Bleak City (31 page)

It was Andrew and Michelle and their four children. Andrew leaned in and kissed Marjorie on the cheek.

‘Grandmother,’ he said.

‘Come in,’ she said, stepping away from the door. Andrew and Michelle stepped over the threshold and Michelle leaned in for the obligatory kiss on the cheek, holding off to one side a bowl that held a salad covered in clingfilm. Marjorie took the bowl from her and started walking through to the kitchen. The children spilled past the adults, pouring into the living room through to the kitchen beyond, where Alice scooped up the youngest, the girl, in her arms, kissing her on the forehead and squeezing her tight. Andrew and Michelle followed Marjorie through to the kitchen while Alice’s siblings told her what they had been up to.

It was a pleasant afternoon. Andrew’s children were well-behaved compared to some of her great-grandchildren and they never complained about vegetables or played around with their food. After dessert, Michelle and Alice cleared the table and filled the dishwasher while the children played outside and Marjorie and Andrew discussed business.

Marjorie’s rental properties that EQC had put overcap were still caught up in the assessment process with the insurance company, which Andrew was handling for her. He had received a scope of works back on one of them, plus an offer of settlement. She had a choice: let the insurance company carry out the repairs or take the money and organise the repairs herself. It was tempting to let the insurance company do the work, if there was more damage discovered, the risk would be theirs and they would bear the costs. If she organised for the work to be done and more damage was discovered, she – meaning Andrew – would be stuck negotiating with the insurance company for money to cover that new damage while work ground to a halt, her property sitting there earning no rent while the insurance company’s bureaucracy contemplated what to do. It was tempting to just let them get on with it. But the building industry had gone mad and there were rumours of poor quality work and good builders struggling to get work. Marjorie and Andrew decided that he would engage an engineer to do their own scope of works, that was the best way to ensure all the damage had been captured.

Then she moved on to the matter of properties she was interested in buying. Marjorie had bought three damaged properties in the last year. Tony had organised for minor repairs to be carried out and had then found tenants. Not a difficult job in a city that had lost thousands of houses, and she intended to buy up more of these as-is-where-is properties.

‘Next year, I expect TC3 properties will start to come onto the market,’ Marjorie said to Andrew. ‘I’m curious to see how much ground works will cost, do you know anyone?’

‘Shouldn’t you be slowing down, Grandmother?’ Andrew said. ‘TC3 land will require a lot of work to get them suitable to rebuild on. I think you’re better off sticking to TC2 and TC1 properties.’

‘Possibly,’ Marjorie said. ‘But I would like to know what’s involved.’

‘Fine,’ Andrew said. He seemed harried, but Marjorie knew he would never say no to her, he had always been eager to please his grandmother. ‘I’ll look into it on Monday, but I think it will be some time before it’s worth buying anything TC3, not with all the geotech work that still needs to be done.’

TC3 properties were those on the most liquefaction-prone land and if a TC3 property had foundation damage, a geotechnical investigation had to be carried out before replacement foundations could be designed and built. There was simply not enough equipment in the country to carry out this work quickly and EQC and geotechnical engineering companies were slowly working their way around the city, carrying out both shallow and deep investigations. Marjorie had seen a drilling rig on a nearby property, one near the river that had visible cracks in its ring foundation.

Michelle came back inside, carrying the girl, Mattie, who was rubbing her eyes. ‘She’s getting tired,’ she said. ‘It’s probably time to get her home.’

Andrew set about rounding up the other children and getting them to say their goodbyes. Alice left soon after, saying she would drop by later in the week, after work one night.

Marjorie was relieved to have the early finish to the evening. She had been in the habit of staying up late most of her adult life, but lately she was retiring as early as eight o’clock some nights. The family leaving early meant she didn’t have to let them know how tired she was, she didn’t want to be seen to be slowing down. She was still keeping up with the garden, but lately she had been thinking about getting someone in to take care of the housework. She didn’t want to ask one of her daughters, she would feel obligated to them, and she didn’t like to think about how they might try to collect on that obligation. Karen was a real estate agent and had made it clear that she wanted to be the one to sell any properties Marjorie decided to part with.

Before Alice had switched to the topic of the gap between the Greendale and Port Hills faults earlier that day, she had told Marjorie there were some in her family having problems with insurance and the stress of living in a broken city. It was difficult, Marjorie found the roads and always-changing detours gruelling. Until recently, she had driven into the city every Thursday to do her supermarket shopping, enduring the jarring roads, the diversions, the indignity of shopping at an inner city supermarket. Thankfully her local supermarket had reopened a few weeks ago, and Marjorie no longer had to worry about anchoring her handbag to her shopping trolley to prevent it being stolen.

Alice seemed overly concerned with her family’s mental health. Mental health was not a term Marjorie had heard of when she was young. She understood the concept of shell shock, after all she had grown up with it. Then, in the war, she had seen men fall apart from seeing too much of the horrors of war. She had lived in a city under siege and seen the neighbourhood she grew up in destroyed, her family home obliterated, and she had been just fine. But really, back then, most people just got on with it rather than having breakdowns. It was the weak ones who resorted to alcohol and violence, weak men like her father.

Her father had returned from the first world war and married a woman who had lost the man she truly loved. Marjorie was born soon after, and brothers and sisters followed, her fellow witnesses to her father’s rages, victims of his bullying. Nursing school had allowed her to escape as soon as she turned eighteen, and the others soon found their own ways out. Her parents were the only ones killed when the terrace was bombed.

For Marjorie, her family had died when Edward was killed, even though she still had another brother and two sisters. Before Marjorie left England, she would run into Gwen and Charlie occasionally, and they would ask if she had heard anything from Lizzie. Even if she had, she wouldn’t tell them, that would only result in her being drawn back into it all. When she, Bill and Suzanne left England for New Zealand, she saw no reason to get in touch and let them know. After all, they would only judge her for the expedient decision marrying Bill had been. Rather than risking her two worlds colliding and blowing her new one apart, she had told Bill that her whole family had been killed in the Blitz.

Lately, listening to Alice talk about her mother’s side of the family, Marjorie had thought more about Gwen, Charlie and Lizzie. They were all younger than her, they could still be alive. What had they made of themselves? Had their parents’ legacy dragged them down or motivated them, driven them to do anything but be like their parents? It had certainly motivated Marjorie. But there was a whole world between her and them, even if they were still alive, a gap that could not be bridged, not without shaking apart the life she had spent the last sixty years building. She wouldn’t let that happen. Instead, she would keep wondering, keep telling herself she had done the right thing by getting out of England, getting out of her family.

Until September 2010, Wellington was the city New Zealanders expected to be hit by a devastating earthquake. In February 2011, those outside Christchurch watched the television news as the horror unfolded, and while Christchurch struggled to get on the road to recovery, the rest of the country did its best to learn lessons from the Christchurch experience. What to do, what not to do.

As bad as the 2010 and 2011 quakes were for Christchurch, a large quake under Wellington would be worse. Roads in and out of mostly-flat Christchurch remained open in spite of the February quake, but that would not be the case for not-so-flat Wellington. Wellington’s main routes in and out went over hills and up valleys and so were likely to be cut off in a quake. Power and water supply would also be interrupted as they tended to follow those main routes in and out of the region. Some suburbs would be cut off, not for days, but for weeks and months. People in those areas wouldn’t have power or water and would be reliant on helicopters and barges for supplies. In short, what had happened in Christchurch following the February quake would be repeated in Wellington, but on a larger scale and for a longer period of time. Wellington needed to learn from the Christchurch experience, build more redundancy and strength into their systems and be prepared. It was a need that was difficult to ignore as long as Christchurch was still fresh in people’s minds.

One mistake Lindsay hoped Wellington would learn from was the CTV building. Buildings needed to be built properly and any issues found needed to be dealt with, not brushed under the carpet as too hard or, worse, as not worth doing because it cost too much. As much as she hadn’t wanted to believe that human failings had led to the building’s collapse, in the end it was undeniably clear that was the case. There were so many mistakes leading to those one hundred and fifteen deaths, and no one had stepped up and taken responsibility for the part they played in the building’s collapse. The engineer who had designed the building didn’t have experience with multi-storey buildings. His boss failed to supervise him properly and then when City Council officials expressed reservations about the design, he pressured them to sign it off. After the September and December 2010 quakes, the council’s inspectors failed to pick up the state of the building. The Royal Commission heard that some people working in the building had felt unsafe after the Boxing Day quake, and some were actively looking for other jobs in order to get out of the building.

Lindsay hated the saying about experience being the best teacher. To her that meant one’s life would be littered with mistake after mistake after mistake. It was best to learn from other people’s mistakes, something she tried to teach her children. But it was a difficult thing to teach children when even adults made short-sighted decisions, postponing upgrading a building because they didn’t want to spend the money, not thinking about the consequences of that building killing people in a large quake. Valuing life more than money, perhaps that’s what she needed to focus on with her children, teaching them to value life and people more than things. But was she teaching by example when so much of her present life was taken up with worrying about when the house would finally be fixed? She constantly felt that she was failing as a parent, not spending enough time just relaxing with Olivia and Jack, leaving it to Alice to be the fun adult in the house. Lindsay tried not to be consumed by worrying about things, tried to remind herself that childhood was short, to enjoy every moment. Look at Alice, after all. Her childhood had passed so quickly, she was twenty now, working full time, and Lindsay struggled to remember where all those years had gone. She tried to learn from that and make the most of these years with Olivia and Jack, but most of the time she was simply too tired.

The second winter in their broken house had passed with more massive power bills, over $400 in June and July, in spite of Lindsay’s efforts to not use the heaters when she was home alone during the day. She was just so cold, sitting in the lounge with the laptop doing Kevin’s paperwork, not moving enough to keep herself warm.

At least the insurance process was going well. The insurance company’s PMO had prepared a scope of works and organised for a geotechnical engineering firm to carry out investigations on the state of the land. The firm had made a series of appointments to carry out the investigations that would be required and the first had been the day before. Lindsay had not known what was involved, otherwise she would have kept Jack home so he could see the rig that they brought onto the section. It was yellow and on caterpillar tracks, with two spiral plates that drilled into the ground. A rod was then forced down into the ground and a series of measurements taken. They had drilled at two spots, one in the backyard and one in the front yard.

Seeing the rig at work would have made up for Jack’s disappointment at not getting the teacher he wanted next year. Julia had been Olivia’s year 2 teacher, and she was one of those teachers who had a way with little kids, could always make them laugh. She never discouraged the kids from asking questions, never became annoyed at the Why? Why? Why? of teaching six-year-olds. She was good at explaining things in a way that made sense to them without being patronising, and this made the children like her and want to be in her classroom. When she told them to do something, they did, because they wanted to please her. A few days ago, Jack had found out that the impending birth of Julia’s first child meant she wouldn’t be teaching next year. She wouldn’t be teaching him. It wasn’t fair, he said. Olivia got to have Julia as her teacher, why couldn’t he?

No, life wasn’t fair, it didn’t always go the way we wanted it to. That was a difficult lesson for children to learn, and Lindsay was glad Jack was starting to learn it over something as trivial as who his teacher would be next year. There were plenty of good teachers at the school, it was unlikely Jack would end up with someone he didn’t like.

Life certainly wasn’t fair for the families of the people who had died in the CTV building. There had been no accountability, no police prosecution, no professional censure for the engineers who worked on the building. Lindsay remembered going into the city for the first time after the February quake. The cordon had been reduced and it was possible to see the remains of the CTV building, its scorched lift shaft standing there like some grim memorial, the space around it utterly bare. It was awful, and Lindsay was relieved to hear it had been demolished. Even now, over a year after the lift shaft demolition, Lindsay tried to avoid that part of the city.