The Speechwriter, Martin McKenzie-Murray [distant reading TXT] 📗

‘That’s just how she speaks, mate.’]

‘The heart is a muscle.’

‘Do you want to hear this story or not?’

‘I want you to quicken your pace.’

‘Okay, so it’s closing time at the Thumb, but the cow folk say that there’s this other place — “just 20 minutes away, we can give you a lift”. And I mean, you’d call it a night now, right? But it’s Goodsy’s call, all eyes are on him, and he wants more risk and more liquid, so the three amigos climb in the ute’s tray and get a ride to The Tweed Pussy.

‘The five of them enter, which immediately doubles the number of people in the place. They’re not gonna be open for long, but happily the two chaperones — the cow folk — are regulars at The Tweed, and they order four jugs of piss, and some salt and vinegar chips.’

‘Okay.’

‘Are you with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not sure that you are. The next premier is in The Tweed Pussy at 1.05am with a cracked bowl of chips and four jugs of lager. Nothing good happens there after 1am, Toby. And these people aren’t his friends. None of them. Not the cow folk. Not the ones who’ve known him for twenty years. You know what they are?’

‘What?’

‘Spectators.’

‘I’m still waiting for the scandal.’

‘Mate, if it was just a scandal, I’d have told you by now. What I’m giving you is a tragedy.’ Emily sipped her pint slowly again. ‘So the four jugs are emptied hurriedly, and the five of them are playing bad pool when Goodsy conceives the second test.’

‘What is it?’

‘The loser of the next game must stand on the pool table, nominate a pocket, and piss in it.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Uh-huh. So the game’s played and lost by one of Goodsy’s old mates, who’s now obliged to defile the table. Reluctantly, he does so. Glimpsing this obscenity, the indignant owner takes the offender’s legs out with a broom and expels the men from the pub. Now what? Home? Please. Onwards! To the farm! It’s only gonna be once that you take the next premier home. And Goodsy doesn’t want to let the team down. He’d rather be liked than respected. Not that he’s not enjoying himself. But, Toby?’

‘What?’

‘The abyss beckons. So they fly recklessly down narrow country roads. The three amigos are in the back, bellowing, sucking marrow from the bone—’

‘Wait, where’d the bone come from?’

‘It’s a metaphor, Toby. The bone’s life, the marrow its raw pleasures.’

‘I see.’

‘So Goodsy jumps out at the farm’s gate, opens it, and watches the ute snake up the hill to the house. The next premier follows on foot, traipsing through mud, his pants wet, filthy. Reunited with the four on the farmstead’s verandah, he takes the bottle of bourbon that’s offered, swigs it, and says, “Lotta fucking cows you got here”. Which is true. There’s a lotta fucking cows. And one of the custodians of these noble beasts, he says, “You should see the cocks on these bastards.” And so Goodsy gets his idea: the ultimate finale.’

‘So what’s he do?’

‘He reminds the boys of The Slalom, of course. Says they haven’t fulfilled its obligations. So they say, “What do you have in mind?” And he says, “Let’s toss a coin. Loser sucks a cow’s dick.” And his old mates laugh, while the farm folk say that a cow doesn’t have a dick on account of it being female. And Goodsy pulls out a coin, tosses it high in the air, and tells his mate to call it. “Tails,” his mate says, and, funnily enough, it’s a fucking head. So Goodsy says, “Shit.” And everyone laughs, no-one believing that the next premier is actually going to fellate livestock. But off he staggers, towards the abyss, the four following, laughing, but then, incredulous, they realise … Jesus Christ Almighty.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘They filmed it.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘The election’s ours.’

‘What if he’s not well?’

‘Then we win.’*

[* Garry says that bestiality is ‘no laughing matter’, and he’s reminded me that he recently bashed a prisoner who was convicted of ‘buggering a Peruvian llama’.]

A meeting was called in the Premier’s office with the dirt squad and key staff. ‘What do we do with this cow fucking,’ the chief-of-staff said. She sat commandingly at the head of the table, strongly giving the impression that no-one would leave the room until there was a satisfactory response to this cow-fucking business. This was my first time in the room, and I was thrilled to be here, even if the context wasn’t quite Sorkin-esque.

‘Let’s define our terms here,’ the media adviser said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked the chief-of-staff.

‘We know what it is, but what do we call it? It’s beneath the dignity of the Premier’s office to refer to it as “cow-fucking”. We need to push this information out, but not reveal that we have, nor can we refer to the act by its more … colloquial descriptions.’

‘Plausible deniability,’ David said solemnly.

‘Fuck me,’ the chief-of-staff said. ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. So let’s get this straight. The first question is: do we push this out at all, and if so, how do we do it? The second question, dependent upon the first, is: how do we respond once the story is picked up by the press? Let’s not answer the second until we have a response to the first.’

‘We can gut him,’ David said, his tongue flashing excitedly. ‘Push it out, call a press conference, and denounce this cow-fucker as a disgrace against God.’

‘Did he actually fuck a cow?’ the policy director asked. ‘I’m still getting my head around this.’

I hadn’t anticipated saying anything, but I thought everyone was way off on bovine gender. ‘He didn’t fuck a cow,’ I said. ‘A cow is the female. He blew a bull.’

‘A bull,’ the policy director repeated thoughtfully.

‘We could give this to Steve,’ the media adviser said. Steve was the chief political reporter on the daily paper, and our grateful launderer of strategic leaks.

‘What would we give him, exactly?’