I was looking down a road and there must’ve been rain recently because it was shiny, a silk road. The seal was bumpy, textured, and as I squinted into the distance I saw that the road looped in a paisley or perhaps a koru shape like a road on the side of a hill. By the side of the road were bundles of something bristly laid out at regular intervals as if ready to feed animals or to thatch a roof. Inside the loop were other roads just the same, concentric, getting smaller and smaller like Russian dolls. And like Russian dolls, each one was perfect in detail; although perhaps as it all got very tiny, they weren’t quite so perfect. I know, I’m mixing patterns and metaphors like nobody’s business—Indian, Maori, Russian, where will it end? But this was our familiar old red brocade couch, and I’d never seen it up so close.
The client came back. Even though I’d pushed the costume, all finished, into his hands on the way out the door, he came back the next day. He said hi and I said hi and we stopped for a minute, fell against each other in the passage and toppled onto the floor, then moved into the front room where I kicked the door shut and swished the curtains across. It was like cinema during the day. He swallowed me.
After that, he came back again and again. At first I numbered every time—workroom, passage wall, red couch, floor—then I lost count. I could give you details, but I don’t want to be self-centred. Suffice to say I had a very exciting idyll, when secrecy was my jacket and lies my skirt, not to get too flowery about it. There were other things going on, which I’ll get on to, but this glory was the main thing, even though I told myself every morning not to. I said—as I carefully picked out my clothes—GoGo, you fool, you’re riding for a fall. I proceeded as if it were temporary, for several reasons. One, I knew how the client operated. Two, the Blackout would come to an end and his wife would come flapping back from Wiggytown like a homing pigeon. The client told me he’d hung the costume in the wardrobe, all prepared for that very day. As if I cared a hoot. He hadn’t mentioned putting it on the wardrobe floor and trampling it underfoot—the original plan, but perhaps redundant if his wife happened to notice the finished sleeve. He hadn’t noticed it, of course.
And number three was blinking obvious: I had a husband. Who I didn’t want to deceive, but I had no choice. It was out of my hands. And so now I started on my period of deceit. I liked the secrecy. In the beginning I liked it.
I liked that he was wiry and heavy, light and dark, smooth and rough, gentle and unpredictable. He was a whole bundle of dichotomies. I know, book me in for a lobotomy.
I went with the client into paradise.
•
In the mornings I couldn’t wait for Art to leave the house. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Things were a bit high-strung. For a start I had adopted sex-avoidance techniques like suddenly getting busy late at night, or falling into bed yawning at nine o’clock. I tried so hard to be normal, it must have looked like a neurosis. Over breakfast we would go back and forth about the news a little bit, and then I would wave him off like a fifties housewife, smiling my gory smile. I’d never done this. I was a nineties housewife. As he got smaller and smaller, disappearing down the path and onto the street, I would stand in the mandolin, its grey light. A layer of brightness had been stripped away as if with a flat knife. I was twitchy, ecstatic. I was on something. When Art was completely gone—no chance of him returning for a forgotten thing, Frantz flipping Fanon f’rinstance—I would go into the bedroom and whirl clothes about. I was a character in a sitcom. A flockcom, seeing we were as far from a nuclear family as a split atom. Nothing went with anything, of course. The agony. That had always been the case, but now I really cared. What I’d discovered about my clothes was, they were nice, but they were intellectual. A Russian constructivist would like them, if you get my drift. What I wanted was sexy. There were a few things. A vintage fifties dress, a wafty op-shop blouse. Anyway.
Then I would have all day. Did I mention Megan Sligo Mending and Alterations was on the verge of collapse? Perhaps I would ratchet it up again, perhaps I wouldn’t. I hadn’t had a client for weeks. The upshot was, I read the odd novel. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, for instance, about the madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre, why she was mad—when I could tear my thoughts away from my own little roman à clef, that is. I must say I thought about the client quite a bit.
•
Around seven o’clock he would arrive. As per usual, you might think, and you’d be right. The Wah Lee moon would shift on the breeze from the front door. We’d kiss on the doorstep. The audacity—it was like petrol. The sun in our hair first, then plummeting in the bay window. Then curtains again. It was after hours. I knew the feeling of his mouth on my neck. His body crushing me and then rolling over, me sitting astride him and spilling myself onto him on the rug. Up close he had a lovely upper lip, its tender shape. I moved onto his body like an immigrant, carved out a new life on terra incognita; his torso, my sweat, his arms and legs, my arse (yes, my arse). He tasted like me now, his mouth, skin, wetness. My hand on his bristly hairline was connected to him filling me. I won’t go on.
I said his name. Shane. Shane. Shane.
Of course we listened for Art in between, like commercials. On the second visit, we seriously thought we heard him, a thump on the veranda, but it was the wind. Fell back screeching. We were a young country with weak infrastructure, wiring that might fizz out at any moment, not to put too fine a point on it. I could lose everything in the next instant—chuck everything away. It was glorious. We lay squashed up on the couch and talked. He smoked there once or twice, the tendrils curling upwards like a Renaissance hymn. My hand on his damp chest, knee across him. We talked about stray things, what kind of weather we liked, the worst teacher we ever had, talked to the ceiling. Sometimes I turned uncomfortably to look at him close-up. And he turned. Like pecking birds.
He asked me to tell some stories, like he did. I told him he already knew about the pole house, and he said yes. And the books, and the Skoda.
Yes.
And my sister Lisa.
Yes.
And my invisible national costume, and he laughed, and said, That’s just bits and pieces.
I suppose it’s true, things had broken down a bit—but that’s alright, I said.
He said it was. After a fashion.
After a fashion! I said.
I didn’t know any long versions anyway.
I knew all about him of course.
‘This is just till the power comes back on, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I hope the Blackout lasts forever.’
‘Me too.’
I can’t remember who said what. I said a lot, a lot of garbage, like thinking aloud. No stories, stories were over. It was snippets now, ephemera. They seemed important.
He said, ‘I love you though.’
And I said—amazed—‘Yeah, me too. I love you.’
We laughed because it was so funny, because you know, I was the mender and he was the client, and it was true. And everything was suddenly beautiful and exciting. Honestly, it was as if I’d turned my head and seen the whole world from a different angle, one I’d never looked from before, and it made the air, objects, even ideas glittering and larger. It made things wonderful.
Our lingering goodbye was dreadful, in the half-light.
‘I have to go.’
‘Don’t go.’
‘I need to.’
‘Go then.’
‘In a minute.’
‘I don’t want you to.’
Some shrieking and groaning, pulling away like chewing gum. It was a pantomime. Agony. It was the best time in my life.
When he’d gone I washed at the basin by candlelight (a whiff of mould in the long bathroom) with a cloth, as if I was in a French film with a soundtrack, the foily tinkle of water. I was Juliette Binoche. I thought Art might think it odd that Juliette had had a shower mid-evening, so I sponged myself, the slick of sweat from my stomach, between my legs, a spit of semen plopping onto the floor, water everywhere. Also to be quick, but it took longer. Shortcuts are always more trouble. I would have cleaned my teeth but thought Art might wonder why Juliette smelled of toothpaste at dusk.
I could smell the client, for hours afterwards. As I walked about the house, his smell clung to me like perfume. I wondered why Art didn’t twitch his nose as soon as he came in the door, dropping his dissertation in the passage. I almost wanted him to. It would all be over. But he didn’t, he couldn’t. He sneezed. But even without hayfever, Art would probably never have noticed. The smell of the client lay on the air like a fresh mend.
In bed I turned away, my nostrils in the crook of my arm. It rushed at me again, how I was in love, a fresh wave of ecstasy or deceit, I don’t know which, surging through me. Now I was like the client, like all the clients whose tracks I had covered. Cases 1, 2 and 3. I was Case 397, or thereabouts. I loved the risk. I felt like I had the day I’d dropped out of university, walked down Church Steps, and come home to an empty house, where a pencil rolled across the floor.
•
These other things going on? Well, they were working on the cables for a start. I heard that on the news. Plus, I had no clients. Plus, the Murus had walked off the job. There was a new Warehouse opening in the town, and they’d thought it would be a safer option. The Taranaki Dried Fruit Company had come to a standstill. Art told me this, in the kitchen. It was like a dream. I might have dreamed him. He talked and I thought about the client. Who I must stop calling the client because he was Shane. But then I did hear, slowly, like a reverberation. The vultures, I suppose, were descending.
In my half-dream, it occurred to me: ‘But you’re cut out of the will anyway.’
‘Might be.’ He sort of blushed.
Of course. Might be. I knew how it was—just the threat of it. He hated that.
‘I could be, but I’m not. At present.’
We almost laughed. I didn’t care. About any of it. I had everything. I revised my thoughts on the highest point, the peak, which I had originally put at the time Mary-France and Dad and Lisa and I drove, then loped, up the steepest street in the Southern Hemisphere, Dunedin, c. 1980. No. It was this moment, standing in the middle of the yellow kitchen in the Blackout. I had absolutely blinking everything.
I felt like singing.
I thought about how on the doorstep I might notice his teeth and the inside of his mouth more than anything. Or his hips. My hands. It was like lying down in the snow. I gave up everything.
In the passage, the wall as a prop. His throat.
Once, a conversation about cars, all arms and legs wrapped up on the rug. He had a new one, don’t ask me what. My knowledge of cars stopped at my father’s Skoda. He laughed. The university professor with the Skoda. Then went a bit thoughtful and said his dad could’ve bought a Skoda but he couldn’t have afforded the money for a taxi. I laughed.
At night I undressed in the bathroom and wrapped myself in a dressing-gown so Art wouldn’t see the marks on my neck. The bruise from a week ago still just visible on my spine, a yellow smudge. I kept my bruise to myself. Time would mend it. I need do nothing but wait. He was a good man, he was lovely, but I didn’t even care. All the same I was jittery in the night, on a permanent full moon. I would wake with a start, having dreamed I’d pricked my finger on a rumbling sewing machine. For a few moments I wouldn’t know who I was, or where I was, what the meaning of the blackness in the room was. I would realise, then, that the rumbling was Art’s snoring and that there was no pain in my finger, I had just thought it was pain. The taste of the client was in my mouth, and the smell of him in my nostrils.
•
Then my lovely routine again. Waving Art off, getting dressed, my choosing-clothes routine, my whirligig (I needed to look as though I’d just tossed them on without any thought, which was where all the thinking came in). One morning I came upon a whole bunch of my Mabel garments. They were certainly beautiful—wool and fur, chiffon and linen—but it struck me for the first time what was wrong with them: they weren’t sexy. They might have been funky, powerful, interesting, but they had zero sex appeal. I packed them up and put them away in the Winter suitcase on top of the wardrobe. Ditto my shoes. I had one good pair, bought to go to a wedding once, from the stylish shop on Ponsonby Road. I looked like a ward matron in them.
I dressed in an op-shop thing, a dress. Then I read a novel, or tried to. It was hard to concentrate. I read a page upside down like Blanche Ingram.
Then the client was in the warm sun of the passage.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
In the front room I walked my fingers on the bones of his neck. And looked at him. Somehow different today. I don’t know why.
‘We’re not falling in love, are we?’
He swivelled his head with difficulty. My finger slipped away. ‘Maybe we are. What do you think?’
‘I think maybe,’ I said.
‘When the power comes back on.’ He looked back at the ceiling.
‘When the power comes back on what?’
Then he said, because I’d got up and opened the curtains and the garden was broadcast by the sun into the room and my Singer sewing machine was glinting (I think it was this): ‘You should employ people.’
I told him I liked working by myself, he knew that, and he said what did liking have to do with it?
‘What you should do,’ he said, and he propped his head on his elbow, getting all enthusiastic, ‘is take on four or five immigrant women and make some decent money.’
‘Immigrant women!’ I sat up. ‘You’re a fascist!’
It was all a joke, you understand.
The client got dressed. It was time anyway. (Art.) ‘My mother was an immigrant,’ he said. ‘She worked for a pittance. You don’t want your kids to be like that, do you?’
‘You’re a capitalist.’
‘Of course. You are too. You’re having a break. That’s what capitalism gave you. It’s a bit like this.’
I stopped with only my sleeves on. ‘What? Us?’
‘Yes.’ Fastening everything, buttons. ‘Just because your parents had degrees and a nice house.’
We laughed and rolled over and over on the rug again and I said stop, I was getting fluff all over me. And Art would notice, I meant.
He was ridiculous. He was gorgeous. We laughed and pressed together in the doorway. While the power was out. Pressed tight. There’d be an imprint of him on me. One day I’d be a fossil and the memory of the man would be a carbon picture. When he’d gone I brushed crumbs from the couch into the palm of my hand. I was dreading when the power would come back on. I was.
I did wonder if Milly would notice the newly embroidered sleeve. Perhaps she would bring the knotwork right up close to her eyes and decipher the two colours worked together, the Dollar Bill and the Minaret.