Bleak City (7 page)

Gerald’s mother had taken a liking to the girl, and he wasn’t sure he understood why as he didn’t think Marjorie liked anyone. She approved of people, if they served some purpose, but generally she didn’t give any indication of actually liking someone, even her own children, and Gerald’s father, when he had still been alive.

He thought Alice should leave, find a nice city, finish her degree in Auckland, or even Australia, although he hadn’t said that aloud. It wasn’t the earthquakes or the effect on her early adult life, it was the city itself, the undercurrent of something rotten. Whenever he brought this up to Sylvia, she laughed. ‘What do you expect from a city built on a swamp?’ she said. ‘We’re all sinking into the rot.’ It wasn’t that he no longer found the city beautiful, he did, it was that he found it disturbing.

Just the day before, Christmas Day, a family in the low-income suburb of Aranui were woken when what was referred to in the newspaper as a homemade bomb was thrown through one of the windows of their house. Earlier in the month, police said they had found the place where a prostitute was murdered a couple of years ago. He knew the place, the land was next door to the radio clubrooms, back when he had still been doing ham radio. Christchurch was the site of too many disturbing crimes, and he wondered what it was about the place that drew the people who could do such brutal things.

Gerald closed the newspaper, made himself another coffee and went through to the lounge, where the day’s sun was pouring through the windows. He sat down in a chair facing out onto the valley and started reading the mystery novel Alice had given him for Christmas.

He was well into the first chapter when he heard another quake, the approaching rumble, then the shaking of the house. Glasses and cups in the kitchen jostled against one another. A good one, and from the city again. He returned to his book, but in a couple of minutes another quake rolled through. Gerald looked out down the valley and could see the power lines along the street swaying. He thought of Sylvia and Michelle in the city.

He had a cellphone, it was necessary for business these days, but he hated the things and had powered his down at the close of business on Thursday afternoon. He powered it on and texted Sylvia, asking if she was okay. She quickly texted back that she was, but Michelle was upset and wanted to get home to the kids. He texted Sylvia to say he would pick her up.

There was a steady flow of traffic going out of the city but not much to impede his progress on the way in. He could see a few streets blocked off, occupied only by police and firemen. He parked down by the Botanic Gardens and walked in to the city to meet Sylvia at the end of the City Mall, under the Bridge of Remembrance. The mall was closed off and there was a fire appliance parked on the tramlines. Firemen and police littered the mall and people outside the cordon were discussing whether to stay and wait in the hopes of continuing their shopping.

Sylvia said she was fine, but really she was a little bit on edge. There had been three quakes since the first one, bricks falling off buildings and some shattering glass, but nothing for about twenty minutes. He talked her into a walk in the gardens, it would help her to wind down. She had become more relaxed about the quakes as the weeks wore on, but at the start, she had trouble sleeping and ended up weepy and easily confused. A trip to the doctor sorted that out, and a few days on sleeping pills had given her the rest she needed to get back into a routine.

Gerald and Sylvia walked along the river on the side opposite the hospital. Patients were outside, enjoying the fresh air. It always puzzled Gerald to see patients outside enjoying the fresh air while also smoking. The river was full of ducks and their ducklings, the usual mallard and grey ducks, along with the larger paradise ducks and their brown and white-striped ducklings. The gardens were full of people enjoying the warm summer weather, mostly couples and families with small children. It was sad to not see very many families with older children, but he supposed the older children were with their friends or at the malls. He hoped that was not his grandchildren’s futures, to be alienated from their parents past a certain age. He and Sylvia had tried to keep talking to their children when they were growing up, and although there had been rough patches, there hadn’t been anything too dramatic, except from the wider family.

There were too many people in the gardens, Sylvia said, she was ready to go home.

At home, Gerald made them an omelette for lunch. There were more quakes while they were eating, just threes, once again, but they disturbed Sylvia. After finishing lunch and a cup of tea, they went for a walk around the park near their house.

They had worked hard at having a peaceful family, at teaching their children respect for themselves and for others. The main issue had been when he decided to break away from the family business, the construction business his father had started. Gerald had only become a builder because he wasn’t interested in school and when he reached fifteen years of age and told his parents he wanted to leave, his father had said he could, but only if he had a job. He had nothing lined up, so his father insisted Gerald go and work for him. It wasn’t long before he found he enjoyed the work, the satisfaction of planning something, choosing the right materials and working towards a finished result, getting everything right. But in Gerald’s late teens, he noticed his brother-in-law, Stan, was in the habit of cutting corners. Nothing that would make a house fall down, but Stan wasn’t being up front with their customers about the choices being made. Gerald wasn’t happy about it, but he knew his father would do nothing, the bottom line was as important to Bill, if not more so, than the quality of the finished product. By the time Laurel was born and Andrew was starting school, it was bothering Gerald. Quality was getting lower and lower and it wasn’t about craftsmanship any more, it was about squeezing every last cent out of a build.

Gerald and Sylvia had spent many late nights after the children had gone to bed discussing what to do, coming up with a solution that wouldn’t create a rift in the family. A lot of the cousins were similar ages and Gerald and Sylvia wanted their children to grow up with their wider family. It built a sense of family that neither of them had growing up. Gerald’s father was the only one of their parents who had been born in New Zealand. Sylvia’s parents were ten-pound Poms who had emigrated when she was just five years old and she had only vague memories of all the family they had left behind. No, however Gerald solved the problem of the declining quality of builds, it had to be done subtly.

The solution was to start up his own building company, Moorhouse Architectural, specialising in more high-end builds, especially in the hills around Christchurch. It was a market Bill and Stan weren’t interested in, too many risks building on hills, fewer opportunities to make a profit. But Gerald had framed it as an extension of the family business, one for which he was willing to take all the risk. That is, he wasn’t asking them for any money. It worked, and Gerald was able to build houses his way, without worrying about when a client would make claims about being ripped off. It was a relief, it lifted a burden from Gerald’s shoulders he hadn’t realised was so heavy.

Running his own company gave him and Sylvia the freedom to let their children spend time with their cousins while they were growing up without having to worry that everyone was too much in each other’s pockets. Of course Lindsay’s unexpected pregnancy had disrupted the family. Alice had been the first great-grandchild on both sides of the family, and all the new grandparents were torn over being in love with baby Alice and worrying about Andrew and Lindsay being too young. But that was the thing with children, you could encourage them to take responsibility for their actions, but you couldn’t do more than that, they had to make their own choices.

Andrew and Lindsay knew each other through mutual friends while they were in high school, which was when they started dating. Both were doing first year law at university when Lindsay became pregnant. Gerald and Sylvia had offered their support for whatever Andrew and Lindsay wanted to do. Little Alice was a good baby, and they were upset to lose contact after the divorce. It was good to see Alice again, all grown up.

Boxing Day was the usual day for the family to pack up and go away for a holiday, and it sounded like Alice would be joining them in Central Otago for a week. It would be good for her, to meet some of the others, have a bit more time to get to know them properly. As much as Gerald and Sylvia wanted to spend that time with her, they had decided to stay in town, to enjoy the good weather and the quiet. They would see Alice plenty in the new year, especially as it sounded like she would stay at home rather than go flatting again. Lindsay and her second family were just five minutes’ drive from Gerald and Sylvia, and now that Alice knew where they were, she could stop in whenever she liked.

After the Boxing Day quakes, there weren’t many aftershocks at all. The city was quiet, the weather stayed hot and the skies were clear. Gerald and Sylvia spent their mornings in the garden, their afternoons inside reading and their evenings walking around the neighbourhood or up in the hills. Was this what retirement would be like? It wouldn’t be too bad, although in winter he would have to spend more time indoors. Christchurch just wasn’t amenable to gardening or walking from May to August, so a third of the year. But he deliberately tried not to think about it too much in those last days of 2010, he just wanted to enjoy the quiet while it lasted.

Seismic activity tailed off quickly after the Boxing Day aftershock, and by early January it was quiet again. The days were hot and people were relaxing, trying to forget the upheaval of the past few months. The city had been lucky, in spite of what they had all been through, no one had been killed. Repairs would get underway in the new year, and the first anniversary of the quake would show how far the city had progressed. Things were looking up.

Alice spent a week with Andrew’s family in Wanaka, a holiday town in the Central Otago region. Andrew and Michelle had a house there and it was big, two wings, four bathrooms, a swimming pool and plenty of land, where some of the kids in the family had pitched pup tents. It was Alice’s first real chance to meet her relatives, she had been too nervous that first time she had met the family at her great-grandmother’s house, when she had spent more time exploring the grounds than she had spent actually mingling.

Three of the second cousins staying at the house were close to Alice’s age, all still in high school. The girl, Charlotte, was thirteen and self-absorbed, always on her phone reading and texting, looking up every now and then, but thumbs still going. Alice texted plenty, but she knew how to be around people. Well, more than Charlotte seemed to, she had no skills other than her thumb skills. Her mother would ask her to do something and she would have to be told two, three, four times, then would get up, huffing, and stomp off to do whatever her mother had asked. Only usually she would return in a minute or so complaining for one reason or another. The washing wasn’t done yet, so she couldn’t put it out, or the meat was still thawing, so she couldn’t put it in the marinade. She had long dark hair, as thick as Alice’s, but she made a point of straightening it every day, even if they would be spending the day on the lake or up a hill somewhere.

‘Just leave me here,’ she said to her mother one morning. ‘I can just read for the day.’

Her mother insisted Charlotte was going with her family. Both parents seemed determined to do everything together. Each night, though, the parents left the kids to their own devices and walked off in the direction of the lake, hand in hand, like they were newlyweds. What was going on there?

Nathan was fifteen and into rugby in a big way. He resented the holiday away from home as he had wanted to stay behind. He had touch rugby he wanted to keep up with and, seriously concerned about losing fitness, spent his days running or climbing up hills or swimming. When he was back at the house, he was eating: bacon and eggs for breakfast, followed by a weetbix chaser, a half a loaf of bread made into sandwiches for lunch, and repeat servings from the barbecue each night, followed by double portions of dessert and then, before bedtime, another serving of weetbix. Alice had a good appetite, but felt like a fussy eater comparing the contents of her dinner plate with his. It was difficult having a conversation with him, as Alice didn’t know much about rugby. ‘Family full of women,’ Alice explained. They were sitting on the grass outside the house eating dinner.

‘No men at all?’ he asked. He was gnawing a chicken drum clean, and it quickly joined the remains of another three on his plate. He picked up another drum.

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘I have an uncle and an aunt, and my grandma has loads of sisters, and they mostly have girls. My uncle has only one boy cousin.’

‘Don’t the women get married?’ Nathan said.

‘Yeah, they do, but the husbands are pretty quiet,’ Alice said. ‘Or they’re off fishing or watching rugby. They seem to live separate lives. The women in my family can be a bit overbearing.’

‘What do you mean overbearing?’ Nathan asked, chewing away at his chicken.

Alice shrugged. She felt like she was saying too much and that maybe she had strayed into being disloyal towards her mother’s family. She loved the aunties, but sometimes found them too loud and pushy. Big family get-togethers were rare, and Alice wasn’t sure if it was because her grandmother’s sisters all lived outside of Christchurch or because it was difficult to have a gathering where there wasn’t at least one row. Andrew’s family, though, were polite to each other, saying please and thank you, and the conversations took place at a much quieter volume than in Lindsay’s family. ‘They know how things should be done,’ Alice finally said, ‘and they’re not shy about letting everyone know how they should do things.’

Nathan laughed. ‘So everyone’s in charge?’

Alice nodded. ‘And no one knows it. Recipe for chaos. Family get-togethers are noisy, not like this.’