Bleak City (57 page)

They were going downhill again, and Alice commented on the lack of bird life. They had seen a few tomtits, cute little birds with their sleek black caps and creamy yellow breasts. They could hear grey warblers in the canopy, but really, there was far less bird life making itself known than she had expected.

‘People ruin everything,’ Charlotte said. ‘Bringing all the predators here, eating up all the birds. We shouldn’t be allowed to go anywhere, we just mess everything up.’

‘We do seem very good at that,’ Alice said.

‘You know,’ Charlotte said, ‘it seems that governments have always sucked. I mean, that special settlement, it’s just like Christchurch. The Government said it was going to be one way, like today they say there’s no problems with repairs, no problem with underscoping, and they refuse to consider the evidence.’

‘They blame the people for having the wrong attitude.’

‘Right,’ Charlotte said. ‘For not seeing the world the way they want them to see it.’

‘For not buying the spin.’

‘Yeah, that’s it. PR is the name of the game, but not everyone wants to play the game. Hey look,’ Charlotte said, looking down at the track. ‘It’s Whittaker’s 50 percent cocoa on this part of the track.’

It was a theoretical game to Alice and Charlotte at that point in time. Neither of them owned houses or rented, but in the future, how would they approach investing in property? They would need places to live in and both could see the value of the argument a lot of adults made that rent was just paying off someone else’s mortgage. But they had seen how owning a house could switch from being a source of security to being a nightmare.

As they drew near the next hut a couple of hours after lunch, Alice wished they had another hut to go to, then another, and that they could stay here always, away from the stress of life in Christchurch, get out of the game.

Charlotte was going to board with her grandmother for her first year at university and Alice was staying with them for the weekend, helping Charlotte to move her things in.

Sunday was Valentine’s Day. It was hot and an easy decision to go to the beach after lunch. They drove out to Sumner, which was so packed with people and cars that they had to park a kilometre from the beach. They walked towards the beach, stopping at an ice cream stand to buy a cone each. At Cave Rock, Charlotte stopped.

‘Have you ever been in there?’ Charlotte said. The huge rock on the foreshore was named for the cave that ran through it. There were also steps up the side of the rock, which a man was climbing up, a small boy on his back.

‘Not for a long time,’ Alice said. ‘Before the quakes.’

‘You want to? I remember going through as a little kid, but I’d like to see what it’s like now. I remember it being enormous, but looking at it, I think that’s just because I was little.’ At only five feet two inches tall, Charlotte was still little, although Alice didn’t say that.

‘Finish our cones first?’

They stood across from the rock, watching people disappearing into the mouth of the cave. When they finished their cones, they dropped their serviettes into the nearest rubbish bin and were about to walk down onto the beach when Alice heard the rumble. She had only a moment to think that it couldn’t be right when she felt the earth surging beneath her feet and heard buildings being shaken, the sound of concrete, bricks and glass clashing. That sound again. Alice wasn’t sure whether to crouch down, and she and Charlotte shot each other anxious looks, unsure what to do. The people around them were the same, some crouching down but most looking panicked, not knowing where to go or what to do.

The quake passed and the sound of it was replaced by shouting, crying and swearing. People pulled out phones and started trying to make phone calls and send text messages. Five, Alice was thinking, that was a five, we don’t have fives any more, just threes. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and tried to send a text to Lindsay, but her hands were shaking too much and she couldn’t see clearly enough to read what she was typing. She blinked away tears. She would give it a moment.

‘Look!’ Charlotte pointed towards the ocean, turning and raising her phone. In the distance, brown dust was billowing out from the cliffs. A dozen people turned to watch, holding up their phones to take photos and videos. Alice felt her heart racing, the panic welling up in her throat. People died in cliff collapses, and it was a hot summer day, there could be people there, walking the tracks, on the beaches below or swimming in the water. No, this couldn’t be happening again, it had been nearly four years since the last big quake, how could this be happening again?

‘Are you okay?’ Charlotte asked. She was glancing between her phone and Alice, tapping out a message to someone, probably her grandmother. The sky about the seaside suburb was full of dust, drifting away from the cliffs like a brown fog.

Alice nodded. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just that feeling, it reminded me of the twenty-second, walking home and there was a five something.’

Charlotte put her arm around Alice’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘Let’s go home, I’ll check on Nanny, then we’ll go to your place.’

They started walking back to where they had left the car. The traffic out of Sumner was backed up, people leaving the beach behind to go home and check on family and friends, to see how much mess they had to clean up this time. Once Alice and Charlotte pulled into the stream of traffic, it took them half an hour to get to Suzanne’s house instead of the usual five minutes.

‘I’m fine,’ Suzanne reassured them, giving them both hugs. ‘I’ve lost two cups and a wine glass, that’s all.’

‘No damage?’ Charlotte said.

‘Nothing I can see,’ Suzanne said. ‘And there’s certainly nothing to suggest I’ll be falling into EQC’s clutches any time soon.’

The three of them walked through, checking all the surfaces to confirm that the house had indeed held up. Alice and Charlotte decided to head back to Alice’s house to see how it had survived the quake.

Lindsay and Kevin were sitting on the steps when they pulled up the driveway, each sipping at a glass of wine. ‘We have bad news,’ Kevin said, lifting his glass of wine in a mocking toast. ‘The house hasn’t come off its foundations.’

‘We were just saying that it would put to bed the whole issue of whether or not the foundation should be replaced,’ Lindsay said. She swallowed back the last of the wine in her glass and reached behind her for the wine bottle, poured herself another glass.

Alice laughed. ‘You’d just have to make another claim and go through the whole business again,’ she said. ‘Livvy and Jack would be in high school by the time it got sorted.’

‘Yes, I suppose we should be relieved nothing’s been made worse,’ Kevin said.

Kevin went inside and brought out another bottle of wine, along with two wine glasses. ‘You’re eighteen?’ he said to Charlotte. He winked at Alice.

‘Nearly nineteen!’ Charlotte said, indignant.

They all crammed together on the verandah, enjoying the sun and the wine while keeping up with the news websites. Information started to flow in, pictures of the cliff collapses and stories of near misses. A group of lifeguard trainees had to swim for their lives to avoid chunks of rock falling onto the beach and into the water, and cyclists going along the Sumner-to-Redcliffs road heard rocks hitting the shipping containers that protected the road from rockfall. In the city, there didn’t seem to be much damage, although buildings and shopping malls were evacuated and checked. There was liquefaction in the northeast once again. Surely that must be depressing to deal with after going through the whole repair or rebuild process. If people weren’t still waiting on EQC or their insurer.

‘If I hear a single mention of kia kaha Christchurch, I will scream,’ Lindsay said.

‘Then best stay away from Facebook,’ Alice said. There were a few mentions of the worn out platitude in the comments on news items she was scrolling through.

‘You know,’ Lindsay said. ‘It really is just another earthquake.’

They all turned to look at her, but no one said anything. Clearly they had missed a train of thinking she had been following for some time.

‘I mean for anyone who’s had to battle EQC or the insurance companies, this is just another earthquake, it’s impersonal and it’s nothing compared to what EQC and the insurance companies have put us through while the Government has just sat back and let it happen. I found the earthquakes stressful, but I didn’t need antidepressants to get through them. The insurance company, though, the stress of that is ten times if not a hundred times greater than all the earthquakes put together. No one is strong enough to withstand that. Telling people to stay strong just doesn’t cut it any more.’

‘For people like us,’ Kevin said, ‘the insurance stuff has gone on twice as long as the main earthquake sequence. About eighteen months versus, what?’ He counted through the number of months since they had been made overcap and passed on to their insurer. ‘2012, okay, that was a write-off, there were still quakes and geotech stuff needing to be done, but 2013, 2014, 2015, that’s thirty-six months, twice as long as the quake sequence.’

It was so long ago, but Alice still remembered the day of the February quake clearly, finding Andrew and the two of them walking along the river, across from the PGC building. A quake about the same size as today’s quake had hit, and on the beach out at Sumner, she had felt that same panic, that of not knowing whether to crouch down or run, of turning in circles and hearing the sounds of buildings being shaken, concrete grinding, glass clattering. The adrenalin surge had been the same, leaving her shaking, her heart racing, having to just stand still for a minute and sort herself out.

Earlier, on the way back to Alice’s house, Alice and Charlotte had stopped across from Redcliffs School, which the Government was trying to close down. The families were fighting back, they said there was no risk of rockfall. The Government said it wasn’t the rockfall risk, it was the risk of disruption, which seemed to Alice a silly argument as in a big quake, every school was disrupted, whether they were under cliffs or on the flat.

‘I can’t see anything new,’ Charlotte said. There were no signs of fresh slips, nothing to suggest that the cliffs had crumbled further. ‘I wonder if today will make a difference to it closing.’

‘Those for closing it will spin it as proof it needs to be closed, those against will spin it their way,’ Alice said.

Lately everything was about spin. CERA had announced that the region’s mental health statistics were improving, showing how much Christchurch was recovering. Yet a few days later, the police were saying they were responding to far too many suicide attempts. Who could be trusted? The ones looking out for the people, Alice concluded, and that wasn’t CERA, especially once it became known that CERA had spent $2.5 million on public relations in the past year. That money would buy a lot of spin.

The next lot of spin came when insurers released their quarterly rebuild and repair stats. Insurers had, it was claimed, completed over 5000 rebuilds and repairs in 2015. But that included cash settlements where no actual building work had taken place. Then someone questioned those figures, pointing out that the figures accompanying the Insurance Council’s press release showed that was the number of rebuilds and repairs completed in total, over the whole five years since the quakes started. It was all about how the figures were spun.

Then there was the EQC staff morale survey.
The Press
reported that only a quarter of EQC staff believed the organisation was delivering on its mandate. But the EQC chief executive hit back, saying that a high proportion of staff believed in the organisation’s mission. That was true, according to the survey, but only a quarter of them believed they were actually achieving it.

In the week after what became known as the Valentine’s Day quake, Alice couldn’t decide whether she wanted to stick around for the anniversary of the 22nd of February quake or get away, up into the mountains for one last tramp during the warm summer weather. The thing that finally decided her against staying was news about another earthquake, one in Taiwan. It had happened at the start of February and there had been a couple of building collapses that immediately made Alice think the buildings had been poorly built. Then, just a few days before the quake anniversary, Alice read a news story that said the developers of one of the buildings had been charged with negligent homicide. Within days of the building collapse, the developers had been charged, but here in Christchurch, it had been five years and no one had been made accountable for the CTV collapse, despite well-documented shortcomings and faults.

A few months earlier, Alice had read about the Prime Minister being congratulated by overseas businessmen because the rebuild of Christchurch had been so well managed. They were talking like it was already complete! It was only the spin job that was complete. No, the quake anniversary would be something she would bypass this year, the programme would be all spin about the progress of the rebuild.

Lindsay and Kevin were trying not to like their new project manager, but he seemed to listen to their concerns, and they weren’t used to that. His name was Callum and he had come to Christchurch for the rebuild from the North Island. He had visited at the start of February, to have a look at the place for himself, he said, and Kevin had taken him around the house, pointing out all the obvious issues with the foundation. Kevin said Callum had been non-committal, but he had paid attention.

Kevin had gleaned one piece of information from Callum on that visit, that John Rutherford was no longer working for the PMO. They were downsizing, Callum had said, now that the rebuild work was coming to an end. ‘But there was something there,’ Kevin said. ‘In how he said it.’

‘I don’t care why,’ Lindsay said. ‘I’m just happy Rutherford’s no longer assigned to our house.’

‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said. ‘I’m choosing to think our complaint had something to do with it.’