Bleak City (61 page)

The last time Alice had seen Andrew was in Wanaka in June. She had talked to him about going back to university and studying law, something she had been thinking about for months. People were suffering from injustice all over the city, and Alice hated how helpless she felt. She had been able to help her family by writing information requests for them and going through paperwork with them, but that wasn’t enough.

Andrew was pleased to hear her say she wanted to study law. He was proud of her for seeing the opportunity, and he said post-quake litigation in Christchurch was going to go on for at least a decade, maybe more. Being a lawyer would secure her financial future.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ Alice said to Lindsay. Andrew took pride in having the big holiday home, in being seen around town with his big, happy family and in closing a big contract.

‘When we separated, I was determined to never get in the way of him seeing you,’ Lindsay said. ‘So I organised your trips up to Auckland while he was there and didn’t complain when he said he had to cancel. I just kept rescheduling. Then when he moved back here, I thought it would be different, but again, it was me doing the planning.’ She paused, then took a deep breath. ‘There was one weekend, he had a work thing in the morning, a golf game, and he was going to pick you up and take you to Willowbank for the afternoon. But he never showed up. You were so upset.’

Alice remembered that, waiting with her lunch packed into her tiny backpack along with half a loaf of bread for all the birds at Willowbank. She had cried while trying to eat her sandwiches at lunchtime, and afterwards Lindsay had walked her down to the river where they fed the local ducks, Alice being serious about it, pitching the chunks of bread near the birds’ heads, while Lindsay tried to land chunks on their backs.

‘I remember that,’ she said. ‘You kept getting bread on the ducks’ backs by accident.’ She raised an eyebrow, which made Lindsay laugh.

‘After that, I decided to just wait and see when he got in touch.’

‘And he never did,’ Alice said.

Lindsay shook her head. ‘You know, there was one time, when he was still in Auckland and I said to him that he needed to make time for you. He got really nasty with me and said it wasn’t like he was a deadbeat dad. Like as long as the Inland Revenue wasn’t coming after him for not paying child support he was an okay dad.’

‘So I won’t talk to Andrew about your claim, then,’ Alice grinned.

‘No. I’m sure you could push him to do it, but I don’t want that. Life is complicated enough.’

‘But you do need a lawyer,’ Alice said. ‘Maybe it won’t get as far as court, but I think you need someone to show them you mean business.’

Lindsay sighed. ‘I know you’re right, I’ll talk to Kev about it tonight.’

‘Tell him your file’s in good order, that will save some money because the lawyer won’t need to do that for you.’

Lindsay looked at her suspiciously. ‘Have you been researching this?’

‘Maybe,’ Alice said.

Another thing Alice had been researching was the statute of limitations. People had six years after an event to take legal action on that event, but as far as the earthquake sequence was concerned, the event that started the statute of limitations running wasn’t clear. It was only a few weeks away from the six-year anniversary of the first earthquake and that could mean that people whose claims weren’t yet settled would no longer be able to take court action against the EQC or their insurer, if the September earthquake was taken to be the initiating event.

Although the Insurance Council had publicly announced that its member companies wouldn’t use the statute of limitations to deny a claim before 2017, that wasn’t legal advice. EQC said the statute of limitations would start running from the time the claim was settled, but that also was not to be regarded as legal advice.

The EQC and the Insurance Council were basically saying, yes, there’s this piece of legislation that means you can’t sue us, but trust us, we won’t use it.

Trust was thin on the ground.

There were thousands of unsettled insurance claims, and thousands of houses going through repeat repairs. If the statute of limitations running out meant people could no longer sue the EQC and insurance companies, then those unfortunate people would lose any power they had in what was already a battle heavily weighted in the insurer’s favour.

Alice’s concern was that Lindsay and Kevin’s insurance company was using delaying tactics to get Lindsay and Kevin past the point at which they could take them to court to get their claim settled. If that happened, they would have no choice but to take whatever the insurance company was prepared to offer, which wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to get the house fixed.

After the February earthquake, there was a lot of talk about rebuilding a resilient city by building back smarter. Part of building back smarter was repairing houses and building new ones so that they would recover well from future earthquakes and other natural hazards. Where the land had dropped, foundations should be built back higher, to reduce the risk of flooding. Where the ground was prone to liquefaction, foundations should be built back deeper, to reduce the risk of damage from shaking and liquefaction in future quakes. But half a decade on, foundations were being patched and the land underneath them was being ignored.

People had died in the February quake because of bureaucratic short-cutting, and now that same short-cutting mentality was being applied across the city. Alice had been excited about the possibility of living in the smarter city and building her future here. Now what excited her was the thought of getting out.

The morning was warm for winter and there were no threatening clouds in the sky. It was a beautiful day and, now that the end of winter was near, there would be many more of them. After walking the children to school, Lindsay walked down to the river, then followed it towards the hills. There was a track that went from the road through a patch of native trees, nothing spectacular, just scrubby, dry bushes. Lindsay remembered following that track one morning in 2011, after walking Olivia to school and Jack to kindy. It had been one of those terrible mornings following a sleepless night interrupted by aftershocks, back when she still wanted to flee the city any time there was a flurry of quakes. The day was cool, it must have been late winter, or even early spring. Five years ago now. It was difficult to accept that it had been so long ago, but the evidence was there in the growth of her children and in the grey hairs appearing in Kevin’s temples and her own hairline.

Their claim was still not settled, but they were further ahead and there were days when Lindsay could see the end of the road. The project manager would visit with a tradesman of one sort or another, working on different aspects of the scope of works, taking tiny steps forward. There were days, though, when Lindsay felt they were on a downward spiral, not really getting anywhere at all. Were their concerns finally being taking seriously or were they being worn down? Did it matter any more?

Lindsay and Kevin had met with a lawyer and their paperwork was in good order. All those late nights Lindsay and Alice had put in the year before had paid off. But they still had to make a decision. All they wanted was an offer that would let them move on with their lives.

Any offer made would likely be a ripoff, not enough to fix the house properly, but it might be enough for them to move on and start to recover from the financial hit. They could focus on their children and their lives together and make the most of Alice’s last months at home.

For the longest time, moving on, for Lindsay, had meant getting away from Christchurch, but she accepted now that it was okay to stay. Whether it was in their repaired house or in a different place no longer mattered, they would find a way to make their settlement work, even if that meant her working full-time until retirement once the children were grown. Her dream of studying to become a radiographer was dead. They simply couldn’t afford it. But her family was what mattered.

Most in her family were staying in Christchurch, and Kevin had steady work. Now that so many homeowners were taking cash settlements to carry out the work themselves, good tradesmen were finding it easier to pick up work. It helped that the extent of shoddy repairs was becoming more widely known, at least in Christchurch, but there was still no sign of the magnitude of the problem being acknowledged in Wellington.

The bush ended and Lindsay was on the part of the track that ran behind about a dozen houses whose backyards met the riverbank. Before the quakes, there had been ducks and geese along this part of the river, not the usual mallard and grey ducks, but more like farmyard animals. Olivia and Jack had loved going there to feed them. Those birds were gone now, they had disappeared following the February quake. Still, five years later, there wasn’t as much bird life along the river as there had been pre-quake.

Lindsay continued walking along the track, avoiding the muddy patches where water pooled, and soon the track opened out onto a cul de sac where the road ran alongside the river. She could cross the bridge and head home or continue along the river for a longer walk home. She decided to continue along the river.

Further along, there was a culvert. Five years ago, in the middle of all the earthquake chaos and before the chaos of the rebuild got underway, someone had scratched into the culvert’s concrete the words ‘LOVE THIS PLACE’. At the time, it had made Lindsay cry, because she did love this place, although she wanted to run away from it and its constant earthquakes. The words had reminded her of how she felt about the city’s hills and the rivers. It had nearly been spring then, as it was now, and there was the wild weather to look forward to, sudden rain showers and blustery winds, followed by warm, sunny days that promised new growth and ducklings, all the signs of life renewing itself.

Five years later, she loved it still.

Alice and Heather were in the kitchen of Neil and Heather’s new house. There were boxes everywhere, and Alice was unwrapping crockery and handing it to Heather, who was finding the right place in the cupboards for plates, bowls, cups and glasses. Neil was down the hallway helping Grandma Bennett get her bedroom sorted out. Alice heard Neil teasing her about being pushy and her teasing him back about getting a move on.

It was Friday night and after work, Alice had driven out to Lincoln, the small town on the Canterbury Plains where Neil and Heather had decided to spend their retirement years. The house they were moving into wasn’t the house in the valley that they had pictured for their retirement, but it was away from the city and, more importantly, it was ‘on good ground’, as their pre-purchase report said. If the Alpine Fault did go, their new place stood a good chance of surviving. They had actually considered that, they thought that not to do so would be inviting disaster, almost saying to the plate boundary, ‘Kick here’. There was still risk, they weren’t fooling themselves that it wouldn’t happen to them again, but at least out on the plains, the risk was lower than had they stayed on the soft soils of the parts of the city they loved the most.

The six-year anniversary of the September quake was a couple of days away. Alice was staying with her grandparents for the weekend, helping them unpack and get settled, and they had agreed they would stay away from the news. Although Alice felt like she had been a bystander in the whole process, it frustrated her how outside of the city the rebuild was hailed as a great success, and there would be so much of that over the weekend. Yet how could it be a success? People had gone through so much pain, and were still going through it. Then there was the fact that the central city showed plenty of evidence of the rebuild’s failings, including the blocks of bare land where the Government’s long-promised anchor projects were meant to be, their expected completion dates stretching out towards the third decade of the twenty-first century. The city was thriving in some respects, but it was in spite of the efforts of the rebuild authorities, not because of it.

Alice had read an article on an insurance industry website about how to increase levels of insurance in less developed parts of the world. It was vital for economic success, the article said. She felt sorry for people in those places, how they would be encouraged to invest their hard-earned money, take on more debt than they might otherwise be inclined to because of this idea that their investment would be protected by insurance. But then, when that insurance needed to be claimed on, the process was likely to be just as painful and time-consuming as it had been for the people of Christchurch. The only sense in which Christchurch’s rebuild could be seen as a success was as a test bed for the insurance companies, who had been able to try out different strategies for minimising their exposure to a major disaster with little fear of the consequences in one of the most deregulated insurance markets in the western world.

The article painted a world in which success was measured by how much insurance people had, that insurance was a mark of affluence, because having insurance was what first-world countries do. There was something very wrong with that thinking and Alice had spent too long feeling helpless in the face of it, too long postponing her own life. How could someone stay sane in that world?

Alice had talked to Gerald about this a few months earlier. He listened without saying much and when she had finished trying, badly, to explain how she felt, he poured them both a whiskey.

‘What’s important to you, Alice?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want you to tell me, I want you to go away and think about what’s truly important to you. Once you’ve figured that out, make that your focus, the anchor point around which you make all decisions. Think about this as your anchor project.’

She nodded and sipped her whiskey. ‘What’s important to you?’ she had asked.

‘It doesn’t matter what’s important to me,’ he said. ‘We’re talking about you. But think about this, too: If you make a decision and it takes you in a particular direction, that doesn’t mean you have to go in that direction forever. You can always make another decision. The only truly bad decision is the one you make and then work against. But if you figure out what’s important to you and anchor yourself to that, that is bedrock for whatever decisions you make.’