Challenge

by Paul Daley

  Despite being a priest, Tom—like his dad and Vince—had a better understanding of where the church stopped and the party began than these other tools. I was sucked into their vortex from an early age—never seriously contemplated going with the Left. Couldn’t. But the young Turks of the Right were suspicious of me because of my background—like if they didn’t watch me carefully I’d revert to my natural hammer-and-sickle game. It was an early eye-opener: I’d always thought the Tories were the party of entrenched social snobbery.

  Tom viewed it as his work to keep me linked in with the Right—for the good of the party, and, I’ve always thought for me, as his best mate. Like his dad and Vince, he thought I could win. And so he was instrumental in getting the Right to back me and to get rid of its teddy bear, Dawes, despite their suspicions about all my lefty ramblings about community, about smashing down the walls and about the window and the postcodes. Yes, he brought the Sweeties and Proudfoot to me, despite their reservations. And today he’s still the glue that keeps them sticking. Or not.

  I know he’s been lobbying them on Normalians and terrorism. He’s got more influence than anyone outside the parliamentary party. And their names popping up on his tablet should only convince me that he is being a good mate, calming horses—talking down leadership tensions and speculation, backing me in, getting them to hold tight.

  He says to me, Danny, I’m not here to judge you about Domenica.

  Okay then, I say, let’s do it?

  What?

  Confession. You know—the whole Bless Me Father thing. I’m serious.

  Fair enough, Danny. If you’re genuinely serious, then this might really help. Conscience is a powerful force. I was never sure about confession when I started hearing it. And honestly, sometimes I’m still not. But I’ve seen it change many lives—people who were stuck at hurdles in their consciences are suddenly able to move on.

  I drink more whisky, say, Really, Tom? So tell me, what does a priest like you do when he’s got a heavy soul? How do you go about clearing your conscience when there’s something you’ve got to get off your chest?

  Mate, there are other priests in the community here. I can confess to them. But there’s also intensive prayer. Dealing with your own sin when you’re a priest is just part of the burden, Danny.

  And just how effective is that, then?

  Danny, you know there are some things that have happened that I’ll always carry in my heart. Always. I can regret, repent, but they’ll always be with me. I can’t change them. But you’re being obtuse here, mate. What’re you thinking of in particular?

  Oh, I’m thinking of the small matter of whether you knew that Chisel—what was his name again? Vic Chislette, the sharp we thought died after the, um, punch-up, you remember?—from that night in ’74, was still alive. Actually, not only just still alive, but living as our friend Vaughan Charles, you know, leading unionist, national exec member, party powerbroker, says publicly all the time I’ve got a character issue. Also whether you knew that the old boys, Paddy and Vince, had given him a leg-up in life somehow. That’s what he reckons.

  Tom says, Danny, I saw the Twitter about ’74 today, so that’s obviously something you—we—might have to contend with if anyone pushes the envelope on it. But really, you need to get a grip if you think Vaughan is Chi—

  Spare me, Tom, spare me. You can still make out the prick’s tats— star on each knuckle. Next to his eyes, the spots where the tears have been bleached out. It’s him, Tom.

  Get a grip, Danny. This is paranoid nonsense, even by your diminishing standards. You want to lie down on the sofa there for a bit.

  I say, No, I want another drink. I lunge for the bottle, pour and say, Tom, one other thing. Paddy and Vince—they never said anything to you about my old man, did they? As in him not being a Terry Slattery, KIA in Malaysia, but rather Terry Morgan, stick-up merchant and murderer?

  Oh this is just nuts, Danny, really! I’m here for you, mate, but I’m not going to indulge this. Go home, get some sleep. Lay off the piss.

  I say, Confession.

  What?

  Confession—I came here for confession. You are a friggin’ priest, right?

  On the TV there’s a story about a lingerie model’s burst buttocks implants. Tom switches it off, then says, Oh Jesus, so go on, Danny. Go on.

  Father, I say, it’s been thirty-five years since my last confession. Tom, do we have to be all formal about this? Can’t we just have me talk, as if we’re in confession, you know, with all the rules—like you don’t tell anyone what I say and I get forgiven—but not actually in the confessional?

  Then absolution?

  Yeah, I want the absolution, definitely.

  Go on then.

  Well, you know we’ve always agreed that I couldn’t help it—that I couldn’t stop Domenica? I could’ve—there was another woman, Tom. Dom found out.

  So, you were a less-than-perfect husband, Danny. I can’t remember you ever claiming to be Husband of the Year. But if you’re confessing infidelity to me, I hear you.

  Then I lied, Tom. I just lied on national television. I didn’t say that I’d cheated on her.

  Mate, I didn’t hear you lie. That dickhead just didn’t ask you …

  I lied by omission, Tom. I should’ve volunteered it.

  For Christ’s sake, Danny, I’m your fucking priest and I’m telling you that that doesn’t count as a lie—you didn’t lie on TV. And this is politics we’re talking about. Everyone lies all the time. The bar is lower for you, okay? It’s a prerequisite for success in this game—I mean, your game. And I’m telling you, Danny, there’s more than just your conscience at stake here. If you want to go out and start volunteering the truth—that you screwed around on your bipolar, suicidal ex-wife, beat her up and then deserted her, you’re going to bring the house down. There are other things at stake here, Danny. The party—the election. So shut the fuck up. I told you—no sin. Case closed.

  Tom—here’s the real sin, if sin exists. The night I left Domenica after the police came she was begging me not to go—to stay with her, try again for a kid, to make it work. I needed headspace, to talk it through with someone I could trust …

  Where was I?

  Rome—remember, you got back the day they found Domenica in the river?

  Okay.

  So I needed someone to tell me what to do. I drove over to Mum’s. I was bleeding, looked like shit. Bev said she wasn’t going to let me waste my life on Domenica—she wouldn’t let me waste everything that we’d worked for on a silly girl who was only going to stop me getting what I wanted. Said she’d made so many sacrifices for me and now it was all going to plan, she wouldn’t let this bitch—this little bitch, Mum called her—derail it all. I could never be married to someone so weak if I was going to be in politics, she said. She’d already made a fool of me around the club and at the firm with her carry-on. She said Vince and Paddy—oh, Paddy, she was always talking about her friend Paddy the politician—thought she was a liability for me, too. Women picked themselves up and dusted themselves off and got on with it when they lost a pregnancy, Bev said, just like she’d got on with things after Dana died—they don’t pull everyone down with them. She told me to call Domenica and tell her I was never coming back and then we’d write to the Pope and get the marriage annulled. I said no way, Mum—can’t do it. She said give me the phone then—I’ll do it. I’ll tell the little bitch my boy’s never coming back. So, Tom, I rang her. She told me she loved me, she was sorry for letting me down—that’s what all this was about. She felt bad because she’d let me down by losing the baby. I told her I had never loved her. That she made me sick. Domenica said I wasn’t serious, come home, baby, come home, you know, she was carrying on, saying stuff like we belong together. Domenica, I said, I’m never coming back. Then she goes, point blank, Danny, if you don’t come home I’m going to kill myself. You know the last thing I said to her, Tom? I said, Domenica, just do it. Do us all a favour. Kill yourself. That�
�s what happened, Tom. Tell me that’s not a sin. Tell me the voters don’t have a right to know that before they decide if I should be prime minister.

  Tom pours more whisky, rubs his eyes. Danny, remind me—this is when?

  Almost twenty years ago.

  Twenty years ago. You weren’t a politician. You were a guy struggling with a bad marriage to a bloody difficult woman. Some people, Danny, you just can’t save. Nobody else knows what happened, correct? There was no suicide note?

  No.

  Danny, there’s no sin here. No act of contrition required. Have another drink.

  So I drink.

  He says, Thirty-five years since your last confession, hey?

  Yeah.

  So last time was back at school then. Tell me, what did you confess?

  Tom, I asked the priest, Father James, I think it was, if it was a sin to lie for a friend. The priest said, Well, lad, that just depends on how good the friend is and how big the lie is.

  Tom’s iPad pings—Eddie.

  What’s Eddie saying? I ask. Two hours ago she was on the verge of quitting.

  Nah, says Tom. She’s tight, mate. She’s going nowhere till you’re in and out the other side of The Lodge.

  He reads her message aloud: Phones melting down—punters admire Ds honesty re dead wife stuff—so hurtful. Hating journos. Good for OzPoll. But, Houston, we have another major problem.

  Tom asks me: Danny, another problem? What’s Eddie talking about?

  The old photos are getting an airing, I say.

  Photos? What photos?

  The Kick, I say.

  Oh shit.

  Correct response, I say. Tom, when you think about it, this was always going to happen. But I don’t know why you’re so worried. It’s me that’s going to be ruined by it. You’ve just got to shut the hell up, priest, and you’ll be right.

  Danny, what’s got into you? I thought we were tight.

  I stand up, say, What’s got into me is the realisation that I’ve been fucking well had, pretty much from the time I was born, by Paddy and Vince, Mum and the world and you, Tom, you. Especially you. Stand up, you prick, let’s take this outside and finish it.

  I want to fight him.

  Tom refuses, says, Danny, you’re pissed as a rat. Don’t be stupid. Get out of here and while you’re at it, why don’t you grow up. And I tell you what, we step outside tonight, mate, I’ll put you on the ground so hard you’ll never stand up again.

  What, you mean like Vaughan Charles?

  35

  Stan drives us into the car park under Coles and waits while I hit the grogshop. I notice, as I always do, the rusty stain on the blond concrete just near the sliding glass doors that open onto the travelator that leads up to the supermarket.

  Unless you mop it or wash it off immediately, blood permanently taints concrete. Here is the reminder of when some smacked-out lowlife from the nearby public housing flats stabbed an inner-south matron in 1999 with a box cutter after a failed handbag snatch. Nothing has changed: despite the occasional harsh reminder that the real world with its real problems is massing on its doorstep, the capital’s vast middle class remains comfortably, blissfully detached from the pitifully ugly social decay in its midst.

  As soon as I step on the travelator I see her.

  Violin Girl.

  I first noticed her a year or two after I got into parliament when I’d come to the supermarket of a Sunday night at the beginning of sitting weeks to collect a few supplies—you know, the makings of a chicken curry or a bol sauce, a few bottles of red, some bread and milk and cheese. She looked like a child back then. Probably still was. She was as skinny as a Biafran, with her dirty, ripped jeans and grubby cream t-shirt hanging limply over her frame.

  Her skin was translucent, like that of my baby twins in the bath, and her long yellow hair was tied loosely in a braid slung over her right shoulder. She always played with her eyes lightly shut, blocking out reality while she swayed and swooned to her tunes that floated off into the cold echoing atrium around her.

  The music seemed to transport her from a dysfunctional now, evidenced by the bruises and needle marks on her arms. I never saw her eyes. But I always threw a gold coin or two into the battered instrument case, with its Girls’ Grammar sticker on the inside felt padding of the lid that was propped hungrily open. She never acknowledged me or the metallic clink as my coins landed. Just played on with her eyes closed, momentarily rising above whatever demons had hijacked her life.

  I’d see her constantly, week in and week out. Then she’d disappear for a month or two before returning, looking improbably thinner and even sicker. Each time I saw her I’d think, This is it—this is the last time. I’ll never see you again—you will die soon, so depleted by smack and malnutrition did she look. I’d go home to the flat and I’d lie awake wondering how a pretty, smart girl from a good family, whose parents are probably public servants in DFAT or PM&C or maybe Defence, had managed to find such big cracks to fall through.

  Then she vanished for what I thought was good. I always wondered what had happened even though I assumed that she’d died. I asked around among my staff and a few other MPs: Do you know what’s happened to Violin Girl?

  They all said that they’d never even noticed her—didn’t know who I was talking about. This bothered me intensely. How could they be so blind to the life around them? It’s like me, now, with the goldfish that may or may not live in the pond just outside my window. Talk about living in a fucking vacuum. And then, when I tossed and turned with the 2 am horrors, I had to wonder if I’d just imagined Violin Girl altogether or if she’d ever actually been there at all.

  No! Because here she is, back on the landing at the top of the travelator, silkily plying out the same tune—concerto for oboe, violin and orchestra in C minor—and with the same lived-in and ever-open instrument case with its Girls’ Grammar sticker on the inside.

  But she has transformed from the skinny, pale, sick child. Now she has the contour and clear complexion of vital womanhood. Her previously lank and dirty hair has been cut into a shiny ear-length bob. And now she plays with her eyes open. I rate them as the clear pale-blue eyes of a woman who is embracing life—life without the monsters that had so clearly plagued her troubled adolescence. Clearly she’s quit the junk.

  I want to run up to her and hug her, kiss her, say how glad I am to see that she is not dead. It’s an urge I really have to fight because, of course, she doesn’t know me, having never seen me before, and there are shoppers all around who know who I am and who are already stopping in their tracks to look at me and say to each other, hey isn’t that …

  But what the fuck, I’m being honest these days so I’m going to do it anyway. I start walking quickly up the moving ramp, instinctively frisking my trouser pockets for coins. Finding none, I fumble inside my suit jacket for my wallet from which I extract a note—I’ve only got fifties—which I quickly fold in half lengthwise and dart into the violin case. She nods, smiles, looks into me without recognition as I move to embrace her, and holds me warmly with her beautiful, soft, milky blue-sky gaze.

  Her wide feline mouth curls at one corner and she stops playing. Shoppers are staring as I take another step towards her and extend my arms. Then she looks down purposefully with a flick of the head, beyond the violin case, beckoning my eyes to trace her line of sight, and I see the sleeping baby, swaddled and secured in a papoose.

  And in that same split second I also see him—a sallow unshaven stick figure in a dirty brown hoodie, loitering between Violin Girl and her baby, his twitchy black animal eyes enlivened by my fifty in the violin case. I stop still and stare as he moves behind her and swiftly, territorially, wraps his arms around her beneath her breasts and kisses her on the neck. Ownership. She doesn’t flinch. Then he lets go, swoops, grabs my banknote and pockets it.

  I stand there flushed and sweaty but also shivering with rage’s adrenaline. I want to grab him by the throat, smash him up against the wall, say
give me back my money and get the fuck out of her life—cunt, and then I want to take Violin Girl and her baby home, lock them in the house with Ana and the kids and care for them.

  A couple more shoppers who have stopped with their trolleys on the way to the car park are watching me and Violin Girl and her boyfriend—the whole strange scene—in the clear anticipation that something is about to happen. And why wouldn’t it, given my reputation? But I manage to swallow anger and walk round to the grogshop, my heart beating so intensely that my ears feel like they are going to burst and my hands, which feel as cumbersome as balloons, start to shake involuntarily.

  I’m late for Deth already and I don’t want to screw up his recipe, so I go straight to the counter and ask the kid, while I register his immediate flash of recognition, for two bottles of Clonakilla Hilltops. He smiles and says, Certainly, Mr Slattery, certainly, and fetches the wine.

  He brings it back, bags it, and, as I’m paying on my card, starts: Sir, I hope you don’t mind me saying …

  Aww, for God’s sake, when a punter interrupts you like that and decides to say what they think is on their mind it’s usually because they want to upbraid you for a sliver of something that they heard you say in Question Time, for something one of the numbnut delegates did on the floor at National Conference two years ago or maybe just because they want to resolve something that happened in the last home and away in 1986 when I was off injured with a torn hammy and Tom was moved from second ruck to take my place at centre-half-forward. It’s never just to say well done.

  Yes? I say, rolling my eyes.

  Um, I just wanted to say well done—and that I really like your style. I admire greatly what you’re trying to do. I think the terrorist legislation is wrong and, well, we saw your interview on TV tonight—he nods at the screen that is perched above the door and blaring out another promo for tomorrow night’s Captain Cook final—and I think it’s incredible the way you’re withstanding all of these personal attacks. I just want to say good luck. I hope that you make it. And if you don’t, well, the country will have missed an opportunity to elect a great prime minister.