‘Oh, you think we very probably should, do you?’ parroted Issy. ‘You don’t give a fuck about the Murus!’

  Art turned the colour of pomegranates. ‘I do, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘And you.’ Issy turned on me.

  I was rattled by this. I mean, I was the Bert figure. ‘This is nothing to do with me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh really?’ said Issy. ‘Why don’t you go and give them a hundred dollars?’

  I think my mouth fell open. The story of the street kid had obviously done the rounds of the family. It felt like something creeping on me to know they’d been talking about me.

  ‘Cut it out, Issy,’ said Art. He stood up from the couch. He had assumed a sort of parental authority that didn’t sit well on him. He was struggling—his smooth face.

  ‘Yes, that’s enough,’ echoed Prue. I thought she cast a brief, guilty glance in my direction, but this may have been far-fetched of me.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. Even with my stinging ego, I knew this wasn’t my business. Brother and sister were still glaring at each other.

  Prue put her hand on Issy’s arm. ‘It isn’t the right time, dear. We’ll tell them in due course.’

  Issy shrugged her mother off. ‘Due course! I’m going to tell Mrs Muru.’

  ‘Issy!’ shouted Prue.

  ‘Try and stop me,’ said Issy. She looked ferocious.

  Prue drew in her breath. ‘Alright, I will. If you tell her, you will not get a cent from here.’ She slumped a bit. ‘What’s left of it.’

  Issy reared back as if Prue had hit her. ‘That old trick. You never tire of it, do you?’

  Bert came in through the French doors. ‘Dear!’

  ‘That’s a bit unnecessary, isn’t it, Mother?’ said Art.

  Prue waved away the objections. ‘I’m not having the staff looking for other jobs at this . . . terrible, terrible point. When there’s still a possibility.’

  There was a long, poisonous lull. This was it, this was the unspoken thing that had always been there, I suppose, but I’d never seen it in action. I looked at Art. He’d hung his head. Shame, that’s what he would be feeling. He respected his parents. Issy argued and trashed them, but Art—well, he loved them. He really did. There was no way out.

  Issy sank down onto the couch beside me, put her arm over her face and cried. It was a strange, lonely sound. The others stared dumbly. I didn’t know if I was meant to comfort Issy, seeing I was sitting right next to her. I’m not very good at that sort of thing, and also I anticipated being flung off if I tried. I sat still while Issy sobbed. ‘It’s not the money,’ she wailed, ‘it’s the abuse of power.’ Actually, I thought it was about the money.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Prue.

  Art seemed to expand like a bird fluffs its feathers. Everyone looked at him. Issy’s crying petered out. Art cleared his throat and announced in a formal way, ‘Mum, Dad, I’m going to tell Mrs Muru what’s happening.’

  The silence and the light seemed timeless—could’ve been right then, could’ve been 1900. Art walked stiffly to the door, his upright stride, and turned back to the room. I’d never seem him cross his parents before, and part of me loved what was unfolding. I wasn’t sure he should be doing this. Maybe the client was right—having the Murus walk off the job could kill the business, and then there really would be no work. I didn’t know. But even as I admired Art’s stand, there was something else, the way Issy and Art could make these grand statements. Somehow it got up my nose.

  Prue stood quivering, and spoke in her raspy voice. ‘I mean what I say. If you tell her, you will not get a brass razoo.’

  Art took one final glance at us all assembled—his eyes grazed mine—and then he could be heard haring down the passage. As the kitchen door opened and closed there was a snippet of dishes being twanged into a dishwasher, and the sound of Art’s sonorous voice.

  ‘I suppose our walk’s off,’ said Bert.

  Issy blew her nose and turned on him. ‘You callous, callous old man.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ shouted Prue. She sailed out the French doors. Bert followed.

  Issy got up quickly. She turned and said to me, ‘You should be worried. Your comfortable little life could be gone.’ She almost ran out the door to the passage and I listened to her thumping up the stairs. Then it was just me in the drawing room. I walked around looking at toothy photos of Art and Issy when they were kids, vases, the grand piano. What Issy had said was so untrue, of course. My life wasn’t even that comfortable. I peered through the French doors at Prue and Bert having an agitated conversation beside the round garden. I felt all jangly, which surprised me. It wasn’t my family. But it seemed like the light in the hall might be going out.

  •

  Half an hour later I saw Mrs Muru flapping down the drive in her raincoat, although it wasn’t raining. I sidled along the passage and peered in at the kitchen, out of curiosity. I’d never been in there before. There were long wooden benches, a tiled table, an enormous china cabinet. It was all gleaming and tidy, every copper pot on its hook, every plate on its shelf.

  Coming back into the hall, I jumped when I saw the figure of Grandma Woolthamly. She said she wanted to go home. I looked around. No one else was coming in from the garden, or out from behind doors.

  ‘Do you mean the care facility?’ I asked. I mean, I wanted to be sure, under the circumstances.

  ‘Of course!’ snapped Grandma Woolthamly. ‘What else would I mean?’

  I was still gaping when Art appeared from somewhere. I thought he’d be feeling on top of the world after standing up to Prue, but he was aloof, distant. For some reason it looked like cling wrap covered his face. All the same, we angled Grandma Woolthamly back into her linen coat, with Art bleating, Grandma, no Grandma, and delivered her to the care facility while the sun was still high in the sky. Then we continued on, threading back through the green blur. I drove. There was silence. No Bic Runga, no Don McGlashan.

  Around Raglan I said, because otherwise I would burst, ‘You won’t really be cut out of the will, will you?’ Art didn’t answer immediately, and I thought he went a bit purple. I couldn’t exactly look at him—driving is like sewing that way.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you’re not being cut out, it’s just a gesture. Maybe you’ve actually done the Murus out of a job, I don’t know. But you don’t know either.’

  ‘It wasn’t just a gesture. I meant it.’

  The coast was rugged, it is around there. I normally love the way the waves crash in.

  ‘Anyway, that’s a bit rich, coming from you,’ he said.

  ‘Me?’ I squeaked, and he said just concentrate on the driving. Fair enough. Didn’t want to go off the cliff.

  ‘Yes, you,’ he said, after a while.

  I took the opportunity to remind him that the family had been talking about me—the street kid business—which wasn’t very nice.

  In my peripheral vision I saw the blur of him shaking his head. ‘That’s nothing to do with this.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ I said.

  After a few miles it did occur to me that the reason I had a hundred-dollar note dilly-dallying in my purse to give to the street kid in the first place was my low living expenses, thanks to the Woolthamlys. But there were strings attached. I more than paid my way in fixed smiles.

  •

  As we pulled up outside the villa conversion, tenants from another of the villas were leaving, their rented trailer piled high like the Beverley Hillbillies. In the half-dark, they rolled away and waved as if they knew us. The street was very quiet. We cracked open the villa conversion. Its thick smell of mould and dust rushed to greet us. I called Bell but she didn’t come. She didn’t come and she didn’t come. I went like a zombie down the passage, my arms out in front of me, calling, Bell!

  She never came home, by the way. We never saw her again.

  It was still tense—I know, it was silly—and I plumped down at the kitchen table like Lady Muck and watched Art ferry things in from the boot. I couldn’t be stuffed helping. On one of his trips he stood and looked at me with a box in his arms. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. But I thought about it and added, ‘Except you Woolthamlys are all horrible.’ Well, I was sick of it.

  ‘I suppose you’re worried about the inheritance.’

  I think I gasped, but there was something freeing about hearing it said. Even Art looked shocked. It was complicated. It wasn’t my inheritance, but it was. I was spluttering. ‘No one can belong to the Woolthamlys who isn’t a blood relation. I’ll never be one of the family as long as I live. Same for your poor fucking father.’ Yes, fucking.

  Art shook his head, he said that wasn’t true.

  ‘Everyone feels sorry for him,’ I said. I was cruel. But I had more. ‘Soon there’ll be no Woolthamlys anymore. They’ll be extinct. Good job.’

  Art’s face, looking down at me, was something from the fruit-drying plant. He lowered his voice. ‘You make out like you despise materialism, yet you want an easy life. You want to do a nice little job at home, while the Woolthamly estate keeps you. You want this inheritance more than I do.’

  ‘I don’t!’ I yelled. ‘I don’t want a cent of your poxy squattocracy money!’

  I hadn’t thought of this before. But I didn’t. I really didn’t.

  It seemed that my little business, my low income, had got under his skin all this time, yet he’d never said anything. That was what got me most, that he’d thought thoughts and hadn’t said them. Later it occurred to me that I’d thought thoughts and hadn’t said them, and I’d done things and hadn’t said them.

  Art moved things around in the kitchen and said he didn’t want to listen to any more of my crap, he couldn’t be bothered talking. I said, Don’t then, and he said, I won’t. I told him he talked shit anyway. Absolute shite.

  But I had one more thing to say, something important.

  ‘I thought you’d seen something wonderful. But you hadn’t.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ He turned from the bench.

  ‘The day the power went out, you walked home and you said all these people were walking together and talking to each other and supporting each other.’

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Did you take notes?’

  ‘I remember it,’ I said. ‘Why talk about things like that if you don’t mean it? It’s just ideas, and it’s meaningless.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘you tell me. Because that’s exactly what you do.’ He folded his arms and said, sort of pompously, as if he were lecturing English 100, ‘It’s the Blackout. Everyone’s acting strangely. The Blackout is making everyone behave differently.’

  ‘That’s garbage,’ I said.

  ‘And you know what?’ he said. ‘I don’t give a fuck about this inheritance.’

  I believed him. But it didn’t change anything. ‘Your grand gesture about the Murus was for nothing after all,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ He stopped pacing and turned to me. ‘It wasn’t for nothing. I discovered that you’re different. There’s something about you, different.’

  A bolt went through me. ‘Maybe I am,’ I said, sounding like I smoked.

  It had all got out of hand. I know it was ridiculous. Art had just made a stand, perhaps kissed his inheritance goodbye, and we were having an argument.

  At this point I felt like I did when I thought I was looking at Auckland for the first time. Like it had popped up out of the mist, and might disappear again. Or I might. Now I wandered into the passage. He called after me, Where are you going? I didn’t answer, but went out to the back doorstep. I sat there fuming and looking out into the blackness. And you know what? I’m sure I saw something. I thought I did, something I hadn’t seen before. Something was revealed. In the core of the darkness was a treasure. Yes, a taonga. Wellington was up, Auckland was down. South was up, north was down. The carefully planted villa garden was a wilderness. Shakespeare was no longer Shakespeare. The neighbours through the wall were seen for the first time just as they left. Fine motor skills resulted in things coming apart. You could hold darkness in your hands. You could smell it, eat it, you could cover your face with it. It seemed there had never been real darkness before, no one had had the full force of darkness upon them. But now, there it was, darkness staring you right in the eye.

  I knew what I was going to do, and I had no earthly reason.

  •

  In the morning, a bit fragile, I put on a blouse, teal, flimsy, bloody Trelise Cooper. There’d never been an occasion important enough to wear it. (I hadn’t known quite what to wear it with though. Jeans.) It was Monday, the seventeenth day of the Blackout.

  28

  He came in. He had flowers, a mixed bunch from the dairy, but nice. ‘About Thursday . . .’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  I went to put them in water. When I came back I asked, ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Am I finished?’ He gawuffed. ‘I thought, Are you finished? was the question.’

  ‘No. Yes.’

  He said, ‘Now you know why I didn’t marry a girl from Clonard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Hah!’

  I did know, of course. Because he was in the New World.

  It would be done today, couldn’t help it. The costume.

  He cooled his heels in the middle of the front room while I stitched over and over into the same spot, running on the spot; an Exercycle. Then sat down at the table. I was aware of him, his hefty torso, good for rugby, for felling the opposition. He’d chosen a wife that way, I knew that, like an All-Black scores a try, falling into the mud clutching her while spectators roared. For this, I suppose, he’d required a New Zealand woman. I smiled at the thought.

  ‘What?’

  I shrugged. ‘What you’re going to do.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Still hide this thing?’ I held up the costume. ‘At the bottom of the wardrobe? Trample it underfoot?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  But he would. And it would be picked up and hung on a hanger. His messy life, his great life. He had everything—streetwise roots and a tertiary education; sob stories about poverty and a high-paying job; a Kiwi accent and an Irish turn of phrase; the beliefs of his parents and the freedom to trash them; a wife and a mistress. Everything. An Irish costume, and the wreck of it.

  How far he’d come; he’d come so freaking far.

  But I knew, I knew. His lovely little immigrant package—every bloody thing—contained the seeds of its own destruction. He’d find this out soon enough. At least, his grandchildren would.

  I’m the grandchild. I am.

  ‘It may be too late for trampling,’ he said.

  Something leaped in me. A sort of hope. The wind.

  I might have kissed him again, right then. ‘How was your weekend?’ I asked.

  ‘Good. How was yours?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘How’s the fruit farm?’ Sarcastic as hell.

  ‘Fine,’ I tootled. ‘Well, actually . . .’

  ‘What?’ He was intent.

  I told him how the Japanese had pulled out. I was sewing the blinking air. The whole deal? he asked, and I said, Yes, the whole blinking deal. The poor Woolthamlys, I said, and he said, The poor Woolthamlys. I told him how the Woolthamlys were firing their workers. They’re firing them? Yes, every last one. The poor stinking rich Woolthamlys, he said. We laughed. They would likely sell the business, I said. Really? said the client. Yes, really, I said. They’d had an offer. He said, Is that so, and I said, So.

  ‘And what about Milly?’ I asked.

  ‘Milly? Yeah. They’ve dug in in Wellington, her firm. Till the end of the Blackout.’

  ‘So there’s no desperate hurry,’ I said.

  He waited a moment, then laughed.

  Even I laughed this time.

  What I realised: I had no choice now, it was out of my hands.

  ‘But it’s finished anyway.’

  ‘It is. It’s finished. I’ll wrap it.’

  ‘’Kay.’

  No earthly reason.

  •

  At that point that Mabel arrived, thumping over the springy veranda, bashing on the open front door. ‘It’s me!’

  Me. It was endearing. I wish I were ‘me’. She was halfway into her monologue before she reached the front room—more aprons, she had more aprons even though there was no desperate hurry but she thought she may as well drop them off on her way home. She stopped when she saw the pile of already-worked aprons, smiled. Then glanced at the client.

  I introduced him. After the don’t mind me, Mabel took up where she’d left off.

  ‘How’d you get through these so quickly? Not that I’m complaining. My God no, the girls can get on with them. But I didn’t expect (isn’t she efficient?),’—directed at the client, who was still arranged at the table—‘expect them for another few days.’

  Then the look on his face. Puzzlement, and the residue of surprise at being included in Mabel’s conversation. His eyes slid over to me, narrowly, and retreated again. He was mulling, I supposed. Quickly? The aprons are early? But the costume. The costume is late.

  Well, what did he expect? Honesty? Straightforwardness? This was all about deceit. Deceit was why we were there.

  Mabel was starting up again, addressing the room, the client, me, the slant of the sun. ‘This theme,’ she was saying, ‘has taken off in directions I’d never dreamed of. That’s the way it works, I suppose, creativity. It happens in your sleep, don’t you find? This is so coming together I almost can’t bear it.’ An aside to the client, by way of explanation, ‘The fifties. We’re having a show. Hence the aprons. They were hard times, but boom times, well, the beginning of boom times. Not exactly booming for everyone, but everyone expected a job—except the women, of course. Everyone expected a section. Milk in schools. Apples. But it all came with work, bloody hard work. Hence the aprons. My mother used to get up at half past five in the morning . . .’ Mabel stopped and brought an apron up to her black-rimmed glasses—a slight hesitation, the furrowing of the brow.