Bleak City (17 page)

‘They’re older, they’re classed as vulnerable,’ Rebecca said. ‘It doesn’t work like that. We’re not in the same queue.’

Across the room, Sean was silently jerking his head at Alice. Charlotte was already headed out of the room towards the kitchen and so Alice swallowed down the last of her coffee and used her empty cup as an excuse to leave the room.

Sean and Charlotte were on the balcony, which looked out over the estuary past the rock formation that used to be known as Shag Rock. This pillar stood on the southern shore of the estuary mouth, a sentinel over ten metres high marking the end of the estuary suburb of Redcliffs and the start of Sumner beach and the wide Pacific Ocean. In the February quake, Shag Rock had been shaken apart and was now a third the height. It was starting to be known as Shag Pile.

‘That argument’s been going on for months,’ Sean said. ‘Ask the family for help, Mum says. No, Dad says, we’re doing things the right way.’

‘Do you think if you know someone who can help you and you ask them to help that that’s the wrong thing to do?’ Alice said.

‘No,’ Sean said, while Charlotte’s answer was an emphatic ‘Yes.’

‘The difference is that we agree to disagree and leave it at that,’ Sean said, pointing back and forth between him and Charlotte. ‘The world’s not fair, and if you know someone who can help you, why shouldn’t you take advantage of that?’

‘Because it’s taking advantage of who you know and it affects the less fortunate,’ Charlotte said. But she laughed, without intention of prolonging the discussion. ‘We should go for a walk.’

Sean looked at Alice questioningly. ’Whaddya think? Go get ice cream?’

‘I’m game,’ Alice shrugged.

They told the others, who, it seemed, barely noticed. Andrew was too busy trying to play referee between his cousin and her husband.

The neighbourhood was mostly dark, the bulk of the hills looming up behind them and they walked down the hill past all the empty, broken houses. They walked along the road in the direction of what had been the suburb’s supermarket, careful to dodge dips and kinks in the footpath. The wind was cool and had the scent of rain in it. Alice shivered, wishing she had brought a thicker jacket.

The supermarket had been demolished and the site was bare, but fenced off, nothing happening. They stood at the fence and peered in. ‘There’s nothing to do around here,’ Charlotte said. ‘Except go get ice cream and walk around looking at ruins.’

‘At least the quake left the dairy standing,’ Sean said. ‘Best ice cream cones in the city.’

‘Given the state of the city, that’s not too difficult,’ Alice said.

They ordered their ice creams and started walking back towards the house. There were few cars on the road, it was the wrong time of day to be going anywhere. Post-quake people went to work, then went home. There just weren’t enough reasons to go out any more.

‘We should do something,’ Sean said.

‘We are doing something,’ Charlotte said, ‘we’re walking and eating ice creams while trying not to kill ourselves on the footpaths.’

‘I mean one night, a Friday or something. Get a video, maybe something old, so none of us have seen it.’

‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Alice said. She was going to Timaru that weekend to see Ben, but that didn’t happen every week, they could get together the following Friday. Sean and Charlotte asked if they could watch something at her house and she said yes without thinking to ask Lindsay and Kevin first. She felt sorry for Sean and Charlotte. Clearly their parents argued a lot, and knowing that made Alice grateful that in spite of the stress of living in a broken city, Lindsay and Kevin were still getting along, even if there were more sharp words than there had been before the February quake.

What Alice had been thinking about the most since that evening with Andrew’s family was how commercial properties in the city had been allowed to stay in a dangerous state. There was a documentary from 1996 someone had uploaded to YouTube soon after the February quake. It talked about how much damage liquefaction would cause in Christchurch in a quake and how dangerous some of its old buildings were. It surprised Alice that the risk had been known about so long ago, and yet nothing had been done. Building owners hadn’t been made to upgrade the buildings, the City Council couldn’t force them to do so. But if they wanted to make changes to modernise the building and make it more appealing to tenants, they had to upgrade them so they were less quake prone, which could be very expensive. That meant owners tended to leave their buildings as they were. People had died because some of those buildings weren’t upgraded, because people had put their own financial welfare above the risk their buildings posed to people’s lives. She hoped lessons would be learned, that out of the Royal Commission would come changes to regulations that meant people couldn’t just leave their buildings in a potentially dangerous state. She didn’t want to live in a place where profits were valued over human life.

Charlotte had fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop. As soon as she jolted awake, she realised she was too far, so she got off at the next stop. She was all the way around in Sumner and although, on the face of it, Sumner wasn’t too far from home, the wind was picking up and it was dark. She thought about waiting for the bus going back the other way, but that wind was cold, the best way to keep warm was to start moving.

The way home was along the road between Sumner and Redcliffs, where broken houses hung dangerously off the edges of a cliff that had collapsed. A long line of shipping containers had been set up to protect the road from rockfall, stacked two high, the gaps between showing rock and splintered pieces of houses. The shipping containers narrowed the road so there was barely room for cyclists and none for walkers. Charlotte had to pick her way along at the very top edge of the beach. It was slow going, lights from cars coming from the city shone in her eyes, meaning her vision never really adapted to the darkness. As nice as it was to not have to be at school until lunchtime each day, getting home well after dark and heating up her dinner and eating alone were wearing thin.

There had been a lot of liquefaction at her school, which was just outside of the city and near the Avon River. That was the February quake, and since school started up again in March, Charlotte and her classmates had been travelling to another school, all the way on the other side of the city. That was the case with a few of the city’s high schools, damaged schools were sharing sites with undamaged schools. The undamaged school’s students would attend from early in the morning until lunchtime, then the damaged school’s students had the campus until the early evening. Other schools had gone back to their own sites after a few months, but it seemed Charlotte’s wouldn’t be back on site until next year, which meant she had another three months of going all the way over to the other side of town. She was lucky to get home before half six each night. It was grossly unfair.

She texted her mother to say she had missed her stop and where she was in the hope that her mum would come and pick her up. Fat chance, though, her mum was so wrapped up in getting new offices set up and there would, no doubt, be something urgent and picking up Charlotte wouldn’t even cross her mind. Charlotte felt invisible, like she was just furniture in the background. Charlotte texted Sean as well. Maybe he would come and get her, maybe he was on his way home and picking her up was just a slight detour. They were getting along better lately. Still, if Sean was already warm at home, fat chance of him shifting himself to come out and get her.

It was Sean’s first year at university, and he had kept going, in spite of the interruption caused by the February quake. At first, students had their lectures in tents and sometimes in offices opened up to them by local businesses, but eventually a temporary village had been set up. Sean had thrown himself into his studies, determined not to be disadvantaged by the post-quake situation. He was more serious about everything, which, for some reason, meant he was less likely to pick on Charlotte. That was the only post-quake change Charlotte was pleased about. In every other respect she found it hard going on with life, travelling all the way across town to go to school, living in their strange, empty neighbourhood, driving past collapsed cliffs, seeing half-houses dangling from them, walking up the hill past twisted, empty houses. She had started reading
The Hunger Games
, but she was already living in a dystopian world, why would she want to escape into one in her reading?

A couple of weeks ago, Sean had been happy to take Charlotte to the mall when she wanted to spend the vouchers she had received for her birthday. They had met up with their cousin Alice and had lunch at the food court. Charlotte wasn’t the mall-going type, but there wasn’t anything else to do in Christchurch, so it was good to do something other than staying at home or walking around their shattered neighbourhood. Alice was more Sean’s age than Charlotte’s, there was something like five years between her and Charlotte, but the three of them got on well. They talked about what the city had been like, what they missed. Before the February quake, Charlotte was bussing into the city after school, then catching a connecting bus home. Often she would spend an hour or so wandering around the city, checking out the buildings and laneways. Sean wasn’t such a fan of the city, but he tolerated Alice’s nostalgia, which meant Charlotte could speak about her own. That wasn’t the case at home. Whenever she said something about missing the city, her parents would say something about how old and tired it had been, the quakes had done Christchurch a favour. That horrified Charlotte, because people had died, there was nothing favour-ful about what had happened in the city that day.

To Charlotte’s surprise, Sean texted back right away and said he would pick her up. Was something going on? A couple of minutes later, she recognised his car moving past when he tooted the horn at her. He had to go further on to turn around and she thought of backtracking to find a place where he could stop without annoying other drivers, but there wasn’t really anything, she was in the middle of the kilometre-long no-stopping stretch. But there was only one car behind him when he stopped and she quickly jumped in so they could get going.

Charlotte cranked up the heater, it was freezing outside. But it seemed the car had only been running a few minutes, so all that achieved was blowing cool air on her. She flicked it back down again. He had been home already, but had come out to pick her up.

‘What are you grinning about?’ Sean said, glancing over at her.

‘Nothing,’ Charlotte said and suppressed her smile.

It was supposed to snow, Sean told her, which was good and bad. Good because it meant Charlotte wouldn’t have to do the trip across town to school the next day. Bad because the house was cold, wind came in through the gaps in the walls and there had been leaks in the roof after the last snow. Also bad because her parents might stay at home for the day, and they would just end up arguing over when they could make some progress on their insurance claim, over how long they could stay in the house in the state it was in, over whether they should spend some of their own money to make it more liveable and, finally, over whether her mother should ask someone in her family to help them out. That always ended with her father saying no, they would sort it out themselves and it would only be a few more months, they would be seen by an assessor and then repairs could get underway.

Charlotte’s uncle Tony, her mother’s brother, was a builder and had picked up work for EQC as an assessor. They could ask him to push their claim along. Her mother’s uncle was also a builder and, she said, if her father didn’t want Tony doing anything about the house, they could ask Gerald and he would help them out the next time he was back in Christchurch. No, her father insisted, there were other people in greater need and they would wait their turn.

‘Do you really want our children growing up thinking this is normal?’ her mother would ask. Charlotte wondered why she didn’t notice that her children were pretty much grown up already.

‘Do you want our children growing up thinking they deserve better than other people?’ he would counter.

‘It’s not like that,’ her mother would reply.

‘Yes, it is,’ her father would say. ‘There’s too much of who-you-know going on in this town and we aren’t going to be part of it.’

They had been back together since soon after the September quake, and now they argued more than they ever had before. Charlotte wished they would separate again, and maybe the house would be quiet for a change, a peaceful quiet, not that stony quiet that fell between arguments. Mornings were great, her parents would go off to work, Sean would go off to uni, leaving Charlotte alone until ten-thirty, when she had to get on the bus for her long trek across town. But now she had the evening to get through, and it was unlikely to be peaceful.

‘You wanna go somewhere?’ she asked Sean. ‘Just for a drive around.’

He glanced at her and there was, she thought, pity in that glance. What was he thinking? ‘I have to study,’ he said. ‘Tutorial tomorrow.’

She said nothing.

‘Maybe we should get a video Friday night,’ Sean said. ‘See if Alice wants to come over.’

Charlotte shrugged. That was most of the week away. If her grandmother were home, she could ask to be dropped off there, but Nanny wasn’t living at home any more. Her house was damaged and she was moving around the South Island, staying with different members of the family. Charlotte had tried to teach Nanny how to text, but she was hopeless. For one thing, she powered her phone off when she wasn’t using it. Even on the day of the February quake when they had been having lunch in the city, Charlotte had to stop her from turning the phone off after sending a text message to different family members: Charlotte & I fine, will head home. They couldn’t hear back from people, Charlotte tried to explain, and know that they, too, were fine, unless they kept their phones on. Still, Nanny didn’t get it.

Their father was in the kitchen and pulled a plate from the oven as Sean and Charlotte came inside. Sean went straight back through to the lounge while Charlotte sat down at the dining table and started eating. There was a folder full of papers on the table, so tonight was going to be an insurance night. Her father sat down across from her.