Bleak City (22 page)

‘Swap ya,’ Charlotte said to Alice only to be growled at by her father.

The younger children could be heard from behind the house, doing who knew what. Alice decided to finish the wine before she ventured out to see what was going on.

‘When’s dinner?’ Sean said.

‘He had a pie an hour ago,’ Alice said. ‘And another before we left. And chips.’

There was no talk of the day’s quakes, which was easy before the children went to bed, but it led to some odd silences afterwards. It seemed no one in Christchurch knew what to talk about apart from the quakes any more, except for insurance, and that was also quickly ruled an off-limits topic. Sean broke out a Monopoly Deal deck, but couldn’t persuade the adults to play, so it was just he, Alice and Charlotte, trying to be quiet so the children didn’t get woken up.

Alice was worn out when she went to bed, in a room she was sharing with Charlotte and Mattie. Poor Sean was sharing with Alice’s brothers and although that was peaceful enough once the boys had fallen asleep, it sentenced Sean to an early morning. Every morning.

Alice woke early the next morning and noticed Charlotte was already gone. Alice managed to dress without waking Mattie and sneaked out of the house for a run along the road. It was cool outside and the sky was still pink from the rising sun. The sky was cloudless, promising a sunny, warm day. Alice walked, then picked up her pace to a jog, continuing up the road, listening to the bellbirds calling from the bush lining each side of the road. It was so peaceful, the only noises natural ones, no dust in the air, no heavy traffic, no listening for the sound of a quake approaching from the distance.

She ran along the road to the next bay and walked down to feel the temperature of the water. It was cold, but not icy, it would be great for swimming as the day heated up. She thought about staying down at this little beach for a while, but she wanted to get back and help out with breakfast. She started back, running once again. As she came near the turnoff to the house, she saw Charlotte coming off the track that went up to a waterfall. She was wearing the clothes she had been wearing yesterday, black jeans and a t-shirt. Alice picked up her pace to catch up with her. Charlotte turned as she heard Alice running up behind her, and Alice saw that her face was red, she was sweating heavily.

‘Did you run up there?’ Alice said, impressed.

Charlotte nodded. ‘And back down.’

‘How far is it?’

‘About ten minutes, maybe.’

‘Wanna race?’

‘Not now,’ Charlotte said. ‘Need to eat.’ She took off towards the house, racing away from Alice. ‘But I’ll race you back to the house!’ she called back.

Alice did her best to catch up, but she had already pushed herself and when she slowed down and began to walk, she found herself shaking, but whether it was because of the exertion or the year she had been through she couldn’t be sure.

Part II: Broken City

There is a temple in ruin stands,

Fashion’d by long-forgotten hands:

Two or three columns, and many a stone,

Marble and granite, with grass o’ergrown!

— Lord Byron, Siege of Corinth

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.

—Honore de Balzac

Alice was stopped at the traffic lights at Eastgate, waiting to right turn into Linwood Avenue. In the car in front of her, a couple was smoking, exchanging a single cigarette. The man was in the driver’s seat, would take a puff and hand it to the woman, who took her own puff and handed it back. Back and forth, back and forth, there was a rhythm and unity to the motion that spoke of familiarity. The green arrow came on and the woman held on to the cigarette as they right-turned. Alice followed their car around the corner, then into the turnoff to the mall.

She and Ben had argued the night before, well as much as you can argue in a series of text messages. But it was just a rehashing of the arguments they’d had in person during her last couple of days in Timaru. Now, after last night’s argument, instead of staying with her and her family for a few days before leaving for Sydney, he was going to come up to Christchurch and fly out the same day.

The mall’s two-storey carpark had been demolished soon after the quake and the space behind the mall was open to the wide blue sky. It was a huge improvement on the dull, crowded understorey of the carpark with its too-tight parking spaces and narrow aisles that she’d found tricky to back out of if there was a long vehicle opposite her. Of course that was a couple of years ago, when she was a relatively new driver, but the old carpark was gone now so she wouldn’t have the chance to test her skills, to see if she had improved. She told herself she was being silly, you couldn’t grieve for an opportunity missed to test your carparking skills, that was being over-the-top as far as the whole missing-old-Christchurch thing went. But she did miss driving up onto the top storey and looking out over the trees of Linwood towards the hills and the estuary. Today the sight would be amazing, the sky clear and blue, stretching out into the Pacific Ocean, not a cloud in sight.

The couple who had been in front of her at the lights were walking across the carpark to the mall, swapping back and forth what must now be the tiny end of the cigarette. Alice hated cigarette smoke, the smell of it made her think of closed, stale rooms and stained walls. Her grandfather Neil’s mother had been a lifelong smoker and after she died, Lindsay had bought her house. That was when Alice was seven and when she and Lindsay moved in, they had cleaned it from top to bottom. The wallpaper in the lounge they had thought was a golden brown had turned out to be something else, only discovered when Lindsay tried to scrub a mark away. They scrubbed the whole wall and then the whole room back to its original colour, which was a nearly-white that they much preferred to the golden brown. The room seemed brighter for their effort, the house more theirs. Lindsay then hired a carpet cleaning machine, which sucked up murky water and, the second time around, less murky water. That would have to do, Lindsay decided at that point, there was only so much you could get out of old carpet. She would save for renovations, take up the carpets and polish the floors if they turned out to be native timbers, the house was the right age for it. They painted the walls, but they never got around to doing the floors.

It wasn’t a great house, but it was what Lindsay could afford at the time. They had been living with Neil and Heather for nearly two years, Lindsay saving up money working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office while Heather looked after Alice outside school hours. Alice had loved living with her grandparents, but, looking back, she could see how hard it had been for the adults. There were times now when Alice thought Lindsay was being too hard on Olivia and Jack, and she had to stop herself from criticising Lindsay’s parenting of them. She wasn’t the mother, she had to keep her views to herself. Instead, she made a point of giving Olivia and Jack a cuddle when they needed one, of being a good big sister, not another mother.

When Lindsay and Kevin decided to live together, it was his house that Lindsay and Alice moved into. Alice resented that, leaving the old one, it had been hers and Lindsay’s project and at the time it felt like Lindsay was abandoning their project for something more interesting. In the old house, Alice had her bedroom exactly the way she wanted it, Lindsay had let her pick the wall colour, a pale purple that matched the pink and purple flowers of her duvet cover. She was ten when they left that house, and it felt like a death, like she was leaving her happy childhood behind.

In Kevin’s house it was different, all of Lindsay’s and Alice’s furniture had to fit in with Kevin’s tastes, which meant that Alice’s opinions took a back seat. She felt left out, alone, and it had taken a long time for her to stop feeling that way around Kevin.

She felt that way now, alone and irrelevant, watching the smoking couple walking into the mall. Her destination was the supermarket whereas theirs was the main doors to the mall, so she veered off, making a point of looking away from their cosy familiarity.

During her time in Timaru after Christmas, she and Ben had talked about going to Sydney. After the December quake, she had been dead keen to leave. As the days passed, though, her certainty had faded and she had started to think about the things she would miss. Ben wanted to go right away, by the end of January, but she wanted to give notice at her job and say goodbye to people, not just rush away as though she was abandoning them to whatever the faults in the city were going to do.

Christchurch was a place full of fear and anxiety in the weeks after the December quakes. There were aftershocks, which was expected after a magnitude six quake, but after the deaths in February and over a year of regular earthquakes, the population was worn out and on edge. Then at the start of the year there had been a rumour going around that scientists knew there was a big quake coming, another one off the coast, further east than the ones just before Christmas. The rumours said this quake would generate a tsunami that some people feared would wipe out northern Christchurch and the satellite towns north of the city, where many of the city’s residents had moved to get away from the quakes. To some, it seemed like the quakes were pursuing them, getting closer, and that there was nowhere they could go to escape them. In some ways that was true, there were few places in New Zealand that weren’t quake prone, but fear and statistical risk were not things that mixed well together. That was what the scientists were meeting about, analysing the statistical risk and revising the aftershock forecast for Christchurch, they didn’t have any secret knowledge of a coming apocalypse.

Although Lindsay didn’t buy into the fear (so she said), she was worn out, and after coming home from Timaru, Alice started to feel like she couldn’t leave, not yet. Maybe at the end of summer or in the autumn, she said to Ben. He couldn’t wait that long, he said, there was nothing for him in Christchurch, no job prospects as long as the city centre was in lockdown, as long as there were still quakes and uncertainty about the future of business in the city. It was a conversation they had been having for months, and every time he said there was nothing for him in Christchurch, she resented it, because she was here, and he said he loved her, but it seemed he didn’t rate her highly enough to keep giving Christchurch a go. He didn’t understand why she wanted to stay here, to keep working in a café making coffees, he thought her mother would be fine without her. Alice couldn’t let go, he said, she was too comfortable living at home, being a child.

Had Alice and Ben ever had that comfortable familiarity of the couple sharing the smoke? For a few months there, Alice thought they did, or were starting to. She would go down to Timaru to see him for a few days or he would come up to Christchurch. But that had been a few days here and there, and it was always just her and him, an escape from the stress of trying to cope with life in Christchurch. That feeling of normalness and ease had made her start to think about where they were going. Such a cliché, where they were going, and it annoyed her to start thinking along those lines, she wasn’t even twenty yet. But it seemed like he was thinking along those lines, too, because he had started talking about going to Sydney together. There would be good jobs there, he said, they could get a flat or find someone looking for flatmates. She had been thinking about it more and more, and the quakes of the 23rd of December helped her make up her mind, another five followed by a six. It seemed like the whole quake sequence was never going to end and now every five would be followed by the anxious wait for the trailing six.

Although they had flatted together for half a year in 2010, Ben hadn’t been around much until after he split up with his girlfriend. Then there was a month or so when he was spending too much time drinking with his boozy mates, which had been where he was at when the first quake came along. His near miss falling asleep on the sofa the night of the first quake had seemed to shake him out of that, and in the months after, they had kept in touch, getting to know each other better. She had thought she was seeing the real Ben for the first time and she’d realised she liked him.

Before the doublet of quakes, Alice had planned to spend a couple of days in Christchurch with Lindsay and Kevin before going down to Timaru to spend some time with Ben. But Lindsay and Kevin left Christchurch for Timaru on the day of the new quakes, so there was no point going home. Alice stayed on the West Coast with Andrew and his family for an extra couple of days, then drove straight to Timaru, bypassing Christchurch altogether. It felt good not going back, and as she drove the road from Springfield to Timaru, she enjoyed the beauty of the mountains and the rivers and felt alive again in a way she hadn’t since the quakes began. Yes, it would probably be good for her to leave Christchurch.

In the end, she missed Lindsay and Kevin, because they went back to Christchurch before Alice arrived in Timaru. Alice was annoyed that Lindsay hadn’t thought to let her know they were going back home and wondered if it was some subtle dig at Alice for spending Christmas with her
other
family. Although Lindsay never said anything against Andrew and his family, there was this feeling Alice picked up, of something Lindsay disapproved of. Lindsay hadn’t just broken up with Andrew, she had broken up with his entire family, and Alice had missed out on knowing her grandparents and her half-siblings. Surely Lindsay understood that Alice wanted to make up for lost time?

She tried to put her complicated family situation behind her and concentrate on spending time with Ben and getting to know his family better. Ben’s father worked long hours and Alice had never spent much time around him, but over the holidays, he had time off and it was the first time she had spent more than a couple of hours around him. As the days wore on, Alice started to see her own family in a different, better light as she saw how Ben and his father treated his mother. They expected his mother to wait on them, and would snipe at her when she did something they perceived as wrong, finding fault with the food, critiquing the way she stacked the dishes as she cleared the table or yelling through to the kitchen where she and Alice were filling the dishwasher, complaining that they wanted to start watching the video they had hired for the evening. Why couldn’t they come through and help? Alice had spent time around Ben’s mother before and Ben wasn’t like that when his father wasn’t around, he helped with the dishes and with the cooking. When the whole family was together, though, there was an undercurrent, something nasty, and Alice wanted to go home to escape the cool silences that seemed to roll in like fog. But she hung on until the end so it didn’t look like she was trying to get away from Ben. Though she had been desperate to stay away from Christchurch after the last series of quakes, she was then relieved to be driving up the straight stretch of highway towards Christchurch and home. Aftershocks and her irritation with her own mother were preferable to whatever was going on in that family.