‘It was eerie,’ he said. ‘This weird quiet, like the end of the world. People were talking, but all quiet and calm. They were streaming by, walking along together in the dusk, as if we were all walking towards something. I saw a man limping and someone was helping him. There was a woman with all these little kids and people were carrying them alongside her.’

  Art’s lit-up face: radiant is not too strong a word.

  ‘GoGo,’ he said, ‘it was fantastic.’

  He’d seen something, something I hadn’t. I can’t quite explain it, but it was this extra quality in him, this sense of wonder. Yes, I know, I’m sick to death of wonder, too—wonder in the bone people, wonder in Alice in Wonderland, wonder with chips—but it seemed to be true for Art. He’d felt real wonder, not just thought about it, and you could see the result coming off him. As I went back to my stitching, I wished I’d been out there on the street among people behaving differently from how they’d ever behaved before, people walking in the fading light, talking to strangers, and spilling over with the milk of human kindness. It seemed that something needed to happen for people to connect. It had happened, but I’d missed it. There might never be another time like this.

  •

  Later, I padded into the bedroom and cuddled up behind Art. We had sex, kind of quickly. Well, it was late. But good. Afterwards the sheets felt watery, steaming—I don’t think I’m getting too fanciful—from the hot rock of Art’s sleeping body. No dehumidifier, of course. I snuffed the torch, and blinked at the pitch-dark. It was almost painful. I could feel my eyelids yawning, gulping as much blackness as possible in case there might be a shred of light in it. There wasn’t. After a bit of tossing and turning, I took the torch and went outside and looked at the blacked-out city. I felt like I was looking at Auckland for the first time. I know this is ridiculous. I couldn’t see anything.

  6

  On Monday morning Art and I sat on the back doorstep drinking coffee, attacking our tough croissants, and reading about the outage in the Herald. Every time I encountered the word I read it as ‘outrage’. We’d spent an inky weekend in the villa conversion, cooked twice on the 747. No, once. On Saturday night some friends in Arch Hill fed us lasagne at a dinner party, among interesting lamps. Art had regaled the table with the story of his walk home after the power went out—by this point it was an interstitial space, neither light nor dark, work nor leisure, but communal. It sounded lovely. Everyone was saying the Blackout would likely go on for a week. Pinnacle Power was fixing the ancient cable. This fixing theory didn’t quite marry with the news I now read in the Herald—that every generator in the country was rumbling towards Auckland. There was also a map of the Blackout zone, and we were exactly on the edge. They were right about that. Walking home from dinner on Saturday we’d noticed that the other side of our street was carrying on as usual, lights blazing, TVs chortling at their own jokes sort of thing. We didn’t know these neighbours, but suddenly they seemed shifty, privileged. I hated them. By contrast, our side of the street had been unnaturally quiet (although of course completely natural). As you passed the dark houses, you saw the odd single muted spark deep inside like an F-stop.

  On the radio they were saying that little old New Zealand was big news around the world. The New York Times ran an article, the Washington Post, the Guardian. We were famous! (Picture a couple sipping coffee on their stoop in Manhattan. Did you hear that, Martha, we got a mention in the New Zealand Herald!) Art had a little rave. How the fuck, rampant capitalism etc. Not to mention the embarrassment. I wasn’t embarrassed. Art said I should be. This great bloody feisty little fucking place.

  Art had been doing his transcribing work at home, but needed to go into the LambChop studios in Mount Eden so he could plug in. When he’d trundled off, I went into my workroom and yanked back the curtains. A lemony sunlight fell obliquely onto the rack of clothes. By afternoon it would be angling onto my bank of spools. Usually I worked in the pond of electric light, but today the pond had dried up. You might imagine fish flapping tragically in it. My swanky new(ish) sewing machine was cold and grey. You’d think I’d have been disappointed, hot under the collar, outraged even. I wasn’t. I felt a strange excitement. The thing is, nothing had ever happened before. I’d missed all the disasters—Second World War, Tangiwai train crash, Wahine storm, the Springbok tour (alive but too young). Now this, in the nick of time, before the end of the terrible century. We would live through the darkness in our half-villa in the middle of Auckland. I know it’s pathetic. No one was going to die. But a charge ran up and down inside my body. You could have hooked me up to the national grid. Ah, but the transformers wouldn’t have been able to transmit the power.

  I took my workbook to the front room. There would be no new clients today, of course, with the city at a standstill. I thought I may as well see what I could get done by hand, taking advantage of the light from the big windows. I must say, it was nicer in there than in my workroom. The big blood-red velvet theatre curtains that someone had got from somewhere, the white-painted floorboards, and an enormous red brocade roll-armed couch that looked like an old Dodge. The only bum note was the abstract-patterned rug that Prue had hooked for us, but at least it was springy. In those years, things, possessions, just appeared. (Why don’t they anymore?) I looked in my workbook. I only quote it here because you’ll be able to see what kind of a business I was in.

  Blouse, cream silk, torn front placket

  Jacket, man’s sports, navy, cigarette burn

  Blazer, school, torn front panel

  Blouse, woman’s, sequined, torn buttonhole

  Dress, evening, red, rip and oil stain

  Dress, evening, pale blue, slit up back

  And here’s how these rips happened, according to my clients:

  Desperate hurry, sex

  Late night, yacht club, gazing at woman

  Boy, innocent

  Teeth, sex

  Small car, gearstick, sex

  Caught in car door, drunk, sex

  And so on. Of course, I also had the standard letting-out and taking-in jobs, and the ubiquitous jean hems, and making a coat into a jacket. Why can’t people ever be satisfied? I estimated that in three days I would get to the end of my list—even taking into account the item that had arrived last thing on Friday, which would of course be a nightmare, and which I should never have taken on, but I did.

  I started on the cream silk blouse, which poured into my hands like milk. It did! I unpicked the remaining stitches on the placket so I could start again. The demure cut of the button-to-the-neck blouse, its neat collar, had been like a red rag to a bull, anyone could see that (even though it was pale). Shame, it was good-quality silk, and here’s an interesting thing: people dress up to cheat. If I had some advice for someone contemplating having an affair, it would be don’t wear your best clobber to the rendezvous. Wear cheap, easily replaceable stuff. No silk, no cashmere, no high-quality cotton. No designer labels, no retro. No custom-made, no homemade. Definitely no heirlooms. But would they take this advice? I doubt it. As for me, I don’t know what I’d wear. Maybe that’s why I would never have an affair—I wouldn’t know what to put on. But no, it was because I was content. I suppose I could understand how my clients might think, in some weird way, that their best garments had no meaning without the lover. The other thing is (and I just thought of this), perhaps they wore these good clothes because they felt good—the cool of the silk, and the way cotton hugs you. The outer clothes would be of fabrics that might rub roughly against a lover’s sleeve in public, in a lift, side by side on a bus, but innocently because it was, after all, just a sleeve. The lovers might have stared straight ahead going up to the tenth floor as this rubbing went on. There would have been no evidence of it to the naked eye. A forensic scientist, however, would find microscopic fibres hopelessly entwined. I only know this from what I saw. I would never have thought of rubbing woollen sleeves in a lift.

  For the school blazer—something tender about the felty grey fabric a boy had torn on barbed wire—a patch would do, given the temporary nature of childhood. I took a snippet from inside the blazer’s hem and transferred it to the elbow, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Dickybirds.

  There was a wedding train with an almighty gash at floor level. I’ve mended a few of these. There are obviously a lot of nervous grooms out there in their big stiff new wedding shoes, and a lot of fragile trains teasing them playfully. Till death us do part. Ri-ip. I do. Parp. I began to reattach the filmy swathe as if it had sprockets. With such fine fabric, the trick is not to stitch too much or too tightly. As I sewed, I remembered my own wedding outfit: a black skirt, black mesh top, and a green Zambesi waistcoat—beautiful, but still a waistcoat. I hadn’t set out to look like a man on my wedding day, but the photo (which someone took, I don’t know who) is evidence that I could’ve been the groom. I think I had a fear of wedding dresses—not that I would’ve worn a fluffy white get-up, but there is a middle ground. When I was a kid, traditional wedding dresses were very last-year. I remember a photo sent in the post of a distant cousin all done up in her frothy gown. Mary-France opened the mail to this shock—a ridiculous get-up, a collage of bourgeois ideologies. This could also apply to the marriage. The case was also discussed in the conversation pit, on another occasion, with the English lecturers. The poor, poor girl. I sort of wanted to be a poor, poor girl, and I didn’t. How to win?

  I finished the train. I would have to tell the just-married woman to be careful with it, it was fragile. I was always telling clients that—just because it’s mended, doesn’t mean it’s indestructible. It was a wound.

  •

  The next day, pretty much the same, except it was raining. Plus they were saying three weeks of Blackout, and an expert was coming from Australia to fix the cables. I woke up the bat.

  Oh, the bat?

  I trundled the antique Singer sewing machine from the corner of the bedroom where it’d been taking up space, but nicely, into the front room and parked it near the window. I swung the machine upright from where it hung underneath the little wooden platform like a flying rodent, shiny black, and eerily sculpted. It had been my bedside table when I was at university. There’d been a fashion for them, and I’d never been able to bring myself to get rid of it. I liked its long curly flourishes. I’d even used it once or twice, for a fiddly job. You could do a single stitch at a time. It didn’t race ahead like a dog on a leash (yes, I know it’s a bat).

  I tidied the front room to make it fit for business—scooped up coffee cups, stacked books, plumped cushions on the red brocade couch. I shuffled Art’s papers, which blossomed with staples in one corner as if it were spring. After my spring-clean, I started trollicking through my list of lettings-out, takings-in, takings-up, all on my trusty Singer. It was tedious work, but no more so than reading certain views of literature and culture.

  By early afternoon I had almost nothing left on my list. I made tea and stuffed my face with bread, warmish cheese and banana, standing at the kitchen bench. Well, there was one item left. I went to my workroom, balanced a banana skin on the edge of the table like a soft clock, and lifted the costume down. It was as heavy as chain mail, from all the embroidery. I’d get it out of the way this afternoon. I carried it like a little body to the front room and spread it out on the table. I ran my hand over the wool, which was soft but with a slight prickle in it, a stubble and glint like grass. It was cold to the touch, as garments always are. They have their own microclimate. It was beautiful, but Christ, it was certainly a right bloody mess. There’d been violence done to it. That was nothing new; but the scale of it—appalling. What had this Trisha woman done! Or the man. I inspected the ripped seam closely. Someone, some amateur, had embroidered right up to the edge. The freed silver threads formed a mass. I was going to have to redo a strip of silver embroidery, there was nothing for it. The afternoon was wearing on, wearing out like a grey jacket getting more ragged every minute. Always match colours in good light. Matching fabric and thread is the first principle of mending.

  I went back to my workroom, to my bank of spools. I loved those spools—a haze from the doorway, but the colours singled themselves out as you got closer. I chose a bunch of blacks, and the two or three skeins of silver embroidery silks that I had. Because there was no blinking electricity, I carted it all back to the front room. In the diffuse grey afternoon light, I matched the colours. There are gradations of black, of course, and finding the right one is like tuning a violin. You keep going, getting closer, going past it, coming back, until you’re bang on. With this old costume, because it was so faded, it was always going to be a little off-key. Flat is better than sharp. Luckily I had a pretty darn good match in the silver silk.

  With my incy snake-handled scissors I nosed a half-centimetre strip of knotwork undone so I could reattach the sleeve. I spent an hour leaning into the front room window with my glasses anchored on my nose, fusing the fine wool seam back together. The black fabric gulped the light like a sea anemone swallows water; a little factory. The seam was the easy bit. Next, the knotwork. There was a lint-like trace of what I’d pulled undone, and also I could copy the other sleeve. All the same, I squatted down at the Big Books shelf and looked in the index of a huge tome I have on costume. I read that these dancing costumes were descendants of Irish peasant dresses of the eighth century. From the twelfth century they were decorated with gold-thread patterns from the Book of Kells. Blah blah blah. I loved this stuff. The curly Kell designs looked like Maori carvings and I remembered reading some theory about how the Celts could’ve settled New Zealand before the Maori, and left stone circles scattered about the place before relocating to Ireland. Sounded like complete bollocks to me, but nice try. Hey, I’d be indigenous! Weren’t the common curly motifs just the sea sloshing about in its communal basin? I couldn’t find anything about the actual stitching, the loops and spirals. Didn’t matter.

  Soon I was pulling silver silk again and again through the old black fabric. Grandmother! I snorted to myself. Within a couple of hours, I’d put all the escaped threads to bed. It was an okay job, even if I did say so myself, considering the age of the thing, and the shambles it had been in the first place. A rider on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice. I hung the costume back in my workroom and took afternoon tea to the front room. Eating a tepid Mallow Puff, I watched rain approaching over the western hills.

  7

  There was a man on the doorstep, wet—soaked. I showed him in and took his furled umbrella and propped it in the corner. He was jittery, but then the men always were. He didn’t have a parcel or anything. There’d be a scrap of something in a pocket, no doubt, a silk shirt screwed into a ball.

  But he didn’t have a garment. He said he’d come to collect a dress. Nervous as hell, stuttering almost. It was kind of late for business hours. Half past six.

  ‘A dress?’ I said. I might’ve smiled to put him at ease, but I tried not to. Well, he’d cheated on his wife. I knew that for a start.

  ‘A dress.’ He squizzed into the tunnel of the flat. ‘You in the Blackout?’

  I said we were and led him down the passage. At the workroom door I asked him if he had a docket.

  He puffed from behind his lips. ‘It’s a, you know, dancing thing.’ He looked around as if he might find it hanging in the air. I’d noticed this before about the men. The women thought abstractly about a garment. It was folded neatly in their head. When I looked puzzled, he said, ‘A sort of dress. A woman brought it to you. Trisha.’

  ‘Oh that,’ I said. As if I could forget. ‘You’re collecting it for her?’

  ‘She doesn’t drive,’ he said, and blushed. What agony to be a man. If a woman were picking up a man’s suit, she wouldn’t be all steamed up about being thought a cross-dresser. He stuttered on. ‘She’s my sister.’ Yeah right. His face twitched, the palsy of a lie. My clients never lied. They always told the truth, because I knew it anyway. But what did it matter about this one? Let him fabulate through his teeth if it pleased him.

  While I swept through the rack like The Woman of the Dunes, he made polite conversation from the doorway. Bit damp out there, he said. It was, I said. Actually it was a downpour. Unseasonable, he said. Mm, I said. It was bang-on for the season. His incessant decorum—I have to blame him—made me snag my finger on a garment. I flinched, and heard him wince in sympathy. I sucked on that metallic taste which never fails to surprise me—the table of elements are our relatives, Granny H, Grandpa He; we’re the result of their unstable relationships. I wrapped a bit of interfacing around my finger; blood on a garment an absolute no-no of course. I was aware of the man watching me as I tied a knot in the bandage with one hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, to comfort him, because he seemed to have felt it more than I did, which is often the case. Thinking is terrible. ‘Occupational hazard,’ I said. ‘And the dark.’ When he didn’t respond, I prompted him: ‘The Blackout.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The outage.’

  He read the Herald.

  ‘Four days now,’ I said, ‘and they’re saying weeks. Weeks.’ It was a mantra.