‘No, and he’s not answered his cell all afternoon,’ she said. That was the second builder they had contacted to try to get some idea of how much it would cost to lift the house and replace the foundations. Lindsay and Kevin had decided they could save money by replacing the damaged walls and ceilings themselves, and that money could be spent on the foundations. But if they couldn’t get someone to quote for the foundation work, they couldn’t make a decision over whether or not they could stretch the cash settlement far enough. Accepting the cash settlement without having a good idea about how much the foundation repair would cost risked ending up in a position where they weren’t able to afford fixing the house properly.
‘Well if we can’t get anywhere with builders, we might have to just let them go ahead with the repair,’ Kevin said. He filled a glass of water from the tap and sipped at it, leaning up against the bench. ‘There’s an email from the insurance company, they say we’ve missed the deadline for making a decision.’
‘What?’ Lindsay said. ‘We didn’t have a deadline.’
‘I didn’t think we did either, but that’s what they’ve said.’
Lindsay wiped her damp hands on a tea towel and marched through to the lounge where the laptop was set up, Kevin following through. She found the email detailing the offer. ‘No deadline, no timeframe.’
Kevin just nodded, and Lindsay felt her anger rise at his calmness. This was serious, how could he just stand there?
‘Did you say something when you talked to them on the phone?’ Lindsay said.
‘No, Lin, I didn’t,’ he said, and she heard the edge of anger in his voice. ‘There was never anything about a deadline.’
‘Well what are we going to do?’ Lindsay swallowed back tears, her throat sharp from the effort. ‘They can’t just force us to make a decision without the information we need. Can they?’
Kevin shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But I think we should write and point out that there has been no deadline, and that we’ve been waiting a long time. We’ve been overcap two years, after all, they can’t just say we’ve got six weeks to make such a major decision.’
‘Do you want me to do that?’ Lindsay said. She had already created a new email and was stabbing at the keyboard.
‘Yes, I’ll finish up dinner,’ Kevin said.
They said nothing to the kids or Alice, but all three seemed to know there was something going on and were unusually quiet over dinner. Later, while Alice was getting the kids bathed and into bed, Lindsay and Kevin went through what Lindsay had written, asking the insurance company for more time and pointing out that they had been given no deadline.
Lindsay was exhausted when she dropped into bed that night, but she couldn’t sleep. She lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house: Kevin snoring softly beside her, the house creaking slightly in the wind, a train passing in the distance. The house was their home, it had been for nearly a decade, where she and Alice and Kevin had made a home together, where Olivia and Jack had lived all their lives. It needed to be fixed properly, and Lindsay wasn’t convinced that their insurance company’s strategy would achieve that. Then there was the question of where they would live while the house was being repaired, what would happen if the repair dragged on for too long and their accommodation allowance ran out. They couldn’t afford to pay rent and a mortgage, and Lindsay had heard of people in that situation, parents of other kids at the school who were stressed out of their minds, not knowing when they would finally be able to go home.
They had talked a couple of years ago about actually leaving Christchurch. That had been in the middle of all the quakes when they were both worn out, not knowing what was going to happen with their house, not knowing if the quakes would ever stop. Since then, Lindsay had started to feel more settled. The city felt like home again, and Kevin hadn’t said anything about leaving for over a year.
Lindsay loved the part of town they lived in. The hills were nearby, always within view, breaking up the sky that would otherwise stretch away into the Pacific Ocean. She had lived on the western side of the city when she and Andrew were married, when Alice was a baby and Andrew was still at university. She didn’t like it, the hills were too far away, and it just seemed flat everywhere. Funny, he had stayed over that side of town, but she had gone back to where she grew up at the first opportunity she had.
If she imagined living anywhere else in Christchurch, it was closer to the hills. Her parents were closer to the hills, a block away from the river and a quick walk down to the park in the inner loop of the river. The river was lined with willows at the end of the park, and the view looked up into the valley that stretched up towards the summit of the Port Hills. It was a view Lindsay found comforting, like the looming hills were some sort of emotional anchor. She had grown up there, in the house her parents were still living in. They didn’t want to stay there forever, but their retirement plans had been derailed by the quakes.
For too long, Lindsay had felt she was at the mercy of the quakes. They dictated the course of her life. She could plan on getting a good night’s sleep so she could tackle a list of tasks the following day, but aftershocks in the night derailed that plan because once awake she had such a hard time getting back to sleep. Functioning on no sleep had never been fun for Lindsay. It was something she endured while her children were little, but she knew, then, it was a phase that would pass. There were fewer quakes now, but the insurance process had stepped in and taken their place. Life would be going in a particular direction, but then, without warning, there was an assessment to be carried out, paperwork to review, processes to attempt to make sense of, and she would have to stop whatever she was doing and focus on the house instead. The interruption to their lives showed no sign of ending any time soon.
The quakes weren’t the first time Lindsay’s life had been interrupted. She had certainly never intended to be a mother so young, but looking back she realised that having Alice had saved her, in a way, from a career she was unsuited for. She was never cut out to be a lawyer, and working through the insurance stuff the last couple of years had reminded her of what that world was like, the endless regulations and the convoluted thinking. Now she was pleased she hadn’t gone down that path. Studying law was simply something her family had expected her to do, as she was the first to go to university. It was either that or medicine. Funny that when she had decided what she wanted to do, it was actually medicine, or closely related. But that, too, had been interrupted.
Once Alice started school, Lindsay worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. She stayed there until shortly before she had Olivia, and they had asked her to go back. She did consider going back, she liked the work, the biological nature of it and the contact with patients. But then Jack came along, and Lindsay decided that once Jack started school, she would train in something medical, maybe nursing. In the end, she settled on radiography. It seemed like interesting work, with a lot of patient contact, but without the burden of responsibility for medical decisions that affected people’s lives. The local polytech had a three-year radiography course that Lindsay was going to find out more about, but by the time Jack was getting ready to start school, there was so much uncertainty about the house and the earthquakes that she and Kevin decided to wait for another year. Then in 2013, their situation seemed even more complicated since Lindsay was tied up with helping her parents get through their botched repairs and everything else they were going through. She had been thinking lately that she should look at enrolling in 2014, that way she would be qualified and working by the start of 2017.
Now they had to make a decision about the house, and Lindsay couldn’t even start to feel comfortable about the idea of the proposed repair going ahead. It wasn’t right, but neither of them had the technical knowledge to argue the point with the insurance company. They needed an engineer of their own, or a lawyer, she wasn’t sure which one. Maybe both? What she did know was that they didn’t need her taking on studying while managi
ng the kids, the house, Kevin’s books and the insurance claim. She would postpone her course of study once again.
Delaying Tactics
December 2013
Following the High Court ruling in the Quake Outcasts case, the Government appealed the decision. The Court of Appeal overturned one part of the High Court’s decision, that the creation of the red zone had been illegal. But it agreed with the High Court judge that the fifty percent offers to vacant land owners and uninsured property owners had been illegal. Although the Quake Outcasts had won their case with regard to the Government offer, the Government told them there would be no revised offers before the end of the year. Suspecting more delaying tactics would follow in the new year, the Quake Outcasts group decided to take the case to the Supreme Court in order to protect their hard-won legal victory.
Lindsay’s parents felt like everything had ground to a halt and that 2014 would be another year without progress, just as 2013 had been. Lindsay was worried about them, especially about her mother, who would often cry at little things.
Alice had resigned from her job with Southern Response and would finish in a couple of weeks. She was going to work for Gerald, helping to run the office at Moorhouse Architectural. Not an ambitious job as far as Lindsay was concerned, but it was better than working for an insurance company, especially one whose reputation was shaping up to be nearly as bad as that of EQC. EQC had been plagued by claims of nepotistic hiring practices and staff running businesses on the side that benefited from their roles at the organisation. Alice’s year and a half with Southern Response had changed her, she had withdrawn to some degree. When Alice told Lindsay she was resigning, Lindsay had tried to get her to talk about it, but all she would say was that it was hard going to work every day and hearing the other side.
‘Do you think we’re wrong to push?’ Lindsay had asked. After their insurance company had pressured them for a decision, Lindsay and Kevin had decided to engage their own structural engineer to carry out an assessment of the house. The insurance company had come back to them acknowledging that there had been no deadline, but insisting that they make a decision early in the new year. The whole experience had left them feeling even more wary of the repair strategy, that the insurance company was trying to push them to make a decision quickly so they wouldn’t notice something important.
‘No,’ Alice said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘It’s not that, it’s how people at work talk about claimants. Like they expect too much, and I don’t see it the same way. They’re always saying we have to be careful because it’s taxpayers’ money, but the Government has said they would honour the contracts, that’s all people want, for the Government to honour their contracts like they said they would.’
‘I think that’s what most people want,’ Lindsay said. ‘Not patch jobs.’
Alice was quiet for a moment. ‘It’s not too much to expect,’ Alice said. ‘I think there are too many patch jobs being scoped and I’m sick of keeping my mouth shut.’
Lindsay was relieved. She wondered at times if she and Kevin were missing something, that they were being greedy. But what Alice said was true, they were only asking for their contract to be honoured.
Alice offered to look after Olivia and Jack for a few days early in January so Lindsay and Kevin could get away. Lindsay didn’t understand when Alice first offered and just stared at her, mystified. ‘You know, without kids, so you don’t have to worry about organising anyone but yourselves.’
‘Oh,’ was all Lindsay could say.
‘Think about it,’ Alice said.
Lindsay discussed it with Kevin.
‘Great idea,’ he said right away and suggested they take Lindsay’s parents with them.
‘That’s not really getting away,’ Lindsay said.
‘No, but they need a break, your mum especially, and I don’t think it’s going to happen unless someone takes her by the hand and makes her have a break.’
Lindsay nodded. He was right about Heather, she was drowning in insurance matters. If it wasn’t the repairs to the house occupying her mind, it was the red zoned section. It would be good for all of them to get away. But still, there was another problem. ‘We have no money,’ she pointed out. Although that wasn’t strictly true, they were trying to save as much as they could for the structural engineering report they needed to have done.
‘Tom has a place in Kaikoura he’s said we can borrow,’ Kevin said. Tom was the guy Kevin had been doing work for all year. He was a good guy. He wasn’t taking the Fletcher’s jobs, instead he had an arrangement with a building company that was working on commercial properties. It wasn’t nearly as dodgy as some of the residential work, and Kevin was finding working for Tom better than trying to pick up work on his own.
‘You have this all sorted out, don’t you,’ Lindsay said. He nodded. She thought about it for a moment. ‘I’ll ask them,’ she said.
The next morning she dropped by Neil and Heather’s after dropping the kids off at school. Heather’s response, worryingly, had been that they couldn’t go away because something might happen with the house.
‘Nothing’s going to happen with the house if you go away for a week, Mum,’ Lindsay said. ‘Nothing’s happened all year, it’s not going to happen, especially in the first week of the new year.’ She should have asked her father, she realised, he would see the value of a week away and then he would get to deal with Heather’s anxieties instead. But it was too late now, she had to push on through.
‘A few days away might be nice,’ Heather conceded. ‘But I need to ask your father. I’ll let you know tonight.’
Of course the answer was no. It was too late to ask her father now, and Heather insisted that Lindsay and Kevin needed time to themselves, they hadn’t taken a holiday since before the quakes. Heather said they would have a break just staying at home, helping Alice out with the kids if she found them too much. It was an excuse, Lindsay knew, but she let it go, she was just too tired to argue.
Lindsay was nearly as worried about herself as she was about her mother. She found it hard to get out of bed each morning, to focus and get just the basics done. She was struggling to keep up with clothes washing, with the cooking and with vacuuming the house to keep on top of the plaster dust from the cracks in the walls and ceilings. If something didn’t change soon, she wouldn’t be able to get out of bed each morning, and she didn’t know what would happen then. She didn’t want to think about it.
Quake City
January 2014
Kevin’s nieces were staying with them while his brother and sister-in-law were spending a long weekend up in Hanmer. The weekend was over and Kevin had gone off to work on Monday morning, leaving Lindsay and Alice to manage the four kids, Olivia and Jack, nine-year-old Katie and eleven-year-old Ruby. Katie and Ruby were missing their mum and dad, looking forward to seeing them later that day, and it was up to Lindsay and Alice to keep them entertained until then. Fortunately, Kevin’s brother and his wife had left their minivan, borrowing Lindsay’s car for the trip, so Lindsay and Alice were able to pile all the kids into one vehicle to get them around.
Orana Park, Alice had suggested, but Ruby and Katie wanted to see the city. Why? Although they lived only two hours south of Christchurch, they had heard so much about the devastation caused by the earthquakes that they wanted to see it all up close. Lindsay and Kevin were in the habit of escaping to his brother’s place in Timaru whenever Christchurch became too much for them, and Katie and Ruby were curious about what they were escaping from.
‘Okay,’ Lindsay said. ‘Let’s go rubble necking!’
They all piled into the van and drove into the city, Alice pointing out buildings in different states of disassembly along the way. They parked on Cambridge Terrace, then walked down Hereford Street so the kids could see the little green Shands building, over a hundred years old, one side nearly fallen off it. Lindsay and Alice pointed out buildings they remembered, a bookshop both had liked, the Drexel’s restaurant that
did the best pancakes, the old KFC site, the chemist where Lindsay used to get her photos developed when she was a teenager.
The kids didn’t seem to understand, even Olivia and Jack, who lived only a few kilometres away. But their parents and Alice had sheltered them from what was going on in the city. They had been in a couple of times, when significant buildings were being demolished. Both Olivia and Jack loved the diggers, it was all excitement and noise as far as they were concerned, they didn’t understand that this had been where people shopped, where mums and dads and aunts and uncles had come to work. Where some of them had died while doing so. But that wasn’t something she wanted to try explaining to them, all four of the kids were too young to have to think about not having a mum or a dad.
‘You know how Stafford Street has all those shops on each side?’ Alice asked Ruby and Katie. They were walking along High Street towards the Cashel Street intersection and everywhere there were gaps where buildings had been demolished, their rubble ground into fill for the basements.
Ruby and Katie nodded. Stafford Street was the main shopping street in Timaru, typical of the retail centres of New Zealand small towns.
‘This used to be like Stafford Street,’ Alice said. ‘There were shops all along here, all the way up there.’ She pointed into the distance, where the kinetic sculpture towered above the street, its orange disc divided into four wedges, always moving slowly, rotating, marking the intersection of High, Manchester and Lichfield Streets. ‘Imagine if you went into Stafford Street and it wasn’t there.’
Both girls looked like they were trying to picture what Alice was trying so hard to explain, but she could see it wasn’t working. Over their heads, Lindsay gave Alice a shrug. Alice shrugged back, she wasn’t going to try to explain further. When they were older, though, they would remember this and maybe understand. It was too much for little kids.
Bleak City Page 32
