Old Bucky & Me by Jane Bowron

Author:Jane Bowron [Jane Bowron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781877551451
Publisher: Awa Press
Published: 2012-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Deep freeze

JUNE 27 – Orange, red, white and green – in the good old days they were simply colours or Cluedo characters. Now they are statements about peoples’ lives. When I hear someone, myself included, ask ‘What colour are you?’ it sounds impolite, discriminatory even. Kermit the Frog sang a song about how it wasn’t easy being green, and I find myself feeling guilty that I’m living in a rented green-zoned house. For the orange people in the hold zone their lives remain in limbo, waiting like that unfortunate character Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days as she becomes literally buried in a mound of dirt.

Sick and tired of being given the mushroom treatment, left in the dark for months by CERA, at last those in the red zone have been offered a deal, but one doesn’t envy them purchasing land off greedy developers, borrowing heavily from the banks to afford land in the west, and battling with insurance companies over the ghastly fine print.

The enormity of moving entire neighborhoods to greener pastures is mind-boggling: there is talk of streets with strong bonds forged post quakes moving en masse. You wonder if the government is prepared for a resistance movement from those who may dig their feet in and absolutely refuse to budge, choosing instead to stay on, tap into the national grid, and keep using the chemical toilets – or, as friends joke, bring back the night cart man, he who used to visit houses back in the 1920s to collect the human waste.

The announcement – only the day after Thursday’s big announcement – that red-zoned land will be bought by the government, eventually redeveloped, and then put back on the market years down the track made those in the red flinch. As they grapple with their brave new world, they wince at the notion of others one day living where they had so confidently put down roots before being moved off their land.

It is the old, the fiercely – as they say – independent who desperately want to keep living where they have grown up, married and bred, and from where they hoped to be carried out in a box, whom you fret for. At the beginning of the week a quake mate and I got to visit an old-timer called Joseph, who is pushing ninety-four and living in one-room rented accommodation in a once grand old house in the inner city. There’s a single bed, a kitchen sink, and a sash window through which he stares out as he sits at the table listening to the blare of his radio. The stud in the room is ten feet high; when his heater packed up for ten days he called the room ‘the freezer’.

After February’s quake, Joseph, who depends on Meals on Wheels, didn’t get a visit from the service for a month. He’s currently having problems with his pre-pay ‘power manager’, and hasn’t had a shower for a long time as the hot-water cylinder has been out of action since November.

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