The Speechwriter by Martin McKenzie-Murray (best biographies to read TXT) 📕

that we must move towards retrieving holistic policy approaches from the demands of programmatic specificity.’

A day passed. Susie was more advanced on her film script than I was with the speech. After opening with a platitudinous Jobs quote, I added: ‘This government believes in robot pilots. For the same reason it believes in innovation. In ideas. In pushing the envelope, expanding the box, sparking the imagination.’

After writing this, I went to the toilet and sparked my gag reflex. Mostly I did this to relieve dread, but I also hoped that, while heaving demonically over the bowl, I would be sufficiently emptied of pride that inspiration might come and refill me. While on my knees, I studied a constellation of hardened shit and waited. But there was nothing. I wasn’t channelling Jobs, but Job, humiliated by a vast power, and in my moment of abjection I waited desperately for guidance.

The bathroom’s door opened. This must be it: Providence. But it was only John washing custard from his jumper. If I was to be guided, I’d have to demand it. So I waited for John to leave before calling my girlfriend.

We’d only spoken a few times since I’d left. I felt too great a burden on the conversation to fill the distance. Too much pressure. To speak compounded the fact of our separation. So we texted. Older readers might seize on this as proof of my generation’s atrophic hearts. But the truth was, my heart was too tender to speak.

It wasn’t just heartache. I was reluctant to call because I was withholding a small but growing doubt. To announce it would undermine the presumed importance of my moving to Canberra. Which was pathetic. I was paid good money for words, yet where it mattered I had none. Pride and longing had strangled them.

But on wet knees, my head above the freckled porcelain, I decided that no more would my heart be silent. It was time to speak honestly. I called Rachel.

‘Hey,’ she said.

‘Hey, baby.’

‘There’s a weird echo.’

‘Is there?’ Fuck. I’d failed already. ‘I’m in a toilet,’ I confessed.

‘A toilet?’

‘A cubicle. At work. It’s rancid, but the fact of my being in a toilet is less important than my telling you I’m in a toilet, because—’

‘I’m glad you called.’

‘Okay.’

‘We need to talk.’

‘We are talking.’

‘Sorry, you’re in the toilet?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’m not sure I want you there while we talk right now.’

‘We’ve been talking a lot about my location.’

‘Toby.’

‘Yes?’

‘We need to talk.’

‘That’s why I called.’

‘Can you, I don’t know, go someplace else?’

This didn’t sound good. I wasn’t moving. I couldn’t move. My heart rate was quickening, my limbs tensing.

‘Toby?’

‘I’m moving,’ I lied, while renewing my interest in the bowl’s profane patterns and remaining quiet for the time that it might take to move to the imaginary room.

‘Toby?’

‘Yes?’

‘I can’t do this anymore.’

A labyrinth without a centre

On the office’s giant plasma screen, which was always playing Sky News, an ex-premier was welcoming a neo-Nazi on his show — not as an extremist, but as a peer and policy analyst. Through tears, I watched the interview on captions.

‘Welcome to Fortress,’ the host said. ‘Your weekly respite from political correctness. Returning to the desk is conservative activist Ricky Hammer, who made such a big splash on last week’s show. Welcome back, Ricky.’

‘G’day.’

‘And remember, you can join the conversation via our Facebook page, or on Twitter with #Fortress. So, mate: we made some headlines last week. Why do you think that was?’*

[* Spoiler alert: it’s because he’s a fucking Nazi.]

‘Well, Pete, we both know there’s a limit to what can be said in this country. If you express a view outside the elite’s preferred ideology, you’ll be punished. And that’s what happened. Hung, drawn, and bloody quartered.’

‘Some have criticised me for not raising certain questions with you.’

‘I heard.’

‘Then let me put some to you now, just so they can’t say that I haven’t.’

‘I’m not afraid of scrutiny, Pete.’

‘Apparently, you’ve said that Hitler was heroic, and Mein Kampf should be taught in schools.’

‘Well, that’s what the elite media would have you believe.’

‘Okay. It’s also been said that you were a member of the white supremacy group Combat 18, named for Hitler and dedicated to sparking a race war.’

‘Slander.’

‘I’m sorry about these questions, Ricky, but let’s just get them out of the way, in the name of transparency, before tackling the real issues, like water polo and our eroding national pride.’

‘Knock yourself out.’

‘There’s a suggestion that you’ve spent time in prison for stalking women.’

‘False.’

‘And armed robbery.’

‘Laughable.’

‘And arson.’

‘Please.’

‘And drug possession.’

‘Well, if pride in blood and honour is a drug, then sure. Guilty.’

‘I think that clears everything up. For those at home, let us know what you think of ethnic cleansing by using the hashtag #SkyDebate.’

I was sobbing now. Archibald heard me, and looked away from a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. His eyes were also red, but it was hard to know if this was from emotion or the miasma of dead prawns. The bastards were multiplying. In the past week, hundreds more had been discovered taped to the bottom of chairs, staplers, mouse pads. Others were secreted more ingeniously — after our TV remote failed, an inspection revealed that its batteries had been replaced by two small prawns in advanced stages of decay. It was now common to see people carefully sniff their documents, after a rumour began that squid ink had been introduced to the printer’s toner.

‘What’s wrong, Toby?’ Archibald asked.

‘It’s the prawns, mate.’

‘What’s really wrong?’

‘My girlfriend just broke up with me.’

‘Heartache is a fanged pimp.’

‘Is that your demon speaking?’

‘No, that’s me.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I admitted.

‘There’s little compensation for you now,’ Archibald said. ‘Your pain is the natural consequence of intimacy. They can’t be separated. But I won’t philosophise, Toby. I’m sorry you’re hurting, and I’m happy just to listen to you.’

I sat humbled. There seemed to flow from Archibald a simple, unadorned decency. But then, I had thought the same thing about Charlie Rose.

‘What do I do, Archie?’

‘Keep faith.’

‘In what?’

‘In your capacity for love. You