The Villa at the Edge of the Empire

by Farrell, Fiona

  And add to this the official denial that such flooding has been caused by the quakes, at least, as Mr Brownlee put it in May 2014, ‘not entirely’, so relieving his department of responsibility and handing the problem neatly on to the city council.

  This is the world surrounding such rooms and the people for whom they are home.

  HERE IS ANOTHER WOMAN. She is seated in the garage of her home. When the house was dangerously damaged in February 2011, she moved out here. The insurer’s accommodation allowance of $20,000 disappeared rapidly, but she was not concerned to begin with. She moved into the garage, assuming that this would be temporary. She would camp out until her home was repaired.

  Four years later, the house stands behind wire cordons. It is white weatherboard, two-storey with several bedrooms, ideal for the international language students who used to board with Jen. For months it has tilted wonkily to one side, its walls supported by wooden struts, with a sign prohibiting entry tacked to the gate. This year, it was raised onto an ingenious frame and after a few weeks in mid-air while new foundations were laid, it was lowered back. It’s now out of plumb but liveable and the contractor is promising her that the crooked can be made straight and she will be back in her home by Christmas.

  In the meantime, Jen continues to live in the garage among her stuff. Back in 2012, she had spread a blue tarpaulin over the floor and, with the help of friends and neighbours, moved her furniture across the yard. The place is crammed: a kauri clothes press stands against one wall, a sofa and dog basket against the front tilt doors, raised to let in the afternoon sun. There’s a bench with a tiny one-plate stove and a plastic bowl for washing up, a fridge with magnets holding the confident daubs of grandchildren, ‘I love you as much as I can/Because you are my favourite nan’, in big uneven letters. There’s a TV on the sideboard where a lean and hairless sphynx, Mondrian, prowls, and a golden Bengal yowls to be let down from the top of the garage door, where it is warm and good for sleeping. There’s a miniature terrier too, Ruby, on guard by the wire cordon blocking access across the drive. The air smells sweetly of turmeric and chilli: warming spices. Jen likes to get the dinner on early before the sun goes down and the uninsulated garage becomes icy.

  A temporary camp. Fourteen engineers have made fourteen separate visits to assess damage. The cost of repairs to her home is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  ‘Friends say, “Why don’t you rent a nice little flat?” But they don’t understand that the temporary accommodation money runs out. And it’s easier here with the animals.’

  Her presence here has prevented attempted break-ins, the last only a few months ago, when she woke to find a man in her makeshift bedroom.

  ‘He’d jumped the French doors off their runners. I think he was as startled to see me as I was to see him.’ He ran, but she didn’t feel as safe afterwards and had a friend sleep over till her confidence returned.

  She doesn’t in fact mind living in her garage. ‘It’s easy. It’s very simple when you live out of a bag. And I’m not a victim here. It’s very, very important to say that: I am not a victim. I hate the way Christchurch people are described as victims on TV.’

  Childhood prepared her well for this life. She was raised on Inch Clutha, the little island that exists somewhat precariously between the serpentine coils of the Koau and the Matau, where the Clutha splits on nearing the sea. The island is dead flat, 11 kilometres long by 3 kilometres wide and prone to flooding. She remembers water lapping at the step and her mother putting sandbags down.

  ‘My father raised me to be tough, to kill a sheep for meat, to drown my own kittens, break up dog fights. He used to say to me, “Look after yourself! Don’t come crying to me with your troubles.” It felt horrible as a child but now I’m glad for it.’

  She waits for her house to be mended, looks after her animals, goes for a swim every morning. ‘And this,’ she says. ‘I do this in the evenings.’

  She reaches under her chair and brings out a box filled with strips of cloth. I recognise it: a rag rug, one of those things the frugal housewives of New Zealand used to make from clothes and old sheets so that nothing would go to waste. Jen lays the strips on the floor.

  This, she says, is her earthquake. There’s a strip that used to be a curtain in her home, an old skirt, a piece of fine fabric she had kept for ages, not knowing what to do with it.

  ‘It keeps me occupied,’ she says, when the feeling that this is the end of the world threatens to rise and must be instantly suppressed. She thinks of people she has read about or seen on television who are living elsewhere in the city in caravans or in garages like this one, with small children to care for. She recalls a moment in the Himalaya years ago when she witnessed a landslide: all this mud and rock flowed down a hillside and swept homes and people away. She thinks of her daughter-in-law’s parents who live in Sendai, and how the Fukushima tsunami stopped only 100 metres from their door.

  She pushes it all down and concentrates on her rug, knitting the scraps together, and when she has a home again with a proper floor, she’ll put it down in the kitchen.

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO TELL how many people are living versions of this: lives of discrete diminution, unadmitted, unreported.

  A rag rug. An orange carpet. They are not the stuff of TV specials or features in The Press. Why, they are so minor! So trivial! The people who tell you about such things shrug. They echo Epictetus, saying it’s ‘just stuff’. They say, ‘There are so many others worse off than me.’ The insurance companies themselves use the line to deflect persistent enquiry. And of course it’s true. But small things pile up, like the bricks from a fallen wall. They are hard and real and confided only to friends and the doctors who issue the prescriptions for chronic anxiety and exhaustion, both of which have reached record levels since the quakes.

  You can be buried by such bricks.

  You certainly do not have to go far to hear the stories. I am at a birthday lunch, a long table at a bach in Akaroa, family and friends assembled to celebrate seventy years of living. It’s another image for the lifestyle magazines. But beside me is a couple who are still living in their damaged home, though they have no idea just how seriously it has been damaged, under or over that $100,000 cap, for the assessors have yet, four years on from the quake, to pay them a visit. Two thousand, six hundred and thirty people share their nebulous situation.

  Across the table sits a man whose home in Heathcote now has standing water lapping beneath the floorboards. The insurers deny this is a result of the quake.

  Next to him sits a woman who is living in her own repaired home but is working on a project to build units to house homeless men: the cheap inner-city flats they used to rent are gone. It is estimated that around 7000 people are sleeping rough, or in cars, or on sofas.

  The woman whose birthday we are celebrating is at her bach in Akaroa because her home on Clifton hangs, broken-backed, at the lip of 100 metres of rock fall. The grief and shock she has felt at its loss have been directed into trying to find a home for a little shed that stood in their garden. Of teak and Baltic pine, it had been taken, in flatpack, to the Antarctic on the Terra Nova in 1911, back in that age of heroic Britons testing their mettle against ice. It was intended for scientific use but was not required and returned unopened from the south. The man who had acted as agent for Scott and Shackleton erected it in his garden on the cliff edge. There is a small balcony on its roof for meteorological observations. It resembles one of those structures that in New England would be called a ‘widow’s walk’, which is indeed what it became. Valerie has a photograph of the shed in which a woman in a black skirt and white blouse stands on the balcony, and something about the photograph seems to render her weightless, as if she is hovering in mid-air. It is presumed to be Oriana Wilson, who lived there for a year, awaiting news of her husband, Edward, the expedition’s genial ‘Uncle Bill’. She is looking out to the wide sweep of the bay while he lies dying, ‘a brave true man’ in that terr
ible, hopeless tent. ‘If this letter reaches you, Bill and I will have gone out together,’ writes Scott, as the men about him become still.

  It has felt necessary to preserve that.

  Our own flat, the one I bought when my mother died, the one where my granddaughters were born, is boarded over, surrounded by wire cordons, ivy in long white tendrils feeling their way in through gaps into the kitchen across the bench, the oven, the fallen rangehood. The living room floor bellies up beneath the carpet like a blister about to burst over solidified liquefaction, and a forest of seedlings sprouts in the gutters. Squatters pull away the ply and sleep here and in the flats of our neighbours. They leave behind beer cans, a sofa in an overgrown yard, and one night set fire to a mattress, black smoke billowing so that a friend phones to say, ‘Is that your flat on the six o’clock news?’

  When I stay in town now, it is with a friend whose home was designed by her husband who was an architect. It is light and airy with something of the quality of a yacht moored among gum trees overlooking Lyttelton Harbour. When it rains, the room in which I sleep floods a few millimetres deep from a source yet to be discovered. She has become used to it, jokes that she should build a pool, but the fact is there is a flaw where there wasn’t a flaw. There is a crack, some uncertainty beneath her home.

  And there are of course, so many others worse off …

  IN THE EMPIRE OF THE INSURED, every man or woman is an island. You are alone on the phone, talking to the person who manages your difficult, exceptional case. And perhaps it is true, too, that your home is especially tricky to repair, the land beneath it exceptionally compromised. How would you know? How do you discover that you are not alone in being irritated at the ninth visit from assessors, casting the little red laser eye across your carpet, jotting down a few measurements, then driving away into the silence? Back to the hum of the commercial cul de sac where the fountains play in the plaza before the towers of State and Tower and Southern Response, with their ground-floor bar/restaurant and the corporate gym and health centre?

  You come to understanding in small ways. You talk to the neighbours. You read letters to the editor in the daily paper. You read Sarah Miles’s book. If you are another Christchurch woman, Sarah Marsh, you set up a Facebook page titled SouthernNOResponse, and in December 2013 you paint the phrase in big black capitals on the roof of your home on St Andrews Hill. If you are Ali Jones, a city councillor and Southern Response claimant, you pick up that phrase and organise a SouthernNOResponse protest in the plaza among the fountains. One hundred Southern Response claimants turn up, and two months later, over 300 fill the auditorium at the teachers’ college to listen to a panel of experts.

  One, who has worked in insurance for twenty-seven years, explains the claims process from the industry’s point of view. A chartered accountant who is also a claimant questions the figures quoted by Southern Response who say they have fully settled 2783 claims — 40 per cent of the 6765 originally registered — but that number, he says, includes homes within the Red Zone which have been written off automatically as not eligible for repair. His calculations are that Southern Response has actually repaired or rebuilt 316 homes of roughly 3000 on the flat, and 64 of 475 homes on the Port Hills, while 638 remain on TC3 land, awaiting geotechnical assessment. An experienced professional surveyor questions the assessment done by unqualified assessors, showing as evidence a series of floor plans for damaged houses covered in scribbled figures of dubious use or accuracy.

  An engineer and a quantity surveyor explain their roles in assessing quake damage to a room full of homeowners who have had repeated visits from such people — some of whom have turned out to lack professional qualifications — whose advice has been instrumental in estimating the extent and cost of repairs.

  A city lawyer, Duncan Webb, who writes a regular column in The Press advising insurance claimants, issues legal advice to the audience. Stick to your policy! Know it inside out! Refer to it! Preface every question to your insurer with, ‘Where in my policy does it say that …?’ Don’t automatically accept a cash settlement, no matter how tempting it might be to take the money and get out of the whole exhausting process …

  The people in the audience take notes, scribbling in folders thick with accumulated documentation, they ask questions until Ali says it’s nine o’clock and ‘we all have homes to go to’. Which earns the biggest laugh of the evening.

  A few months after that meeting, on 14 March 2014, a group of 189 Southern Response claimants announces a class action suit against the insurer. A group of EQC claimants has also engaged the services of a lawyer and is proceeding with litigation. Such large-scale actions are rare in this country. What must be unique, however, is that in both cases, the insurer being targeted is a government-linked entity. EQC, for example, the system established during time of war as a ‘logical development of the principle of collective responsibility for a calamity loss’, has morphed into a business behaving exactly like a business in defending its profit margins against unhappy consumers, and it is doing so with the compliance of a government that has morphed into something like its board of directors. The people engaged in these suits are brave. It could take five years. Five years of argument over foundations and retaining walls and cracks in the fabric of their damaged homes.

  The Canterbury Communities Earthquake Recovery Network (CanCERN), another of the groups formed to assist people trapped in the insurance swamp, estimates that four years out from the quakes, as many as 6000 insurance cases remain unresolved.

  Gloor got it wrong.

  As a citizen of the British empire, my childhood was cushioned by a protected market for my country’s meat and butter.

  As a citizen of the American empire I had been first entertained, then drawn into conflicts as treaties sought to protect me from attack by various shades of pinko communism and black-flagged Islam.

  As a citizen of that new empire centred on Beijing, I have access to endless supplies of cheap socks funded by the export of the dried secretions of seven million dairy cows.

  But as the citizen of the empire of insurance I have the words of my policy upon which I can insist, as the dispossessed have always insisted upon the exact words of a treaty. In fact, I am not really a citizen here at all. The real citizens of that empire are the shareholders whose well-being takes precedence over my own. I am an asset, the raw material on which that empire makes its profit.

  SO HERE I AM, the insignificant asset, driving along River Road in spring past homes and the spaces where homes used to be, and around me stretch dozens of suburbs filled with other homes and I’m trying to understand. I am trying to figure out exactly where I am.

  Along here, awaiting demolition, is the house of a friend. She had stayed on there with her husband as long as she could, potting up the plants in her garden for eventual removal, determined to say goodbye to a place she had loved for many years in her own good time. There was plywood over the chimney breast, and hillocks in the floor, a portaloo on the verge at the gate, but they would not be rushed. She wanted to think about what had happened. She said to me one morning as we talked in the sun at her back door, that she thought the principal effect of the quake was that it had delivered ‘uncovering’. She had felt, in driving about the city, the sensation that her inner self was being uncovered, and the nature of her relationships, with her mother, for example, and her father.

  Diana is a very perceptive woman. She put her finger on the sensation I have felt here, and not just about myself. The nature of people I know seems to have been uncovered: people I had thought of as kindly and decent but not especially heroic turned out to be just that at the moment of catastrophe. In the months since, other qualities have become uncovered: generosity, pettiness, aggression, great patience, strength, altruism. A whole range of previously unsuspected characteristics.

  Other things, too, have been uncovered.

  When Witold Rybczynski wrote his history of the Western home, he focused on the notion of comfort, a
word that was not applied to the sensation of contentment experienced in a domestic interior until the late eighteenth century. He traces the notions of privacy and intimacy as the home evolved from a busy medieval workplace crammed with people in a structure that could be readily adapted for sleep, commerce or eating, to the calm retreat from the pressures of work and trade beyond the doors in seventeenth-century Holland. He charts the history of purpose-built furniture from eighteenth-century France and the scientifically efficient arrangement of the functions of a home in nineteenth-century America and England. He describes the interplay between artistic theory in the twentieth century and the business of creating habitations for actual, messy people.

  But what happens when the home is not the calm retreat, not the refuge, not the place that becomes scuffed by family living, nor the place where you gather all your treasures? What happens when the home cracks like an egg, or threatens to collapse? When you cannot trust its very structure, when its framework might in fact harm you should it be shaken again? That chimney might fall, that staircase might tear from the wall. What happens when a crack opens on your front path, as it opened in the path of a house belonging to friends in Avonside, and they poked a broom handle into the crack and it disappeared, all the way down, waggling in nothing?

  What happens when you doubt the ground on which your home has been built, when you have no faith in solid foundations?

  What happens when you buy a new house, but with that slight misgiving that it might not have been properly repaired? What is going on in there, behind the gib with its skimming of freshly applied paint?

  What happens when your home abruptly loses its desirability, no longer the great investment in the perfect location but now a house in an area that could be prone to flooding, or rock fall, or, God forbid, tsunami?

  What happens when your home becomes a trap: unnerving to live in, but difficult to sell, impossible to leave?