Zebra

by Debra Adelaide

  ‘Oh. Thanks. It was a present.’ Holding her hair aside, she looped the scarf back around her neck, considering how to return the courtesy. The book, of course, the one he held. ‘Are you buying that?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s very long, though.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Not sure I’d have time to read it. God, I’ve only just finished War and Peace. Took me two whole months.’

  Was she an idiot? What ridiculous pretentiousness possessed her to mention War and Peace, even if it was true she’d read it recently? More precisely, re-read it. She had first read it when she was twenty and ignorant but had assumed that reading the Russians made one literary. Now, aged fifty, she realised she should actually read it properly, and the effort had literally strained her wrists. Only when she was towards the end had she realised she should have simply taken a Stanley knife and sliced the volume into four or five sections. That way she could at least have taken it on the bus and into the bath with ease.

  She could say none of this to him, of course. He was probably thinking she was a total nerd. Then again, they were in a bookshop.

  The scarf was a present. Not from a lover, he found himself hoping (what the fuck was wrong with him?), but a nanosecond later felt grateful that it had provided the perfect excuse for a gesture of chivalry. When he handed it back, noting its fine green weave with a pattern of small zebras, he also observed the length of her hands and delicate tapering fingers. No ring. Not that he was looking, especially. It was when she held out the books she was still clutching awkwardly – he accepted them without taking his eyes off her face – then with her hands free reached around and scooped her hair out of the way with one and slid the scarf across her neck with the other, that his heart definitely skipped a beat, no mistaking. He felt something deep inside his chest, like a miniature prisoner was trapped there, hammering to get out. Without intending to, he clapped the books to his chest, and breathed audibly.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Frowning, she took back the books.

  ‘Yeah. Yes, fine. Occasionally, I just get this . . .’ He patted his chest again, thinking.

  ‘Heartburn?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But nothing a decent martini can’t fix.’

  Her daughter would have warned her about this. Kelly would have applied her twenty-something scrutiny to the scenario and exhorted her to turn around, walk back to the cheap Vietnamese in the opposite direction, have the dinner alone that she planned, and return home unscathed. The thought almost made Marion reach for her phone, but of course her daughter was in Japan, and had been since last year when she’d acquired a teaching position. It was Kelly who had given her the green zebra scarf. She touched it now, stroking it all the way down as she walked along the busy street beside the man, whose name she didn’t even know. Oh, yes, what Kelly would have to say on the matter. Well, she was only having one drink, and nowhere was safer than a Sunday autumn evening in Newtown with hundreds of people around. Afterwards she could still have her dinner for one and be home by nine.

  The man walked slower than Marion. She had got a little ahead of him and then a safety bollard at a side-street crossing – would they never finish repairing the footpath? – caused them to break and pause and she saw a look of anxiety pass across his face. So she held her left hand back and up, and he took it and they raised their arms over the bollard as they walked past it, then dropped them in tandem as if they both did this every day of their lives. Another obstacle appeared straightaway, in the form of a homeless person and his dog squatting on the footpath, raspily demanding a gold coin. The dog, like all dogs belonging to homeless people, seemed both calm and indifferent.

  She stopped, realising she had no change in her purse. The homeless person called out again. ‘Two dollars, luv, just two dollars?’ The dog lay down with its nose on its paws as if denying all responsibility. The street was so noisy she leaned closer to the man, who with his free hand started patting his pockets for change.

  ‘Listen, where are we going?’

  ‘It’s just up here,’ he said, nodding towards a sign she couldn’t make out.

  ‘And I don’t know your name. You don’t know mine.’

  ‘Two fuckin dollars. Anyone got two dollars?’

  He turned and faced her, looking at their clasped hands. He brought hers up then drew it towards his chest. ‘Edward,’ he said. ‘Or just Ed, if you like.’ He pushed her hand back towards her and then released it.

  ‘I like Edward,’ she said. ‘I’m Marion.’

  ‘Two dollars?’ barked the homeless person again. Edward tossed him the coin he’d finally found in his pocket.

  The ache, the pain, the skipping, the stab, the whatever. He felt it in his chest once more. He put the martini down and lifted his hand towards his heart when he realised what he was doing, and reached for the glass again, gazing at her as he sipped. The light in the bar was weak but warm, making her face look like toasted gold. Her hair gleamed. Finally he recognised the sensation – even though he also knew he was feeling it for the first time in his life – the sensation that was bearing down on him with the force of a bullet train threatening to carry him along at thrilling speed, or obliterate every trace of him. He was dizzy. If he closed his eyes he might just keel over sideways.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  There was a crease between her eyebrows. It was the second time she’d had to ask that, and they’d only met fifteen minutes ago. He watched her hand reach around to sweep her hair to one side of her neck, the gesture already achingly familiar. And they’d only met fifteen minutes ago. He glanced at his watch. Seventeen.

  He recognised it, he understood. He needed to act quickly if he had any hope. This was not a condition any doctor could fix. Only one person could help. He stood up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Alarm now in her voice.

  ‘I’ll be back.’ He raced out the door.

  Her mouth fell open. She stared at the table, avoiding the glances of anyone else who might have witnessed the last few moments and been curious, or worse: pitied her. Abandoned barely fifteen minutes into the first date in years. She put the glass to her lips and refused to let them tremble when she sensed a movement and glanced up to see him dart back through the door.

  ‘And whatever, whatever you do, please don’t ever cut your hair.’ He raced off again.

  Marion pulled out the two books she had bought. The Marriage Plot and The Time Traveler’s Wife. Her mouth twisted. Was her subconscious telling her something? Or maybe the literary industry, the universe? The light in the bar was too dim for reading and the noise level was escalating quickly. She sighed and opened the first. She could pretend to be reading, which would ameliorate the humiliation, but within minutes she was conscious that the narrow corridor of the place was filling with young bodies, and that a group perched on stools at the bar was almost pressing into her back. She edged the chair around the dot of a table until she sat sideways to them and faced directly away from the door. She would finish her martini, and not rush it. His martini too, fuck it. Plus the olives. Then she would arise with dignity. She would put on her jacket, pack her books into her bag and, with her back very straight, walk out of the bar and into the evening. Thank god she would return to an empty house, because telling Kelly about this was unimaginable.

  Before leaving, she went to the bathroom to stare herself down in the mirror. When she squeezed her way out the door Edward was standing in the street, looking forlorn and guilty. He butted a cigarette and handed her a thin volume.

  ‘Had to run down to the other bookshop. The first was closed already.’

  ‘What is it?’ She couldn’t believe how glad she was to see him again.

  ‘Just the Selected Poems.’

  She took it and held it close under the streetlight. e. e. cummings. He had marked a page with a card.

  ‘Read it later,’ he said.

 
‘Can I just read this?’ She extracted the card. Its cover featured three martini glasses, blue, red and green, with a printed recipe inside. ‘“Classic Martini”,’ she read out before staring at him. His forehead creased, his mouth twitched on one side. ‘Well,’ she finally said, ‘we’d better have another one then.’

  Still holding the slim book of poetry in one hand, she wobbled down the aisle, the second-last passenger, and alighted at the stop before crossing the river. This late at night she should have continued to the better lit stop and walked home along the street. But instead she picked her way down the cracked steps, and followed the path beside the river. She walked warily, glad she was wearing flat shoes as her only meal for the night had ended up consisting of five Sicilian olives. Before they farewelled and she got on the bus, she had inspected the book of poems, and the page where she had reinserted the martini card.

  ‘“i carry your heart”,’ she had read, then closed the book and looked up at him. She was tall, but he was taller. ‘How is your heart, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, good, now. Poetry and gin are excellent for it.’ His smile was so full she could see a dimple on his right cheek, under the beard.

  The hippie party was still in progress, though evidently winding down. Candles had been placed everywhere, small tea lights in glass jars on the grass, tucked into branches of trees, set along the shoreline amongst the stubs of mangroves in the low tide, placed here and there around the seated guests. And at the centre of the gathering tall candles surrounded a couple seated on cushions. As she walked closer the music dwindled to a quiet hum and a man wearing a striped caftan stood up, picking slowly around the seated people to arrive beside the couple. He held a candle in one hand and a book in the other. Marion paused and leaned against a casuarina. It was not really stickybeaking, not in the circumstances. Besides, everyone but he and the couple was looking away from her.

  ‘I am now going to read Skye and Ben a poem.’ His voice was clear, declamatory, as if he were an actor. He placed the candle on the ground while he leafed through the book to find his place, then picked it up again and held it over the page. ‘Or part of a poem, as it’s too long. It’s an epithalamium, by Edmund Spenser.’

  Her mouth fell open and her breath caught. The trained voice had projected each syllable across the darkness as if meant for her ears alone. She lived in a world where knowing long Greek words for certain forms of poetry was useless. But it was a good word, she thought. She had learned it as an undergraduate English major, and still loved the way it engaged every muscle of the tongue and lips to pronounce. She said it now, quietly, as she listened. Epithalamium. It sounded like a rare medical condition, or a drug for an acute form of psychosis, not the name of something celebrating one of life’s best occasions.

  After several verses of the familiar lines, she smiled, then smiled wider, then laughed and commenced walking away before anyone could hear her. They had their epithalamium and she had something else, something in her chest that quickened as she walked faster, holding tight the book in one hand, her zebra scarf in the other, calling out as she went, ‘I carry your heart, I carry your heart,’ louder and louder as she ran, enunciating the words perfectly. There, she was not so drunk after all! Fleet with joy, she ran towards home, laughing, her mouth wide open to drink in the remainder of the night.

  I am at Home Now

  He wanted some stockings and shoes, two pairs of each. And some handkerchiefs.

  She stands by the window, re-reading the letter. It is well creased, no longer crisp, and the seal has crumbled away. There is no stamp. It is twenty-seven years before the first Penny Black, with the image of the queen, twenty-four years before there is a queen. For all these years her husband kept the letter in a drawer in his desk. Now it is amongst the last of his things, which she will keep in a box: the curls of hair, coloured amber and corn silk, tied in scraps of once-white ribbons, now yellowed, and the silver locket containing her portrait only – he never did have the other one painted. The letter is not dated, and it is addressed to her husband. She recalls him reading it to her, and then after that everything is a blur – of the coldest February she had known, of their first infant dying from influenza, of them all being so ill it was many months before she returned to the world.

  Hope you remember me madam. She does indeed remember the two men who came from the bottom of the world to live with them, in the house of Edward Kent, where they worked. One was already ill, dying only weeks after they arrived at Eltham, despite the doctor’s recommendation of fresh air away from the city. The other enchanted her, once she overcame her surprise. She had never seen a black man before, let alone one with missing teeth, and scars on his face. This was just before the spring of 1794, and the men had become sick, quite literally, of London.

  His hut on the point has now been demolished. After all this time he mostly prefers to be on his own but when the desire for company takes him, he moves from place to place in the town. Some days it is as if his own family spurns him. Other days he may saunter into the governor’s house when he pleases and eat at his table, or sleep in the servant’s room provided for him. But he knows the men of property despise him. Scoundrel, wastrel, drunkard, savage.

  His hut faced the water, glittering by day, shot with shrieking gulls and dotted with ships groaning and creaking in the wind. Now he stands at the point where it stood, gazing at all that has changed since he has been away. No more canoes ferrying families from cove to cove. No more fishing. Yes, he prefers to be on his own but does not want the loneliness. I have not my wife; another black man took her away. He expects he will not have another wife now. At night the peace is almost terrifying: on the opposite shore there is such stillness, with few fires any more. The cold starry world above him seems wider than ever.

  It has been too long. She will take the shirts, finish embroidering the handkerchiefs. She sets to work, sitting by the upstairs front window to catch the best light. The last time she did this was when Mr Phillips was already too weak to stand. She had intended to measure the length of him one last time, but rather than fuss around him, she took apart one of his old frayed shirts and used that as a pattern. She would sit here in the same spot by the window, with the door across the landing ajar so that she would hear him if he called. He rarely called out, but if she heard the cough she would drop her sewing and rush in, in case he needed a damp cloth across his face, or a fresh handkerchief.

  You nurse me madam when I sick. He knew what this was like, had nursed his first wife, who’d caught the serpent dust disease. He shivers now, remembering the suffering of that time. How he brought water to his wife yet could never quench her thirst. How she cried and cried for relief, until her throat almost closed over with the pustules that had crawled inside her mouth. The terrible heat of her body, then the sudden clammy cold. And how he expected every day to develop the same trembling chills and pain in his back that signalled the start of that disease. Why he was spared when so many others were not, he has never known. He cremated his wife’s body close to where she died, wrapped in her possum-skin blanket, a stone on her forehead.

  Mr Phillips never wore these shirts. By the time she was hemming the cuffs he was barely able to move in his bed. She sat right beside him then, urging him to drink some beef broth or take bread soaked in warm milk. She took to sleeping in the armchair rather than risk the distance of her own room. The day after the funeral she put away the unfinished shirts with her fabrics and patterns in the box at the foot of the bed. All she has kept aside is a small basket with essentials, threads and needles, a few notions, just for repairs.

  When he thinks about it, he realises he has always needed to live near the water, sometimes right by it. Once he lived on the water, in ships that sailed for months and months, taking him and his companion to see the King and back home again. Not me go to England no more. In London it was such cheerless weather, they always felt cold, even in summer. He enjoyed the compan
y of so many interesting people, enjoyed the attention, even enjoyed the qualified respect. They thought he was ignorant and insensitive, but he knew when he was being paraded, mocked. He kept this knowledge to himself, sharing it only with Mrs Phillips, who looked after him towards the end. Together they made their fun, and her merry charm eased the pain in his heart, when Yemmerrawanne died.

  He was always so polite. When she first met him, when he and Yemmerrawanne were brought to Mr Kent’s house, he took her hand in an educated style and bowed deeply as he pronounced the words, Good day, Mrs Phillips. I am very pleased to meet you. He impressed her with his instant regard for her little spaniel, who licked his hand when he held it out. Later she invited him to call her Betsy, but he would refuse. And so in turn she insisted she would call him Mr Bennelong and that is how they spoke to each other, with exaggerated courtesy, each colluding in the part that had been written for them. Oh, Mr Bennelong, she would say of a morning, Would you care for a boiled egg for breakfast? Or perhaps you might partake of a bowl of porridge? He would always reply by asking for bread, toasted if it were no trouble, and they would eat at the little breakfast table in the parlour, like genteel folk.

  She never called Yemmerrawanne Mr Yemmerrawanne, though he always called her Mrs Phillips. He was so shy, barely speaking to anyone, except his companion. It was Mr Bennelong who came to the kitchen asking for a cup of sweet tea for him, or a slice of bread and butter. His friend was far too diffident to have her tend to him but when she realised how ill he had become she could not stay away, and brought him cooling cloths when his brow sweated, and more blankets when he shivered. She made sure the fire in the grate never went out, even though the weather was turning warm. When Mr Bennelong went out on his excursions with her husband or Mr Kent, she fetched her knitting and sat with him, Penny on a cushion at her feet, watching as he slept and dreamed.

  I live at the governor’s. It amuses him to satisfy his hosts when he perches his cutlery directly above the food, spears a piece of corned beef or a round of potato, and brings it to his mouth. Equally it amuses him to see the glint in their eyes when he brushes the silver knife and fork aside and takes a joint in his hands, tearing the meat from the bone and licking the fat off his lips with exaggerated sweeps of his tongue. And when he applies the linen napkin to his fingertips and mouth, dabbing gently as he has been shown, before half-folding the napkin to one side of his plate, as he has also been shown, he can barely keep from erupting in laughter, such is the consummate joy of watching their reaction. Once he sprinkled salt from the cellar daintily over his soup using thumb and fingertips, gazed serenely around the table to evident approval, then plunged his face into the bowl and slurped the broth with gusto. He stood up, bowed, then ran from the table that day, laughing so hard he was almost doubled over.