I needn’t have bothered. What I realised was, he wanted to tell me.
First of all there was the ridiculous stuff about his jacket. It was quite a song and dance. From one hooked finger he swung a Foodtown bag stuffed like a punching kit. ‘Can you mend this?’ Grinning like a clown. A tow-coloured suit jacket spilled onto the table, and he dived after it, fingering a spot. ‘This.’ Under my nose. I held it away to see it—torn buttonhole, minor, almost nothing.
We were back to tension and blushing and carrying on.
‘Why?’ I knew it was a ruse—the yellow jacket a red herring, and ugly as sin to boot.
‘After that, of course.’ He head-butted towards the costume, which hung over a chair. ‘You wouldn’t want to put one job ahead of another.’
It was Wednesday. Eleven days into the Blackout. Twelve. And late, almost eight o’clock. We were standing by the table.
He was busy, he said, a busy day. Almost breathless with it.
The jacket, as I said, was awful—the dark yellow had a sheen like a petrolly puddle.
‘You don’t wear this, do you?’
His eyes widened in mild offence. Greenish.
‘This is what capitalism does to people.’
He laughed like a drain. ‘You’re funny.’
I don’t know about funny. Unprofessional, yes. I’d never expressed an opinion about a garment before (or an economic system). In fact, I’d never given a toss. They could wear what they bloody liked. But this jacket, it was like sewage, and you put it on to make money.
‘You know your problem?’ he said. ‘You’re too privileged.’
What a joke. Art and I lived on the smell of an oily rag. There was his Grandma fund, but that was usually reserved for buying paintings. And—crucial point—it wasn’t mine. I should have told the client about my original family. Privileged! We had a Skoda. My sister was a drug addict. I should have told him about how my father ran off with an exchange student, which epitomised our lack of privilege—in fact, was the jewel in the crown of evidence. I’d dined out on this story, literally, for years. I’d told it at dinner parties where, late at night after chucking back enough wine to stock a small bottle store, people spill the beans about how their uncle was a remittance man, or their father had a secret family down south. My story held its own at these parties. It sounded like a Peter Greenaway film (that’s what someone said once and I thought it was clever): The Girl, the Mother, the Father and His Lover. I would’ve told the client this story, but he’d already told me about Mr O’Connell, and I felt it wouldn’t have stacked up. But privileged. This client with the costume, Shane, thinks I’m privileged—that was going too far.
I don’t mean to go on about myself. Wasn’t someone going to tell me to stop?
Now he was making a great fuss, all rangy fingers, of finding a rumpled bit of paper in his wallet (his nice wallet), and handing it to me. It was the docket I’d written for Trisha on the first day of the Blackout, two weeks before. It seemed a long time ago. I’d spent much of it bumbling around in the dark.
We. We’d spent much of it.
I screwed the docket up and scribbled a new one for the dog-turd jacket, reciting as I went: ‘Jacket, men’s, yellow, tragic.’
‘Oh, come on!’
I tore it from the book and fluttered it at him.
He made a grab at the docket but I whisked it away. We went through this charade a couple more times, laughing, and finally, when I was falling against the red curtain, I let him pluck the docket from my fingers. He folded it and filed it away in his wallet, looking at me the whole time.
I dusted myself off. ‘You better rough it up a bit.’
‘Oh yeah.’ He took it out again and with great seriousness gave it a Chinese burn.
I watched this pantomime.
‘Have you ever taken anything to be mended before?’
He shook his head.
‘I rest my case.’
I propped the costume up on the table. It just about stood alone, with its embroidered armour. ‘Almost finished.’
He squinted at it from afar. ‘That was yesterday.’ Oh, I was cruel!
I flattened it on the table. It was rough-and-smooth like a feverish dream.
‘I would’ve written you a docket for nothing, by the way. Didn’t need to bring your jacket in.’
‘Would you?’ He flushed slightly. ‘Milly’s coming home tomorrow night—just for the weekend,’ he added. ‘So if I could take the thing now.’
I clunked my chair in at the table, and gestured for him to follow suit (yes, suit), but he wouldn’t. He folded his arms and positioned himself by the curtain. I had my bag of new silks. I threaded up some of the Minaret green. Licked the silk. We were taught by an elderly nun at school not to do that. It was considered disgusting. I remember deciding then and there, age six, that this was bad advice. I don’t think I ever discounted anything so readily. I’ve licked thread all my life. I glanced up at the client, then poked my needle into blackness. I pushed forward into the blank bit. It was flat and expansive. I was a pioneer. I was finishing the sleeve, for God’s sake.
I offered him wine. Well, it was after eight o’clock. The sun was just gone, that exciting loss.
He held up his hand like a stop sign. I poured him tea from the thermos instead. It was stone cold and he didn’t touch it, didn’t come near the table.
He looked at the naked cuff. ‘Is it my imagination, or do you have a way to go?’
‘It’s your imagination. Either that or you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I smiled at him.
‘I’m sure it’s the latter. But why do I feel like I’ve handed my car over to a mechanic?’
‘Don’t you trust me?’
He hesitated.
‘I’m helping you lie, aren’t I?’
‘Alright, just keep going.’
‘I am. Stop interrupting me.’
‘Alright.’ He settled in at the table, cleared his throat. He wanted to tell.
•
Two months in a sticky boarding house in Liverpool. His ma bought them a set of cheap clothes at a chain store. They were watching their pennies. The six grand wouldn’t last forever. I could just see her, his doughty old mother (that was what I thought, doughty), looking at the labels in the shop and saying, This, this, this will do nicely. Her certainty, her plucking ability. And in the evening, while their alternative clothes soaked in a bucket, Ma worried about Dad’s limp as she heated beans on a single electric coil.
And the Blackout would continue. We’d live on in the damp villa, carrying the light around with us at night, cooking dinner on the roaring 747.
I was starting in on a seaweedy green whorl.
I asked him why New Zealand—I mean, of all places. He shrugged and said maybe there were posters advertising New Zealand in the train station, although he may have been misremembering it.
Misremembering. That’s what he said. I told him I loved that, misremembering.
He paused and said, Do you? I thought, GoGo, you fool. You’re a complete fool.
But it can’t have been posters in the train station because they didn’t go on the train. They didn’t go anywhere. They didn’t see The Cavern. They went to Liverpool and didn’t visit the birthplace of Western culture. All he knew was that the ma was worried about the way the dad walked around on his new knees. They knew what new knees meant in Liverpool. And so Liverpool—which had been the promised land for so long—was now too close to the Wanted card and the Mass card and to the death of Mr O’Connell. Around this time, the dad must have got new papers done. There were ways and means. He’d never asked his dad, but that’s what he must’ve done.
I seem to be telling this. I seem to have taken over.
What it was was: there were postcards from Dreadful and Frightful, who’d washed up in New Zealand, for some reason. At the bottom of the world! Postcards of lambs and mountains. You could pick hops in the summer, which was really the winter, wrote Dreadful and Frightful in their convent handwriting, rent a whole house and have enough left over to go out on the town on Saturday night, such as the town was. But it was gorgeous. Ma should come over. One of the girls would say, There’s a postcard from Dreadful and Frightful. Ma would say, Don’t you call your aunties that! The dad scowled. If the family went to New Zealand, Dreadful and Frightful would meet them at Christchurch and help them find a house—a whole house—plus a job for Kevin and a group of girls for Ma to have a gas time with. They said it was paradise. The dad sat on a chair and practised the use of his reconstructed knees as if learning the steps of a dance.
The colour was draining from the room, the white floor going dove-grey.
The client didn’t remember their exact route to New Zealand, but it involved a throbbing week in the air. He recalled steam in Dubai, acres of lino in LA, a warm wind in Hawaii. For our purposes: zap to New Zealand. Like a film. A film made by LambChop Productions.
When they wobbled off the plane in Christchurch, Dreadful and Frightful weren’t there. They’d left word that they were on a farm on the outskirts of Nelson, picking hops. So the family went on a bus to Nelson, grinding over a mountainous pass, sleeping, and shading their eyes from the blue snow on the alps (I imagine). In Nelson they were told that Dreadful and Frightful had gone to Wellington weeks ago, because that’s where the action was. Dreadful and Frightful were good about leaving messages with bearded men standing in the doorways of rickety wooden houses. So the bus to Picton, which turned out to be a tiny seaside village at the top of the South Island, from where they caught the ferry across to Wellington. In a shady street of Wellington, in the fold of a hill, a bearded man told them Dreadful and Frightful had gone on the Limited to Auckland a week ago, because that was where the action was. Piled onto the Limited and slept swaying clickity-clack through the night. In Auckland—you’ve got it, Dreadful and Frightful had skipped to Aussie. Sydney was where the action was. On the doorstep of a wooden house in a weedy windy suburb of Auckland, their bags around them, Ma broke down. That Dreadful and Frightful! she said. She wasn’t going a step further.
‘Paradise,’ said the client.
He came close to the table. I took his hand and put it on the soft wool. He couldn’t feel anything, you could see that a mile off; his unfocused gaze. It was off his map. He took his hand away.
I asked him if all this meant he could never go back and he said, Oh no, of course he could. His father couldn’t though. His father still jumped a mile at the sight of a policeman.
The truth was, I was feeling a bit embarrassed that I’d told him my funny little bourgeois story about the national costume at the one-year-old’s birthday party. Not when he had this big story to tell. I actually said this to him.
‘Your sweatshop is hardly bourgeois,’ he said.
I sat back with the costume in my lap. ‘Sweatshop!’
‘Well, cottage industry.’ He looked around at the sewing machine, the cottons. ‘It wouldn’t be out of place in pre-industrial England. You don’t need to worry about being bourgeois.’
‘It’s the Blackout,’ I said.
‘Even without the Blackout.’
‘I thought you thought I was privileged. You can’t have it both ways.’
‘You can actually.’
‘Oh really.’
His face was leaning in. It was bluish. Our eyes met, stuck a moment, then away. I was bemused, and perhaps a little annoyed. Before I had time to reply, he asked where my husband was.
‘Out.’
‘I know out. I mean what does he do?’
‘He’s working on a film at the moment,’ I said.
I heard myself say feelm. I didn’t really mean his transcribing job to come out that way.
‘I notice you don’t have any clients,’ he said.
‘Have you noticed it’s half past eight in the evening?’ I asked.
‘But even in the late afternoon, no one.’ He sang, Where have all the clients gone? I hate that tune.
‘It’s the Blackout. People aren’t coming into town.’
‘I thought you said they were coming to you.’
‘Well, they’re not.’ I hurried on. ‘People are moving out of the city,’ I said. I’d heard this on the news. I felt on safer territory. I didn’t like being accused of I-don’t-know-what. I was a hard worker. ‘They’ve set up offices in South Auckland, in West Auckland,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’
‘I did know that.’
‘They’re going to Wellington, Hamilton, Sydney even. Or they’re staying home. There’s nothing doing.’
‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I mean, if it’s just the Blackout. You wouldn’t want to be living on what you can earn from one . . . dress.’
‘I don’t have many expenses.’
Which was true, not with ‘the farm’ bankrolling our villa conversion.
I’m not a materialist, you see. I’m really not. In fact, I quite despise materialism.
‘What will you do if it goes on?’ he asked.
‘They’re fixing the cables.’
‘What say people forget to come back?’ He was being ridiculous. ‘What say they find other menders and keep going to them?’
‘I almost have an MA in English.’
Now he laughed. ‘Businesses are going bust all over town,’ he said. ‘No clients for a couple of weeks and already you’re going down the tube.’
‘I’m not going down the tube,’ I said.
‘You’re already down it. Why didn’t you rent another space, so you could keep working?’
‘Because I don’t have to,’ I said. I was getting tetchy. I had choices. I could do all sorts of things.
‘You’re down the tube,’ said the client. ‘But you know what? I think you like it down there.’
This was really annoying. I came from an educated family, but we weren’t capitalists. My father drove a Skoda. And this business, it was really just for fun. I told the client there were plenty of other things I could do.
‘What?’ he asked. To give him his due, he was genuinely curious.
‘Lots of things.’
He suddenly said, ‘Do you want kids?’
I felt myself blush. ‘That’s a bit personal, isn’t it?’
‘This is personal.’ He indicated the costume.
This was true. I’d seen it all undone. I’d taken liberties with it. I shrugged—about the kids thing. (And by the way, I’d been popping little pink pills for years.)
‘What say they want to go to university, like you, these kids?’
I was kind of outraged.
‘They’ll be hustling for the highest-paying job they can get,’ he was saying. ‘They’ll be importing titanium.’
They wouldn’t.
Something occurred to me. ‘This is all hypothetical. Like your imaginary daughter. The one Milly talked about.’
He blushed. He blushed! He was shaking his head.
I started telling him how Pinnacle Power had quadrupled their profits and halved their employees in four years.
He said they had to do that otherwise they would’ve gone broke.
I told him how they increased managers’ salaries by thirty percent.
Of course, he said, otherwise they couldn’t get anyone to work at that level.
He shifted in his suit. Yes, his suit. ‘It’s not ready, is it?’
I peered down at the costume, which was an ink blot in the grey room. ‘No,’ I said proudly. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
‘I’ll come by after work, latish, I have a busy day.’
‘It’ll be ready.’
‘Will it? And I’ll tell you about paradise. Sometimes I wished Dreadful and Frightful had taken it into their heads to go to hell.’
‘But remember I know that bit already,’ I said.
He stood up. ‘Yeah, you probably do. Thanks for the tea.’ Which he hadn’t touched. Suddenly so formal. I couldn’t stand it.
‘You’re welcome, as they say in America.’ He was going. ‘Wait,’ I said. I wanted him there. I wanted to keep him there. ‘About the Woolthamlys’ company, the fruit drying, remember?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Taranaki Dried Fruit.’
‘They’re going to ride it out, that’s what they said.’
‘Oh. That might not be very wise, but still.’
I groped my way across the room to get a torch. I shone it on the floorboards all the way to the front door, like an usher. A lovely yellow dot.
On the doorstep he said, ‘Will this affect you?’
‘What?’
He laughed. ‘If they lose the company, of course.’
‘No!’ I was shocked. ‘I’m not a materialist.’
‘But you could lose your little life here.’
‘My little life?’ My cheeks flushed. I felt his face close in the dark, briefly, almost to touch.
‘What?’ he said.
And I said, What, nothing.
He shambled across the veranda and down the planky steps. I was formulating a theory: if we don’t have any big stories to tell, we start feasting on ourselves. We eat our hands. It’s called literary theory. Actually, I just thought of that.
There was a shred of lilac light over the Waitakeres. I heard him on his mobile phone as he walked to his car, an urgent tone, authoritative. I could tell it wasn’t Milly, and I was relieved. So relieved some kind of chemical flooded through me. It felt like a colour. And as I stood on the doorstep I saw that the tenants from the villa one up from us, who I’d only seen once or twice in passing, were moving out, about four of them loading their stuff into a van and yelling at each other to hurry because the light was going. A woman with a beehive hairdo like Amy Winehouse noticed me in the gloom and called out as if we’d been having a conversation—they were over the Blackout, she said. As they slammed the van doors they all called out, Bye, bye, as if they knew me, and drove off. For a moment I didn’t know whether they’d ever been real. I had the creepy feeling that electricity merely gave us the impression of lives being lived, but that once the power was gone there was nothing.