by Steve Lewis
Chinese commentators had hailed it the definitive end of the ‘Hundred Years of Humiliation’. Meng was raised to the rare status of a leader who ushered in a change in epoch. The internal view was reinforced by the reaction of the rest of the world. Once again the world’s potentates were flocking to the Middle Kingdom, begging for an audience with its leader. In the minds of its people China had returned to its rightful place, but Jiang knew that, for Meng, there was still a reckoning to be had. The humiliation would not go unpunished.
Jiang arrived to this morning’s meeting to find the president surrounded by a cabal of officials carrying notepads and architectural plans, and whispering in the presence of their master.
Though Jiang dared not give voice to it, he had become fearful of what he saw in his President’s unstoppable rise. He believed Meng saw himself not as a president, but as an emperor.
CHAPTER SIX
Canberra
Elizabeth Scott buried her expensively coiffured head in her manicured hands and uttered a long, low expletive.
It had been the Australia Day from hell.
Australia’s twenty-eighth prime minister reached for the television remote to banish the barrage of ridicule that had assailed her all day.
Scott was alone in her parliamentary suite, having ordered her staff from the room. She didn’t need their reproachful looks and redundant advice on how to dig herself out of this latest deep hole.
She’d disabled her Twitter feed to dodge the blizzard of digital excrement hurled by the masses. Social media had become the twenty-first-century pillory where the faceless and cowardly vented their spleen.
Scott’s decision to bring back imperial honours had stirred the piranha pool into a feeding frenzy. What had started as a Twitterstorm had morphed into Twittergeddon, crowned with an uber-trending hashtag: #Knightmare.
What she’d thought would be a deft political play had backfired. The knighthoods were intended to be a sop to the restive conservative wing of the Liberal Party, a counter to their deep resentment of a string of socially progressive decisions. Now Scott, a lifelong Republican, was branded an out-of-touch, opportunistic hypocrite. The move confirmed the electorate’s doubt about her character and judgement in one barbecue-stopping cock-up.
The only winner was the man she had honoured: Jack Webster.
Since he’d risen through the ranks of the RAAF to his current role as Chief of the Defence Force, Webster had been the go–to man in every major crisis – from the war in Afghanistan to natural disasters.
The public couldn’t get enough of him. This was a country where real celebrity was in short supply and he seemed to have joined the ranks of rock idols and sports stars. Scott thought privately that Webster was part benign military overlord, part matinee idol. And he was one of the few safe pairs of hands working for her government. She knew she wasn’t the only politician to have relied heavily on his uncanny ability to catch the public’s mood. She had clung to him in the hope that her low stock would be dragged higher in his reflected glory. But it had only made her appear shabby.
Everyone agreed he was the right man, conferred with the wrong award. When door-stopped at a citizenship ceremony, the burnished and braided military leader had been humble and generous to a fault.
‘The prime minister is a fine woman and a thoughtful leader,’ he said. ‘I am certain she did this for the right reasons. It was not my decision and I won’t comment on your commentary about it. A military man serves at the pleasure of his leader and I accepted the knighthood to honour the warrior men and women I lead.’
‘Do we call you “Sir Jack” from now on?’ one reporter called.
Webster grinned. ‘I’ll always be just Jack. But if you serve under me, then it had better be “Sir”.’
The reporters laughed. Everyone was laughing except Scott.
A snap ReachTEL poll on Channel Seven showed eighty per cent of the population thought the move idiotic. Even the hard-right monarchists in Scott’s government recognised the danger and were now taking to the airwaves to disavow the award.
‘It came as a surprise and a shock to me,’ the education minister declared as he beat a retreat from what was meant to be a low-key and unifying celebration of national pride.
An exasperated chief whip had rung to inform the prime minister that he’d failed to snare even one voice prepared to publicly back her.
‘That includes me,’ he snapped as he hung up.
The decision had left Scott friendless, isolated and vulnerable. This was her nadir. She’d been dubbed the Accidental Prime Minister and the sobriquet had stuck because it was true. In seventeen months as the nation’s leader, the PM had blundered her way from one self-inflicted disaster to the next.
Scott had regained the Liberal leadership in extraordinary circumstances. Her predecessor, Barry Landry, had lasted just a few months before he exploded in the only truly technicolour moment of his long gun-metal grey career. It turned out that the man the Liberal Party had thought was Mr Safe Hands – and who had taken his party to a commanding lead in the polls – was corrupt to his brown brogue shoelaces. Labor’s dirt unit had uncovered, and leaked, compromising details about his chairmanship of a Victorian utility.
In an exquisite piece of theatre, the Labor prime minister, Catriona Bailey, had timed her visit to the governor-general to ask for an election to the very moment that Landry was tearfully resigning as opposition leader.
Shattered Liberals were left with a Hobson’s choice between two deeply flawed former leaders. Scott was considered far too liberal, and the ultra hard-right Emily Brooks was haunted by viral online footage of her spectacular sexual escapades.
‘It’s Bambi or the Bondage Queen,’ one hardhead lamented.
Scott won the party room by a handful of votes, but the polling collapsed as the election campaign intensified. What had shaped as a Coalition landslide narrowed to a six-seat majority.
There was no honeymoon with a resurgent Bailey declaring that Scott would be a one-term wonder. Despite Scott’s fierce intelligence, her radiant good looks, her Olympic past and her stellar business background, it now looked as though the Labor leader would be proven right.
The PM’s phone rang and the screen lit with the name of the only person she was always happy to talk to.
‘Looks like you are taking a lot of fire.’ Jack Webster’s voice was as comforting as hot chocolate on a cold night.
‘Another bad day in a long line of bad days,’ Scott sighed. ‘Gets hard to tell them apart. Thanks for your support; I haven’t exactly been run down by colleagues offering their shoulder.’
‘I feel a little guilty. We’d talked about the idea but I thought you would run it through the political filter in your office.’ Webster sounded genuinely concerned.
‘Don’t, Jack.’ Scott was clicking lazily through the news websites as she spoke. She was trending on every one. ‘This is all my own doing.’
‘It will blow over.’
‘Maybe. But it might just take me with it.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sydney
Self-consciously he glanced into the foxed mirror. A beaten face glared back, bloodshot eyes etched deep with the bitter past. He propped his hands on the basin, then straightened and rolled back his shoulders.
‘Where did you go, mate?’ His voice held a tremble. The one-time political huntsman was ashamed of what he had descended to.
He picked up a pair of scissors, caressing its blades, sharp and somehow comforting.
While he’d not touched alcohol for a week he worried that he still ached for its false comfort. The strength that he’d left behind was returning slowly to his wiry frame, as was a sense of balance and calm. Last night he’d slept well, waking just once to challenge the dark.
Food was no longer the enemy. His appetite was returning and he’d gained a kilo or two.
And that morning he’d taken his first tentative steps around the seminary’s spacious grounds that rol
led over four hectares, sloping gently from Mary Street to Tarban Creek. Planted at the heart of some of the most expensive real estate in this overpriced city, the land alone would be worth tens of millions.
The estate was a lush and secret garden dotted with one-and two-storey sandstone buildings, scarred by a couple of grey bunkers that hailed from the 1970s. What struck Harry Dunkley was that the old sandstone stood grand and timeless, while the more recent concrete monstrosities had aged badly.
The Marist fathers had been the area’s first white settlers, arriving in 1847 when land was cheap and Sydney was a boat ride away. The French community of priests had vowed to bring their Christian God to the Pacific and Hunters Hill was their first permanent supply base for their missions to far-flung islands.
Now the Catholic Church was in seemingly irreversible decline in the post-Christian West. Like this land, it was a relic of the past. Hunters Hill was to be the Marists’ graveyard as they prepared to administer the last rites on their venture in the Pacific.
Harry breathed out slowly, clouding the mirror in front of him. He was surprised by his sympathy for the Marists and wondered whether it involved a kind of self-pity, a recognition that his best days were also past.
Dunkley had scant understanding of the priests’ beliefs, but it was clear they had toiled, within their lights, to make the world a better place. He respected that. As for their many flaws, who was he to judge?
Carefully he pulled at the greying beard and let the scissor blades shear off a large clump of hair. He held the matted fibre in his left hand, rubbing it between his fingers before letting it fall to the floor.
Twenty minutes later his face was clean and raw. A razor had taken off the last of the stubble and he’d splashed warm water on his freshly shaven cheeks, watching as thin red rivulets snaked around the sink.
He raised his eyes to a new face reflected in the small mirror. It held the same haunted eyes, but even they seemed a touch brighter.
‘Welcome back,’ he mumbled.
The borrowed clothes were far from stylish, but they were clean. A makeshift belt tethered the pants to Dunkley’s thin frame.
His upstairs bedroom was in a two-storey accommodation block built in 1975, the same year as the Dismissal. It resembled one of Harry Seidler’s tombs and bore signs of concrete cancer, but it was functional, warm and dry.
Harry was ready to face the day, to reconnect with a humanity that he’d been avoiding. Already he yearned for conversation.
He ambled down a staircase and through a glass door into a brilliant Sydney morning. Nearby stood the imposing main building, its sandstone facade fitted with rectangular windows and graced with five ground-floor arches. A trio of chimneys jutted from a red tile roof. The building was grand and neatly kept, but there was little sign of life.
The refectory was empty, as usual. As Harry walked past tables stacked with chairs, the only sound was the pad of his shoes on the timber floor.
Once this place had pulsated with life as dozens of zealous young men gathered to prepare their meals. Now just a handful of aged priests remained, eating their meals in a small room adjacent to the kitchen.
‘Father.’ Dunkley nodded to a priest who’d been particularly kind during his first days at the seminary. They were the only ones there and he set about making coffee and toast in silence.
A suite of newspapers was laid out neatly, feeding the priests’ old-school media habits. Familiar feelings stirred in Dunkley as he picked up The Australian, the reassuring weight of newsprint like a balm, but they were tempered by a pang of loss that he no longer had a hand in filling these pages.
Still, for the first time in months, he was taking an interest in the latest political crisis. He had always suspected Elizabeth Scott would struggle, but even he was amazed by how quickly her prime ministerial star had fallen. He turned to Sydney’s screaming tabloid, which was revelling in her most recent blunder.
‘RIGHT ROYAL FOOL’ the Daily Telegraph thundered in hundred-point font.
Dunkley whistled and imagined how he might have written about this epic balls-up. He looked up at the priest. ‘The PM’s in all sorts of strife. But I guess you’re a traditionalist, Father, and wouldn’t mind a few new knights and dames.’
The priest gazed at Harry over the rim of his glasses.
‘Why would you say that, Harry?’ His grizzled face was slashed by a wry grin as he contemplated Dunkley. ‘The Marists were originally French and we all know what happened to their nobility. I’m from Irish stock, a lifelong Republican and Labor to the bootstraps.’
Dunkley laughed.
‘ALP or DLP?’
The priest stopped smiling.
‘Harry, I thought you knew your politics.’ His voice held a mock gravity. ‘It was the Victorian archbishop Daniel Mannix who backed Santamaria’s Movement that split Labor. There was no split in New South Wales, thanks to the peerless skills of Joe Cahill and the unflinching support he got from Cardinal Gilroy.’
The old man took a sip of his tea as Dunkley tried to guess his age. Mid-eighties? His mind was razor sharp and his hands were steady.
‘And I like to think that it was my influence that won a young, impressionable Martin Toohey back from his Grouper father.’
Dunkley poured the last dregs of coffee into his mug from a small glass plunger and looked around at the large uneven sandstone blocks of the dining-room walls.
‘Father, it’s not so bad this retreating from the world. I could spend a bit of time here. Not praying like you. But reading, thinking.’
‘I read and think a bit too.’ The priest held Dunkley in a long gaze. ‘By all means, take the time you need to heal, Harry. You are a welcome guest. But don’t misunderstand what this place was built for. We trained men to go out and take on the world.’
The priest took off his glasses, pointing the frames at his younger charge.
‘When you are strong again, you must leave. There is a lot of work left in this world for you. Harry Dunkley, you might just be our last missionary.’
‘Morning, Harry. Welcome back to the real world.’
Martin Toohey grinned as he walked briskly up the path. He’d arrived in a taxi from the city as the time edged towards 11.30am. The two men shook hands awkwardly.
‘How’re you feeling? You look a million dollars . . . well, a few thousand anyway.’
‘Thanks, Martin, you always were rich with the compliments. C’mon, let’s have tea with the ghosts of your old comrades.’
Dunkley led Toohey into a favourite sitting room. Soft light shone through windows covered by patterned curtains. Comfortable lounges and armchairs in yesteryear print lined walls painted light grey. Framed portraits of austere-looking priests in dog collars and black soutanes pointed to a prouder past, before the church’s reputation had been forever stained by the sins of the fathers.
‘Any of them look familiar, Martin?’ Toohey was studying the fading faces closely.
‘Yeah, I remember him. Father what’s-his-name. Nice old bugger. Taught canon law, from memory.’
Dunkley snorted. ‘Now locked up by the Royal Commission, for kiddie fiddling, no doubt.’
‘I see you haven’t lost your cynicism, Mr Dunkley. Yes, the church has a lot to answer for, but these were good men,’ Toohey said. ‘You wouldn’t get it, but this is . . . was . . . a very liberal theological campus. A religious society is part of the church, but not part of its ruling hierarchy. Few of the teachers here would have had any truck with the arch-conservative types who became bishops.’
They sat quietly for a moment, then Dunkley asked a question that had been burning for days.
‘Why, Martin?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you of all people reach out to me? Get me out of jail. Bring me here. After everything I’d done to you over the years; the front-page hatchet jobs. You and me, we were hardly mates at the best of times.’
Toohey rubbed the back of his neck as he contempla
ted an answer.
‘Harry, they teach some strange things in this place. But the nub is this: do unto others what you would have them do unto you.’
Then he laughed.
‘And taking a cricket bat to the Oz’s editorial HQ, now that’s a very Australian act of revenge. I couldn’t let them put you away for that.’
Dunkley smiled as Toohey paused and closed his eyes, as if searching out a painful moment of his own.
‘Remember when you cornered me in parliament on the way to Question Time?’ Toohey asked.
Dunkley’s smile faded. ‘Yeah, you told me to piss off and one of your goons got up close and personal.’
Toohey’s eyes flashed open.
‘You said that I’d been set up, that it was the Americans, not the Chinese, behind those three cyber attacks.’
‘Yeah,’ Dunkley said. ‘Then I teamed up with your old mate Bruce Paxton to show that the man behind that little war was Sir Jack fucking Webster. I had proof he was the mastermind behind the Alliance, those conniving puppeteers working in the shadows of government. But did anyone believe me?’
Toohey slowly shook his head, then surprised Dunkley by slamming the palm of his hand down on the armrest of the lounge.
‘That was an attack on Australia, designed to mislead the elected government. My government.’ Toohey’s face turned scarlet. ‘It was the straw that broke my back. It was a coup.’
‘Yep.’ Dunkley gave a mock salute. ‘Australia’s Allende, come on down. At least they didn’t shoot you. That fucker damn near killed me.’
Toohey stood up and paced about the room.
‘Harry, I’ve thought about that conversation every day since I lost office. I didn’t believe you then, but I believe you now.’
