Bleak City (5 page)

Later that night, Marjorie was alone in the house, which had been tidied within an inch of its life by her daughters and daughter-in-law. All very dutiful women, always asking if she was all right, making sure there was nothing she needed to do for herself, she could just relax and enjoy her twilight years. They actually used that term, ‘twilight years’, as though death was simply a dimming of light, a fading into nothing. Bill had died suddenly, away from their sight, so they didn’t really know the truth of it, that death is messy and ugly, and the common habit of romanticising death is all that protects those who encounter it from insanity.

From where Marjorie was sitting, she saw clouds coming over the hills from the south, piling up, then rapidly moving towards the city, bringing with them a wind that tore at the magnolia bush outside the window. The sky darkened with cloud, and she could see the rain like a veil, coming down on the hills and on the houses between her and them. Soon rain started to pick away at the window, getting louder and louder until she thought it might hail. She stood to check, but there was nothing settling on the lawn. The sky flashed and then thunder rolled across the city, a boom that spread, then broke up. It was a nice change from the rumbling that had been coming from under the hills in recent weeks.

One grandson, Tony, had wanted to move in with Marjorie after the September earthquake, not because his house was damaged but because, he said, he didn’t want her to be afraid. Marjorie knew, though, that Tony was seeing a business opportunity and was planning to rent his house to those whose houses were uninhabitable. Although she approved of his initiative, she wasn’t about to allow him to gain a foothold in her own home.

Marjorie had convinced her children that she would be fine on her own, she had lived through the Blitz, she said, and the earthquakes were much less frightening. Eventually, they accepted that and left her alone to the peace of her own house. But she was scared. It was unnerving waking in the night to a rumble coming from beneath the hills, hearing it before feeling it, then hearing the sound of the house’s joints creaking. The Blitz was personal, the Germans dropping bombs on them, wiping out families, neighbourhoods, livelihoods. And through the years, everything she had faced was personal, someone trying to take business from the family, someone trying to take advantage of one of her children or grandchildren, to get one over on the family. She could face those things, see the enemy, figure out a strategy, a way to turn the tables and get one over on them. But this quake business was impersonal, she just happened to be sitting atop a part of the earth that was breaking, slowly but inexorably, assuming a new shape, oblivious to the tiny beings scurrying around on the surface.

She had told her family she was sleeping well, and that was true, until there was an aftershock. Then she was wide awake, not waiting with dread for the next quake, but awake and thinking about her family, past and present, worrying about what the future held.

Marjorie knew she didn’t have much time left. She needed to make decisions about how her holdings would be distributed once she was gone. The question was: How did she want to be remembered? What sort of future did she want to set up for those she was leaving behind? She wasn’t sure. She had made too many compromises over the years to feel truly comfortable with the past, overlooked the decisions Bill had made that had disadvantaged others. Yes, he had made those decisions, but she had done nothing to stop him, because she didn’t want to lose everything.

There had been the Drakes. Greg was a chippie and he and Bill had known each other from school. Bill had given him work over the years, but Greg had a drinking problem, as many did after the war, and he found it difficult to work consistently. Money was increasingly tight and so Bill offered to buy his house and land. It was a lovely piece of land at the bottom of the Port Hills, west of the city, land that had not yet been developed into housing. It wasn’t a great price, but it was enough to get Greg and his family out of the hole they were in and into a smaller property. What Greg hadn’t known was that the land was going to be rezoned, and Bill was able to exert pressure on his mates in the council and get it rezoned quickly once the sale was complete. Had Greg held on for another couple of years, the zoning change would’ve gone through and he would have been able to subdivide the land himself. Instead, it was Bill who made a killing on the subdivision and development of the land.

Until the earthquakes started, Marjorie hadn’t thought about Greg Drake for at least a decade. His son had come to see her once, in the 1990s, shortly after Bill died. He was angry. Knowing his parents’ financial position, the son said, Bill should have used his influence to push through the zoning change and let them profit from the sale of the land. They wouldn’t have ended up in their pokey, damp flat, Greg angry at being betrayed by a man he had thought of as a friend. It ate him up, his son said, and his health had suffered. Their retirement would have been happier if they’d had the opportunity to profit from the land, their land, instead of seeing it line the pockets of a man who had more than he needed, more than he would ever need.

Marjorie apologised. It was the polite thing to do, after all. She told him she was never privy to any business dealings, which wasn’t true, but he wasn’t to know that. Nor was he to know that it was Marjorie who first became aware of the Drakes’ financial problems and encouraged Bill to ask questions, subtle questions meant to draw Greg out so he would confide in Bill.

Then there had been Stan and Suzanne. When Stan Watson first started working for Bill, Marjorie had recognised that his charm hid a cunning nature and she had resolved to keep an eye on him. He could be good for the business, but he had to be reined in. Unfortunately, Stan knew how to play Bill and before Marjorie could encourage him to do otherwise, Bill had promoted Stan over the other workers and entrusted responsibilities to him that Bill had previously been reluctant to let go of. Marjorie was looking after the books then and had noticed that materials they were buying in were being charged out at inflated prices, not the usual markup, but actually stated as being something they weren’t. It would increase profits, but it had to be subtle or it would ruin the company’s good reputation. She wouldn’t let that happen, she dreaded being poor again, and she worried about the day when a particularly canny client would notice and call them out on it, she could see it all crumbling away.

She needed to find a way to control Stan, and it wasn’t long before she found her way in. Suzanne was working in the office, and Marjorie encouraged her to try out the fashions of the day, the miniskirts, the big hair, the dramatic makeup. She was a pretty girl, with Marjorie’s petite build but lighter colouring and the thick blonde hair of Marjorie’s own mother. Soon she had the attention of all the workers, and a few encouraging words from her mother made her realise that her father’s trusted foreman was handsome, that his ambition would provide her with a good life. Marjorie envied the girls of the 1960s. Although they had few choices, they had far more than she had at their age. In an ideal world, she would have encouraged a daughter to get an education and a career so she could support herself and not be dependent on a man, but she had to face facts, Suzanne wasn’t that kind of girl, she was silly, easily flattered, and the few shiny presents Marjorie encouraged Stan to give her were enough to convince her that he was her shining knight.

Stan was ambitious and had a feel for what people would believe, but he was also a bully, a fact Marjorie hadn’t recognised until it was too late. He enjoyed having power over those less powerful and took pleasure in forcing Suzanne into his mould, his idea of what a wife should be. Their son Tony was very like Stan, in both looks and temperament.

Suzanne was one of many Marjorie thought about late at night. The truth was it wasn’t the quakes Marjorie was afraid of. It was the past, out there in the dark, waiting for her, the ghosts of those she had pushed and guided into making decisions that suited her during her life in this new country. She couldn’t go back and change anything, but that didn’t matter late at night, wide awake hearing the rumble fade into the distance.

There were some nights she couldn’t get back to sleep at all, and what haunted her then was people from the deeper past, the people she had left behind when she married Bill and agreed to travel to the other side of the world with him. There were Walter, her first love, and her brother Edward, both dead in the trenches.

Andrew was like Edward. Edward had worshipped Marjorie, his glamorous big sister who had escaped the family home to a better life. When the war began, she encouraged him to go into the army. It was a way to get away from home, away from the angry drunk taking out the terrors of the previous war on his powerless family. Andrew had Edward’s dark, thick hair and his eyes were the kind of blue that turned to grey when the light changed. Like Edward, Andrew had been soft and easily led. But Marjorie had encouraged Andrew to conceal that, to hide any weakness, any situation where someone would try to take advantage of him.

Marjorie’s parents had been killed in the Blitz, but the others might still be out there, her other brother and her sisters. They had survived the Blitz, she knew that, but what of the years that followed the end of the war? What about their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren?

The war had changed Marjorie, the grief of loss had squeezed her heart and made her hard. Had these earthquakes reversed the process? She hoped not. It would take another lifetime to undo the regrets the young Marjorie would have felt had she known the choices the older, grief-hardened Marjorie was going to make. And Marjorie didn’t have another lifetime, she had, at most, a handful of years to decide what legacy she would leave behind.

During the last months of 2010, the people of Christchurch became used to the aftershocks. Some mastered the art of sleeping through anything, others mastered the art of functioning adequately on interrupted sleep. A game arose, that of guessing the magnitude and location of an aftershock before the government’s geological sciences agency could publish a quake report. This agency’s website, Geonet, experienced more traffic than it ever had before, and tens of thousands of ‘felt’ reports were submitted to describe each individual’s experience of a particular quake.

This is something people fail to understand unless they have been through a series of earthquakes: It’s not the magnitude of the quake that determines how you experience it, it’s how close to the epicentre you are. So although the July 2009 Dusky Sound earthquake in the southwest of the South Island was larger than the September 2010 quake, 7.8 to Darfield’s 7.1, it was less damaging because it was far away from major population centres.

The Darfield earthquake, although it occurred in the countryside, was near a large urban area. As the months wore on, that urban area, home to 375,000 people, was shaken by repeated aftershocks. There were over 1700 individual earthquakes of magnitude three and higher from the initial Darfield earthquake until the end of 2010. Thirty of these were magnitude five quakes, and more than a few were very close to the city. Many of these quakes were centred under the townships of Rolleston, Springston, Lincoln and Prebbleton just west of the city, which was disconcerting for the residents of these quiet satellite towns, but they were also disturbing for the residents of the city itself.

One 5.0 aftershock just a few days after the Darfield earthquake was centred just south of the city, under the hard volcanic rocks of the Port Hills, between the port town of Lyttelton and Christchurch. Its motion was sharply up and down with little warning between the rumble and its shaking, unlike the quakes from Rolleston and further afield, and it occurred just before eight o’clock on a Wednesday morning. So close to the city, it was a brutal shock after four nights of sleep-interrupting aftershocks. An exhausted few packed up and left Christchurch at that point.

But most became used to the regular aftershocks, and learned to live with the interruption to their lives. Parts of the central city and badly damaged commercial areas were cordoned off, and fences went up around buildings that were regarded as too dangerous to be occupied. The people of Christchurch were regularly reminding themselves how lucky the city had been that the September earthquake occurred in the middle of the night, when most people were tucked up in bed asleep. One person had died from a heart attack that wasn’t necessarily because of the earthquake, and two people were badly injured, one by a falling chimney, the other cut by glass.

One Sunday night, Alice’s mother and stepfather, Lindsay and Kevin, went into the city for dinner with Lindsay’s brother and his wife. Having Alice home was nice, Lindsay had missed her during her months flatting, missed the near-adult conversation during the days once Alice arrived home from school. Since the earthquake, it was almost the same, except that Alice’s arrival times varied according to her timetable, and some days she didn’t arrive home until ten o’clock. She was still on her restricted licence and determined not to lose it by being caught out too late.

One of the advantages of Alice being home again was that Lindsay and Kevin could go out, leaving Alice to look after the kids, spending a night at home studying once Olivia and Jack had gone to bed. Both children had been anxious following the earthquake and didn’t like being away from their parents. They had become fussy about babysitters, and the neighbour’s fourteen-year-old daughter was no longer a good option. She was showing all the signs of anxiety herself, and the last time they had left her to look after Olivia and Jack, it had been a stressful night, with both kids refusing to go to bed and insisting on sleeping with their parents. But Olivia and Jack seemed to feel safe around Alice, as though nothing could possibly go wrong with her there. She was a like a magic charm, and Lindsay and Alice had talked about that, wondering if they were thinking that way because Alice hadn’t been there for the big one.