Then Art was coming in and there was a party we were meant to go to a few streets away, Helen Someone we knew vaguely from Wellington. People were starting to have Blackout parties. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go, I wasn’t in the mood for inane conversation, and Art said, Same. We hoed into cold meat and potato salad, deciding, and sculled a bit of the white wine Art had couriered in from outside the Blackout zone. Art said they never knew when to stop with the d-d-d. I looked at him. He sneezed. Dressing. We both said, Oh no, and soon he was sneezing like a starter motor.
‘It’s the d-d-d—achoo!—dust.’
‘Only a matter of time,’ I said, and I laughed for some reason.
It was true. The carpets were like someone’s felting hobby. No hope of vacuuming them, of course. (Or of hanging them on the line and attacking them with a carpet beater, I thought, like the Edwardian housewife’s maid would have done. Nailing them down had no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time.) Art was a card-carrying hayfever-sufferer with a bona fide diagnosis, like a visa to the mythical world of mites—you couldn’t see them, you just thought you had when the sun shone.
‘It was a r-r-race,’ said Art, and sneezed, ‘between Pinnacle Power and m-me.’
‘You did come second,’ I said. ‘Silver.’
We were good.
He asked me between sneezes whether I minded him going around to Glenda’s and I said why would I mind? I mean, he was honest.
We moseyed over to the party with a torch. It was in a villa like ours, but a whole one. There were candles all through the house so it looked like Diwali, and people crowded into room after room, leaning against walls or dancing. The house shook a bit. Nirvana was straining out of a ghetto blaster. I moved through, talked to someone I went to university with but I couldn’t remember her name through the whole conversation. I went to get a glass of red wine from the kitchen, passed Art having an animated conversation with a group of people, including Glenda. Three fucking weeks.
After a couple more conversations, one about property values, another about late capitalism, I drifted out onto a huge deck where there were more candles and people smoking. It was a beautiful evening. It was quite noisy, just talking, but a neighbour yelled from next door to shut up, it was midnight. There was general laughter. Then I saw, at the corner of the deck where it looked like a boat, the client. He was smoking and nodding with a group of three or four other people. He caught my eye, and put his cigarette in the other hand. I felt a bit nervy, like if I’d had a cigarette, I would have juggled with it.
I went back inside, but when I looked over my shoulder, he had followed me. The room was crowded and there were people trying to dance to some New Romance, good luck to them. He was in front of me. I noticed the way his white shirt was tucked into his jeans, a preppy look I wasn’t into. He said, Do you want to dance, and I said okay. You can’t really say, No, no I don’t. We jived around looking a bit stupid. I didn’t look at his face, only his body. Everything from the neck down. We didn’t touch. As you don’t. He was a terrible dancer, robotic. It was kind of funny, really it was. Then the song finished and people melted away from the middle of the room. We stood about not saying anything, but then Art appeared from another room.
‘Shall we go?’ He looked at the client.
I said, ‘This is.’
‘Shane.’
‘Shane, sorry. I knew that. A client.’
They shook hands. I said yeah, I was ready to go. As I turned to the passage I saw a woman flit across it, from a room on one side to a room on the other, which was the side we didn’t have in our villa conversion. And I thought, from the split-second flash I took in of black hair, clompy shoes, surfing gait, that it was Trisha.
We were going. Art was saying goodbye to some people, Glenda, Grant et al. I turned to the client.
‘I thought I just saw Trisha. Did you?’
‘No,’ he said. He smiled.
Art and I sailed home along the empty streets, arm in arm, in the dark, and talked about whether we should stay in the house, because of Art’s hayfever. He said he couldn’t be bothered moving, but did I need to because of my, you know, business (because it wasn’t quite a business), which was thoughtful, but I said no, I couldn’t be bothered. Our voices were bouncing off the houses across the road. It would be fine as long as it didn’t go on too much longer. Another three weeks might just be bearable. I was about to be paid for quite an involved job, I said. Art said, Oh good.
I was feeling blasé, buoyant, I don’t know. I said it wasn’t too bad, was it? It wasn’t, he said, not bad at all. You couldn’t really ask for more. Perhaps some electricity occasionally. A light once in a while wouldn’t go amiss. He could live without almost everything else. Well, that and the computer. And the vacuum cleaner.
We were coming up the steps and he said, ‘That wasn’t the investment banker, was it?’
‘Oh, actually, it was,’ I said.
‘I meant to tell you, I told Mother what he said about the business. Remember? About pulling in their horns, laying off staff?’
‘I remember,’ I said. I was in a trance.
‘They think they can ride it out. They’ve been through bad times before.’
‘Okay, good.’
When the client came the next day, the costume would be ready.