Zebra

by Debra Adelaide

  If she’d had a horse, or even been allowed to ride one now and then, it might have been different. Instead she had a mother who scavenged manure for her vegetable garden. Who, when they were driving to the shops or the library, didn’t think twice if she saw a pile of steaming golden shit left in the wake of some lucky carefree girl in the quiet streets where, then, it was still possible to ride out, often with a few envious friends running behind. Her mother would slam on the brakes, hop out and commence shovelling while the same girls were still in view, still able to turn, spot them, and tease her the next day about it. If she had had a grave robber for a parent it could not have been worse.

  Humiliation upon humiliation. If it were not the taunts about the manure, it was the teasing about her mother’s jam stalls, set up from time to time at the front of the yard. Picking the first raspberries of the season, grown on canes she had set herself the autumn after the election, the PM would remember her mother’s berries, remember collecting them in the early morning, when the pectin was at its most intense, or so her mother maintained. The jars they kept in a box in the kitchen until there was enough fruit for a batch. She helped write the labels. Strawberry Jam. Gooseberry Conserve. Marmalade. She recalled the boredom of waiting for people to drive by the stall at the front gate. How on a Sunday afternoon she would disappear down to the local sports field to hang around with the other kids, returning an hour or so later to lie to her mother about there being no customers.

  Or worse, she now recalled. Her mother had bred champion boxers and sometimes on the weekend she took them away for shows. She had often used the excuse that Star, the older mother, now a household pet, had barked so much at the front fence, she had turned off customers. It was plausible, Star being so defensive. Her front fence performances were so loud and persistent, sometimes visitors had to yell out to the house from the front gate. In later years, she thought she should have felt guilty in exploiting Star, slandering her like that. But the dog was a nuisance. And a sense of culpability was not something a ten-year-old had in high stock.

  The PM regarded the one little peony, wilted in its new pot. Her anger was now steady, focused. She could think properly. She realised now that Kerr’s violations – there was no other word for it – had commenced soon after she moved in and she had ignored them all in the belief that he only wanted attention. When he failed to elicit it from her, she believed he would eventually back off. But this was not an annoyance, like his shifty relocating of border shrubs – for at least he let them live – or his nocturnal stealing of her property’s quality garden mulch – the pile down past the garden sheds was prone to shrinking dramatically overnight, and could not be ignored. He would have to be dealt with. Confronted. Her forgiving and tolerant nature had probably brought this about. He thought he could get away with anything now.

  All the different forms of assault he had inflicted, she now ticked them off. Chopping at the Christmas bushes with an extendable chainsaw, right on Christmas, too, her first in the house. Then the Bobs had reported to Billy, who’d mentioned it to her, an attack on the grevilleas that grew above the height of the fence. Spectacular moon-white flowers had been dropped on the front lawn as an added insult. She should have acted then. She should have brought to bear some law or another. Surely there was a Commonwealth act prohibiting the violation of the national home, the official residence, its fences and flora? Failing that, by-laws protecting the rights of trees? The Arbor Act? The Preservation of National Homes? The Territories Mulch Protection Act? If not she would create one. Create several laws, if necessary, to stop him.

  The gravel spat from under the soles of her shoes as she rounded the house. She walked faster, breathing deep, and staying calm, keeping her thoughts focused. Turning a bend towards the entry, she could see down to the front gates. The Bobs had their backs to her, slouching before the weight of the sunlight as the day progressed. She stamped harder. More gravel flew. Kerr had no right to this violation. She was the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister of flowers. She almost tripped as she approached the gates. A root, snaking under the path? She paused and looked around her. Right here at the very front of the property there was an unacceptable number of weeds around the beds of kangaroo paw. And the mulch itself was in need of renewing. And where were the kangaroos? Normally at this hour they’d be dozing in the shade. The beds themselves looked dry, and long untidy fronds, brown and dusty, drooped from the tree ferns. What was happening to the garden? Why was it suddenly falling into decline?

  As she approached, the police officers stiffened and looked impassive behind their reflective sunglasses. Bob I was chewing gum. At the start, she’d decided that they would be amongst the first to go. She was not the sort of prime minister who needed full-time police security at her front gate. She had no desire to repel people at her door. But her democracy of care also meant she could not simply sack the Bobs. It was not in her heart to dismiss them. They would have wives and children – preschoolers – mortgages. It was bad enough they’d be doomed to live in the dry, light-bleached suburbs out in the west, where the trees wouldn’t grow fast enough to provide shade, where the lawns would be yellow and the fences would always look newly planted. What did ex-cops do? Become private security goons. Bouncers at nightclubs.

  Now she looked at them closer. Beneath Bob I’s sunglasses, his cheeks were soft, flushed with pink. Bob II had an endearing constellation of pimples just under his jawline. They were really quite young. There was no way she could have sacked them, no way a Prime Minister of flowers could have such an act on her conscience, but now, perhaps, she could find something better for them to do than lounge by the front gates enforcing a languid security.

  She was about to speak when she sensed a movement in front and to the right of her. There was that man, still sitting cross-legged a few metres beyond the gates. He seemed not to have moved from the day before, or the day before that. Ever since he had appeared, early one morning, as if he were a spirit from out of the nearby trees, he had just sat there, waiting, head erect. Beside him was a tray of tea and pumpkin scones that Hazel had provided which he had not touched. Did he eat and drink? He seemed not to be wasting away, as far as she could tell. The only thing clear about the situation was that he was not a security threat.

  By the time she had organised the Bobs to remove the dead plants and dig over the destroyed bed, she was calm again. Billy brought around a barrow load of wood chips that smelled comfortingly of old wardrobes – the arborists had recently identified a feral camphor laurel which had been felled and mulched – and she began to feel benign. She wondered if this was how her mother had felt, why she was so devoted to her gardening. Perhaps her mother also found simple solace in growing her vegetables. Despite the unattractive utility of the PM’s childhood garden, it was possible that for her mother it had been as beautiful as the garden of Eden.

  The three of them raked the mulch over and when it was done she sat back on her heels and contemplated the prospect of confronting Kerr. The problem was he was clearly devoted to his property. Perhaps, in his manic, twisted way, as devoted as she was to hers. And there was no proof at all that he had been the culprit. The security cameras swept the entrance to the property, the front courtyard and every entry point to the house but did not extend as far as the peony beds.

  She rose to her feet. Thanks to the drama she had missed her lunch appointment with the presidents of three major unions. She would meet them again but not until she had taken the action that she had decided upon while her hands were in the soil.

  ‘Thanks, guys,’ she said to the Bobs. ‘Take an early break today. And Billy, can you bring a ladder down the back?’

  Malcolm appeared, looking like he had scented a wild animal on the prowl. ‘A ladder? What for?’

  ‘Because it’s either that or climb a tree.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ He hurried to keep up with her as she walked back towards the rear of the ho
use, only pausing to rinse her hands in the frog pond.

  ‘Kerr. Down the back. I’m going to see what he’s up to on the other side.’

  ‘But with a ladder? You’re the Prime Minister, you can just walk up to his front door, you know.’

  ‘No, I can’t. He’d slam it in my face. Tread on my toes.’

  ‘Take one of the Bobs, then.’

  ‘No. Anyway, I want to see into his backyard, not poke around his house.’ She walked faster. He seemed to stumble somewhat, trying to match her pace. She expected it was the elegant shoes he wore, smooth leather soles, impractical for proper walking. Hers were sensible, with rippled soles.

  Beside her he was chewing his lip with anguish.

  ‘You might fall,’ he said. She gave him a look. ‘Break your leg or something.’

  ‘Oh, Malcolm, come on. It’s just a ladder.’

  But he had planted a seed of doubt. That tight spot in her lower back. It might just clench at the wrong moment, let her down, send her tumbling to the ground. Though she suspected Malcolm’s concern was not one of altruism. Missing lunch appointments was bad enough, but what would he do if she were truly out of action? That could not easily be accommodated, not with the Treasurer’s desire to communicate on an almost hourly basis, these days. Nor with the calls they were receiving, the stream of media queries about the man out the front. And how would he explain such an injury to the nation? The Prime Minister falling while spying on her neighbour. And no doubt it would all be witnessed by the neighbour himself. More crimes for him to taunt her with.

  ‘Let Billy go up a ladder, then. God, he’s tall enough, he could practically look over the fence without one. See all the way into the man’s place.’

  ‘Hang on.’ She stopped, held his arm. Billy was walking towards them, ladder over one shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is a better way. Should have thought of it before.’ She turned to Billy. ‘Sorry, I don’t need that after all.’

  The man was always home. The Bobs, on duty every day, never saw him leave. Indeed, they only saw him when he appeared to reinforce his fence or otherwise augment his security. The place was always occupied, the property guarded. His front fence was a line of battlements, constructed of brick, cement render and steel slats. He had ignored the city’s regulations regarding front fences, building it higher by a good half a metre and bringing it right to the edge of the nature strip. How the civic authorities had allowed this was a mystery. The PM could only assume that his proximity to the official residence awarded him some sort of immunity.

  Recently he had replaced his driveway gates. One day the old wire mesh ones, about a metre high, were taken off. Early the next morning, the Bobs spotted him in the driveway with a jackhammer – a jackhammer! he appeared to possess endless noisy tools – pulverising the concrete footings into pieces small enough to be prised out with a crowbar. His letterbox had been removed and now lay on the nature strip like a felled soldier. Parked out in the street was a Handi Skip which he was filling with rubble. Another violation. Skip bins were not allowed to block roads or take up parking space. The PM had glimpsed him that morning as she returned from a walk around the block. He was wearing earmuffs. Sparse curls stuck out under his be-capped head, and he was covered in grey dust. He looked like a dwarf digging for gold.

  If only he were that harmless. And if only she had acted earlier to curtail his activities. She should have marched forward, unplugged the jackhammer, ordered the Bobs to detain him and got her gardening crew to clean up the mess. It occurred to the PM that in some ways she was a jellyfish. She had taken on the coalmining industry and the woodchipping lobby. She had ordered the states to cooperate on a unified education system. She had stood up to the gun lobby and the banks. At times it seemed she had shaken her fist at the very heavens – and got results – but right from the start she’d wavered at the prospect of Kerr, to the point that she pretended he barely existed. And now his antagonism had become something more than personal. Today it felt like an attack upon all that she stood for. Today was the day she was compelled to deal with it.

  Shortly after, the new gates were in place, solid galvanised steel ones that slid open and shut via a remote electronic device. They presented a blank wall to the visitor, should there be one, who had to press an intercom for admission. His property was more inaccessible, more protected than hers. He had also installed sophisticated security lights along the front and down the driveway to the door. Possums and bats regularly set them off.

  The possibility that there might be something valuable, something rare and worth securing, in this curious property of which Kerr was the lord, master, groundskeeper and guard, was slim. Short of sending in the local authorities – for despite the acrimony created by his fence-side taunting and power-tool waving, these were hardly threats to the state – gaining any sort of access while he was there was unthinkable. And investigating while he was absent impossible: the place was always occupied.

  He was irascible and irrational. Highly unpredictable. He had never been friendly to her, but the Bobs had experienced the sudden manic gusts of favour and the occasional eddies of good will from his direction. He was prone to yelling out strings of abuse for daring to position themselves too close to his front fence, despite the fact that it was many metres away from their post, in fact around a bend. This did not stop him from coming up to her gate to complain that they were glancing in his direction, which he called spying and perving. Then the next morning after an episode like this he would appear suddenly, waving heartily and smiling as he went about some conspicuous digging, sweeping or hammering. One afternoon he almost spat in Bob I’s face with accusations of front-fence violations, then demanded to know why he was stealing his mail. When Bob II stepped in to tell him to cool his temper, Kerr turned and called him a paedophile, heathen, drunkard and dog-murderer. The next day he brought over a bottle of beer in reparation. When both police officers remained silent and impassive, staring out at the street behind their sunglasses, their hands behind their backs, he merely continued smiling and waving as he leaned down and deposited the bottle next to a patch of agapanthus.

  ‘Make sure you drink it while it’s cold!’ He waved again and walked off.

  When he had disappeared, Bob I turned and inspected the beer. Not a brand he liked. He ignored it and the bottle remained there for a week until the PM ordered that they get rid of it. A longneck of Tooheys New in the front garden of the prime ministerial residence was not a good look, even if it was unopened.

  She had rarely climbed to the uppermost storey of the house, the third attic level where there were storage rooms and unused accommodation for domestic staff from a former period. And a long window at the end of a narrow passage that opened onto a balcony of sorts, just a patch of asphalt where household staff would once sit and smoke or dry their personal laundry or cultivate a few potted plants of their own. Several weeks previously, she had been inspecting this level with a view to using the empty rooms. With only a little refurbishment they could accommodate perhaps a dozen people, she had thought. The idea had been to set an example to the rest of the nation: no one need be homeless were houses fully occupied.

  Now she climbed the attic stairs and went directly to the balcony, pushed up the window and emerged into the sunlight. Leaning on the parapet, she could see down the garden to the fence, and just over it. Kerr’s tight plantings of Leighton Green cypresses – a species now banned in many urban areas due to its excessive, view-annihilating growth – meant that she still could not see far into his property. But how strange. There towards her left was the man himself on the rear balcony of his house, elevated into the PM’s direct line of sight. He was bending down with his back to her, fiddling with something, the tiles, perhaps? No, he was painting. She saw him dip a brush into a small tin and bring it up to the railing. Had he turned around he would have faced her, albeit from some distance. T
hey might have stared directly into each other’s eyes.

  As she watched she saw a child emerge from the doorway that led into the house. A girl, aged three or four, wearing pink shorts and t-shirt. Her hair was a bundle of blonde curls gathered into a ponytail. The child went to Kerr and hugged him, leaning across his back. And then, as if she knew someone was watching, she turned her head, rested it on his shoulders, and stared straight up. Staring right at the PM, she raised her arms and gripped her father even closer.

  For he was her father. He had to be. To the PM, the girl’s stare was not an unmoving thing. Not an accident. Not the unselfconscious gaze of the innocent who had not yet learned discretion or guile. Simply a child who loved her father. And even as the implications of that flooded through, she observed Kerr absent-mindedly but not accidentally turn partway and place his free hand on the child and ruffle her hair as he continued to paint with the other. Here was a man, a father, capable of gentle affection. Who returned his child’s embrace with an ease that could only mean the affection was genuine. That he was devoted to his daughter. Perhaps there were other children, though she could hear no sounds coming from the house. And children must mean there was a mother. A woman whom Kerr cared for. With whom he had lain, and held in his arms. Someone into whose ear, perhaps, he had whispered sweetly. There was in the world some other person who had felt the warmth of his body, tasted the flavour of his mouth, pressed his chest to hers and hugged him tight, and breathed in the same air in the still, close quiet of their bedroom at night.