Bleak City (60 page)

‘Did you have much damage?’ Alice asked. ‘Did you have to move out for repairs?’ Her eyes were drawn to cracking between the concrete blocks behind where the woman was standing. The cracking zig-zagged across the wall diagonally.

‘Just some cracking,’ the woman said. ‘Some men came and said I only had cosmetic damage and paid me out.’

Alice and Charlotte exchanged glances. Charlotte had seen the cracking in the wall, too.

‘I don’t know if that’s true,’ the woman continued with a glint in her eye. ‘But my family can sort it all out once I’m gone.’

‘That wasn’t cosmetic damage, was it?’ Charlotte said, as they were walking away.

‘No, but I think she knows that,’ Alice said.

‘What kind of a jerk do you have to be to try to rip off an old lady like that?’ Charlotte said.

Alice had no answer for her then, but after the public meeting she had attended that evening, she understood better how the deception had been achieved. Thousands of people in Christchurch had been short-changed by the EQC, the organisation set up to provide New Zealanders with the economic protections necessary to recover quickly from natural disasters. And thousands of people had let it happen because it wasn’t happening to them or, worse, because they stood to profit from the deception.

The most disturbing point made during the evening had been made by two speakers, and that was the fact that land damage issues had been left until last. Many repair and rebuild decisions had been made quickly, thoughtlessly, in order to achieve repairs as cheaply as possible. Yet some parts of the city were lower than they had been before the earthquakes and more prone to flooding, especially around the rivers, the estuary and the coast. The land was still settling, which was apparent from the cracks still appearing in the Bowens’ driveway. But foundation decisions were being made assuming that the land was settled, stable. Lindsay and Kevin were still living in a damaged house five and a half years after the first quake and it seemed awful to Alice to contemplate that, in fact, they might be the lucky ones. There was one thing worse that not yet being repaired, and that was having the wrong repair.

Charlotte had survived her first series of university exams, although she wasn’t confident that she had passed. She would never feel truly confident about an exam again, after the disasters that resulted in her repeating Year 13. But she had worked hard and felt confident in how much she understood. How well that would translate into her exam results was beyond her control now. It was time to relax and enjoy the break.

She was in Wanaka for the week with Andrew and Michelle’s family. Alice had taken a week off work to come along, and everyone but Charlotte was spending long days up on the skifield. Charlotte wasn’t a skier, she didn’t like being snow-cold, but she didn’t mind it up in the mountains, breathing in the clean air and going for runs along the lake.

At Andrew and Michelle’s holiday home, Charlotte had claimed a sofa in the sun where she spent each afternoon reading for her next semester. The family teased her about being too studious, that she should just relax and have fun, but what she was learning about was fun. She loved learning about how the planet worked and being able to look out the window across a lake carved by glaciers. Thousands of years earlier, the land Charlotte was looking at had been locked up in hundreds of metres of ice. Glaciers had carved the horn of Mount Aspiring on the other side of the lake and scoured the lake itself so deep that it reached below sea level.

Before the earthquakes started, Charlotte remembered someone visiting from Australia calling New Zealand ‘the Shaky Isles’. Up until that point, she had done the usual earthquake drills at school without really thinking about it, but the name Shaky Isles had prompted her to ask her mother whether it was actually true. Her mother told her about how New Zealand had a lot of earthquakes, but hadn’t had many since Charlotte was born. There was a big quake early in Wellington’s settlement, then the Murchison and Napier quakes in the 1930s. There was a big fault running through the South Island, her mother explained, and one running through Wellington. Those were the Big Ones that people were expecting.

Her mother told her about a spate of earthquakes Christchurch felt in the 1990s, before Charlotte was born. There was a magnitude six earthquake in Arthur’s Pass and its aftershocks had been felt in Christchurch on and off for months. Her mother had been in the city for one of those quakes, in a tall building that had swayed. Charlotte found it hard to believe, then, that buildings would move. They just seemed too solid. Now, though, Charlotte had seen the way seismic waves moved through the earth, making it roll. The earth’s power was incredible, and terrifying. But smart people developing and following sound engineering principles could reduce the threat to lives.

Earthquakes weren’t something to be feared, Charlotte had decided, but something to be respected. That was why buildings needed to be built properly, or not built in places where the ground wasn’t stable. Preparation needed to be taken seriously.

Some people didn’t get it, though. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if people liked being afraid. One problem was that people found science confusing. Seeing how the quakes were reported in the media annoyed Charlotte, and she was thinking about what she would do once she finished her science degree. She didn’t want to be a journalist, but maybe something to do with communicating science. The university in Dunedin had a science communication programme and maybe Charlotte could end up making documentaries. That would be very cool.

But she had a long way to go, she was only six months into her three-year degree, and she didn’t want to blow it, so she spent as much time as she could learning about her subjects and telling her cousins about it.

One night after the family came back from skiing, they went to a Mexican restaurant in the town. They had ordered corn chips and dips for starters, which everyone was quickly working their way through. Charlotte was trying to explain glaciers to Andrew and Michelle’s youngest, Mattie, who didn’t understand how ice could cut rocks.

‘But it’s just sitting here in my glass,’ Mattie said. ‘It’s not cutting the glass and I can hold it, it won’t cut me.’

‘No because you need a lot of it, so the weight of it is so enormous that it moves,’ Charlotte said.

‘Why does it move?’ Alice said. She was sitting across from Charlotte and Mattie, laughing at Charlotte’s efforts to teach.

‘Because of gravity,’ Charlotte said. She shot her filthiest look at Alice. Mattie nodded, but looked confused. She was only ten. ‘And because it’s so heavy,’ Charlotte pressed on, ‘and because it’s moving, it cuts what’s underneath it.’

The waitress cleared the table and started bringing their mains. Charlotte started eating her burrito when she saw that Alice was upset.

‘What is it?’ Charlotte asked.

Alice shook her head, but Charlotte persisted. ‘Those guys over there,’ Alice said.

Charlotte glanced over to where Alice gestured. Another large group had come in around the time they were ordering their meals. This group was mostly men, rather than a family, in their twenties and early thirties, and quite a few of them looked sunburned from skiing.

‘They’ve been talking about Christchurch,’ Alice said. ‘How well they’ve done from the rebuild.’

‘Yeah?’ Charlotte said, turning to look again. She quickly turned back. ‘Ignore it, they’re just jerks.’

Alice shrugged, but looked sad. She started half-heartedly cutting into her enchilada, then chewed slowly at a small piece. At the other table, one of the skiers stood up, lifting his half-empty beer mug into the air. ‘Thanks, Christchurch,’ he said, and his mates cheered.

Back at the house, Charlotte and Alice poured a couple of glasses of white wine and talked about the diners at the other table. They were sitting in Charlotte’s favourite study spot with the lights out. There was a smattering of lights from the town, but the lake stretched away into the darkness. The sky was clear and full of stars. They went outside and stared up at the Milky Way arcing over the dark mountains.

‘I know some people have done very well out of the rebuild,’ Alice said. ‘But they don’t have to be such jerks about it.’

‘I suppose it depends on whether they did well from doing a good job or did well from screwing people over,’ Charlotte said.

‘What type did those guys seem to you?’

‘More the screwing over type, really.’

Alice nodded. ‘It makes me wonder what I would do if I ran into the builders who messed up my grandparents house, or the ones who didn’t do the work they should’ve on my aunt and uncle’s house. Or what if I ran into Mum and Kevin’s idiot project manager or their claim manager? Am I going to go around for the rest of my life running into people I’d want to punch in the face if I knew who they were and what they’d done to people?’

‘You can’t go around punching people,’ Charlotte said. ‘But I get it. I’d love to punch the EQC for what they’ve done to my parents, but I’d be standing in a very long queue.’

‘Some people will never recover from the rebuild,’ Alice said, ‘and that bothers me.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

They were both silent, watching the sky.

‘Winners and losers,’ Charlotte said.

‘What?’

‘You know, early on in the piece, someone, some politician said there would be winners and losers out of the rebuild,’ Charlotte said.

‘That was about the red zone offers,’ Alice said.

‘That was it. Anyway, it was true,’ Charlotte said. ‘Some people have done well, some haven’t. Winners and losers. But quite a few of the winners are the real losers. For what they’ve done to people and not realising the harm they’ve done.’

‘To the real losers, then,’ Alice said, raising her glass and then swallowing back the last of her wine. ‘May they suffer pain and distress at the realisation of the role they’ve played in what’s going on.’

Charlotte nodded and sipped at her wine. It would never happen. Losers seldom realised the harm they did. They only thought of themselves.

Alice was sure the insurance company was playing games with Lindsay and Kevin. Although they had finally acknowledged that the foundation needed to be replaced, the structural engineering report they had commissioned was sloppy. The biggest issue was that because of land height changes since the earthquakes, the house was now in a flood management zone, which needed to be taken into account in determining the height of the replacement foundation. Kevin had emailed their claims manager to let him know of the mistake, but they had heard nothing back. It had been a month.

In her reading about insurance claims, Alice came across the idea of delaying, denying and defending claims. Insurance companies held their own insurance against events, and once they received the proceeds of this reinsurance, they would invest it and pay claims out of that pool of money. The basic idea of delaying, denying and defending claims was that insurers would maximise their profits by keeping as much of that money as they could for as long as they could, earning interest on the money they should be paying to claimants. Taking a long time to process a claim would wear claimants down and make it likely that they would take offers for far less than the true value of their claim. If they could find grounds to do so, they would deny the claim, or at least part of it. And if the policyholder kept pushing back, the insurer would push back even harder. The only way for a policyholder to get their claim honoured in the delay, deny, defend system was to take the insurer to court, and the insurer would then defend the claim vigorously.

The principle that underpinned the effectiveness of delaying, denying and defending claims was that the policyholder would become tired the longer the claim dragged on. The insurance industry, naturally, denied that this was their approach to settling claims.

It was what was going on with Lindsay and Kevin. What looked like progress was just another step the insurer was taking to draw out the claim and wear them down. And it was working.

Alice explained this theory to Lindsay one morning, after Kevin had left for work.

‘So we’re just going to keep going in circles?’ Lindsay said, and Alice immediately regretted bringing it up. Lindsay looked like she might start crying.

‘I think so,’ Alice said.

Lindsay nodded. ‘I think Kev knows this. He hasn’t said much the last couple of weeks, but he’s been very quiet. We can’t afford to go to court, Alice.’

There had recently been a story in
The Press
about the cost to homeowners of taking their insurance company to court. The cost to file proceedings in the High Court was $1300, and a trial costed $3200 a day. Then there was the cost of lawyers and expert reports, and by the end of it all, a homeowner could expect to spend around $100,000 with no guarantee of a good outcome.

Alice had been thinking about this, and she could only see one way to make it easier for Lindsay and Kevin. ‘Would you like me to ask Andrew to have a look at your claim?’

‘No, absolutely not,’ Lindsay said, irritably. She stood up and stalked out of the kitchen. Alice heard her in the bathroom, blowing her nose. She came back through in a minute, saying she was sorry. Her eyes were red.

‘No, I shouldn’t have suggested it,’ Alice said. She was surprised at the strength of Lindsay’s response and wanted to ask more, but she held back.

‘Andrew has always taken the easy road,’ Lindsay said. ‘The one that makes him look good.’

‘Law’s not easy,’ Alice said. It wasn’t fair of Lindsay to take her frustrations out on Andrew.

‘No, I don’t mean that. He’s a smart guy, no doubt about that, but he’s only motivated to do what helps him be seen as the great guy, the fun guy, the super smart guy.’

That was pretty harsh. But was it true? Whenever Alice had talked to Andrew about insurance issues, he treated it like a game, one side against another, and didn’t express concern for how people were being treated. Alice had attributed that to the detachment a lawyer needed to cultivate in dealing with legal issues.