Restoration drama

When Auckland flooding wiped out her entire wardrobe, former fashion editor STACY GREGG grasped the opportunity for reinvention. 

-  STACY GREGG

Igag at the stench of sewage as we squelch over the bedroom carpet and switch my cellphone to camera mode. “Are you ready?” my boyfriend asks me.

Until now, I thought I was. Yesterday, the guy from the council stood with us in what had once been our backyard and was now a mud mountain and told us he was surprised at how calm we were. “Most of the people we see can’t speak because they are in bits,” he said. “The ones that can speak tell us to fuck off.”

We don’t tell him to fuck off. We say “thank you” when he slaps a yellow sticker on our front door. The insurers have told us a yellow sticker will make it faster to process our claim. We don’t say fuck off to the insurers, either. We are struck by how kind they are when they eventually answer the phone after a wait of more than three hours. We are grateful we even had a policy – because we really weren’t sure we did, or what it covered – and half the people in our street, comprised mostly of state house tenants, don’t have any insurance at all. With no cover, despite the warnings from the council blokes about contamination, there were people scrambling to salvage stuff out of their houses until a couple of days ago, when word spread that the neighbours two down from us had wound up in hospital with E coli. So now, our street is a ghost town and everything that was once inside our homes – furniture, carpet, clothes, books, childhood toys – is piled up along the berm. It looks like what it is. A natural disaster.

“Are you ready?” My boyfriend lifts the first box up and I hold the camera poised to take the insurance pics. I steel myself like crazy Tanya in The White Lotus, teetering on her heels on the railings of that super yacht in the final episode. “You got this!”