Bleak City (11 page)

After her late breakfast, Alice went for a run, following the river, looking at the damage to houses. She needed to go back to Lindsay and Kevin’s and check that it was all right. There had been looters in the suburbs, breaking into houses and stealing valuables, including appliances and hot water cylinders. Scum. She would go over to the house later, in the car, on the way back from the supermarket.

There were two dairies near Marjorie’s house, but both were in bad shape, brick buildings with a lot of damage, one with a partially-collapsed canopy. Both were fenced off. Further down the road, there were cars parked in front of the tiny mall, which housed about half a dozen shops. There was a café down the back, could it be open for business? There was also a doctor’s office, but Alice didn’t think there would be so much traffic for that. Proper coffee! Alice had been to that café before, she came in occasionally and they had good coffee, baking done on the premises. But it had never done great business, tucked at the back of a row of shops on a low-traffic suburban road. Alice checked her jacket pockets and found a ten dollar note.

The café was full of people, more than Alice had seen in the rest of the suburb on her walk. It was like normal life in here, except all the people looked worn out, some with crazy hair. Some of the women wore no makeup, one had made an attempt and really shouldn’t have, the dark line of her eyeliner was shaky and broken along both eyes. But Alice couldn’t blame her for trying to do something to feel normal again.

She ordered a triple shot long black, to go, because there were so many people there Alice didn’t stand a chance of getting a seat. While she waited, she asked the owner, who was working the till, how it was they were still open. The building had no damage, she said, and once they had the power and water back on, there was no reason they couldn’t open up.

‘Business is good!’ Alice said, trying to contain her excitement. Maybe caffeine wasn’t a good idea. But it would be normal to have a long black, and after everything that had happened in the last two weeks and watching the footage of that tsunami coming ashore the night before, Alice desperately needed to do something normal.

‘A little too good,’ the woman said, wiping a stray bit of hair away from her forehead. ‘If you know anyone who wants a job, tell them to come see me.’ She handed Alice her coffee.

‘I will,’ Alice said. She walked home, sipping what she thought was the most delicious coffee she had ever tasted.

They had their very own portaloo, on the grass verge right in front of the house. Lindsay had always avoided the things when they went to the fireworks displays held in the Botanic Gardens or the annual agricultural show day. But now, there it was, right there, every time she went up the driveway or looked out the front window. Another reason to go back to Timaru.

The first reason to go back was that they weren’t going to get any action on their logburner for at least a month, and April was certainly having its cold, wet days. Kevin had demolished the top part of the chimney after the February quake, taking it down to the roofline and leaving a pile of red bricks alongside the house. Oh well, might be useful in the garden, should she ever be interested in working in the garden again. They still hadn’t done anything about the silt that had filled the back of the garden, it was about half a metre deep along the fenceline, and on the opposite side of the fence, in the neighbour’s driveway, there was an enormous hump that the poor guy had to drive over to get onto his property. He was well into his seventies, and his house was badly damaged. It had slumped from the liquefaction, and Lindsay didn’t think he should be living there. No, he had told her, he wasn’t leaving. He had lived in that house for fifty years, no earthquake was going to chuck him out.

The logburner. The Government had a programme in place, fast-tracking heating for damaged houses. She had called EQC the first time she was in Christchurch after the quake and someone had come out to take a look at their logburner to measure up its replacement and to try and talk her into a heat pump instead. They would only have to wait two weeks, instead of six, the guy said. But what happened if the power went out in winter? There had already been power cuts in different parts of town, it would only get worse in winter as the subtle damage to the electricity network became apparent under heavier loads. And if they got a heat pump, what would they do with all their firewood? They had ordered a load last spring, when prices were cheaper, which is what they did every year, and if they replaced the woodburner with a heat pump, all that wood would just sit there, along with the silt in the backyard, doing what exactly?

Lindsay desperately wanted to wash the dust off the house. A lot of silt had been dug out of properties – not their silt, of course, but a lot of other people’s silt – and the City Council had taken it away, but there was still enough drifting around to make a mess. The stuff was everywhere, roads, cars, buildings. The cat was leaving silty deposits wherever he sat, despite Lindsay’s best efforts to keep him brushed and clean.

There was no point washing the house or the car because both would quickly be dusty again. The night before, Alice had shown her a video of some teenage boys skateboarding in the city. It ended with a shot of a lone skateboarder drifting down the centre of an empty city street, dust blowing up around him. The first shot had made Lindsay start to cry. It was the old brick buildings in Woolston, she loved those buildings, had always hoped someone would do something with them, make them a proper retail area. But that wouldn’t happen now, it was obvious they were past rescuing. In another shot, skateboarders were jumping the cracks along Fitzgerald Avenue, where the northbound lanes had slumped towards the river. One of them hit a crack and came off, falling into the crack, which was deeper than he was tall. The abandoned, damaged city was certainly a skateboarder’s paradise, and she admired the fact they were getting out and exploring. She was too afraid to go near the city, to have a proper look at it. The thought made her start to cry, and she didn’t want that, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. She had lived in Christchurch all of her life and all the places familiar to her weren’t there any more. But in her mind, they still existed. To go and see their gone-ness would just be so final, it would make everything real. She wished she could be ‘resilient’, a word she was hearing far too much of. Those skateboarders, now they were resilient, adapting to how the place was, rather than being like her and missing something that could never be put back.

There was also no point wanting to wash the house or water the car or the garden because there were water restrictions. It was still unclear what the earthquake had done to the city’s aquifers, whether they were being polluted by sewage leaking from broken pipes, and everyone was being asked to conserve water. So no car washing or garden watering. It had annoyed her to see a neighbour a few doors down washing his car, even leaving the hose running as he soaped it up. She wanted to get in his face and tell him how inconsiderate he was being, not thinking about anyone around him and the fact that they, too, would like to wash their cars and houses, water their gardens and just enjoy a little bit of normality. She hadn’t, and it scared her that what had stopped her was that she had Jack with her. She didn’t want to be that type of person, who took their frustrations out on everyone unfortunate enough to be in her way. She needed to get away. But she had been back less than a week. And if she did go, she wouldn’t want to come back.

Lindsay and Kevin had discussed staying in Timaru, enrolling the kids in school there. Even if Kevin’s current jobs had been interrupted, they would need to be completed eventually. Things were starting to happen repair-wise and soon there would be more work. Kevin needed to be in Christchurch for that. She didn’t want to be away from him, she would miss him, and the kids would miss him. And now that they were back in Christchurch, Alice had come home. Alice had come home! She had missed her baby so much, and so much was going on with her. Ben for one thing. And she had decided not to go back to university, to leave it for a year or so and see about work, earning some money. When Lindsay pointed out that a lot of people had lost their jobs because of the damage in the city, Alice told her she already had a job, she was working at a nearby café. There was an open café? They should go!

Lindsay was easily distracted. Alice quickly got her back on track, saying she would be able to help with the kids. Lindsay was doing a lot of paperwork related to the damage to the house, and she needed the extra support, Alice said. That was true. Plaster cracks subjected to repeated earthquakes continued to shed powder. She considered duct taping them up, but then couldn’t be bothered because there was no duct tape and she would have to go to the supermarket, but then she remembered she hadn’t been able to find duct tape the last time she went looking for it in a supermarket, and so she would need to go to a hardware store to get some and she couldn’t think where there was a hardware store that was open, that still existed.

So there they were, living in a broken house with broken pipes, three adults and two little kids, one who they had struggled to toilet train just two years earlier. Olivia and Jack didn’t like the portaloo idea at all, even if it was right in front of their house. Lindsay wondered how people with kids coped when the portaloo was several houses a way, especially little ones who sometimes don’t plan their toileting all that well.

‘The pipes take our poos away and make sure they can’t make anything dirty,’ she explained. ‘But they’re too broken for us to use.’

‘But the toilet flushes,’ Jack said. ‘And the poos go away.’

‘It might be going, I don’t know, to a bad place.’ A bad place? Really? She didn’t want to have to explain sewerage backing up, flowing on people’s sections. She tried again. ‘The pipes are broken and the poos could get into the river and kill all the fish.’

‘There aren’t any fish in the river,’ Jack said. ‘Alice told me that. She said the river is so dirty from all the businesses that hardly anything can live in it and that’s why we never see any fish.’

Lindsay shot the filthiest look she could manage at Alice, which, given her state of mind, was probably pretty bad. Alice just raised a single eyebrow. Lindsay remembered the first time she had done that, when she was just three weeks old and feeding, the way Alice had looked up at her and cocked her tiny little eyebrow. She had inherited that from her father. Lindsay had never been able to master the eyebrow cock and felt, sometimes, like something was missing from her emotional repertoire because she couldn’t master that single querying mannerism. As a baby, the eyebrow cock had been sweet, but now it was infuriating. How dare Alice try to foster a sense of environmental awareness and responsibility in her children? Why had she left university? Why was she working in a coffee shop? They hadn’t had that conversation properly yet, Lindsay had been distracted by... something.

The portaloo was fine during the day. Mostly. Hot days were smelly days, even if the loo had been pumped out just that morning, and there was one day, their second day back, when Lindsay found herself lurching out of the portaloo retching, the combination of the smell and the heat so overwhelming that she hadn’t bothered to properly zip up her pants and just stumbled up the driveway and back into the house.

Fortunately, Olivia was back at school, so that was one less portaloo-averse person for her to worry about during the day. But there was no way she was going to expect her kids to go out to the portaloo at night.

For nights, there was the chemical toilet. The City Council had distributed chemical toilets free of charge to parts of the city that had badly damaged pipes. But with three adults and two children in the house, the chemical toilet filled up quickly and had to be emptied at the poo tank that had been installed down the road, about twenty houses away. There were chest-high poo tanks dotted all over the neighbourhood and sucker trucks coming around regularly to empty them.

Kevin emptied the chemical toilet every night when he came home, before getting in the shower. Because he truly believed in hygiene, he had a set of protective clothing just for that job. He put on his wet weather gear: raincoat, waterproof pants, gumboots and elbow-length plastic gloves, spread a tarpaulin set aside specifically for the chemical toilet in the back of his van and carried the chemical toilet out to the van. He drove down to the poo tank and emptied the toilet, then drove home, restored the chemical toilet to its rightful place in front of The Toilet That Should Not Be Used and proceeded to soak his raincoat, his pants and his elbow-length gloves in a dilute bleach solution. So that they would not get gastroenteritis. Then he would get in the shower. Each morning, before he went to work, he would take his raincoat, his waterproof pants and his elbow-length gloves out of the laundry sink and leave them on the clothesline to dry during the day so he was ready to repeat the whole process again when he came home from work. Lindsay thought he was being over the top. But, he argued, no one in the family was getting sick, so it was working. She hadn’t heard of mass gastro outbreaks elsewhere in the city due to poor chemical toilet hygiene, but she decided it was best to keep silent on that.

The chemical toilets were just camping toilets, and it seemed the City Council had cornered the market on them, buying up every available chemical toilet In The World and distributing them, free of charge, to certain parts of Christchurch. Sachets for treating the contents of the toilet were being distributed regularly so that households could treat their own waste. Lovely. And they were lovely, the blue crystals in the sachets were an intense blue, like that of a Ceylon sapphire.

Lindsay needed to sort out Jack’s bedroom. The walls had been damaged, there were so many cracks along them that she and Kevin wondered what the room was trying to spell out, what message it was trying to deliver. Leave Christchurch? The plaster in the closet was cracked and crumbling, coming loose and was all over the place, on Jack’s clothes and in his shoes. She hoped she would be able to rescue them. The shoes, maybe, but she didn’t think she could ever wash the clothes enough to feel they were free of plaster dust. She hated the way the stuff felt on her skin, like it was sucking the moisture out, and she didn’t want to take a chance on leaving enough embedded in Jack’s clothes that it irritated his skin. Jack was sleeping in the second bed in Olivia’s room and they were niggling at each other, in spite of the fact that they had been just fine sharing a room in Timaru for the last few weeks. But now that they were home, they were getting territorial with one another. She could hear them arguing with each other over what they were going to watch on TV, then Alice interrupting them and making them watch her pick. That was
Finding Nemo
, which she had loved as a kid, and both Olivia and Jack loved it too. But then they were arguing over who got to sit where, and so Alice separated them, one to either side.