Bleak City (39 page)

Charlotte decided to go the long way home and walk past the house they used to live in. It was where her family had been living when she was born, and she had been nine when they moved to the new place up the hill. Moving up the hill had been a mistake, the old house had been a happy place where her parents didn’t argue. She wondered if they argued so much in the new house because of money. She remembered them talking about having a large mortgage, and it wasn’t something that sounded like a good thing.

It would have been better for them to stay in the old house because it had already been demolished and rebuilt. Yes, it would have been awful to have your house so badly damaged that you couldn’t live in it, but at least all that would be over with by now. Whenever she walked past the new old house, she wondered if the people living in it were happy, if they spoke nicely to one another, if the quakes were a distant memory. If she were the more obsessive type, she would figure out a way to see what they were like, make an excuse to walk by the house on a regular basis and catch glimpses of the happy, normal family of her imagination, one configured so closely like her own. Parents the same age, boy at university, girl four years younger still at high school.

This way home took her past Nanny’s house. Charlotte thought about dropping in, but it would annoy her parents if she wasn’t home by the time they arrived home. And if she went to Nanny’s, she would find a reason to stay. And to stay a little longer. Then there would be a phone call and Nanny would have to say that, sorry, yes, she would send Charlotte home right away.

Charlotte had the weekend to look forward to, at least. She was going with her dad and her uncle Brent to collect firewood from a farm where one of the shelterbelts had been uprooted and blown over in a big storm a couple of weeks earlier. Thousands of homes had been without power and farms throughout the region had damaged irrigation equipment. It hadn’t been too bad at Redcliffs, although it had been a windy night that Charlotte had trouble sleeping through. Brent and Dan’s parents had a woodburner, so they would get as much wood as they could and store it up for the next winter. Chopping up trees into firewood and stacking wood into a trailer wasn’t the most exciting thing Charlotte could be doing over the weekend, but it was a change, a chance to get out of the city. And spend some time with her dad, that was what she was looking forward to most of all.

The thing she liked about spending time with her dad was that there was no questioning, no prying into what she was doing. Not that she had anything to hide, she was pretty boring as far as teenagers went. But she didn’t like being interrogated about her ‘plans for the future’. She was sixteen, what was she supposed to say? She was going to do a degree that would get her into a career and give her a public profile and a way into politics and changing the world? There was a girl at school like that, India Cooper, but she wasn’t someone Charlotte would be caught hanging around with. Her mother would love having India Cooper for a daughter, she would be able to pour all her frustration over the EQC assessment process they were going through into making sure her daughter would be able to change the world for the better.

That Saturday with her dad almost didn’t happen. Charlotte got up early and got dressed in old clothes for a day she knew would involve a lot of dust and debris. She was in the kitchen spreading Marmite on her buttered toast when her mother came in and pointed out she should be spending the weekend studying for exams. They were over a month away! And, Charlotte pointed out, she had studied every night that week, she should be allowed some time off to do something different. Dan came through and won the argument for her, simply saying, ‘C’mon you, Brent’s meeting us there in half an hour.’ Charlotte stacked her toast on the palm of her hand, grabbed her backpack and ran after her dad, who was in the garage starting the car.

‘I was saying something,’ Charlotte heard her mother calling after her. Charlotte could imagine the disgusted look on her face at being foiled once again.

‘What was your mother saying?’ her father asked as he backed down the driveway.

‘Just that I need to do some studying later,’ Charlotte said. She was too slow to think up a decent lie and when he stopped at the bottom of the driveway and didn’t pull onto the street right away, she thought he was going to insist she go back inside and do as her mother wanted. But he was stopping to get out and hitch the trailer to the car’s towbar. Charlotte let out her breath, relieved.

‘I’m sure you’re keeping up just fine,’ Dan said as he drove down the hill. ‘And it will probably do your mother good to have the house to herself for the day.’

That didn’t make sense. ‘She hates the place,’ Charlotte said.

‘No she doesn’t,’ her father said. ‘She just hates the situation we’re in. She’s promised me she’s just going to relax for the day, do some reading. That isn’t related to the house.’

Charlotte said nothing. Clearly her father wasn’t listening to her mother very closely, because Charlotte heard Rebecca say she hated the house pretty often and she didn’t think a day trying to relax in the place she hated would be enough. Her mother needed a month, or maybe even a year. So it wouldn’t be happening any time soon.

Soon they were on the Southern Motorway, heading out of the city and towards the mountains. The part of the motorway they were on was new, it was being built when the earthquakes started and its completion hadn’t been slowed down by the quakes. Funny how the western side of town had so little damage compared to the east.

‘Do you ever wish you’d stayed on your side of town?’ Charlotte asked. Dan had grown up in Harewood, in the northwestern part of the city on flat land near the airport.

‘Only because of the house,’ Dan said, glancing at her. ‘I like the hills, I like living where we live. That’s why your mother and I decided to live there and not over this side of town.’

‘You have that in common?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘We both love the hills.’

‘You should start cycling again.’ Before the quakes, it was possible to cycle from one end of the hills to the other along the Summit Road. Before her parents separated, it had been Dan’s Saturday morning thing, to cycle up the hill to the Summit Road, then along the Summit Road and back down the hills and home. All up, it was around thirty kilometres of cycling and Dan did that every week.

‘I could stand to lose a few kilos,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the motorway.

‘I didn’t say that!’ Charlotte protested. But yes, he did have a small potbelly he didn’t have when Charlotte was little.

‘But I could,’ he said, looking at her and grinning.

‘Suppose,’ she said. ‘You are old now.’

He laughed and they both fell silent again, watching the mountains drawing nearer. As they got closer to the place where they would meet Brent, Dan had Charlotte look up the location on his phone and tell him which way to go. Soon they were driving along roads bordered by farms, and the number of trees that had come down was staggering. Alongside one road, roots bound up with clumps of mud faced the fenceline, one after the other tipped over into the paddock by the force of the wind.

Brent was already working when Charlotte and Dan arrived at the fallen shelterbelt. Brent had earmuffs on and the chainsaw was chewing through a branch. His back was to them and they waited until he was finished with that branch. No point risking startled motion from a man operating a chainsaw, Dan said.

Brent spent the rest of the morning chopping up trees while Dan split the wood and Charlotte loaded it onto the trailers. Once the trailers were full, they went to Charlotte’s grandparents’ house to start unloading the wood and stacking it behind their garage.

They had dinner there and it was getting dark when Charlotte and Dan started the trip home. Charlotte ached all over and her arms were covered in sticky sap. She would need a hot shower when she got home, then maybe she could go spend the night at Nanny’s, watch one of the old movies Nanny loved so much and fall asleep in front of the television. She asked her father.

‘You’ve been spending too much time there lately,’ he said. ‘We’ll watch a movie at home tonight and tomorrow we’ll do something together.’

‘But you said Mum could use some time home alone. You could go for a bike ride and I’ll stay at Nanny’s.’

‘We’ll spend some time together as a family,’ he said, his voice firm. Charlotte kept pushing anyway.

‘Sean’s not coming home this weekend.’ They were on the causeway crossing the estuary, nearly to the entrance to Redcliffs. Then they were past the shipping containers, sentinels protecting them from whatever hazard might come down off the cliffs above.

‘We aren’t talking about Sean.’

She said nothing. They turned down the road that led to their house and were soon pulling into the driveway. Charlotte opened her door and was about to step out when her father touched her arm.

‘We’re trying, Lottie,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it’s like this, but we don’t know how to make it better, how to fix the house problem, but can we at least spend some quality time together tomorrow? Didn’t we have a good day today?’

She pulled her arm away from him, stepped out of the car and slammed the door shut before running inside.

Time was overtaking Marjorie, she knew that. She was going to bed early and getting up late, despite her best efforts to resist this worrying trend. The days were getting shorter for Marjorie even as spring was drawing out the light part of each day. She still managed to go for a walk each day, but wasn’t able to get as far as she used to. Whereas a loop around the block was once well within her reach, she was now limited to walking down to the river and back, a short one kilometre walk that became more difficult each passing week.

The neighbourhood was changing, houses disappearing, leaving sections that stood empty for months before anything was done. Around the corner from Marjorie’s house, an old weatherboard villa had disappeared, one that had been there ever since Marjorie had moved into the neighbourhood as a young wife and mother. It had been a beautiful villa, built in an era when as much attention was paid to detail as was paid to cost. It was now being replaced by a modern weatherboard and concrete block mix that was larger than the old villa had been, taking up much of the section. It was the way people built these days, making the most of their land, not concerning themselves too much with a garden. Marjorie would find it difficult to live in such a house, not because of the materials used, because she did think it could be made attractive and it was nice to see people using their imaginations and mixing building materials instead of going with just brick or just weather boards. No, it was the garden she would miss in such a place. She had always enjoyed having a vegetable garden, growing food for herself and her family, not being dependent on the bland, uniform offerings of the produce section at the supermarket. Even after the worst of the quakes, Marjorie had been able to feed herself from her garden.

The owner of the house being built seemed to have done well out of the insurance process. The new house would be modern and warm. No doubt the owners would have put some of their own money towards the build, they wouldn’t have been able to get a larger house built otherwise, but they had done well. Not so for the woman next door to them, Joan Armstrong. She had lived in the house since the 1960s, raising her children there. Although a decade younger than Marjorie, Joan had been a widow for many more years than Marjorie had. And, unlike Marjorie, Joan missed her husband, even now, nearly three decades after his death.

Joan had moved out for her repairs for three months late in 2011. Now, over a year after she moved back in, she was seeing cracks appearing in her walls and she was having difficulty shutting and opening some doors and windows. Her oldest son had paid a foundation specialist to inspect the house and the specialist had found unrepaired damage to the foundations. Marjorie had heard of such things. Alice’s grandparents on her mother’s side had badly repaired foundations and were having difficulty getting Fletchers or EQC to do anything about it. But in Joan’s case, the specialist had identified foundation damage that should, he said, have been repaired, but it didn’t appear that any such effort had been made. Joan had been too trusting, Marjorie thought, and had never insisted on seeing the scope of works or having it reviewed by someone other than EQC or Fletchers. Joan’s son was talking to EQC about what needed to be done, but it was going to take a long time. Alice’s grandparents had discovered their dodgy repairs over a year ago and there hadn’t yet been any action.

Marjorie had stopped buying houses, the market was getting too risky. There were two main problems that Marjorie could see. The first was that some houses had been poorly repaired, those like Joan’s and that of Alice’s grandparents, and often the poor standard of repairs was only discovered some months after the homeowner moved back in. The second problem was owners selling houses but pocketing the money that should have been spent on repairs. This was fine if the house was being sold as-is-where-is, and Marjorie had bought several such properties for very good prices. The problem was when there was an expectation that the house was being sold along with the payout that would allow repairs to be made. There were some cases where an EQC payout had been handed over to the new owner, who later found out that there had been more than one claim against the property and so more than one payout. The new owner thought they were buying a house along with a payout sufficient for repairs only to discover that there was more damage and not enough money to repair it. Buyers needed to be more vigilant these days, and Marjorie was no longer feeling energetic enough to make that effort.

It wasn’t just the state of the real estate market that made Marjorie stop buying up properties. Andrew had worked hard at getting her insurance claims settled and although he hadn’t been able to get as much as she wanted, they had done all right. Recently he had found two TC3 properties next door to one another and obtained the geotechnical engineering report from the vendor to see what kind of foundations would be required. The houses on the sections were beyond saving, both were very badly out of level from liquefaction during the February earthquake. But Marjorie could put two townhouses on each section, which would make the cost of the groundwork more economical. It looked promising, but Marjorie was hesitating. Andrew was looking tired. Usually full of energy, the last year had taken its toll on him. His hair was starting to grey at the temples, which was normal in a man his age, but what disturbed her was how pale and washed out he looked. He said it was his workload, but she suspected the work she had asked him to do on her insurance claims had taken too much out of him. Insurance companies elevated twisted logic to an art form, he said, and had little regard for the laws they were supposed to be operating under.