Challenge

by Paul Daley

  Tom extended a hand back then and I took it. It was Tom who taught me that the way to conquer fear is to stand squarely, to assess the enemy eye to eye and either tactically retreat or run straight at him. These days Tom likes to say that I never learned the tactical retreat part of that equation—that on the streets, in football, in the law, and now in politics, I’ve only ever charged headlong at my threats. This is bullshit of course, but Tom insists that if I have a critical failing—and he does like to point out my failings—this is definitely it.

  Still, Tom has been the closest thing to a brother I’ve had. And if that means that he sometimes pisses me off by talking down to me then so be it. I’ll forgive him most things—stealing my girlfriends and wearing my clothes when we were students, advising the comrades about the best way to get on my radar, even interfering at home to smooth it over with me and Ana from time to time when things have been really tough.

  I trust him. I’d like to say absolutely but I can’t. That’s the game I’m in. Father Tom might be my oldest friend, but he’s also a vicious political animal.

  4

  So I say to him—Tom, mate, mate, the party’s going to do me over on this terrorism Bill that Drysdale’s about to reintroduce. Shadow cabinet’s against me—wants me to roll over, support Drysdale. You know what our bunch of jelly-backs is like—always petrified of a fight. I think it’s a try-on from Drysdale—he’ll drop the whole idea if I support it. Shift it to the back burner, suddenly change the conversation to the next scare campaign.

  So typically, Tom goes, Well what’s the actual problem then? Support Drysdale, problem goes away, you don’t get rolled.

  I could say problem’s my conscience, Tom—you remember conscience?

  It’s the second time Drysdale has sent the Bill our way. First time we killed it in the Senate. But this time the political atmospherics are tinderbox. There’ve been some Normalian terror scares. Just a few kids, unemployed and bored, listening to the wrong imams—the usual witchdoctors preaching Jihad and death to the infidel. ASIO’s all over them, following them, planting bugs in their dunnies and tapping phones, so they’re no real danger. But Drysdale’s been ramping up the threat because that’s what the cunt instinctively does—dribbling bits and pieces to his favourite journos to frighten the punters, increasing the volume of the Fear. Sneaky little prick.

  Mate, I say to Tom, Drysdale is returning the Bill to us with amendments that’d allow him to set up Guantanamo in Dandenong or The Shire. Put young fellers under suspicion in the slammer indefinitely. I just can’t go for it.

  Tom, I say, it’s the wrong thing to do—support an anti-terrorism Bill that targets one section of the community. I want to fight him on it. He’s a racist bastard—he’s deliberately fanning xenophobia out there.

  So what happens if you oppose it? he asks.

  Drysdale runs to a double dissolution to save his leadership—campaigns on me being a terrorism soft-cock, and the shock jocks and tabloids incite the rednecks across the country to string up dark-skinned people. He wins the election—or just maybe the punters are so sick of him they see through it all and back principle for a change. In all probability though, I lose and the party does me over straight after the election, if I even make it that far. It’s a Devil’s choice, Tom. You know I’m that damn close to winning government. I’ve done all the impossible stuff, made every compromise to the point where there’s nothing left in me. I can’t in conscience do this. If I roll over, the punters’ll see me as weak. But worse than that, I can’t live with myself if I capitulate. I’m better off going down fighting.

  Danny, Danny—you telling me this as a priest or a friend?

  Is there a third choice, like party elder? I’m shivering and wondering if he’s wearing thongs, as he always does, despite the freezing day.

  Both, I answer, I need some guidance here, mate. Moral. Political.

  Jesus Christ, hear this—moral, he says, moral. I haven’t heard you say that word for a while. Well, ever, come to think of it. You mean you actually want confession?

  No more lies, Tom. I’ve decided I’m going to be guided by principle on every decision I make from now on. I’m going to tell the truth about everything to anyone who asks—the press, the punters, my priest, Ana …

  Tom says, Danny—have you completely lost your marbles? You’re in politics. You want to be prime minister, for God’s sake. You can’t tell the fucking truth about everything. If you’re going to do that, at least wait until you get through the election, until you’re either out on your arse or in The Lodge.

  So it’s come to this: even my priest is advising me to lie.

  I shouldn’t be surprised. Nature and nurture bestowed Tom with finely tuned realpolitik antennae. When you grow up like he did, in a home that existed to serve the prime ministerial ambitions of one man, you learn that stuff early.

  To explain why Tom matters to me I have to take you back to my log cabin.

  Until the scholarship and Tom, life had been unfolding across a few square miles of grim suburban monotony stretching from a three-bedroom ground-floor public-housing flat in Kokoda Street to the high school, the stagnant frog hollows strewn with old car parts, plastic bags and discarded milk-bottle bongs along Darebin Creek, and the proud but dilapidated weatherboard clubrooms of the Heidelberg West Magpies.

  Olympia’s five rings, their shimmering plastic lustre well and truly weathered, still hang like a symbol of lost optimism at the entrance to my old neighbourhood, the athletes’ village for the games of the 1956 XVI Olympiad.

  I was about a year old when my mum, Bev, moved us all into the village in 1958. There was me and Mum and my sister, Dana, two years older. By the time we moved in, the village was already soiling itself with crime, vandalism and family wreckage.

  When I was old enough to understand, Mum explained that Dad was a soldier who’d gone missing in Malaya just before my birth. Three medals in a little satin-lined hard brown leather box that perched reverently on the mantle above the gas fire, and an Australian Army dress uniform that hung like some khaki phantom, protected by dry cleaner’s plastic, at the end of Mum’s wardrobe, evidenced her story.

  I’d always just assumed dads were optional—things that you chose to have or not and that they weren’t in any way integral to one’s inception. Fathers were so bloody rare in the village it was normal to be without one.

  Bev’s still in Kokoda Street. I bought the dingy flat where I grew up from the council twenty-five years ago when I was doing all right at the law and footy had paid me a few quid. But it seemed like a waste spending so much money on a shitbox in a slum estate where Bev’d already misspent a quarter of a century. I felt like I was sentencing Bev to life there.

  I’d asked Bev to move somewhere better—Kew or Camberwell, or even just down to Northcote. But for her it was, No thanks, love, it’s my community and I’ll die here, I’ve got good neighbours who help me out when I’m sick—they’re like family.

  Of course it meant that while she was there I could never entirely get away from the village and all its deadbeat losers. The alternative was that she come live with me and Ana as she got older, more doddery and hit the sauce ever harder. A fucking imponderable prospect really—she and Ana couldn’t breathe the same air.

  No, the only way Bev’s leaving the Olympic Village is on a gurney.

  Like me, if I’d stayed. When I began full-time in the law in the early eighties, a police reporter for The Mercury said the old village had spawned more A-Grade crooks—dealers, stick-up merchants, rapists, even the odd hitman—per street than anywhere else in Melbourne. I never swallowed much any journo told me, but I did believe that he was right. Half of the deadbeats in my prep class eventually ended up inside. I’ve always figured I’d have ended up doing porridge, too, if not for the scholarship to the posh boys’ college.

  I’ve got Bev to thank for that also. She knew what would happen if I stayed. And so she pushed me, drilled me—geography, maths, English
, Latin—fuck, Latin!—and then made me sit the exam. I was, am, utterly driven by fear of disappointing her, especially given the way Dana turned out. Darling boy, I was. That’s what I always will be to Mum.

  It helped that I could play, Bev reckoned, because the college cared as much about beating the rest of the public schools—especially the other Mick colleges—on the oval as in the classroom.

  So she made damned certain they knew just how handy I was—even showed them my Best and Fairest medals from West Heidelberg. They certainly paid more attention to that than my baptism certificate even though Bev gave it and a letter from Father Kennedy, the parish priest, telling what very good churchgoers we’d been for as long as he could remember down at St Pius X.

  Bev thought they just couldn’t resist me: bright, fantastic at footy, brought up a fine Catholic and, she assured them, a future leader, despite the fact I was so bloody shy I could look hardly anyone in the eye and stammered when I went to say, I’m very pleased to meet you.

  The offer came—a three-quarters scholarship. She said I was going, that’s that, and she’d figure out how to pay the other quarter. I don’t care how I get the money, she said, because this is your one chance of up and out.

  I wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant until I got to the school, but I prayed a thanks to God anyway and then I went to the cupboard to curse Dad, just hanging at the end there behind the plastic as usual, for never being around to make it easier for Bev and me and Dana, even though it was almost too late by then for poor Dana.

  5

  So I try to explain to Tom—No, no, mate, that’s the whole point. I want to win on the basis of who I am. Not on the basis of who they think I am. I mean, I’m not going to go out there and actually volunteer stuff like, you know, I lied about never doing drugs and admit I really did belt that waiter who gave me lip that time. But I’ll admit it if I’m asked. Let’s face it—I have done some pretty bad things over the years, Tom. You know most of the worst of it. You were there.

  He doesn’t like me reminding him of that, so he moves it along, says, Danny, some political guidance then for today—get up to the House and fight. Don’t let the critics fill the vacuum. Stare them down, Danny. You decide whether to go with Drysdale on this. But either way, you’ve got to bring our people with you or you’ll be in a world of pain. If you back down, make it your idea …

  Back down—you kidding? Tom, I can’t do —

  Danny, relax, he says, I’m just saying that if you did back down you’d have to own it—you’re strong enough to do that. And if you don’t, then you’ve got to make it their idea to call Drysdale’s bluff—if that’s what you’re really going to do. I’m telling you what they’re telling me, Danny—they’re not lost to you. They’ll be behind you as long as you take them with you.

  I can’t begin to tell you how much this infuriates and frustrates me about my colleagues. They’ll bitch and moan to Tom about what a cunt I am, knowing full well that he’ll pass it straight on to me. But they’re too spineless to tell me to my face.

  I ask Tom, So why the hell don’t they ever tell me that themselves?

  Because you never ask them, you stubborn arrogant know-all prick, he says. Because you never listen to them, especially when your back’s up.

  Okay, priest—the roof’s about to cave in and you’re telling me to be nicer to the comrades? I’m the one hanging my balls out in public. What they need is some backbone.

  Danny, do I really need to tell you that this is not footy training? It’s not like the harder you flog them on the paddock the tougher they are on match day. Talk and listen. Then come around and see me later. You want confession? We’ll do it over a drink. But not here. Go on, mate, I’ve got a pew full of smokin’ sinners out there ready to spill their guts.

  Righto—penance? I ask.

  He turns on the blarney again, goes, Lad, for your penance give me 2.6 million Hail Marys—one for every filthy thought. Now you better make a flawless act of contrition.

  Yes, Father, I say. Here goes—My Father I am truly sorry for all of my sins with all my heart …

  Go on, lad.

  Father, I’ve forgotten.

  Danny, you’re a hopeless Catholic, he says with a smile. See you later, mate.

  I leave with an unsettling, gnawing anxiety about Tom’s equivocation.

  On the way out nobody bothers pretending not to notice or recognise me. Their eyes follow me as I walk down the polished linoleum aisle, and some turn their heads to watch as I open the heavy oak doors and leave.

  Tom’s right. He usually is. One of the sinners must’ve told the grubs I was inside because no sooner have I left the church than a photographer shoots me from across the road. So what? I’ve been to church. It’s not like they’ve caught me leaving a knock shop … or Indy’s place.

  It’s another ominous sign, though. I know what they’re saying about me up there on the hill: that I’m more erratic than ever—off the record and on non-attributable background, of course. It’s code for he’s going insane under the pressure of it all, more nuts than usual even, thoroughly losing the plot.

  But they’re wrong. Which is why it is so critical that I play this the right way from here on in. If I do that, I could still be prime minister by the end of footy season.

  I sit in the back of the Comcar for the short ride up to the house. I turn on my phone. Seventeen missed calls, including three from Mum and six from Eddie. I punch in the contact for Eddie—the only other person besides Tom who I can reasonably trust.

  Eddie answers, doesn’t say hi, just, Where the fuck have you been all morning? I rang the driver and he said you’d told him not to tell me.

  Confession.

  Oh, I see. Father Tom, right—he’s more important than the raging beast up here that’s about to swallow you whole, I suppose. I hope you got it all off your chest, Danny, because the whole world’s watching you at the moment. I’ve warned you to be super careful about where you go and what you do. And um, yeah, yeah here it is on Twitter three minutes ago. @Devilindrag—some troll calling themselves GoodvEvil—says Oppn Leader been v naughty boy? Lots of yelling in confessional in Manuka lol. So there you go, Danny—LOL.

  Eddie, I say, I really don’t care that much about this whole Twitter thing.

  Then it really is all true what they’re saying about you, mate, she says. You’ve lost the plot. This, Danny, says to me someone’s stalking you.

  Eddie, just block the cunt. Problem solved.

  Danny, don’t be a dumb-arse. We need to know what people are saying about you, even if it’s nonsense. Does Tom tweet?

  How should I know? I’ve never thought to ask Tom if he’s a tweeter. But if he does, this has to be is his idea of a joke.

  Darl, I don’t know if Tom tweets, I tell her.

  Well don’t sweat over it, we’ll figure it out. But just remember, this means someone’s watching you more closely than usual. And there’s evil intent everywhere. You close? she asks.

  Two minutes.

  Steer clear of the doors. Go to the underground car park instead, okay? They’re feral today.

  No way. I’m not hiding anything. I want them to see me walk in.

  Well, say nothing then.

  Nothing? I can’t say nothing, Eddie. That’ll look absurd, like I really am hiding something, which I’m not.

  Okay, except if they ask you about the cooking show—you know, Captain Cook—just say something like it’s fantastic that Peng has made it into the final.

  Really?

  Yeah, she made it—didn’t you watch last night? She did this amazing basil-infused rare tuna.

  No, no—I mean really, you want me to say that?

  Sure, everyone’s watching it. It’s all people care about at the moment. Well, that and the leadership chatter. But I don’t want you to talk about the terror Bill because then that will lead to leadership questions, right? Got it? Not a word.

  Fabulous, I say. So I can talk about a cooking show
but not about how this prick of a prime minister is whipping up racist hysteria over a largely law-abiding minority?

  Correct.

  Right then.

  And, Danny, just so you know, you’re now following GoodvEvil.

  What does that mean?

  6

  The cameramen, soundies, snappers and reporters are straight on top of me like flies to a cowpat when I get out of the car under the alcove at the reps’ entrance.

  They’re all yelling at me to say something, anything—how about get the fuck out of my way you fish-eyed loser or I’ll break your arms in three places?—as I calmly walk through.

  On TV dramas a politician always says no comment when they don’t want to answer. But no MP ever says that in real life because it’s shorthand for I’m not going to answer because I’ll incriminate myself/my colleague or I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and the reptiles, despite their love of a cliché, will pillory you as a dunderhead if that’s all that you dare give them. No. Best to just answer a different question—the question you want to answer. Or stall.

  So I track into a holding pattern and say, Guys, guys, let’s keep it nice—I’ll have something to say soon, while they attack my head with microphones and tape recorders.

  I keep pushing through them to a barrage of repeated words—enemies, style, leadership and challenge, challenge, challenge, challenge, so much talk of a challenge it’s got to be coming.

  As if these pricks don’t have enough of me already. Do I look and sound so different today? They’ll get nothing. Unless of course they ask the right questions. In which case I might just admit to infidelity, assault, perhaps even attempted murder.

  Then I hear it in the corner of my ear: Mr Slattery, what’s your reaction to the semi-final of Captain Cook? Are you pleased that Peng has made it through to the final last night?

  I stop, pause a moment. I can’t help myself. A cooking show—the country’s at a crossroads and they ask me about a fucking cooking show.