The Second Cure Read online

  The reality was he probably would get away with it, and with much more. Uniquely among Australian states, Queensland had no upper house – it had spectacularly voted itself out of existence in 1922 – so when a government had a hefty majority in the Legislative Assembly it could become a law unto itself, and frequently was.

  If Brigid leant forwards over the railing and risked a crick in her neck, she could see the speaker down to the right, with Effenberg seated to his left, flanked by his bulging majority. Fortunately, she was sitting next to the monitor, which allowed a far easier view. On the other side of the void, in the VIP section of the public gallery, Brigid spotted a familiar figure. It was Marion Effenberg, there perhaps to watch her husband in action now he was premier. She was with her son, Grunge-Jesus. They were silent and intent.

  The speaker announced that Question Time would conclude in precisely an hour. The circus had begun. The first question was from the leader of the opposition, who asked a rambling question of the premier. Effenberg stood, walked to the dispatch box and simply replied, ‘No,’ before returning to his seat, much to the chortling delight of his government members. The speaker next called on one of Effenberg’s backbenchers, an uninspiring flunky from Mackay by the name of O’Daley.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Speaker. My question without notice is directed to the premier of this proud state.’

  This’ll be a Dorothy Dixer, Brigid knew, a question set up in advance to allow Effenberg to talk on a subject of his own choosing.

  O’Daley read stumblingly from a note he doubtless didn’t even write himself. ‘Is the premier aware of the rate of abortions undertaken in public hospitals in Queensland, which is currently approximately sixteen thousand five hundred a year, which comes to nearly fifty babies a day being killed, and, if so, does he have any plans to do anything about it?’

  Abortion. It hadn’t taken long for Effenberg to get that back on the agenda. She exchanged glances with the journalist sitting next to her, who raised her eyebrow. Brigid drew her phone from her bag to post to her followers.

  .@PremEffenberg talking abortion. Watch this space. #QLDQT#QLDPOL

  Effenberg walked slowly back to the dispatch box, a deep frown dividing his forehead. He paused, as if emotionally troubled. ‘I thank the honourable member for his question. And, yes, I am aware, and yes, it saddens me beyond words. How have we, as a society, so lost our way? How have we strayed so far from the path of goodness, or morality? How have we become a society so obsessed by pleasure and selfishness and dissolute lifestyles? Mr Speaker, I wish I knew. But one thing I do know is that the government has a role in this, a role in putting this state back on the path, and that is what we propose to do. My government will tighten the rules on abortion. We will not tolerate women taking the easy way out. We will not allow them to use murder as a form of contraception.’ There were boos from the opposition, but they were drowned out by the ‘hear hears’ from Effenberg’s side. Brigid’s fingers flew over her phone’s display.

  .@PremEffenberg foreshadows legislation. Criminalisation? #QLDQT#QLDPOL #abortion

  ‘Oh, yes, I can see the Honourable Leader of the Opposition looking horrified, Mr Speaker. Looking horrified. Well, I say to him, Mr Speaker, and I say to those opposite, the real horror is the carnage of thousands of dead babies! The real horror is the dissolution of standards the leader of the opposition presided over when he stood where I stand now. Well, let the leader of the opposition understand, Mr Speaker, let him understand that his day has passed. He’s not in charge any longer, and the days of pandering to the feminists, to the homosexuals, to the drug addicts and the tree-huggers, to the militant unionists and the Aborigines on the public teat, and the student radicals and the criminal bikie gangs – those days are over. They are over, Mr Speaker. This week my government will introduce bills to combat the scourge of immorality. Watch this space, Mr Speaker. Watch this space.’

  He returned to his seat, ignoring the uproar on the other side of the house, nodding in acknowledgement of the applause from his MPs. Around Brigid, journalists were typing at speed, on laptops, on phones. Others hurried out of the gallery to file articles. Across the chamber, Marion was watching them intently. Of course she was. Effenberg’s performance was aimed entirely at the media. ‘Feeding the chooks,’ as one of his predecessors once said. Marion was checking to see if they were eating, and they were. They were gobbling it up.

  Brigid returned to her phone. She checked her notifications. Over thirty reposts of her abortion comments already. Effenberg might not face much of an opposition here inside parliament, but out there in the world? He was in for a hell of a fight, and Brigid would cover every moment of it. She couldn’t wait.

  She looked across at Marion again. Now she was looking directly at Brigid, an icy, slightly amused stare that spoke of – what? A challenge? Victory? A threat? Brigid tried to maintain eye contact, but broke first, feeling unsettled. She blinked, defeated, and busied herself with her phone. Effenberg might be premier, but this woman’s power was beyond mere office.

  18.

  Sydney

  The irises helped a little. They would be the centrepiece of the main display, she decided. Their white and purple would be set off by the dark lavender and the ivy foliage, and there was no risk of a clash with the red of the altar cloth. Winnie always avoided pinks and oranges together, but unfortunately others on the roster had no such scruples. Last Sunday, she’d scarcely been able to pay attention to the service, so appalled was she by the competing hues. The combination of crimson and apricot had nauseated her, setting off a buzzing in her brain, and she went home with a thumping headache. Even thinking of it turned her stomach sour and she forced herself to concentrate on the soothing deep mauve.

  She settled on the step beneath the font and laid the blooms out on newspaper, ready to trim the stems. The enormous crystal vases were sparkling clean, filled with water and seasoned with a dash of flower food. They were heirlooms belonging to Tricia. Everyone thought she’d donated them to St Anne’s, but she always referred to them as ‘my vases’, so it seemed they might have been a temporary gift. Perhaps she’d found out how much they were worth and changed her mind. Snipping the flower stems, arranging the blooms: something Winnie had done for decades, sitting here at this very spot. These had been among the times in her life when she had been at her most serene. The silence of the old stone building, the sunlight catching the colours of the stained-glass windows, the perfect solitude, the scent of the flowers and the leaves. Here in this church where her husband had long ago been the priest she had had her moments of greatest completeness and fulfilment. Here she’d been married. Here Richard and Brigid had been baptised. Here her husband had been laid to rest. Here she’d felt God, deep within her being, even during this most mundane of tasks.

  But not today. Not last week. Not for a long time now. The church was simply a building, slightly decrepit, needing new guttering, the air inside it dusty with decay. The flowers were magnificent, but it was just a superficial, earthly beauty. It meant nothing more, not as it once had.

  The absence was so strong as to be a presence. The sickening buzzing in her head returned and she felt bile in her throat.

  Winnie dropped the sprig of lavender she was holding and stood. ‘Where are you?’ she cried out to the silence. ‘Where are you? Why have you gone?’ Her words echoed through the nave.

  Nothingness. A nothingness that chilled her to her core. She stood there in the emptiness. Not even tears would come. She walked slowly up to the altar.

  ‘Why?’ she repeated, just a whisper now.

  The front doors of the building swung open with a wrench and a bang, and she started.

  ‘Ah, Winnie, I was hoping I’d catch you. I was pottering around the garden this morning and I thought, Oh, these are just too good not to use this weekend. By next week they’ll be past their prime …’ It was Tricia Townsend, bustling in with bucket full of pink hydrangeas. ‘I’ve already trimmed them and seared the
stems, so they’re ready to pop in.’ She bore down on the vases.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Tricia, but I’ve already –’

  ‘Oh, they look so pretty with the lavender!’ She plonked a fat hydrangea head in the middle of the lavender. There was no question, of course, that they were beautiful hydrangeas. They were, indeed, from a plant near those Winnie had raided three nights earlier. She wondered briefly and with a flash of guilt if Tricia had noticed the pruning. She must have, surely. Not just guilty. Annoyed. She wanted a reaction from Tricia, something to wipe that self-satisfaction off her bland, vacuous face.

  Perhaps Tricia picked up something from Winnie’s expression, for she frowned and looked earnestly at her. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Winnie couldn’t trust herself to speak. Of course she minded, of course she loathed Tricia’s flowers and her lack of taste and her tedious chatter and her stupid hair and her infantile god and … Winnie forced her teeth into the flesh inside her cheek to stop herself from answering, and felt a spurt of blood against her tongue. She swallowed and felt its metal taste diffuse through her body as she tried to suppress her roiling rage.

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ asked Tricia. ‘You’ve been looking a little peaky lately, if you don’t mind my saying. Vitamin D deficiency, perhaps? Lot of it about.’

  She kept rabbiting on about who knows what as she fussed about with the hydrangeas. Winnie switched to automatic, snipping and placing her flowers, working faster than normal, determined to get out of there as soon as she could. Finally, they were done, and Winnie carried one of the vases to the plinth by the pulpit. Tricia’s voice was just noise now, melding with the buzzing and the blood and bile. Vision blurred, Winnie felt the step slide away beneath her foot.

  She fell back and the vase flew up above her, the flowers and water soaring free. As her ankle twisted and her spine and head thudded on the tile below, she saw the stems and the droplets rain down on her. The heavy vase landed by her left shoulder and shattered in a crashing rainbow. Then the world went grainy and dark.

  When she tried to sit up, her palm was pierced by a shard from the demolished vase. She winced. It wasn’t deep, but the pain was sharper than that in her ankle. She became aware of an ache in the side of her head where it must have hit the ground as she landed. The church spun around her. Tricia was there, gazing down.

  ‘Stay there, I’m ringing an ambulance,’ ordered Tricia, and Winnie lay back helplessly, marooned in water, scattered flowers and shattered crystal. She stared up into the rafters of the building, seeing them from this angle for the first time. There was a spider’s web in a far corner, and she wondered how long it had been there, and then she wondered if she was in shock. She had started to shiver.

  Tricia repeated the address to the ambulance dispatcher and hung up. Brushing aside broken shards, she knelt beside Winnie and took her hand. ‘They won’t be long, dear, don’t you worry. And don’t worry about the vase: I’m sure we’ll be able to take a collection to replace it. We’ll hunt down a match …’ She patted Winnie’s hand and Winnie closed her eyes.

  The last thing Winnie heard as the ambulance officers loaded her into the back of their vehicle was Tricia calling out, ‘Don’t fret about your little garden! I’ll water it every day!’

  AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT

  DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH

  OFFICE OF HEALTH PROTECTION

  PRESS RELEASE

  Amalgamated figures show that, over time, infection by Toxoplasmosis pestis in Australia is trending towards a more generalised spread across the population, consistent with studies from other world regions. While initially infection was highest in urban areas with high cat ownership and in agricultural centres, it is now more uniformly found throughout the country and across demographic groups.

  The latest update indicates that 53% of the total population of Australia is infected with T. pestis. A proportion of those are asymptomatic, with the total of people both infected and symptomatic being 44%.

  Of those who are symptomatic, 57% experience synaesthesia.

  Of those with synaesthesia, the following types are reported (note that some respondents have more than one form):

  Grapheme/colour 68%

  Chromaesthesia 34%

  Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia 23%

  Sound/sexual response 21%

  Auditory/tactile synaesthesia 16%

  Other 3.2%

  Of those infected, the following symptoms are also reported:

  Lack of coordination/clumsiness: 72%

  Increased sexual appetite: 42%

  Increased sense of recklessness: 39%

  Loss of religious faith/capacity to meditate: 14%

  Other symptoms: 1.8%

  Across the general population, reported miscarriages have increased by 12.2% and stillbirths by 3.2%. Abortion rates have increased by 11%.

  19.

  Brisbane

  Brigid had read about the masks, but hadn’t spotted many in the wild. They were, apparently, becoming commonplace up north, but West End, with its lefties, dykes and hipsters, wasn’t the demographic for that sort of paranoia. Hereabouts, paranoia tended more to the avoidance of gluten and GMO produce, along with a smattering of vaccine-denial.

  The woman with the mask sat a few tables away, engrossed in a magazine. It looked to be a surgical mask, the sort people wore to avoid the ’flu. Brigid wondered if she knew that the parasite wasn’t transmitted by airborne means, and felt an urge to go over and regurgitate what Richard’s Charlie had told her about its life-cycle. And it wasn’t as though the media weren’t full of FAQs on it, attempting to debunk some of the more far-fetched theories as governments across the world struggled to control the disinformation and fear. But some people, she knew, didn’t want the science, so instead she gave her attention to the day’s specials, written on the blackboard in Cassie’s sweeping italics. She settled for the spinach and feta tart with salad, and chai latte, and one of the casual staff took her order.

  While she waited for her food and for the subjects of her interview to arrive, Brigid browsed the Brisbane Chronicle. As usual, she first went to the state politics pages to see how her latest column looked in print. The editorial cartoon caught her eye. Cartoonists loved Jack Effenberg, exaggerating his jowls and vast earlobes. Today’s related to his front bench reshuffle, with the new ministry – entirely male – all portrayed as his clones. Not subtle, but then neither was Effenberg in his selections for cabinet. He had essentially purged the moderates, prudently selected a balance of rural and urban MPs to appease the most powerful branches, and put his enemies where he could keep an eye on them.

  The sub-editor had done well with the headline of Brigid’s column: ‘Where are the women, Mr Premier?’ It wasn’t a bad piece, and it gave her the opportunity to address something that had long irked her. ‘When a parliamentary team,’ she’d written, ‘has intentionally similar numbers of men and women, it’s considered to be unacceptable social engineering/political correctness gone mad/anti-meritocratic. When a parliamentary team has a carefully calibrated representation of regions and factions, it’s so normal as to be scarcely worth acknowledging. Evidently a quota system is not political correctness gone mad when it is aimed at maintaining party support for your leadership.’

  Effenberg would hate it, naturally, and it would further typecast her in his eyes as a radical lesbian-feminist separatist greenie pinko, or whatever clichés appealed to him, but, she thought with a smile, what’s a girl to do?

  Over the page was a feature about the Cat Plague. The previous evening’s sensation at the Sydney Opera House wasn’t, it turned out, an isolated occurrence. Similar episodes had happened at musical concerts in Los Angeles and in Japan – spontaneous orgasms and near riots, seemingly triggered by the music. It was thought to be another variation on the synaesthesia caused by the parasite. Half their luck, thought Brigid. Apparently, though, that wasn’t the extent of the sexual effects of infection. An expert sugges
ted that it was increasing sexual activity among many of those who’d contracted it. There were indications of burgeoning levels of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions and condom sales. She guessed it made sense, if the parasite itself could be sexually transmitted. What was it Shadrack Zinn had called it? ‘Host behavioural manipulation’? If more sex meant more transmission … It was a disturbing thought, people losing control like that. Would all that sex be consensual?

  Another article, cobbled together from international press agencies, looked at political responses to the plague. The US president, known for his fondness for ex cathedra pronouncements on social media, had already told the world that Toxo was causing a mass delusion, and he was declaring war on what was ‘a huge threat, huger than ISIS, huger than opiates. Really huge.’ Unsurprisingly, the sexual effects were garnering a lot more passionate attention than the environmental consequences of major predators being lost across the globe. The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, US televangelists, and sundry grand muftis all seemed united in their denunciation of the parasite, calling on researchers to focus their efforts on a cure. An American Republican senator famed for his aversion to science in relation to climate change, evolution and stem-cell research appeared suddenly to have decided that scientists were his best friends and told them God had made this their sacred duty. The Dalai Lama had also expressed concern because meditative states seemed to be becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, with the sense of transcendence and oneness becoming elusive. Other commentators suggested that the parasite was biological warfare unleashed by the Russians. Or the Chinese. Or the North Koreans. Or the Americans. Or aliens.

  Effenberg was also quoted. He was typically blunt. A ‘force of evil’, he called it. One of his backbenchers was more forthright, suggesting that all those infected be quarantined in camps until a cure could be found. The Federal Government was more circumspect, focusing on research efforts and public education about risks and modes of transmission.