Bleak City (35 page)

Gerald had met Sylvia by that point and married her when Tony was a few months old. Suzanne had managed to hide her misery well, she always put up a cheerful front with the family, but Sylvia was sharp and it was when they were engaged that she said to Gerald there was something badly wrong in that household. He knew that, he said, although in truth, it was only her saying so that forced him to finally admit it. It was soon after they had become engaged and they were trying to decide where to live. At first, he and Sylvia had discussed finding a place in the city’s northwest, nearer to her family than to his. Then, after they discussed Suzanne’s situation, Sylvia said they should find a place near Suzanne, so they could help out. It made Gerald love her even more, although they were never able to be much help to Suzanne, not until after Stan died.

Suzanne had lived with a controlling, abusive husband for three decades, and once Stan died, she had gone back to work and built a new life for herself. Gerald admired that about her, that she had never looked back, never felt sorry for herself. Even in the first year after Stan died, she hadn’t fallen into despair, she had just thrown herself into caring for her grandchildren. Once Charlotte started school, Suzanne started working for Gerald part-time, helping Sylvia out in the office. It was an arrangement that worked well, until recently.

Suzanne wasn’t one to talk about what went on inside the family home, a habit ingrained after thirty years with Stan. Gerald and Sylvia had only been able to pick up snippets of what life was like for Suzanne living with Rebecca and her family, but those snippets suggested it was stressful. Rebecca and Dan’s marriage had never been a happy one, and the earthquakes had put more strain on them than ever. One thing Suzanne did talk about was how stuck they were in their situation with EQC, despite the fact that their house was clearly badly damaged.

In New Zealand’s two-tier insurance system, if a house’s damage was under the cap of $100,000, EQC handled the claim. But once it was overcap, the house should be passed on to the homeowner’s private insurer, along with an overcap payment. Unfortunately, more than one earthquake event had damaged houses in the region, which meant there were multiple claims on the same house. The EQC and private insurers needed to figure out how to split the bill. The process was called apportionment and involved, firstly, figuring out how much damage had been done. Once that was decided, the second step was to figure out how to split that up among the different quakes that claims had been made for. If the value of the damage from at least one quake was over the cap, the claim would be passed on to the homeowner’s private insurer.

Rebecca and Dan had made claims for each of the four major quakes, and it was EQC’s job to figure out how to apportion the damage. It seemed obvious that their house would eventually be passed on to their insurer, but until EQC made a decision, nothing could happen. This was, no doubt, the source of the stress Suzanne seemed to be experiencing while living with them, and why recently she seemed so interested in controlling the choices her grandchildren made.

She had been the same at work since moving in with Rebecca and Dan. Gerald had discussed with Sylvia what they could do about Suzanne’s black moods, and Sylvia’s response had been that they should be patient, that this would pass and Suzanne would go back to being the old Suzanne, the one they enjoyed working with. Gerald knew she was right, but he still didn’t like it. He wasn’t worried that Suzanne would affect the smooth running of the office, he was worried that she might try to interfere with the decisions Sean and Charlotte made, the same way Marjorie had interfered in the decision Suzanne had made in marrying Stan. Interfering in other people’s lives often had unforeseen consequences, consequences borne by the other people, seldom by the interferer. Gerald wondered if his mother ever felt guilty about the situation she had pushed Suzanne into. He doubted it, he had never seen any evidence of that sort of softness in Marjorie.

‘How much longer is Nanny going to be staying here?’ Charlotte asked her mother. Rebecca had put all the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher and was waiting impatiently for Charlotte to surrender the last item, the plate that held her toast. Charlotte had pointed out that she could do that, get everything in the dishwasher and get it going before she left for school, but Rebecca insisted on doing it herself. It was like Charlotte was a small child, incapable of pressing some buttons. Had Rebecca seen kids with phones and tablets these days? They knew more than the adults.

‘She’ll be gone by the end of June,’ Rebecca said, her voice heavy with tiredness. ‘It won’t be much longer now.’

Charlotte took another bite of her toast, chewing slowly, savouring the bite of the dark spread mixed in with butter. The Marmageddon crisis had ended a few weeks ago and just in case there was another shortage, Charlotte had bought a couple of big jars of Marmite and stored them away in her bedroom. Just in case, because you never knew in Christchurch when something was going to disappear and, once gone, when it might return. Charlotte picked up her second piece of toast and before she could bite through the first corner, her plate was gone, disappeared away into the dishwasher. Then her mother disappeared out the back door into the garage, gone for the next eight hours at least.

Usually her mother didn’t get home until late evening. Too much to do at work, she would say. Although Sean and Charlotte had thought a few months ago that their mother was having an affair, they had come to the conclusion that she was simply throwing herself into work, it was preferable to going home and facing the fact of the house, living with the damage, not being able to move their claim forward.

The earthquakes had taken the city from her, it had been cordoned off for months. Years. Soldiers stood guard at the main points through the cordon, keeping everyone out of the city. Their city. The cordon had gradually been reduced in the months since the earthquake, but there were still parts of the city mere mortals couldn’t get into. That was supposed to end in winter, and Charlotte wondered what it would be like to be in there again. The February quake had happened in her second year of high school, and the city was, then, still relatively new to her, part of her journey to and from school. On her way home, she often postponed getting her connecting bus and walked around to see what was going on. She was just starting to get her bearings, get familiar with the old buildings. She had watched the demolition of the Manchester Courts building in a kind of stop motion: five afternoons a week she would go past and see progress, what walls were being taken down, what innards were being exposed.

The earthquakes had also taken Charlotte’s parents from her. To be strictly correct, the September earthquake had given them back, her father had moved back in and they played at being happy families for a while. The February quake had opened up a few cracks in that happy family unit, but they were just minor ones, they were all pulling together, putting aside their bad tempers from lack of sleep, from the difficulties of living in a broken city with a broken sewerage system. But the June quake had opened those cracks wider, and at the same time, her mother was trying to deal with EQC, getting their house assessed, getting some idea of timeframe for repairs. The arguing started again.

Charlotte had a late start at school that morning so she had the house to herself for a few minutes. She considered not going to school that day, she could fake an email to the school fairly easily. All it would take was an email from her mother’s email account on the family computer. Charlotte could watch for replies and delete them so Rebecca would never know. It was tempting, but she couldn’t guarantee her mother wasn’t checking emails during the day. If she was caught, her parents might decide she needed to go and spend her school holidays with relatives, so they could keep an eye on her, ‘get her back on track’ was probably what they would say. She would end up in Ashburton with her father’s sister and her three cousins, all younger than her, watching videos, one after another, day after day. Even Ashburton suffered disappearing building syndrome. Although it was an hour away from Christchurch, some of its buildings had been damaged in the first earthquake, the Darfield one, and some had been found to be earthquake prone and were being demolished.

Apparently you could cook with Marmite, that’s what Nanny had told her the other morning, and Charlotte was going to have a go, google some recipes and try them out at the weekend. It was going to be her school holiday project, ten ways with Marmite, something to amuse her while she studied, because that was all she was doing during the school holidays. Her parents couldn’t afford time off work, because all their spare time was going into their dealings with EQC, and Sean had already had his mid-term break, it was almost finished, just when Charlotte’s was about to start.

Charlotte would miss her grandmother when she went home. At school, it was a running joke, how long would someone be out of their house while repairs were done? No one knew, it was never as fast as the builders said it would be. But Suzanne’s repairs were going to plan, they were being carried out by Uncle Gerald’s company, so of course it was on schedule. Maybe once Nanny went home, Charlotte could go and stay with her. It would be peaceful, and although Suzanne was stressed over being away from her home and having to live with more people than she was used to, she wasn’t verging on crazy. Not like Charlotte’s mother, who bounced between yelling, crying and painfully uncomfortable silences. Other girls at school talked about how stressed their parents were over insurance issues, and for once Charlotte had something in common with them. So many of them seemed to be going through life invisible to their parents, and that was certainly the case for Charlotte.

One side effect of the stress at home was that Charlotte was studying a lot and getting better grades than she ever had before. She had done well in NCEA Level 1 last year and was determined to do even better this year. What else was there to do? Staying in the lounge and watching TV wasn’t an option, there simply wasn’t enough on the actual television stations to hold her attention, even if she could ignore the insurance discussions going on in the kitchen. In her room, headphones on, studying, it was the only way to get away from those tense discussions. Sean was escaping to the university library and his girlfriend’s flat. Not that their parents knew about the girlfriend. Not that he was hiding it from them, they just weren’t paying attention.

Charlotte had tried learning about insurance so she could understand what her parents were going through. And maybe she could learn enough to help. She had read about the concept of ‘good faith’, which meant a person buying an insurance policy had to be honest about the things that made them riskier to insure and about what had happened when they made a claim. For the insurance company, good faith came at claim time, when they were supposed to treat the insured fairly. There was an imbalance of power at claim time, Charlotte could see that. Insurance companies had money and lawyers and experts, plus a thorough understanding of the ins and outs of the insurance policy, which your average person didn’t.

Charlotte’s parents’ problem wasn’t their insurance company, it was EQC and getting over that $100,000 cap. Their house had been assessed several times and each assessment came back different. The first one had said they would be overcap and passed on to their insurer, but then, because they had claims in for four earthquakes, the damage was divided between those four quakes and they were undercap for all of them and they would stay with EQC. Her parents were trying to argue that the February quake had been the most damaging one and would surely put them overcap. It was confusing, not just for Charlotte, but for her parents and, apparently, for the people at EQC because, Rebecca said, she was never told the same thing twice.

Charlotte had asked her grandmother if there was anything Uncle Gerald could do to make her parents’ insurance claim go better. After all, Suzanne’s repairs were going well because Gerald was in charge. Suzanne had only said, ‘Oh sweetheart,’ pulled her close and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘People like me are the lucky ones, our damage isn’t much and there isn’t money to be made off us, so EQC’s willing to let us go.’

Charlotte was puzzled. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘If this house stays undercap, Fletchers gets all the work,’ Suzanne explained. ‘It’s worth a lot of money to them.’

‘But it’s wrong,’ Charlotte said. ‘They have an insurance policy.’ It was something her parents said often, that if only they could get passed over to their private insurer, things would start going smoothly.

‘There’s a lot of things wrong in the world, sweetheart, and not much anyone can do about them.’

Lindsay and Kevin had recently heard from their insurance company’s project management office again. The last communication had been in February, when the project manager visited with the structural engineer. This was the cowboy project manager who had slashed their original scope of works, changing it from having the house lifted and its ring foundation replaced to just gluing the cracks. There had been nothing from the PMO since then, but Lindsay and Kevin had decided to wait and see what the geotech report said. Work on their house could not move forward without the geotech report.

Then, in May, they heard from a new project manager, who arranged a visit to discuss the next steps in their repair. Although Lindsay and Kevin were happy that the cowboy was no longer their project manager, they had questions to pose to the new guy.

There were two of them at the door that morning, and Lindsay quickly ushered them inside. It was freezing outside, snow was predicted for parts of the South Island, including Christchurch, and it certainly felt like it would be happening today.

The new project manager was the younger man, called Kurt. He was in his thirties and reserved, but he seemed intelligent. There was no attempt at charming them, which was a relief. The first project manager had been charming, or thought he was. This new one, Kurt, shook hands with Lindsay and Kevin and then introduced the second man, who was about sixty. His name was John and, Kurt said, he would be their project manager as Kurt was moving on to a new role. Kurt was training John, who had just joined the PMO after a couple of years with EQC.