Broken is beautiful, p.2
Broken is Beautiful, page 2
Johnno tried knitting too and cried because he’d dropped too many stitches, so his tea cosy unravelled when he attempted to pull it into shape. Johnno threw the cosy on the ground, stamped on it, and said it was a stupid activity for girls. Gran got cross with Johnno. She told him off for suggesting girls are inferior to boys and pointed out where his dinner had come from that evening.
I take my tea into the corner of the sitting room to drink it, weaving my way back between the hallway boxes. I carry the teapot, and my gold filigree bone china teacup on its matching saucer, on my Indian inlaid wooden tray. This is my favourite tea-drinking set, the set with which Gran and I drank tea. We had two filigree teacups then and it is possible I still have two, but I only need one at present given my lack of visitors.
I drink tea in the corner of the sitting room because my little problem now occupies most of my sitting room. Not that the room is large, but all the space is taken up with … well … with … things … broken things. That’s my problem, you see. As I said in the meeting tonight for the first time ever, I can’t let go of broken things.
Broken things make me sad. I want broken things to be fixed. I believe I am the person who can fix broken things. Gran taught me a lot about fixing and I have subsequently had plenty more practice. However, I have discovered there are many broken things needing fixing in this world, even in this city. After a series of earthquakes Christchurch was full of broken things requiring repair. These broken things are accumulating in my house, and they appear to be getting the upper hand.
I read a good simile for my feelings about broken things in a book about a girl who lived in the frozen north of Canada. She found a lost mitten and felt absolute empathetic despair with the mitten. There was a terrible sadness in the loneliness of the knitted mitten that would never be reunited with its fellow mitten. It had been a singular pair of mittens, knitted by hand by someone’s loved parent, or grandparent, or child. No other mitten could be a replacement, that particular pair of mittens uniquely belonged together. The mittens had kept the loved one’s hands warm, until a forgetful moment meant there was only one mittened hand, one cold hand, and a lonely red mitten abandoned out in the snow.
3
12 March 2020
Today is important because I have a potential client coming to visit, the first for many weeks. I haven’t been welcoming of late when people have expressed interest in my services. Most clients come through word of mouth, although I do keep flyers on the notice boards at the Sumner Supervalue, by the Bohemian Bakery, and at the Woolston New World. However, my bank now requires me to attend my weekly Thursday OA group and demonstrate I am increasing my income.
I stopped having clients come into my house some years ago. People were tripping over my boxes, and I don’t want the contents scattered all over the floor. The simple solution was to have clients visit in my garden. My garden is a wild thing I have let run deliberately loose. Many of the flowers which now cover the paths remind me of Gran. I have no issue with plants growing on paths as long as they don’t complain when I walk on them. We have reached a reasonable accord, primroses, poppies and petunias, granny’s bonnets and gerberas, marigolds and marguerite daisies, nasturtiums and nigella, all frolic together in a riot of colour in the spring and summer. Jasmine and honeysuckle scent the air while disguising the fence, and clematis and wisteria climb over the veranda.
Gran’s house is unusual for its era in that Pa Stout built a veranda on its north side to keep the house cool in summer. The house is on a corner with roads to the west and south sides, so the norm would have been to build the veranda facing the long southern axis. Pa Stout wasn’t wealthy, but he was smart and brought Gran up to be smart too.
My vegetables grow happily between the flowers. Rocket and sprouting broccoli seed themselves. Potatoes I miss at harvest time provide the next year’s crop. Pumpkins sprout up from the compost piled by the fence. Bean plants grow from old pods. At this point in late summer, vegetables are outcompeting the flowers.
I move some pumpkin vines off the mosaic sofa seat I designed with my china, which shattered in the February 2011 earthquake. Almost everything breakable broke, so I had plenty of scope to adorn a concrete sofa. It’s a mosaic of a taniwha, fish, sea, and seaweed, swirling blues and greens and creams, with bright rays of mirror sun glinting through the water. My sofa is the perfect art piece to give clients confidence that ‘Broken is Beautiful’ can do something special with their offerings.
‘Broken is Beautiful’ is the name of my business. In my twenties I prosaically named it ‘Julia’s Repairs’, when I was more focused on fixing things than on creative reconstruction. I never had a ‘normal’ job – I liked the look of Gran’s life. Gran worked hard for other people but always called her own shots because she never worked more than a day a week for any one client. Gran would say she couldn’t clean today because she had a meeting to attend when her meeting was with her own garden. “Why is my garden less important than their dirty toilet?” was her catch phrase.
Gran taught Johnno and me how to fix and make things, from those days of knitting tea cosies and before. On rainy days when we were little, we would make pictures to put on our dressers by cutting images out of magazines, melting a layer of candle wax into the bottom of one of Pa Stout’s old tobacco tins, carefully placing the image onto the warm wax and then melting another layer of wax on top. If you weren’t careful the image would go askew in the wax and stick out the side. Then you would have to heat the tin up so the wax would melt and start the process over again.
We tried everything we could to find materials to make and improved our skills over time. We folded hundreds of origami paper cranes to hang in our windows to remember the people of Hiroshima. We embroidered samplers for our rooms with our birth dates and city, although Johnno took his down just before his tenth birthday party, in case his mates deduced he had done the embroidery rather than his sister. There were pieces of Pa Stout’s wood stacked in the corner of the property which I used to make a kindling box for the fire and Johnno made into a beautiful ladder for climbing into the roof space.
We darned our socks and sewed buttons on our school uniforms, put up hems and lengthened them again, as fashions changed. We rewired light switches and plugs. We moved on to repairing appliances, carefully disassembling then reconstructing them. It was so exciting when the appliances functioned. Before he left home, Johnno took a whole car engine apart and put it back together. Gran was annoyed because some parts lived in the sitting room for several months. Almost all the parts went back in; the three left over can’t have been important as the engine worked well. Gran was over her crossness once the engine was refurbished because there was no more mess in the sitting room. We were exceptionally proud of Johnno and toasted him with spiced tomato juice made of tomatoes harvested from our garden.
By the time we were close to finishing high school, Mum took herself out of our picture. She headed north to Takaka, or thereabouts, with a new boyfriend who was running a yoga school somewhere in Golden Bay, in the northwest corner of the South Island. Mum asked us what we would like to do, go with her, or stay with Gran. Did Mum ask Gran first? It is quite possible she didn’t. Johnno and I voted wholeheartedly for staying with Gran. Johnno had his sights set on learning more so he could earn lots of money and get out of Sumner, out of Christchurch and out of New Zealand. I was starting to get worried about Gran, who was falling over a lot more often than she ought to and getting confused about which day of the week it was. So, Mum wafted off north with Bruce and has remained in Golden Bay ever since. Golden Bay suits her well, although Bruce didn’t suit her for long.
When we finished school, Johnno applied his mechanical skills at the University of Canterbury. I took my skills and applied them to fixing things for other people, while helping Gran. Gran was always keen for me to further my education, but I couldn’t see the point; I could learn as much as I wanted to know by reading and experimenting.
When Johnno entered his second year at university, he used his student allowance to go flatting. He came home sporadically, needing a free feed or his clothes washed, but his visits became rarer, until we were surprised when he turned up. We knew Johnno had visited when the fridge was empty and the cupboards largely bare.
By then, I was getting a reputation as the local fixer-upper and was pleasantly surprised I could earn a decent cash income that supported me and supplemented Gran’s pension.
I was accidentally introduced to the possibilities of creative repair when I came across a book on kintsugi in the Sumner Library. The book was on the ‘staff picks’ display stand. The cover showed a beautiful ceramic bowl with irregular threads of gold woven through it. How did they do that? I got the book out and read with fascination and awe. Kintsugi is a four-hundred-year-old Japanese art form which glues broken pottery pieces back together, then highlights the cracks with gold. Kintsugi’s concept embraces flaws and imperfections to build something more beautiful than the original item.
Doors in my mind flew open, filled with possibilities of how to repair broken things and make them better than they ever were. How to embed the story of an object, its fragmentation and re-amalgamation, into its whole. With kintsugi there is no need to hide the breaks, one celebrates them. I could go beyond repairing a toaster so the electrical circuits worked again, I could paint an artwork on the exterior. How about a toaster with flames shooting up the outside, though that could be frightening. Or a pair of hands warming themselves on the metal? Or an amalgam of random shapes in attractive colours that make you want to get up in the morning to put stale bread in your exciting appliance? Those daydreams were where ‘Broken is Beautiful’ originated, a synthesis of ancient Japanese art and imaginings of ornate toasters.
4
The potential client dropping round today is Robbie from Coffee Culture in Sumner. I am hoping Robbie might have items I can creatively repair in exchange for him painting the outside of my house. I could also engage in creative accounting to satisfy the bank if he pays me for the items and then I pay him for the painting. Robbie said he likes solid outdoor work as an antidote to designing little flowers on cups of coffee which will vanish in seconds down someone’s throat.
Robbie will end his shift at 4pm and cycle here. He’s a Scottish backpacker who has worked at Coffee Culture for the last few months. Robbie hitchhiked from Auckland up to Cape Reinga then started the Te Araroa walk down the length of New Zealand on a whim. He was a hiking newbie who says he loved his new-found freedom of getting up and walking every day and seeing where he ended up. Robbie got his job because he happened to meet the owner of Coffee Culture Sumner in a bar in Bluff over a beer, as the two finished Te Araroa simultaneously.
I feel a little stressed because my OA session is at 5.30pm, I can’t be late, I don’t like to arrive flustered, and I must get my attendance scan. I need to leave by 5.10pm and it is already 4.20pm. I generally avoid having deadlines or concrete time frames insofar as is humanly possible, but I have no option in my mandated OA attendance.
The letter that dropped a bombshell into my world arrived on a Thursday. I was looking out the window when the post-person pulled up at my mailbox in their red, electric toy car. I get as few letters as visitors so that was a surprise. Afterwards I felt foolish for imagining it could be a nice surprise. Something in the mail … perhaps Johnno had finally got off his rear end to send me an early birthday present for my birthday in April? I opened the envelope eagerly, to then be puzzled by its contents.
The letter was from Bank Aotearoa, who I thought a perfectly adequate bank, up to the moment I started reading that letter. They wanted to inform me I was in arrears on my mortgage payments. I should have known I was in arrears. It is possible I did know I was in arrears but was successfully blocking the knowledge away from the knowing part of my brain. I am very good at segmenting off information I don’t want to know about from the remainder of my brain.
I should never have taken a loan out on Gran’s house, and I knew it when I signed the papers. Gran never owed money on her house and taught me lack of debt equates to freedom. Now I know, more than ever, how correct she was. The incentive for taking out the loan was getting extra work done on the house when it was repaired after the Canterbury earthquakes.
The Canterbury earthquakes were bad in a whole lot of ways. There is nothing like living through large numbers of earthquakes to make you understand them properly. We had earthquakes when Johnno and I were little. The house shook for a while and Gran told us to stand under the doorframes as the safest place to be. Nothing of consequence happened and, after my childhood, I couldn’t remember when I felt an earthquake until September 2010.
Everyone in Christchurch knows the dates of the earthquakes – 4 September 2010, 22 February 2011, 13 June 2011, and 23 December 2011.
September’s earthquake hit west of the city on the Canterbury Plains and sent liquefied mud into houses around the Heathcote and Avon Rivers in Christchurch. However, east of the city in Sumner we got a big shake but nothing more.
February was disastrous. One hundred and eighty-six people died in the city centre when two big buildings collapsed, and brick fronts fell off heritage buildings onto passers-by. February’s hit Sumner hard, then June’s smacked us again.
The earthquakes made one in ten Christchurch houses uninhabitable – through rock fall, liquefaction, sinking foundations, brick houses losing all their bricks. Nearly every house in the city had some damage. Also, this wasn’t just four earthquakes, there were literally thousands of smaller earthquakes between the big ones, so you were woken up every night for months.
The outside of Gran’s house weathered earthquakes well as its flexible wood framing, wooden weatherboard cladding, and light iron roof wriggled around a lot but didn’t break. The lath and plaster coating inside did not fare so well. The walls became full of cracks, which widened as earthquakes continued so plaster fell on the floor and filled the air.
In September, the brick fireplace chimneys in the sitting room and bedrooms fell down. The bricks dented the roof but luckily fell into the garden rather than into the house.
In February, my hot water cylinder ripped itself out of its fixings and fell so water spouted everywhere, including into all the holes in the walls. The water to Sumner got shut off quickly and didn’t come back on for a month, but it still managed to do a lot of damage.
It wasn’t only my hot water cylinder that was damaged, by 23 February 2011 I no longer owned many breakable objects. By a complete miracle, Gran’s teapot and two filigree teacups and saucers survived. I used them at breakfast then placed them in the sink to leave the kitchen tidy. The hand towel hanging under the cupboards fell into the sink and saved them from banging together.
Isn’t it funny how we call good and unlikely events miracles, but we don’t use the same word for bad and unlikely events. There was a man in Redcliffs, the suburb west, whose wife asked him to pick raspberries for dessert. The earthquake struck while he was picking the raspberries and a boulder fell and squashed him. It was most unlikely, but bad, therefore cannot be called a miracle.
The insurance claim process for the earthquakes was a nightmare, rather than a miracle. I filed twelve insurance claims because I had to make separate claims for the house and the contents and the land. I couldn’t keep track of them and nor could the insurance system. I remember one horror of a call when I wanted to know the results of an inspection. The person on the other end of the phone (always a different person) assured me Gran’s house had not been inspected. I told her it had been inspected because I had been there. We went back and forth in this style for over an hour until she belatedly discovered the inspection had been filed under a claim for June and I had given her the claim number for February.
Another part of the insurance saga was how Gran’s house repaired itself, according to the insurance company anyway. When the house was first inspected, the report said the house would have to be demolished. I was shocked and upset – the house was reasonably habitable, and it was far too precious to ever demolish. Luckily, the assessors rethought their report, and the next news was they considered the house repairable. By the fifth inspection, the house was considered only slightly damaged. I was sure Pa Stout didn’t build a magic, self-repairing house. However, by the fifth inspection I was too tired to argue with the bevy of men who strode through, acting as if they knew everything and I knew nothing.
Like all things, including very bad things, after thirty-six months, the insurance deliberation process eventually ended in late 2014. I was informed the house would be fixed by Fleecer Construction. I would have to stay somewhere else for three months while repairs were carried out, but Fleecer promised it would be all like brand new.
Charlie from Fleecer visited and asked whether I would like the builders to do anything extra while they were working on the house. Now I know I was upsold, but I was in too fragile a state at the time to notice.
Charlie pointed out the house wouldn’t be exactly like new because insurance would only cover repairing and painting walls with specific earthquake damage. Nothing had happened to most of the window paint, so the windows would be looking tired against relined and freshly painted interior walls. All the wooden floors were scarred but there was only major damage in the kitchen, where my plates had embedded little shards in the floor. Charlie suggested painting the outside as well – insurance considered the paint was too worn prior to the earthquakes to be covered – but that was one cost too far for me.
Charlie was sure I could get a loan to improve the house and Bank Aotearoa were indeed happy to give me one. I signed the mortgage papers, the repair went ahead, and the inside was substantially improved, including insulation and heat pumps to replace the broken fireplaces, making it warmer in winter. My mortgage didn’t feel excessively large at twenty thousand dollars with repayments at fifty dollars a week, equivalent to only one extra up-furbished toaster. Except, unfortunately, that wasn’t how things worked out. There’s something else huge here that changed everything, but I avoid thinking about, which is how Amanda died.
