Reading Madame Bovary (7 page)

I showered, a long, hot shower on the nape of my neck, which was aching from a day at my console writing a report. I forgot to put on the packaged shower cap in the basket on the bathroom ledge and soon my hair was wet. I wrapped the inevitable white hotel towel around me and climbed onto the bed, still in my tube of towel. Frank unwrapped me, turning me over on my stomach. I curled the white pillow up under my breasts. When we had subsided we began to talk again. He said how having time to talk like this was as big a luxury as our love-making. I was thinking how different it was from last time at The Russell – less urgent, less intense. There we had hardly spoken a word to one another all night. Here we were like old friends. Laid-back, conversational, affectionate. We dressed, and drove home.

The third time it was January, the height of the tourist season, and the only hotel we could get into at short notice was a new one behind the Rocks, in Ultimo, called The Lawson. It was a catalogue hotel designed for Malaysian and Hong Kong tourists. On the walls of our room were framed reproduction caricatures of the writer Henry Lawson. Here he was leaning on a walking cane and holding his pipe. Here was a black-and-white drawing of a drunken man splayed on the back of a frenzied galloping horse. Over the settee was a large print of the facsimile cover of
On the
Track
with two bushmen humping their swags. Here they were, Kay and Frank, sitting up on the bed, fully clothed, except for their shoes, sipping bourbons and ice and discussing the absurd prints on the wall. It was cosy, it was anodyne, it was just like home. We decided it was only going to work at The Russell and if we couldn't get the room we wanted we wouldn't go at all.

The primate in his cage

On the morning of our conference at the zoo – this time, the real one – we all feel a bit skittish. Like kids on an outing. I have chartered a mini-bus to take us there and have my directions from the functions manager, Cecile. ‘You can't miss the convention centre,' she said over the phone. ‘You just follow the arrow marked
Primates
.'

The conference centre is, in fact, bang in the middle of the primates section and we are booked into the Flamingo Room, a huge hexagonal space with a vaulted ceiling like a church, and three whole walls of glass so that you can look out at the animals in their dense tropical garden, their rock pool and their high enclosure of wire netting. Among all this is a three-metre bamboo wall and a fretwork of ropes for the primates to swing from.

‘What sort of primates have we got here?' asks Martin jocularly. Even he is in a good mood.

Winton peers at the plaque beside the glass wall and reads aloud. ‘Black Gibbon:
Hylobates concolor
,' he reads. ‘A small arboreal ape known for its suspensory behaviour.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘It means … hang on … it means that the black gibbon throws itself from tree to tree over gaps of ten metres or more using its arms.' He squints and reads on, half muttering to himself, ‘… adult black male is around
6
.
3
kilograms … the pelage of the male is black with white whiskers …'

We leave him to it and look for coffee. Winton always has to be across the detail. Eventually he joins us at the urn. ‘I hope this isn't going to be too distracting,' he says. ‘The pool is nice, and the rainforest, but I'm not sure about the arboreal apes.'

There are two tables in the room and the first decision is this. Will we sit at the round table or the oblong? We decide on the round, ‘for equality'. There's some discreet shuffling so that almost everyone is skewed to one side and can look directly out onto the black gibbons who have begun, languidly, to cavort among the trees. Two adults and their children. The female is a kind of albino, a light yellow colour, but it's not she who is the show-off in the group. It's her old man who is hell-bent on impressing us and he now begins his warm-up. It's as if he knows he has an audience. We've been warned not to go out onto the terrace and look at them, or wave, or talk to them, because, said Cecile, they are very territorial and they make a shrieking noise to warn people off.

We settle into our chairs and our agenda papers and get down to drafting our vision statement. The first hour is long. At some point I hear a terrific racket and look up. Lisa has defied the guidelines and gone out onto the terrace to look at the black gibbons, has slipped out through the glass doors on her way back from the loo. The gibbons have begun to shriek.

Christina fumes. ‘Tell Lisa, for God's sake, to come inside and stop provoking the beasts!'

Kelvin gets up and joins Lisa, who has retreated to the inside of the window, from where she continues to look out onto the cage, and they are both giggling. After a minute or so they begin to wave their arms in imitation of the gibbons, as if they are doing some dumb tribal dance.

Winton sighs. ‘People, can we stay in our seats here?'

Lisa and Kelvin are called back to their places at the table.

During the lunch-break we stroll around the narrow paths of the primates area. We have bundled the sandwiches provided by the caterers into some paper napkins and carried them outside to eat in the sun. Winton is pensive as he walks beside me. ‘You know, Kay, this isn't easy for me either, and it doesn't help to be working with a group of piss-takers.' He looks so childlike that, as usual, I feel the need to console him.

‘They're just tired,' I say. ‘The re-structuring has been hard on them. That's why I suggested we get out of the office. It will all come together this afternoon, you wait and see.'

But when we resume our seats the troops seem not restless but over-relaxed. Some are dozy, others have cast off their work mode altogether and are frisky. Instead of taking our ape friends for granted they are even more distracted by them and look up admiringly at the male, who is ready to perform for us once more. With manic energy he swings, and swings again, from his immensely long, furry arms, hurtling himself almost in free fall from one side of his luxurious cage to the other, like a trapeze artist on speed.

‘It's hard not to watch,' says Kelvin, lazing back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head. ‘To ignore him would be like you were sitting behind a great artist but not bothering to look at the canvas.' I'm impressed by this: it's the most empathetic thing I've heard our programmer say. Winton just sighs.

But by mid-afternoon, in the tea-break, we are all drawn to the window, even Winton.

‘
Hylobates concolor
has psyched us out,' I say, and Winton gives his resigned little smile, and gazes across to that agile black ape who is flinging himself into space with a driven, rhythmic leaping that is utterly mesmerising, from bare tree limb to bare tree limb. So we stand and gawp, poised with cups in hand. There is no sign now of the mother and the young ones, who appear to have taken their rest in the dense foliage, leaving the big black male to strut his stuff, to uphold the honour of the species before these tired and jaded humans down below. He is the supreme acrobat, flying above the carefully planted rainforest, grinning all the while. Occasionally he pauses for one second, but always at an unexpected moment, as if moving to some unpredictable syncopation. How daring he looks, yet how insouciant. His flying self, his flinging arms, seem too sudden, too unthinking and uncalculated to be sure of reaching his mark, and as he approaches the intricate wire-netting wall at what looks like all the wrong angles, and at reckless speed, you think that this time he won't make it. Your breath catches. This time he'll fall. But no, he hits the wire netting lightly, at an impossible angle, full on, like a limp carcass, a sugar bag thrown against a wall that doesn't ricochet off but adheres, and he looks up and around, but only for a moment, still grinning. See, he says, I can do this, this is nothing, but I'm not trying to impress you, who are
you
? What do I care? And he's off again. On and on and on, barely pausing, each swing twice as far, twice as wide as you anticipate. You calculate, in a blink, the width of his swing, and each time it's far wider than common sense would think possible. Absurdly, recklessly wide:
out of all proportion
, you think.

‘Bravo!' cries Winton. ‘Bravo! Encore!'

And suddenly we are moved, moved by this inexhaustible display of poise to break into a round of spontaneous applause. Here he is, in his cage, locked in, a mere beast, and yet he is the epitome of transcendental élan. He makes our vision statement seem lame.

In future we will refer to this conference as Black Gibbon Day. Winton will refer to the vision statement as the Black Gibbon vision statement. It's the only honour we have to bestow on him.

The mystery

There is a mystery at the heart of my day, a mystery at the heart of the mundane. Take yesterday. It was one of those days when I woke up in a fog of negativity. One of those days when everything seems repetitive and dull. My job is stale: I am going nowhere. The heavens are vast and I am a small, insignificant speck of dust. What is the point of all this, you think? If it were not for the children, why would anyone bother to get out of bed? I tell Frank I have a headache and he will have to organise the children and I stay in my fog beneath the blankets until the house is empty. When I drag myself out of bed I am late for work. And yet, mysteriously, without even my noticing it, once I settle at my desk, my work goes well for the day, almost as if I am not in charge of it and someone else is doing it for me. That evening, without planning or forethought, I cook a particularly good meal. Somewhere in the course of my day a current of animal well-being has risen in me, like a sap. In the morning I was ready to abandon hope, to succumb to ennui, and by evening I am an artist in the kitchen. How does this witless transformation occur? When it happens it seems independent of my thoughts, independent of my will. It just is. But what is this ‘it' and where does it come from? Is it the same current that animates the black gibbon, that keeps him swinging extravagantly about his luxurious cage?

Fluctuat nec mergitur
: we are tossed by the waves but we do
not sink.

I think back to my brothel fantasy. It is, in truth, a rare one for I no longer fantasise. It's age. I am forty, I am myself at last. I have arrived, chosen, worked out, drifted into who I am. When I was young I daydreamed all the time. Now I no longer need the daydream, those future scenarios of Kay as X or living in Y. It's healthy, I suppose, but I miss the electric charge of a fantasy life. I still occasionally daydream, but rarely, and this is not age, or maturation itself, but what age brings: the children, schedules, no free time to just sit. What I really want is not to fantasise but to have time to daydream. Daydreaming is not fantasy – it's not imagining yourself in a new situation. Daydreaming is free-forming narrative. You let all the facts of your past and present drift across the screen of your consciousness, like a diorama, and you form and re-form them in varying stories – as heroine, as failure, as navigator, as warrior, as magistrate, as woman, as mother – and you surrender to its dreamy, excitational, trance-like state; ecstatic with the free flow, the sense of the story of your past, the wonderful form and drama of it, of having lived, completely, no matter how stressfully, your own plot.

And what follows is a state of calm elation, of the dissolution of time, of being in the present moment, like an animal washed up onto some paradisiacal shore. Somewhere at the heart of the daydream is a mysterious source of bliss.

One day I'll learn how to go there and stay within it forever. I know that I will not be able to take my children with me, but they will remember me, and that is enough.

Benigno numine
: by the favour of the heavens.

Reading
Madame Bovary

It was the end of her final year in law and as a graduation present her aunt gave her the money to go trekking in Nepal. But she didn't like it there: too cold, too steep, too dirty. She found she didn't do well at high altitudes and in any case she had never liked camping. She liked comfort and above all she needed to be warm. She hated the feel of dirt under her nails, of small stones beneath her ground sheet and the sense of zipped enclosure within the fuggy padding of a sleeping bag. Nor did she like being in a group of backpacking Americans and Germans who had endless banal discussions about the best kind of walking boots or the merits of brand-name packs – or worse, sat around the campfire singing so-called ‘Rainbow' songs or offering up recollections in sacramental tones of their own feats of abseiling. The nadir was reached when they drifted into tedious and shallow raves about Tibetan Buddhism. Nirvana? It was all just dirt and squalor to her.

Just three weeks after leaving Sydney she arrived, broke, in Amsterdam. There she hooked up with an English guy called Tom, who corralled her in a dark corner of a bar on the Zuyderzee. Before long they were bunkered in on the top floor of his cousin's apartment overlooking one of the canals, and she found herself just a touch smitten. Tom was one of those big hunky men she had a weakness for. It was a particular kind of body she craved, almost independently of the person who inhabited it. He might be infuriatingly taciturn – an enigma – and bloody hard to talk to but with a body like that it didn't matter. You could let it smother you until the breath stifled in your chest or you could fight back with abandon and get into a good heaving sexual scrap with just enough spite to sharpen the senses.

Tom invited her to return to London with him and she said yes. Though he appeared to be one of those stolid Englishmen who are unable to express their feelings it was clear that he was serious.

Within four weeks of having met they were crossing the English Channel. Almost immediately she found a job as a receptionist for a computer firm in Camden Town and moved into Tom's flat, half of a bare-fronted, red-brick terrace in the East End, a block away from where he taught maths at the local high school. The school was a grim place, more like a gaol, with high wire fences, asphalt yards and bricks the colour of soot. The buildings even had wire mesh along the upper-storey walkways that made them look like cages. Sometimes on her morning walk to the tube station she would glance across at the school and thank God she didn't have to work there.