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A Novel
by Richard Flanagan
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“Beautiful, eh?” Jerry Mendes said.
“Exquisite,” Richard Cody replied, his head already
beginning to ache from the inescapable glare.
“Gotta fag, Richie?”
Richard Cody loathed being called Richie. He wearied
of Jerry Mendes always asking this same question and him
always giving the same answer: he didn’t smoke. He
longed for shade.
Jerry Mendes went inside and returned with a lighted
cigarette, took one big drag and, as the smoke meandered out
of his mouth, flicked the cigarette over the deck and into the
blinding white light of Sydney.
Then he turned to Richard Cody and told him that
exciting things were afoot at Six, that the board was keen to
spend more on current affairs in the chase for ratings. He
waited for Richard Cody to say something, and so Richard
Cody said something, but it was like telling Jerry Mendes he
didn’t smoke, for Richard Cody knew whatever he said at
this point was irrelevant.
Jerry Mendes then told Richard Cody that he was
being transferred from his job as anchor for the network’s
flagship weekly current affairs program, This Week Tonight,
to their nightly current affairs show, Undercurrent, but not
as the anchor, which Richard Cody would have found
acceptable, but as “senior network correspondent”. He was
being replaced at This Week Tonight by the young ABC
newsreader Zoe LeMay.
Jerry Mendes used all sorts of empty phrases—reinvention
. . . new demographic . . . we are all family . . . synergy—to
dress up what they both knew to be a demotion.All Richard
Cody could hear was clack-clock-clack and the sound of something
sinking. Zoe LeMay! A bimbo even blondes looked
down on! It was his face, his age, he knew it. He went to
protest, but Jerry Mendes cut him off:
“Well, Richie, if you want it different, you’re going to
have to get off your arse. Take some responsibility for
yourself.Work your way back.”
Richard Cody completely forgot how only a few moments
earlier he had been rather fond of Jerry Mendes, for now he
hated him from the bottom of his heart, hated him completely
and utterly, and loathed his grasping mistress, Katie Moretti,and
all their awful, dull friends.What made it even worse was that
Jerry Mendes, finally weary himself of his own nonsense, had
abruptly changed the subject and was now, his repulsive hand
on Richard Cody’s shoulder, philosophising about journalism
as if they were brothers in arms.
“These fuckwits who think it’s about the truth, you know
where they go wrong?” Jerry Mendes said, neither waiting
for nor wanting an answer.“They think the truth has power,
that it will carry everything before it. But it’s crap. People
don’t want the truth, you know that, Richie?”
Richard Cody knew he was meant to say nothing. He
said nothing.
“People want an exalting illusion, that’s what they want.
Find that sort of story, ginger it up with a few dashes of fear
and nastiness, and you’ve hit gold.True gold.”
This time Richard Cody knew he was meant to say
something. He searched for what he hoped was the right
note of irony.
“Truth is what we turn into gold, Jerry,” he said.
Jerry Mendes laughed so much his laughter turned to
wheezing and then a thin, high-pitched choking noise that
was only alleviated by an inhaler he wrestled from a trouser
pocket. He sucked on it as if it were a giant lollipop.
“Journalism, Richie,” said Jerry Mendes when he was
once more able to speak, his voice now thin and oddly shrill,
“is the art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.”
Walking the length of the Nullarbor Plain did not offer a
more dispiriting prospect to Richard Cody than staying one
more moment at Katie Moretti’s lunch party. And yet, he
stayed in order to impress Jerry Mendes that he was a remarkable
man who deserved better, so that he would not be
thought to be doing what he now desperately wished to
do—leaving in a rage. To distract himself he went back to
flirting with the graphic designer.
Excerpted from The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan © 2007 by Richard Flanagan. Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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