by Paul Daley
Ah, don’t shit me, Danny, Deth says. I’d have told you if I’d known, mate. I’ve had a few problems of my own to worry about recently, ’case you haven’t noticed. Before that I was getting my arse shot off. Vince never told me a thing, mate—he knows I’ve been contemptuous of politics since I was a kid. The only way I know who Vaughan Charles is, is because I’ve had cause to start going through his papers and stuff in the last day or two and because I’ve been sitting with Dad’s hand in mine listening to him replay Tom’s pathetic carry-on. You know, Oh, Vince, Vince, now Vaughan’s getting antsy, threatening to tell the truth about what happened, you know, what am I going to do? Pathetic really. I just put two and two together—Vaughan and the Kick and you and Tom. Don’t need to be a rocket surgeon to figure that one out. Sure you don’t want some coke? Might help you think straight.
Jack, mate, what do you know about the Kick?
Look, Dad and Paddy used to talk about it around me when I was a little kid. Assumed I didn’t understand. ’Course I listened to and remembered everything. Heard all sorts of bits and pieces. I know they smoothed it over with the cops and supported Chislette, as he was, looked after his medicals and rehab—everything really. And recently I figured out they helped him turn into Vaughan Charles …
The fuck—Jack? Vaughan was banging on about this today in my office, carrying on with how we’re almost brothers because Paddy and Vince helped him out, too. It’s the first I ever heard of it.
Well it’s true, mate—I’m Dad’s power of attorney. I get to see the books. Dad and Paddy have channelled hundreds of thousands from the firm, through our family trust company, into Vaughan. They talked about Chisel sometimes when I was a kid. It was all about closing ranks around what happened—making sure he had an incentive not to talk about it or even really know the truth about it and was all looked after—looked after so that word never gets out. And now, sounds like he’s going to go public. To do you over.
Well, if he’s saying it’s me who did that to him, Jack, it won’t be the truth—he obviously doesn’t know the truth.
Yeah, Danny, but you and I do. And Tom.
Jack, mate—you on Twitter?
Hate Twitter, he says. Got a troll account, @cadetjourno, just to watch, to follow you and a few others, so ’course I saw the creepy Devilindrag posts. But I don’t ever post.
Any ideas who Devilindrag is? Tom maybe?
Danny, I sat there with Dad this arvo and listened. Tom had just left when I got there. Dad says to me how Tom’s trying to talk Charles down—trying to tell him not to go public on the Kick. But he’s too late—Vaughan’s running his own race. He’s determined to derail you.
So I ask, Vaughan’s Devilindrag?
Danny, I don’t know who it is. But, mate, it doesn’t matter. The point is they’re doing it. And the Kick will finish you. You know that. Unless you tell the truth about it.
Deth is motor-mouthed now, speaking so fast I can scarcely understand him, hard in the grip of the coke. He keeps topping up and slurping the wine and saying, Danny, it could even be Kirsty Usher trolling you—Dad parrots all the stuff to me she says to him, too. She’s talking the same ticket, Crawley and her, saying she feels so guilty after all you’ve done for her, all the support. I swear.
Deth starts fidgeting around the kitchen bench, opens the oven. It smells fantastic and I realise I haven’t eaten all day. I’m famished. I want Peng’s rabbit thingy.
Deth removes the casserole and places it on a wooden board, uses a cloth to remove the lid. His animated anticipation of the perfectly executed recipe quickly shifts to disappointment. Looking into the pot he shakes his head frantically.
It’s fucked, he says, absolutely ruined. It’s supposed to be a deep caramel hue, with an earthy, dusty scent from the porcinis and truffle oil and the flesh of the free-range rabbits—they’re bred in Hackett, you know?—and it’s supposed to retain a tinge of pink and then just fall off the bone. But I’ve overdone it, which is just as bad as under-cooking rabbit. Stringy one way. Leathery and dry the other. Dog food. I’ll let it cool down and give it to Nellie.
Jack, I plead, I really don’t mind if it’s overcooked. Please don’t give it to the dog—I could eat the arse out of a dead donkey right now. And look, you’ve gone to all of this bloody effort, please …
But Deth is agitated, pouring more wine and drinking randomly from both his glass and mine, one moment looking sloppy-pissed, the next completely wired.
He says, Mate, did I tell you that it’s the rabbit dish from what-sername—Peng? You know it’s the final of the show tomorrow night. Can’t wait. Man, I hope she wins. Come back ’round and watch if you like. Took me hours to make it. But now I can’t be fucked eating it. It’s just not right. And it should be just right. Man, I’m a fuck-up. I stuff up everything I touch. So I’m having another line. You want a line? Go on, mate. Do you good. Kill your appetite but.
I want food, which I’m not going to get, almost as much as I crave sleep.
So I snatch Deth’s rolled-up twenty and hoover two long lines off the benchtop.
38
The dry, brown spectre of mortality is right here, in the dark bedroom, lying close behind me, spooning me, Her Majesty’s Opposition Leader.
My heart is skipping with such arrhythmia that my breast is twitching, dancing to the mad tune within. My mouth is bitter. Shark Face has me in its jaws and I’m thrashing wildly, bleeding as I wriggle to escape its crooked razor-sharp teeth.
I long ago taught myself to identify the feeling at the first sense of it. It is fear of everything—of life and death, of enemies and loved ones, of what you can’t change and what you can but for whatever reason won’t; and it is about obsession, too—the obsession with the minutiae of whether I’ll be too radioactive to work again after the fall, of whether daily flossing will mean I’ll still have my teeth in the nursing home, of whether Sam will keep playing footy, of whether I can live without Ana or Indy or Eddie or Violin Girl, of whether I can betray Tom, of whether there might be a bomb and who will be blamed for it if there is. It adds up to dread. And dread is filling my stomach like a fat black tumour.
And so I start the breathing exercises exactly as the doctor instructed, to shift oxygen to the brain and to defibrillate the wayward wad of muscle in my chest. Yes, the coke was a bad idea. But I’m like this, regardless, every morning these days. I crave, lust for, unbroken sleep. I even fantasise about getting a serious illness so I might be hospitalised, sedated and made to sleep on and on, uninterrupted, while the world turns around me, so that I can have a legitimate reason to quit as leader of this fucked-up organisation and get out of politics. That, not sleeping with Eddie or any other woman or becoming prime minister is my ultimate fantasy now.
The clock reads 2.52 am Tuesday—the same time that the same impenetrable wall of panic invariably shirt-fronts me from dead slumber daily. That is the pattern: a few hours’ unconsciousness—an opaque, beautiful nothingness—that ends with a volt of wild anxiety, panic and dread that segues into another eighteen, nineteen or twenty hours of undiluted aggression and conflict, of shirt changes, Panadol and caffeine hits just so I can survive one more day. Never mind a week.
Sodden sheets.
I’m never quite sure if it’s just sweat.
That’s the sort of self-absorbed prick I am these days. I’ve said it before though: I’m not lacking self-awareness. I know I’m a self-absorbed prick. Indy’s realised it, too. So there’s absolutely no need for us to talk about it. Right then! Settled. The truth is that me and Indy, we don’t really talk about anything much anymore except the twin obsessions—surviving and them—that were really just conversational sub-headings to the thing that most preoccupies me: myself.
Them. As in what they will do to me next. And how I can possibly survive them and then fuck them all over instead first. Yes, I can understand how that became tedious for Indy. It certainly did for Ana. But Indy was different at first. Back when she never asked for
anything. Then when it looked like I was on the skids politically, she started talking about us. As in, what’s the plan?
She didn’t want kids. Now the clock’s ticking.
Yes, something changed a while back. It’s got to do with how much we talk. Which is not very much. We just have sex sometimes; perplexingly for me, decreasingly so. I should qualify that—I have sex with her sometimes.
Not so long ago I used to talk about other stuff—you know, passions and interests. Sport. Books. Yes, books—back when I had the time and the concentration to read anything other than shadow-cabinet submissions and the media clips.
The clips, the clips, those fucking clips.
Films, too. And I’d talk about stuff I’d learned at university, but also about people and places and times over which my mind—which was once pretty agile, apparently—danced.
I know that when I was younger, still playing and for a few years afterwards, women loved my athlete’s body. But then I’d talk. And they’d love my mind, too. Ana called it the package, way back when she really loved me. Back when we still had tenderness and compassion. Back in that other place. Another country.
Even as the athlete in me turned slightly to seed, the mind and the silver tongue became, I was assured, an even more potent aphrodisiac.
In a game where talk counts for everything, so many predecessors had blazed their trails to the bedroom, as to the ballot boxes, with words. But I reckon that for a while there, especially with the old Mandingo, I was in an absolute class of my own. The seduction routine surpassed the meaningless compliment—the sweet nothing—in favour of yarns about the American Civil War, Eureka and the Shearer’s Strike, and about why it was that Federation and everything it encompassed like workers’ rights, the welfare safety net and suffrage, and not the criminal Gallipoli landings, constituted the birth of Australian nationhood. Yeah, I’ve always had a thing about 1 January 1901 and why the Founding Fathers—after years of bush pioneering and forging governance out of the wretched, miserable Pommy penal colonies that were filled with political prisoners—were much more important than the King and Country cannon-fodder Anzacs.
I’ll never forget the beginnings of my awareness—of sex, of ambition, of my potential hold over women and men. Tom had a lot to do with it, of course. Taught me about the power and allure of physical confidence, of winning and demanding respect, self and external, that came from staring down bullies and inequality. I started looking people in the eye. The stutter went. For twenty years he introduced me to girls and then left it to me.
But it was actually Mum who played the most formative part in my sex life. Sounds bizarre, I know. But this is what she taught me. When I was still a kid, I dunno, fourteen, fifteen, she told me that the best way to get a girl was to make her laugh. It worked. And as I aged, along with the realisation that I’d have to try even harder, I pretty quickly determined that there was an even faster route to the bedroom: make her feel clever.
So I told my stories about who we Australians are and where we all ought to be going, as effortlessly as I advocated in the courtroom. And then, yes, I admit it, I cherry-picked the traits of my heroes like Uren and Young, Chif, Curtin, McQuoid, a bit of Gough and even a scoop of Donny Dunstan for, I dunno, variety I suppose, and of course my good old two Veres—Evatt and Gordon Childe—to construct a political persona.
Back when I was still alive as a person I used to love to talk about cooking and food, too. Not the fucking mad cooking show-type antifood that has somehow captivated the punters—where everything has to be perfectly prepared, chopped and neatly julienned, perfectly spiced and assembled and plated—fuck me, plated!—in under twenty-five minutes, with nothing too elaborate or difficult to swallow, because you wouldn’t want to have to chew, right? It’s just the way they want their politics, too.
I even bashed about in the kitchen a fair bit myself. If ever I managed to sneak into town on a Sunday arvo at the beginning of a sitting week for an extra night with Indy, I’d crack a bottle, put on some music and mess around in the kitchen while the milky winter light gathered ink outside the window. Indy laughed at the way I’d be chopping and scalding and banging around pots while talking tactics on the mobile with Proudfoot and pulling faces at him down the line or laughing at the confected shit in the Sunday tabs with Errol or taking the piss with Usher about the performance of whichever frontbench dunce had drawn the short straw to go on Face the Press that morning.
On those earlier, blissful Sunday afternoons as the winter shadows crept across the carpet, I’d eventually turn off the mobile. Indy and I would stretch out on the lounge-room floor together, bowls of red curried duck with lychees or laksa before us, while watching a DVD— usually a classic (I like them best), like Apocalypse Now, 12 Angry Men or, better still, To Kill a Mockingbird.
I relate to Atticus big time, even though at the moment I feel more like Boo Radley—alone, misunderstood, a guy driven by a firm moral compass and a doer of good deeds but marginalised by those he’s trying to help. The cunts.
Which reminds me, yesterday arvo just before Question Time, one of the backbenchers goes on the record—on the fucking record!—says: Danny Slattery is the Holden Caulfield of federal politics. What the hell? Stupid bitch volunteered it on the doors—must’ve thought she was being funny or ironic or something. It was kind of lost anyway as evidenced by one of the younger journos immediately asking, Isn’t Holden in Broadmeadows?, but I don’t care, I was burning up furious, so I ring the whip, Devo, and say, Mate, mate, re-educate that brain-dead tart and tell her if she ever does that again the highlight of her career in a Slattery government will be Deputy High Commissioner to Normalia.
Like I was saying, Indy and me would watch a DVD and roll into bed early, fall asleep enfolded, content we’d quarantined a little normal—a few hours of tranquillity and tender intimacy before the barrage of pre-dawn war-gaming phone calls, demands from the talkback goons, filthy headlines, and texts and calls from home rendered me public, family and party property once more.
I fumble for the bedside lamp. My hand traverses spectacles and damp little ruffles of spent tissues, an unopened condom sachet and a small mountain of pocket stuff: cufflinks, fluff burrs, paper screwings with numbers, pens and the mobile, switched to silent and bursting with two dozen or so captured voices.
The back of my hand whacks the half-empty schooner—filched, when I was still a backbencher, from the bar of the Kingston Hotel. Stale water swamps the lot.
Fuck it.
I clamber to the doorjamb, hit the main light switch, walk back to the bed and flop onto the mess of crumpled, damp sheets.
The capital is close to noiseless, save for the occasional distant semi grinding down its gears while crawling around the outskirts towards the Monaro Highway with loads of apples and copy paper, tractor spares and beer. The cave-like silence amplifies the pounding inside me.
I’ve ramped up the exercise, cut down to four coffees a day, even slowed down on the grog, since this latest shit-storm hit. Though, admittedly, the coke and the wine and the whisky of last night probably didn’t help much at all.
But nothing was making a difference anyway. Every night is the same. And same time every morning here I am, sitting alone, a drenched bed and a pounding heart, gripped with the terror of imminent death. The Fear.
I had my first panic attack when I was seven. I came home from school and found Mum unconscious on the carpet. I thought she was dead. But she wasn’t. Just dead drunk. This happened often. So I never knew quite what I’d find from day to day.
Sometimes she’d be flaked out in the lounge room or the bedroom. A couple of times I found her asleep in bed with a strange man. The worst, though, was when I’d come home and she’d be screaming drunk but still conscious. She’d abuse Dana and me, tell us we’d ruined her life—that’s why Dad went off to war and got killed.
Then next morning, sober, sweet, repentant, she’d smother us with hugs and kisses, cook us the food we liked. It set t
he pattern for a lifetime of anxiety for me.
And that’s Bev. I love her. But I hate her, too. She’s had a crappy life. I just refuse to let her make mine awful, too.
But I will partly blame her that here I am at 2.57 am, wide awake and in extreme panic in the dead zone—the political place where your backers have become ambiguous, saying stuff like, Think about calling it on, mate, just to get some clean air and the numbers are strong, and then, finally, Let’s take these cunts on and put it behind us with a vote. They’re echoing Tom, no doubt, who’s channelling what his dead old man might have said and what Vince would probably think, too, if he could, and my darling Ana, whom they’ve clearly got to as well.
The only ones—the only ones—who haven’t said that to me are Indy and Eddie. But Indy hasn’t had a chance because I can’t talk to her anymore. No. They’re both over me, too. I can tell. And who can blame them?
The bottom line is that I can’t trust a soul in the world.
When you reach this point, you should start demanding your press sec’s phone records and calling in the AFP to investigate the leaks from the bureaucracy and within your own office against you, just as I have been contemplating. Nobody can be beyond suspicion. Your wife, the attendants, the Parliament House gardeners, the boys at Aussies, the staff at the gym, your mum, your girlfriend—they’re all fucking suspects.
And that’s when you absolutely know that it’s really finally got to you—that the paranoia and the sleeplessness and the raw, cancerous hyper-anxiety that is the enemy of rational perspective, is going to beat you. And then you start thinking like this: if I can just hang on for another day or two, I’m so close now I’m maybe still going to be PM … No. Why in God’s name should I hang on for them? They don’t deserve me. I’ll just walk away and leave it to the jackals to fight over. Yep. That’s it. But I can’t. I’m so close. So close. But yes, maybe I really am out of my fucking mind.
Up in the gallery they know it. The comrades all know it, too— because they are responsible.