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

When we arrived at my uncle’s, my cousin offered me a bowl of finely powdered sherbet. WizzFizz is crack cocaine to a child, and my parlous condition couldn’t keep me from heaving the stuff into my mouth. My parents didn’t notice. Mother had made a beeline for the chardonnay; Father was desperately cleaning the interior of Winston with vinegar and beach towels.

Effervescent and volatile, the sherbet combined explosively with my gut virus, sparking an intestinal version of nuclear fission. I ran crying to the bathroom, clutching for moral strength the plastic machine-gun my uncle had given me on behalf of Santa. I was there for half an hour, buffeted by shame and convulsions.

When I emerged, everyone was sitting around the kitchen table. My mother and uncle were ashing obliviously on the coleslaw, while my cousin noisily chewed the heads off G.I. Joe dolls. A chook roasted in the oven.

My uncle was an indifferent Catholic, but nonetheless saw in the celebration of Christ’s birth a reason to drink even more vigorously than usual. In the corner of the kitchen grew an unstable pyramid of crushed beer cans. My mother kept pace with wine.

My father sat morosely, nursing cognac and muttering about the vulgarity of convicts. Work was his refuge from his family, and he usually had no problem asking to be rostered for Christmas Day. But not this year. ‘Dear boy, let’s have you a shower and some fresh lineaments,’ he said to me. I think he was grateful for an excuse to leave the kitchen.

When we returned, my father requested that his brother-in-law relax his obnoxious monopoly of the stereo system. ‘Preferably for Bach’s cello suites,’ my father said, but my uncle insisted upon the thirtieth rotation of Whispering Jack. John Farnham’s album had been out for years now, but was yet to release my uncle from its bondage. His favourite song was ‘You’re the Voice’, which seemed to be about finding the courage to defy some unspecified oppression. But sung by my uncle with frightening volume and incoherence, the song became terribly oppressive for my father.

Christmas can invite bleak reflection, and my father had plenty. His dreams were dead; his scandalous estrangement from aristocracy complete. Once alluring to my mother, his ambitions were now a poisonous joke. More immediately, Winston’s upholstery was ruined, his son incontinent, and he was in the company of a drunk plumber in a filthy bungalow. John Farnham was the final straw. When ‘Take the Pressure Down’ came on, my father slammed his glass and made for the stereo. ‘You know, old boy,’ he said to my uncle, ‘I do believe I’m going to take the pressure up,’ and he seized the stereo, lifted it above his head, then smashed it into a hundred pieces.

‘You shouldn’t have done that, mate,’ my uncle said, shaken from his pissed stupor.

‘I needed relief,’ my father replied.

‘You owe him a new fucking stereo,’ my mother said matter-of-factly.

‘That music is unholy,’ my father said.

My cousin coughed up a soldier’s head.

‘That’s gonna cost ya, mate,’ my uncle said to my father. Then he turned to me. ‘Toby?’

‘Yes?’

‘Where’s your gun?’

‘In the bathroom.’

‘Go get it, buddy.’

I did.

‘What are you doing?’ my mother asked her brother.

‘Something you two should’ve already done,’ he said. ‘Toby?’

‘Yes?’

‘I bought that gun.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I bought it from the shops, mate. Not Santa.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

He took the gun’s receipt from his wallet. ‘And that shit-stained book there?’

‘It’s Churchill’s speeches.’

‘I don’t care what it is. But your weird dad bought it.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Don’t do this,’ my mother said.

‘He did, Toby. And do you know why he bought it?’

‘Don’t you fucking do this,’ my mother warned.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because there’s no Father Christmas, mate. Okay? No laughing fat man gave me that stereo, which I worked like a fucking dog for, and no laughing fat man gave you that gun, Toby. Because the laughing fat man doesn’t fucking exist. We made him up.’

I was prepared to refute this slander until I caught the embarrassed look of my parents. Their strangely contorted faces and averted gazes confirmed it for me, and while I was ignorant of transport logistics, now that I thought about it, the acquittal of a global consignment of presents by one man in one night did seem pretty unlikely.

I vomited.*

[* ‘He shouldn’t have done that, your uncle. What he should’ve done is jammed the volume knob right up your dad’s arsehole, put a steak knife to his throat, and taught him the fucken lyrics. Those songs are woven into this country’s cultural fucken tapestry, mate. But what your uncle shouldn’t have done is rob your sense of wonder. Can’t put a price on that. More valuable than rubies or hash oil.’]

I was drafting my maiden speech when mother’s arrival in my bedroom was announced by a cloud of smoke. ‘How many times must I say this, Toby?’ she said. ‘Stop cutting up the fucking cereal packets before they’re finished.’

She had a point. I was making palm cards for my first political speech, and, having agonised over multiple drafts, I’d destroyed most of the kitchen’s boxes. Not only boxes of cereal, but of biscuits, lasagne sheets, and her four litres of goon. It hadn’t occurred to me to first draft the speech on paper. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘Whatever you’re doing isn’t healthy. All the other kids are outside kicking balls.’

But what could be more important than my first political campaign? While my peers were measuring their dicks, I was sharpening my tongue. And the stakes were high — nothing less than their liberation from the infantilising hoax of Father Christmas.

I’d built a literal soapbox from the scrap timber in my father’s shed, and now I was preparing my first speech. That’s how I had responded to my uncle’s cruel revelation. For a week after, I was so shocked that I wandered the house as if moving through treacle. There were too many memories that required painful reconfiguration. Too many gifts whose provenance required amendment.

But