Read Online Bleak City by Marisa Taylor - Free Book Online

City Mall, under the Bridge of Remembrance. The mall was closed off and there was a fire appliance parked on the tramlines. Firemen and police littered the mall and people outside the cordon were discussing whether to stay and wait in the hopes of continuing their shopping.
    Sylvia said she was fine, but really she was a little bit on edge. There had been three quakes since the first one, bricks falling off buildings and some shattering glass, but nothing for about twenty minutes. He talked her into a walk in the gardens, it would help her to wind down. She had become more relaxed about the quakes as the weeks wore on, but at the start, she had trouble sleeping and ended up weepy and easily confused. A trip to the doctor sorted that out, and a few days on sleeping pills had given her the rest she needed to get back into a routine.
    Gerald and Sylvia walked along the river on the side opposite the hospital. Patients were outside, enjoying the fresh air. It always puzzled Gerald to see patients outside enjoying the fresh air while also smoking. The river was full of ducks and their ducklings, the usual mallard and grey ducks, along with the larger paradise ducks and their brown and white-striped ducklings. The gardens were full of people enjoying the warm summer weather, mostly couples and families with small children. It was sad to not see very many families with older children, but he supposed the older children were with their friends or at the malls. He hoped that was not his grandchildren’s futures, to be alienated from their parents past a certain age. He and Sylvia had tried to keep talking to their children when they were growing up, and although there had been rough patches, there hadn’t been anything too dramatic, except from the wider family.
    There were too many people in the gardens, Sylvia said, she was ready to go home.
    At home, Gerald made them an omelette for lunch. There were more quakes while they were eating, just threes, once again, but they disturbed Sylvia. After finishing lunch and a cup of tea, they went for a walk around the park near their house.
    They had worked hard at having a peaceful family, at teaching their children respect for themselves and for others. The main issue had been when he decided to break away from the family business, the construction business his father had started. Gerald had only become a builder because he wasn’t interested in school and when he reached fifteen years of age and told his parents he wanted to leave, his father had said he could, but only if he had a job. He had nothing lined up, so his father insisted Gerald go and work for him. It wasn’t long before he found he enjoyed the work, the satisfaction of planning something, choosing the right materials and working towards a finished result, getting everything right. But in Gerald’s late teens, he noticed his brother-in-law, Stan, was in the habit of cutting corners. Nothing that would make a house fall down, but Stan wasn’t being up front with their customers about the choices being made. Gerald wasn’t happy about it, but he knew his father would do nothing, the bottom line was as important to Bill, if not more so, than the quality of the finished product. By the time Laurel was born and Andrew was starting school, it was bothering Gerald. Quality was getting lower and lower and it wasn’t about craftsmanship any more, it was about squeezing every last cent out of a build.
    Gerald and Sylvia had spent many late nights after the children had gone to bed discussing what to do, coming up with a solution that wouldn’t create a rift in the family. A lot of the cousins were similar ages and Gerald and Sylvia wanted their children to grow up with their wider family. It built a sense of family that neither of them had growing up. Gerald’s father was the only one of their parents who had been born in New Zealand. Sylvia’s parents were ten-pound Poms who had emigrated when she was just five years old and