Bleak City (43 page)

‘It is,’ Neil said. ‘This part of the river has flooded before, about ten years ago...’

‘In the nineties,’ Lindsay said. ‘Well before the quakes. I remember some guy kayaking along the road.’

There was still muddy water pooling on the road running alongside the river. A car drove slowly along, pushing a small wave up over the kerb and onto the footpath.

Back in the house, Heather was vacuuming, furiously shoving the vacuum’s head into the corner by the front door. It seemed strange that she would pick that rainy, windy day to attempt to get the entryway clean. Neil took his shoes off and left them on the doorstep, sheltered from the rain, and Kevin and Lindsay did the same, swapping worried glances.

‘Your mother’s not getting any better,’ Kevin said as they were driving towards Lindsay’s grandparents’ house.

‘Mmm hmmm,’ was all Lindsay said. She didn’t want to talk about a problem that seemed to have no solution, Heather wouldn’t listen and none of the subtle tricks they had tried to use on her had worked.

They had discussed how Heather was coping before and had agreed to make a point of doing things as a family, giving Heather opportunities to relax and escape from the house and Christchurch, if possible. But it was getting harder to convince her to go more than a few kilometres from home, and a trip out of the city for an actual holiday was not a possibility. She wanted to stay near home, she would always say, in case someone needed to visit the house. Lindsay could understand feeling that way, there were times when she thought about not visiting someone or making an appointment, in case the insurance company wanted to schedule a visit. She had to keep telling herself the insurance company would be reasonable, they wouldn’t expect her to drop everything at a moment’s notice so they could come and have a look at the house. She had tried explaining this to Heather, but Heather insisted someone had to be at home all the time, or at least nearby, just in case.

‘We have to try doing something, Lin,’ Kevin said, sidestepping her evasion. ‘We can’t just let her fall apart, it’s not good for her heart, and it’s not good for your dad. He looks terrible.’

‘I know that,’ Lindsay said, nearly spitting out her words. He was right, Neil’s clothes were starting to hang off him, and he had never been a big man. ‘Dad knows that, Jase does, even Sonya knows that. But Mum won’t listen and we can’t make her, what? Relax?’

‘And you’re just happy letting whatever happens happen?’ Kevin said. He wouldn’t look at her, which was fair enough while driving, but he wasn’t even glancing at her, he was just staring straight ahead, his fists tight on the steering wheel.

‘Things will change when the baby’s born,’ Lindsay said. ‘It will give her something to do, helping Carla.’ Jason and Carla were expecting their first child in July, a little boy.

‘That’s a long time to wait, Lin. You’re happy to just let it go until then?’

Lindsay didn’t reply, it was a conversation that would go nowhere.

Lindsay’s grandmother picked up the tension between them and once Kevin was helping Grandad check the garage and garden shed, she asked Lindsay what was going on.

‘Insurance,’ Lindsay said. ‘We can’t get an engineer to visit until May and the insurance company’s putting pressure on us to go ahead with the repair.’ It was true, but easier to discuss with her grandmother than whatever was going on in her mother’s head. ‘How’s Grandad? He seems pretty good today.’

‘Yes, today’s a good day,’ was all Grandma Bennett would say, even when Lindsay prompted her to say more. It seemed that no one in the family was willing to talk about the problems they were facing, everyone was just bottling it up.

That night on the late news, there were stories about the flooding in Christchurch, especially about an area north of the Avon River called the Flockton Basin. Residents said the area was much lower now than it had been before the earthquakes, which made it more prone to flooding. This flood was the sixth since the quakes had started where water had been through the houses. Residents were calling for the City Council to take action, to do something to stop them having to face yet another flood. The council, though, had no answer, and it looked like the Flockton Basin could only look forward to more flooding. And winter hadn’t even started. If it kept raining like it had over the last day, the city was going to have serious problems.

Lindsay reached for the remote and switched off the news, to sharp looks from Kevin and Alice. ‘Enough,’ she said, getting up from the sofa. ‘I’ve had enough of the misery being inflicted on this city by inept bureaucrats. I’m going to bed.’

From the bedroom, she heard the TV come back on, but then the volume dropped and all she could hear was a low drone. Yes, she knew that switching off the news didn’t stop the suffering, but she needed a break from hearing about it.

In the 1990s, New Zealand insurance companies began selling a new type of insurance policy. For contents insurance, it was advertised as ‘new for old’. If, say, your house caught fire, your contents would be replaced with new contents. So if you had a twenty-year-old three-seater sofa, it was replaced with a new three-seater sofa, not a secondhand one.

The house equivalent of this was ‘full replacement’. You insured your house for a particular floor area, and if something happened to your house and it had to be rebuilt, the rebuilt house had to be to the same standard as it was when it was new. A twenty-year-old house would be replaced with a new house. If a house needed repairs under the insurance policy, it needed to be repaired to the ‘as when new’ standard, not patched.

At first, full replacement insurance was not available for older houses. But as insurance companies began to compete more and more fiercely for the New Zealand homeowner’s money, sense finally left the country when one company started offering full replacement insurance on hundred-year-old villas. Other companies soon did the same.

This was the position Lindsay and Kevin found themselves in: owners of a sixty-year-old house with foundation damage and a full-replacement-as-when-new policy. But they were also on TC3 land, green-zoned but prone to liquefaction in future quakes, so the Government had introduced much tougher design standards for foundations. And tougher design standards are more expensive. A suspicious person would conclude that insurance companies began slashing scopes to not have to replace damaged foundations to that new, tougher standard. A house that had been scoped for complete foundation replacement, as their house had, would change to just replacing the cracked parts of the foundation.

Lindsay and Kevin were becoming suspicious people.

It had taken them a couple of months, but they had finally tracked down the name of a reputable structural engineer, who had carried out a preliminary assessment of their property. They forwarded a list of questions to John Rutherford, their project manager, but weeks later there hadn’t been any answers. Instead Rutherford had decided to engage an engineering firm to carry out a full structural assessment. When Kevin asked why, Rutherford said that a proper assessment hadn’t yet been done.

‘I asked what the basis for the cash offer was if there hadn’t been a proper assessment,’ Kevin said, telling Lindsay about the phone call.

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. Just asked for a time to come around.’ Answering questions, it seemed, was not Rutherford’s forte.

‘So when?’

‘I didn’t say, I said I’d have to sort out some time off work and I’d get back to him. I’m thinking Monday afternoon, knock off early, then take the kids out to McDonald’s.’

‘That works,’ Lindsay said. ‘Do something distracting afterwards. You know, there really shouldn’t have been a cash offer if there wasn’t a proper assessment. This feels like they’re just trying to head our engineer off at the pass.’

‘That it does,’ Kevin said. ‘But it’ll be another three or four months before we get our full assessment, maybe it will take that long for their guys to finish their report.’

‘Monday then,’ Lindsay said. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thanks for taking time off, I don’t want to be dealing with them by myself.’

‘I haven’t done it yet, I’ll talk to Tom tomorrow, see what he says.’

And that was that. Kevin would talk to Tom on Wednesday, Tom would get back to Kevin and Kevin could then get back to John Rutherford.

Letting their insurance company know they were engaging their own structural engineering report had resulted in them being assigned a new claim manager. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing they couldn’t be sure. Maybe the complexities of their claim were being taken seriously? Or maybe the new claims manager was a big gun, hauled out for customers perceived as being especially difficult? Kevin preferred to assume the first, whereas Lindsay took the new claims manager’s name as a bad sign: Malcolm Bitterman. ‘It’s like the guy was born to take out his frustrations on others,’ Lindsay said.

‘You’re jumping to conclusions,’ Kevin said. ‘Let’s just see how things play out.’

On Thursday morning, Lindsay received an email from Bitterman stating that they were obligated to provide the insurance company access to the property for investigations. The tone was almost threatening. She called Kevin to see if he had talked to Rutherford, which only wound him up. ‘It’s been a day and a half since he called,’ Kevin said, exasperated.

‘Yes, that’s true,’ Lindsay said. ‘But we need to deal with this right away.’

‘Okay, I’ll do what I can from here,’ Kevin said.

Over the next hour, Lindsay watched their inbox fill up with communications between Kevin and Bitterman. Lindsay watched anxiously, pacing the kitchen between emails, waiting for the next instalment in the dispute, hoping that Kevin could hold his temper, explain their position and at least get through to these people that Kevin and Lindsay had valid concerns. Bitterman had been told, he said, that a request for access had been made over a week ago and ignored. Kevin replied that the request had been made less than two days before, there was no delay and there was no attempt to deny the PMO access to the property. He needed, he pointed out, to arrange time off work to be on site for the visit and could not suggest any dates until he knew what days he could take off. Bitterman eventually apologised for being misinformed, but Lindsay felt her big-gun conclusion was proven correct. Bitterman had been assigned to their claim to make them do things the insurance company’s way.

When Kevin arrived home that night, he said a date had been arrived at, two weeks from then. Lindsay tried to talk with him about Bitterman’s emails, but he stopped her.

‘I’ve had enough for one day, Lin,’ he said. ‘I just want to stop thinking about it, have dinner, play with the kids, whatever, anything but the house.’

She nodded her agreement, but really she wanted to talk about what had happened, if maybe they should talk to someone about getting a new project manager. Since Rutherford seemed unable to schedule appointments, why would they trust him to manage the repair of their house?

Alice was having dinner with some of her old Southern Response workmates at a bar made of shipping containers. The bar was in the suburb of Addington a few kilometres southwest of the city centre, where a number of central city businesses had moved while the central city was still cordoned off and businesses were trying to figure out ways to stay in business. Even now, three years after the February quake, businesses were struggling to get going in the centre of Christchurch, while in nearby suburbs businesses were thriving. Some people were calling Christchurch a donut city, nothing left in the centre.

There were eight of them at the table sharing pizza and chips. One of them, a guy called Scott, had never worked with SR, he just ended up hanging out with them because his mates from the web design company he worked at had not shown up. Of the others, only two still worked for SR.

Kylie whispered to Alice that Scott’s story wasn’t very believable and insisted he had just latched on to them because he was trying to pick up Alice. Alice told her that if the missing workmates story was a lie, it was because he was trying to pick up Kylie, not Alice.

‘Come on,’ Alice whispered in Kylie’s ear, ‘the only reason he’s hanging out so close to me is because he’s trying to talk to you.’ This made Kylie blush. ‘Watch,’ Alice said, and excused herself to go to the toilet, pushing past Scott to get to the aisle. She glanced behind her and saw Scott move along the table to sit next to Kylie. Alice winked at her and turned to continue on her way to the outside. She needed air, not the toilets. The place was simply too crowded and noisy.

She stood outside and breathed in the cold air. It was raining and the air was damp, but Alice had always enjoyed the smell of rain. There was the occasional car going past and people walking along the footpaths, more people than she was used to seeing around the city. This was the western side of the city, which hadn’t suffered the same degree of population loss that the east had. On a weekday night near Alice’s home, there was so little traffic that she could pull out onto the main road without looking and not hit another car. If she were inclined to.

It had been a noisy week. Alice’s great-grandfather had died over the weekend and the funeral had been a large family affair.

Grandma and Grandad Bennett had been living with Heather and Neil while their house was repaired, and being in a different house had revealed how confused Grandad was. One day he went missing, and Neil, Heather and Grandma Bennett had no idea where he was until the builders at the house called. Grandad had walked six kilometres and was exhausted, upset and confused because they wouldn’t let him into his own home.

Heather and Grandma Bennett kept a closer eye on Grandad after that, but he still managed to escape a couple of times. Each time, Heather found him walking the road back to his home.

Grandad Bennett never got to live in his house again because early in May, he came down with a cold that quickly went to his chest and then developed into pneumonia.