Just My Luck (Escape to New Zealand #5)

by Rosalind James

  Nate hadn’t liked hearing it, and he still thought he could use the extra training time. He’d been gutted by the loss in the quarterfinal that had ended the Hurricanes’ Super 15 season, and he didn’t intend anything like that to happen during the upcoming Rugby Championship, not if he could help it.

  But Mako was right, he did have two weeks off before he had to report back to the All Blacks, and not too many other obligations in there. He’d spend a few days of them with Ally, go see his family for a few more. And then practice his kicking, and do all the rest of it too.

  Ally had been so excited at the prospect of seeing a bit of the South Island, he was grateful that he’d decided, in the end, to bring her down here. Doing anything with Ally made him see it through fresh eyes, she was so full of enthusiasm. And enthusiasm was something you could never get enough of.

  “I guess I always think of earthquakes happening in hilly places,” she was saying now. “Alaska, Turkey. And San Francisco, of course. Did they know how much risk there was here?”

  “Nah.” He stood up once the plane had come to a stop and pulled their bags out of the overhead bin. “Nobody knew. They didn’t even know the fault was here until the first big one happened.”

  Ally followed him out the door of the plane, down the steps to the tarmac. She’d been impressed by his being last on, first off, by the valet parking at the airport. Things he’d taken for granted for a long time now, things that were a necessary part of a sportsman’s life, especially one with as many commitments as he had.

  No need to pick up a car here, anyway, because his mate George was there to meet them, and had promised Nate the use of his Land Rover for the weekend as well.

  George might be retired now, but he was still looking fit. The big lock grabbed Nate’s hand with one of the giant paws that had manhandled him so often on the paddock, then took Ally’s in a gentler grip and completely swallowed it up.

  “You ready to see how real men play footy?” George challenged him with a hard stare when the greetings were over.

  “Nah,” Nate said with a grin. “Have to wait a few weeks for that, won’t I.”

  Since they were going to be down here anyway, he’d decided they might as well watch the Crusaders play in the semifinal. Ally had liked that idea too.

  “Maybe I’ll actually get an idea of what’s going on, if I watch with you,” she’d said hopefully.

  He’d laughed a bit at that. “I may not be the best company,” he’d tried to explain. “I’ll want to watch how the Reds go, as I’ll be seeing some of those boys again on the Wallabies squad in a few weeks.”

  “Oh,” she’d said, looking a bit disappointed. “Oh, well. I still want to go.”

  So here they were, climbing into George’s car for the journey to the stadium. Well, to a spot on a side street a fifteen-minute walk away, actually.

  “We got a stadium of sorts, in the end, but no parking,” George apologized to Ally as they began the trek together with a steady stream of humanity. Young and old, men and women and children. Going to a Crusaders game, now more than ever, was a family affair, the mood festive, and Nate was reminded once again that what had been his livelihood and his life for so many years was a night of recreation and relaxation to everybody else.

  “What would you like to eat?” he asked Ally when they were inside the funky little building that had been upgraded and pressed into service a couple years earlier to replace the rugby stadium that had been damaged beyond repair. Portaloos instead of toilets, just a few food stalls here and there, and metal scaffolding everywhere.

  “What are my choices?” she asked.

  “Well . . .” he admitted, “sausage and chips, or nachos. And beer. Or . . . beer.”

  She laughed. “Sausage and chips, please. And beer. This is the high-end experience, I see.”

  “Nah. But definitely an experience,” he assured her.

  He cast an appraising eye over the players as they warmed up. The Crusaders would be playing a pacey game tonight, trying to tire the Reds, coming off a tough win in the quarterfinals against the Stormers the week before, then having to make the journey all the way from Safa immediately afterwards. He said as much to George, talked a bit of rugby.

  They were interrupted, in the end, by the swell of music, the voice booming over the PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen. The Crusaders . . . Maidens!”

  He saw Ally sitting up a bit straighter as the group of twenty or so young women strutted onto the field. And then she started to laugh, and just kept on, until she was helpless with it, and he had to smile himself. Not the reaction he’d been expecting.

  “You’re kidding,” she got out. “The boots! And the swords!”

  “What?” he asked plaintively. “Good clean fun, that’s what that is.” He gestured to the women as they danced and posed in their ultra-short “leather” tunics, flung their long hair about. All right, the thigh-high boots might be a bit much. Not to mention the swords. Hmm. He’d better study this a bit more closely, since he could tell that Ally was going to be teasing him about it. The poses were probably a little suggestive. And the huge silver swords . . .

  “Phallic symbol much?” Ally gasped, burying her head in his shoulder. “Oh, man. The boots. I need some of those boots.”

  George was grinning now as well. “Think you’ve got your work cut out for you with this one, Toro. She doesn’t seem impressed.”

  “Oi,” Nate protested, trying, and miserably failing, to keep a smile from escaping. “You’re meant to be jealous, Ally.”

  “Want me to get some?” she asked, laying a hand on his arm and looking up at him with patently false sincerity. “Some boots like that?”

  “I could have used those a couple months ago,” she murmured in his ear. “Bet you’d have liked that.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he agreed. Ally in a pair of those boots and nothing else? Yeh, he’d take that.

  “No, but seriously,” she said, “how come you guys don’t have cheerleaders? Do the other teams have them?”

  “Nah. Well,” he corrected himself, “the Highlanders have bagpipers. And the Chiefs have some Maori fellas who do a haka. But the Crusaders are the only ones who have girls.”

  “What would Hurricanes cheerleaders dress up as anyway?” Ally wondered. “They could have their skirts be blown off by the wind, maybe. How about that?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I may just have to pass that one on. Because that would work. What d’you reckon, George?”

  “Yeh,” he said with another grin. “That’d do me.”

  “Guys are pretty hard to please, it’s true,” Ally agreed.

  And then she was jumping and laughing again as a half-dozen horses burst onto the field, each draped in true medieval style with cross-bedecked trappings and carrying a rider costumed as a knight. The well-trained animals did several circuits, their riders pulling them up in impressive formation in front of each stand, drawing their own swords to thunderous background music over the speakers.

  “No Muslim population here?” Ally wondered aloud. “I mean, the Crusaders weren’t exactly good citizens, you know. Why Crusaders, anyway?”

  “Because of the Cathedral,” Nate said. “Which was destroyed, you know, in the quake. But that’s the symbol of Christchurch.”

  “And luckily,” he added, “these Crusaders are good citizens. I’ve never heard any objection to the name, have you, George?”

  “Nah,” George said. “Not so far.”

  “It’s like a high school football game, or a hockey game in Canada, with all this energy,” Ally decided. “Like you hear about Friday night football in Texas. All the families, all the kids. Like the only game in town.”

  “Because it is,” Nate said, serious now. “The only game in town. One of the only things Christchurch still has in the way of entertainment. And the boys know it.”

  “And I’m sorry,” he said as the horses galloped off the field again, the Maidens making their hair-tossing exit, the
crowd stirring in anticipation of the players taking the field. “But now I do need to watch. I’ll see the film, of course, but I’ll learn more here tonight. Which means I won’t be very good company for you.”

  “You do what you need to do,” she told him. “I’m good.”

  “So what did you think, Ally? Pretty boring? I know scrummaging isn’t your favorite, and I counted five resets in that second half. A bit sloppy there, the Reds, eh, George,” Nate said from his spot behind Ally’s seat a couple hours later.

  “I thought that I enjoy watching more when you’re playing, scrummaging or not,” Ally answered promptly. “At least then I get to admire you. Though it was exciting watching the Crusaders win. I was supposed to be going for them, right? Guess I should’ve checked.”

  “Yeh,” Nate agreed. “You were meant to be supporting them.”

  “At least if you wanted a lift home,” George put in.

  “Sorry I couldn’t explain more to you,” Nate apologized again. “Footy players aren’t actually the best blokes to watch a match with, I’m afraid. Just another day at the office, eh.”

  “No worries,” she said saucily. “The guy on my other side was super helpful. Explained all the penalties to me and everything.”

  “I think,” she said, turning around in her seat and opening her eyes wide at Nate, “he might have liked me. What do you think?”

  “I have just two words for you,” he said. “Crusaders Maidens.”

  “And I have just two words for you,” she threw right back at him, and Nate saw George shaking his head, beginning to chuckle. “Dead Meat.”

  She wasn’t laughing the next morning, though, when George took them out after breakfast for a tour of the city. Skirting the Red Zone, the city’s cordoned-off central business district, where most of the lives had been lost, was bad enough. Blocks and blocks, the heart of a once-vibrant city, deserted now. The cheerful signs still in the windows, advertising sales that would never happen. The symbols scrawled in red paint on the outsides of buildings that still looked normal, but would never be open for business again.

  “What do those mean?” she asked George. “Those red marks?”

  “That the building was searched for bodies,” he explained. “That it’s clear.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “Oh.”

  He took them, then, to the eastern neighborhoods, once tidy and prosperous, bordering the Avon River. Across rebuilt bridges, highways still under construction, into the worst of it.

  “It’s like one of those movies,” she said in a small voice as they turned a corner, no other cars in sight on a street that stretched for blocks. “After the zombie apocalypse or something. It looks like all the people got swept away.”

  She looked out at front gardens that had clearly once been cherished, lovingly tended in true Kiwi style. At rosebushes and camellias growing wild now, overtaking grass that stood high around front porches where nobody would ever sit.

  “Lots of these houses look OK, though,” she said. “Like the people just stepped out, and never came back. Are they really so unsafe that the whole neighborhood had to be abandoned?”

  “If you look more closely, George told her, “you’ll see that they’re all sitting too low. That they’ve sunk right down into the ground.”

  Once he’d pointed it out, she could see it. “How could that happen?” she asked. “How could they just sink?”

  “You see the dirt there, in the front garden?” George pointed. “That’s liquefaction. That’s what everyone thought was good soil. Turned liquid, bubbled to the surface. Nothing for a house to stand on, eh. Just a sea of mud to sink into. And that’s what they did. Sink. And crack straight through, some of them.”

  “You know a lot about it,” Ally said.

  “Oh, we’ve all become geology experts round here,” George assured her.

  He turned off the residential street onto a main road, to Ally’s relief. The sight of all that loss weighed her down like the liquefied soil of Christchurch, once the solid ground on which so many had built their lives. All those couples, saving and planning, signing their mortgage papers with so much optimism, excited that their dream of homeownership had come true. The chance to own their own piece of the pie, taking such care with it, keeping it so neat, tending their gardens so lovingly. She felt her heart break just a little for every one of those lost dreams.

  She said something of that to George, and he nodded soberly. “Nobody realized how bad it was going to be, at first,” he said. “They were out in their gardens, out in the road, shoveling away the mud by hand. Using the portaloos for months on end, thinking it would stop. That it would all go back to normal. But the mud just kept coming, and so did the shakes. And the houses got inspected, eventually, condemned. Some of them thought they could fight it, that they could fix the damage or build again. Holding on, the last ones for streets around. No neighbors, living in a ghost town. The kids playing in the front garden, nobody to kick the footy with, all alone. But eventually, they had to give up too. And now they’re all gone from here.”

  “Look here,” he said, pulling off another main road and stopping in front of a school that, as far as Ally could tell, was open for business. “This is something to think about, eh.”

  Ally looked at the grassy playing field, featureless except for a large boulder, twice the height of a man, in its center. “What?”

  “That wasn’t there before,” George said. “Nobody saw it come down, but there it was, next day. Didn’t take down the fence round the school or anything. Which means it hit above, on the hill there, where you see the empty spot, see?”

  He pointed, and Ally saw what he meant, a scar on the cliff face behind the school. “And then,” he said, “it bounced high enough to clear the fence, landed twenty meters away, in the center of the field. More than two meters high, that fence is. Gives you an idea of the power of it, how the cliffs and houses came down.”

  “But your house is OK, right?” Ally asked. “And it’s on the cliffs.”

  “Different geology, Sumner,” George agreed. “And a bit away from the worst of it. Which caused me some sleepless nights too, not suffering as much as some. Survivor’s guilt, they call that. Reckon there are enough people in Christchurch who can tell you something about that.”

  He pulled to a stop on the street outside a pub, clearly doing a thriving trade although the businesses around it were shuttered, the rest of the block deserted.

  “I’m surprised they still have customers,” Ally said when they were inside, tucking into their meat pies and salad.

  “Yeh, yellow zoned round here,” George agreed. “Some buildings OK, some not. But we’re not exactly spoilt for choice in Christchurch these days. Any good spot that’s still open gets a fair bit of custom.”

  “Because it’s not all doom and gloom,” he hastened to assure her. “Not a bit of it. Life goes on, and so does the city. We’re rebuilding now. Pulling up our socks and starting over.”

  Quite a Nice Walk

  “I’m guessing you’re not planning a move to Christchurch,” Nate said the next day.

  Ally had to wait a moment to answer him, because she didn’t have any breath to do it with. She’d been surprised by how quickly the landscape had changed when they’d left the city yesterday, though she shouldn’t have been. She’d been in New Zealand long enough to know that an hour or two could take the visitor from the heart of a sophisticated metropolis to a fern-filled forest where the only sound was the call of bellbirds and tui, to the most pristine, deserted beach, or to a rugged mountain landscape, an alpine lake.

  And rugged mountains were what she was looking at right now. Arthur’s Pass in the middle of the Southern Alps, to be exact. Not much snow right now, but the peaks were impressive for all that, forested in the lower elevations, their rocky summits appearing and disappearing in the mist.

  “Quite a nice walk,” Nate had called it this morning when she’d been pulling on her boots in the comfortabl
e room in the Arthur’s Pass guest house. She hoped it got a little easier as they got further up, because so far, it was one of the steepest trails she’d ever hiked. The fact that their hostess had looked a bit surprised when Nate had told her where they were going, though, made her wonder.

  “Good on ya,” she’d told Ally. “You’ll have lovely views if it fines up. Gets a bit steep, though, Avalanche Peak,” she’d cautioned.

  Now, Ally realized that had been typical Kiwi understatement. Because this wasn’t “a bit steep.” This was grabbing-onto-roots climbing. This was the world’s biggest stairway.

  “What?” she asked Nate, heaving herself up yet another step, determined not to have to ask him to slow down. They’d been at this nearly an hour. Once they got over this beginning part, it would surely get easier. It was a popular track, Nate had said. “What did you say?”

  “Christchurch,” he said, sounding not in the least out of breath, to her annoyance. “Thinking that you won’t be shifting house.”

  “Oh. No,” she agreed. “I was glad to leave.” She pretended she was thinking instead of catching her breath, then gave it up. Talking would take her mind off how hard this was, maybe. And if the sentences came out in gasps, too bad.

  “I know George said that people had adjusted,” she said, “and I guess you do that, if you have to. And I know that New Zealanders are tough. But I don’t think I could live there, and I guess I’m surprised anybody stays. That more people haven’t moved out. That the guys on the Crusaders, especially, are still playing here. Surely they have opportunities elsewhere.”

  “Loyalty,” Nate said simply. “Christchurch has been through the wars, it’s true. Bit of a siege mentality, sticking together and that. Rugby’s been one of the things that’s helped people get back to normal there. You saw that the other night, how strong the support is. Stronger than ever now, and the team feels the same way. Hell of a side, the Crusaders. They always have been, but there’s something more there now. Playing for the city, for everybody there.”