Gerald had wished, for a time, that Andrew would get more involved in helping claimants. He had done such work for his grandmother, but, Gerald knew, it wasn’t the type of work he enjoyed. Then Gerald watched a news story in which one lawyer talked about burnout. This man had done a lot of work for Christchurch claimants, but reached the point where he could no longer function. It almost broke him, he said. No, it was best for Andrew to focus on his family.
Liam had finished school at the end of the previous year and was working as an apprentice for Moorhouse Architectural, under a builder Gerald had considerable respect for. Gerald saw in the boy a growing love of putting things together that he recognised from his own youth. He had considered keeping one foot in the business to help train Liam, but in the end he realised it was time to finish up. He would be seventy later in the year and had already put off retirement for too long.
Building was a good career choice. The fallout from the shoddy repairs crisis was going to be bigger than the leaky homes crisis of the early 2000s. That had cost the country $10 billion, this creaky homes crisis would cost much more. Gerald hoped that this time, the industry could learn from the mistakes it kept on making and recognise that cutting corners always cost more in the long run.
‘You’re deep in thought,’ Laurel said, startling him. She fell heavily onto the seat beside him and pressed her shoulder up against his.
‘Enjoying having everyone together,’ he said, bumping her shoulder back.
‘I can’t believe how grown up Charlotte is,’ Laurel said. ‘She was barely past my knees when I went to Sydney, and now look at her, she’s all the way up to here.’ She indicated a point just below her shoulders.
They both laughed. ‘Yes, she’s tiny,’ Gerald said. ‘But don’t underestimate her, she’s as strong-willed as Mother. What do you think of Alice?’
‘I like her,’ Laurel said. ‘I’m surprised how much she and Charlotte are alike, given they’re second cousins rather than cousins. They hang around a lot, so maybe it’s just that familiarity thing.’
Gerald nodded. ‘No, they are quite alike. I think it’s because they’re both like Mother.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ Laurel said, and Gerald laughed with her. Suzanne had told Laurel her secret, and in the months since she and Joe had moved back, Gerald had talked to Laurel about feeling like he was only now starting to understand his mother.
‘I mean in their own ways,’ Gerald said. ‘They have her strength of character...’
‘You don’t have to explain, Dad,’ Laurel said. ‘I get it.’
‘Get what?’
‘You miss your mum.’ She put her arm through his and snuggled in close.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I really do.’
The Joint Statement
May 2016
In November 2015, a group of claimants called the Anthony Harper Action Group had filed a claim against EQC seeking clarification of how EQC was interpreting its underlying legislation. In April 2016, the two groups were able to reach an agreement. They released a joint statement and court proceedings were stopped.
The Anthony Harper group hailed the joint statement as a landmark. At last, they said, it was clear that houses were to be repaired to the as-when-new standard, not to a pre-earthquake standard. The EQC said they had been doing this all along, flying in the face of the reality experienced by thousands of Christchurch homeowners. There were numerous examples of EQC newsletters and media statements referring to the pre-earthquake condition homes would be repaired to.
Both parties were saying different things. Alice knew who she believed.
Gerry Brownlee, the Minister for Earthquake Recovery who had oversight of the EQC, was out of the country when the announcement was made. He was also the Minister of Defence and it seemed he preferred being in Iraq to staying in New Zealand and answering questions about the EQC. Ian Simpson, the chief executive of the EQC, was also, apparently, nowhere to be found and let some Acting Chief Executive speak for him on the six o’clock news.
‘Does he actually believe what he’s saying?’ Lindsay said.
‘Does it matter?’ Alice said. ‘The statement is clear, the standard is as-when-new, and we can use that in getting Grandma and Grandad’s repair sorted. Jase and Carla’s too. And think about it, if this truly was vindication for the EQC’s position, wouldn’t Brownlee and Simpson be crowing from the rooftops about it?’
Once the Minister was back in New Zealand and asked about the joint statement in Parliament, he said that the information claimants wanted had been on the EQC website all along. Why, then, did so many people find it necessary to file in court when, really, all they needed to do was go to Google? It seemed the Minister thought that eighteen months of earthquakes had rendered the people of Canterbury stupid.
A group called Canterbury Claimants would be holding a public meeting for people who were having issues with the EQC. One speaker was the chair of the Anthony Harper group action, another was the lawyer who headed it up. Other speakers were names Alice recognised, people who had been speaking out in the media in the years since the earthquakes, warning that there was a serious problem with the quality of repairs. Alice and Lindsay decided to go together. There would be information that could help Neil and Heather decide how to proceed with their complaint.
The night of the meeting was windy and cold and the streets around the cardboard cathedral were packed with cars. Alice and Lindsay parked a couple of blocks away. By the time they reached the cathedral, it was nearly full.
They found a couple of seats at the back and squeezed past an elderly couple. The woman smiled tiredly, her frizzy grey hair springing haphazardly from a bun coming loose at the back of her head. Her husband was white-haired and frail, his shoulder slumped. He was crumpling into himself.
At first, Alice found the size of the crowd reassuring. There were so many people in the same position as her grandparents and her aunt and uncle, people who were fighting against the EQC. But then, about half an hour into the talk, she was becoming angry. The way EQC had handled the joint statement worked politically, one speaker said. No one had to admit they were wrong. Really? That was the primary concern here? Not repairing people’s houses the way the law said they should? The wind had started gusting outside and sounded like it was beating against the roof of the cathedral, trying to tear it apart. Inside, Alice was full of churning anger and she could barely sit still. She had picked up a copy of the joint statement when she arrived at the cathedral and now she found herself twisting the sheet of paper into a tight spiral.
On the way home, Alice and Lindsay talked about the implications of what they had learned.
‘The EQC’s going to fight people all the way, aren’t they?’ Alice said.
‘Yes, they are,’ Lindsay said. She was driving, keeping her eyes straight ahead as they drove home through the empty streets.
‘So there’s nothing we can really do for Grandma and Grandad? Or Jase and Carla?’ Alice felt her anger draining away, being displaced by weariness and disgust.
‘We can help them with the proving it part,’ Lindsay said, her voice grim. She was gripping the steering wheel with both hands, as though trying to crush it. ‘They said get everything from EQC, we’ll help them to do that, then we can ask for a review.’
Alice felt energised by her mother’s determination. ‘And maybe that will just do the trick. Stick together, show how determined we all are.’
It was difficult for Alice to get to sleep that night. The wind had picked up once again and kept knocking tree branches against the side of the house. She kept thinking about the city and the promises made about its future in the months after the February quake. People were worn out then, but they knew the quakes had to end eventually. Then there was the 2011 Share an Idea campaign that asked people what they wanted for their rebuilt city. Thousands of people had responded and generated tonnes of ideas. The campaign gave them hope for a brighter city one day, one rebuilt to
take advantage of the unique opportunity all the devastation presented. A smart rebuild would make something good out of the bad. But now, five years later, Share an Idea seemed to be dead. If it wasn’t dead, it was well and truly buried, although no one knew where. It was like someone packed all the ideas away into a box and stored it in a warehouse somewhere. It was probably in the same warehouse the Ark of the Covenant ended up in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Alice thought about all those people in the cardboard cathedral, and about all of those people who weren’t there, the ones too tired to attend or too tired to pay attention to the news and to know that there was a way to fight the EQC. Then there were those who died without having their claims settled.
One day over the summer, Alice and Charlotte had gone for a walk along the estuary shoreline. They ended up talking to an old lady who was working in her garden, deadheading roses. The house was concrete block and her husband had built it fifty years earlier. She loved living by the sea, she said, and she had wonderful views of the estuary.
‘Did you have much damage?’ Alice asked. ‘Did you have to move out for repairs?’ Her eyes were drawn to cracking between the concrete blocks behind where the woman was standing. The cracking zig-zagged across the wall diagonally.
‘Just some cracking,’ the woman said. ‘Some men came and said I only had cosmetic damage and paid me out.’
Alice and Charlotte exchanged glances. Charlotte had seen the cracking in the wall, too.
‘I don’t know if that’s true,’ the woman continued with a glint in her eye. ‘But my family can sort it all out once I’m gone.’
‘That wasn’t cosmetic damage, was it?’ Charlotte said, as they were walking away.
‘No, but I think she knows that,’ Alice said.
‘What kind of a jerk do you have to be to try to rip off an old lady like that?’ Charlotte said.
Alice had no answer for her then, but after the public meeting she had attended that evening, she understood better how the deception had been achieved. Thousands of people in Christchurch had been short-changed by the EQC, the organisation set up to provide New Zealanders with the economic protections necessary to recover quickly from natural disasters. And thousands of people had let it happen because it wasn’t happening to them or, worse, because they stood to profit from the deception.
The most disturbing point made during the evening had been made by two speakers, and that was the fact that land damage issues had been left until last. Many repair and rebuild decisions had been made quickly, thoughtlessly, in order to achieve repairs as cheaply as possible. Yet some parts of the city were lower than they had been before the earthquakes and more prone to flooding, especially around the rivers, the estuary and the coast. The land was still settling, which was apparent from the cracks still appearing in the Bowens’ driveway. But foundation decisions were being made assuming that the land was settled, stable. Lindsay and Kevin were still living in a damaged house five and a half years after the first quake and it seemed awful to Alice to contemplate that, in fact, they might be the lucky ones. There was one thing worse that not yet being repaired, and that was having the wrong repair.
Winners and Losers
June 2016
Charlotte had survived her first series of university exams, although she wasn’t confident that she had passed. She would never feel truly confident about an exam again, after the disasters that resulted in her repeating Year 13. But she had worked hard and felt confident in how much she understood. How well that would translate into her exam results was beyond her control now. It was time to relax and enjoy the break.
She was in Wanaka for the week with Andrew and Michelle’s family. Alice had taken a week off work to come along, and everyone but Charlotte was spending long days up on the skifield. Charlotte wasn’t a skier, she didn’t like being snow-cold, but she didn’t mind it up in the mountains, breathing in the clean air and going for runs along the lake.
At Andrew and Michelle’s holiday home, Charlotte had claimed a sofa in the sun where she spent each afternoon reading for her next semester. The family teased her about being too studious, that she should just relax and have fun, but what she was learning about was fun. She loved learning about how the planet worked and being able to look out the window across a lake carved by glaciers. Thousands of years earlier, the land Charlotte was looking at had been locked up in hundreds of metres of ice. Glaciers had carved the horn of Mount Aspiring on the other side of the lake and scoured the lake itself so deep that it reached below sea level.
Before the earthquakes started, Charlotte remembered someone visiting from Australia calling New Zealand ‘the Shaky Isles’. Up until that point, she had done the usual earthquake drills at school without really thinking about it, but the name Shaky Isles had prompted her to ask her mother whether it was actually true. Her mother told her about how New Zealand had a lot of earthquakes, but hadn’t had many since Charlotte was born. There was a big quake early in Wellington’s settlement, then the Murchison and Napier quakes in the 1930s. There was a big fault running through the South Island, her mother explained, and one running through Wellington. Those were the Big Ones that people were expecting.
Her mother told her about a spate of earthquakes Christchurch felt in the 1990s, before Charlotte was born. There was a magnitude six earthquake in Arthur’s Pass and its aftershocks had been felt in Christchurch on and off for months. Her mother had been in the city for one of those quakes, in a tall building that had swayed. Charlotte found it hard to believe, then, that buildings would move. They just seemed too solid. Now, though, Charlotte had seen the way seismic waves moved through the earth, making it roll. The earth’s power was incredible, and terrifying. But smart people developing and following sound engineering principles could reduce the threat to lives.
Earthquakes weren’t something to be feared, Charlotte had decided, but something to be respected. That was why buildings needed to be built properly, or not built in places where the ground wasn’t stable. Preparation needed to be taken seriously.
Some people didn’t get it, though. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if people liked being afraid. One problem was that people found science confusing. Seeing how the quakes were reported in the media annoyed Charlotte, and she was thinking about what she would do once she finished her science degree. She didn’t want to be a journalist, but maybe something to do with communicating science. The university in Dunedin had a science communication programme and maybe Charlotte could end up making documentaries. That would be very cool.
But she had a long way to go, she was only six months into her three-year degree, and she didn’t want to blow it, so she spent as much time as she could learning about her subjects and telling her cousins about it.
One night after the family came back from skiing, they went to a Mexican restaurant in the town. They had ordered corn chips and dips for starters, which everyone was quickly working their way through. Charlotte was trying to explain glaciers to Andrew and Michelle’s youngest, Mattie, who didn’t understand how ice could cut rocks.
‘But it’s just sitting here in my glass,’ Mattie said. ‘It’s not cutting the glass and I can hold it, it won’t cut me.’
‘No because you need a lot of it, so the weight of it is so enormous that it moves,’ Charlotte said.
‘Why does it move?’ Alice said. She was sitting across from Charlotte and Mattie, laughing at Charlotte’s efforts to teach.
‘Because of gravity,’ Charlotte said. She shot her filthiest look at Alice. Mattie nodded, but looked confused. She was only ten. ‘And because it’s so heavy,’ Charlotte pressed on, ‘and because it’s moving, it cuts what’s underneath it.’
The waitress cleared the table and started bringing their mains. Charlotte started eating her burrito when she saw that Alice was upset.
‘What is it?’ Charlotte asked.
Alice shook her head, but Charlotte persisted. ‘Those guys over there,’ Alice said.
‘They’ve been talking about Christchurch,’ Alice said. ‘How well they’ve done from the rebuild.’
‘Yeah?’ Charlotte said, turning to look again. She quickly turned back. ‘Ignore it, they’re just jerks.’
Alice shrugged, but looked sad. She started half-heartedly cutting into her enchilada, then chewed slowly at a small piece. At the other table, one of the skiers stood up, lifting his half-empty beer mug into the air. ‘Thanks, Christchurch,’ he said, and his mates cheered.
Back at the house, Charlotte and Alice poured a couple of glasses of white wine and talked about the diners at the other table. They were sitting in Charlotte’s favourite study spot with the lights out. There was a smattering of lights from the town, but the lake stretched away into the darkness. The sky was clear and full of stars. They went outside and stared up at the Milky Way arcing over the dark mountains.
‘I know some people have done very well out of the rebuild,’ Alice said. ‘But they don’t have to be such jerks about it.’
‘I suppose it depends on whether they did well from doing a good job or did well from screwing people over,’ Charlotte said.
‘What type did those guys seem to you?’
‘More the screwing over type, really.’
Alice nodded. ‘It makes me wonder what I would do if I ran into the builders who messed up my grandparents house, or the ones who didn’t do the work they should’ve on my aunt and uncle’s house. Or what if I ran into Mum and Kevin’s idiot project manager or their claim manager? Am I going to go around for the rest of my life running into people I’d want to punch in the face if I knew who they were and what they’d done to people?’
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