by Paul Daley
26
We parliamentarians liken ourselves to owls—such is our selfproclaimed wisdom. A Parliament of Owls! What utter fucking horseshit that is. The lie of it all has never been more startlingly evident than today when I enter the chamber.
A murder of crows. A pack of mangy camp dingoes maybe.
Everything slows down measurably as I stride across the green carpet, like I’m the main character in a documentary shot in Super Eight, from which every second frame has been removed and the sound contorted and amplified.
Codeine might help. Codeine and whisky.
A ball of scrunched-up parliamentary notepaper whizzes across the chamber. I have to duck to miss it. The Tory rednecks are slamming their desks with open hands, yelling out Basher, Killer and Biff.
I try to act impervious, keep my head down, even turn to my frontbench and pretend to have a brief exchange with Crawley, but my mouth is so dry and my heart is beating so hard in my throat all that comes out is a sort of wheezy ERRRLUUNGF.
One step, two steps, I’m at the despatch box and my brain is still fixed on finding the collective noun for parliamentarians: a cluster of; a travesty of; a zoo of, perhaps, no, I’ve got it—an abortion. Yes, an abortion of parliamentarians.
I sit in my leather chair, swivel back to look at the comrades behind me. Their faces look as if they’ve just witnessed a drive-by shooting.
The Speaker yells until his voice begins tapering into a hoarse whisper and I turn back around to the table, and start writing in my Moleskine: What a fucking zoo it is today. Got to find a way out of this horror. Win/quit? Develop —
The existential question.
Next, I write: Dad = Disaster.
Two or three Nats are screaming Terrorist and Killer incessantly and my lot seem divided between those yelling back across the house Sit down or Shut up and those just watching it all impassively, appalled, shaking their heads, looking like they would gladly offer themselves to the green carpet if only it would swallow them.
The speaker, Col Allison, sin-bins three of mine straight up, warns the government’s squealing ferret of a business manager, Ritchie Cuntavali (seriously), he’ll be next unless he puts a sock in it. Col says it with no feeling at all.
Col is a bastard of a thing, was one of ours before the government bought him off with the big Speakers’ salary, the office and staff, the black robes—and the promise, one day, of his portrait in King’s Hall. Col has got the shortest arms and deepest pockets of any MP in the place. Wouldn’t shout if a shark bit him. He’s still got his first dollar—and his first travel allowance cheque—in the bank and enough flyer points for a first-class return ticket to the moon.
Unfortunately for Col, party HQ’s got a dossier on him a foot thick, ready to be unleashed if ever the numbers get too tight and we’ve got an outside chance of forcing a by-election and forming minority government. They can place him home in bed in Brisbane while he was claiming TA for a year’s worth of nights in Canberra, Melbourne, Launceston—anywhere he’d get paid an away-from-home travel allowance.
He’s also got a serious hooker problem. Rather more precisely, a B&D problem. Which hardly puts him on an island around this joint. But it does make him vulnerable; too tight to get a taxi out to Madame Stefanie’s of Fyshwick, the Comcar drivers have logged his regular adventures.
If, when, they decide to press detonate, all that will be required is a call to the Eel—or one of the other creeps upstairs—to disclose the paper trail documenting his nocturnal routine.
From there it will be clockwork: they will interview the hookers, who’ll say he likes to be beaten and walked on with stilettos while wearing a nappy. Then they’ll stake him out one night and pap him—all atmospheric red lights and neon—leaving the brothel. All over red rover. Naturally, it would all be done at arm’s length from me—or whichever other loser happens to be the leader at the time. Legitimately deniable. That’s the way it works.
Well fuck me harder, here’s Drysdale who’s walked round to the enemy side of the House. I’m actually engrossed here in my notebook, writing all this stuff down and I don’t see him, so the bony clutch of his knobbly old man’s hand on my shoulder startles me. He asks me, Mate, how about we go behind Col’s chair for a bit of an off-the-record tete-a-tete?
So we walk around the back of the Speaker’s chair while Col keeps screaming, Order, order!
I shake the PM’s hard, chilly little hand. Yes, I think he’s a silly old cunt. But face-to-face I always find myself paying him the respect I reckon the office ought to command. You get no respect at all as an Opposition leader until you’re a dead cert to win. But you do as PM, even if you’re a complete fuck-up and on the way out.
Drysdale says, Danny, mate, I’m going to do you a favour. I’m going to do you a favour and introduce the terror Bill today. Get it out of the way. Give you some clean air to move on. And you never know, it might be a bit of a distraction for the reptiles—so they don’t all focus on all of this nasty personal business of yours that’s floating around.
I say, PM, you may as well send the Bill straight to the Senate. You introduce it here today and I’m going give you your DD trigger. Let’s see you pull it. Here’s a better idea—why don’t you just withdraw the Bill, we’ll forget all about it and move back to the things that matter like the Window of —
Drysdale shakes his head, interrupts, Mate—mate! All this carry on about character, don’t believe it. Remember, they said I was a drunk, sounded funny when I talked, walked strangely and was deaf as a post—and knocking off the diary secretary? He’ll never be PM, they all said about me. But just hang in there, mate. Believe me. I’m telling you this as a favour. Get this Bill out of the way, support it in the Senate, give me what I want today, and you’ll come through this. Otherwise, mate we’ll have the terrorists going mad, just a matter of time till something goes Boom. And you know what, when that happens the punters and your party will blame one person—you. You’ll be more rooted than Marilyn Chambers.
The old prick has told me previously how he quite admires my pluck and what he calls my mad courage. But it’s more fear than admiration, because I know he knows that out there I’m resonating, curiously, improbably, beyond the beltway where the punters are drawn to simple, straight messages about hard work, the power of self-improvement and the window. The window is a ripper out there in the hopeless, endless, miserable ’burbs. Drysdale hates my window. And my postcode.
But I’ll give him this—Drysdale’s always known how to mess with my head and that of the five other Opposition leaders he’s seen off. And he’s doing it again, most successfully, this afternoon.
He says he wants to do me a favour. Really. It proves just one thing: he’d prefer to see me—rather than his deputy, the spineless, gormless Anderson—become PM. But it also confirms what I know: I’m the biggest threat to the prick’s prime ministership and he wants us to go bland again so I won’t be noticed, so that his Bill goes under the radar, so that he gets to arrest a houseful of Normalians this evening and then we all settle back for reality cooking tomorrow night.
Prime Minister, I say, Les, let’s not pretend you’re genuinely helping me out here. You ruined my weekend, dragged me up here to see your sycophantic spook boss because you reckoned the Normalian terrorists were about to blow the place up. I say this is all a try-on. Introduce your legislation today and we’ll oppose it in the House and belt it right out of the Senate with the Greens. I’ll give you your DD and you can run your election on Normalian terrorism. And by the way—I don’t give a flying fuck about Captain Cook.
Drysdale, taken aback, says, Mate, you’re out of touch. Whole country’s watching that show. You’ve got a real tin ear for public sentiment, Danny. I’d be out there talking about it at every opportunity if I were you, just like I’ve been.
Drysdale’s social security minister is droning on in the background, defending a cut to the dole rate for single mums—classic punitive Toryism—in response to s
ome half-arsed question from Proudfoot who really should’ve raised a point of order or two by now. Timmy’s just going through the motions.
As you were, Drysdale says, like he’s the general and I’m the cannon fodder grunt. I can see your troops are fragmenting, losing confidence in you by the second. This is your last chance to play dead, Danny.
Les, Les, Prime Minister, I say, you’re in no position to talk here, mate. The punters have stopped believing you. You’re a heart attack away from the hearse—a scandal from the shitter. Bad news comes in threes, comrade, and we’re three seats from government. So I’d hate Col over here to stroke out at Madame Mel’s or for Ainslie Moran to drop dead on the pollie-pedal—or what about those shoplifting charges against your Angie Apostolou? I mean if they stick and she ends up going to the slammer, you’re in deep shit. But I don’t need to tell you that. You can see all of that happening—it’s why you want an election now. Well, I’m ready to give it to you. I’m not afraid.
Okay, Danny, Drysdale says, extending his hand, game on.
Game is fucking on, PM, I say. We shake and both go back to our seats opposite one another.
27
They say the despatch boxes are two sword lengths’ apart due to some ye olde House of Commons tradition that would make it impossible for the leaders to slash each other across the table. But I’ve often thought that with my height and reach, if I leant deeply and lunged with the blade I could take out Drysdale with a swift, surgical slash to his prominent carotid artery.
In that spirit I rip straight in with the question: Isn’t it true, Prime Minister, that you have concocted this homeland security crisis to cynically enhance your electoral prospects?
The place erupts again. The Tories thump their desks repeatedly with open hands and howl their filthiest abuse at me—killer, psychopath, wife beater, thug, murderer. I’m thinking—nice, just wait till they learn my dad might just be an armed robber and murderer.
My lot fires up, too. Not out of any loyalty to me, just their primal instinct for retaliation at the enemy. The comrades are pointing at Drysdale and bellowing liar, liar across the chamber. A few metres behind me, in the front stall of the back bench, sits Randy Mandy Cochrane, so positioned with her tits halfway out and made up to the hilt to get on the TV news cutaways because her seat is on a bee’s dick and a half less than one per cent—a few hundred votes. She is screaming like a fucking wounded banshee, so piercingly that I fear my left eardrum might burst.
As I move a no-confidence motion against Drysdale’s government, the public gallery goes berserk. I look up to see people huddling, restraining a guy who is trying to jump the three or four metres down into the chamber.
The guards race down and grab the remonstrating idiot who’s yelling Slattery—bin Laden thanks you, while Allison bangs his gavel and tries to scream order.
Here’s something odd. Us MPs can threaten each other across the House, call each other fucking dog rooters and kiddy fiddlers and criminal filth. But woe betide any outsider who invades our space and tries to give us a bit of the same. And so, members from both sides turn and point up at my nutter, yell, How dare you and Get him out and Chuck him out the front door.
Ferret-breath Cuntavali, indignant, bellows, Get elected if you want to behave like that in the House.
It’s true: the mob opposite has called me a terrorist sympathiser plenty of times in the House. The only difference between them and my nutter getting punted into the forecourt is that someone elected them.
I resume, argue for ten minutes that Drysdale had concocted the whole terrorist threat in collusion with the spook agencies. I am absolutely running on instinct here. The colleagues know this and it makes them as nervous as hell. I’ve got no proof at all. Not the vaguest real whiff of a genuine conspiracy but there is no looking back now. And if I’m wrong I’ll be completely fucked because I’ve just made the heaviest allegation it is possible to make against a government—that it has manufactured intelligence for political ends.
I finish by saying, calmly, Bring on the Bill, Prime Minister. Bring on the Bill. If it’s so urgent let’s debate it right now.
Half a dozen speeches follow, including one in which Cuntavali calls me a friend of bin Laden and the craziest leader of that once great party since barking mad Doc Evatt.
Allison makes him withdraw, which he does pronto, but in Hansard I’ll always be a friend of bin Laden. That’s the great thing about parliamentary practice: you say anything, call anyone anything—a liar, a sheep lover, a nuff-nuff—and you can get away with it as long as you later withdraw it.
Then Drysdale speaks, says I’m weak as piss on terrorism because I don’t want to offend the Normalians who vote for my lot, describes me as a political corpse swinging in the breeze, waiting for my party to cut me down—and that I am opposing the Bill to distract from the ugly allegations that are surfacing about my personal life.
Not even, he says, the nation’s excitement at and anticipation of the final of Captain Cook could overshadow the deep personal and political strife that the leader of the Opposition finds himself in this week.
Have I lost the plot? Am I really the only person in Australian public life—no, the only Australian—whose life rhythm is not in sync with a cooking show?
The bells ring and the house divides for a vote on the no-confidence motion that I was always going to lose on the numbers, by three votes. Today. Tomorrow might be a different story. I’ll see. That’s if I’m still the leader, of course.
Then Cuntavali introduces the Suspicion of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill (2010) and proceeds to drone on. Both sides then go through the motions by debating it on party lines.
I wander back to my office, completely fucked, totally wrung out, and stretch out on the sofa, needing a drink. But instead all I have to fortify me is the prospect of the Grimes interview.
Eddie sits opposite, wanting to prep me, saying, Come on, let’s run through it all now. I brush her off, insist I know what I want to say—am going to damn well say—to Grimes.
Eddie, all I want is headspace—can’t I have just a little headspace? Ten minutes of quiet before Grimes.
Eddie leaves me alone. But my phone keeps beeping with missed calls—Ana, Indy, Sam—with texts. I call Mum again, leave another message about the guy who says he’s Dad. Then I turn off the phone … and Shark Face is chasing me down the corridor outside the leader’s office and I trip and the thing is falling on top of me, smothering me, and I’m woken by the humming chatter between Eddie and Grimes as she leads him in.
I am completely disorientated. I must look like shit so I excuse myself, take a minute in the bathroom to straighten the hair and splash water on my face. I am pleased with what I see—not too jowly, clear-eyed, whitish teeth (though nothing compared to Vaughan’s), but the hair is in need of a touch-up, especially at the crown, from where the grey creeps disproportionately to the left.
I come back, shake the fat prick’s sticky, swollen, limp hand.
Antony, I say.
Daniel, he goes.
(Daniel? Fucker.)
We sit knee to knee in opposite chairs. There are two cameras, one glued to me, the other to him. They are operated by one tech— Jase—who I know well from around the traps. All of the techs in the building seem to be named Jase or Nicko. The camera guys and the soundies never say much. But they know plenty, often more than the journos they serve. They watch and listen to stuff that goes straight over the journos’ heads.
Grimes says, We have twenty minutes—so no beating about with bullshit, please, Mr Slattery. It’s disarmingly, deliberately officious; formality accompanies most executions.
And then there’s this, before the cameras start: Mr Slattery—aren’t you going to wear a tie?
The cunt. It’s the last thing I’m expecting and so it throws me off. I say, Um—well …
Before I can finish, Eddie is holding out a blue tie for me.
Put it on, she orders and I do. She fusses over t
he knot, says to Grimes, This bit’s off the record, you hear me? Then steps out of the frame.
Then the fat fuck pipes in, There you go, squire—a bit of media training from the Antony Grimes media school.
Then Jase says, One, two, three—okay, gents we’re recording, and Grimes welcomes me disingenuously.
Whereas I’d have once said, It’s my pleasure, Antony, thank you, I respond with, Antony, you know I’m doing this interview reluctantly. But it’s what I agreed to when you called me with a misconstrued story about my first marriage to a woman who has since, tragically, died. So, regrettably, I’m here.
I see Eddie, over in the shadows of the room behind Grimes, cover her eyes and shake her head.
That’s the thing about these interviews: the reporter always says welcome with thinly veiled malevolence and we politicians usually say, Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here of course, and at the end when they thank us vacuously for our time after treating us with barely disguised contempt, we just say, Oh thank you, I enjoyed it very much—any time at all, when what we actually want to say is, Fuck you, jerk, I’d like to rabbit-punch you in the left eye.
28
Grimes goes on the immediate offensive, utterly confident in his story, saying smugly that he’s spoken at length to Domenica’s mother, Caitlyn.
I know what he’s thinking—after almost forty years in this job, he’s watched them come and go. He’s been interviewing prime ministers and wannabes since I was in short pants, and who the hell do I think I am, pretending I’ve got the discipline, the party pedigree—the character—to lead this great country?
He’s thinking, how dare I turn up to one of his interviews without a tie? He’s thinking I won’t do that again after my little bit of Antony Grimes media training! Then again, he’s thinking, this could be the last time I give an interview as Opposition leader.