Bleak City (51 page)

Heather stepped out of the bed, moving slowly to avoid disturbing Neil, who was snoring softly. She put on her walking clothes and headed outside. She walked towards the front of the section, following the sound of the bellbird, searching for it in the trees along the fenceline that faced onto the road. There in the kowhai tree, the slender olive green bird gave a call far louder than seemed possible for such a small bird.

It was cold and soon the mornings would be bitter. Heather had been walking each morning since the start of the year, part of her programme for taking care of herself, building up her fitness following her bypass as well as looking after her mental health. So far it was working, but Heather didn’t like being outdoors in the cold, it would take real effort to get up each morning, especially once the days started getting shorter. But that problem was a few weeks away, Heather would deal with it when it arrived rather than worrying about it now. She was trying to focus on dealing with the problems at hand, rather than becoming mired in what could go wrong.

She headed along the river towards the hills. Her usual walk was a zigzag through the neighbourhood’s streets, but it was getting too easy, and today she would add a bit of hill in. Her first hill goal was getting over a slight rise without having to stop for breath, and once she had achieved that, she would try some of the hill walks up the valley, towards the Summit Road.

She had to pause once to catch her breath while going up the hill. At the top, she stopped to look out down Port Hills Road towards the Heathcote Valley. She and Neil had planned to spend their retirement there, in a house built to their design, on the section they still owned but could do nothing with. It was a dead dream, Heather accepted that now, and she was starting to think what they might do once it was all over, the issues with the house, the problem of the section. Her mother was nearly ninety and in the months since Heather’s father had died, was looking it. Her house was too big for her, and Neil and Heather had talked about having her move in with them. Heather didn’t like the idea, as having her move in then out again, should re-repairs ever take place, would be too stressful. But none of Heather’s sisters seemed inclined to want to take their mother in, and none of them was near enough to be of help on a regular basis.

There had been good news a few weeks ago, which helped Heather’s mood enormously. The Supreme Court had decided in favour of the Quake Outcasts, the group of red zone landowners who had taken the Government to court over its fifty percent offers on bare land. The half-price offers had not been lawfully made, the court ruled, and the Government had been directed to reconsider their decisions and make new offers. Although it wasn’t over yet, the end was in sight, Neil and Heather would finally receive an offer on their red zoned section, one that would be more than half of the 2007 value. The Supreme Court had given the Government no leeway for further excuses. It had taken such a long time, over eighteen months since the High Court had first ruled against the Government, but finally seeing a just decision gave Heather hope.

Their house re-repairs still weren’t sorted, but there was progress there, even though it didn’t directly relate to their house. The Ministry responsible for building standards had been asked to survey houses where the owners had questioned the quality of foundation repairs. The results had been disturbing. Of the fourteen houses inspected, there was only one that actually met the required standards. Another hundred houses would be inspected to see if the survey findings were part of a wider problem. Once the results of that survey were complete, Neil and Heather had decided they would approach EQC once again.

Heather turned and walked back down the hill. She heard a runner’s footsteps coming up behind her and slowing down. It was Alice, who stopped. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but some curls had come loose and hung around her sweaty face. She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees, gasping for breath.

‘Gran,’ she managed to gasp out.

‘Good run?’

Alice nodded, gulping in breath. ‘Really pushed myself.’

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Heather said.

‘No, I’ve done enough, I’ll walk with you.’

They headed back towards Neil and Heather’s house.

‘Got some stuff from the insurance company,’ Alice said. ‘They said it’ll be a few more weeks before they can give us the full file.’ Alice had helped Lindsay write a request to the insurance company for their file, and they had been waiting over a month for the information to start coming through.

‘Anything useful?’

‘All stuff we already have,’ Alice said. ‘But I was thinking, with the building consent, shouldn’t Mum and Kevin have a copy of that?’

‘Well, yes,’ Heather said. ‘The consent was applied for on their behalf. Don’t they have it?’

‘No,’ Alice shook her head. ‘The claims manager was supposed to let them see it before making the application but he never did. And things were so hectic then.’ She paused.

Heather nodded. She had still been recovering from her surgery at the time. She hated that she had been such a burden, had so worried everyone in her family. She wouldn’t let that happen again.

‘Call the council,’ Heather said. ‘They shouldn’t have any problem giving you a copy. Well, giving Lindsay one anyway.’

‘Good idea,’ Alice said. ‘Did you hear EQC’s started sending out excess invoices?’

‘Yes, I did hear that,’ Heather said. Late in 2014, EQC had announced it would start billing for repairs done under the CHRP. That struck people as strange, almost like an afterthought, as insurance companies usually expected an excess to be paid before work commenced. The EQC official line was that it was deliberate policy. It didn’t make sense.

‘You know the EQC excess is different from your standard insurance excess?’ Alice said. ‘It’s a percentage of the repair value. So when you get your excess bill, you’ll know how much they spent on repairs. No reason you can’t ask them for a breakdown of costs.’

Heather stopped and turned to Alice. ‘We could ask,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘But we can’t make them give us the information.’

‘Yes, you can,’ Alice said. ‘Like we’re doing with the insurance company, there’s an Official Information Act that applies to government departments. So when your invoice comes in, you can Oh-Eye-A your scope of works...’

‘... and that would give us a way forward with our complaint,’ Heather finished. She was excited. For the first time in her life, she was anticipating the receipt of a bill.

Long, straight roads run for tens of kilometres across the Canterbury Plains, and it was one of these roads that Charlotte and Alice were driving along at one hundred kilometres an hour. Grassy paddocks and evergreen windbreaks passed by at a blur, the road stretching off to the distant mountains. Freedom to Charlotte was driving these straight roads far away from her everyday life, and if she had enough money, she would just get in her car and drive, fill the tank once again and keep driving.

‘It’s the next intersection,’ Alice said, glancing up from her phone. ‘Another four kays.’

The road they were on was Telegraph Road and in September 2010, the Greendale fault had ripped across Telegraph Road and shunted the northern half of the road east and the southern half west. The shift had been half the width of the road, so the centreline from each side of the road ran into the road edge markings. Charlotte had been reading about the geology of the earthquake sequence for the writing class she was taking at her new high school and she wanted to see what the fault looked like nearly five years after the big quake. She had a GoPro attached to the dashboard to record the trip.

She slowed the car as they reached the next intersection. There was no one else on the road so they crept along, looking for signs of the big quake.

Charlotte pulled the car off the road and turned off the engine. She removed the GoPro from the dashboard and stepped out of the car. Alice followed. ‘This must be it,’ Charlotte said, panning the camera across the road ahead of her. There was a slight kink in the road, but what was more noticeable was the displacement of the irrigation ditch running along one side of the road.

‘Seems to be,’ Alice said, checking the spot they had stopped at against the information on her phone. ‘You wouldn’t know unless you were looking for it.’

Charlotte switched off the GoPro and pulled her phone from her pocket. They walked around, looking for further signs of the rupture, but there was only the irrigation ditch and the resurfacing that had been carried out to rejoin the broken road. Charlotte took some photos, just as reminders for when she was writing her blog post.

‘You can understand why it’s so hard for scientists to figure out what’s going on in the landscape,’ Charlotte said, turning to Alice. ‘It’s just four years since this, and there’s barely any sign.’

Alice turned and walked back to the car, pulling her jacket tight about her. ‘We need to get going,’ she said, ‘if we’re going to get back in time.’

Charlotte followed and they drove back into the city, to Alice’s house. They needed to be back in time to watch the demolition of the police station. Explosives had been set and the demolition was going to be streamed online. Alice’s little brother wanted to go into the city to see the demolition, but authorities were recommending that people stay away, there could be flying debris.

They reached the Bowen house just in time. Everyone was in the lounge watching the live stream on the television. Charlotte and Alice fell into beanchairs in front of the roaring fire.

The police station was fifteen storeys high and had been stripped before the demolition, so the sky behind it was visible through the levels, bright as the sun dropped behind the mountains. There was a flash of light and the sound of an explosion, and white awnings that had been draped around the building’s lower levels puffed out. Then... nothing. There was another bang and then suddenly the lower level crumpled and the building fell forward, smashing into the ground. Dust billowed away from the site. Jack and Kevin whooped, punching the air, while Lindsay rolled her eyes.

Charlotte knew the Bowens were having problems with their insurance company, but in spite of that, they seemed to be able to take a break and have fun with their children. Charlotte’s parents, though, found it difficult to take a break. For four years, they had been consumed over the future of their house and getting out of the clutches of the EQC. When Charlotte had failed her exams at the end of the previous year, it finally became clear to them that something had to change. When she said she wanted to switch schools, they had agreed without argument.

The new school had made a difference, broken Charlotte out of the cycle of different shades of misery she had been stuck in. She had dropped economics and accounting, continued with maths, geography and science and taken up journalism and creative writing. She could finally see a future beyond living in a broken home with broken parents who couldn’t agree on how to escape the mess they found themselves in. For one thing, Charlotte hoped she could leave home and board with her grandmother next year, which would be her first year at university.

Kevin and Lindsay went off to get fish and chips, leaving Charlotte and Alice with the little kids. Charlotte reviewed her footage of Telegraph Road, which Olivia and Jack wanted to see.

‘Does something happen?’ Jack said.

‘No, nothing happens,’ Charlotte said, ‘but that’s the point.’

Jack’s face scrunched up. He was confused. Charlotte smiled, that was fair enough. She was trying to capture something that was barely there, something that was fading from the New Zealand consciousness.

Telegraph Road looked straight when you just drove along not paying attention. It was only when you slowed down and had a close look that you could see the kink in the road, the evidence that a large quake had broken the surface here. The road had been realigned, part of it replaced so that it appeared to run straight across the plains. That approach worked for a road, but the same strategy was being applied to the city. Christchurch’s houses had been damaged by the earthquakes and the repair strategy was to patch them up to look good, to ignore the underlying damage.

The Government was doing too good a job realigning public perceptions of the rebuild. Outside of Christchurch, New Zealanders were forgetting about the earthquakes. There was very little in the media – television, radio, news websites – about people in Christchurch who were struggling to get their insurance claims settled. The local newspaper had regular stories about the challenges people were facing with getting EQC and insurance companies to deal with their claims properly, and there were more stories each month of repairs that had been badly carried out and had to be redone. But these were written off by authorities as anomalies, not the true picture of what was happening in the city.

One TV programme had regularly covered insurance and EQC issues, but it had just been cancelled. Campbell Live had been on TV five nights a week for a decade. It had been in the background of Charlotte’s life ever since she could remember. Her parents always watched TV3 news and kept the television on TV3 to watch Campbell Live at seven o’clock. They thought Campbell Live had been cancelled because the presenter, John Campbell, spent so much time highlighting the difficulties people in Christchurch were having getting their claims sorted. Charlotte thought it had been cancelled because John Campbell was old, like her parents. The television station he was working for wanted to target people in their twenties and was clogging up the channel with reality shows, what they thought their target market wanted to see. No one Charlotte knew was interested in them, not Sean, not Alice or any of the kids at school.

On the fourth anniversary of the September quake, Campbell Live had filled a school hall with people who had unresolved claims. Since then, the only time Charlotte could remember the Christchurch situation being covered on the national news was on the anniversary of the February quake. That had just been politicians talking about how well the rebuild was going. That was the picture the rest of New Zealand was being fed, and it wasn’t true.