‘What day was it?’

  ‘Tuesday maybe. A few days to go, anyway.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have gone right then?’

  ‘We should’ve.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Just listen.’

  ‘I am listening.’

  ‘Because I don’t have long. I really don’t.’

  ‘Ooh, Milly’s waiting!’ I tooted.

  ‘Wasn’t it you who wanted me to tell this?’ he asked. He sounded indignant. I couldn’t see.

  ‘I thought it was you wanted to tell the story.’ I did.

  ‘It isn’t a story.’

  ‘Okay. Whatever it is. I thought you wanted to tell it.’

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I had no intrinsic interest in telling it,’ he said. ‘It was just to pass the time.’

  Oh, intrinsic.

  He went down the bouncy steps to the garden. I felt each step.

  ‘Tell the story,’ I said from the veranda. ‘Or whatever it is.’

  ‘Alright.’ He turned around and addressed me from the garden. ‘At teatime that night . . .’

  ‘What night?’

  ‘The night after Mr O’Connell—wasn’t that what we were talking about?’

  ‘We were.’

  He stood in the wild garden. Tonight I would heat water.

  ‘We were having our tea. Just us kids. Ma never ate. She’d hang around in the scullery doorway, smoking. There was this bashing on the door, bang bang bang, and it was Aunty Theresa. She was yelling, Concepta, Concepta. I remember there was fried bread on my plate, the colour of copper. It was about Dad. There’d been a man killed at the parade. Aunty Theresa told us kids to get our things. Dana and Sharon—my sisters—ran into the bedroom, but I stayed in the kitchen. Aunty Theresa was saying, Concepta, you’ve got to go. They know they got the wrong man. But Ma was dazed. She said, How do you know? It was a leak in the prison. There’d been a leak. Aunty Theresa was saying, Just go for Christ’s sake! But Ma was asking where Dad was. Aunty Theresa said she didn’t have a clue, and not to worry about Kevin, he knew what was going on. This was us, Ma and us kids, we had to go from the house, now.

  ‘Then I knew he’d killed a man at the parade. A Prod.’

  Well, I knew that for a start. I boinged down the steps myself, to the garden. We stood on the path among the tendrils, the clag of datura in my nostrils. He spoke close to my face.

  ‘Suddenly Ma seemed to come to, like a switch flicking. She said, We’ll go! Aunty Theresa was all excited, as if Ma had won a raffle. Then there was general chaos. Dana—ten years old—going crazy. The UDA, the UDA! And then Sharon started up. The UDA! Ma said, Keep quiet about the UDA, will you? It’s a lot of nonsense. So I knew it was true. Aunty Theresa ran back next door to book us on the ferry. I’d never seen her run before. I said to Ma, who was whirling about plucking at random coats and things, They’re after Dad, aren’t they? She didn’t answer. Her eyes were bright, as if it was Midnight Mass. She said, We’re going to Liverpool, we’re finally going. Dreadful and Frightful would meet us there.

  ‘Aunty Theresa came back to tell us we were on the night sailing, and a taxi was on its way. Ma wanted to know how she’d got a black taxi to come over here at this time of night. Aunty Theresa said she just did, and they laughed. They actually laughed. It really was like Christmas. Ma had the box she’d packed under her arm. There was no time to take the sheets from the beds, or anything. We had our jackets, our schoolbags. As we were going out the door, there was a woman waiting in the lane with five or so kids and a whole lot of supermarket bags. She said, Can we have the house? News travelled fast. You had to be bold to get a squat. Ma said, sort of quiet, that it was a marked house and she wouldn’t be wanting it. That was the first time I knew this. It was a marked house. I saw the woman’s face, like a mushroom under her scarf, all blank. Ma told her to come back in a few weeks, but the woman said it would be too late by then, and she went away.

  ‘As it turned out, the black taxi didn’t come. We had to walk to the Falls Road! As we ran I looked back and caught a glimpse of the tea table, everything on it, the dishes and the half-eaten food like the Mary Celeste.’

  Yes, the Mary Celeste. I was looking into his face with the garden framing it, but couldn’t see it.

  ‘We were kissed by neighbours all along the lane. They’d never kissed us before. All the way along the lane, people were calling in whispers from the doorways. We walked through the streets of Clonard till we got to the Falls Road. There was a checkpoint on the way, and we were trembling. We got a taxi which smelled like an old leather trunk I hid in once at a friend’s house, and then couldn’t open again.

  ‘Dad was waiting on the wharf, smoking, looking nervy. Ma said, So you’re coming then, are you? He ground his fag under his shoe and took the cardboard box from Ma, and we all walked onto the ferry.

  ‘We watched Belfast getting smaller and smaller.’ He held up his hand to the westward sky, comparing it with the Waitakeres. ‘When we were turning out of the Channel—I remember this because suddenly the sea was boiling, it was the Irish Sea, and that was what everyone said about it, it boiled. I thought about my Superman being left behind, and I started to go on about it. A couple of kids stared at me, and I did the classic what-the-fuck-d’you-think-you’re-looking-at, and Ma shooshed me and said we didn’t want to be drawing attention to ourselves. I asked why not, loudly, and Dad gripped my shoulder and hissed through his teeth, It’s just the way it is, which were the first words he’d spoken on the journey. I can still feel his thumb poking into that soft bit under your shoulder blade. He held it there, saying, There goes Ireland, there’s your last glimpse of Ireland. The lights of Belfast were disappearing into the mist, and then it was just black water slopping about. We went and sat in the cabin and I started up again about my Superman. Ma said, For goodness’ sake, you’re too old for a toy like that anyway. But it wasn’t for playing with, it was for keeping. For keeping. I knew who would get my Superman—the boy who would move into the house after us, from the family with the plastic bags. I couldn’t stand it. I was wailing. The girls were saying, Tell him to be quiet, Ma! Ma said, We’ll buy another Superman if it means that much to you. Well, we had six thousand pounds, give or take, burning a hole in our pocket. But I knew we wouldn’t. All the way across the Irish Sea I said under my breath, I’m going back, I’m going back to get my Superman. At one point Dad said grimly, None of us are ever going back, and Ma said, Well you’ve changed your tune all of a sudden. That was us leaving Ireland. When you tried to look out the window all you could see was us. From now on it was just us.’

  Insects brushed against me on the path. I thought I felt warmth coming off him. I heard Bell crackling in the undergrowth, and his breath. There was more. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘The boy with the plastic bags didn’t get my Superman. They did move into the house, a few days later, and it was firebombed and he lost an arm and bled to death before they could get him to the hospital. That’s what I heard. The boy who’d taken my place. But I didn’t know that then. I heard it later.’

  I caught my breath. No words. None. I supposed this was some kind of end, the end of the story, the most tragic bit. You couldn’t get more hyperbolic, could you? He should’ve died but he didn’t, he came to paradise and lived happily ever after. End of story. There are more pages to go in this book, and so we know there is more. We’re privileged as readers and writers. And as immigrants.

  I recovered. ‘But what about Dreadful and Frightful? Weren’t you meeting them in Liverpool?’

  ‘They weren’t there. When we got to the address they’d given us, we were told they’d got on a ship.’

  ‘Well, they were ship girls.’ He laughed. I laughed. It was almost completely dark.

  ‘Are you still there?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I’m here.’

  ‘But none of this is what I meant. What I meant to say.’

  ‘What did you mean to say?’

  He shook his head. I felt the skim of his hair.

  I cuddled the costume, my muff. It was finished.

  ‘Seeing it’s not finished, am I coming back tomorrow?’

  ‘Do you want to take it to another mender?’

  I heard his sigh. ‘She’s probably not coming home tonight or I would’ve heard.’

  I couldn’t make out his face anymore in the dark, and among the trees and vines.

  ‘Milly?’

  ‘Of course Milly.’

  ‘Come tomorrow then. It’s almost finished.’

  It was done. It was done, despite everything.

  ‘This can’t go on,’ he said. I felt his lip brush my upper lip. Hesitate. And again. The smell of cigarettes. A warmth coming from him. I stepped back.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The power will come on.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What should I call you? All this time and—’

  I told him.

  ‘GoGo?’

  I explained about my posh school.

  I knew his name, of course, but I liked to think of him as the client. Perhaps I was always the mender to him. I don’t know.

  He made his way along the overgrown path. I heard the gate click and him curse gently as he dashed his keys against the car door. He was meant to be dead, and this was his new life. I felt a rush of excitement that I was in it.

  21

  Then Art was coming in and there was a party we were meant to go to a few streets away, Helen Someone we knew vaguely from Wellington. People were starting to have Blackout parties. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go, I wasn’t in the mood for inane conversation, and Art said, Same. We hoed into cold meat and potato salad, deciding, and sculled a bit of the white wine Art had couriered in from outside the Blackout zone. Art said they never knew when to stop with the d-d-d. I looked at him. He sneezed. Dressing. We both said, Oh no, and soon he was sneezing like a starter motor.

  ‘It’s the d-d-d—achoo!—dust.’

  ‘Only a matter of time,’ I said, and I laughed for some reason.

  It was true. The carpets were like someone’s felting hobby. No hope of vacuuming them, of course. (Or of hanging them on the line and attacking them with a carpet beater, I thought, like the Edwardian housewife’s maid would have done. Nailing them down had no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time.) Art was a card-carrying hayfever-sufferer with a bona fide diagnosis, like a visa to the mythical world of mites—you couldn’t see them, you just thought you had when the sun shone.

  ‘It was a r-r-race,’ said Art, and sneezed, ‘between Pinnacle Power and m-me.’

  ‘You did come second,’ I said. ‘Silver.’

  We were good.

  He asked me between sneezes whether I minded him going around to Glenda’s and I said why would I mind? I mean, he was honest.

  We moseyed over to the party with a torch. It was in a villa like ours, but a whole one. There were candles all through the house so it looked like Diwali, and people crowded into room after room, leaning against walls or dancing. The house shook a bit. Nirvana was straining out of a ghetto blaster. I moved through, talked to someone I went to university with but I couldn’t remember her name through the whole conversation. I went to get a glass of red wine from the kitchen, passed Art having an animated conversation with a group of people, including Glenda. Three fucking weeks.

  After a couple more conversations, one about property values, another about late capitalism, I drifted out onto a huge deck where there were more candles and people smoking. It was a beautiful evening. It was quite noisy, just talking, but a neighbour yelled from next door to shut up, it was midnight. There was general laughter. Then I saw, at the corner of the deck where it looked like a boat, the client. He was smoking and nodding with a group of three or four other people. He caught my eye, and put his cigarette in the other hand. I felt a bit nervy, like if I’d had a cigarette, I would have juggled with it.

  I went back inside, but when I looked over my shoulder, he had followed me. The room was crowded and there were people trying to dance to some New Romance, good luck to them. He was in front of me. I noticed the way his white shirt was tucked into his jeans, a preppy look I wasn’t into. He said, Do you want to dance, and I said okay. You can’t really say, No, no I don’t. We jived around looking a bit stupid. I didn’t look at his face, only his body. Everything from the neck down. We didn’t touch. As you don’t. He was a terrible dancer, robotic. It was kind of funny, really it was. Then the song finished and people melted away from the middle of the room. We stood about not saying anything, but then Art appeared from another room.

  ‘Shall we go?’ He looked at the client.

  I said, ‘This is.’

  ‘Shane.’

  ‘Shane, sorry. I knew that. A client.’

  They shook hands. I said yeah, I was ready to go. As I turned to the passage I saw a woman flit across it, from a room on one side to a room on the other, which was the side we didn’t have in our villa conversion. And I thought, from the split-second flash I took in of black hair, clompy shoes, surfing gait, that it was Trisha.

  We were going. Art was saying goodbye to some people, Glenda, Grant et al. I turned to the client.

  ‘I thought I just saw Trisha. Did you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. He smiled.

  Art and I sailed home along the empty streets, arm in arm, in the dark, and talked about whether we should stay in the house, because of Art’s hayfever. He said he couldn’t be bothered moving, but did I need to because of my, you know, business (because it wasn’t quite a business), which was thoughtful, but I said no, I couldn’t be bothered. Our voices were bouncing off the houses across the road. It would be fine as long as it didn’t go on too much longer. Another three weeks might just be bearable. I was about to be paid for quite an involved job, I said. Art said, Oh good.

  I was feeling blasé, buoyant, I don’t know. I said it wasn’t too bad, was it? It wasn’t, he said, not bad at all. You couldn’t really ask for more. Perhaps some electricity occasionally. A light once in a while wouldn’t go amiss. He could live without almost everything else. Well, that and the computer. And the vacuum cleaner.

  We were coming up the steps and he said, ‘That wasn’t the investment banker, was it?’

  ‘Oh, actually, it was,’ I said.

  ‘I meant to tell you, I told Mother what he said about the business. Remember? About pulling in their horns, laying off staff?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. I was in a trance.

  ‘They think they can ride it out. They’ve been through bad times before.’

  ‘Okay, good.’

  When the client came the next day, the costume would be ready.

  Knotwork

  22

  I couldn’t very well leave the client stranded in Liverpool, could I? Abandoned by Dreadful and Frightful. What I decided overnight: I would finish the unfinished sleeve. Yes! I thought this as I lay in the clammy bed beside Art, who I couldn’t see and couldn’t feel. I could hear him snoring like an engine, that’s how I knew he was there—also because I knew he was there. And these twin circumstances, the real snoring and the virtual knowing, were comforting. Then I started thinking about comfort, which is such a cushiony notion, and even the word sounds fluffy. And I thought how comfort could be the point of everything, why we work, why we try to get on with people etc. Or maybe it isn’t the point. Maybe doing without comfort is the point, because then you start on other things. I’m not sure what they are, but they’d be profound. I was thinking that you could spend your whole life going backwards and forwards on this issue, in a flower-petal kind of way. Comfort, profundity, comfort, profundity. And then just before you died, you’d come to the last one: comfort. Or maybe it would be profundity. But at that point whether your life had been comfortable or profound wouldn’t matter, because it would all be over. I was gulping in the blackness of the bedroom, which was so very black. It was as if you had no eyes. I pictured the black cuff of the costume, and how I would fill it in with colour.

  •

  In the morning I packed the costume into a bag and went out to buy silks.

  I would finish the unfinished sleeve because I could. And because, like the dog in Sam Hunt’s ‘Bow-Wow’ poems, I had nothing else to do. This was a bit of a worry.

  I walked up to the crest of Symonds Street and headed down the gentle slope towards town. On the off-chance, I’d phoned a sewing shop at the bottom of Queen Street, Oh Sew Good. The pun had me in stitches. I was surprised that they were open, and the woman who answered had sounded surprised too. It was a fine day, with some of those flat Auckland clouds lying about the horizon as if they were tired. In upper Symonds Street there were fewer shops open than there’d been a week earlier. One or two had candlelight. A boutique full of fifties tin monkeys and Bakelite radios. No customers, but then I’d never seen anyone in that shop even when the lights were on. There was a second-hand bookshop in the same state. I tooled on down the hill, past the Jewish cemetery. I don’t suppose the dead minded the Blackout. It was hot in the sun, even in my bright checked World top which I hadn’t known what to wear with, but oh well.

  I crossed over to the Grafton Bridge side, where there was a bit more shade, and to the Everything Else cemetery, which fell away like a miniature Machu Picchu underneath the bridge. The street was quiet, a smattering of people, mostly street kids, the ones who usually hung out in the cemetery, but they seemed to have Moved Upstairs proper. They’d arranged their stuff—blankets, plastic bags, ghetto blasters—along the railing, neatly, as if they were keeping house; their new sitting room. I couldn’t see much point in the relocation—the cemetery seemed more comfortable, with its snippets of lawn and handy graves—except that now, with the Blackout, they could. No one was moving them on. I was pretty sure my street kid wasn’t there. One of the girls (it may have been a boy, nothing poked out from the baggy clothes) was squatting beside an ice-cream container with a couple of coins in it. They weren’t doing a roaring trade. I didn’t contribute and she stared at me: fuck off, you. I stared back. She could go jump in the lake. She half rose menacingly. Fuck off, you. Fine, I’d fuck off.