Bleak City (23 page)

When she called Ben and told him she was thinking of staying in Christchurch until autumn, he said she was being a child, and the mocking tone he used with her had been the same one he and his father used when talking to his mother. Alice felt small, and then she felt angry and ended the call. He texted to tell her she had just proven how immature she was, and she had resisted the urge to text back, to keep the argument going. Now that would be childish and immature. But after a string of nasty texts from Ben, she had fired one back, and then another until finally he had said he would drive up and fly out the same day. And that, it seemed, was that.

Ben was right, she could be childish, but she didn’t think she was being childish about wanting to be spoken to respectfully. And she didn’t think it was childish to worry about her family, to want to be there for them to help them cope.

When Lindsay and Alice had first moved in with Kevin, Alice had held on to her resentment like it was oxygen. The nights Kevin cooked, she would pick at her food, pushing it around her plate. She would refuse to be drawn into conversation, giving only one or two word answers, or none at all if she thought she could get away with it. If she needed help with her homework, she would accept Lindsay’s help but refuse Kevin’s, and each morning she would take a cup of coffee through to her mother, but never one for Kevin. Neither Lindsay nor Kevin had ever brought it up with her, and looking back she could see that the decision had been made to let her work through it herself.

Back then, she could hear Lindsay and Kevin through in the lounge talking each night, after Alice had gone to bed. She couldn’t hear what they were saying and at first she would get herself twisted up over the possibility they were talking about her. Then there was a night when Kevin had to work late and Alice couldn’t fall asleep. She was waiting for the sound of that conversation, Lindsay and Kevin catching up with each other over what had happened during the day. Her mother was happy, Alice realised, she had someone to share her concerns with, and the sound of the two of them talking had become a comfort to Alice, a sign that no matter what had happened in the day, there was something comfortable and stable at the end of it that she could drift off to sleep to.

Alice had reached the supermarket, which was strangely quiet. There were plenty of people shopping, but they seemed worn out, drained of life from the endless quakes, the interrupted nights, the constant effort of trying to live a normal life in a broken city. Alice wanted to get through and get out quickly, back into the hot day and under the blue sky.

Alice was packing the groceries into the car when she heard her name. It was Kevin, waving at her as he walked across the carpark towards her.

‘I thought that was your car,’ he said, taking a shopping bag from the trolley and placing it in the boot. He had finished work early so he could shop for something for Lindsay. He wanted to surprise her with something for the kitchen, it was time to start replacing some of the crockery lost in the earthquakes. ‘I could use your help. You’re much better at picking what she likes.’

Alice burst into tears and Kevin put his arms around her, apologising for suggesting it was time to replace all the things that had been broken.

‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘Ben and I broke up, I’m not going to Sydney.’ She sniffed back tears and wiped her face. ‘I’m stuck here.’

He said he was sorry and hugged her tight. ‘Anything frozen in there?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she mumbled.

‘McDonald’s?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘We can take some home,’ she said.

‘No, just you and me,’ Kevin said.

She choked back more tears as she locked up the car. ‘And then we’ll shop for Mum,’ she said as they walked across the carpark to the main entrance.

‘And then we’ll shop for Mum,’ Kevin said.

The house was empty. Jack had turned five over the summer, which meant he started school with all the other kids at the end of January, and Lindsay was finding the house a bit too empty in the afternoons. Sure Jack had been going to kindy four days a week for the last six months before the holidays started, but the combination of the full-on kid time during the holidays and the empty house every day was making Lindsay tense. Lindsay found herself waiting, waiting and listening for the next quake.

The quakes before Christmas had come after months of relative quiet and had made Lindsay want to leave Christchurch all over again. Until that point, she had become used to being there, had accepted that they wouldn’t leave the city any time soon, but then those quakes hit, one right after another, and she wanted to leave and never come back.

They had gone down to Timaru for Christmas, which hadn’t been the plan, and it hadn’t gone well. It wasn’t Kevin’s brother and his family, they were always happy to have them and their girls loved spending time with Olivia and Jack. It was that Lindsay hadn’t really thought when she packed and they kept needing stuff she had forgotten. Toothbrushes, enough underwear for the kids, socks for Kevin, a hairbrush, birth control pills, the Christmas presents. By Boxing Day, Kevin, Lindsay and the kids were cranky and ready to go back to Christchurch. They packed up what little Lindsay had remembered to take with them and went home.

Alice’s time with Ben hadn’t gone well and Alice and Ben had broken up, whereas just a few weeks before they had been planning to move to Sydney together. Lindsay wasn’t wild about the Sydney idea, she wasn’t really sure Ben was the right kind of guy for Alice, but at least Sydney didn’t have damaged buildings and regular earthquakes. Her separation anxiety would have been offset by knowing Alice was no longer in danger of being killed by some bit of building falling on her.

To make matters worse, Alice had signed up with a temping agency to get office work. She was hardly at home during the day any more, and Lindsay couldn’t just pop down to the café to have a coffee with her (and make sure she was okay). With this new job, Lindsay didn’t know where Alice was at any given time because her jobs took her all over the city. Not into the city, of course, that was still off limits, but if there was another big quake, Lindsay wouldn’t know where Alice was. She was used to this with Kevin, finally, but now she had to adjust all over again with Alice. Lindsay had suggested to both of them that they use one of those tracking apps that tell you where someone’s phone is. Alice had refused outright, walking out of the room in disgust saying the only thing that could possibly be worse was wearing a tracking collar and that she wasn’t a kakapo or a takahe that needed to be babysat. Kevin’s refusal had been more diplomatic, a kiss on the forehead and a promise to always let her know where he was working.

So it was just Lindsay, home alone with her housework, Kevin’s bookwork and her fears, wondering if everyone was okay and, then, when the house might be fixed.

Following the debacle of the not-assessment where the tradies had refused to come back in the house last June, EQC had sent someone out for a proper assessment. They had concluded that the house had foundation damage that meant it was likely over the $100,000 mark. They had confirmation a few months later that they would be handed over to their insurance company and then there was a phone call from the bank asking Kevin and Lindsay what they should do with the money. There were two payments, one for each quake, and having those sitting against their mortgage made their monthly repayments much more manageable and reduced the stress of Kevin not having the work that had been expected as the rebuild got properly underway. But it didn’t quite eliminate the stress of living in a broken house, wondering if it was becoming too normal for the kids.

There was also the problem of their ‘technical category’. When the land zoning announcements had first been made in 2011, their land was green, which was fine, they would be able to repair their house, unlike the poor people stuck in the residential red zone, who were being bought out by the Government at what many saw as less than their properties were worth. There were also orange and white zoned properties then. Orange was flat land and white was the hills. Further investigations were required before a decision could be made one way or the other, red or green.

Green zone properties were fine and so repairs could proceed, but there was one complicating factor. The green zone had been subdivided into three technical categories that were about toughening foundation standards. It was only a problem, really, if you had foundation damage, which was most problematic on TC3 land. Lindsay and Kevin were on TC3 land, which meant they needed a geotechnical investigation before their foundation repairs could proceed.

They had soon received a letter from their insurance company and someone had come to check that the house was indeed damaged. That had been two weeks ago, early February. The guy who visited was there less than fifteen minutes. Lindsay showed him the cracks inside the house and where the foundation was crumbling. And that was it, he didn’t go under the house or into the roof space. When she thought about it later on, she realised the insurance company hadn’t made a specific appointment and the ‘assessor’ hadn’t shown her any identification. Had he been casing the house? There had been stories in the news about fake assessors, people ripping off claimants, wearing orange high visibility vests to look official. She didn’t want to say anything to Kevin, she felt stupid about not asking for the guy’s credentials, but as the rest of the week passed and then the next without hearing from the insurance company, Lindsay was feeling paranoid. Every noise the house made might be someone trying to break in. Or the sound of the imminent collapse of the foundations? But she only really considered that last possibility when she hadn’t had enough sleep.

She could relax now, on the assessment front at least, because that morning a letter had finally arrived from the insurance company saying the next step would be a full assessment of the foundations. But it was going to be a long process, the letter said, as there were so many claims.

Next week was the first anniversary of the February quake. Lindsay wasn’t sure what she would do. Did she want to go to the memorial service planned in the city? Maybe watch it on TV? Or did she want to pretend it was just like any other day? Fat chance of that last option. She couldn’t think of a single moment in the last year when she had actually forgotten about the February quake. It was all around them: the house was munted, the roads were wrecked, there were houses in varying degrees of muntedness all around them. She couldn’t walk the kids to school without carrying out her own uninformed assessments of the status of the houses she passed, wondering how the people were doing, whether they were able to live in their houses or whether their accommodation allowance had run out, meaning they were possibly back living in their houses even if it probably wasn’t a good idea to do so.

She didn’t think she would ever forget the February quake, ever even stop thinking about that day. She had been working at the dining table, doing some invoicing for Kevin, with the stereo going in the lounge. Unlike all the earlier quakes, she hadn’t had time to process the sound of the approaching quake before the shaking began. The stereo cut out as the power died and then there was just the up-and-down of the quake, the noise and her fear. She could remember feeling the panic at not being able to stand up to get under the table because the force of gravity kept pushing her back into the chair, then the fear of thinking the concrete tile roof was going to fall in on her as she sat in front of the laptop watching everything in the kitchen being tossed up and falling down. When the shaking slowed and the quake passed, there was the panic of wondering if Kevin and the children were all right, where they were, knowing Olivia and Jack would be terrified and wanting to rush to them as quickly as possible. But Alice, she had no idea where Alice was, at the university or in the city? She had lunch with Andrew every second Tuesday, was this Tuesday one of them? Was it Tuesday? Yes, it was.

No, she decided, she had no desire to relive that day by going to some memorial, she relived it often enough just going about her daily business. The names of the dead would be read out at the memorial, and Lindsay didn’t want to hear about the people who had died, the number was too great, the grief associated with each name too intense. Even listening at home in the privacy of her own living room would be too much.

Lately, Alice had been telling her about the Royal Commission. Alice had been following newspaper stories and news reports, not just on the Royal Commission but on all the coroner’s inquests that had been conducted last year. Mostly Lindsay stayed away from the news, there were just too many other things to be done. And she didn’t like the idea of a witchhunt, it had been a terrible earthquake, stronger than anyone had expected, of course no buildings could withstand that kind of shaking. People like to find someone to blame, she told Alice, it helps them deal with the grief. Alice said she understood that, but that shouldn’t mean that there weren’t any failings, that there weren’t some deaths that could have been prevented. It had been reported that the CTV building had not been up to code and that the police were getting advice on whether there should be a criminal prosecution. One hundred and fifteen people had died in the CTV building.

One building in which three men had died had been a church damaged in the September 2010 quake, then again in the Boxing Day quakes. The men were part of a team working in the church to get the organ out so the building could be stabilised before a decision was made on its fate. An engineer had proposed propping to make the building safe to work in, another engineer thought it would be safe to work in without the propping. A lawyer representing the families wondered if it was necessary to put people’s lives at risk to recover an organ. These deaths bothered Alice because about the same time as the Royal Commission hearing, there was a building that had been added to CERA’s ever-growing demolition list, a community museum. Some people were upset that no effort had been made to recover some of the exhibits, because they represented the region’s history, its heritage. She spat out the word as though it was poisonous. ‘Heritage.’