‘What’s mine is yours. The house is yours,’ he said. ‘Or would be if we owned it,’ he sniggered.

  There was a little banter, but I wasn’t taking part. I hung the dripping clothes.

  •

  On the day I gave him his yellow jacket, which I’d mended, things racked up a bit. He took the jacket and screwed it up unconsciously as we were falling backwards. Careful, I said. He said, Oh yeah, and laid it out like a body on the table before returning to the rolled arm of the couch.

  This was during a period of rain—the house particularly zoo-like—two, three days’ worth. What am I talking about? It was two days and it cleared up on the third day. The rain applauded quietly at the window. I sat down in the front room to mend my teal blouse, all threaded up with teal thread. I stared out at the nutty garden. The old lady’s lavender looked like it was off its face at Woodstock. The blouse lay in my hands. Actually, I couldn’t be stuffed mending it. I sat there thinking. That’s the thing about thinking, it goes on all day and all night like a factory with a night staff. I wish it would stop sometimes. I thought about my clients whose best clothes were ripped and burned and snagged. I knew what they were on about. They wanted conflicting things, and it was exciting to want them: stability/fresh sex, responsibility/carelessness, family/freedom. Ooh, I hadn’t used a slash for a while! Tradition/modernity, not to put too fine a point on it. The thing is that these days—yes these days—it was possible, at least in the West (although the very term, the West, is melting in front of me, like the Wicked Witch). For a wild moment, with the rain spattering the bay window and me plumped there with my teal blouse, I felt like I’d picked up the essay I’d left unfinished on my desk the day I withdrew from university. What I thought: Having an affair was the most democratic, even-handed, racy, classy, gendery thing in the world.

  The garden coming in the windows onto the table and onto the books, the shelves lined with books and the stacks of books teetering on the floor. I tossed aside my teal blouse unmended. I waited for him among the books. There were so many, always had been. They were like crutches, like built-up shoes. I looked at the books so I could stop thinking.

  When the client arrived I said it was raining the first day he came to the house, and he said he knew that, he remembered.

  It rains a lot in Auckland.

  I found his hand on the cushion and pressed each fingertip with my own. I told him how he had felt that day, a gravitational pull and all of me, all my mass, pushing down on your fingers.

  We fell asleep on the couch and he woke in a panic, sweating. He’d dreamed something. What? I said, smoothing his brow. Something. What? A colour that filled the room, he said, but then, like a glob of colour captured in glass, he would turn his head and it would’ve snapped into a fine line.

  The things you say to people.

  The power stayed off. That was good. The longer it went on, the more I wished it would stay off forever.

  ‘When the power comes back on, maybe we’ll keep going?’

  ‘Maybe we will.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We kissed. Now it was not just sex and fun and elation, it was tenderness.

  I remembered what he’d said. That an affair wasn’t exciting unless there was the risk of falling in love. Yes, risk.

  I remembered my client with the indigo shirt.

  I fingered his upper lip. ‘Would you leave her?’

  He looked at me. ‘Yes. Would you? Him?’

  My lungs pumped up like a tyre. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

  ‘That’s settled then.’

  I regretted doing the sleeve because it was deceitful. But if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have got to know the client, and I went around and around like this a bit.

  •

  Change of subject but not entirely: once I saw a group of people going to the church at the top of Newton Gully, young women dressed in the clothes of their mothers, their grandmothers even—floral polyester dresses, flesh-coloured pantihose and slingback shoes, cardigans. And the men in chain-store suits, white shirts, ties. They looked sexy! No wonder they had piles of children. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The women dressed to look like women and the men to look like men. The women were like baboons with great red arses hanging out for the men, and the men were like big dark blocks of manhood with penises hanging down their front. These were their church clothes. There was no confusion. It would make the species go on.

  Yes, but we don’t need to go on—well, not at this rate. Maybe that’s why fashion makes women look like men, and like interesting drug addicts. How I’d love to look like the women going to church in their polyester dresses. But it’s too late, far, far too late. If I put on a floral dress, a cardigan, Pakeha pantihose, I’d feel like a drag queen. There’s been too much splitting off, dropping out, ripping up, blowing up, boiling down, paring down. There’s been too much bloody theory.

  But sex somehow struggles through. Chemistry can dissolve things like acid.

  •

  That day he came home while I was on all fours throbbing like a baboon, the rug scrubbing my knees. I heard the thud of his satchel on the doorstep. I looked up and saw that the door to the front room was open a crack, and felt the client’s breath still hard on my neck and saw Art walk past the gap in the front room door, not fast, taking his time. In fact, pausing there outside the room for a moment of almost meditative stillness, but not looking right, not turning his head the forty-five degrees it would take to end our marriage. Walking on. I pulled myself away with a pop and loped, as if I’d regressed several stages of evolution, over to the door. And taking the door knob in my hand and feeling it, weighing it, judging the effect turning it will have on the internal apparatus which will close the door, and only when I feel I have an understanding of the door handle’s relationship with the snib, rotating it and closing the door in absolute silence. Looking back into the room and smiling with the client in conspiracy but he isn’t smiling, he’s wearing nothing but an expression of lavish anxiety. Coming back to the rug and resuming position but he’s hopping around putting clothes on, stuffing everything into them, and shooting me looks to indicate I’m a monster. Me! He’s the monster. I try to smile at him, and wipe my brow in an exaggerated gesture of relief, urgently, as if it’s wartime, as if there isn’t much time left, and there isn’t. These are extraordinary circumstances, the Blackout. People are behaving like they’ve never behaved before. It’s wonderful. Why not me? I hiss at him that I feel like I’m coming home. That he’s home. He shakes his head madly as if to say, don’t do this. But all in mime, he won’t breathe a word aloud, and he’s still doing a three-legged race with his trousers. And I go quiet too, because actually I don’t do this sort of thing, I don’t fall in love, I don’t come home. But now, at this moment, I misremember. I do, I misremember, and I think I will never leave home again. I’ll know where home is, what’s possible. That will be enough, for a lifetime.

  When he had gone, I sat on the red couch, alone, and I thought clearly. I hadn’t been thinking before, not at university, not as a mender—only blabbing and listening, blabbing and listening, like a glutton, a gourmand. And I thought now, I am not a liar, I want the truth, yes the Truth like Keats. That the client was a wonder, a glory, and I was in love with him, and that was the only Truth. The events of the past—the pole house, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, my hands, my hands, getting married, Rip Burn Snag, the costume—all had been leading to the moment when I would ruin my life. And I must ruin it. At the same time I am even thinking about an English teacher at school trying to teach us grammar who said, I will drown and no one shall save me, and I shall drown and no one will save me—which is the suicide? And I’m thinking and feeling I will ruin it. I will ruin it and it shall never be fixed. I shall ruin it and it will never be fixed.

  I padded into the kitchen. Art was forking lamb steaks around in the pan. He’d thought I was out. I must’ve dozed off, I said. Lamb was on the list of superfoods on the fridge. It was the healthiest animal, until it was butchered, then it wasn’t in the best of health. But before that it had gambolled in the fields and eaten grass, a superior life to your average chicken, pig or cow.

  There was nothing to say. We wrestled with the lamb chops on our white plates. Trails of blood glistened in the lamplight. Even laughed. I needed to end things. And he did, the client. Why didn’t we just call it quits with our respective spice? I don’t know. Yes, I do know. Because he’d told me everything. Because we were in paradise, down in the Pacific, and it was borrowed time, and it was the Blackout, and in the light everything would be revealed.

  Later, I was in my workroom. A ridiculous hour. Art creaked by in the passage, his torch making the gap under the door into a thermometer—a bout of flu coming on and receding. He looked in at the door.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ I asked.

  I was sweating slightly. I’d just turned from the end of the rack.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s a full moon,’ I said.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Lunatic,’ he said. That was better. Back to normal. But it never would be.

  In the kitchen he poured brandies and we sat down to keep each other company. Stewart had a new theory about Shakespeare.

  The villas going, being sold from under our feet, but there was Stewart and Shakespeare. I sort of admired it.

  ‘Do people still do their PhDs on Shakespeare?’ I asked, kind of tiredly.

  ‘Of course,’ said Art. He was all animated, like an old Archie comic. Honestly, he was. I don’t know why I’d never thought of that before.

  ‘Anyway, what?’ I asked. I’d never actually met Stewart. That’s Auckland for you.

  ‘That Shakespeare was the son of Elizabeth the First, the Virgin Queen,’ said Art. ‘Which just about makes him Jesus.’

  ‘How did he dream that one up?’

  ‘Oh, he read it somewhere.’

  So that’s what a theory was.

  ‘That’s not a theory,’ I said.

  ‘A turn of phrase—Jesus!’ said Art. Quite tetchy, for him. ‘He is a sort of Jesus, culturally, for the West, for the second millennium.’

  ‘Shakespeare?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is the West anyway?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know anymore.’

  ‘Us, you idiot,’ said Art. ‘It’s us.’

  I looked at him across the kitchen table. He seemed to have gone small, like a landscape I was receding from—plains, cabbage trees, rocky outcrops, out the back window of a train. God, I was cruel. I even looked at that from a distance too, my cruelty.

  This was almost the last gasp of the millennium, and we were spending it in the light of the hurricane lamp.

  32

  And then, on the last day—of course—the last day. It was lunchtime. He’d come at lunchtime. I was in the bathroom mopping up when I heard a commotion coming from down the street, yelling, cars honking, a general hubbub. I padded back to the front room. The client, naked, had his hand on the light switch. ‘Ta-da!’ Dangling from the Carrara ceiling, a dazzle on a string. Deadpan for a second, then going nuts. Aah! I turned on a lamp, and the dehumidifier, which purred. We danced, a waltzy thing, sawing back and forth under the light.

  Then hauled on clothes and went out onto the veranda because the whoops were ricocheting up the gully. A man in overalls ran past the house hollering. Someone replied, into the air, About fucking time! There was laughter, more shouting. Yee-hah, as they say in America. A woman from up the street who I’d never met before waved to us from a veranda. A stereo started up, some funk. This pantomime went on for a while. The client and I stood on the veranda watching it, like Christmas in the Park. Then we looked at each other. Time to go forward, into some other thing. I walked along the passage, stabbed at the Wah Lee light switch. The beautiful paper lantern glowed. The client followed. In the kitchen I woke up the fridge and it began humming. The fan coughed out a whole lot of dust. I plugged in the kettle. It creaked and hissed. I turned to the client, who was hanging about in the middle of the room.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Your husband.’ His hands dangled like the first day.

  ‘He’s out,’ I said.

  He smiled, okay. Turned on the light, although it was broad daylight, turned it off again. We cackled. He looked about, plugged in the CD player. There was a mix in it. The Clash started up, ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ I turned it up to blare on the way past. Coffee? Yes, coffee! The client got a whiff of the waste disposal and feigned vomiting. That! I said. Would need some careful thinking about. I said will need some thinking about. The client said he heard me. I turned on the pantry light. There were eggs. Omelettes. Omelettes! I heard you, he said. I cracked oeufs in a bowl and the client found the plug-in hand-held beater and blasted them. A fork will do. I said a fork will do! I know. I tossed some flour into the breadmaker while I was at it. There was still mayhem out in the gully. I suddenly ran into the passage and boinged the hot-water switch, came belting back again. Hot water! He had the toaster going. ‘Poi E’ was belting out of the stereo. God, I love that song.

  We sat at the kitchen table shovelling in omelette, toast, coffee. Looking at each other. Everything on, blaring, bubbling, throbbing. The End. Finis.

  He had work. He had to go back to work. Regardless. He got his jacket from the front room and went out onto the veranda. I followed. There was still the odd shout and horn flaring down in the gully. He turned at the top of the steps and stood wavering. It was one o’clockish, the sun pelting down.

  ‘This is it, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ I said. ‘The end of this bit.’

  ‘Yes, just this bit. The end of deceit.’

  ‘Now we’ll be truthful.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He was nodding.

  And I was. We were nodding like anything.

  ‘Are you pleased this is happening?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course! Yes!’

  Of course. A rhetorical question.

  ‘When will I see you?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘How to arrange this?’

  ‘How to?’

  We were saying how to, how to, and kissed and for a long time, the length of the Blackout, five weeks. Then tore away like suction cups, literally, pop. He had tears in his eyes. And I did. Just because, well, it was going to change. We were coming out of paradise into some other place. He bounced down the weedy steps, waved at the bottom, blew a kiss. A circular saw grated on down the street.

  I went into my workroom, stood there for a minute, excitement drumming through me, then tried the light switch. Darkness dried up like a puddle.

  Now it would begin.

  •

  When I woke in the morning, I was on my own. Art was gone. I had a sudden mad panic, I don’t know why. As if I’d leaped ahead to some future time. I went out into the passage and walked along it, and I felt like I wasn’t anyone and I wasn’t anywhere in particular, I’d just been plunked down somewhere. I thought I could walk forever along the passage and it wouldn’t lead to anywhere, and I wouldn’t ever be anyone. I creaked open the front door onto the day, the silence, the strawberry roofs, the Waitakeres looming out west, and it was just me. I didn’t know what to do. Later, the sun scorched through the banana palms and I read a novel on the back doorstep, can’t remember what. But I do remember thinking how useful novels are.

  I needed to tell Art and when he came in. I paced about and then it was nineish, almost dark, and I was standing in the mandolin looking out on the garden and the lights across the gully, which now seemed festive, like a floor show. I remembered that at the beginning of the Blackout, on the first evening, Art had gasped to see me standing there, but this evening he didn’t flinch. He looked like he’d been in a fight. Yes, a bar-room brawl. His satchel strap dragged like a clenched fist on his lapel. I could smell the medicinal smell of one too many on his breath. He walked past me into the front room and fell onto the couch. I asked him where he’d been but I didn’t care.

  ‘It’s bad news,’ he said.

  ‘The business?’ Well, it did have one foot on a banana skin anyway.

  ‘I don’t care about the business.’ His face purplish. He was a derro. ‘It’s not the money. Don’t you know that?’

  ‘What—not “the farm”? Are you sure?’

  He’d never liked my inverted commas. ‘Yair, “the farm”,’ he said in inverted commas, which were heavy. He’d been there for the day. There’d been a divvying up of things. Art’s beautiful shiny privileged face crumpled like a can. He twisted his painty head. ‘It’s gone.’

  The royal We. I sat down beside him. I hesitated, put my hand on his cheek, but it felt unreal, fake, my touch, and it must’ve to him too because after a moment he wrenched away.

  ‘Gone.’

  I tried to say it wasn’t like that, his parents had their house in Wellington, he had his own life, his career, but even as I talked I knew it was rubbish, balderdash, and I petered out. They’d been the Woolthamlys, and now Art was just a Frome.

  And me? Well, as you know I’m not a materialist, I despise materialism. I suppose I’d got used to there being a light on in the passage, and it had been extinguished, but I didn’t care, I didn’t give a rat’s arse. And anyway, I liked the Blackout. I liked what the Blackout had brought me. I wanted my mouth mashed against the stretched sinews under his chin.

  Now Art embarked on a meandering version (because you know, off his face), about the Asian crisis, how when it got to Japan it was curtains for the Woolthamly prune empire. Which I knew anyway. And then the Blackout, to compound it, and the villa tenants moving out like nobody’s business. Which might have seemed small fry compared to the ‘the farm’ and the business, and it was, but it all added up. Or didn’t. Apparently there was a moment, said Art, and he leaned forward into my face and everything in him was loosened, when it could have been salvaged, and I said, Oh, and he said, Yes, there was a moment.