Bleak City (6 page)

Lindsay and Kevin arrived in the city early so they could walk around and assess the damage. They had been into the city in the days after the first quake and seen the damaged buildings barricaded behind fences and cars crushed by falling brickwork. Now they parked well away from anything that looked dangerous and walked down to Manchester Street, where there seemed to be more damage than in other parts of the city. Manchester Street was just east of Colombo Street, the main street that ran through the city from the Port Hills all the way to the northern side of the city. Manchester Street had a lot of buildings built in the early years of the twentieth century that nothing much had been done with ever since Lindsay could remember. It was an eclectic mix of shops, cafés and services drawn to the street by the low rents offered on space in the old brick buildings.

One part of the street was closed off and soil had been piled up around a four-storey building that was being demolished. The intention to demolish had been fiercely argued, the building owner wanting it down, but heritage campaigners wanted it to stay and be repaired, a symbol of what Kevin mockingly referred to as the city’s ancient history. His parents were English and he scoffed at the idea that a 105-year-old building could be regarded as ‘heritage’.

Demolition had been underway for about three weeks and the building’s guts were visible. Now, during the weekend when the equipment stood still and there were no workmen on site, pigeons could be seen roosting on the exposed beams. Lindsay and Kevin circled the cordoned-off area to get a good look at the building. Nearby there were shipping containers around other buildings, stacked to form walls and protect anyone nearby from falling masonry in case of an aftershock. One building, an old church, appeared to be open, even though blue steel beams braced up one wall. Mannequins had been painted completely white and anchored to the beams. One was kayaking down towards the ground, another was cycling upward and a third, a pony-tailed woman, tight-roped her way across a horizontal beam near the top of the tower.

‘Very cool,’ Lindsay said. She yawned and rested her head on Kevin’s shoulder. There had been an aftershock in the night, a four-something at around one o’clock, and she and Alice had put a video on, unable to get back to sleep after comforting Olivia and Jack. Kevin, of course, had slept through it all. She envied him that. At least one of them was functioning on all cylinders.

Kevin checked his watch. ‘It’s nearly time, we should go.’

They walked around to Lichfield Street and walked up a lane that had been reduced to half its width by the fencing surrounding a badly-damaged building. Its façade had crumbled, leaving a pile of bricks on the footpath in front of it. Jason and Carla were waiting for them outside. Inside, the bar was busy, people had gone back to their normal lives, walking around whatever debris was in the way.

Jason and Carla looked exhausted. Jason was nearly a decade younger than Lindsay, and Carla even younger than that. Carla was closer to Alice’s age than to Lindsay’s. Lindsay had always felt ancient around her and found the gulf in their ages difficult to bridge. That had changed in recent weeks, Jason and Carla’s house was badly damaged, and Carla was looking tired and losing weight from the stress of not sleeping and worrying about what would happen to the house. They had insurance, everyone did, but still, they had been planning to renovate the house in preparation for having children. Not that Carla was pregnant, that was proving elusive, but they wanted children, even though to Lindsay, Carla had never seemed particularly maternal. She worried that Carla was only wanting kids because Jason did. He loved his nieces and nephews, lavishing love and attention on them, but Carla always seemed a bit, well, afraid. But since the September quake, she had been good with Olivia and Jack, and had even had them laughing a couple of weeks ago when she and Jason had been around for dinner and there had been an aftershock. Lack of sleep seemed to force her to drop whatever barriers she used to have up when around Lindsay.

‘Maybe we should stop trying,’ Carla said. Jason and Kevin were at the bar ordering drinks. ‘Wait until the house is fixed. Whenever that might be.’

‘Have you been assessed yet?’ Lindsay said, wanting to stay away from the subject of how often her baby brother might be trying to impregnate his wife. Carla had started down that path once before, and although Lindsay was pleased that the barriers had dropped, she sometimes wished that there hadn’t been so many of them falling away.

‘Not yet,’ Carla said. ‘They can’t give me a time, just said it will be soon. And I’m sick of calling and being told the same thing.’

‘You need to keep on them,’ Lindsay said.

‘But there are so many more people who are worse off,’ Carla said. ‘We don’t want to be pushy. I don’t want to be one of those pushy people looking to profit from the quakes.’ One of her uncles was an antiques dealer, and he had been fielding endless calls from people wanting to replace glassware and crockery. ‘He had one woman claiming a set would cost six thousand to replace, and he said it wouldn’t even be worth sixty.’

‘Pretty disgusting, really,’ Lindsay agreed. ‘Dad has a mate who’s getting a new kitchen. It wasn’t damaged, but he knows a guy who knows a guy, and you know how it goes.’ Kevin and Jason were back at the table, putting down three beers and a coke.

Kevin nodded. ‘It’s who you know, and it’s only going to get worse.’ He told them about a big building company, Fletchers, that was going to get most of the EQC repairs. Of course, anything over $100,000 would go to private insurers, but many of the lower-value repairs would be worth a lot to Fletchers and their shareholders. ‘And I’ve heard they’ll be offering peanuts. So you know what’ll happen, no decent builder will take up the work, but all the cowboys will flock to town to make a quick buck.’

Lindsay could feel Kevin jiggling his leg and was finding it unnerving. She reached over and put her hand on his knee. ‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling wryly. ‘It just gets me angry, the way people are looking for a way to profit from all this. Looking for an angle.’

‘C’mon, it won’t be that bad,’ Jason said. ‘This is New Zealand, not Zimbabwe.’

Kevin shrugged. ‘Well, maybe not. But it isn’t looking good.’

Carla flicked a glance at Lindsay across the table. Yes, this line of conversation had to end. Lindsay and Carla both made a point of opening their menus and studying the choices. The sound of an aftershock rose in the distance, the building shook briefly and settled, ignored by the bar’s inhabitants.

‘It isn’t looking bad, either,’ Jason said.

‘The steak looks good,’ Lindsay said.

‘It does,’ Carla agreed. ‘They do shoestring fries.’

‘I love shoestring fries,’ Lindsay said with excessive enthusiasm.

Kevin and Jason got the message and buried their heads in the menus and, after the waitress took their orders, Kevin dutifully changed the subject. ‘Are you two going away for the summer holidays?’

‘We were going to,’ Carla said, ‘but we don’t know what’s happening with the house.’ She realised the opportunity missed so changed direction. ‘What’s it like having Alice back home?’

Lindsay grabbed hold of the bone thrown her. ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘I think the time away’s done us good. The kids love having her back, and it means we can go out a bit more. Well, when she’s there, that is. She spends a bit of time at the library. And with Andrew’s family.’ Lindsay filled them in on Alice meeting the other side of the family.

‘You all right with that?’ Jason said when she had finished. Carla shot him a look, puzzled.

Lindsay shrugged. ‘It’s up to her, and I understand her curiosity. There’s ways she’s like them as much as she’s like us.’

Jason raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘I mean, she doesn’t look like us, does she,’ Lindsay said. ‘She has Andrew’s colouring, not ours, and when she was a baby I could always see resemblances between members of his family more than ours.’

‘There is that,’ Jason agreed, ‘but you’re talking about surface things. She’s like Dad, thoughtful, analytical, figuring out where the pieces fit, how things work.’

Kevin was jiggling his leg nervously beside her once again. Alice had never called him Dad and it had taken her a while to accept him, but he was the closest she had to a father. He said he understood her curiosity, but Lindsay worried that he felt he might be replaced by Andrew. Kevin also worried whether or not Andrew could be there for Alice, whether he had, as Kevin put it, ‘grown a spine’. Andrew and Kevin had never met, but she had told him about their marriage, the reasons for its disintegration, as best as she could understand them, anyway. He understood, or said he did, why she hadn’t made any real effort to keep Alice in contact with Andrew’s family. Lindsay put her hand on his leg again and he stopped jiggling.

‘Well that may be true,’ Lindsay said, ‘but whatever the case, she needs to figure it all out for herself.’

‘She will,’ Kevin said. ‘She’s a smart girl. She’ll figure it out.’

They moved on to small talk for the rest of the meal, and after dessert wandered around the city looking at the damage. All had grown up in Christchurch, and places they had taken for granted were different now, broken and fenced off. ‘I love that place,’ Carla said, as they walked past a sandwich shop that was fenced off, its ceiling partly collapsed inside. Its façade had collapsed, a long pile of bricks on the footpath. ‘Loved.’

‘Honey chicken sandwich on white bread with coleslaw,’ Lindsay said. ‘I used to get one if I was in town for the afternoon.’

‘They’re in Northlands now, I think,’ Carla said. ‘But it’s not the same.’

‘No,’ Lindsay said. ‘Nothing’s the same any more.’

When Lindsay and Kevin arrived home, Olivia and Jack were asleep in bed and Alice was sleeping on the sofa. Lindsay draped a blanket over her, then quietly moved through to the kitchen, where Kevin was sitting at the table planning the next week’s work. She poured two glasses of whiskey, sat down across from him and sipped at hers. The whiskey had become a habit since the quakes started, it helped Lindsay to get to sleep and stay asleep. Sometimes.

‘Do you think we’re doing the right thing?’ she asked.

Kevin turned away from the laptop to look at her. ‘You think we should stop with the whiskey?’

‘No, with Alice. Encouraging her to see more of Andrew. His family.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not like we’re pushing her at them,’ he said, turning back to the laptop. ‘And if we stopped her, that wouldn’t be right.’

Lindsay nodded, sipping. ‘I just hope she doesn’t get hurt.’

‘Drink your whiskey,’ Kevin said, ‘and get some sleep.’

‘Maybe we should stop the whiskey,’ Lindsay said. ‘It’s getting expensive.’

A faint rumble in the distance grew louder and the house gave a brief shake.

‘Three point two,’ Kevin said without looking up from the laptop. ‘Rolleston.’

It was finally quiet. The rush of winding up work for the year, the stress of preparing for Christmas and having the house full of family on Christmas day, it was all finally over. It was Boxing Day, the day of rest, for the menfolk at least. The women were off shopping in the city, picking up Boxing Day bargains. Gerald had never understood the motivation, facing the madness of post-Christmas shopping only a day after finally seeing the fruit of the madness of pre-Christmas shopping. Michelle, their daughter-in-law, had picked up Sylvia an hour earlier. He did not expect to see them again until the afternoon. Hopefully late in the afternoon, which was very likely if Sylvia went home with Michelle to see the children, to spoil them with any extras she might have picked up in the sales.

Gerald was enjoying the quiet. He had already been awake when a four magnitude quake had rolled through at just after two in the morning. The quakes had tailed off the last few weeks, and it was getting unusual to have a four. That morning, there were a couple of threes, then another four inside half an hour, then the earth fell quiet once again, until eight o’clock, when Gerald and Sylvia had been eating their porridge, drinking their coffee.

These quakes felt close, but they weren’t coming from the hills, he knew the sound of those. No, these ones were coming from the other direction, not the west, which everyone was used to, but the north. When Michelle picked up Sylvia, she said the burst of quakes had been right under the city.

Michelle looked tired. She was finding the quakes stressful, and the kids picked up on it and were frightened, which stressed her more, perpetuating the cycle. Sylvia had tried to talk to her about it, but she said it wasn’t a problem, she was controlling her fear, the kids didn’t notice. But children do, don’t they? Certainly he and Sylvia were aware of the goings-on in the families they had grown up in, well before anyone gave them credit for that level of understanding.

Gerald was at the dining table, slowly going through the newspaper, enjoying the freedom of not having to be anywhere, do anything. In six months he would be old enough to retire, to have every day be like this. How long before he was bored? He didn’t know, and he hadn’t yet made a decision. Sylvia wanted him to sell up the business, but he found the idea of letting it go too much to contemplate, at least right now, anyway.

Gerald thought about what his grandchildren’s lives would be like in this broken city, with the blocked off streets and the demolitions. Paradise for a boy who loved diggers, which Andrew and Michelle’s boys did. Gerald would make a point of taking them into the city during the school holidays to see the excavators, to see how they tear at buildings, piece by piece, gradually chewing them up into pieces small enough to be taken away. It would have to be soon, the Manchester Courts demolition was nearly complete, and there was nothing else of real significance coming down after that.

This time of the earthquakes would probably be a tiny blip in their lives, the rebuild would be over before the young ones reached high school. For Alice, Andrew’s oldest, though, it was disconcerting, she had told Gerald that. This had been her first year at university and she had flatted near the city for the first three terms so had spent more time in the city than she ever had before. She liked it, the cafés, the gardens, the river, and she had become used to it. Would she stay in Christchurch? he had asked. Short-term, yes, she said. She wanted to finish her degree, which would be another three years, but beyond that, she didn’t know whether or not she wanted to stay in Christchurch.