Bleak City

by Marisa Taylor

  He decided to take matters into his own hands with regard to their house. It was clearly a write-off, but he had not yet had any indication as to when EQC or his insurance company would assess it. He decided to engage an engineer, and now, nearly three months after the big quake, he was back in Christchurch to go up to the house with that engineer, a man called Robert.

  It was unnaturally quiet on Huntsbury Hill. Or, rather, all the noise was natural. He could hear birds nearby, and that was it. The day was clear but cool, a slight breeze blowing from the east. Had he not just come back from Sydney, he would have considered it warm. He could get used to that warmer weather.

  He met Robert at the house in the morning, and Robert worked until well past lunch time, taking measurements and photos, asking about the materials used to build the property. Gerald could remember every beam, and made sure Robert got it all down right.

  In the time they were outside, Gerald didn’t see any activity in the surrounding houses, and there were no cars going up and down the road. The hill really had emptied of people.

  When the inspection was finished, Gerald was at a bit of a loss. He was staying with his mother and his flight wasn’t until the next morning, but he wasn’t quite ready to go back to her house and be mothered again. Or what passed for mothering on Marjorie’s part, which involved being fed delicious baked goods while having your life’s decisions scrutinised and judged. Sylvia should be where her husband was, Marjorie had said when he tried to explain to her how Sylvia felt about Christchurch. Gerald should make her come back to Christchurch with him.

  Marjorie had always made sure their material needs were well met. They were always fed well and clothed adequately, but those domestic activities had seemed to Gerald, as he grew older, more his mother proving something rather than showing she loved them. Maternal was not a word he had ever associated with her, and feelings were never discussed. He couldn’t explain to her the grief Sylvia felt over what had happened in Christchurch, that she felt that it was too difficult, at sixty-three years of age, to start building a new life in a completely changed city. Gerald understood, he was struggling too, but it all seemed beneath Marjorie, she couldn’t seem to understand what all the fuss was about.

  Alice had stayed with her for nearly two months, since the night of the February quake. It was the first time she’d had someone in her house for more than a couple of days since she had it built after Gerald’s father died. Marjorie seemed to almost enjoy Alice’s company and had taught her some cooking and baking skills, Alice had told Gerald. It surprised him, that she was being grandmotherly, for the first time he could recall. Of course she had knitted and sewn for all the grandchildren, beautiful, intricate pieces, but there was no affection in it. It had been, again, Marjorie proving something, although Gerald could never figure out what that something was.

  No, he couldn’t figure her out, after all these years.

  Gerald texted Alice, and she told him where she was and said he should drop by. He hesitated. He hadn’t seen Lindsay in over a decade and wasn’t sure how she felt about Andrew’s family. There was only one way to find out, so he texted that he would be over soon.

  Alice hugged him, followed by Lindsay.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you, Gerald,’ Lindsay said. ‘You look well. Quite tan actually.’

  Alice shut the door behind him, shoving it back into the warped frame with a loud bang. They all walked through to the kitchen, which was at the far end of the house. Gerald and Alice sat down at the table while Lindsay stayed standing.

  He smiled. ‘You’re looking well, too.’

  ‘Very nice of you to say, but I’m tired and I’m looking it. Would you like a beer?’

  ‘We’re celebrating,’ Alice said. ‘We’re allowed to use our toilet again.’

  ‘I’ve already had two beers,’ Lindsay said. ‘Alice is about to start on her second. Have you had lunch? I’ll make you a sandwich.’

  ‘Sure,’ Gerald said. ‘That would be lovely. But no beer, thanks.’

  Lindsay started making him a sandwich, snacking on the bits of salad, meat and cheese as she put it together. It had been about a decade since Gerald had seen Lindsay and overall she was looking good for her age, but she was right, the tiredness was showing. She had dark circles under her eyes, her hair was dishevelled and her clothes untidy. The Lindsay he remembered from when she had been married to Andrew had cared about how she looked, even when suffering the sleepless nights new parents experience.

  She placed the plated sandwich in front of him on the table and sat down across from him, taking a sip from her beer.

  ‘Delicious,’ he said, chewing on the first bite of the sandwich. ‘How’s things here? Any progress?’

  Lindsay shook her head. ‘Still trying to get our woodburner replaced. Major cockup at the hub, they came and did their assessment, all their paperwork and then nothing happened. I called and called for a couple of weeks before they finally tracked our file down, it had been sitting on someone’s desk. We should get it by June sometime. We were down as urgent because we have small children, I’d hate to think how long elderly with serious health problems are waiting.’

  Gerald nodded. ‘Certainly hearing a lot of that sort of thing. Not feeling too confident about things going smoothly.’

  ‘What’s the house like?’ Alice said.

  Gerald told them about the engineer’s visit, that he still had to do his report, but that it was his view that the house was beyond repair.

  ‘That’s the place you built?’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Yes,’ Gerald said. ‘It’s very strange to see the place so quiet, no cars going up and down the hill. I wonder if anyone’s living up there.’

  ‘If you go back after dark,’ Alice said, ‘you’ll be able to tell from the lights. When I’ve been past early in the morning, there’s hardly any lights. People are calling it Muntsbury.’

  Gerald repeated the word, puzzled.

  ‘Munted,’ Alice said. ‘It’s the new word for Christchurch. Huntsbury Hill’s munted so now it’s Muntsbury.’

  ‘Munted,’ Gerald said.

  ‘Your house is munted,’ Alice said. ‘Though I doubt it’s a term you’ll see in your engineer’s report. How long will it take?’

  ‘A few weeks,’ Gerald said. ‘Then we’ll see what EQC has to say.’

  ‘Will you come back?’ Alice asked. ‘How’s Nana feeling about Christchurch now?’

  ‘Well she wouldn’t come back with me this time,’ Gerald says. ‘She misses the family, but she’s not ready to come back yet.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Lindsay said. ‘I’m getting used to how it is here, but there’s at least a couple of times a week I want to go back to Timaru.’

  Alice shot a glance at her mother, gave a slight roll of her eyes, then quickly looked away.

  ‘Makes me laugh,’ Lindsay said, oblivious to Alice’s expression. ‘I’ve always hated Timaru, I had an aunt and uncle down there when I was growing up and we used to go down every Christmas. I just loathed the place then, and now it’s like my paradise.’

  ‘I’m used to it here,’ said Alice.

  ‘That’s because you’ve never gone away for more than a day or two,’ Lindsay said. Then to Gerald, ‘She runs around the cordon.’

  ‘I don’t want to go in one day and be shocked,’ Alice said. ‘If I stay away, that’s what will happen and so if I go in a couple of times a week, it’s like a gradual change, not something that’s going to make me run away.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with running away,’ Lindsay said, ‘when a place is trying to kill you.’

  Alice was about to fire something back at her mother when the phone rang, saving them from what Gerald had the feeling was a long-running discussion. Lindsay stood up and answered the phone, then left the room.

  ‘How are you doing, Alice?’ Gerald said.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Alice said. ‘I think I’m used to not sleeping now.’

  ‘I want to
say thank you for looking after Mother,’ Gerald said. ‘I think she enjoyed having you there, and if there was any place open to go out and eat, I’d offer to take you and your family out for dinner.’

  ‘Maybe one day?’ Alice said. ‘When we have restaurants again.’ Her voice was quiet and she seemed unbearably sad, especially for someone who wasn’t yet twenty.

  ‘One day.’

  They were both silent, unsure of what to say next.

  ‘It will happen, Alice, the city will be rebuilt.’

  ‘I know that,’ Alice said. ‘But there’s so much to do before they can start. And they don’t seem to want to start while there are still quakes.’

  ‘There is that,’ Gerald said. ‘People are inventive, though, they find ways to get things done. You watch and see, people are starting to think about what they can get done, it will get started.’

  She nodded, unconvinced.

  ‘Why didn’t you continue with your studies?’ Gerald asked. ‘You seemed very keen on engineering.’ He had asked her the question in messages, but she had never answered.

  She was quiet, her hands folded in front of her, resting on the table. ‘Did you see anything about the coroner’s inquest into the CTV deaths?’

  ‘No, we don’t have much coverage of things over in Sydney.’

  She was thinking, collecting her thoughts. ‘That building shouldn’t have collapsed, all those people shouldn’t have died. I heard that after the quake, when all the SAR people were still here. I heard the Japanese search and rescue people said this wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a man-made one. And it made me think about engineering and what it involves.’

  ‘You mean being responsible for people’s lives? That’s what the training is for, Alice, that’s why it’s a four-year course, not your standard three-year science degree.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s that engineers were involved. The week I was back at uni we were talking about it, people wanted to talk about it, as if there was something wrong with the buildings that collapsed, if some engineers got it wrong. All those people dying might be some engineer’s fault.’

  ‘Local council, too, it’s not just all on the engineer. There are checks and balances built into the system.’

  ‘I get that. But I’m not sure I want to be part of it. Part of a system where something might be wrong with the system.’

  Gerald was silent. Young people had this idea that the world was perfect, and then when they realised it wasn’t they were indignant. He and Sylvia had talked about this many times over the years, that part of getting older was the gradual realisation that there was something very wrong with the world. For Alice, the goalposts had been set high, her maternal family had recognised her intelligence and told her she could do anything. Possibly they believed that was the case. But, Gerald knew, the world wasn’t like that, and he viewed growing up as the process of adapting to the way the world is while trying to keep some sense of having a moral centre. Had he kept his? He wasn’t always sure. Another part of getting older was that he was increasingly aware of how little he knew. But he did know one thing, Alice was not the same girl she was before the February quake. Then she had a lightness about her and the same eager curiosity she had as a small child. She was interested in people, interested in learning things. Now it was like everything was shut up inside, and it was reflected in what she posted to Facebook: photos of wrecked buildings, wrecked streets, links to quake-related videos. No more people, which there had been plenty of in her Facebook feed before the quakes started.

  ‘Something’s wrong with every system,’ Gerald finally said. ‘But that doesn’t mean you have to be wrong.’

  ‘I’m not sure what that means,’ Alice said, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘All I know is that I couldn’t stand people wanting to talk about it all the time like it was an intellectual exercise. It was like they forget that they were people with families.’

  ‘Did you know anyone who died?’

  ‘No, no one I knew,’ she said. ‘A girl from school lost her mum, and Mum’s optometrist was in the CTV building.’

  ‘You could leave, you know,’ Gerald said. ‘Or just get away. Come and visit us for a couple of weeks, go somewhere, do something different, get away from all the damage.’

  Alice glanced down towards the other end of the house. They could hear Lindsay on the phone.

  ‘I need to be here,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s a lot for Mum to do about the house, and Kevin’s having to work outside the city, it’s hard on them, I can help out here.’

  ‘What’s happening with the house?’ Gerald asked. Clearly the place was still habitable, but there were a lot of plaster cracks. Then there was the front door Alice had to force open and shut when Gerald arrived. It kept changing, she and Lindsay had said, sometimes too loose, other times they couldn’t get it open at all.

  ‘EQC assessed it just before the February quake,’ Alice said. ‘They said it had done well and would be undercap. But now, who knows? It moves differently, not just when there’s quakes, but when cars drive by.’

  ‘You think there’s foundation damage?’ Gerald said.

  She shrugged. ‘There are a lot of cracks in the foundation. Some of the windows are stuck, and the front door. Sometimes it’s easy to open, but most of the time it’s stuck.’

  ‘Changing from aftershocks?’

  ‘Yeah, seems like it.’

  ‘Foundation damage is pretty serious,’ he said. ‘It would mean a lift, and that’s a big job. Maybe even a rebuild.’

  ‘A rebuild,’ Alice said, looking grim. ‘I don’t know how Mum would cope with that, she loves this place, she has big plans for it, all the renovations she’s going to do once Jack goes to school. Well that was the plan. I don’t know about now.’

  Alice looked far older than she was, and it worried Gerald, she was taking on too much responsibility that she didn’t necessarily have to carry.

  ‘There are a lot of things to worry about in life, Alice,’ Gerald said. ‘And most of those things never happen. It’s best to just focus on what’s right in front of you now and do what you can about that.’

  She gave a small laugh. ‘You know, I’ve tried doing that, but I can’t make myself stop thinking.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Those people in the city.’

  ‘You can’t do anything for them, Alice. They’re gone.’

  Later Gerald drove into the city and walked around the cordon. It was a different kind of destruction in the city compared to that on the hill he and Sylvia had lived on for the best part of three decades. On the hills, the houses had been shaken and twisted, their structures were distorted. Roof tiles were askew on roofs, windows were broken, some window frames were falling out of walls, some walls had fallen away showing the chaos inside. Munted. But the city’s buildings were beyond munted, they looked like they had been shelled. He could see down Manchester Street, where buildings had collapsed, revealing wooden framing that had splintered into kindling, chunks of wall linings, piles of bricks on the ground below or on the canopy between the ground floor and the first floor. Chaos. People had died in there, and Gerald understood Alice’s sadness. It was difficult to think about those lives lost, the network of people affected, the grief multiplied, amplified, every single one of them wondering why it was the person they loved who was in the wrong place when the quake hit.

  Did Christchurch have a future? He had reassured Alice that it did, but what he hadn’t told her was how uneasy he was feeling about the layers of bureaucracy that had been put in place. CERA was a government department, which meant the recovery was being driven from Wellington by people who had little or even no local knowledge. Yes, the Minister for Earthquake Recovery was a local, but he was still a politician, and in Gerald’s experience, politicians were more talk than action. Christchurch was a city that needed action.

  Double Blow

  June 2011

  Following the September earthquake, Fletcher E
QR was set up to manage repairs for EQC. EQR was part of Fletcher Construction, one of New Zealand’s largest and most well-known construction companies. If a property had only minor damage, the homeowner would be paid out. But properties with more serious damage up to the EQC cap of $100,000 would go into the Canterbury Home Repair Programme, run by Fletcher EQR.

  The reasoning behind having Fletchers manage repairs for EQC was to protect homeowners from construction cowboys, a problem that occurs in many areas following a disaster. Because the volume of work is so high following a disaster, people whose skills are normally not up to scratch are able to obtain work. EQC wanted, they said, to minimise the risk of shoddy repairs that was bound to occur if homeowners were left to manage their own repairs.

  Within weeks of the announcement of the formation of Fletcher EQR, some of the region’s builders were saying that Fletchers wasn’t offering reasonable rates and that they wouldn’t be having anything to do with earthquake repairs carried out through Fletchers.

  EQR hubs were set up throughout Christchurch and repair work began in earnest late in 2010, interrupted only briefly by the February earthquake.

  In June 2011, Lindsay and Kevin finally had an appointment with someone from the local hub. Lindsay was excited, they had been living in a cracked house for nine months. She knew that repairs wouldn’t take place before winter set in, that was too much to hope for. But at least with the assessment process underway, they could have confidence that this would be their only winter in a broken house.

  Mike, the project manager from the hub, arrived at nine o’clock, right on the dot, with two guys. Mike was young, late twenties, no older, clean shaven with an open, friendly manner. Lindsay was happy at the idea that he would be managing their repair. One tradie looked like your usual tradie, the other looked a bit dodgy. If they hadn’t had an appointment and had showed up on their own while Lindsay was at home alone, she would not be inclined to let them in. Mike introduced them both, but later Lindsay could only think of them as Tradie and Dodgy. Dodgy’s hair was long and straggly, Tradie’s was shaved, his pink scalp peeking through the stubble.