Part 22 (1/2)

'On the campaign, love. We all thought we were headed for another uneventful sitting week, so most of them didn't have time to pack up their desks or kiss their families goodbye.'

I spotted a cluttered desk with a pinky sparkly-framed photograph of Maddy on a horse. It made sense that she rode, being from the country, but then she never spoke about it. We'd never spoken much about anything other than politics and even then only the politics of the day, yet I felt like we were bosom buddies with the kind of kins.h.i.+p it would take years to cultivate in normal circ.u.mstances.

'That's Luke's office,' said Beryl, pointing to a room with a door. He too was a mystery.

The phone rang. 'Wait here,' she said, running to get it.

Inside Luke's office, a mahogany-framed legal qualification hung on a white wall. Three ties-one a gaggle of yellow smiley faces-dangled from a wire coathanger on the doork.n.o.b. A novelty Magic 8 Ball weighed down a pile of paper in his in-tray. Next to the door was a finger-painting of a house, a cat, two big people and one small person. By Dan Harley. Grade 1A.

Dan Harley?

Dan Harley?

I went to find Beryl. 'Is that painting by Luke's neph-'

'I'm sorry, he's not in the office at the moment. Can I pa.s.s on a message?' She pointed to the microphone on her headset and scribbled me a note. Debate prep mtg. First door on left.

I walked into the large, hospital-green room which was full of faces-some familiar, some not. Theo, who stood pen in hand at a whiteboard, came to greet me.

'Roo, you look like s.h.i.+t.'

'Thanks for your honesty, Theo.'

'Let me introduce you to everyone.' He started with an enormously pregnant lady, the kind you want to follow around with a mop and bucket in case she erupts. 'I'd like you to meet Senator Sasha Flight. She's expecting twins.'

'In case Roo couldn't tell,' she said warmly, attempting to fasten a flimsy cardigan around her impressive circ.u.mference.

Theo moved around the room. 'This is Joel Tobin. Joel is from the Shadow Treasurer's office.' He couldn't have been a day older than eighteen, but I tried not to let this distract me. 'Meadow here works for the Shadow Health Minister,' Theo said of a severe, matronly lady. 'And you know Archie.'

Archie pulled up a chair for me next to him. I poured myself a cup of tea.

'Roo Stanhope is a financial policy advisor,' said Theo. Not that there's any evidence of it, I thought. 'She's been out on the campaign trail since it began and has her finger on the pulse.'

How are you going to blag your way through this one, Ruby?

'As we know,' said Theo, 'the debate will be broadcast live from the Great Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Channel Eleven, with that mindless, narcissistic himbo as compere.'

'Oscar Franklin?' I asked, praying I was wrong.

'That's the one,' laughed Senator Flight. 'Pretty Boy.'

s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t.

'There will be a coin toss to decide which candidate will speak first. The candidate who loses will make an opening statement of no longer than three minutes, followed by the other candidate. Pretty Boy will then invite the five panel members to ask two questions each. The candidates will have thirty seconds to answer each question and thirty seconds to rebut before the compere silences them. Each candidate will be given two minutes to make a closing statement. In a nearby studio, audience members will rate the candidates contemporaneously, and television audiences will see a smiley face feature at the bottom of their screens, showing the studio audience's response. Franklin will then join the studio audience and facilitate a discussion about the event.'

'Can the candidates see the smiley faces?' asked Meadow.

'No,' said Theo. 'No one in the Great Hall will be able to see the smiley faces until they watch a playback.'

'Are we having a live audience?' asked the senator.

'Yes, mainly staff members, MPs, family and friends.' Theo removed his mismatched cufflinks and rolled up his sleeves. 'Now I suggest we start brainstorming our opening statement.'

When the delivery boy arrived, it was midnight and we still had a solid four hours ahead of us. It was like rehearsing a university stage production. The senator, who had a knack for cutting questions, took the role of media panel, resting a pizza box on the camel hump that housed her twins. Theo did the LOO with such precision that, from outside the room, Beryl thought we had Max on speakerphone. Meadow played the Prime Minister, and Archie acted as compere. Joel and I finetuned language on the whiteboard.

At dawn, we adjourned for a quick tea break. Curled up on one of the reception sofas, I rolled two joints from tissues-a plug for each leaking nostril-and listened to the army of goose-stepping clocks until I was having a nightmare about the crocodile from Peter Pan.

'Rise and s.h.i.+ne, Roo,' chirped Beryl to the s.a.d.i.s.tic flicker and hum of fluorescent bulbs as she switched on the lights and spread the day's newspapers on the coffee table. 'It's almost eight, darl, and you've got a teleconference in five minutes.'

'b.o.l.l.o.c.ks.' I removed the crusty joints from my nose and s.h.i.+elded my burning eyes from the lights. When they'd adjusted, I sat up to glance at the front pages.

IMMIGRATION POLICY HITS MASTERS WHERE IT HURTS, said the Queenslander. BRENNAN CLIMBS THE POLLS, said the Herald.

'Racist p.r.i.c.ks,' said Theo, reading over my shoulder.

'Who?'

'The three per cent of voters who have ditched us since the last poll was taken. You've got dried snot on your face and, no offence, but you look even worse than you did yesterday.'

'Your fly's undone and you're older than my dad.'

He blushed and zipped himself. 'Thanks.' He tucked the Herald under his arm and whistled his way to the gents. I dialled into the teleconference. Di was the only one there.

'How you feeling, Roo?'

'Horrendous.'

'Go into the press office,' she yawned.

I waddled to the end of the corridor and into an open-plan office littered with newspapers and more television screens than the White House Situation Room.

'Go to the desk in the far-left corner with the Special K on it. Open the top drawer and help yourself.'

'Are you some sort of chemist kleptomaniac?' I rummaged through her impressive stash. There were tubs of multivitamins, tampons galore, Lemsip sachets, eyedrops by the bucket load, yards of dental floss, enough whitening strips to make-over a whale, packets of lozenges and every kind of fast-acting a.n.a.lgesic imaginable.

'Now joining...' The recorded teleconference voice interrupted us. 'Luke and Max,' said a raspy Luke from Townsville. Archie joined me on speaker. Theo dialled in from the gents.

'Di, can you kick us off?' asked Luke.

'Sure. The skilled immigration thing has gone down about as well as an impromptu Bar Mitzvah at a mosque in Tehran. We've failed to communicate the need for skilled foreigners when so many Australians are out of work. The government has taken the populist low road by silently siding with the kinds of morons we saw protesting in Darwin.'

'That's just bulls.h.i.+t,' said Theo. 'The core of our policy is to get people out of the driver's seats of taxis and into the specialist jobs they're trained for, like health or IT. This will help fill our skills gap, which will increase our productivity.'

'Di's not suggesting there's anything wrong with the policy, Theo,' said a fatigued Luke. 'She's just saying we f.u.c.ked up communicating it. We're back down to the two-party-preferred result we had at the beginning of the campaign.'

We didn't need to see the LOO's face to know the demoralising effect the poll was having on him. 'I'm getting calls from every marginal-seat candidate in the country,' Max said. 'Punters are telling them that they're not going to come over to us unless we roll over on the immigration issue.'