Walking around rubble had become a habit for Alice. There was little else to do when she wasn’t working or looking after the kids. There were no restaurants, no bars, at least not on the eastern side of town. Most of the Port Hills walking tracks were off limits, the only one near to home was too exposed for Alice, a fierce wind often came up over the ridge and she would end up freezing cold, in spite of the effort required to slog to the top of the hill.
Friends. There weren’t many around. Emma, who Alice had walked home with the day of the quake, had stayed with her parents until after the June quakes, which had been the death knell for their brick house. Her parents had moved out to Rangiora to stay with Emma’s brother and his family. Emma had been working for a bank in Riccarton since the February quake, but didn’t fancy commuting all the way from Rangiora into Riccarton every day, so left for Australia.
Some of the people Alice had been at uni with the year before had chosen to transfer to another university and those who stayed on seemed worn out by the temporary lecture theatres, the confusion of a university that wasn’t quite functioning as normal. What was?
Alice had warned Tyler the place was dead boring, but he said he’d be okay, she was there to keep him company. Alice wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. She was used to the place, Tyler wouldn’t be, he had a short attention span and when the dullness of the place drove him crazy, he would start driving her crazy.
The previous Friday night had been one of those times. Alice had been spending Friday nights with Sean and Charlotte for a couple of months. They would watch a video, at either her place or theirs. That Friday night, Sean and Charlotte had come around and Kevin and Lindsay had gone out for the night. Well, they had gone to visit friends for the night, there was little to go out to in the city, which was why Alice, Sean, Charlotte and Tyler stayed in watching a video. Which Tyler had complained about the whole time. Alice had picked the original Jaws because she thought it would appeal to him, but instead he fidgeted the whole time, swapping between sitting on the sofa or on one of the beanchairs. At one point, he sat back down on the sofa with a dramatic whump, knocking against Sean, who had a bowl of popcorn in his lap. The bowl upended and popcorn went everywhere, all over the sofa, between the cushions and down on top of Charlotte, who was sitting in a beanchair in front of the sofa. They paused the movie and cleaned up, Sean muttering about Tyler and Tyler complaining about how boring the movie was, why couldn’t they go out and do something?
‘We can’t go to a nightclub,’ Sean spelled out, ‘because there aren’t any. And even if there were, Lottie is fourteen, she’s not allowed in.’
‘She doesn’t have to go,’ Tyler said. ‘Just because we’re going doesn’t mean she has to tag along.’
‘Nice,’ Alice said. ‘Real nice, Ty. Just sit down, shut up and watch the movie.’ Which he did, quietly, but that was only because every time he seemed about to open his mouth and complain, Alice poked him in the ribs. In the end, the final battle between the shark and Chief Brody kept his attention, but she couldn’t get him to admit that the movie was actually pretty cool.
‘Your cousin’s an idiot,’ Sean had told Alice on the way out.
‘Your cousin’s a knob,’ Tyler told her once Sean and Charlotte were down the driveway and out of hearing range.
Although Alice and Tyler had always gotten along, it was different now. The quakes had changed her whereas for Tyler, they were almost entertainment. Alice had matured, or at least she thought she had, but he was still the same as he had been at fifteen, and he hadn’t been particularly mature then.
One summer when Alice was still in high school, Tyler was staying with them. They were fifteen and the next year would be their first year of NCEA. Alice wasn’t worried about herself, although she would get stressed over the exams, but she was worried about Tyler. He didn’t like school, didn’t like reading and wanted to leave as soon as he could. But he had no plans for anything other than hanging around his mother’s house playing games. When Alice brought it up, he accused her of being too serious, of having her life too planned out. That wasn’t true, she would point out, she had no idea what she was going to do at university. But you know you’re going to university, he would say, and she would feel like her life was too planned out, that maybe she had just assumed she would cruise through high school and into whatever course she chose at university.
She had decided not to go back to university this year for reasons she barely understood herself. Lately, though, she had found herself thinking about last year’s courses, what she had learned, and she realised that her interest in the subject was still there. Maybe, given some time, going back to university would be a good idea, the right choice. She had voiced these thoughts to Tyler, she thought that he would understand as they had known each other so long.
‘You should do a trade,’ he said. ‘Be a builder. Get your hands dirty.’
‘I have no problem with getting my hands dirty,’ Alice said. She had explained this to Tyler already, the reason she wasn’t working for Kevin was that Kevin was having trouble picking up work. So much of the available work was tied up with Fletchers and although Kevin had registered for that work, he found it difficult to get any. On the jobs he did get, he had been pressured to cut corners. He said it was all about cutting costs, not about making sure people’s houses were repaired properly, and when it became clear that there was unlikely to be more work coming his way, he made the difficult decision to let his guys go. So no, Alice wasn’t working for Kevin. Kevin was barely working for Kevin. Apart from Fletchers, there wasn’t much work going on. Insurers weren’t offering insurance on building work because of the ongoing quakes, so for one reason or another, everything was stalled. Kevin had told Tyler it would be best to go back home, that if there was work for him there, it would be better for him to be there. Tyler, though, had decided that Christchurch was his big opportunity and couldn’t see past his dream to the reality of the stalled rebuild.
It was over a year since the first quake, and Alice thought about how different her life was. If it weren’t for the quakes, she would be nearing the end of the second year of her engineering degree and looking for a work experience placement. In the rebuild environment it would be interesting work. Or would she also experience the pressure to compromise that Kevin had experienced? She didn’t like the idea of that because it was clear from the Royal Commission that cutting corners in an engineering sense meant risking lives, and she didn’t want to be part of that.
Instead, here she was, in the city with her man-boy cousin watching a building being demolished. An enormous digger, nicknamed Twinkle Toes, was tearing away at a building some seven or eight stories high, dropping steel and concrete onto the site below. Tyler wondered what he would need to do to qualify to drive such a thing.
‘I thought you were a builder,’ Alice said. ‘This is anti-building.’
‘Yeah, but it’s cool,’ Tyler said. His hands were gripping the wire fencing, his eyes had a faraway glaze. She wondered if he was thinking of it as a video game. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, a video game about building demolition that you won by making the building collapse faster.
No, she told herself, this wasn’t a game. The rebuild was about people’s lives, which were on hold while the bureaucrats worked at getting the rebuild underway. The rebuild would take off in 2012, people were saying. But what if they were still staying the same thing about 2013? Or 2014 even? Alice hoped that wasn’t the case, she didn’t want to move away from her friends and family, well family anyway, most of her friends had already left. But she also didn’t want to spend years living in a broken city, finding things to keep herself amused. She wasn’t attention deficient the way Tyler was, but, she had to admit, the place was getting tedious. Something needed to change, progress needed to be made, and all she was seeing lately was demolition. She kept telling herself demolition was progress, the first step in getting the rebuild underway, but standing outside a building site watc
hing a giant digger tearing bites out of a sad, broken building didn’t feel like progress. It felt like an autopsy. The city was being taken apart and hauled away, buried in a landfill north of the city. The old Christchurch was dead, this demolition process was about watching it decay.
Alice dragged Tyler away from the demolition and in the direction of the container mall. She needed to see something that would give her hope and as they wandered through the mall, looping through the laneways, she felt that sense of hope. The thinking that had resulted in the container mall could be applied to the wider rebuild, and if that happened, the city would be exciting, full of life, more than it had ever been before the quakes.
‘Pretty lame,’ was all Tyler would say. She wanted to hit him, punch him in the arm, but resisted the urge. That would be immature, something fifteen-year-old Alice would do. But that Alice was gone. She had been carried away with the debris of the city she loved.
A Shaky End
December 2011
After the building collapses in the February earthquake, the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission was established to find out why buildings had collapsed, why people had been killed and injured. Public hearings started in November 2011. Until those hearings began, many in the city believed that it was the intensity of the shaking that had caused the building collapses, that such collapses were unavoidable given the ferocity of the February quake. Privately some may have considered that there were other factors, but it wasn’t until the public hearings were underway that it started to become apparent the degree to which failures in communication and failures to address known issues had set up the situations in which so many people could die.
Following the first quake in September 2010, the city had a placard system in place sorting buildings into three categories in a rapid assessment process. Red placards were for buildings that were too dangerous to occupy, yellow for buildings that should only be entered on essential business and green for buildings for which there was no restriction on occupancy. After significant aftershocks buildings would be assessed once again. Of course building owners were keen to keep a green placard so their tenants could go about their business without interruption, and those with yellow or red placards wanted to be certain that the assessment was correct so they could go about their business, if circumstances made that possible.
As became clear from the early public hearings, there was often confusion about roles and responsibilities, who could say a building was safe to occupy and the criteria for determining so. One building that was regarded as safe to occupy collapsed in the February quake, its façade falling onto the road and killing a man sitting in his vehicle. In another case, a building that collapsed killing eighteen people had structural flaws that had been known about for twenty years, and the building had been known to be quake-prone as long as five years before its collapse. The building had been sold in 2009, but its new owner didn’t know it was regarded as quake prone. His property manager did, but had never told the owner. Alice followed the news stories about these hearings and did a mental tally of how many people might have lived if people had been less passive about buildings known to be dangerous. If people knew of potentially dangerous situations, surely they would do something rather than assuming that someone else would be sorting the problem?
As far as Alice was concerned, the Royal Commission hearings were a depressing end to a surreal and stressful year. She thought she had dealt with the stress of the quakes pretty well, overall, but lately she had found herself crying at random things. Buildings disappearing she hadn’t previously thought she had an attachment to, art works appearing on random walls around the city, paradise duck babies in the river going through the city. Little things, little hints of normality and beauty making appearances among the rubble.
She was looking forward to getting out of the city, to being somewhere else where she could work through everything she had experienced in the past year. Lindsay was, strangely, keen to stay. They had swapped roles lately, Lindsay being the mum once again and taking care of Alice. Alice said she wanted to go to the West Coast with Andrew and Michelle for a couple of days before Christmas, they were staying with Andrew’s cousin Rebecca and her husband Dan at a house on a lake. It would the closest Michelle and the kids had been to Christchurch since February. It still wasn’t clear when they would be moving back.
Sean and Charlotte were going over to the lake as well, and Alice was looking forward to spending some time outdoors with her cousins. Alice had been reluctant to bring this up with Lindsay in case she felt slighted because Alice would be spending holiday time with Andrew’s side of the family, but Lindsay surprised her when she said she should go for longer, have a good break. No, Alice insisted, she would go over for two nights then come back in time for lunch on Christmas day.
‘We’ll go up Rapaki afterwards,’ Lindsay said. ‘Work off all that food.’ Before the February quake, the Rapaki Track to the Summit Road had been the family’s favourite trail up the hills, but since February, it had been closed because of rockfall. The track was opening up again the Friday before Christmas, the day Alice would be driving to the coast.
After coming back to Christchurch for a couple of days, she was going to spend a week in Timaru with Ben. She had told him she wanted to go to Sydney with him and they were going to make their plans.
As for the lake, the adults had gone over a couple of days earlier, and Alice was to pick up Sean and Charlotte and drive across to the coast. Although she got away from home at eleven, Sean and Charlotte hadn’t even started packing, and they would be away a lot longer than her. She had brought them lunch from the bakery in Woolston, thinking that they would all just scoff that and get going. Not a chance. Yes, they did scoff their lunches, but it would be a while before they got themselves sorted. Alice settled down in the kitchen, made herself a coffee and started to flick through news websites on her phone while waiting for the two of them to get their act together. Nothing to see, it was close to Christmas and so the media had given up its usual pretext of reporting on serious matters.
Soon Sean came through and asked her what she was looking at.
‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘What’s Charlotte doing? When will she be ready?’
Sean shrugged. ‘She’s on her phone.’
Alice texted Charlotte to hurry her up. Charlotte texted back a photo of her middle finger, then a selfie of her face twisted, her eyes crossed. ‘You know, we should just leave her behind,’ Alice said loudly to Sean. ‘There’s food here, she’ll be fine.’
Alice knew Charlotte better now than she had last year. In the last few months, she and Sean and Charlotte had spent more time together, and Alice no longer thought of Charlotte as the selfish brat from last summer. She wasn’t sure if Charlotte was no longer the same person she had been a year ago or if Alice simply knew her better. People had changed because of the quakes, Alice knew she had changed, maybe Charlotte had too. Alice asked Sean.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, after thinking for a moment. ‘She’s easier to live with, those few months after the September quake she was a pain in the arse, angry over everything. So annoying.’
‘Where was she during the quake?’ Alice said. It was either something people talked about right away when they first met up after the February quake or it came out gradually, when someone was ready to talk about it. Alice tended to be in the first category. But Charlotte didn’t talk about the quakes.
‘At South City with Nana,’ Sean said. ‘The only thing she’s ever said is that Nana screamed a lot.’
‘You didn’t hear from your mum for a while, did you?’
Sean nodded. ‘It wasn’t until that night, when she finally arrived home. She had left her phone in her office and couldn’t go back in, so she just had to walk home. Lottie was really upset.’
Charlotte walked into the kitchen and slapped a half-full backpack onto the benchtop. ‘You two ready?’
‘That’s all you’re taking?’ Sean said
.
‘Mum took most of my stuff,’ Charlotte said. She poured herself a glass of milk and started drinking, giving herself a milky moustache. Charlotte’s hair was a lot shorter than it had been. She had it all cut off without warning a few months ago, ended up sporting an edgy asymmetrical cut that framed her face and drew attention to her eyes, which were the same blue as Alice’s. The interest in the edgy cut had lasted only a couple of weeks, it needed to be straightened every day to keep control of the curls, and she quickly decided to grow it back out. Longer was easier, she said.
‘What’ve you been doing all this time?’ Sean said.
‘Filling up my iPod,’ Charlotte said. ‘Don’t wanna get bored.’
Alice rolled her eyes, Sean rolled his back, while Charlotte sipped slowly at the rest of the milk. ‘Let’s go,’ Alice said, ‘before it gets dark.’ She slung her handbag over her shoulder and walked purposely towards the front door. Sean followed.
‘You’re so serious now that you’re nearly twenty,’ Charlotte called after her.
‘Leaving without you,’ Alice called without turning back.
Charlotte flew out the front door ahead of Sean, who locked up behind them.
The day was warm and sunny, the sky blue and crisp. The roads were reasonably clear, despite being so close to Christmas, so they made good time to Springfield, where Charlotte started complaining about the lack of cellular coverage as the signal dropped away.
‘Who are you texting?’ Sean asked. ‘Why aren’t they doing stuff with their family instead of texting you?’
‘No one,’ Charlotte said. It was her friend Lucy, Alice guessed. Although Alice had never met Lucy, she knew a lot about her from the photos Charlotte posted of the two of them on Instagram, and would recognise her if she ran into her at the mall. Which was likely, Lucy seemed to spend a lot of time there. Alice was sure she hadn’t been like that at fourteen, mall and clothing-obsessed. Maybe if she had, she would have better fashion sense now. Or maybe she was beyond help, it was difficult to tell, she hadn’t yet developed those critical faculties.
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