King Rich by Joe Bennett Read Free Book Online Page B

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, gettingcorpulent, 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.
    â€˜Can I help you?’
    A priest or father or whatever – he was wearing a clerical collar – had stopped behind her.
    â€˜Thank you, I’m fine. Though I don’t suppose by any chance… no, silly me. Of course not.’
    â€˜Your father?’
    â€˜Yes.’ She pointed him out in the seventh form and the priest took off his glasses and leant in. ‘What hair they had then,’ hesaid. ‘He looks such a whole-hearted young man. I hope he… I mean I hope it isn’t the quake that brought you here.’
    â€˜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?
    â€˜Twenty years ago.’
    â€˜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, theprovincial 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