‘Well this No One will be okay with there being no signal,’ Alice said. She sounded like her mother.
Charlotte huffed and from the driver’s seat Alice could see her turn her head to stare out the window at the passing countryside. There was a smile on her face, clearly she was messing with them.
They were starting up the road towards Porters Pass. She was looking forward to the top of the pass, when the road swept down between the tussock-clad hillsides, it was like driving into a new world, the golden tussock low against the grey shingle of the eroding mountains. It was her favourite part of the road, a world away from the rubble and rough roads of Christchurch. Charlotte commented on the beauty of the pass, echoing Alice’s thoughts.
The tussock-clad mountains started to give way to the rocky outcrops of Castle Hill. ‘Can we stop?’ Charlotte asked as they came up to the turn off to the Castle Hill walkway. ‘I need to pee.’
‘You know there’s no coverage there?’ Sean said.
‘Don’t stop then,’ Charlotte said.
Sean rolled his eyes at Alice.
‘I need to pee,’ Alice said. ‘And I’m sick of sitting.’
In spite of the sunny day and it being December, it was cold outside. It was high up in the mountains, after all, but it was still a surprise after all the sun burning through the car’s windows. Charlotte quickly got back into the car and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the window.
‘Aren’t you going to pee?’ Sean said, tapping on the window. Charlotte scowled, but didn’t reply.
After going to the loo, Alice walked up to where Sean was reading an information board that marked the start of the track. The track went up to a bunch of rocky limestone outcrops. Alice had been up the track years ago, as part of a school trip. She didn’t feel inclined to go for a walk at the moment, all she wanted was to get somewhere where she could have a swim. But she asked Sean anyway.
‘Wanna go up?’
‘Nah.’ He shrugged. ‘It would just annoy her, us taking so long. And then we still have over an hour in the car with her.’
They walked back to the car and got in.
‘About time,’ Charlotte said.
Alice and Sean said nothing. Sean connected his phone back up to the stereo and cranked up the volume. Charlotte may have been saying something about his choice of music, but it was simply too loud to hear.
Soon they were crossing the Waimak, then the road entered the southern beech forest that marked the point that had always said to Alice that it wasn’t long until they reached Arthur’s Pass. She turned down the music to ask if they needed to stop. Sean said yes, he was hungry.
‘You had a pie two hours ago,’ Alice said.
‘It was a small pie,’ he said.
‘Charlotte?’ Alice said, glancing back. Charlotte’s phone had beeped a bit and she had her head down reading.
‘There’s been another quake,’ she said, looking up. ‘Can we stop?’
Alice pulled into the carpark at the railway station, a pit of dread in the bottom of her stomach. Again? A 5.9, Charlotte said, just over an hour ago. That would’ve been around the time they were coming down Porters Pass. Alice powered up her phone. She had a message from her mother saying they were all fine, her grandparents were fine. Alice tried calling home, but there was no answer. There was no answer at Neil and Heather’s. Next she tried Marjorie, who reassured her it had been nothing really, she had lost a glass that had fallen off the kitchen bench. That was no surprise, all the old lady’s knick knacks were still blu-tacked to their shelves, cupboards bungee-corded shut.
Sean and Charlotte were both talking on the phone, Alice couldn’t tell with who. Sean finished his call, his mate Joe had been at Riccarton Mall where everyone had panicked and poured out onto the streets. People were tired, Joe had told him, people just looked like they’d had enough.
Charlotte was making another phone call. ‘Nanny,’ she said to Sean and Alice, while she waited for the call to connect. ‘Are you okay?’ she said when the call connected.
Alice and Sean could hear the muted buzz of Suzanne’s voice on the other end. Sean gestured at her to put it on speaker, which she did. She was at the office, she said, closing up for the end of the year. She was working for Gerald, helping him out while Sylvia was still in Sydney.
‘It wasn’t too bad,’ she said, but her voice was high enough in pitch that they could tell she had been scared. ‘I’m just going to tidy up then go home and see what the damage is.’
They were just saying their goodbyes when they heard it, even over the phone, a rumble, and then Suzanne was screaming and they could hear sounds of furniture and equipment shaking.
‘Get down, get down, get down,’ they were yelling, and then the rumbling faded into the distance and Suzanne stopped screaming. They could hear her rapid breathing. They felt the earth swell under the car as the wave passed across the island. That would be a six. Once again, Christchurch had a five followed soon after by a six. It wasn’t fair.
‘I’m all right,’ Suzanne said. ‘A couple of things have fallen over, but it’s not too bad.’
‘Are you sure?’ Sean said. ‘Do you want us to come back?’
‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘You keep going, and enjoy yourselves.’
After a few rounds of reassurances, they disconnected the call.
‘Do you think we should keep going?’ Charlotte said.
‘She says she’s okay,’ Sean said. ‘She’d feel pretty stink if we went back.’
Charlotte nodded, but clearly wasn’t happy about the idea of not going back. In fact, she looked like she was going to cry. ‘Can we get something to drink?’ she said, sniffing. ‘Just stay here for a few minutes in case we hear back from anyone.’
‘Okay,’ Alice said, and started up the car. Just up the road they stopped at the general store where Alice and Charlotte ordered coffees, while Sean bought a pie, chips and a Coke. They rolled their eyes at him.
‘Don’t go flatting,’ Alice said. ‘Paying for your own food you’ll never be able to afford your fees next year.’
There were a few more messages from people about the city, Alice ended up copying the same message and sending it in reply. Everyone they heard back from was fine, there didn’t seem to be much damage, and by the time they finished their drinks, Charlotte seemed to feel better about continuing on.
An hour later, they arrived at the lake, where the four parents were sitting on the deck outside the holiday home, the women sipping from glasses of wine and the men from bottles of beer. Andrew stood up, waved her around the corner and started to walk off the deck in the direction of somewhere behind the house. Alice followed his directions and pulled her car up alongside the house, behind Andrew’s and rolled down the window. He leaned in, the bottom of his half-empty bottle tinking on the car door, the smell of the beer coming off his breath and into the car.
‘No quake talk,’ he said. ‘Shell and Rebecca are really upset. Rebecca wants to go check on home, but she also doesn’t want to go back.’
‘Okay,’ all in the car said.
‘We don’t even say where we were?’ Alice said.
‘Nothing. We’ve agreed not to talk about it, it won’t do anyone any good. The kids don’t know, they were all running around so didn’t notice it, and we’re not telling them.’
They got out of the car and walked up the deck, said their hellos to everyone, air kisses exchanged with Michelle and Rebecca, glasses of wine (Alice), beer (Sean) and Coke (Charlotte) pressed into their hands.
‘Swap ya,’ Charlotte said to Alice only to be growled at by her father.
The younger children could be heard from behind the house, doing who knew what. Alice decided to finish the wine before she ventured out to see what was going on.
‘When’s dinner?’ Sean said.
‘He had a pie an hour ago,’ Alice said. ‘And another before we left. And chips.’
There was no talk of the day’s quakes, whic
h was easy before the children went to bed, but it led to some odd silences afterwards. It seemed no one in Christchurch knew what to talk about apart from the quakes any more, except for insurance, and that was also quickly ruled an off-limits topic. Sean broke out a Monopoly Deal deck, but couldn’t persuade the adults to play, so it was just he, Alice and Charlotte, trying to be quiet so the children didn’t get woken up.
Alice was worn out when she went to bed, in a room she was sharing with Charlotte and Mattie. Poor Sean was sharing with Alice’s brothers and although that was peaceful enough once the boys had fallen asleep, it sentenced Sean to an early morning. Every morning.
Alice woke early the next morning and noticed Charlotte was already gone. Alice managed to dress without waking Mattie and sneaked out of the house for a run along the road. It was cool outside and the sky was still pink from the rising sun. The sky was cloudless, promising a sunny, warm day. Alice walked, then picked up her pace to a jog, continuing up the road, listening to the bellbirds calling from the bush lining each side of the road. It was so peaceful, the only noises natural ones, no dust in the air, no heavy traffic, no listening for the sound of a quake approaching from the distance.
She ran along the road to the next bay and walked down to feel the temperature of the water. It was cold, but not icy, it would be great for swimming as the day heated up. She thought about staying down at this little beach for a while, but she wanted to get back and help out with breakfast. She started back, running once again. As she came near the turnoff to the house, she saw Charlotte coming off the track that went up to a waterfall. She was wearing the clothes she had been wearing yesterday, black jeans and a t-shirt. Alice picked up her pace to catch up with her. Charlotte turned as she heard Alice running up behind her, and Alice saw that her face was red, she was sweating heavily.
‘Did you run up there?’ Alice said, impressed.
Charlotte nodded. ‘And back down.’
‘How far is it?’
‘About ten minutes, maybe.’
‘Wanna race?’
‘Not now,’ Charlotte said. ‘Need to eat.’ She took off towards the house, racing away from Alice. ‘But I’ll race you back to the house!’ she called back.
Alice did her best to catch up, but she had already pushed herself and when she slowed down and began to walk, she found herself shaking, but whether it was because of the exertion or the year she had been through she couldn’t be sure.
Part II: Broken City
There is a temple in ruin stands,
Fashion’d by long-forgotten hands:
Two or three columns, and many a stone,
Marble and granite, with grass o’ergrown!
— Lord Byron, Siege of Corinth
Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.
—Honore de Balzac
The Break Up
January 2012
Alice was stopped at the traffic lights at Eastgate, waiting to right turn into Linwood Avenue. In the car in front of her, a couple was smoking, exchanging a single cigarette. The man was in the driver’s seat, would take a puff and hand it to the woman, who took her own puff and handed it back. Back and forth, back and forth, there was a rhythm and unity to the motion that spoke of familiarity. The green arrow came on and the woman held on to the cigarette as they right-turned. Alice followed their car around the corner, then into the turnoff to the mall.
She and Ben had argued the night before, well as much as you can argue in a series of text messages. But it was just a rehashing of the arguments they’d had in person during her last couple of days in Timaru. Now, after last night’s argument, instead of staying with her and her family for a few days before leaving for Sydney, he was going to come up to Christchurch and fly out the same day.
The mall’s two-storey carpark had been demolished soon after the quake and the space behind the mall was open to the wide blue sky. It was a huge improvement on the dull, crowded understorey of the carpark with its too-tight parking spaces and narrow aisles that she’d found tricky to back out of if there was a long vehicle opposite her. Of course that was a couple of years ago, when she was a relatively new driver, but the old carpark was gone now so she wouldn’t have the chance to test her skills, to see if she had improved. She told herself she was being silly, you couldn’t grieve for an opportunity missed to test your carparking skills, that was being over-the-top as far as the whole missing-old-Christchurch thing went. But she did miss driving up onto the top storey and looking out over the trees of Linwood towards the hills and the estuary. Today the sight would be amazing, the sky clear and blue, stretching out into the Pacific Ocean, not a cloud in sight.
The couple who had been in front of her at the lights were walking across the carpark to the mall, swapping back and forth what must now be the tiny end of the cigarette. Alice hated cigarette smoke, the smell of it made her think of closed, stale rooms and stained walls. Her grandfather Neil’s mother had been a lifelong smoker and after she died, Lindsay had bought her house. That was when Alice was seven and when she and Lindsay moved in, they had cleaned it from top to bottom. The wallpaper in the lounge they had thought was a golden brown had turned out to be something else, only discovered when Lindsay tried to scrub a mark away. They scrubbed the whole wall and then the whole room back to its original colour, which was a nearly-white that they much preferred to the golden brown. The room seemed brighter for their effort, the house more theirs. Lindsay then hired a carpet cleaning machine, which sucked up murky water and, the second time around, less murky water. That would have to do, Lindsay decided at that point, there was only so much you could get out of old carpet. She would save for renovations, take up the carpets and polish the floors if they turned out to be native timbers, the house was the right age for it. They painted the walls, but they never got around to doing the floors.
It wasn’t a great house, but it was what Lindsay could afford at the time. They had been living with Neil and Heather for nearly two years, Lindsay saving up money working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office while Heather looked after Alice outside school hours. Alice had loved living with her grandparents, but, looking back, she could see how hard it had been for the adults. There were times now when Alice thought Lindsay was being too hard on Olivia and Jack, and she had to stop herself from criticising Lindsay’s parenting of them. She wasn’t the mother, she had to keep her views to herself. Instead, she made a point of giving Olivia and Jack a cuddle when they needed one, of being a good big sister, not another mother.
When Lindsay and Kevin decided to live together, it was his house that Lindsay and Alice moved into. Alice resented that, leaving the old one, it had been hers and Lindsay’s project and at the time it felt like Lindsay was abandoning their project for something more interesting. In the old house, Alice had her bedroom exactly the way she wanted it, Lindsay had let her pick the wall colour, a pale purple that matched the pink and purple flowers of her duvet cover. She was ten when they left that house, and it felt like a death, like she was leaving her happy childhood behind.
In Kevin’s house it was different, all of Lindsay’s and Alice’s furniture had to fit in with Kevin’s tastes, which meant that Alice’s opinions took a back seat. She felt left out, alone, and it had taken a long time for her to stop feeling that way around Kevin.
She felt that way now, alone and irrelevant, watching the smoking couple walking into the mall. Her destination was the supermarket whereas theirs was the main doors to the mall, so she veered off, making a point of looking away from their cosy familiarity.
During her time in Timaru after Christmas, she and Ben had talked about going to Sydney. After the December quake, she had been dead keen to leave. As the days passed, though, her certainty had faded and she had started to think about the things she would miss. Ben wanted to go right away, by the end of January, but she wanted to give notice at her job and say goodbye to people, not just rush away as though she was abandoning them to w
hatever the faults in the city were going to do.
Christchurch was a place full of fear and anxiety in the weeks after the December quakes. There were aftershocks, which was expected after a magnitude six quake, but after the deaths in February and over a year of regular earthquakes, the population was worn out and on edge. Then at the start of the year there had been a rumour going around that scientists knew there was a big quake coming, another one off the coast, further east than the ones just before Christmas. The rumours said this quake would generate a tsunami that some people feared would wipe out northern Christchurch and the satellite towns north of the city, where many of the city’s residents had moved to get away from the quakes. To some, it seemed like the quakes were pursuing them, getting closer, and that there was nowhere they could go to escape them. In some ways that was true, there were few places in New Zealand that weren’t quake prone, but fear and statistical risk were not things that mixed well together. That was what the scientists were meeting about, analysing the statistical risk and revising the aftershock forecast for Christchurch, they didn’t have any secret knowledge of a coming apocalypse.
Although Lindsay didn’t buy into the fear (so she said), she was worn out, and after coming home from Timaru, Alice started to feel like she couldn’t leave, not yet. Maybe at the end of summer or in the autumn, she said to Ben. He couldn’t wait that long, he said, there was nothing for him in Christchurch, no job prospects as long as the city centre was in lockdown, as long as there were still quakes and uncertainty about the future of business in the city. It was a conversation they had been having for months, and every time he said there was nothing for him in Christchurch, she resented it, because she was here, and he said he loved her, but it seemed he didn’t rate her highly enough to keep giving Christchurch a go. He didn’t understand why she wanted to stay here, to keep working in a café making coffees, he thought her mother would be fine without her. Alice couldn’t let go, he said, she was too comfortable living at home, being a child.
Bleak City Page 17