… mark the first anniversary of the quake together, as a family.
‘We could have a picnic,’ she said.
But everyone had other plans. Poppy wanted to go to the group hug in the gardens with her new friend, Gina, and her mother.
‘What’s a group hug?’ she said.
‘A lot of people hugging each other,’ said her mother. ‘Cheering themselves up.’
‘People I know?’ said Poppy.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Janey.
Poppy looked dubious.
‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,’ said Janey. But after the hug Gina’s mum was going to take them for a Happy Meal. Poppy would get a Smurf. Gina had almost a complete collection. Little blue figures with pointed hats, including Smurfette who wore tiny white high-heeled shoes. Poppy privately didn’t like Smurfs much, but to admit it would have been like saying you didn’t like Katy Perry. Everybody liked Katy Perry: Gina, especially. She could do the dance from ‘Hot n Cold’. She and Poppy practised it, over and over, using the sofa as a substitute for Katy’s car, the one she stands on while the brides dance around. She said Poppy was really good at it, and maybe they could do it for assembly? Poppy could be one of the brides.
Poppy set off happily for the park, the hug and the Smurf, along with Gina and her mum, a cluster of red and black balloons bouncing from the windows of their Mitsubishi.
Tom had stayed over at VJs. ‘A picnic?’ he said, as if she’d suggested something completely bizarre. ‘Why?’ He didn’t see the point in picnics: carrying food to eat it somewhere boring, with extra sandflies. ‘I thought we should do something for the anniversary,’ his mum said. Nah, said Tom. He’d just hang out at VJ’s.
The cordon had receded, the wire fences now forming a narrower defensive circle around the CBD. At night they ringed the tilting towers and shadowed streets where demolition cranes reared up into the dark sky and security patrolled with slavering German Shepherds.
Tom didn’t like German Shepherds, the way they strained at the leash, tails clamped between their haunches, ready to spring. On the eve of the anniversary he had watched one crossing a demolition site from a vertiginous viewpoint four floors up on a building off High Street. On the ground floor of this building stood VJ’s dad’s pretzel shop, now a dusty, empty shell. VJ’s dad had been pissed off. All these celebrities were being escorted round the central city, that guy from Gladiator and Prince William and some model, Rachel whatever, getting their photos taken in front of the cathedral, while he couldn’t get in to clear out his property. And when he had finally been permitted through the cordon, it was to find everything had gone: the whole place had been stripped bare, tables, chairs, equipment. And, of course, the till. ‘Now there’s a surprise,’ said VJ’s dad. ‘Who’ll protect us from the protectors?’
From the fourth floor where Tom was crouched with VJ behind the fire escape, the German Shepherd’s panting was clearly audible, an eager, drooling whoosh whoosh whoosh as torchlight slid over the walls. They lay unmoving, scarcely breathing, and then, amazingly, the crackle of a two-way radio and the guard walked on, his voice echoing in the silence as his footsteps receded and the dark came down again.
‘Shit,’ said VJ. His voice buzzy against Tom’s ear. ‘That was close.’
The fine was $5000. Or three months in prison. Not to mention endless trouble with their parents, no matter how much they might have been pissed off about the guy from Gladiator and Rachel whatever.
‘But,’ said VJ, as he showed Tom the way through the cordon, ‘fuck it! It’s our city, not theirs.’
Their city lay around them, streets slamming into darkness as Tom fumbled in his backpack and handed up a can to VJ. He was way more confident up there. Tom preferred the security of the railing. It was a long way down. He kept his eyes averted, watched as VJ threw them up, the letters of his name, each tip a spear point, wild style, taking possession.
He worked quickly, but then he’d perfected it over several weeks, working out style and design among the cracks on the living room wall at Tom’s place. It didn’t matter: no one went in there, in the dark and damp behind the plywood patches, and the walls would be coming down eventually. Just the same, they went there only when everyone was out and they had the house to themselves. Parents could be unpredictable about things like that.
This building, too, would come down and take its tags with it. The demolition cranes stood by. But four floors up on the parapet, for a few seconds, Tom and VJ owned the Death Zone.
Rob didn’t want a picnic either. He simply wanted to get on with his pizza oven. It now stood on the lawn like a little domed cathedral. Its base was a three-sided structure of concrete blocks scavenged from the Novaks’ house across the road. (‘You go ahead and use them, young fella,’ said Stan. ‘No point in it all going to waste at the tip, is there?’)
The base had a space where wood for the oven could be stored to dry properly. On top of the blocks he had laid a concrete slab, carefully levelled, and then the bricks, arranged in an igloo around a central layer of firebricks. The dome was beautiful. Rob had cleaned each brick of old mortar and laid it precisely, abutting its neighbour at a perfect angle. He had supported the dome of bricks with a couple of old beer crates while he was building, then filled the whole cavity with some of the silty soil that had bubbled from the ground and now lay in a pile by the back fence. Nothing was going to waste. Everything had its purpose.
And now the mortar holding the bricks in place was dry enough for its outer layer of insulating concrete and this afternoon was the perfect time to start. He’d work on the oven and then maybe he’d go out for a paddle. Sometimes he just wanted to slip through the water, the kayak responsive to every shift in balance, his passing leaving scarcely a ripple.
The river was filthy, he knew that. But he wasn’t alone in deciding to ignore the fact. Stan had always put out a whitebait net on the riverbank at the end of Savage Street and saw no reason to stop now. ‘Anything that was going to kill me would have done it long ago,’ he said, sprawled happily on the grass by the ‘Fishing Prohibited’ sign very early that morning, smoking a cigarette while keeping a wary eye out for the authorities.
‘Always some miserable bastard these days running around trying to tell you what’s good for you,’ he said when Rob stopped for a chat. ‘And the bait are running this year. Never seen so many. It’s like they know. They’ve just been sitting out there, waiting for everyone to bugger off.’ There was a blue plastic bucket on the grass beside him, half-filled with tiny silvery squirming fish. ‘Well,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘Lucky for some. Here: take a few.’ He scooped a generous serving into an ice cream container, emptied and neatly washed. ‘There you go: enough for a feed!’
Rob received his gift with every appearance of delight. He was certainly not about to join the ranks of miserable bastards preaching caution, but as soon as he got the container home, he tipped it into the compost. He had read the data. Knew the pollution levels. He wouldn’t be eating whitebait from the river again any time soon.
But the kayak, the paddle, the herons lifting on slow lazy wings from the banks, a single white spoonbill standing motionless on the muddy bank of Naughty Boys Island. There seemed to be more birds around now, maybe taking advantage of human abandonment, of the shoals of bait making a dash for it. There were fewer dogs now the houses were empty, and fewer cats. And from the kayak, low in the water, even though the river had risen in its bed, the sad suburbs were barely visible beyond the stopbanks.
First, though, the insulation: six parts Perlite to one part cement, and water to mix. He sat on the back step stirring it in a bucket …
Janey watches him through the kitchen window. It’s impossible to say how much this slow purposeful stirring, this nonsense with the pizza oven, infuriates her. It is supposed to be for her birthday, but it is so terribly pointless. Their house has avoided the red zone and automatic demolition by the narrowest of margins. It may yet be red-stickered, demolished, the site cleared for rebuilding, taking everything, house, pizza oven, garden and all with it. It could perhaps be repaired, but, either way, Janey doesn’t want to be here any longer. She has fallen out of love and can’t go back to that earlier infatuation.
She is making herself a sandwich. If no one else wants to come on a picnic to mark the day, she’ll go alone. Bike up the Port Hills to the point where the roads are closed because of the risk of rock fall. Sit in the sun to eat her sandwich. Think about Before. Think about After.
Above the bench on the kitchen wall hangs the photo board, crammed with the imagery of Before: Tom as a toddler, digging in the sand on the beach at Sumner, Poppy seated in the front of the double kayak on the river, or in their togs, or on Santa’s lap, in their sleeping bags in the tent, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake with chocolate icing, Rob and Tom playing chess, Poppy holding a fish on the pier at Brighton, an old photo of herself and Rob with dreadlocks at a dance party on top of Takaka Hill, long before the arrival of the children, who now regard that photo with derisive disbelief, laughing hilariously at their parents’ youthful absurdity.
And if she looks further back, at some picture of Rob’s parents snapped by the photographer in their best going-to-town clothes walking along Colombo Street, the spire of the cathedral visible in the background, the ‘before’ seems even more remote. A time of careless indifference to masonry and stone. Buildings would always stand, cities were forever.
But they weren’t, were they? New Orleans had been swept aside in a single night, villages at Fukushima have disappeared while the cameras circled soundlessly overhead, filming the little white car that races along the road just ahead of the relentless wave rolling over farmhouse and settlement and you watched it as it played over and over on the news, saying, ‘Go, little car! Go! Run away! Escape!’
As she wants to go. To run. She’s said as much to David. They’ve taken to having a quick coffee while he clears up after his teaching and she comes into the room to prepare for hers. The brief interval before the room fills once more with jostling adolescence.
‘Yeah,’ said David, ‘It’s a weird time, eh.’ He’d been back only a few months, returned to teaching after a couple of years crewing on a yacht sailing from Stockholm to Tahiti. It had been fantastic, even the moment when he’d glanced back over one shoulder somewhere close to Rapanui and seen this great bloody wave rolling down on them and nothing he could do about it but hang on, keep hold of the tiller … He was restless, didn’t know what to do next, where to go. When he talked about the boat, about Lista Light — she’s this old wooden gaff ketch, a fishing boat to begin with, built for the storms in the North Sea, sturdy as — his legs jiggled as if he was about to run. He had her image as his screensaver, fully rigged before a tropic sunrise, ready to go. He was here only because his father hadn’t been well, thought he should come home for a spell.
‘Yeah,’ he said when Janey confessed to wanting to just pick up and leave. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
It was such a relief that someone knew exactly what she …