Read Online The Marmalade Files by Steve Lewis & Chris Uhlmann - Free Book Online Page B

Government.
    And, for once, he was pretty sure it was true – because he’d received plenty of help from inside her tent.

June 22, 2011
    The soft melody of Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’ washed over him with its gentle three-chord arpeggio, a slow rhapsody in blue. Another Canadian songsmith, k.d. lang, had taken it to a higher place, caressed it with her rich chocolate lilt. Harry Dunkley loved the barefoot chanteuse and her ventures into the melancholy, a place he knew well. He was not about feeling sorry for himself but there were moments, quiet times like these, when he would reflect on what life had thrown up, the regrets that gnawed away. Now, with a glass of red in his hand, tired and frustrated after another day doing battle with a government intent on total control, it brought on memories he fought to forget.
    Sydney’s State Theatre – 1992? ’93? They’d held hands tight, just the two of them, in love for the first time, or was it the last? He’d promised a lifetime of happiness as they’d taken the vows, a garden wedding with a celebrant, some distant relative with a trilling voice that had given them the giggles.
    But Belle had left the national capital four years ago, for a new life away from politics and the wreckage of their marriage. She’d grown bored with Canberra, bored with him, sick of eating alone in their Red Hill home with its neat brick-and-tile symmetry, much like every other residence in the city’s inner south.
    After she’d fled he’d gone looking to fill the hole, testing other warm bodies against his own, but casual flings had never really satisfied him. Canberra was a city dedicated to the transient relationship, with its Parliament full of cheating hearts and daily lies. His brief loveless efforts to satisfy a yearning that could not be met had convinced him: he wanted none of it.
    Besides, work had always been his deepest passion, his finest affair; the constant calls for ‘the splash’ from the news desk, the need to try and stay a step ahead of the competition. The press gallery had once soared with an esprit de corps born of a conviction that they were defending democracy, taking on the bastards, fulfilling an important role in a free country. But these days most of the bureaus resembled bank offices, with diligent tellers churning through work like automatons, counting the bucks, making it all tally, taking orders from the government of the day, waiting for the truck to back up.
    Ah, he hated the soulless parade, the battery-hen mentality.
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    Feeling a little dirty for allowing himself to indulge in a silent rant against the decline of the free political press, Harry’s melancholic nostalgia took a right-hand turn out of the gallery and up the highway to Sydney.
    Gaby had left another message, this one a notch up on last week’s. She needed his help with some university assignment and was unimpressed that he’d ignored her pleas, not for the first time. He made a mental note to call her in the morning, began practising an apology he’d learned so well. ‘Sweetheart, sorry, so sorry …’
    Why did his interactions with her always make him feel like a lousy dad? He would lay down his life for her, his angel. She knew that. They shared a mutual talent for teasing each other, sensing each other’s vulnerabilities and, occasionally, overstepping the mark. The flipside of that edgy intimacy was the joy of their cryptic calls, their secret word games. That intellectual connection with his daughter made him feel special. Protected. Alive. He loved her with all his flawed heart.
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    Dunkley’s apartment, if it could be called that, was located at the back of a large blond-brick home in Canberra’s inner south, owned by a retired couple, and a convenient drive to Parliament along the twisting maze of back roads.
    It was comfortable enough, one decent-sized bedroom and another,