‘With whom?’ He looked up from the appointments book. ‘The interview. Tell me it’s not that ghastly Peters again.’
Malcolm pulled his lips down.
She sighed. Howard Peters. Her bête noire. Everyone’s bête noire. He hated all politicians and policy, wrote off any initiative as subversive, denounced everything creative, innovative or environmental as left-wing. She herself was regularly branded a communist, the Minister for Foreign Affairs a spy, the Arts Minister a manifestation of the devil himself. He was a media version of her neighbour.
‘I suppose he’ll be asking about Indonesian lamb too. Indonesian everything.’ Peters had a history of just avoiding prosecution under the Racial Discrimination Act. He was in particular outspoken on the Islamic theme. Female Muslim dress was a favourite topic.
‘Then what?’
‘Address to the Local Government Association; their reps will be waiting for you at Parliament House.’ He paused.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Avoiding questions there too?’
‘Might be an idea.’ There had been enormous hostility to the proposed overhaul of the local government system. Demonstrations all over the nation. Violence had been reported in some boroughs. And, the week before, a small fleet of council garbage trucks, state unknown, but it was suspected Queensland, had arrived in the pre-dawn and tipped their loads onto the sandstone steps of Parliament House. The refuse was especially pungent, a result, it was thought, of the long hot drive from the north. There did seem to be a large number of brown banana skins amongst the rubbish.
‘Then there is the Alliance of Independent Churches. Three pm.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Tax exemptions.’
‘Churches already have them.’
‘On all their business activities. Apparently the legislation is inconsistent on this. And they want approval for their proposed national educational program. You being the prime minister who has been so progressive. Decentralising and diversifying and so on.’
Yes, she was that. She gazed at the diary list for the day, the events blocked out in green, blue and pink. Even for her it was getting daunting. What was after the 3 pm meeting? Afternoon tea? She doubted it. And fifteen minutes with the Treasurer was barely enough. The Reserve Bank was planning to raise interest rates by the end of the day. That would require more than a quarter of an hour.
‘You’re down to review the Production and Incentivation Commission.’ Malcolm had chosen lemon yellow for that one. The Indonesian trade lunch was coloured in what appeared to be Commonwealth pink.
She slapped her hand down onto the iPad, covering the diary.
‘I’ll review it right now. It can be dissolved. There. Reviewed. Stupid name anyway. What on earth is incentivation?’
‘A term minted by a former PM. Cross between motivation and incentive.’
‘It sounds like something you do to a sick rabbit.’
Malcolm sighed now. ‘Afraid I agree. But there are protocols . . .’
She drained her tea. ‘Too many. Cancel all this, please. Apart from the Treasurer. I’d better see him. But the rest can be taken care of by someone else, surely. Isn’t that what I have ministers for? I’ve more important work.’
What was a real job? On the first day of her prime ministership she had indeed wondered if it were real. If job were quite the right word for it. Position? Appointment? Incumbency? Job did not seem to encompass it. It suggested manual work, in a laundry or bakery, or on a building site. The sort of work almost revered when she was young. Honest work. Good, honest, sweat-creating work. Toiling in the fields, the vineyards. The sort of work you never had to feel guilty about performing. People may have despised you or regarded you with contempt if you were a sewerage worker or a hotel housemaid, but they did so with a curious mixture of respect as well, the sort of respect reserved for people willing to undertake menial labour without complaint.
Like many of her generation, the PM had felt guilty for living a life of the mind. In her youth, as a student, she heard people talking defensively about the real world, as if so long as she was sitting in classes or studying for exams she was indulging herself in a dreamlike existence entirely empty of work or cares or responsibilities or commitments. And some of this had rubbed off on her, so that she felt uneasy when she thought about the real world of other people, those who had to drive buses or collect rents or run sandwich bars. This guilt sat on her like a lead collar. Why should she enjoy the benefits, however modest, of a cultured life? How come she could sit down on the weekends to immerse herself in novels, go to art show openings, listen to opera, when the vast majority of the population could not? Or did not? The fact that there was a choice here, one that only people like her exercised, still did not explain all this satisfactorily.
Then she entered the most unreal world of all. All the accusations people levelled at elites being out of touch reached a crescendo when it came to parliamentarians. But she was probably the first prime minister of the country who knew the price of a litre of milk. At both the supermarket and corner store. Previous prime ministers had been crucified for less than that. Entire governments had been criticised for their arrogance, for being indifferent to everyday economic concerns. She would never be that sort of politician. Consumer shows posing as current affairs were fond of exposing politicians’ ignorance. Reporters shepherding hapless ministers around supermarket aisles. Senior ministers, cabinet ministers, if possible, ministers for health or defence – any lofty portfolio to make the humiliation worse – who all expressed surprise when told the price of sliced bread. Who had no idea if a dozen eggs cost two dollars or twenty. Along with the rest of the nation, she had cringed when seeing these sorts fumbling through the self-serve fruit and vegetables section, dropping avocadoes and not knowing the difference between new and old potatoes, or – the ultimate shame – revealing at the checkouts that they were without wallets. Only a small and elite section of the community could afford the luxury of not carrying a wallet or purse, of conducting themselves as if they were royalty. She, on the other hand, was the only prime minister to do her own grocery shopping. Let her political opponents say what they liked about her unmarried state, her failure to produce children, her unfashionable hairstyle, her refusal to wear high heels: she knew the cost of a box of laundry powder or a packet of Weet-Bix. She knew when the prices of lemons or parsnips would soar. And why.
And as for getting a real job, she doubted the man down the back had one himself. He was no more in the real world than she. At least she had her cabinet papers, her reports and her policies. She made decisions, she acted on them. In the few years she had been in government she had achieved a great deal. He could not boast about making company tax more equitable, about simplifying the paperwork for small business, about establishing a non-profit national telecommunications provider. He had not implemented the quiet triumph of her entire term: people answering the phones again in government departments. He hadn’t found a way to keep manufacturers onshore and small schools open in small towns. Nor had he ever got all six state premiers together without a single fight. More than once.
And she was sure her garden was in better shape than his. She had devoted a lot of thought to its improvements and had personally overseen most of the work. In the space of three years, the garden had developed into something spectacular, magical. There was her peony bed, a showcase for the territory, rivalling – no, complementing – the annual floral festival. And her native animal sanctuary. Real kangaroos amongst the kangaroo paw beds all along the south lawn. A family of frisky Tasmanian devils in a pen nearby. A spot set aside for the bandicoots, which Billy once cursed for tunnelling up his lawn. And frogs back in the lily pond again, frogs where there had been none for years. Apparently they had disappeared after the Keatings left.
She was proud of what she had done in the garden. All that had been hard work, as well as the other j
ob, the real job, of running the country. The property was her responsibility too. It was work. She had every right to roam around and inspect it, whatever her advisers thought.
Nevertheless she drew the Tasmanian box closer, and began rummaging through the submissions. Amongst the letters and reports were what seemed to be gifts and tokens, hopefully not bribes. Ribbons, rosettes, pressed flowers, dried leaves. Poppies, flat and agreeably crumpled, but not faded. Apple butter in a small jar topped with a red checked cover. A handful of something fragrant and earthy. She sniffed. Hops, she thought. The beer brewing industry was an important one down south. And in an envelope some star-shaped leaves between pages ripped from an old exercise book. She sniffed them deeply, sniffed again. Really. She tossed them back. If the citizens of Tasmania were hoping to get her intoxicated, or stoned, or softened up with local produce, they were wrong. Perhaps Malcolm had a point. Not that she would concede that, especially at the moment. It was probably about time for him to reappear, threatening her with his iPad.
A breeze had developed. She anchored the papers on the table with her cup. She gazed over at the garden beds behind the house. A stand of native pines clustered in the slight rise that marked the place where the more formal grounds ended and the wilder, park-like space began. Just beyond that was her neighbour, her other neighbours, whom she had never met. Not so far away was an entire neighbourhood. They would have names for their houses. They did have names. Even the man behind her had called his property something. Jorobali. The gilt plaque was fixed on his front fence, above the locked letterbox. She passed it all the time. Though most unneighbourly, he at least had bestowed on his property a better name than hers. Jorobali was a curious name, suggestive of an exotic place: say, a lake in central Africa. Or perhaps it was a cognomen, so beloved of Australian householders in decades past. Not one she would have wanted for her house, but it imparted something approaching personality to the place. Curious, given he had none himself, or one limited to aggression and abuse. She supposed that was still personality.
She had never been happy with the name of this house. The Lodge was an ugly, masculine name suggestive of shotguns and game keeping, hunting dogs and tankards of dark ale drunk by log fires, and all sorts of things she was sure had never taken place here. But she had not known what to change it to. Names were something the PM had never been confident about. For years she felt like she herself had had no real claim to one. It was as if the narrative of her life did not require one. Her first name was as ordinary as the dust on her shoes. Her surname was worse. Altogether it was a dull, muffled name that sat thick on the tongue. Not a thrilling, literary or musical kind of name, one that could be uttered endearingly or called out in passion, but a coming-to-the-dinner-table one, as uninspired as a meal of chops and mashed potato. It was almost a relief to be called Prime Minister, or even ma’am, though she still stiffened at the surprising formality of that, occasionally looked around for some more important person. As if one were the Queen. Or her representative.
Only after the PM was installed in the house had she come to understand that her long-dead mother’s personality was more influential than she thought. She had discovered an interest in the garden that she could only assume came from her early years, as much as she had disdained her mother’s utilitarian regard for the land on which they lived. Perhaps this was why she found her early mornings in the capital so beguiling. She never tired of strolling around, inspecting the flowerbeds and the shrubs. It seemed only proper to approach work in this way. There was no hurry, at least not in her mind, though occasionally she was conscious of some murmuring and shuffling of feet from inside the hallway on mornings when she walked past her office downstairs and out the door. And the security staff would exchange looks behind their dark glasses, she knew that. She smiled at them from a distance. The Bobs had already begun to take turns in patrolling the front gate and tidying the front gardens. It was boring for them, and wasteful for the nation anyway, having two of them just standing on guard either side of the gate. She would encircle the house slowly, stray off the gravel, go right up to the fence line, then meet the driveway on the other side of the house before returning to enter, usually via the kitchen door. The detour would be long, on some days. Sometimes she felt she should spend as much of the day outside as possible. Not to do so would be somehow disrespectful, though to what exactly she wasn’t sure. The weather? Nature itself? And now her morning walks had a distinct purpose.
The day after the zebra had arrived, the PM had walked down to the garden sheds where, in an empty section between the stacked wheelbarrows and a pile of bagged mushroom compost, the zebra had spent her first night. Billy had already provided her with water in a plastic bucket. She was waiting outside, flicking her tail and lifting her nose to sample the air. The tenderness with which the PM regarded this creature surprised her. It was not something she remembered feeling for any animal before this.
Late the night before, in her pyjamas and slippers, she had walked across the dewy lawn and down to the sheds to check the animal was all right. She was almost expecting there would be no zebra, that she had conjured it out of her imagination. That it had all been a folly, a result of hard work and the end of the week. A dream. But no, she was there in the shed, breathing audibly and blinking at the PM from out of the gloom. And she was there again that morning, smelling agreeably of something earthy, like warm dust and fresh mown grass, and looking as mythological as ever, despite appearing quite at home.
What was so wonderful about the zebra was her silence. The PM could spend a few minutes in the animal’s stable, if she were there (for she loved to roam the rear grounds of the property) and silently commune. She loved just breathing in the horsey smells – the manure, the hay, the grassy, dusty richness of it all – and listen to the sound of nothing more than the animal breathing. The zebra would stare at her, blinking calmly. After a while she would lower her head and nudge the PM’s pockets. She would think that she should have brought a treat. Then she would pat the zebra’s neck, put her hands back in her pockets and keep walking.
The day the zebra arrived Malcolm had sent an assistant out for every relevant zoological book obtainable from the national library, exerting the privilege of the prime ministerial office to check out books, since the library was not a lending one. While she waited, the PM combed through internet sites, and within a few days felt extremely well informed about the animal. There were three main species of zebra. Hers did indeed appear to be, as Mr Austin Beamish had said, a Grévy’s zebra. Studying the full-page illustrations in The Complete Zebra by Colonel Arthur Waygrove (Retd), published in Cape Town in 1932, she could see quite marked distinctions between the species. The more common plains zebra, like the mountain zebra, Equus zebra, resembled a horse, while the Equus grevyi had a narrower, more mule-like head.
But, to be sure, she had taken the books with their illustrations out to the zebra, who was by now nibbling the back lawn. The PM had learned that zebras were adaptable eaters, preferring grass but settling for shrubs, herbs, twigs, leaves and even bark if necessary. The garden might have to be protected, or the zebra provided with enough fodder. She had displayed no signs of wanting to run away, but each time the PM approached she had remained aloof. Twice she consented to having her neck patted and seemed content when the PM brushed a hand down her side. But she hadn’t returned any signs of affection. There was none of the usual nuzzling and snuffling, the nosing near pockets in hopes of apple or sugar treats, which the PM remembered from her encounters with horses as a child.
Comparing the illustrations in Colonel Waygrove’s compendium, she could see now very clearly the differences. It was Waygrove’s opinion, and she quickly agreed with him, that George Stubbs’s famous subject, a specimen taken to England as a gift for the Royal Family and displayed at the Windsor Great Park, was an Equus grevyi. Stubbs’s beast – Malcolm’s assistant had thoughtfully provided a print that the gallery shop had in stock
– compared with Waygrove’s photographic evidence, featured a much smaller head and ears, while its neck and forelegs looked very much like a base of black had been overcoated with thin white stripes.
The plains and mountain zebras, on the other hand, had a different pattern stretching almost horizontally across from the rump to the middle with thick, even stripes as if its maker had wielded a brush dipped in black and white paint in either hand. Around the middle of the belly the pattern shifted, tilting vertically, and the stripes, though still even, were thinner. Although the underside of the zebra’s stomach was predominantly white, as the black stripes tapered while the white remained the same, the PM knew, having checked Waygrove against two other titles – J. B. Pearson’s Guide to Hoofed African Mammals (1956; 1986) and Hayes and Barnes’s Illustrated History of Equine Art (1990) – along with the Wikipedia pages she had printed out, that the zebra was essentially a black animal, patterned in white stripes. The Grévy’s zebra seemed to confirm it. To exist, perhaps, just to pose the age-old question: was the zebra a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes? The plains and mountains zebra suggested the latter, teasingly displaying black and white stripes in equal proportion until the belly region. But then the Grévy’s dragged the argument back in the opposite direction.
One source cited embryological evidence, proving that in the womb the animals were entirely black until a certain stage of development. Others theorised that the stripes, well known to assist camouflage, also served the purpose of resisting the tsetse fly, which could be visually confused and therefore deterred from alighting. Lions, known to be colour blind, were apparently confounded when the zebra stood still. Entirely black and white, the zebra would blend in perfectly with the landscape. All of them agreed that the patterns were unique to each animal, who recognised each other by their stripes.
Extraordinary, thought the PM. It was like glancing at a collection of barcodes and instantly seeing the differences. All three of the species, the plains, the mountain and the Grévy’s, could interbreed, apparently, though they never did in the wild and rarely in captivity. Plains and mountain zebras were most similar but the latter was now vulnerable, restricted to highland reserves, and generally failing to thrive in captivity.
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