He got up from the couch and stood in the middle of the room and the room was purple.

  ‘Of course, they wouldn’t carry everything into the next generation,’ he said. He had his arms folded tightly across his chest. ‘Not in New Zealand. Ma and Dad never understood that. No one warned them—the way you’re warned about malaria if you go to Africa—that New Zealand would take away everything. Everything.

  ‘But Trisha,’ he said, ‘she still had it, with bells on.’

  ‘What? What?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. Eight hundred years of oppression plastered all over her.’ He guffawed. He gawuffed. ‘As I stomped out of the house, Ma pushed the dress into my hands. I didn’t want it. I took it back to the flat and tossed it somewhere. I thought I gave it to Dana or Sharon at some point. I meant to. It certainly wasn’t going to the skinny, buck-toothed girl from Clonard, because I was never marrying her. I asked Rena to marry me.’

  ‘Who the hell is Rena?’

  ‘Previous girlfriend. Long story. She turned me down.’

  ‘Sensible girl,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Under the circumstances.’

  ‘I know. It was okay. Well, it wasn’t. But my next girlfriend I married. Milly.’

  I knew Milly. I knew this part of the story.

  ‘But you didn’t marry Milly just for . . .’

  I mean, he seemed to love her. God knew why. She was Bertha Mason.

  ‘Oh, Milly was great.’ He was pacing again.

  Was.

  ‘Is,’ he said. ‘When I met her she was doing middle-class finishing school.’

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  ‘She lived at home and went wild under her parents’ roof. It drove me nuts. A lot of New Zealand girls were allowed to do this, I noticed. I’d meet a girl and her old man’d be offering me a drink and clapping me on the back in the living room. We’d chat about the weather. Half an hour later I’d be fucking their daughter in her bedroom while they watched TV. There’d be stuffed toys flying off the bed. My parents cared who I married. Milly’s father broke out the champagne when he heard this stranger was going to marry his daughter. I might’ve been a psychopath.’

  He came near the table and looked at me. You had to be close to see, in the dark. I knew where this was going. ‘I suppose your family was like that.’

  I looked up at him. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Just a guess. Were you allowed to go wild?’

  I opened my mouth. Perhaps I could’ve gone wild. Lisa did. I think my parents were the wild ones. Never mind. ‘So the betrothed wasn’t coming, then?’

  ‘Not betrothed!’ He was off again.

  ‘Family fwiend.’

  ‘She didn’t come. It was all off. This was seven, eight years ago. Then, a few months ago, she turned up here.’

  ‘Who paid?’

  ‘She did, I suppose. She had a job. It’s different now. Both England and Ireland joined the EU and it’s been good for them. It was all to do with wealth, or lack of it. It always is. Now they have cafés on the Falls Road. So I hear. And there’ve been peace talks going on.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘Trisha?’ He turned and looked puzzled. ‘You know I did.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  That blowing-out-air mannerism. Which I’d grown to like. It was endearing. ‘I picked her up at the airport because I had a car. Slightly weird—the picking-up—because of the history of matchmaking. Milly even came too. She felt sorry for Trisha. Poor Trisha with the buck teeth.

  ‘As soon as I saw her coming out of Arrivals I knew what was going to happen. She was beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes. Her teeth. It’s funny how something ugly in childhood can become beautiful in an adult. But it wasn’t just that. She’d been around the block a few times, you could tell. She had poise, the most amazing poise. But it wasn’t even that. It was that my parents had picked her out for me, and I wasn’t marrying her. It was the way she smiled at me as if she knew something about me. Which she did. I watched her push her trolley through the airport in her black dress, caught sight of her in the rear-view mirror (she insisted on sitting in the back), and listened to her talk to Milly about the flight, Belfast, about the talks, all the way back into Auckland. She stared back at me in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I had no choice.’

  The old out of my hands routine. Spare me.

  ‘We drove Trisha to my parents’ house. They were a bit shocked by her.’

  ‘But there was Dreadful and Frightful.’

  ‘Dreadful and Frightful were always on the outer. You couldn’t remember a time. But Trisha. She’d been a nice Catholic girl. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I remember looking around for Milly. I was worried she might notice something. I couldn’t find her. Then I saw her sitting in the old paisley chair. For a moment I couldn’t distinguish her from it. She was wearing a paisley dress. I remember thinking, she’s invisible now.’

  He shouldn’t be telling me this. I loved it. ‘Is she still?’ I asked. ‘Invisible.’

  He waited a bit. ‘Almost.’

  He came close to the couch. I could’ve touched his thigh.

  ‘While Milly was kissing my parents goodbye—which they hated, they’ve never got used to all the kissing here—I gave Trisha my card. She took it and crushed it like a leaf. A few days later she called at the office. We had lunch at Rakinos and went to a hotel.’

  I couldn’t bear it. I realised.

  (Yes, I am a bit like that little dog.

  Ha ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.)

  But I wanted to know, I had to know.

  ‘Milly often works late, till ten sometimes, and on those nights I took Trisha to a hotel after work. I know. I’m a terrible person.’ He must have sensed I was on the point of defending him. He put up his hand in denial. ‘No, I’m a shocking person.’

  I didn’t believe his self-abnegation for an instant. He was proud of it.

  ‘There’s more. My father was painting my house. Still is. It’s been going on for months. On the first morning, as I’m going to work—’

  ‘In your yellow jacket.’

  ‘My nice yellow jacket. He’s in his overalls. He says to me, You’ve made something of yourself, son. I thought, Here we go. Sure enough he says, But don’t go thinking the men back home didn’t make something of themselves. And I said, Of course, Dad. He didn’t expect me to understand, he said, but they weren’t nothing just because they didn’t have jobs. And I’m saying, No, of course not. I worked with some great minds, he says. Not myself of course. (Always the modesty, which was real, and why people had liked him.) Not myself, he says. And I say, No, you Dad. And we go back and forth like this, just like we did in the kitchen on his first day of work at the railways. He tells me he knew men with great minds. I tell him I know that, I say they were all great men, given to the cause. I was quoting the words I grew up hearing. And now I have to go to work, Dad. But he says to me, he swings around and says to me, What the hell would you know about it?

  ‘And you know what? Nothing. I know nothing about it. And I’m glad I don’t. I went to work. After work, I brought Trisha back to the house. To the spare room. The woman they picked out for me was my—I don’t know what.’

  ‘Mistress,’ I said. I was certain about this. I’d thought about this, through all the ripping and burning and snagging. ‘Mistress.’

  He smiled. ‘Okay, mistress.’ It sounded odd in his mouth. Prim.

  He’d fucked her in the spare room, was what he was trying to say. How far he’d come, the immigrant kid with the funny accent and the new clothes. Now he had the career, the house, the wife, the mistress. How far he’d come.

  ‘Was it good?’ I asked.

  He shook his head as if to shake off the question.

  ‘I thought she was pretty,’ I said. ‘Her teeth.’

  He ignored me. So politic.

  ‘But you thought you’d be together?’ I asked. I was a dog at a bone.

  ‘Of course. For an evening.’ A shrug.

  ‘The evening of the national costume?’

  He asked me what I meant.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I said. ‘The day it was ripped.’

  ‘Yes, then,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me how it happened.’

  ‘You know how it happened.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘At the house one night,’ he said, ‘she was cold and she was looking for a dressing-gown—’

  ‘She was naked?’

  ‘Well, yeah.’ Shrugged.

  ‘Just checking.’

  ‘She saw the costume hanging in the wardrobe. I told her it was for her. I told her the whole story of how it’d been given to me to give to her. She was amazed. Me? she was saying. Me! She was gobsmacked. She put it on. Actually, it didn’t look too different from what she usually wore. She’s sort of . . .’

  ‘Punk,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s right. You know.’ He was surprised. She’d brought me the dress, all that time ago, the first day of the Blackout. He’d misremembered. ‘Punk. She was getting ready to leave in the costume. She wanted to wear it, you know, out. I didn’t want her to, in case Milly. She said I worried too much, the chances of bumping into Milly on the street. She said it was hers anyway, it’d been given to her. The whole thing was weird. I’d never seen anyone in this dress before, I’d never looked at it before, and now it had come to life—in New Zealand. But it was strange. I tried to stop her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And the rest is history,’ he said. He was a silhouette, a blush of light from the western hills.

  Oh for goodness’ sake. I’m telling the rest of it from here on in.

  •

  He was lying on the bed. Naked. He was naked. He got up and went towards her, his cock bouncing, his shoulder lifted and he grabbed the sleeve. She wrenched away. It was a joke, she was joking with him. He had another go but she kept jerking away. They were laughing. It was a game. She could’ve run out the door but she didn’t. He could’ve held her but he didn’t. She kept dodging away from him, just within his reach. This way, that way. Her dressed, him naked. (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe in reverse, I thought.) It was hilarious. But suddenly it went serious. Suddenly they were in a bubble where there were no rules, no limits. No New Zealand, no Ireland. He grasped her shoulder. She turned to glare at him. Almost hateful, but not. Not. There was a scratchy sound. Like a fart, he said. A fart! All he knew was, he had a flap of the dress in his hand, and her white shoulder was showing through. There was a bunch of threads in his hand. This shocked him. It was like veins, he said. Guts. She said, Oh shit. Then they were laughing again, and back on the bed, and he could feel the embroidery—the knotwork, yes the knotwork—rubbing against him. They probably did it more damage then. Hammer and tongs. Afterwards she said, I’ll go now. He opened the front door for her and she stepped outside wearing the dress, her skin showing through the gaping rip. She put on a cardigan as she went down the path.

  I swallowed, brushed threads off myself, if I could see any threads. ‘Milly saw her in the supermarket,’ I said. ‘She told me that day you were—’

  ‘Yeah, that was the first I knew. You wouldn’t read about it.’ He laughed.

  I felt jealousy leap like a weak, unused muscle. I’d always been so unjealous. People said that to me, friends over the years. GoGo, unjealous to a fault, over Art’s string of women friends. I remembered the last time—in the Michael Fowler Centre, 1993. Yes, I suppose I am a bit like that little dog, and the exaggerated, swollen laughter of the woman.

  ‘Now I know everything about you,’ I said. I expected him to say, no, of course you don’t.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He looked sort of surprised, wide-eyed.

  ‘Good that this is finished then, isn’t it?’ I stood up and pushed the costume into his hands in the dark. ‘I’ll light the lamp.’

  He held it close to his face, turned his head on one side, curious like a bird, and seemed to consider something about it.

  ‘It’s done?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  He let it drop, as if releasing a theatre curtain.

  ‘I don’t know anything about you, though. Do I?’

  ‘No, you do,’ I said. ‘A few things.’

  ‘The strange thing is, there’s no urgency now.’

  ‘Because Wellington?’

  ‘Because of the Blackout.’

  ‘That’s the first time you’ve mentioned the Blackout.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It is.’

  He smiled. I followed suit.

  ‘Because it may be too late,’ he said. ‘Maybe always was.’

  I was trembling. I was. I said, ‘Tell me again, is part of all this that you might end up together? There might be no going back?’

  A beat, as they say, in a screenplay. I was close and could feel his warmth. He looked dazed. I prompted him: ‘No choice. Out of my hands.’

  The client seemed to come to. ‘Yes. Of course. Otherwise.’

  ‘Otherwise why do it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A strange energy rushed through me. ‘I need to wrap this,’ I said.

  ‘I remember you said that, that day.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘And you went to wrap it.’

  ‘Did I? I’ll wrap it now.’

  ‘’Kay,’ he said. Just the ’kay, not even that, the click. I remember that.

  In the passage it was a bit lighter because the front door was open. A mauvish colour came in. He followed me down to the workroom. I could feel his footsteps on the floorboards. The Wah Lee lightshade passed overhead like a moon. I turned in the doorway. We fell together suddenly just inside the door, in the metre space between the table and the door. Half a thought, that it wasn’t right, because of the others, the other parties, but finding I was lost in his mouth for a long period of time and that it was impossible to let go, even if you might decide to let go, several times, because of the other parties. You could never break off. There was no human power strong enough. Our clothes gone somehow, out of the way, pants yanked, skirt pushed up all bundily, shirt open, belt fumbled undone. Then disappearing into it, all your body parts, your thumping heart, your limbs, neck, arse, tits, all gone from the known world. His name coming out of your mouth. Shane. Later wondering at which exact point there was no choice about what would happen next. Out of my blinking hands. And in the mirror later, getting undressed, twisting to find small bruises like rare moths on your back from the bones mashing against the workroom table but being unable to remember any pain.

  Skin

  30

  I was looking down a road and there must’ve been rain recently because it was shiny, a silk road. The seal was bumpy, textured, and as I squinted into the distance I saw that the road looped in a paisley or perhaps a koru shape like a road on the side of a hill. By the side of the road were bundles of something bristly laid out at regular intervals as if ready to feed animals or to thatch a roof. Inside the loop were other roads just the same, concentric, getting smaller and smaller like Russian dolls. And like Russian dolls, each one was perfect in detail; although perhaps as it all got very tiny, they weren’t quite so perfect. I know, I’m mixing patterns and metaphors like nobody’s business—Indian, Maori, Russian, where will it end? But this was our familiar old red brocade couch, and I’d never seen it up so close.

  The client came back. Even though I’d pushed the costume, all finished, into his hands on the way out the door, he came back the next day. He said hi and I said hi and we stopped for a minute, fell against each other in the passage and toppled onto the floor, then moved into the front room where I kicked the door shut and swished the curtains across. It was like cinema during the day. He swallowed me.

  After that, he came back again and again. At first I numbered every time—workroom, passage wall, red couch, floor—then I lost count. I could give you details, but I don’t want to be self-centred. Suffice to say I had a very exciting idyll, when secrecy was my jacket and lies my skirt, not to get too flowery about it. There were other things going on, which I’ll get on to, but this glory was the main thing, even though I told myself every morning not to. I said—as I carefully picked out my clothes—GoGo, you fool, you’re riding for a fall. I proceeded as if it were temporary, for several reasons. One, I knew how the client operated. Two, the Blackout would come to an end and his wife would come flapping back from Wiggytown like a homing pigeon. The client told me he’d hung the costume in the wardrobe, all prepared for that very day. As if I cared a hoot. He hadn’t mentioned putting it on the wardrobe floor and trampling it underfoot—the original plan, but perhaps redundant if his wife happened to notice the finished sleeve. He hadn’t noticed it, of course.

  And number three was blinking obvious: I had a husband. Who I didn’t want to deceive, but I had no choice. It was out of my hands. And so now I started on my period of deceit. I liked the secrecy. In the beginning I liked it.

  I liked that he was wiry and heavy, light and dark, smooth and rough, gentle and unpredictable. He was a whole bundle of dichotomies. I know, book me in for a lobotomy.

  I went with the client into paradise.

  •

  In the mornings I couldn’t wait for Art to leave the house. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Things were a bit high-strung. For a start I had adopted sex-avoidance techniques like suddenly getting busy late at night, or falling into bed yawning at nine o’clock. I tried so hard to be normal, it must have looked like a neurosis. Over breakfast we would go back and forth about the news a little bit, and then I would wave him off like a fifties housewife, smiling my gory smile. I’d never done this. I was a nineties housewife. As he got smaller and smaller, disappearing down the path and onto the street, I would stand in the mandolin, its grey light. A layer of brightness had been stripped away as if with a flat knife. I was twitchy, ecstatic. I was on something. When Art was completely gone—no chance of him returning for a forgotten thing, Frantz flipping Fanon f’rinstance—I would go into the bedroom and whirl clothes about. I was a character in a sitcom. A flockcom, seeing we were as far from a nuclear family as a split atom. Nothing went with anything, of course. The agony. That had always been the case, but now I really cared. What I’d discovered about my clothes was, they were nice, but they were intellectual. A Russian constructivist would like them, if you get my drift. What I wanted was sexy. There were a few things. A vintage fifties dress, a wafty op-shop blouse. Anyway.