Bleak City (16 page)

Sonya and the kids were camped out in the lounge in front of the fire. Cody and Ella leapt up from where they had a bunch of cars their grandparents had bought them set up on the floor. They mobbed Alice, who gave them big hugs.

‘We have power,’ Alice said to Sonya. ‘You could come round, watch a video with us.’

Cody and Ella looked at Sonya hopefully. She shook her head. Clearly being confined to one room of the house with two children forced to find non-television means of entertainment for the entire day was preferable to spending time with her family. What would she do once it became dark but the kids weren’t tired enough to go to sleep?

Alice got a cutting board and jam and butter from the kitchen and served up the scones in front of the fire. They had lost their warmth, but that didn’t stop Cody and Ella from scoffing a scone each. Had Sonya fed them anything that morning? Alice looked around the lounge. There were dirty cereal bowls stacked on the television cabinet, so, yes, she had. It was something.

Alice played a couple of games of Monopoly Deal with them, playing badly to let them win. Cody won the first and Ella was on the verge of winning the second when the power came back on. It was a relief, Alice was wondering how to tactfully pull something together for lunch, since Sonya didn’t seem motivated to go out to the cold kitchen and do anything for them. Having power would make that easier.

‘What are you going to do for lunch?’ Alice asked.

‘Hadn’t thought about it,’ Sonya said. ‘Not hungry.’

Alice suggested making a soup, and the two of them went through to the kitchen, which Sonya started heating up with a fan heater. The house was cold, uninsulated, like so many houses in Christchurch. Sonya had been in the house for a couple of years, it was a rental, but with the quake damage it was colder than ever. She would have to move out when her landlord had repairs done, which would be September, she said.

‘What will you do?’ Alice asked. There were some potatoes and onions that were looking a bit past it, but they would be fine in a soup. There were some more vegetables in the fridge and freezer and some stock cubes in the pantry. It would be enough.

‘I don’t know,’ Sonya said. She was on the verge of tears and started peeling the carrots in a way that made Alice worry for her fingers. ‘Rents are so expensive, I don’t know what we’ll do.’

Alice wanted to suggest her grandparents, but they hadn’t heard from Sonya for weeks, and so that probably wouldn’t go down too well. To her surprise, Sonya brought it up herself.

‘Do you think Mum and Dad would have us?’ she said so quietly Alice wasn’t sure she had heard properly.

‘Definitely,’ she said.

Sonya sniffed back tears.

‘Would you like me to ask them?’ Alice said.

Sonya nodded.

Alice made enough soup for dinner as well as lunch. She had lunch with them and another game of Monopoly Deal, then walked back home. It was colder and the footpaths were freezing up. She was looking forward to spending the rest of the day in front of the fire reading.

‘How are they?’ Lindsay asked when Alice got home.

‘Power’s back on now, they’ll be fine. But they have to move out in a few weeks. I said I’ll ask Grandma and Grandad if they can stay with them.’

‘They’ve already said yes,’ Lindsay said.

‘But she wouldn’t agree if she thought we had all this planned out for her,’ Alice said. She hung up her jacket and scarf and went through to the kitchen to put the jug on to boil. ‘Want a coffee?’ she called back to Lindsay.

‘Please,’ Lindsay said, coming through. ‘I’m not sure I like you being cunning,’ she added.

Alice pretended she hadn’t heard. She could imagine the argument that would follow, how you had to be on the level dealing with people, not manipulative, people deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. She handed Lindsay a coffee and took her own through to the lounge to sit in front of the fire. Alice didn’t think people were evil, not many of them, anyway, but she couldn’t see the value of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. If there was any icing on the quake for Alice, it was that she was seeing more clearly how the world worked, that it wasn’t the cosy place her mother wanted it to be, where people looked out for each other and businesses and governments kept their promises.

Alice woke with an aftershock hangover and had trouble making her eyes open. Her alarm had been going for a minute or so and it had intruded into the dream she was having, a dream that quickly faded as she looked around her half-dark bedroom. Had there been an aftershock in the night? Was that why she felt so awful? She would have to check Geonet. But that could wait. She had promised herself the night before that she would get up and go for a run that morning, that was the reason for the alarm. She wasn’t working and she was going to relax for the day, potter around the house and try to pull herself together. The bed was warm, the room was not, but she had promised herself she would go out.

She forced herself from bed and into her running clothes, which she had set out on the end of the bed the night before. She had been running regularly in the months following the February quake, but winter had made it harder. Following the snow days, the footpaths were icy and she didn’t want to slip and hurt herself. That would just be too depressing. Even when it wasn’t iced over, it was dark in the mornings, which was when she preferred to run, and the footpaths were a nightmare. Dips, bumps and snags everywhere. She felt sorry for elderly people who were used to walking around their neighbourhoods. No footpath anywhere was smooth, no road was even. The roads were so hard on vehicles that mechanics were doing a roaring trade. Alice’s Grandad Neil was seeing a huge increase in business: tyres needing replacing, suspension needing redoing. He reckoned windscreen businesses were flat out from all the stone chips flying around as roads were patched up and with all the big trucks hauling demolition waste out of the city.

Driving around Christchurch was an adventure of the worst kind, and Alice could always spot a non-local. They were the ones who still bothered trying to drive around potholes, bumps and raised manholes, whereas the locals knew that if you missed one hazard, there was another waiting a matter of metres away. As work proceeded on the roads, the diversions were increasingly bizarre, road cones marking out convoluted S-shapes where the cars were meant to follow. She had driven on more than one road where the footpath had actually been made into road so road crews could deal with whatever seriously bad thing had gone on under that particular road.

It was cold outside, but not frosty, and Alice walked towards the river, then broke into a slow jog, following the course of the river towards the hills. Her breath plumed out in front of her as she pushed forward, making herself keep going. This had been much easier a few months ago.

The weekend before, Alice had been invited to a family dinner. Andrew was back in town and he had asked if she wanted to meet up at his cousin’s house. Rebecca and her husband Dan were Sean and Charlotte’s parents, making Sean and Charlotte Alice’s second cousins. The three of them had gotten along well and planned to get together again soon. All of them were finding Christchurch depressing, with their normal routines disrupted, many of their friends gone and the homes they were used to living in broken and cold.

Alice hadn’t seen Andrew since soon after the February quake, although they had stayed in touch by text. He and Michelle were still living down south. Although Andrew came back to town regularly, his visits were brief, he was mostly there to catch up with his colleagues, who were working in a makeshift office set up in an old villa just outside the red zone cordon. It wasn’t big enough for everyone and some people were working from home, which is what Andrew was doing a lot of the time.

Michelle refused to come back to Christchurch, Andrew said, and he had decided it was best for the children to finish out the school year in Wanaka and then see about coming back. They weren’t the only ones from Christchurch doing something similar, he said, another family they knew was also in Wanaka and their children were going to the same school as Andrew and Michelle’s children.

Rebecca and Dan’s house was on a hill in the suburb of Redcliffs, in the city’s southeast. Sumner was the beach suburb and Redcliffs was the one before it, nestled on the southern side of the Avon-Heathcote estuary, just before its outlet to the sea. Redcliffs had been in the news after the February earthquake because its primary school was beneath a huge cliff that had collapsed in the earthquake. Although no one in the school was hurt, there were houses behind the school, right beneath the cliff, and some of the residents who were at home that day had died. Redcliffs School was now using another school’s campus over in Sumner, quite a long way for the local kids to go each day.

Rebecca and Dan’s house had a lot of damage in the February quake and even more in the June quake, which had been nearby and shaken those eastern hill suburbs badly. It was hard to say which one had done more damage, Rebecca said, but they thought it might be June. Did it matter, though? Surely EQC would see how much damage there was and put them overcap? It might be more complicated than that, Andrew said. There was a court case, one of the private insurance companies had taken EQC to court over whether EQC should pay an overcap payment for each earthquake a householder had claimed on. Rebecca and Dan had made claims for three quakes, one each for September, February and June, so nothing was likely to happen with their house until that court case had been concluded.

There weren’t many people left living in their neighbourhood, where a lot of the houses were obviously twisted and not fit to be occupied. There were rumours that parts of Redcliffs would be red zoned due to the risk of rockfall in future earthquakes. Rebecca and Dan were feeling like the process would never get going, they hadn’t even been assessed yet. Red zoning would, at least, allow them to move on, even if they did lose money in the deal.

Alice had learned something interesting about the Moorhouse family that weekend. She knew they were what her own family considered wealthy, but Marjorie, apparently was quite the landholder. She had a tonne of rental properties, and Andrew and Rebecca had been talking about them, how most of them were repairable but there were a handful that looked like they were going to be put overcap. Once that happened, Andrew would deal with the insurance company on Marjorie’s behalf. Alice had been thinking of Marjorie as a little old lady with a nice home on the river to spend her retirement in, when it turned out she had this extensive property portfolio.

‘Grandmother has always had an eye for a good investment,’ Andrew said when Alice asked him about these other houses. ‘Pop was into commercial property, but after he died, she sold them all off, she had been trying to convince him to do that for over a decade, she could see the writing on the wall.’

What writing was that? Alice had asked. As the suburban malls grew in the 1980s, retail in the city started to suffer, which meant the city as a whole started to suffer. Returns on central city commercial buildings declined. Many buildings were old and required expensive updates, especially ones that were regarded as heritage. And as long as those buildings were in poor condition, they couldn’t attract corporate tenants willing to pay higher rents, they could only attract retailers who were struggling, who couldn’t afford to pay much. Marjorie could see that rents were only going to go down and she didn’t want to waste money on expensive upgrades. Residential property values, on the other hand, were only going up, so Marjorie had moved her money into residential properties and Tony, another grandson, managed those properties for her.

Tony was currently working for EQC, which meant, Andrew said, that Marjorie’s rentals were getting through the system quickly. That sounded dodgy to Alice, although she didn’t say so. But she did say she thought the speed with which someone was dealt with by EQC should be based on need. If someone couldn’t live in their damaged house and was having to rent, while also paying a mortgage, shouldn’t their needs take priority? It shouldn’t depend on who you knew to get things done following the earthquake.

Alice wasn’t sure, but she thought Dan, Rebecca’s husband, might feel the same way. At that point in the conversation, he had left the room, saying he was going to check on lunch. But there was a grim look on his face, his mouth set in a firm, disapproving line.

Later, after dinner, they were sitting in the lounge drinking tea and coffee when Dan’s views became apparent. The adults were talking once again about how repairs were being prioritised. Alice said it should be older people first, like her great-grandparents, her mother’s grandparents. They had been living in their house near the Avon ever since she could remember. The house had a lot of cracking, but the foundations seemed to be okay for that part of town, they were far enough away from the river that the ground had held up well. But they were in their eighties and their health wasn’t great, so surely they should be prioritised. Dan was nodding away as Alice described their situation.

‘Unfortunately,’ Andrew said, ‘it’s those who make the most noise whose houses are getting done first, those who use their connections.’

‘But it shouldn’t be like that,’ Dan said. He was flushing, only slightly, but because of the earlier conversation about Marjorie’s rentals, Alice was watching him closely. ‘We could make lots of noise and insist our house gets fixed first. But we can live in our house.’

‘But why should we wait if we can get things done more quickly by just asking Tony to push us along in the queue?’ Rebecca said, jumping in. Clearly this was an ongoing discussion.

‘What if we’re behind Alice’s great-grandparents in the queue,’ Dan said, ‘and us jumping the queue means that those eighty-somethings have to sit in the queue for six months longer.’

‘It wouldn’t be six months,’ Rebecca said. ‘Not if we were right behind them.’

‘No, but think about everyone who can jump the queue – because of someone they know – going ahead and doing it. Then those old people who have no someone-they-know are stuck for months or even years. Six months is nothing to us, we’re young. But to them, six months might be, say, only a quarter of the time they have left. How would you feel being asked to give up twenty-five percent of your remaining life so someone with a mate in the right place could get their work done before yours?’