Challenge

by Paul Daley

  I’m eyeing his nametag—TODD.

  Thanks, Todd. Now let me ask you a question: What if I told you I’d killed my first wife—driven her to suicide by having an affair, gotten rid of her because I thought she’d harm my political chances, told her to go kill herself?

  He swallows hard, thinks for a second, asks: This happened before you were in politics?

  I nod. Yep.

  Then it’s irrelevant. Totally irrelevant, unless you lied about it on the way up or unless it contradicts some policy that you’re promoting, which I can’t see.

  Thanks, Todd.

  You’re welcome, he says, offering a hand, which I shake.

  He says, I’m majoring in politics at the ANU.

  Fantastic—you want to come be my chief of staff?

  Look, he says, nodding to the TV and its news flash.

  Snake Boy is dead.

  What kind of people have we become in this country? And why in God’s name would I want to be their leader? I feel like running home now, and bolting the door behind me so I can be inside with Ana and the kids and Indy and maybe even Eddie and Violin Girl and her baby, too.

  36

  Stan drops me out front of Jack Dethridge’s place. It’s an unexceptional two-storey weatherboard and red-brick house on the low side of a shadowy curve at the high end of Red Hill.

  The street—Endeavour—like many in the suburb, bears the name of a ship famous for continental discovery or early survey. Beagle. Fishburn. Discovery. Reliance. All tell stories of the sea’s frontiers, of charting new coasts and of documenting exotic plants and fish and birds and marsupials and natives. Others, like La Perouse—where Vince Dethridge established his last modest, ambient, airy and art-filled family home while he sat on the High Court—take the names of explorers.

  I like that. It’s lazy the way punters from anywhere else loathe this city for what they bemoan as its pervasive dullness, its clinical bureaucracy and its absence of true history or narrative.

  This place, with its streets acknowledging trail-blazing boats and men, Federation fathers, pioneers, courageous Victoria Cross winners, its suburbs named after prime ministers and its layout and public buildings that symbolise a modern, unified country’s non-violent genesis sans the cordite and cold steel and piles of fetid bloated bodies of Yorktown or Gettysburgh or the Bastille—is the story of my country. Our story. But Australia, with its hordes of coast-dwelling urbanites, parochially fixated to states of origin with their state-against-state and mate-against-mate ethos, and with their fear of the bush and open space beyond their vast backyards, and their addiction to TV cooking shows, well, fuck, they just don’t want to, and resolutely will never, understand it.

  Mate, I say to Stan, call me in two hours.

  I want a prefabricated excuse to leave Deth and his misery about the time of the night when the requisite number of drinks usually collides with his recall of the war to make him utterly intolerable.

  Okay, I don’t have to visit him. But I choose to do so because I’ve known him since he was a kid in short pants and it’s partly out of my love for his dying father, Vince.

  Of course I worry about Deth—or Death, as his mates called him. Back when he had mates, that is. It was a small shift from Deth to Death when he became a journalist. Initially, the name, Death, came more as a reference to the darker complexities of Jack’s emotional chiaroscuro. But then came the wars and his near demise. And Death just seemed perfect.

  He is probably the last person I need to or want to share oxygen with tonight. What I need is to be home, in bed next to Indy, sober and early. But it’s too late for any of that now.

  As I take a step forward I consider going back to the car, getting Stan to take me home. But then the yellow sensor light flashes on. It softly illuminates the steep yard and I feel my way from the top, at street level, down along the paved brick path lined with gnarly melaleucas and knotted banksias towards the front door. The lawnmower is abandoned in the knee-high grass where it probably ran out of fuel, a futile curved beachhead of clipped lawn behind it. The house is a rental that belongs to Vince. It had been a student house for years. But Deth who, frighteningly, is Vince’s power of attorney, chose to live in it and fix it up when he moved back to Canberra to watch his father die and to try to get his shit together after Afghanistan. It was a last-effort move. He’d tried, and failed, to get it together everywhere else.

  Jack Dethridge had somehow managed to rise in journalism while newspapers were entering their death roll. He went back to Melbourne, after uni in Canberra, for a cadetship on The Mercury and rose prodigiously. Then he’d come back to Canberra in his late twenties. The family business—and all its internecine political links—didn’t do him any harm at all when it came to sniffing out stories. But mostly he got where he did through hard work and by being a pain in the arse.

  He and I crossed over for a few months or so in Canberra after I won the seat. He drove me and the comrades crazy with his late-night calls, always hassling and checking and alleging and checking again. Yes, I leaked to him. Mainly bits and pieces from committees, gossip from party meetings—who said what and who’s up who sort of stuff. We watched each other’s backs; Deth told me what others in the party were saying about me and what the other journos thought about me.

  Then Deth left Canberra in his early thirties in late 2000. Just in time for 9/11. And so, a decade later, it was the Canberra full circle via London, New York, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Family Court, a crippling case of post-traumatic stress, and rehab and the psych ward.

  The company had wanted to off-load him—to pension him out and forget about him as it did with everyone else who’d become too bloody difficult due to the harm that news gathering in war zones had exposed them to. But after a little bit of convincing from moi, it had reluctantly met—and continued to meet—the ongoing cost of his treatment, had kept him on full salary and even paid for a long stretch in rehab when the last experiment with returning to work in the Melbourne newsroom ended in a three-day coke-and-cognac bender, a written-off company Commodore and a charge, later dropped, of resisting arrest.

  The decline continued: his wife took the kids and left after Deth slept with the widow of a dead mate from Afghanistan. Fucking hopeless, right? Not even I’d do that.

  Deth’s editor, Rick Sloan, became resolved—with the benefit of my free legal advice—to rehabilitate Death, journalistically if not personally.

  Get back to your roots, Sloan told Deth. Forget the day-to-day—I’ve got six reporters in a bureau with byline fever, addicted to telling me what happened yesterday. Get better. Get a life again. Smell the clean air. Do journalism again. See your old man—heard he’s crook.

  That was six months ago. Since then Deth had managed to clean up and rent the old family house in La Perouse to pay for the old man’s stay at The Cedars. But from what I can tell he’s done nothing since but dig a veggie patch in his own backyard and spend most of his days wandering the hills with Nellie, his midnight black staffy. That’s when he’s not doing blow, drinking whisky, cooking and Google-doctoring the symptoms and prognoses for the latest afflictions he’s convinced are killing him.

  When I saw Deth a few weeks ago he was convinced he was dying of a brain tumour. The time before, it was pancreatic cancer, and before that motor neuron disease. Deth denies he has depression or post-traumatic stress—or any other problems. And he still hasn’t written a single story or been anywhere near the press gallery.

  What will it be tonight? Scabies, AIDS, tuberculosis, scurvy, heart failure?

  The dog offers a deep baritone bark even before I even knock on the door and I can hear it scuttle across the floorboards from the other end of the house and skid, finally—thunk!—into the front door.

  37

  The door opens. Deth looks like a cross between a derro and some sort of extreme sportsman; all the wanderings about the hills with Nellie have rendered him lean and weathered his skin a leathery tan. His eyes are alert but
skittish beneath a head of unkempt, matted, graying hair and four days’ facial growth.

  Deth eyes the bottles of wine in the brown paper bag in my hand, takes them immediately, hungrily, and opens the door wider. The dog sits at his feet, its tail wagging furiously.

  We grasp each other in a lingering hug. I convulse in his arms, sob and fight for breath.

  Brother, he says to me—brother—what are you letting them do to you?

  Deth, still clutching me, pats me on the back. It’s good to be held. Even by another bloke. It’s been a while since anyone has held me, really held me.

  Jack, I say, it’s been the worst day. I’m going through the works. They’re getting ready to roll me for sure. I know it. Ana’s halfway out the door, the kids are getting shit at school and Indy’s on the move, told me yesterday it’s her or Ana. Can’t blame her. I wonder if she’s been gotten to as well. And the kid who got bitten by the snake in the geo-thingy …

  Deth interrupts: Geocache, Danny, geocache—geocaching is bloody fantastic, I love it. You never know what you’re going to find. I do it all the time. Geocaches everywhere in the bush round here. The idea is that you take something from the box and then you anonymously leave something better for the next person. But the snake—who’d do that, Danny? There’re some bent units wandering the world. Anyway, come in and show me your phone.

  I give Deth my telephone.

  Let’s give you the geocaching app, Danny, it’s free, he says. Then you can go geocaching yourself. What the … you’ve already got the app. What’s going on, man? You a secret geocacher or what?

  Deth is coked off his face. It’s going to be a long night.

  Sam, I say—remember Sam, your godson?—he must have downloaded it for me. And yeah, Jack, I’ve been asking myself just that—what sort of sicko leaves a poisonous snake just so it bites a kid? The joint’s a mess. Priorities all over the shop when someone’ll do that to a kid and when the punters care more about a cooking show than whether the rednecks declare open season on Normalians.

  I wipe my eyes on the back of my hand, walk into the open-plan lounge-dining-kitchen.

  The place, in stark contrast to Deth, is immaculate. OCD neat. The furniture is all at right angles, the floor rugs just so, the cushions straight, the lighting perfect and a fire crackling in the hearth. The feature windows across the back of the house lend a perfect panorama down over the top of Weston’s urban forest, along the ridgeline of Red Hill to the lights of Black Mountain Tower and Parliament House. Across the lake directly in front is the winking beacon atop Mount Ainslie. A little further south, the lights of the ASIO building flicker through the foliage.

  The earthy aroma of rabbit simmering in wine with scallions and garlic is a balm. I’m still buzzing from Tom’s whisky and had intended not to drink any more. But Deth unscrews the wine, pours two balloon glasses that were meant for cognac and, so, why not?

  Did you bring the smokes? he demands.

  No, mate, forgot, I say. Kill you anyway.

  Plenty of other things to kill me faster. But true—you know I’ve had a few cancer scares lately?

  Yeah, I heard.

  We both are straight-faced, sloshing wine around the vast glasses, sniffing and swilling. I toy with but resist the temptation to shit-stir Deth about his pathological hypochondria.

  Unfortunately, Deth’s sense of irony died in Afghanistan. And I know, as fucked up as he is, he’s fundamentally a good person, always was; he’d never dream of piss-taking me over my panic attacks or my ever-expanding litany of crippling anxieties.

  So we drink big—To getting out alive, Deth says, the only toast he ever makes, and then he refills.

  Deth, no good on conversational segue these days either, says, Mate—I hate what they’re doing to you, Danny. Hate it. I want to help you. I’m trying to help you.

  And I’m thinking, Mate, I want your help like I want a prostate examination—do not try to help me, Deth, please.

  So I do stoic and say, Well, mate, you know the game well enough. It’s hard. Vince played it hard. Played it only to win. I’m at that stage— burn-up or re-entry. I suspect I’m going to burn or crash. But I won’t give up.

  Vince is still kind of playing it, Danny, Deth says. Not that he knows it. But I’m in there at The Cedars with him all the time. And you should see the procession of the faithful, the party bloody royalty that goes through the doors of that nursing home to pay homage. It’s like the queues outside Father Tom’s confessional. You’ve got no idea, Danny. They sit there for hours—Proudfoot, the Sweeties, Vagnoli, Usher, all of them—prattling on, asking for guidance, talking about the state of the party as if he’s in a position to give them any fucking advice. It’s like they’re having an audience with the Pope. I mean Dad doesn’t give a rat’s—he thinks he’s having daiquiris and fish dinners on a Caribbean cruise. He doesn’t know what day it is and he’s having a great time. The ridiculous thing is that they know he can’t answer. It’s sort of like he represents the last elements of some sort of conscience in the party, which is just ridiculous given all of the evil shit that he and Paddy did together in politics.

  You mean you’re there with him when they’re spilling their guts? I ask.

  No, Danny. It’s like he’s a tape recorder. Most nights when I sit there with him, when he’s sedated and he’s supposed to be sleeping, he talks and talks. Parkinson’s is cruel like that—it never lets the body or the brain rest properly. So I sit there and hold his hand and just bloody listen—and he tells me everything they’re saying to him. Even Tom’s sitting there, day in day out, too, just downloading to him.

  Tom? I ask.

  Yeah, he’s forever in the old man’s room. Must’ve given him the Last Rites half a dozen times. Communion every day. Confession. Jesus, confession, Danny, I mean from Tom, can you bear it? It’s Tom who ought to be fucking confessing—you and I know that.

  Deth stands, walks to the kitchen bench, bends into the fireplace and lights a spliff. He sucks on it deeply, offers it to me.

  I shake my head, steer him back to where we were—Go on, Jack, I say.

  Crying, Dad says. Tom’s always crying about the past when he’s with Dad. Telling him stuff about the party. About you. You know I’m no naïf, mate. I understand politics inside out, upside-down—it rooted my family like it does just about everyone’s it touches, remember? Tom says stuff to Dad like he doesn’t know if you’re going to make it because you’ve got too much baggage from the past that they’re going to dump on you during the campaign. Says things like, maybe, Vince, he’s got to go before the election. You know, Vince, I love Danny like a brother, but the party is bigger than any individual. I’m not sure that we can take the risk with Danny because the voters are ready to ditch Drysdale, the punters just want to feel safe about giving him the arse. But Danny scares people. Maybe, Vince, I hate to say it, but maybe we’ve got to try somebody else. Maybe it’s time for the old boy-girl combo.

  I feel like I did an hour ago when Violin Girl’s boyfriend filched my fifty. This is crazy nonsense. Deth’s wasted, has to be making it up.

  Jack, I say, I can’t accept he’d sell me out. He’s been helping me through fixes since you could barely walk.

  Deth is cutting lines of coke with a credit card on the corner of the black granite kitchen bench. He gulps wine, pours more.

  Line? he asks, handing me a rolled-up twenty.

  No, mate, I say. Deth shrugs, snorts one up each nostril. Then he looks up, pupils dilated, and smiles.

  Mate, he says, I know you’re not going to want to believe this, but they’re organising a Crawley–Usher ticket. It’s coming from the usual places—the Sweeties and Proudfoot. Tom’s on board, reluctantly—tells Dad he’ll use whatever leverage he can to force you. Unless you declare it open they’ll get a petition signed by a third of the members, force a vote.

  Really, mate, I don’t think so.

  Danny, believe me. Normalians are the final straw. They’re terrified
that any sort of security scare—a bombing threat, a shooting—will be blamed on the party. And they reckon you’re shot to pieces on the character thing. They think you can’t make it. They’re trying to get the personal stuff aired to force you out now before the Tories get a chance to do it in an election. You know—Domenica and the Kick photos.

  How do you know?

  There’re ears everywhere in this town, Danny. You know that. Someone’s always listening, watching. If it’s not Dad, it’s someone else. Eddie. Fuck me, Danny—how much do you actually know about Eddie? Well, Eddie knows shit you wouldn’t believe—and there’s her hubby, Brendan. Mate, he’s connected—in Afghanistan, I’m sitting in a bed in the American hospital, my shoulder’s ripped apart and I’m morphed to the eyeballs. I’m not sure if I’m imagining being debriefed by a guy with an Oz accent who’s obviously with the agency. But it was Eddie’s Brendan. I know coz he turns up here a few weeks back asking how I am, sits where you are drinking beers, we walk Nellie up the hill together and do a joint up top at the trig, come back and keep talking, then he helps me dig the veggie patch. Good guy. Talks about you and Eddie. Says Eddie reckons you’re the real deal but a difficult cunt to work for.

  Mate, I say, Eddie’s a mystery to me. Haven’t met the husband. But I’ve never worried about where Eddie stands with me.

  There’re plenty of others you should be worried about though, he says.

  Like?

  Start with Vaughan Charles, Danny. He wants to get rid of you because the Sweeties and Proudfoot say so. Plus he’s got a personal reason, right? He’s been looking at those photographs for thirty-five years, mate. Of course he’s going to use them to fuck you up. I know Tom’s been trying to talk him down.

  So you’re just another member of the secret society that’s known who Vaughan Charles is all this time—that’s made sure I’m the last to know? I ask, my voice rising with the accusation.