3

THE TEMPTATIONS OF ST GRAFTON

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians
can. It is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this
respect that He tolerates their existence.

– Samuel Butler

When Grafton arrived home that evening he was exhausted, resting his forehead on the front door as he fumbled for his keys. The door was secured by no less than three locks to protect them from the local inhabitants. Grafton had been quite happy in their Edwardian timber home in Brisbane but, when the University of Mangoland finally prised him out of his tenure and his blink-of-an-eye engagement as the premier of the state came to an end, Janet’s pining for the city of her youth brought them south to Sydney where they bought an elegant terrace house in the inner suburb of Greenfern West, an area noted for its vibrant cultural diversity – that is, crime.

Of course, some might have asked how Grafton could become a senator for Queensland when he lived in Sydney. The answer was that, though ten years had passed, he was still on the Queensland electoral roll for the simple reason he did not know how to change it.

As he opened the door, Maddie the dog met him in the hall, whirling around with excitement, like a top.

‘You’ll get giddy doing that,’ he said, dropping his briefcase which had remained unopened all day and making his way towards the rear of the long terrace house to the kitchen where he found Janet, cooking.

Janet did not whirl with excitement or even look up but continued chopping carrots so fast the knife seemed to blur.

‘Hello, darling. How was your first day?’

‘Exhausting,’ said Grafton, opening the fridge and looking for food. ‘And I just had to listen to a forty-minute lecture from a taxi driver about how 9/11, gun control, homosexuality, vaccinations, ultrasounds, the Ebola virus and World War II were part of a plot by the Jews to take over the world.’

‘Well, people believe what they believe,’ said Janet incontestably. ‘And how was Canberra?’

‘Cold. Soulless,’ said Grafton, wondering why there were so many things in the fridge that seemed to be inedible. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for senatorism, or senatorialism, whatever the abstract noun is.’

‘I think it comes from the Latin senex – old,’ said Janet. ‘So the noun is “senility” and I think you’re eminently suited to it.’

Grafton grunted. He recalled that when Roman generals returned after a successful campaign and rode in the victory parade, a slave stood behind them in the chariot amid the cheering crowds, constantly repeating, ‘Remember you are mortal’. We don’t need those slaves anymore, thought Grafton. We have wives.

Finally finding a plate with half a chicken on it, Grafton extracted it and sat at the table.

‘I had a meeting with the Prime Minister,’ he said, struggling with the cling wrap that stood frustratingly between him and the food.

‘Oh yes,’ said Janet smoothly. ‘Isn’t she the one you …?’

‘… worked with? Yes,’ said Grafton, hastily finishing the sentence. ‘Yes. Nina. But she’s changed. She’s a … large lady,’ he said, desperately rotating the carcass, trying to find an edge.

‘Well, then, you’ll have much to talk about,’ said Janet, taking the plate from him and deftly lifting an invisible corner of wrap with ease. ‘What did she want to tell you?’

‘That she needs my support. You see, my dear, it turns out that I have the balance of power in the Senate. No laws can be passed in Australia without my approval.’

‘Well, that is a concept far too terrifying for me to deal with at the moment. I’ll have to consider the ramifications of that after my meeting,’ she said, hanging a tea towel neatly on a rail. ‘By the way, that arrived for you this afternoon.’

She indicated a large laptop computer sitting on the dining table.

‘It’s from your friend Mr Horton. According to the nice young man who installed it, it’s so you can keep up to date with your Facebook and Twitter and all that.’

Grafton rose and approached the gleaming silver slab as if it were an IED.

‘I told them I don’t know what I’m supposed to write.’

‘Apparently it’s not for you to write. It’s for you to read, so you know what you’ve said.’

This didn’t particularly clarify things for Grafton.

‘I’ll be home around ten,’ Janet said and headed for the door.

‘Say hello to the tricoteurs,’ said Grafton but Janet didn’t really hear him. Grafton could not think of Janet’s knitting group without imagining mop caps and a guillotine.

He wandered back to the kitchen and ripped a leg off the chicken. He took it to the couch and switched on the TV just in time to catch a story on the ABC about the newly elected members arriving at Parliament House. The senator from the Australian Beer Drinkers Party arrived in a prime mover which he parked in the forecourt and scuffed into the building in steel-caps, rugby shorts and a wife-beater singlet. He was followed by a woman from the A-Gender Party wearing camouflage fatigues; she in turn by a cheery, waving member of The Orgasm Party in a see-through blouse, vinyl skirt and thigh-high boots. Lastly came two orderlies wheeling in the large steel cylinder that contained Australia’s first quadriplegic senator.

It then cut to footage of his own arrival. Grafton winced as he watched the replay of his own panicked expression through the windows of the car, his crooked smile and the V for victory gesture which he now realised he should have made palm-outwards.

The program then returned to the the studio where a glamorous blonde female journalist interviewed the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Stephenson, about the government’s refusal to implement an Extraction Trading Scheme. Stephenson explained that the ETS was the only way to prevent catastrophic Tectonic Change by replacing the tonnes of minerals Australia exported with an equal tonnage of imports. Under such a scheme, Australia’s lost tonnage of ore and coal would be replaced by an equal weight of, for example, household waste or big screen TVs.

For some reason, as he listened to Stephenson, Grafton began to get bored. His mind drifted and he found himself wondering why all the women newsreaders on the ABC looked like models. The male presenters still looked like blokes you’d find down at the model aero club but the women – God! The women – blonde, dusky, svelte, sultry – looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of Vogue. He was also bemused by the new practice of having newsreaders deliver bulletins standing up. What happened, he wondered, to someone sitting behind a desk reading the news with a sense of authority? Was this new approach designed to show off the figures of these stylish female presenters and display their carefully chosen outfits? Indeed television seemed to be populated by hundreds of extraordinarily good-looking women, chatting cross-legged on couches, delivering financial figures, bobbing in front of synoptic maps, doing surf reports, hosting renovation programs and interrogating squirming politicians. How far the world of media was from the world of academia where both men and women were egregiously dowdy and unattractive, both in body and personality. He recalled how, in the Middle Ages, sons who could not farm or fight took holy orders and daughters deemed to be unmarriageable were packed off to nunneries. Universities, he mused, were the hermitages of the modern world – sanctuaries for the socially unmarketable.

Suddenly the Peter Stephenson interview was over and Grafton seemed to waken as if from a dream. He became aware of Maddie sitting at his feet, staring at the bare chicken bone in his hand.

‘Stop groaking,’ he chided, that being his word for the annoying practice dogs had of staring fixedly at you as you ate, hoping you might oblige them with a titbit.

Grafton shook himself alert and returned to the kitchen where his mind returned to the subject which, along with food, was never far from his thoughts: his penis. He absently fondled the organ. It was soft and pliable as bread dough, but without any sign of leavening. Looking at the gleaming new laptop in the other room, he wondered if pornography might generate enough of a hormonal rush to stir some action. He had heard, but not yet personally confirmed, that the Internet was flooded with porn. Taking one last bite of chicken and then wiping his hands on the back of his pants, he relocated to the dining room and switched on the computer, which turned out to be only sleeping and sprang to life. Grafton saw that there were already icons on the desktop labelled ‘Grafton Everest Blog’, ‘Grafton Everest FB’, ‘GE Profile’ and ‘Twitter account’. Disregarding these enigmas he clicked on Search and began to type p, o, r … He had scarcely typed the ‘r’ when the heading announced 2,700,000 sites found.

Grafton randomly clicked one that said ‘free porn’ and the screen was immediately filled with pictures of people engaged in sexual acts, not all with other people. Various implements, mostly plastic and disproportionately purple in colour, were involved as well as a number of beverage containers which he hoped were not intended for re-use. Down the side of the screen was a list of advertisements for premature ejaculation and impotence medication and penis-enlargement devices that looked like something out of Jules Verne.

He found that the videos on the site were sorted under categories, many of which he did not recognise. How odd, he thought, that I could be sexually active for forty years, including the free-love seventies, and yet not have heard of at least eleven types of sexual behaviour.

One category in the list was devoted to women having sex with three men at once. One in each orifice. ‘How,’ wondered Grafton, ‘is this a male fantasy?’ And what was the etiquette with three-way intercourse? What if two men wanted to use the same opening at the same time? Was it a case of ‘After you. No sorry, please, after you. Not at all, you were here first …’?

He clicked back to the index and tried a few other categories, quickly exiting from one called BBW that instantly rekindled memories of Nina Poundstone’s huge breasts swinging round like gondolas on a fairground ride. A brief visit to the lesbian section was puzzling. The girls in these videos, slim, athletic, and adorned with false eyelashes and long fake nails, resembled no lesbians he had ever met. They looked like swimsuit models and cheerleaders; not a butch dyke to be seen. And there seemed to be a certain lack of authenticity in the way the featured lesbians would abandon their Sapphic activities the minute a man entered the room and leapt upon them. Continuing to scroll down, he found himself perplexed by the number of Japanese terms and the phrase ‘ass to mouth’ which at first he imagined must have something to do with bestiality but found it was something else that made him feel distinctly queasy.

When he did eventually make his way to the now apparently unusual category of straight heterosexual fucking, he found even that to be somewhat unfamiliar territory. To begin with, anal intercourse, once regarded as exotic, forbidden and daring – something perhaps reserved for anniversaries and birthdays – seemed to have been elevated to a first preference, and was portrayed in a manner so proctological that he felt like he was watching videos of a colonoscopy. Even the traditional white-bread vaginal intercourse was disturbing. To begin with, any hope that sex might be sensuous, exquisite or sublime was obliterated by the moaning, groaning and screaming of the women and their loud, continuous exhortations, in grating American accents, for their male companions do what so clearly they were already in the process of doing. Grafton was sure that were he subjected to such a barrage of demands during intercourse, he would have exploded like Basil Fawlty with a furious ‘I’m DOING it!’

On top of all that, he was unnerved by the fact that none of the male porn stars seemed to have a penis smaller than an astronomical telescope. After watching about twenty minutes of oiled bodybuilders ramming cocks the size of draftsman’s tubes into women whose vaginas were presumably vast and/or anaesthetised, Grafton clicked out of the whole site feeling more disheartened than ever. In one of the few acts of introspection (as opposed to self-obsession) in his life he wondered if any of his sexual activities might ever have been like those just witnessed and decided that they could not. For a start, no room in which he had ever made love had such bad décor or any partner so bossy. And certainly no encounter had ever lasted a quarter as long as the forty-five minutes some of these took. The most depressing thing, however, was not the revelation that millions of men were apparently now excited by women who were prepared to indulge in mild coprophagia or be showered with sperm until they looked like wedding cakes, but that none of the activities he had just viewed had produced the slightest stir in his slumbering supine schlong.

It was lucky that Grafton quit the porn site when he did as moments later Janet returned from her knitting session.

She was followed by Lee-Anne who was, strangely, carrying a motorcycle helmet. This incongruity was reconciled moments later when she was followed into the house by a large male person covered entirely in black leather with tattoos up to, and including, his face.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘this is Gabe. He’s my angel.’

And indeed he was. According to the jacket he was wearing, he was an ‘Angel of the Abyss’.

‘Gabe, this my dad,’ said Lee-Anne.

Gabe stuck out a huge hand with skeleton bones tattooed on it.

‘Your daughter’s a fucking legend,’ he said.

‘Yes, she’s … terrific. We like her,’ said Grafton cheerily, wondering if he should call the police.

‘This show’s fucking great. It’s gonna stick it up right up those cunts in Queensland.’

‘Yes. Yes. Should be good,’ replied Grafton trying to remember where Janet put that large kitchen knife.

Janet breezed in from the kitchen. ‘Would you like some coffee, Gabe?’

‘Nah, I gotta fuck off. Got some business up at the Cross. I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ said Lee-Anne.

Gabe grabbed his jacket, shaking his head in wonder as he addressed Grafton.

‘Fuckin’ legend. Have you seen her pole-dance?’

‘No, not yet …’ mumbled Grafton.

Gabe whistled. ‘What an arse! Amazing arse. Whoa!’ He slapped Lee-Anne on the object of his admiration and exited.

‘Isn’t he wonderful, Dad?’ said Lee-Anne. ‘He and his friends are going to finance the whole show.’

‘He’s got a lot of tattoos,’ was all Grafton could say.

‘Yeah. He’s a walking work of art. I’m thinking of getting my back done. Like all over.’

Grafton felt sick. When Lee-Anne left the room, he turned to Janet in alarm.

‘Bikies? She’s got bikies financing her show?’

‘I think they prefer the term “bikers” now, don’t they?’ said Janet.

‘Bikers, murderers, gangsters, killers, whatever. Does she realise what kind of people she’s dealing with?’

‘I’m sure Lee-Anne is perfectly capable of handling the situation,’ said Janet.

‘I wish I was,’ he said. Then the laptop beeped and a message popped up. It was from Mr Horton. Grafton was required in Canberra in the morning for a meeting. Grafton’s shoulders slumped. Why couldn’t life just leave him alone?

Later as Grafton lay in their large bed, he stared at the ceiling and occasionally sighed audibly while Janet read her thousand-page book.

Eventually, after the sixth of seventh sigh, Janet, without taking her eyes off the page, said, ‘How’s your penis?’

‘Useless,’ said Grafton. ‘A redundant appendage. I’ve gone from a Brief Incumbency to a Permanent Recumbence.’

‘I’m sure it still serves a purpose, darling,’ she said. ‘It is, after all, an organ of urination.’

‘You don’t need a penis for urination. Women don’t have one. And anyway I always sit down.’

‘That’s because you were always too shy to stand at a urinal. And because you always miss the bowl,’ she said, turning a page.

‘I can’t help that. It has a bend in it. Anyway, the point is, its primary purpose is not for voiding urine. It’s for the other!’

Janet finally suspended her reading and looked at him over the top of her glasses.

‘Darling, do you feel a physical need to have sex? You used to moan that your balls were aching and that you could hardly walk for the pain. Is that still the case?’

‘No. Not as such – not as much. Not at all, I suppose.’

‘Then there’s no problem. If you don’t need it, it doesn’t really matter if you can’t have it. Does it?’

As usual, Janet’s logic was, like the rest of her, unassailable.

‘But I’m worried about you,’ he moaned disingenuously.

‘Darling, don’t worry about me. I’m perfectly content.’

Unsure how to take this, Grafton simply said, ‘Right. Well, just as long as you really are.’

‘I’m ecstatic,’ she said. And went back to reading.

Grafton went back to staring upwards, eventually drifting off into a restless sleep in which he dreamed an unsettling dream where he stood naked in the Parliamentary Dining Room while dozens of naked young women, several them ABC newsreaders, were fondling and licking his cock which stretched across the room like a flagpole. He then realised that it was a mechanical cock being controlled from some distance away by Mr Horton via an app on his phone. Grafton woke and quickly checked his groin. Normally he would wake from such dreams with an aching erection but on this occasion the penis was still happily hibernating inside his Collingwood pyjamas.

The next morning Grafton was on another plane to Canberra and again his chagrin at having to rise early and his hatred of flying were substantially dispelled by the solicitous provision of breakfast.

When he trundled into his office he found it a hive of activity. A dozen people were clustered around a conference table poring over newspaper cuttings and laptops. Beside them a whiteboard was covered with arrows and words such as ‘ground-breaking, compassionate, education, equal opportunity’. Grafton wondered what they referred to. Petra rose elegantly from a chair at the head of the table and came to meet him.

‘What’s all this?’ asked Grafton, hoping some new scandal about him had not broken out.

‘We’re redoing your Wikipedia page and your online profile. Just punching them up a little,’ she said.

A young man wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Conquering Everest’ interrupted. ‘Petra? Sorry … “bold” or “courageous”?’ he asked.

‘Courageous,’ replied Petra. ‘Bold has connotations of recklessness.’ Then she turned back to Grafton. ‘Mr Horton is waiting for you in the Dining Room.’

This was balm both to Grafton’s ears and his stomach. He left the hive and made his way to the Dining Room. Halfway there he was intercepted by a hobbit-sized member of the Australian Brownies Party who beamed up at him, said ‘I loved your Tweet!’ and scurried away. Grafton had not the slightest idea what that could mean.

He found Mr Horton sitting at a table in the Dining Room with a tablet computer in front of him. Text was appearing on the screen of the tablet which soberly pronounced each word in a robotic but soothing female voice as it appeared. It seemed as if the blind Horton was composing a letter but did not seem to be in possession of a keyboard or any other form of interface.

‘Are you doing that?’ asked Grafton.

‘Yes,’ said Mr Horton. ‘Mind-computer interface. Just like they use to control bionic limbs. I have a chip in my head which I can use to type text and send messages. Sonar is good but it doesn’t allow me to read.’

‘Sending message,’ said the tablet coolly and reverted to its desktop.

‘How have you done this?’ said Grafton, who normally did not interrogate Mr Horton about aspects of his mysterious life but was confounded by these disclosures.

‘I have a close association with a research facility called The Chimera Institute that specialises in bionics, mind–machine interfaces, nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals. I’m one of their principal directors and, as it turns out, guinea pigs.’

He smiled and pointed to the tablet screen from which a slightly retouched photograph of Grafton beamed forth. ‘I just added a couple more citations to the list of your international awards. I presume Petra told you we are rewriting your Wikipedia page, and the bios on several other sites.’

‘Yes. Good luck with that,’ said Grafton forlornly. ‘What can you say? “He was the shortest-serving premier in Mangoland history. Dismissed by a vote of no confidence from his own party.”’

‘No, no my boy. On the contrary. You were a hero. You martyred yourself to reform Queensland. You went against your own party for the good of the state, sacrificed your own career to end forty-seven years of oppression and corruption.’

‘That’s not what the history books say.’

‘Grafton, no one reads primary sources any more. A teacher sets an assignment on Grafton Everest; the students go home and Google you. They then cut and paste an essay about how you saved the state only to be betrayed by the corrupt establishment. An entire generation sees you as a hero.’

‘Is it that easy to rewrite history?’ said Grafton incredulously.

Horton said simply, ‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t change people’s memories …’

‘Grafton, remember Titanic II.’

‘The Australian cruise ship that sank on its maiden voyage.’

‘Yes, sunk by pirates in the Malacca Straits. Nine hundred Australians died. The government promised no stone would be left unturned in bringing the culprits to justice.’

‘There was supposed to be some joint effort between … Australia and Indonesia.’

‘And what was the outcome?’

‘I don’t … recall.’

‘Of course you don’t. There was no outcome. The pirates were never caught but it didn’t matter because a week later Princess Kylie from Tasmania and her husband Prince Rupert of Lombardy had a new baby. The whole thing was overwritten by more recent events. Do you even remember when the sinking took place?’

‘Late last year?’

‘It was six weeks ago.’

‘My God,’ said Grafton. ‘Perhaps the post-modernists were right. There is no objective reality: truth is merely what people decide is true.’

‘Of course the post-modernists were right,’ said Mr Horton, opening a window on his tablet telepathically. ‘They proved their own theory by convincing a whole generation that science, mathematics, logic and knowledge were all subjective. They put forward the proposition that nothing can ever be shown to be true or untrue which was immediately accepted as being an axiomatic truth.’

‘But surely that creates a paradox. If you accept the proposition that nothing is true, you immediately disprove the proposition itself. Surely the proposition should have been, “Nothing is true, except this proposition”.’

Horton mentally scrolled down a list of messages. ‘No. The exception is unnecessary. The proposition that nothing is true is not self-contradictory because a contradiction can only exist between two statements that are alleged to be true but if no statements are ever true then no contradiction can ever exist; in fact, the word contradiction ceases to have any meaning. As, by the way, does the word “meaning”.’

Grafton’s head was spinning but he decided that it was probably from hunger. He abandoned Mr Horton for the buffet and returned with a large second breakfast. Horton glanced at him with his blind eyes.

‘You need to watch what you eat,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said Grafton. ‘I watch to make sure I don’t miss a bit.’

‘How’s your health?’

‘Fine, except that I’m completely impotent. Trying to have sex is like putting a marshmallow in a money box.’

‘How’s Janet taking it?’ said Horton.

‘Very well. In fact, too well. It doesn’t seem to worry her at all. I’m not sure what that means. Does it mean sex has just been a chore for her all these years and she’s glad to be rid of it, or … has she got a back-up? She’s out almost every night. Is it possible she’s getting it elsewhere?’

Horton closed the window he was working on.

‘Grafton, I’ve given you much advice in your life, most of which you have never taken. But if you ever heed anything I say, let it be this. Never, never seek to know if your wife is having or has had an affair. Only bad can come of it. If you find she has, your marriage will be irreparably damaged. If you accuse her and she is innocent she will never forgive you and the same will happen. It is far, far better that you never even attempt to find out. In this case, ignorance is most assuredly bliss.’

‘What about wives?’ said Grafton. ‘Should they seek to know if their husbands are having affairs?’

‘They just assume they are,’ said Horton. ‘Now, you are about to have your second meeting. The Leader of the Opposition.’

‘Stephen Peterson,’ said Horton.

‘Peter Stephenson.’

‘Right,’ said Grafton. He always got that wrong.

‘He is also going to make you offers you can’t refuse.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘Just accept them as you did with Nina and tell him he can rely on you. And start thinking about your maiden speech in the Senate. It’s only a few weeks away.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘We’ll organise something for you.’

Grafton fell silent and mopped up the remains of his eggs benedict with some toast.

‘Why do they call it a maiden speech?’ he asked.

‘Because they haven’t started fucking you over yet.’

In the Commonwealth car, Grafton mused on the process of historical revision that was now being applied to him. He had feared for some time that his unreliable memory was an indication of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, though Janet had cogently pointed out that he was too old to experience early-onset anything. Now it seemed that it wasn’t just him – it was everyone. The whole world suffered from short-term memory loss. That’s why voters would re-elect a party they obliterated in the ballot box only three years earlier.

As they were approaching their destination, his driver looked at him in the mirror and said, ‘Senator, I loved that message you posted on Facebook this morning about immigration.’

‘Oh good,’ said Grafton, wondering what the message was. Damn! he thought. He was going to have read these sites to find out what he thought about everything.

They soon arrived at the venue for the meeting, the National Museum of Labour and Unionism, a huge Soviet-style monolith overlooking a dry arm of Lake Burley Griffin. Peter Stephenson was waiting for him at the arched entrance.

‘Grafton,’ he squeaked.

‘Stephen – I mean Peter,’ said Grafton, hastily correcting himself.

Peter’s face was pleasant but extraordinarily featureless. He was as bland as a dummy in a menswear window though considerably shorter.

‘Thanks for coming, Grafton. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a long time. Have you been here before?’ he said, eyes shining like a Christian.

Mercifully not, thought Grafton, but simply uttered, ‘No.’

‘Let me show you around,’ said the enthusiastic but diminutive Workers’ Party helmsman.

They entered a cavernous hall lined with huge portraits and exhibits in glass cases.

‘I spent a lot of time here when I was growing up,’ said Peter. Grafton wondered if that was what stunted his growth.

They stopped before a huge gloomy portrait of a man with a raging black beard holding aloft a blacksmith’s hammer and standing on what at first glance looked like a conquered serpent but on closer inspection turned out to be the hose of a petrol bowser. Peter Stephenson looked up at it in awe. ‘That’s Black Jack Murdoch, the leader of the 1903 fettlers’ strike. He shut down all horse-drawn transport in Sydney for three months.’

‘I remember,’ said Grafton. ‘Trying to stop the introduction of motor cars.’

‘Lawson Blaxland,’ said Peter moving to another portrait of a man who looked like Chips Rafferty except cross-eyed. ‘Led the 1911 drover’s strike against the use of cheap Aboriginal stockmen.’ He then led Grafton to a life-size metal automaton standing at a lectern in the middle of the hall. ‘It’s a mechanical Cameron Douglas, the Workers’ Party’s most unintelligible senator. Press the button.’

Grafton pressed a large red button and the figure clanked to life. It thumped its tinplate hand on the lectern and ejaculated a torrent of impenetrable Scottish rhetoric. ‘Doo feeting fontach aparent thews that the okan berricck warkers dinna feesh the brote buken burroc of wee mootin froog.’ Grafton quickly switched it off.

Nearby was a large glass cabinet encasing a Heath Robinson-like machine.

‘What is this?’ asked Grafton.

‘It’s a model of the old Arbitration System,’ said Peter. He pressed another button on the cabinet and the machine sprang to life. Cogs moved, escapements whirled, pistons wheezed and cylinders puffed air. Finally it backfired and a small brown lump of what looked like excrement plopped out of a tube.

‘We’re still looking for the instruction manual,’ he said, frowning, and moved on to a large display of French Empire clocks.

‘This is only a small part of Prime Minister Kent Pauling’s collection.’ Grafton noted that, though ticking furiously, they all displayed different times and one gilt ormolu death clock was actually moving backwards.

‘And naturally …’ Peter pointed skyward and Grafton looked up to see a gigantic ceiling fresco depicting the Creation of the Modern Party showing Edmund Goss Whitman, naked and swathed in a cloud, arm outstretched, handing a cappuccino to a muscular board shorts-wearing Adam.

Further down the ceiling, the same Whitman was being nailed to a cross by a Roman centurion wearing a top hat. Grafton pointed to a painting which looked like the Last Supper except the people had no faces. ‘Was that never finished?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘They’re meant to be like that.’

On the way back to the foyer they passed a wing that was dark and boarded off.

‘What’s in there?’ inquired Grafton.

‘That was supposed to be the Hall of the Construction Industry,’ said Peter. ‘A permanent exhibition dedicated to the men and women who built Australia. It was never finished due to a year-long strike.’

They made their way to a small coffee shop in the foyer where Grafton tried to devour a sandwich possibly older than the exhibits inside while Peter made his pitch. He delivered it with the sincerity and spontaneity of a Jehovah’s Witness standing on the doorstep.

‘I’m happy to have the chance to meet with you, Grafton, because I think we both want the same thing.’

Grafton almost said, ‘What? To have sex with my wife?’ but restrained himself.

‘For example …’ said Peter and inhaled, ‘I believe we both want to live in a country where people have an opportunity to fulfil the hopes and dreams we all have of living in a community where aspirations can be achieved.’

‘So you and I both aspire to create a society where people can aspire to achieve their aspirations.’

‘Equally aspire. Equally,’ said Peter.

‘Indeed,’ said Grafton, wondering if it would be impolite to seek more programmatic specificity in this policy but decided against it. Peter Stephenson’s earnestness became more intense.

‘We are committed to equal opportunity, gender equality, social equivalence, economic equity.’

‘And obviously equivocation?’ suggested Grafton.

‘Absolutely. That is our by-line, our watchword, our slogan and our mantra. We are committed to being equivocal in the delivering of better services without increasing the tax burden, to a more efficient public service without staff reductions and nation building without increasing the deficit.’

‘Very equitable aims,’ said Grafton, gulping some warm orange juice to try and swallow the sandwich. ‘How can I help?’

‘First of all we need your help in blocking some of the inequitable legislation that Poundstone and her cronies are unequivocally trying to ram through the Parliament.’

‘Yes,’ said Grafton, choking slightly on the lump in his oesophagus. ‘That is a worry.’

Peter paused, swallowed, licked his dry lips and said, ‘Now, I would never offer you any sort of …’

‘Bribe?’ suggested Grafton.

‘Of course not, but what I would say is that, all things being equal …’

‘As I’m sure they are,’ added Grafton helpfully.

‘Yes, as they are. With your experience with earthquakes …’

‘You mean the book I wrote on the Great Lisbon Earthquake?’

‘Yes, a seminal work. Seminal.’

Grafton flinched slightly at the word seminal.

‘On the basis of your renowned scholarship in the area of earthquakes, we would be happy to endorse you as the head of the Tectonic Change Commission – which comes with, well, not so much a stipend as a gratuity of … I’m not completely sure but something in the vicinity of $300,000 a year. Not that that probably matters to you …’

‘Of course not,’ said Grafton, thinking it was time he probably wrapped up the tour and got something decent to eat. ‘I’d be happy to assist with anything that helps promote equity, equivalence, equality and equivocation in this country, and if I can help with the problem of earthquakes I certainly will.’

‘That’s great. Just great. Well, we’ll talk,’ said Peter, rising from his chair, though not much. He pumped Grafton’s hand, buttoned his suit jacket and scuttled off toward his car. Grafton watched him depart. If what had been said about the banality of evil was correct, he thought, that man must be virtually satanic.

During the ensuing trip to the airport, Grafton reflected on the issues that had been raised in the meeting but found that he couldn’t actually remember what they were. He also realised, before they had gone even a couple of kilometres, that he could no longer picture Peter’s face. Or was his name Stephen?

In the end he gave up and stared out the window at the bleak Canberra landscape, wondering why they built Australia’s national capital where they had. Perhaps the committee in charge had found that countries whose capitals had cold winters – Britain, United States, Germany and Russia – had strong economies and high technical capability, while those whose capitals had mild or warm winters – Italy, Spain, Mexico and most equatorial countries – were technical, economic and educational laggards. Concluding that frigidity was the mother of industriousness, they searched the hot, dry Australian continent until they found a location for the Australian capital in the foothills of the Australian Alps where there was at least a forty per cent chance of snow. It was not on any main highway, railway or waterway but had one overriding virtue: it was cold enough in winter for politicians to feel comfortable in their thick woollen, London-made, double-breasted suits.

He also reflected that the slower pace of development in northern Australia had long been regarded as confirmation of the hypothesised correlation between temperature and civilisation, though Tasmania remained a troublesome exception.

A chill wind was gusting off the artificial lake and Grafton was glad he was on an early afternoon flight home. He hated travelling, especially flying, even in spite of the food. He loved his house so much he got homesick going out to check the mailbox. This, he hoped and prayed, would be the last time he would have to come to this soulless Alphaville for some time, though in his bowels he knew he would never be that lucky.