Sucked In (7 page)

His admin assistant, Del, was busy at her keyboard, fingers flying. ‘Go on in, Murray,' she said, flipping a wrist towards the open door of the inner sanctum.

Thorsen's office overlooked the Gordon Reserve, a triangle of lawn studded with memorials to dead poets and imperial warriors. He was standing at his desk, a massive block of native hardwood incised with an
art nouveau
gum leaf motif. His jacket was draped over the back of his chair and he'd loosened his tie. A cluster of silver-framed photographs was arrayed in a semi-circle on a credenza behind him, family snaps of his barrister wife and their brood of tow-headed children, four at last count. A phone was pressed to his ear.

‘Yup, yup,' he said into the mouthpiece, waving me inside and signalling that I should shut the door. ‘Yup.'

Peter's political base lay on the other side of town, in socially liberal seaside suburbs that had long since traded their working-class credentials for off-the-rack bohemianism, grouchy gentility and rampant property speculation. Our relationship was cordial, but it had yet to be tested where the poop meets the propeller.

He hung up, nodded for me to sit down, ambled across to the window, propped his backside against the sill and stuck his hands in his pockets.

‘Everybody appreciates the job you did with Charlie Talbot, Murray, the funeral arrangements and so forth. It must have been pretty rough.'

‘The least I could do for an old mate.'

‘Big shoes to fill,' he said. ‘You know Phil Sebastian, do you?'

‘We've met in passing,' I said. ‘But I imagine I'll be seeing a lot more of him from now on. Squiring him around the shire, familiarising him with the southerly boroughs of his new fiefdom,' I fluttered a regal hand. ‘Introducing him to the peasantry.'

‘Will the folks in the local branches be welcoming?'

‘There's bound to be some bitching about being taken for granted,' I said. ‘Always is.'

‘Think any of them will feel aggrieved enough to take a tilt?'

I shrugged. ‘Somebody might have a rush of blood to the head, but I doubt they'll go the distance. The result's a foregone conclusion after all, isn't it?'

‘Alan certainly hopes so. The push for a change of leadership is building up steam. Keeping this cross-factional deal on track will be the litmus test of his authority. But if the wheels come off, he'll have laid himself open to a challenge.'

‘Only if there's a challenger,' I said.

A wolfish glint flashed in Thorsen's eyes. Hello, I thought. Could he be making a move at long last?

I looked around, mock furtive, and dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Strictly between you and me, Peter,' I said. ‘Nobody could be worse than Metcalfe. Not even a ponce like you. And if you can cook up a spill, you've got my vote.' I put my hand on my heart. ‘True dinks.'

He gave a sardonic smile. ‘The Murray Whelan seal of endorsement.'

‘But,' I said. ‘Throwing the Coolaroo deal off the tracks, that'll take some doing. You'd need a spoiler candidate, the fly in Metcalfe's ointment.'

‘Do you think there's any chance such a person might emerge?'

‘Anything's possible. Plenty of wannabes out there. What you're after is a kamikaze pilot.'

‘Quinlan has the numbers on the panel, so they'll get creamed in the final count,' he agreed. ‘The important thing is to make a decent showing in the first round, the district plebiscite. The ideal stalking horse would be some local identity with a branch or two up their sleeve.'

The description fitted Mike Kyriakis to a tee.

‘Somebody encouraged to run by a friend in the parliamentary ranks?' I said. ‘A hidden hand to steer him in the right direction.'

‘Precisely. An MP without a vested interest in the current arrangements. Somebody committed to the renewal of the party. Somebody with an eye to the future.'

‘Put away the trowel, Peter,' I said. ‘What's in it for me?'

‘Assuming this all pans out,' he said. ‘How does a shadow ministry sound?'

‘Like a hollow carrot,' I said. ‘More work for very little gain.'

‘But an assured seat at the grown-ups' table when we get back into office.'

‘
If
we get back into office.'

Thorsen smiled placidly, conceding the point. ‘Sooner or later the pendulum will swing back our way. And when it does, we'd better be ready. Not sitting around with cobwebs up our quoit.'

He went back behind his desk, the loyal deputy leader once more. ‘We're speaking hypothetically, of course.'

‘Naturally.'

If Peter had finally decided to take a shot at the boss cockie's job, he was approaching his target at a very acute angle. In all likelihood, he was simply testing the waters, sniffing the wind, flying a kite, laying some pipe. Whatever the case, I felt no pressing temptation to sign up for the ride.

Wait and see, that was the motto emblazoned on my escutcheon. Head down, tail up. There was fuck-all mileage in getting sucked into the machinations of the upper echelons.

Thorsen scrutinised my face with a look of bland innocence. I chuckled, shook my head slowly and stood up.

‘Before you go,' he said. ‘Brian McKechnie is heading off on a study tour of Europe at the end of the month. Looking into export opportunities for the alfalfa industry. We'll need somebody to cover his portfolio.'

‘Agriculture?' I said. ‘What do I know about agriculture?'

‘Messy business, apparently. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.'

I went downstairs to the back door, heading for my office in the prefab annexe behind the House. The Henhouse, we called it. A cool front had arrived from the west, turning the sky into a roiling mass of rain clouds. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and gusts of damp wind whistled across the carpark. As I hunched my shoulders, bracing for the dash, my mobile phone rang.

‘Mr Whelan? It's Kelly Cusack from the ABC. I wonder if you could spare me a moment of your time?'

She was perched on one of the banquettes in the vestibule, a laptop open on her knees, too deeply immersed in her work to cast more than a cursory glance at the comings and goings around her. From time to time, she compressed her telegenic lips and looked up absently, as though hunting an elusive phrase. I ambled past in the slipstream of a tour group, then detoured into the now-empty Queen's Hall, confident that she'd registered my presence.

Thirty seconds later, she found me waiting beside the statue of Victoria Regina, concealed from casual view by the royal plinth. A press pass was clipped to the lapel of her jacket and her laptop case was slung over one shoulder. She was all business.

‘I don't have long,' she said. ‘I'm on a flight back to Canberra at three. Is there somewhere we can go?'

Heavy drapes hung on brass rails across the archways at the back of the hall, separating it from the gallery outside the parliamentary library, an area off-limits to the public. I checked the way was clear, we slipped through the curtains and I led her down a carpeted corridor past the office of the Usher of the Black Rod, closed for lunch. Ten steps along, I pressed my shoulder against a section of the wood panelling. It swung open, revealing the dimly lit chamber of the Legislative Council.

The shop was shut, the portals locked, the lights switched off. A pale wash of daylight spilled through the high transom windows, illuminating the elaborate plasterwork of the barrel-vaulted ceiling and the gilt finials of the Corinthian columns. Reflected off the crimson plush of the benches, it bathed the whole space in a rosy glow. I shepherded the journalist inside and slipped the latch on the door, a discreet hatch used by the clerks when sittings were in progress. Up close, I could smell her perfume, musky and elementally feminine.

My hands found her hips and guided her back against the scalloped canopy of the President's podium. Her peripherals slid to the floor as I took one of her lobes between my lips and sucked her pearl stud.

She pushed me away, hoisted her skirt and peeled off her pantyhose. In the five seconds this took, I shucked off my jacket and tossed it across the back of the President's chair.

With a quick glance to double-check that we were still alone, we went back into our clinch. Her response was eager, a real buttock-gripper. As my lips slid over her cheek, she ran her palms up my chest and ground her hips against me. ‘Is that a ceremonial mace in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?'

Too glad for words, I lunged for her earlobe again, running my hands up the inside of her jacket, one cupping the contents of her cashmere, the other savouring the sexy slither of her back, my fingers splaying as they neared the nape of her neck. ‘The hair,' she squirmed. ‘Don't muss the hair. You know the rules.'

No kissing was the other rule. It played havoc with her lipstick, she said.

Obediently, I slowed my pace, allowing things to take their time, what little time we had. Lust-flushed in the half-light, we gazed glassily into each other's eyes, confirming our mutual understanding of the situation.

This wasn't romance. It was an itch. And by Christ we were scratching it.

‘Saw you at the Premier's casino thing.' My breathing was heavy with anticipation. ‘Not exactly hard news.'

‘Not as hard as something I could name.'

‘Name it,' I begged. ‘Name it.'

She did more than that. She put her mouth to my ear and tendered some encouraging recommendations regarding its employment. My fingers delved beneath her skirt. She was likewise engaged, negotiating a break in my strides. As I found the passage I sought, she seized upon the pressing issue.

‘I hear there's a spill in the offing.'

With a handshake like that, she should have been in politics. She definitely had my vote of confidence. Maintaining her grip on proceedings, she edged towards the despatch table, towing me along behind.

‘You want spill,' I muttered through clenched teeth. ‘Keep glad-handing me like that, I'll give you spill.'

She shoved aside the chief clerk's chair and bent forward across the despatch table, cheek pressed to the baize. ‘Thorsen's almost got the numbers, I hear.' She widened her stance, toes gripping the carpet, fingers curled around the bevelled edge of the hardwood. ‘He's making all sorts of offers, they say. Thinking of putting your hand up?'

Not just my hand. I hefted her skirt, exposing her ivory orbs. My head spun with the sheer recklessness of it, the wanton folly. We could be sprung at any moment. The main doors would burst open and the chief steward would usher in a tour party of school children. It was utter madness. Again I scanned the room, confirming that we were unobserved.

‘Who's this “they”?' My trousered thighs slid forwards into a valley of bare skin.

‘My lips are sealed.'

‘Liar,' I gasped, pressing home my point.

The slap of flesh on flesh, the carnal squish of congress, urgent and rhythmic, ascended to the chandeliers. Regal beasts, the lion and the unicorn, stared speechless from atop the President's podium. Mythic champions brandished their frescoed spears. The locomotive of progress hurtled onward, pistons pumping.

We'd been at this, intermittently, for almost a year. It had begun with a spur-of-the-moment, alcohol-fuelled shag on the fire stairs at the Meridian during some interminable awards dinner, something to do with medicine and the media. She was there to accept a Golden Goitre for a doco on pharmaceutical kickbacks. I was there as the shadow of the Shadow Minister for Health, who was recovering from a colonoscopy.

Introduced at the pre-dinner booze-and-schmooze, we'd let our eyes do the talking across the floral centrepiece during the leek tartlets, given our dates the slip half-way through the pan-seared spatchcock, and found ourselves going the slam against a concrete wall in the emergency exit somewhere between the Most Outstanding Contribution to Obesity Awareness and the Best Jingle in a Cough Suppressant Commercial. Fifteen minutes later, she was stepping onto the stage to accept her trophy, not a hair out of place.

No visible hair, at least. Several of her short and curlies were stuck to the roof of my mouth, a piquant textural counterpoint to the passionfruit panacotta.

Ours was a no-strings, no-promises, no-assumptions arrangement. It suited us both. She was married, I was amenable. If Kelly Cusack needed attention, I was happy to provide it, even at short notice and close quarters. We hardly ever talked politics. Or much else, for that matter. Too busy with the wham-bam.

Although she was fastidious about her appearance and circumspect in regard to our assignations, Kelly had a taste for quickies. What stoked her fire were knee-tremblers in risky locales, situations with a high prospect of having our coitus interrupted in flagrante. Since the episode in the hotel stairwell, we'd abandoned caution in the kitchenette of a corporate box at the tennis centre during the mixed doubles final of the Australian Open, in a fitting cubicle in the Myer menswear department, in the back of an ABC outside-broadcast van and between the buttress roots of a Moreton Bay fig in the Fitzroy Gardens. On the solitary occasion we'd taken a hotel room, she'd unpacked my lunch in the lift on the way upstairs.

But going the goat on the despatch table in the Legislative Council really did redefine the parameters of parliamentary privilege. My heart was thumping. My loins were pumping. My pulse was ringing in my ears. Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring.

Not my pulse. A mobile phone. Close. Very close. Kelly abruptly jack-knifed upright, bucking me off at the exact moment my honourable member reached the climax of his oration.

She dived for her carry-all and tore it open. ‘Helloo,' she warbled, chest heaving. ‘Oh hi, darling.' She rose from the carpet, Eriksson pressed to her baize-burnished cheek. ‘What? No, fine, just run up some stairs, that's all.' She mouthed her husband's name, as if I needed telling. ‘What, right now?'