‘No,’ Callum said. ‘It was like this when I first visited and that was late January? Early February. Before the quake, in any case. Mr Bowen,’ he said, turning towards Kevin, ‘how long has this part of the ring beam been like this?’
Kevin stepped towards them, but Lindsay stayed back. She didn’t want to appear too eager, didn’t want to let them see how much she hoped they would finally get this right. ‘Since February 2011,’ Kevin said, shrugging casually. But from behind him, Lindsay could see the tension in his shoulders and neck.
Callum nodded, and Kevin stepped back towards Lindsay. Lindsay glanced at him to try to figure out what he was thinking, but his facial expression gave nothing away.
It wasn’t until Callum and the engineers left that Kevin finally said something. ‘Do you think that all this time, they haven’t known that damage was there?’
‘Rutherford knew. You pointed it out to him and the builder, didn’t you?’ Lindsay said.
‘Yes,’ Kevin said. ‘But I’d pointed it out to Rutherford before and he’d ignored it, maybe he discouraged the builder from putting it into the tender.’
‘Well they’ve seen it now, we just have to wait and see what happens. Again. So nothing changes.’
‘No, Lin,’ Kevin said, smiling. He put his arm around her shoulders, squeezing, and kissed the side of her head. ‘This is really good. The first geotech report was done by someone working from the data and Rutherford’s diagrams, they hadn’t seen the foundation for themselves. They can’t not acknowledge this.’
Lindsay shrugged. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see.’
Kevin went back to work and although Lindsay had planned to catch up on housework, she couldn’t stop thinking about what Kevin had said. Maybe this mess they had found themselves in for the last couple of years was just one lazy project manager who couldn’t be bothered documenting the damage properly. She started up the laptop and started going through files, looking for photographs that documented the damage to the foundation. She couldn’t find any in the insurance company’s files, although she did find photos of other parts of the foundation, the parts they did plan to repair.
What Lindsay did find, though, was photos of the insurance company’s newly discovered damage in their EQC file. Although they didn’t have issues with EQC, Lindsay had asked for a copy of their file when she had first made her Privacy Act request to the insurance company. The EQC photos were from five years ago, so they had proof that the damage had been there all along. It probably didn’t mean anything as far as how their claim would progress, but it was good to be vindicated at last.
She showed Kevin and Alice that night, after the children had gone to bed.
‘So that’s it?’ Alice said. ‘All along the PMO’s not been looking at the foundation properly, reporting back to the insurance company that it’s not as damaged as it is?’
‘Seems like it,’ Lindsay said.
‘But what about the structural engineering report they had done in 2014?’ Alice said. ‘Surely the engineer doing that was looking at the whole foundation, not just at where Rutherford was pointing?’
‘He was young,’ Lindsay said. ‘Maybe he was intimidated.’
‘There’s no out clause for feeling intimidated in the engineering code of ethics,’ Alice said sarcastically.
Kevin got out his bottle of whiskey and poured each of them a couple of fingers. ‘Today needs celebrating,’ he said.
‘We’re not there yet,’ Lindsay said, shutting down the laptop and putting it away. She sat down on the sofa beside Kevin and sipped the drink. ‘So how do we use it?’
‘I don’t think you do,’ Alice said. ‘Wait and see what the insurance company has to say and go from there. But if they’re going to stick to their repair strategy, it might be time for a lawyer.’
Lindsay threw Alice a look, she should know better than to bring up the L word in front of Kevin. To Lindsay’s surprise, though, Kevin didn’t object outright.
‘I still don’t like the idea of bringing in a lawyer,’ Kevin said. ‘At this point, we seem to have a good project manager at last...’
‘You don’t know that,’ Lindsay said. ‘Not for sure.’
‘When those engineers asked today about it being new damage, he could’ve just gone along with it,’ Kevin pointed out. ‘But he didn’t. No, he’s good. But what I was saying, if the insurance company refuses to deal with us properly at this point, there’s nothing more we can do. We’ll need a lawyer.’
The following week, an email arrived from their claims manager asking for their patience as the issues brought up by this new damage were worked through. The foundation probably couldn’t be repaired, he said, which made Lindsay whoop with joy. She called Kevin right away and told him the news.
‘New damage,’ he said tightly. ‘Did you see that?’
‘Yes,’ Lindsay said, ‘but at this point I don’t care, they’ve acknowledged the damage, they have to do something about it now.’
‘True,’ he said, and his voice was lighter. He said they should go out to dinner that night, celebrate.
Should she have hope? She didn’t want to. When they complained to the insurance company about Rutherford, she had hope then and had been badly disappointed. The insurance company revisiting the scope of works was, on the surface, a big step forward, but it wasn’t enough. Their mistakes hadn’t been accompanied by an apology or a promise to get their claim sorted and let them move on with their lives. Their mistakes hadn’t even been properly acknowledged.
For the next few days, Lindsay wrestled with her desire to hope. She was starting to get twisted up over it, feeling positive, that their claim would soon make progress, then pulled back into the pit of despair that said this was their life and always would be. What finally stopped her from obsessing was the early birth of Jason and Carla’s second child.
Carla’s blood pressure was going up and so she was induced three weeks early. A day of anxiety was erased when the little girl was finally delivered, and shortly after seven o’clock that night, Lindsay held her new niece for the first time. She was tiny, smaller than any of Lindsay’s babies had been, and looked fierce and angry over being forced into the world early. Lindsay couldn’t blame her.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Lindsay said. She thought about the future that stretched out before this little girl, the type of person she might grow into and the city she would be growing up in.
It was dark, so Jason walked Lindsay out to the carpark.
‘This happened quickly,’ Lindsay said. ‘Too quickly, I haven’t bought you guys anything yet.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jason said. ‘Caught us a bit off guard as well.’
‘What happened?’
‘Too much stress,’ Jason said, and she noticed how tired he was looking. It wasn’t just from the sudden delivery of his daughter. He told her that the house they had moved into at the end of last year needed second-time repairs. EQC had been in touch because it was part of the group of houses that needed to be rechecked following the fallout from the shoddy repairs survey. Its foundation repairs had been done without a building consent, and a couple of weeks ago, they received the report. The work done was cosmetic only, and the foundation repairs listed on the scope of works hadn’t been completed. ‘So we get to go through everything Mum and Dad are going through,’ he said.
Lindsay was trying not to cry when she arrived home and Kevin teased her about going all soft over the new baby. She broke into sobs and told him about Jason and Carla’s house. Even once their own claim was finally settled, her family would still be going through the same nightmare.
That seemed to be Christchurch’s future, for more and more damage to come to light. But what about the unseen damage, what the pressure was doing to people’s lives? Would the recovery ever truly be over?
Mixed Feelings
April 2016
Gerald and Sylvia had moved into Marjorie’s house. It felt incongruous to be living in his mother
’s house, to be its elderly owner, an old man walking around the land he had played on as a young boy. It would take some time to get used to.
Gerald felt he was beginning to understand his mother at last. Suzanne had told him about their mother’s first husband and that she suspected Walter Finlay had been her biological father. He agreed. In the photo of Walter, Gerald could see a resemblance between Walter and Suzanne’s daughter Rebecca in the shape of their eyes. He wasn’t certain just from the photo, but it made sense in light of what Suzanne discovered in the records. Marjorie had loved Walter, it seemed, and his loss had damaged her in ways that had never mended. Gerald wished he had understood that while she was alive.
Suzanne had done more research into Marjorie’s family history and discovered that although her parents died during the war, three of her siblings had survived. Her youngest sister had died in the 1980s. Marjorie had outlived them all by nearly three decades. Another interesting find was that her mother’s name was Annie, which made Suzanne and Gerald laugh. Marjorie used to get so annoyed with Gerald when he would shorten ‘Suzanne’ to ‘Annie’. Clearly she didn’t appreciate the reminder.
‘But she named me,’ Suzanne said.
‘No, Dad named you,’ Gerald said. ‘After his sister who died in the influenza epidemic. Mother had no say in the matter.’
‘I never knew that,’ Suzanne said, drifting away into her own memories.
Suzanne was different since their mother’s death. She had been freed from something. She missed Marjorie, more than she had ever expected, she’d said once. But she did feel free of Marjorie’s expectations and judgements, of the constant sense of having missed the mark. She missed the little things, she said, the cream horns and the gingernuts, and the enjoyment Marjorie got from a tree or bush in bloom. ‘She said once I looked like her mother, that I got my hair from her. Maybe I reminded her too much of her past, of her mother and Walter.’
Gerald knew the power of memory, how something that happened long ago could suddenly fill a person’s mind, as though the intervening decades had never occurred. Maybe Suzanne had done that for Marjorie, dredging up feelings and memories she found too painful to entertain.
He remembered once being at his mother’s house when a plane went over. This was an unusual occurrence as the airport was on the other side of the city, but a company was running tours, flying an old DC3 over the city. Marjorie was in the kitchen pouring ingredients into the cake mixer when they heard the sound of the plane flying overhead. She froze, her shoulders tensed, and because what she was doing had been interrupted, she smashed an egg on the edge of the mixing bowl rather than cracking it into the mix. She became flustered, trying to pick the chips of eggshell out of the mix, which only resulted in her tipping the bowl over and spilling the mix onto the bench and floor. Gerald couldn’t remember ever seeing her flustered before.
Gerald reassured her it was all right and helped her with the mess. It was the sound of the plane, she said, and he understood. She had lived through the Blitz and the sound of the DC3 flying over had brought it back to her.
It had been that way for Gerald with the Valentine’s Day quake. It had been so long since there had been a big quake that the memory of them had faded. But when he heard that approaching roar and felt the shaking start, he froze and that same fear he had in the February 2011 quake washed over him, making his gut churn. He didn’t think that reaction would ever leave him.
There continued to be aftershocks, even now, over two months later. They were just threes and fours, but for a city that had been through eighteen months of regular aftershocks followed by three years of EQC- and insurance-related stress, it was too much for many.
The region’s mental health services had been stretched too far, and the District Health Board was fighting to get the Government to take their concerns seriously. In 2015, there had been newspaper articles about a dysfunctional relationship between the DHB and the Ministry of Health. The population was stressed and had grown as workers moved into the region for the rebuild. Yet funding hadn’t kept up. The District Health Board had gone as far as making a complaint against a Ministry of Health official who claimed he hadn’t been told the emergency department was under pressure, in spite of having been copied into emails discussing the crisis. After the complaint was dismissed, three senior doctors spoke out and said the Ministry was being wilfully blind over the issue.
It seemed like the Ministry of Health had a vendetta against Christchurch, that it was holding a grudge because of the earthquakes, withholding extra funding that international experts said would be needed for mental health services in a region recovering from a natural disaster. But that couldn’t be right, Gerald thought. Surely even bureaucrats would have compassion for a region that had experienced what Canterbury had gone through?
It wasn’t just the DHB warning of mental health issues. The police said there had been an alarming increase in callouts for attempted suicides. Local doctors were seeing an increase in depression and anxiety and said there needed to be more funding to cover the rising need.
But no one seemed to be listening and just before the five-year anniversary of the February quake, there had been news stories about cuts to mental health funding. But on the anniversary of the quake, the Prime Minister insisted the funding cut was a myth, implying that everyone trying to highlight the problem was simply misreading the numbers. Any increase in demand for mental health services was the result of the Valentine’s Day quake, he said.
More money was finally added to the mental health budget at the start of March, for the Valentine’s Day quake, of course. It felt to Gerald like the Valentine’s Day quake was being used as a way for the Government to do something about the problem the DHB had been trying to tell them about for months without having to admit to being wrong.
Gerald was grateful that his family were, by and large, recovering well. He worried the most about his niece Rebecca, Suzanne’s daughter. She and Dan had filed in court against the EQC and their insurance company, and it was sad that they had to go to those lengths to get the damage to their house recognised. But the fight to get overcap had cost her and Dan their relationship with their daughter because Charlotte had moved out to board with her grandmother. Charlotte wanted to focus on doing well during her first year at university, and she couldn’t do that while living with her parents. He hoped one day Charlotte would understand and would be able to mend her relationship with her parents.
Although it was well into autumn, the days were still warm. Gerald and Sylvia were holding their first family gathering at the house, a throwback to the gatherings Marjorie held each year. Andrew and Liam, Andrew’s oldest son, had taken charge of the barbecue, and the smell of charring meat drifted across the yard to where Gerald was walking along the stream. It was a beautiful place, this city. He sat down in the wooden garden seat his mother had loved to sit in on a summer’s day and looked back towards the house.
The house and yard were noisy with the Moorhouse grandchildren. Soon there would be another one. Their daughter Laurel and her husband had moved back from Sydney, and Laurel was expecting a little girl in the spring. Laurel and Joe had bought the house Gerald and Sylvia had lived in since the earthquakes. It wasn’t their forever home, but it was a start, a house they knew was structurally sound and would hold its value, which couldn’t be said with certainty for much of the city’s housing stock.
Gerald was pleased to have both his children living in the same city once again, but he was saddened at the thought of the city his grandchildren were growing up in. The ugly reality of the rebuild would continue to unfold, and Gerald didn’t like what it said about human nature.
He could see Alice, with Charlotte, chatting to Laurel, who Alice had never met before. Gerald actually hoped Alice would leave Christchurch. Moorhouse Architectural was now being run by a manager, and Gerald no longer had any day-to-day input, but Alice was still there and she did seem to enjoy the work. But she was becoming worn out fr
om the stress of what her family was going through, and Gerald was worried about her.
The Government’s failure to acknowledge the magnitude of the shoddy repairs situation was distressing to Gerald. It meant that buying a house would be a risky business for many years to come. Official figures were that EQC had 5500 houses that required further repairs and another 2300 that needed unconsented foundation repairs reviewed. Through the grapevine, Gerald had heard they were getting over one hundred requests for reviews each week. He couldn’t imagine the pressure it was putting on the people whose houses were affected, who faced going through the whole assessment, negotiation and repair process once again.
A joint statement had been issued just that week as the result of a group of claimants taking EQC to court. The EQC and the claimant group had reached agreement on a number of points of law regarding the standard of repairs. What had happened throughout Canterbury was that houses were being repaired to a pre-earthquake standard rather than to the higher standard specified in the insurance contract. The situation had resulted in numerous arguments between homeowners and the organisations that they were paying to insure their homes. Contractors engaged by the insurance industry had been telling homeowners that what they could expect was that their houses would be brought back to pre-earthquake condition, and any homeowners who pointed out the as-when-new terms of the EQC Act or their insurance policy were labelled difficult customers with unrealistic expectations. But their expectations weren’t unrealistic, they were based on a legally binding contract.
The joint statement was hailed by the claimants’ group as a landmark decision, one that meant many of the claims EQC had handled would need to be revisited because the wrong standard had been applied. The EQC immediately turned around and said the joint statement proved they had been working to the as-when-new standard all along, despite the fact that there were numerous examples of EQC documentation that said homes would be repaired to their pre-earthquake condition. The joint statement was a major victory for claimants, but it was apparent that the EQC was going to fight them each and every step along the way. Gerald wondered how hard the District Health Board would have to fight for the mental health funding necessary to help all those poor people recover from their treatment at the hands of the EQC.
Bleak City Page 46
