The People, of course, were assumed to be People Like Themselves. The possibility that The People might elect a narcissistic megalomaniac, ultraconservative, impulsive, unstable demagogue was never anticipated.
Until the election of Ronald Thump in the United States.
It was in this political atmosphere that Prime Minister Scott Braggadocio won an election by promising to restart the transition to a republic.
Braggadocio was in fact the sixth PM Australia had had in five years though, to be fair, he had been three of them. Due to an over-reliance on surveys and a total absence of brains and courage, his party had changed leaders five times since Grafton was in the Senate. The Prime Minister at that time, Nina Poundstone, had been toppled in a partyroom coup instigated by Scott who was himself replaced six months later by a stone-faced politician called Mort Thanatos. When polls showed voters would rather emigrate to Somalia than vote for Thanatos, he was replaced by a Christian Outreach moral crusader called Phil Andrews who earned the nickname of ‘Phil Anderer’ when his affair with a Victoria’s Secret model became somewhat less than secret. Scott returned for a third time and won an electoral victory on the promise of another referendum.
His optimism that the time was right arose from the fact that the Queen had finally abdicated in favour of her son Charlie, a blow which changed the attitudes of monarchists considerably. For a while they retained their resolve, certain that the Queen, though in her nineties, would reverse her abdication when she saw the kind of king Charlie would turn out to be. However, she did not change her mind and King Charlie – or ‘KFC’ as he came to be known (the ‘F’ being left up to your imagination) – continued to reign.
In the lead-up to the referendum, the Direct Election lobby campaigned for an elected President by dangling the possibility of a celebrity filling the role. They invited voters to imagine President Blanchett, or President Jackman, President Farnham or even President Barnes. Despite these tantalising prospects, when it came to the day, because of the shock waves still reverberating from the Thump presidency in the US, The People voted by a narrow margin for the Appointment Model. This was a relief to the Parliament but also a concern, for they realised they now bore the onus of selecting a President and would be punished in the polls if they picked the wrong one.
So it was that Grafton Everest, the person calculated by the members of both the House and the Senate to be least likely to impose any kind of ideological agenda, or indeed any agenda at all, found himself appointed to be Australia’s first independent Head of State.
None of which mattered very much to Grafton at the moment. What was troubling him most, as he stood trying to examine his physiognomy, was that he seemed to be going blind.
And deaf.
And losing his memory.
In other words, Grafton had been struck all of a sudden by the awful possibility that he was getting old.
*
Grafton waddled down the stairs in his tracksuit pants, still bare from the waist up, looking like a large Humpty Dumpy egg perched on a too-small blue egg cup, and made his way to the kitchen where he slumped down at the table. His wife Janet was at the bench making a salad.
‘That’s an interesting look,’ she said, glancing at him.
‘I can’t find anything to wear,’ he said sulkily. ‘Everything’s too small.’
‘Or, alternatively, perhaps my darling, you’re too big,’ said Janet. ‘Maybe if you ate more food like this …’
She gestured to the meal she was preparing.
Grafton looked at the salad and winced.
‘I would have to eat a metric tonne of that to fill me up.’
‘Well, have you considered that perhaps it’s the filling up part that’s the problem?’ Janet suggested politely.
‘Anyway, my weight is the least of my problems. My eyes are failing,’ groaned Grafton.
‘Well, that’s all the better reason to go to the optometrist,’ Janet replied.
‘And my hearing is going,’ he added.
‘All the better reason to go to the audiologist.’
‘And I think my memory is going …’
‘All the better …’ Janet began but Grafton cut her off.
‘Will you stop sounding like the wolf in Red Riding Hood,’ he wailed. ‘The point is, I don’t know what’s happening to me.’
‘It’s simple, darling: you’re getting old,’ said Janet calmly, sprinkling some pine nuts and currants onto the bowl of greens as she blithely confirmed his fears. ‘You’ll be sixty-five at Christmas; that’s about the age when things start to break down.’
It had always been one of Janet’s characteristics to show the truth no mercy.
Grafton looked at his wife, who was still tall and slim and very attractive. ‘Why haven’t you aged?’
‘I have, my darling, I assure you. Though I’m flattered that you don’t think so.’
‘But you don’t wear glasses or have a hearing aid …’
‘I do wear glasses. For reading. I wear them every night in bed. Haven’t you noticed?’ asked Janet in surprise.
Grafton frowned. The truth was he had never noticed. Or noticed but not really taken it in. Or taken it in but forgotten he had taken it in. ‘Yes, of course, but you don’t need them for anything else.’
‘I don’t do anything else except for my bird watching,’ she said. ‘And for that, I have binoculars.’
It was indeed the case that failing eyesight had forced Janet to relinquish her former intricate creative activities such as fabric and pencil art and become not only a ‘birder’ but a ‘twitcher’ – one intent on seeing as many new and rare species of birds as possible. As a result, she had been abandoning Grafton for whole weekends to tramp through the Blue Mountains, searching for birds with designations such as ‘ticks’, ‘lifers’ and ‘cripplers’.
To Grafton, these descriptions sounded like people he had worked with at the university.
But all this only strengthened his current case. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘birdwatching. Hiking through the bush, up hill and down dale, further proof you’re in perfect health.’
‘I wouldn’t say perfect,’ said Janet, opening a small box on the kitchen bench and taking out an assortment of pill containers which she stood in a row. ‘I take this one for cholesterol, this one for reflux, this one for calcium, this one is for iron, this a general vitamin supplement for older women, this is my thyroid supplement, this one for arthritis and this one is a hormone replacement.’
Grafton stared in surprise at the row of containers. ‘I had no idea you took all those.’
‘Well, now you do,’ said Janet, putting the pills back in the little box which Grafton had also never noticed before, probably because his trips to the kitchen always took the form of a beeline to the refrigerator. He was annoyed to discover that Janet took this battery of pills, since he took no medication at all and that seriously undermined his quest for sympathy.