Challenge

By Paul Daley

Fast-paced Australian political fiction, Challenge unfolds over three days in an atmosphere of treachery and deceit, amid a looming federal leadership challenge.
Opposition leader Daniel Slattery is a former sporting hero from the wrong side of the tracks, politically principled and courageous, but also personally unhinged and highly volatile. He is determined to stand the political moral high ground while fighting for his job—and a rearguard action against the phantoms of his dark past. Who is working to trash his reputation and derail his one tilt at the prime ministership? Is it real—or just demons inside his head?
Blistering and blackly comic, Challenge puts us into the shoes of a man whose life is slipping away as he confronts the abyss of modern Australian politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780522860535

Book preview

Acknowledgements

1

Chisel deserved to die. Nothing less, for all he’d done.

When I reach back thirty-five years to conjure a winter’s night in 1974, my mouth dries up and my heart instantly palpitates, so vivid is my recall of what it’s like to hope, to wish, that someone—me, if I could summon the strength—would actually kill him.

I got my chance. And at the end of that night I lived on, satisfied that one way or another Chisel finally got what he’d long had coming. That’s quite an admission from someone in my position, I know. But the thing is I am trying to tell the truth these days, and not just some of it some of the time.

About when we reach our mid-forties we all start bragging about how we live in the now. Really, though, it’s just faux-Zen horseshit, a way of coping with the reality that the best—or at least the most—is probably history, and that our sore joints, our insomnia, our anxieties and our growing fear of the grave will only become more acute as we run up against the end.

So, yeah—I’m as in the now as anyone else my age. But that doesn’t stop me from dwelling on the past quite a bit—a lot more so in recent years since I hit the big five zero and won the chance to become who I deserve to be. But for fuck’s sake, the past is not another country, foreign topography to be pored over, held up to the light and drawn from. You can’t relive it. The only lesson of the past is that it’s always with you—a black weight on your soul and your memory and your conscience, the sum total of which is regret. That’s all. Regret.

Regrets … yes, I have a few.

If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have been on the 5.56 from Hurstbridge as it lurched and hissed into Platform 14 that shitty Saturday evening of the Skyhooks concert at the Myer Music Bowl in 1974.

I can still hear the carriage doors of the red rattler as they slam open symphonically. Weary, inky daylight at each end of the platform and a few flickering phosphorescent tubes light the landing deep under the Edwardian Baroque façade of arcs, Diocletian windows, turrets and towers. And that signature row of clocks over the shabby station’s yawning mouth that have recorded a dozen old men’s lives in delayed trains since the Gold Rush.

A few waiting commuters including a family—mum and dad, thirties, two kids in Hawthorn jumpers—watch tentatively as Chisel fills one of the carriage doorways.

I’m in the next carriage, right, so I can’t see him directly, although I know him well from the trains and the bowling alleys and the shopping-centre car parks and the outers of the footy grounds across the city to anticipate what he’s about to do. It’s his old party trick. Predictable. Terrifying.

I’ve got my face up to the carriage glass. And I’m watching the family register Chisel’s six-three of black-and-purple skin-tight woollen ‘connie’ cardigan, hock fists, calloused knuckles with blue stars, black patent-leather high-heeled square-toed lace-ups, flared scrotum-splitting tight Staggers, top button undone with the Winfield Reds jammed into the waist. They register, too, the tent-boxer nose, peroxide rats’ tails, the tattooed Indian-ink tears at eye corners and the silver cross, left lobe.

I know from their faces that Chisel is running through his usual routine: clutching the doorjambs to flex pec majors, triceps and biceps, and leaning forward to greet the father with that decayed gummy grimace.

Dad returns a quivering smile and shudders involuntarily like he’s just been jabbed with a cattle prod. He instinctively sweeps the family behind, trying to stay calm, passively disengage. It’s a textbook response to a dangerous situation. But it won’t work. Chisel is determined.

Chisel demands, Seen the Hawks?

The man swallows hard, twice, like stale bread’s caught in his throat, eventually coughs out, Yes, mate, his voice rudderless and quivering.

I bet the Dees did ’em, Chisel spits, the Hawks are fuckin’ poofters—right?

Ahh no. Hawthorn won.

Fuck that, mate—you’re just having me on. So, youse goin’ home now? On the train?

Yes.

Where to?

Ivanhoe.

Ivanhoe. Nice.

Chisel steps down onto the platform and into my line of sight. He cocks his head back, sniffs deeply, blinks slowly. The smell of fear re-draws that ugly smile onto his battered potato-that-fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck face. The little boy is whimpering and shaking now. Chisel turns his head slightly to the left and quizzically studies the father grasping for his son’s hand, squeezing—It’s okay—to reassure him.

In a well-rehearsed flourish Chisel suddenly jumps like a cat shot up the arse and crashes his forehead into the man’s face, busting his nose in a miasma of blood, snot and tears. The man crumples. Wife and kids—huddled—scream and shiver, watch sideways. Other commuters intently ignore and scuttle for exits.

Ivanhoe? Chisel says contemptuously. Well haven’t ya heard—this train is going straight to fuckin’ hospital.

The kids are now clinging to the wife’s arms as she stoops over her husband who lies in a foetal position on the platform. She kneels then cradles his upper body.

Chisel looks over his shoulder, says softly, C’mon, triggers an orderly push across the platform of maybe thirty men and boys—mutated Chisels. There’re a few girls at the tail: Bowie cuts and bangs with white connies over pushed-up tits; minis and treads; handbags holding bricks. They stop behind Chisel and his batman, Vulture, a black-hearted, stumpy, prison-tattooed Scot in a skintight red t-shirt that’s white flock-embossed with THOMASTOWN SHARPS. Vulture surveys the victim, grins, stabs a bone-snapping kick into the man’s ribs and searches Chisel’s face for approval. The wife screams again, sobs.

About here I make a mental note to maybe fuck up Vulture tonight, if I’m given a bee’s dick of a chance.

Chisel glances dismissively at Vulture and then holds his gaze one carriage along. He registers our faces in the windows. He’s seen us before, occasionally punching on with his boys and the other sharpie gangs. But he’s high on the thrill of the pain he’s causing and so can’t quite finger us right now. The reflexive, barely discernible flick of an eyebrow, though, simultaneously signals a fleeting spark of recognition and a Darwinian registration of potential threat from us pseudo-surfs.

I catch and hold Chisel’s eye, mouth right at him—I’ll get you for this, cunt. But I only actually mouth the words inside my head. Then I look at the boy. He is staring straight at me, too, his bottom lip sucking in and blowing out with each rapid breath. I want to go out there and help. But my knees feel weak, my hands are shaking and my heartbeat is pounding in my ears. The Fear.

I’m wishing for the boy’s sake that it would end. But really, it’s just beginning. In thirty-five years he’ll still be regretting everything about this evening. He’ll long ago have given up trying to divine a lesson from it. But he’ll still be wrestling with the shame of a lifetime’s anger at his father for doing nothing—not an air punch, not a bitch slap, not even a dry spit or a defiant fuck you—in retaliation.

Everybody knew the trains were sharp lifeblood, linking gangs from everywhere to Flinders Street—sharpie Mecca, where it was sharp against sharp but always, first, sharp against the world.

Sharp feasted on boredom. Kids from every dingy suburban sinkhole were in it for the raging brutal, nihilistic herd-like madness. Some liked the fashion and the music. But Chisel was in it for one thing: violence. I fucking hated his type. The sharps had been bullying me since I was a kid in the clapped-out suburb where I’d grown up. And now, as a seventeen-year-old, with a firm eye on a way out and with a little encouragement from a stealthy mate, I was ready for some judiciously timed revenge violence. Actually, it was a good deal more than that, having been convinced that belting the occasional one or two of these dickheads was a form of natural justice—payback for all the evil things they did to strangers in the name of fun, like this family, across the city. In some ways I think it might’ve actually been my real political awakening. Not that I’ve ever said that in my speeches to the true believers at National Conference or anything. That wouldn’t be too smart. Half the union delegates are probably former sharps.

Anyway, Chisel was the biggest, toughest and nastiest. The challenge I didn’t really want but couldn’t ignore.

Jolting me back to the present, Eddie interrupts, says to me, I already know your log-cabin story, darl, how you survived the mean streets of the seventies. So you’re a tough guy—a survivor. Bravo. I mean—who doesn’t know that about you? And anyway, I’ve seen the YouTube doco on the sharps—I don’t really need a dissertation on them from you. But okay then—tell me what happened next if you’re insisting, I mean, if it’s really that important right now.

Forget it, I say, forget it. I’ll tell you if ever you really need to know.

You mean another time—when the sky’s not falling in?

When the sky’s not falling in? Well, that could mean never. My office seemed to lurch from crisis to mishap, managing the political trash by sweeping it from one end of the party and the parliament, and hiding it under the carpet at the other, placating the colleagues with vacant promises and going full frontal against every new daily line of attack from the government.

I’d at least tried to tell Eddie that I could be accused, one day, of killing a man. But back to the story and the bit she doesn’t know yet.

All right, I’m watching through the train window as Chisel leads his bunch of Neanderthals orderly double-file, up the concrete ramp from the platform. They always follow him like this. The ticket collector stands aside, holds the gate open like a blind cinema usher, eyes glued vacantly to his feet so as not to catch Chisel’s or any other nasty prick’s.

Station staff and a few other commuters are clustered around the bleeding man and his family now. The police and ambulance will come. But no one will identify Chisel. He’ll get away with it. Again. As I walk past them, I bend over, gently tousle the boy’s hair, say, It’s okay, he’ll get what’s his. The boy ignores me.

We follow the tail of the gang up the ramp. They spill into the cavernous piss-smelling atrium with its decades of masticated gum blots, carbon-stained walls, greasy spoons, smoke sellers and soft-porn vendors. Outside a gentle, icy patina of rain is setting in. Under the clocks the steps are a humming, steaming, hyper-mass of hundreds of sharps—spitting, smoking fags in cupped hands, screaming and laughing, six-pack bracelets dangling from wrists.

We stick out like dogs’ balls, so we cross the road, stand on the steps of St Paul’s and watch as Chisel parts the crowd, revelling in the potency of respect he thinks he commands but oblivious that it’s really just fear, which is quite different. Four of his boys go for beer from Y&Js across the road: four cartons of VB Mick Nolans. Chisel cracks a tinny, sucks deeply and leads the rest—a ravenous crocodile line—over Swanston Street, across the bridge spanning the serpentine river and down towards the Myer Music Bowl for the concert.

The sharps were suss as on Skyhooks because they weren’t straight hard rock like Lobby Loyde or Chain, what with that faggot in drag and the pretty-boy Shirl. But the ’hooks nailed it with their songs about dope deals and Toorak cowboys and the wogs down Lygon Street. Sharps liked chicks and chicks liked Skyhooks. Not just sharpie moles. But little rich babes from convent schools who’d told their parents they were going to the pictures at the Rivoli Twin when they were actually chasing a bit of tough-boy edge down by the Bowl.

The violence comes in recurring waves. Police drag someone out by the legs or arms or head. It stops for a minute then a punch or a bottle flies and it crescendos again, as sharps tear into sharps and bystanders and voyeurs scurry to avoid getting roped in. Girls wail as the cops charge in and out of the gouging, writhing horde, dragging smaller stragglers up to the flotilla of paddy vans on the lawns.

We watch Chisel lurk, vigilant in the shadows, and run in occasionally to belt someone, then retreat before he can be collared. He’s got one arm snaked around the neck of a scruffy-looking sheila in a red connie and tartan skirt that just covers her white knickers, one of his hands wedged into her cleavage, the other clutching a beer.

Duffo out front of Kush orders the band to stop.

Fuckin’ cool it, guys, he says. Stop the fighting. It lulls. Then, as he picks up ‘Banana Song’, someone tosses another punch. It reignites, and only calms when the ’hooks start.

After the concert a progressive brawl rolls through the gardens around the Bowl and past the Shrine. Gangs hunt each other through the trees—Punch chasey!—and back towards the station. There’re coppers and TV cameras everywhere.

Dozens hammer away at one another at the Flinders–Swanston intersection. Chisel and his goons take turns to race in from the packs to punch the backs of heads. Cops bring in the horses. Girls scream and run. The cavalry enlivens others who dart about the horses’ legs, belt the whinnying beasts on the flanks—Thwack!—with open palms.

Vulture is kicking the life out of some poor prick on the ground right in front of me. My chance. I step forward, shape up and say, Game on, fucker.

But before I can get one in I’m hit hard in the back of the head. King hit. Coward’s punch. I see stars, drop to my knees. I lift my eyes to catch Chisel looming above me, spinning his punching arm like a windmill. I don’t feel anything when his fist connects. But there’s a loud pop—you know, like when one of the valves on the old black-and-white telly used to blow. Everything goes white for a few seconds. I crawl away before any of them can kick me.

I must’ve looked like complete crap. Blood all down my front. But I’d had worse concussions on the footy field and still played out those games. A funny thing would happen whenever I got sconed really bad on the oval: I’d leave my body like I was in a dream, levitating, and look down on myself playing. Every time I was seriously concussed I played a blinder.

I sink back into the crowd but I’m on my feet. The Fear’s gone and I’m thinking, Why not? Then I take off, out of my body, and I’m hovering above it all, watching down as Chisel keeps circling, arms overhead like a demented prize fighter, while the cavalry struggles at the perimeter of the crowd, looking for a way through without stomping screaming kids.

Chisel doesn’t see him emerge from the shadows, this big bastard dressed like me in cords and a white t-shirt, with some sharp’s connie cardigan wound around his head like a scarf, sleeves knotted at the nape of his neck, leaving only his eyes visible at the front. He’s not quite as tall as Chisel, but he’s fit and with gym-cut iron-pumped pecs and biceps. He walks like he’s lining up a goal from forty-five out. With his head and face covered there’s something other worldly about him—like the Palestinian gunmen on the TV news all the time.

Chisel collapses before he knows he’s been punched, his head bouncing on the wet bitumen.

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 advisers 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,