Bleak City (45 page)

Heather and Neil weren’t the only ones in the neighbourhood having problems with repairs. A house around the corner had been empty for the summer, nothing had taken place on the site for months. A young family had been living there and when Heather ran into the mother at the supermarket, she found out that their issue was that borer had been found in the framing and EQC wanted them to pay for new framing. But surely if it weren’t for the earthquake damage, there would have been no need to replace the framing? After all, borer was common enough in the city’s older houses and she had never heard of one falling down because of it.

Another house nearby had been lifted so that its foundations could be replaced. That had been in summer, the foundation work went ahead over a couple of months and then the house was lowered onto the new foundations. Heather had expected to see work proceeding and the house’s family soon moving back in, but instead there was still temporary fencing around the property and no sign of any workers. A neighbour told Heather that the builders were finding it impossible to get the house level and after months of delays, the owners had filed in court against the insurance company and the builders. The owners had originally objected to the scope of works, as the cost of the house lift and subsequent works was pretty close to the cost of a rebuild. But the insurance company had railroaded them into going ahead with the repairs, and so they had given in, moved out and hoped for the best. At the point where the owners decided to file in court, the botched repair was well over the cost of a rebuild. It really would have been easier to just demolish the old house and rebuild, but instead even more money would go on lawyers and court. Those poor people.

Just knowing about a couple of cases of repairs gone so horribly wrong had resulted in Heather wondering what was going on for other houses in the neighbourhood that were being worked on. Were the owners happy with progress? Would their lives go back to normal once they had moved back in? Or would they have poor quality repairs to deal with, as Neil and Heather did? Walking around the neighbourhood was no longer relaxing, she just kept seeing repairs that, maybe, were going wrong, and wound up back at home feeling more stressed than she had when she decided to take the walk in the first place.

Heather also worried about what was going to happen with Kevin and Lindsay’s house. They weren’t happy with their proposed repair and had engaged an engineering report of their own. But their insurance company wasn’t interested in their report and had simply dismissed it, then insisted the repairs go ahead. The process of applying for a building consent was underway.

The afternoon Lindsay had received that news, Heather had picked up the children from school. When Heather arrived at Lindsay’s, Lindsay was crying. Heather put a movie on for the children in the lounge, shut the door and went through to the kitchen, where Lindsay was making cups of tea.

‘I think you need to get a lawyer, love,’ Heather said when Lindsay told her.

Lindsay nodded. ‘Kevin says no, we’re not there yet. I think he’s thinking of the money, we’ve already spent so much on the report, we can’t really afford a lawyer. He’s hoping the consent won’t be granted.’

‘And what will you do if it is?’ Heather asked. She had heard of this before, one of Neil’s workers was preparing to move out of his house, trying to find a flat for him and his family to move into. They weren’t happy with the proposed repair, but the City Council had granted a building consent, so he didn’t see that he had any choice but to let the repair go ahead.

‘I don’t know,’ Lindsay said. ‘Maybe we’ll just have to let them go ahead with it.’

‘You have to fight it, love,’ Heather said. ‘After what your engineer said about the whole foundation being compromised, you can’t let them just go ahead with it. You’ve said yourself the whole ring beam could just fall apart.’

Lindsay shrugged. ‘But it might be the only way ahead. We can’t keep going through all this.’ She was quiet for a few moments. ‘Bitterman just kept emailing him and emailing him and emailing him saying this form had to be signed. They said our claim could be declined.’

‘Surely that’s illegal!’ Heather said.

‘No, they didn’t say they would decline our claim,’ Lindsay said. ‘Just that it could be declined. We couldn’t take that chance, because then we would need a lawyer and would need to file in court and that could get expensive very quickly.’

In the end, Heather could only give Lindsay a hug and offer to make them dinner. She felt so helpless, she couldn’t do anything to make the situation better for them.

Each morning, after Neil went to work, the emptiness of the house started to get to Heather. It was a cycle she didn’t know how to break out of: she would make Neil’s breakfast and lunch, have a brief chat with him while they drank their tea and Neil ate his porridge, kiss him goodbye and then, within half an hour of his car pulling down the driveway, she would be fighting back tears, feeling her mood slipping into blackness. She tried to keep herself busy, getting stuck into something that needed doing to avoid thinking about the house or the section, but it wasn’t working. And walking around the neighbourhood was no longer an option.

Heather felt trapped in the house, trapped in the neighbourhood, unable to do anything to dispel that sense of confinement. She could see no time in the future when they would be able to choose where they lived and what type of property they would live in. She barely remembered what it was like to have those choices.

The only things that were helping Heather to pull herself together each day were picking up the children from school and the thought of her new grandson, Jason and Carla’s baby that was due at the end of the month. She didn’t want to be the type of grandmother her grandchildren dreaded being around, so each afternoon, she made the effort to seem happy, even if she didn’t feel it. Most days she suspected she was coming across to the adults at the school as dippy, verging on hysterical. Being around the children helped and she went to bed each night, determined to have a better day the next day.

But the next morning, she would be fighting back the tears once again, trying to find a way to talk herself into thinking that there was a future, that the rest of their lives wouldn’t be this post-quake hell. Where they were now felt like the end of the line.

Charlotte had promised her mother she would spend the afternoon studying, and she had intended to keep that promise. Truly. After school, she had gone straight home, made herself a cup of hot chocolate and some Marmite and cheese on crackers, then settled down to work on her geography assessment. She had chosen geography for the afternoon because it was the one subject she was still marginally interested in. But she couldn’t get into it and instead of forcing herself to concentrate, she did the prep for dinner. Once she had chopped vegetables and had chicken marinating in the fridge, she went for a drive.

Charlotte finally had her restricted licence, which meant she could drive by herself. Without her restricted licence, she had been stuck relying on public transport to get anywhere, which could be downright dodgy after the sun went down.

Perhaps out of guilt at neglecting their remaining child, her parents had helped her to buy a little bomb to run around in, an ancient Toyota Corolla that wasn’t flash, but did the job, got her to and from school each day, to the supermarket and the shops, to wherever she wanted to go. But never to the mall, Charlotte shuddered at the thought of becoming one of those girls who hung out at the mall doing nothing. No, she preferred to drive around the city and see if anything had changed, then up around the suburbs, up the hills, practising using her gears properly, because Augustus – her little Toyota Corolla – had a manual transmission. Her mother had said she should get an automatic, but she couldn’t afford something newer, even with their help. After all, she was supposed to ‘focus on her studies’ and an after school or weekend job was forbidden. That meant the only money she had to put towards the car was what she had earned waitressing over the summer. Her father said a manual was a good idea, that would mean Charlotte would be able to drive any car. He also said that naming the car was ridiculous, cars were meant to take people from place to place, they weren’t friends or family members and shouldn’t have names. But Augustus was her friend, a friend who helped her escape from her lonely home life.

Charlotte wasn’t doing well at school, but she kept that to herself in case her parents pinned the blame on Augustus and took him away from her. When she was at school, she was finding it hard to pay attention to what she was being taught. It wasn’t just one subject she was finding difficult, it was all of them. And this difficulty focussing was starting to worry her. It was keeping her awake at night, and even after she did manage to fall asleep, she would wake early and worry about what she had not yet managed to learn to her satisfaction.

Driving was when she felt free, like there was something new and exciting in her life, and driving around the city was always an adventure. Roadworks were everywhere, and a street she might be able to go down one day would be blocked off the next or reduced to one lane. The traffic patterns were the only thing that changed about the city, there seemed to be little in the way of demolition any more. And although 2014 was supposed to be the year the actual rebuild really took off, not much was happening. There wasn’t much in the way of buildings going up, just empty land occasionally interrupted by a stray building.

People were getting frustrated about their homes. Well, more frustrated, people had started getting seriously frustrated as far back as 2012, after the quakes had stopped and the insurers no longer had the excuse of ongoing seismic activity to prevent repairs and rebuilds from going ahead. There had been an article in
The Press
a few days earlier about how much trouble people were having getting their insurance claims settled. The article was talking about trouble with private insurers, and although Charlotte’s mother talked a lot about how much better their situation would be if only they could get overcap, it sounded like people who were overcap were having just as much trouble as those still stuck with EQC. Charlotte was starting to see her mother’s desire to finally get overcap as a fantasy she was clinging to, something to make her life bearable. What would happen when that bubble burst? Charlotte needed to get through the school year and go on to university next year, preferably one that was away from Christchurch, because she didn’t want to be around when her mother discovered that dealing with their private insurer was just as bad as trying to deal with EQC.

Charlotte drove into the city and parked her car in Manchester Street. She walked up New Regent Street, past all the Spanish mission-style buildings that lined the street, their alternating blue, green, yellow pastels a splash of colour in the overcast city. The street was built in the 1930s and was shut to traffic. A tram line ran the length of the street, part of a loop around the city that was intended for tourists, it wasn’t part of the city’s public transport system. Charlotte couldn’t remember ever going on the tram, it simply wasn’t something used regularly by the people of Christchurch.

New Regent Street had been reopened about a year earlier, following repairs to all the buildings. Well, almost all of them. There was a cluster at the northern end of the street that was still fenced off. The businesses that had opened were struggling to survive, there just weren’t enough people finding their way to New Regent Street. It was a few blocks away from the shipping container mall and even if tourists did venture into the Square to see the remains of the Anglican Cathedral, there was nothing to indicate the existence of New Regent Street’s set of shops just another block away.

But New Regent Street wasn’t Charlotte’s destination. She was headed for the Town Hall a couple of blocks away, on the banks of the river. There was a lot of tension between the City Council and the Government over how to use money allocated to the Performing Arts Precinct, the part of the central city set aside for a new Court Theatre, a music centre and space for the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. It was all meant to be based around the repaired Town Hall. Gerry Brownlee, the Minister for Earthquake Recovery, favoured demolishing the old Town Hall and replacing it with a new one, but the City Council had decided to repair the old one. Something about architectural significance, whatever that meant.

For Charlotte, what the Town Hall meant was time spent with her family. When she was about seven or eight, her grandmother had taken the family to the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra every few months. The symphony had regular concerts that were fun for kids and more traditional concerts, which Charlotte found boring at the time, but now that she was older, she wondered what it would be like to go again.

Charlotte walked past the front of the Town Hall, staying close to the barriers that separated it from the road. Through the dark glass, she could see into the foyer, where the floor looked gritty, and she wondered if it was plaster dust or dirt blown in from the outside. There had been a rumour in 2011 that the basement of the Town Hall was seething with rats, one of many rumours of rat infestations that had spread about the cordoned-off city in the months after the big quake.

It was sad to see it so destitute, fenced off, with nothing happening. It was never a pretty building, just slabs of pebbled concrete reaching into the sky with the occasional stretch of unpatterned concrete to break the monotony of it, but Charlotte loved the soft red seats, having one all to herself, waiting for the lights to go down and the music to start. What she treasured the most about those concerts was the trip home, drifting off to sleep in the back seat, between Nanny and Sean, while her parents chatted away in front, talking about the bits of the concert they liked the best. They were happy then, her family in its cosy pre-quake bubble. But now, her family was as wrecked and dismal as the Town Hall.