There was a message from Shona in the morning. Greer heaps better. THANK YOU.

Me: Great. So when are you coming back?

Shona: Don’t know.

I could jump on a bus, trundle all the way down to Dunedin to visit her and Greer. How long would that take? I looked it up. Nearly six hours. I’d have to be away overnight. I couldn’t face sitting on a bus for six hours, plus the thought of leaving my family for that long terrified me. What if another quake hit, another big one? I wouldn’t know if they were okay.

I gave up on the visit idea.

Katie had messaged too. Starting new school today. Nelson Girls. I HATE moving!!! Luv ya both.

I sat staring at the screen for ages. All over the rest of the country, life was tootling on as normal. You got out of bed, jumped in the shower. If you wanted to wash your hair, you did. The water burbled its way down the drain without you giving it a thought. You could travel to work or school the same way every day without detouring when yet another road was closed for repairs.

There probably weren’t any road cones or high-vis vests in any of those other cities – Christchurch had quite likely grabbed them all. We definitely had all the portaloos. Soldiers, cops, USAR teams, fire and ambo people – well, too bad for the rest of New Zealand.

The thing with disasters is you keep thinking they’ll get better, that you’ll wake up and everything will be back to how it used to be. But they don’t get better, and you have to keep bracing for the next aftershock, the next news update.

I hated feeling useless. So much needed fixing. It didn’t seem important enough to just shovel liquefaction and look after Leo and Henry. I took charge of the food situation. Each morning I set out for Dave and Myra’s house with the boys, big and little varieties, tagging along too.

The conversation went something like this each day:

Myra: What’ll we cook tomorrow, boys?

Henry: Spag bol!

Me and Matt: We’re sick of spag bol. Think again.

Dave: You need veges, Henry. Got to grow those muscles.

Leo: We could have spag bol and veges.

Matt: Roast chicken and veges.

Me: Only if Myra tells me how to cook it.

Myra: Of course I will, dear. And I’ll make an apple sponge pudding.

Leo wrote the list and Matt texted it to his father to buy at the one open supermarket on his way back to ours for dinner.

My mind was finding it hard to cope with the new Matt. He was brilliant and great company unless I strayed into a no-go area such as family break-ups or mothers. The little boys worshipped him – he was definitely the flavour of the month. Not that I cared. Well, to be truthful, I did. A bit. Which was so dumb, because it would have been pretty hellish trying to keep them calm and busy all by myself.

They wanted to do everything Matt was doing, so the three of them got busy every night peeling, chopping and stirring. I’d be doing something like browning meat for a casserole and I’d start wondering if I’d slipped into a parallel universe where Matt Nagel was almost a hero.

‘What’s with all the head-shaking?’ he asked, suspicion in his voice.

‘Onions. They get to me every time.’

A couple of days of continued saintliness from him and I finally figured out what it was all about. Matt Nagel was loving being part of a real family. Well, that was my theory and I thought it was a pretty good one.

His friends started coming over to hang out, and so did Millie, Jess and Joanne.

If the boys were with Natalie we all took off on our bikes searching for things to do. There were showers to be had, too – public ones at Pioneer Stadium. We didn’t worry that it took ages to ride there; it helped fill in the day.

The Press published news about our schools, none of it good. Serious structural damage to both of them. The grounds of Shirley Boys’ were awash with silt. Both principals said we wouldn’t be back in either school, maybe for the rest of the year.

Joanne stabbed her finger on the article. ‘They’re looking at site-sharing. How will that work?’

Millie went pale. ‘We might have to squash in with another class. There’ll be no room and they’ll hate us.’

Clancy – feral Clancy, who’d been on his bike since his dad found out about his driving stunt – said, ‘Nah. It’ll be one school in the morning and the other one swanning in at lunchtime when the first school packs it in for the day.’

Millie groaned. ‘But which schools? And when can we go back? I just want to know. Nobody knows anything in this city anymore.’

There was good news on the second Saturday since the quake. All the rubble had been cleared from the cathedral. There were no bodies. Nobody had died there. Why does good news make you want to cry?

That evening Mum and Dad announced that they both had the day off on Thursday.

‘About time,’ I said. ‘But what’s so special about Thursday? Why not Wednesday? Or tomorrow?’

The only answer I got was two identical grins and, ‘You’ll work it out, darling,’ from Mum.

Judging by the smug looks, everyone in that room over the age of eighteen was in on the joke – Myra, Dave, Robert, Blake, Matt’s dad, Natalie and Don – all of them grinning away. Oh well, Thursday would turn up sooner or later and the mystery would be revealed.

I was pleased the parents were having a day off – finally. Both of them seemed kind of stretched thin. Their eyes were clouded, as if they’d seen too many bad things.

I worked out the Thursday thing during the night when an aftershock shook most of us awake.

‘Thursday! Oh my god, it’s my birthday! My fourteenth birthday!’

‘Well done, honey,’ Dad muttered. ‘Now go back to sleep.’

How cool was that, though – I’d totally forgotten about my birthday but the parents had remembered. I think I slept the rest of the night with a grin on my face.

When you have a birthday in the middle of a disaster zone there’s nowhere for people to go to buy you stuff, so I wasn’t expecting presents. I’d forgotten snail mail was getting through again by now but my parents hadn’t and when had a disaster ever stopped them? On Thursday morning there was a pile of parcels on the table.

‘Happy birthday Lyla open your presents hurry up here’s the scissors.’ Henry took a breath at last.

But I didn’t want to hurry. I grinned at him. ‘Here, you can open this one.’ It was small and it rattled. Lollies? Chocolates?

Mum slid into a chair beside me. ‘We told the grands what to buy. Cross your fingers and hope their taste isn’t too wild.’

The first parcel was the very trainers I’d told Nana Kiri to buy Mum. ‘Okay?’ Mum asked.

‘Very okay!’

They’d done well with the three T-shirts, too. The bulkiest parcel was a new school backpack. I read the tag. ‘It’s from Ian and Beth. I don’t know people called Ian and Beth.’ Good taste, though – awesome in fact.

‘You’ve met Ian,’ Dad said. ‘He says he’s sorry he bled all over your other backpack.’

Earthquake Ian. I wanted to cry – he was all right. He really was alive and well.

‘Can I have a lolly, Lyla? Please, please!’

Thank goodness for naggy kids. I swallowed the tears. ‘One each, and only because it’s my birthday.’

Leo said, ‘You need birthday cards too, Lyla.’ He slid a couple of folded pieces of paper across the table.

Henry leapt up and down, the lolly tin clutched in both hands. ‘We made them ourselves.’

‘Wow! They’re brilliant. You sure you didn’t buy them?’ I hugged them – maybe they did still like me, just a bit.

Matt and his dad gave me a mirror for my bedroom. ‘This is gorgeous! But how…where did you buy it?’ Nothing was open – especially not the sort of place where you’d buy a mirror as stunning as this one.

‘Let’s just say it fell off a wall,’ Matt said.

By which I figured it used to hang on a wall in his house, and had perhaps belonged to his mother. Too bad. I loved it. I was keeping it.

Myra and Dave arrived carrying the most delicious cake ever – chocolate, raspberry, icing and four candles. ‘It’s all we could find,’ Dave said.

Birthday texts zapped in from Katie, Shona, Greer, Millie and Jess. Joanne turned up with a card she said her mum had stashed away. It said Happy 40th birthday – life begins from here! Joanne had crossed out the 0 and drawn a 1 in front of the 4.

I grinned at her. ‘Thanks. I think!’

The day after my birthday, we got news of a huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Dinner that evening was a very sober meal. Nobody said much with Leo and Henry there, all wide-eyed and anxious and knowing something was wrong but not what it was. In the end, Don said, ‘You know where Japan is?’

Nods from both kids, although Henry would probably point to Italy on a map of the world. ‘Well,’ said their dad, ‘they’ve had an earthquake too. We’re all feeling sad because we know how horrible that is.’

There was silence from both kids until Leo said, ‘Can we still sleep here tonight, Dad? All of us in the lounge?’

Poor old Don – he so wanted to go back to his own house, but he put his arms around his sons and said, ‘Sure can, buddy.’

What was happening to the world? What catastrophe would hit next? Earthquakes sucked.