Bleak City (20 page)

These quakes weren’t over and although her properties had, by and large, fared well, there were four with major damage that would be passed over from EQC to her private insurer. Andrew would do his best, but insurance companies had a way of wriggling out of their obligations, minimising them, and Marjorie could lose money if they decided to play hardball. She needed to add to her portfolio, take on some of these written off properties, to ensure she wouldn’t be worse off from the quakes. For that, she needed Andrew to assure her she was buying properties from which she could profit, and for that she needed him to be focused, his mind untarnished with worrying about his family and how they were coping in the aftershocks.

At the end of October 2011, the central city reopened to retail. The red zone cordon was still there, although it had been reduced to cover only a handful of city blocks. What opened was a new shopping mall, the Re:Start mall, made of shipping containers painted in bright colours and arranged into a shopping precinct. It was meant to be temporary, but it was something cheerful in a year when there wasn’t much to be cheerful about. The containers had been set up in Cashel Street near the Ballantynes department store, which had completed its repairs and was ready to act as the anchor retailer, bringing people back into the city. For many, it was the first close look they’d had at their city for eight months.

Alice had gone into the city the afternoon after the container mall’s grand opening. The mall was full of colour and vibrancy and, at the same time, unbearably sad. People had died here. Alice was disoriented, the shape the containers assumed was not that of the old, demolished mall but of laneways with courtyards. She kept trying to think of what had been there before, if she was in a spot where someone had died, and she thought of the people, remembering them from the coroner’s inquests. The families of the dead had been into the city in the days before the container mall opened, they had been able to pay their respects. But could that ever be enough?

Now Alice was back in the city with her cousin Tyler, walking around the rubble, pointing out buildings that had not yet been demolished. Tyler was Kevin’s nephew, and he was the same age as Alice. Ever since Lindsay and Kevin had gotten together, Tyler would visit her family in Christchurch for a week or so at a time and she would go and visit his family in Blenheim. After leaving school, he did a carpentry course and had been working for a builder since then. The previous week, he had decided to quit his job and move to Christchurch for the rebuild. It was, he said, the best opportunity for someone like him to really set himself up, he wouldn’t be out of work for a decade. Kevin warned him it wouldn’t be easy, and that he should’ve held onto his existing job and taken a few days to check out possibilities in Christchurch. But the cautious way was not Tyler’s way, never had been.

Walking around rubble had become a habit for Alice. There was little else to do when she wasn’t working or looking after the kids. There were no restaurants, no bars, at least not on the eastern side of town. Most of the Port Hills walking tracks were off limits, the only one near to home was too exposed for Alice, a fierce wind often came up over the ridge and she would end up freezing cold, in spite of the effort required to slog to the top of the hill.

Friends. There weren’t many around. Emma, who Alice had walked home with the day of the quake, had stayed with her parents until after the June quakes, which had been the death knell for their brick house. Her parents had moved out to Rangiora to stay with Emma’s brother and his family. Emma had been working for a bank in Riccarton since the February quake, but didn’t fancy commuting all the way from Rangiora into Riccarton every day, so left for Australia.

Some of the people Alice had been at uni with the year before had chosen to transfer to another university and those who stayed on seemed worn out by the temporary lecture theatres, the confusion of a university that wasn’t quite functioning as normal. What was?

Alice had warned Tyler the place was dead boring, but he said he’d be okay, she was there to keep him company. Alice wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. She was used to the place, Tyler wouldn’t be, he had a short attention span and when the dullness of the place drove him crazy, he would start driving her crazy.

The previous Friday night had been one of those times. Alice had been spending Friday nights with Sean and Charlotte for a couple of months. They would watch a video, at either her place or theirs. That Friday night, Sean and Charlotte had come around and Kevin and Lindsay had gone out for the night. Well, they had gone to visit friends for the night, there was little to go out to in the city, which was why Alice, Sean, Charlotte and Tyler stayed in watching a video. Which Tyler had complained about the whole time. Alice had picked the original
Jaws
because she thought it would appeal to him, but instead he fidgeted the whole time, swapping between sitting on the sofa or on one of the beanchairs. At one point, he sat back down on the sofa with a dramatic whump, knocking against Sean, who had a bowl of popcorn in his lap. The bowl upended and popcorn went everywhere, all over the sofa, between the cushions and down on top of Charlotte, who was sitting in a beanchair in front of the sofa. They paused the movie and cleaned up, Sean muttering about Tyler and Tyler complaining about how boring the movie was, why couldn’t they go out and do something?

‘We can’t go to a nightclub,’ Sean spelled out, ‘because there aren’t any. And even if there were, Lottie is fourteen, she’s not allowed in.’

‘She doesn’t have to go,’ Tyler said. ‘Just because we’re going doesn’t mean she has to tag along.’

‘Nice,’ Alice said. ‘Real nice, Ty. Just sit down, shut up and watch the movie.’ Which he did, quietly, but that was only because every time he seemed about to open his mouth and complain, Alice poked him in the ribs. In the end, the final battle between the shark and Chief Brody kept his attention, but she couldn’t get him to admit that the movie was actually pretty cool.

‘Your cousin’s an idiot,’ Sean had told Alice on the way out.

‘Your cousin’s a knob,’ Tyler told her once Sean and Charlotte were down the driveway and out of hearing range.

Although Alice and Tyler had always gotten along, it was different now. The quakes had changed her whereas for Tyler, they were almost entertainment. Alice had matured, or at least she thought she had, but he was still the same as he had been at fifteen, and he hadn’t been particularly mature then.

One summer when Alice was still in high school, Tyler was staying with them. They were fifteen and the next year would be their first year of NCEA. Alice wasn’t worried about herself, although she would get stressed over the exams, but she was worried about Tyler. He didn’t like school, didn’t like reading and wanted to leave as soon as he could. But he had no plans for anything other than hanging around his mother’s house playing games. When Alice brought it up, he accused her of being too serious, of having her life too planned out. That wasn’t true, she would point out, she had no idea what she was going to do at university. But you know you’re going to university, he would say, and she would feel like her life
was
too planned out, that maybe she had just assumed she would cruise through high school and into whatever course she chose at university.

She had decided not to go back to university this year for reasons she barely understood herself. Lately, though, she had found herself thinking about last year’s courses, what she had learned, and she realised that her interest in the subject was still there. Maybe, given some time, going back to university would be a good idea, the right choice. She had voiced these thoughts to Tyler, she thought that he would understand as they had known each other so long.

‘You should do a trade,’ he said. ‘Be a builder. Get your hands dirty.’

‘I have no problem with getting my hands dirty,’ Alice said. She had explained this to Tyler already, the reason she wasn’t working for Kevin was that Kevin was having trouble picking up work. So much of the available work was tied up with Fletchers and although Kevin had registered for that work, he found it difficult to get any. On the jobs he did get, he had been pressured to cut corners. He said it was all about cutting costs, not about making sure people’s houses were repaired properly, and when it became clear that there was unlikely to be more work coming his way, he made the difficult decision to let his guys go. So no, Alice wasn’t working for Kevin. Kevin was barely working for Kevin. Apart from Fletchers, there wasn’t much work going on. Insurers weren’t offering insurance on building work because of the ongoing quakes, so for one reason or another, everything was stalled. Kevin had told Tyler it would be best to go back home, that if there was work for him there, it would be better for him to be there. Tyler, though, had decided that Christchurch was his big opportunity and couldn’t see past his dream to the reality of the stalled rebuild.

It was over a year since the first quake, and Alice thought about how different her life was. If it weren’t for the quakes, she would be nearing the end of the second year of her engineering degree and looking for a work experience placement. In the rebuild environment it would be interesting work. Or would she also experience the pressure to compromise that Kevin had experienced? She didn’t like the idea of that because it was clear from the Royal Commission that cutting corners in an engineering sense meant risking lives, and she didn’t want to be part of that.

Instead, here she was, in the city with her man-boy cousin watching a building being demolished. An enormous digger, nicknamed Twinkle Toes, was tearing away at a building some seven or eight stories high, dropping steel and concrete onto the site below. Tyler wondered what he would need to do to qualify to drive such a thing.

‘I thought you were a builder,’ Alice said. ‘This is anti-building.’

‘Yeah, but it’s cool,’ Tyler said. His hands were gripping the wire fencing, his eyes had a faraway glaze. She wondered if he was thinking of it as a video game. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, a video game about building demolition that you won by making the building collapse faster.

No, she told herself, this wasn’t a game. The rebuild was about people’s lives, which were on hold while the bureaucrats worked at getting the rebuild underway. The rebuild would take off in 2012, people were saying. But what if they were still staying the same thing about 2013? Or 2014 even? Alice hoped that wasn’t the case, she didn’t want to move away from her friends and family, well family anyway, most of her friends had already left. But she also didn’t want to spend years living in a broken city, finding things to keep herself amused. She wasn’t attention deficient the way Tyler was, but, she had to admit, the place was getting tedious. Something needed to change, progress needed to be made, and all she was seeing lately was demolition. She kept telling herself demolition was progress, the first step in getting the rebuild underway, but standing outside a building site watching a giant digger tearing bites out of a sad, broken building didn’t feel like progress. It felt like an autopsy. The city was being taken apart and hauled away, buried in a landfill north of the city. The old Christchurch was dead, this demolition process was about watching it decay.

Alice dragged Tyler away from the demolition and in the direction of the container mall. She needed to see something that would give her hope and as they wandered through the mall, looping through the laneways, she felt that sense of hope. The thinking that had resulted in the container mall could be applied to the wider rebuild, and if that happened, the city would be exciting, full of life, more than it had ever been before the quakes.

‘Pretty lame,’ was all Tyler would say. She wanted to hit him, punch him in the arm, but resisted the urge. That would be immature, something fifteen-year-old Alice would do. But that Alice was gone. She had been carried away with the debris of the city she loved.

After the building collapses in the February earthquake, the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission was established to find out why buildings had collapsed, why people had been killed and injured. Public hearings started in November 2011. Until those hearings began, many in the city believed that it was the intensity of the shaking that had caused the building collapses, that such collapses were unavoidable given the ferocity of the February quake. Privately some may have considered that there were other factors, but it wasn’t until the public hearings were underway that it started to become apparent the degree to which failures in communication and failures to address known issues had set up the situations in which so many people could die.

Following the first quake in September 2010, the city had a placard system in place sorting buildings into three categories in a rapid assessment process. Red placards were for buildings that were too dangerous to occupy, yellow for buildings that should only be entered on essential business and green for buildings for which there was no restriction on occupancy. After significant aftershocks buildings would be assessed once again. Of course building owners were keen to keep a green placard so their tenants could go about their business without interruption, and those with yellow or red placards wanted to be certain that the assessment was correct so they could go about their business, if circumstances made that possible.

As became clear from the early public hearings, there was often confusion about roles and responsibilities, who could say a building was safe to occupy and the criteria for determining so. One building that was regarded as safe to occupy collapsed in the February quake, its façade falling onto the road and killing a man sitting in his vehicle. In another case, a building that collapsed killing eighteen people had structural flaws that had been known about for twenty years, and the building had been known to be quake-prone as long as five years before its collapse. The building had been sold in 2009, but its new owner didn’t know it was regarded as quake prone. His property manager did, but had never told the owner. Alice followed the news stories about these hearings and did a mental tally of how many people might have lived if people had been less passive about buildings known to be dangerous. If people knew of potentially dangerous situations, surely they would do something rather than assuming that someone else would be sorting the problem?