Bleak City (38 page)

However long it might take, the section saga was at least a step further ahead. That was certainly not the case with the repairs to their house. Their initial attempts to complain to Fletcher EQR about the quality of the repairs had been fobbed off. They had signed off on the repairs, they were told, it was too late to change their minds. But they had drafted a complaint, which had been ‘investigated’ and closed. Next they had followed up with a report from a foundation specialist they had engaged to assess the house. He had spent half a day at the house, taking measurements and photos, and he had picked up issues that no one had before. Now the report was with EQC, it was just a matter of waiting. The High Court ruling gave Heather hope that reason would prevail, as long as they were patient, as long as they stuck to their guns.

When Neil arrived home, they had dinner and afterwards he and Heather went for a walk around the park. Although it was still winter, the days were starting to get longer and warmer, and the world was looking brighter to Heather. She said as much.

‘It’s not all over yet,’ Neil said. ‘We haven’t even had an offer.’

‘I know that,’ Heather said. ‘But it’s just nice to have forward movement, even if it’s only a tiny half step. It’s something.’

‘It’s not much,’ Neil insisted.

‘No, but it’s something, and the way things have been the last couple of years, I’ll take what I can get.’

‘Okay,’ Neil said. ‘I just don’t want you being disappointed if there’s no more progress for quite some time.’

‘I’m quite prepared for that,’ she said. ‘I’m just happy to be a tiny bit further along the path.’

Her elation was short-lived because there was an article in
The Press
the next morning saying the Government would appeal the High Court ruling. Not only that, the Prime Minister said the Government might just walk away from the vacant land owners. She called Lindsay.

‘Did you read it?’

Lindsay had. ‘Unbelievable.’

Heather read from the webpage. ‘“Thanks very much, it’s been a lot of fun. If you don’t want to take the offer, that’s where it’s at.” That, that... man.’

‘Mmmmm hmmmm,’ Lindsay said. ‘I hate the way he refers to it as uninsured land, as though land can be insured.’

‘He’s either the most misinformed man in New Zealand or the most devious. I cannot believe they keep trotting out this line about us being careless over not being insured. We can’t get insurance on land!’

‘Did you read the bit where he said it’s not easy for the Government?’ Lindsay said.

‘I did,’ Heather said. ‘That man is an arse. Does he think it’s easy for us here? Sitting and waiting, not knowing when our house is going to be seen to? Not knowing whether we’re going to have our land taken off us, not knowing how much we’ll get for it?’ Her voice had risen and had an edge to it that verged on hysterical and she tried to rein her feelings in, only to feel tears roll down her cheeks.

‘I’m coming over Mum,’ Lindsay said. ‘Okay?’

Before Heather could object, Lindsay had disconnected the call.

Heather tried to calm down, to think of something else, but wherever she went in the house there was a reminder, whether it was a new crack forming in one of the walls because their foundation hadn’t been repaired properly, paint flaking or bubbling on the walls or stacks of paper documenting their claim.

Ten minutes later, Lindsay arrived. Heather was pacing the kitchen, still clutching the phone, her hands red from the pressure she was applying. Lindsay gave her a hug and took the phone off her. Heather was trying her best to not start crying again.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sniffing back tears. ‘I had this little ray of hope that something, just one thing, might be sorted out sometime soon, and now it’s gone.’

‘I know,’ Lindsay said, rubbing her back. ‘It’s so unfair. Unjust.’

‘Yes, unjust. They just do what they want and won’t listen to anyone, they don’t care who they hurt.’

Lindsay insisted that Heather spend the day with her. They would go out to lunch and Heather could help her around the house, pick the kids up from school later.

They drove to a complex of old tannery buildings a couple of kilometres away. The buildings were in an industrial part of Woolston, with large trucks rumbling along the roads. A gelatine factory nearby was notorious for a smell that on hot days made the area smell like damp, rotting fish. The river passed through this part of Woolston and the tannery buildings were along the riverbank. The owner had planned to demolish one building to use as a carpark and restore all the tannery buildings, turn them into an arcade full of shops and cafés. But the June 2011 earthquake had set him back, shaking bricks from the buildings he was planning to restore, and the only functional building he was left with was the one he was planning to demolish. He turned that building into a pizza bar and café and brewed beer on site. The Brewery drew people from all over the southeast. It was a welcome distraction from the quakes, something new from old in a city where so many of the old things were being torn down and replaced with nothing.

The restoration of the old tannery buildings had continued throughout 2011 and 2012, and recently the first set of shops had opened up. It was the first time Heather had been there since shops started to open. Lindsay held open the heavy door for Heather. The tile floors were a beautiful checked pattern, bordered with zigzagging blue, cream and red tiles, the colours rich and warm. The two of them walked into the main part of the arcade and looked up and down. The shop frontages were large wood-framed windows with stained glass along the top. Wrought-iron light fittings ran the length of the arcade and above the shops were balconies that pointed up to the glass ceiling, held up by intricately patterned beams. Late morning sun streamed through the ceiling.

‘This is lovely,’ Heather said, trying to catch every detail she could. She couldn’t remember anything quite so beautiful in Christchurch.

‘I’m starving,’ Lindsay said. ‘Let’s get something to eat, but let’s come back and have a proper look after.’

They went to The Brewery at the front of the complex and after coffees and a shared pizza, walked back through the shops, enjoying the newness of them. The tannery complex was similar to an arcade Heather and Neil had once visited in Melbourne, something built in the early 1900s, when people still cared about craftmanship and beauty. This new arcade certainly outdid the too-large malls that had come to litter Christchurch’s suburbs in the last thirty years. When she was a child, shopping had been done in the city or out at New Brighton, and Heather had never really warmed to the idea of modern mall shopping.

‘It’s lovely to see someone get on and do something,’ Heather said. They were standing at the end of the main arcade, looking down it, past the shops they had been meandering through. ‘So little has happened in the city, in spite of all the plans. I’m so tired of all the talk, it’s nice to see something actually getting done.’

‘Do you ever want to leave?’ Lindsay said. She was quiet, her brow creased. Was she actually asking a question or was she trying to tell Heather something? Were Lindsay and Kevin thinking of leaving?

‘I’ve stopped thinking about what we might do,’ Heather said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I don’t want to have hope any more.’

Heather didn’t want to worry Lindsay, but she was increasingly feeling trapped in the house. She loved the place when they first moved in, and there were so many happy memories, all those years when the children were growing up. Lately, though, it was something she couldn’t escape, like a bad marriage in a country that had outlawed divorce. When she could think clearly enough to analyse her feelings, she did still love the house, the wooden floors, the remodelled kitchen, the cosy lounge heated by the woodfire and the garden she had put so much care into over the years. It was EQC she felt was the abusive spouse, trapping them there, not responding to their complaints, pretending everything was fine, the house had been repaired properly. When it hadn’t!

‘Everyone needs hope, Mum,’ Lindsay said, putting her arm around Heather’s shoulders.

‘I’m not unhappy, love,’ Heather said, only half convincing herself. ‘I just feel like our choices about where we live are limited.’

‘Well they are limited,’ Lindsay said. ‘Ours, too. We’ve talked about selling the house along with the claim. Letting someone else deal with it.’

‘Where would you go?’ Heather said, surprised that Kevin and Lindsay had talked about doing something that drastic.

‘Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere,’ Lindsay said, smiling. ‘We would lose money doing that, so we’ve decided to hang on.’

‘I suppose that’s all we can do,’ Heather said.

They decided to spend the afternoon making a roast dinner for that evening. It would give both of them a chance to escape from the drudgery of trying to understand the insurance process and trying to figure out how to make progress on Neil and Heather’s complaint with EQC. They agreed that insurance and earthquakes would not be mentioned, which at first made for long silences, but soon they started talking about the children’s progress at school. Then it was time to pick them up from school, which Lindsay did while Heather peeled and chopped potatoes and kumara for roasting.

When Lindsay arrived home with the children, she took over in the kitchen and told Heather to go and play with the children. Olivia and Jack were putting together a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, one of jungle animals around a watering hole. Heather worked at being very bad at putting it together while Olivia and Jack told her about school. She remembered doing the same with Lindsay and Sonya when they were little, when Jason was just a baby and Heather had not yet gone back to work. That was in the house Heather was feeling so trapped in now. They had moved in just before Lindsay started school, when Heather was heavily pregnant with Sonya. She remembered trying to get the house organised while keeping track of a four-year-old and feeling awful. Heather was not one of those women who glowed during pregnancy. She just felt tired all the time, and after each baby she had experienced what was now recognised as post-natal depression. Each time, it had taken her a couple of years to pull herself out of that dark place, the pit with the steep, slippery edges.

Lately she felt that despair creeping in again, felt that she was slipping away, down into the dark. All those years ago it was the little things that would pull her back into feeling alive, things like playing with her children. Playing with her grandchildren had the same effect now, showing her what her priorities should be. What was important to them was the people who loved them, and Heather decided she would try every day to remind herself that it was the people she loved, and who loved her, who were important, not the house she lived in.

Dinner was a loud event, the children noisily telling the adults about school and their afternoon playing with Grandma. It was good to have that distraction, and the only mention made of the Prime Minister’s comments was when Alice greeted her, giving her a big hug and whispering in her ear, ‘The PM is a ginormous arse.’ Heather squeezed her tight and sniffed back a tear.

After dinner, Lindsay, Kevin and Alice did the dishes while Heather and Neil got the children ready for bed. Then they had cups of tea in the kitchen, talking about nothing much, which was lovely for a change. Earthquakes and insurance, insurance and earthquakes, she’d had enough of both of them for several lifetimes, and it was nice to talk about how the children were doing at school and when the weather might start getting warmer now that the end of winter was near.

As they were saying goodbye, Heather turned to Lindsay and hugged her, holding her tight. ‘Thanks very much,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been a lot of fun.’

‘We’ll do it again soon,’ Lindsay said, kissing her cheek. ‘Take our minds off all this.’

Heather nodded, but said nothing more. She and Neil walked out to the road where Neil had parked his van. She started to cry and Neil reached for her arm, giving it a squeeze.

‘We’ll get through this,’ he said.

She nodded and sniffed back her tears. It was nice of him to say, but she was far from convinced. She would find ways to stay away from the edge of that pit. She had to.

Charlotte got off the bus at the first stop in Redcliffs to give herself a long walk home. She studied the shipping containers on the other side of the road. Maersk, P&O, Maersk, Maersk Sealand and more Maersk, the company’s seven-pointed star logo repeated along the road. The containers were stacked two high into ten columns, twenty of them set up to stop rocks falling down the cliffs from hitting any cars on the road below, or people on the footpath. It made the road into Redcliffs narrow and cars had to slow down to thirty kilometres per hour. The containers had been there for so long now that Charlotte struggled to remember what was behind them. There had been a cave, and Charlotte wondered if rockfall had blocked off the mouth of it. Although she had lived all of her life in Redcliffs, she could never remember going into the cave. It had always been spoken of as being off limits, too dangerous to go into. There had been houses near the cave, too, but the only one Charlotte could remember was a yellow one, different in style from the other houses in Redcliffs, a kind of North American desert look to it. It was three stories high, but Charlotte couldn’t remember any of its neighbours. She had been going past that stretch of road ever since she could remember, yet she couldn’t remember what had been there three years before. Funny how memory worked, it had to be reinforced if it was going to stick. Charlotte wondered what else she had forgotten.

She walked past the school with its empty grounds. She had hung around in town, walking around the container mall and the building demolitions before catching the bus home. She had spent so long in town she had missed seeing the school pickup, all the cars lined up on the road in front of the school, mums waiting for the little kids as they got off the bus from the school they actually went to. The cliffs behind the school had collapsed on the day of the February quake and the massive piles of rocks were still there, visible from the road. None of the school buildings had been hit by the rocks falling, but there were more rocks coming down in the June quake and so the school relocated to a school in Sumner. Kids now had to catch a bus from Redcliffs School out to Sumner. Charlotte felt sorry for them, she remembered walking to school as a little kid, it being a big deal being able to go with Sean once she was old enough to start. Then, when Sean went off to high school, Charlotte could walk by herself. Sure the little kids could walk to the pickup spot, but it wasn’t the same thing as walking to school.