‘McGrath. Shane. There’s no need.’

  I scribbled the receipt and handed it to him. They’re quite lovely these receipts, fluttery and bluish. ‘You must have heard everything,’ I said.

  He nodded and looked unseeing at the receipt. ‘Thanks.’ He was trembling.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Well, goodbye.’ He took a breath as if to drag on a cigarette. A smoker. ‘Oh’—he stopped—‘the costume.’ The word fumbled, as if he were holding it under his tongue like a thermometer. Then he lowered his voice, even though the idea of his wife hearing him from out on the street was ludicrous, and repeated, ‘The costume,’ quietly, as if that would cancel the loud version. ‘May as well take it with me.’

  I smiled. ‘May as well.’ On the table I folded the arms of the costume behind its back like a prisoner. He noticed it, a sudden but fleeting interest, and looked away. While I was wrapping it he said from the doorway, ‘Do you mind if I stay a minute or two? So I won’t, you know, catch her up.’

  I hesitated. Harbour him, again, while the wife drove away? I gestured to a chair squashed up against the cutting table.

  He shook his head and stepped further into the room. ‘I’ll stand. Only a minute.’

  I put the parcel on the table and picked up a half-done hem. Peered at the stitches, put it down. I was used to filling in empty minutes, but it was too dark to sew. I glanced at the client. Shane.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said. ‘Well, you know how it is.’ A sheepish smile—but not really, I knew that; it was a proud smile in sheepish clothing. Well, you know how it is was an advertisement for himself. Like so many men who’d come before him to have their trousers and jackets mended, he was bragging. Two women found him attractive, at least.

  I did stucco sweeps of the table, swatches and threads into the palm of my hand. A cursory act because the room was idle anyway in the Blackout. Lying fallow. I told myself not to ask him if he’d driven here, but went ahead anyway.

  When he nodded I asked, ‘Won’t she have seen your car out there?’

  A fresh look of comical anxiety. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘She might come back in.’

  He let out a slow, tight stream of air. ‘Here’s hoping!’

  Oh, a joker. I brushed the scraps into the bin and stood with my arms folded. A minute’s silence. I looked at his face, which was, yes, still angsty. ‘I had a friend,’ I said, and he looked sharply at me. ‘Who was seeing a man behind her boyfriend’s back.’ I stopped to see if he wanted to know the rest. He looked not so much inquiring as accepting of his fate—a touch of irony in his ‘Yes?’ I went on. ‘One day her boyfriend drove past a house, completely random, you know, in a suburb, and saw my friend’s car parked outside it.’ I felt a wiry smile of triumph on my face, and a thrill ran through my body. Well what do you expect? He was a cheater.

  ‘Jesus God!’ he said. ‘That makes me feel much better.’

  I tried to stop my lips from pursing, but I suspect I looked like I sucked lemons.

  He said, ‘I’ve never been hidden before. Not even in a wardrobe. I didn’t want to hurt her, you see. I had no idea she even knew. My name’s Shane, by the way.’

  ‘I know, you told me.’ We shook hands as if we’d just met, which felt awkward because we’d already touched fingers. We waited for the wife—Milly—to get further and further away. At one point he patted his pocket in a gesture I recognised as checking for cigarettes. He cleared his throat carefully, trying not to make too much noise. He still looked white, but there was this humour behind it, a combination of self-consciousness and bursting confidence, like a comedian. It was ego, that was what I identified it as. Barefaced ego. They’re all like that. I’d seen his dirty laundry, and he still managed to be wry.

  Into the silence he said again, ‘I really am sorry about this,’ and I said, ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to drag you into anything.’

  ‘I’m not dragged into anything,’ I said. The self-centredness of the man.

  ‘Good, well that’s good. Sometimes things get . . . so there’s no choice.’

  ‘Yes, okay.’

  ‘Especially when you throw in—’

  ‘No need to explain,’ I said. I’d heard the tangled stories of clients, the forbidden paths their garments took to reach me. I’d heard it all.

  ‘—when you throw in a betrothal, almost.’ He groaned softly but theatrically.

  The wife had been gone four minutes. It was seven o’clock, ish. The evening was stretching out. There were still two hours of daylight to go, but in the workroom the walls were purpling as if bruised.

  ‘I’ll be off,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll be well and truly gone by now,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve taken up enough of your time.’

  These polite phrases, like retro clothing. Sometimes they were empty. It was all in the way you said them.

  I reached for the parcel. ‘Betrothed is an odd word. These days.’

  Well it is, isn’t it?

  A truncated laugh erupted under his T-shirt. ‘Slight exaggeration. Family friend, more like.’

  I saw him along the passage silently. He shambled down the weedy steps, a man with a wife who’d been picked out for him, and a mistress, which was a sexist word but it was hard to think of another that did the job as well. I suppose you couldn’t blame him. No choice. Out of my hands. As he went down the path I remembered that I was still holding the costume and I started after him. ‘Your costume!’ He hadn’t heard. I’ve never had a very carrying voice. I wouldn’t be good in an emergency. He was in his car, pulling out and up the street.

  I went back inside and, stepping over the beads on the floor this time, put the parcel in my workroom until someone should come and collect it.

  9

  I didn’t set out to be a mender, in case you were wondering. No, no. I’d be an academic, and I still will, probably. I would be in an English department somewhere, perhaps in the Northern Hemisphere, which was, well, quite a big place—in a bright fat office, a professor, surrounded by narrow offices like strips of land occupied by lecturers. The seasons would be topsy-turvy of course, with the bulk of the work done in winter, the harvest of final assignments collected in bundles in the spring. The summer would be a time of deadness. But coming from the Southern Hemisphere, which was upside down anyway, this would seem normal. And the thing is, I’d always read a lot of literature, and if you like reading novels, and want to take them to bits and put them back together again like a clock and hope that they’ll still work afterwards, and if your parents happen to be reading If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller and leave it lying around the house, then you end up doing literary theory at varsity, and reading Saussure and Barthes and Foucault et al., who were all great guys, really they were. They were saying the blinking obvious, but someone had to say it. Also Kristeva, Cixous, bell hooks etc. All wonderful. You read them nodding and saying to yourself, That’s so true! It really was how things seemed, only you hadn’t realised it before.

  I once read that Jacqueline du Pré had never set out to play the cello. She was simply given a cello as a child, and so she played it. But sometimes she hated the cello. When she was grown up—and by this time a musical sensation around the world—she was given a very valuable cello and was told to be careful to keep it at the same temperature because of course changes of temperature aren’t good for a wooden instrument. Between concerts she’d put her cello out in the snow, or stand it in sunlight in a glassed-in porch. The cello would shrink and swell.

  I would’ve left Jameson out in the snow, but it never snowed in Wellington. It was Eurocentric to even think about snow, but you couldn’t help missing it somehow in your bones and feeling a little cheated that you’d have to leave old Fred out in the horizontal July rain. The pages would swell.

  It is true, though, while we’re on the subject, that Derrida is a matchmaker. I met Art behind a pillar in the cheap seats at the back of the Michael Fowler Centre when the great man was visiting Wellington on his ‘Derrida Downunder’ tour. Within six months we were married—Art and me, that is. That evening in the Michael Fowler Centre, as I searched for Derrida, who was soon to appear about a kilometre away on the stage, I was aware of a black shape beside me. (Even then Art dressed in the semiotician’s uniform. Boldface.) He was telling an anecdote to the person on the other side of him, a woman, also in black, who I felt annoyed with, even though I didn’t know her, or Art. Later I understood what that feeling was. Yes, I got to know sexual jealousy very well. But at the time, I was a babe in the woods. All I knew was I wanted this man in black to be telling me, not the woman in black, the story about Derrida in Kansas. How when Derrida visited Kansas someone asked him, after his talk, Don’t you think all this is a bit like The Wizard of Oz? (because of course it was Dorothy country, flat and tornado-prone), and Derrida replied, Yes, I suppose I am a bit like that little dog. Art and the woman cracked up, and I laughed too. Art looked at me. As things turned out, it stayed that way. Talk and laugh, laugh and talk, a simple equation. When the tiny, distant figure of Derrida finally appeared on the stage, I stared straight ahead at him for a solid hour while he talked on ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable’. He seemed to get smaller and smaller until he was at the end of the long tunnel of my vision. His head was too big for his dainty arms and legs.

  At the end of the lecture, the woman who had laughed at the Derrida joke dematerialised miraculously (sucked up by a tornado, I said later), and Art turned to me and asked if I’d like to go out for a bite. I was already imagining a tooth bruise in my neck. We went to the Lido, Art doing his upright stride, and ordered pasta, which we couldn’t swallow for wanting, and ended up soon after in his springy student bed. He was from Auckland but had come to Wellington to university because it was small and funky. It just went on from there. We talked about books and ideas and things, and laughed quite a bit. Art was great, he really was, and the more I got to know him, the nicer I saw he was. He was decent to everyone—old friends who he had nothing in common with anymore, shopkeepers, the girl he took to the Seventh Form dance, who wouldn’t let him fuck her even though all the other girls seemed to be doing it: he was friendly to her when he bumped into her in the street. He brought me cups of tea, he pressed his palm onto my brow if I wasn’t feeling well. I couldn’t believe my luck. I hadn’t even known people like Art existed. But also, I think what was so great about it was we weren’t all tied up in knots with each other. We allowed each other freedom, we didn’t stop each other seeing friends. I think the problem with some of my clients, for instance, is that they kept each other in a kind of prison. We were never like that.

  •

  Auckland had been trundling along in quite a fun way. It was bright and ferny, and the city sprawl all silvery. And I kind of liked going to gallery openings and parties—we knew a few people and met a few people, who were new blood.

  Several nights into the Blackout, for instance, Art was telling me about Glenda, an old family friend who’d just got back from France and was working as an assistant at LambChop. She’d been taught by a woman who was taught by Julia fucking Kristeva. The Formica shone in the light of the hurricane lamp. The wine looked like plums. I took a whiff of the fish Art had gone all the way to Freeman’s Bay for. It was acknowledged that I had the superior nose. I sniffed deeply and told him he shouldn’t have. While he lit the 747 and zipped oil around in the bottom of a pan like kanji, I wrestled with kumara. Then there was Stewart, said Art, who along with six thousand other apartment-dwellers had to crawl up multiple flights of stairs in the dark to his flat, poor bastard. It stank to high heaven. The sprinklers had been set off by the power cut, and there was no air-conditioning. They might be forced out of their apartments anyway, by a state of civil emergency.

  ‘We should have him to stay, shouldn’t we?’ said Art.

  ‘Who’s Stewart again?’

  ‘I’ve told you. He’s Shakespeare.’ Art still referred to people by the topics of their degrees. ‘Whoever Shakespeare was.’ Because Shakespeare might actually have been the Earl of Something.

  ‘I hate that,’ I said. And I do. I hate it when every last thing is up for questioning, even poor old middle-class Shakespeare, who apparently wasn’t educated enough to be himself.

  ‘Why would he want to come here when there’s no power? Aren’t there other people he can stay with?’

  ‘Stewart’s a bit . . . he’s a bit . . . how can I say?’

  I generally say yes to everything. I’m famous for it. I’d said yes to the dress, after all. It would be kind to have Stewart stay. There was a lot of goodwill about re the Blackout. But I had a strong feeling that I didn’t want any Stewart lurking around the villa conversion.

  Art’s blue eyes looked surprised, but he shrugged. ‘Fine.’

  We did a wobbly hug by the 747. ‘We’re doing alright, aren’t we?’ And we were. There are worse things. The fish, kumara and spinach were on the list of ten superfoods that Art had stuck on the fridge, of which it was good to eat at least three every day otherwise there might be a nasty shock waiting for you when you reached middle age. Free radicals running amok in your body. It was better to live in a constant state of virtual shock rather than wait for the real catastrophe.

  Life went on across the street, hums, cackles, whines.

  ‘Poor Stewart,’ said Art again. ‘But we’ve formed a sort of club. The five poor sods who actually live in the Blackout zone. Disparate people, all linked by darkness. I mean, Stewart and a feminist theorist from Paris. Darkness brought us together like a marketplace. I might write something about it.’

  Art said at least he would invite the feminist theorist with the degree from Paris, who also sort of grew up with him, and who also wrote a bit of poetry. And her partner or whatever.

  Choice between Stewart to stay and Glenda for dinner, Glenda hands down.

  ‘Except we have no power,’ I said, feeling practical.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Art. ‘They’re in the Blackout too.’

  We were all equal.

  Sometimes I think how different things would have been if I’d said yes to Shakespeare and spent the Blackout listening to someone wandering around the villa conversion reciting What light from yonder window breaks?

  Art asked about my day. That afternoon, that evening, a man in love with a woman.

  10

  On Wednesday (Day 5 of the Blackout) I went out, to stop myself going crazy and to buy food. Up on the corner of our street, with the villa roofs falling away from me, I hit Newton Road and stood and looked out over the quiet parabola of the gully. At its nadir the North-Western Motorway took off into the green-grey distance where the Waitakere Ranges lay. The on-ramp was usually choked with traffic. Now its relative emptiness made the veering-off seem like someone’s mad scheme. I turned and walked in the opposite direction, up the last of the rise to the Symonds Street–Khyber Pass intersection which normally was frantic, but today was like Good Friday—Good Friday when I was a kid. All the shops, the loan agencies, the boutiques were jailed with their squeaking security gates. As I walked, I peered into the long, dark shops. A few had lights shining deep inside, and a few shapes like bears shuffling about. People had been worried about looting, and they’d called out the civil defence the first week. But in fact there’d been less crime than usual, so I heard on the news. No one about. I was thinking about the apocalyptic novels I’d read in my teens—Brave New World, 1984, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Day of the Triffids. They’d scared me stupid, that’s why I liked them. On the footpath above Grafton Cemetery (where the Woolthamly who made all the dosh was buried, by the way), the street kids who normally hung out among the graves were sitting blinking like nocturnal creatures unaccustomed to daylight. I must say I did have a butcher’s to see if the boy I’d given the hundred dollars to was there, but this was ridiculous—there were hundreds of street kids in Auckland. I stopped on the ridge to look back at the city. A strange pall of greyness hung over it. In the rain, the unlit buildings looked like a misty slagheap, dark, jagged and charcoaly. No traffic lights. The odd car, as if it were 1940. Way down Queen Street, where we often swanned around going to bistros, a lone bus. I could hear it lumbering from this distance—a kind of intimacy. But otherwise: quiet, quiet.

  I turned back down Dominion Road, and tromped through that unpleasant bit of Spaghetti Junction where the familiar traffic fumes made me feel sick and comfortable at the same time, and continued on into Mount Eden. I picked up bread, salami, olives, fruit, and walked back home, glad I’d brought my umbrella because it started to rain.

  The villa conversion, when I entered it, was full of natural light and darkness, somehow mixed, reminiscent of unbleached hessian and the slightly depressing atmosphere of health food shops. The rooms already smelled more humusy than usual, like a winter garden. Auckland was like that, even without the Blackout. In spring you wiped white film off your sandals and walked around smelling as if you were very old.

  •

  Mabel arrived with a job, calling from the front door, ‘It’s me!’ No other ‘me’s in the world. She juggled an umbrella and a carton, which she peered over from behind her black-rimmed glasses. ‘Tell me to piss off if you have to, but I thought you might be free, under the circumstances.’ She waved her hand at the Blackout, which filled the air from here all the way to downtown. Mabel usually just turned up, or sent one of her fashionable young acolytes dressed in the clothes they bought for twenty percent discount from Mabel’s boutique. This was to avoid the possibility I might say no to the job on the phone, which I did once when I was busy. Mabel had a label (I know), and was quite successful. Her designs were unmistakable, dark and voluminous. You could tell a Mabel walking down the street. But they also seemed to work within the bounds of some fashion dictum going on in Europe, season by season. Narrow trousers. Tulip-shaped coats. Ruffly blouses (roughly!). How these ideas spring up on different parts of the planet at the same time, like playground games, I have no clue. But Mabel also had perennials. She did a good flouncy skirt. And skirts with landscapes on them. That was where I came in. I’d been doing hand-finishing and embroidery for her for the last year. We’d become sort of friends—you couldn’t avoid being friends with Mabel—although we lived in different worlds. My world had a hole in it—well, you know, the mending. Mabel’s world was always on the boil—shapes, colours, textures, moving like a kaleidoscope.