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

your face is as precise as the entry wounds to my abdomen.

Forever yours,

Goblin

‘What the fuck is this?’ Goblin asked, clutching his colostomy bag. I knew I hadn’t got the tone quite right.

‘It’s a letter saying that you love Tash, and you hope she’ll wait for you.’

‘So why didn’t you just say that?’

‘Well, why couldn’t you?’ I said angrily, my pride injured.

Bad move. Instinctively, I began assessing risk: I was trapped in a small cell with a murderous goon, but at least I had the advantage of having both intestines inside me.

‘What the fuck did you say?’

‘I’m just trying to help, Goblin,’ I said. ‘We can massage the language,’ and I smiled apologetically while working out how to rip his waste-bag from his belly if shit got heavy. Not his shit, obviously, but the shit.

‘You can massage my dick, motherfucker.’

His punch was surprisingly quick. And powerful. It fractured my nose and felled me. As I knelt before the toilet bowl, transfixed by the brilliant surge of blood, Goblin gripped my hair and smashed my head upon the bowl’s lip. Repeatedly. Before losing consciousness, I alerted the guards with my hysterical screams.

Penny Hasluck’s appointment as prison governor was controversial. Or it would have been, had anyone known about it. A failed actor whose personal summit was a TV commercial about pet insurance, Penny’s job immediately before Sunshine had been director of a community theatre group.

But during a Senate inquiry into criminal rehabilitation and the state of our prisons, Penny made a public submission detailing his theory that most criminality derived from ‘constipated souls’ that could be liberated with ‘the laxative of dramatic expression’.

This caught the interest of an independent senator, who later demanded that the government experimentally trial Mr. Hasluck as a prison governor in exchange for his decisive support of a bill. The government agreed, on the condition that it not be publicly announced; hands were shaken, and Penny’s first act as governor was to furnish every cell with a copy of Stanislavski’s An Actor’s Handbook.

Recently, after Goblin’s release from hospital, our theatre group officially convened under the tutelage of the governor himself. I joined a dozen prisoners on the pews of our chapel, which Penny had turned into a simple theatre, angering the more pious inmates. He stood onstage beneath a giant crucifix and explained how our adaptation of Scissorhands would benefit our souls — and possibly our chances for parole.

‘Our journey begins,’ he said, ‘with loosening up. With dissolving our inhibitions. For tough guys, this can be hard. I get that. But it’s necessary for our voyage. I want you to embrace vulnerability. I want you to become fluid, while remaining strong. Like a river, gentlemen. And to achieve this, we’re going to start with some improv. Goblin, assume the stage.’

‘Man, what?’

‘Onstage. Now.’

Goblin reluctantly obliged. Penny jumped offstage and sat on the front pew, crossing his legs ostentatiously.

‘Good. Now, you have a chair, a table, a body, and a voice. That might not seem like much. But you know what, Goblin? It’s the whole world. Or it can be with just one more thing: imagination. You see, theatre is alchemy. We transform the mundane into magic. Right now, you have all the ingredients you need. Now what we want is a scene. Garry! What’s our scene?’

‘What?’

‘I need you to offer Goblin a situation. Something dramatic.’

‘Anything?’

‘Anything.’

‘Shit, okay. Ahh …’

‘Hurry, Garry.’

‘Okay, you’re an astronaut, yeah, and you’re going to Mars, but then … but then all these fucken bees escape in your pod and they’re, like, fucken everywhere.’

‘How the fuck—’

‘That’s the scene, Goblin. Go!’

Goblin nervously held his colostomy bag with one hand, while unconvincingly raising his other to suggest desperation. ‘Help, help! There’s fucken bees in here!’

‘End scene! Goblin, that made me physically ill. I didn’t believe any of it. Let’s start with your colostomy bag. It’s an extension of you. It is you. Don’t pretend it’s not there. We can all see it. We need you to see it. Otherwise you’re just dragging a big ol’ hunk of dishonesty behind you like a rusty wagon.’

‘You want me to see the bag?’

‘Bingo.’

‘I can see it, man. Bag’s right here. Attached to my guts. With my shit in it.’

‘There it is! Passion. Right there. It just got real, didn’t it? I can feel you now, Goblin. Okay, you see the bag. Now I need you to own the bag. And I need you to own it without swearing.’

‘You want me to own it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying, hey.’

‘You have a nose, yes?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you have a mouth?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you have hands, fingers, nails?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And do you think about them?’

‘Nah.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about. Your bag’s a part of you now. Own it like your nose, your mouth, your hands. Because the body, Goblin, is the actor’s ultimate tool. And you blunt that tool with self-consciousness.’

‘Okay.’

‘Good. Now, let’s break the scene down. You’re an astronaut?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re proud and gifted.’

‘I guess.’

‘Elite.’

‘Sure, man.’

‘You’re in control. You’ve always been in control. Of your mind, your body. Do you understand, Goblin? You’re a phenomenon of intellectual and physical discipline. And now you’re on the greatest mission of your life — maybe humanity’s greatest mission. And you’re fine with that pressure. In fact, you relish it. You’ve been dreaming about this since you were eight. Goblin?’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s your destiny.’

‘Okay.’

‘But now … BEES! My god, you’ve meticulously planned this mission. But you’ve never planned for this. How could you have planned for a swarm of bees? It’s unthinkable. But they’re here now. Undeniably. In your shuttle, jeopardising your mission. Now … scene!’

‘Ahhh, bees!’

‘Get the fuck off my stage, Goblin.’

Garry says he’s in here because of the ‘farts of fate’, but the Crown says it’s because he held up four servos. For a man who boasts of his intelligence, he’s frustratingly inconsistent when explaining the roots of his criminality. ‘Man is just fucken clay,’ he once told me. ‘Shaped by the gods of genetics, then buggered by the gods of authority.’

But in Sunshine, Garry is a passionate believer in personal agency. If