‘That’s kind, but.’ I’d go. But this was interesting. I was meeting the entire clan.

  Kevin had retreated to his paint tin. He looked across at me, a shared something, not exactly a wink. Dreadful and Frightful! He was stooping to do the honours with the oxblood again, but craned back up, knees creaking. ‘Taranaki Dried Fruit!’ he announced. ‘That’s the company. Knew I’d remember in the end. That was the sale. Made a mint, he did.’

  I’m stuck, glued, my feet. And my heart’s going. I’m not sure what to think. I’m partly ra-ra-ing for the client. The audacity! And partly angry, yes—very, very angry. Everything goes small. I look down into the shade under the trees, and with the contrasting gashes of setting sun, Dreadful and Frightful are almost invisible. Their silhouettes perform an elaborate ritual, moving the chairs, dusting them, I’ll sit here, no you sit there, moving them again, almost falling, a chair falling over, laughing. Finally they’ve plonked themselves on the chairs and they’re tilting their heads across the lawn. A couple of glasses, please, if you wouldn’t mind! What’s her name? GoGo. GoGo, a couple of glasses from the kitchen. Talk about cheeky, Deirdre. Well, she’s right there, Finoula. The wine, Deirdre. I can’t see them for the sun, the blinding yellow Auckland sunlight. I’m looking for Dreadful and Frightful at the bottom of the garden but I can’t see them, I can see them in my mind’s eye, their top-heavy bodies. Did I mention the rings? A bunch of diamonds like white grapes on their ring fingers, both of them. They must’ve married sugar daddies. And I’m thinking about the client. You fucker! I can’t see the aunts for the life of me, under the shade of the banana palms, under the nutty creepers, the jasmine, the wisteria. But I can hear them, one of them. A couple of glasses, please, GoGo, make it three. Deirdre! Well, why not? She’s joining us for a drink.

  I skirt around the overly red outdoor table. The French doors are open. I stop. From the doorstep I watch stands of banana palms shaking their silly heads at the bottom of the garden. Through them I glimpse other cottages, their lacy backyards and timber fences, flashes of white sheets on a clothesline. I step into the kitchen and listen to the hush of the house, to the radio squawking outside. It’s all modern, renovated, with one of those island benches in the middle, copper pots hanging above. The dining area is off to one side, the living area beyond it. All really nice—nice couches, rugs, bit of art on the walls, and venetian blinds everywhere giving it a cool underwater air like a Sylvia Plath poem. The house is smallish, of course—it’s a Ponsonby cottage. I step from a squishy rug, that sinking feeling, onto the polished boards of the passage. I gawk. GoGo, you’re an idiot. I don’t care. I continue down the passage. It isn’t long, there isn’t much of it. I peer into a bedroom. Theirs. An enormous bed with a white embroidered quilt on it. It’s unmade, the quilt half on the floor. I’m tempted to go in, to look closely at the bed, look for hairs, smell it even, finger the knick-knacks on the bedside table. I restrain myself. I turn and there’s another bedroom opposite, the spare room—yes, spare. I move towards it. I can see another bed, a chair. I’m in the doorway. I see, just inside the door, a pair of tartan Docs. They’re pigeon-toed as if someone has just stepped out of them, there is the ghost of someone in them. I stoop and push my hand a little way inside one of them, and it is still warm.

  Everything in the book happens to me: mouth dry, palms sweating, a shudder up my spine, the hair stands up on the back of my neck. I am in the room, the spare room. The double bed is jammed up under the window, neatly made with a taro-patterned quilt. I stand stock-still, and I cast around. There’s a bit of junk, boxes, a desk, a stuffed bookcase. I jump when I see a figure in the wardrobe mirror. It’s me! I look for a while longer. I want to cry, but I don’t. I rasp tears away quickly. It’s silent in the house. I’m getting out of here. Never again. Never again. I want to cry but I don’t. I hate the reflection of myself in the mirror. I don’t want to look. I swing it to one side, the wardrobe door, and get a start—there’s the costume, hanging, swaying a bit with the sucking motion of the door being opened. I have a sense of déjà vu. I’ve stood here before, with the costume in my hand. If so, maybe this isn’t real either. I touch the site of the mend, the shoulder, where my hands had been busy for so long. It all comes galloping back. I know the fabric well, the coolness. I touch the sleeve. The client hasn’t put it on the floor. He’s forgotten to put it on the floor as he said he would, and to trample it underfoot. I would never have forgotten that detail, to put the costume on the floor and mess it up, with things on top, so it looked as if it had fallen of its own accord. So it looked authentic. But of course, I have changed it. I have finished the sleeve, so it doesn’t matter.

  I hear movement on the path, the shells being crushed. I’m breathless, my heart pneumatic-drilling in my chest. I have the costume. I bundle it up like a baby in my arms. I remember its weight. I go back through the house and out the French doors. I can hear the boom box, an announcer, a burst of cabaret. The father is on the other side of the house. Kevin. He’s whistling. The garden is sunk in shade. I can’t see Dreadful and Frightful. They must be there, at the bottom of the garden, but I can’t see them. They’re in the dark. He’s whistling. Don’t whistle after dark. I’ve heard that. It’s a Maori proverb. Don’t whistle after dark because the birds don’t. I crunch along the shell path, hurl banana fronds away from my face. The sun is dropping. It’s late summer, it’s autumn. That fine light, delicate light. I get into the car, put the costume on the seat beside me, and I must’ve driven home. I don’t remember doing it. I remember the road, through tears. Tears. They should have picked me up for drunken driving, for grief-in-charge.

  •

  I sat in the kitchen, shaking, yes, like a leaf. Everything was on—lights, radio, breadmaker going nom nom. I hated it. Everything was over. Everything. The back door was open. I was looking out over the city lights. There was nothing to see. Dots. A few wild palms.

  I went into my workroom. Didn’t turn on the light. Hah, sometimes I forgot that you could. A snippet of moonlight came in. I was trembling. The costume hanging there looked bigger than it should. It might push down a flipping wall.

  34

  I went back and forth about going to the fashion show because I didn’t want to go anywhere, anywhere on earth, but I sort of needed to go because the aprons. I felt like crap, I mean absolute shite. The worst I’d ever felt. Like you may as well give up. In the end I went because if I stayed home I’d go crazy.

  He was on the doorstep. My heart went up high, then plummeted like an elevator. For a split second I thought he’d come to get back together. Then I realised. That moment, that realisation, was the nadir. It was the well.

  ‘You’ve got the dress,’ he said. ‘Give us it back.’

  I didn’t reply. I don’t know what I did.

  He frowned. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Are you joking?’ I said. My voice sounded croaky.

  He gawuffed. Then he said no, he wasn’t. Joking. He needed that dress. He said he heard I met his father. I said, He’s nice, your father. I was cold as ice. We went on with this nonsense, like we weren’t separate people, like we were talking to ourselves. That’s what s e x does to people. He was wearing a black blazer over a check shirt. The effect would’ve been preppy-looking if it weren’t so messy. I told him I was on my way out and when he asked where, as if it was any of his business, I said off-hand, To a fashion show.

  ‘Oh, thingie’s?’

  I didn’t bother answering.

  He’d been there that day, of course, the day Mabel came around to get the aprons. I didn’t expect them for another week! she’d said. He’d blinked at me, and understood that there’d been no need to wait for the costume, no need to talk, no need to sit and drink wine, no need to wince into the afternoon sun, to look out at the wild garden, or to watch the room change suddenly from yellow to grey. There’d been no need for all that, but it had happened.

  I was half in the mandolin, half out, swaying back and forth on the doorstep. I felt jittery. He was boinging on the veranda. He said, Just get the dress, and I said, Fine.

  I slopped inside. He’d have a fag on the veranda anyway. But he followed me inside.

  I turned. ‘What?’

  We leaned against opposite walls of the passage (our shoulders like the men in Clonard). I asked him why he didn’t tell me and he said tell you what and I said you know. But maybe he didn’t know, because there were two things. He shook his head back and forth. I asked him if he was even sorry and he said he was, about the whole thing, from start to finish. He looked upset—he looked upset—and said it was just the way it was, that was the nature of it. You mean the sale, I said, and he said, no not that, that was just business, it had nothing to do with anything.

  I told him it did have something to do with something.

  He shook his head and screwed up his face. ‘Why do you care about those people? Why should the Woolthamlys have the money? Any more than anyone else?’

  I don’t know. I didn’t know.

  ‘They’ve had their turn. That’s the nature of it.’

  ‘Of late capitalism,’ I said with a kind of sneer.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘And I thought you were finished with him anyway.’

  ‘Did you? I thought you were finished with Milly. And Trisha.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  I said I couldn’t trust him an inch, and he said of course not, and I can’t trust you.

  I knew this, of course. The thing was, I knew I’d never do this again. I’d lived out something, I don’t know what, some sort of brokenness. I turned on the Wah Lee light, turned it off again. Didn’t need it. I leaned against the passage wall and felt the flocked wallpaper through my fingertips.

  He stepped forward and searched my face. ‘I did fall in love with you. I did think we’d be together, otherwise.’

  ‘Otherwise,’ I said. I was pinning myself to the wall, like a butterfly. ‘Otherwise.’

  Suddenly he flushed like a lantern. ‘I loved you, and I told you everything. I told you things I’ve never told anyone. And you didn’t tell me anything in return. I don’t even know you!’ He grabbed my shoulders and I jerked them and said get off, but we wrestled a bit and I sort of biffed him, because I could, it was pathetic. We fell back against the wall, against the fuzzy flowers. Right into his face I said I felt the same, I don’t know you. Even as I said it I knew this wasn’t true. I’d known him as well as you can know anyone. I told him that without the Blackout things would have gone on as they were, and no one would have known anyone.

  ‘That’s just shit,’ he said.

  He told me the Trisha thing was nothing, it was fleeting.

  I put my hand on his face and he hurled it away as if I’d burned him. Then I went into the workroom to get the costume.

  In my workroom I wriggled out of my Marilyn Sainty number, dropped it in a puddle on the floor. Shadows leaped up the walls. There seemed to be at least two of me. I liked the company, because I was so nervy, almost feverish. I bumbled the costume off its hanger. It was heavy. I’d never got used to its weight. The client called out from the passage, what was I doing. I heard him stomp outside, no doubt for a fag. I spread the costume on the table and tugged the zip undone. It was like roadworks, that zip. I held the costume in front of me and stepped into it as if climbing big-gauged stairs. One, two. Shaking like a leaf. Doing up the zip was like being strong-armed by a mobster, but I managed to secure it, right up to my neck. It fit perfectly. No, it didn’t. It was a little big, but not much. It felt heavy, protective, velvety, like a special cello case made for my body. If I were a cello. I watched a ghostly image of myself in the mirror twirling a single revolution, the bell of the skirt swishing around my thighs. I’d never tried on any garment belonging to a client before. I ran my hand over the roughness of the knotwork, where I had torn it, and mended it, and a thrill of transgression (ah, a trans word, the like of which I hadn’t used in a long while) rushed through my body. I peered along my shoulder and under my arm as far as I could see, at the scar where the seam had been torn. The mend was almost invisible. Except to the eye of the mender. I could see it because I knew where to look, and what the mend was made up of. I knew its history. I wasn’t a rider on a galloping horse. I knew though, even then, that it was better to be the rider, and not look so closely.

  In the bedroom I hauled on black pantihose and rooted around in the wardrobe for a pair of black lowish pumps I’d got from the op shop one time. They were a bit mouldy. I tumbled the things from my common-or-garden bag into a squishy black handbag. At the last minute, because I didn’t want to look too eccentric, I pulled out a black lacy wrap of Mabel’s and draped it around my shoulders. Also, the nights were beginning to close in. It was autumn. All this happened in autumn.

  ‘It’s a wrap,’ I said to myself in the mirror.

  I might have laughed once. But I was trembling.

  (Those Were the Days.)

  When I came back out the client was sitting on the front steps, reaching up and drumming his fingers on the handrail. I had liked those fingers. I was so strung out it was hard to walk a straight line. I stood in front of him, looking down. He didn’t notice what I was wearing. Men; I tell you.

  ‘The dress?’

  I opened my wrap like a stripper.

  ‘What!’ He jumped up quickly.

  ‘What?’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Take it off.’

  ‘Here?’ I walked down the path.

  I heard him gawuff. I told him I didn’t have time now, which was true. He said, How long can it take to change? and I said, You’d be surprised.

  ‘Just go and get out of it!’ A neighbour watering his garden across the road craned up at the raised voice. The client said through his teeth, ‘Do it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  He sighed musically. He asked where the show was and I told him. This ballroom thing, in the old Blind Institute. I made to set off up the street.

  He called after me. ‘You’re not driving?’

  The neighbour was having a good old gawk, I noticed.

  ‘Art has the car,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘And anyway, there won’t be parking within cooee.’

  He said come on, I’ll drop you off and I said ta and scurried back and got in the car. Probably shouldn’t have. Don’t get into a car with a stranger. Or someone you fell in love with.

  He bumped his head getting in, and while he was putting on his seatbelt, talked to the steering wheel with exaggerated patience (the poor steering wheel). ‘I’ll drive you there. I’ll pick you up afterwards. We’ll come back here and you give me the dress.’ Now he looked at me. ‘Agreed?’

  •

  I must’ve agreed. He drove rather erratically through the Domain and over to Parnell. All the way through the kinky streets I was thinking, This is the last thing I’ll ever do. I didn’t even care. He pulled up screechily outside the venue. The ballroom.

  ‘Ta,’ I said.

  ‘You look ridiculous.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  He laughed bitterly. I laughed bitterly. You know what? We kissed, involuntarily. A thirst. A hunger. Then I got out. It was a beautiful autumn evening, by the way, hazy and apricotish.

  I was speeding. As I was skedaddling towards the ballroom—because it was almost time for the show to start—a double-breasted-suited person put his head in the car window and started yakking to the client. I saw this out of the corner of my eye. They seemed to know each other. The client got out of the car and was, I have to say, schmoozing with this person. I could tell by the obsequious body language on the part of the client, a notch short of bowing and scraping. As I disappeared inside I saw the client being towed—as if he was being led by his tie, if he’d had a tie, in any case he looked like a goose—towards a tall pashmina-engulfed woman who was undoubtedly the wife of the double-breasted person. They all did European kisses. I left them to it. The client would be gone in a sec anyway.

  Inside the foyer, everyone seemed drunk, a roiling sea. The Irish Sea. There was an air of hysteria, shrieks of laughter like Bedlam or an orchestra tuning up. Perhaps they were all tripping from the chemical smell of new clothes. Perhaps it was just me. I was jostled through the double doors into the ballroom, which was gold and curly and plush, wouldn’t have been out of place at Versailles. Mabel’s friends and followers filled the place. There were distinct groups—I’d noticed this before. Tribes. The forty-something wives of businessmen, whose skirts were of a type as if they all came from the same village. I’d hand-finished loads of them. Then there were the young heroin-chic types dressed in Mabel’s black range. I didn’t know a soul. I also shrugged off my Mabel wrap, and felt pleased with myself in my bell skirt and embroidered sleeves. I noticed the odd person casting a glance at me.

  And there was Mabel, glowing with life and shiny black glasses, surrounded in a cloud of well-wishers, and reaching out to crush me in an embrace, blasting in my ear, twice, ‘I said, you’ll love the aprons when you see them. That tinge of oppression, only joking.’ Then groping for the man next to her, pulling him into view. ‘My second husband, Bruce. The most supportive husband I’ve ever had, the most loyal.’ Bruce blushed. She’d once told me she and Bruce didn’t have sex for five years before they got divorced, and hadn’t wanted to so it was simple, you could be friends, she’d said. Which might tell you something about bitterness, where bitterness comes from. Then Mabel was pointing and saying, ‘Isn’t that your lovely client?’ I heard myself call, Mabel, like a wail, but it was lost.

  The client was nodding ridiculously, like a horse with a feedbag, to a little knot of silver-haired people, the double-breasted person and his wife among them. You know what I thought then, seeing him kowtowing? He’s still the working-class boy from Belfast. He was nodding and smiling and carrying on across the sea of heads. It was like hell, it was like the inferno. Only happy, on second thoughts. Paradiso. And now the client was stabbing at his watch theatrically, and making big movements with his mouth, words, like this was a Christmas pantomime, and he was backing away from the suited group, and then bumping into Mabel, and turning and giving her a possumish look, and studiously ignoring me. Mabel was pecking his cheek and bellowing something at him, then Mabel was swept away and I was swirled further into the Va (yes, the Va).