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

could’ve easily grabbed a few packets while he was emptying the cash register.

‘I mean me fucken legitimate work, you cunt.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Oh, you’re interested now, are ya? I did a few things, mate. With me hands. Me first job was making Chiko Rolls in the Chiko Roll plant. It was 1978, and working there was like working in Willy Wonka’s factory, mate. But with weevils and no sick pay. Your generation won’t get this, but the Chiko Roll was the iPhone of 1970s cuisine. A fucken miracle of innovation, Toby.’

‘What’s actually in a Chiko Roll?’

‘No idea, mate.’

‘But you made them.’

‘I folded the ends of the tubes, mate. That’s all. The guts of ’em came out this flap-door, and there weren’t many allowed on the other side. It was a big secret what was in it. I mean, I heard rumours. We all did. Crazy shit, like it was cabbage or feet. It was hard to know what to believe. But we had a common purpose. When I was there, we were selling 40 million Chikos a year. The Chiko Roll was a national shrine. We went there to pray, then after eating one we prayed again for a quick fucken recovery. And I was right there in the middle of it, folding the ends of ’em.’]

As bad as these things are, I guess my anxiety might’ve been sharpened by the fact that I’d just used blackmail to insinuate myself into the Prime Minister’s office. I’d done this not because I wanted to write for him. And not because I thought I was democracy’s troubadour. Those days were gone. What I wanted now was to accelerate the sickness.

And I had a plan.

Accelerate the sickness

Sky News understands that a majority of the government’s caucus are frustrated with the duration of the Polo-gate scandal, and are pressuring their leader to issue an apology. The pressure comes in the same week that the federal opposition leader became the official mascot for the Olympic water-polo team.

Parliament House resembled an alien spaceship that had crashed into remote farmland, and partially buried itself with the force of impact. It comprised a vast and bewildering network of corridors and catacombs, but most bewildering was its location.* It was designed by a former soldier of Mussolini, who looked around after the war and decided to help make the new world rather than rebuild the old.

[* Offended Canberrans — and there’ll be a few of you — are advised to send expressions of disgust to the Sunshine Correctional Centre, c/o the Department of Justice.]

Romaldo Guirgola moved to the States four years after his ex-leader was strung up like a piñata, and to Canberra in the 1980s after he won a commission to design its new house of democracy — reportedly needed when the old one became untreatably polluted by Graham Richardson speeches.

The most famous feature of the new place was the submerged House and Senate. The two chambers were sunk beneath grassy hills, so The People could stroll across their roofs in symbolic recognition of their primacy.

Personally, I didn’t think it mattered much. Surely the public’s greatest pride should flow from what occurred within those chambers. Anyway, another interpretation was possible: that law was made inside bunkers.

On my first day in the Prime Minister’s office, I entered through the staff entrance on the Reps side — or I tried to, but a school of reporters circled the Liberal MP Reginald Hacksaw, preventing my discreet passage. Hacksaw had just successfully smuggled a spent Luftwaffe bomb through the screening point, and had summoned the press to record his grievances about parliamentary security.

‘It was harder to import this bomb from a British antiques dealer than it was to bring it into the House of the People,’ he said. ‘Security standards have corroded and soon we will all die.’

‘I’m sorry, we’ll all die?’ asked an ABC reporter.

‘That’s what I said,’ he responded, squinting at a distant magpie. On principle, he’d refused eye contact with any ABC staff for 12 years now.

‘Why will we all die?’

‘Because civil society has been poisoned by poofs, parasites, and political correctness, and the buggered security of this place is just another symptom of our long decline.’

This Platonic symposium was interrupted when a federal police officer politely reached for the large leather satchel containing the bomb. ‘Sir, I’m afraid we’ll have to take this.’

‘You can fucking have it,’ Hacksaw grunted, and with great effort heaved the bag towards the officer. The media scrum swiftly retreated, their nervous systems still working on the assumption that the bomb was live. Having secured the lead story on the evening’s news, Hacksaw abruptly turned and re-entered. I followed at a safe distance.

The first time I met the Prime Minister, I was standing a few feet from his door with Patrick, his chief-of-staff, who was attempting, fruitlessly, to divine whether it was an appropriate time to enter his office and introduce me. Patrick had already arranged this meeting, but Joan, the receptionist, raised a deterring eyebrow when we arrived.

‘What was that?’ he asked Joan.

‘What?’

‘Your eyebrow.’

‘What about it?’

‘You raised it.’

‘With what?’

‘What do you mean with what? With your face. With your fucking face muscles. It went up.’

‘Did it?’

‘I’ve booked fifteen minutes with him.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why did you raise your eyebrow?’

‘I didn’t.’

Patrick turned to me. ‘Did Joan raise her eyebrow?’

‘I think she did.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Are you saying that now isn’t a good time?’ Patrick asked.

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘For the tender love of Christ, Joan, you know how I feel about ambiguity.’

‘You say it’s worse than incest.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’ll still have to assess the situation for yourself,’ Joan said.

This was the game everyone learned, played in order to escape blame for annoying the PM. So lawlessly volatile was his mood, and so extreme were the consequences for violating it, that the game demanded from its players an elaborate vagueness when suggesting contact with him. Needless to say, it wasn’t a game anyone could win.

Patrick turned indecisively to the door, just as the Prime Minister burst from