by Fleur Beale
‘Fine! You go to the food hall. Come and find me on my sunny bench.’ We kept walking and arguing – food hall or sun. Sun or food hall.
But we didn’t get to the food hall. We were still walking down the mall when the world around us shook itself to bits.
We were used to aftershocks. This time when the shaking started, for a nanosecond we thought it was just another one – nothing to worry about.
It wasn’t just another one. The shaking knocked us off our feet before we had time to panic, yell or think about what we should do. We huddled together as much as we could with the ground going crazy beneath us.
I don’t remember hearing screaming. I had no breath for screaming. I remember jagged thoughts – it’s never going to stop. We’re going to die. Stop. Please. Just stop.
But the ground didn’t listen to prayers or pleas or screams. It just kept on bucking and buckling and heaving. So much noise. Earthquakes are loud. The earth shrieks as it tears itself apart. Buildings moan before they give up and crash to the ground.
This time the noise and shaking seemed to go on forever. Fifteen seconds felt like fifteen years. And when it did stop we were in an alien place full of chaos.
For seconds after the ground quieted we waited, not believing it was over, before we clambered to our feet. I didn’t trust the ground. I expected it to go crazy all over again. We looked at each other and maybe my eyes were wide and shocked just like my friends’ were. I wiped at blood on Katie’s neck with my finger. ‘You okay?’
She shook her head. ‘Yes. No. I’m still alive. I think.’
‘It’s foggy,’ Shona said. ‘Why is it foggy?’
We couldn’t see much through the swirling fog but we could hear buildings all around the mall collapsing and dying, their bones shattered. Car alarms and building alarms shrieked, all adding to the racket.
‘The buildings. They’re falling down.’ Shona scrabbled for her phone. ‘I’ve got to call Greer. Mum’ll be okay, but…’
‘There’ll be aftershocks.’ Katie grabbed our hands. ‘Let’s get out of here. Greer will be fine. It won’t help if you get yourself killed.’
Mum? Dad? Blake? Was Joanne okay?
We stumbled along over the uneven road. There were sirens now. I tasted grit. The white stuff in the air wasn’t fog, it was dust. I looked around. There were lots of people.
So much dust. It swirled and lifted in great clouds. Sheets of paper from shattered offices flew and fluttered. I couldn’t see up or down the street, but the dust didn’t hide the destruction on both sides of us.
Katie headed towards the square. ‘Come on.’
It was what we’d been told, time and again: head for open space away from buildings.
Shona was crying. ‘There must be people under the rubble.’
The Japanese man? The giggling couple behind the elephant? How many others? Were they hurt – or worse?
A woman holding a toddler’s hand stumbled along through the rubble a few steps ahead of us. They were both crying. ‘Why isn’t she carrying him? She should be carrying him.’
Shona tried to hold me back. ‘No, Lyla! We have to go home. Follow the quake plan.’
‘I will. But I’ll just…’ I caught up with the woman and saw she was very pregnant.
I picked her kid up, tears, snot and all. She took hold of my arm too. ‘Thank you. I can’t…’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Eli.’
Eli put his arms around my neck and hung on. Great. Survive an earthquake and suffer death by toddler.
Up ahead, Katie stopped. Her voice floated back on the dust. ‘The cathedral! The spire’s gone.’
The air had cleared enough to give a view down the street to the square. She was right. The spire wasn’t there. It lay on the ground, just a pile of rubble now.
I couldn’t bear to look at it. There had to be people under those heavy stones.
I led the woman to a bench. She took Eli onto her lap. ‘Thank you.’
‘Will you be okay? D’you want…’
‘We’ll be all right now. My husband – we’d arranged to meet here at one o’clock.’ She pulled out her phone. ‘It’s nearly that now.’
But it looked as though she was only just holding it together. Her face was pale and strained. It was the tear tracks through the dust on her cheeks that got to me. She shouldn’t be by herself.
‘I’ll wait with you.’ I took out my own phone.
‘The network’s jammed.’
‘Like September.’ I sent texts to both parents and Blake. I’m ok. You? It could be hours before they got them and hours before I got theirs. If…don’t go there.
The square was a mass of people, ghostly shapes in the dust. I couldn’t see Shona or Katie. A man stood near us, his hands over his face and blood pouring down his fingers. I jumped up and ran to him. ‘Come over here. Sit down.’
He came with me, as if on automatic pilot. The woman patted the bench beside her. ‘Sit with us.’
Weird. It seemed to help her, being able to do something for somebody else. He peered at me through bloody fingers. ‘Thank you, young lady.’
He wasn’t doing a good job of stopping the bleeding. Even less when he dropped one hand to steady himself on the bench. The woman took it. She didn’t seem to mind the blood and she didn’t seem to understand he needed more help than just having his hand held. I’d have to do it.
Apply pressure to stop a wound bleeding. But if I put my hand over the cut, germs would get in. Both my hands felt gritty from the dust, and they sure hadn’t been sterile before the earth moved. But he was going to bleed to death if somebody didn’t do something. The woman – if she’d had a nappy bag for Eli once, she didn’t have it now. There was nothing I could use for a dressing.
‘Move your hand,’ I told him. ‘You need more pressure on that.’ He dropped his hand and blood spurted. The cut was jagged and it looked deep. Please, don’t let him die. I pressed my palm over the wound, then wriggled around to stand behind him. ‘Lean back. It’s okay. I’ve got you.’
At a rough guess he was in his seventies – about the same age as Grandy. How much blood had he already lost? I wanted Katie and Shona. We needed help, but nobody seemed to see us. I looked towards the police kiosk – it seemed undamaged and people were milling around it, but nobody even glanced at us.
Eli’s mother was talking. ‘It’s all right,’ she kept saying to the man. ‘You’re okay. You’re going to be all right.’
Another wicked aftershock hit. First the roar, then the shaking. My hand flew off the man’s head. I was on my knees, and I wanted to scream and scream and never stop screaming. Eli did scream. Blood cascaded from the man’s head. More bricks and chunks of concrete peeled themselves from high on buildings.
The woman was shouting. ‘It’s all right, Eli. We’re safe. Don’t cry. It’s okay. We’re safe.’
We weren’t safe and we never would be ever again.
The man moaned. I lurched to my feet. ‘Lie down. You’ll be safer lying down.’ I almost tugged him off the bench, slapping a hand against his wound – so much blood. I tried to wriggle out of my cardigan to make him a pillow and discovered I was still wearing my backpack. The woman pulled herself together enough to help me take it off.
A man running past stopped. ‘I’m a doctor. Let’s have a look at you.’ But there wasn’t anything he could do that we weren’t already doing. He didn’t have any supplies either. ‘Keep the pressure on that wound. Don’t let him go to sleep. Somebody’ll be along eventually to take him to hospital.’
How long would it take somebody to come? I didn’t want to stay. I wanted to find Mum and Dad. Blake was at uni – I just had to hope he wasn’t hurt, that the shaking wasn’t so bad out at Ilam. Here it felt like we were on a trampoline that just kept bouncing.
Katie and Shona would be following their family quake plans by now. Go home. Wait there. Stay safe. I should go home too. That’s what I
was supposed to do. I didn’t want to be here with a bleeding man and a woman who might give birth at any second. She shifted on the bench, wincing. ‘Hey! The baby’s not coming, is it?’
She gave a tiny laugh. ‘No. I promise.’
Sirens. The throb of helicopters. Cracking followed by crashing as more masonry gave up and fell. Dust and grit and sheets of paper.
People walked by, faces blank with shock. A couple of boys in Boys’ High uniforms ran towards each other, arms out to crush each other in a hug. Still nobody stopped with offers of help.
A policeman strode through the crowd shouting, ‘Hagley Park. Go to Hagley Park. Keep going. Hagley Park.’
I ached to get up and join the tide of shocked, dusty people walking away from the desperate city. It was cold now. I wished the sun would come out again. I wished my cardigan wasn’t under the man’s head. His eyes were shut. The woman kept talking to him. She asked him his name.
‘Ian.’ Long pause. ‘Ian MacKenzie.’
‘Don’t go to sleep, Ian MacKenzie. You’re going to be okay, but you have to stay awake.’
He said something, or it could have been just a moan.
She took it for an answer. ‘Good. You’re doing well, Ian. My name’s Selina. And this is…’
‘Lyla.’
Her husband arrived. He put his arms around his family. Tears from both of them. He squatted down to check Ian. ‘I’ll get help. There’s triage setting up in Latimer Square.’ Eli wailed as his father ran away.
Cathedral Square emptied. Eli watched the helicopters. Selina talked to Ian, nagging until he made a noise in response. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I was so cold. A woman hurried towards us, her arms full of a pile of white hotel bathrobes. She gave us one each. ‘It’s getting chilly now.’ She was gone before we could thank her.
Blood gushed as soon as I took the pressure off the wound. I slapped my hands back in place. Selina wrapped the robe around my shoulders and wiped blood from Ian’s face with it. It made a difference, being warm.
The ground kept shaking. Selina’s husband came back with men carrying a door. They lifted Ian onto it and told me to walk beside him. ‘Keep the pressure on as much as you can.’
I tried, but blood ran out from under my hand. My mind kept skipping ahead. Dad would be doing triage in Latimer Square. Mum would be helping people but I couldn’t guess where she’d be.
It was only two blocks from Cathedral Square to Latimer Square – but it was two blocks over broken roads filled with rubble and shocked people. Aftershocks kept the ground unsteady. I could only hold one hand pressed to Ian’s head. I hoped it would be enough.
We got there. The men lowered the door to the ground. One of them put an arm round my shoulders in a brief hug. ‘Well done, but you go home now, eh.’
A woman bent over Ian. ‘We’ll take over now. Good work.’ She had an Aussie accent.
‘Will he be okay?’ I could only whisper.
She didn’t raise her eyes from Ian’s bloody head. ‘Hope so. Time will tell. At least he’s got a chance, thanks to you.’
He had to be all right. He had to live. I stepped away to look around me. The square thronged with people: the injured, the helpers and those like me who were searching for family. The ground rolled. People screamed.
My parents weren’t there.
Where were Mum and Dad? Why hadn’t they told me where they were going for lunch? I should have asked. I should have gone home with Shona and Katie. I felt utterly alone in this alien, ruined city.
Somebody, a policeman maybe, shouted to clear the square: the authorities were setting up an emergency response centre.
I started walking, one of a river of people leaving the city behind. Some of them limped, some bled from cuts. Bare-footed women carried their high-heeled shoes. Some of them ran – shoes in one hand, phones in the other.
I stopped, trying to remember what my parents had said about their plans this morning when the world was still safe.
A man put his hand on my arm. ‘You okay there?’
I shook my head. ‘My parents, my brother – I don’t know where they are.’ I couldn’t say any more.
He winced. ‘I know the feeling – but the best thing you can do is go home. Keep yourself safe. They’ll be expecting you to do that.’
‘Yes. Thanks.’
‘Want me to walk with you?’
His kindness helped steady me. ‘I’m okay. Thanks though. I hope your family is all right.’ My brain started working again. This morning, Dad had talked about going to Fazazz. He was excited about some classic car they had. He’d joked about buying Mum a model car kit for her birthday. Today was my mother’s birthday. I wanted to howl. I wanted to find her and Dad. I wanted Blake to text saying he was okay.
An image of Fazazz flashed in my mind. The showroom – on the bottom floor of an old building. It’d be okay, it had survived the September quake.
But it might not be okay. All the buildings now in ruins around me had survived September. I wanted to go and see for myself if my father was in that shop drooling over an ancient car. He’d be helping anyone who was hurt, if only I knew where. He was calm in a crisis. He made you believe things would be all right.
People everywhere, all walking away, intent on leaving the broken city. They looked shocked and dazed. I couldn’t look up, not after I saw a guy frantically waving his shirt out a fourth-storey window.
I edged past a pile of masonry. Men in high-vis vests clambered over it. I wanted to help too. Mum and Dad would be helping. Blake could be too. But what if …
I kept walking.
At the corner, I stopped. Which way now? To my right, the mall section of Cashel Street was a disaster.
Gaping holes in the buildings. Windows gone. Bricks and masonry lying shattered on the street. People searching, helping others escape through gaps in walls. My eyes skipped over a shape on the ground, covered by a couple of towels. Just beyond it, people clambered over a heap of rubble.
‘Mum?’ A chunk of something heavy fell from a building just ahead. I hurried, going faster where the buildings were higher. ‘Mum!’ It was her. She was up on the pile of bricks and concrete, clearing a path to the wrecked shop behind, her face intent.
A man with a helmet and orange vest said, ‘This is no place for you, kid. You need to get home. Off you go.’
‘That’s my mum. I have to tell her I’m all right. I have to find out where Dad is.’ I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
‘I’ll get her. But then you scarper. Deal?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks.’
The man called out, ‘Clemmie!’ She lifted her head to look at him. He pointed at me.
I saw her lips form my name. ‘Lyla!’ She picked her way down the rubble heap. Her feet were bare.
Her arms around me were bliss. ‘Lyla. Darling. You’re all right?’ She held me at arm’s length. ‘Is that your blood?’
I kept my grip on her hand. ‘No. Tell you later. Where’s Dad? Blake? Have you heard anything?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’ll take hours for texts to come through.’ She looked away from me – but I’d already seen her tears. ‘It’s terrible. Go home, Lyla. Keep safe. Please?’
I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay, to help. Another rule from after September thrummed in my brain: obey instructions. I fought not to argue. She didn’t need that. ‘Okay. You stay safe, Mum.’ I tried not to imagine the buildings around us tumbling down on her and the other rescuers.
‘Good girl.’ Another hug and she turned from me.
‘Mum! Wait.’ I tugged my shoes off. Shoes – not sandals. It had been cold this morning. I pushed them into her hands. ‘Put them on. Don’t argue – please. I want to help. It’ll help you to wear these.’
She brushed her feet clear of dirt and grit before she put them on. ‘Thanks, love. They’ll help a lot. Be careful, won’t you? There’s glass everywhere.’ Then she was off, back to the work of clearing a w
ay to get into the building. I couldn’t remember what it had been before it fell into a pile of nothing.
I left my white socks on my feet. One of Mum’s high-heeled sandals lay in the middle of the street.
I swallowed a sob. Dad, please be alive.
I walked away from the city centre, one of hundreds, all of us with our shocked faces, some of us covered in dust and blood. Several people asked me if I was okay. A lot of Ian’s blood had got onto the white hotel robe. I hoped he was in hospital by now. I hoped he hadn’t…don’t go there.
Sirens shrieked and the sky vibrated with the throb of helicopters.
Where was Dad? Don’t think about piles of masonry, scattered bricks.
I walked, all the time checking anyone caring for the injured. I passed a couple of makeshift triage areas, but Dad wasn’t at either of them.
High-vis vests were everywhere. I’d thought we were done with them by now. They’d been all over the city in the months after the September quake, along with the men in hard hats driving cranes and diggers. There hadn’t been a street in the city without orange road cones. Now they were back. The road I walked on was split and buckled, great rifts torn in the seal.
It took me ages to get home. There were so many people, so many cars crawling along choked roads whose signs had either gone or pointed the wrong way. I walked through a city I didn’t recognise, its familiar landmarks pulverised. A tree Blake and I had climbed when we were small lay on the ground, its roots sticking up.
I came to a street that was open. I couldn’t think of its name. I joined the mass of people, all of us walking in the middle. Cars and pedestrians mixed together on the shattered road.
On every road leading out of the city, cars were nose to tail. They bounced up and down whenever another shock hit. So many cars. It would be quicker to walk.
Grey muddy eruptions spurted up through cracks. I dodged around the ones I could until a woman touched my arm. ‘It’s just liquefaction. The quake’s turned the ground to mush, just like last time.’
I should have worked that out for myself but I’d only seen it then when it was like lakes spread all over the ground.
