Bleak City (10 page)

Lindsay stopped what she was doing. ‘You’re coming with us, aren’t you?’

Alice didn’t know what to say, it hadn’t occurred to her that they would leave, but given the lack of power and water, it made sense. ‘I went to see Marjorie,’ she said. ‘I said I would stay with her. Tonight at least. She’ll be alone otherwise. And then there’s uni.’ University had started for the year just the day before, she was supposed to go to a lecture after lunch with Andrew, and her books, that she had paid so much for, were now stuck in her car in the city. When would she get her car back? Would she? Did it matter, given that people had died? She started crying and shaking, and Lindsay hugged and shushed her.

‘It’s all right,’ Lindsay said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ Kevin said, ‘but I’d have to dig the barbecue out of the garage, and there’s quite a few things in the way of it.’

Alice sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘It’s ok,’ she said. ‘I had one before. It didn’t really help.’

‘There’s no water, Alice,’ Kevin said, ‘and that means no toilets. We don’t know how long until it’s back on.’

Alice didn’t want to leave Marjorie by herself, but she also understood their concerns. She didn’t think she could talk the old lady into leaving her house, but maybe a night of aftershocks would make a difference. They agreed that if things got too bad, Alice was to ignore Marjorie’s objections and pack her and her things into the car and take her down to Timaru to meet up with them. They would make contact with Marjorie’s family from there and sort things out.

‘Look at us plotting a kidnapping,’ Alice pointed out.

‘Civil Defence emergency,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s allowed.’

Kevin’s van was packed, and he had packed their own household emergency supplies into Marjorie’s car: water, batteries, torches and plenty of food. They said their goodbyes. Lindsay grabbed her phone charger out of her own car and gave it and her phone to Alice. ‘Text me on Kevin’s,’ she said. ‘I’ll text you when we get there.’

Marjorie and Alice prepared a cold dinner from the perishables in the fridge. Everything from the freezer would probably be defrosted by morning, and Alice thought about cooking it. If she was still here in a couple of days’ time and the power wasn’t back on, she might have to go back home and extract the barbecue from the garage.

Lindsay texted when they arrived in Timaru. It had taken them close to four hours for what was normally a two hour trip. The traffic flowing out of Christchurch had been heavy, Lindsay said, people carrying trailers stacked with stuff. People were evacuating. It was like the apocalypse.

Alice had a restless night in the double bed in Marjorie’s spare bedroom. There were aftershocks through the night. Just as she felt herself drifting off to sleep from the last aftershock, there would be another. There was another sound as well, one she would come to find oddly comforting in the days that followed, the sound of helicopters flying over the hills. It meant there was still a world outside the city, that not everything was broken.

There were two toilets in the house and before going to bed, Alice and Marjorie had agreed to use one each, only for peeing, which they figured they could get away with for a day or two, whatever the condition of the pipes might be. They would have to dig a hole in the yard to use as a makeshift toilet, which Alice would do in the morning. Now that was a discussion Alice had never expected to have with anyone, much less a tiny ninety-year old woman. But, as Marjorie said, she had been a nurse in the war and she had seen it all.

Alice woke to a big aftershock. She felt like she had only just fallen asleep, unrested and weary. She powered up her phone and saw that it was only six o’clock. She lay there staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, trying to remember what it felt like to be refreshed and rested. She wondered what the day ahead held. More big quakes? Would there be power? Water?

Another aftershock prompted her to get out of bed. She decided to go for a walk, maybe even run, she had the right clothes and shoes and it would do her good to just try to relax and get her head in a better place for tackling the day.

Apart from the aftershocks the house was quiet, and Alice went out through the back door, closing it softly and locking it with the spare set of keys Marjorie had given her last night.

It was cool outside and Alice picked up her pace to warm up. There was a park just a few hundred metres from Marjorie’s house and there was no one around but Alice. It was still dark, but the sun was starting to come up in the east, colouring the sky pink and orange. She headed along the track towards the river, the bulk of the hills dark against the navy blue sky, the same hills that yesterday had caused the deaths of at least a hundred people. She picked up her pace to a slow jog, then when she got to the river she sprinted, watching out for cracks in the footpath. She ran until she felt her heart pounding, her breathing heavy, then pushed herself further, to stop herself from crying. She reached Opawa Road, where she stopped, leaning on the bridge, and she started crying, gasping for breath and trying to make sense of the deaths of so many people.

In the days after the big quake, scientists talked about what they called ‘seismic lensing’. The quake’s epicentre had been under the Port Hills, which are made of hard volcanic rock. Seismic waves had reflected off these hard rocks, intensifying them. The shape of the hills had then focussed the seismic waves, directing them north towards the city, magnifying the quake’s destructive power.

The electricity had come on at Marjorie’s the day after the big quake and water was back on the day after that, on the Thursday. Kevin had come up from Timaru on Thursday, bringing petrol and more water. He and Alice went back to their house to check it over, but there was still no water, so they were limited about what they could do. He had asked Alice to go back to Timaru with him, but she said she was doing fine, that she wanted to join the student volunteer army helping in the suburbs. Kevin packed more of the family’s belongings into the van and headed back down to Timaru.

Now, nearly three weeks later, Marjorie had cooked dinner and they ate while watching the news. Marjorie was an excellent cook and it was only the exercise Alice was getting every day as part of the student volunteer army that meant she wasn’t packing on the weight. The first few days she had been shovelling silt, but now it was deliveries, running all over town making sure people had food, water and other supplies. It was easier getting petrol now, not like the Mad Max days just after the quake.

The city had been cordoned off all the way out to the four avenues that framed the CBD, and the military was manning the cordon. What was even stranger than seeing the New Zealand military on the cordons was seeing soldiers from another country, Singapore. There were also light armoured vehicles patrolling the streets inside the cordon. Outside the cordon, helicopters patrolled the suburbs to deter looters. There were comments on Facebook saying that looters should be arrested and locked up in the Grand Chancellor, a hotel that was one of the tallest buildings in the city and thought to be in imminent danger of collapsing. Driving towards the city down Ferry Road, Alice could see the Grand Chancellor, which had slumped in one corner, like a giant that had been punched and fallen down on one knee. It was disturbing, when driving out of the city, she would see it in her rearview mirror when she checked the traffic behind her. It was like a stone angel from
Doctor Who
, sneaking up on her when she wasn’t looking, waiting for her to blink so it could advance towards her, catching her to drain her of all her energy. What energy? She needed more sleep.

It was Friday night now, and she had the weekend to try to catch up on her sleep and get ready for the resumption of lectures on Monday. A lot of buildings still needed to be checked, but marquees had been set up for lectures and some local businesses were letting the university use their meeting rooms. She would try to wind down a bit over the weekend, and maybe go down to Timaru on Sunday. Lindsay and Kevin were still there, and her old flatmate Ben had been in touch as well. Last year had been his final year, so there was no need for him to come back up to Christchurch and experience the whole tent city thing.

For ninety years old, Marjorie was doing well. It was the Blitz, she told Alice whenever Alice brought it up, going through something like that, you never forgot the experience, so you always knew how to make do. Most of Marjorie’s family had left the city. Those with little kids were worried about providing them some stability, and Andrew and Michelle were staying at their holiday house in Wanaka and had already enrolled their kids in a school there. They intended to stay for at least a term. Gerald and Sylvia were in Sydney, staying with Laurel, Andrew’s younger sister. Their house on the hill was a mess, the roof tiles were all askew, and the day after the quake Gerald and Andrew had strapped blue tarpaulins over it to stop too much rain from getting in. The winds had been heavy and the tarpaulin wouldn’t necessarily do a good job for long, but given the state of the place inside, Gerald said he wasn’t sure it mattered. Gerald had signed up to Facebook and had told Alice that Sylvia didn’t want to go back to Christchurch. Alice wondered how many other people were feeling that way.

Neil and Heather, Alice’s other grandparents, were all right, but their house was damaged and it didn’t seem like they would have water for a while. They had moved in with Heather’s parents, whose house had new cracks and more liquefaction in the yard, but it was liveable. Lindsay’s brother and his wife had lost their house, it had been badly damaged by liquefaction in the September quake, but this quake was much worse. The house had slumped so much it was difficult to walk around in. Jason and Carla had retrieved some clothes and were staying with Carla’s mother in her damaged but liveable house north of the city. It was like that everywhere, families doubling up, picking the most liveable house and making do.

But a lot of people had left the city and the streets were empty. The jammed roads and crazy traffic of the day of the quake had given way to a few cars kicking up dust on the damaged, rumpled roads. Some roads were particularly bad. Going along Aldwins Road towards Eastgate Mall was like a rollercoaster, a huge hump in one lane changed into a dip, while the adjacent lane did the opposite. Around the city, roadworkers were starting to smooth out the silt humps, but given how many there were it would take a long time. It was dusty when the wind picked up, and the army guys on the cordon had to wear dust masks some days. Other days, when it rained, gutters full of silt backed up, flooding streets.

Before the quake, this big quake, not the September one, Alice had been a nervous driver, staying on her learner’s licence for two years, only gaining her restricted licence just before she started at university. Now, though, she was used to driving over bumps and into dips and keeping a close eye on following traffic in case she had to dodge an especially large dip or pothole.

Dinner was finished and they were washing the dishes. Marjorie had a dishwasher, but everyone was still conserving water, so they were doing dishes in the sink using as little water as possible. Marjorie boiled the jug and made cups of tea and they sat back down in the lounge to watch Campbell Live. Alice felt herself slipping off to sleep, in spite of the hot cup of tea in her hands, when it was announced there had been a big quake off the coast of Japan, a 7.9. There was a clip of the Tokyo skyline, buildings swaying.

‘That doesn’t look nearly as bad as what we had,’ Marjorie said. ‘I think I’d be all right with just a bit of swaying.’

There was footage of a newsroom, which showed some juddery shaking, but nothing as bad as they remembered from the 22nd of February.

‘It’s far away,’ Alice said, ‘and they’re built for it.’ She felt callous for just dismissing it that way, but she was thinking of the collapsed CTV building. She had heard from someone in the student army that the Japanese search and rescue workers who had come to Christchurch were saying that the deaths in Christchurch were from a manmade disaster, not a natural one. She had told Marjorie that, and Marjorie said she heard on the radio that the media in Japan were asking a lot of questions, especially since so many Japanese students had died.

They kept watching, long after their tea had grown cold, as footage showed a black, oily-looking tide full of debris advancing across coastal towns, picking up everything in its path. The quake had been upgraded to an 8.9, a monster. Alice remembered the Indian Ocean tsunami when she was 12 or 13. What she remembered the most about it was going to bed with the death toll at a few thousand, then waking up the next morning to hear it had gone over 100,000. Sure, the Japanese could build super-strong buildings that could withstand an enormous quake, but what could you do about a tsunami?

Although she was exhausted when she went to bed at ten o’clock, she couldn’t sleep. She was waiting for another quake, it had become like she needed one before she could feel the day was over and she could drop off. It was well after two o’clock when one finally came through, and by then Alice could feel her head tightening with a headache that she hoped wouldn’t still be there in the morning. The house stopped shaking and the rumbling faded into the distance. She could hear Marjorie down the hallway, snoring lightly, and then Alice finally slipped into sleep.

The sun was shining brightly through the gap between the curtains when she woke up. Saturday. Stay away from the internet, she told herself, she didn’t want to know, yet, how many people had died.

She could smell baking. She wandered through to the kitchen, where Marjorie was pulling a batch of scones out of the oven. It was eleven o’clock.

‘I left you to sleep in,’ Marjorie said. ‘And I thought scones would be nice for a late breakfast.’ There was a bowl of whipped cream on the dining table, along with a big slab of butter and two types of jam. Alice smiled. Marjorie was old-school food-wise, none of this low-fat eating. Milk was full fat and there was no cutting the fat off meat in her house. Alice would go for a run afterwards, to work some of it off. Marjorie was going to spend the day in the garden, she said. They had been eating Marjorie’s summer vegetables, which were getting scarce, and so Alice would have to go to the supermarket today. A supermarket. The nearby one was a wreck, fenced off and silt all through the carpark. One of the few remaining neighbours said it was a write-off and would be demolished. The nearest supermarket was in the city on Moorhouse Avenue, just on the edge of the red zone. Later Alice would go and wander the aisles along with the rest of the walking dead, seeking fresh vegetables and other supplies.