Miles Walker, You're Dead

by Linda Jaivin

  Not long after that, Destiny announced that she intended to cut funding to scientific research. She explained that she had it on ‘reliable sauces’ that scientists were involved in ‘growing cultures in pea-tree dishes’. Besides, she said, like other native plants, pea-trees should be reserved for industrial wood-chipping.

  She also decided to shut the ‘liberries’ because someone told her that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, and that the liberries were where they stored it. ‘I promised to make this country a safe place to live in,’ she explained, ‘and there’s no safety in danger?’ Apprised of a report that recent immigrants had found the process of acculturation relatively easy, she ordered her ministers to look into ways of making it more difficult, and not just for migrants.

  The jokes flowed; the knives came out. Destiny found herself on the back foot. In parliament, the newly unified opposition hammered her with questions neither she nor her ministers could answer. Her backbench began to grumble and her frontbench to squirm and there were constant rumours about leadership challenges. Clean Slate had only managed to swing the election on marginal seats and preferences—and because the voters, clever little dicks that they were, wanted to teach the other parties a lesson. And, I suppose, because the people of the little country love a ratbag, and Destiny Doppler certainly seemed to be that.

  But if there’s one thing the people of Strayer love better than elevating a ratbag, it’s cutting down a tall poppy. It wasn’t long before the papers began running headlines that suggested Destiny would be a one-term wonder. ‘Pundits Predict: Doppler a One-Term Wonder.’ ‘Destiny Doppler—Comin’ a Cropper?’ Cartoonists portrayed her rubbing herself out with a blackboard eraser—her party’s symbol.

  As her political life looked like it was about to be cut short, very short, Destiny’s thoughts turned increasingly to my favourite subject. Immortality.

  I didn’t know this at the time, of course. If you’d told me I’d be hearing it from the horse’s mouth, I’d have laughed. If you’d told me the circumstances under which I’d be hearing it, I’d have cried. Laughed and cried.

  And look at us both now. Wanting to live forever, scheduled to die in just over, what, two hours? Would you laugh or cry?

  Destiny’s a funny old thing.

  From the day she had leapt into the political arena, she was single-mindedly focused on the gaining of power. Now that she had it, she saw that power could never be more than a fragile compromise, a balancing act. Power was a temporal art, like a piece of improvised music that, once played, was gone forever. I’m not saying she thought in those terms; at the time, I’m quite sure, she didn’t know what improvised music was. But she was distressed.

  She began to feel her own mortality creeping up on her. I know the feeling.

  I’ve always wanted to leave something to posterity. Destiny just wants to be left. The leaver and the left, that’s us.

  What would people remember her by? What would she leave behind? She later told me, ‘I wasn’t completely out of touch with reality?’ She understood that she hadn’t really managed to banish the arts, or put an end to culture. She knew she’d merely driven it underground where, her spies told her, it was flourishing.

  She also knew we were mocking her. ‘And that hurt?’ Rock bands with names like Culture Clubbed played exuberant gigs at the underground venues beneath the banner ‘Not Our Destiny’. Artists sent protest work abroad to be exhibited in New York and London galleries, where Strayer became the oppressed flavour of the week. Well-meaning people all over the world sent angry letters to our embassies, demanding the government restore artistic freedom, release all cultural prisoners and lift the ban on chardonnay. They didn’t always get their facts straight but they meant well.

  Some people, meanwhile, had been pushed to the edge. Following the abolition of the ‘liberries’ and the raising of the tax on fiction to eighty-five per cent, one novelist became so desperate that he made an attempt on Destiny’s life. He was a comic novelist, so predictably, it was a laughable attempt. Not having worked out the logical flaws in his plot, the ending didn’t turn out quite as he’d anticipated. He got a long sentence.

  Destiny became exceedingly anxious about the possibility of dying. She obsessed about what her funeral would be like, and wondered who would come and mourn. She tried to imagine great elegies being read, but then she realised that great elegies required great poets. It occurred to her that, if there were any great poets out there, they probably loathed her.

  As the long winter rounded the corner into spring, the treasury produced a confidential analysis of the impact of Clean Slate’s anti-culture policies on the economy showing them to have been disastrous. Someone leaked the report and both the opposition and the press screamed for her resignation. Destiny called a Cabinet meeting. Entering the room, she sat down at the long table. The table had been crafted to look like a tall ship with a cut-out in the centre shaped like a longboat. There were pictures of native birds on the wall. She felt uncomfortable in this windowless room with its boats that would never sail away and birds that would never fly out of their frames. She told me all this later. When I was her flightless bird.

  Soon the meeting was in full swing. Pressing the buttons underneath the table for the official messenger like disgruntled airline passengers summoning stewards, Destiny’s ministers ran him ragged racing between them and their harassed staff. They bounced up and down on the sheepskin-covered chairs like children, and worried the orange leather armrests with their overheated palms. The shouting grew so loud that it shook the bulletproof doors.

  Destiny could see her empire collapsing before her very eyes. She made several stabs at drafting her elegy on the margins of a briefing paper. She stared at the marquetry over the table, trying to pick out the three insects some joker of a craftsman had worked into the decoration of this bug-swept room. She considered making an ‘if you are watching this, then I am already dead’ video. Then she remembered what happened to the last person who’d tried that. No, Destiny wouldn’t follow in those footsteps. She was smarter than that.

  Tuning back in, she announced to Cabinet that she would hold a quick press conference. Soon the bell trilled in the press gallery and the house journos descended on her office like vultures onto carrion. She watched from the window of her office as they gathered in the courtyard. At the back of the courtyard flowed an artificial waterfall. Attendants turned on the waterfall when she was there; this thrilled her at first, for it was a symbol of her power. Now all she could think was that they’d turn it on for the next prime minister’s benefit, and the one after that.

  In her office, she paused before the one painting that remained there—Cap d’Antibes, by Winston Churchill. She’d given the other pictures, the Nolans and Streetons and Cossington-Smiths, their marching orders long ago. She had nearly got rid of Cap d’Antibes as well, but something had stopped her. Destiny liked history, so long as it stuck to the facts. She knew that Churchill had been a great statesman, that he was remembered by posterity much as she would like to be. Besides, it was kind of pretty, with its ship and lighthouse and sea. She looked at this painting and a thought nagged at her. She pushed it to the back of her mind.

  She went back into the small antechamber behind her office to freshen up. I can see her splashing water on that flawless skin, powdering her fine nose and re-applying her lipstick to those serious, little lips. She returned to the courtyard, now despoiled by the untidy tangle of camera leads and the journalistic scrum. The journos threw questions at her all at once, questions that barely concealed their own mocking disdain, questions that she couldn’t answer, questions she didn’t want to answer. She imagined that even Verbero, her chief of staff, who was observing from the side, held her in contempt.

  When the ordeal was over and the press had fled back to its warren, Destiny returned to her office and slumped in one of the doughnut-shaped orange chairs there, the garish awfulness of which she found oddly comforting. In an act th
at only amplified the Troubles, a previous prime minister had banished them, ordering in a new set of lounges that he felt went better with Sao biscuits and Jane Austen re-runs. Destiny vastly preferred the orange seaters: they had no cultural connotations whatsoever. So she’d rescued them from the storeroom.

  She swivelled her neck and peered at Cap d’Antibes. Nice boat. Nice lighthouse.

  Verbero knocked and entered with a sheaf of papers in his hand. I can easily imagine the smirk that would have been on his face. ‘No west for the wicked,’ he announced, sounding almost delighted to be able to tell her yet another crisis was looming, this one over the rise in youth unemployment following the disbanding of the national and regional youth orchestras and young people’s theatres. ‘I think it’s a beatup,’ he commented. ‘I mean, weren’t actors and musicians chwonically unemployed anyway?’ He cleared his sinuses in what seemed to Destiny to be a prolonged and deliberately annoying manner.

  ‘Can you leave me alone for a bit?’

  Verbero raised one eyebrow and, she presumed, disappeared into the private secretary’s office, where he could observe her movements on the video monitor. She needed to think. It was dusk. She wandered out of the office and down the corridors, and eventually found herself in the Members Hall, where the Historic Memorials Collection was hung. The collection consisted of the portraits of all the previous prime ministers, as well as governors-general, presidents of the Senate and so on. On taking power, she’d ordered most of the 3000-odd piece parliamentary art collection returned to the Art Bank, but she’d overlooked the memorials.

  On this evening, looking at the portraits, she felt her unease growing. It occurred to her that their subjects would live forever. Not because they’d been in the papers. Not because they’d been on TV. By the close of the twentieth century, nearly everyone had been on TV at least once in their lives. And if someone hadn’t been on TV, they certainly had a website. ZakDot’s enthusiasm for the concept notwithstanding, the currency of celebrity devalued faster than the Brazilian real. The American talk show host Sally Winfrey Lake had even done a special program about people who were upset that MY FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME WAS MORE LIKE FIVE AND A HALF; she gave them exactly four minutes of screen time each.

  ‘Those men and women in the pictures?’ Destiny told me later. ‘They’ll live on because they were part of art?’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ I replied. ‘After all, who remembers Whistler’s father?’

  She didn’t get the joke.

  I’m running ahead of myself.

  The point is, she saw something for which she’d been searching for a long time. She saw immortality. And, though she didn’t know it at the time, she’d seen my name on the bottom right-hand corner.

  Looking at the Historic Memorials, her heart thumped, her cheeks flushed and she sat down heavily on one of the hall’s curvilinear benches of silky oak and beefwood, which embraced her generous bottom like cupped hands. The more she stared at the portraits, the more convinced she became that the faces on the wall were laughing at her, even the unsmiling ones.

  Fleeing the Members Hall, she was nonetheless loath to return to her office and the suspicious looks with which Verbero was sure to shower her. At the last minute she changed direction and headed for the North Wing. She took a lift up to Room 108, the Meditation Room. The Meditation Room had three ‘thinking cells’, designed, like everything else in the nation’s capital, on an open plan. Poking her head over the dividing wall, she ascertained that all were empty, as usual. Politicians didn’t have much time for thinking of any type, much less meditative.

  Choosing the middle chamber—she’d always been suspicious of both the left and the right—she recoiled at the sight of a large stain soiling one of the cushion covers. Recalling that it was forbidden to eat or drink in the Meditation Room, the thought came to Destiny, not for the first time that day, that politics was a grubby business and, herself aside, didn’t always attract the best class of people. Sitting down at the other end of the bench, she stared at the khaki hills that lay darkening beyond the roofs of parliament.

  After a long while, it came to her. She knew what she had to do. Have all the portraits taken down and destroyed.

  Unfortunately, the little country was still a democracy, and there were some things that even a prime minister couldn’t do. She breathed a sigh of relief at this, surprising herself. Her mind turned, with increasing and finally unstoppable enthusiasm, to a better solution.

  Strayuns were no more suited for culture than koalas for water-skiing. She had done the right thing in suppressing the arts. The nation was better off without them. On the other hand, maybe she ought to make an exception for portrait painting.

  Portrait painting wasn’t really art or culture, she rationalised. It wasn’t like those other artworks that looked like shelving or aquarium filters, or which were made of matchsticks or garlic skins. The ones which always seemed to come with a silent soundtrack in which the artist was laughing at you for not getting it.

  The truth was, Destiny hated art because she imagined art hated her. She sped back to her office.

  ‘Get off the bloody phone, Verbero.’

  He mumbled something into his mobile about a pick-up and ended the call.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of it. Once the dykes are bweached, all hell will bweak loose. It won’t end with just poor twit painting, you know,’ he warned. ‘Give an artist an inch and he’ll take a mile. And besides, how will you find one you can twust?’

  This stumped her. Then it came to her. Boats and lighthouses. If Churchill could do it, so could she. She would paint her own portrait.

  It wasn’t as crazy an idea as it sounded. In the little town she grew up in, it was considered that she came from an artistic family. Since at the time practically everyone regarded themselves as artistic, this was hardly surprising. Her father Davo Doppler, a retired sausage stuffer who joked that he was the original snag, would sit her on his knee and tell her the story of how he used to play the piano accordion when he still had all his fingers. Destiny’s mother, Sadie ‘Bubbles’ Doppler, who was renowned both for the sexy, cockatoo-shaped birthmark on her neck and her festive slices, had once rendered Mona Lisa in crosspoint from a kit. She changed it slightly so that the Mona Lisa didn’t look quite so sad. She had planned to do one of Degas’ ballerinas as well. When the Degas kit arrived by mail order, Sadie saw that one of the ballerinas had got cut off at the edge, so she sent it back requesting a new one. The company, infuriatingly, simply delivered an identical kit. After a frustrating flurry of correspondence, Sadie gave up needlepoint for macrame, and covered the walls in owls.

  When Destiny was seventeen, her local council sponsored an art fair. She went along. While admiring the pretty pictures of roos and waratahs and farmhouses and waves and penguins, she overheard two women talking. They, too, marvelled at the art on display. ‘You know, I could never do that,’ said the one with the polka-dot hat, pointing to a watercolour picture of the sun setting over the desert. ‘I couldn’t draw a cork out of a bottle.’

  Her friend shook her head sympathetically. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I can’t even draw a straight line!’ This stuck in young Destiny’s head. Bubbling with excitement, she skipped all the way home, sat down with some paper and pencils and, scarcely daring to breathe, drew—a perfectly straight line. She held it up to the light, and checked it against a ruler. She did it again. I can see her tongue sticking out of her mouth, beads of sweat forming on her smooth schoolgirl forehead. Within an hour, she had a formidable collection of what she called ‘line drawings’.

  She enrolled in a private art school. When she told me this, I asked her how it was that no one knew she’d once been an art student. ‘There was a, you know, prolification of art schools? There were always ones opening up and closing down? Records got lost?’

  She was keen as mustard. The teacher, Colin, was young and handsome, and on the first day of classes he gave her such a searing l
ook that she clutched at the neck of her blouse as though fearful the fabric had been burnt straight off. She fantasised that they would run away to Paris, France, or maybe just Perth, which was the nearest big city, and live in a garret. She wasn’t entirely certain what a garret was, but she imagined it to be a nice little fibro with lots of roses out front. They’d paint and show their pictures in art fairs just like the one that inspired her to become an artist.

  The first problem came when Colin tried to instil the principles of perspective. ‘You want us to draw everything round but I see the world as flat?’ she complained. Then things got worse. He introduced concepts like gestural brush strokes, and painterly effects, and other things that didn’t make any sense to her at all. When he showed slides of work by Max Ernst and De Chirico and then, more alarmingly, by people like Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol and Dinos and Jake Chapman and Bill Henson, she grew upset and confused. Although she worked very hard at art school, she never quite got it. She sensed that she was becoming the butt of jokes between Colin and the other students. This was very painful.

  Art school wasn’t working. She chucked a u-ee and embarked on another path entirely. Accounting was good. There were problems and there were solutions. Numbers retained their shapes no matter how you pounded or crunched them, no worries at all, and this was deeply comforting.

  Like a spurned lover, Destiny Doppler turned her fury on art itself. Art became the classic ex: a bastard now, a bastard then, with no redeeming features. She couldn’t even bear to hear the word.

  Following a whirlwind romance involving funny little Valentines sent in July and the purchase of single roses from vendors in restaurants, she married an accountant from another firm and set up house with him. But things started to go wrong when he began calling to say he’d be working late and she’d discover that he’d actually snuck off to the theatre or ballet. Soon, he was unapologetically spending hours glued to the television, watching art program after art program. Divorce followed swiftly.