Bleak City (24 page)

‘As far as the February quake is concerned, I get it,’ Alice said. They were at the dining table having cups of tea one night after getting Olivia and Jack off to bed. ‘There was a plan to go into that building, keep the men inside safe. No one expected an aftershock to actually be worse than the seven point one. But now? Why on earth would anyone think it was worth sending people into a dangerous building to recover things? No one should be asked to take that risk. Would the people who want those things saved be willing to go in? Or send their sons or their husbands in?’

‘Alice,’ Lindsay said, ‘I think you need to stop following all these inquiries.’

‘No, Mum,’ Alice said. ‘Everyone needs to follow them, everyone needs to know, because all those people died and some of them didn’t have to.’

Lindsay knew that was true, but she didn’t like the idea of Alice spending so much time trying to get her head around what had happened. She started to cry. Alice got up from the table and walked around it to put her arms around Lindsay.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, I didn’t mean to upset you, I won’t talk about it any more.’

Lindsay wiped her eyes. ‘No, it’s okay. I know it’s wrong, that some of those people, maybe a lot of them, didn’t have to die. But we can’t change the fact that they’re gone.’

Alice sat back down across from Lindsay. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But people shouldn’t forget. If people forget, then they start making the same mistakes again, things like thinking it’s okay to send a crew of guys into a damaged building to do work on it when it’s maybe safest to just tear it down. This whole risk assessment business, check this and then this and this and if your calculations say the risk is low, then it’s probably okay doing something. But is any risk low enough? If there’s the remotest chance of the bad thing happening, then the risk is too high. When you’re talking about someone’s life.’

Lindsay nodded. ‘I see your point,’ she said. ‘But you can’t fix the world. You can’t think about everything that goes wrong in the world and, I don’t know, stay sane. You have to stop thinking about these things.’

‘I know that,’ Alice said. ‘But I don’t think I should stop thinking about these things quickly. They happened here, right here.’ She was tapping the dining table with her finger. ‘We shouldn’t stop thinking about them. They happened to people like us, Mum, people who went to work and thought they would be going home. It’s not fair that I just go on with my life.’

Lindsay nodded. She kept to herself the fact that she disagreed. There was a difference between being aware of something and being burdened by it. She was afraid that Alice was too burdened by what had happened in the city and that it was hindering her ability to get on with her life.

In the end, she let it go. Alice was twenty now, still young, still working out for herself how the world worked. And Lindsay did trust her to work it out, she was, mostly, a sensible kid, and Lindsay wanted to treat her like an adult and show that she trusted her to form her own opinions.

In the mornings, though, when everyone had gone to work or school and Lindsay was back in the house by herself, she did wonder. Was she trying enough to help Alice through what she was feeling? Or was she lying to herself, saying she was letting Alice work it out for herself because the longer she spent doing that, the longer she would stay at home?

That was Lindsay’s big fear, not that there was going to be another big quake and that someone she loved would die, but that Alice would open her eyes and look at the city around her in the light of her own future and decide to leave. Lindsay wasn’t yet ready to lose her baby.

The big news wasn’t that a fantastically high number of insurance claims had been settled, that a bunch of buildings had been rebuilt or that the city’s roads would all be fixed up by the end of the year. No, the big news was the Marmite shortage. The factory that made all of the country’s Marmite had been damaged by the quakes and had shut down for repairs. The manufacturer had tried replicating the recipe outside of Christchurch, but it hadn’t worked out and now supplies were running out.

Panic buying ensued and Marmite was auctioned on TradeMe for ridiculous amounts of money. Ben had messaged Alice asking her to buy up as much as she could and send it over to him. Back in January when he had left for Sydney, she had gone out to the airport to say goodbye. They had made up, to a degree, said they were sorry about the things they had said to each other and that they would stay friends, keep in touch. He texted her for the first week or so, but now the only contact between the two of them was him posting photos on Instagram, which was no sort of contact at all because he was posting those to everyone who was following him. Alice waited a few minutes and messaged him back that the supermarkets had all run out, then unfollowed him on Instagram.

Alice was fine going without Marmite, she preferred the more bitter Vegemite. But Jack was a die-hard Marmite fan, he had Marmite on toast for breakfast at least a couple of times a week and he was forever asking Alice to make him little Marmite sandwiches for lunch. When Alice made Olivia and Jack sandwiches, she cut them into different shapes using cookie cutters.

‘Stop spoiling them,’ Lindsay would say. ‘They need to get used to the idea that bread comes with crusts.’

But Alice kept making them sandwich shapes. She knew she wouldn’t be there forever, that one day she would move out of home and begin her independent life once again, as she had done at the start of 2010.

When it first became known that Marmite was running short, Lindsay had tried to swap in Vegemite, but Jack had noticed and refused to eat it. Lindsay had then asked family members for their supplies and added them to her own one full jar and one half-used jar, tucking them away in the pantry, behind the tins of tomatoes and the three-bean salad that never got used. Alice had tried to get her to toss the three-bean salad out after the first quake.

‘It’s been there since before Jack was born,’ she had argued. ‘Maybe even before Olivia. Toss it.’ Alice tried to remember if the bean salad had been around for longer. Possibly. Lindsay had a half-empty Vicks vapo-rub from 1991. It was older than Alice.

Now, eighteen months later as she pushed the tins apart looking for a new jar of jam, the tin of bean salad was still there, with a dent in it from the February quake. Wasn’t there something about not eating tins that had been dented? She would google it later.

‘Leave the Marmite for the kids,’ Lindsay said. ‘We might have to make it last for a while.’

‘You tell me not to spoil them,’ Alice said, ‘and here you are hiding away this black gold. It’s your precious.’

‘One spread to rule them all,’ Lindsay said, doing a Gollum voice that made her start coughing. Alice patted her back to help her stop.

Another thing that made March different was that Alice had picked up a full-time job. Woo-hoo! No more temping. It was okay for a couple of months, but Alice had been getting tired of having a day off and then suddenly not having a day off because someone’s receptionist had called in sick and they needed a substitute. She was doing office work for one of the companies managing claims and rebuild work for an insurance company. It wasn’t exciting, stimulating work, but it was regular, nine to five. It kept her busy and away from following the CTV hearings too closely.

The hearings found that the building didn’t comply with the Building Code when it was built because its load-bearing columns didn’t have enough reinforcing. Yet it had gotten past the City Council’s consenting department. At some point, someone identified a flaw in the design and work was done to make the building stronger, although given what happened in the February quake, that work wasn’t enough to save the building and all those lives. The saddest thing, Alice thought, was that quite a few people working in the building were uncomfortable about the building. But because they had to work, they kept going into that building, five days every week. If the quake had happened at the weekend, as the September quake had, so many people would still be alive.

Alice’s grandparents, Lindsay’s parents, were out of their house while it was being repaired. Their accommodation allowance was covering what they considered the extortionate amount of rent each week. They were right. The place they were in was about the same age as the one Alice had been flatting in before the first earthquake, less than two years ago. In fact, Alice’s flat had an extra bedroom and, on that basis, qualified as a better house. But Neil and Heather were paying a full $200 more a week than Alice and her flatmates had paid. It had taken them six weeks to find it, going to see places and finding out they had been snatched up by someone who had turned up a few minutes earlier. It was crazy, the fierceness of the competition. At one place they went to, there were two other couples bidding on the flat, putting the rent up by $20 a week until the price was $100 higher than what had been advertised. Alice had told Gerald, her other grandfather, how much trouble they were having finding a place and he asked around. Someone he knew had a place whose tenants were a month away from moving out, and so Neil and Heather ended up getting that place before it was advertised.

Every now and then Alice thought about leaving home and going flatting again, but rents that high put her off. Lindsay had told her she could stay as long as she liked and things were good at home, but Alice couldn’t stay forever. She was an adult now, and moving back home had happened because an earthquake wrecked her flat, not because she was incapable of being away from her family. And she worried about leaving it too long, that Olivia and Jack would become too used to having her there, she would be too used to seeing them so often, that it would be difficult moving away, even if it was to a place nearby. She decided she would find a flat when Lindsay and Kevin moved out of the house for repairs, whenever that might be. Foundation guidelines were being written for houses like theirs and would be published in April. They couldn’t expect any progress until then, at the earliest, and realistically 2013 probably wasn’t a bad guess. In the meantime, Alice saved whatever she could so she would be able to get a reasonable place and some decent furniture.

Everything about living in Christchurch was weird, it wasn’t just the reaction to the Marmite shortage. Each weekday morning, Alice drove west over the rough roads littered with orange cones marking roadworks in various states of completion. Once she was past Hagley Park and driving up the overbridge onto Blenheim Road, it was like crossing into a different world, one where the roads were relatively smooth, compared to the east, and where buildings weren’t falling apart all over the place. Before reaching the overbridge, there were regular gaps where buildings had disappeared or were in the process of disappearing, but not on the western side of town, where it was rare to see something being torn down.

Then there were the ongoing arguments around the rebuild. It was normal in a natural disaster, Alice had read, for things to not go smoothly. A region that had been affected by a natural disaster went through stages. The first anniversary of the quake a month ago had told the story of the heroic phase, where everyone pitched in to help people out. And Alice definitely remembered the honeymoon phase, being so glad to be alive when she woke up each morning that it was easy to look past how tired she felt, to drag herself out of bed and keep going on with what passed for normal life in a city that was still being shaken on an almost-daily basis. They were well into the disillusionment phase now, where people were worn out and snarky with the effort of keeping going for so long. That was manifesting itself in how people were feeling about those running the rebuild.

At the end of 2011, the City Council’s chief executive had been given a pay rise that was higher than what Alice thought she might make each year by the time she was thirty, some $68,000. Given the city was facing an expensive rebuild and the rumours that there wasn’t going to be enough insurance to cover repairs to council properties, people were angry about such a substantial pay rise. People protested outside the council’s offices twice, asking for the chief executive and the mayor to resign. A few days later, the Minister for Earthquake Recovery referred to the Christchurch mayor as a clown, which seemed unbelievably childish to Alice, it was something Olivia and Jack would do. These people were responsible for getting the city back on its feet and, therefore, for Alice’s future, should she decide to stay in Christchurch. Instead of working past differences and getting on with the job, they were all behaving like, well, clowns.

There were days when Alice wanted nothing more than to leave Christchurch. When it became too much, she would stop ingesting news for a few days, just focus on doing her job, spending time with her family and catching up with the few friends left in Christchurch.

One Friday night, Alice and Charlotte decided to take advantage of the good weather while it lasted and go for a walk instead of spending the evening watching videos. Sean had spent most Friday nights with them in the last few months, but since university started a month earlier, he had university friends to do things with. Fair enough, Alice thought, but she knew Charlotte was hurt. Over the summer, she had told Alice she was enjoying getting to know her brother, there were four years between them and until the February quakes had changed everything about their lives, she had always felt left behind, the annoying little sister it wasn’t cool to hang around with. Charlotte said the girls at school were too superficial, always talking about boys and clothes and squealing in alarm at the tiniest of aftershocks. Their idea of fun, she said, was going to the mall, hanging out trying to out-normal each other by mocking anyone who looked different.

They had decided to stop in and see Alice’s great-grandparents, the Bennetts, and then walk around the residential red zone. Alice had seen the damage to the houses around the Avon River east of the city, the pumps on the streets that stood in for the broken sewerage network in the months after the February quake, but she hadn’t been through the red zone properly for months. The Bennetts, Heather’s parents, lived a couple of streets away from the start of the red zone. Their house hadn’t yet been assessed, but it didn’t seem to be too badly damaged and they were still living in it, looking after their fruit trees, vegetable garden and chickens. Alice and Charlotte had dropped in and had a cup of tea, and had a shopping bag of fresh fruit and vegetables foisted on them, along with a carton of eggs.