The Speechwriter

by Martin McKenzie-Murray

  Fingers of self-disgust gripped my throat, and I needed some booze to loosen them. Maybe confession. As Archibald was clearing his desk for the day, I asked him if he would join me for a drink. We hadn’t done this before, but I think he intuited my need.

  ‘Okay, Toby. Where’s good?’

  Good’s relative, and I’d defined it perversely when it came to my new bar. I didn’t tell Archibald that, though. In fact, I knew that I probably wouldn’t tell him anything.

  ‘Let’s try The Goose Pimple,’ I said.

  Conventional wisdom pegged the Goose as the coolest bar north of the lake, but only because it was a refuge for young public servants anxious about how their knowledge of capital gains tax might reflect poorly on their cool. But the staff didn’t care if you liked their music or not, and even less that your silk tie and PhD disguised the heart of a punk. I pointed Archibald to a free booth, and went to the bar.

  ‘You know, I just think the tone of the album is problematic,’ the bartender said. She leaned against the bar, her body turned from the queue of customers.

  ‘I, like, totally agree,’ the other bartender said, twirling his moustache. ‘Don’t pretend to like kink more than you do, right? Their appropriation of kink lifestyle is basically, if you think about, a kind of kink shaming. Like, is this parody?’

  Evidently it was vital that, before serving anyone, these two complete their disquisition on Cum Sloth’s second album. The service here was notoriously awful, but I now found that it pleasantly ratified my newfound misanthropy. What I really loved was the self-consciousness of their rudeness. Its careful sculpting. The bar staff weren’t innocently enraptured by their conversation. They were addressing us, the customers — declaring their enlightened politics and heroic indifference to bourgeois hang-ups like hospitality. As I stood, invisible, I closed my eyes and watched all fondness for humanity erupt in a glorious blaze. What was happening to me?

  When I opened my eyes, the two had exhausted their specialised vocabulary and I ordered two pints of Embryonic Mirth — an obscenely tart pomegranate cider that, like the service, deliciously enhanced my hatred.

  ‘It’s nice,’ Archibald said, after I had returned to our booth, but his face puckered and then collapsed like a supernova.

  ‘Don’t lie, Archibald.’

  ‘It’s different.’

  ‘It’s foul.’

  ‘It’s … distinctive.’

  ‘Archibald?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve given you half a litre of acid—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘—to test the boundaries of your politeness.’

  ‘Toby?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but recently you’ve seemed … nihilistic.’

  ‘Let me ask you something.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why have you given yourself to purgatory?’

  ‘I have?’

  ‘You work at DARE.’

  ‘Do you know what purgatory is, Toby?’

  ‘I think we’re currently contracted to it.’

  ‘But really.’

  ‘Is it a bus stop where the bus never comes?’

  ‘Interesting, but no. It’s a place of temporary pain, where the soul is purified with fire in preparation for our unification with Him.’

  ‘So there’s an end? A point, a purpose to the suffering?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like DARE.’

  ‘Well, that depends on how you look at it.’

  ‘I’ve begun looking at it quite unfavourably.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘How might it become purgatory, then?’

  ‘You must reorient yourself.’

  ‘To Him?’

  ‘To your soul.’

  ‘I don’t think I have a soul, Archie. I don’t think any of us have souls. I’m starting to think we’re just talking carbon.’

  ‘You don’t have to think of it as something divine. Merely as the essence of your humanity.’

  ‘Teach me,’ I said, punishing myself with a large swig of cider.

  ‘Okay. When you were at the bar, I couldn’t help but overhear the couple behind us.’ Archibald lowered his voice to prevent their embarrassment. ‘Perhaps I didn’t quite follow them, but they seemed to be mourning the death of the record — a casualty of Spotify. But, if I’m not mistaken, records are still being produced. Instead, what perturbed these young people, Toby, was that our listening habits have been manipulated. Our focus attenuated. We have become bowerbirds.’

  His story checked out. On any visit to the Goose, you were guaranteed to hear at least a dozen eulogies for The Album — a victim of the streaming age, our cherry-picking of tracks, and indifference to artistic intention. The subject was infinitely fascinating, as were artists’ ‘problematic politics’. No-one here seemed to enjoy culture anymore, preferring instead to excitedly police it for crimes of privilege. But their luxuriating in this outrage testified powerfully to their own.

  ‘Now,’ Archibald continued, ‘life will endlessly encroach upon our attentiveness, our discipline, our sense of enchantment — things that comprise a soul. And we must vigilantly guard against those encroachments. That is our responsibility. No-one else’s. The couple behind us have abandoned their post.’

  I was moved by this — but did I believe it? Did I care? Was my creeping nihilism justified? Was it a product of privilege? Environment? Depleted serotonin? All of the above?

  ‘And what does this mean for me?’

  ‘Don’t abandon your post. If the department is diminishing your soul, leave. No-one is keeping you there, Toby. But I suspect that something inside you is.’

  Well, he was wrong there. I was leaving. And as for my soul, I was beginning to think it was too late. The boat had been pushed out.

  I didn’t confess my sins to Archibald, as I knew I wouldn’t. But I did take our unfinished cider back to the bar and, after a 40-minute wait, ordered us something palatable.

  Having secured my place in the Prime Minister’s office, just two nightmares remained to be overcome in my final week at DARE. The first was writing a speech congratulating Scott Luscious on winning our $70,000 essay competition. His detailed study of his six-week addiction to Monster energy drinks, and his subsequent ‘shaming’ by friends, had won the country’s most lucrative essay prize.

  It opened: ‘What is a Monster? Is it a beast under the bed, or an energy drink in our supermarkets?’ and so it continued, a perfectly executed woke slalom course. Luscious met all the gates — ‘erasure’, ‘stigmatisation’, ‘problematic’, ‘triggering’, ‘enslavement’ — before declaring the drink a symbol of ‘toxic masculinity’.

  It was harrowing to have to commend it. So then I thought: Why fucking bother? I’d be out of here soon, ushered into the highest sanctum. So liberate yourself. Discard your chains. And I did. Relaxed, I wrote what I considered the ideal speech for the Minister on the occasion of Scott Luscious winning his prestigious prize.

  Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I’m going to be blunt. This won’t be popular, but I was drugged recently and have lost my talent for feigning generosity.

  PAUSE

  Hands up who’s orbited the Earth in a fucking space shuttle?

  PAUSE AGAIN FOR AUDIENCE RESPONSE

  That’s right — no-one.

  But Scott Luscious has. And Mr. Luscious, thinking his moral conscience more interesting than his experience, or those of the astronauts he had the privilege of travelling with — one of whom gave birth to fucking triplets in zero gravity — has dismissed space exploration as ‘colonialism’ and ignored it in favour of detailing his Monster addiction.

  Call me cynical, but maybe there’s another reason. Maybe Mr. Luscious calculated that the attention
he’d receive by refusing to catalogue the experience would be greater than the acclaim he’d receive for writing about it.

  I’ve read his work, and he’d be right to think so.

  Now, not only have you sent Mr. Luscious into space, you’ve also rewarded him for ignoring the experience.

  Instead of giving a speech tonight, I thought a more powerful statement could be made by unfurling a mat, kneeling before you, and committing seppuku. But my wife made me promise not to commit ritual suicide. I can assure you, though, that splitting my belly like a grape, and watching my bowels spool out into a wet heap before me, would be less awful than reading those essays again.

  Thank you and goodnight.

  DROP MIC AND/OR SURPRISE THEM BY ACTUALLY DISEMBOWELLING YOURSELF

  I emailed the speech directly to Stanley. John didn’t need to see this — not that he was talking to me anyway. He’d stuck a calendar on his wall and was ostentatiously crossing out the dates until my departure. After half an hour, Stanley called me.

  ‘Do you have any boundaries?’

  ‘I’m not sure anymore.’

  ‘You know this is unusable?’

  ‘I suspected.’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘I’d like to think that some parts might be salvaged.’

  ‘I want something short and orthodox. In an hour.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘An hour, Toby.’

  So I wrote some pabulum about the writer’s courage, and the judges’ discernment, and blah, blah, fucking blah, and then I went to the toilet to purge myself again.

  The second nightmare was my farewell morning tea.

  We all feared it. We all lived in its shadow. The morning tea was a guaranteed event of uncertain timing — like a starving panther coming down from the mountain to feast upon the villagers. You knew it would happen, but you rarely knew when.

  They had a profound effect upon us. Otherwise comfortable, the formality of the tea inspired paralysing self-consciousness. For my tea, each of us stood, mute and rigid, staring intensely at the mud cake, Tim Tams, and the sweating block of cheddar. Someone mumbled an inanity about the pleasure of cake, but instead of closing the abyss it only served to remind us of it — a pebble dropped from the top of a great gorge.

  ‘Well, I’ll start,’ I bravely offered, stepping to the table and reaching for a biscuit. I was the vanguard, and the others, grateful for the opened door, shuffled silently towards the food.

  At any office morning tea, a universal process is observed. It’s a process that many believe can make them invisible, or at least give the impression of their obliviousness to the social vortex threatening to swallow the room. The Process is as follows:

  1. Once someone has become the first to approach the food, amble over with glacial speed — one function of The Process is the consumption of time.

  2. Always pick up a plate, even if it seems unnecessary for eating a mere flake of cheese. Getting a plate eats up a little more time, and, more importantly, it employs your hands and declares your civility. You’re a team player.

  3. Your inspection of the food should be agonised, as if you’re selecting a child’s coffin.

  4. Having chosen your food, when stepping away from the table assume that where you stand in the ring of people is a matter of great delicacy and importance.

  5. The food should enrapture you. Not its flavour, but its appearance. Don’t eat much of it, as the food loses its tactical benefit if it’s consumed (though, if you’re brave enough, you can go back for seconds). Instead, stare at your biscuit like Pollock stared at his canvas, or like Bach stared at his keys (probably). The aim is to generate an air of intense preoccupation.

  6. When appropriate, this intensity should be transferred, seamlessly, to the person designated to give the small, platitudinous speech in honour of the staff member whose birthday it is, or the one who will soon depart (almost always gratefully). An air of polite solemnity should form, regardless of your contempt or indifference for the person.

  7. The speech finished, politely finish your morsel of food (you’re no longer spellbound by its appearance) and, making eye contact with no-one, gently place your plate upon the table and return to your desk, grateful that another panther attack has been survived.

  My tea was additionally complicated. As director, John would normally have served as master of ceremonies. Overwhelmed with hatred for me, John had refused to leave his office, and was flamboyantly mashing his keyboard to suggest some vital absorption. That left Archibald to mark my departure, but the chance of a profane eruption only intensified the awkwardness. As I examined the layers of my Tim Tam like an enthralled geologist, Archibald began: ‘I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say that you leave us too soon, Toby,’ he said. ‘But in the short time you’ve been here, you’ve impressed us with your wit and energy, and it’s no surprise that you’ve caught the eye of the Prime Minister. We wish you well.’

  I nodded gratefully. There was a ripple of applause, barely discernible, followed by a silence of unprecedented horror. My heart rate increased, and I began to wonder if silence could blind a person. As the subject of this ceremony, I couldn’t be the first to leave. But why weren’t the others leaving? Jesus, the silence. I’d seen some bad shit at these morning teas, but this silence was the worst I’d ever experienced. No one could breathe.

  ‘Archibald?’ I said, flailing madly at the beast.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have a mission for you.’

  ‘Okay, Toby.’

  ‘I want you to go back in time and kill Aaron Sorkin.’*

  [* Garry’s angrily said that there were no Tim Tams in any job he ever had, but I’ve pointed out that his job was robbing convenience stores so he could’ve easily grabbed a few packets while he was emptying the cash register.

  ‘I mean me fucken legitimate work, you cunt.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Oh, you’re interested now, are ya? I did a few things, mate. With me hands. Me first job was making Chiko Rolls in the Chiko Roll plant. It was 1978, and working there was like working in Willy Wonka’s factory, mate. But with weevils and no sick pay. Your generation won’t get this, but the Chiko Roll was the iPhone of 1970s cuisine. A fucken miracle of innovation, Toby.’

  ‘What’s actually in a Chiko Roll?’

  ‘No idea, mate.’

  ‘But you made them.’

  ‘I folded the ends of the tubes, mate. That’s all. The guts of ’em came out this flap-door, and there weren’t many allowed on the other side. It was a big secret what was in it. I mean, I heard rumours. We all did. Crazy shit, like it was cabbage or feet. It was hard to know what to believe. But we had a common purpose. When I was there, we were selling 40 million Chikos a year. The Chiko Roll was a national shrine. We went there to pray, then after eating one we prayed again for a quick fucken recovery. And I was right there in the middle of it, folding the ends of ’em.’]

  As bad as these things are, I guess my anxiety might’ve been sharpened by the fact that I’d just used blackmail to insinuate myself into the Prime Minister’s office. I’d done this not because I wanted to write for him. And not because I thought I was democracy’s troubadour. Those days were gone. What I wanted now was to accelerate the sickness.

  And I had a plan.

  Accelerate the sickness

  Sky News understands that a majority of the government’s caucus are frustrated with the duration of the Polo-gate scandal, and are pressuring their leader to issue an apology. The pressure comes in the same week that the federal opposition leader became the official mascot for the Olympic water-polo team.

  Parliament House resembled an alien spaceship that had crashed into remote farmland, and partially buried itself with the force of impact. It comprised a vast and bewildering network of corridors and catacombs, but most bewilderin
g was its location.* It was designed by a former soldier of Mussolini, who looked around after the war and decided to help make the new world rather than rebuild the old.

  [* Offended Canberrans — and there’ll be a few of you — are advised to send expressions of disgust to the Sunshine Correctional Centre, c/o the Department of Justice.]

  Romaldo Guirgola moved to the States four years after his ex-leader was strung up like a piñata, and to Canberra in the 1980s after he won a commission to design its new house of democracy — reportedly needed when the old one became untreatably polluted by Graham Richardson speeches.

  The most famous feature of the new place was the submerged House and Senate. The two chambers were sunk beneath grassy hills, so The People could stroll across their roofs in symbolic recognition of their primacy.

  Personally, I didn’t think it mattered much. Surely the public’s greatest pride should flow from what occurred within those chambers. Anyway, another interpretation was possible: that law was made inside bunkers.

  On my first day in the Prime Minister’s office, I entered through the staff entrance on the Reps side — or I tried to, but a school of reporters circled the Liberal MP Reginald Hacksaw, preventing my discreet passage. Hacksaw had just successfully smuggled a spent Luftwaffe bomb through the screening point, and had summoned the press to record his grievances about parliamentary security.

  ‘It was harder to import this bomb from a British antiques dealer than it was to bring it into the House of the People,’ he said. ‘Security standards have corroded and soon we will all die.’

  ‘I’m sorry, we’ll all die?’ asked an ABC reporter.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ he responded, squinting at a distant magpie. On principle, he’d refused eye contact with any ABC staff for 12 years now.

  ‘Why will we all die?’

  ‘Because civil society has been poisoned by poofs, parasites, and political correctness, and the buggered security of this place is just another symptom of our long decline.’

  This Platonic symposium was interrupted when a federal police officer politely reached for the large leather satchel containing the bomb. ‘Sir, I’m afraid we’ll have to take this.’