A bit about my little business (which was still moderately fun, and had just been for something to do, more on that later): Every day there was a procession of clients who, with their bundles, were like the survivors of a train wreck. They would drop off their torn clothes, tell me how it happened, then leave and I’d get on with it. While I worked, I’d mull over what they’d said. After a while, I began to suspect that at least some of them were spinning me a load of the proverbial codswallop. Was ‘evening dress, red’ really torn getting out of a car? And seriously, were ‘trousers, navy’ chewed by a dog? The ragged tear did seem to be the work of some kind of teeth.
Perhaps there was a change in me, I don’t know. Perhaps I started looking at the clients sideways. Because pretty soon, they started fessing up. The first time was when a schoolteacher cleared his throat and described how his girlfriend had, with her lips, glued him all over as if to wallpaper him. That’s what he said. First she had ripped off his clothes, hence the torn dinner jacket. I had no idea why he told me this, as he stood in my workroom. Yes, I did know. It was because he knew I knew. I was becoming experienced. I was like a forensic scientist. I could tell, just from looking at a garment, how a pocket parted company with a panel, how a skirt split its pleat.
From then on I heard about the many uses of the hands, together with the tongue, stomach, neck, the arms, the area behind the knees, the crotch, breasts, and anywhere else clothing might be torn from. Not that I didn’t know about them before, of course, just not like this. Or not anymore. I noticed that in their lugubrious descriptions, they all used the word ‘passion’. So Baroque. They told me it was the kind of passion that was out of their hands, there was no deciding about it one way or the other, it just was. This was what they said. Not just one client, but many, over and over. They said these words—passion, no choice, out of my hands. I know. Tedious. What’s more, they explained that the consequences of this passion were going to destroy their life, or would if it weren’t for me, the mender. I must say I quite liked this bit. They were so grateful to me! They would tell me I was worth my weight in gold. I would shrug in a shucks kind of way. But underneath I was glowing. I imagined my bodyweight as a rough, glittering nugget. Of course I knew it wasn’t my skill in mending they were grateful for. It wasn’t the neatness of my weaving or the tininess of my stitches. Because really, there’s no special trick to it. Well, perhaps a little natural dexterity helps. Perhaps having been a girl once, that helps. Having been a girl and because you were a girl having a bodkin put into your hands at school at the age of six, with a skein of bright wool and some hessian woven as loosely as fingers latticed together, and being shown how to make a running thread like the dotted line down the middle of the road. And over the years everything fined down gradually, from cross stitch in wool, to chain stitch in cotton, to satin stitch in silk, and it all got finer and finer until the fibres were like hair and the fabric was as tight as, say, the matt of the sky. It was as if you’d walked away from your big woollen running stitch and it receded into the distance, and at the same time your hands got bigger as if they came into the foreground. Nothing had changed. Everything was still there under my hands, but smaller.
But it wasn’t my skill the clients were grateful for. No. It was my collusion. What lies are worth: their weight in gold. If it weren’t for me, their lives would be over. This was such a lot of melodrama. Of course their lives wouldn’t be over. Look at Clinton.
My neck would ache from being crouched over the sewing machine, thinking about all this. I really needed a visit from a health and safety officer to sort out my workstation. Not to mention the stories I was hearing. Also, my fingers would end up chafed from the needle, which poked me repeatedly as if to remind me I wasn’t dreaming. The thing is, I didn’t give a rat’s arse what the clients did in their spare time. But why couldn’t people be upfront about things? Why couldn’t they be honest? What I really hate is deceit.
•
Some jobs I remember, others not.
Case 1: I remember a green shirt. I didn’t do many shirts. This one was rayon, made from wood! The owner looked like he drank powdered protein drinks—somewhat pumped up. So the shirt might have burst anyway. Across the back was a long tear with bright threads like a fringe of grass. The man’s skin would have shown through like a new road on his shirt. I wondered if a woman had traced it with her finger. Or another man.
Case 2: A winter coat belonging to a library assistant. The buttons were ripped off, all of them, each one taking a swatch of wool and leaving a little hole like a nibble. Impossible to nibble woollen suiting, of course. More like the frenzied chomp you’d need to tear into a Mars Bar.
Case 3: A black skirt with a pretty L-shaped tear. Piece of rubbish, one hundred percent polyester, badly cut—nothing wrong with that. The girl who brought it in was about sixteen, bit her nails, in a hurry, on her lunch hour. The tear caused by hurry in the first place, in a storeroom, with the manager, she said. She blushed, and was kind of proud he was so high up. The skirt belonged to her mother. Who must never know, of course. The girl couldn’t find the exact same thing in the shops. I repaired the damage.
Case 4: Another black skirt, also inexpensive, ripped in gorse on Mount Eden. The owner in her thirties, married. She told me she’d scratched her thighs and her bum and had to soak her underwear in milk to get rid of the blood and keep covered up in front of her husband until the grazes healed. She was slightly shamefaced as she told the story, but also boasting. I suppose only a particularly desirable woman could have a man not her husband rip her skirt in the prickly undergrowth on Mount Eden. I told this woman she could buy a new skirt for less than it would cost to mend the old one, and her husband would never notice. Even if he saw it hanging in the bathroom with the tear visible. Even if he caught sight of it in the rubbish bin. I found myself getting quite worked up—even if, even if. The thing is, men don’t notice that kind of detail. The woman wouldn’t listen. She paid twice the value of the skirt to have it mended. She would never understand men, what they see, what they don’t see. So I thought, in my great wisdom.
Case 5: A man who brought in a shirt his wife had made for him. Purple silk—no, indigo. She’d dyed the fabric from berries. Berries! A labour of love. The pocket was torn. The man told me the story standing in my workroom. His lover, not his wife (the categories so distinct), had ripped the pocket. He was ashamed and bursting with pride at the same time, literally, his jowly face swelling up. I looked at the flesh of the tear under the light—its fat, so to speak. It was bad. They’d been having a game, he said, in which he hid the condom about his person—that’s what he said, about his person—and the object of the exercise was for her to find it, and for him to stop her. I felt my eyes roll involuntarily. This was a tame and childish game compared to some of the things I’d heard. We’re talking objects and things that won’t open in a hurry. (But why do people wear their best clothes? More on that later.) The man with the indigo shirt told me his lover had herpes, that was why they used a condom. So, no secret babies either. Strange how one thing leads to another, he said, and laughed. On eye contact he blushed deeper. Oh please! As they say in America. He was delighted to have a ripped shirt—but even more delighted, ecstatic, that I could see that another woman, not his wife, loved him, or something. Then he told me it was just a bit of fun. It wasn’t as if he would play a game like that with his wife. His wife didn’t need to rip his shirt. His wife made him the shirt.
I bundled up the indigo shirt as briskly as you can other people’s clothing, and said I couldn’t repair it. He coloured visibly and asked me why not. I said it was because his wife made it, and he asked me how that made a difference. I told him it made the job impossible. No matter what I did, the wife would notice. She would know it down to the last stitch. He said he didn’t give a damn how much it cost. I told him money wasn’t the point, it was whether it was possible. The man sniffed a bit, then sat back as if resigned. This could be the end, he said. I said, surely not. Then he told me something the others hadn’t mentioned: he might leave his wife for the lover. There was always that possibility. I guess when you put it in that light, I said. And he said, I do.
I remembered this.
I mended it. Took a whole afternoon. It was labour-intensive, a word which used to be associated with carrying bricks, but has gone soft now that labour is carried out sitting down. I found the almost exact match of thread in the good afternoon light, the indigo of the berries. Thread by thread I wove the fabric back together. In the end I charged him peanuts compared to the hours it took. (I’m not good at taking money from people, which I guess means I’m not good at business.) I wondered if the wife would ever peer closely while she was embracing her husband, if her lips would press into her husband’s chest and feel a line of roughness. Perhaps she would put her head back, retracting like a snake for a better look. I wondered if the wife was the kind of wife who ironed her husband’s shirts. Perhaps she would reach suddenly for her reading glasses while she was at the ironing board late at night, thinking she’d seen something odd about the pocket. She’d peer inside and see the faint line of threads twisted and raised like a scar. Then turn her head to look curiously at her husband, who might be in the bedroom preparing for bed. Would she look at his naked figure with new eyes? I’d never know. I would never know unless, by some chance, I met the wife.
Enough case studies. The messes people got themselves into—up shit creek, basically. I was pleased never to have found myself in that kind of creek, which sounded very disgusting. All in the name of love.
But there is one more case study.