Bleak City (56 page)

‘Let’s say I’m mad at your dad and I call him a poopyhead,’ Lindsay said. Olivia giggled. ‘Does that mean he’s a poopyhead or does that mean I’m in a bad mood?’

‘It means you’re in a bad mood,’ Olivia said.

‘Is it right for me to call him a name because I’m in a bad mood?’

‘No...’

‘Would it be fair to say it’s kind of mean of me to take my bad mood out on him?’

Olivia thought about that, scrunching up her face and about to speak, then changing her mind. Finally she nodded.

‘So me calling your dad a bad name just says I’m being mean, doesn’t it?’

‘I guess so. But what if you’re mad at him because he’s being annoying?’

‘I would ask him nicely to stop being annoying,’ Lindsay said, rifling through her recent memories to make sure she was dealing with annoyances in that way. Olivia had a sharp memory and would bring up any instances of hypocrisy, and Lindsay and Kevin had been arguing over insurance issues too often.

‘What if he didn’t stop?’

‘I would go to a different room and do something else,’ Lindsay said. This wasn’t working, Olivia was just going to come up with a series of actions that would skip right over the point Lindsay was trying to make. ‘But that’s not the point. The things we say about people, the way we talk about things, say more about us than they do about the people and things we’re talking about. So I want you to practise, in the next few days, talking about things in a nice way. Can you do that for me?’

Olivia nodded. ‘Even Jack?’

‘Especially Jack,’ Lindsay said. ‘If he’s annoying you, how about asking what he would like to do, and maybe you’ll want to do it too. Don’t just tell him to go away, think of something you’d like to do with him.’

‘But I just want to read my book and he keeps asking what I’m reading,’ Olivia said. She was getting agitated again, a whine creeping into her voice.

‘He wants to know what you’re reading so read it out to him,’ Lindsay said. ‘Would it hurt you to do that?’

‘No?’ Olivia said.

‘So go back to reading your book and when Jack comes back in here in a few minutes, how about reading out loud so he can listen to the story?’

Olivia nodded and sat back down on the sofa. Lindsay went back into the kitchen and started heating up the pan for the pancakes. When the butter had melted and she was pouring the first pancake, she could hear Olivia reading her book to Jack. Maybe there could be a peaceful end to the year after all.

The place was rotting. The air was full of the smell of damp and decay, vines and ferns climbing over bushes and trees, up towards the sun, out along any surface that supported growth. Everywhere Alice looked, things were growing up, over and around other things, vines strangling trees, smaller trees embracing larger trees, foliage everywhere celebrating the abundant water.

Alice was on Stewart Island with Charlotte. The others who were meant to go on the tramp had bailed out at the last minute, but Alice and Charlotte decided to go anyway, both had been looking forward to getting out of Christchurch, to getting into clean air and experiencing something different from the dry, dusty summer that was eventuating in the city on the edge of the Canterbury Plains.

Alice and Charlotte had come over on the ferry from Bluff the previous day and spent the night at a backpackers. After Stewart Island, they would go home the long way, via Queenstown, the Haast Pass and the lake where Charlotte’s parents were staying with their friends. Andrew and Michelle wouldn’t be there this year, they weren’t on speaking terms with Charlotte’s parents, which was part of the reason why the tramping plans had fallen apart, leaving only Alice and Charlotte.

Since Marjorie’s death, arguments over her estate had split the family into factions. Gerald and Sylvia were in the process of moving into Marjorie’s house and deciding what to do with their own. Marjorie’s younger daughters objected to Gerald having the house, both had expected it to be part of the larger estate, sold off, with the proceeds split among Marjorie’s four children. Suzanne neither objected nor agreed, she was too overwhelmed by the loss of her mother, which seemed odd to Alice as there had never been any signs of a warm relationship between them. The whole family was too complicated for Alice, she was just happy Charlotte and Sean were still talking to her, given that their mother was firmly in the sell-the-house faction, and so not speaking to Andrew.

Although doing his best not to take sides in the family argument, Sean wasn’t able to get time off work for the tramp. The other disappointment had been Alice’s friend Emma and her boyfriend Dave. Emma had been living in Melbourne since June 2011, but now she and Dave had moved back to Christchurch. They were staying around the corner from Alice with Emma’s parents in their rebuilt house, and Alice liked having her old school friend nearby once again. But then Emma announced she was pregnant and was suffering from morning sickness bad enough to make Alice think twice about ever having children. Going on the ferry across Foveaux Strait, much less on the tramp, was not an option. Alice had suggested they fly across, but Emma said she wasn’t keeping much food down at all, so would be unlikely to have enough energy for a three-day tramp. Alice tried to be happy about Emma’s pregnancy, but it was too strange, such a grown-up thing to be doing, and she had been surprised when Emma said it was planned. She almost asked why they hadn’t waited until after Stewart Island, but she knew that was a childish thing to ask, something thought by someone who really hadn’t moved on to the adult stage of their life.

Alice had felt desperate to be away from Christchurch and home. The week before Christmas came the news that the City Council had finally reached a settlement with their insurers. Instead of the full value of the claims on various buildings and infrastructure, the council was getting sixty-eight cents on the dollar. ‘That’s with a team of lawyers,’ Kevin said, ‘and millions to fight them with. I don’t see what chance we stand of getting even a fraction of what it will take to fix this place.’

Lindsay and Kevin had then agreed to put discussions about insurance on hold for the holidays, until mid-January when Kevin would go back to work. But the tension hung in the air, as though something was rotting under the floorboards. If Charlotte had decided not to go on the tramp, Alice would have gone by herself, just to get away.

The start of the track was marked by a sculpture of giant chain links. One brown link formed an arch that walkers passed under. Alice was familiar with the legend of Maui, how the South Island was the canoe Maui fished from, bringing up the fish of the North Island. But she wasn’t aware of the role Stewart Island played, that it served as the anchor stone for Maui’s canoe. The chain sculpture at the start of the Rakiura Track was matched, so the sign said, by another chain sculpture in Bluff, where the anchor stone connected to the canoe. They were all connected, everyone in the North Island, the South Island and Stewart Island, they were all people with stories, lows and highs, people dependent on one another, even if they felt strong and self-sufficient or weak and isolated.

That first part of the track was straightforward: a gentle walk along the coast, then a downhill bit to a late lunch on a golden beach that stretched away to the north. Later, the track branched off the main track, to the hut they would stay at for the night. There was a steep downhill section near the hut, and Alice wondered how they would go the next morning, having to do this climb out of the bay back to the main track, where they faced a series of steady upward climbs for at least half of the day.

There were already half a dozen other trampers at the hut when they arrived, but it slept twenty-four, so they had plenty of choice in bunks. Charlotte set up her burner to boil water for hot drinks, while Alice set up their beds. Soon they were sipping coffee while admiring the surroundings and chatting to the other trampers.

An American couple in their fifties was interested to hear they were from Christchurch, they asked about how the rebuild had gone. Past tense. Alice was going to make the point that the rebuild was still only partway done, but Charlotte got there first, telling them about how her parents were fighting to get EQC to acknowledge all the damage to the house and pass them on to their private insurer. Their insurer didn’t want to know about the house until the EQC had passed them on, so they had engaged an independent engineer, but EQC didn’t want to acknowledge the damage detailed in that report. Charlotte’s parents had hired a lawyer to argue their case and drive home the specific points in their engineering report in order to get them overcap.

‘So the process hasn’t really started for your family?’ the man said, amazed.

‘No, not yet, because once they go overcap, they still have to go through the whole assessment and scoping process with their insurer,’ Charlotte said. ‘There’s no way of knowing if the insurer will take on board what they have in their engineer’s report.’

‘But if that report puts them over the top,’ the man said, ‘then the insurance company should accept it.’

‘Maybe, but not always,’ Charlotte said.

‘How long’s it been?’ the man asked.

‘Five years since the first quake,’ Charlotte said. ‘Five years this coming February since the seriously damaging one.’

The man shook his head and his wife clucked sympathetically. ‘Insurance companies,’ she muttered, shaking her head in unison with her husband.

More trampers filtered in, shaking off their boots and leaving them outside to dry off before picking a bunk and moving through to the common room, which was heated by a woodfire. Before long, jugs and pots of water were boiling on top of the woodfire and on camp burners of different types. Alice and Charlotte had packets of freeze-dried food to rehydrate and soon they were filling their bellies with curried lamb that had a slight sponge-like texture.

A poster in the hut told the story of a special settlement at Port William, an attempt by the provincial government of the 1860s and 1870s to make back some of the money it had spent on the purchase of Stewart Island. They attempted to draw Scottish settlers and Alice could see that the climate of Stewart Island might roughly equal that described by the Scottish people she had known. The idea had been to start settlement at Port William, the site of the hut she was currently standing in. Settlement would spread towards Patterson Inlet, a thousand families seeking to make a better future for themselves in this place, which would be called Rakiura Town. But it never happened. The provincial government could only attract five families of Shetland Islanders, who arrived in 1873 and ended up rattling around in barracks intended for 150 people. The promises made about opportunities to make a living and the development of the island had been empty promises, and the damp of the place led to despair among the settlers, who had all left the island by the end of 1874. The poster said the government of the day blamed the failure of the settlement on the immigrants, who were said to be too lazy. But had prospects for life on the island been misrepresented? It seemed unbearably sad, to cross the world in search of a better life only to find yourself lied to, the benefits of the place oversold.

The only trace left of the Shetland Islanders, Alice read, was the flowers and trees they had planted. Outside the sun was going down, and Alice sat on a picnic bench under a eucalyptus tree where a kaka was singing melodiously, like a slide whistle filled with water. Was the eucalyptus one of those planted by the settlers? Possibly, or the offspring of those planted nearly 150 years earlier. She wondered if they’d had the opportunity to sit outside on a summer night and listen to the singing of a kaka or if they had simply been too overwhelmed by the despair of the situation they found themselves in. She hoped they had enjoyed it, seen some of the beauty of this place, even if for only a moment.

The next morning, Charlotte was up first and got the water boiling for breakfast, and they quickly packed up and headed up the steps to return to the main track. That day’s track would take them across the island to the North Arm of Patterson Inlet, meaning there would be no coastal views until the end of the day. The track was muddier than it had been the along the coast, and the dark mud oozed across the tops of their boots and up their gaiters. ‘It’s like Whittaker’s dark chocolate, the Ghana one, the seventy-something percent,’ Charlotte said.

‘I don’t think Whittaker’s would like you saying that,’ Alice said. ‘Comparing their chocolate to mud.’

‘But it’s beautiful,’ Charlotte said, ‘so dark and rich and delicious looking.’

‘It’s mud,’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure you won’t see it the same way when you’re scraping it off your laces.’

‘You sound like my mum,’ Charlotte said. ‘So factual, such an accountant. I’m trying to be whimsical here.’

Alice shrugged, as much as she could with her pack strapped to her back. ‘Do you think it’s like an orgy of foliage in here? It’s all just growing everywhere, all over each other, anything goes.’

Charlotte gave her a strange look. ‘Now that’s just disturbing,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you got enough sleep?’

‘You wanted whimsical,’ Alice said.

‘Yeah, but that’s just plain perverse.’

‘Did you read about the special settlement?’ Alice asked.

‘Yeah,’ Charlotte said. ‘Pretty sad, really. They come all that way to find what they were promised wasn’t anywhere to be seen.’

They were starting up another hill, which put a temporary end to conversation. Alice found herself thinking about the Shetland Islanders. The blame for the settlement’s failure had been laid at the feet of the settlers, that lazy lot, which was why the provincial government tried again to attract settlers in 1875. Because, of course, it couldn’t be the government’s fault for overstating the island’s prospects. The second attempt also failed.

Alice wondered if there was a Brownlee in that government, dismissing any complaints from the Shetland Islanders as the utterings of carpers and moaners. Government has such power, Alice thought as she forced her feet onto the next steps, pushing her way up the hill. Do the powerful ever take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions? Traditionally, it seemed as though the election cycle was meant to hold governments accountable. If they made too many mistakes, they would be voted out. But these days, it seemed governments had too much control over their public image, were able to paint a portrait of success, while underneath the spin was a layer of something rotting, coming apart. What did it take to make people notice? And what about businesses that kept on pouring money into advertising? Did your average person ever think to look at what lies beyond the advertising, or did it take something bad happening to them personally to open their eyes? The way it was looking lately, the Government and the insurance companies would walk away from badly repaired and inadequately repaired homes the same way the provincial government had walked away from Port William’s Shetland Islanders.