A House Built on Sand, page 4
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ says Rose, meaning it. ‘How long were you together?’
Aaron looks to one side, like he is making his own calculations. ‘Ah, we were kind of on and off for a while. The last time was for about six years.’
As long as she and Paul have been together. If she and Paul were to split up now, it would be devastating, like a chunk of her life slipping off an eroded cliff face.
‘Anyway. Shit happens, eh.’ His attention comes back to her, and Rose recognises that sense of moving on from her own tendency to deflect anything difficult. ‘How about you, Rose? What brings you back?’
‘Well…’ Images of Maxine, her car and the police station flood Rose’s mind and she shoves them quickly away. ‘I’ve just come over to, you know, catch a break from the city.’
Aaron glances up the road, as if he’s just remembered something. ‘Look, I’ve got to go, but it’d be great to have a proper catch-up. Um, do you want to meet tonight for a drink?’
‘Tonight’s not great,’ she frowns.
He knocks the big white plastic container against his leg. ‘Sure, no, that’s all right.’
‘No, it’s just that I’ve got my mother to look after and—’
‘Maxine?’
She is a little surprised Aaron remembers her name. ‘Yes, she’s not that well.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ His gaze lingers on her face.
Realising that he is probably assuming something horrible like cancer and not wanting his concern, Rose waves her hand airily. ‘Oh, it’s nothing too serious.’ Then an impulsive idea seizes her. ‘But hey, why don’t you come over to the house instead?’
He smiles. ‘Sure, that’d be great. Give me your number.’ Pulling his phone out of his jeans pocket, they exchange numbers.
‘So, um,’ says Rose, looking at her car.
‘Yeah, right,’ he says, gesturing at the tap with the plastic container.
Quickly, she says goodbye and jumps behind the wheel. As she pulls out onto the main road, she sees in the rear-view mirror that he is still standing in the same spot, watching her go.
*
Of all people, Rose thinks as she drives past marshy lowlands and paddocks rising to hills, staring cattle and the occasional goat. If she was superstitious, she might think the universe was trying to tell her something. Because things aren’t that great with her and Paul at the moment…Paul, her lovely husband who, right now, will probably be at the Avondale market buying fresh produce for the meals they cook during the week, the stir-fries and the Thai-style curries and the keto-inspired salads. And why doesn’t that image fill her with contentment? What is wrong with her? She’s keeping secrets from him, like the hypnosis, when they should be open about everything; yet she can’t seem to help herself.
And here is Aaron Walters, out of the blue, dredging up all sorts of memories and feelings.
Rose huffs. The stress of trying to get pregnant isn’t helping, either.
God, Aaron. The last time Rose saw him was on the walkway behind the shops, the fishing boats at rest smelling of diesel and brine, the sound of lapping water that should have added to the romance of a warm summer’s night. It was midnight and they were walking back to his mother’s place from a party where they’d been drinking vodka shots when things turned sour. She was sulking, said something. He said something back. Next thing, they were standing under a pōhutukawa spitting bile at each other. Too trashed to have a decent conversation. Then she just walked off. No wonder they broke up that night.
She takes a bend a bit too fast, adjusting her speed as she cruises into the camber, and wonders if she and Aaron had reached a turning point that she’d been too young to see coming? She can see now that ten years ago when she was wanting to go places, he wasn’t.
Although…her mind drifts back to another night. They were in the dunes, his body pressing her into the cool sand, the Milky Way a blanket above them, the weed making her feel loose and free. That was good, wasn’t it? What would it have been like if she’d stayed with Aaron and never met Paul…? There might have been babies by now.
But she can’t picture Aaron in her current life, in the Avondale apartment making a Thai stir-fry. Rose struggles to even picture him living away from the insular town and the coast.
And he accused me of having a summer romance, she thinks.
THE TURN-OFF, FINALLY.
The car grinds along the gravel, thin bush pressing in on both sides, flickering past, the twiggy kānuka trunks breaking the light into long jagged stripes. Something catches my eye as I drive—a man in a suit standing in a paddock. He raises an arm, hailing me, but I put my foot down. No way I’m falling for that trick. It’ll be the shadow man. Besides, if you start talking to the shadows, they’ll start talking back to you, and we can’t have that. I’ve got appearances to keep up. Otherwise it’ll be a prison cell in residential care, eating boiled cabbage with geriatrics who don’t even recognise their kids when they turn up to visit on Sundays.
Like that Sunset Vista place.
Rose would visit me, though. She’s a good girl, my Rose.
Dust plumes in the rear-view mirror. A glimpse of sea between thinning trees. Nearly there. The slight rise in the road and the satisfying sound of gravel crunching under my wheels. I could move out here, live at Kutarere, the boys wouldn’t mind, Douglas and…Douglas and…Never mind, it’ll come back to me. It’s stress. Not enough sleep what with being at the cop shop half the night. Ironic—I used to have mates in the force, now they’re locking me up.
The last bend and suddenly, on the left, the driveway leaping up sooner than I expected. I have to brake hard, slewing the car to make the turn. This time, I remember the clutch and don’t stall. I’m here. Quickly now, I gain control of the car and ease down the driveway.
There’s a man among the trees beyond the old garage. Another one! He’s got a spade, and he seems to be digging. Real, then. Not a shadow man after all. But what the hell? He’s digging where he shouldn’t be. No. No, that’s not allowed!
I bash the horn and wrench the wheel to stop, jump out and stalk across the buffalo grass towards him. ‘Oi,’ I shout, though he’s already looking at me. ‘What d’you think you’re doing?’
The man frowns, spade dangling impotently.
‘Maxine?’
I’m panting by the time I reach him, breath high in my chest. ‘This is private property—you can’t just dig.’ It’s hard to get the words out, but I do, and there they are, out.
‘Maxine, we talked about this?’
He makes it sound like a question, like he’s asking me, and how should I know? But. It’s seeping back now. A neighbour, maybe—Nile? Bole? The name is lurking somewhere in my head.
‘You need permission,’ I go on, still panting like I’ve been in a running race. ‘You can’t just go about digging willy-nilly.’
The light shafting through the trees is hurting my eyes. I can see his place through the trunks, that ugly white place he rents out on Airbnb. Surely he has enough land without coming onto our property?
I look at the hole he’s been digging, the brown earth rising up at me and stealing my breath. There was…what? I was digging. It was way back when…something to do with Rose, something terrible had happened. No wonder I was worried with this going on.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Maxine,’ he says, wiping his forehead, which I can see now is damp from his efforts, his red face seeping moisture like a sleeve, ‘I’m confused.’
‘Well, that makes two of us!’
He shades his eyes with his hand to look at me. ‘Are you feeling all right, Maxine?’
And just like that, I don’t feel all right. Things feel really not-right.
I look about—from the hole to the trees to the grass to our house standing there so calmly in the light like it always has, dear old Kutarere. The years reel through me like a lightshow, fragments of memories flickering in my head. It was all so long ago. I can barely comprehend where the time has gone.
THE FIRST THING Rose sees as she pulls into the place at Kutarere is her mother’s car parked at an angle across the buffalo grass in front of the house, the door wide open and engine idling. Maxine is nowhere in sight.
‘What now?’ she mutters, picturing her mother passed out in the footwell.
She turns off the engine and pockets the keys. Her mother can’t be left alone, that much is clear. Anything could happen, just look at yesterday. And then she let Maxine drive over here by herself. The doctor is right, she shouldn’t be driving. At least now they’ve got here Rose can take charge of the car. They’ll go back to Auckland first thing tomorrow and Rose will phone Sunset Vista to confirm her mother’s place. She’s been putting it off in the vain hope that Maxine would miraculously ‘get better’.
The sound of the car door, as she shuts it, echoes across the still air. She can just make out the sound of water lapping at the shore down at the little cutting beyond the house—must be high tide. Then she notices the sound of muted voices. Coming from their house? No, thinks Rose, tilting her head in the direction of Noel’s place.
Rose picks her way across the buffalo grass towards the trees that separate the two properties. No fences here on the headland. If only there were other siblings who could shoulder the responsibility. Even her uncles—where the hell were they when Maxine decided to go AWOL?
She steps around a freshly dug hole with a spade sticking upright nearby. Somebody’s doing some planting, by the look of it. There’s a kōwhai in a planter bag. She remembers that Noel was going to plant a tree on the boundary in memory of his dog, a mastiff or some other huge, drooling breed. She’d never liked it, and why Noel felt he had to plant his memorial tree so close to their boundary when he had all the rest of his own property to plant it she didn’t know. Maybe because Leroy had so loved pissing and shitting on their property. It was like he did it deliberately, the way the dog would grin at you just as he finished doing his business, then trot off back to Noel’s place. Job well done.
Christ, she hopes he isn’t going to plant the dog’s ashes in there as well. Rose doesn’t believe in sanctifying a pet’s ashes like you would a person. They aren’t human. It makes her skin crawl how people treat animals like they are small people, the way they call them fur-babies. When she can’t even have a human baby. She can’t help taking it personally. Bad enough caring for other people’s babies at Little Poppets. She tries not to get rostered on to the baby room too much if she can help it. Her heart squinches every time she picks one of them up, cradles a soft head against her shoulder. If she doesn’t manage to get pregnant at all, Rose may have to change jobs. She finds her mother on Noel’s concrete deck overlooking the harbour. White Island smokes faintly in the distance. Maxine’s sitting in a white plastic recliner sipping what looks like a cocktail: pink with pale froth on top, a glacé cherry stuck on the rim.
‘There you are,’ says Rose, slumping into the other recliner. ‘Where’s Noel?’
‘He went to find something.’ Maxine wafts her glass at Rose. ‘Here, try this. I forget what he called it, like a flower. It’s very nice.’
Rose takes the stemmed glass and sips, tasting gin. ‘Pink Lady,’ she murmurs, and hands it back.
‘Lovely,’ agrees Maxine, ‘like the flower, only those are naked.’
‘What’s naked?’
‘The ladies. Probably because they’ve got no leaves.’
Rose doesn’t know what Maxine is talking about. They sit companionably gazing at the view. Maxine sucks on the cherry.
‘He’s got a much nicer view than we’ve got.’
‘We’re more sheltered,’ says Rose. ‘He’ll get the wind.’
‘True.’ Maxine snuffles out a laugh.
‘What?’
‘You’d never guess, he put on these pink shoes. He was wearing gumboots out by the, you know—’ she waves her hand, ‘but when we came in here, he changed into pink shoes with a, whatchamacallit, kitten heel. He’s got taste, I’ll give him that.’
Rose smiles. ‘Give me another sip.’
Maxine passes it over and Rose savours the tart fruity taste on her tongue. If only life’s problems were so easily solved with a mid-morning cocktail.
‘Do you remember that time Douglas got the hook through his lip?’ asks Maxine.
‘Oh my God, that was horrible.’
‘Silly man, you’d think he’d have learnt a thing or two about fishing from Dad.’
‘I remember that crazy drive through to the emergency doctor at Whakatāne, and then there was nobody there,’ says Rose. ‘Taking him to the pub was a stroke of genius.’
Maxine looks pleased. ‘That bloke at the bar who whipped out a pair of pliers and cut the hook off him, now that was genius. Then got a shot of whisky into him.’
Rose snuff les out a laugh. ‘And I got a lemonade. I’d never been in a pub before.’
‘It took several whiskeys for Doug to feel up to the drive home again.’
‘Did he ever get to the doctor after all that?’
‘They patched him up the next day, least I think he did,’ she frowns. ‘Poor old Douglas. It put him off fishing completely.’
Rose gives the cocktail back to her mother, who quietly knocks it back. Across the water is the oyster farm, which makes Rose think of Aaron and whether he’s still working there. It was how they first met, when she got a job in the takeaway shed—he was one of the guys who brought the wire cages of oysters in on the barge. She thinks of all those years Aaron has stayed in the area, possibly working over there. Her imagination can’t see beyond that…He’ll have a child, maybe more than one, her imagination capable of conjuring that up! A worm of jealousy writhes in her stomach. Of course he’ll have a kid. He’ll be fertile, Jasmyn will be fertile, between them they would make a baby as easy as clicking your fingers.
‘Hello—Rose?’ A voice sounds behind her.
She and her mother both turn their heads at the same time and must look like robots. Clowns, more like. It’s Noel, wearing a beige tunic over a pair of loose cotton pants and yes, grey-pink suede shoes—it suits him. Her? Rose tries on them in her mind, but no. She settles on ‘her’, and gets up to take the empty glass from her mother. It’s been a while since she last saw Noel, and now he has transformed himself. It’s a surprise, though Rose thinks it’s nice.
‘Thanks for looking after Mum. I wasn’t too far behind.’ ‘That’s all right, Rose.’ Noel glances at Maxine, who is staring up at her with an unreadable expression. ‘Rose, can I show you something inside?’
Anxiety flutters in her gut. ‘Um, sure.’
She follows Noel through the open glass doors and into the house. It’s really stylish in here, far better than she remembers, with a big glass vase of lilies on a kitchen island and glass-fronted cupboards lining the walls. There’s a bowl of limes on the bench with a large knife lying next to it on a wooden board.
‘I’ve had the kitchen done,’ she says, noticing Rose’s gaze.
‘It’s very nice.’
‘Yes, I’m planning on shifting out here permanently.’
They have moved away from the doors now, to the far end of the open-plan room. On the deck outside, Rose can see Maxine sitting peaceably in the lounger.
‘But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Rose waits, noticing her cheekbones. She hasn’t had much to do with Noel, and wonders if she’s had that surgery done, facial feminisation, because she looks really attractive, and has obviously spent money on more than just the kitchen. She can’t think when she last saw her.
‘It’s about your mother,’ says Noel.
Rose feels her guard go up. ‘What about her?’
‘Well, when she got here, she was acting rather strangely and didn’t seem to know who I was.’
Her heart sinks a little. ‘Mum hasn’t been well.’
Noel waits her out, grey eyes assessing her. Rose wonders how much to tell her, then decides that being their neighbour, it might be helpful if she knows, in case…well, Rose can’t think what kind of ‘in case’ that might be, but Noel sees them coming and going from the property, and might as well know.
‘The doctor thinks it’s mild cognitive impairment, though that sounds like a cover-all kind of diagnosis,’ she admits. ‘I know there’s an early-onset form of Alzheimer’s,’ she frowns, ‘but I mean, Mum’s only fifty-eight, so it’s hard to think it could be that. We don’t really know for sure right now.’
Noel surprises her by squeezing her elbow. ‘I’m so sorry, Rose.’ And are those tears glistening in her eyes? ‘That must be hard, the not-knowing.’
‘Yup.’ Rose feels a bit embarrassed. Shouldn’t she be the one with the tears? ‘I hope it’s not. Mum’s such a, um, character, it would be awful.’ Though stroppy might be a better word. Rose puts it down to all those years as a social worker.
‘I hope not, too,’ says Noel, dropping into a confidential tone. ‘I lost a close friend to dementia not that long ago. And, you know, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but Robin Williams was only sixty-three when he died by suicide and they found out later that he had dementia.’
Noel’s look of avidity makes Rose take a step back. It’s as if her friend and Robin Williams are one and the same person. Rose isn’t very good with other people’s complex emotions, especially when it comes to celebrities.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your friend,’ she says gruffly, suddenly wanting to get away. ‘Anyway, we’d better let you get on.’
But Noel has perked up. ‘No no, don’t feel you need to go. I was just about to make lunch, why don’t you and Maxine stay for something to eat?’ She is already turning towards the kitchen area. ‘I’ve got some beautiful avocados from that lovely Swiss boy down the road, and a loaf of sourdough from the French bakery. Simple but quality, that’s what I always say, don’t you agree?’
