Challenge

by Paul Daley

  Grimes makes the most of the long silent pause which is his way— the sick prick—of giving parenthesis to the fact that I’d deserted her.

  I’m waiting for him—wanting him—to ask me about the affairs. If he asks I’ll say it all—I’ll tell him I screwed around and that that was the ultimate cruelty. My career is one simple question away from oblivion.

  Do it, do it.

  But he doesn’t ask.

  Instead, he ends it with: So you left and then a terrible thing happened. You said before that you live with what happened every single day. So, can you tell me about your former wife’s death? Let’s start with the day she committed suicide. What date was that again?

  This is one nasty son of a bitch. He thinks he’s caught me out. Gotcha: the Opposition leader doesn’t even know the date his first wife died.

  Of course, Antony, I reply. Domenica was found in the river, near Dights Falls, on the 20th of February 1991. But she probably drowned the day before that.

  And so it goes on and on until I hear myself saying: Antony, I am not a perfect human being. I have never claimed to be. I do not hold myself up as a paragon in terms of my personal behaviour. But I don’t think that my personal life is anyone’s business, even though I understand that not everyone shares that view.

  I know what is coming next.

  Mr Slattery, there have been some obscure allusions on social media to another episode—possibly of alleged violence—in your distant past, on the 25th of May 1974 to be precise. Have you any idea what that is about? Did you hurt somebody else?

  I don’t blink.

  Well that, Antony, I can’t tell you anything about. I don’t know a thing about that. All I can tell you is that I’ve never intentionally seriously physically harmed anyone—off the field.

  I look at Eddie. She’s crying again.

  Until today, I’ve never seen her cry.

  30

  I spend the rest of the afternoon in my office with Eddie, Errol and Crawley keeping track on the monitor of the Senate debate on the terror Bill.

  I wander back into the House to vote twice in response to the division bells. But mostly I just count down the hours until the Grimes interview airs, filling in the odd highly selective blank about my past with the colleagues, and intermittently going out into the hallway to play kick-to-kick with Errol and Crawley and a junior press office staffer called Alan Best—Bestie—who played a few games for Essendon Reserves and who I elbow—hard under the ribs, just the once though— when he tries to take a speccie over me, to demonstrate for the lurking cameras that while the gallery might all be in a lather over this latest bullshit about violence and leadership and my dead first wife and the terror Bill and every-fucking-thing else, they really need the old cold spoon treatment because I, at least, appear not to give much of a rat’s fat one. Impressions still count.

  Naturally, I can’t stop thinking about the letter.

  I put in a couple more calls to Mum because it’s a bridge we need to cross and I must’ve ignored thirty calls from her since Saturday. She gets on the sauce and calls all the time just to say she loves me and ask when am I coming over to see her and that. Anyway, I’ve calmed down on the letter a bit and I can easily convince myself that it’s just some nutter, even though he’s got Dad’s first name right, but then again he could’ve found that out from reading the press about me—all of the profiles always mention how Dad, Terry Slattery, died in Malaya. Dad’s been dead more than fifty years. And we always had his medals and the uniform to prove it. But I want to straighten it out with Bev regardless, because of course I’m curious but also just so I’ve got something to tell Eddie when I eventually show her the letter and, not least, in case the reptiles ever find out given that they are scouring the universe for the filth on me. But Mum’s phone is still ringing out.

  I take calls from Ana and Tom, who tells me to come down to his place as soon as I can get out of the house. I miss—deliberately—two more calls from Deth, who leaves me a garbled, hyper-anxious voicemail about dinner tonight—Christ, dinner! I’d forgotten about dinner with Deth—saying that the recipe he’s cooking is the one that got Peng into the semi-final of the cooking show last week and that if he doesn’t time it precisely, then the rabbit in the ragout will be stringy and dry and the whole thing will be a waste of time and so, you know, could I be on time—eight o’clock—and bring some special local shiraz to go with the bunny—if it wasn’t too much trouble I could get it from the bottle-o next to the supermarket at Manuka. And whisky. Could I bring whisky, too, and, oh yeah, a packet of smokes—Winnie Reds?

  Ana seems even more pissed off than usual. She’s had to take the kids out of school early because they’re getting hassled about me. Sam’s been in a punch-up with another kid who said I was a violent lunatic and the Australian people would soon consign me to the dustbin of history—that is if the party didn’t get rid of me first. (Smart kid, whoever he was, but I reckon he probably still deserved a smack over the head from Sam—attaboy!)

  Ana reckons she’s scared, says she felt like people were looking at her sideways in the street and in the office block where her practice is based.

  Ana knows, of course, the details of Domenica’s death. She reiterates on the phone that she doesn’t care about anything else that had passed between Domenica and me. Back when we met, when we decided to get married, we’d joked about what we’d called the Cambodia Resolution—Year Zero on my past. She knew the village was a tough place to grow up. And she knew that, as a young bloke, I’d become pretty handy in a melee, so to speak, be it on the street or behind play. In fact, I think she actually quite liked that about me.

  Ana, brought up on the correct side of the Yarra and educated at one of the so-called ladies’ colleges, said she admired me for taking the opportunities that had presented themselves, for having created so many others and, yes, for the fact that I’d had to learn to look after myself. She said even though her dad had once been a Tory, he and I had a lot of stuff in common: both cared about poverty traps and blackfellas, access to education for all, a ‘Big Australia’ that welcomed refugees—that sort of stuff. I was already talking about the Window of Optimism way back then. She reckoned Big Dick would’ve gone for that. Would’ve wished he’d actually thought of it. She got politics all right. Ana was under no illusions, thanks to her dad, about what it would take.

  Until pretty recently, Ana and I still had our moments—well, enough of them, at least, to remind us of what we shared together before we actively introduced politics into the equation. The truth is that I yearn to be as close to her as we used to be, to have time to sit in the garden together and to talk about what we’re reading, to farm the kids out sometimes and to go away for a night alone and to make love in the afternoons and then go out to dinner, rather than attend the local Fabian Society Quiz Night or drinks with the hospital board. We could be tight again. It could be like it was. But I’d probably have to extract politics from us first. And I’m not sure I’m quite willing to do that just yet. But ask me again in a day or two.

  That’s why India—Indy—and me always seemed to work together. Until recently, anyway. Our affair and then our ongoing relationship was built around my political demands. Indy’s a PhD in Australian economic history—specifically the management of the Australian economy from 1939 to 1945. She still works as a researcher in the parliamentary library, which is how we met. After I’d abandoned Dawes’s frontbench, I wanted to look for parallels between wartime austerity and government responses to the global financial crisis. So much for that dead-end; in the 1940s they cut spending, heavily regulated public expenditure, put building projects—including Canberra—on hold, whereas Drysdale and his lot spent in the name of stimulus, like lunatics, on school halls, libraries, home insulation, even one-off thousand-dollar payments to the punters. A cash injection to the economy, they called it. More like an injection straight into the veins of the intractable losers who can’t find the window.

 
; But the point is that when Indy was researching for me, I got to tell her a story about another one of my great Australian heroes—Lyndhurst Falkiner Giblin, warrior, MP, sportsman, adventurer, political adviser, economist. Giblin is up there for me with Vere Gordon Childe. Born into middle-class comfort in Hobart, Giblin studied at Cambridge, rowed for Kings, played rugby for England, then went gold-mining in British Columbia, did a term in the Tasmanian parliament and then went off to fight on the Western Front. During the Second World War he ran the Australian economy from the ghostly, deserted, half-built capital where he and his artist wife, Eilean, lived in their cottage that was surrounded by fruit trees and with chooks and dogs in the backyard. She wandered the Limestone Plains digging up clay to throw into pots.

  When I was on the backbench I ruled a line through the afternoon after one Question Time, hid myself away in the Petherick Room at the National Library and read Eilean’s unpublished diary. I envied the Giblins their joint life, to each other and to country. I’d like to grow chooks and have dogs and pick apricots and live in the bush capital and run the country, I told Indy apropos of the Giblins when we first met.

  I didn’t mean it as a come-on line. But here was this woman, not really at first glance my type at all—a little plump but tall, full hips and breasts, and so painfully, painfully pretty with her retroussé nose and blue eyes, her brown bob with its flamboyant bolt of purple, a tiny stud on the left side of her nose and a blue-tattooed Chinese character on her wrist.

  And she asked me, Can I come, too?

  That was the beginning with Indy.

  A year-and-a-half’s worth of dinners, walks through the bush with her dog, coffees at out-of-the-way suburban shops, and movies, hours and hours of drinking and talking late at night at our respective places preceded anything at all happening in a physical sense. We kissed once or twice, but no sex. I even bedded the odd staffer—from all sides—just to meet the old needs, while Indy and I grew closer. I had a thing about quarantining her from the fetid swamp that was—is—my private life. I feared, with good reason, that once the sex began she’d end up in the swamp, too.

  Ultimately, it was she who convinced me. There were only so many conversations we could have about the suffragettes, about Federation, about Eureka, about Apocalypse Now as a metaphor for public life. And as Indy pointed out, by the time I was leader there was so much talk about us around the House that we may as well have been on the nest anyway.

  I fessed her up to Eddie as soon as it began. And I even stopped fucking around. Indy was forty then. Still time for kids. For a long time she asked for nothing except for my honesty and a spare night where I could afford it. But then she started asking about Ana and precisely where it was going wrong between us. And she started sussing me out about Domenica—why she killed herself, whether it was because I’d been unfaithful to her. Soon she wanted to know if Ana and I still slept in the same bed when I went home. I didn’t like that at all. Just yesterday, after I managed to steal a couple of hours out of the day I’d otherwise spent with Eddie and Errol war-gaming how we’d handle the terror Bill, Indy was red hot about whether Ana and I had a future and if I’d ever leave the marriage.

  She’s never seemed jealous or especially possessive. But then again I’d never promised her anything. But suddenly, there we were out walking with her dog, and she raises the prospect of workshopping it all with Ana.

  Of course I go into immediate flashback mode, thinking of Bridie’s letter to Domenica and the whole sordid disaster that that turned into. No one could blame me for being a little gun-shy on this front. I’ve done my best to cover tracks with Indy, to ensure that Ana doesn’t know about her. And I’m home so little that it hasn’t been too hard. But there’s been the odd indiscreet phone call or text from Indy when I have been home that’s made me wonder if Ana suspects.

  It’s like a switch has been flicked in Indy in the past two weeks. Indy had always seemed to understand and accept when I couldn’t see her because of politics or the kids. And she didn’t make too many demands whenever we did catch up. But I’m coming to realise the mistake I made with Indy. And it was this: if ever we’ve made plans together, if ever she’s dreamt that we might have a life together outside of politics, it’s been at my instigation.

  Now she’s calling in my fantasy of a life with her, win or lose. Even talking about a reverse vasectomy and a late kid or two. Jesus Christ. How could I ever think that she’d never want to make it real? I’ve been stupid. But I’ve also been so thoroughly unhappy and lonely.

  Where Indy had always pretty much said that she was willing to wait for me as long as it took, yesterday she told me that time was now running out. She didn’t have forever to wait around for me. She wanted an answer, yes or no? Her, or Ana and the kids? I was non-committal, as always, said, Let’s just see how the next week or two pan out before we make any long-term plans, babe. The thing is, I really do love Indy. I mean deeply. But with Ana, well, our history, our plans, our ambitions, even our physical bond, they are umbilical. I’ll grieve if I have to give up Indy. But I know I can’t live without Ana.

  Ana has set the deadline at the election: I either win and we’re all together in The Lodge. Or I lose and get out. Or she does. That’s her deal or no deal.

  So either way something’s got to give soon. But until then I suppose we’re all just in the swamp together.

  * * *

  When we’d first hooked up I’d told Ana a few true stories about the dickheads who’d pick fights around the village when I was a kid—about some of the punch-ups on the trains and around the streets, back when the sharps were the filthy scourge of the city, feared and loathed by anyone who wanted to peacefully get about their own business.

  I’d told her how I’d learned to fight early at primary school because I’d had to—I’d had no dad to teach me. So I learned the hard way: trial and error through a hundred rounds on the schoolyard bitumen or down at the creek, over a dozen years.

  Still, for four years as a scholarship boy, I’d pack my dacks every morning when I left the village in my blazer and flannel trousers to catch the bus and the tram into the stuck-up east with its sprawling bungalows amid tended gardens, its restaurants, fancy furniture boutiques, cake shops, private-school kids and new cars. It was a galaxy away from my factories, single mums and shitty housing commissions, a place without restaurants at all, a parallel universe from that inhabited by my mum and my sister, Dana, who had gone wild, like most of the village girls, when I was twelve or thirteen, had hung out with the local sharps, who’d got repeatedly knocked up, had abortions and succumbed to the habit that killed her, at nineteen, when I was in Year 11. It’s why Mum is still so protective of me, has invested so much in me. I get it with Bev. Even though it’s always driven me nuts.

  The gangs gave me heaps for the first few months I was at college. The sharps were bloody everywhere back then. Hundreds of gangs roamed the city on the trains, hung out at bowling alleys and outside cinemas, at the footy grounds on Saturdays and always at train stations and shopping centres. They’d beat the crap out of each other, and if that wasn’t an option, anyone else who crossed their radars.

  Some, like the Heidelberg West Boys, were a mixture of hardcore crims—speed dealers, burglars, car thieves—and unemployed deadbeats, even a few bored young blokes who worked in the local factories down Waterdale Road, who saw it as nothing more than a social club. I knew a few of them from the old team, which sometimes helped when the others in the crew were giving me a hard time. The real deadbeat dickheads with nothing better to do would greet me at the village shopping centre—half of which was boarded up because the windows of the closed shops were smashed—where my bus arrived in the afternoon.

  I got beaten up more times than I can remember because of the posh school uniform. So I started carrying a flick knife and taking civvies to change into before I caught the bus home. It didn’t help. I couldn’t hide. And, even though I’d keep my hand on the knife in my pocket and d
ream of filleting the biggest and nastiest of them, Maggot, I was just too spineless. And this is a roundabout way of explaining how I really became mates with Tom McQuoid.

  31

  One morning at school Tom badgered me to spill about what had happened to my face. It was not easy for me to say, because I was scared of my own shadow off the field and had a stutter. I haven’t stuttered for years. But it totally plagued my childhood.

  You know, the only time I enunciated really effectively was on the page with my schoolwork, and on the field when Tom would duck out of the pack with the ball and I’d lose my tagger and bolt halfway down the oval while calling for it, mark it and then belt along the wing and nail it. Otherwise I was a hopeless mumbler.

  But Tom dragged it out of me: Mate, tell me how you got the split lip and the eye and I’ll help you sort it out for good.

  I stuttered and mumbled through an explanation of who’d beaten me up.

  Tom insisted that he would ride home with me that afternoon.

  Danny, he said, you can’t fight them all individually. You’ve got to settle on the biggest, toughest one, beat the crap out of him, make him apologise, and then offer to take them all on—one at a time. But you do have to stand up to these pricks or they’re going to pick on you every day for the rest of their lives. If it’s not them it’ll be somebody else. It’s just human nature, Danny. And life’s too short to play the victim.

  Tom sorted out Maggot as soon as we stepped off the bus that afternoon. The West Heidelberg Boys never touched me again.

  It was a lesson I heeded ever after. You could say I transplanted my on-field physical confidence to the street after that. And maybe the parliament, too.