by Paul Daley
What I didn’t say to them but might yet if they ask the right questions next time, is that, well if it does end that way, with me losing my seat and arseholed from parliament, it’s okay—I’ll take Ana and the kids off to France or Germany for a gap year, sleep, read books, give back to my family.
Or maybe I’ll go to Plan B. I’ve told Indy that I’m willing to leave the family, especially if I lose the election. Be with her all the time. Go back to the law—maybe a crash-and-bash practice down the coast somewhere. Or even sit the bar exam in Dublin. I’ve always wanted to live in Dublin—go back to my roots. Drink Guinness. Get fat. Reconnect with Dad’s family. Well, that’s where Mum reckons they came from.
18
We are all on this planet separated by six degrees or fewer. It’s the Kevin Bacon principle. Errol talks about it another way—in terms of what he calls rooting circles. Reckons he can connect me or Eddie to Queen Elizabeth, George Bush Junior or Marc Bolan through our sex partners over the decades.
Yes, it’s the sort of stuff we talk about sometimes, in the weird window of downtime after Question Time, when the journos are filing frantically and the MPs are taking five to call home or check their personal emails.
Some go for a walk around the path that girdles Parliament House. Some go to the gym. Some pray. Some meditate. But we talk about stuff like rooting circles.
I’d never given much thought to the whole six-degrees thing. My world had been pretty small. There was the old Olympic Village estate, the club down at West Heidelberg, high school and then college where I’d met Tom, later the club and university, and McQuoid, Dethridge & Partners. Then came the party, the High Court and now the parliament. Meeting the McQuoids and through them, the Dethridges, gave me opportunities, set me on a trajectory I might not otherwise have tracked.
But it actually gave me entrée to an even smaller, far more exclusive world, where everyone’s paths crisscrossed repeatedly, where it was the norm for indiscretions and faults to be noted but not spoken of. Civility and discretion were everything.
It’s possible I’d have got into the law without the secondary school scholarship. But it’s more likely I’d have quit after Year 10. I’d have failed—like every other boy on the estate—to find an apprenticeship, then gravitated towards drugs and petty crime through my teammates down at West Heidelberg. Christ, some of those boys were already doing burgs when they were twelve. In the slammer by nineteen, too.
At the very best I might have made it to a one-man operation above a carpet showroom in Keilor, doing conveyances and wills. But I would never have been employed by McQuoid and Dethridge and I wouldn’t have ridden to preselection on the back of their party connections.
Yes, it’s just possible the club might have spotted me even if McQuoid and Dethridge hadn’t been on the board. But I do have to admit that, despite how damned talented I was, they had drawn the attention of the scouts to me. Of course they were always going to make sure Tom was in the squad.
Becoming associate to the Chief Justice of the High Court? Well, that’s no easy mark. And while I’d done bloody well at law school and run some good cases with the firm, nobody does well enough to get a job like that without the right contacts. Vincent Dethridge and Paddy McQuoid considered me an adopted son. They supported me, helped raise me, really, gave me all the chances I never would have seen otherwise. I, in turn, was discreet—respected their confidences, didn’t talk out of turn about their private lives or the stuff that went awry with the firm or while Paddy was in The Lodge.
I was a natural for the job as associate to Vince when Paddy appointed him to the High Court. But I’m not going to fool myself that it was anything other than nepotism.
Ditto for preselection. Fuck, there’s no other way. You want to be in politics, you court the right people to get your seat. And so McQuoid and Dethridge and their right-wing automatons sponsored me through their stacked branches in the same way as they sponsored me financially through university and secondary school.
And I was so ambitious, running so hard from the village, I’d have done anything to get ahead.
Their modus operandi had always been to watch and wait for payday as their human investments matured. They knew everyone has their price. Not least me. And now they want to collect. And I suspect that means caving in to Drysdale if it’s the difference between losing and winning the election. I ask myself what Paddy would have done in the same circumstance and the answer is clear—he would have acquiesced.
The great anomaly of politics is that as soon as you enter parliament you begin to lose touch with the world you purportedly represent. As soon as you’re an MP everyone does everything for you. Coffee. Dry-cleaning. Lunchtime sandwiches. Somebody else books your travel and your restaurant tables. They drive you around, tell you what you supposedly need to know, and who to talk to, what art to hang on the walls of your office, who else to listen to, who not to listen to and who not to sleep with.
But what they mostly don’t tell you is the truth. Especially when your instincts are wrong. That’s why I need Eddie.
Every so often, when I’ve had a gutful of fuckwits from party HQ, pollster fuckwits, fuckwits from limpet consultancies who buttonhole me at functions with gratuitous advice, and fuckwits who’ve still, despite Eddie, somehow inveigled themselves into my office, I snap, say, Damn it, Eddie, if these cunts keep pushing me like this I’m going to call a doorstop this arvo and say, Well, the party boys have tried to shape me and to mould me. But they lose. From now on all that you are going to see is the Real Danny—the Real Me!
To which Eddie responds something like, Danny, suicide with a gun is cleaner and more efficient. Danny, you do that and you’re dead— you’re admitting that up until now your whole political personality had been a fraud, a confection. Don’t be fucking stupid. Now get back on the bike.
That’s the problem when there are so many morons round. They hijack your integrity. And after a few years in politics the same idiots constantly recycle through your professional life. A former adviser who knows way too much about you suddenly turns up in the gallery working for a newspaper, while a journalist you might have bagged, or even threatened to punch, is suddenly on the staff of a close colleague and sitting in on your briefings.
Bureaucrats from one department pop up in another, the people you think are the spooks turn out to be the catering staff. In contrast, the catering staff, the parliamentary library researchers and the Senate officials end up being the spooks. When you’re the leader the rooting circles become disconcertingly smaller as more and more freaks and weirdos from your political past resurface to claim a piece of you.
Offers of political support come from the unlikeliest of places. If I made lists, side by side, of my enemies and friends, the name Vaughan Charles would definitely be in the ‘enemies’ column. So it’s quite surreal having him sitting opposite me this early Monday afternoon, in my office, telling me, just before I’m about to go into Question Time, that what he wants more than anything is to help me.
Odd, this coming from Vaughan, since the prick’s made pretty much what is a damned awkward virtue for me of offering the polar opposite since I took over as leader.
Vaughan’s leant heavily on the temperament thing—you know, I have my doubts about whether Mr Slattery has the temperament to be prime minister—temperament being a coded public-life simile for character and Vaughan out there front and centre to assassinate mine.
Word developed that a pattern was emerging—of me being too reflexively, impulsively violent. And not entirely without reason, I admit. But in my defence the circumstances were always mitigating. Like the waiter I’d threatened to drag outside and drown in the lake soon after I won the leadership. Well, he had asked me, How’s it feel to have blood on your hands, dude? I couldn’t let that one pass. And then a few months later a minor episode of fisticuffs with a bouncer down at The Treasure who reckoned I’d had enough and pushed me towards the door. So I whacked the prick and he h
it the deck. Jesus, the scene!
On top of that old story about me threatening Ellingsen, the Electric Eel, which they recycled, of course, even though it was ancient history, it made me look dead bloody ordinary.
Funny thing was I just kept going up in the polls as preferred prime minister. I got to thinking I might go right off the graph if I just walked into Question Time one day, sauntered across to the Treasury benches and snotted Drysdale.
Anyway, Vaughan Charles was among the concerned party citizenry who said at every turn that I lacked the character to go all the way. Intriguing bloke, Vaughan is. He’s been national secretary of the ALF since Timmy Proudfoot quit for preselection five years back. Timmy implanted Vaughan and programmed him to carry on where he left off—which is to ensure the dominance of the Right nationally and to make certain his union’s hegemony stays intact, despite all the stories of officials like him and Timmy splashing their workers’ dosh on plush autos, fancy restaurants, pointy-end travel and hookers.
Vaughan’s eye is well and truly on the main game. Safe seat in the short-term and PM in the long.
I can accept ambition in an enemy. Vaughan can sniff an election, knows that if there’s a double dissolution our lot has to settle preselections pronto. He’s running. He just hasn’t said so publicly. And he wants my blessing. I know what he’s thinking: if I’m still going to be leader during the campaign, which at this stage of this day it looks like I may well be, he wants my blessing.
19
I first noticed Vaughan, beyond his obvious disability, about a decade ago, when a TV cutaway panned across him sitting next to Proudfoot. In that second or two the contrast between the pair was profound. It was raw physicality against short-arsed softness. I was intrigued and so scrutinised the photographs of him in the papers.
We’d first met face-to-face soon after—round about the time everyone else was starting to suddenly take notice of him, too. It was over lunch at Florentino about eight years ago, with me a green backbencher, Vaughan and Timmy Proudfoot.
Vaughan was sitting there and I was looking intently at his face. His head was clean-shaven, polished. He was wearing a three-thousand-dollar suit and delicately forking a thirty-three-dollar entrée of tuna carpaccio.
His back was partially to the window and a shadow fell over his face. Well defined with a sharp jawline, broad mouth, high cheeks and an aquiline nose. For a bloke my age he just looked too damned good—too fresh and youthful. I’d heard the rumours that he’d had work and I concluded on the spot that the plastic surgeons must’ve been into him. ’Course a nip here and a tuck there and a bit of Botox is hardly unheard of in public life (they reckon Julian Dawes had gastric banding, but I couldn’t tell—he was always such a fat prick). Anyway, I was struck by how Vaughan was so oddly pedantic about his appearance and so terribly physically finished, especially for a unionist.
His skin actually shone, like he used exfoliant and drank four litres of water a day. And he obviously had manicures and spent hours under the sunlamp.
The truth is that I’ve always found him to be a rather attractive man—and seriously anyone’ll tell you I’m not at all partial to admiring other men in such a fashion. He’s broad across the chest, narrow-waisted, and even beneath the exorbitant bag of fruit, you can see the definition in his upper arms. When he smiled at me in the restaurant, he disclosed straight rows of pristine teeth. The pearly whites are obviously either bleached or false. I remember thinking that about his teeth, and I notice them again today, because Eddie’s always at me to get my teeth whitened and capped. She reckons the punters pay attention to teeth.
Since that day in the restaurant we’ve come across each other plenty of times. Not least at national executive meetings, where Vaughan has said the shittiest stuff vis-à-vis the character thing. I’ll pay him this, though: at least he says it to my face. He’s not completely spineless like the rest of them.
Truth is, the character question as posed by Vaughan is a bit of a red herring. He and the rest of the brothers from the Right just find me a bit hard to categorise, ideologically. You know, I was raised by the Right and I’m still to the right of Genghis economically and on most welfare issues. But I’m a bit more left on the social stuff—abortion, gays, migration.
I mean, for example, I’m completely open-minded regarding shirt-lifters—even got a few poofter mates. Well, actually, they’re mostly Ana’s, but, you know, the point is I don’t feel threatened at all by them. They can marry each other for all I care and root to their hearts’ content if they want to. No big deal. It’s not like anybody really gives a fuck about all that stuff out there in voter land. And the conservatives don’t get it: surely the best way to get the poofters to give up rooting each other is to encourage them to marry! What better way to kill desire in a relationship than bring marriage into it?
I mean, the times have changed. You’ve got to keep up. Just a few weeks ago we went to dinner with some of the parents from the P&C. Ana had worded me up that one of the dads, Jamie, had had a sex change—gender realignment, she called it in that PC way she’s got.
Anyway, Jamie was a good bloke. But he’s now Sharyn. Still with the wife, but they had to divorce because two women can’t be married, right? Got that? All very confusing and ultra-modern. Anyway, I used to shake hands with Jamie when we’d say g’day. But the other week when me and Ana walk into this dinner party, I have to kiss the cunt. Seriously. Everyone was watching me though, and I didn’t even flinch.
On all that sort of stuff, the issues that I clash with the brothers on, Vaughan’s never given me any indication that he’s any different to the rest of the Right.
It was Tom who got Vaughan on board when Dawes was falling over and I was circling. Tom reckons Vaughan pulled five, maybe six Right votes my way, despite all his reservations about me. So now he reckons I owe him. That’s the way it works—you end up owing, one way or another, every fucker who votes for you.
He’d obviously been a natural for the profile writers. I’d read the accounts of his life in the different weekend mags, but he didn’t stack up to me. Too many holes where the late teens to the end of his twenties should have been.
I wondered if Vaughan had finessed his story. Belfast mixed Catholic–Protestant family migrated when he was a kid; dad disappeared; housing estate out north of Melbourne; burgs as a kid and youth training centre and so on through the Three Rs of rehab, reform and renaissance involving, first, university, and then elite sport for the wheelchair-bound—Murderball. And then came God. Lots and lots of God, which is how I always reckoned he and Tom got connected.
The journos, especially the women, say there’s an aura about Vaughan in the same way they reckon there’s one about Tom—a Zen that comes with utter self-confidence and comfort in one’s skin. I wouldn’t know.
But I do know what Mum told me: the only thing a girl likes more than a bad bloke made good is a bad bloke willing to be made good by her. Mum’s usually right about that sort of thing.
Anyway, everyone in public life confects aspects of their past in order to stay on the board. The press and the punters demand we be interesting—they bemoan white bread and want authenticity. But we are also coached by the image makers and spin doctors, and by the experience of watching those who give too much away get burned, that nobody’s ready for the whole truth about us at all.
So we give ourselves a little nip here and a tuck there—around the edges, to make it all just a bit more palatable. Jesus, I’ve certainly had to do that. And I can tell you, the more you do it, the more it becomes a great burden on your conscience that weighs you down a little more each day.
It’s plain as day that Vaughan’s done his share of it, too. But one thing Vaughan did have to volunteer, because it was on the public record and the journos would’ve found out sooner or later, was that as a kid he’d pleaded guilty to burglary and assault. Even served three months in kiddy prison.
He’s made an almightily big deal of the guilty plea—s
ays that while he did the wrong thing it didn’t amount to a criminal record because he’d fessed up. That’s important to him: a record means he can’t sit in parliament. And when I look at him now, sitting there in his chair across from me, it’s as clear as dogs’ balls that that’s what he wants most.
I’m looking at him and thinking, No help forthwith from me, sunshine and good luck with that one, Vaughan. Australia has thrown the keys to The Lodge to drunks, psychopaths, philanderers, compulsive liars and many other misfits, and still seems to be contemplating laying down the welcome mat for me. But it isn’t close to ready for a PM who’s done kiddy time for assault. Now that’s what I’d call a character problem.
But maybe I’m out of touch because whenever the pollsters ask who, outside of parliament, voters want to see as leaders, Vaughan’s up there. So, for that matter is Tom, who, like his father, an assiduous spotter of political talent, had picked Vaughan Charles a long way out as one to watch.
Yes, I’ve got the prick pegged as a potential future competitor and an imminent threat. Not an ally. As an enemy I should be keeping Vaughan close—which is why Eddie is encouraging me to do exactly that—but he just gets up my nose too much. Still, Eddie has insistently ushered him in when I’d ordered her not to.
Danny, Vaughan begins, I’m here to help.
No shit, Vaughan—and I’m the Pied Piper, I say.