Bleak City (49 page)

Lindsay thought about it for a moment. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘They’re good people. They try to be anyway, very thoughtful.’

‘But you wouldn’t say that about Andrew, would you?’

Lindsay gazed at her.

‘I’m not sure what I would say about Andrew, I don’t think I ever really knew him,’ Lindsay said at last. ‘When we got married, I thought he was pretty cool, always good for a laugh, and he was smart.’

‘Those are good things, right?’

‘Usually,’ Lindsay said. ‘The problem was that after you were born, he didn’t really change.’

Alice didn’t understand. Of course a person would change after their child was born, it’s a big deal. Alice had changed when Olivia was born, and Olivia wasn’t even her own child. Even before that, when Lindsay was pregnant and the baby moved around so much Alice could see Lindsay’s belly moving, Alice understood that a new baby was something wonderful. Your world would change.

‘I’m not saying he didn’t love you,’ Lindsay said, her voice softer. ‘But he was immature and didn’t really understand that his life needed to change. He was only able to continue with university because we had his parents’ support. That was a good thing they did for us, and I was grateful, but Andrew just went on with his life, like he wasn’t married, didn’t have a child and responsibilities. I was at home with you, and Andrew was either at lectures or out with his mates. I felt like we didn’t matter.’

‘And it just went downhill from there?’

‘I suppose you could say that,’ Lindsay said. She looked at her watch. ‘Time to pick up the kiddies. I’ll make sure they leave you alone. Given it’s so hot, I think I’ll take them to the beach, wear them out there, rather than let them loose on you.’

Alice laughed, which hurt her throat, then flopped back onto the sofa. She heard Lindsay’s car back down the driveway and got up and poured out what was left of the sickly lemon and honey drink. She made herself a coffee and went back into the lounge. She was thinking about what Lindsay had said. It was the first time Lindsay had really said anything about her marriage to Andrew.

Some members of Andrew’s family were definitely interested in making a profit, and people didn’t seem to be high on their priority list. Alice had gone along to a family barbecue. Andrew and his cousin Tony had been talking about buying up damaged houses, using their industry contacts to get the repairs done cheaply and then selling them on. When Alice asked later if that was ethical or moral or whatever, Andrew explained the difference between insurance policy entitlements and repair quality. ‘A repair can meet the Building Code,’ he said, ‘but not meet the insurance policy. So someone who settles with their insurance company might want to take the money and move on, especially if the repair cost is high on a low-value house.’

‘But that’s not right,’ Alice said. ‘If they’re given the money for repairs, they should go on repairs.’

‘That’s not what an insurance contract is about,’ Andrew said. ‘They’re given the money to get them back into an equivalent house, not necessarily that exact house. Insurance is about protecting their financial position, not about protecting the house itself. And the way insurance companies are settling now, people can do that, go and buy another place and sell the damaged place as it is.’

Alice nodded. It kind of made sense. Then again, not really. ‘Insurance thinking and common sense don’t really go together, do they?’

‘Insurance is a legal contract, and it goes by the law,’ Andrew said.

‘Not by common sense,’ Alice said.

‘That’s not what I said.’

‘Okay, but the damaged place, it could be repaired for a lot less than the settlement?’

‘In a lot of cases. As when new is a pretty high standard, that’s what the insurance companies are paying out, it can be a lot higher than a repair that just gets the place back into a reasonable state.’

‘But are they paying that out?’ Alice said. ‘My grandparents, my other grandparents, have a neighbour who was paid out for repairs, he had a scope and everything, but when he went to get a builder sorted, he couldn’t afford to fix the house. Even if he stuck to the scope.’ She didn’t say anything about what Lindsay and Kevin were dealing with, it was none of Andrew’s business.

Andrew nodded. ‘That does happen,’ he said. ‘People don’t do their homework.’

‘But what if the insurance company didn’t help him to do his homework?’ Alice said.

‘That’s not their job,’ Andrew said.

‘But they’ll say, I don’t know, they say we’re looking out for you, like in the ads. It doesn’t seem to be very looking out for you if they force the homeowner to settle for less than they know it will take to fix the place.’

‘Insurance is not a social service, Alice,’ Andrew said. ‘It’s a business.’

‘Then they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise themselves as though they’re benign and generous.’

‘Maybe they shouldn’t,’ Andrew said. ‘But I think that’s a conversation you need to have with the Commerce Commission.’

Later, Lindsay came home with Olivia and Jack and a hot chicken. Lindsay pulled it apart and made a salad while Olivia and Jack sat in the lounge with Alice telling her about their day and how there had been so many people at the beach. Jack had decided he wanted to be a lifeguard when he grew up, looking out for the people swimming and surfing.

It wasn’t long before Alice went to bed. She had opened up the windows earlier to cool the room down, but it was still too hot to get to sleep quickly. She lay in bed looking out the window. Cloud was piled high in the classic nor’west arch.

Alice’s bedroom was on the front of the house, facing the street. She remembered one night when she was still in high school. She saw lights flashing outside. She pulled back the drapes and a white four-wheel-drive was moving slowly down the street, purple and yellow lights flashing. It looked like a security patrol and seemed odd, a little frightening even. What were they looking for? Soon another ute came into view, same make, same flashing lights. But that second ute had a sign on it saying ‘House Follows’. The next vehicle was a truck carrying the promised house, a weatherboard affair in what might be cream, though it was hard to tell so late at night. On the side facing Alice was a single long window. It wasn’t exactly an exciting house. The house truck was followed by another four-wheel-drive. Three vehicles, looking out for the house and for the neighbourhood it was passing through. Now, though, it seemed no one was really looking out for the city’s houses.

Alice was going on a tramp with Andrew, Charlotte and two of her half-brothers. It was a five-day tramp in the Lewis Pass a couple of hours away from Christchurch, and on the drive up there, the two boys talked about the big earthquake the week before. They wondered if they would feel aftershocks and were excited at the possibility. The quake had been a 6.0 in magnitude, on the western side of the South Island, under the mountains near Arthur’s Pass. It had been felt throughout much of the South Island, and Alice had been in the kitchen having breakfast when she felt the house sway, the ground swelling up under her feet. She knew it was from further away than those in the Christchurch sequence and she pushed away thoughts of panic at the possibility of people being harmed. If it was remote, it wouldn’t be a problem.

‘We’re too far north to feel any aftershocks,’ Charlotte had told them. ‘Of course if the Alpine Fault goes, we’d definitely feel that.’ She explained to them the risk the Alpine Fault posed to the whole South Island, that it was expected to generate a magnitude eight quake sometime in the next fifty years.

Both Liam and Hugo were in their teens now, but only Liam was old enough to have any solid memories of the months following the September quake. They had spent most of 2011 and 2012 away from Christchurch and so the trauma of ongoing aftershocks was something they knew about but didn’t feel. Even nearly four years on, Alice still felt her heart race at a big aftershock, that moment of fear over what could be about to happen.

They left Andrew’s truck in the carpark and started along the track, getting into the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other. The first day was easy, just four hours walking that was mostly flat until a final climb up towards the first hut.

Alice had been pleased to get away from the atmosphere at home and up into the mountains. On the drive up to the track, she hadn’t been able to get her family’s situation out of her mind. It was in her head, churning away, over and over, what had happened to Lindsay and Kevin in the past year and what they faced in the year to come. What the insurance company was doing was wrong, going ahead with a repair that ignored damage anyone could see, over the objections of the homeowner, the person paying for the insurance policy.

After Christmas, Kevin had taken Olivia and Jack down to Timaru to stay with their cousins for a couple of weeks. Both Lindsay and Kevin said they should be having fun during the holidays and hanging around their stressed parents was in no way fun. They were right, it wasn’t fun at all, but Alice thought sending the kids away was a bad idea. It gave Lindsay and Kevin an excuse not to make an effort. Instead, they were just at home, doing their own thing, reading or playing games on a tablet or the laptop, barely talking because they couldn’t figure out what to do next about the house. Having the kids at home would have forced them to put the house situation to the back of their minds, eventually.

An hour into the walk, she dropped back to where Andrew was bringing up the rear and let the others get ahead.

‘Can I ask you some legal stuff?’ she said. Although Alice had talked to Andrew about insurance company behaviour in general, she had never mentioned Lindsay and Kevin’s situation to him. But he might be aware of what was going on if his parents had told him, Alice regularly talked to Gerald and Sylvia about how worried she was about what would happen with the repair of the Bowen house.

‘About insurance?’ he said. He smiled to encourage her. Andrew was one of those people who enjoyed their work and enjoyed talking about it outside of work.

‘About Mum and Kevin,’ she said.

She explained, as briefly as she could. Lindsay and Kevin weren’t happy about the proposed repair, it seemed to ignore quite a bit of damage. What they were especially unhappy about was that the original scope of works had said the whole foundation needed replacing, but now they were only going to do part of it. But the insurance company was insisting on going ahead with the repair to the point where they had received a building consent.

‘How has the insurance company responded to their engineering report?’ Andrew said.

‘With more reports from their own engineers restating their belief that their own strategy meets the policy,’ Alice said. ‘Mum and Kevin don’t know whether to get their engineer to fire back or if that’s just pouring more money down the drain.’

‘If the insurance company isn’t going to pay attention to the first engineer’s report, there’s no point,’ Andrew said. ‘It sounds like they need a lawyer.’

‘But Kevin doesn’t want that,’ Alice said. ‘I think he thinks it sends the wrong message, that they want to sue.’

‘It does send a message,’ Andrew said. ‘It says that they’re serious about getting their policy honoured.’

They were walking side by side along the track, and Alice looked across at him. ‘He says there are plenty of other alternatives to try before getting a lawyer,’ she said. Andrew restrained a laugh. ‘But I’m not convinced that there’s anything effective.’

‘No, there’s nothing really,’ Andrew said. ‘If you go to the ombudsman, you need to go through all the insurance company’s processes...’

‘... and get a letter of deadlock,’ Alice smiled at him. ‘I know, I looked at that, but it seems to take a long time. And there have been so many things done the wrong way that it’s hard to know where to start.’

‘You could see about getting their file,’ Andrew said. ‘From the insurance company.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Make a request under the Privacy Act, they’re entitled to the information, it is about them. They don’t need a lawyer to do that.’

Andrew told her to get Lindsay and Kevin to write the insurance company’s privacy officer requesting their whole file. It might take a bit of time, he said, but they should be able to get more information than they already had.

‘I’ll do that,’ Alice said. She was relieved at having another possibility. Maybe Lindsay would let her help out with getting through whatever information they received. They would have to act quickly if the insurance company was determined to get the repair underway. The claims manager had already said they would meet in the new year to discuss temporary accommodation.

But having an alternative that Lindsay and Kevin would find acceptable relieved Alice of her worries about what was happening at home. She was finally able to relax and start enjoying the scenery, being in the sun in the mountains, the air fresh and warm. Soon they started the climb up to the first hut and the effort wiped the last vestiges of her worries from her mind. At the top of the climb, they reached a plateau that stretched out towards the first hut, the mountains and the clear blue sky behind it. This was the point of tramping, escaping civilisation, feeling the weight of it all falling away.

Alice started running following the September quake, when she moved home. Then she had found it difficult to sleep at night, always waking to aftershocks. Or, on quiet nights, she had trouble falling asleep until there was an aftershock. Running wore her out, making it easier to fall asleep.

Although she had grown up in the neighbourhood, she saw it in a different way after the September quake. The constants were the lines of the hills, the jutting points, the hill that looked like it had a nipple, the crag of Castle Rock, when it still looked like a castle. She wished she had paid more attention when she was a child, so she could compare, assemble some sort of history of Alice then, Alice now, and construct some sort of journey, rather than the random wanderings that had made up her life so far.