Lyla: Through My Eyes

by Fleur Beale

  That corner turned into my go-to place when I was feeling low, fed up or just vaguely annoyed with life. All that stuff reminded me that other people did care. They couldn’t be here in my city, but they hadn’t forgotten us.

  We didn’t know what was going to happen with our house. Its fate was the same old Christchurch story – nothing was certain and things kept changing. First of all the inspectors said our house would be fixed. Then another lot of men with clipboards said it couldn’t be. Next we were told the ground was too unstable and we couldn’t rebuild even if our house had to be bulldozed.

  The parents spent hours on the phone to officialdom, but in the end gave up. ‘We’ll live in it till they pull it down round our ears,’ Dad said.

  Fine by me. The floor sloped, none of the doors would shut properly and there were gaps in some of the corners. But we were lucky: we had a house that kept us dry and reasonably warm. The drains got fixed, the water flowed from the taps – yep, we were one of the lucky families in a city where people were living in garages and tents with nowhere else to go when winter properly hit.

  Veronica in my class had moved five times already since February and she said they’d have to move again before the end of June. Louisa’s house had a tarpaulin instead of a side wall; they wanted to move out but rental places were almost impossible to find. Becky, Freya, Aimee and Christie’s houses were wrecked and they hadn’t been able to save anything.

  I went to school on Monday of the third week in June with everything ticking along nicely. I still missed Katie and Shona, but I now had earthquake friends like Matt, Joanne, Freya, Millie and Jess. Some days, I even added Feral Clancy to my list.

  We were in our first lesson for the day and all was well until it wasn’t. The room rattled and shook, desks skidded around on the floor. Mrs D yelled, ‘Drop, cover, hold!’ but we’d already all dived under our desks.

  Somebody near me was crying. Veronica. As if she hadn’t had enough drama already this year. Mr Jenks and his hissy fit flicked across my memory. I yelled, ‘Forswear, foul fiend! Fie upon you! Flee and never trouble us again.’

  Veronica hiccupped; Freya and a couple of others laughed. The siren was going – evacuation. Out we trooped onto the sports field. ‘A five. That was at least a five.’

  Some of the guesses were wild – nine point two, eight point seven. No way.

  We found out later that it was a five point five.

  The school had to be closed for inspection to make sure it wasn’t going to collapse on our heads. We went home.

  Natalie, you want me to collect the boys?

  Got them thanx. Glad yr ok.

  I walked slowly from the bus stop. Bloody ground – why couldn’t it just stay in one place? Who needed earth that upped and bounced around just for the fun of it? Not me.

  I turned the corner before our place and, oh joy, Mrs Nagel’s car was parked across the gutter.

  I can do this. I can be polite. I wished she hadn’t chosen an earthquake day to visit – my nerves were still rattling and my heart grabbed any old excuse to do the pile-driver drum riff.

  I shoved the front door open, dropped my bag, stuck a smile on my face and walked into the lounge. ‘Hi, Matt. Hello, Mrs Nagel, would you like…’

  ‘Lyla Sherwin, can’t you see I’m speaking to my son? Where are your manners? Leave us alone. Go on. Get out.’

  Matt held his head. ‘Mum! You can’t…jeez!’

  Rage, red hot and burning, filled every atom of me. Force ten on the quake scale. I jammed one fist on my hip and pointed at the door. ‘This is my house, not yours. You get out. Right now. Leave!’

  Mrs Nagel sat there, going red and doing the stranded fish gasp, then heaved herself up. ‘Come on, Matthew. We’ll leave this young lady in charge of her house.’

  Matt kept his butt firmly in his chair. ‘Goodbye, Mum.’

  ‘The door’s that way.’ I took a massive stride towards her. I was mad enough to grab her.

  She gave me a snooty look. I glared; she caved and scuttled around me.

  I didn’t move till we heard her car take off with the engine revving.

  The adrenalin faded. I looked at Matt. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘She deserved it.’ Short, sharp, didn’t want to talk about it.

  Fine.

  The house shook, the earth rumbled, I fell down, Matt got thrown from the chair. We hunkered down on the floor, turtle style. This felt worse than the earlier quake. My heart felt as if any minute now I’d be spewing it up on the carpet. I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t take any more.

  But you have to, just like you have to pick up the stuff from the pantry, put back the contents of the fridge and clean up the spills.

  And text the parents and Blake. I’m ok. You?

  They were all good, but Mum and Dad would be working late. Damage in the city. The emergency room busy with the injured.

  We gathered the neighbours for a communal meal. That night, Leo, Henry and their parents slept on our lounge floor with Matt, my family and the Chans. I was so glad to be one of a crowd.

  Aftershocks shuddered through all night long.

  But it turned out that nature still hadn’t finished with my city.

  We got snow. In the July holidays the weather turned bitter and the snow powered down.

  Matt stood at the window. ‘We need a snowman. Can’t waste the white stuff.’

  ‘I’ll summon the workforce.’ I reached for my phone.

  Snowman planning meeting at ours, 11am sharp! Bring your best techniques and ideas!!

  Five minutes before the hour our lounge was busting at its cracked seams with snowman-construction experts. Millie, Jess, most of the kids from our liquefaction brigade. Henry and Leo bouncing out of their skins. Joanne was there with her brother. Feral Clancy lay flat on the floor.

  We took several hours to build that sucker – it must have been the hugest snowman in the city. A combination of big and little boys had even managed to set another small one up on top of the portaloo.

  Anyway, while we were playing in the snow there were officials all over the country scratching their heads and worrying about how to host the seventh Rugby World Cup when one of the key venues had gone and made itself unusable.

  As the snow melted Matt talked about rugby non-stop. Fine by me. It helped keep the deaths out of my head. A hundred and eighty-five. That’s how many people had died in the February quake. Bring on the rugby.

  Matt planned his campaign. He intended to watch every All Blacks’ game from the fanzone in Hagley Park where, he told me several times, there would be huge screens and lots of atmosphere just like at a real game. ‘You can tag along too, if you like,’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’ For some of them, anyway. The Aussie–NZ games – I intended to be where I could watch and cheer and bite my nails. I wanted to go to the New Zealand versus Tonga opening game too.

  I couldn’t wait. The idea of being part of a crowd that had nothing to do with earthquakes – brilliant. The Tonga game kicked off at eight-thirty in the evening, so I had plenty of time to get home from school and to the park fanzone before kick-off.

  Matt’s rugby fever infected our whole neighbourhood. Imelda Chan bossed her family into coming. You couldn’t have stopped Leo and Henry with a force five-point-five quake. Myra and Dave, Blake, Mum and Dad, Matt’s dad, Millie, Jess, Joanne and their families, Feral Clancy – all of us made plans. How to get there and what to take.

  Something to look forward to – great. But then Matt’s school reopened on its own site in September and his day went back to normal and just like that, my life felt a lot harder. And that set off the guilts. So many others were struggling with real problems – injuries, deaths of loved ones, homelessness. All I had to do was go to school at a weird time. Get a grip, Lyla Sherwin.

  It didn’t make a blind bit of difference to how I felt. Swearing helped, but not for more than a few seconds. I simply hadn’t understood the solidarity I’d got from him having to deal with t
he same school upset as I did. Who’d have thought? Matt Nagel, support buddy? But being sarcastic didn’t help either.

  So I went to watch the rugby. I cheered and groaned and lost myself in the excitement of each game. It was good. I felt resilient.

  The All Blacks got into the quarter-finals, then the semis and then the final. We’d play France in Auckland at Eden Park at the end of the October holidays.

  The day arrived. We hit the fanzone. Henry kept leaping around, questions pouring out. ‘Will we win, Matt? We will, won’t we? The score’s gunna be us 72 and France nil.’

  Leo looked nervous. Imelda worked on looking cool – not easy when your face is painted solid black with a silver fern across the chin.

  The All Blacks won 8–7 but I reckon I wasn’t the only one whose heart nearly stopped a thousand times over during those eighty minutes. Tense! There needs to be a force nine word for the tension we all felt. And the roar when the final whistle went was a force ten.

  We walked home on a high.

  The win and the whole atmospheric excitement made going back to school at the wrong time of the day okay. Life went on. Fun still happened, and we had the opening of the start-up mall to look forward to at the end of October – shops in shipping containers. It felt like the central city was beginning to come alive again.

  But in the days between the rugby ending and the start-up mall opening, Mr Nagel found a place to rent and Matt moved out. ‘See ya round, Lyla S.’

  I lifted a hand in farewell. He high-fived me. I couldn’t believe how much I didn’t want him to go. Who could I talk to now? Of course Matt didn’t do talk, but he’d been there through the worst of it. In his own weird way he’d been kind. If he did get to be an All Black, I’d go and watch him play.

  Having him around had helped. Like, I could tell he was freaked out too when an aftershock happened. Meals, dishes, washing, kid-minding – he’d helped with all of it. Matt Before Quake was horrible. Matt Post Quake was okay. And now he wasn’t here, and it sucked.

  Fate had more to chuck into the mix before October ended. There was news about GG Block at my old school. It was being torn down.

  I suddenly didn’t feel like going to the mall opening. Big deal – shops again. Who cared? Not me.

  As it turned out, I should have sucked it up and gone to the stupid opening of the dumb mall. Not going gave the parents the opportunity to ask Probing Questions. ‘How are you feeling, Lyla?’

  ‘Fine. Don’t keep hassling me.’

  ‘Is school going okay? How are you coping with the homework?’

  ‘No problemo, I get it done in the mornings.’

  ‘How are you coping without Katie and Shona around?’

  ‘I miss them, but Joanne, Freya and I hang out now.’

  ‘Are you as close to them as you are to Katie and Shona?’

  ‘Oh for crying down the broken chimney! Stop hassling me!’

  They were always watching me, checking my mood temperature. It drove me nuts. I was fine. If sometimes I felt like I was wading through thigh-deep liquefaction, so what? I wouldn’t be the only one in the city who wasn’t exactly a box of fluffies right now.

  The liquefaction hit the fan thanks to Mrs Ghastly Nagel. She rang the landline at ten one Tuesday evening. Mum snatched it up, all of us thinking Late call. What’s happened? Who’s sick/injured/in hospital? Mum automatically hit the speaker button – best to do that. It avoids the need to repeat rotten news.

  The voice of the Queen of Ghastliness erupted. ‘Clemmie, I want you to go and get some things from the house. I’ve got a list. You’ll need to write it down.’

  Mum took a deep breath, or maybe two. Mrs N said, ‘Clemmie? Are you ready?’

  I never liked to be on the receiving end of Mum’s voice when it went deadly calm and icy cold. ‘Candace, I am not going near your house. It’s red-stickered and very unstable. Goodbye.’

  Then the Queen of Horrible said, ‘I should have guessed you’d refuse to help me. And as for your daughter’s egregious behaviour…’

  What?

  But yay for my mother. In a voice colder than the July snowstorm, she said, ‘And what about your part in this egregious behaviour, Candace? What did you do to make my daughter angry enough to lose her temper?’

  Apparently Mrs N didn’t want to go into her own eg-whatever behaviour. We heard her splutter before the line went dead.

  Mum plonked down the receiver. ‘Bloody woman. What happened, Lyla?’

  So I had to tell her the whole gory story of me ordering the woman out. Mum winced – at Mrs N, not me. ‘Unbelievable. Matt’s not got it easy with a mother like her.’

  I shook my head and kept it down to hide the tears just waiting to spill over and alert the parents that I was a tad shaky.

  But apparently parents were meant to be looking out for signs of stress in their kids and I got even more attention focused on my ‘well-being’.

  I held it together, mainly by talking to Joanne and Freya about how other people were coping. Joanne said her grandmother took a friend from New Plymouth to look at the Red Zone. They peered through the wire fence at the cathedral and her grandmother cried.

  Freya’s mother wouldn’t go into a supermarket. ‘She’s terrified of things falling on her.’

  I told them about Myra’s friend Elaine who went to Auckland for a break. ‘She’s wanted to go up the Sky Tower forever. But Myra said when she got there she freaked out. Tall building. Lifts. No way.’

  We didn’t talk about ourselves and we didn’t talk about the demolition of our school. I didn’t want to discover they were as jumpy as I was. We needed each other to be okay. I could keep on going if everyone around me just got on with it.

  The wheels fell off the trolley in the middle of November. All I did was stomp in after school and kick the door harder than usual to get it shut.

  ‘How was school, Lyla?’ Mum asked, her gimlet eyes boring into me.

  Leave me alone. I dumped my bag. ‘It was okay. Not brilliant – it’s not the same without Katie and Shona. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I kind of miss having Matt around.’ Pick up on the decoy topic, Mum. Let’s talk about Matt. Or Shona and Katie.

  Why did I think that would work?

  ‘I’ve made a counselling appointment for you for Friday.’ She plonked a hand on my shoulder. ‘No arguments, Lyla.’

  ‘Mum! I don’t need counselling!’ I got out of there before I exploded all over the kitchen.

  I just one hundred per cent knew the parents would be exchanging one of their worried-over-Lyla looks. Well, let them. I was fine. I was handling it. I was one of the lucky ones – somewhere to live, parents who cared (a bit too much), new friends. I wouldn’t be the only one to think earthquake when I heard the roar of a truck engine or a plane. It wouldn’t be just my heart taking off like a racehorse, because I wasn’t the only jumpy one in the city.

  I absolutely was not going to sit down with a counsellor, unless they could stop the aftershocks and magic the city back to whole again. Like that was going to happen. Neither of the parents mentioned the counselling appointment all week, and I didn’t remind them.

  On Friday, Dad was waiting for me after school. He opened the car door. ‘Hop in, Lyla.’

  I got in. It was nice to be picked up from school, but unusual enough to make me suspicious. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Counselling.’

  Oh. Hard to believe, but I’d forgotten. ‘If it’s not in a single-storey building I’m not getting out of this car.’

  She was in a single-storey office in Riccarton, where every business that used to be in a high-rise in town seemed to have relocated to.

  When Dad stopped the car he said, ‘It’s hard living here now, hon. Take all the help you can get. Clemmie and I – both of us have regular counselling.’

  He leant over to give me a hug. ‘You’re a great kid. But your mum and I suspect you’re struggling more than you realise.’

  Am not s
truggling.

  The counsellor said to call her Cilla. Her grey hair might have been tidy when she’d arrived at work, but by the looks of things she’d dragged her hands through it more than a few times since then.

  It took her about three point five minutes to crack me open. Utter humiliation for an entire hour. I howled and hiccupped and bellowed – I was my own personal earthquake.

  I went through all the tissues she had left in the box on her desk. I know she asked me questions, because each time she did I howled a whole new gush of disgusting wetness.

  Exhausting. By the end of the fifty minutes, I couldn’t sit up straight.

  Dad came in. Through the fog, I heard battle fatigue and complete break somewhere safe.

  If I’d had any energy left I’d have had hysterics – there wasn’t anywhere safe. Nowhere. Nothing was ever going to be safe again.

  The very next day I was on a plane, winging my way across the Tasman to Brisbane where my grandparents would be waiting for me.

  ‘Don’t worry about school,’ the parents told me. ‘We’ll sort it out. Think of this as sick leave.’

  Whatever. Too hard to think. I didn’t even know what I thought about being parcelled up and posted to another country for however long it took to cure me of bursting into tears anytime anyone looked at me.

  Wretched counsellor. I was fine until she got stuck into me.

  I slept. We landed in Brisbane. Somehow I found the strength to get myself off the plane. The temperature in the airbridge was warm. It was late in the evening. The day at home had been colder than this. Warm was nice.

  Grandy and Nana Lilith hugged me, collected my bag, stowed me in their car and didn’t bother me with talk. I was grateful. I slept again, only waking up when Nana Lilith put her arm around my shoulders. ‘Come along, sweet girl.’

  I unscrambled myself from the car. Even in the darkness I could tell we weren’t anywhere near their Sunshine Coast apartment. ‘What? Where?’

  I was looking at a house raised above the ground but not in a scary way. It had big windows and wide verandahs. It looked friendly.