And beneath our feet, the plates grind on.
I AM DRIVING ALONG RIVER ROAD. A fresh green afternoon, the river running on my left in full spate, sweeping along with powerful singleness of purpose between cracked and slumping banks, dragging at the roots of willows, puddling in billows of cappuccino froth.
Not a deep river, nor a wide one, though deep enough. More than 200 have died in its waters since European recordkeeping, and countless others no doubt before them. Matthew Hamilton staggered in drunk in September 1851, and six months later a little girl who had been playing on the bank fell in. Robert Shanly missed his footing looking for a boat; Margaret Owens was despondent when she jumped in near the Barbadoes Street cemetery wearing, The Press reported, a dress of ‘a yellow shaded print with black spots, trimmed with black braid and velvet buttons of the same colour … a white Tuscan hat with white trimmings and a pink ribbon round her neck.’ The couture for despair. George Smith fell in because he was blind, and Arthur Watts was just trying to retrieve his hat. Several children have died navigating makeshift boats, cars have swerved and sunk, and then there have been all those babies, weighted down with stones …
This river is not all daffodils and punt trips past the cherry blossoms. It rushes past me, tangled in twigs and broken branches like some image for time and the swift current of human affairs, and here I am, in my Subaru, heading up its left bank, against the current.
I hadn’t planned on taking this route. I was on my way back into the city after picking up my sewing machine from the repairer who lives by the coast at New Brighton. He works from home, as many do these days, on a wide, flat street set down between former sandhills. On one side there is a golf course where magpies were nesting, staging Stuka attacks on the men in caps attending to the serious business of knocking a ball into a hole. On the other side were bungalows set low in the New Zealand fashion and between them, today, roared diggers and trucks. The pipes beneath the roads out here by the coast had buckled and cracked with particular intensity and now the council was at work on their repair. The street had narrowed to a single lane lined with orange cones and their festive stripes and the streamers of yellow plastic slung between made a little party of the day, out here in the spring sunshine. They garlanded a deep trench where there was a glimpse of pipes and ducting, the bones and sinews of the city rudely exposed, and the air bore that sour whiff of mould and things long buried.
I bumped between the cones to the corner where the signs nudged me away from my usual route and I found myself on a street I had never driven down before. Before the quakes and cones I’d have accelerated across the bridge onto three lanes and 60 kilometres per hour, back in time to fit in a trip to the supermarket before heading home. But today, I was nudged aside. I was off my usual map.
It happens often. For a while after the quakes, there was the phantom city. It rose whole and entire in the early morning when I lay half waking, planning the day: pick up a printer cartridge, drop off a library book, then down to C1 for 500 grams of coffee beans. Along Gloucester, down Dundas, over Moorhouse … And then I’d wake up properly. I didn’t know where anything was any more: not the cartridges nor the library nor the beans. Streets were cordoned off, then one way, then the other. Businesses relocated, friends moved, then moved again while they awaited zoning decisions or the insurance assessors or a payout or a builder. The whole city seemed to be in motion. My daughter’s friend moved so often — fifteen times in two and a half years — that her children took to asking, ‘Is this our new house?’ whenever they went visiting, and they stored their toys in the car.
The telephone directory was little help in locating the beans. It retained the addresses of the phantom city for months before revision. Driving about the city became a kind of game, a lucky dip where you came upon signs or drew a complete blank. I’m stopped at some traffic lights when I see a sign tacked to the wall: Ah ha! It’s our lawyers! So this is where they are! And is that the stationery shop newly risen across a forecourt on Blenheim Road? When you talk to friends it is often to exchange directions: this is how you get to that café, this is how you get to their street along the one-way maze, this is where they live now, in that motel.
You are denied your customary course, as I am today. And once diverted, it is easy to decide to take another road. I’ll take the slow road home. I’ll follow the river.
I’d done this before: biked the length of River Road on pre-quake Sunday afternoons, walked a stretch before work in the mornings. It was peaceful, shaded by tall trees. Men lounged on the banks in season, nets out waiting for whitebait to make their fatal mistake. Scaup dived, held their breaths and popped up at unexpected angles. Children came with bread for the ducks and dogs crashed in for the glorious splash of it all. I liked River Road.
I DRIVE AWAY FROM THE COAST, past the subdivisions of medium-sized bungalow-style houses, built, despite opposition, on wetlands at the close of the twentieth century. Past newer neighbourhoods, with grey houses of Hardiplank and tile and ornamental gas lamps lining a curving avenue. They slump, their windows boarded with plywood. Between floodbanks the river rides high, for its bed has risen while the surrounding land has fallen by up to a metre, and those houses that have escaped demolition will have to be lifted onto higher foundations if they are to avoid repeated flooding.
On this spring day, they all seem so very vulnerable. Frail shells where people have invested their savings, liking the closeness to the beach, perhaps, where they can walk the dog, or because there’s a neighbourhood school, or it’s an easy commute to work and there’s a deck for barbecues and a good-sized garage, and it’s what they want. They’ve made an offer, moved in, hung the wedding photos on walls you can paint any colour you like with no landlord to stop you. You can own your own home. It’s a common aspiration in this country, though ownership rates are falling fast. In the 2006 census, 53.2 per cent of New Zealanders owned their own home. By 2013, the percentage had fallen to 49.8. On the Wikipedia list of international home ownership rates, we come in at thirty-six, right behind the US.
I pass them now, the homes, settling into the earth among overgrown shrubs. By Kerrs Reach they look out with empty eyes at a couple of lads rowing desultorily in unison downstream. I pass a school where children hang about the war memorial commemorating other children who had grown up here, the ‘Burwood Boys who fell in The Great War’ and in the Second World War and, in one final panel, ‘all post-World War II conflicts’, just to be sure that no one will be forgotten. The girls and boys perch on the memorial benches, teasing in loud voices, young and in perfect sunlight.
Then the riverside road narrows and there are trees and people jogging and on both banks, abrupt pockets of habitation, tended gardens, cars parked in driveways, interspersed with cleared sections, patched houses, a rim of plants marking the borders of a former garden. The road becomes rough, no longer smooth black tarmac but that fine tilth that underlies the city and braids the great rivers of the region, and the road has reverted in an eyeblink to a track between ridges of shingle where the mains covers have ridden up clear of the surface and stand like little conning towers hinting at some unseen subterranean existence. The car bounces and the chassis scrapes and I take it slowly.
As I drive closer to the centre, there are Victorian and Edwardian villas built to a colonial fusion of designs: with verandahs from the Raj, for shade, ornamented with bracket and wrought lace, and corrugated iron roofs, steeply pitched to enable the circulation of air overhead. And a central hallway, borrowed from the Queensland breezeway, permitting a cooling draught from front to rear. And weatherboards that are part practical waterproof cladding, part clinker-built dinghy, yet in their detailing retain the memory of the stone of some English cottage original, with the carved flutes and planes around the window frames and the knucklebone scroll of astragals at each corner for a dignified classical finish.
There are inter-war bungalows, and they, too, have their parentage, tracing a genealogy to that Indian
roadside hostel, the bangalo, the Gujerati meaning simply ‘of Bengal’. Simple in layout, cooled by low eaves, with vents beneath the gables and a verandah for shade. And here it is, transported from the Raj, refined and extended and passed on in American and British architectural publications to this riverside, in this city in the South Pacific.
Here they are with their porches and leadlights and, under the gable end, the little vent that permits air into the attic as a tiny reference to the distant Punjab, though its purpose is less necessary here, where the temperature rarely rises above 35 degrees Celsius. It remains, though, like some residual thing: like the human coccyx that hints at our long discarded, lovely waggly primeval tails. The bungalows line the riverbank, compact and scientifically designed for comfortable modern twentieth-century living. As one of their most enthusiastic proponents, the British architect R.A. ‘Bungalow’ Briggs, wrote, the bungalow was intended to be ‘an artistic little dwelling … popped down in some pretty little spot with just sufficient accommodation for our particular needs’. A spot exactly like this, where a metal footbridge links bank to bank over a river lined by elm and willow. Except that today the bridge is twisted tightly, as if wrung by great hands, and signs prohibit access.
There are larger houses, too, where borders of camellias and rhododendrons surround two storeys of gabled roof and weatherboard, bay windows and casements and Greene and Greene shingles. Their doors once opened onto the art and craft of panelled timber and inglenooks juxtaposed with tiled bathrooms and kitchens designed in accordance with the latest principles of home science. And all the subsequent adaptation: the tiled patio at the back out of reach of the easterly, the ‘beastly east’ly’ that chills the warmest of days, the French doors installed in the 80s to permit that highly desirable indoor–outdoor flow, the enlarged kitchen with Velux skylight and the ensuite cunningly installed in a former box room.
There are also state houses along the riverbank, dating from the era when the government undertook to house the working man and his dependants in the aftermath of the Great Depression. They stand, square and sturdy, built to one of the 300 government-approved patterns, designed by architects who were resolute modernists engaged on a great experiment in healthy living. Their designs had none of the medievalish flimflam of stained glass, leadlights and porches. These were insistently contemporary homes, blending the proportions of the bungalow with Corbusier’s unadorned ‘factory for living’, the primal cube, and a good dash of New Zealand, no-fuss practicality.
There are 60s houses of brick and tile and 70s timber and 90s stone and floor-to-ceiling glazing and I drive past them, these houses that bear on their faces all the history of everyone who has ever lived in them, all the history of their origins in the wild fusion of their design, and the river rushes away on my left in the opposite direction, bearing broken stuff to the sea. The houses along this stretch stand empty. They lean at odd angles, porch and pergola splaylegged as midnight drunks trying to find their feet after a heavy session. And around them on this warm spring day the gardens riot. Camellias are all tutu pink, roses send out unpruned skinny canes bearing tiny bunches of young leaf, tulips and snowdrops are making another appearance around unmown lawns and the air smells like growth itself. It is beautiful: the poignant beauty for which we need that Japanese word wabi, the beauty of a cracked cup.
Until recently, some still had a rubbish bin on the verge, or a portaloo leaning a little ominously off centre, or there was a car drawn up in the driveway hinting at continued habitation. Rentals since the quakes have been uncontrolled in a city that has always had high levels of rental tenancy: before 2010, some 74,000 homes were owner-occupied, while 42,000 were rentals. Now, 5 per cent of the housing stock has been abruptly rendered uninhabitable and the new pressure is driving rents to record levels. Maybe that is why people stayed. Or maybe they stayed, as friends have done, simply because this is home.
This is the kitchen with the tiles you chose one Saturday morning years ago, deliberating between vinyl and ceramic, ivory or anthracite. This is your bedroom, where you have always slept better than anywhere else, with the faint background rippling of water late at night when the city’s traffic quietens. And really, it’s not so bad: you nail plywood over the gap on the wall where the chimney fell in, you ignore the hillocks on the floor where the house has slid from its foundations, you use the portaloo on the verge. And on a sunny afternoon you can still sit on the step and look out at your own garden where the forget-me-nots are a blue cloud round the plum tree and you can call a halt to the onward rush of time, you can pretend for just a moment that all is as it has been, on this quiet riverside street a couple of kilometres from Cathedral Square. You can pot up plants to carry with you when you must go. You can say goodbye in your own time, to a house. A home.
I BOUNCE ALONG RIVER ROAD past houses and sections already cleared and there it is: the patch that used to belong to friends. It was one of those ample dwellings built around the turn of the nineteenth century for a city optometrist. Two storeys, volutes round wide windows, high ceilings, room for a Victorian family or its modern blended equivalent. It rocked mightily in the first quake and our friends moved downstairs, sleeping on sofas in the living room with cats and dog, all scrambling madly for the doorways as the aftershocks rattled through, threatening to dislodge heavy plaster ceilings.
In February 2011, when the plaster was an avalanche and walls and staircase fell away, our friends were unable to re-enter to retrieve anything from chaos. They moved first to a tent on their back lawn and then to a rental on the other side of the city while they waited for the insurers to act.
The last time I came to this gate it was to witness the old house’s demolition. Vandals had set fire to it, and one Saturday morning, I stood here on the footpath with my friends and a small crowd of onlookers — a couple of kids on bikes, some passers-by, an elderly man who had grown up in the house and come to see its end after hearing of the blaze from his son, who was in the fire brigade.
A crane’s yellow head swayed above the camellias as he told us about living here, about the Dutch lads who had boarded with the family back in the 50s so they could learn English, and how in return the lads had taught him to swear, grandly, in Dutch. Jij dent een typhusleider! Sodemeiter op! Snertverderrie!
The crane and dozers roared, swamp things circling a burnt-out carcass. They tore at soffit and window frame. From time to time one of the crew brought something our friends might want to keep. A sideboard, for example. It contained circles of glass it took a moment to recognise as the rims of martini glasses, melted by fire. A scrap of crimson waved from a blackened beam on the second floor. ‘That’s my scarf!’ said my friend. You could look straight up through burnt and broken timber and there were her clothes still hanging in the wardrobe. The scarf floated this way and that, like a pennant in an ancient hall. It was too sad to watch any longer. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ So we left, while behind us the crane’s head reared up, a triple sash window, fluted frame and astragal, dangling from its jaws.
I drive past the empty space — an expanse of gravel, a single camellia. I drive past all the empty spaces along River Road and suddenly I find myself thinking about the villa.
IT WAS A ROMAN VILLA in the corner of an English field. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but that’s what happens now. Memory and thought and fact and image are jolted into consciousness at odd conjunctions. My mind works differently since the quakes, as if it had been shaken up along with the city. Reality has become a thing of multitudinous pieces. So here I am, driving along with my sewing machine on the back seat on a spring afternoon and I am looking out the window of my car at a street by the river and I find myself thinking about the villa.
I visited it back in 1969 in the company of a young man who was studying archaeology. I liked archaeology. As a child I had read books about Tutankhamun, and Schliemann digging up Troy. I’d looked at photos of that golden sarcophagus, at Schliemann’s wife wea
ring the jewellery of Helen of Troy, and spent hours digging in our garden, in Oamaru, without quite the same wonderful result: a sheep’s jaw bone, a black Victorian penny, the tops of bottles with marbles trapped in the neck. At university I’d given it a try on an excavation at Purakanui Beach, where archaeology turned out to be hours of grubbing bracken, then scraping in the mud for a few postholes that could be read, if you knew what you were reading, as evidence of lives lived here. A shelter. A home.
I’d given up archaeology for less strenuous pursuits — I found it easier to read books on a sofa — but this boy hadn’t. He liked digging things up, grubby as a pup, delighting in finding old bones, broken stuff, always with a rim of dirt under his nails. He had been excavating a field, one of those English fields with cows and buttercups and, by the hedge, a low roof that kept the rain from a mosaic. He and the other pups had been peeling away the earth from a pattern made up of hundreds of tiny tiles of limestone in several colours — cream and brown and a dull red — that had been quarried from the hills a kilometre or so away.
Only a corner had been exposed so far. A chain of interlocking links formed the frame to a pattern of geometric shapes and the curling tail of some creature yet to emerge fully from the rich, dark earth: a dolphin, perhaps, or some creature from mythology. Something southern, at any rate; of the Mediterranean. I looked round at the cows and the grass as the pup pointed out the slight awkwardness in the execution that suggested colonial workmanship, perhaps a late date as the machinery of Roman hegemony crumbled in the fifth century in this corner of a beleaguered empire. A domestic site, he said, for mosaics like this with all their little tesserae, each cube no more than 4 millimetres square, a size more or less standard over the entire empire for several centuries, were designed for small spaces. Public buildings like temples or law courts were floored with harder-wearing opus sectile: large pieces of marble or granite purpose-cut to make a jigsaw of an artist’s design.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 22
