A House Built on Sand, page 12
Yet I was still wearing the yellow dress, that must count for something.
Maxine, a voice called—it was Renfrew, standing in the doorway. Come out of the rain, Maxine.
I turned my face up to the sky and water splattered onto me. I opened my arms to it, embracing the warm rain. The dress was getting soaked, sticking against my skin. It’d be see-through (and me not wearing any underwear, let alone a petticoat), but who cares? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was this swish and drip of warm rain on my body as I twirled on the lawn.
Then somebody grabbed my arm. You’re making a display of yourself! Mum’s livid face, up close and shiny-wet in the rain, the shoulders of her print dress turning dark from the water. You’re doing it on purpose, aren’t you—And as she said that, I saw that the windows were full of people staring at us—she was right, I was making a display of myself. It was the day of the memorial drinks, when everybody came over to remember Dad, though the number of people was getting smaller each year.
Mum started dragging me towards the house. Slut, she muttered under her breath, her grip hard on my arm.
You’re hurting me.
You should’ve thought of that before. Which didn’t make sense, did it?
Let me go! I shrieked.
We struggled past smirking Renfrew, and into the house where I shook her off and ran—down the hallway and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind me.
‘Bloody hell,’ I mutter, throwing the dress away from me and into the mouth of the sailor’s sack that’s hanging open like it’s got something to say as well. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’
The graveyard attic is silent—no humming rain, no shouty voices from the past—just light shafting in through the boxy window and all the sulking junk. It really is like the inside of a brain—all the shit that’s lying in wait to ambush you.
And then, later, Mum died—too young—from the breast cancer they didn’t pick up in time. How long must the seed have been lurking in her body, growing, without her knowledge? I cried at her funeral, a small part of me relieved as well. There, that’s over, I thought, no more creeping around and pretending, staying away. I could go back to Kutarere. I could take Rose back to Kutarere. And that was when our long summers began, when Mum was no longer around to see us, to make her snarky frowning face, to poke and pry.
With a slap of inspiration, a brain-f lash, I realise she didn’t like me. It was always about the boys. Small things—like that time she made the marmalade she was so proud of and didn’t give me any, not a single jar. I’d phoned home collect—feeling homesick, farmsick, sick of being in the wind-battering city—and she told me all about it, went on about the bloody marmalade even though she was paying for the call. Can you send me a jar? I asked, mouth watering and longing for a taste of home. I don’t think there will be any spare, Maxine, she said tartly.
So, after Tony, I kept away, held my secrets close.
Maybe Ren knew about what happened at Kutarere, I’ll never know for sure, and if he did then he seemed to play along, played the game. He came to the unit I’d rented down the back end of Onehunga along the road from the Black Power and various care-in-the-community misfits, and brought vegetables. No, that’s not right. He brought a bottle of something, and we sat on the front deck drinking and listening to the not-so-distant sirens and staring up the slope of ragged lawn to the rickety gate while the weirdo on the other side of the partition was shuffling around talking to himself.
This place is a dump, sniffed Renfrew.
I know. But it’s not for long. Just till I get on my feet.
Do I want to know about Tony?
Nope.
So there I was holed up in Onehunga, hoping like hell Tony wouldn’t track me down. He had vanished from our lives. My ribs were healing, though other parts of me were still awfully fragile. It haunted me to think he might suddenly turn up and see Rose.
I’d find myself looking over my shoulder—when I was hurrying along a busy Auckland street or picking up Rose from day care. Out of the corner of my eye I’d catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure standing under a tree, and startle. Or I’d see a male shape slip into the next aisle at the supermarket ahead of us, and I’d abandon the trolley to hurry us breathlessly towards the exit.
Me and Tony were good at the start…like that night we went up Mount Victoria on his motorbike, and I danced on the cold grass in the dark, the city lights like a cape slung behind me, while Tony lay on a rug and beamed. So beautiful, he said. I flopped down beside him. It’ll always be you and me, babe, he said, holding my face in his hands.
And he was right: I’d never be free of him.
So no help from that direction? My brother could sound very stuffy sometimes, and I tittered.
No help from that direction, I intoned, taking the mickey.
Renfrew already had money back then—held in a trust from when Dad died. The arrangement was that Doug would take over the farm, which he had, Renfrew would get a fistful of dough and I’d get the rest of the inheritance when Mum died—the country thinking being that the males needed to be set up first as the female would get married and her husband would take care of her (excuse me if I puke).
At least let me help, he said.
That put my nose out of joint. Why would you want to do that? And I fought it down, the fear that he knew about Rose, and turned it back on him. I can keep a secret, you know, I don’t need to be bribed. Ren and a dodgy deal I’d happened to stumble on. Because I wasn’t the only one with secrets. It kept us close.
He blushed in the dark, yet ignored my mood. I’ve got a friend—
Ooh, I’m sure you have, I leered.
I’ve got a friend in real estate, he said patiently. I’ll see what he can do.
Well, bless him, if Ren and this friend of his didn’t find me a townhouse going cheap, a real bargain, suspiciously affordable even on a solo mum’s social worker salary. Ask no questions, is what I told myself, and you’ll get no lies—we had enough of those already.
Three bedrooms, brick exterior, upstairs and downstairs, courtyard garden at the back for Rose to play in. Dated, but safe and secure, is what I was thinking: the previous people had put locks on all the downstairs windows and I could check out the garden from upstairs to see if anybody was lurking out there. I got a lock put on the side gate, anyway, to get ahead of that kind of nonsense. And when Renfrew came over with his bottle, we’d sit on the balcony looking out at Mount Eden, definitely a step up from the arse-end of Onehunga.
Here’s to luck. He raised his glass to the night sky in a sardonic toast.
Luck, I agreed and tossed back my own drink, whatever it was at the time.
Survival, more like it. Survival of the fittest. Not that I was all that fit, more like an eggshell. An eggshell that was putting on a good show. Though Renfrew could see through the fakery—maybe because he had his own facade to maintain, which was why he kept coming round: we were two of a kind, two peas in a cracked pod. And if he knew about Kutarere…maybe he thought I’d have a change of heart about what I’d done and make things right. I wanted to talk to Ren, but the words were impossible. It was too late for making things right, too late for words: no going back.
The main thing was that I had Rose. Together, we’d get through anything and with enough time, I hoped that life would settle into something resembling normality. Onwards and upwards, as Mum used to say. When she died and I could go back to Kutarere, that helped most of all. My bruised ribs and the dark fissure beneath them eventually scabbed over, so I was barely aware of the scars that still remained.
And my little girl became mine all over again.
People say life goes on. And really, that can be true.
DRESSED AND CLEAN , Rose makes a mental checklist: fix up the beds, check on her mother, do an internet search for other aged-care facilities, food, drink. No, not in that order. Check on her mother, food, drink, make the beds, search for other facilities…
A knock at the door distracts her and Rose makes her way down the hallway, past the attic ladder which is strangely down—she peers up in passing at the open trapdoor—is Maxine up there?
A fit-looking woman wearing huge dark glasses is at the door. Rose guesses that she has been crying, her nose is pink and her lips seem swollen.
‘Hello?’ says Rose.
The woman looks vaguely familiar, long black hair hanging down her back.
‘Aaron said you were here,’ she says in a rough voice. ‘Thought I’d, you know, drop by. Old time’s sake. Hope you don’t mind?’ She attempts a smile.
The connection takes a moment to clang into place and Rose gasps. ‘Jasmyn?’
The woman waves her hand in the air in place of speech. Rose, feeling superficial, can’t help noticing that she still does her fingernails. They are a glossy deep pink, honed and shaped. But what is she doing here? Rose is confused, yet can sense the woman’s vulnerability.
‘Did you, um, want to come in?’
Jasmyn nods and steps past Rose into the hallway, her chin up.
‘Always wondered what this place looked like inside,’ she murmurs, looking around.
‘You never came here?’ Rose tries to remember back to that summer. Wasn’t there that one time a gang of them came over to Kutarere and…?
‘Nope,’ says Jasmyn, taking off her dark glasses. Her eyes are shiny with recent tears, mascara smudged on her eyelashes. ‘Nice place.’ She makes her way over to peer at the painting of a ship in a storm, stumbling on the rug.
Oh my God, she’s drunk, Rose realises, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Has Jasmyn come to confront her about Aaron? But aren’t they separated, wasn’t that what Aaron had told her—or had he? Scanning back over their conversation at the water place—a conversation Rose can barely recall because she was so excited about bumping into Aaron again—she finds she can’t remember.
‘Coffee?’ Without waiting for a response, Rose scurries to the kitchen and puts on the kettle while Jasmyn sinks onto the couch and starts looking at her phone. When Rose comes back with two mugs of coffee, Jasmyn is staring into space. She blinks and meets Rose’s gaze.
‘Long time no see, eh?’
Rose contemplates the woman who seems to have barely aged since they were seventeen. She feels a stab of envy, knowing that Jasmyn has had three children already (three) and here is Rose, probably looking older than her age, with none. All that wasted effort—the miscarriages, the futile longing—has aged her, she’s sure of it. She sits in the armchair opposite the couch and indulges in a spasm of self-pity. No babies. Losing her mother to dementia. And now things are souring with Paul—a man she expected to spend the rest of her life with. It’s like finding out the foundations of her life that she had thought were so solid are actually made of sand.
Jasmyn’s assessing her lazily. ‘You’re looking good, Rose.’
‘Thanks,’ she says, not believing it.
Jasmyn leans forward and snags the mug from the coffee table, takes a sip. ‘This place.’ She is looking around again. ‘Aaron told me all about it.’
‘Really?’ She imagines them talking about Kutarere, the time he fell asleep on her couch, laughing about her, the outsider.
‘You got kids?’ Jasmyn asks suddenly.
‘No.’ Rose hates herself but can’t help bringing it up: ‘You and Aaron…?’
She takes another sip of the coffee before answering. ‘Yep, three. Well, the oldest is definitely his.’ Jasmyn looks frankly at Rose. ‘He’s just turned fifteen, can you believe it?’
Rose, feeling chilled, has already done the maths. As she thought, it would put Jasmyn’s pregnancy around the time that she and Aaron were going out.
‘I’m thinking of doing a course.’
‘Oh, right.’ Not that she cares. ‘What kind?’
‘Sports. At Toi Ohomai. I want to be a personal trainer. I’m already leading a few classes at the local gym—Pump, Step, you know.’
Now she says it, Rose understands why Jasmyn looks so good—her biceps are defined, her belly is flat—unlike Rose, she works out. ‘Cool.’
Jasmyn’s gaze settles thoughtfully on Rose. If she was drunk before, she’s sober now. ‘I never did get what Aaron saw in you.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I mean, it’s like you never cared what you looked like. Turning up to work in those scungy old dungarees.’ Rose doesn’t remember any dungarees, could she have owned such a thing? ‘Hardly the fashion statement of the century.’
She must be making a joke, thinks Rose, and tries to play along. ‘Yep, I had the fashion sense of a teabag.’
Jasmyn doesn’t seem to get it, and pushes on with what is starting to feel like a personal attack. ‘I mean, you’d look like something the cat dragged in, and Aaron’s tongue is hanging out. What was that about, anyway?’
An edge of bitterness has crept into her voice and Rose sees the young Jasmyn in a new light. The hair, fingernails, the effort she must have put in to grab Aaron’s attention. Well, she got it in the end, didn’t she.
Rose is starting to think how soon she can get rid of her when Jasmyn narrows her eyes, about to make another sudden leap. ‘I saw you guys.’
Rose frowns. ‘Sorry, what?’
Jasmyn puts down her mug. Is she going to leave, or throw a punch?
‘In the dunes, that time. I followed you guys. Aaron was supposed to be meeting me, we was gunna hang out, but he stood me up. I was waiting for him down at the wharf—my best gear, looking hot—and he never showed. So I phoned me mate and we walked around, chilling, then I see you at the beach carpark, getting out of your car like a calf that’s just been born.’ Jasmyn makes a dry chuckling sound, though it’s obviously a hurtful memory. ‘Totter, totter, totter.’ She walks two fingers in the air to show what she means. ‘And there was Aaron, you were meeting him. So me and my mate, we followed yous.’
Sweat breaks out on Rose’s lip as she remembers driving to the beach to meet Aaron. She quickly scans her memory of what they did in the dunes…And Jasmyn was watching them? What part exactly did she see? But surely, if they’d been followed, she and Aaron would have noticed, they would have seen anybody who was there that night, so maybe Jasmyn didn’t see anything?
Jasmyn is enjoying Rose’s discomfort, and her tone lightens, as if that was what she had wanted to achieve.
‘Anyways, it’s all good now, eh.’ She smooths her hands down the pale-blue fabric of the skinny jeans that she can wear because of all the gym work. ‘Me and Aaron, we’re tight.’
This is the message Jasmyn has come to deliver, really?
‘I’ll be off,’ she says. Standing, she accidentally—or no, deliberately, Rose realises—knocks the mug with her knee and it goes flying, coffee splashing over the old carpet. ‘Oops,’ she smiles faintly, making for the door. ‘See ya, Rose.’
She gets a tea towel as Jasmyn lets herself out the front door and finds that her eyes, shamefully, are filling with tears. She presses the cloth to the coffee on the rug and dashes at her eyes with the back of her other hand. Silly. So what if Jasmyn did see them in the dunes? It was fifteen years ago, for Godsake. It isn’t about the spying, though. It’s about how this new knowledge warps a good memory into something smutty.
She and Aaron in the dunes…lying on the rug sharing a cigarette, both of them naked, the night sky blazing with stars.
I’m not gunna be here forever, he was saying, an arm behind his head. I’ve got plans. He turned to look at her. I could get a job in Auckland, what d’ya think?
Rose tried to imagine Aaron in Auckland. She would get to see him all the time, and what would that be like? Her heart sparked, picturing it. You could stay with us while you look, there’s a spare room.
He turned his head to look at her. Yeah? That’d be great. But then another thought swiftly followed. What about Maxine? She won’t like it, eh.
Rose didn’t see that. She’d be all right.
Thinking was going on behind his eyes. I mean, she won’t want your life here to go back with yous.
What? Rose didn’t follow. How d’you mean?
He turned back to study the sky. Shooting star, he pointed out and she looked for it.
Isn’t that good luck, she said, if you see a shooting star?
Aaron grinned. Then I must have heaps of good luck.
Rose pushed up onto an elbow to look at him. Seriously, you should come and stay with us, it’d be great. I’ll take you to my special places, up the maunga, to the beach.
Something clicked in his eyes, it was only a moment then it was gone. A city beach, eh? Bet it won’t be as good as here. Besides, I can still see you every summer, right?
Rose reached for her clothes. So I’m, what, a summer romance?
Aaron sat up, getting his jeans. Maybe for you too, eh? Keeping it light. You’ve probably got heaps of boyfriends back in Auckland.
Even though his dismissal of her stung, she also aimed for lightness. Heaps, she agreed, pulling her shirt over her head. She couldn’t admit that Aaron was her first and only boyfriend. So many, I don’t even remember their names.
He laughed. There you go, then.
Aaron slung the blanket over his shoulder and they climbed out of the dunes and down to the beach, where a crescent moon was casting a feeble light onto the glossy-wet sand. They were holding hands, and even now Rose can summon up the warmth of his hand, the warmth inside her from their sex, like he had filled her up somehow, had helped her to become somebody whole (when she hadn’t even realised that she wasn’t) and it was a powerful feeling. She wanted to say something corny like, You complete me—but no way could you speak words like that out loud. And maybe Aaron had words of his own he wanted to say but couldn’t, because he turned to her on the way back to the carpark and started kissing her, as if he could express his true feelings that way. He’s like any other boy, Maxine had told her, they only want one thing. But her mother was wrong. In a flash, Rose saw herself living here with Aaron, working in the town, having kids, being with him all the time. She kissed him back and a spurt of passion opened like a tiny bud inside her heart. You complete me—she said the words in her head as her mouth pressed hungrily against his.
