In captivity. These were herding creatures. Was it fair to keep just one? The Grévy’s zebra was the least sociable, living in small family groups for a few months, while the males generally lived alone. But it was arguable that her zebra was in captivity. She showed no signs of fear or apprehension, and hadn’t, even on the first day, strayed any further from the lawns. As dignified as it was possible to be, given those amazing stripes, she emanated a clear sense of independence. It was almost as if she had chosen to be here. When the PM had encountered her grazing in the native garden the day she arrived, raising her head to nibble at an early blooming callistemon, she had asked Billy to drag around the bales of hay dumped by the driver. The zebra calmly transferred her attention from the natives to the hay.
The PM had never been able to take zebras seriously. Maybe it was because her experience of them until now had always been manipulated by art. She had once embarrassed herself by laughing out loud at the original of Stubbs’s painting on show at the national gallery. The sheer incongruity of the zebra standing still before the English forest background. Yet the wild creature looking so calm and contemplative. Thousands of miles from the vast open grasslands, and seemingly resigned to a fate of pinched cold winters, damp hay and shrivelled root vegetables. Now there was this zebra, here at the bottom of her garden. Behind it the stand of callistemon, and the beds of flannel flowers and kangaroo paw all around. Was it any less absurd? Intellectually, not. And morally? But the PM could not think about that. She could not really think at all, not while her heart was opening up to the zebra. All she wanted was to keep the animal close by and make sure it was safe.
Right from the start the zebra had held her head high and stared directly at the PM. Zebras had excellent eyesight. Their eyes were positioned wide on the head to give them a great field of vision. And it was said they could see in colour, a fact the PM found comically fascinating, given the zebra’s markings.
That morning, as the PM was still looking through books and comparing markings, Malcolm had appeared beside her. The zebra shifted her unblinking gaze to him then turned back to the pile of hay she was nosing through. He pocketed his phone.
‘That was finance. I told her you’d call back in ten minutes.’
‘All right.’
They watched the zebra chewing for a few moments.
‘It’s almost enough to make you believe in a god, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘One with a massive sense of humour.’
That was why she found Malcolm so compatible, despite his barely concealed cynicism.
‘It’s like that joke.’
‘What joke?’
‘Oh, I’d tell you, but I’d muck it up,’ she said. ‘Should we get her something nicer to eat? Lucerne, maybe.’
‘That might make her shit all green and slimy.’
‘You know about horses?’
‘I grew up on a farm, just south. The zebra might be different, but I know we had to watch the horses with lucerne. And oats. Too many oats make them frisky.’
Who would have thought it of oats? Stodgy, nourishing food, something one associated with invalids, or babies. Porridge and oatmeal cookies. She glanced at Malcolm. And who would have thought he knew about horses, or zebras.
The garden in bloom was teeming with activity. It was busier than the biggest shopping centre. Noisier than parliament in full swing. More complex and dangerous and intriguing than any section of the city at any time. Deaths, collisions, murders, births. Hatchings and burials and feasts and fights all took place within a deceptive serenity. One only had to sit quietly and gaze into a patch of flowering lavender, wait a while by the rosebushes, stand amid the grevilleas to feel the force of its buzzing, sometimes tempestuous life.
So when, several weeks later, the wind delivered a pale pink bloom from a far portion of the garden, the PM was intrigued. It landed in the grass before her, then danced away, paper thin, before landing again a few metres away. She ran and grabbed for it twice before she succeeded, and when she looked closer at the crumpled petal in her palm she frowned. The peony bed was on the opposite side of the property, part of the showy front garden, but she reached it in a minute, almost running. She stopped, panting, then held her breath. Then cried out in anguish. The damage. The waste.
The plants had just been displaying their first buds. A few, including the one in her hand, had opened up in the days before. But most of the fleshy stalks had still been covered with firm, marble-shaped buds, promising a splendid burst of bloom in the coming weeks. Now the beds, massed in shallow terraces that extended to the north path, were a mess of uprooted stems, crushed and in some places ground to a green pulp, and a litter of buds everywhere. Pink and white cracks in the dark green buds, revealing the promises of pale pink flowers, some so pale as to be cream, others to feature a subtle stripe on the outer petals.
Her first instinct was to blame Billy, the gardener, but for what? Not being vigilant enough? That was hardly fair, and Billy, though silent to the point of unresponsiveness, was a good worker, a decent man. Her second thought was that it was the zebra, but there was not a single hoof mark, and even as she scrutinised the ground the PM felt guilty for considering it.
It was that Kerr. She knew it down to her boots, though it would not do to start making accusations yet. Her neighbour would hate flowers, as he would hate anything that was not considered useful. She had once spotted him removing all the everlasting daisies from the nature strip along the front of his property – the nature strip that was not even his – and he had been observed by Billy and the Bobs clipping off the magnolia blooms from the specimens planted where the properties adjoined. Evergreen trees he tolerated, and in some places encouraged, as they provided privacy. Shrubs he would also tolerate, so long as they were tidy and obliging. But flowers would be a contemptible frivolity. He would abhor them. He would especially loathe their sexy connivances. The way they posed and preened and parted their petals. He would hate the whole scented, blowsy, fecund world of arousal and desire and attraction and disguise that was the flower. The rose unfolding like the vulva, the hairy testicles of the unopened poppy, the polleny, powdered stamen of the lily. And the peony, which contained, it was said, the very scent of a woman. Was it true that their stamens and petals were more genital-like than many other flowers? That the Chinese over centuries purposely bred peonies to capture this?
Long before knowing any of this, the PM had decided this flower was one of her favourites, and the crushed-looking pink blooms of the Paeonia lactiflora her favourite of all. The utter perfection of it almost made her laugh.
The PM was not laughing now. She felt close to tears. Her beautiful plants. This would have been the third season they had flourished.
The peony bed was a long way from the southern fence line, but she did not put it past Kerr to come somehow, in the deep end of the night when even she was asleep, with his mattock or pick or whatever tool of destruction he used. Was he not down the back all the time, sawing, chopping, abusing any vegetation that wasn’t useful? Had she not just that morning caught him at it? Not that she was certain of the exact nature of his depredations this time, but there seemed to be bush saws and mattocks involved. Had she been able to see into his backyard she would have known for sure, but to do so would have required ladders or upturned crates and an undignified sort of curiosity incommensurate with her position. She imagined the yard was full of severe-level lawn (she regularly heard the lawnmower chewing its way through her Sunday mornings, even from the distance of her bedroom), something harsh and unkind to the bare foot like buffalo grass and probably kept greener than most through illegal use of watering – who would know? The place was such a fortress: the trees guarding the property on all three sides. And as for other plants, nothing that wasn’t useful. She expected he planted potatoes and onions, a variety of root vegetables. Serious, filling, carbohydrate-rich vegetables, the sort that required immense efforts with
digging and maintaining the soil. Why would you bother when you could drive to the local markets any Saturday morning and buy an entire sack of potatoes or a bag of carrots for less than twenty dollars?
Oh, but she did know why he would bother. It was not about saving money or providing wholesome food for his household, it was far more primal than that. It was about making his mark on the land. The more he cultivated it, the more he controlled it, the more he felt the power that had been denied him by whatever circumstances had brought him to this state: a miserable, antagonistic, abusive balding man in a dirty orange baseball cap, obsessed with her property and violating it by stealth.
She knelt down in the bed, not caring that she soiled the knees of her trousers. One or two plants seemed intact, though wilted. She gathered them close.
The peony was immortal. Unlike more revered beauties of the flower world, such as the tulip, whose capacity for propagation had been diminished down the centuries, the peony could be endlessly grafted and cloned. All the developments in the horticultural world could not make a cornflower or a pansy much more exciting than it was. Seasons and fashions may bring a fondness for streaked petunias or a mania for pink lilies, but little more. A carnation – even a green one – was never going to transcend its status. It would forever be a flower for nervous young men in new suits or old ladies in nursing homes.
But the peony, like the rose, was an open-ended flower. It resisted closure. It contained possibilities that had not been exhausted by generations of cross-breeding, cloning, grafting and other forms of unnatural selection.
Despite knowing most of this, her response to the flower was instinctual. She first loved it for purely aesthetic reasons, only later appreciating its unique design. She loved the way its profuse and crowded petals seemed so accidentally arranged, so messy and wayward, and yet how each bloom was held together by the tightest and strictest of architectures. Its petals were soft and papery, yet they remained strong and erect. They curved outward then inward, and remained upright despite all the laws of gravity that should dictate their falling or drooping. Their arrangement was not entirely circular: the blooms formed a flattened sphere. They were more like little globes than balls. And their central emptiness seemed to be another ingenious paradox. Even the double blooms of the Paeonia officinalis, the common European peony, offered a void. The petals clustered around nothing. And yet there was everything in that vacant space. It was the reason the petals arranged themselves so artfully in deceptive disorder.
Billy had helped plant the peonies soon after her first few weeks of residence. She was delighted that her arrival coincided with the flower’s optimum planting time. The dry air and cool soil would provide the perfect conditions for enhancing the flower’s beauty. She planned to set up a national competition for breeding the first truly purple peony. For as much as she loved them she felt cheated by the limitations of colour, largely restricted to pinks, reds and whites. The cerise and shiraz colours of the deeper pinks and reds which were often passed off as purple were nothing like the amethyst or iris shades she desired. There were some insipid pinky-mauves. The professional horticulturalists, even the amateurs, she thought, could do better. While she was knowledgeable about much, on gardening and flowers in particular, she was a novice. And she knew in her heart she would always be an amateur, and that she did not have the obsessive personality – or the time – to devote herself to a breeding challenge.
From the time she first gazed on a bunch of peonies, she knew that this flower was exquisite. And that she would have them as much as possible in her life. She was living in an inner city share house at the time. A grateful friend, whose several years’ worth of muddled accounts and unlodged tax returns she had sorted with her clear eye for arithmetic order, sent her a bunch. Not only had he not been fined for the late returns, but he had received a tax refund for exactly the amount she had predicted. She hoped he’d not spent too much of it on the flowers, for she had received them fatigued and worn. They had arrived when she was at work, and been entrusted to the care of neighbours, a wife and husband team who made their living from a towing business, and whose truck screamed and clattered under her window late at nights going to and from jobs. When not working, they spent their leisure time in the street, drinking beer and laughing. They both wore the same kind of overalls and had the same short hair and gravelly smokers’ voices, and she would have had trouble telling them apart except that the husband had an impressive pornstar moustache. When the woman banged on her door later that evening and shoved the flowers at her, they were well into a slab of VB.
‘Here ya are, love. Been mindin’ them for ya all day.’
It was before the time when florists started to shroud arrangements in metres of stiff brown paper and preserve stem ends in water-soaked tissue. The blooms drooped. A few petals fell as the neighbour handed them over. But they were not spoiled. And while she hoped they had brought some pleasure to her neighbours’ day, she knew they would have lain ignored. She carried them to the sink to untie them.
‘Thanks very much. Here, why don’t you take some?’ The arrangement was enormous. Creamy petals, with a hint of pink. Dark green leaves. All dotted with many more buds, firm and rounded like marbled gobstoppers.
But the woman declined, cheerfully slamming the screen door on her way out and whistling. Perhaps it was best. She imagined their house, which she’d never entered, was a serviceable place. Probably no vases. She herself was having trouble finding a suitable vase. The flowers – she still didn’t know what they were – required more room and support than the ones she had, so she trimmed the stems and made do with a storage jar.
When her housemate arrived, she took one look at them and said in delight, ‘Oh, peonies. Unusual at this time of the year.’
‘Peonies? Is that their name?’
‘Yes.’ She cupped one of the blooms in her hand. ‘I’ve only seen these growing back home, never here. Do you know what we call them in Japan?’
‘I didn’t even know what we call them here.’
‘They are called the prime minister of flowers.’
‘The prime minister of flowers?’
‘Yes. They are that special.’
How had the carnage been effected? She could see no evidence of boot prints, or weapons. The dew had already dried. But it had to have been him. Who else would have been up that early, before her? It was probably before dawn. He could have sneaked over the fence and come around the western side of the property. She walked back towards the house, taking the short cut through the pool yard and the kitchen garden, searching the ground for signs of violation, some squashed blooms or clods of soil. Nothing, but she continued striding down towards his place. All was quiet. The fence sat innocently, behind it his trees, also quiet, not even any honeyeaters about. There was nothing to link him to the crime. Still, she glared in his direction.
There was the matter of the fence, which she should do something about, but she could not imagine what. A fence was a fence, and it was not as if her property suffered from losing eight inches. Lately he had also been trimming the prime ministerial trees that extended above his property but she had said nothing, he trimmed them all the time, though strangely left his. The trees were lopsided but seemed unharmed and she had been content for the moment to leave it at that.
She made her way back, and combed through the peony bed to be sure. There were two or three plants left, escaping the assault by accident. She laid them side by side, then picked up the smallest, a tiny wilting thing – and maybe it would not have produced many flowers – but she lifted it out of the soil and, cupping it in both hands, took it down to the garden shed.
‘Billy, look at this. The peonies are all destroyed. I need some small pots please.’
He turned around. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Go and see for yourself.’
He dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow and strode off. She
had just found a stack of empty flowerpots when he returned, shaking his head.
‘My guess it’s that maniac from down the back.’
‘Exactly my thoughts. But what are we going to do about it?’
‘I’ll go and talk to the bastard.’
She considered this. There was not the slightest proof. And there were other factors to consider. Her position. The dignity of the office. The fact that Billy was an intimidating size, six foot eight in his socks, a former rugby forward.
‘No. I’ll have to think about what to do.’
As she washed her hands at the tap she wondered if Billy had too much to contend with lately. It was a large property, and while the lawns were mowed and the trees trimmed and the paths swept by outside contractors, perhaps she had made too many claims on him, with her projects.
She would have to be calm, think rationally. Gardening was meant to be calming. The PM felt soothed when she had her hands in dirt, though it had taken her a long time to come to terms with gardening. The ultimate humiliation of her childhood – a childhood so full of humiliations as to seem like one endless hot blush – must have been the news of her mother caught scavenging horse manure from the middle of Sefton Road one afternoon. Three girls from her class at school spotted her mother, shovel in one hand, hessian sack in the other. Shamelessly scooping, ducking in and out of the traffic. Then slinging the sack and shovel into the back of her old station wagon, which was plastered with peeling yet still readable bumper bar stickers espousing the virtues of red meat and advertising the Country Women’s Association. Another reason to blush. Anyone could tell at a glance from the high-waisted, faded cotton frocks and the sensible flat shoes that her mother was a genuine country girl, even though her family farm had long been swallowed by the western urban sprawl. More humiliation, of course. In Sydney you could come from anywhere but the west. In the western suburbs themselves, where the PM spent her childhood, the west was especially despised, for there was always more of it. Beyond Blacktown or Londonderry or Toongabbie there was always another semi-rural settlement comprising half-built houses on huge lots. Tiny fibro shacks. Redbrick cottages. Concrete and tile monsters that commenced ambitiously but petered out by the rear half of the house. Testaments, all, to overcapitalisation, mortgages underserviced by the owners’ meagre incomes earned at the meatworks, the car yards, the furniture factories.
Zebra Page 19