Bleak City (28 page)

Kevin brought in some more firewood and helped Alice to clean the snow off her car before both of them left. Lindsay decided to leave the children to sleep in, poured herself a bowl of porridge and made another cup of coffee. In the lounge, she wrapped herself in a blanket on the sofa close to the fire. If she was going to have a busy kid-filled day, she was going to have a quiet start.

Lindsay texted Sonya to say that if the kids weren’t going to school, she could look after them. Sonya texted right back saying that would be great, she would drop them off on her way to work. Then Lindsay called her parents to let them know. No point texting Heather, she still wasn’t used to carrying a phone around all the time, even though many older people now did, because of experiencing the stress of not knowing the whereabouts of someone they loved during one of the many quakes.

Lindsay loved the house they were living in. It was an old state house with native wood timber floors that they had planned to expose and polish. They had chosen the house for those features, although they hadn’t been able to get underway with the renovations once Lindsay found she was pregnant with Olivia. The walls were old-fashioned lath-and-plaster, very cracked from the earthquakes. They were also uninsulated, and the house was colder since the quakes started, harder to heat. Now they were just hoping it could be repaired, and soon. It would be odd to move out of this place, into another and then back into this one. People just didn’t do that.

Then there was finding accommodation. Her parents had faced bidding wars whenever they went to look at a place and, in the end, had only been able to find something because Alice had asked her other grandfather if he knew of any places that would be available. Lindsay didn’t like the idea that it was who you knew that found you a place, but she also didn’t like the idea of a bidding war.

She and Kevin had talked about leaving Christchurch during their repairs. Kevin could find work that wasn’t insurance related and they would be able to stretch their insurance company’s accommodation allowance further away from the city. But Kevin wanted to be close by, to keep an eye on the place during its repairs.

There was too much moving going on in the family. Jason and Carla had no idea where they would be living in a month’s time. They had accepted the Government’s offer on their red zoned property and had made an offer on a townhouse. But the paperwork on house sales in post-quake Christchurch was a nightmare. Inspections needed to be carried out to ensure all the repairs on the scope of works had been completed correctly and that there wasn’t damage that had been missed.

Then there were Lindsay’s grandparents, Heather’s parents. Their repairs had been scoped and they were expected to be out of the house for eight weeks, although when was still unknown. The best thing would be for them to stay with Neil and Heather, but they didn’t know where they would be, neither did Jason and Carla, and Lindsay and Kevin didn’t have the extra room. No one liked the idea of Grandma and Grandad Bennett staying in a cold, damp flat or in one of the temporary accommodation villages. There were a couple of them in the city, one near Eastgate Mall not far from Lindsay and Kevin. But Lindsay had heard there were problems with drugs and drinking there. Maybe Lindsay and Kevin could make do for eight weeks, Olivia and Jack could share and Alice could have Olivia’s room. Grandad would have trouble getting in and out of their shower, though. It was a string of problems she wasn’t going to solve sitting in front of the fire digesting her porridge. Time to move.

Lindsay woke Olivia and Jack, telling them there was snow and so it was a no school day. Both jumped out of bed and for once she didn’t have to push them to get dressed. They bundled up warm, rushed outside and right away started to pile snow up in the backyard. Sonya arrived with Cody and Ella, who quickly dumped their stuff in the house and ran off to help Olivia and Jack.

Lindsay’s plan for the day was to get her parents to look after all the kids while she did some work. It would do her parents good, keep them busy, not thinking about their house and whether or not they would need to move again before finally getting home.

Heather made lunch for everyone and just as she and Lindsay were cleaning up and the kids had settled in the lounge playing video games, Kevin pulled up the drive. Too cold to keep working, he said. He talked the kids into going back out into the snow.

Soon Kevin and the children had made a giant snowball and were standing around it. There was a small stone embedded in the snowball and Kevin was moving his arms around like he was explaining something to them. They just looked puzzled. Lindsay wondered what was going on but then twigged. He had made his own transit of Venus, the stone was Venus moving across the face of the snowball sun.

It would be one hundred and fifteen years before there would be another Transit of Venus. The opportunity had been missed.

What worried Lindsay the most about how long it was taking to get their repairs scoped was that this was their second winter in a damaged house. If the insurance company didn’t start taking action soon, the opportunity to get them back into the house before the winter of 2013 would be missed. They would then have to spend another winter trying to heat a damaged house, and Lindsay was already feeling too used to the house the way it was. Living in a damaged house was now normal.

The Share an Idea campaign in the autumn of 2011 had given the people of Christchurch an opportunity to think about the future of their city in the months after the February earthquake, when they were facing a stark winter in damaged homes and a broken city. It had reminded Alice, as that first post-quake winter got underway, that the rebuilt city would soon start to take shape. Share an Idea promised a smart rebuild, harvesting the ideas of the city’s residents to make something good out of the bad.

What appealed most to Alice was the idea of a green city full of parks and cycleways, one that made the most of the city’s natural beauty, combining the enjoyment of the green spaces with the usual functions of a CBD. Residents wanted to see a city connected to Hagley Park, the Avon River and beyond to the estuary and the sea.

The City Council collected these ideas and used them to formulate a draft Central City Plan, which was submitted to the Government at the end of 2011. The Government rejected this plan and then, via CERA, created a group called the Central Christchurch Development Unit. The CCDU’s initial assignment was to produce what was known as the 100-day plan, a blueprint for getting the CBD up and running that was so full of good ideas and promise that businesses would rush to put their development dollars into the rebuild of Christchurch.

The 100-day plan was announced in July 2012. There would be a new library in the centre of the city, a new, larger convention centre and a new stadium to replace the damaged one just outside the city centre. Another idea was to develop precincts to bring common activities together: an innovation precinct for technology companies, a justice and emergency services precinct, a retail precinct, a health services precinct and a performing arts precinct. Alice wasn’t sure about the whole precinct business, it seemed a lot to ask businesses that had survived the earthquakes to move on because some government planner thought something else should be there. But what was exciting was the way green spaces would be used to frame a smaller city centre. The areas around the Avon River would be widened in places and a riverside park would be developed to connect to corridors of green spaces to the east and south of the city.

It was a city Alice wanted to live in and could see herself having a future in, something that had become more and more difficult as the year dragged on.

Alice wasn’t enjoying her new job. She had been expecting that this job would be more challenging than her last one, but that the challenges would be balanced by the fact she would be helping people make progress on their claims. Her grandparents had found in their dealings with Fletchers and EQC that the people they talked to often seemed unwilling to provide the information they were asking for, and they didn’t seem interested in pursuing answers for their customers. Alice was determined to be different, to find out for her clients the answers to their questions, to help them understand the process and feel that their claim was going in the right direction.

The system didn’t work that way. Alice considered herself a reasonably intelligent, logical person, but the systems were impenetrable. But, she promised herself, she was going to stick with it, get her head around the systems and do her best to become an effective claims officer.

Alice had spent most of the last two months training and getting used to her new job, and her frustration continued to mount. By the time the 100-day plan was published, she was feeling that she was in a dark place, wondering what she should do, what options were open to her.

The plan was a bright light on the horizon, a promise that things would get better, the city would return to normal. No, not normal, because Christchurch had, in truth, been a bit dull before, but something new and vibrant, a place where there were always interesting things to do and see, any time of the year. The plan painted a picture of a shining city on the plains, showing off all that Alice loved about Christchurch, making the most of it.

But was it enough to keep Alice going? There was a lot of work to do to achieve the blueprint, land and buildings to be bought, buildings to be demolished and new ones to go up. It would be a few years before the plan began to be realised, but Alice would be in her mid-20s by then, the right age to take advantage of everything the new city had to offer.

This broken city was only for a brief time. The shining city on the plains was the future.

In 2012, it became more common for shipping containers to appear on grass verges in front of houses, storing the house’s contents while repairs were carried out. The Canterbury Home Repair Programme run by Fletcher EQR was in full swing. All over the city, people moved out of their houses, often taking weeks to sort through household goods accumulated over decades, taking only what they needed to get by for the few months they would spend in temporary accommodation. Some people moved in with friends or family, others into a rental property and some spent the duration of their repair living in motels. In Christchurch, it was becoming normal to move out of a house and then back into it again a few months later.

Back before the earthquakes started, Neil and Heather expected to make only one more move in their lifetime, from the house near the river where their children had grown up, into a new house built on a section two suburbs away. Instead, they packed up their old house, moving some of its contents into the rental they had arranged but packing the rest into the Bowens’ garage.

Five months later, the work was finally complete and Neil and Heather went through with the project manager, who expected them to sign off the work. There were some things they weren’t happy with, but the project manager said they had three months to complain. The lease on their rental was nearly up and in a few months, Heather’s parents needed a place to stay while their own repairs were done. They decided to sign off the repairs and move back in.

A month later, the list of flaws was staggering, and their project manager was not returning their calls. What would they find given another month? So far, floorboards creaked throughout the house and some were starting to split, not all of the plaster work had been sanded back properly, the wall between the kitchen and the lounge was cracking, the door to the bathroom was constantly swinging open and, the latest thing, paint was flaking off the walls in two of the bedrooms.

Problems with their repairs were the last thing they needed, especially since they didn’t yet know whether or not their section would be red zoned. There was, Lindsay had said, going to be an announcement later in the month, but deadlines had already been missed, so Heather wasn’t holding her breath. Even if there was something soon, the whole process was taking far too long, it had been fifteen months since the February quake, nearly two years since the September quake, and they had talked about whether or not they needed to get a lawyer to pursue the matter for them, if something didn’t happen soon. But then there were the problems with the house they were already living in. Would they need a lawyer for that, too?

They were disappointed, they had expected better, after the repairs to the house Sonya rented had gone so well. Sonya and her children had lived with them for the last four months of 2011. It had been a stressful time, full of loud arguments, followed by long silences, then a few days of peace before the cycle started all over again. Even saying nothing was regarded as an affront, and Neil and Heather had many late-night conversations discussing how to cope with the arrangement for the sake of Cody and Ella. Heather stopped trying to understand her younger daughter, she didn’t know where Sonya’s anger came from and why it was so often directed at her.

The day Sonya moved back into her repaired flat, Neil, Heather, Kevin and Alice helped her move back in while Lindsay took the four children to Willowbank for the day. ‘We definitely have the easier job,’ Sonya said sitting in her newly painted house surveying all the boxes. She was in a surprisingly good mood. Heather was trying not to be offended at the idea that Sonya’s good mood was more about getting away from her mother than from getting back into her renovated flat.

The landlord had insulated the house while all the wall linings were replaced and it felt warm and dry, much different from how it had been before. The kitchen, bathroom and laundry had been replaced, not with new items, they were clearly early-2000s-style fittings.

‘It’s lovely,’ Heather said, running a hand over the kitchen benchtop.

‘From demolished houses,’ Kevin said, placing his forefinger alongside his nose. ‘It’s who you know.’

‘Better here than in the tip,’ Lindsay said.