The first one was temporary, of course. But strangely enough, I’d been having a bit of an existential crisis about university. I knew quite a few people who were having them and they seemed catchy. I’d written a whole essay without using the word hegemony, just a space where it should be. I imagined Professor Bleakley—Bob—having a chuckle in his jam-packed office, at the epistemological hole. Bob thought it was hilarious, but took marks off because this was university, he said, not drama school. My low mark was okay in the scheme of things, and I decided never to use that word again, which I’d always disliked because it reminded me of the gorse behind the house I grew up in. Next I wrote an essay without the word hegemony or the word prolepsis, which reminded me of medicine. Discourse reminded me of the opposite of soup or an appetiser, and the opposite of those must be regurgitation, so I started leaving that out too. Followed by dialectic and normalcy. So ugly. Negotiate, unpack, problematise. Gone. It was like that Haydn symphony where the musicians all gradually leave the stage until there are none. I thought old Wittgenstein would actually quite like that (I said ‘old Wittgenstein’ in my head, as if I were Holden Caulfield).

  One evening after my second low grade, which was thrilling in a strange way, Art took my face in both hands like a goblet and looked right into my eyes. No one had ever looked at me quite like this. I remember looking away and back again. ‘Do what makes you happy, GoGo.’ I nodded as much as I could between his hands. Of course I would. Why wouldn’t you? He put down my face. Where he came from, you could do what you damn well liked because you were so rich. Where I came from, you could do what you damn well liked because you were so highly educated. This was why we got on. This was what I thought later anyway.

  •

  You can spend a long time getting educated and drop out relatively quickly. On a Monday morning I took the cable car up to varsity. I usually rode the lift in one of those buildings that sits like a spirit level next to the hillside, and then I’d pound along The Terrace. I was broke, and the cable car cost money, and anyway you could think when you were walking. (Good with your feet.) But this day I needed the cable car. There was no point having a cable car if you didn’t take it when you were about to drop out of university. When I got to campus, I remember being glad Dad (I actually thought that, in a Seussy kind of way—glad Dad) had lost his job at the university. There was no chance of bumping into him. I got forms from Registry (they should have Deregistry) and went around getting them signed by various professors, as if I was collecting for something. One said, Are you sure the situation can’t be salvaged? I was a shipwreck. I said, This isn’t spur of the moment, you know. And I realised with sudden clarity that this had been coming for a long time. Since the age of thirteen, to be exact. For ten years I’d been working towards dropping out, and now I felt drunk with the power of it. The drunken feeling came from the very fact I’d been a good student until recently. Otherwise this would have no meaning. I was a dropout! It was exhilarating.

  From that moment I was officially unemployed, but something would turn up.

  On the way down Church Steps (you didn’t need the cable car when your business was done) it struck me that for the first time in my life I didn’t have anything in particular to do. No books to ferry to the library before the fines kicked in, no chapters on post-structuralism to scatter with sticky neon petals as if there’d been a high wind at the end of spring. And nowhere in particular to go. Except the flat, our place in Mount Victoria where a pencil dropped on the floor rolled downhill. I’d go there, at eleven o’clock on a weekday. Art might be home, reading, writing, just as I’d done, until today.

  But when I got home Art was out, and the flat had a desolate air. I saw, lying on the desk, the essay I’d been writing the night before. It stopped at the word discourse, which in any case wasn’t there. I never touched it again, the essay. It lay there decaying as if someone on the Mary Celeste had been writing a paper on renegotiating the interstitial space at the time it was abandoned.

  •

  I felt my way along to the kitchen. I was getting used to negotiating the passage without the Wah Lee moon. Once the lamp was burning in the kitchen, it felt cosy, in all its yellow seventies glory. When Art’s parents had first bought the villas I’d thought of painting the kitchen white, but the man in the paint shop told me that, considering the layers that would have been put on over a hundred years, the walls would need to be taken right back to the board. He said anything new would just fall off if applied to the present layer. I just left it, and we lived with the yellow. That was okay.

  I turned on the radio news. The Auckland City Council was having a meeting right then about the outage, but Pinnacle Power hadn’t turned up. There was a lot of yelling going on in the background, of outraged customers. I found a jar of pesto in the cupboard. Art would be home any minute. I cranked up the Primus stove and filled a pot with water for pasta. When I hoved near the sink, a smell, sweet and disgusting, rose up from the waste-disposal unit, the last few scraps left unground since last Friday. I plugged it up. What else to do? What did you do about these things while you waited for the power to come back on?

  I looked out the back door to see if any lights had come on in the Blackout zone. Sometimes you could think this was just you, your own private blackout. But it was still completely black. It made me think of black gloves, I don’t know why. I sort of liked it. I was getting to like it.

  There was rustle of twigs. Did I mention we had a cat? Bell, short for Bella, short for Isabella, short for Isabella of Spain, because she had a black mantilla on her white head. Her eyes gleamed as she thundered through the garden. We laughed at her. There was a standing joke that she was so clumsy the native birds could party around her.

  ‘Here, Isabella of Spain!’ I said.

  She wouldn’t come. She’d heard something in the undergrowth and lumbered off. The banana palms were swishing now, as the wind got up. Couldn’t see them, though, only hear them. I sat on the step and heard Art drop his dissertation and creak along the passage singing ‘Between the Wars’ under his breath.

  •

  From the start I loved rough wool in my hands. I remember the thrill of doing running stitch on hessian at school, aged six. It was the middle of the road. Crunchy asphalt. (Yes, thank you Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.) Next I did wool tapestries like fields of Xs. The odd person, a visitor to the house, a colleague of Dad’s (but only ever a woman), might lean over and look at a yellow rabbit as neat as a corn cob, and say, Good with your hands, aren’t you? I would squirm with pride. ‘She has advanced fine motor skills,’ Mary-France would comment flatly, which made you think of cars suspended so their undersides were exposed. ‘It runs in the family.’ Unfortunately.

  Sister Jude, of course. Not that I or anyone could be descended directly from Sister Jude, our great-aunt. Along with several nuns and priests who seemed to have ganged up in that generation of the family, she was a full stop when it came to potential cousins. The fun cousin-filled Christmases we might have had, but for the nuns and priests! Instead of having children, the nuns embroidered in their spare time. Every year Sister Jude would send by post several finely worked linen cloths and doilies. I would catch a glimpse of their starched bendiness, their multi-coloured arrangements, as Mary-France opened up a rough brown-paper parcel in the bottom of the hall cupboard and dropped them in. Poor Sister Jude, Mary-France would say. We always called her ‘Sister Jude’. Like a married woman, no one could remember her name—and not just her surname, her first name. Annie? Patricia? It was lost to the Brown Josephs.

  Once we visited Sister Jude in a convent in a strange town with milky light and a stillness that made it seem as if the world had stopped, after the wind of Wellington. Perhaps it was Auckland. The first thing you noticed was the smell—camphor, disinfectant, essence of old skin. And then the darkness of the polished wooden panels. Sister Jude was slipping away, breathing harshly, already halfway through a door. No one had thought to visit her while she had been fully in the room. She was lying in bed, a skeleton with wispy white hair like high cloud. While the adults huffed over her, I stood by the window, hoping to get some respite from the stench, but it was shut tight. I parted the dark curtain and looked down into a wet, sewer-like space which seemed at odds with the order and beauty of the Gothic convent. What was down there? Perhaps Sister Jude’s real name, dropped like a coin a long time ago and still lying among the moss and mould. We didn’t stay to see her die, but she died. And the stack of embroidered cloths—the dressing-table doilies, the tablecloths, the serviettes, the boiled-egg covers—were retrieved from the bottom of the cupboard and rehabilitated. Maybe old-fashioned was alright. Maybe it was daring. Mary-France decided that the embroidered cloths may as well be used, because what was the point of having them otherwise? What was the point?

  And so one Saturday evening when she and Dad were having one of the parties they threw, mostly for Dad’s English department buddies, but also for the odd publishing friend and an assortment of gas-meter readers who had brilliant minds, and smelly people who did nothing in particular but were also brilliant, Mary-France unfolded the first tablecloth and flared it out over the rough totara table. It was beautiful, with flowers and leaves done in thousands of the most careful stitches, so real that you thought you could pick them off the linen surface and it was a surprise to find the cool silk packed tightly under your fingertips. The crocheted lace edgings hung like icicles that would disintegrate and fill the palm of your hand with icy water. They didn’t. I know because I sidled through the thicket of brown-and-green-clad English lecturers and tried it—they sat in your hand, cold but heavy. I remembered these moments, as if they were fined down to their individual stitches.

  The English department and publishing friends would pour themselves a drink and settle down in the conversation pit to talk about books, books with titles like musical motifs. The Leaves of the Banyan Tree, The Adaptable Man, Jerusalem Sonnets. Then they’d get up to pour more drinks, a little less carefully, and settle back into the conversation pit, to talk about more books and the sexual habits of their workmates. More drinks poured, now with a kind of happy-go-lucky sloshing motion, and before long red wine stains began to appear beside the sprays of forget-me-nots and the big heads of the chrysanthemums which I’d tried to lift from the tablecloth. The blotches accumulated fast. How quickly that part of it was accomplished, the staining, compared to the hours that had gone into the stitches.

  Over the years I became intimately acquainted with every embroidered cloth in the brown-paper package. I pored over them. I wanted to make these tactile pictures too, so I got a book out of the library and discovered that there were different stitches, and that you could follow a pattern or make things up. My first made-up things were wonky woolly cross-stitch affairs. A tennis player in whites on a green lawn. Another visitor to the house with an English accent thought it was the Long Man of Sussex. He wasn’t. He was a she, for a start, and she was standing up. I kept going. I would go into what people call your ‘own little world’, which isn’t that little because it has all the ideas and the people you’ve encountered in it. I once read in a novel by V.S. Naipaul (a raging misogynist but who cares?) about a character who could never be bored, even in jail, because he had a ‘well-stocked mind’. I was patient. I discovered that each stitch was an act of patience. It all took a very long time. You had to not care too much about time passing. Maybe you had to be just filling in time until death with these little acts, these stitches. Maybe you had to not care about life too much, be clinging too tightly to it. Maybe you had to not fear death but even be, perhaps, looking forward to it and so filling up the minutes, the hours, the days until it should arrive. Not joking. That’s how existential I discovered embroidery was.

  It was alright, though, about my degree, in case you were wondering. I’d go back at some point and polish off my master’s. Then I’d do one of those meandering degrees people do without tutoring jobs, without scholarships, without being able to bring leftovers for lunch and heat them up in the faculty microwave, but it would be fine. I’d do a PhD in the way of those older students you glimpsed around varsity when you started as an undergraduate, really nice people, and when you were halfway through your MA they were still there. You might have conversations with these students beside the lift occasionally. They’d tell you they’d decided to chuck it in, the PhD, it was like an albatross around their neck. Their relationship with their husband was suffering, their children were running wild, they were poor, and what’s more they were fed up to the back teeth with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet they’d unfortunately chosen to spend ten years of their life analysing. They must have been crazy back in 1985. They never wanted to see another equals sign in their life. And you’d agree, yes, probably best to give it up if it was such a burden. But the next time you saw them, and expressed some surprise that they were still in the department, they were shocked, offended even that you’d thought they might drop out. Drop out! Of course they weren’t going to drop out, in fact they had never for a second considered it. Well, perhaps for that moment once while waiting for the lift, otherwise, all that research, all that thinking, all those conferences, all the readings of the poems would be wasted, wasted.

  That’s what I’d do. It would be okay.

  The thing is, I’d known since I went off to kindergarten with my plastic lunchbox that I’d go to university. That was what we did: improved our minds. Why emigrate if it wasn’t for Uncle Vince to get a BCom, and Uncle Pat a flipping Doctorate in Divinity? From Rome. And lately the women. But you know what? (This is what I realised after I met Art.) They collected degrees because they didn’t own anything, didn’t produce anything. If they’d had a few thousand hectares dotted with fat cows, a few flocks of blinking sheep (yes, blinking), it would’ve been alright. As it was, no choice but to slog it out at school so they could work with invisible things like philosophy, literature, business theory.

  If you didn’t do this with your mind, if you didn’t—what? I don’t know. Body and soul could go to hell.

  •

  In the night I lay awake beside Art staring uselessly into the dark. I started panicking about the costume. Well, about the strange game I’d fallen into with the man—the unbearable formality, the awful closeness, and the fact I was an accomplice. I had threads on my hands. When he came the next day, I’d have the costume ready to give to him.

  13

  Thursday was nothing to write home about. Art went off to LambChop, the centaur came to collect her tweed skirt, a society matron picked up the blue gown with the slit up the back. I went out and snipped a few tendrils in the garden. The rain had cleared and it was a fresh, clean day. If the Blackout went on for weeks, as people were saying it would, I’d be reading a lot of books, I’d be drinking cups of tea and reading the paper—which was what I did next, in the front room. Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations would close. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. But as one door closes another opens. I was brought up on that expression. The world was full of doors. I felt jumpy.

  The flat was dead quiet, as if it had gone back in time—hey, to the Edwardian banker’s wife. But hang on, the suburb would have been inventing itself around her, houses being built all over the valley, footpaths tarred as she walked along them, children everywhere. There were no kids in this part of town anymore. I fossicked for Mabel’s aprons. May as well get on with them, although the show wasn’t for a few weeks. I rattled the beads. They really would be lovely, these aprons, when they were finished. Mabel was right—the juxtaposition of function and beauty. Not that I gave a rat’s arse. Soon I was making the olivey stems of koru in stem stitch (although ‘olivey’ is an example of Western centricity if ever there was one), and every so often sliding a bright bead down the thread. Usually I would’ve spaced this kind of work out over days, weeks even. But I spent most of the day at the window embroidering. It drove me nuts.

  Around seven I showed the client into the front room. On his tense face, more a grimace than a smile. I can’t blame him—the oddness of it, an eccentric little ritual already solidified. Sunlight poured in the bay window. You brushed it out of your eyes like a fringe. He was in his suit again, but carried the jacket over his arm, prim as anything despite the wrinkly shirt. I offered him tea. He shook his head as if the idea was ridiculous. I half smiled. I hadn’t really meant it. Tea!

  ‘It’s not finished,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The costume. Isn’t finished.’

  He dropped his jacket over the back of a chair. ‘Again?’

  Again! He’d guessed. That it was already mended, and I was keeping it from him.

  ‘Still. It’s still not mended.’ I’d broken out in a sweat. ‘Sorry. I have these aprons.’ I indicated the pretty tufts of organza.

  He didn’t give them a second glance. One hand was clenched under his chin like The Thinker. ‘Are you going to do this or not?’

  ‘I’ll do it, don’t worry, it’s just that I have . . . all this.’

  ‘Because if you’re too busy, say so and I’ll take it somewhere else. Maybe you can recommend someone. Doris of Kingsland.’ I laughed. He laughed through his nostrils. He remembered that I’d mentioned Doris to his wife, outside the workroom door.

  I went serious. ‘The thing is, there isn’t really anyone else. Not who’d redo the embroidery. The way I would.’ He frowned and I felt myself flooded with an awful power. I was holding his future like a hand of cards. I’d often been in this situation but had never withheld anything. ‘We don’t grow on trees, you know,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ A tightening of the mouth.

  To show how busy I was, I fished around twitching fluff out of a dish of beads on the table. I shook out an apron. From under my eyelashes I could see him watching. It occurred to me he might ask to see the costume, to check its progress, and in my head I hurriedly prepared a convincing performance of not being able to put my hand on it. But of course he wouldn’t ask. A man wouldn’t ask to see a garment, at least most men. I was trading on stereotypes. What a relief it was. My little one-act play was unnecessary.