Underground (34 page)

All as it had been before the bomb went off. The only thing missing was the ceremonial mace, but I suppose the members took it with them when they evacuated. And yet for some reason, they’d left the bound copies of Hansard behind.

A private joke all right, Bernard, you fucker.

I was standing on the floor of the House of Representatives.

My prison cell, ladies and gentlemen.

And that, my dear friends and interrogators of the US secret service, that is pretty much it. My story told. The incident at the airport, and my interview with your half-faced superior, whatever his real name is—that was nearly a month ago, by my reckoning. I’ve been here ever since, at your pleasure, holding court in the very engine room of Australian democracy. A Parliament of one.

So. Any more questions for me?

Actually, maybe there aren’t. It hasn’t escaped my notice that your visits have been steadily declining in frequency. Two weeks it’s been since I took up pen and paper to write all this down, and for most of that time I’ve barely seen your over-muscled faces in here. Even my cigarette burns have had a chance to heal. It’s no surprise, I suppose. After all, what do we have left to talk about? I do wonder, though—what are your plans for
me now? I’d expected that by this stage some final decision might have been made about my fate, a sentence handed down and carried out, but you appear content to leave me in limbo. I have a suspicion as to why that is. But we’ll see.

In the meantime, I have become more familiar with the House of Representatives than I ever wanted to be. As I’ve said before, I’m deathly sick of the colour green. Green leather chairs, green leather blotters on the desks, green carpet . . . and walls that I
think
are green, or at least faintly so. But it’s hard to be sure, they might be white, and just reflecting the tone of everything else. I can’t tell the difference. And maybe ‘green’ is the wrong word anyway for the whole colour scheme in here. It’s really a paler shade. Perhaps it’s ‘eucalyptus’.

Either way, it’s an odd prison. True, all the outer doors are locked and I can’t escape, so it serves its primary purpose well enough, but it feels like a dreadful waste of space, just to hold one man. I mean, if Canberra is now supposed to be some sort of international conference centre for evil, then it seems to me that a meeting hall like the House of Representatives would be in demand. Surely you people have a normal prison block somewhere that you could keep me in?

Still, as cells go, it’s not all bad. I’m not confined to just the House, after all. I also have access to the members’ lounge immediately adjacent—and a welcome refuge it must have been, too, in the old days for drooping pollies during the longer parliamentary sessions. There must have been soft couches in there once, and five-star food and drink on hand. It’s all stripped bare now, of course, but the adjoining toilets remain, and no prisoner ever had more luxury in a bathroom. All that stately polished wood and marble and mirrors. And just think of the famous arseholes that have lowered themselves, bowels unclenching, on the very same seat that I use.

And overall—especially since the worst of the interrogations finished—I’ve been treated well enough. I’m provided with
three perfectly decent meals a day. I have blankets, and I’ve made myself a nice bed out of the shadow front bench. A doctor was brought in to treat the wound in my leg, which has recovered nicely. And as for my other bumps and bruises, okay, I may be bitter, but I do understand about that, interrogators. I’m sure you only did it for form’s sake. We all know I was perfectly happy to spill my guts, pain or no pain. But now that torture is the western way again, you’d be idiots not to use it. Right?

Otherwise, well, I’ve had my writing to keep me occupied. As I said at the beginning, there’s plenty of waste paper here, left behind in their desks by the departing members. I’ve discovered all sorts of documents; schedules, memos, petitions from constituents. Even a few private letters—one, notably, from the mistress of a backbencher on the Labor side, lovingly recounting a weekend of passion they shared in Byron Bay. (She goes into quite some detail, and I’m not ashamed to say it’s brought me comfort and stimulation on the lonelier nights. And how many ejaculations of
that
kind has this House witnessed, I wonder, before I claimed the privilege?)

There are plenty of pens, too. I have them spread across the table in front of me, from cheap plastic biros all the way up to a glorious gold fountain pen—dry of ink, alas. And speaking of this table—I must say, I couldn’t ask for a finer piece of furniture. A lovely warm wooden grain. And hand-carved, no doubt. It probably even has a special name, seeing that the governance of Australia once took place across it. The Table of Commonwealth, maybe. The Table of Judgement. The Table of Doom. I don’t know. And although I have over a hundred very comfortable chairs to choose from, including the high throne of the Speaker’s Chair, I’ve opted for the Opposition Leader’s seat, right across the table from where my brother used to sit as Prime Minister. But I hardly need to explain the symbolism of that, do I?

I’m even something of a celebrity, I gather. Every now and again, people come into the visitors’ galleries (which are sadly just out of my reach) to gawk at me. I have no idea who they are, but there can’t be much to do for fun around here, if I’m one of the big attractions in town. Or am I wrong? Do you have the cinemas running? And the pubs? The golf courses? I bet you do. Canberra is the most exclusive town in the world now. The residents would expect their amenities.

Even so, sightseers keep coming to look at the famous prisoner, alone in his dungeon. Sometimes I feel a little like that guy in the Bastille in all those old movies—the Man in the Iron Mask. And come to think of it, wasn’t he the twin brother to the wicked king, just like I am? Or was he the real king? Or did he just look like the king?

I can’t remember, and the only resource material in here is Hansard. Miserable fucking reading that is, believe me.

Although I
do
read it.

Most of it is dry as sawdust, of course, but if you’re patient, and weed through the drearier passages, then sometimes it does manage to come alive. After all, here before me are the verbatim transcripts of the last one hundred and ten years of parliamentary sessions. There have been some fiery debates in that time, well worth perusal. Awkward questions and angry denials. Furores and uproars and members expelled. Resignations and accusations and condemnations. Truly, the House has seen some great rhetorical battles in its history, and the pages of Hansard record them all, invective by invective.

The great identities are there too, the prime ministers of ages gone. Barton. Deakin. Fisher. Hughes. Scullin. Lyons. Menzies. Curtin. Chifley. Holt. Whitlam. Fraser. Hawke. Keating. Howard. To mention but a few.

And, of course, the Honourable Bernard James.

All names—apart from the last two—of which I assume you Americans will probably know nothing. But I can tell you, I sit here sometimes at night, and the echoes of those men remain in this room. Oh, admittedly, most of them worked in the old Parliament House, not this one. But the place itself doesn’t matter. The House is still the House, whatever building it might be in. Those men are here. And, if Banjo Paterson will forgive me the quote, their ghosts may be heard.

They don’t sound happy.

Indeed, in the first few days of my imprisonment—when your treatment of me was much rougher than it is now; when you had me strapped to this chair, denied food and water and sleep; when you plagued me with questions day and night; when the cigarettes came out, and when the ‘positions of discomfort’ were applied—well, I confess I became a little delirious there, once in a while. And I’d imagine that there were other people in the House. I’d see stern faces behind your own, men sitting in the Prime Minister’s chair across the table. Faces I recognised from old newspapers and old footage. Barton, I’m certain I saw him. And Lyons. And Curtin. And others. They never spoke, they never frowned, they never shook their heads. They just watched on. But ah, the judgement in their eyes.

This is not what they built this chamber for.

But Hansard contains more than just old arguments and old prime ministers. There are other histories in there too, testimonies to the challenges the whole nation has faced. Depressions and recessions, bushfires and floods, droughts and cyclones. And yes, wars of course, endless wars, and internal threats from enemies of every kind. And at times, reading the old speeches, you can almost feel, beyond the walls of the House, the actual nation as it was in the past, and how the country must have pulsed and swayed in different eras. You can almost feel, behind the politicians and their rhetoric, the Australian
people.
The many millions of them. Their struggles, their
suffering. Their anger, their hate. Their hope and their triumphs and their doubt.

But most of all, you can sense their
power
. It’s not a thing that is ever mentioned happily, or comfortably, by a single politician that I can find. It’s an uneasy presence in their speeches, a monster over their shoulders that needs to be placated. It’s evidenced by the changes of government, the elections won and lost. It’s evidenced by the many names that disappear from the records with brutal suddenness, without farewells or ceremony. It’s evidenced by the referendums that are proposed, to be either beaten down or passed. And in certain moments, you get a sense that the monster is not to be fooled with, or taken lightly.

Open the Hansards from the First World War, for instance. You’ll find Billy Hughes in there, blustering about the need to introduce conscription, about the profundity of our alliance with Great Britain, about the desperation on the battlefields, about how a vote against the draft would be akin to an act of treason, a vote to lose the very war. Even so, come the referendum itself, the Australian people voted no. Indeed, they did it twice. And both times they were saying, ‘We’ll fight your damn war, but we’ll do it with volunteers. We’re not going to force anybody into the trenches.’ And with volunteers alone, they did it indeed.

Or skip ahead, to Robert Menzies, in the 1950s, when the cold war was at its height and, over in the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee was in full hysterical swing. Hear Menzies in stentorian voice, decrying the Communist Party and demanding that the nation pass a referendum to ban it forever or be swallowed up by the red tide. ‘Put a sock in it, Bob,’ the Australian people replied. ‘The Commies can stand for election like anybody else, and good luck to them, because they’ll need it. But we don’t ban political parties in this country.’

The
strength
of those decisions. The courage of them. I mean, World War I was no joke. The cold war and the Communists were no joke. People were scared. And yet the nation refused to be stampeded by its leaders.

Yes . . . but that was the old Australia.

If I flip to the Hansards of the last fifteen years, then what do I see? I see the rise of the new nationalism. I see the declaration of the war on terror. I see the outlawing of refugees. I see security laws passed time and time again, each regime more oppressive than the last. I see dozens of organisations banned. Protesters locked away. Freedoms disappear. Coercion legalised. I see new standards being set almost every day for how a western democracy should operate. And every single one of those standards is lower. And then lower again.

But nowhere, anywhere, do I see the Australian people saying no. The monster is silent. We arrived at this position—this George Orwell nightmare in which we all now live—willingly, it seems.

That’s what I mean about miserable reading.

But look at me, the great judge and critic.

What example have I set, even in these last weeks, that’s so wonderful? At what stage in this whole sorry saga have I stood up and cried,
Enough
? Who have I helped? Harry? Aisha? The Underground? Anyone at all?

Not bloody likely. I sit here, and write, and turn the pages of Hansard, and I remember the deaths of virtually every single person I came in contact with after that cyclone descended on my resort. And frankly—when I look back over my role in these events—I feel about as useless and ineffectual as all the other men who have sat in this very chair, ever since 1996, when John Howard and my brother took power, and the country was set on this godforsaken path.

Well, well. My suspicions were right, interrogators.

All this waiting around, when clearly you had no further use for me. It was just so Bernard could pay me a visit.

He strode into the House not an hour ago, even as I was putting down my pen—as confidently as if it were Question Time in the old days, with the Opposition floundering on the ropes as usual. My brother, the Prime Minister. Tanned and fit and groomed. His suit immaculate, his shoes shined.

The pompous little shit.

I didn’t get up.

A couple of bodyguards were with him, but he waved them back to the door, and then took his old seat, the Prime Minister’s chair, across the table from me. And if he was aware of any significance in the fact that the last time he’d sat there was the same day that we’d last met—and the last day that Australia
operated as any sort of democracy worthy of the name—then he didn’t show it.