6

THE HONOURABLE MEMBER

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it
would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets
would take seats in senate.

– Orson Welles

Grafton was very thankful to discover that he did not have to fly to Canberra to deal with the Prime Minister’s mystery problem because she was currently staying in the PM’s Sydney residence. While the official residence of the Australian Prime Minister was The Lodge in Canberra, Sydney maintained its own residence for the PM, the only state capital to do so. It was a subtle reminder that Sydney regarded itself as the true capital of Australia, or at least equally important as the ACT.

Kirribilli House is a faux English cottage set on a hill overlooking Sydney Harbour with multi-million dollar views of The Bridge, The Quay and The Opera House. Grafton arrived at the elaborate wrought-iron gates in late afternoon and was saluted and waved through to the front door as if he were a visiting ambassador. He was met at the front door by the PM’s partner Jenny who, to Grafton’s surprise, was dressed in neat business suit, though the hair was still orange and spiked. ‘She’s upstairs,’ said Jenny and led the way up to the first floor. From Jenny’s somewhat sombre manner and attire, Grafton was momentarily seized by the apprehension that he was being summoned to a deathbed. He pictured a room lit by the last rays of the setting sun with Nina in a voluminous Victorian nightgown, propped up in bed on thick pillows, smiling wanly and telling him he was the only person she ever loved. The reality was somewhat more banal.

When they entered the master bedroom Grafton noted the king-size bed was neatly made and clearly unoccupied.

‘She’s in the ensuite,’ said Jenny with a sense of fatigue.

Grafton turned towards the bathroom where he saw the PM on all fours in front of the toilet. Her gigantic buttocks were shaking to and fro and his first impression was that she was vomiting. As he drew nearer, however, he realised she was not being sick in the toilet but scrubbing it vigorously. He turned and looked at Jenny, who simply raised her eyebrows.

He turned back to the wobbling quadruped on the bathroom floor.

‘Nina,’ he said, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Trying to clean this fucking bathroom,’ came a response from somewhere in the vicinity of the S-bend. Then she placed one hand on the rim of the washbasin and heaved herself up into a standing position with an effort that Grafton feared might pull the vanity unit off the wall. She steadied herself and flushed the toilet, then turned around, revealing a face flushed red, and wiped wet matted hair off her forehead.

‘I’ve got Bathroom Cabinet coming first thing tomorrow morning and the fucking cleaners are away today – just when a film crew is going to be taking close-ups of the loo.’

Bathroom Cabinet, Grafton recalled, was a popular program on the ABC where political journalist Yolanda Yabbie visited politicians in their homes to discuss their health and beauty regimen, and even what medication they were on.

‘Couldn’t you get a contract cleaner in?’ asked Grafton.

‘I didn’t have time to organise it …’ began Nina.

‘We had a crisis,’ interrupted Jenny, who was standing, arms folded in the reproving attitude of a deputy headmistress.

Nina looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, a crisis.’

There was a pause. Nina stared at the toilet brush still in her hand.

‘Well?’ said Jenny impatiently. ‘Tell him.’

Nina glanced at Jenny and then turned and deposited the toilet brush back in its cradle. ‘You tell him.’

Jenny sighed. ‘At about four am this morning, Madam was found wandering around Milson Park, about half a kilometre from here. She was undressed …’

‘I had pants on,’ corrected Nina.

‘Yes, not that anyone could tell,’ snapped Jenny, ‘given that she was covered in mud and leaves and had twigs in her hair. She also had blood on her face. Do we know what that was from?’

Nina shuffled awkwardly.

‘I think …’ she said tentatively, ‘I might have eaten something.’

‘What?’ said Grafton.

‘I don’t know. Maybe a possum? Something like that. I don’t recall.’

Grafton turned back to Jenny, who raised her eyebrows again and shrugged.

‘Why? What happened?’ said Grafton, bewildered.

Nina plodded over to the bed and sat down on it with a loud squeak.

‘I think I’m turning into a werewolf,’ she said.

Grafton stood nonplussed for a moment and then said, ‘Do you have any chocolate?’

They sat in silence in the Kirribilli kitchen as Grafton finished his second slice of the chocolate cake Jenny had produced from the industrial-size refrigerator. He had pleaded hunger not just to satisfy the gnawing in his stomach but also to give him time to work out what to say. What was most puzzling was why they had turned to him, and he wondered if he was being thrust into the role of detective.

‘So,’ he asked between mouthfuls, ‘is this going to be all over the media?’

‘No, thank Christ,’ said Jenny. ‘I realised she was gone about three am and called the Protective Service guys. They went looking for her and, luckily, they found her before the police did.’

Grafton took another bite of cake and tried to imagine what Hercule Poirot would say in this situation.

‘Is this the first time you’ve had … an episode like this?’ he said, trying to think forensically.

‘Yes, though I’ve been having a lot of cravings – for meat.’

‘We’re supposed to be vegetarians,’ said Jenny archly.

‘Well, that would explain it,’ said Grafton.

‘But I’ve been tense and restless. I feel like my nails are growing longer.’

‘They’re not. And trust me, I would know,’ said Jenny, conveying more information than Grafton wanted.

‘Most of all, I can’t sleep at night. Every time there’s a full moon I’ve been wandering the house feeling like I needed to escape, to break out. To hunt. But this was the first time I actually went over the wall.’

‘She means that literally,’ said Jenny. ‘She climbed a peppercorn tree to get out.’

Grafton tried to imagine the size and strength of the tree that would take Nina’s weight.

‘So,’ he said, finally addressing the issue that really concerned him, ‘why did you call me?’

‘You’re the only one I can confide in,’ said Nina.

Grafton was gratified. ‘I take that as a compliment,’ he said.

‘Don’t,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t mean you’re trustworthy. I mean you don’t have any friends so you’re least likely to tell anyone. I need someone to find out what the hell is wrong with me.’

Grafton leaned back and tried to adopt the tone of a logician.

‘Well, Nina, looking at matters objectively, you’re clearly not really a werewolf because werewolves don’t exist and even if they did exist you would have had to have been bitten by a werewolf to turn into a werewolf and I’m sure you’d remember if you had been bitten by a werewolf. So the real question is why you think you’re a werewolf.’

‘Because I’m losing my mind,’ suggested Nina.

‘Or …’ said Grafton, pausing as if taking a puff from an imaginary pipe, ‘someone wants you to think you’re turning into a werewolf.’

‘How do you make someone think they’re a werewolf?’ asked Jenny.

‘That’s what I intend to find out,’ said Grafton portentously. Then he nodded towards the last slice of cake. ‘Do you want that?’

‘No. You have it,’ said the PM, taking out a small container and popping a pill in her mouth.

The truth was that Grafton had not the slightest clue about how to investigate the Prime Minister’s problem. His only solution was to refer the matter to his long-time mentor Mr Horton at the earliest opportunity which, as it turned out, came sooner than expected; on his way home in the Commonwealth car he was reminded by a call from Petra that he was required in Canberra the next morning for the first sitting day of the Senate. This put Grafton into a sulk which worsened when he arrived at his house to be greeted by loud rock music.

On entering the sanctity of his domain, Grafton found Lee-Anne in the living room choreographing a pole-dancing routine with the two bikie chicks, Ariel and Zophie. The two young women, wearing almost invisible G-strings, were twirling around a couple of portable poles which, Grafton was alarmed to see, were wedged between the floor and ceiling of the lounge room.

‘Hi, Dad,’ said Lee-Anne cheerfully, as both girls up-ended on the poles, did the splits and slowly rotated like a pair of lawn sprinklers.

‘Where’s your mother?’ yelled Grafton, shouting over the music.

‘Gone to a meeting,’ said Lee-Anne. ‘Legs straight, Zophie!’

‘What? Knitting?’ said Grafton.

‘No. The other one!’

‘What other one?’ said Grafton, trying to ignore the two girls who were now leaning out from the poles, breasts thrust forward like ships’ figureheads.

‘The one about young people in Asia.’

‘What?!’ said Grafton.

‘Something about youth in Asia. I don’t know. Dad, do you mind? I’m working.’

Grafton gave up and beat a tactical retreat to the kitchen where he found much of the food in the fridge had been consumed by the acrobatic thespians in the front room. He salvaged an assortment of odds and ends and started making a sandwich, deliberately making it as badly as he could in order to reinforce his sense of neglect and abandonment. As he threw ingredients onto a large slab of bread he fulminated petulantly.

‘What has happened to my life? My cock doesn’t work, my house has turned into a strip club, my wife is never home, I have to fly to Canberra which I hate and sit in the Senate which I never wanted to be in and listen to a collection of morons, frauds and psychopaths talk about idiotic political issues that I don’t care about; the Prime Minister wants me to find out why she’s a werewolf and to top it all I’ve got a seventy per cent chance of dying in the next twenty-four months.’

He slammed a thick slice of bread on top of the pile, slumped down onto a chair and took a savage bite out of the sandwich which, to his annoyance, tasted quite good.

Then Ariel and Zophie panted into the kitchen and wrenched open the fridge. They dragged out bottles of Perspirade sports drinks and stood there, breasts heaving and glistening from exertion, and took swigs in unison.

‘Pretty good workout,’ said Ariel, smiling at Grafton and wiping her damp forehead with her forearm which was tattooed with an elaborate picture of a burning skull.

‘You should try it,’ said Zophie, smiling.

Grafton was momentarily lost for words at the sight of the two young rookie pole dancers standing casually in his kitchen, glistening and naked. Both, he noted, had tattoos of angel wings on their shoulder blades.

‘I think I’d need a bigger pole,’ he said humbly. ‘Like a bridge pylon.’

‘You’re funny,’ laughed Ariel.

Zophie laughed too and they bounced back out to the living room.

Why was it, Grafton wondered, that the minute he was impotent, young women were suddenly wanting to walk around in front of him naked and flirt with him? Was it because they knew, or sensed that he could do nothing about it? Or was it something more karmic? Was this the punishment of Tantalus being visited upon him for his past misdeeds?

This prompted him to retrieve the laptop computer from the dining table and bring it into the kitchen. Here, feeling safe as long as deafening rock music shook the house, he tried to relocate the porn site which he had accessed earlier. He was slightly shocked when the computer returned to it so quickly, as if it remembered that he had been there, which of course it had. That, he thought, was something he would have to find how to remedy later.

Ignoring the pictures of gaping orifices which covered the main part of the screen, he turned his attention to the advertisements stripped down the side, in particular one to buy Viagra online. He stared at it for a while, uncertain as to whether to take the plunge. It was not the thought of the medication itself that caused him to hesitate but the sheer modernism of ordering something over the Internet. He had never done it before and, for some reason, felt a strange, almost moral, aversion to it. After wrestling with his trepidations for a moment, he drew his wallet out of his pants pocket and found a credit card. Feeling as if he was possibly doing the most daring thing he had ever done in his life, he clicked on the ad, filled out his address and details and finally, after hovering his mouse over the Send button for several seconds, clicked it.

He then froze, heart beating, as if thinking the laptop might explode. When it didn’t, he exhaled and shut the lid. ‘Well, it’s done,’ he said, and leaned back with a sense of relief, knowing that whatever happened was now beyond his control.

Now why, he wondered, was Janet at a meeting about youth in Asia?

The following morning, for the first time, the fawning Business Class service did not succeed in mitigating his hatred of flying. Perhaps it was that he had had to get up at six-thirty to make the flight; perhaps that the Captain’s Club at Qantas was so packed with businessmen and women gorging on the buffet breakfast that he did not get to eat anything before boarding; or that boarding took so long because he had to wait for that same crowd of business people to take off their jackets, hang up their jackets, take the laptop or tablet or folder out of their briefcase, then put the briefcase into the overhead locker before finally sitting down; or perhaps that the only way you could read a broadsheet newspaper on a plane without punching someone in the cheek was to fold it up like a piece of origami. Not that there were many broadsheets left. The main Sydney daily was now about the size of a Reader’s Digest and about half as informative.

Still sulking over what he perceived as everyone’s utter disregard for him and the fact that he had to travel with his panama on his lap because the headrest would not accommodate it, Grafton looked around at all the business commuters swiping their tablets and leafing through pages of figures and bar graphs. What were they all doing? Where were they all going? What conversation about sales figures, stock options or beetroot futures could not be conducted over the phone? He was fascinated by the intensity with which they stared at their screens and jotted notes on print-outs. One woman was laboriously highlighting every line in a document, an act which he was sure defeated the whole purpose of highlighting. He wondered how they could appear to be so interested in graphs and columns of figures, for he was certain that he could never be – or even appear to be. That started him wondering what he was interested in, and for a strange moment he couldn’t think of anything. Luckily, the arrival of breakfast rescued him from this sudden existential void.

In Canberra, winter was abating. The trees along the road from the airport were starting to sprout green buds, and although the news crews waiting around the forecourt were still in parkas, when he arrived in his office Petra greeted him in a light silken blouse which seemed to ripple as she walked. Aphrodite, he thought. Or perhaps Artemis, the huntress.

‘Good morning, Senator,’ she said with a smile that destroyed Grafton inwardly. A wave of confusion propagated through his body. Here was this agonisingly attractive woman who, under other circumstances, he would be trying to, dying to …

‘Are you looking forward to your first day in the Chamber?’

‘About as much as root canal work,’ said Grafton pleasantly.

Petra handed him a folder the size of a paving slab.

‘These are the bills being debated today.’

‘Should I have read these?’ said Grafton, noting the list on the cover which included such best-selling titles as a Bill to Amend the Regulations on Secondary Financial Surcharges on Groundwater Leases for Non-government Tenements in Registered Heritage Sites.

‘No. No one ever does. We’ll tell you when you need to vote on something. Anyway, there’ll be no divisions today. It’s all procedural.’

‘Good,’ said Grafton, though he found the word procedural ominous.

‘And Mr Horton would like to talk to you over lunch.’

‘Speaking of which,’ said Grafton, ‘is there time to get something to eat?’

‘Not really,’ said Petra walking away. ‘You’re due in the Chamber now. By the way, I love your new nickname.’

Grafton had no idea what she meant and he was annoyed that he wouldn’t have time to eat before the session began. He was very glad he had pocketed a couple of packets of biscuits during the flight down – his own and those of the passenger next to him which he swiped as they were coming down to land.

There was something about his first day in the Senate that reminded Grafton of the first day at school. The old hands were greeting each other and chattering animatedly while the newbies wandered around stealing glances, not really having anyone to talk to. Grafton was in a class of his own: people knew him but did not want to talk to him.

As often happens, the newcomers formed a group of their own. The random assortment of Independents and Minor Party Senators – or The Imps as the press had christened them – quickly gravitated together and introduced themselves. Although they came from different, even diametrically, opposed political positions, they knew that they shared two attributes: megalomania and irrelevance. Grafton also noted they had all scrubbed up considerably since the election: their minders had clearly been doing their jobs. The senator from the Australian Beer Drinkers Party had swapped his Stubbies for an Armani suit and the militantly androgynous woman from the A-Gender Party was now in a slightly too tight skirt and jacket. Even the senator from Orgasm. org was dressed like a barrister, although Grafton had the impression that her black stockings may have had an obscene pattern on them. The only one who had not been corporatised – as far as could be seen – was the quadriplegic senator in his huge stainless-steel iron lung that stood upright in the first row of the cross benches where one of the desks had been removed to accommodate it. Grafton was, as usual, in his slightly smudged white Panama hat and creased linen suit. ‘Rumpled of the Bailey’ they had dubbed him in the Mangoland Parliament.

Soon, the assembly was called to order and the senators were shown to their seats. Grafton was gratified to find that he was seated in the uppermost tier of desks, well out of sight. That was until he realised that he was next to Colin Quince, another senator from Mangoland and a member of the Put God In The Senate Party – dubbed The Gits by the press. Colin smiled a beatific smile. ‘Good to see you, Brother,’ he said, basking in the warmth of his new-found power.

It would be nice to be able to say that Grafton felt a sense of pride, participation or virtually any positive emotion as his first day in the Senate passed. Unfortunately, the experience was purely one of stupendous boredom. There were proclamations and affirmations and introductions and a long ceremony in which incoming senators swore an oath of allegiance, during which Grafton silently swore some oaths of his own. Then there were speeches from the Leader of the Government in the Senate and then the Leader of the Opposition team, neither of whom Grafton recognised or could name off the top of his head. He looked around for a while at the other senators, noting how apt the description of ‘circus’, now almost universally employed by the press, had become. The analogy with the big-top was inescapable. There were the elephants – the ponderous patriarchs of the Chamber who stood and swayed and delivered long incomprehensible sermons on obscure details of policy; there were the show-ponies who pranced around and went through their acts under the watchful eye of the Whips. There were the tightrope walkers – those middle-of-the-road politicians who trod the razor’s edge, teetering between Right and the Left, Progressive and Conservative, knowing that one false step could send them crashing down. And there were the trapeze acts – pollies who launched themselves into the unknown with high-flying pronouncements with no safety net or any assurance that someone was there to catch them. There usually wasn’t.

Grafton was seated amongst the clowns – the crazies, the zanies, who rushed onto centre-stage from time to time, spraying all and sundry with offensive comments, juggling contradictory statements, tripping over their own words and even running around with their pants on fire. Their role was to provide entertainment while the next main attraction was being set up to distract the crowd while the roustabouts cleaned up shit left by the elephants.

Contriving this elaborate metaphor diverted Grafton for a little while and then he became bored again. Another speaker was now droning on about ‘challenges’ and ‘opportunity’, proclaiming that the ‘we are the people who will build the future of this country.’

Crap! thought Grafton. The future of Australia will be built by the 24 million people out there who are working, studying, raising families and don’t even know you exist. He exhaled and opened the huge folder of legislation to see if there was anything there to help pass the time. The first thing he saw was a news clipping Petra had placed on top of the pile. It showed a cartoon of him in Middle Eastern garb, wearing an explosives vest and toting a Kalashnikov. ‘Osama bin Everest the Educational TERRORist!’ proclaimed the caption. Grafton was mildly shocked and quickly read the article.

The gist of it was basically that ‘ultra-right wing conservative Grafton Everest had been charged with orchestrating the government’s jihadist attack on tertiary education’. He was the man charged with committing ‘educational genocide in Australia’, a key player in the government’s ‘back to the future’ campaign and was ‘hell-bent on taking Australian universities back to the dark days of the fifties’. If only, thought Grafton. He then reflected on how politicians and journalists always used the phrase ‘back to the future’ when they clearly meant ‘forward to the past’. Then he realised how hungry he was and wondered if he could sneak the biscuits out of his pocket and eat them unobserved. Luckily, just as he was about to risk it, the sitting was adjourned for lunch. Relief swept over Grafton like a cool breeze.

The Parliamentary Dining Room was more crowded that it had been previously but Grafton was gratified to see that Mr Horton had reserved a table. As he made his way across the room with a tray of food, he passed Peter Stephenson who smiled a cheery ‘Hello, Grafton’.

‘Um … hello,’ said Grafton, wondering who the person was and where he had seen him before. When he reached Horton, he plonked himself down, exhausted from doing nothing.

‘How is it going, my boy?’ said Horton, who was tucking into stroganoff with enthusiasm. ‘Did you enjoy your first morning as a senator?’

‘I’d rather have given myself a home-appendectomy with pinking shears,’ said Grafton bitterly. ‘How long do I have to stay here?’

‘You’d better stay the distance, at least for today, my lad,’ said his minder. ‘The Senate requires a quorum of nineteen which means from tomorrow onwards at least two-thirds of the buggers won’t show up. But you should stay the course today. And remember, you’re on camera, so no picking your nose or anything else unphotogenic.’

‘Apparently I’m “The Educational Terrorist”,’ said Grafton, tucking into a schnitzel and wondering whether he too should have gone for the stroganoff.

‘Did you like the article? I think it’s quite good for us,’ said Horton.

‘How is it good? I’m a hated man.’

‘Make no mistake, my boy. The public is on your side. Your Facebook comments this morning about the waste in universities got over a million likes. All genuine.’

Grafton was mystified as to what a ‘like’ was, let alone a ‘genuine like’.

‘What are “genuine likes”?’ he asked.

‘Grafton, almost everything you say on Facebook gets hundreds of thousands of likes. Usually we achieve that with Indian click farms.’

‘Click farms?’ said Grafton, feeling as if he were in some sort of ‘Who’s On First?’ routine.

‘Normally, we pay Indian companies to get half a million people to say they like your posts.’

‘What interest would Indians have in my comments?’

‘None,’ said Horton. ‘But Facebook doesn’t know where likes come from, it just counts them. The point is that your comment, that universities should be spending money on teaching students –’

‘Which I didn’t make,’ interrupted Grafton with a mouth full of schnitzel.

‘– but which you would have made if you had any kind of competence with social media,’ said Horton.

Grafton was not sure of this but conceded the point with a nod and a grunt.

‘The point is, that those comments got a million genuine likes. Which means you are on the wavelength of Australian voters.’

Grafton had a feeling that the wavelength of Australian voters was well towards the bottom on the old AM dial. An affinity with that echelon might be good politically but on all other levels was disquieting.

‘My boy, the average person knows deep down that tertiary education has nothing to do with raising the national intellect or guaranteeing a career. It’s about keeping unemployment down. If all the people doing tertiary education were thrown onto the labour market, the unemployment rate would skyrocket. As older people retire later, there will be even fewer vacancies for young people. The only solution is to try and keep people studying until they’re about twenty-four – even if they can’t spell words of more than five letters.’

This depressed Grafton somewhat. He ate for a few moments and then broached the other issue that was concerning him.

‘There’s something else I have to talk to you about,’ said Grafton.

‘Mmm,’ said Horton, still eating.

‘I have a friend who is suffering from, shall we say, delusions.’

‘What sort of delusions?’

‘She thinks … she’s a werewolf.’

Horton almost dropped his fork. ‘Someone we know?’ he asked calmly, but clearly trying to recover his composure.

Grafton took a deep breath. ‘It’s the PM,’ he said.

Horton remained very quiet of a moment, his fork hovering idle over the stroganoff. ‘That’s a matter of some concern,’ he said, appearing to Grafton to be visibly shaken. ‘You’d better leave that one with me.’

Then a bell rang to signal that the senators were required back in the Chamber. Grafton mopped up the last vestiges of his meal and hauled himself to his feet.

‘I suppose I’d better go back,’ he said vaguely, as if hoping Mr Horton might grant him a last-minute reprieve.

‘You’d better,’ said Horton. ‘And by the way, you will need to write your maiden speech.’

To Grafton’s dismay, his first afternoon in the Senate was worse than the morning.

With formalities concluded, the Chamber launched into what was apparently the continuation of a debate that had commenced prior to the midyear break. For Grafton, it was rather like coming in on a film halfway through. Despite listening intently to the content of the speeches and accompanying interjections, he could find no clue as to what the legislation was actually about. It struck him for the first time that political debate consisted almost entirely of a universal collection of catch phrases and rhetorical devices that could be applied to any topic at hand. The same arguments and intonations were heard whether the question before the Chamber was to raise the cost of knee-replacement surgery by two dollars or to declare war on New Zealand.

Within half an hour Grafton noticed that several of the old pachyderms on the front bench, sated and sedated by lunch and a couple of wines, had dozed off. He kept wondering when the next break would be, but the debate droned on and on. Terminally bored, he opened the bulky folder and re-read the newspaper story about him. He now saw that the article was paper-clipped to a larger document which was a summary of the financial details of the University of Mangoland. A quick glance at the figures confirmed the impression he had gained from his meeting with the Board: the vast bulk of the university’s expenditure was on administrative salaries, travel expenses and consultancies. He noticed that the entire budget for sessional staff – that is to say, teachers – in the School of Legacy Studies was less than the salary of just one of the seventeen vice-chancellors. The Income section listed monies derived from governments plus a plethora of corporate subsidiaries, the licensing of the University’s name for everything from scalp treatments to sex toys and an amount of some 23 million dollars in relation to something scantily described as ‘Chimera/ABSYS Lease’. He vaguely recalled hearing something about Chimera in relation to research but had no idea what ABSYS was.

Seeing how deeply the university was immersed in private speculative ventures, Grafton realised the impossibility of the task the government had set for itself. No amount of reform could rectify catastrophes such as UniMang. As Professor Annie Angel had said, the only solution would be for the earth to open up and swallow the entire shebang.

Still looking for a way to pass the time, Grafton perused a few of the Bills that were in the folder, but had to stop after just a few pages as he felt his brain calcifying. The thing that most voters did not realise, he thought, is that most of what governments do is incredibly boring. The media focuses on a few emotional touchstones but the real business of government, the bottom nine-tenths of the iceberg, was about issues that were soul-destroyingly, artery-hardening, tissuenecrotisingly dull.

By five-thirty he was angry. There had been no afternoon tea break and his stomach was growling so much it felt like it was about to claw its way out of his torso. He had surreptitiously retrieved the airline biscuits from his pocket and, under the guise of scratching his nose, slipped them into his mouth, but they had barely made a dent. Come six-thirty the Big Ben of his stomach clock was tolling stentoriously. He leaned towards Colin Quince who was not only listening to the debate on the floor but writing copious notes, and whispered, ‘What time do you think we’ll finish?’

‘Oh, it’ll be a late one tonight,’ whispered the eager evangelist. ‘Haven’t even started on the second Bill and there are fifteen amendments to the Sand Mining Equalisation Bill. I’d say we’re here at least until midnight.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Grafton jovially. ‘I’ll just slip out to the Men’s.’

And he left and caught a plane home.