Bleak City (40 page)

Marjorie was thinking that she should just let the TC3 properties go, for Andrew’s sake. She was getting soft, she realised. Whereas a decade ago she would have told herself to go for the deal, more recently, she had been thinking about how she didn’t want to spend her last years pushing her grandsons into working hard for her when they had already gone above and beyond what any reasonable grandmother could expect of them.

Alice had visited a few nights earlier, asking questions about the past, the family’s history. Marjorie had discouraged her children from asking about their English relatives from the time they were young, the whole family knew it was an off-limits topic. But Alice hadn’t grown up around the family and was curious. Marjorie talked, but just a little bit, she intended giving a list of names, nothing more. She found herself telling Alice about Edward, how he had signed up as soon as he turned eighteen and was so excited to be doing his part for his country. Andrew looked like him, Marjorie told Alice, the same build and colouring. When Marjorie was growing up, Edward could always make her laugh. She had missed him so much over the years. She also told Alice about her other siblings, Gwen, Charlie and Lizzie, and about how the house they grew up in had been bombed. It was a surprising release, to voice some of the thoughts that had haunted her since the earthquakes began.

‘This was all a very long time ago,’ Marjorie said. ‘I find it difficult to talk about.’

Alice nodded. ‘Losing so much of your family in one go can’t have been easy.’

‘Nothing about that war was easy,’ Marjorie said. It was time for a change of subject. ‘Are you feeling any better about your job?’

Alice was puzzled at the question and seemed to be thinking about how to answer it.

‘I know it’s not what I want to keep doing,’ Alice finally said. ‘I don’t think I’m helping the rebuild at all, I’m not helping people get their claims settled fairly.’

Marjorie studied the girl, was touched by the concern etched on her young face. ‘The rebuild has never been about settling claims fairly, Alice. It’s about keeping costs down. Nowhere is that more true than at Southern Response, because the Government never wanted to bail out an insurance company.’

‘That’s why we’re so careful, because it’s taxpayers’ money,’ Alice said, shaking her head. ‘But it takes such a long time to work out what a fair settlement is.’

‘It also takes time to properly pull the wool over people’s eyes and figure out how to make voters think they’re being served well when all that’s being served is politicians’ own interests,’ Marjorie said. ‘All governments are like this.’ Alice’s view of the world was one where people looked out for each other. That wasn’t the world Marjorie knew. No one had ever looked out for Marjorie, not until she married Walter. But that hadn’t lasted long.

‘But it shouldn’t be like that,’ Alice said, seeming much younger than she was.

‘No, it shouldn’t,’ Marjorie said. ‘But it is, and you can’t change it. No one can.’

In the months since their project manager’s last visit, Lindsay and Kevin had prompted the insurance company for their geotech report, which they had received a few weeks later. It told them nothing. It was, it seemed, based on what their project manager had told the geotech company about how the house would be repaired. It seemed backward, surely the expert advice was supposed to be the basis for the repair solution, not the other way around?

A few days after the geotech report arrived, they received the new scope of works. Their issue with the previous scope of works was that it proposed just gluing the cracks in their foundation. There had been no explanation as to why the insurance company had changed their minds about lifting the house and replacing the foundation. The new scope of works recommended replacing about a third of the ring foundation, which, although an improvement, wasn’t good enough. Kevin and Lindsay could see crumbling parts of the rest of the foundation and didn’t see how the insurance company could say it was okay to replace one crumbling part of the foundation but not the other. They were considering how to voice their disagreement when the insurance company sent them an offer to cash settle.

Cash settling would let them repair their house the way they wanted to. Even better, they wouldn’t have to rely on the PMO’s project manager, who didn’t seem terribly inclined to listen to them when they pointed out more damage. After all, he was the one who wrote the scope of works that replaced a third of the foundation but ignored the extent of damage to the rest of it.

‘Did that guy come around?’ Kevin asked when he arrived home. Lindsay was in the kitchen getting dinner ready, cutting vegetables into chunks. She slapped the knife she was using down on the bench, making a loud bang when the knife’s metal handle hit the stainless steel benchtop. She turned to Kevin.

‘No, and he’s not answered his cell all afternoon,’ she said. That was the second builder they had contacted to try to get some idea of how much it would cost to lift the house and replace the foundations. Lindsay and Kevin had decided they could save money by replacing the damaged walls and ceilings themselves, and that money could be spent on the foundations. But if they couldn’t get someone to quote for the foundation work, they couldn’t make a decision over whether or not they could stretch the cash settlement far enough. Accepting the cash settlement without having a good idea about how much the foundation repair would cost risked ending up in a position where they weren’t able to afford fixing the house properly.

‘Well if we can’t get anywhere with builders, we might have to just let them go ahead with the repair,’ Kevin said. He filled a glass of water from the tap and sipped at it, leaning up against the bench. ‘There’s an email from the insurance company, they say we’ve missed the deadline for making a decision.’

‘What?’ Lindsay said. ‘We didn’t have a deadline.’

‘I didn’t think we did either, but that’s what they’ve said.’

Lindsay wiped her damp hands on a tea towel and marched through to the lounge where the laptop was set up, Kevin following through. She found the email detailing the offer. ‘No deadline, no timeframe.’

Kevin just nodded, and Lindsay felt her anger rise at his calmness. This was serious, how could he just stand there?

‘Did you say something when you talked to them on the phone?’ Lindsay said.

‘No, Lin, I didn’t,’ he said, and she heard the edge of anger in his voice. ‘There was never anything about a deadline.’

‘Well what are we going to do?’ Lindsay swallowed back tears, her throat sharp from the effort. ‘They can’t just force us to make a decision without the information we need. Can they?’

Kevin shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But I think we should write and point out that there has been no deadline, and that we’ve been waiting a long time. We’ve been overcap two years, after all, they can’t just say we’ve got six weeks to make such a major decision.’

‘Do you want me to do that?’ Lindsay said. She had already created a new email and was stabbing at the keyboard.

‘Yes, I’ll finish up dinner,’ Kevin said.

They said nothing to the kids or Alice, but all three seemed to know there was something going on and were unusually quiet over dinner. Later, while Alice was getting the kids bathed and into bed, Lindsay and Kevin went through what Lindsay had written, asking the insurance company for more time and pointing out that they had been given no deadline.

Lindsay was exhausted when she dropped into bed that night, but she couldn’t sleep. She lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the house: Kevin snoring softly beside her, the house creaking slightly in the wind, a train passing in the distance. The house was their home, it had been for nearly a decade, where she and Alice and Kevin had made a home together, where Olivia and Jack had lived all their lives. It needed to be fixed properly, and Lindsay wasn’t convinced that their insurance company’s strategy would achieve that. Then there was the question of where they would live while the house was being repaired, what would happen if the repair dragged on for too long and their accommodation allowance ran out. They couldn’t afford to pay rent and a mortgage, and Lindsay had heard of people in that situation, parents of other kids at the school who were stressed out of their minds, not knowing when they would finally be able to go home.

They had talked a couple of years ago about actually leaving Christchurch. That had been in the middle of all the quakes when they were both worn out, not knowing what was going to happen with their house, not knowing if the quakes would ever stop. Since then, Lindsay had started to feel more settled. The city felt like home again, and Kevin hadn’t said anything about leaving for over a year.

Lindsay loved the part of town they lived in. The hills were nearby, always within view, breaking up the sky that would otherwise stretch away into the Pacific Ocean. She had lived on the western side of the city when she and Andrew were married, when Alice was a baby and Andrew was still at university. She didn’t like it, the hills were too far away, and it just seemed flat everywhere. Funny, he had stayed over that side of town, but she had gone back to where she grew up at the first opportunity she had.

If she imagined living anywhere else in Christchurch, it was closer to the hills. Her parents were closer to the hills, a block away from the river and a quick walk down to the park in the inner loop of the river. The river was lined with willows at the end of the park, and the view looked up into the valley that stretched up towards the summit of the Port Hills. It was a view Lindsay found comforting, like the looming hills were some sort of emotional anchor. She had grown up there, in the house her parents were still living in. They didn’t want to stay there forever, but their retirement plans had been derailed by the quakes.

For too long, Lindsay had felt she was at the mercy of the quakes. They dictated the course of her life. She could plan on getting a good night’s sleep so she could tackle a list of tasks the following day, but aftershocks in the night derailed that plan because once awake she had such a hard time getting back to sleep. Functioning on no sleep had never been fun for Lindsay. It was something she endured while her children were little, but she knew, then, it was a phase that would pass. There were fewer quakes now, but the insurance process had stepped in and taken their place. Life would be going in a particular direction, but then, without warning, there was an assessment to be carried out, paperwork to review, processes to attempt to make sense of, and she would have to stop whatever she was doing and focus on the house instead. The interruption to their lives showed no sign of ending any time soon.

The quakes weren’t the first time Lindsay’s life had been interrupted. She had certainly never intended to be a mother so young, but looking back she realised that having Alice had saved her, in a way, from a career she was unsuited for. She was never cut out to be a lawyer, and working through the insurance stuff the last couple of years had reminded her of what that world was like, the endless regulations and the convoluted thinking. Now she was pleased she hadn’t gone down that path. Studying law was simply something her family had expected her to do, as she was the first to go to university. It was either that or medicine. Funny that when she had decided what she wanted to do, it was actually medicine, or closely related. But that, too, had been interrupted.

Once Alice started school, Lindsay worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. She stayed there until shortly before she had Olivia, and they had asked her to go back. She did consider going back, she liked the work, the biological nature of it and the contact with patients. But then Jack came along, and Lindsay decided that once Jack started school, she would train in something medical, maybe nursing. In the end, she settled on radiography. It seemed like interesting work, with a lot of patient contact, but without the burden of responsibility for medical decisions that affected people’s lives. The local polytech had a three-year radiography course that Lindsay was going to find out more about, but by the time Jack was getting ready to start school, there was so much uncertainty about the house and the earthquakes that she and Kevin decided to wait for another year. Then in 2013, their situation seemed even more complicated since Lindsay was tied up with helping her parents get through their botched repairs and everything else they were going through. She had been thinking lately that she should look at enrolling in 2014, that way she would be qualified and working by the start of 2017.

Now they had to make a decision about the house, and Lindsay couldn’t even start to feel comfortable about the idea of the proposed repair going ahead. It wasn’t right, but neither of them had the technical knowledge to argue the point with the insurance company. They needed an engineer of their own, or a lawyer, she wasn’t sure which one. Maybe both? What she did know was that they didn’t need her taking on studying while managing the kids, the house, Kevin’s books and the insurance claim. She would postpone her course of study once again.

Following the High Court ruling in the Quake Outcasts case, the Government appealed the decision. The Court of Appeal overturned one part of the High Court’s decision, that the creation of the red zone had been illegal. But it agreed with the High Court judge that the fifty percent offers to vacant land owners and uninsured property owners had been illegal. Although the Quake Outcasts had won their case with regard to the Government offer, the Government told them there would be no revised offers before the end of the year. Suspecting more delaying tactics would follow in the new year, the Quake Outcasts group decided to take the case to the Supreme Court in order to protect their hard-won legal victory.

Lindsay’s parents felt like everything had ground to a halt and that 2014 would be another year without progress, just as 2013 had been. Lindsay was worried about them, especially about her mother, who would often cry at little things.