Bleak City (4 page)

‘Had a bit of a party,’ Alice said, while Chloe said, ‘Earthquake.’

‘No way,’ Ben said. He seemed inclined to believe the party explanation until another aftershock rolled through, and they could hear more bricks clattering onto the driveway and something thudding on the roof.

‘That chimney is dangerous,’ Kevin said, looking up towards the ceiling. ‘And even if it wasn’t, you can’t stay here with that wall the way it is. You’re lucky no one was sleeping on the sofa.’

Ben went pale and slid down the wall to land sloppily on the floor.

‘Get your things together,’ Kevin said, ‘you can all come home with me.’

At the Bowens’ house, Lindsay ran out of the back door when the van pulled up the driveway. She grabbed Alice, her embrace like a clamp. ‘I was so worried,’ Lindsay said. ‘It was only a couple of minutes before we heard from you, but it was so long and I thought...’ She stopped and hugged Alice tight again.

Kevin wanted to go and check on Alice’s grandparents and great-grandparents, and Ben decided he would go, too.

Inside, Olivia and Jack were under the dining table, which they had covered with a sheet. Both ran out and hugged Alice, but then scrambled back under the table at the sound of another aftershock. Olivia reached out and pulled at Alice’s arm, dragging her down and under the table with them. They had pillows from the beds on the floor under the table and it was cosy under there. Alice drifted off to sleep with Olivia and Jack on either side of her, wondering if Andrew’s other children, her half-brothers and half-sister, were as scared as Olivia and Jack were. Alice was scared, and she was a lot older than all her half-siblings, so they were bound to be. She hoped they were tucked up tight with their mum and dad, and she thought about how nice it would be to have all of her brothers and sisters here, under the table with her.

When she woke, it was only half an hour later, but she felt refreshed. She gently untangled herself from Olivia and Jack and left them to continue sleeping. The television was on, showing the carnage in the city, where building façades had fallen into the street, crushing cars. Lindsay and Chloe were sitting on the sofa, watching, silent. One building, a Mexican restaurant the family had been to a few times, was open to the elements. Green, white and red flags were strung across the room, its tables were still set and bricks from its Manchester and Worcester Street walls were lying all over the street, where a streetlight had bent to kiss the ground. As the morning wore on, more images were shown and more stories told. The quake had been downgraded to a 7.1, and no one had died. The shaking, someone said, had lasted forty seconds. It had been the longest forty seconds Alice had ever experienced.

In the suburbs, something called liquefaction had damaged houses, a slurry of water and soil pushed up to the surface by the force of the shaking, forming sand volcanoes where there was nothing to obstruct their passage, but where a structure was in the way, strong enough to damage foundations and rip up footpaths and driveways. There was a shot of a petrol station where the forecourt and building had been pushed up out of the ground, its entire slab sitting above the surrounding ground by half a metre.

‘We haven’t seen the cat,’ Lindsay said softly, almost a whisper. ‘They don’t know.’ She nodded towards the table Olivia and Jack were sleeping under.

Alice nodded. ‘We’ll go look for him later.’

Alice texted Andrew to tell him she was okay. She had replied to his text earlier, but now she thought maybe she should say more, that maybe she had held on to her anger for long enough. She asked about his family, and he quickly texted back saying everyone was all right. ‘Glad you’re ok,’ he texted next. ‘I love you.’ She texted back saying she loved him too, and she realised that she did. It wasn’t the same as she felt for her mum or for Kevin and Livvy and Jack, but it was there, and maybe over time they could be more like father and daughter than what they were now, just related strangers.

Kevin and Ben were back just before lunchtime. Alice’s grandparents and great-grandparents were fine and although a lot of things had been broken, both houses had done reasonably well. Everyone was anxious from the aftershocks. Lindsay’s parents said her sister’s place was fine and she had power, but her brother Jason’s house was in bad shape from liquefaction. Kevin wanted to go around after lunch and see what he could do to help Jason clean up. Lindsay and Kevin’s own suburb didn’t seem to have any liquefaction, Kevin said, although it did have a lot of broken chimneys.

While they were having lunch they heard that the university wouldn’t open the following week. It was clear that the flat would be uninhabitable for some time and they would need to find another place to live. It was easy for Alice, she could stay at home if she needed to, but Ben and Chloe and the other flatmates would have to find something else.

Ben would stay another night or two and then drive home to Timaru, but Chloe had called her parents and they had booked her on a flight out of Christchurch the following day.

Kevin and Ben decided to go and help Lindsay’s brother with his piles of silt. Alice helped Lindsay clean up the kitchen, then the broken things in what had been her bedroom, what would be her bedroom for a little while once again.

Later in the afternoon, Alice took Olivia and Jack for a walk around the neighbourhood. They had finally noticed the cat’s absence and wanted to go and find him, in spite of Lindsay’s reassurances that he would be home when he was hungry. They walked along the street and down long driveways and cul-de-sacs calling the cat’s name.

There were, as Kevin had said, a lot of broken chimneys, bricks on roofs and driveways. There was one house where the chimney had fallen off the house in a big chunk and landed on top of a car parked beside the house. The car was a crumpled wreck, the front seats crushed into the tiniest of spaces. It would be impossible to retrieve anything from the glove box.

The neighbourhood was strangely quiet, it was like everyone was staying inside, trying to figure out how it was that The Big One that was expected to hit Wellington had hit Christchurch instead. It was something Alice was still trying to get her head around.

In the evening, with aftershocks continuing, Olivia and Jack insisted Alice sleep under the table with them, so Ben and Chloe each got a bedroom. It was a restless night, full of rumbling and shaking, clammy children and stray limbs. Alice’s head hurt and her mouth felt disgusting, a post-quake hangover. Alice extricated herself from the children, tucking the blankets around them like swaddling, then climbed out from under the table. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of water and quickly drank it down before remembering that residents were supposed to boil water before drinking it, until the city’s water supply had been thoroughly checked. Too late now.

She heard the thunk of the cat flap in the laundry, then a pathetic meow. The cat walked past his food bowl full of biscuits and up to Alice, rubbed up against her leg. She picked him up and buried her face in his fur, which smelled musty, like he had been in the crawlspace under the house. It was good to be home.

When the English first settled the Canterbury region, they tried to make it look just like home, planting English trees and releasing English birds and animals. Although flat and laced with streams in an England-like manner, the Canterbury Plains on which the city of Christchurch was built are not another England, they are, in fact, the product of mountain building. The upward growth of the Southern Alps is countered by erosion and glaciation, wearing away at the mountains and washing them down rivers and out towards the sea, piece by tiny piece. The finer soils of the Southern Alps are blown onto the plains by a regular, dreaded foehn wind that blows from the northwest. Two mighty braided rivers meander wide riverbeds, flanking the city, one some fifteen kilometres north, the other fifty kilometres south. Closer in, two spring-fed rivers flow from west to east, meeting in an estuary that empties out to the sea, the surrounding land soft, wet swamp overlying the river gravels. Then, south of the city, rise the Port Hills, the eroded remains of an ancient volcano cradling the city in a one-armed embrace. The contrast then is this: the swampy soils of flat parts of the city, soaked from a rainier-than-usual winter, and the hard volcanic rocks of the Port Hills.

A month after the big September quake, the people of Christchurch were getting used to living with cracks in houses, waiting for insurance processes to get properly underway and sleeping sporadically, plagued by hundreds of aftershocks that came at all times of the day and night.

Southeast of the city, tucked into a loop of the Heathcote River, a tributary cuts across the land. The area had been farmed by the early settlers, and the last farmer died in the old farmhouse shortly before the Second World War, leaving it and the land to his son, Bill Moorhouse. Bill returned from the war with an English bride, Marjorie, and a young daughter, and in the building boom of the 1950s, set himself up as a builder. He subdivided the land, in stages to avoid flooding the market, and kept the best of the land for himself and his family, raising a son and three daughters in the old farmhouse.

After Bill’s death in 1990, Marjorie had a new house built further along the stream, in her favourite spot. Bill had been planning to sell off the land before he died, and he and Marjorie had argued about it. When Marjorie finally moved into her new house and began planning its garden, she gave up the pretence of missing her late husband.

The house had been well built, designed by her son Gerald to take advantage of the beauty of the land, with views towards the stream along the back of the house and plenty of views towards the hills along the front. The house was timber framed with wooden weatherboards and a steel roof and like many of that construction, it had performed well in the September earthquake. Bill had remembered the great earthquakes of the 1920s and 1930s and had drilled into Gerald the need for houses to be built on strong, stable ground. That was why Gerald had suggested his mother build further back on the section, not right up near the stream. Her garden stretched away to the stream, blending in with the old oaks, where monarch butterflies spent each winter, lining the bare branches, their folded bodies like thousands of unnatural leaves quivering in an unfelt breeze.

Marjorie had heard visitors refer to the old oaks as ancient, but nothing was truly ancient here, a thought she kept to herself. Never give people too much information about you, that was a rule Marjorie lived by. She gathered as much as she could about them, but never gave away too much about herself.

Marjorie had turned ninety a few days earlier and soon the house would be teeming with family. It was her tradition, a springtime gathering of all her children and grandchildren, although in recent years, she had allowed her daughters and daughter-in-law to take responsibility for preparing the savoury dishes. The desserts, though, were Marjorie’s domain, and she had spent the last two days and much of the morning baking and preparing dishes. Now it was time to relax for a few moments and enjoy a cup of tea.

Her grandson Andrew, Gerald’s son, had arrived ahead of the rest of the family, bringing along his teenage daughter, Alice, who Marjorie hadn’t seen since she was a tiny girl. Her hair had darkened considerably since, to the same colour as Andrew’s, and Marjorie’s own when she had been young. Alice was blue-eyed, not the blue that changes, but clear and intense. She was taller than Marjorie and her daughters, something Alice had inherited from her mother’s side of the family. Alice sat down on the sofa across from where Marjorie was sitting. Andrew asked if they wanted something to drink and went off to fill their requests.

‘I remember when you were a little girl,’ she told Alice. The girl seemed surprised. ‘You came here with your father, and I took you down to the stream and showed you the butterflies.’

Alice looked out towards the back of the garden, confused. ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘Would they be there now?’

‘It’s the wrong time of year,’ Marjorie said. Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of more family, but soon after, Marjorie saw Alice walking towards the stream, looking up into the trees.

They weren’t able to speak again until later in the afternoon, once most of the family had left and those who remained were cleaning up in the kitchen. Alice had brought Marjorie a cup of tea and was sitting across from her once again, sipping at a cup of coffee.

‘They’re a bit unnerving,’ Marjorie said. ‘This lot.’

Alice started to protest, but Marjorie cut her off.

‘Don’t worry about what they think of you,’ Marjorie said. ‘Their world is rugby and building, and a woman doing an engineering degree, well they don’t know how to handle that.’

Alice laughed. ‘Engineering’s not so different from building.’

‘It’s the woman part they’re uncomfortable with. As innovative as this family prides itself on being with regard to building, they’re in the dark ages when it comes to women.’

‘It’s different from my mum’s family,’ Alice said. ‘They’re so proud of having a girl doing engineering.’

‘That must be a lot of pressure,’ Marjorie said, peering at Alice, daring her to brush away the scrutiny.

Alice met her gaze and seemed to drop her guard. ‘Sometimes it is,’ she admitted. ‘But they’re really supportive, almost too supportive sometimes and I wish they’d just let me help them with the cooking.’

‘That’s a better reaction than I had when I said I wanted to go to nursing school,’ Marjorie said, smiling. ‘My father said what was the point, I was just going to get married and have babies.’

‘Did you?’ Alice said, then laughed nervously. ‘Because obviously... I mean, did you go to nursing school?’

‘I did,’ Marjorie said. ‘I was a nurse in the war, until Suzanne was born. It was rare for a woman to keep on working after she was married back then, but during the war, it was all hands on deck.’

Marjorie made sure to invite Alice to come around any time. The girl’s company was a refreshing change, she seemed able to talk to people of different ages, unlike Marjorie’s other great-grandchildren, who mostly seemed bored, anxious to get away from family gatherings as quickly as possible.