Bleak City (26 page)

‘I never even got through to the right person,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to try again in the morning.’ She asked Alice about her job. It was all right, Alice said, but she didn’t like dealing with customers desperate for information.

‘That’s understandable,’ Sylvia said. ‘People have been waiting a year and a half now, if they’ve been waiting since the September quake.’

‘It’s sad,’ Alice said. ‘There’s nothing I can tell them, and they sound so tired.’

‘There’s a lot to do,’ Gerald said. ‘Not everything can happen at once.’

Alice nodded. She was draining the broccoli. ‘I get that,’ Alice said. ‘What I don’t like is that the claim staff tend to talk about them like they’re greedy. When they just want what they’ve paid for.’

It was good she could see beyond the insurance company spin: claimants are greedy and want more than they’re entitled to. The policies people had claimed against were, by and large, full replacement policies, basically gold standard that allowed for reinstatement to an ‘as new’ condition. He doubted there were many people wanting more than they were entitled to, especially as what he heard most often when people talked about what they expected from their insurance policy was that the place should be put back to the way it was before the quake. That wasn’t an expectation of a new house, that was an expectation that earthquake damage should be repaired. He wasn’t convinced people were going to get that. ‘There’s a bit of that going around,’ he said.

‘I get that dealing with CERA,’ Sylvia said. ‘The staff talk like they’re doing me a favour, they seem to forget that they exist to help the people of the city to recover, that’s the purpose of the Act, the R in the act is Recovery. It wasn’t enacted to keep them employed for five years.’

‘Too easy to forget,’ Alice said, ‘even though it’s in their name.’

‘Comes from the top,’ Gerald said.

‘From the PM?’ Alice said.

‘Maybe,’ Gerald said. ‘But I was thinking more the Minister. He talks like the Government is doing everyone in the red zones a big favour by paying them out based on a five-year-old property valuation.’

‘My aunt and uncle are in that position,’ Alice said. ‘It looks like they’ll have to buy a smaller place and take out a bigger mortgage.’ She lifted the lid on the pasta and used a wooden spoon to push a piece against the side of the pan to cut through it. She turned the hotplate off and lifted the pot off the stove.

‘Which offer are they taking?’ Gerald asked.

‘The land and house,’ Alice said, pouring the pasta water down the sink. ‘They were going to take the land offer only, but there’s been a lot of people whose houses have mysteriously changed from rebuild to repair. Things were getting too stressful, they’ve decided it’s better to be able to move on.’

‘That’s not a silly idea,’ Sylvia said. ‘The bureaucracy is a nightmare and why prolong that if you don’t have to?

‘The Minister should step in, iron out problems,’ Gerald said. ‘But any time anyone brings up an issue, he attacks. In Parliament the other day, Lianne Dalziel raised a question about people being out of pocket if they took one of the Government’s offers, his response was to say she was grumpy because she wanted more taxpayers’ money for her red zoned property.’

‘That’s just plain rude,’ Sylvia said. ‘She’s the Opposition’s spokesman on earthquake stuff, there’s nothing wrong with her bringing up issues that affect a lot of people. At least she has some sympathy for the position people are in.’

‘He does seem to resort to name-calling a bit quickly,’ Alice said. She was mixing the broccoli, the cooked chicken and a splash of cream through the pasta. ‘First a clown mayor, now a grumpy opposition MP, what will it be next? Sneezy and Dopey?’

Gerald and Sylvia laughed. But it wasn’t funny. The rebuild was a serious matter, affecting the lives of thousands. The region needed leaders who could effectively deal with the problems that would arise, not ones who would lash out any time an issue was raised or criticism voiced.

For the last five minutes, Charlotte had been watching the neighbour’s house. She was home sick for the day, her throat sore from coughing, and had set herself up in the lounge on the sofa where she could watch the TV, the street outside and the estuary and ocean beyond. She had the TV, DVD player and AppleTV remotes lined up on the coffee table within easy reach in case she finally managed to decide what movie to watch, but for most of the morning and afternoon, she had been engrossed in the second book of
The Hunger Games
series, which she had started that morning. Charlotte and Alice had seen the movie of the first book a couple of weeks ago and she wanted to see how it turned out. It was past two o’clock and Charlotte was nearly done, but had been ignoring her own hunger for a good couple of hours. She put the book to one side to get up and make herself some two-minute noodles.

She was eating while staring out the window, thinking about how the soup was soothing on her throat and that she needed to make more effort to get up and drink more water. That was when movement caught her eye.

The neighbour’s house across the road was empty, locked up, and no one had lived in it since February 2011, over a year ago. There was a woman standing in front of the house, looking around. She was dressed in black jeans and a long jumper, her long dark hair hanging like a heavy curtain, partly closed over her face. Although she was standing in one spot, she couldn’t seem to stand still, moving from one foot to another, one fist up by her mouth, rubbing her face, while she looked around, up the street, then down the street. She didn’t seem to think to look up the hill to the house looming above her, the one Charlotte was watching her from. She looked like she was on something, not that Charlotte really knew what someone who was on something looked like, it was her best guess based on seeing people hanging around the courthouse when she went to visit her mother at work in the city. Back when there was a city. And there was a woman who panhandled at the bus exchange that reminded her of this woman lurking outside the neighbour’s house. One time the woman at the exchange had asked Charlotte for money, saying her boyfriend had stranded her in the city and she needed to catch a bus to get home. Charlotte told her she didn’t believe her and quickly walked away, towards the portable building that served as the information desk. She told the guy there about the woman, and he said she was there every day and wasn’t stranded. This reassured Charlotte, since the moment she had opened her mouth to say she didn’t believe the woman, she hoped she was right, otherwise she had just made a bad situation worse for her by being unkind.

A man walked up the driveway from the house the woman was standing in front of and he and the woman quickly moved on to the next house. She stood at the letterbox while he shot down the driveway, looking around, up and down the street. Should Charlotte call the police? She put her bowl of noodles down on the coffee table and stood up to get the phone.

Charlotte was about to start dialling when she heard the approaching rumble. She froze, just stood there in front of the bookshelf on which the cordless phone and its charger sat. It had been a long time since she had taken cover during an earthquake. The house jolted and swayed, she heard glasses and crockery jiggling in the kitchen and the TV swayed alarmingly on the cabinet. The quake was from the northeast, had that under-the-sea feel that accompanied the quakes that originated offshore. It was strong, bigger than a four, probably a five. The motion stopped and Charlotte felt her heart racing. She just stood there for a minute, breathing deeply, then put the phone back into its cradle and walked through the house to check for damage.

Nothing seemed to be broken except for the pot that held The Last House Plant, the only survivor of all the quakes. Before the September quake, her mother used to have them all through the house, potted creeping figs, peace lilies, spider plants and different coloured African violets. She said she wasn’t going to replace them until the quakes were over, it was just too hard to clean up. One plant that fell in the September quake had landed on a bunch of books that had slipped out of the bookshelves. They were still, over a year later, finding bits of potting mix in various books.

Charlotte wished her mother would start getting some more plants, they made the house feel full of life in a way it hadn’t for over a year. Her mother had seemed softer then, now everything was about her job, the house and EQC. Maybe once Charlotte was feeling better, she would get some pot plants. When she was younger, she used to buy her mother plants from the supermarket, but the supermarket was gone now, and there was no indication as to when it would be rebuilt. There was a hardware store in Ferrymead that sold plants, and an actual plant shop on Ferry Road closer to the city, she would go to one of those.

This last plant was one of the African violets. It had been sitting on the window sill above the kitchen sink and had been tossed off and down onto the floor. Pieces of broken pot and dirt were everywhere, its lone pink flower peeking through. Charlotte found some newspaper, gently picked the plant out of the remains of its container, along with as much soil as she could scoop up, and wrapped it in the newspaper. She poured some water into the makeshift pot and placed it in the sink.

There was nothing else broken because they had become used to being vigilant. Dishes were never left on the bench where they could crash onto the floor and shatter, they were always stacked into the dishwasher as soon as they had finished eating off them. Books they were reading, things they were using, cups, plates and bowls, all were tucked away, put into drawers or pushed towards the backs of cupboards to minimise the possibility of them being lost, should there be another quake. So many precautions. Alice said her mother was the same way, and her grandparents, too. Charlotte opened up the cupboard and pushed her favourite coffee cup towards the back, where it was less likely to fall and break. Just in case.

Charlotte vacuumed up the last of the dirt and threw out the broken pot. Back through in the lounge, she started to compose a text to her mother and father, but then decided not to. Would they get in touch with her? They hadn’t so far, and it had been nearly twenty minutes since the quake. She texted Alice instead, who was going to be coming over that night. Sean had said they would cancel, but Charlotte had been home sick most of the week, she was bored, she needed the company, and if Alice wasn’t there, Sean would just study the whole night. Or worse, not bother to come home, just hang out with his university mates. She was almost better she insisted, no longer contagious, and they should stick to their Friday night plans.

Alice replied saying one of her co-workers had freaked out, her husband was working in the city and she couldn’t get in touch with him. Charlotte looked on
The Press
website and a story said the city centre had been evacuated. The quake was a 5.2 under the sea near Scarborough, east of the city, about 20 kilometres from where Charlotte was. People were reporting things falling off shelves, but nothing worse. It seemed the shelves of Christchurch houses had been cleared, people were tired of picking things up, throwing them away, cataloguing what had been lost and putting in contents claims.

Charlotte settled back on the sofa, tucked her blanket around her and returned to her book. She soon finished it and decided to move on to the third one, it was too exciting, she wanted to see what happened next. She forgot about the suspicious man and woman across the road until her mother arrived home after five. One of the neighbours had been broken into, she said. The woman had come home from work early to check on the house and found the back door open. Had Charlotte seen anything? she asked. Charlotte hadn’t seen the man and woman clearly and how could she explain not calling the police? Sure, there had been the quake and the clean up, but would her mother see that as a reasonable excuse? Not likely. She decided not to say anything.

‘What’s missing?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Doesn’t look like anything’s missing,’ her mother said. ‘But the back door has been kicked in.’

They must have been interrupted by the quake, then scared off. Served them right.

She was going back out, her mother said, meeting a friend for dinner, since Sean and Charlotte were going to be watching a movie and their father was working late. She asked nothing about the quake, nothing about how Charlotte was feeling.

It was different when Sean arrived home, with Alice arriving soon afterwards with Thai food she had picked up on the way. While they served up and started eating, they exchanged experiences. Alice’s workmate had left work early to go into the city and find her husband. Everyone had tried to reassure her it was just a five, but she kept saying she was over it all, Christchurch, quakes, everything.

‘I don’t think she’ll be sticking around,’ Alice said. ‘I wonder how many other people will feel they’ve had enough. My mum’s not very happy, she didn’t say it, but I could tell she wants to leave again. I just hope that’s the last five we have for a while, or the last anything.’

‘It wasn’t a big deal at uni,’ Sean said.

‘Well it wouldn’t be way over there,’ Charlotte said. ‘Not coming from off the coast.’

‘It wasn’t where I was,’ Alice said, nodding. ‘The building just sways a bit. It was only a big deal because Connie’s husband was in the city and she was freaked out.’

‘Did you hear anything from Mum and Dad?’ Charlotte asked Sean. ‘A call? A message?’

‘No, nothing,’ Sean said. Sean and Charlotte had been talking lately about how they were almost invisible as far as their parents were concerned. They were too wrapped up in paperwork, trying to get the house assessed, to get some idea of when their repairs would finally happen. They were seldom home at the same time any more, which was kind of a relief, as there was less arguing.

‘Me neither,’ Charlotte said. ‘She didn’t even ask if I’m feeling better.’

‘She was home?’ Sean said.

‘For all of five minutes,’ Charlotte said. ‘Enough time to change. She said she’s going out for the night.’