Zebra

by Debra Adelaide

  There was no noise this afternoon. The wind had dropped and the birds were at rest. It was a silent tableau, a story without words, a barely moving picture that said it all. And it was a long story, a narrative captured and spent in only seconds, but speaking of a lifetime. Her heart tilted as she watched the pair, the child holding her father in a tender embrace. The man painting slowly and with exceptional care. The mute communication that flowed between them. The child’s unfixed gaze that seemed to say to the PM, this is my father, my comfort, my rock, my world.

  What could she do to a man with a child who loved and trusted him like that? She backed away from the parapet and re-entered the house, fastening the window securely behind her. All the measures she had been entertaining to deal with Kerr, from merely exerting her legitimate powers, making the local authorities issue orders to demolish the illegal front gates and remove his feral trees, to full-blown revenge fantasies, commencing with one of those wild, raucous parties that she had never had but about which he was always complaining. Perhaps inviting loud rock bands to perform from the second-floor rear terrace, aiming their amplifiers straight towards his house. Making sure there were plenty of teenagers and other noisy partygoers who had the stamina to keep up the noise level until well into the early hours.

  In other extreme and frustrated moments she had considered ordering in wholesale quantities of weedkiller and spraying his place from the back of hers. Or dropping prawn heads into the hubcaps of his car. Firecrackers into his letterbox, and broken bricks onto his front lawn. Late during sleepless nights, high on insomniac frustration, she had pictured herself crawling commando-like into his property and cutting his phone and power lines. Or ransacking his garden shed to remove every tool and implement to prevent the absurd and endless digging, chopping, sawing with which he filled his days, his sole aim that of ousting her.

  Now these plans all deflated. She would naturally perform no such acts of vandalism. He should be dealt with in the correct and legal manner, but now she could see that that too was impossible. Kerr was loved by at least one other person in the world. He had his worth. He may have no respect for the PM or for anyone but she would not meet that with a lack of respect on her own part. Instead she would meet his lack, his void, with her own substance. So far she had countered his violations and his abuse with dignified aversion. Now she could see how someone like him could construe that as infuriating passivity. He had regarded her efforts at improving her property with contempt that expressed itself in many ways, from simple verbal abuse thrown over the fence, to the violence of the destroyed peony beds.

  It was now time, she decided, to take proper steps. Not to resist him or return his insults, but to set a standard. To take control. To show him she was in charge. To lead by example. To concentrate on his strengths and talents (apart from his excellent capacity for abuse) and show him what he could do with and for himself. And for his family. And his country. To do, in short, what she was employed to do, and be the Prime Minister. His Prime Minister – though he may not want her – as well as the rest of the country’s.

  Not long before her mother had sold their home in preparation for a move closer to the city, she and their neighbour had replaced the side fence. For most of her life Star had conducted a war with the fox terrier on the other side, a war of sustained barking punctuated by ferocious growling, day after day, year after year, despite the fact that the two animals had never met. The morning the old fence came down, Star and Bullet were engaged in mutual hostilities, running up and down either side of the section that remained, until they came to the gap created by the builder. Facing each other for the first time, they were both shocked into sudden and panting silence. Unmoving, the pair stared at each other for several long seconds. Star panted and drooled and licked her lips. They both looked around. Bullet whined. They both edged back to the section where the palings remained. Then they happily recommenced barking and running up and down the fence, avoiding the gap.

  As a child the PM had disliked the boxer dogs that her mother bred in the backyard. They were a nuisance and a shame. They stank, they yapped, they salivated. And they were ugly, even when puppies, when all puppies were meant to be cute. She couldn’t even take them for social walks down to the local park. Why couldn’t her mother have bred poodles? Silly name but elegant and endearing dogs. Or plain old golden retrievers, which everyone loved. Especially the puppies. No one could resist a golden retriever. Everyone liked them. Even their names suggested beauty and goodness. Golden retrievers were universally beneficent. They were the bananas of the dog world. The daffodils. Disliking them amounted to publicly admitting hostility towards handicapped people, the blind in particular. If only she’d had golden retrievers her social status would have been assured. A warm glow of kindness and charity would have emanated from their family. Had her mother come to weekend netball games with two of them on a lead, then girls – from rival teams too – would have rushed to embrace them. Instead, her mother waited out her daughter’s games seated in the old Valiant station wagon reading seed catalogues while Star dribbled at the rear window. No one rushed over to the car park to fondle the dog or exclaim over her good looks.

  She was too young to know the difference when her mother had brought the first puppy home. A puppy was a puppy and therefore she loved it. Her resistance was marked from the time, a few weeks later, when she was allowed to hold the dog’s lead, and they walked her to the local shops. Outside, while her mother tried to persuade the grocer into taking some of her blackberry jam, she encountered a schoolfriend and her family.

  ‘It’s a boxer. Her name’s Star,’ she announced. Owning a new pup was high on the kudos-scale at school.

  Star, who had already slobbered over her bare legs, now leaked urine from excitement. The friend reached out to pat the dog’s head but was pulled back by the father, who said he had heard that boxers were notoriously unstable, prone to snapping and biting for no reason.

  ‘She’s only a puppy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think she’s cute?’

  The friend looked doubtful. The distinctive white splodge on Star’s forehead was not enough to counterbalance the excess of undershot muzzle, the frill of black lips, the strings of drool stretching between her mouth and her owner’s shins like slimy fishing line. The friend shrugged. ‘She’s kinda ugly.’

  By Monday recess the entire school knew that she owned an ugly, dribbling dog. Over the next few years she became convinced she smelled of dog and dog shit, even though an increasing disdain for the animals meant she rarely associated with them, leaving them to the backyard runs. They were her mother’s responsibility anyway, and only when she ruffled a wad of notes in front of her face after selling one of Star’s litters, did her daughter see any virtue in keeping them. Motherhood meant Star became quiet, docile. Except for her front fence line ferocity, her bouts of carefully constrained aggression with Bullet, she remained a loyal, gentle animal.

  One morning Kerr walked out his back door, yawning, to be greeted by the zebra. She was standing at the step to the patio, her head slightly down. He caught her direct gaze, the expression in her dark fluid eyes inscrutable. As his mouth gaped and before he could utter a sound his eye shifted to beyond the black and white shape of the animal. And then he gasped at the sight – the entire back garden of the prime ministerial residence exposed in the early light. Mouth still open, he swung his gaze to the zebra again, who had not moved a fraction, and did not as he took a few steps across the patio until they were almost nose to nose. She broke eye contact first, turning around and flicking her tail as if dismissing him. She stepped across his back lawn, past the barbecue and pergola and the garden shed, towards the line of cypresses, where until last night his fence had been.

  The PM was standing there, in front of the closely massed azaleas on the slight rise of the bottom of her property. The zebra almost brushed her as she passed by, but neither looked at each other, as if they were members
of a relay team, and as the PM walked towards him the zebra continued into her property and disappeared.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said. She was holding a long roll of paper. ‘Now you’re here we can get started.’ She was accompanied by several people wearing hard hats and hi-vis shirts, a few others in gardening greens with spades and wheelbarrows. ‘Oh, yes.’ She waved an arm around. ‘I had to have the fence removed. Thought I’d get a start by having that done at first light.’ (Early that morning? How had he not heard that?) ‘I needed the access, you see, and we can’t get through the front of your place.’

  It was true. The front of his house being so fortressed.

  ‘And it came down very quickly, in the end.’ She was holding a lightweight cordless screwdriver, obviously having removed some of the hex screws from the top caps herself. The panels would have slid out easily. They were now stacked neatly in the far corner behind the potting shed. Considering all his long efforts, secretly removing and replacing the fence, section by section, to encroach on her land, the nation’s land, it was almost a shame.

  ‘Of course, we can replace it when we’re done. Although I never really liked that colour. Do you? Reminds me of warships.’

  Speechless still, Kerr almost nodded in agreement. She was now walking across to his garden table. She was walking across his garden. His land.

  She unrolled the papers on his outdoor table and began pointing.

  ‘Now these are only rough, and only suggestions, mind you, but I thought we should have something to go on.’

  What was she talking about? He stopped staring at the vanished fence, then stared at her, then down at the paper. Plans of some sort. Landscaping plans. He could see his own house sketched in on the left, the PM’s residence away to the right, and there in between, right where the fence used to be, was a series of what appeared to be rails snaking back and forth. Then, closer to his house, clusters of round things, coloured blue. Pools. Or ponds? On her side, stacks of blocks.

  She was talking again, the irritating woman. Except he did not feel irritated. She had demolished his fence and he should have been assaulting her with a sledgehammer but instead he was standing here calm in the morning sun, as if it were any kind of morning and they were any kind of neighbours, discussing the weather or the football while down at the letterbox.

  ‘Now you have your team and they’re all reliable workers. You won’t have any problems. Hamish here’ – she waved over a man in shorts and boots – ‘his team has recently done three child-care centres. And Ashleigh’ – a woman in a hard hat raised her hand and waved – ‘well, her landscape business has won so many awards, I can’t tell you how experienced she is.’

  He examined the plans again. At the top was printed: garden farm playground.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ the PM said. ‘It’s only a working title. You can think of a better one, when it’s done.’ She fixed him with her gaze. The same candid, unblinking gaze that transfixed the nation when it appeared in public, or on the television screen. The clear blue eyes that lacked guile. And the steady smile that crinkled their corners. The smile that people found reassuring and comforting for no particular reason. Above her smile the nose that, he conceded, intrigued a nation.

  It was the first time he had been this close. The first time he had entered the personal space of the PM, that magnetic field that people found so compelling but without knowing why. And stripped of his tools, without his fence or his front gate, or even his cap.

  Apparently he was building a children’s playground. He was to be in charge of the project. Apparently he had agreed – had he agreed? – and some of his backyard was to be appropriated for the project, to be added to the PM’s property, if not claimed altogether, and it was a good deal more than eight inches.

  There was the proposed miniature railway. He could already see how that could be adjusted, to circle around the trees and run through little artificially made hills with tunnels. And the water feature seemed rather basic, just paddling pools. They could include fountains and a lake, and the lake could have ducks floating on it, with a little waterslide for the ducklings; children always loved that. There could be a proper sandpit, with miniature earth excavators and fake buried treasures. A cornfield, an organic potato patch, all growing miniature vegetables, for miniature hands. A dam near the rock wall there, and so partly in the shade behind his azaleas, with tiny windmills that actually worked. Gentle water jets spraying out at intervals. The climbing frame, the blocks sketched in the other side of the railway, would require shade cloth. Maybe it could continue the farm theme. Bales of hay stacked all around.

  ‘The shade cloth could resemble the roof of a barn. And the sandpit could have all sorts of things buried in there. Tiny picks and rakes. Or coins.’

  Was the woman able to read his mind?

  ‘But don’t let me get carried away.’ She held out her hands, palms up, as if disavowing the whole idea. ‘It’s your project, remember, and basically I’m leaving it up to you. You’re the expert with building and suchlike.’ She pointed to his barbecue, elaborate and rather picturesque beneath the pergola covered in wisteria, to the children’s swing set which she’d also spotted from the top of the house and which gave her the idea. Except now it sounded very much like it had been his idea.

  A slight woman wrapped in a blue dressing-gown had now emerged from the back door. She was looking around with her hands on the backs of two children, the girl whom the PM had seen some weeks earlier, and a boy, slightly older, with the same curly golden hair. They were both still rubbing their eyes.

  And up this close, for her part, she could see that Kerr was rather younger than she had thought, prematurely rendered bald. Without the cap he seemed exposed, almost vulnerable. But with his family, who had now moved up to stand beside him, he seemed more of a man. He was a man who had dug and sawed and sworn, who had hammered and shouted and slammed and even stolen, but from the conviction that he was doing the best for them. And he was a man who may even have more children. He would want, she knew, to continue in these endeavours, for them.

  She leaned closer to him across the plans. ‘You won’t let me down, will you, Mr Kerr? You won’t let down your own children? And the children of this city? This country?’

  Still speechless, he almost shook his head. His eyeballs barely moved while his lower lip twitched sideways.

  ‘No. I was sure you wouldn’t. And we shall all be very, very grateful.’

  The transformation had been rapid. Lake George was swollen like a placid cow, almost at full capacity. People had commenced taking boats out again, something that few in living memory could recall. On weekends families were now driving thirty or forty kilometres and parking by the lakeside, pitching tents in the free campsites, inflating rubber dinghies or setting afloat canoes and kayaks, and taking to the waters as if they were a cure. Along the lakeside, on the narrow strip between the water and the freeway, small cabins had appeared perched on stilts (the rise and fall of the water was unpredictable), brightly coloured, pink, orange, cobalt blue and banana yellow, some with flags atop like pennants of medieval jousting pavilions or Balinese temples. On the banks were small flotillas of tinnies; out on the water, rafts and paddleboats, churning like crazy. Children ran and splashed and screeched with delight, while the elderly reposed in deckchairs with magazines across their chests. Fish had reappeared, and freshwater crayfish burrowed along the lake’s banks.

  Motorboats, jetskis and other noisy mechanical toys were forbidden. Waste was all recycled. Sunhats were freely distributed and spray-on sunscreen booths dotted the shores. Ingenious water sports were devised, like giant paddles and great umbrellas of water that spouted high and wide before falling down to the shrieking joy of countless children. A bicycle path stretched the length of the lakeside. There were ice cream booths, gelato bars on trolleys and even a raft where one enterprising vendor was floating around ser
ving slices of icy watermelon directly to bathers.

  ‘They had excellent coffee out there,’ Malcolm told her one Monday morning. ‘Some guy in a coffee cart. And the weather was perfect. Didn’t want to come back to work.’

  That was it. As soon as he said it, he realised the source of the nagging unease he had nurtured since he’d woken that day. The afternoon at the lake had been his first away from work since she’d become Prime Minister. Not that she didn’t give him days off – he had his fair share, and she was as generous with him as anyone else in her employment – but he found it impossible to stop working altogether when she never did. So he came to work on the weekends, stayed back until later in the evenings, often returned earlier than necessary the next morning. When she, of course, was always up and working. And that afternoon out at the lake, he wasn’t really there. He was still observing, not participating. And he was alone. He felt that now, and it was not a good feeling.

  As if she sensed this unease, she handed back notes and papers. The latest report from the tax office.

  ‘It’s a bird’s nest,’ she said. ‘We’ve pulled out a few bits and pieces and tidied them up, but what a mess. Enough to make you want to impose a flat income tax rate. Except the conservatives were always keen on that. What if you draft up something after all? Perhaps get an expert in.’

  ‘It’s tax. We have a thousand experts. An entire department. We don’t need to get someone in.’

  ‘Well, for once I would like some clarity and simplicity from my staff.’