King Rich by Joe Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜Cheers, Jess,’ she said, ‘and thank you.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Jess, if you wanted to find someone, how would you start?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜And failing that?’
    â€˜Google?’
    â€˜What about medical records?’
    â€˜Medical records are private.’
    â€˜Oh, I wouldn’t want to read them. I’d just want to know if a record existed in Christchurch, or anywhere else.’
    â€˜Still private. And no, I’m not going to put my…’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I love you, Jess,’ said Annie.

Chapter 7
    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