King Rich Read Free Page A

not get out of the chair.
    When he wakes the sun has dropped away to the side of the building. His throat is familiarly dry. The tap in the bar delivers a still-cold stream of water with which Richard sluices his throat and face.
    In a dark corridor on the floor above half the doors stand open. By some instinct of caution Richard shuns the rooms nearest the stairs, goes as far as 107, pushes open the door. A wheeled suitcase with a grey ribbon tied to its handle lies open on the strapped rack. Underwear folded, socks, a laptop and a duty free carton of Rothmans. The bed is made. In the wardrobe two suits, four shirts. In the mini-bar, abundance. Baby bottles of Johnnie Walker, Stolichnaya, mixers, a full-size bottle of cabernet sauvignon. In the knee-high fridge Heineken, Steinlager, pinot gris.
    Richard wrestles the pillows from the bedspread, stacks them, places a Scotch and dry and a packet of peanuts on the bedside table and flops onto the mattress with a little gasp. He drains a third of the tumbler. He tears at the foil packet but it resists. He bites the corner and pain sears through a right front tooth. Sickened, he holds still while the pain wanes, studies the packet, finds an indentation in the foil, tears at it with his crabbed fingers and the foil tears meekly, neatly open and he tips nuts into his mouth, keeping them to the left side. How deft the mouth is, how fast to learn. The nuts grind down toa salty paste, which he rinses away with an anaesthetic swig of Scotch. Richard sighs with the ease of it, the softness of the bed, the blessing of the booze. How many rooms are there? He pictures the building from the outside, the tallest in the city. He watched it being built. No need to compute. There are rooms for the rest of his life.
    The Scotch, a frisbee-sized biscuit and half the cab sav later, the edges of the world softened, Richard heaves himself to the bathroom. As he pisses – a hesitant start, a brief jet, a pause, a dribble, another pause that he knows to be a delusory conclusion – he sways slightly and braces his bad hand against the wall above the cistern, his head against his bicep. He smells the ripeness of his coat. No eight-year-old girl, however lost or stricken with fear, would bury her face in that. On the shelf, shampoo and gels in little bottles and a stack of white towels. A wash bag in patterned leather, a razor protruding. A toothbrush.
    Turned to maximum, the shower soon runs warm. Richard’s coat falls to the floor, a bottle in the pocket thudding. He sits on the end of the bed to remove boots and socks, sits up too fast and has to pause to allay the dizziness. He stands to let his trousers and underpants fall, hauls his shirt over his head, grabs the Stolichnaya from the mini-bar, turns towards the bathroom and sees himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stares at the body. It is years since he saw it all plain. The breasts like empty piping bags; the belly slumped in corrugations; the sparse grey hair of groin and thigh as nest to that shrunken withered dick, the vastly pendulous lop-sided balls. The scrawn of thigh and thefamiliar red and purple uselessness of his left hand dangling like Hook’s claw. ‘Jesus,’ says Richard and he raises the vodka to his lips. ‘Holy Mary Mother of God.’ He drinks.
    He stays in the shower till his fingertips shrivel, laving his flesh with random miniatures of gel and shampoo and conditioner. He towels himself with a deep white fluffiness, sets a gin on the bedside table and slides between the sheets. The luxury is a cocooning wonder. Richard could almost cry at its embrace. The things money can buy. Softness. Comfort. Ease of the flesh. He is asleep before he can even reach for the gin.

Chapter 4
    When she’d arrived in London Annie had fallen in love with the Tube. She loved the scheme of the Tube map, giving her a template for the city, a way of grasping its hugeness, its thirty-times-as-big-as-Christchurch-ness.