Bleak City

by Marisa Taylor

  ‘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.’

  Quiet

  December 2010

  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 n
ot 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.

  Gerald’s mother had taken a liking to the girl, and he wasn’t sure he understood why as he didn’t think Marjorie liked anyone. She approved of people, if they served some purpose, but generally she didn’t give any indication of actually liking someone, even her own children, and Gerald’s father, when he had still been alive.

  He thought Alice should leave, find a nice city, finish her degree in Auckland, or even Australia, although he hadn’t said that aloud. It wasn’t the earthquakes or the effect on her early adult life, it was the city itself, the undercurrent of something rotten. Whenever he brought this up to Sylvia, she laughed. ‘What do you expect from a city built on a swamp?’ she said. ‘We’re all sinking into the rot.’ It wasn’t that he no longer found the city beautiful, he did, it was that he found it disturbing.

  Just the day before, Christmas Day, a family in the low-income suburb of Aranui were woken when what was referred to in the newspaper as a homemade bomb was thrown through one of the windows of their house. Earlier in the month, police said they had found the place where a prostitute was murdered a couple of years ago. He knew the place, the land was next door to the radio clubrooms, back when he had still been doing ham radio. Christchurch was the site of too many disturbing crimes, and he wondered what it was about the place that drew the people who could do such brutal things.

  Gerald closed the newspaper, made himself another coffee and went through to the lounge, where the day’s sun was pouring through the windows. He sat down in a chair facing out onto the valley and started reading the mystery novel Alice had given him for Christmas.

  He was well into the first chapter when he heard another quake, the approaching rumble, then the shaking of the house. Glasses and cups in the kitchen jostled against one another. A good one, and from the city again. He returned to his book, but in a couple of minutes another quake rolled through. Gerald looked out down the valley and could see the power lines along the street swaying. He thought of Sylvia and Michelle in the city.

  He had a cellphone, it was necessary for business these days, but he hated the things and had powered his down at the close of business on Thursday afternoon. He powered it on and texted Sylvia, asking if she was okay. She quickly texted back that she was, but Michelle was upset and wanted to get home to the kids. He texted Sylvia to say he would pick her up.

  There was a steady flow of traffic going out of the city but not much to impede his progress on the way in. He could see a few streets blocked off, occupied only by police and firemen. He parked down by the Botanic Gardens and walked in to the city to meet Sylvia at the end of the City Mall, under the Bridge of Remembrance. The mall was closed off and there was a fire appliance parked on the tramlines. Firemen and police littered the mall and people outside the cordon were discussing whether to stay and wait in the hopes of continuing their shopping.

  Sylvia said she was fine, but really she was a little bit on edge. There had been three quakes since the first one, bricks falling off buildings and some shattering glass, but nothing for about twenty minutes. He talked her into a walk in the gardens, it would help her to wind down. She had become more relaxed about the quakes as the weeks wore on, but at the start, she had trouble sleeping and ended up weepy and easily confused. A trip to the doctor sorted that out, and a few days on sleeping pills had given her the rest she needed to get back into a routine.

  Gerald and Sylvia walked along the river on the side opposite the hospital. Patients were outside, enjoying the fresh air. It always puzzled Gerald to see patients outside enjoying the fresh air while also smoking. The river was full of ducks and their ducklings, the usual mallard and grey ducks, along with the larger paradise ducks and their brown and white-striped ducklings. The gardens were full of people enjoying the warm summer weather, mostly couples and families with small children. It was sad to not see very many families with older children, but he supposed the older children were with their friends or at the malls. He hoped that was not his grandchildren’s futures, to be alienated from their parents past a certain age. He and Sylvia had tried to keep talking to their children when they were growing up, and although there had been rough patches, there hadn’t been anything too dramatic, except from the wider family.

  There were too many people in the gardens, Sylvia said, she was ready to go home.

  At home, Gerald made them an omelette for lunch. There were more quakes while they were eating, just threes, once again, but they disturbed Sylvia. After finishing lunch and a cup of tea, they went for a walk around the park near their house.

  They had worked hard at having a peaceful family, at teaching their children respect for themselves and for others. The main issue had been when he decided to break away from the family business, the construction business his father had started. Gerald had only become a builder because he wasn’t interested in school and when he reached fifteen years of age and told his parents he wanted to leave, his father had said he could, but only if he had a job. He had nothing lined up, so his father insisted Gerald go and work for him. It wasn’t long before he found he enjoyed the work, the satisfaction of planning something, choosing the right materials and working towards a finished result, getting everything right. But in Gerald’s late teens, he noticed his brother-in-law, Stan, was in the habit of cutting corners. Nothing that would make a house fall down, but Stan wasn’t being up front with their customers about the choices being made. Gerald wasn’t happy about it, but he knew his father would do nothing, the bottom line was as important to Bill, if not more so, than the quality of the finished product. By the time Laurel was born and Andrew was starting school, it was bothering Gerald. Quality was getting lower and lower and it wasn’t about craftsmanship any more, it was about squeezing every last cent out of a build.

  Gerald and Sylvia had spent many late nights after the children had gone to bed discussing what to do, coming up with a solution that wouldn’t create a rift in the family. A lot of the cousins were similar ages and Gerald and Sylvia wanted their children to grow up with their wider family. It built a sense of family that neither of them had growing up. Gerald’s father was the only one of their parents who had been born in New Zealand. Sylvia’s parents were ten-pound Poms who had emigrated when she was just five years old and she had only vague memories of all the family they had left behind. No, however Gerald solved the problem of the declining quality of builds, it had to be done subtly.

  The solution was to start up his own building company, Moorhouse Architectural, specialising in more hig
h-end builds, especially in the hills around Christchurch. It was a market Bill and Stan weren’t interested in, too many risks building on hills, fewer opportunities to make a profit. But Gerald had framed it as an extension of the family business, one for which he was willing to take all the risk. That is, he wasn’t asking them for any money. It worked, and Gerald was able to build houses his way, without worrying about when a client would make claims about being ripped off. It was a relief, it lifted a burden from Gerald’s shoulders he hadn’t realised was so heavy.

  Running his own company gave him and Sylvia the freedom to let their children spend time with their cousins while they were growing up without having to worry that everyone was too much in each other’s pockets. Of course Lindsay’s unexpected pregnancy had disrupted the family. Alice had been the first great-grandchild on both sides of the family, and all the new grandparents were torn over being in love with baby Alice and worrying about Andrew and Lindsay being too young. But that was the thing with children, you could encourage them to take responsibility for their actions, but you couldn’t do more than that, they had to make their own choices.

  Andrew and Lindsay knew each other through mutual friends while they were in high school, which was when they started dating. Both were doing first year law at university when Lindsay became pregnant. Gerald and Sylvia had offered their support for whatever Andrew and Lindsay wanted to do. Little Alice was a good baby, and they were upset to lose contact after the divorce. It was good to see Alice again, all grown up.

  Boxing Day was the usual day for the family to pack up and go away for a holiday, and it sounded like Alice would be joining them in Central Otago for a week. It would be good for her, to meet some of the others, have a bit more time to get to know them properly. As much as Gerald and Sylvia wanted to spend that time with her, they had decided to stay in town, to enjoy the good weather and the quiet. They would see Alice plenty in the new year, especially as it sounded like she would stay at home rather than go flatting again. Lindsay and her second family were just five minutes’ drive from Gerald and Sylvia, and now that Alice knew where they were, she could stop in whenever she liked.