Bleak City (47 page)

‘Go on,’ Stan said to Tony, who grabbed a piece of the caramel slice and shoved it greedily into his mouth to tear off a bite, smearing chocolate icing and crumbs across his face. He ran off outside while Stan turned to face Marjorie.

‘You do not tell my son what he can and cannot have,’ he said, his voice cold.

‘The boy lied,’ Marjorie said. ‘It’s getting to be a very bad habit.’

‘My boy is not a liar,’ he said, turning and walking out of the house.

Prevented from acting to curb the boy’s bad habits, Marjorie had only been able to observe, so she knew when he was hiding something. Usually.

Recently, Tony had been presenting invoices for work on his own properties, getting her to pay by saying it was work on her properties. She was embarrassed to realise, going through her paperwork, that he had been doing it for some months without her noticing.

Grown up Tony collected himself and flicked his eyes over the invoice. ‘You’re thinking of the Russell Street invoice,’ he said. ‘I can understand your confusion, the work’s been similar. We paid that a few months ago.’

She remembered. This invoice she was questioning was legitimate, she simply wanted to see how he reacted when challenged. Hopefully, catching him off guard would serve as a warning, get him to stop, because she didn’t want to have to make an issue of this in the family, not at this stage in her life. Her world would be reshaped into one driven by his attempts to defend his greed, and she would be robbed of her hard-won peace.

‘You’re right, of course,’ she said quickly. A smile of relief passed over Tony’s face, then concern.

‘Are you getting enough rest, Grandmother?’ he said, passing the invoice back to her. ‘Maybe this is all too much? Should I be doing more with the finances?’

She shook her head, keeping her eyes down, an old woman ashamed at how dim she had become. ‘I’m managing,’ she said. ‘I just need some rest.’

He paused, hesitated to express his next thought. ‘Have you given some thought to what we talked about a few weeks ago?’

She hadn’t, she told him. She started to stand up from her chair and then dropped back into it, feigning a tired spell.

‘Are you all right?’ Tony said, leaping up from his seat.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I just need a lie down.’ She slowly pushed herself up from her chair, forcing Tony to move out of her way. He took the hint and said his goodbyes, while helping Marjorie over to the sofa.

The sound of his footsteps faded and she heard the engine of his ute start up then fade as it moved off along the street. She pushed herself up into a sitting position and tucked the woollen blanket around her legs. She had been feeling cold recently, even though it was well into spring. Outside, her yellow magnolia was flowering. Suzanne had given it to her before the earthquakes and this year it was heavy with blooms the colour of lemon curd. Dozens of flowers were in different stages, from just opening up to dropping their heavy petals into the soil below.

It was no secret in the family that once Marjorie died, her property portfolio was to be sold off and the proceeds split among her children. Tony had expressed no expectation of receiving a specific inheritance, but he had offered to act as executor. He knew her holdings, he said, he would know how to get the most out of each one. That was true, he had been managing her properties for a long time and knew exactly what each one was worth. But then he would be in a position to conceal how much of her money he had spent repairing his own properties.

Then there was the house, the one she had built after Bill died and was still living in now. She intended to die in this house, her safe place. Here she had been able to shape her world into what she wanted, free of anyone else’s expectations or influence. If allowed free rein, Tony would demolish the house in the interests of maximising the value of her estate, destroy her garden and develop the land, she had no doubt about that. That he thought she didn’t recognise his intentions only reinforced her view of him as cunning but ultimately not smart enough to harness the power of that cunning.

Gerald and Sylvia would take good care of this house. And if it weren’t for Tony’s indiscretions, she would trust Gerald to act as her executor. He would follow her instructions and make sure that his sisters received good returns on her property investments. But if Gerald noticed any irregularities in what had been spent on repairing some of those properties, he would ‘do the right thing’. No, Andrew would be her executor. She hadn’t yet asked him, but he had never been able to say no to his grandmother. He would follow her instructions and, if he noticed Tony’s indiscretions, he would keep it quiet once he realised Tony was the cause. Andrew could always be trusted to look after the family’s interests. He would keep her secret.

Marjorie woke to the sound of the front door opening and Alice saying hello. She was carrying three plastic shopping bags. That was right, Alice had arranged to do Marjorie’s shopping after work that day. Alice used her foot to push the door closed behind her, then walked through to the kitchen.

The sky was darkening, with the sun disappearing behind the mountains in the west. Marjorie got up and walked slowly to the kitchen, following Alice, trying to shake the sleep from herself in order to appear lively. Alice saw through her efforts and asked if she was all right.

‘Just a long day,’ Marjorie said, sitting down at the dining table, watching Alice unpack the shopping bags. ‘Did you have enough?’ She was sure the list she had given Alice would be, at most, two bags’ worth. She had given Alice cash for the shop and she was sure it wasn’t near enough to cover what the girl was starting to unpack.

‘Just over,’ Alice said. ‘But don’t worry about it, my treat.’

Alice had bought a cooked chicken, which she unwrapped and started pulling apart, putting the pieces onto a plate. There was also fruit, including a pineapple and tamarillos. Marjorie loved tamarillos, but it was too cold to grow them in Christchurch. It was a bit late in the season for them, Alice must have paid a fortune for these.

‘I don’t need all these things, Alice,’ Marjorie said. ‘Really, you shouldn’t have done this, take some of it home.’

But Alice insisted. ‘You need to eat, you need to keep your strength up.’

‘How much strength do you think I need for the time I have left?’ She had shocked the girl, for which she was immediately sorry. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you think I will live forever.’

‘No, of course not,’ Alice said, flustered. ‘But...’

Death was difficult for the young. It was such a far-off prospect that when it intruded on their view of the world, they were shocked. Alice had been acutely aware of the fragile nature of life from following the Royal Commission into the earthquakes, but the freshness of that pain had faded for her, only to re-emerge following the death of her maternal great-grandfather and the recent near-loss of her grandmother. She had trouble coping with the idea of losing someone, and she had been fussing over Marjorie too much in the last few months.

‘Could you at least aim for one hundred?’ Alice said.

Marjorie pushed herself up from the dining table and went into the kitchen. ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘Would you like some chicken?’ She pulled two dinner plates from the cupboard.

‘Love some,’ Alice said, happy. ‘I’ll get some lettuce.’

Alice put a salad together from the garden and from some of the food she had bought, making up two plates for dinner. She chopped the pineapple and dressed it with chopped mint and sugar. ‘For dessert,’ she said, covering it and putting it in the refrigerator.

They sat down to their dinner, and after they had discussed Alice’s day, they began talking about the EQC situation. There had been articles in
The Press
questioning whether foundation repairs were being carried out properly. That this was an issue was no shock to Marjorie, she had never had any illusions about people’s honesty and could see how the managed repairs situation presented some people with irresistible opportunities. It was human nature, after all, to seek one’s own advantage.

‘The Government’s ignoring it,’ Alice said. The Ministry responsible for building standards, MBIE, had brought out a set of repair guidelines that had reduced the standard to which properties were repaired. ‘I think that’s what’s happened with Mum and Kevin’s repair,’ Alice said. ‘The insurance company was going to replace the foundations, but then the MBIE guidance came along and the insurance company decided to use it as an excuse to just patch instead. It’s ripping people off and no one in authority is going to put a stop to it.’

‘But fixing everyone’s foundations properly would be very expensive, you can understand why these companies are trying to find a way to save money,’ Marjorie said, playing devil’s advocate, a role she thoroughly enjoyed when Alice was the other party. The girl was a good mix of compassion and intelligence. No, not girl, young woman, Marjorie reminded herself. Alice was no longer the naive girl Andrew had reintroduced her to four years ago, she was figuring out how the world works and how to find her way in it.

‘But if there’s a contract that says the higher standard applies, why is the Government coming along and saying no, ignore the insurance contract, just use this standard instead?’ Alice said, countering. ‘It shouldn’t be possible for a legal contract to be set aside like that just because the Government decides it’s going to be too expensive.’

‘That’s true,’ Marjorie said.

‘And if the people speaking out are right, and this is another leaky homes crisis on the horizon, someone needs to stop it before it gets there,’ Alice said.

Clearly she had been talking to Gerald on the topic. He had seen the leaky homes crisis coming in the 1990s, when the Government changed the Building Act to allow the building industry more freedom to regulate itself. The leaky homes that had resulted had cost the country over $10 billion in rework and caused untold stress to people unfortunate enough to find themselves the owners of these poorly-built homes.

‘It has all the hallmarks of that,’ Marjorie said. ‘The building industry is allowed to regulate itself, as is the insurance industry. There’s too much room for corruption when there’s a lot of money to be made and an industry is allowed to do as it pleases. Business can’t be trusted to do the right thing when there’s no one keeping an eye on them.’

‘I just hope someone does something about this soon,’ Alice said, that naive girl there once again. ‘People are worn out and should be able to move on.’

‘That’s also true,’ Marjorie said, ‘but it’s not going to happen. That requires that someone steps up and does the right thing, and people don’t do the right thing. They do the right thing for themselves, that works in their own interests. And nowhere is that more true than in politics. Politicians don’t admit they’re wrong, and they don’t accept blame.’

‘Not all people,’ Alice said, annoyed. She got up and retrieved the pineapple from the refrigerator and served up two bowls. ‘Eat up.’

Marjorie sighed, half-heartedly, but spooned a piece of the fruit into her mouth. It was good, but she was starting to feel full and picked slowly.

‘No, perhaps not all people are like that,’ Marjorie said, pushing on to the point she wanted to make. ‘But there’s not enough people determined to do the right thing to stop this EQC and insurance business from dragging on for many, many years. I’ll be long gone and you’ll still be learning more about what’s gone wrong with the Christchurch rebuild.’

Alice sighed and all signs of the naive girl were gone as she dropped her spoon into her half-empty bowl. She looked defeated. Marjorie remembered that feeling, in the weeks after Walter’s death, when she felt unable to go on. But she had gone on, pulled herself back together.

‘I hate thinking that this could still be going on in a year’s time, or ten years’ time, that my family could still be caught up in it,’ Alice said, ‘when it’s gone on long enough already. But I know you’re right. There’s no signs of anyone coming clean on this debacle, and the Opposition isn’t asking the right questions.’

‘So what can you do?’ Marjorie said.

Alice looked confused. ‘But you’ve just said nothing can be done, that there is no point,’ she said.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Marjorie said. ‘I’m saying this is how the world is, greed and self-interest are its primary driving forces. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that can be changed, because you will spend the rest of your life beating your head against a wall hoping for change.’

‘What do I do then?’ Alice said.

‘Be who you choose to be, Alice,’ Marjorie said. ‘Don’t let this world choose that for you.’

Lindsay got up and went to the toilet. She was bleeding but she wasn’t in any pain, so she didn’t take anything, just made herself a coffee and went back to bed to read. Kevin was still asleep and she left him to it. He had spent too many nights lately going over insurance, and he deserved a decent lie in.

It wasn’t until a few minutes after she was back in bed that she felt the cramping start and she considered getting up and getting some painkiller. It was cold, though, and the bed was warm so she stayed where she was. Soon, though, the cramping was worse and she moved to get out of bed and get some painkiller but instead sucked in her breath and fell back onto the bed. It was bad. She tried again, but it was too bad to move. She nudged Kevin, gently, to wake him slowly, but he was out to it. Alice. Alice would be up, Lindsay had heard her wandering through the house earlier. She texted Alice.

Alice brought her a strip of pills and a glass of water, then sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Are you going to see the doctor?’ she asked, her voice quiet as Lindsay gulped down the pills.

Lindsay nodded. ‘I thought last month was bad,’ she said. She pushed her hands into her belly, trying to dull the pain until the pills kicked in. She had been having painful periods since before winter, when she had started worrying more and more about her mother’s anxiety, together with the pressure from the insurance company to proceed with the repairs. Since Heather’s heart attack, Lindsay’s symptoms had been worse, and she needed painkillers constantly for the first days of her period.