King Rich by Joe Bennett

lovely. Dad wasn’t around. Dead or divorced, I didn’t know and never asked.
    â€˜We had these old long boards and if you got it right you rode like a king. This was the sixties, remember, all freedom and the Beach Boys and it felt like the dawn of the world. It was always going to come to an end, but that was part of the wonder of it. Come February he was going north to art school. And I was going the other way, to Otago.
    â€˜And there was this one particular afternoon and we were in the water and Rich caught a wave and stood and he was silhouetted against the sky, and I can see him now, so lean and handsome and I felt this sort of crushing in my chest. It was so sudden and so strong.’
    Vince paused. He had been looking out across the city as he spoke, but now he looked across at Annie.
    â€˜I’ve never told anyone this,’ he said.
    â€˜You know you don’t have to,’ said Annie.
    â€˜Oh, but I want to. I used to be ashamed of it, or at least scared of someone finding out. But that wore off and since then I’ve sort of hugged it to myself as a secret, something private and vivid and good. But telling Rich’s daughter feels like the right thing to do.’
    Annie looked at him. He seemed happy, this sixty-year-old man reliving memories from before she was born, happy.
    â€˜We ate fish and chips on the dunes that evening and our shadows stretched thirty, forty yards across the sand and dunked our heads in the sea. And then we went up to the Ozone – the landlord there would serve anyone – and we bought a bottle of port, Sailors’ Port it was, I can still see the label, and we wereheading back to the dunes through this line of macrocarpas, when I heard Rich call. When I turned he wasn’t there and he called again and I looked up and there he was in the tree, grinning. He reached down to haul me up and I can see and feel now how we gripped each other’s wrists. His wrist was thin but he had long, strong fingers and veins on his forearms. We climbed high into the tree, higher than I would have dared to go alone.
    â€˜From up there we looked out over the dunes and the sea to one side and Brighton on the other and the headlights of cars moving along Marine Parade. And we sat each in the crook of a branch with our backs against the trunk and we passed the port between us and drank from the bottle and I don’t remember that we said much. It was just magical up there, overlooking the world, and that brilliant sense of no one knowing we were up there.
    â€˜Rich lit a cigarette and when he struck the match his face lit from below like some Halloween lantern, only beautiful, and he saw me looking and he smiled and blew out a cloud of smoke. Pall Mall was the brand he smoked. For as long as I smoked, I smoked Pall Mall. I’m boring you.’
    â€˜No,’ said Annie, ‘you’re not boring me. The opposite in fact.’
    â€˜We finished the bottle and swung down out of the tree like gibbons, letting go of one branch without knowing where the next one lay below. It must have been midnight or so, I don’t know, but Brighton was silent and the moon was so bright itcast shadows. It felt like we owned the world. And through the dunes you could feel the thump of the waves.
    â€˜We crept into the house to avoid waking Rich’s mother. I’d stayed there a hundred times, sleeping on a mattress pulled out from under his bed. But that night when the door of the bedroom shut behind us, Rich spread his arms and smiled. Even then a part of me wanted to back out, a part of me was shouting no and he must have felt it in the muscles of my back and he just held me and eventually I relaxed and I ran my hands over his back and without saying anything we got undressed and into bed.’
    He looked up. Annie held his gaze but said nothing, not wanting to break the spell.
    â€˜When eventually Rich fell asleep he was lying across my arm, and I could