The last days of the nat.., p.1
The Last Days of the National Costume,
p.1
The Last Days of the
National Costume
ANNE KENNEDY
Published by Allen & Unwin in 2013
Copyright © Anne Kennedy 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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ISBN 978 1 74331 386 2
eISBN 978 1 74343 155 9
Set in 11.3/16.4 pt Sabon LT Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
For Kathy Phillips
CONTENTS
Rip burn snag
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Good afternoon light
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Knotwork
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Skin
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One is about to leave; the other is staying,
and suddenly it matters that there are trees
they know, fields they have farmed.
They are only
poets dressed up as farmers, or you and I
got up as poets in farmer suits. But departures
are real enough and loss is nothing new.
from ‘Tityrus,’ Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil,
translated by David R. Slavitt
When you come to visit,
said a teacher
from the suburban school,
don’t forget to wear
your native costume.
But I’m a lawyer,
I said.
My native costume
is a pinstriped suit.
from ‘My Native Costume’ by Martín Espada
Rip burn snag
1
When I’d been in this racket for a year, a year of clients coming and going with their garments bundled like babies in their arms, at which point the novelty had slightly worn off, I hid a man in my workroom. He wasn’t there long, five minutes at the most. We barely talked, just to-the-point as you do with strangers sometimes. No traffic reports, no outlook for Saturday, no pleasantries. He told me about his lover. I suppose that’s a pleasantry. Then he went home.
I had a husband, but that wasn’t the reason I hid the man.
If I’d said no to the costume I would’ve saved myself a truckload of trouble. It was a difficult job, a right mess actually, and I nearly did my eyes in, if that’s possible—I think they think eye strain’s a myth now. But the fabric was so black it absorbed all the light. There wasn’t a lot of light to go around (I’ll get on to that soon). If I were ever in that situation again, not that it’s likely, not now, but if I ever were, with a garment in such a shocking state on my worktable, the proverbial dog’s breakfast, I’d say I couldn’t mend it. If I ever again had a succession of clients, one after the other, snorting down my neck like that, I’d just say, Go away, go jump in the lake. No I wouldn’t, I’m too polite. I’d say, Let things unravel—yes, unravel—without involving yours truly. I was involved from day one, just by saying yes to the dress.
The day it arrived was the very day the power went on the blink in Auckland: 20 February 1998. It was a Friday, late afternoon, and my workroom was getting dark anyway. It was the contrast—the blinding yellow sunlight, the deep secret fold of the hill. Our house was in a gully on the city fringe, in one of those messy post-hippy suburbs. I’d always liked the feeling of living close to a pulse—cafés, boutiques, used-vinyl shops. All the useful things. You couldn’t buy a loaf of bread to save yourself. But now it had all gone dead. That Friday was just the beginning, only we didn’t know it then.
Notice I’ve migrated to the royal We. I hope that this is going to be a story about We. Bigger than just me, GoGo Sligo. I hope it’s going to be about history, large-scale cultural movements, diasporas, about humanity, because, really, that’s what I’m interested in, despite everything that might come bumping along between now and the end of this book. I’m interested in the transforming power of literature. I am! But I suspect I might stray down a few self-centred alleyways occasionally. All roads lead to GoGo sort of thing. Stop me if I do. (You can’t, of course, but I’ll pretend you can, otherwise I may as well shut up shop. The literature shop, that is, not to sound too poncy; the mending shop is already shut, and that’s what I’m going to tell you about.)
•
First, how the costume came to me: that Friday, high summer, the sun still only three-quarters of the way across the sky at half past five. Later, I thought about those long evenings, how it seemed as if the light had squeezed itself between the minutes on a clock, making them fat and pale. When I opened the door a rogue gust plonked me back in my Wellington childhood, when the wind always blew. The wind for me is like one of those famous cakes dipped in tea. Good old Proust. What would we think otherwise?
There was a girl on the doorstep—woman: punk-looking, kohl-eyed, hair dyed as black as shoe polish, almost blue. Funny how punk never dies. She was peaky and shaky, a slight lack of physical control as if surfing. Too many trips, I thought (sagely). But beautiful. She was beautiful. Under her arm she had a plastic bag. She asked me if I did invisible mending. They always ask that. She had an accent—Irish, I thought, or Canadian—and also a rasp like Marianne Faithfull. I gave her the speech I usually trot out: one, I could do almost-invisible mending; two, making it completely invisible would cost more than the garment was worth; and three, almost is usually enough. She said fine and clomped inside in her tartan Docs. A whomp of air blew a poster of a Colin McCahon painting off the wall (The Blessed Virgin compared to a jug of pure water and the infant Jesus to a lamp, in case you want to know).
She followed me down the passage, which was gloomy even though it was still sunny outside. It’s these train-like villa conversions. The light that should have come from the other side of the house now belonged to the neighbours. I groped for the switch (troubling Pinnacle Power for a light), and the paper moon from Wah Lee’s glowed. The punk woman was trembling like a goat. She asked me dully when it would be ready. I told her I’d have to—strange as it may seem—look at it first. Her pushiness was no surprise. The women were more trouble than the men, for two reasons: one, they were assertive; and two, they could actually see the garments (even this head case), whereas when it came to clothes most of the men were blind. I’m sorry to be genderist, but it’s true. The punk woman went ahead of me into the workroom. She had that stalk of self-consciousness beautiful women often have. It’s much easier to look ordinary, to have nothing to bother holding up. Take me, for instance. I’m medium all round, and I can just get on with it. Sorry to be lookist, but there you have it.
If the villa conversion was a train, my workroom was the middle carriage, plus it was cheek-by-jowl with the house next door and so—shadowy. I had the light on all day. The punk woman and I parted ways around the big table that filled up most of the room. We met up near the window. On closer inspection I saw she was thirtyish. She’d seemed younger because of her clothes. If she stuck to it (as people who dress in a certain style often do), she’d wake up one day and punk would have gone from making her look young to making her look old overnight, as if she’d had a terrible shock like the death of a loved one. I sort of admired it, sticking to your principles, not being swayed by fashion like a reed in the wind. I’d like to be like that, a style oak tree, but I’ve never known quite what to put on in the first place. Even though I like clothes—and I don’t tell just anyone this—I never entirely trust how I look. There are too many possibilities. I quite liked this woman’s black skirt and ripped tights, for instance, her military jacket. But I liked my Nom*D cardigan with its enormous safety pin. I like bohemian skirts and loose blouses, I like chic. I’d like to look like the women on Wall Street in their clipped suits, but you have to have the job to go with it. I never will. How simple it would be to have a tribe.
The punk woman smiled pertly, like an animé character. ‘I’m in a bit
My first reaction was, Christ, not knotwork. My next: Irish—the accent. This was a dancing dress, à la Riverdance. You’ll be able to picture it. Short, flared from the waist, heavily embroidered with hose-like loops (the knotwork), and a cape swinging from the shoulders. I’d mended two of them previously, and they’d been hell. It was the strain the embroidery put on the fabric—the dresses could almost stand up on their own—that and the cut, the tightness under the arms. When a seam went, it shredded like spaghetti squash. In both cases, the girl had outgrown the dress. But they were expensive—you wouldn’t get change from a thousand dollars—so the mothers wanted their daughters to get the wear out of them. A too-small dress, combined with prancing about, you were bound to end up at the mender. I read once that the Irish used to use their arms in dancing like the Scots, but one time an Irish dancer who was entertaining an English nobleman whipped a sword out from under his costume and lopped the Englishman’s head off. He probably had good reason, but after that, the English banned the use of the arms in Irish dancing. I don’t know why the Irish haven’t reclaimed their arms. But I also wondered if the girls, the wearers of these dresses I’d mended, had flung their arms into the air with relief once Riverdance practice was over.
The girls’ dresses had been brilliantly coloured—peacock blue, emerald green. The capes were fastened at the shoulder with shiny Tara brooches. The cartoonish knotwork was a riot. One of the mothers told me, starry-eyed (they were born-again Irish), that the loops were a symbol of the continuity of life, which probably didn’t include emigrating to New Zealand after the famine. But this costume—the punk woman’s—was different. It was black, or near black. Old, you could tell by the matted woollen weave, which had a grey bloom on it the way a black-haired person goes salt-and-peppery. The knotwork seemed at first glance to be silver, but when you looked closely you also saw gold and pale green. It wasn’t shiny, it was dull, subdued, almost mournful. In the way of these dresses, the fabric was a vehicle for the embroidery, as if it only existed so there would be something to attach the thread to. It had been done by an amateur, you could tell, because the embroidery went right up to the seam.
I was accused of having a national costume once.
I don’t, of course.
An odd story I won’t trouble you with. Not yet anyway.
I fanned out the bell-shaped skirt. The design was concerned only with the arms and the torso. It had no interest in legs. Or the legs were everything, it depended which way you looked at it. A cape hung down the back like dark moth wings. But there was something odd about this dress. The knotwork covered the bodice as per usual, and ran around the edge of the cape, the hem and the cuffs. One sleeve was embroidered with a climbing thing like a creeper, which spread out with a flourish onto the shoulder, but the other sleeve was only three-quarters done, with the lower part and the cuff left blank. On the costumes I’d seen before, everything was symmetrical. Perhaps someone had run out of steam. Or thread. Perhaps they had died.
I’d seen straight away, of course, the great rent in the shoulder, where it parted company almost entirely with the sleeve, and I suppose I should have mentioned that first. Because the knotwork went all the way to the seam, I wouldn’t be able to mend it without a heck of a lot of trouble.
‘It’s my grandmother’s,’ said the punk woman.
Pack of lies, of course. I shone the bright lamp on it. The punk woman peered over my shoulder, blocking the light. People like to feel involved. I undid the zip and peeled the dress outward. It was a system of tongues, a black orchid. From the inside you could definitely tell it was homemade—unfinished seams, uneven stitches. Where the sleeve had come away was the weakest part of the garment. The threads running sideways—the weft—were finer, and at this junction two areas of weft met as in plate tectonics. The rent had travelled like a shockwave into the sleeve, dislodging the old strands. The dancing girls’ dresses had been torn only where they were plainest, but this rip had set the silver threads of the knotwork dangling like glow-worms.
‘I wore it to dancing.’ The punk woman was breathing close, and an odd, medicinal smell came off her. ‘It caught on a nail as I was going through a doorway.’ Her speech was unkempt, something about her tongue, but she was trying to keep it tidy. She gestured towards her shoulder, the site of the tear, and smiled. She had big yellowish teeth, like the inside of an orange, but strangely nice-looking. ‘The whole thing just. Tore.’
There was no nail hole. I scrubbed the fabric between finger and thumb, like rubbing the fragrance from a leaf. I asked her how old it was.
‘Old,’ she said. ‘Yeah, old.’
I thought it might be fifty years.
‘At least.’ She flicked her hair like paintbrushes. ‘When can you fix it by?’
I held the dress aloft (yes, aloft), and it tumbled down like a theatre curtain. ‘One of the problems,’ I said, ‘and this is just one of them, is matching the threads.’ I explained how it would require a lot of thread, but that the dyes are different these days, and the textures.
‘Oh,’ she said, pouting a bit. ‘So, no chance of it being invisible?’
I laughed lightly (yes, lightly). ‘No chance.’
In a minute she’d beg me to do anything I could to save the garment. That’s what they always did. Begged and pleaded. There was usually a lover involved, and a cheated-on spouse. I, as the mender, would be saving their life.
I said to her, ‘It’s so far gone even reattaching the sleeve would be a struggle.’
The punk woman considered. She tucked her lips into her teeth like tucking in a blanket. She reached for the garment. Her nails were black.
At that moment the lamp and the overhead light snapped out with no preamble. We were plunged into, well, the greyness of late afternoon. We both made involuntary not again noises. Because there’d already been a couple of power cuts. The transformers had been popping like party balloons. I tried the switch on the standard lamp in the corner. Zilch.
‘Strange,’ said the punk woman. She had this awful gleam. ‘It’s meant to be.’
‘Meant to . . . ?’ I might have started on a little rant about Pinnacle Power.
‘No, I mean the dress,’ she said. ‘Dead, obviously. I tried to tell him.’ She bundled it up, looking bemused. ‘Well, I did my best.’
I must admit I was gobsmacked. She was taking it back! No one ever did that. People pleaded and whined, they begged me to save their garment. She didn’t give a rat’s arse. My heart was galloping in the Melbourne Cup—a ridiculous reaction, I know. I can’t quite explain it. I needed the money, but there was something else. I put my hand on the poor, limp, knotworked sleeve just in time to stop her stuffing it back in the plastic bag. I said I would look at it again, that I may have been too hasty. She shrugged—which sort of annoyed me too—and I led her clomping to the front room where the sun was streaming in, and I had another squiz. The seams, the fuzz, the spaghetti—it certainly was a wreck.
I said I’d give it a shot. The sun warmed it a bit.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She had her hands out ready to take it.
I said, No, really, that I could do it. She went neutral and said fine then, and put her hands in her pockets. I said I’d do my best.
