by Pip Adam
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600 Wellington
vup.victoria.ac.nz
Copyright © Pip Adam 2017
First published 2017
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers
ISBN 9781776561162 (print)
ISBN 9781776561346 (EPUB)
ISBN 9781776561353 (Kindle)
A catalogue record is available at the National Library of New Zealand
Published with the assistance of a grant from
Ebook conversion 2017 by meBooks
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The New Animals
Acknowledgements
Also by Pip Adam
Everything We Hoped For
I’m Working on a Building
for
Brent and Tallulah
Laurence
Coco and Bryn
Carla stopped on the way at Fort Greene for a cup of peppermint tea. The barista was a ‘big tea drinker’. Fort Greene was awful but Verona didn’t open until lunchtime and she needed a decent cup of tea. The whole of St Kevin’s Arcade was awful now. All the new owner had done was clean it up – the walls, the tiles. Or maybe they’d painted, but the whole mall seemed to call out for help. It was terrified in its bright new white. She’d spent hours in the café at the end of the arcade, sitting at one mismatched table or another under the large windows, and as a teenager she’d climbed the stairs drunkenly on Sunday afternoons up from Myers Park. But now it was clean and the café down the end of the arcade served ricotta doughnuts to men in suits and she couldn’t stand it. She’d lived in Auckland for 43 years and it still wasn’t finished. Nothing stayed in place.
The barista said this was the most pepperminty tea he’d ever had. Some of the other brands sat on the shelf too long. They lost all their taste. Carla nodded, pretending to look at her phone. There was a child at one of the other tables. It was probably the owner’s daughter. The woman next to the child was ripping up brown paper. Rip. The sound of the coffee machine spitting hot water into Carla’s takeaway cup, some cold water from a jug so she could drink it right now. She would have liked an ice cube but she was old now and it wasn’t cute.
On the outside Carla was polite and engaged. Looking the barista in the eye, back to the phone, smile over to the child. She could feel when her face was right. She opened her bag to pay and the pungent smell of the Tagara she’d just picked up at Lambs hit her. It smelt of women. She always thought that, somehow menstrual and sharp – but vaginal for sure. It always raised a blush in her. She didn’t like having to carry them round but the small ziplock bags of Ayurvedic powders and capsules were the only thing keeping her upright. She pushed her glasses up her nose but kept smiling. Her skin was wrecked, her eyes, her nerves. But the powders and pills and tongue-scraping and cleansing made it possible for her to pay the barista, smile at the child, look down as she left the café and walk towards East Street.
They were meeting at Tommy’s apartment. It was above the workroom. You went up some stairs, then through the workroom, then up some more stairs and you were at the door to the apartment. It was a large, narrow, 1990s industrial building. Tommy’s apartment had been added on at some stage. It sat as a kind of smaller third floor. The building would all be apartments now if Tommy and Cal and Kurt hadn’t bought it to run the clothing label from. They’d maintained the open-plan and linoleum of the second floor for the workroom and some offices. The blue paint still peeled off the white of the exterior. Carla was pretty sure Tommy’s father had bought it. Cal lived in Grey Lynn and Kurt lived out at Piha. They always asked Carla to come when the meeting was halfway through. They liked to talk to the photographer and the stylist and each other first. So she couldn’t be late – because, in a way, she already was. There wouldn’t be a makeup artist at the meeting. Carla sighed deeply at the time the awkwardness would take up. She’d already called Elodie.
There were plenty of people on K Road. The sun was out. It had been hotter back in Glen Innes. The city was always colder. She’d caught the train in, walked down from her place in Felton Mathew Avenue, thinking about how warm it was, how mild the winter had been, the end days, but now she was on K Road she was glad she’d brought her coat. It was a woollen Peppertree swing coat. It had large, round shoulder pads and a petal collar. It had been her aunt’s and then her aunt had died of cancer everywhere, and Carla was given it. It was only Peppertree but it was so old people mistook it for something much better because they thought she’d just got it. Most of the people knew everything that you could get just now, but they didn’t know this coat so it must be much, much better than anything they knew. It wasn’t waterproof. But it wouldn’t rain today. Not until later. And when it did, it wouldn’t be soaking and Carla would be on another train with not far to walk at the other end.
She crossed the road at Mercury Lane. When she was at high school she’d seen Death of a Salesman. It made her cry because he’d wasted his life doing something he didn’t want to. She’d left school about ten months later to be a hairdresser. When she told people the story – if they were walking past the Mercury, say, or someone was going to the theatre – she’d say, joking, about how she’d missed the point. It wasn’t just sales. Get it? she’d think, in that moment when she wasn’t sure if anyone would get it. Please get it.
Mukunda’s was open. $8.50 prasadam. $11 prasadam. Carla looked in, then away when she saw someone was at the counter working, looking at the street. Family Bar was open. A woman almost looked Carla in the eye and then dropped her glance, and went in. There were pokies and beer. Carla looked in again. She always looked in. Looked in to see if she was there or at Mukunda’s. Hare Krishna. But both shops were dark and then she was at East Street.
Bowerbank Ninow had an Oscar Perry oil in the corner window. On the floor, because that’s how they were doing it. There was a nest of galleries. She walked past Michael Lett and Ivan Anthony. East Street was quiet. The metal gates with the fish built into them were pulled closed over the doors of the church and the needle exchange was closed. She always approached the workroom this way. Like it was a ritual. Cross the road from ArtSpace, walk down on the opposite side of the road then look at the door to 12 East Street from the steps of the church. She stood there now, knowing that once she crossed the road she’d still wait a bit longer at the door before pushing it open and walking up the stairs. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose again. Squinted behind them. Looked at the inset door, the blue tiles around it.
In the workroom, Sharona was at one of the high tables with another pattern cutter and the sample machinist. The table was covered with leather swatches and photographs. Sharona moved the leather samples around on the table, picking some up and sorting them like she was sorting playing cards, while the other women watched. She hated working with leather but it always arrived, like a storm day. Some of the samples were full-grain. She could see the sweat pores and the hair follicles and the lines that ran between them. She thought of Langer’s lines. She didn’t wear leather anymore. It felt like sliding into something else’s skin, because it was. It smelt so bad to her. She hated touching it. When she walked into a room she could pick out all the leather bags – there were four in the workroom right now. She imagined them still full of organs, blood, sinew, life. When she saw it she imagined it coming off. A knife in between fat and skin, and then the pull. It was the pull that did it. The weight the puller had to put behin
d their work. It didn’t slide off, it resisted, like anything alive would pull back. ‘No,’ it seemed to say, ‘no, I want this. I want to keep it.’ She put the samples down again and moved them around on the table. Then she heard the door open and she looked up and it was Carla.
Sharona waved her over. The other women smiled at Carla, too. Sharona and Carla hugged, and Carla looked at the table – her glasses had fogged up, with the change in temperature and the way she was sweating a bit from the walk. Sharona followed Carla’s stare to the table. There was a 10x12 print of Brett Anderson wearing a leather jacket, shirtless, with a silver, huge-linked chain around his neck. His hair was one length, just above his shoulders. It had been tucked behind his ears and the front had been worked up and over so it was almost a quiff. Next to that was a publicity still from Poison Ivy. A 17-year-old Drew Barrymore stood outside in front of a rack of autumn-hued dresses. Her hair was cap highlighted and permed, blown out to a frizz. She wore blue denim jeans cut off to shorts and a black biker jacket, and under that a sheer mauve top and a lace bra.
‘Leather,’ Carla said.
Sharona gave a slight huffy laugh and nodded.
‘And lace,’ said the sample machinist, and they all smiled at one another.
Carla wound one of the photographs round so it faced her, then the other. ‘That,’ she said, pointing from one image to the other, ‘is going to take some range building.’
Everyone laughed like it was a light joke but they all knew that it said something deeply humiliating about Tommy and Kurt and Cal.
‘I’d better get up there then,’ Carla said, lifting her disposable cup towards the stairs that led to Tommy’s apartment.
‘Onward,’ Sharona said.
Carla hauled the large Eco Party Mearry tote back onto her shoulder. Sharona remembered when Duey brought it back from Korea. It was made of street banners. Everything in it clunked against the weather-hardened PVC as Carla dropped it on her shoulder. Smiling, she raised her cup to Sharona. ‘And upward,’ she said, walking towards the half-landing stairs that led to the apartment.
In a fair world Sharona would be living in an apartment above her own workroom. Carla flinched every time they called her a pattern cutter. Everyone knew how much she was doing. It was evident the minute you talked to one of the boys. It was evident from the lack of sketches and the way they kept sending down emails full of words and photos. Other people’s photos. When Carla got drunk and said this to Duey, Duey always reminded her that Raf Simons didn’t do sketches either. ‘That’s different,’ Carla would spit and she’d fill her glass again, balancing glass, bottle, indignance.
Carla had seen the Brett Anderson picture the first time round – so had Sharona and Duey. Kevin Cummins had taken it in about 1993. Suede might have just released ‘Animal Nitrate’, or it might have been after that, when they were famous. She couldn’t exactly remember now but it would have been in either The Face or NME. When Carla first started work, all the apprentices would put in some money and one of them would walk up to the stationers to buy airfreighted copies of the magazines. They’d pore over them in the colour bay, where they were supposed to be cleaning tint bowls and perm rods, folding the corners of the pages they wanted to go back to. Often, more than one of them would be in the colour bay at the same time and they’d talk and argue about how the hair was done. Then someone would call them back into the salon to take Mrs Dryden’s rollers out or neutralise Mrs Wallace’s perm, but while the neutraliser was processing or Mrs Dryden was being combed out, they’d come back to the colour bay with some new theory about how the hair was done. They’d pester a senior stylist who walked through the bay to the lunchroom. ‘David,’ they’d shout, ‘David, wait.’
Carla and Duey would meet Sharona after work on Fridays. Carla would cut Sharona’s hair and Sharona would sew, working straight from the photos in the magazines. They wouldn’t go out until the clothes were finished. They wore something new every Saturday night. Carla had bought her first leather jacket off a gang member who was going to jail. Sharona had imported special leather needles so she could make it look like the one in the photo they saw of Tessa Pollitt. Sharona had to shorten it, bring it in, then reline it. They’d stayed up night after night, Carla standing up again and again so Sharona could try it on her.
Tommy, Kurt and Cal had done a Google image search on ‘leather jacket’. She couldn’t be sure, but she was sure. She wouldn’t say it to anyone else, neither would Sharona or any of the other women in the workroom. It was like a conversation they had telepathically with one another, but each in their own mind.
Tommy wound the screen of his phone up and down over the playlist. In the end he put on ‘Adults and Children’. Carla would recognise it immediately, and realise. Not understand. Understanding was a strong reaction. But she’d recognise what they were about, and that Tommy understood – she’d get it at a whole new level. He looked around at everyone. The photographer, the stylist, and Kurt and Cal sat perched on high stools around the heavy wooden table in his apartment. Tommy was at the table too – the conduit, the person who made people realise. They always asked Carla to come to the meeting when it was halfway through. They didn’t want to waste her time, she charged by the quarter hour. There was never a makeup artist. Elodie would be good for this. They probably needed Elodie. The others would agree. God, he felt sure of the work. He looked at the screen of the laptop on the table. It was cycling through the test garments. Each one was a surprise all over again. They’d worked so fucking hard and it was worth it. He hadn’t said it yet, but he would, it was their best work.
They’d come from nowhere, Cal, Kurt and him. People lined up – lots of them, long lines – to get a good vantage point to see them fail, but they didn’t and they hadn’t. The money was a hindrance, their families. They could have done it from anywhere and that’s what scared the people who hated them. They’d had to hold their heads up through all of that. He’d said it to them from the beginning and he’d probably say it again, because even in this, he’d motion towards the screen – the clothes, before this was over, there’d be dark times – confidence was key. Holding heads high. Answering yes, when people asked, well, anything. ‘Yes, we do plan to release a men’s corporate line.’ It felt so good to feel so sure. He had to stop himself from saying ‘beautiful’ out loud.
They always looked sure, that was their thing, but to feel so sure. The photos would be great, too. He sorted through some of the images they’d collected, on his phone; it was 11.59, Carla would be here soon. He went back to the playlist, stopping the song abruptly, so suddenly the others were left shouting into the bed of sound which wasn’t there anymore. Cal was the loudest. He moved into Tommy with the length of his upper arm, from shoulder to elbow, half ‘Hey, dude’, and half ‘Do you see what you’ve done?’ Tommy grunted slightly, as in ‘Sorry’ and as in ‘Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing.’ He put on ‘Expecting to Fly’ and ran his thumb along the screen so it was louder. Then he looked at the door, and as the opening chords rose into a high metallic noise backed by drums and then dropped into a guitar, the door opened and Carla walked in.
Tommy waved, then stood a bit on the footrest of the stool, then sat again and waved her over. ‘Carla,’ he said, to confirm it was her. ‘I love this.’ He pointed at the song, invisible in the air.
Carla had never really liked the Headless Chickens. Everyone, everyone, then, now, had tried to convince her on Stunt Clown, but she just couldn’t like it. She’d seen them a lot in the 90s. They were marginally better live. But right now, here, about to walk into this particular nest of men, the song gave her a nostalgic rise. Maybe she’d listen to them again. Maybe. Or maybe it was always like this: the shit was what came back. She counted them off. Tommy, Cal, Kurt, the photographer, the stylist, the sucking wound of their yearning that was the absence of Elodie. They’d want Elodie, they always wanted Elodie but they played it like this, as if Carla was some idiot child. Well, she’d already rung Elodi
e, as soon as she’d got an invite to the meeting, knowing how it would turn out, just got her to pencil it in for a couple of weeks from now. Just so Carla’s life would be easier. She went over to the table.
Tommy, Cal and Kurt ran the company. They designed together – it was theirs. They hadn’t been able to find clothes they liked, so they started their own label. That’s how the story went. They were agitators. Untrained outsiders. They hadn’t found clothes they wanted to see women in. That was what they said in the first interview. But now they said they hadn’t been able to find clothes they liked. They were rich. It helped with the whole renegade thing. People unrelated to untrained outsiders tended not to invest in them. On average, everyone in the room was 20 years younger than Carla. Everyone suspected it, but she was the only one who knew it. Eventually they’d ask Carla if she would contact a makeup artist and eventually, after throwing around a few names, Tommy would say, ‘What about Elodie?’ Kurt and Cal would nod at Tommy’s suggestion, saying, ‘Yeah, Elodie,’ like it had come out of nowhere.
Carla pulled herself up onto the high stool in one fluid motion and sat at the table.
Tommy started talking to everyone again as she sat down. Kurt lifted the coffee press at her; she lifted her disposable cup of cold tea in reply. She missed coffee but the hole she was sure it would burn through her already-compromised gut kept any cravings at bay.
Tommy passed around some prints as he talked. They were reproductions of Ava Seymour collages. Tommy didn’t say that. By the time Carla met her in Dunedin, Ava had lost two partners. The collages had been huge when Carla had seen them in Ava’s studio. She’d cut out the elements by hand, with a Stanley knife or scissors, with loud music playing in the studio. She usually wore fur. She’d hunch over them as she cut, as if nothing else mattered in the world except separating the bits from their context. Tommy had printed the collages off small. Even tiny, they hummed with that action, that intent on them.
