Challenge

by Paul Daley

  I say, Morning, comrades, we’ll start in a minute. But we’re missing one of the Sweeties. I want Dave here.

  There’s a knock on the door and Gina shows Dave Sweetman in. Gina’s coquettish. He walks in sheepishly, apologises for tardiness. I reckon they’ve got to be rooting. Eddie’ll know. She makes it her business to know that personal stuff.

  He says, Danny, I uh, got caught up …

  Just outside in reception, I know, you big sweetie, I say to Dave with a wink. He winces.

  Eddie scowls, stands up, brings the chair from behind my desk over for Dave so that he is directly opposite me at the other end of the table. Eddie goes back to leaning against my desk behind him. Dave shudders.

  Okay, Dave. We’re all here now. Let’s start. Anybody?

  Nothing.

  So I say, Okay, let’s please cut to it and talk about Normalians.

  11

  The rednecks reckon the Normalians are taking over. Not just the rednecks in the government and in the Opposition, but also the rednecks who have their own mass-audience radio-talkback shows and the redneck listeners who ring in to them and follow them on Twitter.

  Then there’re the rednecks who write columns for the newspapers, the rednecks in the state and local governments, and, thanks to compulsory voting, the rednecks who pay no attention to politics until they are frightened into doing so and then go on to become the rednecks who determine election outcomes.

  They are the loathsome rednecks that I know I’ve got to either engage with or take on if I’m going to win. One thing’s for sure—I’ll never change their ignorant, stupid redneck minds.

  The rednecks think they see the Normalians everywhere. And it’s true—they run the newsagencies, the service stations, the milk bars, the Chinese and Indian takeaways and the Normalian ones. They asphalt our roads, dig our ditches and clean the toilets in our hospitals and schools. They drive our taxis, wait our tables, bag the weekly supermarket shopping and then collect the trolleys in the car parks. They’re even working in the remote mines, ripping up our minerals and sending them to the docks where they load it all onto the Chinese ships.

  Our universities and our technical colleges are full of them. They first started coming to escape the Normalian civil war in the 1990s. Now we have Normali doctors and lawyers, academics and accountants, and more imams than Aya Sofia at opening time. There’s a Normali playing for the Roosters and one for the Tigers. There’s even a couple of Normali branches of the party out west of Melbourne that the Sweeties and Proudfoot haven’t yet managed to stack.

  Their curious, compelling grocery stores, with their juju roots and herbs and dried meats and weird stuff smelling of bush smoke and voodoo, are popping up in our suburban strip shops between the Vietnamese bakeries, European delis, VideoEzys and butchers. And their mosques are suddenly everywhere. The boats keep on coming and coming and now, as a result, they are moving into our middle-class neighbourhoods, having already occupied every second or third house on the public estates. Their little dark fuzzy-haired kids are going to our state schools with our children with strange things in their lunch boxes.

  It’s a fucking invasion. Every second face in some suburbs is midnight black—not Abo black like we’re all kind of used to seeing occasionally. Jesus no: there’s not much left of our Abos and what’s left, the derros and the like, well they could hardly spit up at you from the gutter let alone start some terrorist revolution or something. No. What the rednecks are worried about are your slanty-eyed, arrive-by-the-boatload, illegal, queue-jumping, Osama bin Laden-loving darkies who shift their whole clans in, who come take their jobs, want to steal their daughters and murder their boys who are fighting under our Aussie flag over there in the ’Stan.

  That’s what the worst of the rednecks out there think. It shows up in the endless focus-group research of my terrified party and feeds into our—my—bottom-line numbers, and the government’s, every time I have the guts to defend these people publicly by stating the simple truth: they’re good citizens. And every time I do that I have to gird myself because I know that every soft cock from every sad, racist westy marginal shithole on my side of politics will ambush me in the dunnies while I’m taking a piss or in the coffee queue at Aussies or in caucus. Or they’ll ring Eddie or even track her down to the Parliament House gym at lunchtime. They always say the same thing: Danny, Eddie, you can’t keep going into bat for the goddamned Normalians—it’s fuckin’ killing us out here in the ’burbs because people are terrified of them, just terrified.

  The commercial talkback goons, those lying brain-dead bullies, are playing the subliminal soundtrack of hate for it all: there’s boatload after boatload of illegal Normalians on the way, they say. They don’t mix. They will take over. They’re all preaching Jihad and breeding terrorists in our midst.

  It doesn’t seem to matter how often I go out there and call bullshit on it—try to explain that they’ve fled religious persecution in a country where we’ve seen fit to send peacekeepers, that they’re decent human beings, and anyway, there’s nothing illegal about seeking asylum here.

  Jesus, I’ve even tried to mix it up with some common sense—to say hey, there aren’t even actually that many Normalians here—maybe fifty thousand have arrived, all told, in ten years. Most, I point out, have come here not by boat, but by plane from Malaysia with clean identity documents, and claimed asylum. They have found work quickly. Learned the language. Studied. Tried to assimilate, integrate. Census figures prove show they’re socially mobile—which could just be the real crux of the problem—that very few stay on welfare once they’re settled and that they show initiative and get ahead. And let’s face it—when you’re a resettled refugee living in a run-down housing-estate flat digging ditches all day to feed your kids while the smack heads cook their government-funded fixes on your doorstep and the schizophrenic brothers upstairs spend all night howling at the moon, you’ve got to really want to work your way up and out if you’re going to stay in Oz.

  And for the most part that’s what they do. Because it beats staying in Normalia where the sharia loyalist gangs just might drop by your home and rape your wife and baby daughters and cut off your sons’ hands before killing you all with a rusty machete.

  So the stage was pretty much set for some sort of wild domestic rumpus when a suicide bomber did the business last Friday at some camel station in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, where our boys are patrolling. Three of our uniformed boys and one woman were killed. A few days later one of the shock jocks gets a story—how?—that the bomber’s a Normalian kid, raised in Western Sydney from the age of fourteen, gone over to the ’Stan to do Jihad with the Taliban against the Aussie troops.

  Sounds like bollocks straight away to me. Why go all that way to kill Australians when you could just as easily do it here? But before I knew it the ASIO chief goes public and confirms it, says we have intelligence, says the boy was part of a big cell of homegrown terrorists, despite this pretence of oh, well, I couldn’t possibly publicly comment because we just don’t discuss intelligence matters. Horseshit. Governments—theirs, ours—always comment on the intelligence that suits them.

  Then, like clockwork last Saturday morning, the ABC runs a wireless story, says that Normali kids from all across the wide brown land are being recruited to go fight for the Islamic cause in Afghanistan, in Sri Lanka, in Aceh and in West Papua. Says some have even gone back to Normalia to fight for the jihadists, and are pretty soon bound to be taking pot shots at and blowing up UEDs under Aussie peacekeepers there, too.

  I smell lies and sense the trap. One or two Normalian kids maybe. But not dozens. But Drysdale’s a sneaky cunt. If I disagree, keep supporting the foreigners, calling for the troops to come home, the impossible burden of proof will be mine.

  This, I know, is the moment. My choice is clear. Either I confront the Fear or I curl up in a ball and disappear.

  12

  I woke up at two-thirty last Saturday morning, two days ago, sweating
, dry-mouthed, with the usual horrors about the existential (I am fifty-three—my life will be wasted if I don’t win) and the mundane (how do the cupboard moths always manage to break through the seal of the airtight plastic container of Weet-Bix?) before bone weariness dragged me back into slumber about an hour later.

  When I woke, again, at seven forty-five, it was to the sound of my eight-year-old twins, Lottie and Gemma, bouncing about the living room and watching kids’ TV.

  I was on that morning. I’d been away all week and Ana badly needed sleep. Though not as badly as me. But that’s an argument I’ll never win. Some of the biggest disputes in our marriage have been about sleep—or lack of it. Sam was an easy baby. Slept ten hours a night from the time he came home. But the twins entered the world wriggling and have never stopped. Here we were in our mid-forties, way too late really, and still having more kids. Twins, for fuck’s sake. I’m going back and forth to Canberra, rooted whenever I’d walk in the door, Ana’s trying to salvage her career from Mummy Track. For the first two years of their lives Lottie and Gemma woke every two hours—and never in sync. Ana and I, both bone weary, would just lie there, turned away from each other, pretending to be asleep until one of us—usually her—would crack, curse the other, and get up to warm the bottles and change the nappies. Kids! They’re great. But they can be a firm stepping stone to hating your spouse.

  Anyway, Saturday morning I’m lying there on my side, just looking at Ana, something I don’t get to do very much of these days. Ana has never been the most conventionally beautiful woman in the room. But from the moment Tom introduced us almost twenty years ago, I’d thought her the most noticeable. At fifty-two her swimmer’s frame—broad shoulders, lean midriff and narrow hips—hasn’t succumbed entirely to the gravitational impact of childbirth or the general weathering of age.

  It’s obvious she still works out. Somehow she juggles the domestic and the personal—while I, shit parent, am always away—with her never-ending duties as a political spouse. A long-limbed athlete’s poise together with a full-lipped broad mouth, aquiline nose and searingly intelligent green eyes make her handsome. Bloody attractive.

  She still does it for me big time. I mean hypothetically. But there’s been no sex with her for months. Sex with Ana would have meant her ignoring one of the prerequisites—that we’d been in the same bed for two consecutive nights; that each of us wasn’t totally buggered and that the children’s needs—homework, dinners, ironed school uniforms, baths and bed-time stories—were met. Of course that’s just a bloody excuse. Because mostly it would have required the absence of that poisonous, simmering underlying resentment. Hers: that the pursuit of my ambition somehow entitled me to be constantly absent, which led to her suspicions about my infidelity. Mine: that she’d encouraged me to pursue politics—oh yeah, baby, we’re in this one together, this plan of ours, all the way—then burned up with spite and turned off all compassion when I’d pursued The Project with characteristic single-mindedness.

  In this regard I’m probably luckier than most politicians. You see, Ana had been privy to a front-row seat on public life thanks to her father, Richard—well, Sir Richard, actually, Premier of Victoria—when she was still in primary school. Big white cars in the front driveway, nannies and babysitters, turn left when they boarded a plane, strangers forever in the kitchen demanding the old man’s attention, Big Dick always away and mum, Tess—Mother Theresa!—always in the support role, suffering in silent solitude. Yes, he was a Tory. I know, I know—how could I, right? But he was a Tory back when the L in Liberal was overwhelmingly small—well before the party was hijacked by its Jurassic Park branch, the self-flagellating, hair-shirt-wearing gay haters from Opus Dei, the climate-change deniers, economic flat-earthers and social-policy cavemen who revel, despite their tax havens and their inherited wealth and their negatively geared slum rentals, in dispensing punitive tough love—of the you’re either a lifter or a leaver variety—to the under-classes. Richard eventually made the same mistake as most of us: he started to believe his own bullshit. So he went federal when the Tories were just about to head back into the dark ages.

  He was talked of as a federal leader for a while. Even made it to deputy at one point in the late seventies. But then, inevitably, they chewed him up and spat him out over a bag of issues—publicly funded abortion, government schools funding, Aboriginal land rights—about which he’d drawn a line in the sand against the barbarians. He became a conscience of the party from the backbench, in truth a bit of a dilettante, really. Eventually, he had more mates on our side. Meanwhile he developed RDS—Relevance Deprivation Syndrome—as well as a loathsome problem with the bottle and a not insignificant one with his trousers. The family endured the gossip about his indiscretions (Dick would never have survived social media) and fully supported him when he quit the Tories and successfully contested his seat for the Australian Democrats. He served a term, got the flick at the next election, and then it was all over. Dick went home to the big bungalow in East Malvern. But his daughters had gone and the dogs had died. Tess was still there though, and eager to extract the dividend: a retirement of luxury overseas travel on his Gold Pass, where his past indiscretions became her unspoken emotional collateral. Dick had a few good years before he stroked out on a cruise ship in the early eighties, not yet seventy. I never met him. Ana reckoned I’d have liked him though. I’m sure. I like politicians who stick to their principles no matter the personal cost.

  So Ana is no naif. She went into The Project with her eyes wide open, ambitious for us, not just me. She’s got a higher threshold for the indelicacies, the pitfalls, the rough and tumble of political life, and if anyone knows how it can wreck a family, it’s her. That said, many have been the times she’s warned me that she’d cut off my balls if I behaved like her father. Which has, naturally, made me cautious. Although perhaps not always quite careful enough.

  Lying there, looking at her in bed last Saturday, I got the feeling and for a few seconds I even thought of trying it on—never know your luck unless you throw your hat in—so I reached over and touched her cheek. She sighed, rolled over the other way and slept on. So I got up, quietly closed the bedroom door and wandered out to the lounge in my trackie dacks and an old Levi’s black denim shirt I bought on an end-of-year footy trip to LA too many years ago. It was freezing, not that the kids ever feel it. I flicked on the central heating on the hallway control panel.

  Babies, I said not too loudly, Dad’s here—got home last night after you went to sleep, and they just ignored me totally. The ultimate payback for being such a deadbeat, dickhead, absent father. Babies, I said, louder this time and they noticed, clattering across the polished boards towards me with the usual chorus—Daaada—and crashed into me, wrapping their arms around my middle.

  Dada. Dada. This morning I can be Dada.

  It’d been a week since I’d seen them. Lottie’s hair had been cut into a tight bob. Gem had a crusty graze on her forehead. Ana hadn’t told me that it’d happened. Least if she did, I couldn’t remember the conversation.

  Sam came out, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Suddenly, at fourteen, he’s a big bugger of a kid—lanky Great Dane height close to mine and real muscle tone that shames my soft edges. I looked at his feet—twelve-and-a-half at least. He’s made for switching between centre-half-forward and on-the-ball like me. I’ve just got to keep him interested. I don’t know, maybe because I’ve been so absent for so long I’ve still got him fixed in my head as the six-year-old boy he was, with his Harry Potter cape and Goosebumps books—frozen in time at the point where I’d effectively left home and chucked in family life for politics.

  I put my arm around Sam, gave him a mock hip-and-shoulder, and ruffled his hair.

  What time’s your match, mate?

  Ten.

  Where?

  Home—at school. Main oval.

  That’s where I’d first played with Tom for the same boy’s college almost forty years earlier.

  Sweet, I’m tak
ing you. I’m home this weekend.

  Dad, I don’t want to go.

  What? You’re in the team, mate. You’re going to be better than me, mate—you’ve just got to apply yourself a bit more, you know that. Go in harder and you’ll be right.

  The twins watched intently. Lottie broke the silence, said, Dad—Sammy’s got something to tell you. He doesn’t want to play anymore.

  Sam blushed, shook his head, pissed off at his sister for letting out of the bag what has clearly been the source of major family discussion in my absence.

  I asked, Mate, this true? What’s the bloody story here?

  And then he said, Dad when’re you going to lay off me and footy? His voice was quavering as he went on to say, I don’t want to play footy all the friggin’ time. Today, I’ve got other stuff on. A group of guys are going geocaching. That’s more fun than footy. I want to do that. You only want me to play footy because you want me to be just like you. But I’m not just like you, Dad. And I don’t want to be.

  How’s that for gratitude?

  I’d been warned by other footy dads that this might happen if I pushed him too much and if he came to resent my absences. Payback, they said. But I just thought, what would you dickheads know and don’t judge my parenting and who was it anyways that captained the ninety premiers—’course the kid’ll play football. And of course I’d read that book by that bloody know-all, hippy smart-arse expert on boy-raising that recommended I be a good role model to my boy by using my neckties to stake up the tomatoes and that absent fathers raise deadbeat sons, but it gave me the shits so badly that I said fuck the tomatoes and ripped up the book and chucked it in the compost instead. What would he know? I mean, look at me—the only father figure I’d ever had was the empty uniform at the end of Mum’s cupboard.