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  In the front room they all went silent and spun their heads around when I came in. Grant looked amused, Glenda pitying. Art half got up from his chair.

  ‘Alright, darling?’ He’d had a few, and was all soppy. He toppled back down again.

  ‘Fine.’ I slid into my seat.

  ‘Where were we?’ asked Glenda.

  ‘Bets,’ said Art. He turned to me. ‘We’re going to bet on how long we can stick it out in our houses. And when the fuck, when the fuck they’re going to fix the cables.’

  ‘A hundred dollars it’s out till the end of March,’ said Grant.

  ‘Two hundred on April,’ thundered Art. ‘They’ve given up on fixing the forty-year-old cables. They’re getting a stopgap cable, which will take two months.’

  I sat back. ‘Do you have two hundred dollars?’

  Art looked hurt. ‘I might have.’

  ‘I prefer this,’ said Glenda softly, but blinking vividly. ‘I like the dark.’

  ‘Do you?’ asked Art, suddenly quiet too.

  ‘Yes.’

  I looked at my hands, which were trembling slightly. I remembered what I’d come back to ask. ‘Coffee anyone?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Glenda.

  Art noticed my hands and put his on top.

  I smiled, aware of my teeth.

  Grant said, ‘Don’t have coffee, Glenda.’ He turned to Art and me. ‘It keeps her awake till four in the morning.’

  ‘It does,’ said Glenda. ‘But I write, so all is well. I mean, it’s not as if it’s wasted.’

  ‘No coffee for me, thanks, either,’ said Grant. ‘We’d better be going.’

  ‘You don’t need to go,’ said Art.

  ‘No, we should,’ said Grant, getting up.

  The rest of us followed. Glenda said she’d put a copy of her first book in the mail for Art. She wouldn’t be seeing him during the shoot.

  ‘Is there mail?’ someone said. During the Blackout. No one knew.

  ‘That’d be great,’ said Art.

  ‘Lucky for you.’ Grant was shuffling into his coat. ‘She’s only got three hundred and ninety-five copies left.’ On the way out the door he turned and said, ‘We’re hoping the books will outlast the Blackout because, you know, poetry makes good fuel. Embrained poetry that is. The other sort’s probably not so efficient. Embrained is definitely best. It’s all the methane.’

  When they got to the bottom of the steps, Art called out, ‘Goodnight! Take care!’

  But Glenda had already wrenched Grant towards her, and they were kissing violently. I looked at Art. He was transfixed. The kiss went on and on, their bodies writhing, until Grant yelped in pain and pushed Glenda away roughly. She staggered slightly and said something, a curse, and he laughed. He took out a torch, shone it down into the gully, and they linked arms and walked off.

  We tidied up in the kitchen in the leaping shadows. I said the evening had been a rousing success, and waited for Art’s funny rejoinder—Glenda and Grant, their bickering, Jesus. There wasn’t one. Art was slightly glum, for him, as he put out the rubbish. I suppose they didn’t need electricity to collect the rubbish. I looked out the back door after him at the snippet of city. Tonight there was the first moonlight since the electricity went off. It picked out just enough jaggedness to make the city look like a beautiful ruin.

  17

  On Monday the client was in the doorway to the workroom like the first day, the day Milly came. He stood watching me. Art and I had spent the weekend making trips to Mount Eden to eat takeaways (none of which conformed to the ten superfoods), washing clothes by hand and lugging them out to hang in the back garden (me) (thankfully it was windy and fine), squeezing the last drop of power out of a laptop in order to tweak Settler Literary Ephemera, which was apparently coming apart at the seams (Art), and reading about Ponsonby artists in the Saturday paper by candlelight and joking about setting the villa conversion on fire. On Sunday afternoon I’d noticed that the neighbours in the other half of the villa conversion were moving out. I called Art and we peered at them through the front window—a couple in black with stylish chairs. We’d never laid eyes on them before. On Monday morning there’d been a sense that everything would return to normal, but it didn’t.

  With the client watching me, I lifted the costume down from the rack like a puppet, and brought it out of the cave of the room.

  ‘It has pins.’

  He backed out into the passage to let me through. I signalled he should go ahead of me, but in the end I went first, my head high and self-conscious. He followed at a short distance but somehow I could feel him against me like an overcoat. In the front room I spread the costume out on the table. It fell into a rugged landscape—black crags and the shadowy folds of hills. In places the light caught the bloom on the wool as if it were obsidian. I saw him looking fiercely at it, as if seeing it for the first time. I shook it out again quickly and it was strangely soft, mashable. As if my hands did the work of millions of years of erosion, but quickly.

  He stared up at me. ‘You haven’t even started it!’

  He really was like Mr Rochester, and what I’d discovered was, I quite liked Mr Rochester, even though not many women would. Only Jane Eyre, and, well, Charlotte Brontë I suppose, but she had led a very sheltered life. Oh, and Blanche Ingram, aka Trisha the Punk. I decided I’d quite like to go for a walk on the moors in a hooded cape, thinking about this revelation, but hopefully not catching a chill. I’d pulled Jane Eyre to bits in the Sixth Form, you see. And other works of literature.

  ‘Sorry,’ I managed to say. ‘I was snowed under.’ I found myself remembering Rose and Nance and the gauge by which busyness was measured. ‘Must be the darkness,’ I said. ‘People’ve been ripping and burning and snagging . . .’ Nonsense, of course. I hadn’t had a client since the previous Friday.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how busy you are, you said it’d be ready.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  He took a breath and smoke-ringed it out. No cigarette, just pa-pa-pa-pa-paa. Dying for one, no doubt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it now.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’ll take the costume now, as is.’ He sniggered bleakly. ‘As-is-where-is. It is a wreck, after all.’

  He wouldn’t take it. I knew that. I said to him, ‘I’ll do it. Really I will.’

  He smiled and looked up at the ceiling. I noticed his Adam’s apple, which was slightly prominent. ‘You must think I’m an idiot. You’ve held me up for, what, a whole week? I have my wife arriving home any minute. It’s a miracle she hasn’t turned up already. She could be there now, looking in the wardrobe.’ Here he looked right at me. ‘I’ve waited a week, and now I’m taking it somewhere else.’

  We were flanking the table. ‘The problem with taking it to someone else,’ I said, ‘is that you’ll go to the bottom of their list.’

  ‘List! I’ll take my chances.’ He did the pat-for-cigarettes reflex. God, he was desperate. ‘Couldn’t be slower than this.’

  I watched his face stretching and rippling like a canvas. He was going to take the costume. With my rip in it. My very own tear. So what? Let him take it. I didn’t give a rat’s arse. He’d half turned to the window, gagging for a cigarette, you could see that—the fluttering hands. What a jerk. He was killing himself. I said to his back, ‘Whereas I suppose I could do it after hours—i.e. now.’

  ‘Now?’ He didn’t turn.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said to his back. ‘It’s next on my list. I could sit down and do it right now.’

  Why not?

  He spun around. ‘While I wait?’ The idea did seem ludicrous, coming from his lips, which were angular. Twin peaks in the upper lip.

  ‘While you wait.’

  He thought for a moment, then: ‘Nah. Sick of mucking around. I’ll just take it.’ He stepped towards the table. Perhaps sensing some movement in me, he said, ‘Don’t bother wrapping it.’

  I snatched the costume from under his hand. In mid-air, like a trapeze artist, I quickly repinned the torn seam. I stepped back and held it against myself, looking down. It wasn’t bad, pinned like this. Even I didn’t know I was so good. When I looked up I saw him frowning at the costume in a narrow-eyed way, as if he had astigmatism. ‘How long would it take?’

  I shrugged. ‘An hour. No more than that.’

  ‘An hour?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Okay.’ He squinted out the window at the late afternoon sun, and laughed. ‘Will there be enough light?’

  I ignored the sarcasm. ‘Yeah, course. It’s beautiful out there.’ I indicated the sky, the drenched-pink bougainvillea, the daisy bushes planted a hundred years ago, the forget-me-nots that had gone nuts in the Auckland sun.

  He sat down at the table on a bentwood chair which wobbled ominously—well, they’re eighty, ninety years old, and made for small English people. I noticed the way his thighs occupied his trousers. ‘Alright,’ he said.

  I slid onto my chair but kept the costume bundled against me (avoiding pins, of course; I’m usually a dab hand at that). ‘Before I start,’ I said, ‘tea?’

  ‘No! No thanks. Just . . .’ He waved his hand at the costume and looked away, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it. The site: the table Art had brought home from an auction on the back of a truck, my sewing things, my hands.

  ‘Actually, you know what? I’ll just pop out for a fag.’ Yes, pop.

  ‘Okay.’

  I felt the veranda throb like a piano as he bounced down the steps to the garden. A moment later a tendril of cigarette smoke floated past the window. It smelled exciting. Death. I spread the costume out on the table and flattened the seams that needed to be reattached. There was a nest of broken black fibres, shot through with trails of coloured silk from the knotwork. Boy, if last time was a mess, this took the biscuit. I didn’t want him to see it quite like this, so I worked quickly. I pulled each coloured thread away from the torn seam. I threaded a needle with the black thread I’d chosen the first time, and I began the job all over again.

  By the time he came back I was weaving like a maniac. He reeked of smoke and brought the coolness of the late-summer afternoon inside with him. I saw him glance at the costume as he approached the table. Was it shock on his face at the state of it? No. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know one end of the costume from the other. I have to admit, though, the tear wasn’t pretty. The threads pulled away from the rip like veins pegged back for open-heart surgery. He pulled out a chair and sat at the table, looking at me. It was a gaze. I blushed.

  ‘Right,’ I said. It needed something, a word.

  I was working on one side of the rent, weaving the needle in and out, in and out, as if making a kete of black and silver, the black of the thread, the silver of the needle. Checks. I was rebuilding the fabric. Then I’d do what I could going the other way, using the threads I was putting in place now to fill in the missing weft ones. It was a confidence trick, a high-wire act. You had to believe in it. Once you doubted, it all disintegrated, the threads, every which way. We sat in silence while I worked. At one point he looked at my hands, and up at my face through my reading glasses. Then looked away again. Or I looked away. Everything seemed fat: my fingers, his face, the air. There was an unbearable silence. But it had to be silent, didn’t it? If we talked—I mean, we were mender and client, we might shrink back down to our neat and tidy proportions. If we talked, the odd thing that had happened between us the day I hid him might flare up again. What then? The threads of the costume would get tangled, he would scrape back his chair and go home, I would tidy my sewing things, perhaps sweep up the last few beads from the workroom floor. But because I’d hidden him, there was silence. I bent my head over the black hole I was filling in. The day outside was quiet—the Blackout. Cicadas. I was looking at swing bridges disappearing into black, wet bush either side of a ravine. I was thinking of bush walks. I noticed, from the corner of my eye, his hand come out and touch the costume. It was a long hand, slightly knobbly, with tiny gingerish hairs on the tops of the fingers. Strange, because the hair on his head was brown. His middle finger passed back and forth over the black wool. He looked up at me and seemed to hold his breath. I kept the costume still until his hand had gone.

  He was fidgeting a bit, his hands on the table like birds.

  I kept weaving. In out, in out. It’s pretty relentless, but you get results. That’s what I like. As long as you keep at it. Progress.

  He cleared his throat. ‘What do you do while you’re sitting here sewing?’

  I didn’t look up. You can’t. This isn’t so easy, you know. It’s intricate. ‘I sew,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, do you, you know, listen to music or something?’

  ‘Sometimes. But the Blackout.’

  ‘You could sing.’

  Sing! I kept sewing. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I just think.’

  He was quiet for a while, then asked (of course) what I thought about.

  I was finishing a row. ‘I don’t know. What do you think about?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ I looked up and saw that he was a bit dazed. The afternoon, the heat in the room?

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought that was a rhetorical question.’

  ‘What does one think about? No. No, it wasn’t.’

  He shook his head. ‘I asked it first. Because you’re doing something . . .’ He trailed off (as they say).

  It was a bit vague—you couldn’t squeeze it—but I liked this question: what I thought about while I was sewing. See, I’ve thought about this myself. Thought about thinking. I said to him, ‘And you—I suppose when you’re at work, you think about the economy, etcetera.’

  ‘Yeah. But the economy isn’t a set piece, it’s volatile, so you know, you think about risk, you think about what could happen. Wonder, if you like.’

  If you like.

  ‘I think about what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘It takes a certain kind of concentration.’ I was leaning close over the costume, working carefully as if to illustrate my point. ‘I think about the threads, I think about how they’re all working together; really, they’re almost like people—well, ants anyway. They’re not quite inanimate. They’re altered. Actually, I’ve never thought that until now.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Yes!’

  ‘Altered?’ He looked anxious. ‘But it’ll look the same as it did before, won’t it, when it’s fixed? How will I know? I mean . . .’ He faltered and smiled sheepishly. ‘It’s not my strong point.’

  I’d filled in the rip one-way, with lines, telephone wires, a stave, refill paper.

  ‘I know that.’ I smiled. ‘I could do anything, couldn’t I? I could make a total mess of it and you’d never know the difference. Because you don’t actually look at it.’

  ‘I look at it.’

  ‘No you don’t. You’ll just have to trust me.’ He looked so forlorn that I said quickly, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do a good job. It’ll look the way it did when your mother, or whoever it was, wore it dancing at the Irish club.’

  ‘Irish club! It was Ireland.’

  ‘Okay, normal club. Dancing at the Normal Club and winning medals.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. They didn’t do that sort of dancing.’

  ‘Didn’t they? What did they do?’

  ‘I don’t know, the twist or something, or whatever came after that.’

  ‘Nothing came after that,’ I said.

  ‘Shuffling,’ he said.

  ‘That’s so true!’ I said. ‘I’ve always felt kind of hard done by that proper dancing had gone out by the time I was born. There are no rules. If there were special moves, I could be quite a good dancer, I know I could.’

  He smiled at my outburst, and I blushed.

  While we’d been talking my sewing had come to a standstill. My hands were rested on my wrists like a Frenchwoman having lunch.

  ‘You’ve stopped,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m only interested in getting this done. Milly . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, Milly.’

  I started weaving in the weft, weaving thread after thread in among the old threads.

  ‘Well, you’re married. You understand.’

  Burrowing like a termite, in and out, in and out. My needle. ‘I am,’ I said.

  With my head still bent I saw, in my peripheral vision, the client getting up from the chair. He paced about but paused every so often, no doubt to look back to make sure I was still sewing. It made me self-conscious. I’d noticed that when we talked he didn’t watch my hands; when we talked he forgot about the tear.

  ‘I suppose you think about stocks and shares, do you?’ I asked. When he looked blank I added, ‘Our conversation . . .’

  ‘The financial markets. Yeah. Of course.’

  ‘Futures?’ I attempted. My superior knowledge of finance. Well, I had to say something.

  He laughed. ‘Yeah. And the past and the present.’

  ‘That just about wraps it up.’

  ‘It does,’ he said.

  We went silent again.

  ‘My sister,’ I said.

  He frowned at me from the window.

  ‘Had a kimono from Japan. She was an exchange student.’ (Well, I was desperate.)

  He did his Jim Carrey rendition, as if I were mad. Or he was.

  ‘A national costume,’ I said. ‘One of these! This!’ I held up the costume. Exhibit A.

  He shook his head. ‘That’s not a national costume. It’s a dress.’

  ‘Alright, if you want to deconstruct it.’

  He stepped over to the table. ‘Look, it’s in bits! I took it to bits myself. I’m Jacques fucking Derrida.’

  ‘Derrida?’ I smiled. I mean, he was a banker.