I looked at the client. He was frosty, but couldn’t resist a smile. This was one of the wined-and-dined aprons. Wined-and-washed. A little dancing. I was trying not to laugh.

  Mabel was packing the aprons away into a box. ‘These are great by the way, wonderful, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I’ve had a wonderful idea for an eighties line, I’m quite excited about it. I think we’re far enough out from them to look at them, don’t you? Generally it was an ugly decade—I mean shoulders, my Gahd.’ Mabel mimed vomiting. ‘But also, beauty isn’t everything. A little ugliness, like the zest of a lemon. Mm.’ Mabel flung her bunched fingers out from her mouth. ‘So I’m thinking eighties for Spring 1999. No, I’m serious!’

  It was our laughter.

  ‘I’ll do the burst bubble. I’ll do tatters. In fact, people did wear tatters. I wore the odd tatter myself. Ripped tights and T-shirts. The op-shop greatcoats. It’s going to be the stripping down, the flaying, of everything. Hence . . .’ She spread her hands as if to indicate the air around us. ‘Has anyone heard what’s going on, by the way, with the cables? I’m just hanging out for power again. Give me power!’

  We shrugged. Well, I did.

  ‘But the eighties, when they sold off everything, my Gahd. But it did bring us kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.’ Here Mabel turned to the client. ‘It’s so easy to wipe things off as a bad deal, but there’s always new growth, it’s the way the world goes around. I remember when they sold the buses, the post office, the hospitals, the elec-tric ser-vice!’ wailed Mabel. ‘Ay-ay-ay! But we can celebrate this. You might not even remember this, GoGo. And I don’t know how old you are . . .’ A flirtatious rolling of the eyes in the client’s direction. ‘I’m not holding you up, am I?’

  The client folded his hands and looked at Mabel. ‘I remember when they sold the railways.’

  ‘Oh, you do?’ said Mabel. ‘Shocking business.’

  ‘My dad was the first to go.’

  ‘The poor darling,’ said Mabel.

  The client frowned at me. If he’d known I was leading him on—well, Doris in Kingsland. He would’ve fired me. I was fired!

  ‘Unqualified,’ he went on, to Mabel, ‘middle-aged, last on board.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Sponged off my mother.’ He was performing for her, a monkey.

  ‘The poor sausage.’ Mabel clicked her tongue.

  The client was calm. ‘It fit like a glove.’

  I shook my head. ‘The little bourgeois troubles we have.’

  ‘Oh, I know!’ said Mabel. ‘Don’t talk to me about bourgeois. Don’t think I don’t struggle against it every day of my life. In this business, you have to be vigilant about that sort of thing, believe me.’

  ‘I have bourgeois troubles,’ said the client, and enjoyed the slight flush that came onto Mabel’s face. ‘What d’you call this?’ Indicating the costume. And he looked at me, confronting, but funny. I almost laughed.

  Mabel followed his gaze and snatched up the costume from the table. ‘What is this?’

  ‘It’s his,’ I said. I was tidying up the scraps. I’d finished. The costume was finished. ‘It was his mother’s. All the way from Ireland.’

  ‘What a gorgeous thing!’ said Mabel. She fingered the shoulder. ‘What’ve you been doing to it, GoGo?’

  I caught my breath. Doing to it? Was the ripping of the shoulder the night of the dinner party, the subsequent mending like a slow train—was it written all over it?

  ‘Did you mend it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Here.’ I showed Mabel. ‘I reattached the shoulder, I repaired the knotwork.’

  Mabel ran her fingers over the glittery mass of silk. ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Long story,’ I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the client purse his lips.

  ‘Utterly gorgeous.’ Mabel smiled at the client. He smiled back, and blushed in a bamboozled way—such fuss over a dress. Mabel ran her hand over one embroidered sleeve, then the other. She noticed that one was different at the cuff, I could tell by the way she looked from one to the other. I hoped she wouldn’t say anything. At this point, especially after the client knew that I’d put the aprons ahead of this job, I’d look foolish if it was discovered that I’d gone beyond the call of duty as well.

  ‘It’s not authentic, of course,’ said Mabel, ‘but still nice. Still very nicely done.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, on autopilot.

  Thank you! Mabel was going to spill the beans. Oh well, I’d been expecting to be sprung every day for the last two weeks. I began to rehearse, in my head, what I would say: how I couldn’t bear to leave the sleeve unfinished (which was partly true), how, once I knew something of the costume’s past, I regarded it as an heirloom, just like Milly did. I understood that now. Even after my pretty speech—the client would go away annoyed that I’d spent so long doing work that didn’t need to be done, and that I’d actually made things worse. Because now, Milly would definitely notice. But I wouldn’t give a rat’s arse, because I’d probably never see this person again in my life, or only by accident because Auckland wasn’t a very big place—

  But Mabel was going on.

  ‘Not the authenticity of your repairs—that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? I’m talking about the authenticity of the garment. It’s not historically authentic. It’s a reiteration of something that never was, and therefore how can it be a reiteration?’

  Oh, not my overenthusiastic patch-up job, but the costume per se.

  ‘Not authentic?’ I said, bristling, ready to defend the client. His mother and the dancing club, the box they took on the ferry—his rich culture going way back. Not authentic! The client didn’t flinch, of course. I needn’t have bothered.

  Mabel shook her head. ‘It’s not as if Irish women ran around in embroidered dresses with capes attached to them. No, they dressed very plainly. In fact, there were sumptuary laws. Only the wealthy were allowed to look wealthy. That’s why the poor needed to go all sumptuous later, when they got the chance. Who wouldn’t? Come to think of it, history has been one big rollercoaster of sumptuary and sumptuary laws. But this,’ said Mabel, pushing her glasses back to inspect the knotwork again, and again humming over the discrepancy between the sleeves, ‘this is a product of the industrial revolution. Not this exact dress, of course, but the design. It was the textile mills. Suddenly a poor woman could have something fancy. Yeah, so, post-industrial, and not authentic. But still nice, still wonderful. Aren’t you lucky?’ Mabel turned to the client. ‘It’ll be an heirloom, this, won’t it, even though it’s not authentic?’

  The client shrugged, but looked bemused, pleased.

  ‘Of course it is!’ said Mabel. ‘And what else do we have to hand down? If we have children, that is. Myself, I seem to be waiting until I need artificial insemination. The choices we have! My fifties line, on the other hand, I mean talk about no choice—do you want to come to the opening, by the way? Bring a friend.’ Mabel dug two flyers out of her bag and handed them to the client. He nodded thanks, and Mabel continued, ‘We’re celebrating the fifties women who went to live in the suburbs after the war. The sponge cake, the tomatoes on the windowsill, the antidepressants, the apron! Thank Gahd the venue is outside the Blackout zone otherwise we’d simply die. No person waits for fashion. I’d better get going, hadn’t I? Will you come?’

  ‘Hopefully,’ said the client. ‘I’ll talk to my wife. Thank you.’

  Meaning not a snowball’s chance.

  Mabel left in a cloud of cartons, words, silk skirt, black-rimmed glasses.

  When she’d gone, I was as honest as I’d ever been.

  29

  The atmosphere was unbearable, somehow dehydrated, gasping. To break the silence, for no other reason because it was blinking obvious, he said, ‘I didn’t need to be coming all this time, did I?’

  He was close, his skin. The table for support. I could smell him, cigarettes, ironed shirt. His face was hyper-real, blurry, like a Roy Lichtenstein. I wanted to touch it. I didn’t. He seemed to come out of a trance, and did his puffing thing. Twice. His fingertips on the table. He shook his head. It was all over.

  ‘Don’t you want me to tell you about the girl from Clonard?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Come on. He was screaming to tell it.

  ‘May as well then,’ I said.

  I was pulsing. The costume fell from the back of a chair onto the floor. I left it there and led him over to the couch. We sat at either end of it, perched like Victorians. Mr Rochester, Jane Eyre.

  I give up. He’s telling it.

  He looked at me. ‘They hoped I’d marry the girl from Clonard. This is about 1990. Ma always fought off the non-Catholic girlfriends with a stick.’

  I opened my mouth.

  He smiled. ‘With pursed lips. You have to hand it to her, she was a good fighter. If I didn’t find a Catholic girl in Auckland, they’d get me one from back home where there was an endless supply. There was a tap in Clonard running with Catholic girls and all you needed to do was line up with a bucket.’

  Oh, a bucket.

  ‘But why this girl?’

  I got up to pour wine that was open on the sideboard and handed it to him.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘It’s eight o’clock.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Eight o’clock.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Uncle Vanya. But why Trisha?’

  He shrugged. ‘I misremember.’

  He misremembered!

  ‘They knew her parents? They were Catholic? That was enough.’ He stopped, then added, ‘It ran deep. It ran very deep.

  ‘There’d been letters. From her ma, and she was coming to New Zealand. Trisha. I remembered her. Buck-toothed Trisha. Now she was grown up and had a job and everything. There were jobs. She had a sunny nature, her ma said in a letter. My ma read it out. I remember that, a sunny nature.’

  He laughed. I laughed. I’d met Trisha, after all.

  ‘She did Irish dancing, and she’d turned into a beauty. Strange thing, the day I heard about this girl, I also came to blows with my father. I was visiting the house, having a cup of tea, hanging around like a spare limb. I always felt like a hulking teenager, compared to my dad (who starved as a child). Ma sat at the kitchen table and read me the letter from Trisha’s mother. I was living in this wonderful country, teeming with New Zealand girls. I was doing my degree, and had just bought a car.’

  I wondered how a student could afford a car and he said he made it his business.

  ‘A Mazda 626. Blue.’

  Blue. I smiled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So I thought I’d drive the new car out to see Ma and Dad. Who were on the bones of their arse. Ma with her letter, and Dad in his chair all day with his fags and his ashtray and his cup of tea, set up like a hospital trolley. Leaping sky-high every time there was a siren.’

  ‘Wait. The paisley chair?’

  ‘The paisley chair, poor bastard. Lungs rotting to hell. All day smoking and listening to the radio news, every hour on the hour. In case there was a tidal wave or parliament was dissolved or something. Five o’clock he’d start on the TV news. Anyway, Ma was telling me about Trisha’s sunny nature, Dad was watching the news, when suddenly he stood up, knocking his trolley-load—the necessities of life—onto the carpet, and he was yelling blue murder. Ma and I came running in. We thought something terrible had happened. Dad was jumping up and down, pointing at the screen yelling, Conlon’s on the TV! It’s Gerry Conlon.

  ‘I’m thinking, fine, who? Dad says fucking Gerry Conlon is what I’m telling you. So I ask who’s Gerry Conlon when he’s at home, even though I sort of knew. But I was sick of it, I was sick of the whole thing. Dad was foaming at the mouth—the Guildford Four, you don’t know about the Guildford Four? They were wrongly convicted, in like 1975 or something. They’d just had their convictions quashed. When the ads came on Dad turned to Ma and he’s going, How can he not know about the Guildford Four? And Ma was saying, How would he? He was a boy. Dad put his head in his hands and he was mumbling about the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven, who were related. Gerry Conlon’s father Giuseppe, an aunt and two teenage sons, all put away, all innocent. Dad looked up and he said, Do you want to know what they did to them, down in London, to get them to sign the confession? I said I didn’t want to know. Dad said, I’m fucking sure you don’t. They were accused of running a bomb factory. The mother of these lads, running a bomb factory in her kitchen in London. She served fourteen years. Giuseppe Conlon never saw the light of day again. Dad turned back to Ma. Does he really not know? Ma said, Leave the lad alone. Lad! Dad was spitting. He’s twenty! Actually, I was nineteen. Ma went back to the kitchen. Dad was still shaking his head and wittering on, For pity’s sake, he doesn’t know anything.

  ‘I went right up to his face and I said, You’re not there anymore, Dad. You’re here. We came here so you wouldn’t be shot in the street like Mr O’Connell. That’s why we came here in the first fucking place. He said, That’s rubbish for a start. It was for you we came here, for you and the girls. I would’ve died willingly. Every day I was ready to die for Ireland. But no. We had to come here, here—he meant the room, the room with the chair from the side of the road, the TV and the carpet. We came here for you.

  ‘I told him we came here because he was a murderer.

  ‘Ma bleated from the doorway—Shane! Well, he was, I said, he murdered someone, didn’t he? In the July twelfth parade. He was a wanted man. That’s why we were here, wasn’t it?

  ‘It all went slow-motion in the room—silent, but the TV still going. He looked me full in the face and said he had. He spat it out. He’d taken out an Orangie and he was proud of it.

  ‘At that point I swung my fist at him. He ducked. I was pathetic. Well, he was the hero from the lane, and I was the university student. I hated him to hell. The news was back on. He turned away to watch the news, which had background stuff on the Maguires. I was sick of it. I couldn’t stand it. I said, That’s right, go back to the telly. You’re like a little working-class fucking Englishman, with your chair and your telly and your ashtray. (This is what I said, all in my New Zealand accent. At home I could always hear my own accent.) I felt like dusting my hands. I’d been crucified at school for being a Pom, and I’d called him an Englishman. He was purple with rage, literally purple, and he was pushing his face right up to me. I thought he was going to hit me, so I swung at him again and this time I hit him in the mouth. It was as hard as a doorpost. He sort of staggered backwards onto the chair and looked up at me with this incredulous expression on his face. I couldn’t believe it either. Me, his son! I’d won.

  ‘Ma came running in, all upset. She told me I should go, and I said I’d go alright, and I’d never come back. She said she didn’t mean that. But I meant it. I said I was never setting foot in there again. Ma was all, you know, crying, and went out of the room.

  ‘I put some money on the kitchen table, which I often did. Ma cleaned houses. That’s how they survived. They didn’t go on the benefit because Dad kept a low profile. He was still terrified of being extradited. I’d give Ma a hundred dollars, and make sure Dad saw it, the red note. Even when I was a student I earned more in a year than he’d earned in a lifetime. Dad called out—he was still holding his chin—You can keep your fucking money! And your fancy car. But he looked sort of broken. I felt sorry for him. I remember he looked down at the chair as if he’d just noticed it. Then back at me. He said he should’ve been there, with Bobby Sands, and with the Conlons and the Maguires. And I would’ve been, he said, if I hadn’t brought you and your sisters to this godforsaken fucking place! God, I hated him. Then he was watching the news again, not Gerry Conlon, but some other catastrophe. And I repeated, I’m never coming back.’

  •

  The client was pacing around the room. Wound up like a spring. He looked back at me, and I felt an odd tremor because there was this anger coming off him. He came up and jabbed a finger at the costume. I didn’t like it.

  ‘What?’ I said. I glared at him.

  ‘Nothing.’ He turned away.

  ‘So you never went back?’

  ‘Of course I went back.’ As if this was a ludicrous suggestion, but he’d said it. There was more. ‘Ma came back into the room and she had something—guess what?’

  I shrugged. I was screaming to know.

  ‘She said if I was going I should take this.’

  ‘What, the costume?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘She said when I got married, it’d be for my wife. It was this Trisha thing, she hadn’t given up on it. In the other room, I could see Dad watching us. He turned off the TV, you know like shooting it to death, load of fucking rubbish.’

  ‘I bet you couldn’t even see it,’ I said. I felt all jangly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The costume, of course, what are we talking about?’

  ‘It was a dress,’ he said, his hands outlining one in the air.

  ‘That’s a terrible dress,’ I said. ‘I’d never wear that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ He looked at me.

  ‘No,’ I said. It sort of all went quiet. I blushed.

  Then he was off again. ‘I told Ma one of the girls should have it, of course. But then I remembered Ma had tried to get them to do Irish dancing when they were young, but they wouldn’t have a bar of it and she’d given up. Never, she said, sort of darkly. The dress was for my wife.’

  ‘Trisha,’ I said.

  ‘Not that it was for my wife.’

  ‘What? Pardon?’

  ‘It was for a grandchild, the first girl grandchild, of course, Catholic. Who would carry everything into the next generation.’

  The costume really was an heirloom. It did have some meaning beyond itself. The wool, the silk, the knotwork, they weren’t just materials. I’d held it in my hands, in my lap. Okay, GoGo, don’t get carried away. But it was something. I’d torn it, for God’s sake. For I-don’t-know-what.