Things were heaving, like on a ship, but not shipshape... slip-slip...
A House Built on Sand is an ephemeral story of remembering and forgetting as a daughter and her mother attempt to deal with early onset dementia.
Everyone's in cahoots. Black coats are morphing into black dogs, files are misfiled in a café, and 'objects (are) turning up where they shouldn't'.
Maxine's life is getting out of control. Symptoms and repercussions, including losing her job, lead to a diagnosis of early onset dementia (she's only 58!) and her driver's licence is revoked. This is close to the bone - I'm a librarian getting long in the tooth - and have seen how the loss of being able to drive affected my own mum's independence.
Something's at the back of my mind, lurking like a bad smell; it jitters and crawls inside me like cockroaches. ...The past comes running at me like a sand-jumper at the Olympics, all insect legs and wheeling arms, catching me unawares.
The character of Maxine, an ex-social worker, is funny - she casts around for an escape hatch out of her situation, as memories ebb and flow like the tides at their bach at Kutatere, in the Ōhiwa Harbour. Secrets begin to wash up on the traitorous and untrustworthy sands of Maxine's memory and she heads for the sanctuary of the family bach, convinced she has something she must do before it's too late.
Rose loves Kutatere, though she has also become aware of other, more complicated feelings in being here. Like a glimpse of something moving below the surface of a pond, just there, within reach, though when she tries to reach for it, whatever it is slips away.
Not only are Maxine's memories becoming unreliable, cleverly, Shaw ascribes the problem to her daughter, Rose, too, implying two things: memory can be murky for everyone, and something may not be quite right with Rose's memories either.
Maxine's eyes, starkly blue, land on Rose, who gets a shiver of presentiment, a shift in reality as she knows it, and it's as if time is creaking and opening up around the pair of them.
Rose suffers from panic attacks and extreme claustrophobia. The root cause is elusive but she's having therapy to find it.
"It's entirely possible she ('Dr Prod') and Rose will put me in the loony bin. Isn't that where they put stroppy women who've gone past their use-by date? ...I was in this room recently...not for a smear or a shear or any of those other female health checks.
A House Built on Sand is full of delicious and salty sentences, from constructions such as the 'horn-blaring hell of the motorway' to a honking driver who's 'a red-faced man mouthing silently, like a landed carp'.
The language of Tina Shaw's text mirrors Maxine's state of mind. It's woven through scenes at Kutatere, where 'The road wafts around the...harbour, teasing with its inner recesses and sneaky views, glimpses of water and land...' We're told the name Kutatere means 'place of the sedge wafting in the tidal flow'.
Who is the Shadow Man? Is he a figment of Maxine's imaginings? What does he have to do with a missing girl named Jade?
This lyrical and poignant story builds a sense of unease with a gradual reveal, clever imagery and beautiful wordplay.
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.
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