In the car park at St Luke’s Shopping Centre are two stiff little green blazers that look as if they’re still on the hangers, but they have children inside them. A girl and a boy, about five and seven respectively. The girl has a tiny tartan skirt and white pipe-cleaner legs. It’s the uniform of an expensive Anglican prep school. The children have dropped down from the high door of an SUV, almost as if from a building, but gently, like Spiderman. I am sitting in the driver’s seat of our little bomb under the low roof of the grey, oily parking building. I turn my head and see the client closing the shiny door of the SUV that the children have tumbled from. He’s fatter around the middle, greyish, going grey young, and his hand is reaching to engulf that of the younger child. There’s Milly, older, harassed in a happy kind of way, her hair breaking free of its bun, tottering in her high heels from the other side of the car and gathering the boy’s hand, and her bag. I happen to be in her line of vision and she smiles vacantly as if she thinks she might know me, perhaps would wave even, if her hands weren’t occupied. As they walk away across the wasteland of the car park, the client turns to fire at the car, which jumps with the force of all the locks shooting home at the same time. At this point, he looks at me. A bolt of shock goes through him like the car locks, I can see it. But no, it’s me, it’s going through me and I am welded, until he looks away and, in a few strides, catches up with his family as they trail across the heterotopia. Yes, heterotopia.
So that’s the girl, the little five-year-old uniform on legs, who the costume was for. Who I toiled away for in the front room back in 1998. It was her blinking heritage. When she’s older, if someone asks her at a party, Why didn’t you wear your national costume? she’ll have to say, like me, I don’t have one. It’s gone.
I remember it intimately. I remember every last stitch of it.
You know what? I could make a costume for my own daughter, if I put my mind to it. I could run her up a so-called Irish dancing costume in velvet or soft wool, in black or blue or green. I could embroider the hem, the cuffs, the sleeves, the edges of the cape. Oh yes, in knotwork. I know all about knotwork. My daughter could have a costume hanging in the wardrobe at home. I could do this for her. But I don’t.
She is six. At the local state school.
I won’t.
Art is buckling her into her car seat. Oh, Art? Doctor Frome? He has a part-time gig teaching academic writing in the evenings. The pay is stink. Hopefully a position in his field will come up soon. It’s been a long time. I’ve taken up my studies again, now that Sadie is at school. I’m looking into current theories behind Deformance: The Subjective in New Zealand Women’s Poetry. From there on it gets involved. But thanks for asking. I have a bit of cleaning work which almost covers the fees.
Sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if there’d been no Blackout. I might have mended that particular dress in a pool of electric light, which I, like everyone, took so much for granted, and nothing would have changed. I would have kept on working with my hands in my workroom. I never would have moved into the front room and looked out through the wobbly glass at the overgrown garden. Now my hands are mostly still. I have a narrow office like a strip of land. Just this afternoon I had a conversation by the lift with a fellow student who, for some reason, was under the impression that I was about to drop out. Drop out! Nothing could be further from the truth. I had in my bag right at that very moment Helene Cixous, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Derrida—Derrida who I’d actually seen, heard, in the Michael Fowler Centre, 1993! And the fellow student in the foyer, a slightly eccentric woman (I mean, drop out!), said, Wow, Derrida! Did you touch the hem of his garment? I shook my head and was about to say that in fact I had been a mender, had done hems, and had taken small snippets from the insides of hems to mend a hole elsewhere on a garment. I could’ve made a hole somewhere on Derrida’s jacket almost invisible. But I didn’t say that. Better not to go down the meandering avenues of my mad-but-good fellow student. Anyway, there I was, book bag on my shoulder, wearing my Nom*D cardigan with the big safety pin, left over from the days when I could afford to buy the odd designer garment—yes, garment—and on my way into the staff room to heat up lunch in the microwave. I realised—I did—that it was a relief after all to be thinking again instead of doing.