Bleak City (25 page)

‘Your greats are pretty cool,’ Charlotte said. ‘The only great I have is the old lady by the river.’ She stopped and thought for a moment. ‘The other river.’

They had left Alice’s car at the Bennetts’ house and were walking the couple of blocks to the red zone, which meant they were headed towards the river. It was the suburb’s proximity to the river that made the area so vulnerable to liquefaction. Over centuries, silt deposited by the Avon River built up, creating the soft, fine, waterlogged soils that liquefied during earthquakes. There were similar issues around the Heathcote River, the river that ran through the neighbourhood Alice lived in, but it didn’t seem to be as bad there, even though it had been closer to so many of the big quakes.

The houses in the part of the neighbourhood they were walking through were occupied and looked like they had some damage, although there weren’t the dramatic cracks and breakages of the houses in the red zone. But as they drew closer to the red zone, the roads became worse, more lumps and dips where silt had been forced upward and broken through the surface of the road and footpaths.

‘They’re certainly different from Marjorie,’ Alice said. Grandma and Grandad Bennett were warm, affectionate people, always calling their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren ‘Love’ or ‘Pet’. Marjorie never shortened someone’s name, it was always ‘Alice’, never ‘Ali’.

‘Is their house okay?’ Charlotte asked. ‘I saw some cracks, but it felt pretty even.’ People in Christchurch had become amateur house assessors. Alice had been in places that were clearly out of level, giving the feeling of walking downhill to go from one room to another, then uphill to go back the way you came. Charlotte was right, there was none of that in the Bennett house, whereas at home, in Lindsay and Kevin’s house, there was a subtle downhill tilt from west to east.

‘Seems to be,’ Alice said. ‘But they’re still waiting to be assessed. What did you think of Grandad?’

Charlotte thought a moment. ‘It was funny what he was saying about the dog going into the river after the ducks,’ she said. ‘A bit risky, given there’s sewage going into the river, I hope he washed her off properly.’

‘Did you see a dog?’

Charlotte stopped and looked at Alice. ‘No.’

‘The dog died a couple of months after the February quake, Grandad’s taken it really hard. He keeps talking about her like she’s still around though.’

‘So he was talking about something from last year? He seemed like he was talking about today,’ Charlotte said. ‘You think he’s losing it?’

‘I don’t know. We’ve been noticing a few little things like that,’ Alice said. ‘A few odd things he’s saying lately.’

They were at the river, walking along the crumpled road. The land was going to be cleared, but that hadn’t started yet. People who were living in the red zone had been made offers and they had been given a few months to make a decision, and then a few more to move out. There were few signs of life in the broken houses, although there were plenty of signs of break-ins and vandalism: broken windows, doors ajar, a few graffiti tags here and there.

‘Anyone would be feeling a bit out of sorts living so close to all this,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s just weird. Like a wasteland from a movie. Kind of creepy.’

They were walking past the entrance to a long driveway and Charlotte stopped. Alice turned back to look at her, to try to see what she had seen. ‘There’s someone living down there,’ Charlotte said. ‘She looked quite old, from what I could see of the back of her.’

‘Poor thing,’ Alice said. ‘She’s probably lived here for decades.’ Alice’s great-grandparents had lived in their house for over sixty years, it was where Heather had grown up. It would be difficult if they had to leave, even if it was only for a few months of repairs.

They started walking again. It was getting dark and they picked up their pace to loop back around to the car.

‘You know what’s really weird?’ Charlotte said.

‘What?’ Alice said. She had no idea what was going on in Charlotte’s head, they had seen nothing unusual in the last few minutes, just the ducks on the river and the broken roads and houses.

‘That there are people leaving here, saying goodbye to their lives here. Why aren’t we hearing more about it? Their stories. All I’ve heard about lately is the Marmite shortage. They’re talking about it like it’s the end of the world that we’re running out of a sandwich spread. But here it really is.’

She was right. People’s lives were being left behind. They could only take their furniture and their memories, everything else was left to the bulldozers. It really was the end of a world.

With over 100,000 damaged houses in the region, builders and other tradesmen were flocking to Christchurch to get their share of the huge volume of work that would be ramping up from 2012 onward. The organisation set up to manage EQC’s repairs was Fletcher EQR, and to work for EQR, tradesmen had to be accredited. The private insurers could see the value in having a similar setup, it was a way of ensuring repairs were done properly. These project management organisations were also looking for staff, and anyone who didn’t get work with EQC or EQR was being picked up by one of the private insurers’ PMOs.

In the months after the February quake, before Sylvia had decided she was okay about coming back to Christchurch, Gerald had tried to run his construction business from Sydney. It was too hard, the bureaucracy was byzantine. Actual building work was impossible to pick up, properties needed to be assessed first and engineers and assessors were as rare as hen’s teeth. A lot of business owners had to let workers go, and Gerald wasn’t happy about the idea of being one of them. So he decided to stay in Christchurch three weeks a month and live with his mother. He could work his contacts face-to-face to make sure there was enough work coming in to keep his staff on and pay the bills. What he ended up doing was demolition and make-safe work in the CBD red zone, managing teams going into buildings to strip out the fittings before demolition or, if the building could be saved, to do the work required to make it safe to work in.

Gerald and Sylvia had talked at length about whether they would go back to Christchurch. Their house was a write off, it had been assessed and they were pretty much all the way through the settlement process with their insurer. They had plenty of options, including staying in Sydney. At first, that was what Sylvia wanted. Her view was that most of the family had left Christchurch, there was no one to go back for. But it wasn’t long before various family members started heading back to the city to get their houses and businesses sorted and to resume their lives, lives that would one day get back to normal. She said that she finally realised that she and Gerald should be there to support them in whatever they ended up going through. As nice as it was spending time with Laurel and her husband, the truth was they worked all week and needed their weekends to themselves. Sylvia was starting to feeling like an intruder, always waiting for them when they arrived home, and if she went back to Christchurch, Gerald could really commit himself to the rebuild. He was keen to be part of it, to give something back to the city he had lived in for all of his life. Before the quakes started, he wanted to retire, but after the February quake it seemed wrong to just stop working. Now there was just too much going on to consider that. Maybe he could start thinking seriously about retirement in a couple of years, when the rebuild started winding down. And maybe that retirement could be in Sydney.

They found a house on flat land below the hill on which their ruined house sat. This house wasn’t in bad shape, it seemed to be on stable ground. The family who were selling had lost a family member in the earthquake, the wife’s or the husband’s brother, Gerald wasn’t exactly sure, but they wanted to get out of Christchurch and so Gerald and Sylvia got a good deal on the place. Its foundation had stood up well and there was only minor cracking on the inside, things Gerald could easily fix up in his spare time. Sylvia seemed happy to be back with Gerald, and unpacking the possessions they had been able to salvage from the house up the hill and deciding where to put everything in this new, smaller house made it start to feel like being home again. Going through some of the mementos they had collected over their decades together seemed to make her feel happier about being back.

Once the house was reasonably sorted, Sylvia offered to help Gerald out with the paperwork. He hesitated at first, the bureaucracy involved in getting anything done was confusing, and although Sylvia had dealt with the City Council on and off over the years, this CERA organisation was something else entirely. But she insisted, and she was good with paperwork and, more importantly, with people. If anyone could get things done it was Sylvia.

It was only a matter of weeks, though, before Gerald regularly heard her muttering over having to deal with CERA. That night, when he arrived home, she was trying to arrange passes into the red zone to carry out some work. She had organised passes for the same job weeks earlier, which had been the usual gruelling process, but additional damage had been discovered that required the input of an engineer. The work had stopped while that was organised and the workers’ passes had expired. Now that the engineer had made his recommendations, Sylvia needed to organise a new set of red zone passes. More paperwork, it never ended.

Gerald kissed Sylvia on the cheek and left her alone in the office. In the kitchen, Alice was cooking. When she arrived, she said, Sylvia had been stuck on the phone with CERA and getting a bit too stressed, so Alice offered to take over the meal prep. She had sliced chicken breast simmering with mushrooms and red capsicum and two other pots, pasta and broccoli.

Gerald offered to help, but she said she was fine, the cooking helped her to wind down from her day’s work. She was working for one of the newly-appointed PMOs as an office administrator. Hardly challenging for a girl as bright as Alice, but it seemed to be something she wanted to do, to help out with the rebuild. Gerald had thought of telling her to keep out of the insurance side of things, there was so much cost-cutting going on with repairs that he couldn’t help but think the EQC and insurance side of the rebuild was not going to go well. But that was his old man’s cynicism and he decided he should keep it to himself.

Gerald had decided a couple of weeks ago to finish up on their current lot of make-safe jobs and start looking for opt-out work. Some people wanted EQR to take care of everything for them, but others wanted more control, and those people could opt out of a managed repair and project manage their own repairs or contract someone like Gerald to do it for them. What that meant for Gerald was that he was less likely to have to deal with the bureaucracy that was bound to come with all the EQR repair work. Gerald could contribute to the rebuild without being strangled by all the red tape, and without dirtying the reputation he had worked so hard to build. It would take a few months before everything he already had going was finished, but in that few months he could line up something else for his guys to move on to.

Gerald’s mother had taught Alice some of her cooking skills in the weeks Alice stayed with her after the February quake. It was nice seeing the old girl pass on something, and Marjorie was a good cook. Gerald wasn’t sure what it was about Alice that his mother liked, she had never seemed to like her own daughters, or Sylvia. Of Gerald’s sisters, Suzanne and Judith still wanted Marjorie’s approval, tried to do things to look after their mother, to please her. Karen, on the other hand, made a point of saying she didn’t care about their mother’s opinion, but Gerald could see the sadness she carried, the sense of something missing from her life. He felt that sadness had a lot to do with Karen’s poor choice in men, her careless parenting of her children.

With Alice, Marjorie was different. There was a level of care and consideration there that Gerald had never seen directed at, well, people. Gerald wondered what had prompted that softening.

It had been difficult losing touch with Alice. But Alice had remembered Gerald and Sylvia from the time they had taken her up to Auckland to see Andrew, while Andrew was still making time in his life for his little girl. There had also been visits in Christchurch before Lindsay had drifted away from them. But now Alice was back in their lives and having her in the house fussing around in the kitchen of their new home made it feel like more of a home. He would have to point that out to Sylvia later on, in case her frustrations at dealing with the bureaucracy were making her regret coming back. It was good to build new bonds with family, to look out for them as they worked their way through EQC and insurance issues. Not that Alice had those concerns, but the city was a strange place, the old boys’ club was thriving in the frenzy for everyone to get a cut of the insurance funds pouring into the city.

On the surface, the establishment of Fletchers EQR and all the PMOs was about ensuring quality, making sure the people of Christchurch had a fair deal from the city’s rebuild. Gerald had been dealing with bureaucrats for the whole of his adult life, and they were seldom that kind and caring. The arrangement gave the Government and the insurers the power to control the costs, minimise their outlay. One could argue that insurance companies were businesses, they had the right to try to contain costs, and Gerald agreed with that in principle. However, it was a dangerous line, it was too easy to compromise on quality for the sake of containing costs. There were already people complaining of poor workmanship and damage that had been ignored, and the rebuild was only just starting to crawl to the starting line. Sylvia was coming into contact with people who talked about similar things, from business contacts to neighbours and people she ran into while walking. Between them, Gerald and Sylvia were hearing about these shoddy, inadequate repairs too often for it to just be isolated cases.

Alice turned down the element for one pot and moved another off to the sink. Sylvia came through from the office and right away moved to help her, but Alice nudged her away, told her to relax, she had it all under control. And she did. Gerald asked Sylvia how the phone call had gone.