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  Chisel flounders, tries to stand but can only roll onto his side, a captive, for once, of his physical mass, like some great beached sea mammal. He watches sideways as the man walks purposefully away—seven, eight, nine steps—stops, turns slowly. The TV lights catch Chisel’s shadowed, bewildered face as the man re-enters the frame with long, poised strides—one, two, three, four—before running—five, six, seven, eight steps—to finish with a monstrous kick. There’s a sickening sound—like a tree branch snapping—as Chisel’s head lifts from the road, carrying his body with it.

  The crowd goes, Ooohh.

  After the kick the man doesn’t break stride, bolting across the intersection and along Flinders Street, to the tunnel that takes him under the platforms and down to the river, before the horses can get anywhere near him. He slides down onto the bank of greasy bluestone blocks, rips off the t-shirt and throws it in the river.

  Slipping the connie off his head, he puts it on. He inches his way along the bank towards Spencer Street, just another sharp heading home from the fun.

  Back at the intersection the crowd dilutes. Vulture has vanished. From above I hear the siren and watch the blue lights of the ambulance careening down the tram tracks on Swanston. I watch Chisel lying face-up where he fell, convulsing and coughing blood.

  His dead black fish eyes stare emptily up at me. Real tears trace the ink in his cheeks.

  2

  Occasionally, there’s still a day when I think that I might just make it after all. You get a lot of them when you start out. It’s when you’re getting none that you should probably play the last desperate card in the deck and throw it open to a leadership contest to face down the fuckers who’re so desperate for your job they’d blithely kill you if it wouldn’t end in seventeen minus parole in Goulburn supermax.

  Either that or strap on the Kevlar, snap in a full magazine and take out as many as possible with you. And that is the only way I know.

  The problem is that by the time you’re at this point you’ve lost absolutely all sense of perspective. Your head is a paranoid mumbo jumbo of unrequited ambition, diminishing options and raging ego, your heart pulsating with injustice and a filthy lust for vengeance.

  As a little boy, soon after Mum told me what had happened to Dad, I began having a recurring dream. Something evil would be chasing me. It was big and black, part-human and part-animal. More bovine than canine, it stood upright like a man but much taller, it had cloven hooves at the end of its legs and giant pincers for arms—burnt orange, like a crayfish, except hairy. It had the gaping contorted rubber-lipped mouth of a camel and the fangs of a wolf set in the chinless, neck-less concave head of a shark.

  The torso was covered in long, tangled fur—a great cape made from the hide of a wildebeest or the actual body hair of the mutant creature itself, I couldn’t tell. Sometimes, just as it was about to catch me, I’d wake, panting, shaking uncontrollably and screaming. Mum would run in from her room next door and pat me back to sleep.

  Sh-sh-sha-ark Face, I’d stammer between sobs. Shark Face.

  Other times I’d be running from it and just as it was about to catch me my feet would leave the ground. I’d take off and then soar, my outstretched arms transformed to wings, high above my enemy who was looking up, snapping and cursing in a baritone, vaguely human but foreign tongue. That’s the dream I was having when I first became leader. And that’s exactly how it feels when you start out in the job—the beast is snapping at your heels but you escape it every single time.

  During the first few honeymoon months you fly so high that you can see every threat clearly below you, like you’re playing a game of snakes and ladders but viewing it from above. All of the traps and all of your enemies are laid out down there. Each time you roll the dice you get the exact number you need to avoid the serpents’ heads. So you just keep climbing from ladder to ladder. Everyone’s blowing smoke up your arse, saying you’re a fucking genius, reinforcing your instincts—good and bad. Pretty soon you start to believe your own shit, and everyone else’s bullshit only serves to reinforce it, even though when you stop for a minute or two and actually pinch yourself and think hard about it, you know that that’s what’s actually happening to you.

  Next, those around you stop giving you the time to contemplate or take stock. And you don’t really want to stop anyway, because plain truth’s chilly prospect is too frightening.

  I’ve had the Shark Face dream hundreds of times since I was a child. But the monster has only ever caught me three times. On the eve of my first senior match when I was eighteen, thirty-five years ago. On the night before my first wedding to Domenica. And again last night.

  I don’t need Freud to interpret it all. I’ve always recognised the Fear when I’m in its grip. Last night I couldn’t fly. I ran so fast that I lost control of my legs, fell and smashed my forehead. Shark Face caught me, smothering me with its bulk and thick fur that smelt of industrial ammonia like a wharfies’ pub urinal at Closing Time. Then I woke up, freezing, shaking, my heart wildly out of sync.

  Privately I know that it’s probably over. I keep telling myself I might only have a day or a week—a month, six weeks, tops—left in the job. But then again if I fought like fury and got lucky, I might even hold on till an early election. Still might …

  The punters are sick of us. Who can blame them? The factional boys, the union bosses, the party bosses and the journalists have turned it into a low-rent Big Brother where only the personal abuse, the allegations of lies, the revelations of human foibles that rise like unflushable turds to the top of Question Time or the blogosphere sewer make it to the TV news and the comics that pass for the papers.

  We’re all scrambling so hard for that tiny plot of middle ground that we’ve forgotten what we stand for. It’s our fault that voters will only accept their politics in bland, perfectly plated, over-produced, under-spiced servings like the homogenised swill they’re trying to replicate in their kitchens at home from the banal reality cooking shows that have invaded free-to-air consciousness. They don’t listen to us for more than ten seconds at a time even though we determine how they will live, who they can marry, what they can eat and drink, how much tax they pay, and, yes, how they can die. They don’t listen to us, yet they’re addicted to Captain Cook, which had 3.9 million viewers on Sunday night.

  Now, thanks to Captain Cook, to get anywhere near the top of the Sunday-night news or the front of the Monday-morning papers I’d probably have to get my dick jammed in the Bamix while whipping up a poison pesto for prime minister Drysdale on live TV.

  This particular Monday morning is quite different, though.

  I’m all over the papers and the radio. It just happens to be the wrong sort of over—the sort you get when the colleagues suddenly become petrified that you’re not sufficiently vanilla even though they liked your promise of a bit of Neapolitan … in the beginning, anyway. It’s the sort of over you get when they’re leaking anonymously to undermine you because they’re toying with the idea of yet another last-option potential leader.

  They know I won’t go quietly. No. If I’m going then I’ll go railing against the banality of it all, in a blaze of red-hot headlines and acrimony.

  It suits the enemies, of course, to say that I’m losing the plot. The funny thing is, I’ve never felt more self-aware or operated with more clarity of purpose, of intent, of conviction, than I have in the past few days. I know exactly what’s happening around me. And I want everyone to know about my journey from faith and belief into the abyss of political emptiness.

  Given that it could be coming to an end—and who knows? I might just jump off a bridge, then they’ll be fucking sorry—I’m sure the punters will be interested to know what a bunch of cunts the party’s been to me, how I gave it everything and tried to do the right thing and how, in return, they just chewed me up and spat me out. They want reality? Try this true insider’s account of this filthy business.

  I know, I know, former ministers and leaders and advi
sers always say that when they deliver their diaries for publication—you know, this is my actual diary, what I wrote down in the cabinet meetings, on the campaign plane and every night in the hotel room. Horseshit. Those venal bastards get their fat advances from publishers and just make up their so-called diaries afterwards. Not me. This is the real fucking deal. Warts and all. No prisoners. Not a one.

  A few of the comrades have let me know via the reptiles in the gallery that they’ve got a dirt file on me thicker than the Shanghai white pages. Anywhere else but in politics you’d call that blackmail. And now they’re scouring the planet for more filth. There’s plenty of dirt in my background to find. But they won’t know the half of it.

  I’ll raise them—and see them. The punters are sick of the white bread they’re served up as politics. If I can bypass the party and get in first with the truth, to explain and even atone a little, to open my soul and to offer some direction, then the voters might want to keep me no matter what the comrades say. That’s why I decided last weekend that I am not going to lie to the voters anymore. About anything.

  I’m even willing to go rogue from the party I’ve supported and that, yes, I acknowledge, has patronised me pretty much since I was a boy. I’m willing to go rogue from the party of which I am still leader.

  Then we’ll see who the fuck follows whom.

  3

  It’s still very early Monday morning as I sit, a weighty bookend to the other sinners, at the end of the pew. Every few minutes a confessional door opens. The freshly atoned amble away, lighter for guilt and regret, towards the altar.

  Amid candle flicker and incense mist they kneel upon the prie-dieu for penance. Some do speed-penance: a nod, a rat-a-tat-tat Our Father and a breezy sign of the cross before heading back to their offices to oil the bureaucratic cogs.

  But how about these others who pray with such physical intensity—what could possibly warrant so many Hail Marys? If shoplifting is good for, say, three minutes of penance, then what about this joker who’s been blazing away for fifteen? Theft? Fraud or embezzlement? He does look like a banker.

  Eighteen minutes? Adulterer! They’re everywhere. After twenty your options really narrow: kiddy fiddler, killer, married closet gay—addicted to beats, dipsomaniac? Yep. That’s Lucifer’s patch through and through.

  Christ, I’m in no position to judge. My little game—What’s My Sin?—simply kills time while I wait, sliding an arse-width along the pew towards the confessional doors every few minutes. Until I notice the awkward glances from my co-sinners who, naturally, recognise me.

  Okay. Now I’m on.

  I close the door behind me, drop my knees onto the cushion, align my face with the little wire grate and the sliding wood panel behind it. The priest is murmuring to the sinner in the other confessional. Then he quickly slides the little wooden panel open, revealing his softly lit face.

  Silence.

  The words, drilled into me in chapel, emerge flawlessly despite the decades: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Here I stop, ponder just how long it really has been.

  It’s been … Father—here I take a very deep breath and continue—it’s been about thirty-five years since my last confession.

  He sighs.

  Well fuck me, lad, he says in an Antrim accent, I expect you’ll be havin’ quite a bit to get off your chest then.

  Yes, Father.

  Thirty-five years? Now tell me, lad, I imagine you’ve had the odd impure thought in that time.

  Yes, Father. Many.

  He pauses, turns his face square to mine. Eyes I know so well search my own. He nods, smiles, returns to profile.

  Just how many would that be, lad?

  Well, Father, they say a man has one every seven minutes or so, so—rough back-of-the-envelope calculation here—that would make it about 2.6 million dirty thoughts.

  He goes, Lad—that’s an awful lot. Would you care to share a few with me now? Just a couple of the … more impure ones.

  It’s true: I hadn’t been to confession since 1974, my last year at secondary school. In early adolescence confession had been a serious business for me and the mates. As thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds we’d spend the weeks committing and collecting ordinary sin—white lies to parents, voyeurism wherever possible, furious masturbation, gluttony, disobedience and minor opportunistic theft—to offer the priests. They demanded sin. So we went sin shopping, dutifully cultivating then confessing them. If you went in and said, Bless me, Father, for I have not sinned—which I did once—you’d be dispatched to the end of the queue to search your soul for transgression and return only once you’d found it.

  Those sins we couldn’t acquire we invented. They usually involved a combination of a fertile pornography-inspired imagination and the first woman who came readily to mind: someone’s sister or mother, an elderly tuck-shop lady, the sick-bay nurse or the girls from the nearby ladies’ college. The priests demanded minute detail. We complied, adding to their complex paranoia that everyone was at it like rabbits while they clung to their tortuous chastity vows.

  Yes, there were genuine sinners in our ranks. Or so they assured us with tales of requited lust and seduction, drunkenness, hooch-smoking and debauchery. I’m not sure the priests ever knew the difference between the doers and talkers. But those of us who waited longingly for the years to deliver us unto genuine sin certainly did.

  The priest says, Okay, lad—give me just one impure thought then, would you? Come on now, do your best for old Father Tom. With this he turns once more to the screen, smiles and winks. The priest’s cubicle, barely illuminated, suddenly glows. He fidgets in his lap. Then it darkens again, just as quickly. An iPad? Perhaps. Everyone—the bloke who reads the gas meter, the dishwasher repairer, the mechanic, the milkman—can’t do their jobs without one these days. Why not the priest? Not sure if there’s a penance app yet.

  But, Father, it involves your grandma.

  No mind, lad, go on anyway—quickly then. And don’t hold back any detail.

  With this, the priest roars laughing. Then in a lower voice says, Danny—what the fuck are you doing here? The walls have ears. If you want to be seen, come to confession here. Any Catholic who matters in this city—make that Australia—and then everybody else, will know about it by the end of the day.

  That’s Tom—Father Tom—McQuoid. Supposedly my best mate, the one I can absolutely trust to watch my back both inside and outside the party. But things have been happening—little things—that make me wonder if they’ve finally got to him, too.

  Tom’s a true son of the party. And I’m just its wayward bastard. Not that he’d ever say that to me. But I reckon that’s what he thinks.

  Sometimes when we’re having a drink Tom lets stuff slip about the party’s great heritage and about how it’s my responsibility to carry forward his old man’s golden legacy by regaining the Treasury benches. I mean, no pressure there, mate—just unseat Les Drysdale, the wiliest chook-house rat of a Tory PM there’s ever been after a decade and a half of soft welfare bribes and confected terrorism scares.

  So it’s all down to me, according to Tom—even though he’s the son of the last prime minister for whom the party reserves the honorific ‘Great’. I know that he reckons he, not I, should be leading the party his old man modernised and reshaped. But we both know the hush-hush reason he entered the priesthood rather than parliament.

  And we never go there.

  I’d be lying (I don’t as of last weekend) if I claimed that the stuff Tom sometimes says to my face doesn’t hurt. Things like, You’d be a much better leader, Danny, if you were just a bit more self-aware and if you listened to the comrades occasionally. It’s endearing in a funny way, mate, but you can seem arrogant—it pisses the brothers and sisters off no end.

  Arrogant? Well no shit, Sherlock. It’s self-protection. This is just the way the Fear presents itself in me. I mean, the Fear that every inch of ground I’ve crawled over, every cent I’ve made, every m
atch I’ve played and every award I’ve won on the field, every person who’s ever come to love me—that it could all be snatched away by those around me, including the people who’d supported me in the first place.

  It’s a notion completely alien to Tom. His family wealth, his assumption that life would always be comfortable and the assurance, from a young age, that his place in society’s upper echelon would remain fixed, have always given him an ease of physical, emotional and intellectual confidence.

  Anyway, we’re still mates—for better or worse. That’s what matters. He can have a go and I can tell him to fuck off. I’ve just got to trust that he’s ultimately got my—and not just the party’s—best interests at heart. He has pretty astute political judgement. I just worry, sometimes, that if it comes down to a question of me or the party he’d shop me.

  Christ. We’ve been together for the best part of forty years since we met on the footy field at school. A school that had usually been attended by your father and your father’s father, I got more grief than most of the other scholarship boys. As if it wasn’t enough to arrive at such a toffy private boys’ college having come from such a down-at-heel housing estate and a high school, I had no father at all.

  It’s not so much that I wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Half the time I actually couldn’t. I’d been a stammerer (not always and not badly but certainly discernibly, especially when I felt social pressure or found conflict) since I was a kid. I compensated with football. I was a natural. I say that immodestly. It’s been written often enough, so it must be true.

  Tom had a God-given talent, too—perhaps even more so than me. The difference was that I used to put in another hundred per cent on the track. Tom was a lazy prick who coasted by on his raw ability and athleticism. That’s why I was always better, far more successful, as our respective football careers, and our scrapbooks illustrate.

  So yeah, what I lacked in life’s social confidences I compensated for on the field. There I could always find my voice.