On Monday the client was in the doorway to the workroom like the first day, the day Milly came. He stood watching me. Art and I had spent the weekend making trips to Mount Eden to eat takeaways (none of which conformed to the ten superfoods), washing clothes by hand and lugging them out to hang in the back garden (me) (thankfully it was windy and fine), squeezing the last drop of power out of a laptop in order to tweak Settler Literary Ephemera, which was apparently coming apart at the seams (Art), and reading about Ponsonby artists in the Saturday paper by candlelight and joking about setting the villa conversion on fire. On Sunday afternoon I’d noticed that the neighbours in the other half of the villa conversion were moving out. I called Art and we peered at them through the front window—a couple in black with stylish chairs. We’d never laid eyes on them before. On Monday morning there’d been a sense that everything would return to normal, but it didn’t.
With the client watching me, I lifted the costume down from the rack like a puppet, and brought it out of the cave of the room.
‘It has pins.’
He backed out into the passage to let me through. I signalled he should go ahead of me, but in the end I went first, my head high and self-conscious. He followed at a short distance but somehow I could feel him against me like an overcoat. In the front room I spread the costume out on the table. It fell into a rugged landscape—black crags and the shadowy folds of hills. In places the light caught the bloom on the wool as if it were obsidian. I saw him looking fiercely at it, as if seeing it for the first time. I shook it out again quickly and it was strangely soft, mashable. As if my hands did the work of millions of years of erosion, but quickly.
He stared up at me. ‘You haven’t even started it!’
He really was like Mr Rochester, and what I’d discovered was, I quite liked Mr Rochester, even though not many women would. Only Jane Eyre, and, well, Charlotte Brontë I suppose, but she had led a very sheltered life. Oh, and Blanche Ingram, aka Trisha the Punk. I decided I’d quite like to go for a walk on the moors in a hooded cape, thinking about this revelation, but hopefully not catching a chill. I’d pulled Jane Eyre to bits in the Sixth Form, you see. And other works of literature.
‘Sorry,’ I managed to say. ‘I was snowed under.’ I found myself remembering Rose and Nance and the gauge by which busyness was measured. ‘Must be the darkness,’ I said. ‘People’ve been ripping and burning and snagging . . .’ Nonsense, of course. I hadn’t had a client since the previous Friday.
‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how busy you are, you said it’d be ready.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
He took a breath and smoke-ringed it out. No cigarette, just pa-pa-pa-pa-paa. Dying for one, no doubt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll take it now.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I’ll take the costume now, as is.’ He sniggered bleakly. ‘As-is-where-is. It is a wreck, after all.’
He wouldn’t take it. I knew that. I said to him, ‘I’ll do it. Really I will.’
He smiled and looked up at the ceiling. I noticed his Adam’s apple, which was slightly prominent. ‘You must think I’m an idiot. You’ve held me up for, what, a whole week? I have my wife arriving home any minute. It’s a miracle she hasn’t turned up already. She could be there now, looking in the wardrobe.’ Here he looked right at me. ‘I’ve waited a week, and now I’m taking it somewhere else.’
We were flanking the table. ‘The problem with taking it to someone else,’ I said, ‘is that you’ll go to the bottom of their list.’
‘List! I’ll take my chances.’ He did the pat-for-cigarettes reflex. God, he was desperate. ‘Couldn’t be slower than this.’
I watched his face stretching and rippling like a canvas. He was going to take the costume. With my rip in it. My very own tear. So what? Let him take it. I didn’t give a rat’s arse. He’d half turned to the window, gagging for a cigarette, you could see that—the fluttering hands. What a jerk. He was killing himself. I said to his back, ‘Whereas I suppose I could do it after hours—i.e. now.’
‘Now?’ He didn’t turn.
‘Yeah,’ I said to his back. ‘It’s next on my list. I could sit down and do it right now.’
Why not?
He spun around. ‘While I wait?’ The idea did seem ludicrous, coming from his lips, which were angular. Twin peaks in the upper lip.
‘While you wait.’
He thought for a moment, then: ‘Nah. Sick of mucking around. I’ll just take it.’ He stepped towards the table. Perhaps sensing some movement in me, he said, ‘Don’t bother wrapping it.’
I snatched the costume from under his hand. In mid-air, like a trapeze artist, I quickly repinned the torn seam. I stepped back and held it against myself, looking down. It wasn’t bad, pinned like this. Even I didn’t know I was so good. When I looked up I saw him frowning at the costume in a narrow-eyed way, as if he had astigmatism. ‘How long would it take?’
I shrugged. ‘An hour. No more than that.’
‘An hour?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Okay.’ He squinted out the window at the late afternoon sun, and laughed. ‘Will there be enough light?’
I ignored the sarcasm. ‘Yeah, course. It’s beautiful out there.’ I indicated the sky, the drenched-pink bougainvillea, the daisy bushes planted a hundred years ago, the forget-me-nots that had gone nuts in the Auckland sun.
He sat down at the table on a bentwood chair which wobbled ominously—well, they’re eighty, ninety years old, and made for small English people. I noticed the way his thighs occupied his trousers. ‘Alright,’ he said.
I slid onto my chair but kept the costume bundled against me (avoiding pins, of course; I’m usually a dab hand at that). ‘Before I start,’ I said, ‘tea?’
‘No! No thanks. Just . . .’ He waved his hand at the costume and looked away, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of it. The site: the table Art had brought home from an auction on the back of a truck, my sewing things, my hands.
‘Actually, you know what? I’ll just pop out for a fag.’ Yes, pop.
‘Okay.’
I felt the veranda throb like a piano as he bounced down the steps to the garden. A moment later a tendril of cigarette smoke floated past the window. It smelled exciting. Death. I spread the costume out on the table and flattened the seams that needed to be reattached. There was a nest of broken black fibres, shot through with trails of coloured silk from the knotwork. Boy, if last time was a mess, this took the biscuit. I didn’t want him to see it quite like this, so I worked quickly. I pulled each coloured thread away from the torn seam. I threaded a needle with the black thread I’d chosen the first time, and I began the job all over again.
By the time he came back I was weaving like a maniac. He reeked of smoke and brought the coolness of the late-summer afternoon inside with him. I saw him glance at the costume as he approached the table. Was it shock on his face at the state of it? No. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know one end of the costume from the other. I have to admit, though, the tear wasn’t pretty. The threads pulled away from the rip like veins pegged back for open-heart surgery. He pulled out a chair and sat at the table, looking at me. It was a gaze. I blushed.
‘Right,’ I said. It needed something, a word.
I was working on one side of the rent, weaving the needle in and out, in and out, as if making a kete of black and silver, the black of the thread, the silver of the needle. Checks. I was rebuilding the fabric. Then I’d do what I could going the other way, using the threads I was putting in place now to fill in the missing weft ones. It was a confidence trick, a high-wire act. You had to believe in it. Once you doubted, it all disintegrated, the threads, every which way. We sat in silence while I worked. At one point he looked at my hands, and up at my face through my reading glasses. Then looked away again. Or I looked away. Everything seemed fat: my fingers, his face, the air. There was an unbearable silence. But it had to be silent, didn’t it? If we talked—I mean, we were mender and client, we might shrink back down to our neat and tidy proportions. If we talked, the odd thing that had happened between us the day I hid him might flare up again. What then? The threads of the costume would get tangled, he would scrape back his chair and go home, I would tidy my sewing things, perhaps sweep up the last few beads from the workroom floor. But because I’d hidden him, there was silence. I bent my head over the black hole I was filling in. The day outside was quiet—the Blackout. Cicadas. I was looking at swing bridges disappearing into black, wet bush either side of a ravine. I was thinking of bush walks. I noticed, from the corner of my eye, his hand come out and touch the costume. It was a long hand, slightly knobbly, with tiny gingerish hairs on the tops of the fingers. Strange, because the hair on his head was brown. His middle finger passed back and forth over the black wool. He looked up at me and seemed to hold his breath. I kept the costume still until his hand had gone.
He was fidgeting a bit, his hands on the table like birds.
I kept weaving. In out, in out. It’s pretty relentless, but you get results. That’s what I like. As long as you keep at it. Progress.
He cleared his throat. ‘What do you do while you’re sitting here sewing?’
I didn’t look up. You can’t. This isn’t so easy, you know. It’s intricate. ‘I sew,’ I said.
‘I mean, do you, you know, listen to music or something?’
‘Sometimes. But the Blackout.’
‘You could sing.’
Sing! I kept sewing. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I just think.’
He was quiet for a while, then asked (of course) what I thought about.
I was finishing a row. ‘I don’t know. What do you think about?’
He said nothing.
‘Well?’ I looked up and saw that he was a bit dazed. The afternoon, the heat in the room?
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought that was a rhetorical question.’
‘What does one think about? No. No, it wasn’t.’
He shook his head. ‘I asked it first. Because you’re doing something . . .’ He trailed off (as they say).
It was a bit vague—you couldn’t squeeze it—but I liked this question: what I thought about while I was sewing. See, I’ve thought about this myself. Thought about thinking. I said to him, ‘And you—I suppose when you’re at work, you think about the economy, etcetera.’
‘Yeah. But the economy isn’t a set piece, it’s volatile, so you know, you think about risk, you think about what could happen. Wonder, if you like.’
If you like.
‘I think about what I’m doing,’ I said. ‘It takes a certain kind of concentration.’ I was leaning close over the costume, working carefully as if to illustrate my point. ‘I think about the threads, I think about how they’re all working together; really, they’re almost like people—well, ants anyway. They’re not quite inanimate. They’re altered. Actually, I’ve never thought that until now.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Yes!’
‘Altered?’ He looked anxious. ‘But it’ll look the same as it did before, won’t it, when it’s fixed? How will I know? I mean . . .’ He faltered and smiled sheepishly. ‘It’s not my strong point.’
I’d filled in the rip one-way, with lines, telephone wires, a stave, refill paper.
‘I know that.’ I smiled. ‘I could do anything, couldn’t I? I could make a total mess of it and you’d never know the difference. Because you don’t actually look at it.’
‘I look at it.’
‘No you don’t. You’ll just have to trust me.’ He looked so forlorn that I said quickly, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do a good job. It’ll look the way it did when your mother, or whoever it was, wore it dancing at the Irish club.’
‘Irish club! It was Ireland.’
‘Okay, normal club. Dancing at the Normal Club and winning medals.’
‘It wasn’t like that. They didn’t do that sort of dancing.’
‘Didn’t they? What did they do?’
‘I don’t know, the twist or something, or whatever came after that.’
‘Nothing came after that,’ I said.
‘Shuffling,’ he said.
‘That’s so true!’ I said. ‘I’ve always felt kind of hard done by that proper dancing had gone out by the time I was born. There are no rules. If there were special moves, I could be quite a good dancer, I know I could.’
He smiled at my outburst, and I blushed.
While we’d been talking my sewing had come to a standstill. My hands were rested on my wrists like a Frenchwoman having lunch.
‘You’ve stopped,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m only interested in getting this done. Milly . . .’
‘Yes, yes, I know, Milly.’
I started weaving in the weft, weaving thread after thread in among the old threads.
‘Well, you’re married. You understand.’
Burrowing like a termite, in and out, in and out. My needle. ‘I am,’ I said.
With my head still bent I saw, in my peripheral vision, the client getting up from the chair. He paced about but paused every so often, no doubt to look back to make sure I was still sewing. It made me self-conscious. I’d noticed that when we talked he didn’t watch my hands; when we talked he forgot about the tear.
‘I suppose you think about stocks and shares, do you?’ I asked. When he looked blank I added, ‘Our conversation . . .’
‘The financial markets. Yeah. Of course.’
‘Futures?’ I attempted. My superior knowledge of finance. Well, I had to say something.
He laughed. ‘Yeah. And the past and the present.’
‘That just about wraps it up.’
‘It does,’ he said.
We went silent again.
‘My sister,’ I said.
He frowned at me from the window.
‘Had a kimono from Japan. She was an exchange student.’ (Well, I was desperate.)
He did his Jim Carrey rendition, as if I were mad. Or he was.
‘A national costume,’ I said. ‘One of these! This!’ I held up the costume. Exhibit A.
He shook his head. ‘That’s not a national costume. It’s a dress.’
‘Alright, if you want to deconstruct it.’
He stepped over to the table. ‘Look, it’s in bits! I took it to bits myself. I’m Jacques fucking Derrida.’
‘Derrida?’ I smiled. I mean, he was a banker.
He rolled his eyes. Fair enough. I’ve heard of Alexander Hamilton.
The thing is, I had taken the costume to bits this time. It made a change to have a female post-structuralist. I had performed this exercise in deconstruction in my workroom while a dinner party hummed away along the passage.
‘You’re making me jittery,’ I said.
‘You’re jittery? I basically have one more day to save my marriage. I think Milly’s coming home tomorrow. It keeps changing. I suppose that’s a good thing.’ He patted his pocket and turned to the window again.
I made a noise.
He looked back at me. ‘What do you mean, Mm?’
I didn’t know what I meant, but I said anyway: ‘Maybe she’ll forget about it.’
‘No. She’ll ask me, as soon as she gets home. She won’t forget. I’m not a good liar.’
I did a few more in-outs with the long needle. ‘I thought you were quite good at it actually.’
‘No,’ he said, dead serious. (Seriously.) ‘I’m crap at it.’ He was pacing again. He stopped and looked at a work of art on the wall—Construction Site No. 14, by Art’s sister Issy. She was doing sculpture at art school even though she was thirty-five.
‘Well, that’s why I’m doing the lying for you,’ I said.
He laughed and turned from the artwork, whose mish-mash of twisted metal had not had much effect on him. ‘Good point.’
We were silent for a bit. The light falling in the windows was ageing, getting golden. He came close to the table and was gazing at my fingers, their busyness. From the corner of my eye I could tell he was mesmerised. I wished he would look away. ‘I have a story about a national costume,’ I said.
This did snap him out of his mini-trance. ‘It’s not a national costume,’ he said. He sounded tired.
‘Yeah, alright, this’—gesturing with the costume—‘has nothing to do with costumes, national, native, whatever. But I really do have a story about a national costume. I just remembered it.’
I had. I’d just remembered it.
Silence. God, this was like wading in mud up to your armpits sometimes.
‘Do you want to hear it?’
‘Is this costing me?’ he asked.
‘No!’
He laughed.
‘What?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Just, never mind. The story.’ He gave a little gawuff. ‘Will you keep . . .’ He fluttered his hand at the costume. I was snipping the tiny threads left after a section of weaving.
‘Of course.’
‘Alright. Fire away.’ He sat down, grating the chair and angling himself towards the window. The low sun showed up the odd red hair on his head like an electrical wire among the brown.
I poured two cups of tea from the thermos I’d made earlier and pushed one across to him. It rippled.
•
I told the client a story which I was kind of proud of. A real story, but with meaning, vis-à-vis migration, culture. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
‘I went to a birthday party for a one-year-old,’ I said. ‘Daughter of a sort-of friend, Evangeline, who was our next-door neighbour when I was a kid. She was brought up Fundy, but married a Hindu. Indian. Long story, but anyway, the baby—gorgeous baby—they had a big party for her with all the relatives. The relatives on the father’s side. Evangeline’s parents disowned her. Anyway, the women, the aunts, were wearing saris, and the girls were wearing beautiful coloured dresses, blue and pink and yellow, with their hair tied up in matching ribbons. The boys wore white shirts and trousers. There were a few Pakeha kids and I noticed they were wearing jeans and T-shirts, and not even their best jeans and T-shirts. They looked as if the invitation had said, Come in your scungiest clothes. There was this Pakeha woman there, and I could see she was making a beeline for me, probably because I was the only other white person in the room. Apart from Evangeline.’
He creaked in his chair and looked at my hands. Not just looked, glowered, like a cartoon. The eyebrows. ‘Are you sewing?’
I quickly did a stitch.
When he was satisfied, he said, ‘That doesn’t surprise me. I had a Maori girlfriend.’ I looked at him and he stopped, then hurried on. ‘If there were just a few Pakeha in the room, they’d be all over me like a rash.’
I nodded, and continued. ‘This Pakeha woman at the birthday came up to me and you know what she was wearing? A Scottish costume.’ Here I put down the costume so I could describe with my hands the long white dress with a tartan sash thrown over the shoulder. ‘Like this, with this big medallion thing, the size of a fist, pinned there,’ (holding the sash in place). ‘She told me she was their neighbour or something. She said, I don’t discriminate, I don’t care what colour people are, as long as they’re decent. She said she’d worn her national costume because she knew the Indians would be wearing theirs. They wore their saris every day.’
He glared at my empty hands, at the costume, and I picked it up again.
‘That’s what I was talking about,’ he said. ‘Before. It’s not a national costume.’
‘It might be a wee bit different for a dancing outfit,’ I said, stitching now. ‘But generally, generally speaking, I know. That’s why I’m telling you this.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, the women were wearing their saris. Did you know they’re the oldest fashion item? Five thousand years.’
‘No.’
‘The women had spencers on underneath, by the way, and cardigans. It was freezing, even inside, because, you know, Wellington in July in a rickety wooden house, it was eleven degrees outside and twelve inside.’
I paused for effect. He nodded, unimpressed, and I continued.
‘The woman in the Scottish costume—who was called Fiona Campbell, which is about as Scottish as you can get (except it would’ve been Anglicised)—told me again why she’d worn her national costume, and asked me if I had one, and I said I didn’t. Of course. She asked me where I was from, and I said Wellington. She looked disappointed, so I said, Well, if I had a national costume I suppose it’d be Irish, but it was all a long time ago. She must’ve been a bit deaf, because she lit up and said to me, Ah, you should’ve worn your national costume, everyone else is! One of the cousins, who I knew a bit actually, was coming around with nibbles and stuff, and as she offered them to us, Fiona Campbell said, Megan has an Irish costume and she would’ve worn it if she’d known we were all going to be wearing ours.’
He smiled and leaned back in his chair. It creaked again ominously—they always creak.
Oh, he liked it. I felt the thrill of the storyteller. I continued.
‘I said to the cousin, I don’t have a national costume, but she looked me up and down with a funny expression on her face, as if she was imagining me in a strange get-up. I struck up a conversation with a couple of the aunts, and the grandmother who I’d never met. Fiona Campbell was still hanging about—because, remember, I’m her desert-island Pakeha—and she leaned over to the aunts and the grandmother and said, You know, Megan would’ve worn her national costume if she’d known we’d all be wearing ours. Jesus. I said to the aunts and the grandmother, I don’t have a national costume, really I don’t. Then I moved away and talked to a couple of uncles about how some of their children’s friends, their New Zealand friends, were dropping out of high school, and how astonishing this was, blah blah blah. One uncle was saying, Why? Why do these young people who are offered an education say, No thanks! Well, I didn’t know.’
Actually I did. But it would take a very long time. I went on with the story.
‘Then Fiona Campbell hoved in sight and told the uncles about my national costume. The men looked me up and down and I blushed and said, I don’t have a national costume, I don’t. There was a bit of a lull, then later on Fiona Campbell came and talked to me again. I felt sorry for her, the poor old bat, and I asked her what part of Scotland she was from, just for something to say. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse, not knowing one end of Scotland from the other. She reared back, literally, like this’—I arched back in my bentwood chair, which creaked—‘on her hind legs and looked at me the way old people read price tags and said, Goodness me, I don’t have a clue, I’m a fourth-generation New Zealander. I’d hate to live in Scotland. New Zealand’s a great little place, apart from the Maoris. If only they’d just get on with it. They were given good money for their land.’
I waited for his reaction. ‘She really said that,’ I said.
He nodded. I continued.
‘I was trying to move away from Fiona Campbell, I couldn’t stand it anymore, but old Fiona was telling some Indian friends of the family about my national costume. I kept saying, again and again, No, really, I don’t have one, I don’t have a national costume. I looked them straight in the eye so they could see that I was, you know, normal and that this Fiona Campbell woman was crazy. But nobody would meet my eye. They all looked me up and down, they looked at where my national costume might have been, if I’d had one. I was entirely sick of it, and the last couple of aunts who were being told by Fiona Campbell about my national costume, how I would’ve worn it if I’d known, I just nodded at them and smiled and I was imagining I had this old tartany green thing, or embroidered thing, hanging in the wardrobe at home.’
He laughed, out loud, no secret squeaking like the afternoon Milly was there. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh like that. I quickly took up the costume, which I’d been holding in my lap all this time. I hoped Art wouldn’t come home and find me having a cup of tea with a stranger at an odd hour and, for no reason whatsoever, a man who was laughing at something I’d said. I didn’t usually offer tea to clients. I didn’t tell funny stories to clients, or joke with them. It was nothing really, but I didn’t want to hurt Art’s feelings, which I knew could be hurt despite his lucky life, his landowner mother, his father in insurance, his tertiary education—perhaps because of it. It might seem as if there was a hint of collusion between myself and the client, even though there was nothing, nothing. Except a way of talking that was all confidences, a turning inside out of all the words inside you.
Because I knew about his wife. I knew about his wife and his mistress and how there was no choice.