4

GRAFTON AGONISTES

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a
fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

– Samuel Johnson

To Grafton’s considerable relief he was not required to travel to Canberra for several weeks, though the sword of Damocles still hung over him with the knowledge that sooner or later he would have to take his seat in the Senate. Amongst other things, he worried whether said seat would be wide enough for his considerable girth, then he remembered the size of some of the notable pollies from the past and realised that seating in both Houses must have been designed with this in mind. Nevertheless, the prospect of commuting to Australia’s own windswept version of Brasilia filled him with trepidation. He sought consolation in his time-honoured practice of spending mornings in bed till midday reading the newspapers and eating toast, enjoying it perhaps more than he ever had, knowing it might be his last chance to do so for some time – six years if his incumbency went full term – though he drew some comfort from the fact that most of his former incumbencies had been, as Thomas Hobbes said, nasty, brutish and short.

Ensconced in bedded bliss, the idea that he was a senator-elect for Mangoland might almost have been dismissed as a dream, except for the constant references and reactions in the morning papers to comments he had apparently made on social media. Petra sent him daily reminders to check his Tweets and Facebook pages but Grafton never checked his emails. He was not sure how to check his emails and in fact had no real idea of what Tweets and Facebook were. He was, by his own admission, non-technological. At the University of Mangoland, the IT staff had referred to him as a Cybernought. Grafton wondered why there was a not a medical-sounding term for people such as himself. After all, since such relatively mundane conditions as being rude, lazy and stupid were now dignified by complex neurological labels, why not computer illiteracy? Could he not be cognitively atechnical, genetically disputerate, cortically undigital? Maybe his eventual legacy would be to give his name to a condition – Grafton’s Syndrome: the inability to fathom computers.

As it turned out, the main source of information regarding his own utterances came from his Saturday night spot on Rarefax Radio 2FU with host Bob Baddly when people called in to discuss what he had written in his blog. Luckily most callers rang to say that they agreed heartily with what he had said and all he had to do was thank them in a tone of endearing modesty. The few who rang to challenge him were expertly batted away by Bob, who quickly handballed the issue to another caller for rebuttal on Grafton’s behalf. So protected was he from any actual engagement with the callers that Grafton wondered if Bob Baddly was aware that Grafton’s social media posts were ghosted and were part of the well-oiled publicity machine run by Petra – a machine that afforded him the unusual experience of being a politician without actually having to do anything political. He felt as if he were being wafted aloft by angels – blessed to float effortlessly through his entire career as a senator.

Unfortunately, this sublime aerial experience was soon to hit turbulence and the metaphorical sword suspended over his head was to transmute into something more along the lines of a ten-tonne safe.

In mid-October, Grafton sat in the office of Dr End, waiting to receive the results of his post-operative tests. Dr End spent some time perusing a multi-page document while Grafton shifted his weight on an uncomfortable chair, looking around at the obligatory array of framed certificates and degrees on the doctor’s walls.

‘Did you know,’ said Grafton, trying to fill in the silence, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous was created by a proctologist.’

Dr End looked up sharply. ‘I’m a urologist,’ he said tersely. ‘Not a proctologist.’

Grafton fell silent, chastened. It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be some sort of hierarchy in these specialisations. Was urology of slightly higher standing in the Burke’s Peerage of the alimentary world? Was proctology a field you went into only when all other specialties had been taken? Was it the profession of last resort, the bottom option, so to speak? If so, surely urology was only one or two steps above it. Was this what underlay Dr End’s defensiveness? He might only be a urologist but at least he was not a proctologist.

Finally, Dr End finished perusing the report and said, ‘Well, it’s not bad. I think we got it all.’

‘What, the prostate?’ said Grafton, thinking they surely couldn’t have left bits inside.

‘No. I mean the cancer. I think we got it all.’

‘Think?’ said Grafton. ‘Are you telling me there’s some doubt?’

‘Well, there’s always doubt,’ said End, turning to his computer and typing something.

‘But …’ Grafton was almost lost for words, ‘… the whole reason I agreed to have the prostate out and render myself impotent was to remove the chance of cancer spreading. If there’s still a chance, I might as well have left it in and rooted myself to an early grave.’

‘You’re fifty-nine. It’s a bit late to be talking about an early grave,’ said Dr End, looking up some code on a laminated sheet.

Grafton sat in shock. Had Janet made such a comment it might have taken the form of a kindly reality check. Dr End’s delivery had been blunt to the point of rudeness. Was this the attitude of the medical profession – that, at fifty-nine, he’d had a good run and death by cancer was about as much as he really should expect?

He tried to clear his mind and seek some clarification on the issue.

‘So …’ he inquired, ‘… in how many cases where people have had their prostate removed does the cancer re-emerge?’

‘It commonly re-emerges, in which case we have another raft of treatments,’ said Dr End without looking up from the screen.

Grafton took a deep breath. ‘And so … what would you say is the survival rate?’

Dr End continued typing. He spoke as if it were a purely theoretical matter. ‘It’s hard to say. Depends on what the follow-up treatments are and the particular patient …’

‘Just roughly,’ said Grafton with a slight degree of insistence.

Dr End stopped typing and turned to him.

‘Mr Everest …’ he began as if Grafton were interrupting some far more important task.

‘It’s Doctor Everest … I mean Prof … I mean Senator Everest,’ said Grafton testily.

‘Oh yes, Senator,’ said Dr End without the slightest hint of contrition. He turned back and tabbed up to the top of the screen where he made some minor correction to Grafton’s record.

‘Well?’ said Grafton.

Dr End exhaled and spoke without looking at him. ‘Studies vary. The five-year survival rate is normally used but it’s not really useful as most of the recent treatments haven’t been tested for that long. In general terms, the ten-year survival rate is about eighty per cent.’

‘Eighty per cent,’ said Grafton. ‘Meaning I have a one in five chance of not making it to seventy.’

‘It’s not that simple. It depends on several factors.’

‘Such as what?’ said Grafton.

‘On whether the cancer was localised, regional or general,’ said Dr End as if this ought to be obvious.

I’m in a Monty Python sketch, thought Grafton. ‘So, how will we know whether it’s local, regional or general?’

‘By whether it comes back.’

Grafton clenched his eyes tight shut. He spoke slowly and enunciated clearly. ‘Are you saying the only way we can know whether the cancer is going to come back is …?’

‘Whether it does or not,’ said Dr End, finally looking at him as if he were an uncomprehending schoolboy. ‘There’s no way of knowing whether the cancer has come back until it actually comes back.’

Grafton sat in silence. It suddenly seemed to him that the entire edifice of Western medicine was one monstrous fraud. All the miracles of diagnosis and cures that it had boasted over the last century were fabricated. We lived in a world where hearts and lungs could be transplanted from one person to another, yet here was a doctor sitting in front of him telling him that the only way they could tell if he was going to die of cancer was if he actually died of cancer.

‘I’m sorry but that’s the whole problem with cancer,’ said Dr End, appearing for the first time to realise the profundity of his patient’s ignorance. ‘We don’t know whether it’s going to re-emerge until it does. That’s why it’s hard to cure. That’s why people die of it.’

Grafton remained silent, shocked,

‘If you’re worried, however,’ said End with a conciliatory air, ‘we can start you on a prophylactic course of anti-androgens.’

If I’m worried? thought Grafton. ‘Yes, yes, I think that would be good idea. If you can.’

‘Very well,’ said Dr End, turning to the computer and starting to type again. ‘There will be some side-effects, of course.’

‘As long as one of them isn’t death, it’s got to be better than the alternative,’ said Grafton.

That night Grafton sat helplessly on the couch as Janet brought him a cup of tea sweetened with condensed milk.

‘You don’t understand,’ whined Grafton. ‘There’s a good chance I could die.’

‘I think there’s a good chance of us all dying,’ said Janet. ‘In fact I’m pretty sure it’s a certainty.’

‘I mean, I could die soon. Any minute.’

Janet sat down beside him and took his hand. She spoke to him soothingly as she would if he were coming down with a cold.

‘Well, darling, it’s worth remembering that when you’re dead you don’t know you’re dead so you won’t be the least bit upset about being dead. Being dead only worries you now which is silly because you’re not dead, you’re happily alive. It’s a win-win situation really.’

‘But I don’t want to be dead and not know I’m dead,’ protested the invalid.

‘Hmm,’ said Janet, seeming to think about it for a moment. ‘Well, I’m sure it would be far worse to be dead and know that you’re dead. That would be really depressing. But it would also be contradictory because if you were depressed about being dead then you wouldn’t actually be dead.’ Then she jumped up and started throwing things into a bag.

‘Oh God,’ moaned Grafton. Then, after a moment watching her getting ready to leave, ‘Will you remarry after I die?’

‘No, darling.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because over the course of a lifetime we do learn, my sweet. I have to go.’ She kissed him on the forehead and departed.

Grafton sat miserably on the couch. He looked at Maddie the terrier.

‘You’ll miss me, Maddie. You’ll sit by my grave and refuse to leave, won’t you?’

Seeing there was no food to be had, the dog turned and ambled stoically back into the kitchen. Grafton continued to meditate on his impending demise. ‘That is, assuming that I have a grave. Most people get cremated these days and just have a plaque on a wall. Imagine that: after all this I end up in a little box stuck in a hole in a wall, like a post-office box except no one is going to ever open it and look inside for mail. There’s no way a faithful hound can sit on an alcove.’

Grafton shuffled to the fridge and dragged out a large tub of low-fat ice-cream. Since it was low-fat he felt justified in scooping himself a double helping and sat at the table, morosely spooning it into his mouth.

‘Some people get sprinkled,’ he said to Maddie, who sat beside the table, her eyes riveted to every spoonful that passed from the bowl to his mouth. ‘Like lawn food. Or out on the water like fish food. Imagine ending up a dietary supplement.’ The dog licked her lips and swallowed audibly. Grafton was almost about to say, ‘Stop groaking!’ but it sounded too much like ‘croaking’. Instead he simply observed, ‘I’m sure you would sit by my grave if I had food with me. Maybe that’s the truth behind those stories of dogs refusing to leave their masters’ graves. Maybe there was a chicken sandwich in the coffin.’

He took another large mouthful. Death had always seemed like something far over the horizon, something he was sure he would face heroically when the time came. Now the time was coming and he didn’t feel heroic at all. Death wasn’t something in the distance. It was here, sitting opposite him at the table. He idly wondered what Death might look like. He remembered the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, where Prince Don Fabrizio imagined Death as a beautiful woman. Maybe that was how death would come to him. He could only hope. Even though he was impotent, the arrival of a beautiful woman was far preferable to feeling the vast wings of the great dark Angel of Death beating above his head.

The home phone rang, rousing him from his morose reverie. He picked up the kitchen extension. It was someone from the Prime Minister’s office. He was to meet the PM the next day at the Greenfern chapter of Eataholics Anonymous. Grafton mumbled his compliance and then returned to the table to finish the bowl. The thought of a room full of eataholics made him hungry.

The Greenfern Eataholics Anonymous meeting was held monthly in a Scout hall, now disused since a persistent campaign from community groups claimed that Scouting was racist, militaristic, monarchist, imperialistic propaganda. This led to the disbanding of the local troupe. Grafton walked up the driveway to the EA meeting with some trepidation, hoping no one would notice the Mars Bar he had in his jacket pocket. A large Commonwealth car was parked outside the hall and two Protective Services officers, one being The Possum, were standing on either side of the door.

Inside he found people sitting in a semi-circle on chairs, some of which seemed to be dangerously under-engineered for the job with which they had been tasked. At the far end of the semi-circle sat Nina, who glanced over at Grafton and patted an empty chair beside her. Grafton made his way around the archipelago of obesity and sat down next to the PM. As he sat, the convenor of the meeting, who looked like a female version of Meat Loaf only not as pretty, called the meeting to order. The assemblage rose and began to recite the Twelve Steps printed on a large board beside the convenor: I admit that I am helpless in the face of food; I know I am unable to control my dependence on food; I know I cannot conquer my addiction alone …

Grafton recited the first few Steps with confidence but found himself unable to identify with or even understand many of the following ones which seemed to have something to do with limiting food intake and trying to control appetite. They finally sat down and the first member of the group walked forward to a small lectern to speak. Grafton was surprised to see that the speaker was stick thin.

‘My name is Chantelle and I am an eataholic,’ she began. ‘I have been fighting food addiction since I was a child. I came from a family of eataholics: my parents ate food every day, three times a day. There was always food in the house of all types – meat, vegetables, bread …’

As Grafton listened, slightly confused, Nina whispered out of the side of her mouth, ‘I have organised what we spoke about. You are now officially the head of the Tertiary Education Resource Reallocation and Organisation Review. My office will send you the papers.’

She paused for a moment as the svelte Chantelle related how she finally decided that she needed help when she found she had eaten her way up to a size 8.

‘I have also agreed with the Opposition,’ said Nina, ‘that you will chair the Tectonic Change Commission.’

‘Uh-huh,’ whispered Grafton.

‘Good luck with that. That Commission doesn’t just need a Chair, it needs a chair and a whip.’

The group was clapping now as Chantelle returned to her seat and another member, equally emaciated, stepped up to the lectern.

‘Hi, my name is Sean and I’m an eataholic.’

‘Why are these …?’ whispered Grafton.

‘Anorexics,’ said Nina, anticipating the usual question. ‘They think they’re overweight. We have to let them in. We can’t discriminate.’

Grafton looked around and noticed that about a third of the group were abnormally thin, including a young Chinese woman with orange spiked hair who was glaring at him balefully.

‘The problem is,’ whispered Nina, ‘that unlike alcoholics and drug users, eataholics can’t totally abstain.’ While this was obviously true, it seemed to Grafton that some of these stick-thin members were giving it their best shot.

When the meeting was over, they walked out to where the Commonwealth car was waiting with its back door dutifully held open by The Possum. Nina told him that the first piece of legislation that she was going to need his help in passing was ‘The DRACUL Bill. When Grafton looked confused she explained: the ‘Disestablishment of Really Awful Criminal Underworld Liaisons Bill.’

Grafton was not much wiser.

‘The bill to outlaw criminal motorcycle gangs.’

‘Oh, right!’ said Grafton with slightly more conviction.

‘We’ll get it through the House next week but it won’t come before the Senate until next year. I need to know that I can rely on you.’

‘Of course,’ said Grafton, wondering if the PM knew his daughter was planning a major event to protest about that very legislation. Then, as she bent down to step into the car Grafton considered the expansive rear he had once admired when it was much more compact.

‘Have you lost weight?’ he asked.

Nina turned back. ‘Yes,’ she said, seeming almost for one moment to be flattered. ‘I’ve been trying a new diet pill.’ She slid her hand into the pocket of her jacket and held up a small pill container. ‘From Camira. In Queensland.’ And she stepped into the car.

‘Jenny!’ she barked as she slid across the seat.

At that, the skinny Chinese girl barged past Grafton, physically pushing him out of the way, and folded her stick-like frame into the seat next to Nina. She continued to glare at Grafton until The Possum closed the door. Grafton was fairly certain that, although he could no longer see her through the tinted glass, she was still scowling at him. The Possum then nodded to Grafton, checked up and down the road and then took his seat in the front.

As Nina’s Commonwealth car pulled away, Grafton turned to see a group of the larger eataholics meandering slowly down the path like a family of hippos perambulating along a river bank. Feeling low on blood sugar, he put his hand into his pocket and was about to pull out the Mars Bar when he paused. Sensing something, he turned and saw the group had stopped almost mid-stride and was looking at him intensely through gimlet eyes. Realising that the sight of a chocolate bar could trigger something resembling a buffalo stampede, Grafton slowly drew his hand out of his pocket, patting down the flap as if he had just put something into it, making sure that his hand was visibly empty. The group remained motionless for several seconds, nostrils dilated slightly as if sniffing the air, and for a terrifying moment Grafton feared they could smell the confectionary, but after what seemed like a very long time they blinked in the afternoon light, turned and lumbered off down the road. Grafton allowed himself to start breathing again and walked away quickly. That was a close one.

Back in the sanctuary of his home Grafton headed straight for the refrigerator, only to find his kitchen cluttered with people. Sitting around his table, swilling his coffee and eating a plate of biscuits that he suspected had been baked for him were Lee-Anne, two enormous male bikies and two considerably smaller female bikies.

‘Hi, Dad,’ said Lee-Anne. ‘You know Gabe and Mick and this is Ariel and Zophie.’

Grafton grunted some sort of acknowledgement, concerned that the girth of one of the bikies was effectively blocking his access to the refrigerator. Lee-Anne leapt up, full of excitement. ‘Dad, guess who’s agreed to produce my stage spectacular!’

‘Trevor Nunn?’ ventured Grafton.

‘Nanny NEAL,’ cried Lee-Anne triumphantly. ‘He’s been directing a lot of stage productions for the differently-abled. He said he’d love to do it.’ Then, turning to the assembled company, she explained, ‘He was my nanny when I was little. He raised me from when I was this high. He’s a genius.’

Grafton grunted agreement, still trying to work out how to circumnavigate the obstacle blocking access to the fridge.

‘And Dad …’ continued Lee-Anne. ‘This is Jason LeSinge from the Liberty Alliance. He’s going to help us with the project.’

Grafton looked towards the end of the table but saw no one. Then he realised that there was an open laptop computer sitting on the end of the table with a face of a pale young man with a bang of blond hair flopping stylishly over one eye on the screen.

‘Ciao,’ said the face.

‘He’s on Skype. In North Korea,’ she explained. Grafton assumed Skype was some sort of drug.

‘We’re really happy to be involved. Anything to get rid of this government and its fascist legislation,’ said the disembodied head.

‘Um, right,’ mumbled Grafton, then to Lee-Anne again, ‘North Korea?’

‘They granted him asylum. Remember Jason? He set up the Stikibeaks website. They hacked the Federal Police’s computers and published the names of all their undercover agents on line.’

‘Fucking brilliant,’ said Mick the bikie.

‘Fucked them right up,’ said Gabe.

‘Yes, I remember,’ said Grafton, who did indeed remember that. As a result, several undercover police who had infiltrated drug gangs had been declared missing, presumed shredded.

‘So, Dad,’ said Lee-Anne, using the tone with which she had commenced every conversation since she was five years old that involved her wanting something, ‘all we need now is somewhere to stage it all. Do you know any large arenas or convention centres we could get for nothing?’

‘Well, um …’ mumbled Grafton, trying to frame an excuse, but was saved by the doorbell.

Making his apologies, he escaped to the hall and opened the front door where a courier handed him an envelope the size and weight of a mediaeval Bible. Ripping it open on the dining table, Grafton found it was the Terms of Inquiry, Briefing Notes and Itinerary for the Tertiary Education Resource Reallocation and Organisational Review, fetchingly shortened to The T.E.R.R.O.R. Scanning the Itinerary, he noted that the first university to be audited was his alma mater, the University of Mangoland.

Grafton was just recovering from the magnitude of the task confronting him when his mobile phone rang. It was Horton.

‘Don’t panic, son. I know you’ve just taken delivery of the package but you needn’t worry. We’ll take care of all the assessment. All you have to do is go and talk to them and assure them that their jobs are secure.’

‘Are their jobs secure?’ said Grafton, looking at the list of Aims on page 1 of the Briefing Notes and seeing ‘a forty-five per cent reduction in staff expenditure’.

‘Not at all,’ said Horton. ‘They’re all for the high jump. But you have to make it seem like there are huge bonuses for them in this review.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Grafton, knowing that this was equivalent to saying he’d do nothing.

‘Two other things,’ croaked the voice. ‘There’s a painter coming to sketch you tomorrow for the Artichoke Prize.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Just something extra to keep you in the public’s eye. And you’re chairing your first meeting of the Tectonic Change Commission on Thursday. Check your emails.’

‘I don’t know …’ began Grafton but the call was abruptly ended, telepathically no doubt, he thought.

In the kitchen laughter rang out and Grafton brooded on how he hated having people in his house.

The first meeting of the Tectonic Change Commission was held in the Buckingham Room of the Royal Plaza Hotel in central Sydney. The room was luxuriously appointed with an enormously long oak table, deep leather chairs and, most important for Grafton, an extensive buffet laid out on the sideboard. A woman called Hilary with large black-framed glasses introduced herself as the secretary and said that she would take the minutes. Grafton thanked her and headed for the food.

As he piled his plate to the rim with delicacies, the Commissioners began to arrive. It was clear that they were a diverse group – representatives of all the minor parties and delegates from almost every environmental body in the country. They were not so much from different walks of life, as different forms of life. Grafton felt for a moment as if he were presiding over the intergalactic senate in Star Wars.

In a gesture to bipartisanship, half the members of the Commission had been nominated by the government and half by the Opposition. Since being a member included a handsome stipend, business-class travel to and from Sydney every month, plus accommodation at the Royal Plaza, plus per diems, appointment to this body was something to be prized and thus one of the main inducements that both sides of politics used to secure cooperation. It was no doubt a particularly attractive prospect for people living in Western Australia and Tasmania.

After some twenty minutes of gorging themselves with food while discussing their flights, the Commissioners took their seats. As the meeting proceeded, waiters quietly circled the table, topping up coffee cups.

Grafton took his seat, slightly annoyed that he had not had time to get to the dessert end of the buffet, but he consoled himself that he could return to it at the meeting’s end. Hilary passed Grafton an agenda as if aware that he would not have brought his background papers with him, which he had not. Grafton called the meeting to order and announced the first order of business which was a progress report on the National Cushioning Initiative.

The delegate from the Tectonic Change Action Committee spoke.

‘Mr Chairman, many years ago there was a saying that if all the people in China jumped up and down at once, the Earth would move. People might have laughed at that once but today we know it to be true. If 1.4 billion people in China jumped up and down, there would be earthquakes in Bangladesh and tsunamis that would wipe out the west coast of Japan. Tectonic Change affects us all and Australia must do its part to stop Crustal Sliding. The 2012 Tectonic Impact Impact Statement concluded that the impact on the Australian continental plate from impacts caused by activities such as fracking, blasting, pile-driving and even jogging presented a threat to our long-term survival. The National Cushioning Program was set up to make people aware of the dangers and the need for all of us to be aware of our own Footprint Footprint. The program has already introduced several legislative changes: tap dancing and pogo sticks have been made illegal …’

‘Do kids still have pogo sticks?’ said Grafton, in an attempt to act as if he was interested.

‘They are rare, Mr Chairman, it is true,’ said the delegate, ‘but the point is that it helps raise awareness.’ Having lost momentum, he re-checked his notes, cleared his throat, and continued. ‘The domestic airlines have agreed to fit their aircraft with larger, softer tyres to reduce impact on landing and we hope that an international agreement on this is not far away.’ There were murmurs of approval around the table.

‘As we all know, driving piles into the ground to create foundations for buildings and bridges is akin to hammering giant nails into the Earth. The construction industry is currently developing, with the help of funds from this Commission, a system whereby, instead of piles, they use giant screws driven in by something resembling a very large Phillips head screwdriver.’

There were nods and gasps of admiration around the table. Even Grafton felt rather impressed by the idea.

The next item on the agenda was a progress report from the ETS sub-committee. The Convenor of this body reported that the need for Australia to enter into an Extraction Trading Scheme was becoming more urgent.

‘As we all know, every day thousands of tonnes of iron ore, coal, timber and wheat are exported from Australia, decreasing the mass of the Australian continent and increasing the weight on the Indian and Asian tectonic plates. Unless this transfer is balanced in some way, Australia and the Pacific region face the risk of catastrophic Crustal Sliding. The only feasible way to combat this is for foreign importers of Australian resources to export to Australia an equivalent tonnage of goods.’

‘What would they be?’ asked Grafton.

‘Mr Chairman, they would be anything that those countries do not want. Obviously countries like China and India have a huge problem with domestic waste. That waste could be shipped back to Australia to offset mineral exports. Remember, the bulk ore carriers currently travel back to Australia empty.’

Everyone around the table nodded sagely.

‘We would be maintaining our continental mass, and helping to solve a huge problem in Asia.’

‘What about obesity?’ said Grafton, whose mind kept returning to the uneaten food on the sideboard. There was a slightly stunned silence down the table. ‘I keep reading that Australians are getting fatter. Does that help offset the problem?’

The Convenor stuttered as if not sure whether the question was serious. ‘Um, no Mr Chair, since the food that is ingested is mostly grown in Australia, it is merely a transfer of weight within our borders. Only the eating of imported foods would count as part of a trading scheme.’

‘But if we encouraged more people to, for example, eat caviar or Atlantic salmon …?’

There was vague nodding around the table. ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Convenor. ‘As long as it did not compete with and displace any Australian-grown produce, it could help. It certainly would.’ There was more nodding down the table and several Commissioners wrote notes to increase their caviar consumption.

The rest of the agenda consisted mainly of ratifying the funding for various projects, most of which seemed to involve the Commissioners taking trips to investigate Tectonic Change in places such as Hawaii, Bermuda, Greece, Paris, Venice and Bali. It was fortuitous, thought Grafton, that so many places at risk from Crustal Sliding and Tectonic Upheaval were also popular tourist destinations. It was the very last item on the Agenda, which he did not see until he turned the page, that struck Grafton.

‘The last application,’ said the head of the Grants Sub-committee, ‘is from a Sunshine Coast academic – who is quite well credentialed in event management – to hold a three-day Stop The Slide Festival in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It would be a combined arts, music, Earth sciences, spirituality, craft and environmental Festival where artists from around Australia could present works related to environmental and social issues.’

‘Who is the applicant?’ asked a Commissioner from the Palaeolithic Party who was wearing a bear-skin tunic.

‘Um, Ms Annie Angel. She’s a researcher in Social Change.’

Grafton, who had almost drifted into unconsciousness through boredom, was suddenly wide awake and alert.

‘I’m not sure, though …’ said the speaker, ‘whether we can fund this out of this year’s budget. We have a number of other vacati– I mean, overseas study grants still to come in.’

Grafton rapidly interjected. ‘I think this is precisely the sort of thing we need to raise awareness of these problems. A Festival like this is more cost-effective than twenty television campaigns. Plus I’m sure we all know organisations who would appreciate the opportunity to have such an exciting forum to deliver their messages.’

A ripple of self-interest immediately ran down the table, and to Grafton’s great satisfaction the funding for Ms Annie Angel’s project was passed unanimously. Promptly closing the meeting, Grafton headed for the pavlova.

That evening Grafton had the pleasure of doing what he had rarely done in his life, which was to be a hero to his daughter. When he announced that he had ‘managed to raise funding’ for an arts Festival on the Sunshine Coast which would be the perfect venue for her social-political extravaganza, Lee-Anne shrieked and hugged him. He was, for what was probably the first time in his life, ‘the best father in the world’.

Grafton’s satisfaction at helping his daughter was accompanied by another feeling – one of anticipation. Annie Angel was none other than the delectable young woman who had been his mistress, his lover, his Desirée, his afternoon delight, during many years of his academic career. In a few days he would be flying back to Mangoland to begin his audit of the university. It seemed logical that, as he was involved in funding her project, he might catch up with Annie Angel, and also logical that she might be warmly disposed towards him for his assistance. Grafton could not help but consider the possibility that she might be the one who could cure the minor problem of his impotence.