Bleak City by Marisa Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

occupied. The people of Christchurch were regularly reminding themselves how lucky the city had been that the September earthquake occurred in the middle of the night, when most people were tucked up in bed asleep. One person had died from a heart attack that wasn’t necessarily because of the earthquake, and two people were badly injured, one by a falling chimney, the other cut by glass.
    One Sunday night, Alice’s mother and stepfather, Lindsay and Kevin, went into the city for dinner with Lindsay’s brother and his wife. Having Alice home was nice, Lindsay had missed her during her months flatting, missed the near-adult conversation during the days once Alice arrived home from school. Since the earthquake, it was almost the same, except that Alice’s arrival times varied according to her timetable, and some days she didn’t arrive home until ten o’clock. She was still on her restricted licence and determined not to lose it by being caught out too late.
    One of the advantages of Alice being home again was that Lindsay and Kevin could go out, leaving Alice to look after the kids, spending a night at home studying once Olivia and Jack had gone to bed. Both children had been anxious following the earthquake and didn’t like being away from their parents. They had become fussy about babysitters, and the neighbour’s fourteen-year-old daughter was no longer a good option. She was showing all the signs of anxiety herself, and the last time they had left her to look after Olivia and Jack, it had been a stressful night, with both kids refusing to go to bed and insisting on sleeping with their parents. But Olivia and Jack seemed to feel safe around Alice, as though nothing could possibly go wrong with her there. She was a like a magic charm, and Lindsay and Alice had talked about that, wondering if they were thinking that way because Alice hadn’t been there for the big one.
    Lindsay and Kevin arrived in the city early so they could walk around and assess the damage. They had been into the city in the days after the first quake and seen the damaged buildings barricaded behind fences and cars crushed by falling brickwork. Now they parked well away from anything that looked dangerous and walked down to Manchester Street, where there seemed to be more damage than in other parts of the city. Manchester Street was just east of Colombo Street, the main street that ran through the city from the Port Hills all the way to the northern side of the city. Manchester Street had a lot of buildings built in the early years of the twentieth century that nothing much had been done with ever since Lindsay could remember. It was an eclectic mix of shops, cafés and services drawn to the street by the low rents offered on space in the old brick buildings.
    One part of the street was closed off and soil had been piled up around a four-storey building that was being demolished. The intention to demolish had been fiercely argued, the building owner wanting it down, but heritage campaigners wanted it to stay and be repaired, a symbol of what Kevin mockingly referred to as the city’s ancient history. His parents were English and he scoffed at the idea that a 105-year-old building could be regarded as ‘heritage’.
    Demolition had been underway for about three weeks and the building’s guts were visible. Now, during the weekend when the equipment stood still and there were no workmen on site, pigeons could be seen roosting on the exposed beams. Lindsay and Kevin circled the cordoned-off area to get a good look at the building. Nearby there were shipping containers around other buildings, stacked to form walls and protect anyone nearby from falling masonry in case of an aftershock. One building, an old church, appeared to be open, even though blue steel beams braced up one wall. Mannequins had been painted completely white and anchored to the beams. One was kayaking down towards the ground, another was cycling upward and a third, a pony-tailed