Bleak City (44 page)

Heather’s sisters and their families had descended on Christchurch to see Grandad and say their goodbyes, so every night for the past week, Alice had arrived home from work to find she was sleeping on the sofa because there was someone in her room. That was fine, she was so worn out that she fell asleep quickly, and it was good to have a catch up each morning with whatever uncle or auntie or cousin wandered out of her room.

Alice had never lost someone she was close to, not that she could remember. Her grandfather’s mother had died when she was seven, too young to really understand what death meant. Now her great-grandad was gone, a quiet, gentle man who found enjoyment in his garden and walking the dog along the river.

Her phone buzzed. It was Kylie asking if she was coming back.

Inside, Alice’s seat had been taken as the others shuffled themselves around so she sat down across from Kylie and Scott, who were deep in conversation.

‘Scott’s telling me about how there are too many guys around town calling themselves project managers,’ Kylie said. Scott’s arm was around Kylie’s shoulder and she was leaning heavily into him. How many beers had she had?

‘A three week course doesn’t make someone a project manager,’ Scott said. ‘Guys I work with study hard to qualify as project managers, go on courses at nights, and have study groups and they have to work so many hours in project management to get the right number of credits.’

‘How long does that take?’ Alice asked.

‘As long as a year,’ Scott said. ‘And then they sit a four-hour exam. These guys working for the PMOs, they’re not real project managers.’

Alice nodded. The project manager Lindsay and Kevin had been assigned showed no evidence of being able to coordinate the screeds of information people were collecting about their house, and he certainly didn’t have the communication skills to sort out conflicts. If anything, he was simply making matters worse for them. He couldn’t seem to listen, or maybe he just didn’t want to. Alice had said to Kevin that they should ask for another project manager, but he had said no, the insurance company would just think they were trying to delay the claim and he was determined to be cooperative.

‘You know we all work for Southern Response,’ Alice said to Scott. Kylie shot her a look that said stop, while Scott glanced sharply at Kylie with a look of puzzled disappointment. Southern Response was in the news almost as much as EQC, and its reputation was nearly as bad. An accountant writing for a business and finance website had said that Southern Response was systemically undervaluing their claims, ripping people off. Alice wasn’t sure that was true, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t true, either.

‘Really?’ Scott said, his voice sharp and high.

‘Not all of us,’ Kylie said quickly.

‘Okay, not all of us,’ Alice said. ‘Except Kylie and David, there.’ She pointed down to the far end of the table. ‘The rest of us have seen the light and left.’

‘I’m looking to get out as well,’ Kylie said. Was she? She hadn’t said anything. Those who had left did seem happier and more relaxed than those still working for SR.

Scott excused himself from the table, saying he was going to get another beer.

Kylie leaned over the table and hissed at Alice. ‘Why are you being such a cow?’

Alice paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, trying to assemble her thoughts. She was confused and upset because of her great-grandad, but instead of dealing with it, she was taking it out on Kylie. ‘Do you really want to leave SR?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Kylie said, and started to cry. Alice got up and pushed around the corner of the table to squeeze in beside Kylie. She put her arm around her, which only made Kylie cry harder. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘The people are so miserable and I hate talking to them when I can’t do anything to make it better for them. You’re so lucky to be out.’

‘Have you looked for something else?’

Kylie shook her head.

‘If it’s gotten that bad, maybe you should start. Ask around. Take a couple of days’ leave and just go door-knocking with your CV, see what turns up.’

At that point, Scott returned. He put down his pint and sat down across from Kylie and Alice.

‘What’s up?’ Scott asked, glancing between the two of them.

Kylie looked at Alice, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back,’ she said, sniffling and wiping at her eyes.

‘Ah...’ Scott said, looking uncomfortable.

‘I’m kidding,’ Kylie said, kicking him under the table. ‘I was just telling Alice how much I hate my job.’

Scott relaxed and swallowed a large gulp of beer. ‘That’s okay then,’ he said, ‘because it would be weird if...’

‘Yeah, it would be weird,’ Kylie said.

Driving home later on, Alice decided to go through the city for a few more minutes of quiet before going home. At the end of 2013, various authorities had said 2014 would be the year the rebuild took off. But it was May already, and the city was still as stalled as it had been a year before.

The central city streets were lit up, but not the way the bar and the main road through Addington had been, places that were open and full of people. Here in the middle of the city there were street lights and traffic lights, and equipment on building sites was lit up for safety, but there were too many empty blocks of land that were simply dark holes, gaps in the city, and the buildings that were there were dark and empty. She wondered what it looked like from above, if satellites passing over saw an obvious gap in the heart of the city, the empty donut hole.

Alice crawled along the city streets in second gear, tucked up in her warm car, insulated from the cool late-autumn air of the city. Why would people be out? It wasn’t just that it was cold, it was that there was nothing to do past five o’clock when the container mall shut down, no pubs, no bars, no movie theatres. When would that change?

She was stopped at the lights near the police station. There was no traffic crossing in the other direction. Even the police station was empty and dark. It had been abandoned after the December 2011 earthquake and the police had moved into new buildings a few blocks away, near the hospital and Hagley Park. It had been announced recently that the old police station would be demolished, but there was no news about what would replace it. The only certainty was that it would be an empty plot of land for some time before a decision was made on its future. That was how Christchurch worked.

Across the river opposite the old police station was The Terrace. Before the quakes, there had been a strip of bars and restaurants. Their replacements were well underway and they were supposed to open at the end of 2014. But there had been bad news a few weeks ago, that the development had stalled. The developer said he wasn’t in financial trouble, he was just trying to figure out how to make the best use of his money. Alice wasn’t sure what to make of that, except that there wouldn’t be anything to do in the city at night for at least another year. Alice was twenty-two now, no longer a teenager, as she had been when the quakes started. Would she look back on these years and see a hole in her life, something she had missed because of the quakes and the rebuild?

Her great-grandad’s last memories of the house he had raised his children in was it being occupied by irritated builders who wouldn’t let him in. His home had anchored him and his memories, and he had never expected to leave. Now he would never go back.

The city was like that for too many people, a series of memories no longer anchored in space. There was only the hole and it was getting harder to look ahead to the day when there would be something to keep people in Christchurch.

To Alice, the biggest tragedy of the whole earthquake sequence was the collapse of the CTV building. One hundred and fifteen people had died in a building that just pancaked, and although two years had passed since the Royal Commission findings, no one had been held accountable. The Royal Commission had shown up the failings in the design and construction of the building and in how it had been assessed following the September and December 2010 earthquakes. Actually holding someone responsible for those mistakes seemed to be impossible.

There was a code of ethics engineers were supposed to follow, it was something Alice had learned about in her year at university. Engineers were supposed to be accountable to a professional body, the Institute of Professional Engineers New Zealand. IPENZ did start an investigation into the engineer whose consultancy was responsible for the design of the CTV building, but had to drop the investigation when the engineer resigned from IPENZ. There was nothing further they could do to hold him accountable once he resigned. That there was clearly something seriously wrong with the engineering profession made Alice feel a little more settled over her decision not to go back to university.

Another thing that bothered Alice about the engineering profession was how much trouble Lindsay and Kevin had getting an independent engineering report on the house. Most engineering companies seemed to be doing insurance company work, which meant it had been difficult finding one who didn’t have a conflict of interest, who could carry out an independent report on behalf of a homeowner. This was why it was taking so long for Kevin and Lindsay to get a full engineering report, the engineer they had engaged was so busy he wasn’t able to do the full site visit until May, and then it would take up to six weeks before the report would be complete. That meant they would have it by July, but in the meantime, the insurance company had commissioned their own engineering report, which had been speedily arranged. That report agreed with the repair strategy their project manager, John Rutherford, had recommended, which was to replace the concrete ring foundation on the kitchen end of the house. That didn’t seem right, though, because there were other parts of the foundation that were cracked and crumbling just as much as the part of the foundation the insurance company planned to replace. Why replace half the ring foundation while ignoring damage to the other half? It didn’t make sense.

The same day Bitterman, the claims manager, sent Kevin and Lindsay the engineering report, he started applying pressure on them to sign a document that said the repair could go ahead without a building consent. He kept emailing them every couple of days asking when they would sign the form and send it back. Kevin objected to going ahead with the repair before they had their own engineering report, but Bitterman insisted the form needed to be signed.

‘No way,’ Lindsay said. ‘No way at all that’s happening.’ She wanted to get a lawyer to make the insurance company stop applying pressure, but Kevin said no, they would wait for their own engineer’s report and then the insurance company would listen. Alice didn’t say anything, but she wasn’t so sure the insurance company would listen, and what would Lindsay and Kevin do then?

In the end, they had no choice but to agree to the repair going ahead because Bitterman sent them a formal letter saying their claim might be declined if they didn’t cooperate. Not that it would be declined, just that it might. Kevin signed the document but crossed out the part that said they agreed to the work going ahead without a building consent. ‘If they’re going to do this repair,’ Kevin said, ‘they’re not going to lump us with responsibility for it by skipping the whole consent process.’

Within a few days of Kevin sending the form, Bitterman started sending people around to prepare documentation for the building consent. After the first visit, Kevin emailed Bitterman to ask why the consent was going ahead when their own engineering report hadn’t yet been reviewed by the insurance company. Bitterman replied that getting a building consent was taking a long time and they needed to get the paperwork underway, but Kevin and Lindsay would have the chance to review the consent application before it was lodged with the City Council. That didn’t answer the question about their own engineering report.

‘The report’s not far away,’ Kevin said. ‘Let’s wait until we have that before spending any money on a lawyer. They’re more expensive than bloody engineers.’

‘Surely they won’t get a building consent,’ Lindsay said, ‘when there’s damage that the repair strategy doesn’t cover.’

Alice hoped that was the case, that the consent wouldn’t get approved, because if it did, it would put even more pressure on Kevin and Lindsay than she thought they could handle. Already conversations about insurance were strained, with clipped words, long silences and strident pacing. Kevin and Lindsay had never had big arguments, at least not around Alice, and it made her worry for them, and for the little kids.

Heather and Neil were making no progress with EQC on their repairs. They had submitted their foundation specialist’s report to EQC nearly a year ago, but when they contacted EQC after a couple of months to check on progress, EQC said their report wouldn’t be actioned. No explanation, no nothing. After discussing what to do next, Neil called EQC to lodge an official complaint, but he was told to complain to Fletchers EQR, as they had actually carried out the repairs. But that complaint had gone nowhere, because the person they had investigating their complaint was the person who had managed their repairs. Of course they were going to say nothing was wrong!

Publicly EQC was reporting that eighty percent of claimants were satisfied with their repairs. At first, Heather struggled to get her head around how their repair could go so awfully wrong when EQC could get it right in most cases. Maybe she and Neil were being too fussy? It was a big job EQC had to manage, maybe they should consider themselves lucky to have been seen to so quickly. She tried to enjoy living in their repaired house, but then, while gardening, she would notice the cracks appearing in the foundation. She found herself reluctant to spend time in the garden, because seeing the state of the foundation just reminded her of the problems with the house that it seemed they could not solve.

That EQC was determined not to face the problems with their repair was abundantly clear, and it seemed Neil and Heather weren’t the only claimants being ignored. At the end of 2013,
The Press
reported that EQC had been excluding customers from their customer satisfaction surveys if those customers had complained. Over 30,000 customers had been marked as ‘do not survey’, which made Heather angry, because that was a big chunk of people who weren’t being asked how happy they were with their repairs. It looked like EQC had been fudging the statistics to make the repair programme look more successful than it actually was.