by Pip Adam
Duey was still watching TV. She was always watching TV when she wasn’t working.
‘Don’t you sleep?’ Sharona said, and they both laughed. She stopped for a minute by the door.
‘Good meeting?’ Duey didn’t look away from the TV.
‘Cal wanted to cut the hem off the T-shirt, he wanted to see what an unfinished edge would look like.’
‘Scandalous,’ Duey said. There was nothing in her voice but the lateness of the night.
‘It’s a weft-cut knit.’
‘He deserves a bullet.’
‘He walks out with those clothes and he doesn’t even know you can’t leave an unfinished edge on a weft-cut knit.’
Duey shook her head. ‘I don’t know why you bother.’
Neither did Sharona, but she suspected Duey meant ‘at all’, while Sharona meant, ‘in fighting him’. ‘Okay, thanks for the shower.’
‘Best shower in Auckland.’
‘Best shower in the world.’
Sharona had the door open when Duey turned around. ‘Did you see Carla’s cut?’
‘On Dominic?’ But she knew.
‘Is he the one with the slope shoulders?’ Duey asked.
Sharona nodded. ‘Yeah, I saw it.’
‘Will she get away with it?’
‘Not the way they’re going to light it,’ Sharona said. ‘Not the way they’ll have to shoot the shitty, shitty samples they have.’
‘Should I call her?’
‘Nah. She’ll work it out. That’s why they get her, because she always works it out.’
Duey turned back to the television. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Those shoulders.’
‘Tell me about it. It’s me you should be worried about.’
‘Get him to reach for something in the photo.’
They both laughed, and Sharona left, pulling the door shut as she crossed the threshold.
Duey looked at her phone then turned it back on. If it had changed to bad this quick, maybe their friendship could change back just as quickly. Maybe with some care it could be better than it had been. ‘Come round,’ Duey typed in the reply field, and then she looked and looked at it.
Sharona had gone somewhere. Tommy hadn’t heard her in the workroom downstairs for about 20 minutes. He was lying on his bed, fully clothed. He hated it when she was working late. When she moved around it was like a ghost of her was in his apartment. It threw him. He wished the workroom wasn’t under his apartment. He thought about it a lot, what it would be like to be able to ‘go home’ from work. But it made financial sense. That’s what he thought, really. He understood about the money. His father never gave him enough credit, but he understood about the money. No one gave him any credit for a business mind. It happened a lot with creative people he knew. But how could you grow up the way he had, surrounded by money and talk about money, and not have at least some of it wash off on him? Kurt and Cal were the same. He knew money and he knew people and most importantly he knew fashion. He was unstoppable.
Everything would be fine. He wished he’d made up his mind about the T-shirt. Or at least he wished he’d made up the others’ minds. He was sure. The T-shirt could stay or go, it just wasn’t an issue. He liked it, but these wouldn’t be the last photos they took. They were only the first photographs, and the orders were in – not all the orders. Some orders were in. They’d launch the corporate line again – at a party. He was sure of that. That’s where their point of difference was. Other houses just photographed, all the time, but they had parties. They’d always had parties. Long before everyone else had parties. He could remember some from the first year. They were chaotic and fun. Elodie would come to the parties, but none of her friends who were her age. They’d know soon enough. That was the thing with young people. They’d know soon enough. You can’t stay 20 forever.
He didn’t want to go to sleep, but he didn’t want to get out of bed, either. The accounts his father had given him to look at as he left their house were in his bag in the other room. He should look at them. It wasn’t that he hadn’t looked at them; he just hadn’t looked at them.
The workroom door opened. Sharona was back. He got out of bed before he realised he had. Pulled on his shoes and walked down the stairs. Sharona’s hair was wet, she was facing away from him, but he knew she’d heard him come down. She was sewing something by hand. Small, winding movements. The thread was short. Tiny stitches. He walked over. ‘Is that the jacket?’
Sharona nodded. ‘He’s got’ – she lifted her hand, the thread, the needles and the jacket, and made downward waves over one of her shoulders.
‘Yeah,’ Tommy said. ‘Yeah. Probably for the best.’ He picked up the trousers of the bench, then smoothed them back where they were. ‘Everything’s tailored now, I suppose.’
‘Always was,’ said Sharona. She bit the thread off high above the jacket. She smelt like soap and warm water. Tommy couldn’t tell if she was angry at him, if she respected him, and if, now that everyone was gone, this was how she really felt or if this was the play. She had glasses on. All of them wore glasses, now. They bought beautiful glasses but they all wore glasses because their eyes were getting worse, with age. Sharona held the jacket up in front of her, then lifted her phone. Tommy suspected she was looking at the time because she made a small, calculating face.
‘Will you call the other sewers in early?’ He was winding up the conversation.
Sharona shrugged. It could have been a tired shrug, it could have been disrespectful. He couldn’t tell.
‘Is there much left to do?’
She looked at the workbench, then over at the rack, and didn’t answer.
Tommy liked that they’d have one-offs to shoot tomorrow. It wasn’t orthodox. But they’d been doing it for a long time now and it felt nice to feel like you could do things a bit differently. Sharona was threading the needle again. She hadn’t answered his question, but he didn’t care. He was only asking out of something to ask, somewhere to be. He didn’t want to be in his bed. Didn’t feel like sleeping, but didn’t feel like working, either. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Then he turned back. ‘Do you want a cup of coffee or something?’
Sharona pointed at the kitchenette. There was a plunger half full of coffee on the bench.
‘Oh, okay,’ he said and left.
It wasn’t that Sharona was angry, just that she was working. ‘I’m just working,’ she said as he walked back upstairs. ‘I can’t really talk and concentrate.’
Elodie left East Street after everyone else. Tommy hadn’t had much to say. Mainly, he was worried the girl was going to be too ‘done up’. Elodie had never done anyone up in her life.
‘Yip,’ she said, smiling. ‘Totally.’
‘Yip.’
‘Aha.’
‘You’re not wrong.’
He’d only kept her so that Kurt would have to leave without her. She was walking by herself down Queen Street now – past Topshop. All the lights were on. There was so much stuff. Garments and garments, squashed into racks. Some on sale because the season was over. All over town, there were huge posters up for H&M, which was opening in Sylvia Park. H&M were the worst – they turned everything around, constantly. Most of it wouldn’t sell and then where would it go? Topshop felt like a sad goodbye. The whole of Queen Street did.
Elodie told herself she had no idea where she was going. As if practising for what she would tell a reasonable person, if they asked, if she was caught wandering like this, here, on Queen Street in the middle of the night, with the lights from the stores shouting out. Carla wasn’t really to blame. She’d tried to go away. Elodie looked down Queen Street, where she was heading, now. But Carla had come back. That was what she had to live with. She’d got away. Extricated herself from all of it and then come back. Cold, wet, naked. Quietly, without any attention, and she’d fit back in again, eyes fucked, skin awful, bung feet. She’d come back, washed away the salt, got dressed, and fallen back in line. Be
hind Tommy, behind Cal, behind the shampoo company she styled for – and the others. She came back and worked for money, tried to fit herself back into Duey’s life, which had worked for a while but Elodie was pretty sure wasn’t going to help her ignore this. Elodie pointed with her mind across the road into the window of Glassons. Pointed like she was telling the story of what she saw happening before anyone else did.
She walked with purpose now, even though she had no idea where she was going. She told herself she had no idea where she was going but she knew exactly where she was going. The street was still busy. Wednesday was student night. There were people sleeping in the street because this is how it was, now. The bright, bright shops keeping the merchandise warm and the people outside them under cardboard and newspaper.
Elodie had been to London with her parents ten years ago and there were people sleeping in the streets there and when she came back her mother had said wasn’t it great there were no people sleeping on the streets in New Zealand? There were people sleeping in the streets, now. Elodie wanted to shout, but there was no point. Every time she shouted she eventually stopped. Carla had told her she was thinking about de-barking Doug. But it was Elodie who was de-barked.
She stopped outside the Louis Vuitton store. There were colourful spheres in the window, like planets, orbiting three bags. There were no overstuffed racks in Louis Vuitton. They filled the shop with space, with scarcity. Elodie knew they were manufactured next door to where the bags for Topshop were manufactured – like directly adjacent, on a neighbouring conveyor belt. She’d been to the factory, with Tommy, in Indonesia. They’d never tell anyone, but she’d seen it with her own eyes and Tommy had laughed about it. It was an awful trip. She’d hated him from the minute she saw him but that was how she lived her life. Wandering, like a shell. Like an automaton. There was a bright light shining from beside the store and Elodie realised there were people working inside. They were building a white, white hallway. The light burnt at her eyes like a final, bright sun. No one came out. She didn’t need to talk to anyone.
A gust came up Queen Street, moving Elodie’s hair. She turned towards it. She was close to the water, she could smell it. She looked behind herself, up Queen Street, to the taxi stand, where she could get a taxi home and then sleep and get up. Be ready for the photo shoot in the morning. Then she turned back. When she smelt the sea, she could feel everything falling away. She’d been trying to pull it from herself because she wanted to go away so badly – wanted to be the type of person who could go away. She’d pulled away everything that was holding her here. But it fell from her now, almost without any effort on her part at all. She felt an odd ecstasy, a recognition of the brightness and the quiet and the tide. Elodie walked to the gutter and sat in it. Feet in the road and the rubbish – paper and leaves and dirt and exhaust. She sat for a moment, slowing her breath.
She’d been at a meeting a few weeks ago where the photographer had asked if the model could lose, say, five kilos, six; ten would be good – and she had. Bodies changed all the time. Carla was never going to tell her. Elodie was tired and the thought of trying to find out from Duey exhausted her.
She stilled herself. Looked. Really looked for a sign that tonight was the night she would leave, with or without the information she needed.
A week ago, she’d sat on the steps of Britomart Station and watched them build inside the hole where the mall used to be. She’d thought she’d seen it then. People working through the night under lights to build something high and metallic – it seemed like a sign, her boarding call. She’d stood and walked across the street, along the strong metal fence and towards the wharves, through an open gate. She walked through acres of cars, then she came to the containers that were bigger than houses. More cars? Elodie wondered, and kept walking towards the smell of the sea.
She had looked at her feet. Her shoes felt like a disease, like some kind of rash that had grown up over her. They surprised her, she didn’t know how they had got there. It was a shock. She tried to walk out of them, pulled at the backs of them with opposing feet, but it didn’t work, they were buckled up. She knew she couldn’t stop walking. So Elodie hopped, tripped, unbuckling her shoe first with one hand then the other. The shoes had cost a thousand dollars and she threw them as far away from herself as she could. It wasn’t far. She walked in her bare feet across the asphalt and in between the containers. She ripped her jacket off and let it slide to the ground.
She’d wanted to call Tommy, that night, and tell him. She wanted to call all of them. Instead she took her phone and threw it. It went high so that when it landed, just behind her, it smashed on the ground. Exploded apart.
It had been a calm night, much calmer than the night she was in now. Elodie had knelt at the sea wall, panting, knowing she wasn’t going anywhere. She’d stood and turned, picked up her handbag and walked back barefoot. She told them she’d lost her phone, had to get a new one, could they send their numbers to her. They’d laughed at her and touched her shoulder, her head. ‘Poor wee dopey thing.’ She realised now she’d never been serious. She’d carried her bag the whole way.
So maybe tonight was just another night of going nowhere, she thought, as she sat in the gutter outside the store while the men worked in the white, white tunnel, and she looked and looked for a sign. But in the end it was inside her, the rage gone sad, the quiet falling away of the pit of her stomach to let the loss flow in. The streets are only here for me to say goodbye to, she thought. All the progress we’ve made – not just for money – but for life, for art. All this progress unchecked. All this sweet hope lost. Lost to time, to dust, to heat. Like the dinosaurs’ hopes, like the fish that left the sea, like the fish that stayed in the sea knew they wouldn’t see one another again.
She was going back to make everything right. To try to reset it, but just for her. The time for saving everyone was over, but she could save herself. Everyone could. Everyone could save themselves. Would save themselves. As long as she left now. Everyone could find themselves a safe place. One fish at a time. One fish at a time. Then she remembered Doug, and it made her breathe in sharply and everything clicked into place. It was Doug.
She didn’t need Carla. Or Kurt. Or Duey. She just needed Doug.
Elodie pulled her equipment bag onto her lap, not taking it off her shoulder. She pulled out a tiny pair of scissors that she used to cut fake eyelashes. She looked behind herself and looked at the Louis Vuitton window. The planets weren’t even trying to be real planets – not from this solar system anyway. She got up and as she walked to the window she pulled the blunt blade and the point blade in opposite directions, an eye-ring in each hand, and as she reached the window the scissors came apart at the wing, spitting the screw to the footpath. She leant her cheek against the window, and holding the blade in a fist she scratched in her tiniest writing, ‘Good buy’, because it was. The men working in the doorway had earmuffs on and no one noticed her anymore. That was her reward for living her invisible way.
She stepped back and smiled at her work. She grinned and grinned, because she was so happy. She got out her phone and messaged Carla, ‘You home?’ Then waited, one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, and the ‘No’. No. No. No, and the rest, and Elodie messaged back ‘k’ without even looking and when she sent it, she placed her phone on the ground beside the window and walked to the taxi stand and got into the first car and gave the driver Carla’s address.
He was from Iran, and New Zealand was better than Iran and Kiwis didn’t understand. He drove her up Queen Street, where she’d just come from, then over Grafton and through the Domain. Elodie asked him questions all the way, interested questions about Persia and poetry. She wasn’t finished quite yet. So when they got to Felton Mathew Avenue, he didn’t seem to mind that she’d dragged him all the way out to the Eastern suburbs. There was a pub at Stonefields and one at Lunn Avenue, but it was Wednesday night and they weren’t Wednesday night kind of places, but someone would want to go into tow
n. The night was young.
‘Thanks,’ Elodie said, and she smiled as she handed over more than the fare, handed over all her money and put her wallet in the pocket in the door beside her. But he was already checking his display for another ride. She’d been to Samoa once. For work. Petrol had been really expensive and the taxi drivers would push their taxis from job to job. They’d only use petrol when they had a fare. Petrol was cheap, now. The Americans were hauling it from the ground. She checked Carla’s letterbox, but it was empty. Her neighbours hadn’t emptied theirs for months, they overflowed with paper.
She walked across the parking lot to the main door, which was broken and open. She walked up the stairs to Carla’s flat. She had no key, but Doug had almost destroyed the door so she pushed low, with all her weight, and the door opened like a can. The flats were quiet, which didn’t usually happen. There were 13 other flats in the building and whenever Elodie had been there she could hear people moving around. Coming home from work, getting up for work, coming home from the pub. But she felt like the flats were sleeping this morning. Quiet as the bottom of the sea, she thought. Quiet as a bath. Quiet as being away from everything. She heard Doug. The terrifying noise of the terrifying dog. Growling, barking. Barking so hard it was like there were two dogs, more, in the bathroom. Elodie walked through the open door and across the room. The flat smelt like Indian food.
She knelt beside the bathroom door and Doug ran at it and into it and then into it again and again. Elodie felt the door give but not all the way.
‘Doug,’ she whispered, smiling. ‘Doug, we’re going for a walk.’ From low where she was, she could see a leash under the bed. She slid towards it, like she was climbing a rock, and pulled it back towards the door. It occurred to her she might not have long. That one of the neighbours might hear Doug and call the police. Might phone and say, ‘I heard a door breaking and then the dog.’ They might start waking up, turning on lights, banging on the walls, on Carla’s ceiling which was their floor.
