Around ten, Art and I rolled together like marbles in the kitchen of the villa conversion.
Oh, villa conversion? That’s what we lived in, and that’s what we called it. ‘See you back at the villa conversion,’ we’d say. We were lucky to have it. They were rare as hen’s teeth, a good villa ruined by being converted into flats in the seventies. Most of them were being knocked back into full houses. We didn’t want the whole house, even though Art’s parents owned it, along with its three neighbours. A whole house would be excessive. Instead, we lived with the doorways on one side of the passage blocked off and papered over as if they’d never existed. This night, in our seventies kitchen, we sat near the hurricane lamp. Art’s laptop whined on and he thanked Christ it was charged. I reminded him he didn’t believe in a Christian god. He said he might not, but the computer did. The laptop was full of bright gold leaking around the edges. Beautiful. Art furrowed his brow at the screen. He was telling me some new angle on Orientalism, to do with the settlers rather than the folk who stayed put in the motherland. Other was in their face, not at arm’s length. I listened without looking at him, stitching in my pond of light. (That’s the thing about sewing, you can’t look up.) His PhD was like a piece of knitting still on the needles; you could see quite clearly it was a jersey, but you wanted to go on looking at it as knitting for a while longer. I understood that completely. Because I was once about to write a thesis. (I never quite got to it.) When Art finished his dissertation, it would all be over. Settler Literary Ephemera (which was, you know, letters, advertisements, posters—all the stuff that wasn’t writing) done, closed with a bang, yes, settled. Tick the box. Good. To tell the truth, I was a bit sick of it. I was sick of it!
Because Art was a nanosecond from getting his PhD in English from Columbia, he would have an academic job in a jiffy. There just wasn’t much around at the moment. Not long after we got back to Wellington from New York—we’d barely unpacked—he got a tutoring gig up in Auckland, just temporary, but it seemed fun and he wanted to do it. He’d said to me, Do what makes you happy. More than once, countless times. The least I could do was return the favour. So we repacked our stuff and went to Auckland. Auckland would be kind of fun anyway. We knew people up there, as you do.
At the kitchen table that first dark night of the Blackout, I leaned close to the lamp with my reading glasses perched on my nose, and stitched the last of twenty-five white tutus back onto its mushroomy polyester bodice. (Yes, reading glasses.) It was an alterations job for a ballet school, and quite a good wicket, although the netting had continually pushed up under my fingernails. Swans were ruined forever for me. But in the end, they were still tutus. I sat there thinking (you can think a lot when you sew) about how when I was five I pestered Mary-France (my mother, who didn’t like being called Mum) to enroll me in ballet class. I’d pictured myself in pink ballet slippers. Pink ballet slippers were the whole point. Mary-France was philosophically opposed to ballet—it would have been its cultural irrelevance to the Pacific, and the fact it promoted gender stereotypes. But in the end I went to a class in a brown church hall. The ballet teacher had a pair of black second-hand ballet slippers that were being given away. I tried them on. They fit. They fitted. I remember looking down at my feet. Free ballet slippers. Free, but black. I wasn’t interested in ballet after that. If only I could have said, ‘All I want is pink ballet slippers.’ The agony of the five-year-old who can’t say that, or even think it. But the worse agony, twenty-odd years later, of realising that that was what you’d wanted. Perhaps it was better never to have known.
But I know. I know now. Not to get too maudlin about it.
Sewing netting onto polyester in the half-light was driving me nuts, so I was glad when it was finished. It had really needed daylight. With my torch, I scalloped along the passage to my workroom. The tutus thrusting out behind me made my shadow look like an ostrich. I bounced my pen light around the room to see if there was anything low-key enough to do in the half-dark. There was the garment that the last client had brought in. Knotwork. Christ! Definitely a daylight job, and all in good time. Never put one job ahead of another. That was what I learned from Rip Burn Snag, Clothing Alterations and Repairs in New York (I’ll tell you about that in due course). I ran my thumb over the tips of my fingers, which were tender from Swan Lake. The night air, usually thumping with next door’s stereo, was silent.
Back in the kitchen, I read the paper until I thought I’d go blind, and then I just sat. Art’s computer shut down suddenly. Those laptop batteries don’t stand on ceremony. He rooted in his bag and brought out a settler studies person. No, it was Homi Bhabha—other side of the coin. All of which Art was still wading through up to his armpits. I was glad I didn’t have to read Homi. I used to be into this stuff. But Art didn’t open the book. He leaned back in his chair and said, GoGo, guess what? (He always used my nickname. I went to a poncy school, albeit Catholic, where the rich country girls came up with droll nicknames like Mimsy and Fifi. I was Megan Sligo, so GoGo was a giveaway.) (I have to add here, I was the poorest girl in school, although we weren’t poor.) What? I said. Art talked out into the darkness. His upper lip caught the light. He told me about his walk home that evening through the choked streets. He was strangely serious, for him. He described how the light was peculiar and slanting as dusk came on, because there were no streetlights. An apocalyptic surge of pedestrians moved up Queen Street, and in every street to right and left there were crowds of people walking. They talked to each other, and had jokey conversations with people who’d been stuck in traffic so long they’d got out of their cars.
‘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.