King Rich (5 page)

The source of the foul smell proved to be the toilet off the hall. Annie gagged as she opened the door, took one glance and closed it again. Promising that she would get someone to see to it, she took Mrs Yeats out to the Portaloos on the street and showed her how to use them.

‘I wondered whose they were,' said Mrs Yeats. ‘I didn't like to, you know.'

How many more Mrs Yeats were there in the city, Annie wondered, as the bus to Hornby battled the broken roads, old people who had been discarded? Only in the wealthy Western world could such a thing happen. For the first time in the history of the species the old had become encumbrances. We neglected them, segregated them even in walled villages of their own kind with minders to look after them, benign concentration camps, leaving to the young the actual world beyond the walls.

* * *

‘Is the sewer working?'

‘No,' said Annie.

‘Then if you tell me the address we can see about getting a Portaloo delivered.'

Annie explained that Portaloos had already been delivered. Rather she was concerned for Mrs Yeats' general wellbeing, living on her own at that age in a damaged house and in an almost deserted street.

In which case, the woman replied sympathetically but firmly, it was not the council's business. Perhaps Annie could try the local medical centre.

Annie did. But because she was not a relative they would not tell her whether Mrs Yeats was on their books and nor did they make house calls for the purpose of assessment. Had Annie tried the Red Cross?

Annie hadn't and for the moment she didn't. But within a few calls she found a commercial cleaner, a Mr Butts, who was willing to accompany Annie to River Road to address the fouled toilet and generally render the place more habitable.

‘Mr Mahoney?'

‘Vince,' he said, smiling and holding out his hand. Despite herself Annie had been half expecting a seventeen-year-old, a youth with an explosion of snowy hair. The man in front of her was sixty years old. He had the scrawniness of one who has kept himself fit but whom the years have still bitten. He was as bald as a cue ball.

She'd first rung a retired teacher who hadn't remembered her father and had seemed to resent the intrusion. In the background she'd heard the sound of a television quiz show. Then she got a wrong number brought about by a coincidence of names and initials. But her third call had found a former pupil who unhesitatingly recalled her father. ‘Rich,' he said, ‘we knew him as Rich.'

Rich had been good at art and running, but he and Rich had never been close. ‘His great mate,' said the man, ‘was a boy with blond hair – Mahoney, that was it, Vince Mahoney.'
And Annie could hear the smile in the man's voice, more than a smile, an ache at the memory of boyhood and energy and hope. ‘Yep, Vince is the boy you want to talk to. He and Rich were pretty well inseparable.' Annie had loved that use of boy. Vince, like all of them, would be sixty-ish.

And when she'd rung him he too had sounded delighted to have been blown out of the flatness of late middle age and into the gold-bathed memories of youth. ‘Rich's daughter, eh?' he'd exclaimed. ‘Well I never.' The note of surprise was unmistakable.

Vince Mahoney had proved eager to meet, indeed had invited her to his home on Hackthorne Road. ‘Just watch out for the road cones,' he'd said.

He'd not been wrong. The cones along Cashmere Road around Princess Margaret Hospital were a forest of dwarf orange, reducing early-evening traffic to little more than walking pace. Liquefaction had spurted from the Heathcote's banks but Annie saw none of the wholesale inundation there'd been in the east.

On Hackthorne Road the damage to buildings seemed arbitrary. One stone-built 1920s house, which any real estate agent would have dubbed a residence, was an obvious write-off, its front porch sagging down the hill, its walls rent and ruined, its roof line skewed. But two doors up stood Vince's weatherboard villa, trim, recently painted and apparently undamaged.

‘I know, I know,' he said when Annie commented. ‘I've been embarrassingly lucky. I lost a bit of crockery and the books fell
off the shelves and that was about it. I've made a donation to the mayoral fund as a sort of half thank you, half apology and half guilt offering. If you can have three halves, that is,' and he grinned and looked straight at her. ‘I'm so pleased to meet you, Annie.'

The books were back on the shelves now and everything was impeccably in order, with a sense that that was how it always had been.

‘It'll be nice to talk of something other than the quake,' he said. ‘Here's something for you to look at while I fetch the drinks.' And he handed her a picture frame with what looked like a scrap of golden paper pinned behind the glass, and a cellophane booklet of perhaps a dozen photographs. Most were black and white, the rest in colour that had faded to tints. All were of her father. Had Vince put it together that day specially for her?

Here he was by a stream in flared jeans, on the apex of a tin roof, sitting back against the brick chimney and clutching a beer, pillion on a motor scooter, smiling with that inner radiance, his arm draped over the shoulders of Vince on what looked to be South Brighton beach, both of them wearing old-fashioned swimming togs, like cut-off shorts. And Annie felt an ache in her chest that wasn't far from pain.

She had no photos of her father. Not one. Mum had got rid of them, burned them, down the end of the garden at River Road. She'd hauled out everything associated with her father and flung it on the fire, smoke and little smuts of ash rising over
the fruit trees and Annie had just stood and watched from her bedroom window, holding the curtain to the side of her face. The curtain was pink with a paisley pattern.

‘I can get copies made, if you like.' Vince was standing before her holding out a glass of wine.

‘Oh, would you? Oh, yes, please.'

‘What do you make of the thumbnail sketch?'

‘The what?'

Vince gestured at the picture frame. Behind the glass was what turned out to be, on closer inspection, the front of a Benson & Hedges cigarette packet, and in the space below the brand insignia Annie could make out a few lines or indentations in the gold surface.

She shrugged.

‘It's a cat. We were in the pub, the Zetland, because they didn't ask too many questions, and someone wondered why a thumbnail sketch was called a thumbnail sketch so Rich drew that with his thumbnail. I kept it in my wallet for years.'

Annie looked at him.

‘They were the best days of my life, Annie. Everything since has been dull in comparison.'

All Annie knew was what Vince had told her on the phone. How they'd been friends at school but then Vince had gone south to varsity while her father had gone up to Auckland and that had been that, all over.

‘Believe me, Annie, you don't want to know what a blameless career in stainless steel looks like. I had a marriage
of sorts, two nice kids, one boy, one girl, of course, brought up in Sydney and Singapore and anywhere else that stainless steel took me, before going back to Auckland and an amicable divorce that neither of us regrets.'

‘And the kids?'

Vince shrugged. ‘I wasn't much of a dad, Annie. I tried, and I'd have died for either of them, and I was a good provider, but it was their mother that raised them really. One's in Auckland, the other Brisbane. They've both got kids. I visit. But I'm not much of a granddad either, as it happens. No one minds when I leave. No, really, I'm not kidding.'

‘And your ex?'

‘Remarried. Happily. Fifteen years we did together and apart from the kids it's left nothing with me. Not as much as one night in the Zetland in, what, 1968, or thereabouts. But hey, no complaints.'

Vince had taken early retirement. He did ‘a bit of consulting', sat on a couple of boards, but didn't really need to work. ‘I'm sixty, Annie. When I was a kid, sixty was the end. You put your slippers on as soon as you could after that and became an officially old person and waited to die. But I feel fine. I've kept myself fit, I go running, I even play squash. I just don't know why. What's the point? I mean there's a good chance I've got thirty years in front of me and at the moment I don't want them. I've led my life, for better or worse, had my kids, made my money and now there's nothing for me to do. I'll level with you, Annie. I welcomed the quake. It was something
happening. And I'm only sorry in a way that it didn't do more damage to my life, didn't force me out of the path of least resistance. But at least it put me in touch with you.' And he smiled, rather boyishly.

‘Do you want to help me find my dad?' said Annie.

‘Try and stop me,' he said.

* * *

The known facts were listed down the left-hand side of the sheet of A3. They weren't many. Year of birth, mother's Christian name (Meg) but not father's, name and dates of secondary schooling (but not primary). The rest was all speculation or a possible plan of campaign, apart from an oil smear from a piece of battered cod and a sickle-shaped stain from the foot of a wine glass.

‘Do you think we'll find him?' asked Annie. ‘We know so little.'

‘I don't know.'

‘That wasn't what I asked,' said Annie. They had drunk a bottle and a half of Rook's Lane shiraz. ‘Do you think we'll find him?'

‘Yes,' said Vince. ‘I do. It's hard to hide these days. And besides, in business I've always found that if you believe you're going to succeed, you tend to succeed. If you don't believe, you won't. And more to the point, thank you, Annie.'

‘For what?'

‘I'm looking forward to tomorrow.' And he opened his arms to offer her a hug. He smelt of fish and chips and eau de Cologne and shiraz.

‘I slept with your dad once,' he said.

‘Chernobyl,' says Richard, laying the crumb trail on the window sill. ‘I saw it on the telly. It's the new Eden. Bears and birds and flowers and everything flourishing but no people. The cleansed earth. What do you think, Friday? The city heals itself. You'll have to fight for your living. No more sponging off the master species. No more sucking up to
Homo sapiens
. You'll have to go out and be a dog again. Join a pack, maybe. Hunt. How does that sound?'

And it clearly sounds good to the dog because his tail sweeps the floor, and Richard tosses him a chunk of mini-bar biscuit, which he leaps and captures in midair.

‘Now, you know the drill, Friday.' Richard gestures downwards with his palm and the dog lies slowly, folding itself to the floor, then lowering its head onto its paws but not quite relaxing, retaining a little of the weight of the head with the muscles of the neck, ready to stand, ready to respond.

‘Stay.'

Windows on this side of the building have popped in the aftershocks, burst from their frames by the twisting and the strain, going off like gunshots, followed some seconds later by a distant tinkle of shards reaching the street, shards to slice open a skull. Richard settles himself at an empty window frame, his backside propped on an easy chair, his left hand laid upwards on the sill like a crab's claw, reddish-blue and hardened, a little mound of crumbs in the palm. The right hand waits, charged with more crumbs to toss and tempt with.

It is early days in Eden. The air is sweet and warm and the world is quiet but the only birds to come are the urban invaders, the birds that came with the people who built the city. The starlings are gangsters in flashy suits, strutting like hit men on the far edge of the sill, their sword-beaks jabbing at each other in perpetual squabble. But they are cowards, greater cowards than the house sparrows, who for all their being just dowdy balls of fluff and feather, hop past the gangster brutes and are rewarded for their courage with fat-laden crumbs, crumbs to fire a sparrow's tiny high-revving heart. But they remain shy of the claw. They hop to within inches of it, then pause, and Richard holds his breath and wills himself not to cough, but they sense somehow that the hand is animate, that it constitutes a threat. None has yet pecked from it.

In twenty minutes the starlings have cleaned up the more distant scatter, the sparrows the near stuff. Twice Richard has tossed out replenishments with his good hand and the birds have withdrawn, hopped back with instantaneous, precisely
synchronised alarm. Richard becomes immersed in the birds, the chance-driven miracles, miniature feathered dinosaurs with hollowed bones, Darwin's brilliant, pointless children.

A city pigeon lands heavily on the sill, disturbing the warring starlings. Greyish brown, it has one good pink foot and one that's clenched to a sort of upturned fist, so the bird lurches as it crosses the sill towards the crumbs. It pauses only once to cock its head and eye Richard's hand as if for final confirmation, then unhesitatingly it takes the last two drunken steps and stoops to peck. And through the hard, scarred and puckered skin Richard feels the insistent little hammer of the beak, and the muscles of his face turn up the corners of his lips and lift his grey and whiskered cheeks and crease the flesh around his eyes and the dog who you'd have said was sleeping senses something changing and flicks up its eyes to see the man is smiling and it thumps its tail and the birds take off. As one.

Richard sighs as the tension of concentration slides from him and throws the last of his crumbs through the window frame. ‘Good boy, come here,' though the dog has anticipated the call and has his head already against Richard's thigh and is being patted in the luxuriant fur of its neck.

‘A cigarette, Friday, a glass of wine, and then tea time, I think.' He jams a Rothmans into the V of his claw, lights it and draws on it cautiously, wary of the paroxysms of coughing that twice have left him curled on the floor too weak to move for minutes. Once Friday pawed at his shoulder as he lay weak and incapable, pawed with such vigour that he tore a hole in the
shiny parchment of Richard's skin and drew blood that soaked into the thick pile of his dressing gown.

The wine seeps goodness into him. He can feel easing of something in tissues far down in his body and his mind. It is not the first drink of the day but it is the first to tip him over the base level of need into the zone of pleasure. The knack is to stay there as long as possible, for the dog as much as for himself.

‘Fetch the lead,' says Richard and the dog lollops across the room and drags the dressing gown belt from the handle of the door. ‘Good boy.' Richard stubs out the cigarette on the window sill, takes the belt from the dog and with a little gasp heaves himself onto his feet. And down the corridor they go, man and dog.

Crossing the foyer troubles Richard. The plate-glass frontage gives onto the street. He is sure that a cordon has been set around the inner city, but he has seen police and soldiers patrolling within it and men and women in hard hats and bright vests. There would need to be only one of these on Cashel as he and Friday crossed the foyer and that would be that. They'd be found. They'd be chivvied from the place like vermin. So he keeps the dog on the lead and to the extent that he is capable of scuttling he scuttles across the foyer, and through the bistro restaurant and into the dark kitchen beyond. Where, for the first time, Richard is aware of a background hint of a smell, a suspicion of sweet rot.

Unleashed, the dog goes straight to the stainless steel double doors of the wardrobe-like fridge. Richard opens them, inhales and closes them immediately. ‘Shit.'

The dog sits. Richard notices and three seconds later he laughs, laughs loud and the dog's tail wags and, still laughing, Richard pats the dog's head but his laugh becomes a cough and he bends, still coughing, and lays his head against the cool of the stainless steel workbench. ‘Jesus,' he mutters as the cough finally subsides and a wave of weakness runs through his arms and back and legs, so strong a wave that he almost falls to the ground. ‘Jesus.'

He stays there until the dog's head pushes against his thigh and he reaches down to stroke it.

‘Oh Friday,' he says, ‘you'll be the death of me,' and he smiles to himself, but is careful not to succumb again to laughter. While he waits for a little strength to return, he runs the dog's ear between finger and thumb as if assessing its silkiness.

He scours through drawers till he finds a long carving fork and he clamps a tea towel over his mouth and nose and opens the fridge and with the fork he flicks out one, two, three, four steaks. Even as he prongs them he can sense that they have become slimy and the sound of them slapping onto the floor makes his gorge rise. But the dog is undismayed, ingesting them with greedy gulps, its back arched with the urgency of the effort.

Richard goes to the back door with a cigarette, sucking at the cauterising, throat-catching, smell-masking bitterness of smoke. Late afternoon and beneath a scatter of birdsong he can hear, he thinks, the distant sound of traffic. The dog licks the last traces of flesh from the floor, then looks up at Richard,
searching for a hint of further food or play, gathers nothing, is unconcerned and goes rootling around the yard in search of smells of interloper dogs or cats or anything that breathes. The evening is thick with summer insects. Swallows dance and weave between and around and over the deserted buildings, silhouetted like distant fighter planes, carving the air to commit a thousand insect murders.

Dust and soil and crud have collected in a corner of the yard to one side of the door. And already it is tinged with green, with the all but unstoppable will to life. Richard props the door open with a stool and searches for dinner. There's the cupboard of eggs, and the bags of onions. The spuds have begun to sprout. The pans and plates he's used for previous meals still lie on the benches. Such mess he's made in so few days.

He pulls a fresh frying pan from the wall hook and fills it with an inch of olive oil and sets it on the gas. He snaps the fleshy sproutings off two potatoes and cuts them into chip-sized pieces. As he works he becomes aware of the smell of rotting meat and he ties a tea towel round his mouth and nose like an old-style bank robber, but he soon finds himself defying the cloth, breathing in as deep as he can in a bid still to detect the putrefaction, as if the senses resist deception, are aware that their job is to read the world for him. He dumps the tea towel and lights another cigarette.

From the lobby bar he fetches a bottle of Johnnie Walker, pours a slug, takes a swig and feels the earthy burn of it, the old fake fire. The oil is close to boiling. He drops the chipped
potatoes in. The oil soars and bubbles, threatening to overflow the rim. Richard goes outside and smokes until the chips are done, then drains the pan over a vast commercial sieve and showers the chips with salt, and drenches them with white wine vinegar because he can't find malt and tips them onto a platter and goes back outside. Dusk is coming. A few late swallows still wheel in silhouette against a pink and orange sky. He blows on a chip and bites cautiously into it. And he's a boy on Brighton beach.