Driving around Christchurch was an adventure of the worst kind, and Alice could always spot a non-local. They were the ones who still bothered trying to drive around potholes, bumps and raised manholes, whereas the locals knew that if you missed one hazard, there was another waiting a matter of metres away. As work proceeded on the roads, the diversions were increasingly bizarre, road cones marking out convoluted S-shapes where the cars were meant to follow. She had driven on more than one road where the footpath had actually been made into road so road crews could deal with whatever seriously bad thing had gone on under that particular road.
It was cold outside, but not frosty, and Alice walked towards the river, then broke into a slow jog, following the course of the river towards the hills. Her breath plumed out in front of her as she pushed forward, making herself keep going. This had been much easier a few months ago.
The weekend before, Alice had been invited to a family dinner. Andrew was back in town and he had asked if she wanted to meet up at his cousin’s house. Rebecca and her husband Dan were Sean and Charlotte’s parents, making Sean and Charlotte Alice’s second cousins. The three of them had gotten along well and planned to get together again soon. All of them were finding Christchurch depressing, with their normal routines disrupted, many of their friends gone and the homes they were used to living in broken and cold.
Alice hadn’t seen Andrew since soon after the February quake, although they had stayed in touch by text. He and Michelle were still living down south. Although Andrew came back to town regularly, his visits were brief, he was mostly there to catch up with his colleagues, who were working in a makeshift office set up in an old villa just outside the red zone cordon. It wasn’t big enough for everyone and some people were working from home, which is what Andrew was doing a lot of the time.
Michelle refused to come back to Christchurch, Andrew said, and he had decided it was best for the children to finish out the school year in Wanaka and then see about coming back. They weren’t the only ones from Christchurch doing something similar, he said, another family they knew was also in Wanaka and their children were going to the same school as Andrew and Michelle’s children.
Rebecca and Dan’s house was on a hill in the suburb of Redcliffs, in the city’s southeast. Sumner was the beach suburb and Redcliffs was the one before it, nestled on the southern side of the Avon-Heathcote estuary, just before its outlet to the sea. Redcliffs had been in the news after the February earthquake because its primary school was beneath a huge cliff that had collapsed in the earthquake. Although no one in the school was hurt, there were houses behind the school, right beneath the cliff, and some of the residents who were at home that day had died. Redcliffs School was now using another school’s campus over in Sumner, quite a long way for the local kids to go each day.
Rebecca and Dan’s house had a lot of damage in the February quake and even more in the June quake, which had been nearby and shaken those eastern hill suburbs badly. It was hard to say which one had done more damage, Rebecca said, but they thought it might be June. Did it matter, though? Surely EQC would see how much damage there was and put them overcap? It might be more complicated than that, Andrew said. There was a court case, one of the private insurance companies had taken EQC to court over whether EQC should pay an overcap payment for each earthquake a householder had claimed on. Rebecca and Dan had made claims for three quakes, one each for September, February and June, so nothing was likely to happen with their house until that court case had been concluded.
There weren’t many people left living in their neighbourhood, where a lot of the houses were obviously twisted and not fit to be occupied. There were rumours that parts of Redcliffs would be red zoned due to the risk of rockfall in future earthquakes. Rebecca and Dan were feeling like the process would never get going, they hadn’t even been assessed yet. Red zoning would, at least, allow them to move on, even if they did lose money in the deal.
Alice had learned something interesting about the Moorhouse family that weekend. She knew they were what her own family considered wealthy, but Marjorie, apparently was quite the landholder. She had a tonne of rental properties, and Andrew and Rebecca had been talking about them, how most of them were repairable but there were a handful that looked like they were going to be put overcap. Once that happened, Andrew would deal with the insurance company on Marjorie’s behalf. Alice had been thinking of Marjorie as a little old lady with a nice home on the river to spend her retirement in, when it turned out she had this extensive property portfolio.
‘Grandmother has always had an eye for a good investment,’ Andrew said when Alice asked him about these other houses. ‘Pop was into commercial property, but after he died, she sold them all off, she had been trying to convince him to do that for over a decade, she could see the writing on the wall.’
What writing was that? Alice had asked. As the suburban malls grew in the 1980s, retail in the city started to suffer, which meant the city as a whole started to suffer. Returns on central city commercial buildings declined. Many buildings were old and required expensive updates, especially ones that were regarded as heritage. And as long as those buildings were in poor condition, they couldn’t attract corporate tenants willing to pay higher rents, they could only attract retailers who were struggling, who couldn’t afford to pay much. Marjorie could see that rents were only going to go down and she didn’t want to waste money on expensive upgrades. Residential property values, on the other hand, were only going up, so Marjorie had moved her money into residential properties and Tony, another grandson, managed those properties for her.
Tony was currently working for EQC, which meant, Andrew said, that Marjorie’s rentals were getting through the system quickly. That sounded dodgy to Alice, although she didn’t say so. But she did say she thought the speed with which someone was dealt with by EQC should be based on need. If someone couldn’t live in their damaged house and was having to rent, while also paying a mortgage, shouldn’t their needs take priority? It shouldn’t depend on who you knew to get things done following the earthquake.
Alice wasn’t sure, but she thought Dan, Rebecca’s husband, might feel the same way. At that point in the conversation, he had left the room, saying he was going to check on lunch. But there was a grim look on his face, his mouth set in a firm, disapproving line.
Later, after dinner, they were sitting in the lounge drinking tea and coffee when Dan’s views became apparent. The adults were talking once again about how repairs were being prioritised. Alice said it should be older people first, like her great-grandparents, her mother’s grandparents. They had been living in their house near the Avon ever since she could remember. The house had a lot of cracking, but the foundations seemed to be okay for that part of town, they were far enough away from the river that the ground had held up well. But they were in their eighties and their health wasn’t great, so surely they should be prioritised. Dan was nodding away as Alice described their situation.
‘Unfortunately,’ Andrew said, ‘it’s those who make the most noise whose houses are getting done first, those who use their connections.’
‘But it shouldn’t be like that,’ Dan said. He was flushing, only slightly, but because of the earlier conversation about Marjorie’s rentals, Alice was watching him closely. ‘We could make lots of noise and insist our house gets fixed first. But we can live in our house.’
‘But why should we wait if we can get things done more quickly by just asking Tony to push us along in the queue?’ Rebecca said, jumping in. Clearly this was an ongoing discussion.
‘What if we’re behind Alice’s great-grandparents in the queue,’ Dan said, ‘and us jumping the queue means that those eighty-somethings have to sit in the queue for six months longer.’
‘It wouldn’t be six months,’ Rebecca said. ‘Not if we were right behind them.’
‘No, but think about everyone who can jump the queue – because of someone they know – going ahead and doing it. Then those old peo
ple who have no someone-they-know are stuck for months or even years. Six months is nothing to us, we’re young. But to them, six months might be, say, only a quarter of the time they have left. How would you feel being asked to give up twenty-five percent of your remaining life so someone with a mate in the right place could get their work done before yours?’
‘They’re older, they’re classed as vulnerable,’ Rebecca said. ‘It doesn’t work like that. We’re not in the same queue.’
Across the room, Sean was silently jerking his head at Alice. Charlotte was already headed out of the room towards the kitchen and so Alice swallowed down the last of her coffee and used her empty cup as an excuse to leave the room.
Sean and Charlotte were on the balcony, which looked out over the estuary past the rock formation that used to be known as Shag Rock. This pillar stood on the southern shore of the estuary mouth, a sentinel over ten metres high marking the end of the estuary suburb of Redcliffs and the start of Sumner beach and the wide Pacific Ocean. In the February quake, Shag Rock had been shaken apart and was now a third the height. It was starting to be known as Shag Pile.
‘That argument’s been going on for months,’ Sean said. ‘Ask the family for help, Mum says. No, Dad says, we’re doing things the right way.’
‘Do you think if you know someone who can help you and you ask them to help that that’s the wrong thing to do?’ Alice said.
‘No,’ Sean said, while Charlotte’s answer was an emphatic ‘Yes.’
‘The difference is that we agree to disagree and leave it at that,’ Sean said, pointing back and forth between him and Charlotte. ‘The world’s not fair, and if you know someone who can help you, why shouldn’t you take advantage of that?’
‘Because it’s taking advantage of who you know and it affects the less fortunate,’ Charlotte said. But she laughed, without intention of prolonging the discussion. ‘We should go for a walk.’
Sean looked at Alice questioningly. ’Whaddya think? Go get ice cream?’
‘I’m game,’ Alice shrugged.
They told the others, who, it seemed, barely noticed. Andrew was too busy trying to play referee between his cousin and her husband.
The neighbourhood was mostly dark, the bulk of the hills looming up behind them and they walked down the hill past all the empty, broken houses. They walked along the road in the direction of what had been the suburb’s supermarket, careful to dodge dips and kinks in the footpath. The wind was cool and had the scent of rain in it. Alice shivered, wishing she had brought a thicker jacket.
The supermarket had been demolished and the site was bare, but fenced off, nothing happening. They stood at the fence and peered in. ‘There’s nothing to do around here,’ Charlotte said. ‘Except go get ice cream and walk around looking at ruins.’
‘At least the quake left the dairy standing,’ Sean said. ‘Best ice cream cones in the city.’
‘Given the state of the city, that’s not too difficult,’ Alice said.
They ordered their ice creams and started walking back towards the house. There were few cars on the road, it was the wrong time of day to be going anywhere. Post-quake people went to work, then went home. There just weren’t enough reasons to go out any more.
‘We should do something,’ Sean said.
‘We are doing something,’ Charlotte said, ‘we’re walking and eating ice creams while trying not to kill ourselves on the footpaths.’
‘I mean one night, a Friday or something. Get a video, maybe something old, so none of us have seen it.’
‘That’s not a bad idea,’ Alice said. She was going to Timaru that weekend to see Ben, but that didn’t happen every week, they could get together the following Friday. Sean and Charlotte asked if they could watch something at her house and she said yes without thinking to ask Lindsay and Kevin first. She felt sorry for Sean and Charlotte. Clearly their parents argued a lot, and knowing that made Alice grateful that in spite of the stress of living in a broken city, Lindsay and Kevin were still getting along, even if there were more sharp words than there had been before the February quake.
What Alice had been thinking about the most since that evening with Andrew’s family was how commercial properties in the city had been allowed to stay in a dangerous state. There was a documentary from 1996 someone had uploaded to YouTube soon after the February quake. It talked about how much damage liquefaction would cause in Christchurch in a quake and how dangerous some of its old buildings were. It surprised Alice that the risk had been known about so long ago, and yet nothing had been done. Building owners hadn’t been made to upgrade the buildings, the City Council couldn’t force them to do so. But if they wanted to make changes to modernise the building and make it more appealing to tenants, they had to upgrade them so they were less quake prone, which could be very expensive. That meant owners tended to leave their buildings as they were. People had died because some of those buildings weren’t upgraded, because people had put their own financial welfare above the risk their buildings posed to people’s lives. She hoped lessons would be learned, that out of the Royal Commission would come changes to regulations that meant people couldn’t just leave their buildings in a potentially dangerous state. She didn’t want to live in a place where profits were valued over human life.
Background Noise
September 2011
Charlotte had fallen asleep on the bus and missed her stop. As soon as she jolted awake, she realised she was too far, so she got off at the next stop. She was all the way around in Sumner and although, on the face of it, Sumner wasn’t too far from home, the wind was picking up and it was dark. She thought about waiting for the bus going back the other way, but that wind was cold, the best way to keep warm was to start moving.
The way home was along the road between Sumner and Redcliffs, where broken houses hung dangerously off the edges of a cliff that had collapsed. A long line of shipping containers had been set up to protect the road from rockfall, stacked two high, the gaps between showing rock and splintered pieces of houses. The shipping containers narrowed the road so there was barely room for cyclists and none for walkers. Charlotte had to pick her way along at the very top edge of the beach. It was slow going, lights from cars coming from the city shone in her eyes, meaning her vision never really adapted to the darkness. As nice as it was to not have to be at school until lunchtime each day, getting home well after dark and heating up her dinner and eating alone were wearing thin.
There had been a lot of liquefaction at her school, which was just outside of the city and near the Avon River. That was the February quake, and since school started up again in March, Charlotte and her classmates had been travelling to another school, all the way on the other side of the city. That was the case with a few of the city’s high schools, damaged schools were sharing sites with undamaged schools. The undamaged school’s students would attend from early in the morning until lunchtime, then the damaged school’s students had the campus until the early evening. Other schools had gone back to their own sites after a few months, but it seemed Charlotte’s wouldn’t be back on site until next year, which meant she had another three months of going all the way over to the other side of town. She was lucky to get home before half six each night. It was grossly unfair.
She texted her mother to say she had missed her stop and where she was in the hope that her mum would come and pick her up. Fat chance, though, her mum was so wrapped up in getting new offices set up and there would, no doubt, be something urgent and picking up Charlotte wouldn’t even cross her mind. Charlotte felt invisible, like she was just furniture in the background. Charlotte texted Sean as well. Maybe he would come and get her, maybe he was on his way home and picking her up was just a slight detour. They were getting along better lately. Still, if Sean was already warm at home, fat chance of him shifting himself to come out and get her.
It was Sean’s first year at university, and he had kept going, in spite of the interruption caused by the February quake. At f
irst, students had their lectures in tents and sometimes in offices opened up to them by local businesses, but eventually a temporary village had been set up. Sean had thrown himself into his studies, determined not to be disadvantaged by the post-quake situation. He was more serious about everything, which, for some reason, meant he was less likely to pick on Charlotte. That was the only post-quake change Charlotte was pleased about. In every other respect she found it hard going on with life, travelling all the way across town to go to school, living in their strange, empty neighbourhood, driving past collapsed cliffs, seeing half-houses dangling from them, walking up the hill past twisted, empty houses. She had started reading The Hunger Games, but she was already living in a dystopian world, why would she want to escape into one in her reading?
A couple of weeks ago, Sean had been happy to take Charlotte to the mall when she wanted to spend the vouchers she had received for her birthday. They had met up with their cousin Alice and had lunch at the food court. Charlotte wasn’t the mall-going type, but there wasn’t anything else to do in Christchurch, so it was good to do something other than staying at home or walking around their shattered neighbourhood. Alice was more Sean’s age than Charlotte’s, there was something like five years between her and Charlotte, but the three of them got on well. They talked about what the city had been like, what they missed. Before the February quake, Charlotte was bussing into the city after school, then catching a connecting bus home. Often she would spend an hour or so wandering around the city, checking out the buildings and laneways. Sean wasn’t such a fan of the city, but he tolerated Alice’s nostalgia, which meant Charlotte could speak about her own. That wasn’t the case at home. Whenever she said something about missing the city, her parents would say something about how old and tired it had been, the quakes had done Christchurch a favour. That horrified Charlotte, because people had died, there was nothing favour-ful about what had happened in the city that day.
Bleak City Page 13
