37

  Art was in bed, just waking and realising it was morning. He said, Where’ve you been? in a custardy voice. Long story, I said, and I sank onto the bed. Well? he said. I said nothing and we just looked at each other. I wrapped Art in my arms and I knew that this bit of love would save me from being destroyed. He wrapped me back. I felt lucky, because I knew I couldn’t love completely the way I wanted to, only in secret.

  After a while I said, Change of subject but not entirely. He didn’t exactly laugh. I said, into his shoulder, that for some reason I was thinking about the time Mary-France and Dad and Lisa and I tried to drive to the top of the steepest street in the Southern Hemisphere, how we had to do the last bit on foot, and it was all downhill from there.

  I said I was starving. Art went and got a huge bowl of Weetbix, about six of them, and I shovelled them in to keep body and soul together. He sat and watched me. Milk, I said, or tried to and he said, Yair, good to have milk again. Even then, I thought things would fall apart, I really did, that’s why everything was so flat. And maybe he did too, I don’t know. And they could’ve. What I knew then was that things would only ever be climbing or falling, like the free market. Never still.

  Then he told me, sitting there, that he had something to say, and he had tears in his eyes—a canary down a mine, when a man cries—and I got a bit alarmed. But then he didn’t say it, whatever it was. He said, instead, that he’d thought everything was going to end because the farm did, but it wasn’t going to.

  I finished the Weetbix and lay down. I was exhausted, in my bones, in my blood. I fell asleep and slept like death until one in the afternoon.

  When I got up, Art was crashing about packing pots in the kitchen because we were moving, of course. I started to help, getting jars with dead flies in them out from the back of the pantry. Art turned to me and said, Do you think it will be okay? And I said, Yes, do you think it will be? and he said, Yair.

  38

  Some last things:

  A few days later, I went downtown to Darby Street, a higgledy-piggledy lane off Queen Street, in which there is a shop called the Recycle Boutique. I went in and fossicked about. I had this crazy notion I might find the costume there. I mean, what would a street kid do with a dancing costume apart from sell it? If it was in the Recycle Boutique, by any chance, I would buy it (like they do in The Red Overalls—‘We’ll just have to buy them again’). The shop assistant would run her hands over the knotwork as she wrapped it and say it was beautiful. I’d agree, although I was sick to death of its beauty. I’d had a-blinking-nuff of it. I would go home and get the car, drive to the client’s house and park by the brass 96. The place would be sparkling, all periwinkle and oxblood, white lace and jasmine. Milly would open the door. Yes, Milly. I’d push the parcel at her, and she would look rather astonished. Here, I’d say, your husband had the sleeve finished for you as a surprise. Pleasure would cross her well-groomed intelligent-looking accountant’s face, and I would tromp back along the shell path and through the dinky picket gate.

  But the costume wasn’t at the Recycle Boutique. Which meant Milly never got it back, which meant there must’ve been some kind of comeuppance. I hoped it spelled curtains (to be honest), but I suspected it didn’t. Like a plastic bag, a marriage is hard to kill off.

  •

  Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations went bust, as you may have gathered—the clients didn’t return, and I had to sell my machine and overlocker. It shouldn’t have. I should’ve been able to go to the cleaners over the Blackout, and come back again all sparkling because my overheads were so small (to quote you-know-who). But in any case, the house had been sold and the settlement date was approaching like a meteor.

  We packed up fast. Sorting through my workroom felt like an archaeological dig. I bundled up offcuts of fabric like a baby. I turned on my good light. I opened my workbook, and there was the last job I had done.

  Costume, black, torn sleeve, embroidery

  Which meant:

  No choice, out of my hands

  I understood this.

  It was all over. Which is not to say I didn’t imagine the client standing in the doorway, finding me at my electric sewing machine with pins in my mouth. He would laugh, he’d say I couldn’t survive because I was a sweatshop of one, no really, he was serious. And I would answer him, out loud, out into the room, pins falling out of my mouth.

  •

  Three months after Prue and Bert sold them, the villas were on the market again. This was the shortest amount of time you could turn over real estate. Someone was laughing all the way to the bank. I went to have a nosy at the open home, although I shouldn’t have gone. It was rather depressing, especially seeing we couldn’t afford to live in the inner city anymore. They’d put our conversion back into one house—and renovated it to within an inch of its life in the process. It felt like a new world. What I realised: the house hadn’t been cut in two when we lived in it at all, it only seemed that way, like a magician’s sequinned wife sawn in half in a chambered box. As I paced about at the open home (a bit self-conscious, as if measuring), I saw that the yellow kitchen had been stripped back and they’d started again. It was white. In the passage I looked through the space where a wall had once been into the side of the villa I’d never seen before. The rooms were big and square and elegant, and the yellow Auckland sunlight came flooding through them. There would be no need for a Wah Lee’s paper lantern to be glowing during the day. I stood in the mandolin and looked back at the place where the beads had run under the door like honey, and I thought it is over, and I boinged down the weedy steps for the last time.

  39

  In the car park at St Luke’s Shopping Centre are two stiff little green blazers that look as if they’re still on the hangers, but they have children inside them. A girl and a boy, about five and seven respectively. The girl has a tiny tartan skirt and white pipe-cleaner legs. It’s the uniform of an expensive Anglican prep school. The children have dropped down from the high door of an SUV, almost as if from a building, but gently, like Spiderman. I am sitting in the driver’s seat of our little bomb under the low roof of the grey, oily parking building. I turn my head and see the client closing the shiny door of the SUV that the children have tumbled from. He’s fatter around the middle, greyish, going grey young, and his hand is reaching to engulf that of the younger child. There’s Milly, older, harassed in a happy kind of way, her hair breaking free of its bun, tottering in her high heels from the other side of the car and gathering the boy’s hand, and her bag. I happen to be in her line of vision and she smiles vacantly as if she thinks she might know me, perhaps would wave even, if her hands weren’t occupied. As they walk away across the wasteland of the car park, the client turns to fire at the car, which jumps with the force of all the locks shooting home at the same time. At this point, he looks at me. A bolt of shock goes through him like the car locks, I can see it. But no, it’s me, it’s going through me and I am welded, until he looks away and, in a few strides, catches up with his family as they trail across the heterotopia. Yes, heterotopia.

  So that’s the girl, the little five-year-old uniform on legs, who the costume was for. Who I toiled away for in the front room back in 1998. It was her blinking heritage. When she’s older, if someone asks her at a party, Why didn’t you wear your national costume? she’ll have to say, like me, I don’t have one. It’s gone.

  I remember it intimately. I remember every last stitch of it.

  You know what? I could make a costume for my own daughter, if I put my mind to it. I could run her up a so-called Irish dancing costume in velvet or soft wool, in black or blue or green. I could embroider the hem, the cuffs, the sleeves, the edges of the cape. Oh yes, in knotwork. I know all about knotwork. My daughter could have a costume hanging in the wardrobe at home. I could do this for her. But I don’t.

  She is six. At the local state school.

  I won’t.

  Art is buckling her into her car seat. Oh, Art? Doctor Frome? He has a part-time gig teaching academic writing in the evenings. The pay is stink. Hopefully a position in his field will come up soon. It’s been a long time. I’ve taken up my studies again, now that Sadie is at school. I’m looking into current theories behind Deformance: The Subjective in New Zealand Women’s Poetry. From there on it gets involved. But thanks for asking. I have a bit of cleaning work which almost covers the fees.

  Sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if there’d been no Blackout. I might have mended that particular dress in a pool of electric light, which I, like everyone, took so much for granted, and nothing would have changed. I would have kept on working with my hands in my workroom. I never would have moved into the front room and looked out through the wobbly glass at the overgrown garden. Now my hands are mostly still. I have a narrow office like a strip of land. Just this afternoon I had a conversation by the lift with a fellow student who, for some reason, was under the impression that I was about to drop out. Drop out! Nothing could be further from the truth. I had in my bag right at that very moment Helene Cixous, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Derrida—Derrida who I’d actually seen, heard, in the Michael Fowler Centre, 1993! And the fellow student in the foyer, a slightly eccentric woman (I mean, drop out!), said, Wow, Derrida! Did you touch the hem of his garment? I shook my head and was about to say that in fact I had been a mender, had done hems, and had taken small snippets from the insides of hems to mend a hole elsewhere on a garment. I could’ve made a hole somewhere on Derrida’s jacket almost invisible. But I didn’t say that. Better not to go down the meandering avenues of my mad-but-good fellow student. Anyway, there I was, book bag on my shoulder, wearing my Nom*D cardigan with the big safety pin, left over from the days when I could afford to buy the odd designer garment—yes, garment—and on my way into the staff room to heat up lunch in the microwave. I realised—I did—that it was a relief after all to be thinking again instead of doing.

  40

  I’m afraid I’ve got a bit self-centred about all this, but I really couldn’t help it. I set out to write about culture, loss of culture, economic movements etc., but I’ve ended up telling you quite a bit about myself. It was hard to unravel the different parts. I suppose, along the way, you’ve got the message that another man, apart from my husband, loved me. He really did. I loved him, of course. But I didn’t intend to go on like this. I’d like to thank you, though. If I hadn’t told you, I don’t think I would have been able to stay on an even keel, I don’t think I would have been successful in keeping it secret. My life would’ve been destroyed. Thank you. You’re worth your weight in gold.

  Acknowledgments

  Permission to reproduce the following is gratefully acknowledged:

  Slavitt, David R. “Tityrus.” Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil. p. 3. © 1971, 1972, 1990 by David R. Slavitt. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Espada, Martín. “My Native Costume”. Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2003. New York: Norton, 2004. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

  I am indebted to the following publications for accounts of life in Belfast: Parker, Tony. May the Lord in His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Conroy, John. Belfast Diary: War As a Way of Life. New York: Beacon Press, 1987.

  The book that GoGo finds in the library is: Harrold, Robert. Folk Costumes of the World. Illus. Phyllida Legg. New York: Stirling, 1990.

  Many thanks to Creative New Zealand for a grant that helped with the writing of this novel.

  My grateful thanks to Laura Mitchell, Ali Lavau and especially Jane Palfreyman; to dear writing friends, Kathy Phillips, Deborah Ross, and Erica Reynolds-Clayton, and to faculty and students (from whom I learned so much) at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Thanks and love, as always, to Robert Sullivan, Temuera Sullivan, and Eileen Kennedy.

 

 

  Kennedy, Anne, The Last Days of the National Costume

 

 

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