Bleak City (41 page)

Alice had resigned from her job with Southern Response and would finish in a couple of weeks. She was going to work for Gerald, helping to run the office at Moorhouse Architectural. Not an ambitious job as far as Lindsay was concerned, but it was better than working for an insurance company, especially one whose reputation was shaping up to be nearly as bad as that of EQC. EQC had been plagued by claims of nepotistic hiring practices and staff running businesses on the side that benefited from their roles at the organisation. Alice’s year and a half with Southern Response had changed her, she had withdrawn to some degree. When Alice told Lindsay she was resigning, Lindsay had tried to get her to talk about it, but all she would say was that it was hard going to work every day and hearing the other side.

‘Do you think we’re wrong to push?’ Lindsay had asked. After their insurance company had pressured them for a decision, Lindsay and Kevin had decided to engage their own structural engineer to carry out an assessment of the house. The insurance company had come back to them acknowledging that there had been no deadline, but insisting that they make a decision early in the new year. The whole experience had left them feeling even more wary of the repair strategy, that the insurance company was trying to push them to make a decision quickly so they wouldn’t notice something important.

‘No,’ Alice said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘It’s not that, it’s how people at work talk about claimants. Like they expect too much, and I don’t see it the same way. They’re always saying we have to be careful because it’s taxpayers’ money, but the Government has said they would honour the contracts, that’s all people want, for the Government to honour their contracts like they said they would.’

‘I think that’s what most people want,’ Lindsay said. ‘Not patch jobs.’

Alice was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s not too much to expect,’ Alice said. ‘I think there are too many patch jobs being scoped and I’m sick of keeping my mouth shut.’

Lindsay was relieved. She wondered at times if she and Kevin were missing something, that they were being greedy. But what Alice said was true, they were only asking for their contract to be honoured.

Alice offered to look after Olivia and Jack for a few days early in January so Lindsay and Kevin could get away. Lindsay didn’t understand when Alice first offered and just stared at her, mystified. ‘You know, without kids, so you don’t have to worry about organising anyone but yourselves.’

‘Oh,’ was all Lindsay could say.

‘Think about it,’ Alice said.

Lindsay discussed it with Kevin.

‘Great idea,’ he said right away and suggested they take Lindsay’s parents with them.

‘That’s not really getting away,’ Lindsay said.

‘No, but they need a break, your mum especially, and I don’t think it’s going to happen unless someone takes her by the hand and makes her have a break.’

Lindsay nodded. He was right about Heather, she was drowning in insurance matters. If it wasn’t the repairs to the house occupying her mind, it was the red zoned section. It would be good for all of them to get away. But still, there was another problem. ‘We have no money,’ she pointed out. Although that wasn’t strictly true, they were trying to save as much as they could for the structural engineering report they needed to have done.

‘Tom has a place in Kaikoura he’s said we can borrow,’ Kevin said. Tom was the guy Kevin had been doing work for all year. He was a good guy. He wasn’t taking the Fletcher’s jobs, instead he had an arrangement with a building company that was working on commercial properties. It wasn’t nearly as dodgy as some of the residential work, and Kevin was finding working for Tom better than trying to pick up work on his own.

‘You have this all sorted out, don’t you,’ Lindsay said. He nodded. She thought about it for a moment. ‘I’ll ask them,’ she said.

The next morning she dropped by Neil and Heather’s after dropping the kids off at school. Heather’s response, worryingly, had been that they couldn’t go away because something might happen with the house.

‘Nothing’s going to happen with the house if you go away for a week, Mum,’ Lindsay said. ‘Nothing’s happened all year, it’s not going to happen, especially in the first week of the new year.’ She should have asked her father, she realised, he would see the value of a week away and then he would get to deal with Heather’s anxieties instead. But it was too late now, she had to push on through.

‘A few days away might be nice,’ Heather conceded. ‘But I need to ask your father. I’ll let you know tonight.’

Of course the answer was no. It was too late to ask her father now, and Heather insisted that Lindsay and Kevin needed time to themselves, they hadn’t taken a holiday since before the quakes. Heather said they would have a break just staying at home, helping Alice out with the kids if she found them too much. It was an excuse, Lindsay knew, but she let it go, she was just too tired to argue.

Lindsay was nearly as worried about herself as she was about her mother. She found it hard to get out of bed each morning, to focus and get just the basics done. She was struggling to keep up with clothes washing, with the cooking and with vacuuming the house to keep on top of the plaster dust from the cracks in the walls and ceilings. If something didn’t change soon, she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning, and she didn’t know what would happen then. She didn’t want to think about it.

Kevin’s nieces were staying with them while his brother and sister-in-law were spending a long weekend up in Hanmer. The weekend was over and Kevin had gone off to work on Monday morning, leaving Lindsay and Alice to manage the four kids, Olivia and Jack, nine-year-old Katie and eleven-year-old Ruby. Katie and Ruby were missing their mum and dad, looking forward to seeing them later that day, and it was up to Lindsay and Alice to keep them entertained until then. Fortunately, Kevin’s brother and his wife had left their minivan, borrowing Lindsay’s car for the trip, so Lindsay and Alice were able to pile all the kids into one vehicle to get them around.

Orana Park, Alice had suggested, but Ruby and Katie wanted to see the city. Why? Although they lived only two hours south of Christchurch, they had heard so much about the devastation caused by the earthquakes that they wanted to see it all up close. Lindsay and Kevin were in the habit of escaping to his brother’s place in Timaru whenever Christchurch became too much for them, and Katie and Ruby were curious about what they were escaping from.

‘Okay,’ Lindsay said. ‘Let’s go rubble necking!’

They all piled into the van and drove into the city, Alice pointing out buildings in different states of disassembly along the way. They parked on Cambridge Terrace, then walked down Hereford Street so the kids could see the little green Shands building, over a hundred years old, one side nearly fallen off it. Lindsay and Alice pointed out buildings they remembered, a bookshop both had liked, the Drexel’s restaurant that did the best pancakes, the old KFC site, the chemist where Lindsay used to get her photos developed when she was a teenager.

The kids didn’t seem to understand, even Olivia and Jack, who lived only a few kilometres away. But their parents and Alice had sheltered them from what was going on in the city. They had been in a couple of times, when significant buildings were being demolished. Both Olivia and Jack loved the diggers, it was all excitement and noise as far as they were concerned, they didn’t understand that this had been where people shopped, where mums and dads and aunts and uncles had come to work. Where some of them had died while doing so. But that wasn’t something she wanted to try explaining to them, all four of the kids were too young to have to think about not having a mum or a dad.

‘You know how Stafford Street has all those shops on each side?’ Alice asked Ruby and Katie. They were walking along High Street towards the Cashel Street intersection and everywhere there were gaps where buildings had been demolished, their rubble ground into fill for the basements.

Ruby and Katie nodded. Stafford Street was the main shopping street in Timaru, typical of the retail centres of New Zealand small towns.

‘This used to be like Stafford Street,’ Alice said. ‘There were shops all along here, all the way up there.’ She pointed into the distance, where the kinetic sculpture towered above the street, its orange disc divided into four wedges, always moving slowly, rotating, marking the intersection of High, Manchester and Lichfield Streets. ‘Imagine if you went into Stafford Street and it wasn’t there.’

Both girls looked like they were trying to picture what Alice was trying so hard to explain, but she could see it wasn’t working. Over their heads, Lindsay gave Alice a shrug. Alice shrugged back, she wasn’t going to try to explain further. When they were older, though, they would remember this and maybe understand. It was too much for little kids.

‘Are these for a train?’ Jack said, excited at the tram tracks. ‘Can we wait for the next one?’ He loved trains, loved it when there was a train going over the rail bridge. He liked to stand under the bridge and look up at the carriages going by. It kind of freaked Alice out to do that, but, she would tell herself, they’ve fixed the bridge, they’ve fixed the bridge, they’ve fixed the bridge, finding that by the time the last carriage passed, she was repeating that mantra in rhythm with the train passing overhead.

‘No, it’s for a tram,’ Lindsay said, ‘but they aren’t running any more.’

Jack looked disappointed but brightened up when Alice pointed out that because there weren’t any trams or trains they could walk along the tracks.

So they walked up the tramlines and crossed Colombo Street to reach the container mall, the brightly coloured shipping containers arranged to form the small shopping centre. All the kids thought it was pretty cool, although they were disappointed that there wasn’t really anything they could buy or play with. That was okay, Lindsay said, because they could all have ice cream.

They found an ice cream caravan in the mall and ordered, then walked around, looking up at the remaining buildings and the containers. There were more people in the mall than Alice had expected, a mix of tourists (wearing backpacks and carrying cameras) and locals. Although the sky was blue and sunny, the day was cool, a slight wind blowing from the east.

‘Can we go there?’ Ruby said. She was pointing at a building that housed a museum display called Quake City. Alice had heard of it, but wasn’t sure she really wanted to go inside. She had lived through the quakes, did she really need to see an exhibit telling her about it all over again?

Lindsay gazed at Alice, saying, ‘We could do that. But you need to finish your ice creams first, so do that and put your rubbish in the bin.’

All four kids quickly munched their way through the last of their cones and dashed off to the rubbish bin.

‘Do you think this is a good idea?’ Alice said.

Lindsay thought about it. ‘Their parents talk to them about the quakes pretty plainly,’ she said. ‘They know people died.’

‘Yes, but do they know what that means?’

‘I don’t know. But we’ll keep an eye on them, move them on quickly if anything’s too much.’

The exhibition started with explanations of earthquakes, European and Maori, and then there was a pad where the kids could jump up and down to see how big an earthquake they could make. Poor Jack, at age seven, was really still too small to make as big a quake as he wanted.

Past that there was a theatre screening interviews with people who had been in the city during the February quake. These people, sitting against a pitch black background, were describing their experiences of the quakes. Alice sat down on one of the plastic chairs and the four kids slid into seats beside her, bookended by Lindsay. Lindsay shot her a glance, jerked her head to indicate they should move on. But Alice ignored her.

They watched for a few minutes, it was the end of one interview and Alice couldn’t really get the gist of what that person’s experience had been. The next subject was a man, a fireman. He was talking about someone trapped in a building. When Alice realised he was talking about someone who was dying, she started to slide along her seat, bumped her hip into Olivia and pushed the kids along the row.

‘Time to move on,’ she whispered, and Lindsay stood up to let the kids out. They rushed off to the next exhibit.

‘Do you want to stay?’ Lindsay said.

She shook her head. ‘I’ll come back another day.’

‘If you want to stay, I’ll take the kids home.’

Alice thought about it. ‘Okay, but I’ll go through the rest of it with you.’

Alice followed the kids through the rest of the exhibit. The kids lingered at the Lego rebuild of the city longer than Alice thought possible.

‘Maybe CERA should hire these kids,’ Lindsay said, smiling. ‘The rebuild might actually get underway at last.’

Alice laughed. The rebuild had been a long time getting underway. She remembered the news at the start of 2013 saying that was the year the rebuild would be in full swing, and now it was the start of 2014, and again, people were saying the rebuild would get properly underway this year.

Once Lindsay left with the kids, Alice went back to the darkened theatre and sat in the back row. She watched the interviews all the way through as various people came in, watched a few minutes, then moved on. She recognised some of the people interviewed, some had appeared in newspapers around the anniversaries of the February quake or when inquests or Royal Commission hearings were being held. One man had been flying home to Christchurch from Auckland when the plane turned back. The control tower in Christchurch had been evacuated due to an earthquake, they were told. He was able to reach his sons, but his wife’s cellphone went to voicemail. He saw on the news that a building had collapsed, the CTV building, where his wife worked. Alice thought about the helplessness of not being in Christchurch on the day of the quake, of not knowing, just watching from afar, news reports delivering tiny pieces of information, never enough to provide the full picture, but enough to paint a nightmare. She hadn’t thought about that, of people from Christchurch who happened to be away on the day and had to watch. Everyone’s experience was different. Was everyone changed as a result of the quake? Alice knew she had changed, although she hadn’t decided yet whether it was a good change. Gerald would tell her it was up to her whether it was good or bad. Was that true?