Reading Madame Bovary (3 page)

‘I'll just leave these on and see how they look outside in the natural light,' I said to the sales assistant, a girl with short, spiky blonde hair and heavy blue eyeshadow, expertly applied. ‘The colours are so misleading under these lights.' She murmured her discreet assent.

‘Do they really last?' I asked, with the knowing scepticism of the practised, indeed, jaded buyer.

‘They're a drier formula,' she intoned, with all the solemn aplomb of a research scientist explaining the latest breakthrough in genetic engineering, and then she streaked, first, an orange-pink frosted and then a scarlet slash on the back of her hand, just above the thumb – which is where they always do it. Where I do it. Where all women do it. Why there? Is there a lipstick-testing gene in all females?
One Perfect Coral, Mister Melon, Rio Mango, Sherry
Pepper
, and a new range with names like
Lust, Vanity, Ambition
. Before I know it, I've spent ninety dollars on two lipsticks.

I pay with one of my credit cards.

Our credit cards are precious. They sustain morale. Every time I hear someone on the radio droning on about the perils of credit, I turn it off. Once I found a credit card in the gutter on Glebe Point Road. When its owner came to pick it up she brought me a cutting of African violet, taken from her own garden and earthed in a small decorative pot to express her relief and gratitude. Her son had broken his arm that day but she had taken the time to show her appreciation.

Credit cards are our life-blood.

I work at keeping the African violet alive.

The zoo

Let me tell you about work. I call it the zoo.

I am a project officer in the Human Resources section of a medium-sized company that does (mostly) outsourced work for government agencies. I won't say who or what: somebody might sue. My director is a young man called Winton, a psychologist by training with an MBA and an infatuation with all things Japanese, especially their approach to corporate management and decision-making. He goes to ikebana classes. I am fond of Winton, and it's probably because he's such an unpredictable blend of the fey and the fly. He's short and stocky with fair curly hair, square practical hands and rimless glasses, and is so improbable a blend of corporate style and winsomeness that it can be disconcerting. He is quietly spoken with a reserve that is neither stiff nor shy but is a kind of charm in itself.

Today is a hat day in the office and Winton is wearing a smart Tyrolean number with a feather.

‘Only Winton,' I say.

‘I'm amazed that it's not Japanese,' says Christina, tartly. Christina Montiades is Winton's chief antagonist. Christina is the office cynic, a big woman with a deep, hearty laugh.
Cynic: an autocrat in
search of a vision.
She is an SCW (Single Career Woman) and a workaholic (she has a life coach). Christina perches on her ergonomic stool typing away at the keyboard with a long, thin pencil set firmly between her teeth. She keeps it there, on the advice of her dentist, to prevent her unconsciously grinding her molars into a paste. This morning Christina is wearing a navy-blue baseball cap with the Southern Cross of the Eureka Flag on the front. She is an ardent advocate for a republic.

I am wearing Ben's Sydney Swans beanie, which rather suits me (red is my colour), but by general acclamation the prize goes to Martin who is wearing an understated grey felt effort, a kind of soft turban. Immensely smart.

‘I got it on my trip to Tashkent,' he says. ‘It's what the Taliban wear. I also bought an embroidered cap but it's a bit gay.'

‘I wouldn't worry about that,' says Christina. ‘This
is
Sydney.'

‘You can't wear a Taliban hat,' says Winton. ‘It's in poor taste.'

‘Grow up,' says Martin.

We are dangerously on the edge of politics which, mostly, we manage to avoid.

It was Winton's idea to have a hat day because this week we begin yet another restructure. First off, we have to draft a strategic plan, which will mean redundancies, and Winton thinks we might all get a bit tense.

Stratagem: a manoeuvre in war; a plan for deceiving an enemy; an
instance of clever generalship; in figurative speech, any ploy to gain an
advantage; a trick or scheme.

We are scheduled to meet in the afternoon in the conference room on the twenty-first floor, the one that's painted grey and has white Venetian blinds. It's about as sterile as it could be, and perhaps that's why we get nowhere. Winton has just returned from a special management conference on how to develop a vision statement for the next three years. But first, he says, you have to have a vision before you can have a vision statement.

‘What,' asks Martin, ‘is the difference between a vision and an objective?'

‘It's the difference between a mechanical and an organic, relational model.'

‘In plain English, Winton.'

‘I'll have more to say about that at this afternoon's meeting.'

Winton has been reading a book on management called
Theory
Z
and he's at pains to explain it to us. It's all about how to adapt Japanese management practices – with special reference to
teamwork
– to Western management hierarchies. He has scanned pages into his workstation and emailed them to every member of the office. The gist of these is that ‘hierarchies' and ‘bureaucracies' are out and ‘clans' are in, viz: ‘
The Theory Behind the Theory Z Organisation.
‘The difference between a
hierarchy
– or
bureaucracy
– and Type Z is that Z organisations have achieved a high state of consistency in their internal culture. They are most aptly described as
clans
in that they are intimate associations of people engaged in economic activity but tied together through a variety of bonds.
Clans
are distinct from
hierarchies
, and from
markets
, which are the other two fundamental social mechanisms through which transactions between individuals can be governed.' AND ‘Type Z companies succeed both as human social systems and as economic producers. A Z company seldom undertakes any explicit attempts at team building. Instead, it first creates a culture to foster interpersonal subtlety and intimacy, and these conditions encourage cohesive work groups.'

I can't help wondering how this squares with what a young mining executive told me at a dinner recently, that anyone in the same job for more than four years is a loser who's going nowhere. ‘If he's any good,' he said (note the ‘he'), ‘he'll be bored after four years or headhunted by someone else.' Winton has been in this job for five years. I should tell him he is in danger of becoming a loser.

Winton wants us to begin our vision statement by coming up with a definition of our work ethic (a
clan
ethic, presumably).

‘I've read your material, Winton,' says Christina, ‘and it strikes me as just another form of groupism. I know these models, full of love and kindness but with a thin line operating between consensus and coercion.'

‘The most efficient working bodies are like clans. Look at the Google corp.'

‘You mean packs of nerds who go jogging together in their knee-length running shorts.'

‘There's a place for everyone,' he says, ‘and if not, you retrain them. This is how the Japanese do it: they always find a niche for you. You work for the company all your life, give them total loyalty, and they find a place for you.'

‘But they own you. It's all about creating the corporate personality. You become an automaton.'

‘Yes, Christina, but don't you see, it works for them, it works.' He looks pointedly over the rim of his Armani glasses.

Later, Christina will take me aside (her strong grip on my arm) and say that Winton just loves the group thing, the bonding thing.

‘It's stronger in some men than the sex drive,' she says.

The afternoon drags on and we wallow in abstractions. Sitting to my right is Lisa, picking at the rim of her styrofoam cup, flicking the crumbs onto the floor and making, in her fastidious way, a mess. Lisa is an administrative assistant, all of twenty-six, with two degrees and a mop of curly black hair. She is tall and thin and neurasthenic. She smiles and laughs too much, in a kind of brittle, high-strung way. She is the youngest and possibly the cleverest person in the office. Except perhaps for Kelvin, our programmer. Kelvin is into minor forms of self-mutilation. During meetings he has been known to trim the cuticles of his nails with a razor blade.

After three hours of squabbling and getting nowhere, we rise from our chairs and head back to our stations.

‘That went well,' says Winton dryly as we go down together in the lift. He sighs. I hate it when Winton sighs. I want to console him.

‘It's that room. Next time we should meet somewhere nice, outside the building. Bring a fresh perspective to it, try and enjoy ourselves.' We need to get out of the office, I say, to somewhere our heads can clear and we can – just maybe – get out of old patterns of thinking and knee-jerk responses to traditional antagonists. We should go somewhere to have our sense of possibility enhanced, our sense of wonder replenished.

‘Where?'

I tell him I hear there's a great conference centre at the zoo (the real one), with a glassed-in meeting room that looks out onto a pool in a rain-forest setting.

‘Book it,' he says. ‘It's a great idea.'

‘Does this make me a Z person?'

Winton smiles, wanly.

Domesticity

Are all pleasures corrupted by domesticity, except the pleasure(s) of domesticity itself?

The moment I leave work it's like some kind of whirlwind. The office is a space capsule, sealed in, airless, quiet; you're unreachable, no-one from the family can get at you emotionally; there is only work that can be done, and I do it. My work has a manageable limited-ness to it, unlike the family, whose demands go on and on and on and you could have ninety hours a day and it still wouldn't be enough.

I get off the train, walk to the butcher on the corner who stays open late, buy some chops for tea because that'll mean a quick meal, jog to the little fruit-and-veg man (it's late and Frank has to eat early tonight to get to his martial arts class), buy some French beans (it's the only green thing Ben will eat) and some melon (a quick dessert). Then I remember I've forgotten the anti-itch cream for their mosquito bites from the weekend camping and I've got to double-back to the chemist behind the train line; I get there and he has just closed and I swear and some schoolboys look up from under their boaters and smirk and I'm doing my high-heel jog back across to the station and down those interminable steps painted with slogans – ‘Drugs Kill' – and a fat busker echoing in the tunnel, ‘
Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door
', and this is the fourth time today that I've been through this filthy tunnel.

When I get home there isn't time to read the mail. I dump my shopping on the bench and switch the hot plates on – still with my handbag over my arm – because they take an age to warm up on this old stove. And I think of when I used to cook an interesting meal nearly every night, only now I haven't the time and the kids wouldn't eat it anyway (‘Yuk, not curry!') and I spend two hours cooking something mediocre that nobody likes and then feel let down, and on bad nights hate myself for not making more of an effort, for not being innovative and surprising, and Frank doesn't like pasta and Ben can't eat dairy foods because of his allergies but the only dessert he likes is ice-cream which he can't have, except the tofu variety which he hates (‘Yuk'), and some nights I just give up. They can have a toasted bacon sandwich and a banana or go to bed hungry.

I think of my grandmother, Audrey, who worked cleaning floors for six days and on Sunday cooked the household to a standstill. I used to watch her at the stove, a bad-tempered fairy godmother, conjuring up clouds of cholesterol. Eggs and bacon and fried bread for breakfast, hot jam tarts for morning tea (puff pastry loaded with butter, I'd watch her cut the rich yellow knobs into the dough and then roll out the layers), roast lamb and baked everything for lunch with steamed sultana pudding or suet jam roll with cream
and
custard. After lunch I'd feel so full, so terribly heavy that, even though only nine years old, I would have to go and lie down in the spare room until, around
3
.
30
, I'd be summoned for afternoon tea. Scones and sponge cake, and sardines on toast … We'd catch the train home before tea proper; God knows what they ate then. Audrey all day at the oven and the pine bench by the sink, little and plump with short dark hair and a perpetual frown of concentration. She lived to be seventy, my grandfather until eighty-one. How is this possible? Was cholesterol different then? On our Sundays my children seem to eat nothing at all. If I won't weaken and give them pies and chips and pizza they sulk into an unholy fast. And the fat man in the dirty echoing tunnel sings ‘
wasting away –
wasting away
'. Huh! When they were little I'd lie awake at night and work through, in my head, what they'd eaten for the day. Especially Rebecca. Half a green apple here, a quarter of toast there, some butter on a spoon, a knob of raw carrot, a small bowl of plain white rice. Would she make it into the next morning? Would she survive the week? Now I'm too jaded for this evening review: they're still here, even if they do bring home their lunchboxes with more or less what I put in them, except for the fact that their sandwiches look as if they've been drop-kicked around the schoolyard and the pieces reassembled for my benefit (‘Why can't we buy our lunch?'). And then there are those nights when Frank looks dolefully at his grilled fish, sans sauce of any kind. We used to have ginger and chilli, his eyes say, and fennel and coriander. We used to have lamb with apricots and sour cream and roasted almonds (‘Yuk!' the children cry). I can't bear his reproaches, my eyes stare back at his. ‘Cook yourself,' they say. But Frank is more or less unreconstructed – sausages and chops are his entire repertoire, and then under protest. I made the mistake of trying to impress him with my culinary arts before we were married and I've been paying for it ever since.