topples. It falls to one side and lies, hopeless, down. The gull cocks its head, assessing, then hops lazily from the parapet and comes towards the pigeon on great webbed feet. Feebly Richard lobs the rest of the biscuit at the gull. It falls well short. The gull hops briefly into the air, then stands and studies Richard. The pigeon lies on its side in the sun and does not move.

‘Hotel California' wafts across the city. The gull stands and waits. The pigeon looks dead. The dog gets up and lollops over to clean up the scraps of biscuit with a prehensile tongue. The gull takes three steps into the breeze and rises onto the air, flaps huge wings once, twice, thrice and is suddenly riding the sky, twenty, fifty feet up, twisting its head to peer down at the man and the bird and the dog. It circles and watches, and then with
a rippling tilt of its wing-span it arcs and flies back down. As it nears the parapet it pulls up against the air till it all but stalls and it lands as lightly as a leaf.

The dog noses the pigeon. The bird comes weakly to life, flapping its wings but unable to get itself to its feet. It shifts on its side, like a swatted fly.

Voices, and they are on the way up High Street, a party of a dozen or more in glowing orange vests and hard hats the colour of daffodils. Token clothing, worn not as protection against the destructive forces of the world but in propitiation of them, a charm against disaster.

From seven storeys up Richard can sense deference in the way the people are arranged around and behind the focal figure. That figure is clearly being led through the scenes of destruction but is required by status to appear to be doing the leading.

The pigeon is lying still, one wing outstretched in spastic uselessness. The dog has lost interest. The gull has not. Again it has left the parapet and is waddling towards the dying bird. Its intent is unmistakable. Richard makes to stand. There's a spear of pain, a new one, just up under the ribs on the right. He groans and jack-knifes forward, his right hand shooting to the point of pain, kneading it, pressing in towards innards, organs, who knows what. The pain comes in waves. Richard is absorbed by the pain. There is room for nothing else in his world – birds, dogs, nothing.

The waves weaken and recede. He breathes, nervously, relaxes, winces, relaxes more, unfurls a little, opens his eyes.
The gull is stabbing at the pigeon with its hooked beak. It pierces the flank and the pigeon flaps a wing.

Richard tries to rise but sits back down. He shouts at the gull. The dog looks up. ‘Friday,' says Richard and he waves towards the gull and the dog looks at him but not at the gull. There's a wine glass beside his chair and Richard flings it and it shatters and the stem skims across the concrete at the bird. The gull grips the pigeon by the neck, spreads its wings, walks into the breeze and up onto the air. But after ten strokes of those vast wings the weight of the bird proves too much and it falls from the gull's beak onto the bonnet of the Audi and lies still. The gull circles. The dog looks at Richard, unsure of the nature of this game.

With an effort Richard rises to his feet. His head swims. When he looks up again the gull is about to settle on the Audi. He shouts and waves his arms but he is too far away and the gull eyes him without alarm. The dog seems not to understand. Richard sets off towards the car, feels himself swaying, is afraid he'll faint and drops to his knees. The dog dances and fusses round him, eager to play.

From down on the ground he can see the gull on the car's bonnet. It ducks its head and comes up with a beak full of fluff, which it leaves to the wind, and then ducks again and again and again. Richard crosses the car park on all fours, the dog beside him. Richard is panting. The old skin of his left hand has torn on the concrete and blood is seeping from a knuckle. He uses the car's front bumper to get himself back on his feet. The gull takes off.

The pigeon flutters one wing but its guts are exposed and ruptured. Richard covers the bird's head with his good hand, holds the body down with the other and stretches the neck till he feels the click of the separating spine. The bird gives a single, weak convulsion. Richard lays his head on the car's bonnet, feels the warmth in the painted metal.

Strength of a sort returns slowly. He looks at the dead bird in his hands. Blood has matted the breast. He strokes the tip of his index finger down the ruff of feathers at the bird's neck, parti-coloured and soft and light as thistledown. He stretches a wing, admires the fan of feathers, the articulation of thin and hollow bone. The bead of the eye, the one good claw, so wiry, scaly and reptilian, the other bunched and useless like his own. He takes the corpse to the parapet and lets it drop. With one wing half-extended it scythes in the air and swings away from the building's flank and then back, as the circling gull swoops lazily down towards it.

A ute is parked down there. Two men in blue overalls are studying a plan or something on the bonnet. The pigeon lands some thirty feet away. Neither man appears to notice. They fold the plan and fetch some gear from the back of the ute and walk towards the entrance of the hotel.

At the other end of High Street the guided party is standing in a semi-circle behind the central figure. Richard washes his hands with a bottle of Kiwi Spring. The PA system in the park plays ‘Stairway to Heaven', ebbing across the city on the breeze.