King Rich (4 page)

‘But you didn't.'

‘No.'

Jess turned to look at her.

‘Oh, and he said that he didn't love me, but that by having a dozen kids and twenty years of raising them we'd find we loved each other by the end, or something.'

‘And if you don't?'

Annie shrugged. ‘The possibility didn't seem to arise. Though I suppose by then it's too late to matter much.'

‘So what are you going to do about him?'

‘I said I'd tell him when I got back. He's in a bit of a rush to start breeding.'

‘So should you be if you're going to.'

‘How's
your
love life?' asked Annie. ‘Is that Irish guy still on the scene? Or has some wise doctor finally beaten down the door to your heart and is even now preparing to whisk you off to Fendalton to frighten the expensive wives?'

‘Neither of the above,' said Jess. ‘But work's good for a change. Bizarre injuries, terror, power cuts, aftershocks… It's full on, the sort of thing you went into nursing for. Or at least I did.'

‘By the way,' said Annie looking out the window at the neat houses lining the road, ‘where is it? The quake. I don't see it.'

‘No, sweet pea, you won't, not out here. In these parts it was just a bloody good shake, a bit of crockery down perhaps, the odd crack in the plaster. A couple of miles that way, however,' and she jerked her thumb in the direction of the city centre, ‘well, you've seen the pictures. And as for where we were brought up, well, the word everyone's using is munted. It's about right. Avonside's munted. Still, we'll cope. Never say die and all that. Though quite what the hell you've come back for I haven't a bloody clue.'

‘Yes, well, here I am, anyway.'

Later, sitting outside with a bottle of shiraz, Annie felt the exhaustion of the journey stealing over her, but the late-evening warmth was a blessing, and the rich Aussie wine, and with the weatherboard house behind her and the view framed by the wrought-iron corners of the verandah, Annie felt comfortingly where she belonged.

‘Cheers, Jess,' she said, ‘and thank you.'

‘Thank me once more and I'll turf you out,' said Jess. They chinked glasses. The last of the sun was streaming shadows across the lawn.

‘Jess, if you wanted to find someone, how would you start?'

‘I see,' said Jess. She looked across at Annie with eyebrows raised. ‘Well now, have you tried finding a phone number? Old-fashioned, but you never know.'

‘And failing that?'

‘Google?'

‘What about medical records?'

‘Medical records are private.'

‘Oh, I wouldn't want to read them. I'd just want to know if a record existed in Christchurch, or anywhere else.'

‘Still private. And no, I'm not going to put my…'

‘Of course not, Jess, of course not.'

They sat a while saying nothing. As Jess had said, you wouldn't have known, here in this Hornby garden, that there had been a quake. The evening air swam with insects. ‘How am I supposed to go looking,' said Jess, ‘if I haven't got a name?'

‘I love you, Jess,' said Annie.

She ran her finger along the names. Stopped dead when she found his. Fifth from the right in the back row. She raised her gaze and counted and there he was aged seventeen. Annie gasped, felt her heart lurch. She could see the man in the boy. That grin, as if forged on his face by some inner warmth, the crinkle of the upper lip, those eyes. She would have recognised him without the name beneath. And what hair he had. What hair they all had. The back row looked like a Beatles convention. Great fingers-thick luxuriance, the abundance of youth as it chose to present itself in the seventh form in 1969. And it had been a windy day. High above his head a magpie had been captured forever on the point of turning in the air, looking tattered and unaerodynamic. She traced his features through the glass with her fingertip, caressed his cheek.

The prefects sat at either end of the row of staff, but he was up the back with the unanointed. His head was framed in the blue of a summer she'd never seen, a decade before her birth.

She made a note of the names of the boys to either side of him, then went back a year, testing herself by running her finger along the second-to-back row and found him easily. Less hair in 1968 because less senior presumably, less brave, but with the same grin and that crinkled lip. The boy to his right was different but on his left stood unmistakably the same character, with an explosion of blond frizz and a face the shape of a shield. V.P. Mahoney.

The school had been Jess's idea. It had survived without great damage, would reopen within days. But for the first time in its existence it would be accommodating girls, the sister school having been all but written off. They would retain, however, a virtuous Catholic separation. The boys would have the place in the mornings, the girls the afternoons.

Everyone had so much to do to prepare for this that the secretary had simply given Annie the freedom of the place. The school photos lined a single daunting corridor of history, all screwed to the wall in dark wood frames and quite undamaged. Every photo was different yet effectively identical: a seated row of priests and masters, small boys cross-legged in shorts at their feet, and then behind them four rows of boys, rising towards the sky as they grew older. You could trace almost all of them as Annie was tracing her father from little boy to young man until pop, off they went into the world. And you could trace the priests and teachers too, as year by year they moved towards the centre of the picture and the headmaster's throne, shedding hair as they went, gaining furrows in cheek and forehead, getting
corpulent, hunched, shorter, until, after up to forty photos, pop, they too, rather more ominously, disappeared. And in every one of those forty photographs they were surrounded by an unchanging sea of youth. And if you looked along the row you could watch a pine tree growing to a different time scale, the only living thing to feature in every photograph, going in a century of snapshots from slender sapling to massive, unmissable entity, its lower boughs protruding ever deeper from the right.

Of the four most junior teachers in 1968, the outliers on the staff row, little more than seventh formers themselves, two stayed into the twenty-first century, both of them in clerical garb. Annie made a note of their names. The last had retired, bent, bald, fat and presumably single, in 2009. That corridor held the whole of his adult life.

She needed the names below to pick out her father in his first-year photograph, sitting quite close to the headmaster's brogues, and in the second year when he was near the end looking abnormally earnest. It was as though he came into being as himself only in the fifth form.

‘Can I help you?'

A priest or father or whatever – he was wearing a clerical collar – had stopped behind her.

‘Thank you, I'm fine. Though I don't suppose by any chance… no, silly me. Of course not.'

‘Your father?'

‘Yes.' She pointed him out in the seventh form and the priest took off his glasses and leant in. ‘What hair they had then,' he
said. ‘He looks such a whole-hearted young man. I hope he… I mean I hope it isn't the quake that brought you here.'

‘No, well, yes and no. I'm hoping to find someone who knows where he is.'

The priest looked at her for a moment, then said that it shouldn't be too hard. The old boy network was remarkable. When had she last seen him?

‘Twenty years ago.'

‘I see. I'm sorry. If I can help in any way,' and in her notebook he wrote his name and a phone number. Just that, no Father or Monsignor or whatever it was. ‘A lot of people seem to be trying to reconnect at the moment. Perhaps in the end we'll be grateful for all this in some way.'

Her way out took her to where the front quad backed onto the playing field. Here was the pine, now casting a massive afternoon shadow across a cricket pitch. By moving around Annie found more or less the spot where the panoramic camera had been placed every year and from there she estimated where her father would have stood on a chair in his final year photograph and she stood there herself and tried to imagine and failed.

* * *

The central city was cordoned off. The cordon contained almost every feature that people associated with the name Christchurch – the Victorian Gothic of the cathedral, the
provincial chambers, the Arts Centre, Christ's College, the various squares, the brutalist sixties town hall, the multiply-bridged, grass-banked, winding tameness of the Avon, all of it masked from view behind barricades and soldiers, accessible only to the privileged or the powerful. Through the temporary fencing Annie had caught remote views of tower blocks with shattered windows, a hotel on a lean, fallen facades. Already there were mutterings of discontent from those whose livelihoods remained within the cordon. The authorities, it was said, were becoming arrogant, high-handed. The state of emergency, the media attention, the hard hats and hi-vis vests had made them feel like men and women of action, the inner coterie, the makers of the big decisions, and they handed down those decisions to the mob with the disdain of royal decrees.

The north of the city around the school seemed little damaged, but the bus that took Annie east went from there into a different world, a world she'd seen on television but not grasped the scale of. Roads buckled. Houses broken. And limitless liquefaction, a heavy grey silt that had been squeezed from the land by the shaking. It dried on the edges to a gritty talcum powder that flew with slightest breeze and lodged in nose hairs and eyes and throat and in the whorls of the ear. But mostly it stayed wet and heavy, turning suburbs that had always struggled into sodden moonscapes. From the bus window Annie saw householders shovelling the stuff listlessly into barrows. She could sense the water-laden weight of every shovelful. They emptied the barrows onto heaps that had grown
into ramparts, lining the road like snow drifts that wouldn't melt.

Eventually the bus turned back towards the centre of town. How its suspension coped with Pages Road Annie wasn't sure. She got off on Stanmore and went north on foot towards the Avon. It was clear that weatherboard buildings had fared better than those built of block or brick. Brick, in particular, was hopeless, undone by its own rigidity. The mortar cracked, the bond was lost and down came whole murderous frontages. On the corner of Worcester Street a flat above a shop lay open to the world, pictures on the walls and a pair of green armchairs still aligned to a fat, old-fashioned television. Two rooms along stood a single bed, its brightly patterned duvet ruched and crumpled from the last careless waking now more than a week ago. It and other ruins were all fenced in by yet more free-standing fencing. How much of this had she already seen? Where had it been beforehand? Did every city have miles of it in store awaiting disasters? And a vast cache of traffic cones? There had to be thousands of cones on the streets of the city, a forest of witches' hats that had erupted almost overnight like some sudden orange fungus. Who organised all this? Who planned it? Or had the authorities merely reacted as everyone else had reacted to this sudden surprise? Because people did react. Immediately and instinctively they had dealt first with what was around them, then the circle had widened to family and basic needs, and then they had started to look wider still, at their streets and their suburbs, and they had begun the business
of cleaning up. And some had acted with enormous kindness. University students, most of whom lived in the relatively unscathed north and west, had formed a volunteer army of young strong limbs, touring the south and east with shovels and wheelbarrows in search of liquefaction to be shifted, drains to be cleared, gardens to be disinterred, any jobs that needed strength and youth and hope to put things right.

For a moment Annie didn't recognise the aftershock for what it was. Then she half heard, half felt the rumble underfoot. With no walls to magnify the sound and movement, and nothing overhead to fall or break, it did not feel threatening. There was give and bend in the natural world. But a woman on the other side of Stanmore stopped and pulled her little daughter to her and looked around like a deer on the plain that has sensed a predator. The woman's eyes met Annie's across the road and she smiled but the smile was stretched like wire.

The bridge over the Avon, and Annie leant against the iron parapet. Before her lay the view she'd seen on television in Turnpike Lane, the hundred or so yards of the world where much of her childhood had happened. There was nowhere she would ever know more intimately. River Road.

The river seemed wider and shallower, though she doubted that could be so. Ducks and Canada geese floated on the rippled surface. The big willows still stood, trailing twigs in the water like finger bones, but the grass bank had slumped in places and in others it had simply split, like torn skin. The road was humped and twisted, the footpath too, which now supported a
cluster of three portable toilets in orange and white. There was old Bateman's place, a stucco villa on a raised concrete pad that had all but split in two. Just beyond it, the house she'd grown up in. There was no one about. As she stepped down off the bridge ducks grumbled and slid into the water, and the Canada geese glided pointedly to the other bank.

She stood across the road from her childhood home. The two storeys of weatherboard had been recently painted but in roughly the same shade of cream. There was the bedroom window from which she'd looked down on the ducks one winter morning twenty-something years ago. The front garden was neater than it used to be, the front door now blue. She couldn't remember what colour it had been. She was surprised by how little emotion the place aroused. She would have liked to see the back garden, long and narrow, with a wall of espaliered fruit trees, but the only way in was down the side of the house and she didn't like to unhitch the fencing.

Annie sensed movement in a kitchen window of the neighbouring house. An old woman was filling a kettle at the sink. Annie thought, yes, she was sure, and she shouted and waved but the woman's stooped back had turned away to plug in the kettle. Across the road and through the little iron gate – still the same one with the latch she remembered, though much rusted now. Then she tapped on the kitchen window. The woman turned, her eyes widened by alarm.

‘Mrs Yeats, it's me, Annie, from next door. Remember me, Annie?'

The old woman was staring.

‘Annie,' mouthed Annie again, exaggerating the syllables, ‘next door. Can I come in?'

The alarm in the old woman's face subsided a little. A few moments later the door opened on a security chain.

‘Yes,' she said through the gap, ‘what is it? What do you want?'

‘Mrs Yeats, it's me, Annie, from next door, Raewyn's daughter, you remember, all those years ago.'

The old face looked worn with time and care, but the fear had waned.

‘Annie, you say,' and she fumbled with the chain. ‘Come in, Annie,' and the door opened. How tiny she had become, tiny and bent and frail.

There was a putrid smell in the hall and the living room was a wreck. Ornaments, books, pictures lay scattered. The television had fallen on its face. By the main window the floor sloped where the concrete beneath had split and subsided. Between floor and skirting board lawn was visible.

Only one chair looked to have been used. Surely there had been a Mr Yeats, a quietly cheerful man forever in the garden. Annie swept ceiling plaster from the sofa.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea, dear?' said Mrs Yeats. Her hair was pitifully thin, the scalp shining through. ‘What did you say your name was again?'

‘Let me make it, Mrs Yeats,' and Annie and she was on her feet before the old woman could protest. ‘And I'm Annie. We lived next door, years ago.'

‘Yes, dear,' said Mrs Yeats.

On the kitchen bench stood a box of Bell's tea bags, a sliced loaf and a butter dish. In the fridge a litre of milk, still within its use-by date, and half an onion that looked to have been peeled and saved before the quake. The pantry shelves had leapt on their brackets and the meagre provisions been thrown to the floor. It seemed from the smell that a bottle of vinegar had broken and a split bag of flour had caked everything in a ghostly volcanic ash.

‘So how are you coping?' said Annie as she poured the tea.

‘Oh, all right, dear. We've got the water and power back on now so everything's fine. No need to worry about me. There's others worse off.'

‘Has anyone been to see you?'

‘Like who, dear?'

Had there been children, grandchildren? Annie couldn't remember and didn't like to ask. Mrs Yeats seemed to divine her thoughts. ‘But don't you worry about me. I don't need much at my age. I'll get along just fine.'

It took Annie an hour or so to bring some order to the kitchen, despite Mrs Yeats' protestations. She shifted the pantry heap with brush and cloth, straightened the shelves on their brackets and placed on them the few cans and packets she managed to save. She cleaned the floor of the pantry and then of the kitchen as a whole with a mop and Handy Andy. How we all cling, thought Annie, to the brands we're brought up with, the familiar furniture of our lives.