Bleak City (9 page)

‘You can come with me,’ he said. ‘It won’t take me long to walk home, and we can see about getting you home from there.’

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t heard from Mum yet, I need to get home.’

They stood, not speaking. It was difficult to actually part ways, not knowing what would happen next. He nodded. ‘Stay away from buildings,’ he said. ‘Walk down the middle of streets.’

‘You, too,’ she said. They said goodbye and that they loved each other, and then went off in the direction of home, Andrew to the north, and Alice to the southeast.

She felt like she was walking through a war zone, or as close to a war zone as someone living in this part of the world might experience without getting on a plane. Alarms continued to go off in buildings and shocked, scared people, some with cuts and many of them crying, were picking their way along the streets, keeping to the middle as much as they could, moving out of the way of cars moving slowly between the debris on each side of the street. Bricks, pieces of concrete and glass were everywhere, and the fronts of some buildings had fallen away completely, slumped onto the road, crushing cars. She could hear sirens in the distance and building alarms nearby, never stopping. Aftershocks caused dust to billow from buildings as they collapsed further.

She heard her name. It was Emma, whose parents lived down the road from Alice’s family. They had been in school together, but had gone to different high schools and drifted apart. Emma had left school at sixteen and was now working in a bank. She was crying and hugged Alice tight. ‘You’re covered in dust,’ Alice said, make a small effort at rubbing some off her.

‘So are you,’ Emma said.

Alice looked down at her clothes and saw Emma was right. She thought she could smell smoke.

Emma was living at home again since the September quake, she said, and that’s where she was going now. Alice put her hand in Emma’s and they started walking again.

At the intersection of Manchester and Lichfield, the red dome of the triangular building on the corner had come off and lay upside down in the middle of the street. Normally if she walked home from the city, she would go up High Street, but it was a mess, and a policeman was directing people to go up Manchester Street towards Moorhouse Avenue.

Before long, they were outside the CBD. Moorhouse Avenue was packed with vehicles moving so slowly that Alice and Emma were passing them. Two queues of traffic going towards the city parted way to let a ute through. A woman was walking forward, saying something to the drivers, and they all cooperated to make a third lane so the truck could pass through.

Alice and Emma walked past the stadium, where the ground was wet, covered in silt, gutters full of the stuff. Walking through Charleston was a strange experience, like the world had been twisted. There had been a lot of liquefaction here, water was still streaming in places, and houses lurched at strange angles. It was oddly quiet, very few people were moving around.

They crossed another main road, where traffic was heavy, moving slowly. But they noticed that drivers were being polite, letting cars turn in from the neighbourhood’s roads.

Their street was covered in silt. They walked down towards their houses, looking to see what damage neighbouring houses had sustained. The further they went down the road, the more silt there was flowing out onto the road and down the gutters.

They reached Alice’s house first, which looked shut up tight. There was a silt hump in the driveway, water bubbling up from the cracked surface. She asked Emma to come inside, but Emma had heard nothing from her family and was anxious to get home and see how they were. They said their goodbyes, hugging each other tight.

Alice had to shove the front door open, not because there was something behind it, but because it just didn’t fit the frame any more. She left it open and inspected the house.

The power was off so she flicked the mains off at the switchboard to avoid a fire when it came back on. The house was a mess, worse than it had been the day of the September quake. The existing cracks were worse and more had joined them for company, although, thankfully, no plaster had actually fallen down. Everything in the kitchen was awry. The refrigerator and oven had shaken away from the walls and food from the pantry and the refrigerator lay on the floor, together with the shattered contents of the cupboards. There was a note on the whiteboard, from Lindsay, saying she was fine and that she had gone to pick up the kids. She was walking, the note said, the garage door was stuck. How long they would be?

Outside, the backyard had a layer of silt that might have been as deep as a foot. She had thought her days of digging silt were over after her stint in the student volunteer army in September, but if it was like this here, it must be way worse in the places that had liquefaction in September. Their chimney that had survived the September quake had cracked at the roofline and was hanging off the flue in one heavy piece. That would have to be taken down, Alice wasn’t sure she would feel comfortable sleeping in the house if an aftershock could make that thing come through the roof. Then she thought about the physics of it and realised the real threat was to the neighbour’s driveway, which would be blocked completely should the chimney come down.

Alice’s phone had been fully charged when she went into the city, so she visited the Geonet page to see what the quake was. A 6.3, with its epicentre under the tunnel to Lyttelton. It had been nearly six months since the September quake, and the six magnitude aftershock people had waited for in those early weeks had finally come. Now they had the aftershocks of this monster to deal with, and there came another one, a rumble from the hills and then the shaking of the house. Everything that was broken in the kitchen clattered together. She wanted to know more and was tempted to visit the news sites, but she didn’t know when power would be back on, so she resisted the urge.

It had been about an hour since the quake, probably more. Lindsay’s note had given no indication as to when she had left to pick up the kids. Alice assumed it would have been right after the quake, so why wasn’t she home by now? She decided to walk towards the school to see if she could find Lindsay there or on the way back. There were several ways Lindsay could go, Alice just had to pick the right one. She left her own note on the whiteboard, forced the front door shut once again and locked up.

At the end of the street by the river, the liquefaction was much worse. A sinkhole had opened and claimed four cars. Three men were pulling one of them out. An idiot had decided to do donuts on the silty water coming up from the street, they told her, and the road had collapsed out from under him. They were going to extract their own cars, but would leave the idiot’s as it was, tilting precariously on the edge of the gaping hole.

She picked her way along the footpath until she reached the river, then walked along the river to Olivia’s school. Parents were hurrying their children into cars and the teachers looked stressed. Alice found Olivia’s teacher, who said that Lindsay had picked Olivia up about twenty minutes earlier and she was then going to pick up Jack. His kindy was further towards the hills and Alice ran there, hoping she would be able to catch up, but she had missed them and there were at least three different ways they could have headed back home from the kindy.

Alice couldn’t decide what to do. Her grandparents, Lindsay’s parents, lived about two kilometres away, and she could go there, but there was no guarantee they would be there. She decided to walk back home but stopped by to see Marjorie, as the way home went past her house. Marjorie was sitting outside in the garden, on a seat looking out over the stream, sipping a cup of tea.

‘You have power?’ Alice said.

‘No, dear, I had a jug full of water and a little gas burner your grandfather set up after the first quake. Would you like a cup? A cup of tea is always good for the nerves.’

As if to reinforce Marjorie’s offer, a boom sounded in the distance, then rumbling from the hills became louder and louder until the ground started shaking and they could see the ground rolling. She was glad they were outside, away from anything that could fall on them. Marjorie was strangely calm, and Alice suspected the poor woman might be utterly terrified.

Alice accepted the offer and went inside to help Marjorie get the gas burner on. She told Marjorie about the city, that Andrew was fine and had been walking home to his family when she last saw him. Marjorie hadn’t heard from anyone.

It didn’t take long to boil the water for a single cup of tea, and Marjorie topped up her own with more hot water. Marjorie’s kitchen wasn’t terribly messy, she had been using bungee cords to keep her cupboards shut since the first quake, and looking closely, Alice noticed that the ornaments in Marjorie’s lounge were blu-tacked to the shelving. Still, furniture had been shaken out of place and there were some cracks in the plaster that Alice hadn’t noticed the last time she was there. In fact, she had been impressed then at how well the place had fared.

They sat out in the garden sipping their cups of tea while quakes continued to roll through.

‘There’s a radio in the third kitchen drawer,’ Marjorie said. ‘There are batteries in the drawer too. I was going to put them in, but I couldn’t get my fingers to work.’

Alice brought the radio outside and tuned it to National Radio. A report said there had been deaths and building collapses, fires and people trapped in buildings. It was very bad. The cellphone network was running on backup power and people were asked to use it sparingly. Alice texted her mother to say where she was, giving the address.

They were listening to the mayor saying the communities on Banks Peninsula hadn’t been heard from when one of Marjorie’s grandsons arrived, Tony. Alice had only met him a couple of times and their conversations had been brief.

‘Grandmother,’ Tony said. There was no hug, no kisses. ‘Alison, isn’t it?’ he said, turning to Alice.

‘Alice,’ she said. The way he had said it made her think he knew perfectly well what her name was.

Tony had been working during the quake, he said, and had made it home to check on his family, who were all fine, just scared. He was on his way out to the seaside suburb of Redcliffs, to check on his mother. Tony said he wanted Marjorie to go with him, then go back to his house along with his mother. They shouldn’t be alone for a night that was bound to be full of aftershocks.

‘I won’t be going anywhere,’ Marjorie said. ‘I can stay here, and Alice has already said she’ll stay with me.’

Alice quickly turned to look at Marjorie, whose eyes innocently reinforced the lie that had just come out of her mouth.

There was some discussion over whether Alice should go home to ‘her own family’, which Alice resented Tony saying, she was part of their family, too. She decided to play along with Marjorie’s lie. ‘Our house is too dangerous to stay in tonight,’ Alice said. ‘The chimney has cracked and could come through the roof in an aftershock. We’ll have to see to that before we can sleep there.’

Marjorie smiled at Tony, satisfied that the argument had been won. Tony checked Marjorie’s emergency supplies and said he would be back in the morning.

‘Don’t worry about me, dear,’ Marjorie said once Tony had left. ‘I’ll be fine here on my own. I just don’t like the idea of all the tears and hysteria. Tony’s wife is high-strung, like that wife of Andrew’s.’

To Alice that seemed a bit unfair. Yes, Michelle could be tense, but she relaxed once you got to know her. It was probably the tension that was making Marjorie snap, be unkind. ‘I can stay,’ Alice said. ‘And I’d prefer to, since I’ve said to Tony that I would.’

Marjorie was quiet a moment. ‘I think I’d like that.’

Alice was going to walk home and see if her family were there, then she would collect some things and come back to Marjorie’s for the night. When Marjorie learned that Alice’s car was stuck in the city, she insisted that Alice take hers. She wouldn’t be going anywhere, she said, and even if she wanted to, the thought of what the roads were like would quickly change her mind.

Alice drove Marjorie’s Suzuki Swift slowly, uncertain of what damage there had been to the road. The main roads were still nuts and Alice crawled along. She had the radio on, reports said people had died, ‘multiple fatalities’, including some from buildings falling on buses. Alice remembered enough from discussions about earthquake engineering at university to think that should not have happened, and she wondered why a building that dangerous hadn’t been caught in the checks after the September quake. But this quake had been so incredibly strong, were 6.3 quakes supposed to be like that? Could any building withstand that?

Power was out for most people, and phones were down. People were being told to get out of the central city and Civil Defence had declared the highest level of disaster. There was another strong quake as she crossed the railway lines, and she felt the car lift up, then the wave passed and the cars in front of her rose up, then sank back down. Freaky.

She thought about Marjorie’s calm. She knew there was fear lying beneath it, could see that in the way she was so anxious to not be at her grandson’s house. Maybe she should try to talk Marjorie into going and staying with someone. Maybe she could stay with Gerald and Sylvia, Andrew’s parents.

Lindsay and Kevin were home, along with Olivia and Jack, who threw themselves into Alice’s arms, telling her how scary it was during the quake. Lindsay and Kevin were packing. They were going to stay with Kevin’s brother in Timaru, they didn’t want to keep the kids here with no water, no power and no indication as to when they would be back on. Lindsay’s parents and grandparents were okay, but were going out to stay with Lindsay’s auntie in Amberley, north of the city and well away from the disaster of the quake. Lindsay’s sister Sonya and her kids were going to Dunedin to stay with Sonya’s ex-husband. That would be uncomfortable, but was preferable to staying in the city. Jason and Carla were taking Carla’s mother to stay with relatives outside the city. Was anyone staying?

‘How long will you be?’ Alice asked.