Extract: A House Built On Sand, by Tina Shaw

THE UNDERGROUND CARPARK is huge and terrifying. ‘Everything’s fine,’ I keep muttering, trying not to panic. There are acres of cars and they all look the same. Mine is here somewhere, it won’t have gone far. Early model Corolla hatchback. Rose would tell me to check the licence plates, but what the hell is mine? EWJ...? EMD...? Maybe it’s on my phone. I’ve started using Notes for passwords, shopping, names—normal stuff that has been slipping lately. The other day I bumped into an old friend, the parole officer, on the street and couldn’t remember her name. Em-barrassing. And more worrying than I want to admit. Clever, though, thinking to put the rego number in there. I start scrabbling around in my bag. ‘Miss?’ I swivel towards a voice that seems to have come out of nowhere. ‘Are you all right, miss?’ A young man in a baseball cap. Leaning towards me as if peering into a cave, so I must look like I need help. Miss, huh. Like I’m his teacher. He looks young enough to be my grandson—if Rose ever has kids, and that’s looking unlikely. ‘I’ve lost my car,’ I admit, keeping it casual, stripping out the fear. He kinks a grin. ‘I did that once. Had a massive hang- over, complete blank. Turned out to be another street over.’ The kid’s old enough to buy booze? ‘So how did you find it again?’ He shrugs, loosey-goosey. ‘Walked round, click-click,’ he says, pressing an invisible key remote. ‘Right.’ I squint at my key ring, thick with redundant keys, useless now that I’m no longer at work. ‘My car hasn’t got that kind of technology.’ ‘No worries,’ he says. I tilt my head to one side to get a better look at him— he’s the buoyant kind of kid I’ve come across now and then in foster homes, a kid who’ll end up in a good place simply because of his optimistic nature. ‘Here, what colour’s your car, miss?’ ‘It’s a 2005 Toyota Corolla, hatchback.’ It rolls off my tongue satisfyingly. Years of practice. He takes off then, ambling along the nearest row of parked cars and I just stay put. Breathe, Maxine, don’t freak out. I watch his dark head bob in and out of the cars, rows of them lined up like a bargain basement sale of cars, until finally he stops and points. ‘This one?’ the kid shouts. With a jerk and a lurch—I’m a wonky boat launching from a jetty—I make my way over. It looks like any other car and panic rises up to grab my throat. The kid lifts the bundle of keys from my hand and tries the driver’s door. ‘Bingo!’ He stands back grinning in triumph. I can’t help grinning as well. ‘Genius,’ I tell him. My feet in the clumpy trainers stutter forward, then I remember my manners. ‘Thanks so much,’ I say, brisk to mask my gratitude. ‘Don’t know what I would’ve done without your help.’ Thank God for lovely boys. He looks pleased as he fakes a shrug. ‘No worries, miss.’ Digging into my boomerang bag of groceries, I extract a bunch of wine-dark grapes and shove it at him, raising my free hand in a salute. ‘Um, thanks,’ he says, taking the grapes like he doesn’t know what to do with them. As he trots off to whatever carefree life he is used to I turn my attention to the car. ‘All right, you,’ I tell it, climbing in and shoving the groceries onto the passenger seat, ‘let’s get going before any other crappy thing happens.’ So on to the doctor’s, according to the calendar on the phone that I check umpteen dozen times a day. The list for stuff, the calendar, increasingly thin, for other stuff. Don’t know why Doctor Prod didn’t just call with my test results, but no, she would like me to come in, somebody told me on the phone, and I was welcome to bring a support person. Duh. I’ve been a social worker long enough to know that. And at least I don’t need to worry about getting to work late, thanks to Marisa bloody Hattrick. The weird thing about the list of stuff on my phone is that half of it doesn’t make any sense. But how can that be when I wrote those things myself? Molasses. As I stare at the list in the doctor’s waiting room, the list stares back at me. Hat Trick. That one’s obvious at least, the bitch. But Sunset Vista? It rings a bell, a sickening kind of toll, though I can’t for the life of me think why. Could somebody have got into my phone and written these things down to confuse me? It wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s happened lately. Maybe I left my phone lying around somewhere—like I apparently left a certain file—and some malicious person got into it. Screwing with my head. Right at this minute, for instance, a young woman who looks just like Rose is standing at the counter with her back to me. It can’t be her, she’ll be at school...no, that kindy place where she works... Concentrate, Maxine—the list. ‘Mum?’ I look up and there’s Rose, who’s supposed to be at work. Must have a day off. She’s wearing a sundress and her cheeks are pink, her mouse-brown hair limp on her shoulders. My face opens in a smile. My Rose. She plumps into the chair next to me, looking unhappy. I hope she and that bloke of hers are all right. She hasn’t said anything. There are signs, though. Rose is an open book: she can’t hide something like that from me. ‘Where were you?’ ‘Sorry, what?’ ‘I’ve been trying to phone you—’ She whips away my phone, her thumb flying over the screen, and holds it out to me in triumph: a bunch of missed calls. Must’ve been when I was stuck in that underground carpark. She’s swiping furiously, her face going pointy. ‘Mum, it’s on mute.’ ‘Well, my bad,’ I sniff. Rose pushes the phone back at me. ‘The appointment was an hour ago,’ she accuses. ‘Lucky the doctor can squeeze us in. I don’t even know why I came back. I’ve been all the way over to your place, thinking you’d forgotten.’ Now that she mentions it, Rose does look frazzled— Auckland traffic can do that to a person. ‘Like an ice cream sandwich.’ I nudge with my elbow to locate her sense of humour. ‘What?’ ‘Squeeze us in?’ Rose smiles faintly, and folds her hands on her knee. ‘Well, we’re here now,’ she huffs. ‘Though I’m going to be late back to work.’ A short bespectacled Indian woman emerges from a corridor and fixes her blackbird eye on me. ‘Maxine Christensen.’ We traipse after this woman and into a small room with a window overlooking a garden that’s full of fluffy white things. I’m hoping Rose won’t find the space too claustrophobic, you never know what might set her off. I used to get phone calls from the school dental nurse about Rose freaking out in the chair. ‘How are you, Maxine?’ the woman asks in a friendlier tone. We’re all seated cosily around her desk, knees almost touching. Next she’ll be bringing out the tea and bickies. ‘Never better,’ I say automatically, through a bubble of anxiety. Some things have been happening lately that have been out of my control. People have been acting oddly. The Hat Trick accusing me of the cold shoulder. Objects turning up where they shouldn’t. Just the other night I was visited by a black dog, not the depression dog, but a fey-faced dog that might have been a labrador. It’s been years since I had a dog, labrador or not. Then it turned out to be my black coat on the chair. Tricksy. I was going to tell Rose about the coat-dog but she would only have told Doctor Prod, so I thought it better to keep my mouth shut. Now that we’re in this stuffy little room with the doctor-person I think it was a wise decision. It’s entirely possible she and Rose will gang up and put me in the loony bin. Isn’t that where they put stroppy women who’ve gone past their use-by date? Rose’s bloke certainly would, so he can get his hands on my money. ‘I wanted to see you both,’ says Prod, ‘as the tests we’ve done so far haven’t been all that conclusive, and...’ The woman rambles on in her doctorly way, and I cut my eyes to Rose. Could they be in cahoots? And how much does the doctor-person know about me? I was in this room recently...not for a smear or a shear or any of those other female health checks, but because of all the things that have been going on, and there have been some tests and other visits I don’t want to think about that Rose has very kindly been taking me to. So all right, it’s possible, in fact highly likely, that I might be sick and the doctor has found out something, probably cancer...