Bleak City (30 page)

Sonya thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘That’s probably a good idea.’

Both were quiet, sipping at their drinks. Sonya brightened for a moment. ‘I did make a pav,’ she said. ‘You might as well take it, best it not stay here with me.’

‘Will do,’ Alice said. She finished her coffee. ‘I better go, I still need to help Mum with the vegetables.’

Sonya went to get the kids and while they were getting their shoes and jackets on, took the pavlova from the refrigerator. ‘You have any fruit?’ she said. ‘I forgot to get some. But I have a jar of passionfruit pulp if you don’t have any.’ She reached into the pantry and handed Alice a jar.

‘This will be good,’ Alice said. ‘Save you a piece?’

‘Sure, why not.’

At home, Neil and Heather had arrived and were in the lounge with Olivia and Jack, who were showing them their latest game on the Xbox. Cody and Ella hugged their grandparents then joined Olivia and Jack in front of the television. Alice went out to the kitchen to help Lindsay and Kevin. Soon Jason and Carla arrived, bearing a bowl of trifle. Carla lifted the edge of the plastic wrap and Alice sniffed. The scent of rum drifted out into the kitchen.

The roast was a leg of lamb that had been cooking slowly in the oven since first thing in the morning. A tray of potatoes and kumara had been added in the last hour, and everything was ready to be served.

Carla was the first to bring up the state of the city. Following their red zoning the previous year, she and Jason had bought a townhouse in Addington, one that had only minor damage. They had moved in just three weeks earlier. They had to increase their mortgage to afford the place and would have preferred a house with a yard for the children they wanted to start having, but overall they were happy with the place and putting off having children for a couple of years. She wasn’t even thirty yet, Carla said, there was no hurry. They were more relaxed than they had been for a while. The red zoning had been stressful and upsetting, but taking the Government offer had taken them out of a difficult situation, living in a badly damaged house in a munted neighbourhood. But it was over now, they were in a place they could make a home once again.

Carla said the roadworks around their house were crazy. ‘Some days I wonder if I’ll be able to get out to get to work,’ she said.

‘There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of planning,’ Heather said. ‘Usually we have about half a dozen different ways into our neighbourhood, now we’re down to two. It seems like the ones down the street aren’t coordinated with the ones around the corner.’

‘Will you take the offer?’ Jason said without prelude.

‘We don’t know whether we’re red zoned or not,’ Neil said.

‘But I thought they had decided all that?’ Jason said.

‘No,’ Lindsay said. There was an edge in her voice, she was irritated with Jason for some reason. ‘The flat land’s been decided but the hills are still being worked on.’

‘Even if we did have an offer,’ Neil said, ‘we don’t know what we would do. It doesn’t seem fair, we didn’t do anything wrong and all of a sudden our land might not be ours to keep. We don’t know who to complain to.’

‘Well don’t complain too loudly,’ Kevin said.

‘Or you’ll get called carpers and moaners,’ Lindsay finished. She laughed wryly, shaking her head.

‘Who said that?’ Jason asked. At Lindsay’s disbelieving look he added, ‘Sorry, I’ve been busy with the house, I haven’t been following anything this last couple of weeks, I only know about the red zone offers because a guy at work, his grandparents have been offered fifty percent for their land. They’re not insured.’

‘Someone did a survey of TC3 residents,’ Lindsay said. ‘People like me and Kev, with foundation damage. They weren’t at all happy with EQC and insurers, saying everything’s taking too long. Anyway, the Minister wasn’t happy about them complaining, said he was sick of all the carping and moaning.’

‘From people who had time to buggerise around on Facebook all day,’ Alice finished. The election the previous year had been the first she was old enough to vote in and she had thought long and hard about who to vote for, who she felt she could have confidence in to run the rebuild well. Nearly a year later, she was disappointed to hear someone who was supposed to be looking out for the people of the city talking about them that way.

‘How many people were surveyed?’ Jason asked.

‘Nearly 700,’ Lindsay said. ‘So quite a decent chunk. Apparently there’s ten thousand in our situation, on TC3 land who need new foundations.’

Jason asked what was going on with their claim, and Lindsay explained that they had their scope of works – the house would be lifted and the foundations replaced – now they just had to wait for the geotechnical work to be carried out.

‘But there’s only a couple of rigs to do the drilling for the whole city, 10,000 sites, so we probably won’t hear anything until the end of the year.’

‘Well at least you know what’s going to happen,’ Jason said. ‘Not everyone does.’

‘And we’ve avoided being fletchered,’ Kevin said. ‘So we’re happy about that.’ Alice saw Lindsay shoot him a look that said to shut up, but he ignored it and ploughed onward. ‘I reckon that’s what would’ve happened to us if we’d gone ahead with the work they wanted to do last year,’ he continued. Alice felt Lindsay kick at him from under the table, but he ignored her. ‘I think those guys from Fletchers were here to do the September work, they hadn’t taken into account the damage from February. It would’ve gone ahead if we hadn’t been asking questions, and now we’d be in...’ Lindsay had kicked him again, hard enough to make him stop.

‘... our position,’ Heather finished.

Kevin’s face turned red. ‘Yeah. Though you didn’t have a scope from September then, so possibly yours is just shoddy scoping.’

‘I’ll get dessert,’ Alice said, getting up from the table.

‘Can you help me clear the table, Kev?’ Lindsay said, getting up and starting to stack the plates. Kevin got up and helped her, which resulted in a hushed conversation in the kitchen that Alice pretended not to listen to, consumed by getting the desserts out the fridge.

‘This is supposed to help them get their minds off what’s happened,’ Lindsay said, ‘not rehash the whole thing.’

‘We need to talk through it,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s complicated, they need to get their thoughts in order to decide what to do.’

Lindsay sighed and brushed her hair from her face. ‘But that doesn’t have to happen right now, does it?’

‘Look at them, Lin, they’re exhausted, we need to do something to help, even if it’s just talking it all through, listening.’

‘But...’

‘And I think it would be good for Jase and Carla to know what’s going on,’ Kevin said. ‘They’re so relieved to be out of the red zone that they’ve forgotten that this is still going on for a lot of people.’

Alice handed a stack of bowls to Kevin and a handful of spoons to Lindsay. ‘Right then,’ she said, pointedly. ‘Time for dessert, everyone can talk after.’

Once the dessert bowls were cleared, coffees and teas were served and the children were settled in front of a video. The adults started talking about Neil and Heather’s house. They were having trouble getting EQC’s attention because they had signed off on their repairs.

‘We had to sign to move back into the house,’ Neil said. ‘I only signed because they said we had three months to complain, and we’re well within the three months, but they don’t want a bar of it. Because we’ve signed off, even though we were railroaded into it. So I don’t know what to do.’

‘I’ve heard about that happening,’ Jason said. ‘And about people’s repairs being signed off by the contractors themselves.’

‘That’s dodgy,’ Kevin said. ‘Surely the police would be interested in something like that.’

‘They’d have to double the police force to investigate all the dodgy stuff going on in the city,’ Lindsay said.

‘What I want to know,’ Heather said, ‘is why we’re not hearing anything about this in the media, on TV. Surely it’s the sort of thing Fair Go should be picking up?’

‘Not going to get covered on TV,’ Alice said. She had been silent up until then and everyone turned and stared at her. ‘Look at who advertises, TVNZ isn’t going to shoot themselves in the foot by doing nasty stories on their advertisers.’

‘You heard this through that job of yours?’ Jason said.

Alice hadn’t wanted to say anything because she didn’t want her job being drawn into it, but there it was, she had said something without thinking and now she felt like her job was fair game. She was talking to some very stressed people, and she was finding it increasingly hard to go to work each day, wondering if she would be able to do anything to make their situation better. She couldn’t help but think of these people as being like her grandparents, paying their premiums for decades and yet not getting the response they had been promised. The rebuild was so slow to get going, it was hard to believe that it had already been two years since the first lot of damage was done.

‘Even if the media was listening,’ Neil said, ‘we wouldn’t go that route, we will not make a spectacle of our situation, at least we have a place to live. Give the attention to the people worse off than us, the ones who can’t stay in their homes.’

‘Dad,’ Lindsay said, ‘your repairs need repairs and you have a section you might one day be offered half the RV for. It doesn’t get much worse than that.’

‘We can still live in the place,’ Heather said. ‘It’s not like we’re paying a mortgage and rent like so many are. We’ll just keep plugging away on getting the repairs fixed, and as for the section, let’s see what the next month or so brings. There’s one man talking about taking court action over the fifty percent offers. Maybe if we end up red zoned, we can be part of that.’

‘Or at least keep an eye on it,’ Neil said. ‘See what happens.’

Everyone was quiet again. That decided, there seemed to be nothing else to talk about.

‘Nice to have the supermarket back,’ Lindsay said. Their local supermarket had been a rebuild after the February quake, so the closest supermarkets for the past year and a half had been in the city. ‘Would never have thought three years ago that a new supermarket could make me so happy.’

‘It is beautiful,’ said Heather. ‘That view of the hills is just so lovely.’

‘I’m just happy not to go to Moorhouse Ave any more,’ Alice said. ‘A bit depressing seeing the old railway station being ripped apart.’

‘Have to wonder,’ Kevin said, ‘it’s taking them so long to take that down, if it’s that strong, did it really need to be demolished?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ Heather said. ‘Gerry Brownlee wants all the old dungers gone!’

‘So stop carping about it,’ Lindsay said. ‘You big moaner, or we’ll settle your claim for fifty percent of its actual value.’

Everyone laughed, but half-heartedly. With the Minister for Earthquake Recovery so scathing of the people whose red zoned properties had been worst affected by the quakes, the future of the rebuild was far from shiny.

The September 2010 quake occurred on the Greendale fault south of the small town of Darfield. During this quake, the fault did what faults famously do: it broke the surface, offsetting roads, fences and railway lines. The February 2011 quake, however, occurred on a different fault, one that did not break the surface, one running under the Port Hills south of the city. Although it left no surface scar, the February quake did deform the hills and surrounding land. The hills and the floor of the estuary were pushed up by the force of the quake, while some areas north of the estuary and in the east of the city sank by as much as fifteen centimetres.

Neither fault was known to exist before the Canterbury earthquake sequence began. In the months that followed the September and February quakes, scientists swarmed over the land, collecting as much information as they could about the network of hidden faults in the region. This wasn’t simple curiosity, but was an attempt to understand how at risk the region was, what faults lurked beneath the river gravels, building up tension, ready to rupture.

These investigations found that there was a poorly-formed connection between the two faults several kilometres underground. The Port Hills fault extended far enough west to almost touch the eastern end of the Greendale fault. This almost-touching point corresponded to an area that had become known as The Gap, the area near the satellite towns of Prebbleton, Rolleston and Lincoln. It was an area that tended to have a lot of aftershocks whenever there were quakes elsewhere in the region. Scientists theorised that if the September 2010 earthquake had run along the gap, rupturing the Port Hills fault, the quake generated would have been a 7.3 magnitude quake rather than the 7.1.

‘Is that much of a difference?’ Marjorie asked.

Alice was setting the table, telling her about something she had read recently. Andrew and his family were coming around for dinner and Alice had arrived early to help Marjorie with the cooking. Michelle and the children had been in Christchurch for the week, they were still living in Wanaka, but Andrew and Michelle’s house had been repaired, the number of quakes had dropped right off and Michelle had finally agreed to come back to Christchurch. Not right away, but at the start of 2013. The children would finish the school year in Wanaka.

The leg of lamb and vegetables were in the oven and more vegetables were on the stove.

‘It’s not just a little bit stronger than a 7.1,’ Alice said. ‘It’s twice the energy, so there would’ve been a lot more shaking, more damage.’

There was a knock at the door and Marjorie went through to the living room to open it. Alice would just knock and then come in, but the rest of the family always waited for the door to be opened for them. It was a formalism that Marjorie had been unable to train into the girl ever since she had stayed with her after the February earthquake. At first, she had minded, it was her own home after all, but she had become used to it from Alice, who seemed to want nothing from her other than to get to know her, to know the family’s history and to understand how she fit in.