Sean had talked to Alice about wanting to leave home. He was 21 and he wanted to go flatting for his last year at uni, but he didn’t want to leave Charlotte home alone, dealing with their parents by herself. Alice could relate, she should be flatting as well, but she didn’t want to leave her family, not if she could help around the house and so reduce some of the pressure her mother and Kevin were feeling. She felt sorry for Olivia and Jack, their happy, fun parents had been replaced by stressed, angry people who had trouble relaxing. Alice was the fun one now, who read to them at night and made them laugh.
Alice, Sean and Charlotte went into the city late in the afternoon, parking down by the hospital and walking along the river into the city. A month earlier they had debated whether or not take a red zone bus tour, but that seemed wrong, being shown around your own city, told a history that might not match your own experience, and seeing it from bus height rather than the eye level they were used to. They had decided to wait until the end of June and do the self-guided option.
Apart from the days after the container mall had opened, Alice had never seen so many people in the city since the big quake. People weren’t in a hurry, they were stopping to look, to figure out what had been where they were standing, thoughtful and quiet, some teary. The day was warm and dry for midwinter, no rain threatening, no chill wind to put people off. It was like the city had put on its best winter weather to welcome its citizens back in.
It was disconcerting knowing what street she was on but trying to convince her brain that was where she was. They stood on the corner of Hereford, Colombo and High Streets, looking up the tramlines and through to Cashel Mall, turning, trying to take it all in. A sculpture of a sheaf of wheat rose from the stone paving, starkly silver, towering above them. Alice couldn’t remember if it was there before the quakes. Of course it had been, why would they put something like that up now when there hadn’t yet been any memorials to the people who had died in the February quake? Maybe the sculpture hadn’t been noticeable because of the buildings. But now there were hardly any buildings, so the wheat sheaf stood out.
Near the wheat sheaf stood a shiny new sign, about as tall as Alice. It had photos of the building that used to stand on the corner of High and Hereford Streets and said that it had been built in Venetian Gothic Style. Sean was reading it, puzzled.
‘Why mark this one?’ he said. ‘But not all the others?’ He was turning again, still trying to get his bearings, figuring out where the building in the photo had stood. He read off one part of the sign. ‘“What architectural styles or features do you like on High?”’
‘Well this rubble grunge motif lends a kind of end-of-the-world ambiance,’ Charlotte said in a posh accent, crooking her arm like she was sucking smoke from an old-fashioned cigarette holder. ‘But I do wonder if the architect has considered the functional aspects of the design. The day-to-day uses, you know.’
‘The signs were for the Rugby World Cup,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t you remember? They started turning up all over the city at the end of 2010. There’s one down on Moorhouse pointing the way to the stadium.’
Sean nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’d forgotten all about that.’
‘I haven’t had KFC since the day of the quake,’ Charlotte said in a soft, faraway voice, the posh one gone. She was looking up Colombo Street to the spot where the red and white KFC shop used to stand. The site was clear, the whole shopping complex that once filled it gone, pounded into rubble and trucked out of the city. ‘I got out of school early and came into the city, had some KFC and then walked up to South City, met Nanny and then it hit.’ It was the first time she had mentioned what she had been doing the day of the quake to either Alice or Sean. They both glanced at each other over the top of Charlotte’s head. Had Charlotte lingered in the city just a few minutes longer, she would have been on Colombo Street, where a building collapsed onto a bus.
‘Which way?’ Sean said.
The old green-blue BNZ building that had been demolished to half-height pointed the way towards Cathedral Square, but Charlotte had already shot off up Hereford Street. Alice and Sean followed and stopped where she had stopped, peering in through the murky windows of a café. There were still cups and plates on the tables, dried food on them. The food cabinets held what could not really be described as food, not after more than two years.
‘That’s disgusting,’ Alice said. ‘It must stink in there, or do you think it’s beyond that?’
‘Let’s not find out,’ Charlotte said, quickly walking off back towards the Square. ‘There’s probably rats in there.’
In the Square, people were milling around fencing that kept them from getting too close to the gothic cathedral that marked the centre of the city. A few people held up cameras, but more just stared. There was steel bracing holding up the front of the old church, although it was difficult to tell if the bracing was actually doing anything, so much of the front of the building had fallen away. Inside, pigeons lined the wooden rafters.
‘Wow, what a mess,’ Charlotte said. ‘Pigeon central.’
‘Were there pigeons before the quakes?’ Sean said. Alice and Charlotte shot him a look that said he was stupid. ‘Well of course there were, but I don’t remember ever seeing any. Maybe it’s like the birds on the river and rats and stuff and the quakes have given them the opportunity to really take off.’
‘Probably,’ Alice said. ‘It’s pigeon paradise in here for a few years at least.’
‘Vermin always thrive in a disaster,’ Charlotte said. ‘Rats, pigeons, lawyers.’
‘Ooooooo,’ Alice said, ‘that’s harsh.’
‘But accurate,’ Charlotte said.
‘She’s right,’ Sean said. ‘Lawyers are going to be very busy in Christchurch for some time.’
‘You shouldn’t be so happy about it,’ Alice said, poking him in the ribs. He oofed and poked her back. ‘Or so proud about being classed with the vermin.’
They walked around the fencing to get a good look at the whole building, which looked better from the back and sides. The front, though, was a mess, crumbly stone and roof tiles breaking apart. In the days after the February quake, it was thought that people had died in the cathedral. There had often been tourists in there, walking up to the top of the spire, and people had wondered if they would have been able to get back down in time, once the shaking started. Luckily, though, no one had died there, although a woman working in the cathedral had been injured and needed to be helped out of the building.
The fate of the cathedral was unknown. The Anglican Church wanted to demolish the building and replace it with a modern church. But there were some in Christchurch who saw the cathedral as the heart of the city, symbolic of the city’s English origins and, therefore, worthy of restoration, regardless of the cost. The issue was in court, a heritage trust had been formed to stop the demolition. Like so many things in Christchurch, the issue of what would happen to the cathedral was going to take a long time to settle. A temporary cathedral was being built a couple of blocks away and would open in a few months. It was made of shipping containers with roof beams of lengths of cardboard tubing and was being called the ‘cardboard cathedral’.
Later, while drifting off to sleep, Alice was still trying to make sense of the city. She had become used to not going down certain streets, to running into fences blocking her way. Allowing extra time to get places and changing which way she would go at a moment’s notice had become normal. There had been a time in 2012 when she could drive across the city from east to west, but then she couldn’t drive back the same way. To go back east, she had to drive south and then out of the CBD to Moorhouse Avenue. Now it was all open and back to normal. No, not normal, because nothing was normal any more. It was a new normal, one that would, in a few months, be replaced by another one, and then another one.
Part III: Jaded City
Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
— Psalm 146:3, King James
Bible
Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it.
— Andrew Young
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Accreditation Lost
July 2013
The largest earthquake to occur in New Zealand since the 7.8 Napier earthquake was the 2009 Fiordland earthquake, also a 7.8 but not nearly as destructive to human settlements as the Napier quake had been nearly eighty years earlier. This was because of its location, near Dusky Sound in the remote southwest of the South Island where there are few towns and, therefore, few houses to damage and people to injure. Everyone forgets about this quake, because although it was felt throughout the South Island, its location meant there were no injuries and only minor damage.
The Opunake earthquake in July of 2012, though, is remembered by more people, coming as it did towards the end of the Canterbury earthquake sequence, when the nation’s awareness of just how damaging quakes could be was at its peak. This quake was off the western coast of the lower North Island and was felt throughout the country, especially in Wellington. This quake was a 6.5 but, again, because of where it was centred, there were no injuries and only minor damage.
In July 2013, there was another major quake, this time off the coast of Marlborough, in the Cook Strait. This 6.5 occurred at five o’clock on a Sunday evening and it was near enough to several population centres for people to notice it. There was damage, in both Marlborough and Wellington, and a few minor injuries. The region was haunted by aftershocks in the week following and its inhabitants came to feel they understood what Christchurch was going through. But that quake didn’t destroy Wellington, or even Seddon, the small Marlborough town nearest to the epicentre. Although Christchurch people appreciated the show of fellow feeling on the part of those further north, they still felt that people outside of Christchurch didn’t really understand what they were experiencing.
The fanfare that had followed the 100-day-plan in 2012 had not been met with much in the way of action. People were becoming suspicious of the promises of both local and national government, especially after the City Council lost its accreditation for issuing building consents. Yes, in the middle of the biggest building project the country had ever seen, the local government entity responsible for issuing the majority of the required building consents lost its ability to do so.
The messy way in which the loss of accreditation unfolded did nothing to boost the confidence of the ratepayers and other residents of Christchurch. The qualifying authority had informed the council at the end of May that it had a month to remedy the situation and keep its accreditation. The council’s chief executive chose not to tell the mayor or the city councillors. It seemed he hoped to fix the problem before anyone higher up the food chain found out. When the Minister for Earthquake Recovery found out, he called a press conference to announce this dire state of affairs, which was embarrassing to the mayor and the councillors. The end result was that the Government appointed a crown manager to achieve what the chief executive had not been able to: put the consents department in order. The chief executive resigned and the mayor announced he would not run for re-election later in 2013. This political earthquake took place in the last weeks of June and the first week of July and it was three weeks into the month when the Seddon quake reminded the country that Christchurch was not alone in being vulnerable to seismic activity.
Alice watched all this unfold and began to think seriously about whether she wanted to stay in Christchurch, or New Zealand for that matter. It wasn’t the risk of earthquakes that bothered her, she had become used to them, she knew how to protect herself to give her the best chance of surviving a quake, and she also knew what she would do to keep her own house safe, when one day she had one. What made her want to leave was the bureaucracy and behaviour of those who were supposed to be running the rebuild. She had seen six-year-old Jack behave more maturely over disclosing to his parents something he had done wrong than the City Council’s chief executive had behaved over the building consent issue. That he wasn’t sacked on the spot astounded Alice. Lindsay and Kevin worked hard to teach Olivia and Jack to take responsibility for their actions, but there seemed to be none of that accountability for decisions at local government or even national government levels. Why do your best to make good decisions if there are no consequences for the results of the bad ones?
But leaving the city wasn’t an option for the short-term. Before she could even consider moving somewhere else, she had to get herself some qualifications, though what in she did not yet know. She was frustrated with herself. She was still in the claims officer role and she had been asked if she wanted to move up, into roles with more responsibility. But she was increasingly uneasy about whether the system she was part of was actually helping people. It seemed to create more problems than it solved, dragging out claims instead of moving them closer to settlement.
One thing they were taught at work was that your average person didn’t understand their insurance policy. And that was true, most people didn’t read their policies and didn’t understand how insurance really worked. Although Alice had been working in the insurance industry for a year now, she was still getting her head around it all. One thing that bothered her was that almost everyone in the city had full-replacement-as-when-new policies. That meant their house was supposed to be put back to the state it was in when it was new. But so many of the repairs that were being proposed seemed to be patch-up jobs that barely put properties back to their pre-earthquake state. Alice could understand patching broken foundations if the policy imposed a limit on how much could be spent on repairs, but these policies didn’t.
Alice knew she didn’t want to keep doing that job, but she was holding on until the end of the year. She was thinking about going back to university and continuing with her engineering degree.
The other issue that was wearing Alice down and making her think about what direction she was going in was the situation her grandparents were in with their red zoned land. Although they had been red zoned nearly a year before, Neil and Heather still hadn’t had an offer, not even a fifty percent one. A group calling itself the Quake Outcasts was taking the Government to court, asking for a judicial review into whether or not the red zoning and the buy-out offers were legal. People she worked with talked about the Quake Outcasts like they were losers who had forgotten to insure their properties, said they should just take what they were offered and move on. But Alice knew, from her grandparents’ position, that just accepting the offer and moving on felt like being cheated, having something stolen from you. If the court case didn’t go favourably for the Quake Outcasts, Alice thought, it meant that there was something seriously wrong with how the law was applied in New Zealand. She wondered, on and off, whether she should consider a law degree, then one day she could help people like her grandparents, making sure they got a fair deal. But that involved being part of the industry, insurance and law, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to immerse herself in all that more than she already was.
Alice had talked to Gerald about her doubts about the industry, about being part of it, and he had asked if she wanted to move on. She did, she said, but she didn’t know what to do. It was good to be able to talk to Gerald about it, he didn’t try to push her in any particular direction, as Lindsay tended to. But sometimes she felt some guidance would be welcome, from Gerald anyway.
‘Let’s look at what you’re good at,’ Gerald said when she suggested this to him.
She thought about that for a moment. ‘I can type, answer phones, keep files in order, arrange meetings and site visits.’
‘You’re good with people,’ Gerald said. ‘Good at communicating. So something where you’re figuring out what people need. I could use someone like that.’
‘Doing what exactly?’ Alice gave him a weary look, he was simply humouring her, his hopelessly flaky granddaughter who couldn’t find herself a real job, a real career.
‘I’m serious, Alice,’ he said. ‘Not all people are. Don’t underestimate yourself, you deal with people well, and that’s definitely something you should factor into whatever you choose to do. Now when I hire people,’ he went on, ‘I look at their qualifications, but that’s not the main thing. I want to know how good they are at solving problems, because that’s what most jobs are about: investigating problems and coming up with solutions. So think long and hard about what problems you want to solve and that’s where you will find your career.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Alice said. At primary school and high school, people always asked what you were going to be when you grew up: a fireman, a doctor, a policeman, an engineer. What you liked to do didn’t really seem to come into it.
‘You don’t have to figure it out today,’ Gerald said. ‘Just try thinking about it in a different way.’
‘One thing I don’t want to do is choose something just because it’s convenient.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well I’m doing this insurance stuff now, because that was the opportunity I had from working for the PMO. But staying with SR would be like marrying a man standing next to you in the queue at the coffee shop because you decide you want to get married,’ Alice said. She wasn’t making sense, she knew. There were opportunities around her, but she didn’t want to wake up in twenty or thirty years and find she was doing it just because it had been convenient.
Bleak City Page 29