And then, on the last day—of course—the last day. It was lunchtime. He’d come at lunchtime. I was in the bathroom mopping up when I heard a commotion coming from down the street, yelling, cars honking, a general hubbub. I padded back to the front room. The client, naked, had his hand on the light switch. ‘Ta-da!’ Dangling from the Carrara ceiling, a dazzle on a string. Deadpan for a second, then going nuts. Aah! I turned on a lamp, and the dehumidifier, which purred. We danced, a waltzy thing, sawing back and forth under the light.
Then hauled on clothes and went out onto the veranda because the whoops were ricocheting up the gully. A man in overalls ran past the house hollering. Someone replied, into the air, About fucking time! There was laughter, more shouting. Yee-hah, as they say in America. A woman from up the street who I’d never met before waved to us from a veranda. A stereo started up, some funk. This pantomime went on for a while. The client and I stood on the veranda watching it, like Christmas in the Park. Then we looked at each other. Time to go forward, into some other thing. I walked along the passage, stabbed at the Wah Lee light switch. The beautiful paper lantern glowed. The client followed. In the kitchen I woke up the fridge and it began humming. The fan coughed out a whole lot of dust. I plugged in the kettle. It creaked and hissed. I turned to the client, who was hanging about in the middle of the room.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Your husband.’ His hands dangled like the first day.
‘He’s out,’ I said.
He smiled, okay. Turned on the light, although it was broad daylight, turned it off again. We cackled. He looked about, plugged in the CD player. There was a mix in it. The Clash started up, ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ I turned it up to blare on the way past. Coffee? Yes, coffee! The client got a whiff of the waste disposal and feigned vomiting. That! I said. Would need some careful thinking about. I said will need some thinking about. The client said he heard me. I turned on the pantry light. There were eggs. Omelettes. Omelettes! I heard you, he said. I cracked oeufs in a bowl and the client found the plug-in hand-held beater and blasted them. A fork will do. I said a fork will do! I know. I tossed some flour into the breadmaker while I was at it. There was still mayhem out in the gully. I suddenly ran into the passage and boinged the hot-water switch, came belting back again. Hot water! He had the toaster going. ‘Poi E’ was belting out of the stereo. God, I love that song.
We sat at the kitchen table shovelling in omelette, toast, coffee. Looking at each other. Everything on, blaring, bubbling, throbbing. The End. Finis.
He had work. He had to go back to work. Regardless. He got his jacket from the front room and went out onto the veranda. I followed. There was still the odd shout and horn flaring down in the gully. He turned at the top of the steps and stood wavering. It was one o’clockish, the sun pelting down.
‘This is it, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘The end of this bit.’
‘Yes, just this bit. The end of deceit.’
‘Now we’ll be truthful.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He was nodding.
And I was. We were nodding like anything.
‘Are you pleased this is happening?’ I asked.
‘Of course! Yes!’
Of course. A rhetorical question.
‘When will I see you?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘How to arrange this?’
‘How to?’
We were saying how to, how to, and kissed and for a long time, the length of the Blackout, five weeks. Then tore away like suction cups, literally, pop. He had tears in his eyes. And I did. Just because, well, it was going to change. We were coming out of paradise into some other place. He bounced down the weedy steps, waved at the bottom, blew a kiss. A circular saw grated on down the street.
I went into my workroom, stood there for a minute, excitement drumming through me, then tried the light switch. Darkness dried up like a puddle.
Now it would begin.
•
When I woke in the morning, I was on my own. Art was gone. I had a sudden mad panic, I don’t know why. As if I’d leaped ahead to some future time. I went out into the passage and walked along it, and I felt like I wasn’t anyone and I wasn’t anywhere in particular, I’d just been plunked down somewhere. I thought I could walk forever along the passage and it wouldn’t lead to anywhere, and I wouldn’t ever be anyone. I creaked open the front door onto the day, the silence, the strawberry roofs, the Waitakeres looming out west, and it was just me. I didn’t know what to do. Later, the sun scorched through the banana palms and I read a novel on the back doorstep, can’t remember what. But I do remember thinking how useful novels are.
I needed to tell Art and when he came in. I paced about and then it was nineish, almost dark, and I was standing in the mandolin looking out on the garden and the lights across the gully, which now seemed festive, like a floor show. I remembered that at the beginning of the Blackout, on the first evening, Art had gasped to see me standing there, but this evening he didn’t flinch. He looked like he’d been in a fight. Yes, a bar-room brawl. His satchel strap dragged like a clenched fist on his lapel. I could smell the medicinal smell of one too many on his breath. He walked past me into the front room and fell onto the couch. I asked him where he’d been but I didn’t care.
‘It’s bad news,’ he said.
‘The business?’ Well, it did have one foot on a banana skin anyway.
‘I don’t care about the business.’ His face purplish. He was a derro. ‘It’s not the money. Don’t you know that?’
‘What—not “the farm”? Are you sure?’
He’d never liked my inverted commas. ‘Yair, “the farm”,’ he said in inverted commas, which were heavy. He’d been there for the day. There’d been a divvying up of things. Art’s beautiful shiny privileged face crumpled like a can. He twisted his painty head. ‘It’s gone.’
The royal We. I sat down beside him. I hesitated, put my hand on his cheek, but it felt unreal, fake, my touch, and it must’ve to him too because after a moment he wrenched away.
‘Gone.’
I tried to say it wasn’t like that, his parents had their house in Wellington, he had his own life, his career, but even as I talked I knew it was rubbish, balderdash, and I petered out. They’d been the Woolthamlys, and now Art was just a Frome.
And me? Well, as you know I’m not a materialist, I despise materialism. I suppose I’d got used to there being a light on in the passage, and it had been extinguished, but I didn’t care, I didn’t give a rat’s arse. And anyway, I liked the Blackout. I liked what the Blackout had brought me. I wanted my mouth mashed against the stretched sinews under his chin.
Now Art embarked on a meandering version (because you know, off his face), about the Asian crisis, how when it got to Japan it was curtains for the Woolthamly prune empire. Which I knew anyway. And then the Blackout, to compound it, and the villa tenants moving out like nobody’s business. Which might have seemed small fry compared to the ‘the farm’ and the business, and it was, but it all added up. Or didn’t. Apparently there was a moment, said Art, and he leaned forward into my face and everything in him was loosened, when it could have been salvaged, and I said, Oh, and he said, Yes, there was a moment.
He told me how at the house, Prue, Issy and himself had divided up the furniture. Even then, I noticed how it was just the blood relatives. It wasn’t pretty, he said. He told me vaguely what was happening to the sideboards, the big dining room table and chairs, and how some things would be sold to the new owners, who were white South Africans. How it was kind of heartbreaking, but it had to be done because his parents obviously couldn’t squash everything into their Wellington house. I nodded a bit, I watched him. He was sort of twitchy. He sat forward, reached into his pocket and dipped out a handful of earth and told me he’d literally knelt down and scooped it up before he drove off the land. He held it out to me and I looked at the earth but I couldn’t tell if it was good earth or bad. I thought how his jacket pocket would be all dirty. He’d shed tears, he said. Yes, shed tears.
‘It was heartbreaking,’ he said again, ‘but even so, even so,’—he groped for words—‘GoGo, it was wonderful.’
I screwed up my face. ‘Was it?’ I asked.
He said it was, it was wonderful. He kept telling me about the stuff in the house and what was happening to it, the portrait of the old guy, Woolthamly, being gifted to the National Gallery, the big chiffoniers auctioned. And how they’d stopped Grandma giving the twenty thousand quid to Danielle who was marrying royalty, in the nick of time. We sort of laughed at that, but as he was talking I was thinking about the walks over the hills with Bert, the battles and the skirmishes, the camping in the summer, free as a fucking bird, the girl who was murdered, and how the farm was carved up and carved up among the siblings, and the lions at the gate. When he’d told me it was gone.
He said again, there was a moment when it all could have been saved.
I asked, ‘What was that moment?’ Well, I had to.
‘When the Murus left,’ he said, ‘and production at the plant stopped. Completely,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? Completely?’
I said I did know.
‘And you know why it stopped?’
And I said I did, but it was okay.
‘It was,’ he said. And he laughed, but it wasn’t his usual laugh, it was a cackle. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘and then, an investor made an aggressive offer, yes, a very aggressive one, and it was sold for a song, a song.’
He was falling asleep, wilting on the couch.
‘It’s all over,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He blinked at me, trying to focus. ‘But in the end, you know, GoGo, you have to do what makes you happy.’ He was flickering asleep, his bright eyes shutting down. ‘Do what makes you happy.’
‘I will,’ I said. I put a blanket over him and went out of the room.
•
In the morning I turned on the vacuum cleaner. Art sneezed. This won’t be pretty, I yelled. He went to LambChop. I did the whole house, which took ages, was like hoeing up the dust. Then paced about. It was back to normal. It felt foreign. There might be clients. I’d almost forgotten. Probably not, the first few days.
In the passage I touched the phone. It was still. I didn’t have his number—I’d never had it, hadn’t thought of it. He had mine, of course. My docket.
What I realised was: those clients, they didn’t love their wives, their husbands. They loved the lover.
Somehow there was dinner (the oven), and chilled things from the fridge. I was distracted. He even said that, Art—GoGo, you’re distracted. It’s the electricity. Back on, he said, and I said, Yes, back on.
(Oh, and by the way, there was a false start with the power—it went out again for a few days, but that’s another story.)
The next day I thought, I thought of taking a novel to bits. I thought, I am the granddaughter of the storytellers. Stories are over. Now we can just undo them.
I felt like absolute shite, in my own words. Whatever shite feels like when it’s at home.
•
The next day I went downtown. I set the answerphone.
I expected the city to be bustling. It wasn’t. Trolley buses were whining up the steep bit of Queen Street. The big shops were open, banks, and a few neon signs were blinking. The water sculpture by the Art Gallery burst on and a bunch of kids jumped in, screeching like monkeys. But overall the city was still on reuptake inhibitors.
A lot of small shops—lunch bars, tobacconists—were dark. They were like strips of land from which the serfs have been turfed off for not paying their rent. I walked and walked. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I remembered the day I dropped out of university. I remembered a pencil rolling over the wooden floor.