Challenge

by Paul Daley

  She opened with drugs.

  A bit of dope, I said—out of season only. Youthful experimentation. Yes, I inhaled. Just made me paranoid and hungry for souvlaki. Never liked it much.

  She asked, More, you mean?

  More what?

  More paranoid.

  Yes, Eddie—more paranoid.

  Ever do ’roids?

  Never. Weren’t around much in my day on the track.

  Coke?

  Never on a footy trip.

  Oh right. That makes it okay then—so when?

  After I won the Grand Final, twenty years back.

  Anyone see?

  Eddie—you fucking kidding? I was with the team. We were celebrating. We’d just won—first time in thirty-two years.

  Any pictures or videos, you know, of you snorting lines off the glass coffee table—off a maiden’s silken backside?

  Not that I know of. Phones weren’t cameras back then. In fact, I didn’t get my first mobile till well after that …

  Danny, I pray that you’re right. Because if there’re photographs—it’s all over. So you deny it if you’re ever asked. If the pictures ever happen to turn up you’re fucked anyway. So lie about it. You just say no—never, ever. If they ask if you’ve smoked hooch, say what you just told me. Yeah, once or twice as a student, made me sick, prefer a few beers, don’t condone drugs, yadda yadda yadda—don’t mention you did it with the other players.

  I said, Sure, then impatiently, what’s next?

  Danny, this is going to take a while. But it could save your arse. So back to footy trips. Any gang bangs?

  What the fuck, Eddie?

  Oh come on, Danny. You were a footy player, for God’s sake. Gang bangs every Saturday night, isn’t it? You never picked up one of those bad-girl groupies at the end of the night out at the social club, you know—irresistible in that slutty kind of way you quite like, your number tattooed in team colours on her inner thigh, you’ve got size-ten beer goggles, the pissy horn, you take her back to one of the teammates’ places, sink a few more dark and stormies, play tag team?

  Eddie, that sort of stuff might’ve happened. But I never took part in it. Ever. You’ve got to believe me.

  Danny, it doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what’s true—and whether it ever comes out and how prepared we are to deal with it if it does. You want to be prime minister. Well this, my friend, is contingency planning.

  Eddie, I really can’t believe that you’d think I’d do something like that.

  Danny, I’m not your mum. I’m not judging you—just asking.

  I was the captain—kept away from that sort of thing. I also had another job, remember? Law student, then lawyer. I wasn’t trouble—I tried to sort out the boofheads, stop them from raping and pillaging.

  How’d that go then?

  I didn’t answer.

  But I knew precisely where all this was going, especially when she asked, Danny, you really like women, don’t you?

  Again, I didn’t answer, so she continued, Danny, have you ever forced yourself on a woman?

  No, I fucking have not, I said. I’ve never needed to.

  Moving right along then, she said. Affairs?

  Eddie, I’ve been married twice. And I’ve been a public figure for a long time now. There have always been women.

  Meaning what? I need to know if you’ve ever cheated on your wives.

  We’re in the cone of silence, right?

  Deep inside, okay? Relax.

  Domenica—Dom—my first wife. She found out. We split. She was angry. You know the rest. It ended very badly. Everyone knows that. And I really don’t like to talk about it. That’s it. I’m not proud of what happened. I feel guilty about it every single day—even though it’s not strictly my fault. I don’t see why it’s anyone’s business whether or not I was faithful to her—name me a monogamous political marriage. But if anybody ever asks me about Domenica I will tell the truth.

  I recounted almost everything about Dom for Eddie. The baby. Her illness. Me being unfaithful. Her mother. The ugly end. But I didn’t tell her about the incident with the cops. The only other person who knew that much was Tom. By the time I finished talking to Eddie about it I was weeping.

  Never, she said, admit to anyone else that you were unfaithful to Domenica. They’ll destroy you with that.

  She didn’t let up while I was wiping my eyes, demanded, Okay, now tell me about you and Ana.

  I told Eddie the not-quite truth: I loved Ana and was lucky to have met her. Ana and I were part of the same project, which was to head the government that would end the tawdry cynicism brought by the Tories, and change the country for good. We were tight. It began as an equal marriage. She’d clean-slated my past—knew everything. We started together at Year Zero. I said that I valued my marriage and kids more than anything, and would put them all before my career.

  I’m not perfect, I told Eddie, never have been—but then again I’d never claimed to be perfect and the punters and the party knew that. There’d been a minor personal slip-up or two on my part. But I was committed.

  She sympathised. Danny, no one is ever really likely to ask you if you’ve been faithful to Ana or Domenica because nobody wants to deal with the truth—not the journos and not the other politicians. Who wants to set a precedent round here on lapses of monogamy? You open the floodgates, everyone’s quaking—you’ll have wives and husbands electronically tagging their MP spouses, getting private detectives to trace them.

  On reflection today, I know exactly what Eddie means. I’ve lost count of the good marriages I’ve seen collapse in politics over the past decade.

  It starts off the same way. Usually, the bloke becomes an MP on the back of a shared dream, which is that one day he would go all the way to the top—you know, we’re-doing-this-together-honey sort of stuff.

  Never, ever, believe a member of the House of Representatives who tells you he or she doesn’t plan on becoming prime minister one day. Because it’s absolute horseshit. They all do.

  Anyway, they keep the discipline for the first year or two or three— fly to Canberra first thing Monday or Tuesday in sittings weeks, home last plane Thursday, even if they’re so rooted it nearly kills them.

  And for the first couple of years they go home to their sad rented room after parliament each day—quick takeaway, Newsnight, early to bed. Alone. Then after a few years they realise just about everyone else is doing it differently. It’s always the loneliness that gets them.

  They think sure, why not, what’s the harm in going along tonight? Just dinner in Kingston and a drink or two afterwards. Other pollies. Staffers. Get pissed because it’s so much less painful than being sober. Ignore the late-night calls from the wives and kids back home to save the family hearing the music pulsating through the bar where you’re doing shots and ogling your opponent’s press sec, the echoing voices and laughter, the clinking glasses. It seems like just a small step to a bit of same-party sex. Or Mandingo. Even a journo. You fall into bed with someone. Wake up dry-mouthed, angry, hung-over and lost. You’re ashamed at having broken Home Rule, but also a little confused because it’s so easy to justify what’s just happened under the Away Rule.

  You feel so shithouse, so intensely guilty, that you confide to one of the colleagues who says, Don’t feel too bad about it, mate, the rules are different here. Anything goes—like the footy trip. So long as it stays away. Relax. Everyone does it. No one ever tells. And mostly they never do.

  If this sounds like an excuse, it’s not meant to be. I can take responsibility for my own actions. I was only unfaithful to Ana, the first time, by mistake.

  I’d been in parliament about eight years and on shadow health. She was on my staff. As they nearly always are. I can’t count the number of shadow ministers who’ve had it away with their chiefs of staff or press secs. My mistake was Jenny, social policy adviser on leave from the department. Party member. True believer. Very young. Thirty—thirty, for fuck’s sake.


  She was up for it. I resisted for a long time until one night in Brisbane, after a day full of meetings. I’d had Ana on the phone, screaming abuse at me for not getting home—dog needed the vet, Sam was in trouble at school again and the twins had flu. You know, it was when the hell are you coming home, I didn’t sign up for being a widow and by the way the roof is leaking again, did you get the leaves out of the gutters like you said you would before you took off on Sunday night?

  So it happened. Then again. And again. I felt bad. But I kept doing it because at the end of the parliamentary day when the air was palpable with anger and abuse and pheromones and testosterone, when you’d been bellowing so much in parliament your throat was raw, when your head thumped and your hands shook from all the caffeine, when the leader’s office had just rewritten your health policy for a fourth time so it was a carbon copy of the government’s, and when your mother’s neighbour had rung you to say that the old girl had fallen on the footpath outside again, was in hospital and how soon do you think you’ll be able to come, the only thing that will make you forget is the sensation of skin on skin.

  You want to blot out reality. As a temporary fix, nothing works better. It works so well that it’s almost worth the guilt.

  When I ditched Jenny she said she was pregnant. Nonsense, I said, I had the snip after the twins—and anyway I don’t want kids with you and I’ll never leave Ana. She threatened to tell everyone. I said it was just sex—that she couldn’t blackmail me into being with her, because no one else would care even if they believed her. She said she’d fuck my life, end my career. All I could say was go on. I don’t know who else she told. Before I knew it, she’d left my office. It’s been nearly three years and I haven’t heard boo from her.

  Still, the rumours that the party had hushed her up, paid for an abortion, swept through the building. A few of the sisters on the backbench carried on a bit, privately asked a few too many questions. But nobody else really made a big deal of it. Mutually assured destruction. Glasshouses. Mostly, nobody ever really wants to go there.

  My mate, Andy Tiernan, shadow environment minister back then, wasn’t as lucky as me. It was a total tragedy. A great guy. One of the few real friends I’ve ever had in politics. We were chalk and cheese. He was shy, polite but into his footy. Blues fan. Only Carlton supporter I’ve ever understood.

  A gentle, intelligent, considered, sweet, sweet bloke. One of about ten pollies I’ve met who really did get in to make a difference. They all say it—you know—but it’s horseshit. They all get in because they want to be prime minister. Biscuits, we used to call him Biscuits because he was one short of the packet. He was also a bee in a bottle. Boundless energy. Would come out of his shell when he went on the tear. Funny as all get out. Great mimic. He could hold up the bar down at the Buried Treasure with his imitations of Dawes, and Drysdale and the Sweeties, and Vadge and Timmy Proudfoot.

  Then he knocked up one of the backbenchers’ staffers.

  Garry Sweetman, parliamentary secretary—bagman for the Right and stacker for big bro Dave—had someone else in mind for Andy’s seat. Made sure Andy’s wife found out about the fluff. The missus went spare. Left him straight away, took the kids—two under five. No second chances there.

  Andy had a complete crack-up, ended up in the psych ward at St Vinnie’s. There were lots of filthy stories in the papers—leaked by the Sweeties—that Andy was so crackers he’d have to lose preselection. The poor prick, all he needed was time to get better. I went out in public, told the party, the factional boys and the reptiles to back off and leave him alone.

  Then I rang Julian Dawes—left a voicemail saying he, too, should do the right thing and come out publicly in support of Biscuits. It was the moment of absolute truth for Julian Dawes and me. The journos eventually asked Jules if he supported Andy’s preselection.

  It’s all very sad, tragic in fact, but it’s a matter for the party, he said, not the leader. I don’t get involved in preselection matters.

  Weak as piss. I couldn’t believe it. I went and saw Biscuits in hospital to say, Hang in there, mate. You’ve got these beautiful kids and another on the way. Fuck politics. Get out. It’s not worth it. Life’s too short.

  He just stared into space, said, Thanks, mate, you’ve been a good friend and I appreciate it.

  Next thing I know he’s walked out of hospital, driven down to Phillip Island and thrown himself off the Nobbies. They found part of him around at San Remo three days later, bloated, eaten by the sea lice and sharks.

  Dawes! Weak cunt. Empty as a keg at closing time. I will always blame him for Biscuits’ suicide.

  It remains the absolutely most despicable thing I’ve seen in politics. Worse than anything the Tories ever did. But then again, they’ve learned all the worst stuff from us.

  I quit Dawes’s shadow cabinet a week after the funeral and went to the backbench. Waited for the numbers. Told myself I was doing it for Andy. That fired me up. But truth be told, I was mostly doing it for me and Ana, and because I’d convinced myself that this once great party, a party whose old stalwarts had found me and patronised me and given me a chance in school, in university and the law and football and politics, actually deserved better: it deserved me.

  But now I know it has never really deserved me. And it still doesn’t. What it actually deserves is itself.

  Anyway—Ana. I never told her about Jenny. She might’ve heard the rumours. The point is that once I’d had the affair I’d crossed the threshold, broken the seal, lowered the bar. It was easy to do it again and again. And I felt a little less guilty each time.

  Then about a year ago I met Indy. She’s different.

  When she was giving me the inoculation routine eighteen months back, Eddie wanted to know one thing about Jenny: Did I ever text her, write to her or email her about the pregnancy claim?

  No.

  What about the others? she asked. Texts? Emails? Photographs? Letters?

  I told her I honestly didn’t know—I couldn’t be sure.

  From now on, she advised, if you can’t keep your dick in your dacks, make sure you cover your digital tracks.

  Her next question floored me.

  Danny, she asked, would you say that you are a violent man?

  16

  I wait in the foyer of my office. It’s just before lunchtime, Monday now. I am anxiously buffing each black RM on the opposing suit trouser calf. Eddie appears before me. She picks fluff off my suit coat lapel and straightens my tie. I wonder if she might lick her handkerchief and wipe a stain from the corner of my mouth, like Mum used to do when I was a little boy.

  She holds each of my upper arms. Looks into my eyes. It feels as intimate as I know it seems.

  Everyone thinks we’re fucking, of course. I know how it must look; they can’t understand how we could spend so much time together, be so unashamedly, blithely, physically familiar, and not be. But we’re not.

  I don’t know what Eddie does after hours. Not that there’re many of them.

  I know there’s a husband, Brendan, but I’ve never met him. Older guy. Defence. Spooky type. Always away. He’s got older kids, none with her. I know she’s Israeli Jewish—on one side extracted of Poles who survived Plaszow, on the other from Iraqis, one of whom died in Auschwitz. Her folks, academics, came out from Tel Aviv in the late sixties, had her and settled in Melbourne. She did Aliyah in the late eighties, served two years in the Israeli Defence Force. As an Arabic speaker and a psychology graduate, she was put to use to both help interpret and interrogate suspected militants in the West Bank and Gaza.

  Tell me more, I’ve said to her a million times. And she goes something like, You’ve got no idea how hard it is when you believe in Israel but hate what you do to the Palestinians. I was an absolutely shit soldier, but as a translator I could actually help people they arrested—diffuse, get prisoners better deals. It’s not black and white, although I know that’s the way you see everything.

  Oh, yeah, fuck it’s all righ
t for some to claim the past is another country, I say to her, but with you it really is, Eddie.

  She might be right. But I’m capital-P pro-Palestinian—something else the comrades pack themselves over because they’re all totally shit-scared of the influence of the four-bees and their capacity to withdraw party funding. Honestly, they’re as scared of dissing the Jews as they are the Yanks, which says something about the fortitude of the comrades. It’s like that joke, What’s the difference between Israel and Australia? Answer, About forty-seven years.

  Anyway, not much more do I know about Eddie. Except she’s a Saints supporter—about the only thing I don’t like about her.

  She’s always in the office well before me, leaves much later. She goes to the gym for forty-five minutes every lunchtime. That’s it for recreation as far as I can tell.

  What else she does to make herself happy I don’t know. If we ever talk about personal stuff it’s mine. I guess I never really ask her much about herself. I can’t imagine she’s happy with an older man who’s away all of the time. A woman like Eddie, she needs attention, I’d say—lots of it. I’ve got her picked as aching inside. Sad. Lots of covert affairs.

  Ready? she asks.

  Blood oath-ski, I say, and bounce on my toes, a bit like Timmy Proudfoot does, just to show I’m as keen as mustard to kill it in the big room.

  She’s holding both my hands in hers when she says, Danny, go big. Say it all. I know you can.

  She holds open the doors and I walk out, turn left into the corridor.

  The parquetry floor has such a sheen that, with the light above and behind me, I can see my facial features in the reflection, and just behind me the procession that always follows the leader in for show—Crawley and Proudfoot, Usher and Jamieson, Vagnoli, Flynn and, a little further back, one of the junior press secs.

  The flash guns pop, make me blink, wince, as we walk to the caucus room. I can hear my heart and feel sweat prickle my skin. Everything comes down to this.

  I enter to the usual murmur and hush, sit behind the table up front, Steve on one side and Proudfoot on the other. My mouth is dry. My right hand shakes when I pour water. Proudfoot notices, looks at me askance, deliberately, to compound my discomfort. I look at the headshots on the wall. Curtin. Chif. Doc. Calwell. Gough, Holden, McQuoid, Gilling, Chambers, Patterson, Dooley, Dawes. Me.