‘Because I don’t have to,’ I said. I was getting tetchy. I had choices. I could do all sorts of things.

  ‘You’re down the tube,’ said the client. ‘But you know what? I think you like it down there.’

  This was really annoying. I came from an educated family, but we weren’t capitalists. My father drove a Skoda. And this business, it was really just for fun. I told the client there were plenty of other things I could do.

  ‘What?’ he asked. To give him his due, he was genuinely curious.

  ‘Lots of things.’

  He suddenly said, ‘Do you want kids?’

  I felt myself blush. ‘That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?’

  ‘This is personal.’ He indicated the costume.

  This was true. I’d seen it all undone. I’d taken liberties with it. I shrugged—about the kids thing. (And by the way, I’d been popping little pink pills for years.)

  ‘What say they want to go to university, like you, these kids?’

  I was kind of outraged.

  ‘They’ll be hustling for the highest-paying job they can get,’ he was saying. ‘They’ll be importing titanium.’

  They wouldn’t.

  Something occurred to me. ‘This is all hypothetical. Like your imaginary daughter. The one Milly talked about.’

  He blushed. He blushed! He was shaking his head.

  I started telling him how Pinnacle Power had quadrupled their profits and halved their employees in four years.

  He said they had to do that otherwise they would’ve gone broke.

  I told him how they increased managers’ salaries by thirty percent.

  Of course, he said, otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to work at that level.

  He shifted in his suit. Yes, his suit. ‘It’s not ready, is it?’

  I peered down at the costume, which was an ink blot in the grey room. ‘No,’ I said proudly. ‘Come back tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll come by after work, latish, I have a busy day.’

  ‘It’ll be ready.’

  ‘Will it? And I’ll tell you about paradise. Sometimes I wished Dreadful and Frightful had taken it into their heads to go to hell.’

  ‘But remember I know that bit already,’ I said.

  He stood up. ‘Yeah, you probably do. Thanks for the tea.’ Which he hadn’t touched. Suddenly so formal. I couldn’t stand it.

  ‘You’re welcome, as they say in America.’ He was going. ‘Wait,’ I said. I wanted him there. I wanted to keep him there. ‘About the Woolthamlys’ company, the fruit drying, remember?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Taranaki Dried Fruit.’

  ‘They’re going to ride it out, that’s what they said.’

  ‘Oh. That might not be very wise, but still.’

  I groped my way across the room to get a torch. I shone it on the floorboards all the way to the front door, like an usher. A lovely yellow dot.

  On the doorstep he said, ‘Will this affect you?’

  ‘What?’

  He laughed. ‘If they lose the company, of course.’

  ‘No!’ I was shocked. ‘I’m not a materialist.’

  ‘But you could lose your little life here.’

  ‘My little life?’ My cheeks flushed. I felt his face close in the dark, briefly, almost to touch.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  And I said, What, nothing.

  He shambled across the veranda and down the planky steps. I was formulating a theory: if we don’t have any big stories to tell, we start feasting on ourselves. We eat our hands. It’s called literary theory. Actually, I just thought of that.

  There was a shred of lilac light over the Waitakeres. I heard him on his mobile phone as he walked to his car, an urgent tone, authoritative. I could tell it wasn’t Milly, and I was relieved. So relieved some kind of chemical flooded through me. It felt like a colour. And as I stood on the doorstep I saw that the tenants from the villa one up from us, who I’d only seen once or twice in passing, were moving out, about four of them loading their stuff into a van and yelling at each other to hurry because the light was going. A woman with a beehive hairdo like Amy Winehouse noticed me in the gloom and called out as if we’d been having a conversation—they were over the Blackout, she said. As they slammed the van doors they all called out, Bye, bye, as if they knew me, and drove off. For a moment I didn’t know whether they’d ever been real. I had the creepy feeling that electricity merely gave us the impression of lives being lived, but that once the power was gone there was nothing.

  24

  In the morning I made a few calls looking for other premises. To no avail. Every room, garret, nook and cranny within cooee of the city was spoken for. As I had predicted. I collapsed on the couch and read some of Jane Eyre, which was quite long, thankfully.

  I looked out the window. I remembered that once when I was about ten, Mary-France and Dad (arguing all the time), with Lisa and me in the back seat, drove as far as you could up the steepest street in the Southern Hemisphere, which is in Dunedin (because Dunedin was laid out in Edinburgh by a Scottish town planner who knew nothing about the Otago hills). Near the top of the street there was a sign saying you couldn’t take your car any further, with a cartoony picture of tyres skidding. You might fall off the street, like falling off the world. We all got out of the car and walked, or rather crawled, loped, low down like our ancestors, the few metres to the crest of the hill. You felt that if you stood upright or stood still you would slide, or worse, topple, all the way down to the bottom.

  (And then there was Pinnacle Power. Ah, aren’t coincidences wonderful! You couldn’t make this stuff up. That’s what I thought, actually, those afternoons as I worked on the costume: this was all just put in front of me. But what to make of it? I mean, isn’t it the thing?)

  It did seem that when I began working with my hands, I might have begun a long glide downwards—me and my sister too. Nobody really knew what Lisa did except shoot up when she could. There was a sense that the civilisation of a family had reached its peak, its golden age, and this was the westward slope. It was alright, though. You could do a lot worse.

  •

  The client started straight in on the chair from the side of the road. Didn’t mention the costume, just stabilised his briefcase against the couch, sat at the table and said his dad found a chair by the side of the road. I poured tea. And was relieved, under the circumstances, that he didn’t ask after the costume. I was plugging away at the cuff, alternating the Dollar Bill and the Minaret. It was a crisp evening, cooler, and the sunlight falling into the room was milky. Perfect for close work, for knotwork. I wanted to hear about New Zealand. How it was, and so on? I mean, hello (as they say in America), I live here.

  I might as well just tell you myself. I might be leaving out a few ums and ahs.

  It was bright. The cicadas fizzed all the time and the lawn out the back was springy like a mattress. It was awful, a wasteland. He thought, Where is everyone? They were in their cars. The immigrants were the only ones walking. They got lost every time they went out. They walked in circles like zombies, as if they were dead.

  That’s what he said. They had died and gone to paradise.

  •

  In paradise the houses were wooden and the gaudy sunlight chopped everything up. Like bunting, he said. When they got to New Zealand it was summer. In January, he said, all topsy-turvy, everything shaken up like a snow bubble. I know, a snow bubble. The metaphors. I loved them. And I loved misremember. I thought I’d like to do that. I’d like to misremember and toss it off, as if it were nothing, nothing to get it all wrong. Even if it were serious.

  The New Zealand house was flimsy like a carton. His ma put on the apron she’d worn on the ferry under her coat, an apron similar to one of Mabel’s—That, he said, pointing (although his mother’s apron wouldn’t have been made of organza because it would have needed to actually function as an apron). And cleaned briskly, like blessing herself even in the new godforsaken place. It was a dive—holes in the walls, mould on the ceiling, no working door handles. Later he realised his parents were ripped off for years, the rent they paid to the slum landlord. It was a kind of paradise. They’d never had carpet before and he regarded it as an entity, the way skin is an organ. There was a bath. He watched his mother scrubbing pink mould off the bath like you watch TV. No emotion. The wind got up in the late morning and exploded all through the rest of the day. It was a pattern he came to recognise.

  End of story. He leaned back in his chair.

  My hands in the costume. I looked up at the Carrara ceiling. A wedding cake. My chair creaked.

  ‘Your husband?’ said the client.

  I put on a puzzled expression. My husband? Anyway, Art would be late. He was going to hear Billy Bragg over in Devonport with Glenda and Grant and some other old uni friends. I didn’t think of myself as privileged. Privilege was a dirty word. I offered him wine. It seemed decently late enough. I poured it at the sideboard.

  ‘Do you love him?’ he asked.

  I think my mouth fell open. ‘Of course. What a question!’

  ‘I know. Sorry. There’s just something.’ He stopped. ‘It’s almost finished, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know, Milly.’

  ‘Actually, Milly.’

  Yes?

  Wasn’t coming home tonight after all. He was going to her for the weekend instead.

  Oh he was? To Wellington?

  To Wellington. For that he would not require a costume.

  ‘Oh, so there’s no urgency,’ I said.

  He paused, then cackled. ‘I’m sorry, but this is funny.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘Now there’s no urgency! How long has this been going on?’

  I didn’t think it was that funny.

  ‘I’m sewing the bloody thing. Look.’ I held the costume up as if saying cheers, salut!

  He settled down. ‘Cheers.’ With his glass.

  ‘Cheers.’ With the costume.

  It wasn’t that funny.

  ‘Dad found a wicker chair by the side of the road.’

  Oh, the chair.

  He’s telling it now. I give up.

  ‘Dad appeared in the doorway, all chair. He said it was like bringing a hot-air balloon home, in that wind. It just about took him out to sea, like Phileas Fogg. Ma and the girls thought this was great. I didn’t. I didn’t like this development.’

  He didn’t like this development.

  ‘Why? Why not?’

  ‘You’ll see. The chair was sort of round and chunky, like the basket of a hot-air balloon. It had paisley cushions.’

  ‘Paisley!’

  ‘I know. You wouldn’t read about it. We needed a chair. I wasn’t complaining about the chair. It wasn’t that. It was that Dad had noticed it. A chair by the side of the road! He’d thought about sitting down. It was anathema. My dad. He’d always been a consumed man, burning. It was there on his face all the time, his eyes smouldering. He’d never had a job, but he didn’t sit around all day. He talked to the men in the street. He paced around the house and thought with his intense expression and then he’d mutter to Ma he was going out, and grab his jacket and be out the door, and even the way he walked along the street showed he was a man with a mission. When he came home, he’d done something, I don’t know what, but you could see it coming off him. No furniture on his back, no bloody chair from the side of the road.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I had to say something.

  Wine. Costume in my lap. Sun coming in the bloody window.

  ‘So anyway, Ma and the girls thought it was great and they were all laughing about it being paisley. They were going to sit on paisley, put their arses on paisley.

  ‘Ma was fixing the unravelled wicker and saying the chair had been waiting for us to come along. It was sent. Dad said, It was not sent! It was lying by the side of the road because someone else decided they were too good for it. That was more of the old Dad. Dana and Sharon had turns sitting in the chair and bouncing on it until Ma said they’d break it, and to give me a turn. But I was not going to sit in that chair. So the girls had more turns, and started fighting about it, until Dad said, Let your mammy sit in it, for God’s sake. But Ma said, I’m too busy to sit in a chair, I have the tea to get—you sit in it. This was somehow a threat. Dad just walked into the bedroom. I watched the muscles of his back, which were as expressive as anyone’s face, frowning. I knew how he felt, because I felt the same. Ma and my sisters were stupid and blind because they couldn’t see. I could see it. Dad had been a hero. He was a hero, and now he was looking for furniture by the side of the road. Maybe not looking, but seeing. Seeing it. And what I realised, but much later, was: he continued to fight for the cause, while slopping around the house in slippers, fiddling with the knob on the radio (when we got a radio). The day he left Ireland he began starving himself like Bobby Sands in Long Kesh.’

  I was kind of blown away by this. ‘Wow,’ I said (again). ‘You mean metaphorically?’

  ‘Yes, metaphorically.’

  ‘Is this true? You’re not embroidering it, are you?’ I was just about having a meltdown over Kevin McGrath starving himself, and I had to make a smart, ironic comment about it. This is what’s wrong with our society, myself included.

  ‘It’s not a story,’ said the client. He did his blowing mannerism. ‘It’s true. And for a long time, no one sat in the chair. It was like the bounty of the new land, and we didn’t use it. But later I thought, What’s the point of being here if you don’t take advantage?’

  He was looking at me.

  ‘Oh, that’s a question?’

  What was the point? But I didn’t have to answer that because I was born here. Hah!

  He didn’t wait for an answer anyway. ‘We shouldn’t have been here, of course. After three months we were overstayers. There was stuff in the paper about how there were too many Poms here.’ He laughed. ‘We were Poms! To all intents and purposes.’

  He patted his pocket as if he’d forgotten something. His fags.

  Then he was going on again. I wasn’t stitching. ‘But nothing ever happened. We enrolled at the school, nothing happened. Dad walked about with his wonky knees, craning around because he was worried about being caught. They could still have got him for whatever he did the night of the parade. He would’ve been extradited. Nothing happened. Later I found out they were too busy doing dawn raids on Pacific Islanders to be bothered with us. In fact, there were more English overstayers than Pacific Islanders.’

  •

  Now there was a little intermission. He asked, by the by, how much it was all going to cost. All these hours. I told him it would be the same as I quoted, a hundred and sixty dollars. He was aghast and I panicked. I was a money-grubber, and money was so obscene.

  ‘Well,’ I said, backtracking, ‘it might be a bit less.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, is that all? How much do you pay yourself an hour?’

  An hour? It varies. It must. Obviously.

  He shook his head. ‘How do you make a living?’

  ‘I make a good enough living,’ I told him. ‘What more could I want?’

  He took this as a serious question, and a comic expression of pondering appeared on his face. Finally he said, ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  Fine. I motored on with the knotwork. The gold silk was glinting in the sunlight.

  ‘The thing is, things aren’t very good at the moment. You have heard of the Asian crisis?’

  ‘Ye-ah,’ I lied as if it was blinking obvious.

  The truth is, I was in my years-long phase of not reading the papers. It started at university. The news seemed too non-theoretical.

  I laughed gaily. Yes, gaily. ‘Change of subject. New Zealand,’ I said.

  Because I knew New Zealand.

  ‘Well.’ He sipped his wine. ‘Dana and Sharon came home and said, We’ve met some Girls. As if they weren’t girls themselves because they’d come from away. These Girls, who lived across the road, had things—toys, a game called Trouble. The only problem was you couldn’t understand them. They quacked. We got to know them all, of course, over the years. One of them was gorgeous, lovely, when she was older. But I remember Ma asking if they were Catholic, and Dana saying she didn’t know, and Dad saying, As if it matters, it doesn’t matter here. Ma said she knew it didn’t matter, she was just asking out of curiosity, and what were their names? They were Penny and Olivia and Linda. Ma said, Oh they’re Orangies. With a look of satisfaction on her face.

  ‘Dana and Sharon ran about screaming with The Girls, and then they disappeared again into the mysterious New Zealand house, which was so bright on the outside that the inside looked dark by comparison.’

  ‘Like this one?’

  ‘Well.’ He glanced about the bright front room.

  ‘I mean the back. My workroom.’

  ‘Your workroom. Yes, like that.’

  A little something crossing his face. That day. The doorway. Where I hid him. GoGo, you’re a nutcase.

  He went on: ‘When they came home—Dana and Sharon—they said they’d played another game, Monopoly, which was set in London where the Prods lived but they were buying it up and renting it out at exorbitant prices. I’d never seen them so excited. I hated it, because how could you abandon Clonard, just like that? They told me there were boys along the street, several. They were called The Boys. I went out to the gate and looked up the street. Sure enough.’

  ‘Sure enough!’

  ‘I saw The Boys crossing the road. They were like a pack of urchins, all scruffy. They were white kids, but they were the colour of saveloys. I was too pale, and too well dressed, in my new Liverpool clothes, so I went inside. Eventually I met them all, of course. They were my friends for the next five years. But that day, I thought I looked a right idiot with my pale skin and my new clothes. I’d been part of a gang of Clonard boys and now I was only one boy. Now I was shy, although I hadn’t been before. You know how I felt?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘As if I’d left my skin lying on the road in Clonard. I’d shed a skin.’