Campaign Ruby

by Jessica Rudd

  In the present case, the LOO had challenged the Prime Minister to a debate. She had duly accepted, but on the condition that it be held in the Great Hall of Parliament House on the second Sunday of the campaign. The LOO accepted, but pointed out how unusual it was to hold the debate so early in the campaign and requested that his opponent leave open the possibility of a second debate. She had not ruled it out. So if one candidate did badly there could well be another round.

  With a pile of reading in my laptop bag, I’d boarded a midnight flight to Canberra. It hadn’t been such a good idea to catch the eight-hour flight from Darwin (via Adelaide, where the lounge was closed) to Canberra with nasal passages full of ball bearings and eyes that might pop free of their sockets if I sneezed. Business Class was full, so I had found myself inexorably sandwiched between a man the size of a Smart Car and a woman with a teething baby.

  I wasn’t just sick; I was homesick and miserable. My niece was fuming, my sister distant and my aunts a faint memory. Cobwebs and a few hundred quid were all that remained of my bank account because I kept forgetting to sign my employment contract. I hadn’t slept properly in a fortnight and I’d been cruelly close to the Barossa Valley and Margaret River on several occasions without picking up a brochure, let alone a bottle. To top things off, I’d fallen in lust with the political equivalent of Romeo Montague. As the infant beside me howled through the turbulence, I too had shed a few quiet tears.

  It was a glorious Thursday morning in Canberra when I filled my script at the Manuka chemist, a perfect twenty-four degrees. I tilted my head skywards and basked in the gentle sunlight, asking that it warm my face and hair. My prep meeting wasn’t until noon, so I had a rare ninety minutes to myself. I probably should have done something productive with them, like find a laundromat or remove the chipped pearl lacquer from my fingernails, but I erred on the side of indulgence. Securing a half-sunned table for one at a tiny cafe, I read only the Food & Wine, Arts and Literature sections of the papers over two lattes, a mushroom risotto and a lightly dusted gelatinous cube of rose and pistachio Turkish delight.

  Where in the world is Roo? xxx

  Oscar had staged a virtual invasion of my heavenly peace, the second message since Darwin, but his company wasn’t unwelcome.

  Sick in Maunka. Rhinosinusitis. As ugly as it sounds. R

  My initial would suffice. Frankly, there had been enough kisses for now.

  Couldn’t be ugly on you. I’m a bit stuffy too. Manuka is practically my hood—I live in Kingston. How long are you there for? x

  I drafted and redrafted my reply. Charming as he might be, I couldn’t very well tell a journalist my purpose for being in Canberra. My head praised me for heeding its warning.

  Not sure at this stage. Where are you? R

  I knew where he was. In fact, I even knew where he was headed next, which was more than he did.

  Arnhem Land. It’s amazing—hope you missed this for something important? Your guy has announced he’ll fund trips for school students to visit Indigenous communities in their state—I just blogged my support. Looking forward to seeing more of you. x

  That was presumptuous. If I hadn’t needed to be at Parliament House twenty minutes later, I probably would have spent the next hour wrestling with my aching head about the pros and cons of dating the enemy, but there was a bigger debate to be had.

  From newspaper photographs, I’d always thought the Australian parliament had all the architectural grace of a squat hatstand, but as I walked through its main doors into the huge entrance hall, I changed my mind.

  Staffers on their BlackBerries traipsed across the vast space. A travel-weary school group clad in crumpled uniforms marvelled at the high ceilings, their nervous young teacher conducting a solemn headcount. Three pairs of high heels went clip-clopping across the floor, the identities of their wearers hidden behind cardboard trays holding dozens of precariously balanced takeaway coffees. An old man stepped out of their way, rapping his knuckles against a marble wall, while his wife browsed the decorative teaspoons in the gift shop. This was the national parliament and there was nothing stuffy about it. The open hall told me a lot about the country I was getting to know.

  I approached a staffed desk and said I had a meeting at the Leader of the Opposition’s office, giving them Beryl’s name.

  ‘She’ll be down in a minute to sign you in, love,’ said a uniformed man.

  ‘Roo!’ bellowed Beryl as she came rushing towards me like an excited child. ‘It’s great to see you.’ She grabbed my hand and squeezed until my fingers fought for their release. ‘Come with me,’ she said. I attached a flimsy cardboard UNACOMPANIED VISITOR pass to my jeans and followed her through a maze of indistinguishable corridors with identical wall clocks ticking in unison.

  We arrived at an enclave of empty partitioned offices, each desk in total disarray as if everyone had just stepped out for a fire drill.

  ‘Where are all the people?’

  ‘On the campaign, love. We all thought we were headed for another uneventful sitting week, so most of them didn’t have time to pack up their desks or kiss their families goodbye.’

  I spotted a cluttered desk with a pinky sparkly-framed photograph of Maddy on a horse. It made sense that she rode, being from the country, but then she never spoke about it. We’d never spoken much about anything other than politics and even then only the politics of the day, yet I felt like we were bosom buddies with the kind of kinship it would take years to cultivate in normal circumstances.

  ‘That’s Luke’s office,’ said Beryl, pointing to a room with a door. He too was a mystery.

  The phone rang. ‘Wait here,’ she said, running to get it.

  Inside Luke’s office, a mahogany-framed legal qualification hung on a white wall. Three ties—one a gaggle of yellow smiley faces—dangled from a wire coathanger on the doorknob. A novelty Magic 8 Ball weighed down a pile of paper in his in-tray. Next to the door was a finger-painting of a house, a cat, two big people and one small person. By Dan Harley. Grade 1A.

  Dan Harley?

  Dan Harley?

  I went to find Beryl. ‘Is that painting by Luke’s neph—’

  ‘I’m sorry, he’s not in the office at the moment. Can I pass on a message?’ She pointed to the microphone on her headset and scribbled me a note. Debate prep mtg. First door on left.

  I walked into the large, hospital-green room which was full of faces—some familiar, some not. Theo, who stood pen in hand at a whiteboard, came to greet me.

  ‘Roo, you look like shit.’

  ‘Thanks for your honesty, Theo.’

  ‘Let me introduce you to everyone.’ He started with an enormously pregnant lady, the kind you want to follow around with a mop and bucket in case she erupts. ‘I’d like you to meet Senator Sasha Flight. She’s expecting twins.’

  ‘In case Roo couldn’t tell,’ she said warmly, attempting to fasten a flimsy cardigan around her impressive circumference.

  Theo moved around the room. ‘This is Joel Tobin. Joel is from the Shadow Treasurer’s office.’ He couldn’t have been a day older than eighteen, but I tried not to let this distract me. ‘Meadow here works for the Shadow Health Minister,’ Theo said of a severe, matronly lady. ‘And you know Archie.’

  Archie pulled up a chair for me next to him. I poured myself a cup of tea.

  ‘Roo Stanhope is a financial policy advisor,’ said Theo. Not that there’s any evidence of it, I thought. ‘She’s been out on the campaign trail since it began and has her finger on the pulse.’

  How are you going to blag your way through this one, Ruby?

  ‘As we know,’ said Theo, ‘the debate will be broadcast live from the Great Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Channel Eleven, with that mindless, narcissistic himbo as compere.’

  ‘Oscar Franklin?’ I asked, praying I was wrong.

  ‘That’s the one,’ laughed Senator Flight. ‘Pretty Boy.’

  Shit, shit, shit.

  ‘There will be a coin toss to decide wh
ich candidate will speak first. The candidate who loses will make an opening statement of no longer than three minutes, followed by the other candidate. Pretty Boy will then invite the five panel members to ask two questions each. The candidates will have thirty seconds to answer each question and thirty seconds to rebut before the compere silences them. Each candidate will be given two minutes to make a closing statement. In a nearby studio, audience members will rate the candidates contemporaneously, and television audiences will see a smiley face feature at the bottom of their screens, showing the studio audience’s response. Franklin will then join the studio audience and facilitate a discussion about the event.’

  ‘Can the candidates see the smiley faces?’ asked Meadow.

  ‘No,’ said Theo. ‘No one in the Great Hall will be able to see the smiley faces until they watch a playback.’

  ‘Are we having a live audience?’ asked the senator.

  ‘Yes, mainly staff members, MPs, family and friends.’ Theo removed his mismatched cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves. ‘Now I suggest we start brainstorming our opening statement.’

  When the delivery boy arrived, it was midnight and we still had a solid four hours ahead of us. It was like rehearsing a university stage production. The senator, who had a knack for cutting questions, took the role of media panel, resting a pizza box on the camel hump that housed her twins. Theo did the LOO with such precision that, from outside the room, Beryl thought we had Max on speakerphone. Meadow played the Prime Minister, and Archie acted as compere. Joel and I finetuned language on the whiteboard.

  At dawn, we adjourned for a quick tea break. Curled up on one of the reception sofas, I rolled two joints from tissues—a plug for each leaking nostril—and listened to the army of goose-stepping clocks until I was having a nightmare about the crocodile from Peter Pan.

  ‘Rise and shine, Roo,’ chirped Beryl to the sadistic flicker and hum of fluorescent bulbs as she switched on the lights and spread the day’s newspapers on the coffee table. ‘It’s almost eight, darl, and you’ve got a teleconference in five minutes.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ I removed the crusty joints from my nose and shielded my burning eyes from the lights. When they’d adjusted, I sat up to glance at the front pages.

  IMMIGRATION POLICY HITS MASTERS WHERE IT HURTS, said the Queenslander. BRENNAN CLIMBS THE POLLS, said the Herald.

  ‘Racist pricks,’ said Theo, reading over my shoulder.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The three per cent of voters who have ditched us since the last poll was taken. You’ve got dried snot on your face and, no offence, but you look even worse than you did yesterday.’

  ‘Your fly’s undone and you’re older than my dad.’

  He blushed and zipped himself. ‘Thanks.’ He tucked the Herald under his arm and whistled his way to the gents. I dialled into the teleconference. Di was the only one there.

  ‘How you feeling, Roo?’

  ‘Horrendous.’

  ‘Go into the press office,’ she yawned.

  I waddled to the end of the corridor and into an open-plan office littered with newspapers and more television screens than the White House Situation Room.

  ‘Go to the desk in the far-left corner with the Special K on it. Open the top drawer and help yourself.’

  ‘Are you some sort of chemist kleptomaniac?’ I rummaged through her impressive stash. There were tubs of multivitamins, tampons galore, Lemsip sachets, eyedrops by the bucket load, yards of dental floss, enough whitening strips to make-over a whale, packets of lozenges and every kind of fast-acting analgesic imaginable.

  ‘Now joining…’ The recorded teleconference voice interrupted us. ‘Luke and Max,’ said a raspy Luke from Townsville. Archie joined me on speaker. Theo dialled in from the gents.

  ‘Di, can you kick us off?’ asked Luke.

  ‘Sure. The skilled immigration thing has gone down about as well as an impromptu Bar Mitzvah at a mosque in Tehran. We’ve failed to communicate the need for skilled foreigners when so many Australians are out of work. The government has taken the populist low road by silently siding with the kinds of morons we saw protesting in Darwin.’

  ‘That’s just bullshit,’ said Theo. ‘The core of our policy is to get people out of the driver’s seats of taxis and into the specialist jobs they’re trained for, like health or IT. This will help fill our skills gap, which will increase our productivity.’

  ‘Di’s not suggesting there’s anything wrong with the policy, Theo,’ said a fatigued Luke. ‘She’s just saying we fucked up communicating it. We’re back down to the two-party-preferred result we had at the beginning of the campaign.’

  We didn’t need to see the LOO’s face to know the demoralising effect the poll was having on him. ‘I’m getting calls from every marginal-seat candidate in the country,’ Max said. ‘Punters are telling them that they’re not going to come over to us unless we roll over on the immigration issue.’

  ‘But it’s the right thing to do,’ said Theo.

  ‘Nobody’s arguing with you,’ said Max, ‘but I need to give them something a bit more persuasive than that if we’re going to win this thing.’

  It could have been the hit of Ibuprofen or maybe the sleep deprivation. One thing was certain: at that moment, my head allowed me to trust my instincts. ‘I’m new to this game,’ I said, ‘but I think Theo has a point here.’ Archie sent discouraging signals which I promptly ignored. ‘If you back down on this issue, the gallery will eat you for breakfast. It’ll be all flip and flop, no backbone. The issue will probably fizzle out in a week, but won’t you lose even more ground from the about-face?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Max.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I think you should stick to your guns because it’s the right thing to do. It will serve as a point of differentiation between you and Brennan. Brennan will say and do anything to win this election, just like she said and did anything to topple Patton. You won’t lie to the Australian people. You won’t compromise on what you know to be right. Be the hero.’

  ‘That’s all very nice, Roo,’ said Archie, in the tone of a children’s television presenter. If my nose hadn’t required urgent attention, I would have pointed out that I read History at Oxford while he was cold-calling arts and crafts magazines to sell in his clients’ exciting new knitting patterns. ‘Problem is, Max,’ Archie continued, ‘you’ll be more martyr than hero when we can’t squeeze the complex detail of this policy into a sound byte.’

  ‘Maybe you can’t, Archie,’ skewered Di, ‘but I’m willing to give it a shot.’

  ‘The stakes are too high,’ said Archie. ‘You do this sort of thing when you’re in government, not when you’re trying to win it.’

  Max sighed. ‘I think the debate’s the time to get this message across. I’m going to plough on. Have it ready for me to look at by this afternoon when I’m on the plane to Canberra.’

  The Debate

  ‘Is it your birthday, Roo?’ asked Beryl, poking her head around the corner of my partitioned nook in the press office. She was all gussied up, even wearing make-up in honour of the debate, which was less than a couple of hours away. I thought hard about her question and checked the date on my BlackBerry. March the fourteenth, two days since the polls had dived.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘why’s that?’

  ‘There are three deliveries for you at reception.’

  This was exactly the distraction I needed from the Pre-Debate Jitters, the name I’d given to the acrobatic troupe using my bladder as a trampoline. Grabbing a pair of scissors, I sat at Beryl’s desk, which reeked of her musky perfume, and ripped into the largest of the three packages. ‘Hallelujah!’ I squealed, giving the senator rather too amorous an embrace as she waddled through the door. ‘My suitcase has arrived—he’s been on a national tour without me and I’ve missed him so.’

  I cradled the battered and bruised Samsonite like a handsome beau returning from war. There was a little note inside.

  Dearest Ruby,

&nb
sp; We’ve taken the liberty of packing all of your things into this suitcase.

  All our love, your aunts, Pansy & her pups

  With such a happy reunion, the other two packages seemed ancillary, but when I opened the medium-sized one, it was all too good to be true. Inside were Debs’ black pants and white shirt, both unblemished. Luckily for the senator, she wasn’t within reach. By parcel number three, my eyes glistened with joy. This one was a fat cylindrical shape and came with an elegant cream card.

  Get well soon, Roo. Believe in the healing power of Redskins. See you tonight?

  Oscar x

  Beneath layers of bubble wrap was a curvaceous kitchen canister in thick, warped glass with a shiny silver lid: the kind one might find filled with vanilla sugar in Nigella Lawson’s pantry. It was brimming with individually wrapped sweets. ‘Roo’s Redskins’ was handwritten in Tipp-Ex on the lid.

  ‘Yummo,’ said Di, helping herself. ‘Who gave you these?’

  I blushed.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ she said. ‘Pretty Boy’s compering the fucking debate tonight, Roo!’

  I couldn’t look her in the eye. It wasn’t shame that prevented me, just that I hadn’t had enough time to make any sensible decision about where things with Oscar might go next. Until I had the answer to that question, defending myself was pointless. I had seen the inside of my eyelids for only eleven of the past seventy-two hours, a violation for which my spinning head was yet to forgive me.

  Shelly’s arrival with Milly and Abigail saved me from further interrogation. ‘Abigail,’ said Shelly, ‘have you met Roo?’ The girl, who had her father’s features, shook her head, clearly bored. She was busy listening to her iPod.

  ‘Redskin?’ I offered.

  ‘Thanks.’ She unwrapped one.

  ‘You look great tonight, Shelly.’ She was wearing a shell-pink asymmetric shift dress, nude peep-toe platforms and a wooden necklace which tied with ribbon at the side.

  ‘She does, doesn’t she?’ said Max, who had pushed through the hinged doors of his office into the reception. ‘Dad!’ squealed Abigail, taking a running leap into his arms.