Then I would have all day. Did I mention Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations was on the verge of collapse? Perhaps I would ratchet it up again, perhaps I wouldn’t. I hadn’t had a client for weeks. The upshot was, I read the odd novel. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, for instance, about the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre, why she was mad—when I could tear my thoughts away from my own little roman à clef, that is. I must say I thought about the client quite a bit.

  •

  Around seven o’clock he would arrive. As per usual, you might think, and you’d be right. The Wah Lee moon would shift on the breeze from the front door. We’d kiss on the doorstep. The audacity—it was like petrol. The sun in our hair first, then plummeting in the bay window. Then curtains again. It was after hours. I knew the feeling of his mouth on my neck. His body crushing me and then rolling over, me sitting astride him and spilling myself onto him on the rug. Up close he had a lovely upper lip, its tender shape. I moved onto his body like an immigrant, carved out a new life on terra incognita; his torso, my sweat, his arms and legs, my arse (yes, my arse). He tasted like me now, his mouth, skin, wetness. My hand on his bristly hairline was connected to him filling me. I won’t go on.

  I said his name. Shane. Shane. Shane.

  Of course we listened for Art in between, like commercials. On the second visit, we seriously thought we heard him, a thump on the veranda, but it was the wind. Fell back screeching. We were a young country with weak infrastructure, wiring that might fizz out at any moment, not to put too fine a point on it. I could lose everything in the next instant—chuck everything away. It was glorious. We lay squashed up on the couch and talked. He smoked there once or twice, the tendrils curling upwards like a Renaissance hymn. My hand on his damp chest, knee across him. We talked about stray things, what kind of weather we liked, the worst teacher we ever had, talked to the ceiling. Sometimes I turned uncomfortably to look at him close-up. And he turned. Like pecking birds.

  He asked me to tell some stories, like he did. I told him he already knew about the pole house, and he said yes. And the books, and the Skoda.

  Yes.

  And my sister Lisa.

  Yes.

  And my invisible national costume, and he laughed, and said, That’s just bits and pieces.

  I suppose it’s true, things had broken down a bit—but that’s alright, I said.

  He said it was. After a fashion.

  After a fashion! I said.

  I didn’t know any long versions anyway.

  I knew all about him of course.

  ‘This is just till the power comes back on, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I hope the Blackout lasts forever.’

  ‘Me too.’

  I can’t remember who said what. I said a lot, a lot of garbage, like thinking aloud. No stories, stories were over. It was snippets now, ephemera. They seemed important.

  He said, ‘I love you though.’

  And I said—amazed—‘Yeah, me too. I love you.’

  We laughed because it was so funny, because you know, I was the mender and he was the client, and it was true. And everything was suddenly beautiful and exciting. Honestly, it was as if I’d turned my head and seen the whole world from a different angle, one I’d never looked from before, and it made the air, objects, even ideas glittering and larger. It made things wonderful.

  Our lingering goodbye was dreadful, in the half-light.

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘I need to.’

  ‘Go then.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’

  Some shrieking and groaning, pulling away like chewing gum. It was a pantomime. Agony. It was the best time in my life.

  When he’d gone I washed at the basin by candlelight (a whiff of mould in the long bathroom) with a cloth, as if I was in a French film with a soundtrack, the foily tinkle of water. I was Juliette Binoche. I thought Art might think it odd that Juliette had had a shower mid-evening, so I sponged myself, the slick of sweat from my stomach, between my legs, a spit of semen plopping onto the floor, water everywhere. Also to be quick, but it took longer. Shortcuts are always more trouble. I would have cleaned my teeth but thought Art might wonder why Juliette smelled of toothpaste at dusk.

  I could smell the client, for hours afterwards. As I walked about the house, his smell clung to me like perfume. I wondered why Art didn’t twitch his nose as soon as he came in the door, dropping his dissertation in the passage. I almost wanted him to. It would all be over. But he didn’t, he couldn’t. He sneezed. But even without hayfever, Art would probably never have noticed. The smell of the client lay on the air like a fresh mend.

  In bed I turned away, my nostrils in the crook of my arm. It rushed at me again, how I was in love, a fresh wave of ecstasy or deceit, I don’t know which, surging through me. Now I was like the client, like all the clients whose tracks I had covered. Cases 1, 2 and 3. I was Case 397, or thereabouts. I loved the risk. I felt like I had the day I’d dropped out of university, walked down Church Steps, and come home to an empty house, where a pencil rolled across the floor.

  •

  These other things going on? Well, they were working on the cables for a start. I heard that on the news. Plus, I had no clients. Plus, the Murus had walked off the job. There was a new Warehouse opening in the town, and they’d thought it would be a safer option. The Taranaki Dried Fruit Company had come to a standstill. Art told me this, in the kitchen. It was like a dream. I might have dreamed him. He talked and I thought about the client. Who I must stop calling the client because he was Shane. But then I did hear, slowly, like a reverberation. The vultures, I suppose, were descending.

  In my half-dream, it occurred to me: ‘But you’re cut out of the will anyway.’

  ‘Might be.’ He sort of blushed.

  Of course. Might be. I knew how it was—just the threat of it. He hated that.

  ‘I could be, but I’m not. At present.’

  We almost laughed. I didn’t care. About any of it. I had everything. I revised my thoughts on the highest point, the peak, which I had originally put at the time Mary-France and Dad and Lisa and I drove, then loped, up the steepest street in the Southern Hemisphere, Dunedin, c. 1980. No. It was this moment, standing in the middle of the yellow kitchen in the Blackout. I had absolutely blinking everything.

  I felt like singing.

  I thought about how on the doorstep I might notice his teeth and the inside of his mouth more than anything. Or his hips. My hands. It was like lying down in the snow. I gave up everything.

  In the passage, the wall as a prop. His throat.

  Once, a conversation about cars, all arms and legs wrapped up on the rug. He had a new one, don’t ask me what. My knowledge of cars stopped at my father’s Skoda. He laughed. The university professor with the Skoda. Then went a bit thoughtful and said his dad could’ve bought a Skoda but he couldn’t have afforded the money for a taxi. I laughed.

  At night I undressed in the bathroom and wrapped myself in a dressing-gown so Art wouldn’t see the marks on my neck. The bruise from a week ago still just visible on my spine, a yellow smudge. I kept my bruise to myself. Time would mend it. I need do nothing but wait. He was a good man, he was lovely, but I didn’t even care. All the same I was jittery in the night, on a permanent full moon. I would wake with a start, having dreamed I’d pricked my finger on a rumbling sewing machine. For a few moments I wouldn’t know who I was, or where I was, what the meaning of the blackness in the room was. I would realise, then, that the rumbling was Art’s snoring and that there was no pain in my finger, I had just thought it was pain. The taste of the client was in my mouth, and the smell of him in my nostrils.

  •

  Then my lovely routine again. Waving Art off, getting dressed, my choosing-clothes routine, my whirligig (I needed to look as though I’d just tossed them on without any thought, which was where all the thinking came in). One morning I came upon a whole bunch of my Mabel garments. They were certainly beautiful—wool and fur, chiffon and linen—but it struck me for the first time what was wrong with them: they weren’t sexy. They might have been funky, powerful, interesting, but they had zero sex appeal. I packed them up and put them away in the Winter suitcase on top of the wardrobe. Ditto my shoes. I had one good pair, bought to go to a wedding once, from the stylish shop on Ponsonby Road. I looked like a ward matron in them.

  I dressed in an op-shop thing, a dress. Then I read a novel, or tried to. It was hard to concentrate. I read a page upside down like Blanche Ingram.

  Then the client was in the warm sun of the passage.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  In the front room I walked my fingers on the bones of his neck. And looked at him. Somehow different today. I don’t know why.

  ‘We’re not falling in love, are we?’

  He swivelled his head with difficulty. My finger slipped away. ‘Maybe we are. What do you think?’

  ‘I think maybe,’ I said.

  ‘When the power comes back on.’ He looked back at the ceiling.

  ‘When the power comes back on what?’

  Then he said, because I’d got up and opened the curtains and the garden was broadcast by the sun into the room and my Singer sewing machine was glinting (I think it was this): ‘You should employ people.’

  I told him I liked working by myself, he knew that, and he said what did liking have to do with it?

  ‘What you should do,’ he said, and he propped his head on his elbow, getting all enthusiastic, ‘is take on four or five immigrant women and make some decent money.’

  ‘Immigrant women!’ I sat up. ‘You’re a fascist!’

  It was all a joke, you understand.

  The client got dressed. It was time anyway. (Art.) ‘My mother was an immigrant,’ he said. ‘She worked for a pittance. You don’t want your kids to be like that, do you?’

  ‘You’re a capitalist.’

  ‘Of course. You are too. You’re having a break. That’s what capitalism gave you. It’s a bit like this.’

  I stopped with only my sleeves on. ‘What? Us?’

  ‘Yes.’ Fastening everything, buttons. ‘Just because your parents had degrees and a nice house.’

  We laughed and rolled over and over on the rug again and I said stop, I was getting fluff all over me. And Art would notice, I meant.

  He was ridiculous. He was gorgeous. We laughed and pressed together in the doorway. While the power was out. Pressed tight. There’d be an imprint of him on me. One day I’d be a fossil and the memory of the man would be a carbon picture. When he’d gone I brushed crumbs from the couch into the palm of my hand. I was dreading when the power would come back on. I was.

  I did wonder if Milly would notice the newly embroidered sleeve. Perhaps she would bring the knotwork right up close to her eyes and decipher the two colours worked together, the Dollar Bill and the Minaret.

  31

  Once or twice he popped in at lunchtime (yes, popped). On one of those lunchtimes we were in the front room with the curtains drawn, though obviously it was broad daylight, not to put too fine a point on it, when there was a major development.

  He said, ‘I see the house is on the market.’

  There was no wall anymore. You could fall through into the other side of the villa conversion, through one of the blocked-up doorways in the sunlight.

  ‘I see all of the houses are on the market.’

  I told him about the fruit empire shares taking a tumble.

  He said, ‘Oh, they took a tumble.’ As if he knew nothing. He knew I knew.

  A key clattered like a maniac in the front door lock. The inevitable, I thought—and the client thought, and sprang up like a cheetah. Perhaps this was for the best. I realised I wanted the Truth, and the client did not, he wanted Lies and Beauty. Even at this point I knew this. However. Yes, however. Even in the first nanosecond the rattling didn’t have the particular timbre of Art opening the door. Next, multiple footsteps in the passage, a herd, then Prue’s Taranaki voice, Bert’s pleasant bleating, and another voice, a shrill rejoinder. We scrabbled, the client and I. Our eyes met briefly like a ding. A moment later the door was flung open as if by a poltergeist. The tail-end of wonder why this room is, and Prue’s blue stare followed (like Art’s, but it occurred to me in that moment she’d had her eyelids pegged back).

  ‘Oh, Megan! I didn’t expect to find you home. I’d forgotten about your . . . little business.’ Prue took in the scene and frowned as much as she could. Me sitting at the table pawing over an apron, the sun beating down on the mad garden. ‘Lovely to see you. We have rather unfortunate news.’

  Bert waved from the passage and disappeared as if pulled by the clopping heels of the shrill woman. Master bedroom, if you wouldn’t mind.

  It was a visitation.

  As you’ve no doubt guessed, the house was on the market. Come to think of it, Prue looked dreadful. Blue, her skin. They tromped up and down the passage and in and out of the rooms again and again as if the spaces might have changed since the last time. I sat at the table pretending to be busy. At one point the real estate agent—bottle blonde, business-suited (the kind I’d like to wear, but never could), wound up like a spring—made a circumnavigation of the front room. She stood in the bay window and took in the garden. As I watched I saw the curtain beside her breathe in and out. Her polished brass head turned to look at it. It happened again, in out, like a lung. The real estate agent pushed the curtain aside and saw the client, standing like a sentry, if sentries were naked from the waist down. Prue and Bert were craning up at the Carrara ceiling. Ah, the ceiling, the ceiling has always been an asset. Prue wiped a tear from her eye. Bert told her not to be a silly sausage, they’d be alright. And Prue sniffled, Yes, it was just money, they had their health and their happiness. She might have just said health, on second thoughts. I might be embroidering a bit here.

  The real estate agent let the curtain drop and turned back to the room. ‘The garden has potential,’ she said. ‘A little neglected, but nothing a bit of landscaping can’t fix.’ She caught my eye on the way out and I tried to smile my thanks, but she stayed in character, in her suit.

  That was the day I ripped my teal blouse.

  When they’d gone, the client and I had an episode of hilarity during which I thought I might have a heart attack. Then he went back to work, and I stood outside in the frying sun looking at the For Sale sign that had been stapled to the fence. It flapped in the tough little wind. The gully was quiet apart from the mechanic down the road and the building site. I looked up the street. There was a For Sale sign on each of the four villas. The whole blinking row was on the market.

  I got to know all about the baht of course. Things were toppling like dominos through Asia.

  Over the next few days, when prospective buyers came to inspect the house, I lurked in the garden. The house wasn’t at its best—ponged like a trench, carpets matted, though the real estate agent sent someone around with a carpet sweeper. Prue-short-for-Prudence and Bert were desperate. The thing is, the villa conversion was fading away anyway. It was light and flimsy.

  The next time he came I reached out behind me for his fingers and we walked along the passage joined tenuously like paper dolls. On the workroom table he entered from behind. I reached back blindly to clutch his thigh, his hair, in my clenched hand. He was solid and silky.

  It was urgent, no stories. I knew all about him.

  Everything was gone.

  Everything?

  Everything except the couch, the floor, the table. I’d brought these with me. I’d moved, you see; I’d emigrated.

  •

  In the evening I washed clothes by hand in the bath while Art stalked up and down the passage, and outside, talking on the phone about the villa being sold, having to move and so on, with a succession of people. Villa-z, I heard him say. Not just villa, villa-z. He was stunned, I thought, the proverbial mullet, but was putting a good face on it, in true Woolthamly fashion. I lugged the clothes out to the yard and hung them on the line. They were dripping, but the heat would dry them. Art followed me in and out, still on the phone. I think one of the conversations was with Prue. I almost wanted to tell him about the funny incident with the real estate agent, because that was what we used to do. I didn’t, of course. Are you crazy?

  We’d sort of stopped talking, we’d stopped our banter. I didn’t miss it. It felt like there were more urgent things. Banter had seemed like an excess, like a burn-off of oil.

  Plus—to tell the truth—I couldn’t sit still. I was a bundle of nerves. When there was a bump, Art’s foot knocking the rubbish bin, I jumped like a firecracker. I imagined the client turning up out of the blue. Not exactly blue. He’d gone mad, and was knocking on the door, coming in and walking through the rooms until he found Art. I’m fucking your wife. Or even, I’m in love with your wife. There had been this fear or hope sitting there in my head all these weeks.

  I loved the risk. I had a Wanted card. I had a Mass card.

  When he’d hung up the phone, I turned from the line and said I was sorry about the house. I wanted to say something. Art said there was no need to be sorry on his account, he didn’t care. He was knocking back a glass of wine. And anyway, the house was mine too, he said. I said I thought it wasn’t mine, I thought we’d established that and he got all het up and said no, no, of course it was mine, that was just a silly argument.