We felt our way along the passage. It was a beautiful passage, with a high wooden ceiling and a moulded arch, miraculously passed over by the seventies renovators. They must’ve had a crick in their neck that day. Lovely, that arch, when you could see it. Our fingers hissed along the old flocked wallpaper which lined the upper half of the walls. I knew these fuzzy shapes quite well anyway. They were like pet rabbits, and I liked to pat them. In the kitchen I scrabbled in my handbag for my pen torch and pointed it while Art climbed up to get the hurricane lamp from on top of a cupboard. He brought it down, dusted it off and held a match to it daintily, as if doing calligraphy. It gave a lovely warm light. His hair lit up like a sou’wester, and his face glowed underneath. He has a face of privilege—good food and happiness. I envied him that, still do. I fed batteries into the radio. It was like a snake eating eggs.

  The news fizzed on, and we heard that the fourth cable had gone kaput at a quarter to six. Pinnacle Power said it was due to the heat and high demand for air-conditioning. Bollocks! said Art. The cables, which were forty years old, had been dying like flies over the last month. The third one had gone the day before. Pinnacle Power would get one going by Monday, they said. We yammered—the whole weekend ahead of us! Art said we could blow that for a fucking joke.

  He’d found a bigger torch in a drawer and flickered out through the banana palms to the shed. I could hear him crashing around out there, cursing happily. I used my pen torch to investigate the contents of the fridge like a dentist looks into a mouth. Steak (we were meant to be vegetarians but both got cravings and attacked meat like lions at the zoo), broccoli, the good vanilla ice cream for afters. We were sticking to our gender roles, thank God. Art reappeared with a Primus stove, a disgusting rusty thing that would give you tetanus. He brushed off the cobwebs and fired it up—it was like a Boeing 747—and stood back with his arms folded, satisfied momentarily.

  ‘Oh, and the wine,’ he said. ‘Chilled, but not for long.’ He sloshed some into a couple of glasses. ‘Cheers.’ We clinked as the steak spat in the pan. ‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ said Art. ‘Like camping. We did this all the time on the farm.’

  He’d grown up in town (his father did something in insurance, not very high up, strangely), but spent holidays on the Woolthamly sheep station. It wasn’t what it had once been, apparently—carved up between the siblings, and there were a few of them. In fact, it wasn’t much of a sheep station anymore. Art’s mother, Prue-short-for-Prudence, ran the dried-fruit empire the grandfather had started—there were orchards and a drying plant on the property—and exported apples, prunes etc., mostly to Japan and Hong Kong. Made a pile. Good for piles, I’d say. We were hilarious. One day Art and his sister would inherit the whole shebang. A Prune of One’s Own, I’d say. It sort of included me too, but we never discussed it. Money embarrassed him. Poor Art! I mean that.

  He was on a roll, about the camps they went on. Days, weeks, near the creek, free as a fucking bird. Until a girl on a neighbouring farm was dragged from a tent in the middle of the night. They dug her up months later. No one went camping after that. As you wouldn’t, I said. (Myself, I’m scared to do anything outside the city limits. Even within them.)

  ‘But what are the odds?’ said Art. ‘Everyone stayed inside at night after that. Poor girl, though. Libby somebody. Raped. They—’

  ‘Spare me,’ I said. Seriously.

  We ate at the kitchen table in the lamplight while the shadows danced on the raw, flaking walls. I’m not a materialist by the way. If I’m ever worried about having an old kitchen, take me out and shoot me. I asked Art how Work and Income was. We always said that, Work and Income, because we’d lined up at it in the university holidays to get the dole. I know, even with ‘the farm’. These were the last days of the welfare state. Well, there was no casual work in the late eighties—none! But at the time of the power cut, Art’s Work and Income was a temporary gig transcribing interviews for a film company called LambChop Productions. They mostly made docos. Art earned a pittance, but that was okay, he almost had his PhD. (Also, there was the spectre of serious money one day from the Woolthamlys. It was like a light in the passage, even when you closed your eyes at night: always on.)

  He told me about his day. He’d been typing up conversations with a serial killer. There’d been an argument between a director and the producer like a bar-room brawl. Really, it was quite an eventful day. (He’d love a bar-room brawl. He would.) And how was my day?

  Well: a commercial traveller—who I couldn’t help thinking of as a cockroach waving its legs on a bedroom floor—brought in a waistcoat with a cigarette burn in it, pair of trousers with the fly gone (so many insects), both smelling of tobacco and the inside of a car. An elderly lawyer with a tweed skirt, zip gone. She was wearing another tweed skirt and a frilly white blouse and looked half-man half-woman, a kind of centaur. Oh, and a girl with yet another cocktail dress, which by then was making me think of Clinton and, well, cocks. I mended a lot of them. They should’ve worn saris—hard to unwind. After the cocktail girl, the mess of a dress arrived, and the power went off.

  I thought of something and put my finger in the air. ‘Um.’

  Art looked over. (He had a very blue, lit-up gaze, by the way.) ‘Idea, lightbulb?’

  ‘If only,’ I said. ‘How will I work without electricity?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Art. ‘It’ll be back on by Monday.’

  ‘What say it isn’t?’

  ‘You doubting Thomas,’ said Art. ‘You’re a doubting Thomas, d’you know that?’

  ‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘I seriously doubt it.’

  ‘A doubting Thomasina.’

  We always went on like this.

  It is true, though, that black absorbs all the possible light.

  4

  The truth is, at this point I was quite pleased about the distraction of the Blackout, for a specific reason. The night before had been a Ballet Night, always brittle affairs, but this had been a Ballet Night with bells on its toes. Art’s parents, Prue-short-for-Prudence and Bert, were royal ballet supporters. The Royal New Zealand Ballet needed royal support. When Prue and Bert were up in Auckland they often took us to the productions they’d already seen in Wellington. The night before the power went kaput, we’d all had dinner in High Street (which was slumming it for Prue and Bert, they usually went to Antoine’s, and I thought I detected a frisson of eye contact about the bill), then gone on to Swan Lake at The Edge. We’d walked up to the theatre together in our best get-ups, perfume trailing behind us, because it was such a beautiful evening, still light, still pink on Queen Street. There are worse things. Some weekends we went to ‘the farm’. And anyway, the Woolthamly-Fromes were nice people, hospitable and full of bonhomie, as long as you bit your lip. And I did, for Art’s sake, and because when I added up dinner (even that dinner) and the ballet tickets in my head, there wasn’t change from a grand.

  If there was any tension on Ballet Nights and Farm Weekends, it wasn’t my doing. But I take full responsibility for what happened on this particular Ballet Night. I do. I feel terrible about it. As we were all processing down Queen Street, us women in our wafty finery in front, and the men in their, well, suits (Art changed out of his semiotician’s zip-up polo-neck for his parents) bringing up the rear, we approached a group of street kids milling around outside a games shop, and I noticed Prue whip her head away as if disgusted, as if the very sight of them made her want to upchuck. I admired the Woolthamlys, even though they were such horsy-gentry types, but there was something comforting about their practicality. They were good at life, money, property. But I’m not a complete idiot. My parents, by the way, were Marxists, just thought I’d throw that in. Somehow Prue’s head-tossing gesture stuck in my gullet. I did a sort of ostentatious thing; I rummaged in my purse and found a note, a five I thought, and as we passed I thrust it into the fist of one of the street kids, a boy of about fourteen with intense eyes and dressed in that baggy basketballish uniform they all wear. He was Maori, but the kids were mixed, Pakeha (i.e., white, like moi) and Maori. I was about to increase my pace to catch up with Prue when I noticed that the street kid was standing as if stunned. He was holding the note like he was a tree and it was a leaf. In a second I realised why: I’d given him a hundred-dollar note—egad, the red one, not the orange of the fives! (I didn’t usually carry this much spondulix around, but a client had paid me in cash earlier in the day and I’d been happy to accept, re tax purposes.)

  Everything around the street kid had gone like a tableau from 1910. He was rigid, ditto his friends, who were all staring at the note. Bert and Art had caught up with us. I saw Prue and Bert—once they’d twigged as to where the note had come from and what its denomination was—exchange Munch-like expressions in the evening light. I felt like a great philanthropist. I did. I felt like Warren Buffet. I smiled at Art. I remember his electrified face in a sort of torment, and I thought, Ah, he’s torn, the poor bastard. But I didn’t have time to get any further with my analysis because the tableau was over. A couple of the boy’s mates were tackling him to the ground like it was a rugby game. All in fun. They were tussling and tumbling and play-fighting. But then, as I watched, as we all watched, one of the rugby players, the size of a fridge, grabbed the boy—who was quite slight—by the hair and punched him. I heard an awful moan, and the boy’s neck jerked sideways. The fridge one punched the boy again, then let his hair go. His head slammed back onto the ground. The other kids leaned in around him like a scrum, poised. I was panicking and blabbering that we should do something, ring the police, find a phone booth. It was 1998. Not everyone had a mobile phone. Prue was already clipping away and saying over her shoulder, Come along, Megan, you only encourage them, the police will be in the vicinity. Megan’s my real name. I saw Bert hesitate a second, then trot after his wife like a lamb. Art’s warm hand was on my arm. GoGo, come away, he was saying, there’s nothing you can do. I let myself be pulled away. Not pulled, walked. I went willingly, arm in arm like My Fair Lady to the ballet. As I looked back one of the girls, big, all boofy in her hoodie, gave the boy a kick in the head as he lay on the ground, and his head jostled and he whimpered like a puppy. In the distance, the shriek of a police car. There you see, said Prue. But the siren waggled off in the other direction, along the waterfront.

  At The Edge we stood on the terrace sipping champagne, while Prue said and this is our son Art and his wife about thirty times to people in glittery dresses and suits. I had the impression of a lot of teeth, but couldn’t get the street kid’s head out of my head, and I thought about the possibility he might be dead. I pulled Art aside and said I thought I should go back to check, and he said, Are you crazy? It’s dangerous. He said someone would have called someone by now.

  When we went in, the auditorium was hushed, cushiony and perfumed. I sat clutching my program and listening to the orchestra tuning up, which was a divine noise but unsettling like a gale. I felt shit-scared, to coin a phrase. Not just, What am I doing here? but, What am I doing on the planet? The thing is, I’d felt this before, even when there hadn’t been dramatic things happening like street kids being beaten up on my account. I know it’s pathetic. I hadn’t married Prue-short-for-Prudence and Bert, but sometimes I felt like I had, and that they were aliens. I wanted to go home to the pole house I grew up in and never leave it, even though when I’d turned eighteen you couldn’t see me for dust. At one point, with the lake and the trembling feathers all bathed in blue, Art squeezed my hand. I hadn’t ruined the evening. I was comforted, and concentrated on the swish and thump of ballet shoes as they landed on the stage. They were so human.

  I haven’t forgotten I didn’t want to go down any self-centred alleyways.

  On the way up Queen Street afterwards, just Art and me by this point (and I was on the lookout for street kids, I can tell you), I kept replaying the sick clunk of that vase-like teenage head. I said (ploughing uphill, under the verandas of the two-minute Chinatown) that we should’ve called an ambulance. Art said we probably should have. I said (out loud, which made it worse) that he might be dead. Art said nah, he’d be alright, he was a street kid, he was tough. As we passed the cemetery on Symonds Street I said we should’ve hung around though, and Art said we probably should’ve, but we didn’t. He said it wasn’t my fault, but I went on and on. He was only trying to comfort me. The thing is, Art is a good person, but (and this might sound a bit nineteenth century, but it’s the truth) when you have parents as rich as his, you can’t cross them because it could cost you millions. I knew that.

  5

  Around ten, Art and I rolled together like marbles in the kitchen of the villa conversion.

  Oh, villa conversion? That’s what we lived in, and that’s what we called it. ‘See you back at the villa conversion,’ we’d say. We were lucky to have it. They were rare as hen’s teeth, a good villa ruined by being converted into flats in the seventies. Most of them were being knocked back into full houses. We didn’t want the whole house, even though Art’s parents owned it, along with its three neighbours. A whole house would be excessive. Instead, we lived with the doorways on one side of the passage blocked off and papered over as if they’d never existed. This night, in our seventies kitchen, we sat near the hurricane lamp. Art’s laptop whined on and he thanked Christ it was charged. I reminded him he didn’t believe in a Christian god. He said he might not, but the computer did. The laptop was full of bright gold leaking around the edges. Beautiful. Art furrowed his brow at the screen. He was telling me some new angle on Orientalism, to do with the settlers rather than the folk who stayed put in the motherland. Other was in their face, not at arm’s length. I listened without looking at him, stitching in my pond of light. (That’s the thing about sewing, you can’t look up.) His PhD was like a piece of knitting still on the needles; you could see quite clearly it was a jersey, but you wanted to go on looking at it as knitting for a while longer. I understood that completely. Because I was once about to write a thesis. (I never quite got to it.) When Art finished his dissertation, it would all be over. Settler Literary Ephemera (which was, you know, letters, advertisements, posters—all the stuff that wasn’t writing) done, closed with a bang, yes, settled. Tick the box. Good. To tell the truth, I was a bit sick of it. I was sick of it!

  Because Art was a nanosecond from getting his PhD in English from Columbia, he would have an academic job in a jiffy. There just wasn’t much around at the moment. Not long after we got back to Wellington from New York—we’d barely unpacked—he got a tutoring gig up in Auckland, just temporary, but it seemed fun and he wanted to do it. He’d said to me, Do what makes you happy. More than once, countless times. The least I could do was return the favour. So we repacked our stuff and went to Auckland. Auckland would be kind of fun anyway. We knew people up there, as you do.

  At the kitchen table that first dark night of the Blackout, I leaned close to the lamp with my reading glasses perched on my nose, and stitched the last of twenty-five white tutus back onto its mushroomy polyester bodice. (Yes, reading glasses.) It was an alterations job for a ballet school, and quite a good wicket, although the netting had continually pushed up under my fingernails. Swans were ruined forever for me. But in the end, they were still tutus. I sat there thinking (you can think a lot when you sew) about how when I was five I pestered Mary-France (my mother, who didn’t like being called Mum) to enroll me in ballet class. I’d pictured myself in pink ballet slippers. Pink ballet slippers were the whole point. Mary-France was philosophically opposed to ballet—it would have been its cultural irrelevance to the Pacific, and the fact it promoted gender stereotypes. But in the end I went to a class in a brown church hall. The ballet teacher had a pair of black second-hand ballet slippers that were being given away. I tried them on. They fit. They fitted. I remember looking down at my feet. Free ballet slippers. Free, but black. I wasn’t interested in ballet after that. If only I could have said, ‘All I want is pink ballet slippers.’ The agony of the five-year-old who can’t say that, or even think it. But the worse agony, twenty-odd years later, of realising that that was what you’d wanted. Perhaps it was better never to have known.

  But I know. I know now. Not to get too maudlin about it.

  Sewing netting onto polyester in the half-light was driving me nuts, so I was glad when it was finished. It had really needed daylight. With my torch, I scalloped along the passage to my workroom. The tutus thrusting out behind me made my shadow look like an ostrich. I bounced my pen light around the room to see if there was anything low-key enough to do in the half-dark. There was the garment that the last client had brought in. Knotwork. Christ! Definitely a daylight job, and all in good time. Never put one job ahead of another. That was what I learned from Rip Burn Snag, Clothing Alterations and Repairs in New York (I’ll tell you about that in due course). I ran my thumb over the tips of my fingers, which were tender from Swan Lake. The night air, usually thumping with next door’s stereo, was silent.

  Back in the kitchen, I read the paper until I thought I’d go blind, and then I just sat. Art’s computer shut down suddenly. Those laptop batteries don’t stand on ceremony. He rooted in his bag and brought out a settler studies person. No, it was Homi Bhabha—other side of the coin. All of which Art was still wading through up to his armpits. I was glad I didn’t have to read Homi. I used to be into this stuff. But Art didn’t open the book. He leaned back in his chair and said, GoGo, guess what? (He always used my nickname. I went to a poncy school, albeit Catholic, where the rich country girls came up with droll nicknames like Mimsy and Fifi. I was Megan Sligo, so GoGo was a giveaway.) (I have to add here, I was the poorest girl in school, although we weren’t poor.) What? I said. Art talked out into the darkness. His upper lip caught the light. He told me about his walk home that evening through the choked streets. He was strangely serious, for him. He described how the light was peculiar and slanting as dusk came on, because there were no streetlights. An apocalyptic surge of pedestrians moved up Queen Street, and in every street to right and left there were crowds of people walking. They talked to each other, and had jokey conversations with people who’d been stuck in traffic so long they’d got out of their cars.