‘I don’t want to buy anything built before the quakes,’ Heather said. ‘If we can swing it.’
She could see Neil nodding out of the corner of her eye as they walked along. ‘I agree. Far too risky. Maybe something further out in one of the newer areas, like Rolleston or Lincoln,’ he said, glancing sidelong at Heather to gauge her reaction.
‘It’s far from family,’ she said. Where they were now was so handy, less than five minutes from Lindsay and Kevin and only ten from her mother and from Jason and his family. But travelling further to visit family would be a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing that they had bought a structurally sound property.
‘It’s close enough to Jase and Carla,’ Neil said. ‘And maybe we should see about having your mum with us. That place is too big for her.’
‘You’ve thought this all through, haven’t you?’ Heather said, surprised.
‘I have,’ Neil said. ‘I really think it would be good for us to have a fresh start somewhere else. Not too far away, because we need to be near the kids, but far enough to give us room to recover.’
‘I love the idea,’ Heather said. She hooked her arm through Neil’s and kissed him on the cheek. ‘And I love you.’
Sticks and Stones
December 2015
It was nearly the end of the year and looking back Lindsay didn’t feel like they were any further ahead than they had been twelve months ago. Although their insurance company had assigned them a new project manager, they hadn’t acknowledged the previous one’s incompetence and seemed determined to stick with the same repair strategy, of just patching the foundations. Lindsay had been angry at how the insurance company had phrased the news of their new project manager, ‘In the interests of moving this claim forward, we have assigned it to a new project manager.’ Who knew what the new guy would be like?
Lindsay had stopped thinking about where else they might choose to live or about doing something new and different with their lives. Even her decades-old habit of doing something different in the house to cure her restlessness was constrained by the fact that she was restricted to moving furniture. There could be no renovations, there was no point in painting the lounge or the bedroom or looking at options for making changes in the kitchen. No point in doing anything.
Lindsay wanted to talk about leaving Christchurch, but Kevin said there wasn’t any point to discussing it until they knew how badly off they would end up financially. Lindsay didn’t want Olivia and Jack growing up in a half-finished city, where repaired houses needing to be re-repaired was considered normal. Going into the city was a lesson in contrasts, all the busy construction work going on in private developments south of the Square versus empty sections where nothing was happening north of the Square.
There was too much arguing going on between the people who were meant to be running the rebuild of the city. In the last week, Gerry Brownlee had called Treasury ‘dopey’ over a report Treasury published that said most of the Government’s anchor projects were in trouble. Lindsay couldn’t understand why a Government minister, someone trusted with authority, didn’t seem able to take responsibility for issues. He could, however, be consistently relied on to call any critic a name.
Between their own insurance problems, what was going on with the houses around them and the governmental squabbling, Lindsay was sick of the whole place, and she didn’t want her children growing up in a poorly-functioning city whose so-called leaders showed less maturity than your average new entrant.
School holidays were coming up and the kids only had two weeks left of school. Lindsay and Kevin wanted to do something holiday-like with them over the summer, not just have Alice look after them while Kevin worked and Lindsay did insurance paperwork. No, that was going to be shelved for at least three weeks, they were going to ignore their email so they could have an actual break. They had decided on camping near Arthur’s Pass and were going to head up on Boxing Day, after the madness of Christmas was over.
That was the plan, anyway. All Lindsay had to get through was the next two weeks, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to accomplish that because it was only Saturday morning and already Olivia and Jack had been arguing most of the morning. Lindsay hadn’t even been able to finish making pancakes yet, so getting through the next two weeks without having some sort of explosion was seeming less and less likely. Maybe Kevin and Lindsay should go camping in separate places, one child each, that might be the only way she would get any peace and quiet, any real escape from the pressures of living in the city.
Lindsay could hear them in the lounge, back and forth, trading names. She stepped away from the bowl she was mixing pancakes in and brushed a loose strand of hair away from her eyes. She walked around the corner into the lounge where Olivia was sitting on the sofa with a book held to her chest. Jack was leaning against the edge of the sofa trying to see into Olivia’s book, but she was holding him at arm’s length.
‘You’re so stupid, Jack,’ Olivia said. ‘You’re a poopyhead.’
‘Olivia,’ Lindsay said. ‘Don’t talk to your brother like that.’
Olivia dropped her arm and Jack stepped away from her.
‘But he keeps bugging me with his stupid questions,’ Olivia said. ‘Make him leave me alone.’
‘I get that,’ Lindsay said, ‘and I’ll deal with that in a moment, but you shouldn’t be calling your brother names.’
‘Yeah, it’s not nice,’ Jack said.
‘Jack,’ Lindsay said. He had been about to say something else but shut his mouth tight. ‘Have you made your bed?’ She knew he wouldn’t have made his bed yet. He shook his head and scampered off to his bedroom. Lindsay turned her attention back to Olivia.
‘It’s not like I hit him,’ Olivia said.
‘No, I know you didn’t hit him,’ Lindsay said. ‘But it’s not nice to call people names.’
‘But he’s being stupid,’ Olivia insisted. She crossed her arms over her chest and turned away from Lindsay.
‘Look at me,’ Lindsay said. She reached out and touched Olivia’s shoulder. Olivia shrugged her away. She kept her voice firm. ‘Olivia, I want you to listen to me. When you call your brother bad names, you’re not telling people anything about Jack, you’re telling people something about you.’
Olivia turned to look at her, a puzzled look on her face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Let’s say I’m mad at your dad and I call him a poopyhead,’ Lindsay said. Olivia giggled. ‘Does that mean he’s a poopyhead or does that mean I’m in a bad mood?’
‘It means you’re in a bad mood,’ Olivia said.
‘Is it right for me to call him a name because I’m in a bad mood?’
‘No...’
‘Would it be fair to say it’s kind of mean of me to take my bad mood out on him?’
Olivia thought about that, scrunching up her face and about to speak, then changing her mind. Finally she nodded.
‘So me calling your dad a bad name just says I’m being mean, doesn’t it?’
‘I guess so. But what if you’re mad at him because he’s being annoying?’
‘I would ask him nicely to stop being annoying,’ Lindsay said, rifling through her recent memories to make sure she was dealing with annoyances in that way. Olivia had a sharp memory and would bring up any instances of hypocrisy, and Lindsay and Kevin had been arguing over insurance issues too often.
‘What if he didn’t stop?’
‘I would go to a different room and do something else,’ Lindsay said. This wasn’t working, Olivia was just going to come up with a series of actions that would skip right over the point Lindsay was trying to make. ‘But that’s not the point. The things we say about people, the way we talk about things, say more about us than they do about the people and things we’re talking about. So I want you to practise, in the next few days, talking about things in a nice way. Can you do that for me?’
Olivia nodded. ‘Even Jack?’
‘Especially Jack,’ Lin
dsay said. ‘If he’s annoying you, how about asking what he would like to do, and maybe you’ll want to do it too. Don’t just tell him to go away, think of something you’d like to do with him.’
‘But I just want to read my book and he keeps asking what I’m reading,’ Olivia said. She was getting agitated again, a whine creeping into her voice.
‘He wants to know what you’re reading so read it out to him,’ Lindsay said. ‘Would it hurt you to do that?’
‘No?’ Olivia said.
‘So go back to reading your book and when Jack comes back in here in a few minutes, how about reading out loud so he can listen to the story?’
Olivia nodded and sat back down on the sofa. Lindsay went back into the kitchen and started heating up the pan for the pancakes. When the butter had melted and she was pouring the first pancake, she could hear Olivia reading her book to Jack. Maybe there could be a peaceful end to the year after all.
The Special Settlement
January 2016
The place was rotting. The air was full of the smell of damp and decay, vines and ferns climbing over bushes and trees, up towards the sun, out along any surface that supported growth. Everywhere Alice looked, things were growing up, over and around other things, vines strangling trees, smaller trees embracing larger trees, foliage everywhere celebrating the abundant water.
Alice was on Stewart Island with Charlotte. The others who were meant to go on the tramp had bailed out at the last minute, but Alice and Charlotte decided to go anyway, both had been looking forward to getting out of Christchurch, to getting into clean air and experiencing something different from the dry, dusty summer that was eventuating in the city on the edge of the Canterbury Plains.
Alice and Charlotte had come over on the ferry from Bluff the previous day and spent the night at a backpackers. After Stewart Island, they would go home the long way, via Queenstown, the Haast Pass and the lake where Charlotte’s parents were staying with their friends. Andrew and Michelle wouldn’t be there this year, they weren’t on speaking terms with Charlotte’s parents, which was part of the reason why the tramping plans had fallen apart, leaving only Alice and Charlotte.
Since Marjorie’s death, arguments over her estate had split the family into factions. Gerald and Sylvia were in the process of moving into Marjorie’s house and deciding what to do with their own. Marjorie’s younger daughters objected to Gerald having the house, both had expected it to be part of the larger estate, sold off, with the proceeds split among Marjorie’s four children. Suzanne neither objected nor agreed, she was too overwhelmed by the loss of her mother, which seemed odd to Alice as there had never been any signs of a warm relationship between them. The whole family was too complicated for Alice, she was just happy Charlotte and Sean were still talking to her, given that their mother was firmly in the sell-the-house faction, and so not speaking to Andrew.
Although doing his best not to take sides in the family argument, Sean wasn’t able to get time off work for the tramp. The other disappointment had been Alice’s friend Emma and her boyfriend Dave. Emma had been living in Melbourne since June 2011, but now she and Dave had moved back to Christchurch. They were staying around the corner from Alice with Emma’s parents in their rebuilt house, and Alice liked having her old school friend nearby once again. But then Emma announced she was pregnant and was suffering from morning sickness bad enough to make Alice think twice about ever having children. Going on the ferry across Foveaux Strait, much less on the tramp, was not an option. Alice had suggested they fly across, but Emma said she wasn’t keeping much food down at all, so would be unlikely to have enough energy for a three-day tramp. Alice tried to be happy about Emma’s pregnancy, but it was too strange, such a grown-up thing to be doing, and she had been surprised when Emma said it was planned. She almost asked why they hadn’t waited until after Stewart Island, but she knew that was a childish thing to ask, something thought by someone who really hadn’t moved on to the adult stage of their life.
Alice had felt desperate to be away from Christchurch and home. The week before Christmas came the news that the City Council had finally reached a settlement with their insurers. Instead of the full value of the claims on various buildings and infrastructure, the council was getting sixty-eight cents on the dollar. ‘That’s with a team of lawyers,’ Kevin said, ‘and millions to fight them with. I don’t see what chance we stand of getting even a fraction of what it will take to fix this place.’
Lindsay and Kevin had then agreed to put discussions about insurance on hold for the holidays, until mid-January when Kevin would go back to work. But the tension hung in the air, as though something was rotting under the floorboards. If Charlotte had decided not to go on the tramp, Alice would have gone by herself, just to get away.
The start of the track was marked by a sculpture of giant chain links. One brown link formed an arch that walkers passed under. Alice was familiar with the legend of Maui, how the South Island was the canoe Maui fished from, bringing up the fish of the North Island. But she wasn’t aware of the role Stewart Island played, that it served as the anchor stone for Maui’s canoe. The chain sculpture at the start of the Rakiura Track was matched, so the sign said, by another chain sculpture in Bluff, where the anchor stone connected to the canoe. They were all connected, everyone in the North Island, the South Island and Stewart Island, they were all people with stories, lows and highs, people dependent on one another, even if they felt strong and self-sufficient or weak and isolated.
That first part of the track was straightforward: a gentle walk along the coast, then a downhill bit to a late lunch on a golden beach that stretched away to the north. Later, the track branched off the main track, to the hut they would stay at for the night. There was a steep downhill section near the hut, and Alice wondered how they would go the next morning, having to do this climb out of the bay back to the main track, where they faced a series of steady upward climbs for at least half of the day.
There were already half a dozen other trampers at the hut when they arrived, but it slept twenty-four, so they had plenty of choice in bunks. Charlotte set up her burner to boil water for hot drinks, while Alice set up their beds. Soon they were sipping coffee while admiring the surroundings and chatting to the other trampers.
An American couple in their fifties was interested to hear they were from Christchurch, they asked about how the rebuild had gone. Past tense. Alice was going to make the point that the rebuild was still only partway done, but Charlotte got there first, telling them about how her parents were fighting to get EQC to acknowledge all the damage to the house and pass them on to their private insurer. Their insurer didn’t want to know about the house until the EQC had passed them on, so they had engaged an independent engineer, but EQC didn’t want to acknowledge the damage detailed in that report. Charlotte’s parents had hired a lawyer to argue their case and drive home the specific points in their engineering report in order to get them overcap.
‘So the process hasn’t really started for your family?’ the man said, amazed.
‘No, not yet, because once they go overcap, they still have to go through the whole assessment and scoping process with their insurer,’ Charlotte said. ‘There’s no way of knowing if the insurer will take on board what they have in their engineer’s report.’
‘But if that report puts them over the top,’ the man said, ‘then the insurance company should accept it.’
‘Maybe, but not always,’ Charlotte said.
‘How long’s it been?’ the man asked.
‘Five years since the first quake,’ Charlotte said. ‘Five years this coming February since the seriously damaging one.’
The man shook his head and his wife clucked sympathetically. ‘Insurance companies,’ she muttered, shaking her head in unison with her husband.
More trampers filtered in, shaking off their boots and leaving them outside to dry off before picking a bunk and moving through to the common room, which was heated by a woodfire. Befo
re long, jugs and pots of water were boiling on top of the woodfire and on camp burners of different types. Alice and Charlotte had packets of freeze-dried food to rehydrate and soon they were filling their bellies with curried lamb that had a slight sponge-like texture.
A poster in the hut told the story of a special settlement at Port William, an attempt by the provincial government of the 1860s and 1870s to make back some of the money it had spent on the purchase of Stewart Island. They attempted to draw Scottish settlers and Alice could see that the climate of Stewart Island might roughly equal that described by the Scottish people she had known. The idea had been to start settlement at Port William, the site of the hut she was currently standing in. Settlement would spread towards Patterson Inlet, a thousand families seeking to make a better future for themselves in this place, which would be called Rakiura Town. But it never happened. The provincial government could only attract five families of Shetland Islanders, who arrived in 1873 and ended up rattling around in barracks intended for 150 people. The promises made about opportunities to make a living and the development of the island had been empty promises, and the damp of the place led to despair among the settlers, who had all left the island by the end of 1874. The poster said the government of the day blamed the failure of the settlement on the immigrants, who were said to be too lazy. But had prospects for life on the island been misrepresented? It seemed unbearably sad, to cross the world in search of a better life only to find yourself lied to, the benefits of the place oversold.
The only trace left of the Shetland Islanders, Alice read, was the flowers and trees they had planted. Outside the sun was going down, and Alice sat on a picnic bench under a eucalyptus tree where a kaka was singing melodiously, like a slide whistle filled with water. Was the eucalyptus one of those planted by the settlers? Possibly, or the offspring of those planted nearly 150 years earlier. She wondered if they’d had the opportunity to sit outside on a summer night and listen to the singing of a kaka or if they had simply been too overwhelmed by the despair of the situation they found themselves in. She hoped they had enjoyed it, seen some of the beauty of this place, even if for only a moment.
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