The Speechwriter Read online

Garry and I keep up with the news. It helps bond us. There’s a TV in our cell, and a weekly newspaper delivery. Garry once admitted to being thrilled by a Trump presidency — ‘for nihilistic reasons’ — but now accepts it has hastened mass extinction.

  Garry and I watched in awe as Trump, aggrieved that Californians weren’t sufficiently offended by his personal boycott, declared war on the state. His tweet was shown onscreen: ‘If my military refuses my Order to invade the Sad State of California, I will fly the bombers myself like I did in the Great War. #MAGA.’

  Unfortunately for the Home of the Brave, more of its citizens believe in elves than the merits of psychology, and they’ve refused to accept the profound unfitness of their president. Their renamed penny dropped when he ordered Trump Jnr. to hijack Air Force Two and suicidally steer the plane into Disneyland. ‘Vice President Pence was low-energy … until he was incinerated in jet fuel and patriotic glory. #RIP #MAGA.’ Congress is still split on impeachment.

  We have our own nightmares inside, but appreciate that we’re reasonably sheltered from the globally tessellating ones. The Machines are one intersection, though, and an issue of great significance to us inmates. Since PlayStations became sentient, ambulatory, and wildly murderous, the government has — correctly, I think — classified them as an enemy plague undeserving of due process. The murder rate has quadrupled since the console achieved singularity, and if we were ever grateful to be imprisoned, it was when we considered our relative protection from having our skulls stove in by a sentient control pad.

  So you can imagine our alarm when we watched on the evening news recently a Greens senator explain a bill to ‘explicitly outlaw the extrajudicial killing of machines that think, feel, and aspire to humanity. They should be charged and tried in a court like anybody else.’

  The senator’s remarks were not favourably received in Sunshine. Made anxious by the prospect of sharing a cell with these machines, we rioted. Well, everyone else rioted. I was more insolent than riotous, and lit a newspaper before guiltily stamping it out. Not that it would have mattered. The screws, the public, and the major parties were unprecedentedly supportive of the riot, and we enjoyed three days of violent carte blanche. Unfortunately, a few spoilt it for the many by exploiting this freedom to practise rough justice or purge the place of rivals. I stayed in my cell, trying to read Pushkin. Then Garry returned, breathless.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m trying to read, Garry.’

  ‘We just torched Pedo Mike.’

  ‘I am myself the matter of my book,’ Montaigne once wrote. ‘You would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.’

  You have to credit his honesty — or is Montaigne’s self-effacement too knowing, too prideful? At least he knew himself better than anything else, and, in committing this knowledge to paper, he accelerated modernity and touched Shakespeare. Who am I to scorn this aristocrat for ignoring his wife so that he might reclusively muse on his erections?

  My problem, besides lengthy incarceration and the shiv, is that I’m impatient to tell you how I got here, but unsure how to tell it. Where do I begin? There was a time when my job as a speechwriter was making clear the crowded desires of my bosses. I was a landscaper, assuming custody of the wild and overgrown ambitions of my masters, and pruning them into artful coherence. At least, that was the idea.

  But I’m no longer a speechwriter. Instead, I’m a memoirist and infamous criminal, and telling my story seems infinitely harder. ‘I am myself the matter of my book’ — but who the fuck am I? And which of fate’s farts blew me to Sunshine?

  Or are those awful winds self-made?

  A portrait of the criminal as a young politician

  If you want to know the truth, I do feel like going into all that David Copperfield crap. The crap about the lousy childhood and my parents’ jobs. The crap about how my father couldn’t climax without the Book of Revelations, and how my mother once decorated the Christmas tree with pretzels and the bladders of goon casks. I don’t know why Holden was so bored by it.

  I’m not blaming my parents, it’s just that it all starts with them. My interest in speechwriting derived from my father’s love of Churchill, which itself derived from a unique and sentimental madness. You see, my father was convinced that he was conceived during Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’. He didn’t mean this like Churchill did, as a galvanising rhetorical gesture. No, my father had precisely calculated the crest of British virtue: it arrived between 20.00 and 21.00 GMT on September 15, 1940.

  This, my father said, was the most important hour in the whole of the Battle of Britain — and thus the most important hour in the history of the United Kingdom. It was the time when the Royal Air Force had most decisively repelled the Luftwaffe, and all the Queen’s subjects were joined in a spirit of noble defiance. In this doubly pregnant moment, my father’s soul — then flickering to life in a zygotic speck — fed hungrily on the ether of national valour.

  ‘I was a blessed foetus,’ my father would say. ‘My destiny was pledged by history and the stars.’*

  [* Garry wants me to record here that he’s unsurprised that the story of my childhood — and so early in its telling — is already ‘stranger than a truck-driving sub-atomic particle’. When I told him that I’d never heard that phrase before, he accused me of being ‘a sheltered cunt’ and told me that it’s very common where he’s from. I said that it didn’t sound like Australian idiom at all, that it lacked sense and the distinctive rhythm of our idiom, and that it was probably the result of some fascinating corruption, the origins of which it might be interesting to explore together. Garry confiscated my pen and paper for three days.]

  What my father failed to mention was that he was conceived many miles from the bombs on a bed inherited from the Earl of Gloucester, and to a family notorious for its avoidance of military service. I might have humoured my father’s origin myth if, during the Blitz, his folks had fucked amongst the fearful, sheltering crowds in the Tube. But they didn’t. My father was Baron George Beaverbrook II, third child of Lord and Lady Beaverbrook, and they’d fornicated stoically in a Tudor mansion.

  My father was obsessed with the RAF. And this wasn’t just eccentric sentimentality — the Air Force was the gilded carriage that would take him to 10 Downing Street. He had a plan: become an air cadet, distinguish himself in combat, enjoy rapid promotion, popularly reform the air force, become a high-profile MP, and then, after adroitly managing the Defence portfolio, be sworn in as Prime Minister. Already baptised by history, my father thought his ascension to Churchill’s old job was as simple as conceiving a plan.

  He got as far as air cadet. The reason for his dismissal was never clear to me, but I once heard that he’d mistakenly engaged a cloud in a dogfight. Whatever the reason, his parents’ influence was sufficient to obscure it — and secure his commercial pilot’s licence.

  Which is where Mum comes in. She was an Australian air hostess for British Airways while my father was flying their 747s. Apparently, my mother was quite the bombshell, before her vivacity was revealed as alcoholism.

  I was an accident and my father was feckless, but my mother’s pregnancy still aroused some sense of obligation in him. He capitulated and moved to Australia. It was the beginning of the end for him, and right until his death he exuded an air of sour astonishment. He was incapable of accepting that he had condemned himself to the common class in a hot and distant satellite of the Motherland.

  My own political awakening came on Christmas Day, 1991. I was ten. We were in Winston, my father’s second-hand Jaguar, and driving to my uncle’s house for lunch. Santa had given me a leather-bound copy of Churchill’s speeches, which I was pleased with, even if I was surprised by how closely it hewed to my father’s interests.

  I had woken to this gift, but also to gastro, and while sitting in the back seat reading aloud from my book, I could feel its tide violently r
eturning. ‘‘‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood —’” Urrrrgghhhhhhh …’

  ‘I’m warning you, Toby,’ my mother said. ‘Do not shit the car.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I lied. It was already happening.

  ‘Don’t you dare excrete on that book,’ my father said, panicked. ‘Those words are sacred, Toby.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I lied. The book, and much of the leather upholstery, was now conspicuously soiled.

  ‘I despise this country,’ my father said.

  When we arrived at my uncle’s, my cousin offered me a bowl of finely powdered sherbet. WizzFizz is crack cocaine to a child, and my parlous condition couldn’t keep me from heaving the stuff into my mouth. My parents didn’t notice. Mother had made a beeline for the chardonnay; Father was desperately cleaning the interior of Winston with vinegar and beach towels.

  Effervescent and volatile, the sherbet combined explosively with my gut virus, sparking an intestinal version of nuclear fission. I ran crying to the bathroom, clutching for moral strength the plastic machine-gun my uncle had given me on behalf of Santa. I was there for half an hour, buffeted by shame and convulsions.

  When I emerged, everyone was sitting around the kitchen table. My mother and uncle were ashing obliviously on the coleslaw, while my cousin noisily chewed the heads off G.I. Joe dolls. A chook roasted in the oven.

  My uncle was an indifferent Catholic, but nonetheless saw in the celebration of Christ’s birth a reason to drink even more vigorously than usual. In the corner of the kitchen grew an unstable pyramid of crushed beer cans. My mother kept pace with wine.

  My father sat morosely, nursing cognac and muttering about the vulgarity of convicts. Work was his refuge from his family, and he usually had no problem asking to be rostered for Christmas Day. But not this year. ‘Dear boy, let’s have you a shower and some fresh lineaments,’ he said to me. I think he was grateful for an excuse to leave the kitchen.

  When we returned, my father requested that his brother-in-law relax his obnoxious monopoly of the stereo system. ‘Preferably for Bach’s cello suites,’ my father said, but my uncle insisted upon the thirtieth rotation of Whispering Jack. John Farnham’s album had been out for years now, but was yet to release my uncle from its bondage. His favourite song was ‘You’re the Voice’, which seemed to be about finding the courage to defy some unspecified oppression. But sung by my uncle with frightening volume and incoherence, the song became terribly oppressive for my father.

  Christmas can invite bleak reflection, and my father had plenty. His dreams were dead; his scandalous estrangement from aristocracy complete. Once alluring to my mother, his ambitions were now a poisonous joke. More immediately, Winston’s upholstery was ruined, his son incontinent, and he was in the company of a drunk plumber in a filthy bungalow. John Farnham was the final straw. When ‘Take the Pressure Down’ came on, my father slammed his glass and made for the stereo. ‘You know, old boy,’ he said to my uncle, ‘I do believe I’m going to take the pressure up,’ and he seized the stereo, lifted it above his head, then smashed it into a hundred pieces.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that, mate,’ my uncle said, shaken from his pissed stupor.

  ‘I needed relief,’ my father replied.

  ‘You owe him a new fucking stereo,’ my mother said matter-of-factly.

  ‘That music is unholy,’ my father said.

  My cousin coughed up a soldier’s head.

  ‘That’s gonna cost ya, mate,’ my uncle said to my father. Then he turned to me. ‘Toby?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where’s your gun?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘Go get it, buddy.’

  I did.

  ‘What are you doing?’ my mother asked her brother.

  ‘Something you two should’ve already done,’ he said. ‘Toby?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I bought that gun.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I bought it from the shops, mate. Not Santa.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He took the gun’s receipt from his wallet. ‘And that shit-stained book there?’

  ‘It’s Churchill’s speeches.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is. But your weird dad bought it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Don’t do this,’ my mother said.

  ‘He did, Toby. And do you know why he bought it?’

  ‘Don’t you fucking do this,’ my mother warned.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because there’s no Father Christmas, mate. Okay? No laughing fat man gave me that stereo, which I worked like a fucking dog for, and no laughing fat man gave you that gun, Toby. Because the laughing fat man doesn’t fucking exist. We made him up.’

  I was prepared to refute this slander until I caught the embarrassed look of my parents. Their strangely contorted faces and averted gazes confirmed it for me, and while I was ignorant of transport logistics, now that I thought about it, the acquittal of a global consignment of presents by one man in one night did seem pretty unlikely.

  I vomited.*

  [* ‘He shouldn’t have done that, your uncle. What he should’ve done is jammed the volume knob right up your dad’s arsehole, put a steak knife to his throat, and taught him the fucken lyrics. Those songs are woven into this country’s cultural fucken tapestry, mate. But what your uncle shouldn’t have done is rob your sense of wonder. Can’t put a price on that. More valuable than rubies or hash oil.’]

  I was drafting my maiden speech when mother’s arrival in my bedroom was announced by a cloud of smoke. ‘How many times must I say this, Toby?’ she said. ‘Stop cutting up the fucking cereal packets before they’re finished.’

  She had a point. I was making palm cards for my first political speech, and, having agonised over multiple drafts, I’d destroyed most of the kitchen’s boxes. Not only boxes of cereal, but of biscuits, lasagne sheets, and her four litres of goon. It hadn’t occurred to me to first draft the speech on paper. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘Whatever you’re doing isn’t healthy. All the other kids are outside kicking balls.’

  But what could be more important than my first political campaign? While my peers were measuring their dicks, I was sharpening my tongue. And the stakes were high — nothing less than their liberation from the infantilising hoax of Father Christmas.

  I’d built a literal soapbox from the scrap timber in my father’s shed, and now I was preparing my first speech. That’s how I had responded to my uncle’s cruel revelation. For a week after, I was so shocked that I wandered the house as if moving through treacle. There were too many memories that required painful reconfiguration. Too many gifts whose provenance required amendment.

  But I shrugged off my depression, and soon the young politician emerged. I would ensure that no other child’s soul would be played with so frivolously. With my soiled copy of Churchill’s speeches beside me, I prepared my gloriously mutinous remarks.

  I worked for the rest of the summer. On a major speech and handmade pamphlets. On enunciation and posture. Before my bedroom mirror, I rehearsed gestures. I’d read that Demosthenes, to overcome his stammer, practised his speeches with a mouthful of pebbles before the roar of the ocean. I used gobstoppers and commercial radio, but quit after choking. I barely left my room. My parents never knew that my project was an energetic renunciation of their fraud. My parents knew nothing.

  School resumed. On the first day, I brought my wooden platform. The speech cards were secured in my shirt pocket. I was confident both that I had mastered the arguments and that I’d developed the self-possession that would aid their reception. I would be focused, fierce, articulate.

  But when the bell rang for recess, and I planted my soapbox at the edge of the busy quadrangle,
I realised my problem. It was noisy. Very noisy. How was I supposed to compete with the squeals and blissful engagement of those playing cricket and four-square?

  The answer came when I stepped upon my wooden box — and it splintered dramatically. I fell harshly to the bitumen, one of my feet captured by the jagged wreck of wood. For all of my intellectual preparation, I had failed to test the integrity of my platform.*

  [* Garry didn’t seem to notice this casual witticism, so I pointed it out. ‘It’s a play on words, mate,’ I told him.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Toby.’]

  But I had their attention, and suddenly squeals were replaced with laughter. After I dislodged my foot from the mess of timber, I stood and removed my cards from my pocket. I surveyed the audience proudly, as if nothing had happened. As if I had been born for no reason but to seize this one moment. Then Pete hurled a tangelo at my dick, and I fell to the ground again.

  Surely Churchill never had to deal with this. But as I writhed on the bitumen, I was grateful for the audience. The volume of laughter now suggested that the whole school was watching, and when the nausea subsided, I stood again. We, the children, had been taken for fools — and now they would all hear the truth. If genital bruising was the cost of their attention, then so be it.

  I cleared my throat.

  I have made cookies for him, but they were eaten by Father. I have poured milk for him, but it was drunk by Mother. Father Christmas does not exist. It is all a lie. The laugh, and the naughty list, and the big telescope so he can always watch us — lies. The walking stick that is one big candy cane is another lie. There are so many lies.

  The reindeer and how they teased Rudolph — that is a lie. The Santa at the shops, who said you could sit on his lap and tell him your dreams — he is a lie. He is just a normal man called Dave who is paid money to lie to children. I hope the job is worth it, Dave. I hope the money is heaps.

  I asked Father how does Santa come when we have no chimney? And I was scared that he couldn’t come to visit us, but Father said he would leave the front door open with a note, and then I was more scared because I thought a gunman would just walk in and take my presents and milk. Why would Father say this and make me scared?