‘At work,’ he said, as if this was blinking obvious.

  ‘Were you stuck in the building?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How was it getting home? Was it wonderful?’

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘No.’ In the doorway he turned. ‘Monday, seven o’clock.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But aren’t your offices blacked out?’ Donovan Brothers were in High Street, right in the CBD.

  ‘We’ve moved to Mount Albert,’ he said, ‘temporarily. Monday it is.’

  He stuck to the point, you had to give him that.

  There was something I wanted to ask him, and I thought I would, standing there in the doorway. ‘Tell me, is part of the thrill of all this that you might, you know, end up with the person? With the lover?’

  He seemed about to speak but didn’t.

  I went on: ‘That there might be no going back, even if you hadn’t set out that way, you’d—’

  ‘No, I know what you mean.’

  ‘Even if it hadn’t been that way in the beginning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes? You mean, it is part of it?’

  ‘Yes. I said yes.’

  For the first time I looked at him fully. It was an unfamiliar feeling, as if I’d shone a light on him. I didn’t even know I had a light.

  16

  He must have passed my husband in the street because moments later Art slalomed in the door with a polystyrene tower of takeaways. Like the Cat in the Hat he swooped them to the table in the front room. The feminist theorist and her boyfriend were close on his heels. Art made intros in the darkness of the passage. Glenda, Grant. We all laughed because no one could see anything—just a flutter of Art pumping Grant’s arm up and down as if milking a cow, which was a habit of his. And a voice from the direction of Glenda. ‘Wife? That’s right, Aunty Prue told me. How wonderfully committed of you.’

  ‘GoGo performs miracles on clothes,’ said Art. ‘She learned this amazing technique when we were in New York, didn’t you, darling?’ I could see his lovely teeth, and I smiled too.

  ‘What a day at LambChop, eh?’ said Glenda. ‘That place! But listen, I’ve got news. For later.’

  There was a Shakespearean sigh I didn’t recognise. Grant. (More Shakespeare.)

  ‘Mysterious!’ said Art. ‘What?’

  ‘Just wait!’ said Glenda, like a slap on the wrist. ‘Wait till we’re sitting down.’

  ‘Why? Will we fall down if you tell us now?’

  ‘You just might.’ Glenda giggled.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Art, ‘let’s not talk all night in the passage. Follow me! Mind your step.’ He was like a scout leader, minus the sexual abuse, tromping us into the front room and lighting the hurricane lamp. Everyone appeared. Grant’s long black coat, which in the dark of the passage had seemed New Romance, was revealed to be a boxy Wall Street affair, although it was February. He had a staid, clean-cut face to match, with a five o’clock shadow at this hour of the evening. He held up the booty that had been tucked under his arm. ‘Champagne,’ he said with overblown reverence, and handed the bottle to Art. Glenda was dark-haired and petite, gamine. She dangled a plastic bag of something like a stork bringing a baby. ‘This is quite fun, isn’t it, roughing it?’ she said. ‘Honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion we’d all be better off without electricity.’

  ‘Great,’ said Grant. ‘The takeaway bar might need a spot of power, though, to make the, you know, fast food.’

  ‘Sit, sit,’ said Art.

  ‘We’re not dogs, Art,’ said Glenda. ‘Next you’ll be telling us to roll over. For God’s sake.’ She slid onto one of the splintery bentwood chairs which wobbled bandily. ‘Oh my Gahd!’

  It was apparent that Glenda would like to wrestle Art to the ground and fuck him. I didn’t mind, because I knew he wouldn’t. If you stop people having friends, that’s when they’ll go off and have an affair.

  I sleepwalked to the kitchen and returned with champagne flutes on a tray, the torch tucked under my arm. I edged into the room, smiling at the complexity of my manoeuvre. ‘Help, I’m going to drop it!’ The cork popped in Art’s hands. He handed the bottle to Glenda and jumped up to take the tray. We were all laughing. Perhaps Glenda was right, it was fun having no electricity. It brought people together. Glenda poured the bath-like froth into glasses and said, ‘Well, my news.’

  Art’s face floated near the lamp. ‘You’re not . . . ?’ He gestured in Grant’s direction, a nod oversized enough to be visible in the gloom.

  ‘No!’ said Grant. ‘Good God, no! Never.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Glenda. ‘We’ve got the message. My news is, I’ve had another manuscript accepted.’

  ‘Oh, well done, Glenda!’ said Art. ‘Congratulations!’

  I joined in, finding the strange seam of elation I had for someone I’d met ten minutes before. ‘Congratulations! That is good news.’

  Grant receded into the darkness. No doubt he’d already congratulated Glenda.

  But Glenda hadn’t finished. She squeaked the next instalment. ‘In England. It’s being published in England! Not just New Zealand.’

  ‘In England!’ said Art. ‘That’s fantastic. That is such amazing news! Isn’t it, GoGo?’

  ‘England! Yes it is.’

  ‘Home,’ said Grant, re-emerging from the shadows.

  Glenda stopped with her champagne halfway to her lips. ‘Grant, for fuck’s sake, stop saying that.’

  ‘It is global, though,’ said Art doubtfully. ‘England still means global.’

  ‘The planet Earth,’ said Grant. ‘No matter how big our publishing aspirations, we’re still limited to the planet Earth.’

  No one listened to Grant. There was a feeling he was banned.

  I asked Glenda, ‘Is it fiction? Poetry?’

  Glenda turned her face towards me, but her eyes were on Art, with a puzzled expression in them. ‘Hasn’t she heard of me?’

  ‘Ah, Glenda, Glenda, Glenda,’ sighed Grant.

  ‘Grant, shut the fuck up.’ This Scorsese-esque phrase sounded odd coming from her mouth. Glenda now looked at me. ‘What exactly is it that you do?’

  I told her about my alterations and mending business.

  Glenda put her head back and said, ‘Aah,’ as if everything had fallen into place. ‘From what Art said—I obviously got the wrong end of the stick. Poetry. I write poetry.’

  ‘Well, that’s just wonderful news,’ said Art. ‘Let’s drink to it.’

  ‘Yes, to conquering England,’ said Grant. ‘The Romans couldn’t do it. The Germans almost did, and would’ve if it hadn’t been for the Americans. This is the first direct occupation since 1066.’

  Glenda clobbered Grant on the arm, hard. He said, ‘Ow,’ and looked at her deeply.

  ‘To Glenda,’ said Art loudly.

  I think he liked her too, which was fine, because she was clearly out of the question. We all drank. The Chinese takeaways were opened up. While we ate Glenda told the story of the coincidences that had led to her sending her manuscript to the publisher and after that, well, the rest was history. She talked exclusively to Art, which some wives-or-girlfriends might not like, but I knew there was nothing in it, and I hate petty jealousies. I’m not that kind of person. I struck up a conversation with Grant like polyphony. He was a lawyer. We established that Grant’s firm was working out of a makeshift office in Manukau, and that I was one of the eight thousand five hundred businesses affected by the Blackout. (I wasn’t sure if I counted. Maybe it was eight thousand four hundred and ninety-nine.) Grant had a pinballish delivery to his speech, jumpy and circuitous, that made you not quite sure if he was joking or not. You could imagine this unsettling quality having sway in court. He and I did our best to talk while listening with half an ear to the low, slightly intimate-sounding conversation (when I thought about it) that was going on at the opposite corner of the table. I heard the phrase Settler Literary Ephemera. Grant was listing recent changes to the Education Act, ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’, which had been a complete disaster. He had more than one client suing the Education Department for damages—trauma. He was a whiz, Grant, you could tell. Tomorrow’s Schools was all part of the gigantic divesting of responsibility which had begun with selling off the state assets. I heard myself murmuring, I know, I know, and had the sensation of going in and out of consciousness. There was something about a teacher throwing herself off the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Grant poured himself another glass of wine from the gathering thicket of bottles on the table and said, deadpan, that he and Glenda had met a long, long time ago, when they were kids, virtually. Before she had—he groped for the word—crystallised.

  Across the table, Glenda was on a roll, excited, incandescent, a good thing in a Blackout. But Grant was swallowing his wine and telling me how he had done better than Glenda at university, getting A-pluses for tort law (quoting grades was the teensiest bit pathetic, I thought), while she did a mediocre job at subjects you couldn’t really put your finger on, that is, other people’s texts—yet now that was all they talked about. It made him sick. While he, of the A-pluses for tort law, wore a suit Monday to Thursday to his stuffy law firm downtown at which he sometimes represented stepfathers in abuse cases, although not so stuffy as they wouldn’t have casual Fridays, when you saw Aloha shirts perched around the office like exotic birds. Eradicated by Monday.

  Grant fell silent and we both listened to Glenda telling Art about the English publisher, an astonishing man who circumvented the gatekeeping that kept cutting-edge writing out of bookshops—he printed copies on demand.

  ‘It works the way tits do,’ said Grant, and knocked back a slosh of wine.

  This time, everyone looked at him from the dark periphery.

  ‘I mean, you know, breasts, to be more biological, and politically correct. The baby sucks and it excites the glands into producing more for next time. That’s the general idea.’

  ‘Grant,’ said Glenda, ‘are you hoping for sucky-dicky tonight? Because if so, you’re heading in the wrong direction.’

  There was a silence. Then Glenda told Art she might have a spare copy for him and Grant said he was sure she would. I looked at Art and thought I could detect a blush in the candlelight. I had thought being squattocracy absolved you from blushing.

  Grant was leaning right back in his chair, which groaned. His voice was disembodied. ‘Tell them what it’s about, Glenda.’

  Glenda looked at Art and gave a light laugh. ‘It’s not about anything. It’s poetry.’

  We all ate some more chow mein. Art said it was jolly good, and I agreed. Thank god, said Art, for ta-kay ah-ways in an outage. I thought I saw his eyes roll in the lamplight.

  Everyone had a general rave about the Blackout. Only a matter of time before something happened. The inevitable culmination of years of privatising. A late-twentieth-century long jump at complete capitalism. Grant asked what we should expect, when we ritually divested ourselves of the postal service, the medical system, the railways. Everyone joined in like a chorus in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The roading, the airline, public housing, public television, the provision of electricity.

  ‘And the administration of schools,’ said Grant sagely.

  ‘Grant, don’t rabbit on,’ said Glenda. ‘He rabbits on,’ she told Art, and me sort of. ‘I live with this all the time. It drives me absolutely nuts. Will he stop? No.’

  Grant rabbited on. These services, which the country had built up over a hundred and twenty years, were now owned by profit-driven consortiums like Pinnacle Power. Who, did we know, had quadrupled their profit and halved their staff over four years, and raised managers’ salaries by thirty percent.

  Art moved to the narratological present. ‘And while the consortium grows fat, the cables, two of them over forty years old, grow thin. They become so waif-like they let their waif hands come unclasped.’ One of Art’s hands let go of the other, like the Sistine Chapel in reverse.

  ‘That’s very poetic, Art,’ said Glenda, and Art leaned back.

  There was a pause. We’d exhausted the subject.

  ‘Well,’ said Glenda, ‘in some ways it is about something.’

  ‘Pardon?’ asked Art politely.

  ‘My book,’ said Glenda.

  ‘Your book!’ said Art.

  ‘Although I’m still not sure if you could always apply about to this kind of textualising, but okay, it might be an interesting framework to look at it in. Within which to look at it. It’s about embrained notions of transference, you know, in which language is a character, fleshed, that walks about freely in the text.’

  Grant said, ‘Freely?’ He put down his chopsticks to think.

  ‘It sounds great,’ said Art.

  ‘Who walks about in the text,’ said Grant. He had his eyes screwed up in exaggerated thought. ‘Who walks about in the text.’

  ‘I just told you,’ said Glenda. ‘Language. The character.’

  ‘No, the character who walks about freely in the text, not that walks about freely in the text.’

  Glenda looked at Grant with her head on one side, pouting. ‘Is language a person?’

  ‘Well, you just told us it was. Didn’t she?’ He appealed to me, for some reason. His sparring buddy.

  I raised my shoulders. ‘Um.’

  ‘Honey,’ said Glenda—she called her boyfriend honey like a rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and smiled an American smile revealing all her teeth, the lower as well as the upper set—‘honey, save your pedantry for the Family Court. Okay?’

  ‘O-kay. I certainly will. I certainly will do that. And. You can spend the result flying to writing conferences that won’t pay your fare to get there.’

  Glenda hit Grant again on the arm and he smiled.

  Art splashed more wine. ‘Glenda? Grant? Here, man.’ He and I exchanged a smile as I got up from the table with plates and a torch. We’d cackle in bed about it afterwards. It might turn into a discussion about whether they were happy or not. Art was interested in people’s happiness. I thought it was hard to tell.

  ‘You know what this reminds me of, Art?’ said Glenda. ‘Camping at the Woolthamly farm. They were wonderful days, weren’t they?’

  ‘Free as a fucking bird,’ said Art.

  •

  With the torch tucked under my arm I ferried the plates to the kitchen. I planned to make coffee, but stood looking at the 747, suddenly exhausted. The outage had made everything trouble. The days had once run like clockwork, but now, the planning involved in lighting small fires, using ballpoint pens, peering and groping—at that moment it was more than I could stand.

  I wavered with the torch back along the passage. A bubble of laughter swelled in the front room. I hesitated a moment, then turned. I was on the periphery of darkness. I put out my hand and brailled over the flocked wallpaper. I was retracing my steps, a moving cave. I came to my workroom and became one with my shadow. On the other side of the big table, light from the street shone obliquely in through the windows. I lay the torch on the table, a clunk. It rolled back and forth once either way like a beached fish with a waggling fin of light. I stood there for a moment, in need of something—air, darkness, the duration of a cigarette. I don’t even smoke.

  Change of subject but not entirely: the issue of tearing. I’d had the odd client who’d brought me a garment deliberately cut. Chopped. Usually I couldn’t mend them, they were irreparable. It seems that people do a lot worse damage when they set their minds to it than they do by accident. There was a callow youth once, twentyish, still pimply, with a jersey, knitted by his mother, unravelling like Harry the Dirty Dog’s coat. (I suppose this is Case 6.) Of course I told him straight away I couldn’t repair knitting, but I gave it the once-over anyway, to soothe him. He was so anxious he had a smile plastered over three-quarters of his face. At first he told me he’d snagged the sleeve on a fishing knife. The wool was a nice shade of brown like tea with a drop of milk in it. While I was looking at it he told me how his girlfriend had cut the sleeve in a fit of rage. She’d just missed his wrist, which she was aiming for. I stayed blank. They wanted me to be blank. He worked it out for himself, then and there. He said he’d let the sleeve unravel.

  I’d seen two shirts mutilated by wives (Cases 7 and 8). How you could bring yourself to cut up a perfectly good shirt, I don’t know. The wives brought them in. The husbands probably didn’t give a damn. The whole scenario—the effort that went into the shirt, then its quick demise—might make you think about the nature of construction in the first place, that the stitches were somehow invested with the very ingredient that would bring them down. Take a tablecloth, for instance. Made to catch the drops. Embroidered over hours, days, weeks. Stained in an instant.

  Murmuring and a high giggle came from the front room. I felt my way along the edge of my worktable, familiar like a body. The rack of clothes caught the beam of the torch. So many shoulders illuminated. I saw a flash of my dim self in the mirror in my World satin trousers. An old Mary Hopkin song Mary-France used to play came into my head—‘Those Were the Days’. I came to a chair against the wall and bent down to it. My fingertips arrived on the paper parcel at infinitesimally different times, picked a tune out of its crispness. I snatched it up, quickly. Then tore it open in the prism of light on the table. The costume lay in the wrapping, soft and floppy, dark, bloodlike or black, like innards. I touched it. It was cooler than you’d expect, so cool it seemed damp. But no, just cool. I lifted the costume and held it to my mouth. Put it down again, picked it up. I held it away from me, by both its shoulders, as if I were giving it a talking-to, and I pulled. Nothing. It was tough, tough for an old garment. And my mending job was tight, the threads woven in securely, the ends tied. I should’ve been pleased with myself. I was. I tried again, grasping it and dragging at the seams. Not a sausage. It was certainly more solid than you’d think, this costume. I bunched a shoulder in each fist, and wrestled with it like a demon for a solid minute. Nothing. I gave up. I looked at my hands in the torchlight. They were reddened. Suddenly I picked up the costume again and gave it an almighty wrench. It gave way with a farting sound. As it did, I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard another sound, a strangled cry like a seagull, ring out into the room. When I looked at the costume, at what I’d done, it was a bit more than I’d intended. The tear, once it had started, had run along the seam it had traversed once before, and the silver threads splayed out like a sea anemone. I looked down at it, my handiwork. How violently the warp and weft had parted company.