The Speechwriter Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Introduction

  A portrait of the criminal as a young politician

  A bird in the hand

  A blown opportunity

  Land of the free, home of the knave

  Where eagles dare

  A labyrinth without a centre

  The cosmic Sherpa

  A breakthrough in the prawn case

  Accelerate the sickness

  Sunshine and lollipops

  Garry’s afterword

  Acknowledgements

  THE SPEECHWRITER

  Martin McKenzie-Murray was The Saturday Paper’s chief correspondent, work for which made him both a Walkley and Quill finalist. Before that, he worked as a teacher, speechwriter, Age columnist, and adviser to the chief commissioner of Victoria Police. Elsewhere, his writing has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Guardian Australia, Meanjin, and Best Australian Essays. His first book, A Murder Without Motive: the killing of Rebecca Ryle, was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Awards for crime writing.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2021

  Copyright © Martin McKenzie-Murray 2021

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  9781925713831 (Australian edition)

  9781925938579 (ebook)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  For Stel & Tilly

  ‘The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.’

  Ecclesiastes 7:4

  ‘And other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’

  Unknown

  It was only after his death that I learnt of Toby’s credo: the one he was secretly and dramatically fulfilling while he worked for me. I’m still unsure what ‘Accelerate the sickness’ means exactly, and, as its principal victim, I’m an unlikely person to preface the book in which he attempts to explain it.

  But if I was a victim of Toby’s, I confess to also being his beneficiary. Toby Beaverbrook conducted one of history’s strangest political experiments — and if I can’t praise its methodology, I can at least commend these memoirs for their historical significance.

  The Hon. Richard ‘Steamboat’ Jackson,

  former Prime Minister of Australia

  Introduction

  Like many bookish dreamers with low prospects for imprisonment, I’d fantasised about a long spell in jail: my life simplified, I might finally read the Russians without guilt or distraction. Before you curse my stupidity — or its suggestion of privilege — I would add that the fantasy was involuntary. Like picturing yourself falling when standing upon a great ledge.

  Well, colour me chastened. As I write this, my cellmate is distracting me with his fourth ecstatic discharge for the day. It’s not lunchtime yet. I say ‘ecstatic’, but Garry’s exaggerating his pleasure. Orgasms are purely mechanical. His real pleasure is found in contriving howls of sexual delirium to discomfort me.

  Which is the least of the distractions. Our toilet is obscenely dysfunctional, Garry’s pornographic wallpaper has exceeded the negotiated boundaries, and I’m struggling with our theatre group’s adaptation of Edward Scissorhands. Worse, there are whispers that Goblin’s renewed his interest in puncturing my stomach. I’ve secured some comforts in Sunshine Correctional Centre, but reading Chekhov isn’t one of them. It’s a miracle that I might even record this for you.

  Garry became my cellmate after his predecessor, Goblin, tried to kill me. Goblin’s serving a life sentence for killing a man with a tractor — and for manufacturing most of the state’s methamphetamines — and the fact that we were cellmates embarrassed him. It queered his menacing status. He could never forgive me for this, but I never stopped reminding him that the decision hadn’t been mine. As he was the influential leader of ‘The Sick Cunts’, wardens had sensibly resolved not to place him with rival gang members, nor allow him to cohabit and conspire with his own. Which left me.

  Months into my sentence, Goblin was ambushed in the gym by a group wielding weaponised socks and toothbrushes. Stabbed, stomped, and bludgeoned, he was hospitalised for weeks. After Goblin was lifted from his induced coma, but still lay crippled in bed — quiet weeks, when he was painfully undistracted from his own mind — doubt and reflection intruded, and about his girlfriend he became rather maudlin and sexually possessive.

  When he returned to our cell, Goblin made his expectations clear.

  ‘You write, yeah?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You wrote for the fucking Prime Minister, is what I heard.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well, I’m the fucking Prime Minister of Sunshine, mate. And I’ve got a job for ya.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No one hears about this — right?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘I need a promise, you weird cunt. You don’t belong here, but I’m telling you something anyway. Something personal. And you’re gonna promise that no other cunt hears it.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘You understand what happens if you break this promise?’

  ‘Not specifically, but I expect it will be very bad. Possibly fatal.’

  ‘Not possibly, cunt.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘My missus. Tash. Love her. Great chick. But I reckon she might be fucking some other dudes. Or thinking about it. I mean, I’m in here for a while, you know?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So, I want you to write a letter from me. You tell her to stay with me, yeah? But do it with nice words. Make her feel something. Then I’ll copy it out in my handwriting. And tomorrow, cunt. I want this tomorrow.’

  So I wrote:

  Sweetest Tash,

  I have mostly recovered from my injuries. During my convalescence, I discovered the pleasures of reading, so you may note a change in my language. Condemned to bed, there was little to do but read, curse the murderous fiends who put me here, and think of you. Doctors say my jaw, bowels, eye socket, and left lung will recover, but that there is no cure for my swollen heart: I miss you.

  I know that changes to the conjugal visiting policy have strained our bond. I assure you that memories of those trysts sustain me, and I hopefully ask that they sustain you too. I have only 21 more years in this place. My recollection of your face is as precise as the entry wounds to my abdomen.

  Forever yours,

  Goblin

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Goblin asked, clutching his colostomy bag. I knew I hadn’t got the tone quite right.

  ‘It’s a letter saying that you love Tash, and you hope she’ll wait for you.’

  ‘So why didn’t you just say that?’

  ‘Well, why couldn’t you?’ I said angrily, my pride injured.

  Bad move. Instinctively, I began assessing risk: I was trapped
in a small cell with a murderous goon, but at least I had the advantage of having both intestines inside me.

  ‘What the fuck did you say?’

  ‘I’m just trying to help, Goblin,’ I said. ‘We can massage the language,’ and I smiled apologetically while working out how to rip his waste-bag from his belly if shit got heavy. Not his shit, obviously, but the shit.

  ‘You can massage my dick, motherfucker.’

  His punch was surprisingly quick. And powerful. It fractured my nose and felled me. As I knelt before the toilet bowl, transfixed by the brilliant surge of blood, Goblin gripped my hair and smashed my head upon the bowl’s lip. Repeatedly. Before losing consciousness, I alerted the guards with my hysterical screams.

  Penny Hasluck’s appointment as prison governor was controversial. Or it would have been, had anyone known about it. A failed actor whose personal summit was a TV commercial about pet insurance, Penny’s job immediately before Sunshine had been director of a community theatre group.

  But during a Senate inquiry into criminal rehabilitation and the state of our prisons, Penny made a public submission detailing his theory that most criminality derived from ‘constipated souls’ that could be liberated with ‘the laxative of dramatic expression’.

  This caught the interest of an independent senator, who later demanded that the government experimentally trial Mr. Hasluck as a prison governor in exchange for his decisive support of a bill. The government agreed, on the condition that it not be publicly announced; hands were shaken, and Penny’s first act as governor was to furnish every cell with a copy of Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Handbook.

  Recently, after Goblin’s release from hospital, our theatre group officially convened under the tutelage of the governor himself. I joined a dozen prisoners on the pews of our chapel, which Penny had turned into a simple theatre, angering the more pious inmates. He stood onstage beneath a giant crucifix and explained how our adaptation of Scissorhands would benefit our souls — and possibly our chances for parole.

  ‘Our journey begins,’ he said, ‘with loosening up. With dissolving our inhibitions. For tough guys, this can be hard. I get that. But it’s necessary for our voyage. I want you to embrace vulnerability. I want you to become fluid, while remaining strong. Like a river, gentlemen. And to achieve this, we’re going to start with some improv. Goblin, assume the stage.’

  ‘Man, what?’

  ‘Onstage. Now.’

  Goblin reluctantly obliged. Penny jumped offstage and sat on the front pew, crossing his legs ostentatiously.

  ‘Good. Now, you have a chair, a table, a body, and a voice. That might not seem like much. But you know what, Goblin? It’s the whole world. Or it can be with just one more thing: imagination. You see, theatre is alchemy. We transform the mundane into magic. Right now, you have all the ingredients you need. Now what we want is a scene. Garry! What’s our scene?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I need you to offer Goblin a situation. Something dramatic.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Shit, okay. Ahh …’

  ‘Hurry, Garry.’

  ‘Okay, you’re an astronaut, yeah, and you’re going to Mars, but then … but then all these fucken bees escape in your pod and they’re, like, fucken everywhere.’

  ‘How the fuck—’

  ‘That’s the scene, Goblin. Go!’

  Goblin nervously held his colostomy bag with one hand, while unconvincingly raising his other to suggest desperation. ‘Help, help! There’s fucken bees in here!’

  ‘End scene! Goblin, that made me physically ill. I didn’t believe any of it. Let’s start with your colostomy bag. It’s an extension of you. It is you. Don’t pretend it’s not there. We can all see it. We need you to see it. Otherwise you’re just dragging a big ol’ hunk of dishonesty behind you like a rusty wagon.’

  ‘You want me to see the bag?’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘I can see it, man. Bag’s right here. Attached to my guts. With my shit in it.’

  ‘There it is! Passion. Right there. It just got real, didn’t it? I can feel you now, Goblin. Okay, you see the bag. Now I need you to own the bag. And I need you to own it without swearing.’

  ‘You want me to own it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying, hey.’

  ‘You have a nose, yes?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you have a mouth?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you have hands, fingers, nails?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And do you think about them?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about. Your bag’s a part of you now. Own it like your nose, your mouth, your hands. Because the body, Goblin, is the actor’s ultimate tool. And you blunt that tool with self-consciousness.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good. Now, let’s break the scene down. You’re an astronaut?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re proud and gifted.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Elite.’

  ‘Sure, man.’

  ‘You’re in control. You’ve always been in control. Of your mind, your body. Do you understand, Goblin? You’re a phenomenon of intellectual and physical discipline. And now you’re on the greatest mission of your life — maybe humanity’s greatest mission. And you’re fine with that pressure. In fact, you relish it. You’ve been dreaming about this since you were eight. Goblin?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s your destiny.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But now … BEES! My god, you’ve meticulously planned this mission. But you’ve never planned for this. How could you have planned for a swarm of bees? It’s unthinkable. But they’re here now. Undeniably. In your shuttle, jeopardising your mission. Now … scene!’

  ‘Ahhh, bees!’

  ‘Get the fuck off my stage, Goblin.’

  Garry says he’s in here because of the ‘farts of fate’, but the Crown says it’s because he held up four servos. For a man who boasts of his intelligence, he’s frustratingly inconsistent when explaining the roots of his criminality. ‘Man is just fucken clay,’ he once told me. ‘Shaped by the gods of genetics, then buggered by the gods of authority.’

  But in Sunshine, Garry is a passionate believer in personal agency. If you can’t survive in here, he says, it’s because you’re a pissant. There are the frail and the strong — the hapless and the guileful — arranged in a fixed and savage constellation. When abstractly contemplating humanity on the outside, Garry has an abundance of sympathy. But there’s little for those wearing prison greens. Garry can afford to be unsympathetic: he resembles a steroidal boar and, having survived three shankings, has come to believe in his own exceptionalism.

  After a recent session on pruno,* I mistakenly thought we’d established a rapport that could accommodate some honest inquiry. So I asked Garry about this contradiction — about the besieged individual outside these walls, and the man of agency within them.

  [* Throw peeled oranges, bread, and lots of sugar into a bin bag. Add hot water, close the bag, then allow Our Lord Almighty to ferment. Remember to ‘burp’ the bag after a couple days, otherwise it’ll explode.]

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, you contradict yourself, mate.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I think I’ve been clear.’

  ‘Spell it out, cunt.’

  Suddenly, Garry’s face looked like a scrub fire.

  ‘I think I’ve misread the situation,’ I said.

  ‘Spell it out, Toby.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘Well, I’m fucken asking.’

  ‘I’ve misread the mood, mate. That’s all. It�
�s the bloody bin juice — it’s gone straight to my head. Thought we had some warm candour going on here.’

  ‘But it’s very fucken warm, mate. And it’ll be a lot fucken warmer when you finish your thought.’

  ‘It’s just …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you describe your crimes, you assign blame elsewhere — genes, parents, bad haircuts. Shit beyond your control. But in here, where you’re an alpha dog, you expect everyone to own their station. Out there it’s sickness, but in here it’s weakness. Which seems …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know … inconsistent.’

  ‘Inconsistent?’

  ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  Before I ran my mouth off, I’d forgotten a cardinal rule: the peace of our cell was contingent upon me recognising Garry’s superiority. This didn’t require mute deference, but I wasn’t allowed to forget that his patronage was the only reason I hadn’t been fatally stuck with a screwdriver yet.

  ‘Who’s that wizard-looking cunt you’re always getting me to read?’ Garry asked.

  ‘Walt Whitman.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. And didn’t he say: “Do I contradict myself, you drunk dog? Well, so be it, mate, I fucken contradict myself. I’m a massive cunt — I contain heaps of shit.”’

  I conceded that he’d written something similar.

  ‘I like you, Toby. So I’m gonna give you a choice. I can beat you with a sock full of batteries, or you can help me write a letter to me estranged dad.’

  This was a no-brainer, but Garry’s request added significantly to my workload. I was in demand. In addition to the play, I was helping the Governor draft policy notes, as well as ghostwriting two prisoners’ memoirs. While my safety depended upon this labour, I reflected bitterly on how much greater my workload was in prison than it had been in the public service.

  ‘Okay,’ I agreed.

  ‘And one more thing,’ Garry said, calmly finishing the dregs of his pruno. ‘I want to look over this book you’re writing. Make suggestions. Maybe save you from that fucken head of yours.’