Bleak City (18 page)

‘How was your day?’ he said, giving her what she supposed he meant as an encouraging smile. She shrugged. What was there to say, given that all the time they had was between now and whenever her mother arrived home. She had thought, when her father moved back home, they would be able to talk more. It had been like that when her parents were separated. Although they only saw each other once a week, he encouraged them to talk, run things past him. He said he wanted his kids to speak their minds, that then he would know what they were thinking about. Charlotte was pretty sure her mother didn’t see things the same way, she certainly never seemed interested in what Charlotte had to say. She might ask, but she was never really listening. But when he had moved home after the September quake, he and her mother were all tied up in ‘putting their marriage back together’, like it was something that had broken in the quake, they just needed to get it assessed properly, then they could figure out a repair strategy and get it scoped and costed. What would a scope of works look like for the repair of a marriage? These were terms they used when talking about the house, and this utilitarian, systematic approach was polluting their marriage.

The garage door opened and her mother’s car pulled up the driveway. Her entrance was greeted with a curt, ‘I’ll get your dinner out of the oven’, no hellos, no glancing kisses. Charlotte took her meal through to the lounge, where Sean had books and papers spread out over the coffee table.

‘Hey,’ he said, only raising his head to glance at her as she sat down on the sofa, her plate on her lap.

‘Hey,’ she said back and started eating. He was back into his study, and she wondered if he would be finished any time soon so they could, you know, just talk. Even the TV would be welcome company, but she didn’t want to interrupt Sean’s study.

After Charlotte finished her dinner, she texted her friend Lucy. They had gone to school together but ended up at different high schools. They hadn’t seen each other in weeks, Lucy’s school had also done the site sharing thing, but she had been going in the mornings, not the afternoons, so there was never a chance to catch up during the week. But now her own school was back to normal, the other school’s repairs were finished and they had gone back to their own site. Charlotte had thought she might get to see Lucy more often, but that hadn’t happened.

Nothing back. She’d had nothing back in days and had no idea what she had done to offend Lucy.

She flicked through her Instagram feed to see what was going on with everyone. The usual selfies, photos of food, rubble, nothing interesting. She sighed and tossed her phone off to one side. She could hear her parents in the kitchen, voices raised. Insurance nights always ended like this. Non-insurance nights were just silent.

After the September quake, her dad was around at their house within half an hour. Hugs and kisses all around, he had been so worried that he just climbed over the debris at the flat he had moved into and drove right over. They cleaned up the house together, went to check on Nanny together, then on aunts and uncles, the other grandparents and the great-grandparents. He stayed with them that night, sleeping on the sofa, and made them pancakes the following morning, all of them bleary-eyed from the night of aftershocks. In the weeks afterwards, they saw more of him, then, that November, he moved back in.

The summer had been odd. They had all gone down south to the big family gathering, which they did almost every year. Her parents put on a show of being a family again, which annoyed Charlotte, because they never left her alone to do what she wanted. And the long conversations she had been having with her father during the separation were gone. She had taken to getting up early each morning and going for a run, just to get some truly alone time.

On their last day there, Sean had made a big deal about wanting to do his own thing for the day while their mother had planned out where they would have breakfast, lunch and dinner.

‘I just want to swim and lie in the sun for the day,’ Sean said.

They took him seriously and left them both to their own devices for that last day. That annoyed Charlotte even more than the constant coddling because she had been saying the same thing for the last week and they had taken no notice at all. Was she invisible? Did she have a mute button she didn’t know about? Only once the precious son spoke up did they take notice. It wasn’t fair. But they did ease off once they got home and for that Charlotte was grateful. They planned little trips for the rest of the holidays, day trips or one or two nights away, and they made a point of letting Sean and Charlotte have time to themselves. It was good and Charlotte started the school year feeling like she was part of a real family, more like a real family than she could ever remember anyway.

Then the February quake hit and the panic of not knowing everyone was okay until late in the day was surpassed by the grind of trying to keep going in a house with no power and no water. They left the city, went to Nelson for three weeks to stay with one of her dad’s brothers and his family. Again, that was a family time. It was when they came back to Christchurch that things started going downhill. Her parents were trying to get the house assessed and fixed, but they struggled to even get people in to patch up the place and make it more liveable. There were cracks everywhere, the floors were uneven and it was difficult to get windows and doors open and shut. Charlotte couldn’t close her bedroom door properly until her dad planed off some of the bottom of it.

Their house wasn’t as bad as many in the neighbourhood, which was almost deserted. They were on a hill and the hills had been shaken badly in the February quake. Nearby, cliffs had collapsed onto the buildings below and people had died. When they first came home, there were only three other families living on the street, which had thirty-seven houses. Some were badly damaged. One had slumped, crumpling the garage door, another had its front door twisted in the frame. Eventually, people moved back into the neighbourhood to the point where about half the houses were occupied, but the June quakes had done even more damage to the hill suburbs and some families had left once again. There were fourteen occupied houses, including their own. Charlotte thought she had seen someone at the window of a fifteenth, but she didn’t want to check too closely, there were rumours of squatters living in abandoned houses throughout the city.

Charlotte flicked through her Instagram feed again and saw that Alice had posted a photo from their summer holiday, her three younger brothers wrestling on the grass outside the house. There were other people in the background and Charlotte recognised herself sitting against a tree with a book. Only she wasn’t reading, she was looking off into the distance, towards the hills. She remembered that day, it was the last, when her parents left her and Sean to their own devices for the day. It was a lonely picture of her, so far away from everyone and staring off into the distance. No wonder she didn’t have any friends.

Alice’s caption said she continued to be amazed that her brothers didn’t break each other. Charlotte tried to think of something funny to say in reply, but her brain wasn’t cooperating, so she just hearted the photo. Lame. She texted Alice instead, asking if she was still working at the café. Idiot, she thought as soon as she sent the message. Of course Alice was still working there, they had only seen each other two weeks ago. Yes, Alice replied, asking why. Charlotte couldn’t think of anything to say. Her phone warbled again. It was Alice, saying she would see them Friday night. Sean must’ve asked her around for a video, like he had said earlier. Well it was something to look forward to.

She went through to the bathroom and flicked on the light to look at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t breaking out horribly like some of the girls at school, which was a relief. She had followed the hair straightening trend for a while, but lately she had just let it do its thing, leaving it to curl and letting it just hang down. No one noticed one way or the other. She pulled her hair up and back from her face and wondered what it would be like to have short hair. It would be easy enough to find out, there were scissors around somewhere. But what if it turned out awful? No, she wasn’t going to risk that, she’d get someone to do it, someone who knew what they were doing. She would find some photos, she decided, and go to the mall before school the next day, or the day after if it snowed. Then she would go home and see if anyone noticed. She decided to keep her expectations low.

It was spring again, but a very different spring from that of a year ago. Then people had felt a sense of relief, that they had survived the big one, that their houses had survived the big one, mostly intact. Assessments were getting underway, repairs would follow and then it would all be over.

Now eight months after the February quake, the sense people felt was grief, for the people who had died and the city that was no more, barricaded off from the general population, army sentries on its entry points. Not armed, of course, this was New Zealand and it wasn’t wartime, but it felt the way England had felt after the war, people going about their lives only partly awake, avoiding the devastated buildings, coping with life in the damaged ones.

Before the February quake, Marjorie would regularly go into the city to shop at Ballantynes and have lunch in their café. She had done so for many years, decades. She had been in Christchurch long enough to remember the 1947 Ballantynes fire, in which forty-one employees had died. The city was in mourning following that tragedy, too.

Soon Ballantynes would be reopening, at the centre of a new development, a temporary mall built of shipping containers. That was a couple of weeks away, and Marjorie had arranged with her daughter Suzanne to go into the city then and have a good look at the place. Marjorie had not been near the city since the quake, she had seen a ruined city once before, she didn’t need to go looking too closely this time. But a return to Ballantynes would be a welcome dose of normality. Marjorie had missed the place, the quality of the service, not like those modern stores where a person could go in looking for something only to end up searching for staff interested in serving them. Not so at Ballantynes, where the sales ladies would ask her what she was looking for, quiz her on her tastes while giving her a discreet visual inspection and then go off and find what she wanted. Now that was service!

Some of the family were still living away from the city but many had returned, and with them Marjorie had returned to her weekly baking ritual. Friday was baking day and then over the days that followed, various family members would drop by to check on her. There was always something for them to have with their cup of tea, and she made sure there was enough to fill a tin they could take away. Her chocolate eclairs and cream horns never made it out of the house, but the date loaf, banana cake, chocolate cake, chocolate chip biscuits and gingernuts were made to be taken away, so they would have reason to remember her fondly. It kept her busy, and she was happy to have the family back in the city.

While most of the family were still away, she had taught Alice her recipes, passing on what her old neighbour had taught her when she first arrived in New Zealand. When Marjorie left home, she had no domestic skills, and when she and Bill started their life together in New Zealand, she struggled to figure out how to keep a house. Her nursing training had taught her the housework basics, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was food that was too often ruined and thrown out to the chooks or the dog. A neighbour had taken pity on her, teaching her to cook and bake. The woman had lost a son in the first world war and seemed impossibly old to Marjorie then. Of course, she was probably a couple of decades younger then than what Marjorie was now.

Now Marjorie was passing on those recipes to Alice, savoury and sweet. The girl had been experimenting and Marjorie was pleased at the variations on the old standards she was coming up with. She had the same knack for baking that Marjorie’s daughter Judith did. Judith was a baker by trade and ran a successful catering business. Although Marjorie could have suggested to Judith that she give Alice a job, she wouldn’t do that to the girl. Judith was always losing staff. She would complain about how difficult it was to find and keep good staff, but the truth was that Judith was not easy to get along with, shrill and demanding, expecting perfection when she hadn’t put in the effort to make her expectations clear. No, Alice was better off where she was now, even if a job with Judith was a step up from working at a coffee shop. And Alice was better than that, she had more in her than just being a baker, if only she could get past her grief for the city and the people in it.

In some ways, the war had been easier than this disaster business. There was an enemy to fight against and that kept people going. But in this post-earthquake situation, there was nothing to fight against, there was just keeping going, and without that enemy to rail against, it seemed many were just giving in. Alice was in danger of that, although recently she had told Marjorie she was thinking of leaving Christchurch. Most of her friends were gone and her boyfriend was thinking about going over to Sydney for work. Alice was happy with her decision to not continue with her studies that year, she said she couldn’t imagine keeping up and doing well given everything that was still happening in Christchurch. If she wasn’t going to go back to university next year, she needed to figure out something to do, she couldn’t work at a coffee house indefinitely. Maybe Sydney would be a good change, Marjorie had told her. The girl needed to get out, if the city was going to drag her down with it, she needed to get away to place where she could make something of herself.

Marjorie had just pulled a rack of biscuits from the oven and put another one in when she heard a knocking at the front door. It was her grandson Tony, who had come from work, a fact made apparent by his high visibility vest and EQC identification hanging around his neck. The high vis vest had become like a badge of honour for people working on the rebuild. In fact, it had become so ubiquitous that criminals took to wearing them, showing up at people’s houses claiming they were there for inspections when, in fact, they were seeing if there were any valuables in the house. Later they would return and, if the owner wasn’t home, break in and take what they wanted. Disasters brought out society’s vermin: looters, thieves, bureaucrats and lawyers. Certainly the bureaucrats had come to Christchurch in large numbers, it was only a matter of time before lawyers followed. It was the way a modern society worked.