The only thing that had given her real grief was her slightly crazed neighbour, whom the PM and others believed had succumbed to her charms, but she knew that was a lie. Kerr had merely been provided with the right context for his obsessions, and received a proper acknowledgement of his skills. She had not vanquished the man. She had only exercised patience.
How that would read in the history books to come she could not imagine. If a more passive approach to reform could be found, she was not sure where. The history books remembered prime ministers who confronted wars in distant lands, who stayed up every night waiting for overseas bulletins on the teletext machines, now from the satellite, the internet, text messages. Who broke strikes or put an end to conscription or wrestled monopoly from the banks. Who disdained the loopy left but protected the rainforests, restored the wetlands, and saved from extinction the orange-bellied parrot. Who barked commands and were loud, imperious, sarcastic. These sorts of prime ministers may not have been loved, or even liked, but they were always admired. They were remembered for saving iconic national brands, for making the public service shiver in its boots, for inaugurating vast ambitious projects, like dams and mines and hydro-electric schemes, and for never taking shit from the unions. Her industrial relations improvements had been so successful that the unions, recently revivified, were fast becoming obsolete. She was not sure now that was a good thing.
Late the day before, she had walked down to the Garden Farm Playground. Not the most ambitious construction project of her career, but one of the most satisfying. Now the place was looking almost worn in. Gardens were like that, shrubs and climbers growing, in the right conditions – and the weather had been perfect – at fairytale rates. Like the Hardenbergia, which had scuttled across the roofs of the little toy tractor sheds like it was on a mission from god – and weeds sprouting through the pine-shaving mulch while you glanced away. She recalled now that her final thought last night, before falling into that remarkable sleep, was that her mother would have been proud. Had she seen the results of digging and composting, the jars filled with berries and honey, the buckets of new potatoes crusted with soil, her mother would have noted approvingly and understood that her only child had achieved something important in her life. And it was perhaps more important than the PM had intended, more than she herself realised.
She did not consider herself a religious person, but she realised Kerr was like the one lost sheep in that parable, for whom the shepherd searches high and low, all through the night, until finally he brings it home, safe and warm. He was not perfect – he could still lose his temper and make mistakes and stalk off back to his own home and slam the door from time to time – but the deep-seated nurturing qualities that had previously manifested as manic fence-building and obsessive digging and planting were now given their natural expression. She had created the right place, in every way, for him to bloom. She had allowed him to be a man, the sort of man that at the time even he hadn’t understood he needed to be. Perhaps in the end Kerr would stand as her greatest achievement. He was her national green energy scheme, her harbour tunnel.
As for him, he had gained the precious experiences of countless children who had come through the place, played in the miniature cornfield and got dirty digging up his perfect Dutch cream potatoes or presented sticky hands to their parents at the end of their adventures, having picked strawberries – actually growing out of straw! – and mulberries, and followed bees from the flowering melaleucas to their hives and then helped while the warm, cinnamon-coloured syrup dropped from comb to jar, flowing in a lazy, drowsy way as if time stood still and waited, which in fact, for children, it did. And it was the children, only the children, who had managed to elicit any response from the man keeping vigil out the front. He had accepted their gifts of fruit, their bowls of honey, their grubby corncobs.
Of course, she should have realised by now. Yesterday, the man out the front had been packing up his few things. She had been too preoccupied to pay any attention when the Bobs reported some activity, a tipping of tea dregs into the bushes, a neat stacking of a few plates left by the children. It was not too late. She raced upstairs to her bedroom, where she changed into jeans and walking shoes, threw a few things into a backpack. It was just breaking dawn as she slipped out the front door and set off up the driveway. If she walked fast enough she knew she could catch him up. Perhaps they could both follow the zebra and her foal.
But he hadn’t left. He had packed up, but was standing there waiting by his swag and a milk crate of belongings, waiting as if by appointment, as if expecting her. As she approached she smiled and waved, and he only nodded, not friendly, not unfriendly. That was right, she thought, he had no need to be grateful for anything. When the idea struck her it was so logical she might have been planning it for months, indeed for her whole prime ministership. It was as if this moment were the entire reason she had entered politics, been elected, come here to live. The very reason for her existence in this world.
Instinctively she patted her pockets for a key, before realising she had never had a key to the house, never had the need for one.
Nor did he.
‘The back door’s unlocked,’ she said. He nodded again. ‘Clean sheets on all the spare beds. Plenty of milk and bread in the fridge. And I think Therese’s made a lasagne.’
As he hoisted his swag she thought she caught a flicker of a smile. After he passed her she turned and watched him stride towards the house. She hoped he would rename it. She wondered what it would be, then realised that it was none of her business now. It was his business, his and all his people’s. She assumed they would all move in quickly, the relations.
Her chest felt light; she was breathing better than she ever had in her life. She would walk as fast as she could, and might even catch up to the zebra, and follow her wherever she led. She adjusted the backpack and took out her mobile phone. As ex–prime minister she could do whatever she wanted now, and as she pressed Malcolm’s number she smiled. She might even allow herself to giggle, or to laugh.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of some of these stories have been published previously. The author would like to acknowledge the following publications, and thank their editors:
‘How to Mend a Broken Heart’, in Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald (January 2011).
‘The Master Shavers’ Association of Paradise’, in A Country Too Far, edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally (Viking: 2013).
‘Nourishment’, in Kill Your Darlings, Issue 10 (July 2012).
‘Welcome to Country’, in The Intervention, edited by Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss (concerned Australians: 2015).
‘Festive Food for the Whole Family’, in Southerly (vol 77, no 3: 2017).
About Debra Adelaide
Debra Adelaide is an author and academic who has published five works of fiction, including The Household Guide to Dying, Letter to George Clooney, and The Women’s Pages, as well as many edited collections, the most recent of which is The Simple Act of Reading. She works at the University of Technology Sydney, where she is an associate professor in creative writing.
Also by Debra Adelaide
Novels
The Hotel Albatross
Serpent Dust
The Household Guide to Dying
The Women’s Pages
Short Story Collections
Letter to George Clooney
Anthologies
Motherlove
Motherlove 2
Cutting the Cord
Acts of Dog
Non-Fiction
A Bright and Fiery Troop (ed)
Australian Women Writers: A Bibliographic Guide
A Window in the Dark (ed)
Bibliography of Australian Women’s Literature
Stories from the Tower (ed with P. Asthon and A. Salt)
The Simple Act of Reading (ed)
First published 2019 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Debra Adelaide 2019
The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
The author and the publisher have made every effort to contact copyright holders for material used in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked should contact the publisher.
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au
EPUB format: 9781760784799
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group
This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.
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