He rolled his eyes. Fair enough. I’ve heard of Alexander Hamilton.

  The thing is, I had taken the costume to bits this time. It made a change to have a female post-structuralist. I had performed this exercise in deconstruction in my workroom while a dinner party hummed away along the passage.

  ‘You’re making me jittery,’ I said.

  ‘You’re jittery? I basically have one more day to save my marriage. I think Milly’s coming home tomorrow. It keeps changing. I suppose that’s a good thing.’ He patted his pocket and turned to the window again.

  I made a noise.

  He looked back at me. ‘What do you mean, Mm?’

  I didn’t know what I meant, but I said anyway: ‘Maybe she’ll forget about it.’

  ‘No. She’ll ask me, as soon as she gets home. She won’t forget. I’m not a good liar.’

  I did a few more in-outs with the long needle. ‘I thought you were quite good at it actually.’

  ‘No,’ he said, dead serious. (Seriously.) ‘I’m crap at it.’ He was pacing again. He stopped and looked at a work of art on the wall—Construction Site No. 14, by Art’s sister Issy. She was doing sculpture at art school even though she was thirty-five.

  ‘Well, that’s why I’m doing the lying for you,’ I said.

  He laughed and turned from the artwork, whose mish-mash of twisted metal had not had much effect on him. ‘Good point.’

  We were silent for a bit. The light falling in the windows was ageing, getting golden. He came close to the table and was gazing at my fingers, their busyness. From the corner of my eye I could tell he was mesmerised. I wished he would look away. ‘I have a story about a national costume,’ I said.

  This did snap him out of his mini-trance. ‘It’s not a national costume,’ he said. He sounded tired.

  ‘Yeah, alright, this’—gesturing with the costume—‘has nothing to do with costumes, national, native, whatever. But I really do have a story about a national costume. I just remembered it.’

  I had. I’d just remembered it.

  Silence. God, this was like wading in mud up to your armpits sometimes.

  ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘Is this costing me?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’

  He laughed.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Just, never mind. The story.’ He gave a little gawuff. ‘Will you keep . . .’ He fluttered his hand at the costume. I was snipping the tiny threads left after a section of weaving.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Alright. Fire away.’ He sat down, grating the chair and angling himself towards the window. The low sun showed up the odd red hair on his head like an electrical wire among the brown.

  I poured two cups of tea from the thermos I’d made earlier and pushed one across to him. It rippled.

  •

  I told the client a story which I was kind of proud of. A real story, but with meaning, vis-à-vis migration, culture. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

  ‘I went to a birthday party for a one-year-old,’ I said. ‘Daughter of a sort-of friend, Evangeline, who was our next-door neighbour when I was a kid. She was brought up Fundy, but married a Hindu. Indian. Long story, but anyway, the baby—gorgeous baby—they had a big party for her with all the relatives. The relatives on the father’s side. Evangeline’s parents disowned her. Anyway, the women, the aunts, were wearing saris, and the girls were wearing beautiful coloured dresses, blue and pink and yellow, with their hair tied up in matching ribbons. The boys wore white shirts and trousers. There were a few Pakeha kids and I noticed they were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and not even their best jeans and T-shirts. They looked as if the invitation had said, Come in your scungiest clothes. There was this Pakeha woman there, and I could see she was making a beeline for me, probably because I was the only other white person in the room. Apart from Evangeline.’

  He creaked in his chair and looked at my hands. Not just looked, glowered, like a cartoon. The eyebrows. ‘Are you sewing?’

  I quickly did a stitch.

  When he was satisfied, he said, ‘That doesn’t surprise me. I had a Maori girlfriend.’ I looked at him and he stopped, then hurried on. ‘If there were just a few Pakeha in the room, they’d be all over me like a rash.’

  I nodded, and continued. ‘This Pakeha woman at the birthday came up to me and you know what she was wearing? A Scottish costume.’ Here I put down the costume so I could describe with my hands the long white dress with a tartan sash thrown over the shoulder. ‘Like this, with this big medallion thing, the size of a fist, pinned there,’ (holding the sash in place). ‘She told me she was their neighbour or something. She said, I don’t discriminate, I don’t care what colour people are, as long as they’re decent. She said she’d worn her national costume because she knew the Indians would be wearing theirs. They wore their saris every day.’

  He glared at my empty hands, at the costume, and I picked it up again.

  ‘That’s what I was talking about,’ he said. ‘Before. It’s not a national costume.’

  ‘It might be a wee bit different for a dancing outfit,’ I said, stitching now. ‘But generally, generally speaking, I know. That’s why I’m telling you this.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Anyway, the women were wearing their saris. Did you know they’re the oldest fashion item? Five thousand years.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The women had spencers on underneath, by the way, and cardigans. It was freezing, even inside, because, you know, Wellington in July in a rickety wooden house, it was eleven degrees outside and twelve inside.’

  I paused for effect. He nodded, unimpressed, and I continued.

  ‘The woman in the Scottish costume—who was called Fiona Campbell, which is about as Scottish as you can get (except it would’ve been Anglicised)—told me again why she’d worn her national costume, and asked me if I had one, and I said I didn’t. Of course. She asked me where I was from, and I said Wellington. She looked disappointed, so I said, Well, if I had a national costume I suppose it’d be Irish, but it was all a long time ago. She must’ve been a bit deaf, because she lit up and said to me, Ah, you should’ve worn your national costume, everyone else is! One of the cousins, who I knew a bit actually, was coming around with nibbles and stuff, and as she offered them to us, Fiona Campbell said, Megan has an Irish costume and she would’ve worn it if she’d known we were all going to be wearing ours.’

  He smiled and leaned back in his chair. It creaked again ominously—they always creak.

  Oh, he liked it. I felt the thrill of the storyteller. I continued.

  ‘I said to the cousin, I don’t have a national costume, but she looked me up and down with a funny expression on her face, as if she was imagining me in a strange get-up. I struck up a conversation with a couple of the aunts, and the grandmother who I’d never met. Fiona Campbell was still hanging about—because, remember, I’m her desert-island Pakeha—and she leaned over to the aunts and the grandmother and said, You know, Megan would’ve worn her national costume if she’d known we’d all be wearing ours. Jesus. I said to the aunts and the grandmother, I don’t have a national costume, really I don’t. Then I moved away and talked to a couple of uncles about how some of their children’s friends, their New Zealand friends, were dropping out of high school, and how astonishing this was, blah blah blah. One uncle was saying, Why? Why do these young people who are offered an education say, No thanks! Well, I didn’t know.’

  Actually I did. But it would take a very long time. I went on with the story.

  ‘Then Fiona Campbell hoved in sight and told the uncles about my national costume. The men looked me up and down and I blushed and said, I don’t have a national costume, I don’t. There was a bit of a lull, then later on Fiona Campbell came and talked to me again. I felt sorry for her, the poor old bat, and I asked her what part of Scotland she was from, just for something to say. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, not knowing one end of Scotland from the other. She reared back, literally, like this’—I arched back in my bentwood chair, which creaked—‘on her hind legs and looked at me the way old people read price tags and said, Goodness me, I don’t have a clue, I’m a fourth-generation New Zealander. I’d hate to live in Scotland. New Zealand’s a great little place, apart from the Maoris. If only they’d just get on with it. They were given good money for their land.’

  I waited for his reaction. ‘She really said that,’ I said.

  He nodded. I continued.

  ‘I was trying to move away from Fiona Campbell, I couldn’t stand it anymore, but old Fiona was telling some Indian friends of the family about my national costume. I kept saying, again and again, No, really, I don’t have one, I don’t have a national costume. I looked them straight in the eye so they could see that I was, you know, normal and that this Fiona Campbell woman was crazy. But nobody would meet my eye. They all looked me up and down, they looked at where my national costume might have been, if I’d had one. I was entirely sick of it, and the last couple of aunts who were being told by Fiona Campbell about my national costume, how I would’ve worn it if I’d known, I just nodded at them and smiled and I was imagining I had this old tartany green thing, or embroidered thing, hanging in the wardrobe at home.’

  He laughed, out loud, no secret squeaking like the afternoon Milly was there. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh like that. I quickly took up the costume, which I’d been holding in my lap all this time. I hoped Art wouldn’t come home and find me having a cup of tea with a stranger at an odd hour and, for no reason whatsoever, a man who was laughing at something I’d said. I didn’t usually offer tea to clients. I didn’t tell funny stories to clients, or joke with them. It was nothing really, but I didn’t want to hurt Art’s feelings, which I knew could be hurt despite his lucky life, his landowner mother, his father in insurance, his tertiary education—perhaps because of it. It might seem as if there was a hint of collusion between myself and the client, even though there was nothing, nothing. Except a way of talking that was all confidences, a turning inside out of all the words inside you.

  Because I knew about his wife. I knew about his wife and his mistress and how there was no choice.

  18

  The sun had sunk further but there was still enough light that I might make serious headway with the reweaving. I was still going in out, in out. The client rearranged himself noisily at the table.

  I asked him if he thought his parents had done a good job choosing a wife for him. I’d wondered about this, you see. He professed to love her, but he was, well, cheating on her.

  The tea, going cold, was fluttering as I wobbled the table—my stitches.

  He crunched back in his chair. ‘Mm, gosh, that’s a bit personal.’

  I paused. ‘I suppose it is. And so is this.’ I held up the costume briefly, and laughed. ‘Personal! My Gahd, as they say in America.’

  It seemed he wasn’t going to answer, then he said, ‘Long story.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ I said. ‘Mending is slow.’

  He blinked. ‘I thought you said it wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘So I did,’ I said, perhaps a little too hastily. ‘And it won’t take long. Tell me the quick version.’

  ‘Even the quick version . . .’ He considered his watch. ‘I suppose there’s nothing else to do, is there? But you must be almost finished. What was the question?’

  I spoke with exaggerated enunciation: ‘Do you think your parents did a good job picking out a wife for you?’

  ‘Trisha?’

  ‘No, Milly. Your wife.’

  Did I have to spell it out?

  Suddenly he snorted. ‘Milly! You thought Milly—good God, no! Milly is the last girl they would’ve picked for me. Jesus. The last girl.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Milly! The irony of it is, if Milly was Irish she wouldn’t give a toss about the costume. I wouldn’t be standing here.’ He quietened down and went all sombre. ‘I wish to God I wasn’t.’

  Charming, when we’d just been having an interesting discussion about a national costume.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘Milly wasn’t the betrothed?’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  ‘You said it. That day.’

  ‘But stop saying it.’

  ‘Okay. Friend. Family fwiend.’

  He checked his watch and squinted out at the sinking sun. ‘No, it was Trisha, of course.’

  I think I stopped in my tracks. Whatever my tracks were, I don’t even know. ‘Trisha?’

  ‘The buck-toothed girl from Clonard. I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve.’

  Trisha. Christ. She was the betrothed, and he’d—what a mess.

  Well, I knew that for a start. But this was interesting. Trisha was the betrothed.

  Stop saying that, GoGo.

  Okay.

  I asked him if his parents thought he’d go back to Ireland with Trisha, and he said, Good God, no. No. No.

  Clearly they didn’t.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe the other way around. For my parents she was sort of a link to something. You wouldn’t get it.’

  No doubt. But, then, perhaps I was meant to find a boy at university. It was just that no one said it out loud. And I did! I did find a boy. Who was a bit like my parents, only richer. Engaged with the culture, had a degree in something useless, and liked to drink. Joking.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘I know, it’s pathetic,’ he said. ‘You need to know the background.’

  I re-engaged with the black thread. In out, in out. ‘Fire away.’ My turn to say that.

  ‘First of all—this’ll be quick—we left Belfast in a hurry. In ten minutes. When you leave that quickly, there’s something, well, unfinished.’

  I snipped a thread and clattered the little silver scissors onto the table, scissors with a snake twisting up the handles. ‘Why such short notice?’

  ‘Um.’ He cast a glance at the ceiling as if there was a cue card up there. ‘Well, it was to do with council housing, in retrospect.’ He swung his gaze back down to the costume, then back up to me because I had paused.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said.

  He was restless and scraped back his chair and went and stood looking out the window, patting the pocket where his cigarettes were and looking back at the costume and my hands. ‘Is this light good?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’

  ‘Okay, good.’ He came back to the table. ‘It’s funny how things turn out. If we hadn’t had to move out of council housing—this is years ago now—maybe none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t be here, but’—here he smiled and gestured to the room—‘we did, and here we are.’ He turned away in his chair, as if I couldn’t possibly want to know about council housing.

  ‘Oh, and why-did-you-have-to-move-out-of-council-housing?’ Facetious as hell.

  We smiled, then he went serious.

  ‘Rats.’

  I looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘No, rats,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Rats. I thought you meant “oh, rats”.’

  ‘No, I meant rats. Specifically.’

  ‘Is there a “generally”?’

  ‘Well, yeah, actually, there is. Was. There’d been a general hoohah going on about housing for years. Our row in Clonard, and lots of the rows, were condemned in, like, 1890 or something. Roofs were falling in, one by one. When it rained the families at the end had to move in with the next-door neighbours. That sort of thing.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah, shoe-box-int-middle-of-road. And we weren’t even English.’ He laughed.

  ‘But the rats.’

  ‘The rats were the last straw. Hundreds of them. They’d pulled down an estate nearby and the rats had, you know, packed their bags and moved in with us. You could hear them scratching at night. I didn’t mind, actually, but I remember Ma shrieking in the kitchen in the morning when she saw what they’d done.’

  ‘My Gahd,’ I said. ‘Terrifying.’

  He frowned and shook his head. ‘It wasn’t fear. You’re not scared of rats when you’ve seen a lot of them. It was rage. Blind rage. I was more scared of my mother than I was of the rats. Then she’d take a Valium and calm down a bit.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘My mother took Valium.’ Something in common.

  ‘It was cheaper than a fag because it came on the National Health.’

  I laughed. ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Of course it’s true. Why would I tell you otherwise?’ He went faintly puffy, put-out.

  Why would he tell me? Because I’d trapped him here and there was nothing else to do, that’s why.

  As if to back up his story, he said, ‘All the mothers in the lane took them. They’d say, Can I bum a Valium off you?’

  I nodded seriously. No laughing. Then I laughed. This was hilarious. I had a vague memory of sitting on the stairs while Mary-France told someone on the phone about her new generation of antidepressants. They’re the grandchildren—hooting with laughter, and performing the fridge-suck, slosh and clink that indicated another glass of wine. Valium was passé by that time. (Wine was still first generation, I suppose.)

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘we moved. We were going to get a new unit, everyone in the row was. In a new housing estate, with two bedrooms, wardrobes, hot water and a bath. We were all excited, my sisters and I. We were going to go swimming in the bath and play hide and seek in the wardrobes. There was just one problem.’ He held up his finger. Hamming it up.

  ‘Ah. What was it?’

  ‘First of all, you are sewing, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course! Look.’ I was motoring. He’d be out of here soon. ‘What was the problem?’

  ‘We had to find somewhere else to live for two years while the estate was being built.’

  ‘Oh. It was being built on the same site.’

  ‘No. It was being built across the road.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Exactly. Why couldn’t we just stay put until the new estate was ready? Most people had been in them all their lives, and their parents before them, grandparents sometimes, so what’s the fuss all of a sudden? But the FHE, which stood for—I remember this, all the talk, I was about eight or something—Fucking Housing Executive, the Fucking Housing Executive said the rows weren’t fit for human habitation. All of a sudden. It was the rats.’