by Ken Saunders
...
Aggie felt a hand shaking her shoulder. ‘What time is it?’ she rumbled. ‘It’s still dark.’
‘It’s six am,’ one of the Veronicas said. ‘Get up, we have to be in Yass by nine.’
Aggie sat up and put her feet on the ground. She stood up slowly. There were aches, but not nearly as many as she’d expected. Her back mostly. She flinched.
The rain had not let up at all yesterday. Eight hours of hard push into a driving wind, but they had made Binalong at last. Aggie had had a shower, a handful of trail mix, half a glass of red wine—that glass was still on the bedside table—and collapsed into bed. ‘I need a coffee,’ she told them now.
‘There’s no cafe open yet,’ a Veronica informed her.
‘We’ll get one in Yass. We kept a piece of pizza for you in case you were hungry,’ the other Veronica said, aware of the meagreness of the offer.
Tim the bodyguard entered the room. It struck Aggie that both the Veronicas looked sheepish.
‘How far is it to Yass?’ Aggie asked.
‘About forty. Maybe a bit less.’
‘Forty!’ Aggie couldn’t help groaning. ‘How far is it to Canberra then?’ They had to get there today. Tomorrow, Sunday, was the leaders’ debate.
‘Sixty from Yass to Canberra. A hundred kilometres all up today,’ Veronica answered.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Tim interjected, ‘I estimate we did a hundred and sixty kilometres yesterday.’
Aggie turned her glare onto the two Veronicas, who suddenly seemed preoccupied with their Genie phones. They had let her think Wagga Wagga to Canberra was a hundred and fifty kilometres total.
‘The footage from yesterday was brilliant,’ the taller Veronica declared. Having formed their mini-peloton, the small group had been joined by an Australia Post drone that was sidelining its parcel delivery obligations to provide news footage for the media networks. ‘It’s played well with the public overnight.’
‘Everything’s in place for today,’ the shorter Veronica added eagerly. ‘Just wait until we get to Yass.’
The patter of rain on the roof picked up. Aggie suppressed a scowl and took a bite of cold pizza. She shot a glance at the half-finished glass of wine, but thought better of it. ‘Right then,’ she said, ‘I’ll get dressed and we’ll go.’ There wasn’t any other option. ‘They better have a good cafe in Yass,’ she added, making this mild hope sound something like a threat.
Three people with bicycles were waiting for them in the dark outside the hotel. ‘We’re here for the “On to Canberra” trek,’ they told her. The Veronicas had recruited local Bicyclism Australia members to join them.
Aggie surveyed the sky but it was too dark to tell much other than that rain was currently falling on them. ‘I appreciate the support,’ she said, ‘but you don’t have to bike in the rain with us.’
The recruits laughed. ‘We don’t want to miss this,’ one of them replied. ‘Today’s the day!’
What did they think was going to happen? Aggie wondered. The Binalong contingent cycled in the vanguard with the Veronicas following. Having served as her windshield all day yesterday, Tim now pulled alongside her.
‘When I fell asleep last night, you were having an argument with the Veronicae,’ she said, adopting his term. ‘What was it about?’
Tim paused before replying. ‘I told them they were driving you too hard, that they shouldn’t have made you bike so far.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I told them that you weren’t a cyclist, and they had no right to demand such distances from you.’
‘Not a cyclist?’ Aggie exclaimed, surprised at the indignation in her voice.
‘You’re a cyclist,’ Tim conceded. ‘You’re just not a cyclist like them or me. You probably ride to work and all that, but in wanting you to churn off a hundred and sixty kilometres, they were being bloody-minded. They have the legs for that kind of distance, but your pedalling yesterday, it was done on guts and grit alone.’ There was admiration in his voice. ‘I told them they ought to appreciate that.’
Aggie said nothing for a few hundred metres. ‘Two months ago, I’d never biked further than fifteen kilometres,’ she admitted at last. ‘Today, when I was told we had a hundred kilometres to do, but that we’d done a hundred and sixty yesterday, part of me was proud at the one-sixty and the not-really-very-sensible part of me thought, given yesterday, well, a hundred kilometres isn’t much, is it?’
Tim laughed. A cry came from one of the Binalong riders up front. ‘There be blue skies ahead,’ he shouted as if he were up in a crow’s nest. A soft cheer rippled through the group. The first drone of the day swooped alongside Aggie, some controller at Australia Post having judged there was enough light for decent footage.
‘We’re heading for Yass and a coffee,’ Aggie told the drone, ‘and then it’s on to Canberra from there!’
...
The sight of Yass put even the thought of coffee off her immediate agenda. Aggie was gobsmacked. With other things needing her attention in the campaign, she had given control of the Bicyclism Australia website to the Veronicae. Now, with her mouth half open, she perceived the full organising scope of her two campaign assistants. Cyclists from all along the Melbourne–Sydney train line had descended on the town from Friday evening to Saturday morning. A festive atmosphere filled the streets. Someone generously handed Aggie a takeaway latte to save her queuing up for one. Aggie gave interviews to a swarm of drones. Behind her the Veronicae and a local teacher were mustering the Yass Primary School recorder band to perform a rendition of ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’. One of the Veronicae then clambered onto a penny-farthing that had been produced from somewhere. She pedalled out into the gathered mass. ‘Give me your answer do, Australia!’ she shouted at the crowd and the drones buzzing around her.
‘Ned Ludd! Ned Ludd!’ the cyclists shouted back.
Aggie found the emotion of the moment almost too much. Ned Ludd was the answer? For the first time, she saw the passion of the Luddite campaign and the hope that passion contained. Did she deserve this kind of support? She’d been so busy campaigning, she hadn’t considered that question before. Regardless of where her thoughts were going, her body was busily scrambling up onto a nearby wheelie bin, her legs betraying nothing of their weariness. ‘On your bikes everyone!’ she shouted. ‘On to Canberra from here!’ She jumped acrobatically to the ground. A school kid with a recorder took Aggie’s empty takeaway coffee cup as if it were a prized souvenir.
‘Can you sign the cup?’ the girl asked, producing a pen.
Aggie scrawled Ned Ludd underneath the barista’s L for latte. She mounted her bicycle amid more chants of ‘Ned Ludd’. There were hundreds of bicycles. This time it was a full-on peloton that hit the road.
The sixty kilometres to Canberra were a blur. They had slowed to keep the pack together and not lose any stragglers. Incredibly, Veronica was able to keep pace on the penny-farthing. Was there nothing this woman couldn’t do on two wheels? Aggie wondered. There was often a breakaway group running ahead, but they always came back to the pack, sensing that the peloton and its Ned were what mattered. Other cyclists joined from side roads on the Yass-to-Canberra leg. When they hit the outskirts of Canberra, newcomers pedalled in from all sides, making Tim more attentive to his bodyguard duties. Still, he took a moment to turn to Aggie and blurt, ‘Ms Ludd, this is amazing! I’m so glad I got to be part of this!’
The penny-farthing pulled alongside them. ‘It’s two kilometres to our hotel,’ Veronica shouted down at her. ‘We could go straight there, or we could …’ Veronica caught Tim’s glare and withheld her alternative proposal.
Aggie laughed. ‘Or we could take the whole peloton on a spin around Lake Burley Griffin,’ she proposed. ‘What’s that? Ten kilometres? That’s nothing!’ she scoffed.
Veronica whooped and rode ahead to lead the pack.
Partway around Burley Griffin, the Veronicae halted the entire mass and hustled Aggie up to a vantage point from where she cou
ld address the crowd.
Tim, by her side, was worried. ‘Ms Ludd,’ he said, ‘while we were moving, we could be considered traffic, but stopped like this—’ he pointed to a distant police car approaching ‘—we’ll be considered a demonstration and we don’t have a permit. Nobody has got official Demonstration Participant IDs. We don’t have anything. It could be major trouble for you, trouble for the Luddites.’
‘Don’t you be worrying about that,’ a Veronica replied. She smiled and, adopting the term herself, said, ‘Your Veronicae have already taken care of that minor detail.’
‘That’s impossible!’ Tim swept his arm across the whole range of the crowd. ‘You can’t have registered them for a demonstration. You don’t know who most of these people are.’
Veronica pulled a tiny red item from a pocket. ‘This is all we’re going to need.’
‘What is it?’
‘A ribbon. A first-place ribbon.’ She pointed at a young girl in the crowd wearing a Ned Ludd for Eden-Monaro t-shirt. ‘Tim, get that girl up onto this hill and …’ She turned to Aggie. ‘Ned, when that police car gets here, you make a big show of pinning this ribbon onto her t-shirt and congratulating her on winning the first annual Yass-to-Canberra bike race.’ She grinned at the bodyguard. ‘What you see here, Tim, is not a demonstration. It’s an amateur athletic event. The government might have slapped a thousand regulations on our right to demonstrate, but they never thought to restrict amateur sporting events!’
It dawned on Aggie that the Veronicae were, in their own mad way, geniuses.
Aggie delivered a rousing spontaneous speech to the faithful—the Pelotoni, as she affectionately called them, not sure whether she had just invented the word or not.
Whether it was Aggie’s speech or the quiet word a Veronica had had with the police or just simple prudence on their part, the police did nothing to interfere. Candice, the twelve-year-old ribbon winner, told the crowd that cycling was fun and a good way to stay fit.
Aggie surveyed the crowd. There was still work to do. She had to meet with several Ned Ludds to prepare for the debate tomorrow. She needed a shower. She needed a hearty meal. She was going to take the amazing Veronicae and the loyal Tim out to dinner tonight for a proper feast. She was famished from her exertions. Her stomach was rumbling, but she also felt an almost equal hunger for the looming debate.
What she could really use, the indulgent part of her brain suggested, was a leg massage. That wasn’t going to be possible, Aggie told herself as the chant of ‘Ned Ludd’ filled the air yet again. First, there was an election to be won.
CHAPTER NINE
Prime Minister Fitzwilliams had expected his improv theatre coach to be some sensitive New Age twit murmuring scientific-sounding nonsense about expressive transmission or some other current fad. Instead, Georgia Lambert had sent him a battle-hardened stage and B-movie actor with a badly broken nose and a very direct manner.
‘Improv is the best weapon you’ll have against the Luddite in the debate,’ Paul, his coach, had declared. ‘A weapon you’ll have and they won’t.’
Fitzwilliams looked at him, surprised.
‘Yeah,’ Paul said, ‘everybody thinks the Luddites are skilled at improv, instinctively hitting the dramatic moment in debate, that they are making it up as they go along, but that’s crap.’ Fitzwilliams half expected Paul to spit for emphasis. ‘They aren’t improv artists, they’re chess players. All those supposedly creative ideas they keep springing on you and Labor? They’ve worked out all that stuff beforehand and they carefully set it up during the debate and then spike it like a volleyball player.’
‘I thought you said they were like chess players,’ Fitzwilliams quibbled.
‘Yeah, well, they’re like both. When you do improv, you can mix metaphors.’ Paul jabbed a finger at him. ‘That trick with the celery stick the Luddite pulled on Donna Hargreaves and that Labor health person whose name I can’t be bothered to remember …’ Fitzwilliams could not believe how much he was liking this fellow. ‘There was nothing improv about that. She tricked them into declaring policies on a non-existent disease. The Luddite lured them both into that trap and then sprang it. That’s chess. That’s what they do. Improv can counter that.’
This actor was right, Fitzwilliams saw. The Luddites followed an already-worked-out strategy, and that strategy depended on the other parties campaigning in the standard political way. If Fitzwilliams did the unexpected, if he went ‘improv’, it might well disrupt whatever debating plan they had.
‘Let’s do this, Paul,’ Fitzwilliams told the actor. ‘Let’s go improv.’
‘Okay,’ Paul said, shelving the rest of his pep talk. He hadn’t expected the PM to accept his analysis so readily. Paul rubbed his hands together. ‘A lot of people are treating the Luddites like they’re heroes. They aren’t heroes. They’ve just thrown a spanner in the works and people are going, “Oh wow! Aren’t they something?” So some no name of a Ned Ludd is going to front up against you at the debate. We’re going to cut that Ned Ludd to pieces. Agreed?’
‘Delighted to.’
‘Right, but some people aren’t going to like it if you cut their hero to pieces. They’ll call you a bully. The only way to do it, therefore, is with humour. Make cutting them to pieces so funny the public will go along with it because people like to share in a joke. Nobody wants to be the one standing outside, not getting the joke or not approving of it.’
‘I’m not that good with humour,’ Fitzwilliams cautioned. ‘I do question time kind of jokes, but that stuff isn’t really funny,’ he admitted. ‘We have to tell the backbenchers to laugh along with it.’
‘I don’t want lame question time kind of humour. I want you to forget the last twenty years of your political life, where you’ve massaged your messages, weighed the consequences of everything, taken no chances. Humour isn’t homogenised that way. With humour, you’ve got to take people some place their brain hasn’t been before, a place that’s funny.’
‘I’m not sure I can do that,’ Fitzwilliams confessed. He didn’t want to let the actor down, but Paul should know the truth.
‘Yes, you can,’ Paul insisted. ‘First, remember, you’re not a comedian, you’re a prime minister. So do all those other things, all that political shit, so the voters will recognise you’re not half bad as a prime minister, but when you want to go for the knockout blow, that’s when you hit the Luddites with comedy.’
Paul cracked his knuckles. ‘We’re going to start with an exercise: knocking down a hero. I’m Neil Armstrong a’walkin’ on the moon and you’re Richard Nixon.’
‘Richard Nixon?’ Fitzwilliams asked. Practising being Richard Nixon didn’t sound like a winning idea.
‘You and I are old enough to remember this. Neil Armstrong and Buzz What’s-his-name were walking on the moon and Richard Nixon called them from the White House to congratulate them. Nixon probably didn’t give a shit about the space program, but he wasn’t going to miss a chance to claim glory on worldwide television.’
Fitzwilliams recalled it vividly. He’d been five years old, his whole family around the television. Neil Armstrong stopped moving on the surface of the moon while his president spoke to him. The young Fitzwilliams was fearful a giant meteor was going to smash the astronauts to pieces before his very eyes.
Paul now set a different scenario. ‘This time, Richard Nixon isn’t just seeking a bit of easy high-impact promo. The Nixon you’re about to become has had a gutful of the space program. NASA’s been bleeding money from your treasury and now that they’ve finally got someone on the moon, all the TV stations are trotting out that old tape of John Fucking Kennedy vowing to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. You hated Kennedy and NASA’s a right pain. So now, make all America recognise that Neil and NASA need to be taken down a peg or two.’ He held up a cautionary hand. ‘But do it with humour. You need to start now.’ Paul snapped his fingers.
Fitzwilliams squared his shoulders and pretended to hold an
old-style phone to his ear. ‘Neil? Buzz? This is your president,’ he intoned, affecting a Richard Nixonesque voice.
Paul stood stock-still. ‘Yes, Mr President.’
‘As your president, and on behalf of the American people, I’d like to know what you’re doing up there.’
‘We’re collecting rocks, samples to bring back to Earth.’
Fitzwilliams felt a glimmer of an idea. ‘Rocks, huh? You know, Neil, it has taken about ten billion of the taxpayers’ money to get you up there … and you’re going to bring us back some rocks?’
‘Yessir, Mr President.’
Fitzwilliams paused, not because he was out of dialogue. He’d paused, he noted to himself, out of comic timing. ‘Neil, I don’t know how to break this to you, but we already have a lot of rocks down here. We have a lot of rocks in America,’ he emphasised. ‘We have so many rocks, we have a whole mountain range named after them.’
‘It’s for science, Mr President.’
‘Science?’ Fitzwilliams affected his friendliest tone in his Nixon voice. ‘I guess you’re keen on rocks, are you, Neil? A bit of a geologist?’
‘I wouldn’t say that, Mr President. I’m a test pilot. NASA did give us some geology lessons though.’
‘So what do you know about rocks then?’ Fitzwilliams did not wait for an answer. ‘What are the three types of rocks, for instance?’
‘Well, there are igneous … uh, metamorphic and sedimentary,’ Paul/Neil replied.
‘Sedimentary?’ Fitzwilliams took the opening. ‘Look around you, Neil. Do you see any lakes? Do you see any rivers? Do you think you’re going to find any sedimentary rocks up there? I know it’s called the Sea of Tranquility, Neil, but did NASA ever tell you there’s no water up there?’
Paul/Neil, quietly, ‘I know that, sir.’
‘So you’re going to be bringing us back about twenty pounds of these rocks, I understand, and the Apollo program has cost us all, who knows, maybe twenty billion dollars, I can’t keep track. NASA just keeps sending us these invoices with astronomically long numbers on them. Tell me, Neil, how much do you think these moon rocks are costing us per ounce?’