‘What about this?’ He held the stem out as she rose from her desk.
Kerr was quite right. The lilly pilly had small glossy leaves that changed colours as they matured and so provided a polychromatic effect. And its foliage was dense but not impenetrable.
‘This variety’s called Resilience.’
‘I think it will be perfect,’ she said.
‘Maybe you could still have your stall,’ he said. ‘The berries make good jam.’
She looked at him. His face was deadpan. It was possible Kerr was mocking her, or that he shared her keen sense of enterprise.
‘And they grow fast.’
‘How fast?’ she said.
‘I reckon in two months it’ll look like a proper maze.’
As he walked to her office door she said, ‘Kerr?’ He turned around.
‘This is the first time you’ve ever been inside this house.’
‘Yes.’
She came out from behind her desk. ‘Well, you’re very welcome here.’
He stared at the floor. ‘Right. Thanks. Ah, back to work then.’
She watched him leave. Thanks? It must have nearly killed him.
The evening phone calls diminished. Malcolm made a point of summarising matters before he left for the day. Sometimes he sent her a final email updating her, advising on what to expect first thing the next day. Now the long nights were made longer by the absence of that chirpy ring. Night followed night with the phone soundless in her pocket, beside her chair, on her desk. The PM discovered an anguish that she never knew existed, an empty gulf made all the more bleak because there was no one to tell, no one with whom she could discuss it. He fancies you, you know.
Therese’s words, which had slid out the side of her mouth as she left the room one night, had become the opening lines of a narrative, a long delicious fiction in which she and Malcolm gradually came closer and declared their feelings and in which she, the heroine of this narrative, overcame all the practical difficulties of this unlikely relationship – the age gap, the fact she was his employer, the contempt of her colleagues, the ridicule of the press, her long working hours, the alienation of the electorate – in this one long tale of desire and devotion, longing and love and lust. In this fiction she envisaged all the ordinary things too: takeaway pizzas and late-night movies, browsing through the weekend colour supplements together in bed, arguments over the toilet seat left up. The story contained everything overriding the dignity and good sense that she had carefully nurtured for so long in order to preserve herself against the unbearable weight of love gone wrong, and becoming yet again that most abject person of all, the spurned woman.
But how could she have been so stupid! So guileless. And so vain. To think even in the darkest, least accessible nodes of her brain that he might have been interested. And to betray those thoughts so artlessly when on the phone. Giggling, if Therese was right, and no doubt she was. She had denied it but of course she would have been giggling. She had probably been simpering and blushing too, twisting her hair in her fingers and swinging her legs like some schoolgirl in love with the captain of the team. To imagine that a man like him – how much younger, a good ten years? – would desire a woman like her.
One evening, after switching off the television, having watched three current affairs programs in a row and registering none of their contents, she could bear it no longer. These thoughts were rotating like lottery balls in a barrel. She had to do something, at least assess her situation. She went to her laptop, opened her emails, clicked the icon to order the messages by correspondent, and scrolled through. Nothing to Malcolm that was not work related. Some friendly, some informal, many brief, but none that could be interpreted as flirtatious or as an invitation to something more. Then her text messages. Again nothing, though that was to be expected, since her messaging abilities were restricted by her lack of patience with the medium. No other forms of correspondence that betrayed her feelings, her hopes. That left the phone calls, the face-to-face conversations, through which she raked again and again. The last time they spoke during one of his late-night calls (how long ago was that?). But nothing. The last time they spoke that afternoon, before coffee, when he was ushering her out of a press conference. He’d handed her something, what was it – that’s right, a file that she’d placed in the pile on her desk. She went and retrieved it. A thick document outlining the proposed water resources policy, the one to capitalise on the excellent rainfall and take the country through the environmental crisis, indeed make it a leader in a grand global sustainable future.
Crisis. What crisis. She tossed the paper aside and flicked through the remaining pile of folders and documents. What did she care for water resources or any resources when her heart was gripped so tightly? This was a real crisis, her whole being abased. Shamed. She shrivelled under the force of her own disgust. Look what she had become, a bell curve of expectation and disappointment, an index of overworn emotions and fatigued hope.
She paced the room. Unsleeping was familiar to her, but unsleeping with all her nerves feeling like their outer sheaths had been peeled away, leaving them exposed to the brutal elements of her emotions – this was not familiar. She paced and paced. She would ring him, and put an end to this misery. She would not ring him. What would she say? Hello, Malcolm, just wondering if you were watching the eleven o’clock news bulletin? She glanced at the clock. It was 10.10 pm. And it would only be plausible if there were a link to something affecting her or the government. She would not ring him. She paced; she nibbled the tip of her left thumbnail. She would ring him. She would ask if he had remembered to organise the steelworks visit for next month. She would ask him to remind her of the schedule for that week; she would pretend she had something else on that required urgent discussion. What could she pretend? A distant relative’s ongoing illness? Not plausible. A friend’s family crisis. He knew enough about her to know that she didn’t have friends like that. What did she have on that would require a discussion, and at this time of night? There was nothing. The most significant thing she had on that week was her period. And search her brain though she did, she could not come up with a way to work that into a conversation about the national iron and steel industry.
She would not ring him, she would not. She could not.
Oh, but she could. Sort out your ideas by going on a walk, her undergraduate philosophy lecturer always advised. Pacing stimulated her creativity and so she had a brilliant idea. She would ring him. She could. She could ring his landline and block her identity, and then at least see if he was home, and if not then she would know he was out somewhere (but where? what would be open so late and on a weeknight?) and if she didn’t want to speak she could just hang up. Or maybe she would be inspired with the perfect reason to call him at this time. But if he were out? And with whom?
She would not ring him. That would impose an added torment, wondering if he were in an intimate bar with a woman. Who would be, unquestionably, much younger than her.
She paced. Before another string of thoughts could knot themselves together, in one movement she flicked through her phone book and reached for the phone, then quickly tapped at the keypad as she sat upright at her desk – if she were seated here it would be a professional call, it would have to be – and breathed in two very deep breaths as, at the other end, the phone buzzed once, twice, thrice and was then picked up.
‘Hello . . .’
A woman’s voice. The PM slammed the receiver down.
This was nonsense. She was making herself unwell. Late as it was, she had to get out. She was halfway along the drive when she realised that would not do. The night security staff, John and Hazel, would wonder what she was doing. They might talk. People could gossip. The word would spread that the PM was disaffected or unstable, given to aimless nocturnal prowling. Well, she was disaffected, seriously so, but she would overcome it on her own. She turned and walked down the
side of the house to the rear instead.
The property was not in complete darkness. The moon shone on the lily ponds and made silvery shapes of the trees, showing the way through to the maze. The entrance was marked by a pale wicker turnstile and the maze itself was faintly lit with small solar lamps set into the side of the path at regular intervals. The lilly pilly shrubs were now just past head height, making adventure into the maze a genuine challenge even in daytime. There was just enough light for her to make her way through without stumbling or groping, although she should, she thought, be able to make her way through blindfolded if necessary.
Obviously there would be a woman in his life. Malcolm was personable, even charming, at times outrageously witty, good-looking but in an undramatic way, with regular features, reasonable skin and, so far, an unreceding hairline. He was fit. He was well informed. He was in his thirties. Well educated. A dog lover. The fact that he had never mentioned a woman, that a woman had never appeared at any of the numerous social functions he had attended as her adviser, was explicable, the PM supposed. She would expect that he would keep his private life separate from his professional one.
She reached the centre, and spotted the sundial. The moonlight glinted off the surface. She held her hands out and reached to either side of the dial, leaning into its face as if it were a magic mirror in which she could divine the future or read the secrets of the hearts of others. The segments were marked in roman numerals and around the edge was the inscription, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
A movement behind her made her turn, alarmed. The PM did not have a nervous disposition, but this night she felt especially vulnerable and miserable. A dark mass moved forward from the gloom of the hedges and she instinctively stepped back, feeling her heart beat faster, for two, three seconds, until the mass took shape and the zebra emerged into view. She sighed, relieved, and held out her hands. The zebra ignored them. She stopped on the other side of the sundial and raised her nose to sniff the night air, whisking her tail back and forth.
It seemed that the zebra had become more independent lately, as if she ignored the rest of the world now that she considered herself adequately housed. At the end of each day, from wherever she had roamed – here into the centre of the maze, or up at the main gate – the zebra would make her way back, unassisted, through the grounds and into the stable beside the potting shed and the compost bins. Rarely did their interaction progress beyond a few quiet words on the PM’s part and a gentle snorting and tossing of the head on the zebra’s. Now that she had found her perfect home the zebra was if anything more aloof, less grateful. Or maybe that was the PM’s clumsy reading of the animal’s personality. Perhaps the creature was simply and perfectly content, and therefore in no need of displays of affection or dependence. At least she comforted herself with this explanation. Any other would have meant a form of rejection that she found personal, more personal than she cared to admit. It would not do to be spurned by a zebra, especially a zebra that she had rescued from euthanasia – if Mr Beamish were to be believed – and fed and sheltered in the most important house in the country.
The zebra tossed her nose as if to say, Let’s go, turned around and commenced walking back through the maze. Feeling oddly comforted, the PM followed.
Malcolm was restless before the day hit 9 am. The PM’s office door was ajar; he wasn’t even sure she was in. He’d been at work since seven-thirty and seemed to have achieved nothing, not even the consumption of the morning news, which he normally digested like baby food. A walk, some fresh air, then he would return to face the task of appearing normal for the remainder of the day. The maze was perfect for this. It was like running the brain through a workout, though less physically demanding. He would return to his desk glowing, not sweaty. He knew the maze well, though it always seemed like a new puzzle, having followed its paths since the day they were first marked out, that day the PM stood there with Kerr and his crew of landscapers and gardeners, in her raincoat though it was not raining, and those ridiculous striped gumboots. Zebra stripes too, of all things. Thinking of things like that only made his heart sag a little more. He would have to learn to live without the sight of the PM, oblivious, uncaring, unfashionable woman that she was. How much he would cherish all that about her, if he could.
Last night, talking to his sister who had dropped by with a casserole, he had realised there was no alternative but to move on, in fact move right away. His sister’s talk of her husband and two children, her happy chatter about their friends, their latest family holiday, their plans to get a puppy, all made up his mind. He would have to crush all feelings for the PM before he started hatching any foolish ideas for that too, something approaching a normal family life, even if it were just him and her. When the phone rang while he was in the kitchen, and his sister told him it was a wrong number, he felt unaccountably forlorn. No calls from her, no calls from anyone at all. Yes, definitely time to move on.
He first went to the stable, the corner of the garden shed which Billy had fixed up for the zebra, not that she had ever needed it; she had never needed any confining. But she was not there. Her stall was empty and her feed scattered around, though that was not unusual. Partly eaten carrots and chunks of apples. Since people had been coming out to feed her she had become casual in her eating habits. Lately she had been flinging hay around, and half-chewing mouthfuls of lucerne before dropping the remainder. She nibbled at vegetables then spat them out, nosed through buckets of apples. It was as if she was becoming both finicky and profligate with her food. Or rather, Malcolm thought, she was simply being fed far too much, the result of constant unchecked visitors. They should curtail the animal’s eating habits, if not put her on a proper diet. He was sure she had gained weight in the last few months.
Nor was she in the corner of the property that she favoured on sunny days, down under the eucalypts past the native garden. He had walked back past the stand of callistemon, wondering if she had strayed around the front. It was rare that she did, but occasionally she had visited the Bobs, surprising them out of their postprandial reveries by silently approaching and nosing one or the other in the back. Then he reached the entrance to the maze. It was quite possible. She had hung around the maze often enough and several times entered for a few minutes before returning with her head up and her tail flicking, as if to show she had considered it and decided going further was an unnecessary distraction for an animal of her standing. And yet she was the most curious of animals, so compliant but remote. Malcolm would have said tame, except the word did not encapsulate the creature’s immense reserve and independence. Tame implied a bending to human will, a compromise of her wild nature, a meek or cringing acceptance of behavioural boundaries. The zebra was nothing like that. It was almost as if she had arrived here as a result of her own decision, not that of Mr Austin Beamish.
He walked more slowly as he approached the centre. Nowhere along the paths did the zebra appear, until he turned the final corner and there she was, right behind the sundial. He stopped short, shocked and open-mouthed, still staring as he made to turn around and race all the way back through the maze and up to the house to bash on the PM’s office door and bring her back to show her what he’d found.
But she was already there, not five metres away, approaching him almost at a run, hair ruffled and face slightly flushed. Just in time, Malcolm stopped the instinctive lift and curve of his arms to scoop her close, as she ran right up to him but not to him at all, to pause beside him, gazing just as he had with open-faced wonder at the miraculous sight of the zebra and her newborn foal.
Delight. Sheer child-like joy. And laugh-out-loud amazement. For it was not just any foal, it was a mongrel, a freak, a lusus naturae. The absurd little creature that was already wobbling on its chopstick legs was a zonkey, a zebronkey, a zebadonk, a donbra, a donkra, a call-it-what-you-will – one of nature’s most improbable things, the baby of a zebra and a donkey.
‘I suppose,’ she
said, when they had stopped exclaiming, ‘it was another reason Mr Beamish was keen to get rid of her. Maybe the main reason. But isn’t it just the perfect thing?’
The foal looked like two different animals had been cut up and reassembled by a blind person. A striped head, a grey-white body, a large patch of stripes on its flank in the shape of Victoria, and four white legs, three of which ended in striped socks.
‘It’s a freak, a folly,’ Malcolm said. ‘In a maze. Of course it is!’ Then he laughed, really laughed. A laugh that began low in his stomach and rippled up through his body, throwing his head back and making his teeth shine in the morning sun.
The PM watched him instead of the zebra and her foal. His tongue was very pink. He already loved the zebra as much as she. He had also thought Stubbs’s painting of the zebra in the English park was as absurd, as funny, as endearing as she had. Now he shared her joy in the unexpected appearance of the zebra’s foal, and what a foal. Oh, to know a man who understood! Who shared her sense of humour. Who laughed like that. Perhaps she could tell that joke after all, the one about the zebra asking god if he were black with white stripes or white with black ones, if only she could get it right. Jokes were like sonnets, they had to be pitch perfect. She stepped closer and smiled directly into his face. She almost reached out for his hand, almost leaned up to kiss him. A man who didn’t need words to explain all that, who shared her thoughts without needing them expressed, except by his merriment. He continued smiling.
Zebra Page 23
