The Speechwriter by Martin McKenzie-Murray (latest books to read .TXT) 📗

a waiter swooped and offered him the tray of salmon hors d’oeuvres. He smiled awkwardly and took one. ‘What do you think of the art, Minister?’ the waiter asked him.

‘Oh, very nice. Very nice.’

The Minister’s speech wasn’t scheduled for another half an hour, and, wanting the company of neither Stanley nor the anxiously performative bohemians, I stole outside to smoke cigarettes and finish my wine in a laneway. When I returned 25 minutes later, I noticed that the skaters had stopped and were now licking the wheels of their boards. Then the gallery’s director approached me, her eyes as large as the government’s contribution. ‘You’re the Minister’s writer,’ she slurred.

‘Yes.’

‘This is sparkles.’

‘What is?’

‘Sparkles,’ she repeated, and began chewing her hair.

I looked around: the gallery was in the throes of a lush madness. A man was delicately performing CPR on the beetles. An orgy had begun beneath a canvas soaked in blood and Japanese mayonnaise. Before the stage, the Minister was passionately expressing his respect for Stanley while massaging his shoulders. What the fuck was going on?

The Minister, now one of the few fully clothed people in the gallery, jumped on-stage and hugged the director before taking the mic. Then he theatrically threw his speech away, eliciting whoops of pleasure from the crowd. Sweat discoloured the pits of his RM Williams shirt. A few patrons began filming him with their phones.

‘Gubbermint,’ the Minister began, while chewing his lip into a red pulp, ‘is a flend of the arse.’ Stanley was waving excitedly at him, trying to alert his man to the shocking amounts of blood pouring from his lips. The Minister slowly deciphered the gestures, and pressed his hand against his mouth.

‘Blesus,’ he said, smiling. ‘Been chewin’ my bips.’ Then he silently stared out at the crowd for a full minute, swaying gently, absorbing their intensity. ‘Government,’ he repeated, his enunciation vastly improved now that he wasn’t cannibalising himself, ‘is a friend of the arts.’ There was enthused applause. Even those engaged in the orgy stopped and offered their hands. ‘This fish is superb,’ he said, and gestured the waiter over for more. Well, as we later learnt, dear reader, that fish was soaked in brine, LSD, and remarkably pure MDMA.

The scenes were now magnificently lurid — they would’ve made John Waters blush. The crowd were like seventeenth-century Englishmen who had mistaken hallucinogens for magic, and welcomed their mental distortions as divine passports. In MDMA they had found their cosmic Sherpa. In the Minister they had found their ambassador to the stars.

The Minister had now seized the gallery’s most expensive artwork from its display stand: DJ Blinky, an embalmed koala with oversized headphones priced at a quarter-million. The crowd, anticipating spiritual catharsis, surrounded the Minister. Some wept. In the middle of the circle, the Minister cradled Blinky — a Cosmic proxy, he declared, for our Creativity.

‘This,’ the Minister said, raising the marsupial above his head, ‘is a daughter of Zeus. Our Muse. Our inspiration. But we are not so far from the Gods. We too are made of stardust, older than time. Fuck, we are time!’

The weeping intensified, before Stanley broke the circle and handed the Minister a bottle of kerosene and a lighter. Solemnly, the Minister laid DJ Blinky on the polished concrete floor and showered him with kero. ‘Now we consecrate our bond with the Muse!’ he shouted, and sparked a flame.

Blinky’s immolation didn’t require accelerant. This daughter of Zeus was embalmed with formaldehyde, and she lit up like a meteorite breaching the atmosphere. She also began issuing thick, aggressively toxic plumes of smoke — all the better to wrap Her arms around the Cosmic Children. But as the crowd enjoyed their smoky benediction, the toxins were enjoying their insinuation into nervous systems. Some lost consciousness — casualties, it seemed to most, not of poisoning, but of exaltation. Though not to the paramedics, who arrived a little later and were frustrated in their attempts to resuscitate patients by the deliriously passionate hugs of Stanley and his boss.

Some political commentators later argued that the Minister should have anticipated all of this. Please. What happened was unprecedented, unimaginable. Regardless, the story of the blitzed minister and spiked salmon was manna for the political talk shows. ‘This confirms what every right-minded person already knew about artists,’ the social conservative said, trying to disguise his excitement. ‘They’re perverted crooks who demand the public fund their eccentric decadence.’

He had a point. I might’ve added ‘vapidly righteous’. Our department’s most recent funding round for literature had included a spot for a writer on a shuttle that would service the International Space Station, then perform 20 orbits of Earth. The successful candidate, however, wasn’t obliged to write about the experience — the selection panel were ‘loath to dictate an artist’s vision’ — and, six months after returning home, Scott Luscious submitted an essay about his brief addiction to energy drinks.

Anyway, the panel’s resident feminist, whom one might have expected to counsel against drugging people, refused to agree with a conservative — presumably it was off-brand — and improvised an edgy distinction. ‘Artists have always pushed boundaries,’ she said. ‘I admit this pushed it pretty far, but let’s be honest: it was a love drug. I think we can all agree that our politicians could probably do with a bit more love in their hearts.’

‘What was a minister doing there in the first place?’ the opposition backbencher said. ‘I mean, it makes you wonder about the priorities of this government. I’m not sure the taxpayer is too keen on our leaders attending weird drug parties.’

Here was proof that partisan talking points could be affixed to anything. Even surreal criminality; even things that might normally prompt simple astonishment. ‘It really makes you wonder,’ he said. It sure did. Depressed, I mused bitterly on my early optimism for Canberra. What I didn’t know was that, right then, a seed was being planted in the exotically fertile soil of my subconscious. I turned the telly off and walked out to