A House Built on Sand, page 24
Rose was dead and I was in the trees, swaying against the Who. Shouting voices. If you can save only one. Then a ghosty shiver of movement…A little girl was clambering off the concrete deck, bum first. Was it Rose? But no, I’d fetched her up the steps from the bay and phoned for an ambulance, hadn’t I…? Yet here she was, escaping the nasty party. I could hardly believe it. Thank Christ, she was all right. I dragged myself forward through the trees like moving through treacle, hand over hand, trunk by trunk.
But I need to find something…It’s why I’m here and now at Kutarere. It’s to do with Rose. Ren might know. If only I can get out of these damned trees and find my way across the border, by skiff or by hook.
Rose was toddling across the grass towards me, heading home, where she belonged. Even in the dark, I could make out the mix of weepy fear and glee on her face. So I stepped out of the trees, crouched down and opened my arms.
If you can save only one…
IT’S CHRISTMAS AT Kutarere, just how Rose imagined it—with the different generations, rounders on the front lawn, aunties in the kitchen.
‘And I was locked in the linen cupboard,’ laughs Rose, ‘can you believe that?’
Rose and her cousins Libby, Pru and Matt are sitting around on the back deck drinking bubbly and she has been regaling them with her lock-in experience, though she hasn’t mentioned that weird memory.
Miraculously, her claustrophobia has seemingly resolved itself. Cured—mostly. Panic still clutches at her from time to time, but she can go in lifts—mostly—and the tiny resource cupboard at work is no longer a problem. Marius would be pleased, though Rose seems to have done it herself.
‘You probably got locked in while Aunty Maxine was getting trashed next door,’ chuckles Libby, exchanging a loaded glance with Pru. ‘Remember how she had that hipflask?’
‘It was, like, an affectation,’ Rose explains, ‘that hipflask. Bucking the status quo, or something.’
‘By being a secret drinker?’ Libby says drily as Paul comes out with a plate of snacks.
‘Have you told them our news?’ He sits on the couch next to Rose and links his fingers through hers.
She holds up her glass of sparkling grape juice. ‘We’re pregnant.’
The others go ‘Wow’ and ‘Congratulations’ and ‘When are you due?’ and call for a toast, while Rose settles smugly into Paul’s side. Happy, she thinks, fizzing with the reassuring flutter of the baby inside her. No longer jealous when parents take their babies home from day care at the end of the day—now she waves them off with relief. Not distracted, either, by thoughts of an alternative life: that night with Aaron seems strange to Rose now, a cloud to blink at as it sails through her mind, how close she’d come to…what? It was like a test, she decides, and she passed. She might well bump into him again somewhere round here, and that’s fine.
‘Sorry to change the subject,’ says Libby, topping up her glass, pink fingernails flashing, ‘but what’s the latest about Uncle Renfrew?’
Rose tells them how Renfrew, shockingly, has been put under house arrest pending his trial. It has been all over the media, her uncle accused of molesting a young man who was living in his house. ‘It’s ridiculous. He was just Renfrew’s housekeeper.’
‘Not looking good, though,’ comments Paul, squeezing Rose’s hand.
He knows she doesn’t like to talk about Renfrew. She hates how it’s become grist for the family gossip mill. Even people in town she barely knows have been trying to talk to her about it. Salacious, thinks Rose. Only Doug—and Maxine, for obvious reasons—have been silent on the subject.
‘Who has a housekeeper, anyway?’ sniffs Libby. Everybody knows she would like for her and Malcolm to be wealthier than they are.
Matt crosses his legs. ‘I read he got somebody to offer the guy a bribe to make it go away, drop the charges.’
‘Really?’ Pru’s tone borders on avid.
‘Oh, come on.’ Rose is starting to get angry. ‘We don’t know that.’
‘Course not,’ says Libby quickly. ‘Innocent till proven guilty, right?’
‘It’ll be some kind of mix-up,’ Rose persists.
She expects Paul to back her up, but he says nothing. They have different opinions about Renfrew, who Paul once called ‘a nasty piece of work’. Rose believes her uncle has been set up by an avaricious grifter. With the new, happier state of their world, they have been doing their best to avoid talking about it.
Mary-Beth appears at the back door, her hair looking even bushier than usual in the humidity, and angles herself to speak confidentially into the side of Rose’s head: ‘Maxine wants to talk to you, she seems a bit…agitated.’
‘I’ll go see what she wants.’
Rose gets up with a backward glance at Paul, making a conscious decision to leave all talk of Renfrew behind her. Focus on the baby, she tells herself, not wanting Renfrew’s problems to colour her happiness. By the end of the day, everybody will know about the baby, which feels the right thing to do, they’ve kept it quiet until they were out of the twelve-week danger period (fingers crossed).
Aunty Marie and Natalie are working in the kitchen; Douglas and the other two elderly aunties are eating carrot cake and drinking coffee in the lounge. Out front, Maxine looks settled on the bench in the shade of the kōwhai. Rose flops onto the grass at her mother’s feet. ‘Mary-Beth says you wanted to see me?’
‘Did I?’
Her mother’s gaze is clear, the new medication seems to be helping, and probably also the regular meals at Golden Pond, and thank God her mother likes the place. The word ‘remission’ drifts into Rose’s mind, though she doesn’t know if dementia works that way. Probably not. The specialist made a point of telling them that there is no coming back from dementia, and Maxine’s condition will only continue to deteriorate. Rose imagines a dwindling path through an increasingly wild forest with a cliff-like plummet at the end. If it is some kind of remission, she decides, just enjoy it while it lasts.
‘You don’t remember?’ Rose teases now.
‘Oh, I remember all right,’ Maxine fires back.
To save her mother the effort, Rose opens the old tin and lifts out a bunch of small square photos held together by a rubber band. Overexposed colour. ‘Look what we found,’ she says, handing Maxine the one of a little girl sitting on a tartan blanket.
‘Who’s that?’ frowns Maxine
Rose smiles brightly. ‘Someone not a million miles away.’ She passes Maxine another snapshot—a little girl in a frilled swimsuit standing on a beach in a distant time. Her mother blinks once, twice.
‘Mum, do you know who this is?’ she asks in her best day-care voice. A curling smile on her lips, Rose already knowing the answer.
Maxine’s gaze studies her daughter’s face as if properly recognising her.
‘It’s you—my Rose.’
Rose is pleased with them both.
Yet her mother isn’t finished. ‘There was a party,’ she explains.
Rose, feeling a barometric drop, glances up at Maxine.
‘A party and a row. Vicious. Cat and dog.’ Maxine’s voice comes from a distance.
She opens her eyes and the colour is an intense blue that startles Rose.
Maxine clears her throat. ‘She wouldn’t stop crying,’ she says in the new husky voice that makes her sound like a stranger. Her gaze is fixed on a distant spot and Rose even looks in that direction, drawn by her mother’s gaze. ‘So I put her in the linen cupboard.’
‘You mean me?’ asks Rose, trying for a smile.
Maxine turns that gaze towards her. ‘No, the other one…’
Rose shoves off the ground and to her feet, inexplicably afraid for her unborn baby and reverting to her old coping technique of flight.
‘We should go in,’ she says abruptly.
Maxine looks around, focuses. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Her mother stands, then stares at the house with its windows and faded white trim, people walking around inside. ‘Good old Kutarere,’ murmurs Maxine. ‘How lucky we could come back here again.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel has been very personal to me as it was inspired by the dementia that my mother went through, and, by extension, our family. Although this story is not hers (nor mine), the dementia was something I wanted to portray in a fictional sense. So I am deeply grateful to the Gifkins family, to Michael Heyward and Text Publishing, and to the New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi o Aotearoa for giving this work a public life.
I also wish to thank and acknowledge Caroline Barron who read an early version of this work, Gabrielle Strichen who talked to me about being a social worker, Julia Charman-White who shared ECC notes, and my marvellous editor from Text Publishing, Mandy Brett.
A House Built on Sand is set in a region of Aotearoa known as the Ōhiwa Harbour, where there is an actual place named Kutarere, a small community in the Ōpōtiki District. Here, it is used as the name of a house.
Tina Shaw is the author of novels for adults and younger readers. She is a former recipient of the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency, and was previously Writer in Residence at the University of Waikato. She lives in Taupō, Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Text Publishing Company acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the country on which we work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pays respect to their Elders past and present.
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Copyright © Tina Shaw, 2024
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Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2024
Book design by Imogen Stubbs
Cover illustration © Grace Helmer/Bridgeman Images
ISBN: 9781922790903 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922791931 (ebook)
Tina Shaw, A House Built on Sand
