Free King Rich by Joe Bennett Page B

turned again to the sparse file of notes. The address Jess had given her was central, on Park Terrace. A flat by the look of it. She’d go there tomorrow.
    Nineteen ninety-two. She’d have been in her last year at intermediate. They’d often played netball at Hagley Park. From the courts you could see the hospital. Could it have been that one Saturday morning while she and her friends squealed with excitement under the empty winter trees, and their breath misted their air and they pulled on those stiff cotton bibs and their thighs below their skirts were pink with the cold, her father had been lying in a hospital bed almost within earshot?
    She pictured him sitting up in bed, drawing a picture perhaps for a nurse. But the face she’d given him, she knew, was not the face of the forty-year-old he would have been, nor even the face she’d known him by, the details of which had become vague. It was the face of the boy in the school photo. Though she did remember precisely the way he held a pencil, the deft economy with which he drew, the picture taking shape in just a few lines. He held the pencil in his left hand.
    At the kitchen table Annie opened Jess’s laptop. The Hugh might make a difference. ‘Richard Hugh Jones, Christchurch’ she typed and in less than a second the hundred thousand-strong list of hits had taken shape on her screen, already ranked in decreasing order of accuracy. To Annie it was still a form of magic, impossibly brilliant and yet also sinister, threatening. How was it possible to escape it?
    But her father seemed to have done so. She found nothing new, nothing she hadn’t seen and dismissed before. Where was he? For some reason she felt more strongly now that he was out there. But if Google couldn’t find him, what chance did she have?
    The cat erupted from the basket and was out through its door before Annie felt the shake. Then it was as if the house had been gripped from below by some impossible force. It threatened everything. Annie knew she should go to a doorway at least but she found herself pinned, gripping the table edge, wide eyed, paralysed by forces that dwarfed her and the house and the city. The fear was existential. The quake lasted perhaps a dozen seconds, a rolling subterranean thunder, a growl of the gods. Annie wasn’t sure that she breathed during it.
    â€˜Welcome to Christchurch,’ Jess shouted down the hall. ‘You all right, sweet pea?’
    â€˜Shit,’ said Annie. ‘Was that pretty big?’
    â€˜Four point five or so. We’re all seismometers now. Night night.’

Chapter 11
    The pigeon is on the sill already, waiting. As Richard and the dog approach it edges back towards the open air, lurching on its club foot. But it does not take off. From a yard away Richard tosses crumbs. The bird goes straight to them, pecking without concern. Richard can hear the noise of its beak tap-tapping on whatever shiny synthetic stuff the sill is made of. Boffins somewhere trained a pigeon to sit inside a missile and steer it by pecking on a video screen. If the missile was ever fired, the pigeon died.
    At a word from Richard, the dog settles on the floor. Moving slowly, Richard seats himself at the window and slides his claw towards the bird. Its head cocks to eye the crumbs in the palm and it lurches forward and pecks and Richard feels the blunt stab of the beak against his damaged flesh. Slowly he raises the right hand and the bird looks up but does not withdraw. Richard lays a trail of crumbs up the inside of his left forearm, like a powder fuse. The pigeon doesn’t hesitate,stepping onto the palm so that Richard feels its weight for the first time. That weight is less than the bird’s apparent plumpness would suggest. A million feathers clothe the pigeon’s neck, overlapping with impossible precision, adjusting without effort to every movement, insulating, independently intricate, collectively astonishing, much