Bleak City (46 page)

There had been accusations from the City Council that the Government had seized control of the development of the Performing Arts Precinct in order to make the rebuild look good in an election year. Whatever the case, the relationship between the council and the Government wasn’t good. Why couldn’t people who were supposedly adults pull themselves together and make decisions? Because they were just arguing about it, nothing was being done, the city was not getting a Town Hall back, leaving the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra without a true home.

Charlotte’s home was no longer a true home, thanks to EQC. There was, EQC said, about $300,000 worth of damage to their house, which, Charlotte thought, should put them overcap and with their private insurer. But apportionment didn’t work that way. Her parents had filed claims for four quakes, and EQC divided the estimated cost by four quakes, to come up with $75,000 worth of damage per quake, as though each quake had done an equal amount of damage. That kept them undercap and EQC insisted the house would be repaired as part of the Canterbury Home Repair Programme. Her parents weren’t happy about that, there were too many rumours of bad repairs.

They had photos of the house, inside and out, after each of the major quakes, and her father was putting together this information to ask EQC to reconsider how the damage was apportioned, because the photos clearly showed that it was the February and June 2011 quakes that had done the most damage. But that assumed that they would listen to reason, and Charlotte didn’t think for a moment that would be the case. It was just another bubble that would soon burst.

It was late on a Wednesday night and Alice was drifting off to sleep when there was a tap on her door. She drew herself up from the pull of sleep and shielded her eyes as light from the hallway fell through the doorway. It was Kevin.

‘Your grandad’s up at the hospital with Heather,’ he said. ‘She’s having trouble breathing.’

Alice sat up, wide awake. ‘Her heart?’

‘He says he doesn’t think so, but the doctors want to be sure,’ Kevin said. He swept his hand over the top of his head, pushing his hair back and forth, then rubbed his face and scratched at the side of his mouth. ‘But I think he’s worried, he wouldn’t have called otherwise.’

‘She’s at public?’ Alice said, putting her feet onto the floor. ‘Are you going to go up?’

Kevin shook his head. ‘We’re too sick.’ Lindsay had come down with a cold the previous week and Kevin had quickly followed. Both had fever and chills and were having trouble sleeping from coughing.

‘I’ll go,’ Alice said. Kevin nodded and shut the door, leaving Alice to find clothes to change into.

Jason had called and was going to the hospital as well, he said he would drop by and pick up Alice. Sonya, who had moved to Dunedin at the start of the year, texted Alice asking her to let her know what was going on. ‘Ask about her troponin levels,’ her text said. ‘It’s a marker for heart attacks.’ Alice texted back saying she would let her know as soon as she knew anything.

Jason parked by the river and the two of them walked towards the hospital. It was strange being in the city at that time of night, it was so empty, the streets bare of cars and traffic lights going through their signals, directed at no one. Red lights high up in the sky flashed from the different cranes dotted all over the city. A cold wind blew from the east and Alice zipped her jacket all the way up to her chin and tucked her hands into the pockets.

Jason talked to the receptionist, who directed them through the security doors. A nurse took them through to the ward, a big open space only loosely partitioned off for patients. Equipment beeped from all directions. Heather was in a bed on the far side of the room, propped up, wires sticking out of the top of her hospital gown. Neil sat beside her, holding her hand. She was taking in shallow breaths, almost coughing, and Alice could see that she was scared, trying to control her breathing, which seemed to just be making the coughing worse.

Jason leaned in to kiss her on the forehead, followed by Alice. Neil told them the doctor thought she might be having a panic attack but wanted to run some tests, just to be sure.

‘I’m so embarrassed,’ Heather muttered, looking away from them. She was pale and tiny, as though the giant hospital bed was swallowing her.

‘Better safe than sorry, love,’ Neil said.

Jason pulled up two chairs and lined them up alongside Neil’s chair so they could all sit with Heather.

‘These things happen, Mum,’ Jason said. ‘And it’s happened more since the quakes.’

Alice wasn’t sure whether he meant panic attacks – which was what she thought this was – or heart attacks. Both had been on the increase since the quakes started. There was something called broken heart syndrome, where stress caused part of the heart to freeze up. Before the earthquakes started, Christchurch Hospital saw only a couple of cases a year, but after the quakes there were so many instances of it that a research group was formed. They had about fifty patients, mostly women.

Heather’s problem, it turned out, was not a panic attack, nor was it broken heart syndrome. It was a heart attack, plain and simple. It was about four in the morning when the doctor came and told them that Heather’s blood tests were showing the biochemical markers they expected to see in a heart attack, and she would be admitted to the hospital. Neil wanted to stay, but was looking pale and strained, so Heather, Jason and Alice insisted he go home and get some sleep. Jason wanted to get home to Carla and the baby and said he would drop Neil off and leave Alice with the keys to Neil’s car so she could go home if she needed to.

Alice stayed with her grandmother, worn out but unable to sleep while waiting for Heather to be taken up to the ward. Alice stayed until Heather had been settled, then went home.

It was six o’clock, and both Lindsay and Kevin were already up, looking like they had hardly slept.

At eight, Alice called Gerald to say she wouldn’t be in to work that day, then went to pick up Neil. He said he had managed to get some sleep, but he didn’t look like it, his thin hair was standing up at the back and he was still wearing the clothes he had been wearing when he left the hospital.

The doctor had already been by the time they arrived on the ward, and Heather was being prepped for an angiogram to see how blocked her arteries were. There were quick hellos and then Neil went with Heather for her test. Alice sat down on a chair beside the empty bed and stared out onto the busy ward, watching people go past. Nurses and doctors walked rapidly, efficiently, while patients meandered, their slippered feet making soft scuffing noises on the linoleum.

Before long, Neil and Heather were back, looking grim. Heather had blocked arteries and needed a bypass, probably a double. She would stay in hospital until the surgery, which would be in a week or two.

The morning of Heather’s surgery, Alice, Neil and Kevin went to pick up Grandma Bennett so she could see Heather before the surgery. Since Heather’s admission, only Kevin had recovered from his cold, while Jason and Carla had come down with it. Alice was still free of it, but she was tired, sleeping at the drop of a hat, and she suspected all the nights at the hospital after long days at work were going to catch up with her before too long.

The sick members of the family could only call Heather to have awkward pre-surgery conversations. Alice listened to Heather’s side of a couple of these conversations, but it annoyed her. Heather always said that what would be would be, trying to keep her voice cheery and light. Her grandmother could die, this might be the last time Alice saw her, what was she supposed to say? And how could she say it without Heather saying, ‘What will be will be’?

At the end of another phone call, Alice felt the right words falling together in her head, but they abandoned her as soon as she opened her mouth and all she said was ‘I love you’ and ‘I’ll see you later’. It didn’t seem like enough, especially after Heather held on to her so tightly when she said goodbye. Outside the room, Alice burst into tears that she tried to cover up as Neil, Kevin and Grandma Bennett came out.

‘Right,’ Neil said, his voice strained. ‘What do we do to get through the rest of this day?’ It was a pointless question as they had already agreed it would be a movie day around at Neil and Heather’s, with a family dinner at the end of the day.

The family was having dinner, the adults at the dining table and Olivia and Jack in the lounge. Baby Eddie was sleeping in his carry cot in Neil and Heather’s bedroom. The only conversation was coming from the coffee table, the kids chattering away. The adults were too anxious from the afternoon’s wait to talk and were just pushing their food around their plates, taking the occasional uninterested bite. The phone rang and Neil leapt up from the table to answer it.

It was the surgeon. Heather was fine, the surgery had gone well, her heart was strong and there was no reason she shouldn’t recover completely. One or two family members could visit her in recovery in a couple of hours.

It was easier to finish dinner after the phone call, and it was decided that Neil and Alice would go up to see Heather, while Kevin would take Grandma Bennett home.

Alice waited outside the ward while Neil went through. She was unable to focus her thoughts and paced mindlessly until Neil came out and she went in.

It was a large, open room with beds and monitoring equipment in a semi-circle, like something from a sci-fi movie. There was a lot of space between each bed and no curtains. Obviously being able to get to patients quickly was more important than privacy.

Heather seemed to be unconscious, so Alice hesitated to approach. She was awake, a nurse reassured her, but still feeling the effects of the sedative. Heather had tubes up her nose and down her throat, taped to her face to keep them in place. Alice reached out and stroked her hand, which caused Heather to crack open her eyes.

‘Hi Grandma,’ Alice said, trying not to cry. ‘It went well, really well.’

Heather mumbled something unintelligible. Was she panicking?

‘This is normal,’ the nurse told her. ‘She’ll be wide awake in a few hours and tomorrow we’ll have her walking the ward.’

‘Really?’ Alice said.

‘Yes, really,’ the nurse reassured her. ‘She’ll be as good as new in no time.’

Alice kissed her grandmother on the forehead and said goodbye.

The physical aspects of the surgery had gone well, and from what the specialist had said, Heather had every chance of recovering quickly. But how would she go at handling stress? Although the hospital preferred bypass patients to be cared for at home following surgery, Neil had discussed with the social worker how the situation with the house had contributed to Heather’s stress. She would stay at a convalescence hospital near home for the first weeks of her recovery and only go home once she felt she could face it.

Neil and Kevin were going to repaint the inside of the house and fix up any quality issues they found along the way. ‘We’ll still pursue EQC over the foundation problems,’ Neil said, ‘but Heather needs to feel like her home is her home once again, and not some suffocating weight.’

Alice had been with Neil when he discussed Heather’s recovery with the social worker. A lot of people in Christchurch were going through this sort of thing, the social worker said. The quakes and the drawn-out insurance process were proving too much.

Hearts were being broken all over the city, crushed by the weight of the so-called recovery.

Marjorie’s greatest strength had always been her ability to get the measure of people. When such things started being talked about more openly in the 1980s and 1990s, she heard it said that watching and weighing of people was a skill often cultivated by the children of alcoholics, looking for certainty in an unstable environment. That was true of her, and that skill had seldom failed her over the years. As her physical strength ebbed, though, she noticed that her ability to read people was also in decline.

Tony had dropped by on his way home from work. He had invoices Marjorie needed to settle for work done on her properties. She flicked through them, checking the amounts and the work done against her mental list.

‘Haven’t we paid this one already?’ Marjorie said, passing one invoice back to him. She hadn’t paid it yet, she knew. She peered up at him, waiting to see how he would respond. The look on his face reminded her of a day when he had wanted another piece of her caramel slice. He was eight or nine then, and already had a tendency to lie, something he had learned from his father, Stan. Tony was growing into a copy of Stan, and although there was enough of a difference of age that his attempts at bullying his older sister were ineffective, he took every opportunity to intimidate his younger cousins. Marjorie had tried to encourage Andrew to stand up to him, but Andrew was small for his age, trusting, and still believed every tale Tony spun.

That day Suzanne had been clear, no more sweets, but once she had gone back out into the yard, Tony had crept back into the kitchen, unaware that Marjorie could hear him from the lounge, his feet pattering over the old farmhouse’s wooden floorboards. She went through to the kitchen quietly, avoiding the creaky floorboards, and in her most imposing voice asked him what he was doing. She needed her imposing voice as her grandchildren grew older, she was always a petite woman and soon they would tower over her.

‘Mum said I could have another piece,’ he said, snapping his hand away from the plate, his eyes wide and expectant.

‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ Marjorie said.

Tony glared at her, the expression on his face brightening as he saw something behind her.

‘Let the boy have what he wants,’ a loud voice said. It was Stan.

Marjorie turned to face him. ‘His mother said no,’ Marjorie said.

‘No, she didn’t!’ Tony said.

Marjorie sighed, exasperated. Of course Stan would let him get away with the lie. In Stan’s eyes, his son was a prince who could do whatever he wanted. He was doing the boy no favours.