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+{"text":"\n\nGreat Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP\n\nOxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.  \nIt furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in\n\nOxford New York  \nAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto\n\nWith offices in\n\nArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France  \nGreece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal  \nSingapore South Korea Switzerland  \nThailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam\n\nOxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries\n\nText and illustrations copyright \u00a9 The Estate of D J Watkins-Pitchford 1948\n\nThe moral rights of the author have been asserted\n\nDatabase right Oxford University Press (maker)\n\nFirst published 1948 by Eyre & Spottiswoode  \nFirst published by Oxford University Press 2001  \nFirst published in this eBook edition 2013\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above\n\nYou must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing in Publication Data\n\nISBN 978-0-19-273584-3\n\nThis eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.\n\nCover illustration by Peter Weevers\n_For my daughter_  \n _Angela June_\n\n## Contents\n\n1. A Rude Awakening\n\n2. The Exodus\n\n3. The Death of the Folly\n\n4. Plans\n\n5. Mr Shoebottom's Boy\n\n6. Mr Shoebottom's Shop\n\n7. Conversation Piece\n\n8. At Bantley Weir\n\n9. Rumbling Mill\n\n10. Squirrel\n\n11. The Salvage Gang\n\n12. Cloudberry Takes a Walk\n\n13. The Raising of the _Jeanie Deans_\n\n14. Holidays\n\n15. The Anchor Weighs\n\n16. Exit _Jeanie Deans_\n\n17. Baldmoney Gets to Work\n\n18. Wonderbird\n\n19. The Fire at Mr Brockett's\n\n20. Wonderbird Tries Her Wings\n\n21. Airborne\n\n22. At the Knockgobbin Light\n\n23. Woodcock's Island\n\nAbout the Author\n\nMore eBooks from Oxford\n\n_The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights, and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts_.\n\n## CHAPTER ONE\n\n## _A Rude Awakening_\n\n f you have read _The Little Grey Men_ you will know all about the Oak Tree House and the Stream People, and how three gnomes\u2014Dodder (a lame gnome), Baldmoney, and Sneezewort\u2014went up the Folly Brook to look for their lost brother Cloudberry, and how they discovered him, after many adventures, fit and well and full of high spirits.\n\nYou will remember too all about the _Jeanie Deans_ , a toy ship they found on Poplar Island, what fun they had aboard her and how they all went back to Oak Tree House on the banks of a Warwickshire brook.\n\nIf you have not read it, it doesn't matter; perhaps you will one day before very long.\n\nThese four\u2014Dodder, Baldmoney, Sneezewort, and Cloudberry\u2014were the last gnomes left in England. All the others, and the fairies who used to inhabit the green places and the streams, had long ago disappeared but our gnomes had survived for so long because they lived in a very secure and ancient Oak Tree in a remote part of the Warwickshire countryside. They had managed to avoid coming into contact with the Mortals for hundreds of years, and, believe me, _that_ took a bit of doing! For this very same reason the badger survives to this day: one of the oldest animals we have, he has endured simply because he never shows himself during the day (except when he is ill or old) and is very particular _never_ to get mixed up with Mortals and their quarrels and he never (or very rarely) steals their property, as is the habit of the foxes, rats, and some wild birds.\n\nSoon after the gnomes got back to Oak Tree House after their hair-raising adventures, I left the district where they lived. I often wondered what happened to them because I knew that men were at work spoiling the Folly Brook and all the lovely country in those parts. And perhaps I never should have known their fate if it were not for a little bird, who told me the rest of their adventures. From what he narrated to me I have managed to piece together the following book. It happened this way.\n\nOne April morning quite recently, when I was in Pricket Wood watching a Bottle-tit1 build its nest, a tiny yellow bird came hopping about among the blackthorn just over my head and I recognized Peewee, the Willow Wren, newly arrived from Africa.\n\nIt was Peewee who gave me the facts. He had them from his wife's cousin who happened to live by the Folly Brook, so you may be sure he was telling the truth and Woodcock had also told him a great deal. But Peewee was a bad story-teller and he had to stop every now and then to look for caterpillars and other little green insects, besides which he was still very tired after his long journey. So I will tell you myself in my own way, just as I did in the first book.\n\nWell, after the Animal Banquet (that is a sort of jolly feast) in Oak Tree House, and all the birds and beasts went home, the gnomes and Squirrel fell fast to sleep. The fire went out and it became very cold inside the tree. But the gnomes were as warm as a litter of puppies. They all squeezed up, one against the other, and tucked the dead bracken bed around them and then they snored and snored. December passed, January came, (what a bitter winter that was too!) with the snow piling up in drifts about the oak tree root and the Folly was like black iron. It was a bad time for the Stream People. February came and still the snow lay. Sometimes it thawed and became all dirty and brown, but soon fresh snow would come and whiten it again.\n\nIt was not until mid-March that one could feel the spring stirring. At last the Folly brook was unbound and could sing its old sweet song, buds appeared on the willow trees and the Tits, Blue Button, Bottle Button (the Long-Tailed tit), Black Bonnet (the Marsh tit), and Spink the chaffinch, began to get busy in the hedges and woods. The watervoles came out of their holes and sat in the sun, warming themselves, and the red-gartered moorhens began to think about nest building.\n\nBig winds came roaring over the greening water meadows, weeding out every rotten tree and pulling them out of the ground. The March wind is Nature's dentist, it pulls out every decayed stump and rotten branch and makes the trees sound and well again.\n\nAnd how busy the peewits were over the ploughlands, tumbling about in the pale windy sunlight crying 'A week, a week, two bullocks a week!' It was good to think the bitter winter had passed.\n\nAnd then, one such windy day, when the Folly flashed and the first celandines gleamed on the warm bank, newly painted with yellow varnish, there came a scrabbling on the door of Oak Tree House. 'Scratch! Scratch! Scratch!'\n\nDodder was the first to stir. And how stiff he was! He pushed away the bracken and stuck his big nose out like a sleepy dormouse.\n\nSure enough, someone was scratching very loudly on their front door! Now this was a great breach of animal etiquette. Never before had the Stream People dared to disturb them from their winter sleep. Dodder was so puzzled and annoyed he awoke the others.\n\n'Hi! Baldmoney. Ho! Cloudberry! Hey! Sneezewort! Wake up! Wake up! There's someone scratching on the door!'\n\nBaldmoney turned over with a grunt and sat up, his beard full of bracken bits. 'Someone at the door?'\n\n'Yes, listen!'\n\n_Scratch, scratch, scratch_.\n\n'Disgustin'. What are the Stream People thinkin' of?'\n\n'Go and see who it is,' commanded Dodder, rummaging about among the bracken for his leg. 'Tell 'em to go away, give 'em a piece of your mind.'\n\nBaldmoney grunted. Particles of bracken had got down his neck and he felt all tickly and irritable.\n\nHe felt his way to the door and undid the bolts and bars. When he opened it, the flood of brilliant light and rush of cold sweet air blinded him. He passed his hand over his face and then he sneezed so violently he fell over.\n\n'Who's there? What do you want?'\n\n'It's me, Watervole,' came a squeaky voice. 'We thought you ought to wake up because something dreadful's happening.'\n\nBaldmoney opened his left eye a tiny way and slowly he became used to the blaze of light.\n\nSoon he could make out the familiar form of Watervole appearing extremely agitated.\n\nThe poor animal was so upset he could hardly speak or make himself clear. 'Oh dear, it's awful, it's _awful_!'\n\n'What's awful?' asked Baldmoney irritably, for he was not yet quite awake.\n\n'Why, the Folly\u2014it's getting so low and we don't know what's the matter. All our galleries and holes are high and dry and there's only just a trickle of water coming down!'\n\n'Well, I expect it's because of the dry weather,' said Baldmoney, rubbing his eyes. 'Don't get so flustered, Watervole, it isn't like you.'\n\n'But there's been plenty of rain, it can't be that. We're afraid the Miller's been playing some tricks up at Moss Mill and he's stopped the water. All the Stream People are worried about it. Some of the voles from Lucking's meadows are moving house because they think there'll be more water down this way.'\n\nBy now Baldmoney's eyes had become accustomed to the light. He stood there with bracken and dried grass in his beard and gazed at the Folly. And I must say he had a nasty shock. On the oak root was a pale bleached band quite a foot in width which showed the usual height of the water. Normally they could almost launch their fishing boats from the very doorstep of Oak Tree House but now the level was far below and in place of the brown pool there was a wide expanse of wet green shingle.\n\n'All right, Watervole, I'll fetch the others. Dodder'll be here in a minute.'\n\n'What's the trouble?' Dodder was at his elbow. He had put on his bone leg and like Baldmoney was rubbing his eyes in the unaccustomed glare of day.\n\n'The Folly\u2014look at it!' exclaimed Baldmoney, now thoroughly alarmed. 'Looks as if it was running dry or something.'\n\nBy now Sneezewort and Cloudberry had appeared and Squirrel too. They all staggered sleepily down the wet shingle to have a look.\n\n'This is serious,' said Dodder. 'Looks as if we're all going to be left high and dry, and see who's coming down the stream!'\n\nRound the bend above the Oak Tree came a party of water voles and seven or eight distracted moorhens. 'Looks as if they were in a hurry, let's ask them what's the matter.'\n\nIn a few moments the frightened birds and animals came up to them. 'It's awful,' gasped a mother vole. 'The stream isn't running at all now up by Lucking's meadows, only the pools hold water and the _fish_!\u2014you should see them kicking about on the shingle!'\n\nDodder, who had been looking at the stream with a keen eye suddenly gasped, 'Pan save us! Look at the fish in the pool\u2014they're all going downstream.'\n\nThe others followed his gaze and, sure enough, it was as Dodder had said. The amber depths were alive with fleeing fish. They were passing in cloudy shadows, hundreds and hundreds of fish: perch, roach, and minnows, all jostling each other, pushing and darting, with fear writ large in their jewelled eyes.\n\n'That's bad,' said Dodder. 'They know something's up too.'\n\nOne of the watervoles began to snivel. 'What's to become of us all if the Folly dries up?' she wailed. 'Where shall we go?'\n\n'It's a nice how d'you do I must say,' said Dodder gruffly. 'Just when we're still half-awake like this and all set for the summer fishing. But it's no good panicking... Hullo, here comes the King of Fishers, _now_ we shall know something!'\n\nThe kingfisher came direct like a big brilliant blue bee up to his favourite perch on the oak and all the animals crowded round.\n\nBut he took no notice of them at first. He puffed himself out and wriggled his throat.\n\n'Hey! King of Fishers,' called Dodder, 'what's up?'\n\nBut truth to say, the Kingfisher was so crammed with fish he couldn't get a word out.\n\n'Disgustin',' growled Dodder. 'Perfectly _disgustin_ '. Look, he's eaten so much he's nearly bursting!'\n\nIf the bird had not been sitting out of reach, I believe Dodder would have shaken him.\n\n'It's no good,' piped up Sneezewort. 'We shall have to wait now till he's digested his meal.'\n\nThe Kingfisher seemed to be trying to say something. He made several attempts but no sound would come and after a minute the gorged bird relaxed into a stupor. Baldmoney, shaking with rage, picked up a pebble and threw it up with deadly accuracy. It struck the Kingfisher on the beak and it so surprised him he immediately coughed up five sticklebacks, which fell on the shingle at Dodder's feet. One hit Watervole on the nose, which made everybody laugh.\n\n' _Now_ perhaps you'll tell, King of Fishers,' said Dodder icily.\n\n'Marvellous!' said the Kingfisher dreamily. 'Never had such fishing in all my life! Why, every pool and stickle is simply _stiff_ with fish. Glorious!' he exclaimed again. 'Wonderful!'\n\n'Never mind about the _fishing_ ,' shouted Dodder, almost beside himself with rage. He had quite forgotten to treat the Kingfisher with respect; there was no time for ceremony. 'Tell us what's the trouble, why is the Folly drying up?'\n\nAll the answer they got, however, was a splash. Kingfisher had dived straight down over their heads into the pool. He emerged a second later with a minnow in his beak, which he carried up to the oak twig and beat insensible before turning it round and gulping it down.\n\n'Marvellous fishin',' said the Kingfisher again, in a dreamy sort of way.\n\nDodder was now so incensed he could hardly contain himself. He turned to Squirrel. 'Can't you _do_ something, Squirrel. Climb up the tree and shake some sense into him?'\n\n'All right, gnomes,' said the Kingfisher, as Squirrel began to advance towards the oak. 'I can't tell you much. All I know is the water's dropping and the fish... '\n\n'Never mind the fish,' interrupted Dodder, 'can't you go up to Moss Mill and find out what's happening?'\n\n'Oh well, I'll do that, Dodder, if you want me to, but personally I don't see why you're all getting so excited.'\n\n'Well, anything might have happened,' said Squirrel indignantly. 'The miller must have done something.'\n\n'All right, I'll go,' replied the Kingfisher. 'One more minnow first though, watch me catch this one!'\n\nDown he went again into the pool, sending the spray right and left. The others could only sigh and sadly shake their heads at one another.\n\nWhen the greedy bird had eaten this last fish he darted off away up the Folly. They watched the speck of vivid blue speeding round the bend until it was lost to sight. After the maddening bird had departed, Baldmoney went under the bank and cut a willow stick. This he pushed into the sand just on the edge of the water and made a little notch with his hunting knife where the ripples wetted the wand. Then everyone sat down on the stones and watched it. The level of the stream must have been falling very slowly because at first there was no noticeable drop. But after a quarter of an hour had passed the notch was the minutest fraction above the water. Yes, there was no doubt about it, the Folly _was_ getting lower, very soon it would be dry!\n\nCannot you picture the pathetic plight of all those little people gathered there upon the sandy shores of the oak tree pool? The sun was shining so brightly, the water meadows were such a vivid green and a gentle breeze was silvering the slender willow thickets. Overhead white clouds, like soft pillows, were drifting slowly before the west wind, blackbirds and thrushes were singing, and away over Collinson Church a kestrel hovered just like a small red paper kite.\n\nIt was a shame that such a bright spring morning should be so heavy with impending disaster. For the Folly meant everything to the gnomes. It had been their loved companion for generations, it had provided them with fish, it had sung them to sleep, it had borne them safely back from the perils of Poplar Island and sinister Crow Wood. It was quite unthinkable that this bright and happy stream should ever go.\n\nWith horror-stricken eyes they gazed at the willow stick, hoping against hope that their fears were groundless. The only one who appeared unconcerned was Cloudberry.\n\nHe swaggered up and down the beach with his thumbs stuck in his belt whistling through his teeth. The truth was, that ever since he had been to Spitzbergen with the wild geese, he thought himself no end of a gnome and the possibility of leaving the Oak Tree and the Folly didn't worry him a bit.\n\n'I wish you'd stop whistling, Cloudberry,' said Dodder irritably. 'Come and see if you think the water's dropped any more.'\n\n'Pooh! Why worry anyway? If we've got to move downstream, who cares? Who wants to stay in the same place all their lives, anyway? _I_ like seeing new country. If only I had wings like the King of Fishers! That's a fine bird for you, _he's_ the one to get about! The beastly old Folly can go on dropping for all I care, I'm all for the open road and high adventure. What's the good of looking like a lot of gravedigger beetles? Anyone might think that the end of the world had come,' and he turned a somersault on the shingle.\n\nDodder did not deign to reply. He got up and hobbled along to where they had moored the _Jeanie Deans_.\n\nAlas! she was no longer the bright spick-and-span ship they had left tied up under the bank that snowy night four months before.\n\nShe lay half on her side in the shallow water, red rust covered her keel and green slime draped her stern. Even her name, _Jeanie Deans_ , had been half-washed out by the rigorous winter weather. Baldmoney and Sneezewort scrambled up on to her sloping decks. Rainwater had collected in the hold and several snails had taken up their abode in the wheelhouse. Baldmoney indignantly wrenched them off and threw them onto the bank, where a big spotted thrush speedily pounced upon them and carried them off. Song thrushes love snails, they prefer them to worms. He took them one by one and smashed them on a large white stone by the stream side and then came back and begged for more, but he never offered to help. Meanwhile Baldmoney was rummaging about in the cabin. Old oak leaves had half-filled it, the whole place smelt damp and musty and the bunks were full of wood-lice.\n\n'Disgustin' mess,' muttered Baldmoney as he looked about him. 'It'll need a whole day to spring-clean her.'\n\n'Let's start in on her now,' said Sneezewort. 'We won't ask Cloudberry, he won't help. I'll bet he thinks she's a rotten old hulk anyway.'\n\nHe kicked a lot of leaves into a corner and gathered them up in his arms. Baldmoney climbed down the side and went back to the oak for the frog-skin bucket and a scrubbing brush.\n\nGnomes are cleanly little folk and the sight of their lovely ship in such a state was a grievous thing.\n\nVery soon that tiny strip of wet sand behind the oak tree presented a very busy scene indeed. There's nothing like a job on hand for banishing depression and worry. The _Jeanie Deans_ had to be spring-cleaned anyway, whether she would be wanted at once or next week, and at last even Cloudberry condescended to lend a hand. Back came Baldmoney with the bucket of water and a scrubbing brush. The latter was not of his own making.\n\nIt may amuse you to know that it was really the head of a toothbrush and had once belonged to none other than the miller at Moss Mill! He had bought it three years before in the local Woolworth's and it had seen good service. When the bristles began to come out the miller used it for cleaning the spokes and hubs of a new bicycle which he was very proud of. He had a puppy and one day the puppy stole the toothbrush and took it down to the riverside to play with it. It fell over the mill dam and the puppy watched it splash into the water with his little head cocked right on one side. The current bore it to the tail of the pool and there it lay among the rushes for some time until the winter floods rolled it on down. Baldmoney had found it under a willow root close to Joppa. That was the history of the scrubbing brush, though of course the gnomes knew nothing of its story nor why the Mortals used such a brush.\n\nDodder called the poor anxious voles and waterhens together and told them not to worry but to come and help spring-clean the _Jeanie Deans_. Soon some Bub'ms (rabbits) joined them and a tit or two, and Squirrel. The latter being most agile and strong, made himself very useful.\n\nThey fetched a ladder from the stores in the Oak Tree so that Dodder could climb aboard and the voles could get up and down without any difficulty. Many beaks and paws make light work and in a very short while the _Jeanie Deans_ was looking quite smart again. They worked so hard they forgot all about the Folly and the voles forgot about ruined homes and their neatly tunnelled galleries which were now high and dry. Nobody heeded the constant procession of fish which were passing endlessly downstream; they even forgot the King of Fishers. Baldmoney went on all fours and scrubbed like any old seasoned charwoman until his little face was the colour of a bilberry. Sneezewort scraped off all the red rust from the hull. Cloudberry went to and fro with an empty snail shell, baling out all the water which had collected in the hold and once, just out of spite, he emptied the contents down Sneezewort's neck, and the latter squeaked indignantly like a mouse. The watervoles got busy on the green slime, gnawing it off with their sharp teeth, and the tits flew in and out of the cabin with dead leaves in their bills.\n\nIn the middle of all this bustle and activity the King of Fishers miraculously appeared on the oak branch above. For a moment or two he surveyed the scene without speaking. Nobody noticed him sitting there.\n\nThen he whistled once, loud and long, and instantly everyone stopped work.\n\nThey crowded round the shingle underneath him; nobody said a word.\n\nThen the Kingfisher spoke. 'Well, Stream People, I've got bad news for you. I've been up above the Mill and you wouldn't recognize the place. There's a whole gang of men, clearing the Folly Brook and digging an underground drain. There isn't a bush or a tree along the banks all the way to Crow Wood. They are taking the water right under the hill to the new reservoir beyond Collinson. _That's_ where our Folly's going. In another week there won't be enough water in the brook to float a fiddler (a fiddler is a water skater), so it looks as if we shall _all_ have to make a move. The bank where my wife and I have built our nest for generations just isn't there!'\n\n'We are all in the same boat then,' said Dodder, after a horrified gasp had gone up from everyone. 'You'll have to move too.'\n\nBaldmoney, who had said no word, put down his frog-skin bucket and mopped his forehead. 'You've said it, Dodder, we're all in the same boat and that boat is the _Jeanie Deans_! In another day there won't be enough water to float her at the rate the stream's dropping. We must all get away tonight!'\n\n'Come on!' shouted Dodder, suddenly galvanized to life. 'All hands to work on the _Jeanie Deans_! Squirrel, you and Sneezewort start getting the stores on board. Baldmoney and I will get the contents of the cellar down to the hold. I'm not going to leave all that wine to go to waste, every scrap of food must be under hatches by sunset! And you voles and moorhens had better lend a hand too, if you've the time to spare.'\n\n'I'll be getting downstream to tell my wife and the rest of the Stream People,' exclaimed the Kingfisher, who was now very sobered at what he had seen and a little ashamed of himself too for his earlier boorish behaviour.\n\n'Good luck to your Majesty,' said Dodder, polite for the first time that day, 'and thank you for helping us.'\n\nAfter the King of Fishers had gone everybody set to with a will. They put out two more gangplanks from the shingle to the hull and there was a constant procession of animals and gnomes up and down it. Some carried leaf sacks of acorn bread and wheaten ears, others bundles of dried sticklebacks; Squirrel carried little bags of nuts (popping a nut into his mouth on the sly).\n\nReverently the snail shells, sealed, and full of Dodder's precious vintage berry wines, were laid all a-row on the shingle. Dodder would not let anyone save himself carry them aboard for fear they would be shaken up. He held the shells in a certain way, for he was an experienced connoisseur of wine.\n\nBy nightfall all stores were safely under hatches. It only now remained to get the ship down the bank and into the stream.\n\nAlready Baldmoney's tell-tale stick was high and dry, the Folly had dropped a foot since morning. There was not a moment to lose!\n\n**Note**\n\n1 Long-tailed Tit\n\n## CHAPTER TWO\n\n## _The Exodus_\n\n nomes as well as mortals must have sleep. I have told in the first book how they prefer going about their business at night, for the very good reason that during daylight they might be seen. This especially applies to the early part of the year when there are few leaves on the bushes and the grass, flowers, and weeds have not begun to grow.\n\nYou must remember that it was yet early spring and the Little Men would normally have only just begun to think about stirring.\n\nThey had been aroused from their deep hibernation a week too soon and they had hardly time to collect their wits. This dreadful calamity was so sudden and upsetting. Without warning they found themselves faced with a complete uprooting of their home, where they had dwelt for nearly five hundred years, and all because a few miles away some men had been told to dig a new bed for the Folly!\n\nIt was indeed lucky for the gnomes that the weather was kind. It was early March and had there been snow on the ground and hard frost I really cannot say _what_ would have happened to Dodder and his brothers. Perhaps they would have perished like all the other gnomes who used to live among the fields and forests of medieval Britain.\n\nThe Little Men had been working all day loading the _Jeanie Deans_ and they were tired out. When darkness fell the voles and other Stream People went away downstream and the gnomes were left alone. They decided that they must have a short sleep before trying to launch the ship and Dodder asked Ben the owl, who lived up in the oak, to wake them before midnight, otherwise they might have overslept. I forgot to mention that Ben had been terribly upset when he had heard the news. But he said he was going to stay on in the oak tree whatever happened. He and his forebears had lived there since the oak tree was three hundred years old and he did not depend on the Folly for a living. It is true he liked the stream, indeed he had once said that he would never live out of the sound of water, but he had talked the whole thing over with his wife and they had decided to stay.\n\nThe four weary little creatures, and Squirrel too, huddled up inside the tree for their last nap in the old home.\n\nThey were too upset to talk very much. Sneezewort of course snuffled a good deal, but the others managed to control their feelings and Cloudberry, as I said before, seemed to treat the whole affair as rather a joke.\n\nHe kept on saying 'Of course we (meaning the wild geese and himself) WE would think nothing of this out in Spitzbergen,' and then he began a long story of how once an Arctic fox stole all the eggs out of a goose's nest and the mother goose had to find another site and how he helped her. Dodder soon shut him up.\n\nThey scraped together the dead bracken to make a bed and in a few moments everybody was asleep and had forgotten all about the happenings of the last few hours. When at last Ben's voice came hooting down inside the hollow oak they awoke quite fresh and ready.\n\n'Don't worry, gnomes,' said old Ben kindly. 'I'll bet you three fat field mice that you'll come back one day and we shall all meet again in this old tree, and that the Folly will come to life again.'\n\n'I hope you're right,' faltered Dodder, trying very hard to keep a tremor from his voice. 'It's awful leaving the old place, and you too, Ben. You've been a true friend to us, we can't ever repay you. You've found us skins for our clothes and done us many a good turn one way and another.'\n\n'Oh, I've done nothing,' said Ben gruffly, and there was a shake in his voice too, 'I shall miss you no end in the old tree, even though you did smoke me out sometimes! And here's a little present, Dodder, for all of you. My wife and I couldn't let you go without something to remember us by.' From the darkness above four lovely velvety moleskins dropped down and fell at Dodder's feet. 'They'll keep out the cold,' added Ben, more gruffly still, and he turned abruptly and vanished back into his nesting hole above.\n\nDodder and his brothers took up the skins. They were beauties and would make them grand coats which would last for years. 'Well, that's very nice of you, Ben,' Dodder called out. 'They certainly will remind us of you, every time we wear them.'\n\nI must here break in on this touching scene with a piece of information. As the gnomes never killed warm-blooded animals, for the voles, mice, birds, and four-footed beasts\u2014with the sole exception of wood dogs (foxes) and stoats\u2014were their very good friends. But skins were the best possible clothing and there's nothing like moleskin for keeping a gnome nice and warm. Every time they came across a mouse or mole and saw him looking suspiciously at their coats they had to explain how they had come by them. Now, without Ben as a fur trapper, what would they do? One consolation was that these fine new skins which Ben had given them would last for a very long time. Their old mouse and mole skins had seen good service and were wearing very thin.\n\nWith one last look round the oak root they trooped down the shingle to the _Jeanie Deans_.\n\nShe was now about two feet from the water but the sand and shingle sloped fairly steeply and with Squirrel's help they soon pushed her down. She went into the stream stern first in the approved style and in a moment or two all were aboard.\n\n'Goodbye, Ben!' they shouted, as the ship began to feel the current. 'GOOOOD BOOOOO!' quavered Ben and there was a very pronounced shake in his voice. 'GOOOOD BOOOOO! GOO GOOO BOOOOO!'\n\nAs they slowly drifted away down the dark stream they heard Ben's voice growing fainter and fainter until it died away. Dodder sighed. 'He was a grand old chap was Ben.'\n\n'He was indeed,' replied Baldmoney. 'As fine a bird as ever gulped a mouse.'\n\n'Ben was a good sort, I don't deny,' said Cloudberry, 'but I don't think you can compare a bird like that to a\u2014'\n\n' _I_ know, a _wild goose_!' burst out Dodder. 'I _do_ wish you'd shut up about the Heaven Hounds. Old Ben had a heart of gold.'\n\n'Can't see why he wanted to stick in one place though,' said Cloudberry. 'You should see the Snowy owls now, they're twice the size of Ben, and as white as snow. I once\u2014'\n\n'Oh! shut up, Cloudberry!' snapped Dodder again. 'I'm just about sick of hearing about all your wonderful doings. Go below and help Sneezewort with the supper, I'm starving.'\n\nCloudberry moved sulkily away, muttering to himself, and Dodder stared into the darkness.\n\nThe great masses of the elms and pollarded willows, the dense thorn bushes on the banks loomed darkly over them. Even though they were as yet bare of leaves they seemed vast and heavy in the dim light.\n\nDodder sighed deeply. There was no elation in his breast such as when they were last aboard the _Jeanie Deans_. And then he had a curious feeling that, after all, this ghastly happening was all for the best, that it had all been planned. Supposing they had not gone up the Folly last year to hunt for Cloudberry, why, they would never have found the _Jeanie Deans_! And if they hadn't got the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ , even though her engines were useless, what would have become of them? They would have had to set out on foot, and at this time of year the dangers would have been great. At any time the weather might turn cold and there was no cover along the banks. Perhaps Pan was still watching over them, perhaps he had sent them the boat for this very purpose. Dodder sighed again.\n\nHe leant his arms on the rail in front of him and stared at the stars. What a beautiful calm night it was! Scarce a cloud to be seen and a sickle moon hung among the fretted willow wands which glided so softly past.\n\nHe heard the very low and secret chuckle of the dying Folly as it swirled around some projecting root. Where would they be by morning? They would have to tie up somewhere, of course. Would the water still be deep enough to float them? Already the current had borne them beyond familiar places. Dodder noted trees and bushes he had never seen before. The Folly took unfamiliar turns and twists. He hoped there were no waterfalls or weirs.\n\nNow and again he heard the plop of a water vole and once he saw three of them swimming alongside. They, like themselves, were refugees. Dodder called softly into the darkness and asked them if they were making downstream. But the voles only shook their muzzles and went on swimming.\n\nThe _Jeanie Deans_ was slowly turning round and round as she drifted in the current. Had they the engines going this would not have happened, but without power she was at the mercy of the stream. Now and again she bumped gently against some protruding branch or sunken snag, once she stuck for a moment on a mass of floating reed, but the current of the Folly had her in safe keeping and wheeled her out and on.\n\nWith one last look at the stars Dodder turned and went below. He found a cosy sight there. Sneezewort had lit the little lamp over the cabin table and had drawn the curtains. Supper was laid, nuts for Squirrel, and fried mushroom and fish for themselves. As a great treat Dodder produced a snail-shell full of blackberry wine, some of his best.\n\nIt was surprising how much better they felt when the meal was done. Dodder made up his mind he would not worry any more, they were in Pan's keeping, they must trust in him.\n\nThey crawled into the little bunks and tucked themselves in and soon all but Dodder were asleep. He lay long awake. Not worrying; oh dear no, his mind was at peace now, a curious comfortable peace enveloped him. He felt the gentle movement of the boat and heard now and again the faint sound of weeds brushing the hull and the chuckle and gurgle of the stream bearing them on. Why worry? What was the use? Something shook the bunk opposite. It was Squirrel scratching. Perhaps he had caught a flea. Good old Squirrel! It was cosy having him with them. I think it shows to what desperate straits the gnomes had been driven, to abandon themselves to the mercy of the stream in this way, without even keeping a watch on board. It was all very well to trust to Pan, but Pan only helps those animals who help themselves.\n\nSo all through that long night the Folly bore them on. The _Jeanie Deans_ swung and gyrated solemnly in the current. Many times she was swept into a miniature whirlpool and there she stayed, circling for several minutes. And all the time the level was dropping and dropping. Once the foremast caught against a fallen branch and there the ship stuck fast, with a dangerous list. Still the occupants of the cabin slept peacefully on.\n\nWhether or not it was the finger of Pan which lifted that twig and let the ship drift free, or whether it was the drop of the water level, I do not know, but at last the _Jeanie Deans_ got clear once more and floated gently on, on an even keel.\n\nThe light in the cabin went out (the gnomes used nut oil for burning) and the little lantern, smoking and smelling abominably, swung faintly creaking to and fro in the darkened cabin. Now and again a slight jar passed through the ship, but the mariners never woke.\n\n## CHAPTER THREE\n\n## _The Death of the Folly_\n\n odder opened his eyes slowly. His brain was fogged with dreams, strange disturbing dreams, in which their Oak Tree house had been uprooted by a violent gale, leaving them as naked and defenceless as beetles disturbed from under a stone.\n\nWhat had happened? Where was he? He stared around him at the cabin. A faint light, coming down the companion-way, shone on the pictures on the walls opposite. Slowly the events of the preceding day and night came back to him. Of course! this was the cabin of the _Jeanie Deans_ , they were refugees without a home now that the old oak tree was no longer able to shelter and protect them.\n\nHow far had they drifted since last night? Dodder sat up suddenly and rubbed his eyes. The others were sleeping soundly. He could see no visible trace of them under the skin rugs in the opposite bunk and only the fluffy tip of Squirrel's tail protruded from his blanket.\n\nThere was no motion in the ship, no sense of movement. Quickly he pulled aside one of the little curtains and looked out. His heart sank. They were aground! Opposite was a red bank of earth drilled with old sand-martins' holes. Three small ash trees grew precariously on that steep little cliff.\n\nA swift run of muddy water still flowed a few yards away but he could see shingle and sand just below the porthole and, even as he looked, the _Jeanie Deans_ gave a sickening lurch to starboard and all the plates and crockery slid off the cabin table onto the floor with a loud crash.\n\nThe noise awoke the others. Baldmoney jumped from his bunk wild-eyed, his hand on his knife. Cloudberry and Sneezewort were tipped right out of their bunks under the cabin table where they rolled among the plates and bedding.\n\nSquirrel managed somehow to hold on to the side of his bunk and with one spring he was out of the cabin door. Dodder had been prepared for the worst. His hand clutched the edge of his bunk and he just saved himself.\n\n'Wha-what's up?' stuttered Sneezewort, his eyes big with fear.\n\n'Aground I guess,' said Dodder. 'Hard and fast too. Let's get up on deck.'\n\nPicking their way along the sloping floor they joined Squirrel on the tilted bridge.\n\nDodder was right. Aground they were, 'good and proper', right in mid-stream too and in full view of either bank. Moreover, day was breaking and it was bitterly cold. The _Jeanie Deans_ had gone aground on a shingle bed, right in the centre of the stream. At normal water level the ship would have passed over with inches to spare but with the falling stream she had not had a chance. One thing was in their favour, they were still among meadows, and bushes and trees grew plentifully along either bank.\n\nDownstream, beyond the tail of the shingle bed, he could see a good deal of water. If only they could get the _Jeanie Deans_ over the obstruction they might at least gain the deeper stream and float on to some safe hiding place.\n\nAs they stood all together there they spied several water voles with bundles on their backs, coming down-stream. They appeared in a fearful hurry and were strangers, obviously refugees from the upper waters. When they saw the stranded steamer they took to the banks and scurried by, despite the fact that Dodder called to them in their own language.\n\nOnly the last vole lingered a moment and pointed with his paw upstream and then, without saying a word, he hurried after his companions.\n\nSquirrel hopped over the side, and though he didn't like getting his fur wet, he tried to move the boat. But the task was beyond him.\n\nBaldmoney and Cloudberry waded ashore (the Folly barely came to their knees) and went on down to spy out what lay below.\n\nDodder and Sneezewort remained on the bridge, shivering with cold and blowing on their fingernails.\n\n'We haven't a chance to get her off unless a miracle happens,' said Dodder. 'She's hard and fast. If we stay here all day somebody will spy us. Our best plan is to leave her and go into hiding close by and try to get her off tonight.'\n\n'The water will be lower then,' said Sneezewort, 'it's running away so fast. There won't be a drop by tonight. I don't see we can do much.'\n\n'Then we shall have to go on foot,' said Dodder grimly, 'and leave the bulk of our supplies aboard. It's a pity, but there it is.'\n\nNot a bird nor a beast was visible. The stream seemed quite deserted. Baldmoney and Cloudberry had passed out of sight round a bend of the bank. Three feet away two minnows were flapping and slapping in a little hollow in the shingle where they had been stranded and in another little pool Sneezewort spied quite twenty little fish frantically trying to wriggle free.\n\n'There's our breakfast at any rate,' said Dodder as he let himself over the side by the rope ladder. 'We might as well have fresh fish for breakfast. We'll get 'em cooked before the others come back.'\n\nIt was the work of a moment to capture the unfortunate minnows and they were borne in triumph back to the ship. Sneezewort speedily got the stove going and by the time Baldmoney and the others returned they found a nice hot breakfast awaiting them.\n\nAnd they brought a ray of hope with them. Not more than a hundred yards below, the Folly joined a big stream. Indeed, it was more than a stream, Baldmoney said, it was a river, a real wide river, three times the size of the Folly.\n\n'If only we had got through we should have been safe,' said Baldmoney. 'Can't we try and push her along over the shingle?' But Squirrel shook his head. 'Not a hope,' he said. 'Even if we all pushed her we couldn't move her.'\n\n'Well, it's no good worrying,' said Dodder. 'Let's have some breakfast and then talk things over. It's pretty early yet by the sun and we may hit on a plan.'\n\nSo they set to with a will and very soon all those minnows had disappeared and Squirrel, who was not very fond of fish, disposed of a surprising quantity of nuts.\n\nJust as they were finishing their meal there came a sudden rapping on the hull and Dodder, peering nervously through a porthole, uttered a shout of delight, for he saw the friendly squat head of an otter.\n\nIn no time everyone was out of the cabin and up on deck. To their delight they found it was a relation of their old friend Otter, who met such a sad end in Crow Wood at the hands of cruel Giant Grum. He was a sleek well-grown beast but he looked very worried. 'I'm off downstream, gnomes,' he said. 'I saw this ship aground and thought I'd knock and see if there was anyone at home.'\n\n'Well, you couldn't have come at a better moment!' exclaimed Dodder. 'We're in a bad fix. The ship's firmly aground and we can't get her off. We had to leave Oak Tree House last night because the Folly was dropping so quickly. Where have you come from, Otter?'\n\n'All the way from Joppa,' replied the otter, 'and it's a good thing you _did_ leave last night. Your Oak Tree Pool hasn't enough water in it to cover a minnow now and every rapid is bone dry. You only just made it. As for my holt under the willow, that's dry too, that's why I'm coming downstream. If I were you I shouldn't waste a moment here, gnomes. Let's try and get the ship off. There's a big river lower down; if you can reach that you will be safe.'\n\nSo the gnomes and Squirrel scrambled out of the cabin and down the rope ladder on to the shingle. Dodder, who remained in the bows, threw them a rope which Otter took in his teeth. The others formed up behind the ship and at a word from Dodder the struggle began.\n\nIt was rough treatment for the _Jeanie Deans_. She was dragged bodily over the shingle, half lying on her side and the alarming crashes and tinkles from the cabin seemed to suggest that their crockery was suffering yet again.\n\nWhat a business that was! Otter pulled with all his might and main, the gnomes and Squirrel shoved and shoved, digging their feet into the loose gravel, slipping and gasping. Otter was a powerful beast and his weight told. The heavy little ship jerked slowly forward, ploughing quite a furrow in the sand and stones as she went, and at last the water lapped her keel. With a final squirm of his powerful rudder, Otter pulled her down into the stream and very soon all were aboard, puffing and gasping and quite out of breath.\n\nDodder was delighted. He waved his cap gaily to Otter who, now his job was done, began to go on downstream. It did not take long to reach the main river which Baldmoney had told the others about.\n\nThe Folly took a sharp bend to the right and there was their salvation: a deep, dark river, lined with sedge clumps and willow stumps, with a depth of water enough to float a ship many times the tonnage of the _Jeanie Deans_.\n\nNot far distant was an immense willow tree whose roots formed a natural cave and thither the gnomes guided the ship\u2014no easy matter without her engine. Squirrel and Baldmoney paddled with long sticks and by skilful seamanship and by making use of the slow current they at last edged her right under the root and made her fast.\n\n'Phew!' gasped Dodder when this was done. 'If Otter hadn't come along we should never have got her off. And now,' said he, 'after all our work you must be thirsty. What about broaching a shell-full of Elderberry 1905?' This proposition was hailed with enthusiasm. They all trooped below and Dodder set to work to remove the wooden bung from one of the snail shells.\n\n'Here's to Otter,' he said, raising the shell to his mouth, and one by one they drank the toast, passing the shell from hand to hand. After a rest and a smoke Dodder set everyone to work to clear up the mess.\n\nThe rough treatment the _Jeanie Deans_ had received on the shingle bank had thrown the cabin into indescribable confusion. Two of their little china plates were shattered beyond repair and things were lying all over the floor. By some lucky chance the pictures had not been broken but their copper stewpan was dented and this would give Baldmoney some trouble to repair. But on the whole, things had gone well. They had won through to this new river, they had found a secure hiding-place, however temporary, and they had at least time to breathe.\n\nWhen the _Jeanie Deans_ was shipshape once again and everyone felt rested, the gnomes and Squirrel got out the dinghy and rowed up to the Folly, or what was left of it.\n\nIt was pretty plain that, had they been delayed much longer, their position would indeed have been desperate. They beached the dinghy and with Dodder in the lead they walked almost to the shingle bank which had so nearly spelt disaster.\n\nIt was a calm warm evening. To the westwards the sun was down and already the shadows had begun to gather. Not an animal was seen, all the refugees had gone on down, the Great Trek from the upper waters of the Folly was over. Dodder hobbled across to the edge of the wet shingle. He stood for some time rapt in deep thought looking at the wet Folly bed, where water-snails and minnows were vainly trying to find some cover in the last drop of precious moisture.\n\nThen he turned to the others and his seamed little face was strained with sorrow. 'Gnomes,' said he, 'we have come at the right moment, we are witnessing the passing of our beloved stream. For a thousand, thousand years it has flowed for us, a thousand thousand cuckoo years. It will flow no more!'\n\nAnd all the gnomes, even Cloudberry, bowed their heads and tears dimmed their eyes. As they stood there in the gathering dusk, looking at that last dying trickle, two dark silent forms swung into view upstream. Like monstrous moths they came and lit in the branches of a shattered elm above them. It was Ben and his wife.\n\n'So it has come at last,' said Ben in his deep voice, 'the prophecy of the Stream People has come to pass!'\n\nDodder looked up quickly, the tears still running into his beard. 'Why, it's Ben and Mrs Ben! We thought you had decided never to leave the Oak Tree!'\n\n'It has come to pass,' said Ben again, regarding the gnomes with solemn eyes, 'the prophecy of the Stream People.'\n\n'And what was that?' asked Dodder in a voice so low that none but the owl's sharp ears could hear him.\n\n'It was said,' went on the owl, 'that when the Folly ceased to run the Little Grey Men would go and leave the stream for ever!'\n\n'But why,' said Dodder at last, when he could control the lump in his throat, 'why have you left the Tree?'\n\n'The Tree, alas, is no longer standing. Soon after daylight men came with saws and hatchets and cut it down, cut down _our_ Tree which has been our home for so long and in which we have reared so many families!'\n\n'That is terrible,' groaned Dodder. 'It was enough the Folly should go, but our Tree!'\n\nBut the Folly still lived. Even Man cannot kill a stream. That bright water, which burst from the earth and seemed its very life-blood, flowed still, though down another channel, a man-made channel of bolted iron, where no trees could grow and no voles or gnomes could live. Imprisoned it was, away from the sunlight and the open air. No longer could it reflect the pale blue skies of spring, no longer would the swallows dip into it chattering joyously, but still it flowed, albeit asleep.\n\nA sudden mourning cry floated out over the darkling fields, 'Booo Hoooooo! Booo Hooooo!' And then the two dark moth-like birds wheeled away and the gnomes retraced their steps to the dinghy.\n\nWithout a word they got in and sorrowfully rowed back to the _Jeanie Deans_ and the darkness of the Willow Root engulfed them.\n\nThe gnomes and owls were not the only ones who were shifting quarters. Later that night, as Dodder was smoking his pipe close by the Willow Root, he heard the sky above him full of wings. But they were not birds fleeing from the dead Folly, they were the advance guards of that mighty army of spring migrants who were pouring into Britain at the rate of countless thousands an hour. And he knew that whatever the future had in store for them, the winter at least had gone.\n\nAlways the gnomes watched and waited for this night, the night of the Spring Flying as they called it, and greatly cheered and excited, Dodder called the others out. They stood there with Squirrel on the river bank, gazing up into the soft night sky, their long ears pricked. Gnomes have the keenest hearing of any living thing, and their ears told them all that was going on overhead. They could see nothing, but as they listened they heard a faint rustling and soft whispering which, could we but hear it, is one of the most thrilling sounds in the world. For hours on end it went on until, tired and weary with all their strenuous work, the gnomes went back into the tree. And as they fell asleep they still heard the rustling multitudes passing in endless waves high above them.\n\nAs soon as it was light they were up and out to meet their friends whom they had not seen for six long months. Before long they heard the voice of Chiffchaff, one of those dainty leaf-tinted warblers, slender of leg and trim of body who are the first to arrive in spring. And he was tired, for he had met bad weather in the Bay of Biscay. Others had come from Algeria and Morocco.\n\nThe bird snapped up a small green caterpillar and sang a short burst of song. 'You seem very happy, Chiffchaff,' said Dodder. 'I wish we were!'\n\n'What's the worry? Don't let these Mortals bother you. They've never done much for us anyway, though they're mighty inquisitive. My sister had one of her babies ringed last year.'\n\n'Ringed?' asked Dodder with horror in his face. 'What a dreadful experience!'\n\nChiffchaff laughed. 'Oh, it didn't hurt the youngster, I suppose, but it was very interfering of them, shoving a band round its leg like that, can't see the point of it. Anyway, don't let's talk of Mortals. How's yourself?'\n\nPoor Dodder told the chiffchaff all their troubles but the merry little bird made light of them. 'Look at us!' he said. 'Look at us chiffchaffs, how we travel, there's nothing in it! I say, have winter quarters and then, when spring comes, go somewhere else! I've tried summering in other countries, but there's nothing to touch this little island.'\n\nCloudberry, who had been listening with all his ears, nodded briskly. 'Just what _I_ tell them, why stick in one place all your life? Move around, see the world!'\n\n'But we haven't wings,' said Dodder, glancing at Cloudberry, 'so don't talk a lot of sparrow gossip.'\n\n'You don't know how nice it is to be back,' went on the chiffchaff. 'For weeks we've had nothing but desert, sand, blue skies and sun, sun, sun, until we were sick of it! We made landfall last night, just after dark, and wasn't it good to smell this country and the green grass and woodlands! You ought to see the Spring Flying,' added the bird, 'you'd never forget it.'\n\n'I've seen it,' said Cloudberry, eagerly bending forward, 'I went to\u2014'\n\n_'Cloudberry!'_ warned Dodder, in his 'shut-up' voice, 'that's enough!'\n\nThe chiffchaff yawned (a bird yawns by opening its beak wide and waggling its tongue; if you don't believe me, notice a canary yawn) and continued, 'We passed a lot of willow warblers on the way across, they'll be here pretty soon, in fact I think I hear one now, listen!' And he was right, for, from a little copse not far away came the dying fall of the willow warbler's song. 'There!' he exclaimed, 'what did I tell you? In a week's time they'll be all over the place. Ah!' said the bird, gazing contentedly around him at the opening leaves and green fields, ' _what_ a green. D'you know, this is what I've been missing for the last six months, the _green_ of England! I think it's the green that makes us come back here, the green and your soft grey skies; of course,' the bird added proudly, 'we are British birds, as we breed here; not like the Heaven Hounds and the fieldfares and redwings. And that reminds me, if you could ever see the Autumn Flying, why, that's even more exciting than the Spring Flying! I don't know why it is, perhaps it's because a lot of our children are with us and they've never seen Africa, or Spain, and their excitement is infectious in a manner of speaking. Don't _you_ ever get restless, gnomes, when all this (the bird indicated the fresh greens all around them) when all _this_ is getting tired and dusty and brown, and mists begin to hang over the water-meadows and the sunlight goes all pearly and yellow?'\n\nDodder thought a moment before replying. In some ways Chiffchaff's words had taken his mind back to an autumn Folly, with yellow leaves floating on its dark breast, of lonely camps up there in the higher reaches, and of the cold dew-wet nights and starlings' chatter.\n\n'Perhaps we do, Chiffchaff, but as we have no wings, what's the use? All we can do is to go to sleep when the weather gets very bad.'\n\n_'Go to sleep!'_ cried Chiffchaff, in astonishment. ' _Sleep?_ Why, you can't enjoy yourself when you're asleep! As it is, we birds have to sleep, of course, at night, and we live for six or seven Cuckoo Years, if we're lucky, perhaps even a little longer than that. I had a grandmother who lived to be nine Cuckoo Years. And that reminds me,' went on the bird, 'you gnomes are always a bit of a puzzle to us, how old _are_ you? We tree warblers often talk about it, some say one thing, some another.'\n\nDodder looked rather amused. 'Even I don't know that, Chiffchaff. I watched the Folly Oak grow up from a young sapling. That was in the days of King Henry the Sixth. Oh dear\u2014what changes I've seen! The country has changed and the people have changed; they used to dress in such a queer way and the men wore their hair long. But even in those days there was a mill up the Folly and the stream has never altered. Sometimes it's shifted its course a yard or two, but its voice has always been with us, day and night. And now to think the Oak has gone too, it's terrible!'\n\nDodder buried his face in his hands and Chiffchaff felt very uncomfortable. 'Come, Dodder, that's no way to carry on during the Spring Flying. One day there will be another oak tree and the Folly will run again. Look! the sun's breaking through the woods; in a day or so the cuckoo will be here. And as for me, I must be off to find some caterpillars. I'm mighty hungry, I can tell you.' And away flitted the merry little bird between the green leaves.\n\n## CHAPTER FOUR\n\n## _Plans_\n\n e must make a plan, a sound plan, of what we are going to do.' Dodder, puffing a fragrant cloud of tobacco smoke, leant his elbows on the cabin table.\n\nFor over a week they had remained in the Willow Root, recuperating from their ordeal. The fishing in this new river had been marvellous, too marvellous, for as it was such a deep river the fish were correspondingly big and their fishing tackle was repeatedly broken.\n\nAnd you can imagine their joy when they found that Ben and his wife also took up their abode in the willow! There was a cavity in the top which gave them shelter. It was the gnomes who had suggested to the Bens that they should keep together as long as possible, despite the buffetings of fate.\n\nDodder blew another cloud of smoke and regarded Cloudberry with a jaundiced eye. The latter was sure to suggest something absurd, such as going to Spitzbergen or some rubbish and these last few days he had been very full of himself.\n\n'What about asking the Bens down into the cabin?' suggested Squirrel. 'They're up above, we've only to call 'em. Let's have a real powwow.'\n\n'Good idea!' said Dodder. 'Ask 'em down.'\n\nWhilst Baldmoney went on deck, Sneezewort lit the lamp and pulled the curtains, for it was almost dusk.\n\n'I hope they haven't gone out hunting yet,' said Cloudberry, twiddling one end of his beard between finger and thumb. 'Not they,' said Dodder, 'they never wake up until it's almost dark.' Just then steps were heard on the companion-way and Baldmoney appeared followed by Mr and Mrs Ben.\n\nThe two birds could only just get into the cabin and Ben bumped his head on the doorway as he came in and uttered a hoot of pain.\n\n'Sorry, Ben!' said Dodder. 'You should read the notice,' and he pointed to a neatly written 'Mind Your Head!' on a square of birch bark nailed to the wall.\n\n'I'm afraid we can't offer you anything to eat or drink,' said the hospitable Dodder, glancing round towards the galley stove. 'I hope you haven't hurt yourself.'\n\n'Oh, that doesn't matter,' said Ben; rubbing his head with his hairy claw. 'I ought to be more careful. Anyway, the house upstairs (he meant in the willow top) is pretty small, I'm always doing it.'\n\n'You've got a cosy place here and no mistake,' said Mrs Ben, looking round the cabin with a professional eye.\n\n'Yes, it's not a bad old tub,' said Dodder, secretly very pleased.\n\n'About the best ship ever built, I should say,' said Ben, glancing admiringly at the pictures and the neat bunks.\n\n'Yes, she's a good well-found ship,' said Baldmoney, 'and I may be able to mend the engines. Truth to say I haven't had a moment yet, what with one thing and another.'\n\n'Of course not,' said Ben understandingly.\n\n'Well, we asked you down here,' began Dodder, drawing up his chair a little closer to the table, 'because we thought as we're all in the same boat we should make some plans as to the future. It's pretty plain we can't stay in this tree; it isn't suitable, for one thing, and besides, there's not room for you, and we do want you to be with us as long as possible.'\n\n'That's very kind of you, Dodder,' said Ben, greatly moved. 'We take that as a great compliment, we do indeed. After all, we've lived long enough together to know each other's little ways.'\n\nAnd then he looked rather confused. 'You see, Dodder, the whole thing is rather complicated. We always, as you know, have a family every spring. My wife had already laid her eggs in the Oak Tree when those unspeakable savages came and cut it down. Well, we've lost those precious eggs, (here Mrs Ben gave a sniff and turned away her head) and my wife thought of starting up house in the willow here. But I tell her to be reasonable; there's not room and for many reasons it's _quite_ unsuitable for a nursery. But you know what females are... '\n\n'I know,' said Dodder (he didn't in the least) and Ben went on, 'She will be miserable if we don't have our family as we always have done.'\n\n'Well, why not go around a bit and find a better tree somewhere downstream and then we'll come along too,' Baldmoney suggested.\n\nHere Cloudberry, who had been very fidgety, broke in, 'No, I don't agree with that,' he said, very red in the face. 'I don't think it's any good settling down again in another tree somewhere; we aren't a lot of cabbages. Why can't we go on down to the sea and live in a cave? We might even go off overseas every autumn with the swallows and come back in the spring. I say, let's see the world a bit!'\n\n'Don't be absurd, Cloudberry,' snapped Dodder, banging the table with his fist. 'How can we go with the swallows? They can't carry us on their backs. Preposterous!'\n\n'Absurd!' said Baldmoney.\n\n'Ridiculous suggestion!' grunted Squirrel.\n\n'Well,' said Ben, trying to calm everyone down, for tempers were rising, 'it isn't too easy to find a suitable tree, not so easy as you think, gnomes. What the wife and I don't know about hollow trees isn't worth knowing, though I say it myself, and to find a tree on the river bank with a hole for me and a hole for you will be a most difficult job. We might have to go miles before we found the right one. Take this willow for instance. You've got no storage chambers, you've got to live aboard the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ , and as you know, there isn't room to swing a mouse upstairs. It's very difficult, it is indeed,' and he wagged his big head woefully.\n\n'I know all that, Ben,' said Dodder. 'If the worst comes to the worst then you must find a tree _near_ us, and we'll live in another place.'\n\n'Oh dear, it _is_ a business house-hunting at our time of life.'\n\n'I don't see what's the point of worrying like this,' said Cloudberry again. 'Why on earth you _want_ to settle down at all beats me! I'm all for the wandering life, I am.'\n\n'No!' said Dodder with feigned surprise. 'I should never have thought it of you, Cloudberry!' he added with bitter sarcasm.\n\n'Oh yes I am,' rejoined Cloudberry, who was rather dense and did not see the gleam in Dodder's eye. 'I'm all for the roving life and the wind on the heath.' And to everybody's shocked surprise he burst into the following song, beating time with his snail-shell tankard:\n\n_'Oh I'm a rover, roving free_\n\n_The wind in the wood is the wind for me_ ,\n\n_The silvery downs and the silver sea_.\n\n_Heigh-ho for the life of a rover!'_\n\nWhen Cloudberry had finished there was an icy silence. Then Dodder turned to the owls. 'I must apologize for our brother, Bens, he's never been the same since he met the Heaven Hounds.'\n\n'I haven't,' said Cloudberry at once, and with pride in his voice. 'Nobody ever is! Once you've been with the wild geese there's something gets into your blood.' His eyes were all dreamy now and the others half thought he was going to burst into song again. 'Think of it!' he continued. 'Even now the Heaven Hounds are setting out. I can see them massing in their vast armies on the sand banks, I can hear the bell buoys clanging, I can smell the sea and hear the creamy whispering tide breaking on the leagues of shore. To the north! To the north! _That's_ the Great Call which brooks no denying!' He got up and began to pace restlessly round the cabin until Dodder, with a quick movement, seized him by the slack of his skin breeches. Then began a most disorderly riot. Baldmoney jumped up and Squirrel too, Sneezewort caught hold of one leg and Dodder seized the other and in a moment or two the pandemonium was terrible. The table was overturned, Ben and his wife were twice knocked over. The lamp fell down and went out, emitting a stink of smoky oil and you never saw such a disgraceful scene in all your life. 'Lock him in the fo'castle!' gasped Dodder as he struggled to get hold of Cloudberry's collar. At last, the unhappy Cloudberry, completely overpowered, was carried, kicking, up the companion-way and thrust into the fo'castle, where they locked him in. There he set up a terrific din, beating on the door and calling everyone, Ben included, a lot of mouldy cabbages.\n\n'Phew!' said Dodder, when peace reigned once more and everything had been put to rights. 'Now we can perhaps talk in comfort without that silly little idiot upsetting everything and everyone. I must apologize again, Bens, for such a scene, we don't know what's come over Cloudberry, he used to be so peaceable and sensible.'\n\nBen said it was all right and that he quite understood, but both birds looked rather awkward. Family rows before guests are always nasty ill-bred things.\n\n'As I see it,' said Ben at last, 'this question of settling down in another tree is a very, very difficult question. And I'm going to say something which may surprise, even hurt you, Dodder. To my notion I can see there is something more in Cloudberry's restlessness than we think. The truth is, this England of ours is not what it used to be. Look at all these thunder birds and cars which are flying about all over the place. No, England's getting less and less a place for people like us. If only we could find some other country, a nice quiet country, mind, where we could stay until the Mortals stop cutting down all the trees, and spoiling the countryside. I've no doubt things will come all right again one day and England will be her old self again. But as the world is now, it's no place for the likes of us.'\n\nThere was dead silence in the cabin. In some queer way Dodder thought Ben had played them a scurvy trick.\n\n'Mind,' said Ben, noticing the cloudy looks of his companions, 'I'm not siding with Cloudberry, don't think that; but a snipe once told me that away to the west there's a green little island, a lot smaller than Britain, a green, quiet little island, with leagues of wild country, mountains and forest, bogs and lakes. If we went there we should find peace and quietness for the rest of our lives.'\n\n'And how far is this island you're talking about?' said Dodder. 'This wonderful place where we should find peace at last?'\n\n'That I don't know,' replied Ben, 'but I will tell you of somebody who knows _all_ about it, for he's been there quite a lot, and that's Woodcock.'\n\n'Woodcock!' exclaimed Dodder. 'What, that comfortable old long-nosed bird?'\n\n'The same,' said Ben, inclining his head gravely. 'Woodcock knows it well, he'll tell you all there is to know about it.'\n\n'And where can we find Woodcock?' asked Dodder. 'At this time of year I seldom see him.'\n\n'I think I can find him,' said Ben. 'I saw him last week in Red Shoot Wood. You wouldn't know the place I expect, it's some way off. I'll go there tonight, if you like, and fetch him along.'\n\n'By all means,' said Dodder, 'find him if you can, and we'll hear what he has to say. If there really is such a place I'd be the last to stick out against our going there\u2014if we _can_ ,' he added significantly, with a glance at Baldmoney.\n\n'If I mended the engines we could go there,' suggested Baldmoney, 'if it isn't too far.'\n\n'I'm afraid it's a long way,' said Ben. 'A lot farther than your journey up the Folly, and you'd have to cross the sea.'\n\n'That would be easy,' cried Baldmoney, unable to suppress a strange new excitement welling within him. 'If once we got the engine going the _Jeanie Deans_ would go anywhere, even to this precious Spitzbergen place that Cloudberry is always babbling about.'\n\nNot many hours later they heard Ben hooting in the distance and in a little while he appeared, in company with the strangest-looking little bird you ever saw. He was dumpy and had a very long nose. His great black eyes were almost as big as Ben's, set very high in a tall forehead. Indeed, he was not unlike Ben in many ways and his dress was a beautiful blend of russet and grey, exactly like the autumn leaves.\n\n'I've found him,' said Ben triumphantly, ushering the bewildered bird into the cabin. 'I thought I could.'\n\nThe Woodcock stood blinking in the light of the cabin lamp.\n\n'Welcome, Woodcock,' said Dodder, anxious to put their new guest at his ease. 'This is Baldmoney, this is Sneezewort, and this is Squirrel. Our other brother is a little\u2014er\u2014unwell, excitable, you know.' The last remark was well borne out by a distant confused racket from the direction of the fo'castle.\n\n'Better go and let him out,' said Dodder in an aside to Baldmoney, 'he'll _have_ to meet Woodcock anyway.'\n\nBaldmoney stole out of the cabin and soon reappeared with Cloudberry, who now seemed very subdued.\n\nWhen all the introductions had been made, Ben turned to Woodcock.\n\n'My friends want to know all about that green island where you live,' said Ben. 'You see, they\u2014we, I mean\u2014have lost our home because those hateful Mortals have drained the Folly and the Oak Tree House has been cut down. We haven't a roof over our heads. We thought if we could reach this island of yours we should he able to live in peace, without danger of any more of these disturbances.'\n\n'I can't blame you, I must say,' said the woodcock. 'These Mortals are getting too much above themselves. I'm off tomorrow to my island, and I shall be glad to go. Another day and you wouldn't have found me!'\n\n'Is it a nice _quiet_ place?' asked Dodder.\n\n'Quiet! I should say it is!' said Woodcock (and here he dropped his voice), 'I believe there are other gnomes there too, and a few Lantern Men.'\n\n'Why, it must be Ireland you're speaking of,' said Dodder, starting up, 'that's the only place now where any of the Little People remain.'\n\n'Ireland it is,' said the woodcock, lapsing into brogue. 'A fine place it is entirely, green all the year round, as green as spring. And there are oak woods there, and mosses and bogs, and never a mortal comes nigh you, week in, week out. There are streams... and the lakes\u2014Oh! the blue of them! And I'm thinking of a place that would suit ye, an island, on a grey, grey loch below the Mourne Mountains. There's an old chapel there, where a hermit lies buried, bless his soul, and a little wood of bog oaks close by. The bracken grows high and the wild geese rest on the shore of it and no sound will you hear but the wind, and the voice of the waves on the shingle!'\n\nCloudberry, who all this time had been sitting very quiet and composed at the end of the table, began to gulp. He looked nervously at Dodder, at his brothers, and then at Ben. And the latter, to Cloudberry's immense surprise, gave him a prodigious friendly wink.\n\n'It sounds a nice place I must say,' said Dodder at last (and Owl gave Cloudberry another wink) 'but how do we get there?'\n\n'Ah! that's the rub,' said the woodcock. 'How do you get there?'\n\nCloudberry, unable to control his tongue any longer, got to his feet. 'I know!' he exclaimed. 'The Heav\u2014'\n\n'Silence!' roared Dodder. 'Another word from you, sir, and you'll be locked up in the fo'castle again and live on acorns and water for a week!'\n\nThe discomfited Cloudberry subsided like a pricked bubble and gazed reflectively at the table.\n\n'If we could mend the engines of this ship could we get there?' asked Dodder.\n\nThe woodcock gazed round at the cabin. Then he shook his long bill. 'I fear not, good gnomes, the Irish sea would sink this little boat like a pebble.'\n\nCloudberry opened his mouth again to say something, thought better of it, and continued to gaze at the table in a profound manner.\n\nThen Ben spoke up. 'If I may make a suggestion,' said he, 'did not your brother Cloudberry here go all the way to Spitzbergen on a goose's back last year?'\n\n'To Spitzbergen!' gasped the woodcock, gazing at Cloudberry with unmistakable respect. 'Why, that's _much_ farther than Ireland, much farther.'\n\n'You may speak,' said Dodder to Cloudberry, 'but confine your observations to the mode of travel and not to your adventures.'\n\n'I travelled with the Heaven Hounds, as Mr Ben here has just informed you,' said Cloudberry, crimson with pride in spite of himself. 'I met them up the Folly and the Leader of the Skein took me on his back. A cold journey it was, but a comfortable one. And I had the good fortune to be of great use to the\u2014'\n\n'Silence!' commanded Dodder. 'That is all we want to know. You may sit down.'\n\n'The Heaven Hounds left yesterday,' said the woodcock, 'I saw them flying, flying like a great arrow, over Red Shoot Wood. You are too late, my friends, to think of asking them. Anyway,' he added, 'they would never go out of their way to take you to my country. When the Call comes we birds have to go, to the place of our birth. Those Heaven Hounds, which took your brother to Spitzbergen, would be the Pink Feet which rarely visit Ireland. It is the White Fronts who go there and they too will have left by now, I have no doubt. Where this river joins the Severn Sea, the White Fronts live\u2014in winter that is\u2014along the marshes by the Estuary. But as I say they will be leaving now, they will most certainly have gone by the time you reach the Severn, if ever you get that far.'\n\n'Then we have missed our chance,' said Cloudberry, his eyes filling with tears and the great undreamt of hope, which had been rising within him, cruelly dashed.\n\n'Not by any means,' said Baldmoney. 'We have been helped in the past, we shall be helped again. To Ben here, and Mrs Ben, the journey presents no difficulty. And besides,' he added, his eyes glinting, 'I have one of my Ideas. I think we can get over the difficulty of transit.'\n\nDodder, sitting with head sunk in his hands, sniffed and a little groan escaped him.\n\n'I suppose you all _are_ right,' he said in a low voice, 'I suppose we _must_ go, somehow or another. And now Brother Baldmoney has one of his \"Ideas\" there will be no peace for any of us!'\n\n'Cheer up!' said the woodcock. 'All will be well!' He turned to go. 'I shall expect to see you there,' he said. 'I will tell Ben what compass course to steer for that little island that I spoke of. He will no doubt be your pilot, whether you fly or sail there. As for me, I must be off, I'm late already!' And with a polite bow, the strange little bird walked up the companion-way with the Bens closely following on his heels, and vanished from view.\n\nIn the following breathless silence, poor old Dodder, weary with years and feeling more tired than he had ever been before in his long life, heaved a deep, deep sigh.\n\n## CHAPTER FIVE\n\n## _Mr Shoebottom's Boy_\n\n hatever 'Idea' Baldmoney had in that wise little head of his he kept it to himself. But in the days following the round table conference just related he spent most of his time down in the engine room, hammering and scraping at the springs and bolts.\n\nThe others were not sorry. After a promising spell of warm spring-like days there was much rain and frost at night and everyone, even Cloudberry, was glad that they were not somewhere downriver at the mercy of the wintry weather.\n\nBaldmoney was so busy he had his meals taken down to him in the engine-room by Sneezewort. The others spent their time fishing and making some very smart and serviceable coats out of the moleskins which Ben had given them. Mrs Ben was very impressed when she saw the finished garments.\n\nSquirrel became venturesome. He made 'excursions' downriver all by himself. One day, not half-a-mile below their temporary home, he came upon a road which led to a village. Close to the river was a bridge and a garage-cum-shop which belonged\u2014according to the notice over the garage door\u2014to a gentleman named Shoebottom. The notice said 'G. Shoebottom, Garage. Petrol, oils, quick repairs of all kinds undertaken.' Shoebottom had a small son and a very fat black spaniel called 'Bogie', which looked more like a woolly roly-poly bolster than a dog. This animal chased Squirrel up an apple tree one afternoon and had not Mr Shoebottom been busy in his engineering shop and the little Shoebottom at school, things might have gone hardly with him. He was lucky to escape and thereafter he avoided that section of the river bank.\n\nAnd then the cold bleak weather changed. Mid-April came, and with it a spell of warm days which made everyone feel that it was real summer at last. The swallows came, and the cuckoo, and every plant and leaf grew apace. Poor old Ben had a very trying time with Mrs Ben, for the latter, now that the countryside was so full of such green promise, pined for another family. But old Ben knew best; as he often told her, 'Ben knows best', and after a day or two she decided that she would wait until the following spring. Everyone knew that great things were brewing and those days were just as full of suppressed excitement as when Baldmoney and Sneezewort were planning their trip up the Folly.\n\nThis new river was full of surprises and in many ways was much more imposing than their old beloved Folly. But for all that it did not have the same dear intimacy of that other little stream and even Dodder confessed to himself that they could _never_ be happy on its banks, even if Ben were to discover a suitable tree. There was another thing: sometimes boats came up the river, boats with Mortals in them, who played gramophones and threw ginger-beer bottles into the water and left paper lying about. Loving couples often came by, with a dreamy look in their eyes and once a noisy grunting motor launch passed the Willow and its wash came slooping and slopping under the root with such force that it nearly swamped the _Jeanie Deans_. And I must confess that their neighbours were very stand-offish. Of course there were voles and rabbits in dozens, living quite near, but they never dropped in for a friendly chat. No, it did not take long for even Dodder to realize they could never be happy in this sophisticated waterway.\n\nBut though the sun shone now with such warmth and the days were full of birdsong and glorious light, and buttercups by the million began to deck the water meadows, Baldmoney, working away in the bowels of the ship, did not seem to be making any headway.\n\nOne evening he came into the cabin looking very weary and strained. He flopped down and stared gloomily at his brothers.\n\n'What's up, Baldmoney?' asked Dodder kindly. 'We haven't worried you at all at your work, have we? We've kept out of your way as much as possible.'\n\n'I can't mend that blessed spring,' confessed Baldmoney, with a break in his voice. 'I'm afraid I shall never be able to, the job's beyond me.'\n\n'Oh, cheer up, Baldmoney, don't take on so. Supposing we push off and drift; after all we came down from the Big Sea that way.'\n\n'You don't understand,' said Baldmoney. 'We could never drift down to the sea, it's miles and miles and _miles_ \u2014forty, fifty times the distance we covered up the Folly!'\n\n'Oh dear me,' said Dodder, looking very worried. 'I never knew it was as far as that. How do _you_ know?'\n\n'King of Fishers told me last week. He said we might do it if we could mend the engine, but even then it's going to take all summer. Without the engine we haven't a hope and, besides, the boat isn't under control.'\n\n'I see,' said Dodder. 'Then we shall have to stay here. But you said you had an Idea the other day. What was it?'\n\n'I'm not going to tell anyone,' said Baldmoney. 'Ben knows my secret, but he's promised not to tell. You see, I've talked the whole thing out quietly with him and he agrees entirely with my Plan. But unless we can mend the engine we can't put it into operation, if you understand me.'\n\n'It's a bad business. I don't know what to suggest, unless we go on foot,' said Dodder after a pause.\n\n'That's impossible,' said Baldmoney. 'You _know_ it is, Dodder. How could _you_ walk for miles and miles, it just can't be done.'\n\n'What about Sir Herne? Can't he help?' suggested Dodder. 'He gave me a lift upstream, you remember.'\n\n'No, Sir Herne won't leave the district, not even for us. Herons don't hold with flying about the country; besides, even he couldn't take us all on his back.'\n\nDodder looked glumly through the porthole at a moorhen which was swimming past with a train of sooty moor-chicks following after. He sighed and passed his hand over his brow wearily.\n\n'Well, don't let's worry, Baldy, old fellow; everything will come right, you see.'\n\nThose lovely days of spring seemed to mock our poor homeless gnomes and their good friend Squirrel. Cloudberry, irritated at Baldmoney's failure to mend the engine, was more restless than ever, and spent much of his time teasing the water voles and aimlessly wandering along the river bank, despite the warnings of the others.\n\nOne hot afternoon in early May when Sneezewort, Dodder, and Baldmoney were playing Acorn Hop on the cabin table (Acorn Hop is rather like draughts but much more complicated) something very distressing happened.\n\nCloudberry was, as usual, 'mucking about' downriver in the dinghy (strictly against Dodder's orders) and Squirrel had been persuaded by that restless spirit to go with him.\n\nDodder had just taken one of Baldmoney's best pieces on the Acorn Hop board when there was a sudden noise outside. They heard the dinghy crash into their port side and a second later Squirrel and Cloudberry, very out of breath and pale of face, came tumbling down the companion-way. 'Quick, quick, they're after us. Get up inside the tree or we'll all be caught!'\n\n'Whatever's the matter?' exclaimed Dodder, starting up. 'Is it stoats or wood-dogs?'\n\n'Neither,' said Squirrel, 'but I tell you if we stay down here we'll all be caught like minnows in a bottle. Come on, all of you, we'll tell you later.' Without giving any further information Squirrel and Cloudberry ran up the stairs again and disappeared on deck. In no more time than it takes to tell, Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort followed. By standing on the bridge it was possible for them to scramble up inside the tree, for there was a hollow slit which went up the interior for some way.\n\nThey had hardly pulled themselves up when a terrific barking began outside, a perfectly deafening noise. And a moment later the head of a fat black spaniel pushed into the opening below them, sending big waves slopping about on the red roots.\n\n'Gercher!' chattered Squirrel. 'Get out, you brute!' and picking off a lump of rough wood aimed it at the spaniel. The dog could only get its head and shoulders into the hole, so it swam about, barking watery barks and glaring up at them with bloodshot eyes. It ignored the _Jeanie Deans_ which kept bumping its nose.\n\n'This is what comes of you playing about in daylight,' growled Dodder. 'I told you not to go out until dusk.'\n\n'I couldn't help it,' said Cloudberry feebly. 'Squirrel and I went for a row downriver and this beastly dog jumped out of the rushes at us and what's more serious still, one of the young Shoebottoms heard the noise and he's coming along the bank with another urchin to see what all the noise is about.'\n\nDodder groaned as if in pain. 'I'm surprised at you, Squirrel, I wouldn't have thought _you'd_ be so silly.'\n\nSquirrel hung his head sulkily. 'That dog's chased me before\u2014I hate him,' he muttered in his whiskers.\n\n'Well,' Dodder observed, 'we can only hope he gives up and goes away. Once we get Mortals on our track there'll be trouble.'\n\nBut the dog had no intention of going away. It could smell and see Squirrel squeezed up in the dark tree and he could see the gnomes too. So he swam round and round, barking as if he were quite mad.\n\nVery soon they heard hobnailed boots clambering and knocking on the tree. They also heard Ben and his wife fly out and then a voice called, 'Come on, Winkle, 'ere's an owl's nest up 'ere an' Bogie's got an otter in the tree!'\n\nThe gnomes heard the boys climb up to the top of the willow and a lot of dust came down. But they found no eggs, only a quantity of beetle castings, and after a while they climbed down again and began poking with a stick under the hollow beneath.\n\nThe young Shoebottom poked so vigorously that he severed the cable attaching the _Jeanie Deans_ to the inside of the root and the next moment the very worst possible thing happened. The ship, free of her anchor rope, slowly moved out from the hollow and floated in full view of the two urchins on the bank.\n\n'Now we're finally and _utterly_ sunk!' said Dodder, white with rage. 'Thanks to you, Cloudberry, we've lost the _Jeanie Deans_. I've a good mind to drown you or throw you down to that beastly dog!' The 'beastly dog' was still swimming around and barking. Then came a squeal of ecstatic delight.\n\n'OOOh! Wot a loverly boat\u2014'ere Winkle, cum an' look at this loverly boat wot's cum out from unner the tree!'\n\nThey saw a crooked claw reach out and grasp the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ by the foremast and in a brace of shakes the ship was lifted out of their ken and below them there was nothing but agitated ripples, rocking to and fro and sucking at the willow roots. The expressions of delight which echoed all about them fully testified that the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ was meeting with huge approval.\n\n''Ere, let me wind 'er up, there's a key in 'ere,' they heard one urchin squeal.\n\n'The spring's broke, but ain't she a loverly ship!'\n\n'Coo, there's a lil' cabin an' all, full o' things, tables an' all!'\n\n'Coo!'\n\n''Ere, let _me_ look.'\n\n'Get out, I found it first!'\n\n'Garn, that you didn't, Bogie found it. If 'e 'adn't gone in after the otter you wouldn't 'ave found it, so there!'\n\n'I should!'\n\n'You wouldn't now!'\n\nThere was a sound of a scuffle in which the dog, tiring of trying to get at the gnomes and Squirrel in the tree, apparently joined. Then the wrangling died away. Scrambling down the tree the gnomes peeped through a bunch of stinging nettles. The two boys were going away down the river bank, the little Shoebottom carrying the _Jeanie Deans_ in his arms. Dodder watched them out of sight and without a word he went back and sat down on the willow root with his head in his hands.\n\nCloudberry and Squirrel (the latter especially) appeared very shame-faced and said nothing, so Baldmoney and Sneezewort went over to Dodder and tried to comfort him.\n\nWhy was fate so cruel to these poor little refugees? What wrong had they done? Now their last home had gone and with it everything they possessed: their fishing rods, Dodder's precious wines, their moleskins, all their worldly goods and it was all Cloudberry's fault.\n\nTo mock them the swallows swept overhead twittering so happily, speeding cloud shadows raced each other over the green hedges and larks sang their silver songs high above the spring corn. In the reed thickets by the waterside the sedge warblers sang and gnats danced in the sunlight.\n\nWhere was Pan? What was he doing to let such a thing happen? Was he somewhere close by, hidden among the silvery willows which bent so gracefully before the breeze of evening?\n\nAs a matter of fact, quite unknown to the gnomes and Squirrel, he _was_ close by, secreted among the willow thickets, smiling to himself, a queer crooked smile as he toyed with his pipe. He had arranged the whole thing. He put the idea of a row into Cloudberry's silly head, he had lured the spaniel to hunt for water-rats along the river bank, he had planned that the little Shoebottom and his friend should play truant that afternoon from school. And all this goes to show, as you will very soon see, what a wise old Pan he was!\n\n## CHAPTER SIX\n\n## _Mr Shoebottom's Shop_\n\n here was a starling whistling up in the willow tree. His plumage was shot with lovely blues, greens, purples, and reds, a coat of many colours. And his song was many-coloured too, little snatches of sound made up on the spur of the moment: sheep bleating, jackdaws chacking, peewits crying, swallows twittering, and sandwiched in, here and there, his own queer clicks and clackings.\n\nAn amusing bird, a clown among the birds, Nature's jester. Many a time had he made the gnomes rock with laughter at his funny ways and pranks. How they loved to see the big starling flocks in autumn, wheeling in a shimmering cloud over the reed beds! How they laughed to see these busy star-spangled people waddling in the meadows after wireworms. But just now, Dodder thought, it was no time for jesting. And after a while, when the starling began to copy the sound of Mr Shoebottom's hammer in his workshop, Dodder could stand it no longer. 'Hi! You there! Shut up, can't you!'\n\nNow the starling had never before been spoken to so rudely by a gnome. He regarded Dodder and his brothers with a shocked and injured air.\n\n'Oh, I'm _sorry_ , Spangle, I didn't mean to shut you up, but we've had a dreadful loss.'\n\nThe bird gave a shrill whistle, which ascended the scale and then with a throaty gibber came to rest on the grass close by. 'Dear, dear, dear,' said Spangle, regarding the sorrowful group, 'I'm sorry to hear that, I am indeed. What's the trouble?'\n\n'We've lost our boat,' said Baldmoney, and Squirrel and Cloudberry affected to gaze with unusual interest at a large red cow which was pulling at the rush-tops downriver.\n\n'Not the _Jeanie Deans_ \u2014the famous _Jeanie Deans_?' said Spangle, and he gave a low whistle. 'Why, we all knew what a lovely boat she was and how you had her safe and sound here in the willow tree. How did it happen?'\n\n'Well, there's no need to go into that now; least said, soonest mended,' said Dodder wearily, 'but she's gone and gone for good. The Shoebottom kid has stolen it!'\n\nThe starling was speechless. 'Why, _that_ little brat. Goodness gracious, but what a shame! I've cause to know that family well, a good hard-working family too, and they have a nice warm thatch. Why, I've got a wife now sitting on five eggs under their very roof. We build there every year. Old Shoebottom's a good sort, never interferes with me. Says he likes us whistling about his chimneys. Clever bloke too, with his hands, so they say.'\n\n'Clever or not, the brat's got the _Jeanie Deans_ ,' said Dodder grumpily, 'and I don't know what we're going to do. Even though her spring was broken she made a splendid houseboat.'\n\nSpangle sat for a minute or two regarding the gnomes out of the corner of his eye. The sun was shining and in its bright rays Dodder was struck by the beauty of the bird's plumage. Usually they made fun of the starlings and called them Spangleclowns. 'Tell you what,' said Spangle, 'I'll fly across to the cottage now and see if I can see anything of the boat. There's been a fine old clatter going on in the workshop all afternoon, even my wife remarked on it. Just wait here and I'll be back in a wriggle of wire-worms.'\n\n'He's an amusing fellow is Spangle,' said Baldmoney, after the bird had gone. 'Well-meaning too, but I can't see he can do much to help us.'\n\nIn a very short while, however, back came Spangle, and he was fairly bubbling over with excitement.\n\n'Old man Shoebottom's in the workshop right enough, with the kid. I peeped through the window. They've got the _Jeanie Deans_ on the bench and they're working away on her like leatherjackets.'\n\n'Ho ho,' said Baldmoney, pricking up his ears. 'They are, are they?'\n\n'True enough,' said the starling. 'If that boat's got a broken spring, as you say she has, old Shoebottom will soon put it to rights. Thinks no end of his kid, you know\u2014nasty little brat, I call it, but there's no accounting for tastes.'\n\n'Now if only we could get that boat out of the workshop tonight,' said Baldmoney, pulling his beard, 'that would be the thing to do.'\n\n'Well,' said Spangle, 'old Shoebottom is a member of the Bowling Club, and I happen to know they've got a dinner on tonight at the Spotted Cow, no end of a beano it's going to be. I heard it from another starling who nests in the roof of the pub up in the village. So he'll be out of the way and he may come back in liquor; he usually does after affairs of that sort. Mrs Shoebottom's a sound sleeper and the brat won't wake. The dog's the only thing to worry about, that and getting the boat out of the shop. It's all locked up at night.'\n\n'Well, this _is_ a teaser,' said Baldmoney, who nevertheless had brightened up considerably.\n\n'You'll get into the place all right,' said Spangle. 'The door's an old one, I've even squeezed in myself sometimes to have a look round, but it'll be a job to get the boat out, as you say. Anyway, your friend Ben can keep watch, can't he? He can sit on the gable top and keep a look-out.'\n\n'Yes, he'll do anything to help,' said Dodder, 'but how we're going to get the boat out\u2014that's the question. Supposing we all go down there tonight and have a look, eh? What do you say, Baldmoney?'\n\n'Good idea!'\n\n'And Cloudberry and Squirrel' (those worthies started guiltily), 'as you've led us into this mess you'll have to do all the dirty work. You'll have to go inside the shop\u2014how I don't know\u2014and see what you can see.'\n\nIt was after eleven o'clock that night when the gnomes and Squirrel, accompanied by Ben, set out for the Shoebottom's shop. A full moon rode clear in the sky and a brisk breeze blew ragged clouds across its pallid face.\n\nThe trees and hedges had now put on their heavy green and it was eerie to see the leaves bending and swishing under the rough caress of the wind and to see quite big waves breaking on the river banks. It did not take them long to reach the place. Squirrel and Cloudberry, anxious to make good for their earlier behaviour, led the way across the meadows.\n\nVery soon they saw the gleam of the moon on the galvanized roof of the garage. The gnomes trod fearfully. Never before had they been so close to the haunts of men and the smells which assailed them were shocking. Gnomes, as I said in my former book, have a very strong sense of smell and the stinks of petrol, paraffin, grease and what-not, were truly horrible.\n\nThe Shoebottoms' house was well curtained, only a faint light showed in a lower window where Mrs Shoebottom was sitting up for her husband.\n\nThey stole along the grass beside the road and in a few moments they entered the yard. On the chimney-pot they could see the rigid form of old Ben keeping watch, bobbing up and down as he looked about him on all sides, now towards the village and up the road, now across the windy fields. Nothing escaped that piercing gaze of his.\n\n'It's lucky the dog sleeps in the house,' whispered Cloudberry, 'I found that much out from Spangle. Here's the shop. Look! it's easy to get in; we can squeeze in under the door!'\n\nSquirrel went first, then came Baldmoney and Cloudberry, followed by Dodder and Sneezewort.\n\nThe first thing that Sneezewort did when he got inside was to fall headlong over an old 'Lodge' sparking plug which lay on the greasy black floor.\n\n'Clumsy little idiot,' hissed Dodder. 'Look where you're going!'\n\nThe moonlight was streaming in through the windows, making the interior of the workshop appear very ghostly.\n\nTo Baldmoney's mathematical mind the sight of this place was enthralling. All about lay screws, bolts and pistons, coils of wire, drums of oil, iron bars, cylinder heads, parts of bicycles, two canvas canoes, an anvil, rakes, hammers, nails, gaskets, and Heaven knows what.\n\nIt did not take Squirrel long to hop up on the workbench and there, sure enough, was the _Jeanie Deans_. Shoebottom senior had been working late upon it and he had only just got the job done before black-out time.\n\n'Try the key,' whispered Dodder, trembling with excitement, 'you know how it works.' But Squirrel had forgotten and Sneezewort and Cloudberry had to climb up on the bench and help him. From the darkness above Dodder heard them fitting the key and a second later there came a sudden whirr from the propellers.\n\nNow that alarming buzz in that silent ghostly place, patterned as it was by the moonbeams, and full of odd-looking shadows, was too much for Sneezewort. He jumped back and collided with a heavy iron bar which Shoebottom (or Pan) had propped near the window. With an appalling noise this weighty metal rod crashed down and shivered the panes into a thousand fragments!\n\nFor a second everyone was frozen with horror. And then Dodder, whose brain always worked quicker than most folks, realized that their problem had been accidentally solved. The window was broken and through that shattered pane it might be possible to pass the _Jeanie Deans_!\n\nIt was only a few feet above the ground, there was a bed of nettles under the window. They could push the boat out and trust to its falling softly outside.\n\nWith trembling hands and paws, the gnomes and Squirrel lifted her bows up and pushed with might and main. It took every ounce of their strength to move the ship but the urgency of their mission gave them unwonted power. The _Jeanie Deans_ was thrust forward (Baldmoney slipping some bolts under her keel to act as rollers) and the next moment, with a final heave, she toppled from sight into the moonlit night.\n\nBut still the job was yet half-done. The problem now was to get her across the road and down to the river, a matter of thirty yards. Again Baldmoney's mathematical brain came to the rescue. He threw the others three of the bolts and after a mighty struggle they got them under her keel and began to move the ship, inch by inch, out of the yard and into the road, Squirrel and Cloudberry pulling on a rope from the bow, and the others pushing behind.\n\nPanting and heaving they edged her along. Success was in sight. But at that moment there came a sudden barking from the house. Bogie the spaniel had heard the crash of glass and the unwonted noises from the garage and was giving the alarm. At that moment too Ben gave a wild hoot and swept low over the yard shouting that old Shoebottom had just turned the corner of the road beyond the bridge. It was a lucky thing that once over the road the ground sloped steeply under some rails to the river's edge. There old Shoebottom had several rowing boats tied up (he let out boats for hire as well as selling petrol) and just as the straining gnomes and Squirrel had pulled the _Jeanie Deans_ into the middle of the road Shoebottom, reeling slightly and singing, 'It's my delight' at the top his voice, bore down upon them.\n\nAs the tipsy fellow drew near the song died on his lips. He saw clearly in the moonlight four little figures and a rabbit-like creature hauling the boat across his path. 'Hey!' he shouted. 'Hey, you! That's my boat, that is!' But the gnomes had now got the boat on the slope, she rolled and slithered down the bank, and just as Shoebottom came puffing and stumbling right upon them, the _Jeanie Deans_ took the water. Dodder and the others had only just time to climb aboard, Squirrel was left behind and forced to swim after them, an arrangement he had not bargained for as the water was icy chill.\n\nA tremendous row now began from the direction of the shop. Mrs Shoebottom rushed out, followed by the yelling dog, and she soon saw the shattered window of the garage.\n\n'Thieves! Thieves!' shouted they all in unison. Old Shoebottom was staggering about in circles, waving his arms and pointing to the river. 'They've made off with our Billy's boat,' he was shouting over and over again.\n\n'Perlice!' yelled Mrs Shoebottom with deafening gusto. 'We've been robbed we have, we've been robbed! Perlice!'\n\nMeanwhile the current was bearing the _Jeanie Deans_ out into midstream and the shadows of the trees hid her from Mortal gaze.\n\nIn a brace of shakes they got the engine going and without more ado they made off downstream as fast as they could go, despite the frantic squeaks of Squirrel, toiling in the water. That unhappy beast had at length to take to the bank and join them farther down.\n\nIt was truly amazing how well their plans had gone. The gnomes were beside themselves with joy. Ben and his wife circled above them against the stars, hooting happily, and away back at the garage Mrs Shoebottom was gently guiding her tipsy husband up the rickety stairs.\n\n'I tells 'ee, Mary, them was _pixies_ I saw! Plain as a pikestaff, a-pullin' and a-haulin' that there toy ship over the road!'\n\nAnd Mrs Shoebottom was saying 'There, there,' and such-like soothing things, and shaking her head from side to side.\n\n''Twas the wind that blew the crowbar through the windy, mi-dear,' she said, ''twas no burglar, that I'm sure.'\n\n'But Billy's boat's gone I tells ye, woman,' her husband kept on repeating in a thick voice, 'an' I saw them little critturs a-carryin' o' it off!'\n\nAnd up in the thatch a sleepy starling, who had stayed awake to see the fun, clappered his bill and went happily to sleep.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVEN\n\n## _Conversation Piece_\n\n ow the gnomes found themselves once more back in possession of their beloved ship their joy knew no bounds. The unhappy Mr Shoebottom had done his work well and the _Jeanie Deans_ was apparently as good as the day Dodder came upon her reposing on the white sand of Poplar Island.\n\nTrue, she had lost some of her pristine glory, her paintwork had suffered through what she had undergone, but she pulled along through the water with all her old fire and glided as gracefully as any swan upon the ample bosom of this new river. It cannot be expected, or pretended, that the gnomes found her interior fittings as smart as they used to be, nor that they found everything intact. There was some splintered woodwork in the cabin, several panels had suffered, either from the attentions of Master Shoebottom, or from the fall from the garage window. But the clumsy fingers of old Shoebottom had been unable to force an entry into the cabin and even Master Shoebottom had not had the leisure to explore all the hidden treasure below decks.\n\nThe wine was untouched, though one shell was broken and the precious liquid had drained away with the bilge water. Also the glass in the pictures was shattered but the pictures themselves were happily undamaged.\n\nBaldmoney soon got busy putting everything to rights, mending the broken panelling and so forth. Even their new moleskin coats were found hanging up in the little cupboard by the bunks quite unharmed.\n\nYou may be sure that they put a good many miles between them and the scene of their alarming adventures. They journeyed unceasingly from dusk to dawn and as they went the river widened and widened. Sometimes they passed under bolted railway bridges. Some came aslant to the path of the river, as though they were out of drawing, as the artists say, some were of steel, others were of brick. Once they passed a big town with many bridges and factory chimneys. And once too, a puzzled policeman, yawning on his beat, saw the shadowy outline of the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ pass below him as he stood on a road bridge, but he thought it was a large rat and yawned again and looked eagerly for the dawn.\n\nIn passing these Man Dwellings the gnomes were assailed by the many foreign smells which quite swamped the natural smells of reedbed and osier. They were always glad to be past them and out among the open country once again.\n\nThey quite lost count of the water mills and villages which went gliding by them. By day they sought the sanctuary of deep osiers, where the wind sang tunes among the slender wands and swallows twittered at close of day. Sometimes they pushed their way into dense reed beds, those graceful slender forests which were ever a-whispering their mysterious secrets to one another and where the little reedy bird people slung their neat ball-like nests anchored from stem to stem.\n\nThere was no urgent hurry; when they came to some restful spot, an eyot or backwater, they stayed for a day or so, quietly fishing and now and again having a refreshing swim. For now the country was at its loveliest. Never before had they seen such water-lily beds or such magnificent cup-shaped flowers. Never before had they seen such black poplars, bigger by far than those which they remembered at Moss Mill. And as for the fish they caught\u2014why, Dodder had his tackle broken many times a day by leviathans of the deep, as big or bigger than the perch he caught when he travelled up the Folly. There was no lack of good fresh food. Watercress was abundant and all sorts of tender water salads which Mortals do not know of. How pleasant it was to lie in your bunk and listen to the reed warblers all a-singing, to hear the sweet bell-like voice of the cuckoo sounding across those spacious evening meads. Sometimes oak woods, bluebell floored, came right down to the river's brim, and in those soft summer evenings, delicious with the scent of hayfields and meadowsweet, they watched the big river bats hawking to and fro and heard the monotonous 'crake crake' of land rails among the thick green mowing grass and branching buttercups.\n\nBen and his wife shadowed them, quiet and watchful ghosts. The two devoted birds were never far away. By day they went to sleep in some thick meadow elm or churchyard yew, but evening always found them floating along the misty river within sight and hail of the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ , noting their steady progress.\n\nThe gnomes made many new friends in their daily stopping places. The quaint little fluffy corks of dabchicks were a familiar sight, birds who have, as they told Dodder with great pride, no 'parsons' noses', and they met also the graceful and aristocratic crested grebes who glided by with dignified mien. Swans, of course, they met, but these creatures were as vain as peacocks. Once they had an encounter with a particularly bad-tempered bird.\n\nThey foolishly anchored near a swan's nest, and in a very short while the cob came alongside and ordered Dodder to move on. 'We don't allow gypsies, land _or_ water, on this stretch of river,' he said. Dodder answered with some heat that they had as much right, and more, than he to the river. Whereupon the cob waxed wroth and threatened to drown them and sink the boat. He would have done so had not Dodder, thinking 'discretion the better part of valour', weighed anchor and gone on.\n\n'As spoilt and vain-glorious as the Crow Wood Chinaman,' was Dodder's verdict, and long after they were out of earshot everyone shouted uncomplimentary remarks to the hissing angry bird.\n\nOne beautiful evening late in May they were anchored in a dense bed of reeds surrounding a calm backwater. Lily beds stretched on either hand and blue dragonflies hawked about the stern of the _Jeanie Deans_ as keenly as the swallows and martins, which latter birds were seeking for larger game in that quiet retreat close beside the main river.\n\nThere is a particular charm about such places. Hidden away by pallisades of graceful whispering reeds and willows one can dream the hours away and nothing but the sleepy twitter of birds or the splash of a fat fish breaks the quietness. Dodder was up on the bridge, contentedly smoking a pipe, his elbows resting on the rail, watching the blue-black swallows and the white spots of the martins' rumps as they weaved about the ship.\n\nBaldmoney and Squirrel were playing Acorn Hop on the foredeck and Cloudberry was fishing over the stern. From the faint clinks and clanks from the galley it appeared that Sneezewort was preparing the evening repast.\n\n'It's quite like old times,' said Baldmoney, sweeping the pieces off the board and leaning on the deck rail. 'Quite like the old days when we were going up the Folly to look for Cloudberry, only we don't seem so hurried now.'\n\n'Yes,' said Squirrel, falling in with Baldmoney's idle mood, 'it's sad we'll never sail the Folly again. We've had some tough times since then. I often wondered what would have happened to me if I'd stayed on in Crow Wood. Not that I ever want to go back there. Seems as if I've been living along with you fellows all my life somehow.' And he yawned.\n\n'Young Cloudberry seems more contented these days,' said Baldmoney after a while. 'Seems to me he's been more subdued too after that business with the Shoebottoms.'\n\n'Yes, I was a fool to be led on by him like that, but _you_ know what he is, and as it turned out it was the best possible thing that could have happened, otherwise we should never have got the spring mended.'\n\n'No,' replied Baldmoney, 'that job was beyond me I must confess, Squirrel. Doesn't it make you think, looking back on it all, that Pan must have engineered the whole thing?'\n\n'P'raps so,' agreed Squirrel. 'There's a lot of things we can't figure out, but plans don't always come out right. Talking of plans, you have a Plan, so Dodder tells me, about getting to Woodcock's island?'\n\n'Oh _that_ ,' said Baldmoney. 'Yes, I've got a Plan, of sorts; at least, Ben and I have one between us, but we've got to reach the Sea first before we tell anyone about it.'\n\nAs Baldmoney talked Squirrel saw him looking very intently at the reeds which swayed about all around them. Squirrel was a very sharp animal and seldom missed much. And this interest of Baldmoney's intrigued him enormously. Now, if he had been a little less subtle he might have remarked upon it, but instead he held his peace and pretended to be watching the swallows curvetting and circling about them. 'Look at the martins and swallows, they're having a high old time just here, catching no end of flies!'\n\n'What about a row in the dinghy?' suggested Baldmoney, ignoring Squirrel's last remark.\n\n'Good idea!' said Squirrel eagerly, who was, truth to say, just a little bored. 'But won't we have to get Dodder's permission?'\n\n'He looks in a good mood,' observed Baldmoney, 'he's always in a good mood on an evening like this and he's smoking a pipe, which is a good sign. I'll give the old chap a hail. Hi! Dodder!'\n\n'Hullo below there! What d'ye want?'\n\n'May Squirrel and I take out the dinghy for a row?'\n\n'What for?'\n\n'Just for a row\u2014we won't go far!'\n\nThere was a pause as Dodder took his pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at Squirrel. 'No more tricks then, you mustn't go out in the main river.'\n\n'All right,' shouted Baldmoney, 'we won't.'\n\nFull of excitement they lowered the boat into the water\u2014luckily the Shoebottoms had not taken it off the deck davits\u2014and a moment later both were safely aboard and rowing away. 'Don't make too much row,' whispered Baldmoney, 'we don't want Cloudberry bothering to come. I think he's so busy fishing he won't notice us.'\n\nBut at that moment Cloudberry, sensing in his uncanny restless way there was fun afoot, called out in his piping voice, 'Hey! come back for me, I'd like a row too!'\n\n'Sorry,' called Squirrel, 'sorry, Cloudberry, old chap, but we can't come back now. Go on, row fast, Baldmoney,' he added in an aside, 'we don't want him with us.'\n\nIn a moment or two they had drawn away and were threading between the stout green stems of the reeds and the _Jeanie Deans_ , with the gesticulating Cloudberry standing in the stem, was lost to view.\n\n'What fun it is,' said Squirrel, looking about him and settling himself on the cushions, 'this is _real_ fun, this is!' and he leant back luxuriously and closed his eyes, sniffing the air, for he could smell the hawthorn wind. There comes a day in early summer when the air becomes charged with the scent of the newly-opened hawthorn flowers. This lovely perfume, not unlike bean flowers, is wafted for miles o'er hill and dale. It needs a warm wind to bring it out and only on one day is it possible to notice it. Mortals sniff and say, 'What a lovely smell, what can it be?' That is the wind that the Little People name the hawthorn wind.\n\nAfter a while, when they had pushed well into the reed bed, Baldmoney stopped rowing. He pulled the little dinghy against one of the stout stems and began cutting at it with his knife.\n\n'What's the idea?' asked Squirrel, watching his friend with interest.\n\n'Oh, I just want to test out something,' said Baldmoney. He hacked away at the stout reed stem and in a minute or two its feathery top trembled and it toppled across the prow like a falling tree.\n\nBaldmoney worked away and soon cut off a length. This was, of course, hollow and quite strong. Baldmoney examined it with care, shaking his head now and again, and passing low remarks, hardly audible to Squirrel. 'Not strong enough by half... wouldn't stand the strain, no... they won't do at all... must find something else... ' and suchlike observations which so tickled Squirrel's curiosity that he could contain himself no longer.\n\n'Whatever _are_ you about, Baldmoney, muttering away like that? Do tell me. Is it something to do with that Plan of yours?'\n\n'P'raps it is, p'raps it isn't,' said Baldmoney mysteriously. 'They're no good anyway, not strong enough.'\n\n'Not strong enough for _what_?'\n\n'For my purpose.'\n\n'Oh, all _right_ ,' said Squirrel testily, 'I don't want to know your precious secret, but I think you might tell me!'\n\nBut Baldmoney would not be drawn.\n\nHe lay back and paddled slowly along with half-shut eyes. 'This is the sort of thing I just enjoy,' he murmured, gently guiding the dinghy between two water-lily leaves, 'just gliding about like this. What huge fun we're having.' He sighed again.\n\n'I believe Dodder is keeping a log every night,' said Squirrel, 'ever since we started from the Oak Tree he's kept a diary.'\n\n'All captains have to keep a log,' said Baldmoney. 'Surely you know that? The trouble is, Squirrel, I'm no hand at writing myself, engineering's more in my line. I say,' he cried, half sitting up, 'what a jolly place we're coming to!'\n\nThey had glided out of the reed bed into another smaller backwater. It really _was_ the most fairy-like place, with the dark green water studded with pure white lilies, each with a yellow centre, a small pool not more than ten yards across.\n\nThe willows, in a lovely silver tangle, formed a wall on all sides, shutting out the distant views of river and meadows. The low sunbeams, pouring down into that well-like place were gilding the tops of the bushes but the water itself was in cool shade. All manner of beautiful riverside flowers grew among the reeds and vegetation: willow herb, milk parsley, water betony and dock, and many another moisture-loving plant; each added its quota of scent, which lay heavily on the evening air.\n\nFrom under some water-lily leaves they saw the trembling tails of several large fishes. To fish, the flat lily leaves were like parasols.\n\nWaterhens swam about very busily, but when they saw the boat appear they shyly took refuge in the reed pallisades and passed watery remarks to one another.\n\n'Now, if we had only brought our fishing lines,' said Squirrel, 'we might have caught some of those big fellows hiding under the lily pads there.'\n\n'Oh, it's too hot, even to fish,' murmured Baldmoney, yawning widely and letting the little boat bump gently among the lilies. 'I believe I'm enjoying this trip more than the one we had up the Folly. Hullo! See who comes!'\n\nSquirrel turned about and saw, high above them, the huge extended vanes of grey wings, the pinions spread like fingers. It was Sir Herne the heron. He wheeled round in a wide arc and seeing the little opening below he checked himself and plunged down at a surprising speed, almost as if he had been shot. They could hear the still air burring through his feathers. When he came just above them they saw his long green legs suddenly drop down and he alighted with infinite grace a few yards away on a half-submerged willow root. It was quite remarkable to see how his silver-grey plumage toned with the willows all about them.\n\n'Sir Herne!' exclaimed Baldmoney, and doffed his cap politely. Squirrel, having no cap to take off, bowed distantly.\n\n'Hey ho! if it isn't the gnomes again! Why, I haven't seen any of you since I gave your friend Dodder a lift up the Folly, let me see... how long ago was that? Last summer, wasn't it?'\n\n'Yes, he was following after us and he told us how good you'd been,' said Baldmoney, beaming broadly.\n\n'But, gnomes, what _has_ happened to you? I've been thinking a lot about you lately. All the Stream People have left the Folly and the stream is dry. Your tree is down too. You wouldn't recognize the place. But I said to myself, I'll bet a pound roach to an ounce minnow the gnomes have not been caught napping, I'll wager they've gone off in that boat of theirs I've heard so much about!'\n\nBaldmoney grinned from ear to ear. 'We _were_ caught napping, Sir Herne, we were all asleep when Watervole came and woke us up!'\n\n'Ah! a good friend is Watervole,' said Sir Herne, drawing up one long leg. 'Poor things, they've had to pack up too, I suppose?'\n\n'Indeed they have,' said Squirrel.\n\n'Pardon me,' said Sir Herne, noticing Squirrel for the first time, 'I don't seem to have met you before!'\n\n'No, he came with us down the Folly last autumn, he lived in Crow Wood, you know,' said Baldmoney.\n\n'Ah... How's Dodder?' asked Sir Herne, after a pause.\n\n'Oh, he's well _and_ flourishing.'\n\n'Are you living close by?'\n\n'Oh no, we're on our way downriver to a place Woodcock called the \"Severn Sea\", wherever that may be.'\n\n'And what, may I ask, are you going to do when you get to the Severn Sea?' asked Sir Herne, looking rather surprised.\n\n'We're going to Woodcock's island, where a hermit or a saint lies buried, and no Mortals will bother us. It's right in the middle of a grey, grey loch, so Woodcock said; Ben knows the way, Woodcock told him.'\n\n'I expect,' said the heron, 'it's Ireland that Woodcock's talking of, he thinks a lot of the country, swears by it, says there's no place like it! I've never been there. I'm rather a home-lover, I'm afraid, England's good enough for me.'\n\n'It's good enough for us,' said Baldmoney earnestly, 'if only the Mortals would behave themselves, but they can't. We just can't stand them, and now the Folly's gone and our tree too, we feel we must clear out and find some peace before we die!'\n\nThe heron nodded gravely. ' _I_ know. I can quite see your point. I, too, sometimes feel the same way myself. But you've still some way to go to reach the Severn, and when you get there I don't see how you're going to get over the Irish Sea to Woodcock's island.'\n\n'We don't quite know ourselves yet,' confessed Baldmoney, 'but the Bens and I have a plan, and I think we might do it.'\n\n'The _Bens_ , did you say?' asked Sir Herne. 'Not Ben from Oak Tree House?'\n\n'Yes, _the_ Ben, _you_ know!'\n\n'Well I never, and where are the Bens? I haven't seen them for ages.'\n\n'Oh, I expect they're somewhere close by, roosting in an oak or an elm. Anyway, they always show up at night when we do all our travelling.'\n\n'So they are going too, are they?'\n\n'Oh yes, we've decided we'll stick together, come what may. You see, we've always lived in the same tree. Ben's ancestors did too, _you_ know what it is with old friends.'\n\nThe heron nodded wistfully. He was rather a lonely old bird and had few acquaintances. Most of the Stream People were afraid of him and truth to say, he often ate a fat water-rat on the sly. And as for frogs, he fairly wolfed them down.\n\n'Well, I wish I was coming with you,' he said after a pause. 'I do indeed. But I've got a wife and we've had a fine family this year on Poplar Island, two girls and a boy; fine children,' he said proudly.\n\nThe sun was now well down and Baldmoney realized that, without their knowing it, the evening had advanced surprisingly quickly.\n\nThe tops of the willows were no longer bathed in light and the backwater was full of green gloom and shadow. Everywhere arose the sweetly rank scent of the herbage and a bat began to hawk about overhead.\n\n'Well,' said Baldmoney, 'goodbye, Sir Herne. We must be going. As it is, I fear we shall get in an awful row from Dodder for stopping out so late, time passes quickly with friends.'\n\nThey turned the boat about and began to paddle softly away. Baldmoney waved his cap to Sir Herne and Squirrel raised a paw.\n\nLooking back they saw his grey form standing on the leg, his head sunk in his shoulders, and his spear couched in readiness.\n\n'Good hunting, brother,' called Baldmoney. 'Good hunting and a good trip,' called back Sir Herne, and the next moment the clustering reeds hid him from view.\n\nIt was nearly dark when they reached the larger backwater and saw the _Jeanie Deans_ anchored against the wall of reeds. She looked indescribably cosy, her every line reflected in the still water between the lily islands. Appetizing smells were wafted from the galley stove and a dim slit of light showed through a porthole of the cabin.\n\nThey tied up the dinghy, and a minute later had scrambled aboard, hungry and tired, but feeling as though they had spent a thoroughly enjoyable evening.\n\n## CHAPTER EIGHT\n\n## _At Bantley Weir_\n\n es, those were delicious evenings and dreamy nights, as the _Jeanie Deans_ progressed upon her journey.\n\nWhat magic there was in simply watching the hundred shifting lights and shadows on the river. What ripple patterns, whorls and eddies, complicated geometrical designs, ever-changing, never repeating themselves!\n\nI believe the gnomes would have liked to have spent the whole of that lovely summer pushing about like water-fowl among those secret waterways. But, after all, there was a job on hand, and if they but looked forward they could see that the time would come when the sun would cease to magic the river and those graceful beds of reeds and lush green pastures would be shrivelled and yellow under rude winter's breath.\n\nWhen those days came, woe betide them should the snow and frost find them shelterless! They were gathering no harvest to see them through the cold. This idle water-gypsy experience was all very nice and soothing, but they had to finish up somewhere, somewhere that was friendly, warm, and undisturbed.\n\nAfter sunset a river is as mysterious as a dense wood. The sounds one hears are echoed and magnified by the water, as from a sounding board; the plop of a rat, whistle of otter, or splash of some hefty fish, are startlingly clear.\n\nOn one of these soft luminous nights such as I have just described the _Jeanie Deans_ was churning steadily along down the centre of the river. The angling season had not yet begun, otherwise it is unlikely the gnomes would have dared mid-stream. But at that late hour (it was well after midnight) not a Mortal was abroad, they had the witchery all to themselves. Dodder, as usual, was steering. Supper was over and Squirrel and the others were up on deck; it was too hot down in the cabin. Now and then the gnomes heard the quavering hoot of the Bens as they glided about the flat meadows on either side, where faint mists smoked whitely just above the tips of the mowing grass.\n\nOccasionally one or the other wheeled over the boat, peering down at them with their big eyes.\n\nDodder puffed at his pipe, the tiny glow from the bowl gleaming on his nose and whiskers. He was enjoying himself. Only Dodder and Baldmoney ever steered the _Jeanie Deans_ , though once, for a treat, Dodder had let Squirrel do so, when they were on their journey down the Folly from Crow Wood.\n\nBelow him, sitting up near the fo'castle, Dodder could see Sneezewort mending a rent in the back of his skin breeches. Baldmoney was busy over his notebook, drawing plans, sucking his pencil and wrinkling his forehead occasionally. Cloudberry was trying to peep over his shoulder to see what he was doing and Squirrel was up on the bridge with Dodder. After a long silence, broken only by the steady throb of the ship's screw, Dodder removed his pipe from his mouth. 'This reminds me of the night when we heard the Pan Pipes, Squirrel, d'you remember?'\n\nSquirrel nodded and said 'Um, um.' He was watching Dodder's knotted little claws resting on the wheel. How easily their skipper steered. How _he_ would like to steer, just for a minute or two! But he dare not ask Dodder. He sighed deeply.\n\nDodder looked at his companion. 'What's up, Squirrel? Out of sorts? Something worrying you?'\n\n'No, nothing,' said Squirrel a trifle sadly, 'only I... '\n\n'Yes, what?'\n\nIt came with a rush. 'I was only thinking how I should _love_ to steer, for just a little while, just one lap.' By 'lap' Squirrel meant the full ten minutes which it took for the spring of the _Jeanie Deans_ to run down, for she was driven by clockwork and not steam.\n\nNow Dodder was in a particularly good mood that night. The weather was calm and warm, not a breeze disturbed the silent waters, and they had made good progress lately, indeed Owl had said only that morning that in another week or two they would see the end of their journey down the river.\n\nLike all birds, Owl was a good judge of distance and Woodcock had told him exactly how far it was to the Sea.\n\n'Oh, well, Squirrel, I don't mind, just for a treat. And I shall be glad to take a walk along the deck.'\n\nSquirrel was so overcome he could hardly gulp his thanks. So when the engine was re-wound Dodder handed the wheel over to him with a few cautionary remarks. 'Don't lug on it, the slightest touch is enough, she'll answer to it and\u2014keep clear of the banks.' Squirrel nodded. His heart was beating fast with excitement. Dodder went down below to the cabin to fetch his tobacco pouch and Squirrel was at last alone, the ship was his obedient slave! How proud he felt, to think that Dodder trusted him! Trusted him with this wonderful craft! How smoothly she glided along! How sympathetic she was to every little touch on the wheel! What poetry of motion!\n\nHe glanced at the massive dark trees fringing the river, one willow branch hung right over like the arch of a bridge, and he watched it swim towards him and pass overhead, soundlessly, and on one of its graceful branches he saw two birds rolled up fast asleep. Nightingales were singing from the gardens of a riverside bungalow 'weet weet, jug, jug, pew, pew, pew!' The last beautiful sorrowful note beginning faintly and growing louder on the ear was magical.\n\nAcross the moonlit path of water he saw a vole swim busily and quickly. And Squirrel sniffed deeply, drawing his lungs full of the sweet night air. What a life, thought he, what a pity they could not go on like this always and always!\n\nMeanwhile, Cloudberry, that restless spirit, baulked of his curiosity over Baldmoney's task, saw Dodder come down from the bridge and go into the cabin. That meant Squirrel was steering.\n\nThat wasn't fair! Dodder would never let _him_ steer, so why should Squirrel? And a burning jealousy arose in his heart. He walked up the little stairs on to the bridge.\n\n'Hullo, Squirrel, who said you could steer?'\n\n'Dodder, of course,' said Squirrel, with a superior air. 'You don't think I'd steer without his permission do you?'\n\n'Well, he won't let _me_ steer ever,' grumbled Cloudberry. 'It isn't fair. Why should he favour you and not me?'\n\n'Oh, don't start a quarrel, Cloudberry,' said Squirrel, wearily. 'Why must you come and upset me like this, just when I'm enjoying it so? Why can't you clear off and play Acorn Hop or something with Sneezewort?'\n\n'He's busy, besides I don't _want_ to play Acorn Hop, I want to _steer_!' Then Cloudberry bent forward and whispered, 'Come on, Squirrel, old fellow, be a sport. Dodder's below, he won't know; do let's steer for a bit, just to know what it feels like!'\n\n'Dodder wouldn't like it,' said Squirrel. 'Besides, _I_ want to steer.'\n\n'Oh, come on, Squirrel,' wheedled Cloudberry, 'you can stand by me, and if we hear Dodder coming back you can take over right away; he'll never know! Come on, be a sport. After all, I took you for the row down the river in the dinghy, didn't I?'\n\n'Yes, and what happened?' said Squirrel with some truth. 'We lost the _Jeanie Deans_ , didn't we?'\n\nCloudberry relapsed into moody silence. 'What a stuffy crowd you are,' he said pettishly. 'The Heaven Hounds were far nicer to me, I wish I'd never come back.'\n\nThere was a long silence. As Squirrel continued to steer, he seemed to hear, far away, a distant murmur. Was it the night breeze in the trees and reeds? Sometimes it wasn't there at all, then it loudened.\n\n'Wind's getting up,' said Cloudberry. 'Hark!'\n\n'Well, what of it?' asked Squirrel. 'It's only the night wind or maybe it's a mill somewhere.'\n\nOverhead the stars shone brightly and the moon gleamed on the spacious water meadows so that they looked like mysterious greenish plains. Sedge warblers chattered in the reeds. The wake of the _Jeanie Deans_ made no more gleam than that from a rising fish, but even those minute ripples could be heard gently washing among the riverside vegetation.\n\nDead ahead the river took a sudden turn to the right and very dark trees hung over, the water was intensely black just there.\n\nCloudberry began to wheedle again. 'Come on, be a sport, Squirrel, let me take her round the bend!'\n\nNow Squirrel was a good-natured animal. He knew if he refused Cloudberry's request he would sulk for a day after and he remembered that Cloudberry had always asked him to go with him on many little trips and excursions. It did seem a little churlish perhaps, and selfish too. So he heaved a sigh and said 'Very well then, but be careful round the bend, and if I hear Dodder coming back, I'll take over.'\n\nCloudberry, secretly elated at the success of his cajolings, but not thinking any more of Squirrel for acceding to his request, took over.\n\nThey went gliding round the corner in great style, but as they did so, that distant murmur, which had been trembling in the background for some little time, became suddenly insistent. 'Sounds as if another stream comes in just ahead,' said Squirrel uneasily, and then he caught sight of a glimmering white square against the background of black shadow on the bank. It was a notice-board, and peering through the gloom Squirrel could just make out three words: MIND THE WEIR.\n\nCloudberry had not noticed the board and Squirrel did not draw his attention to it. He suddenly felt at all costs he must regain the wheel of the _Jeanie Deans_. So he laid his hand on Cloudberry's arm and said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'Right-o, Cloudberry, I'll take the wheel now.'\n\n'Oh no, we're not round the corner yet!'\n\n'Yes we are. Come on, let's have it.'\n\n'Don't be silly,' said Cloudberry, shaking him roughly off, 'my time isn't up yet. Do you hear that funny roaring noise, whatever it is?'\n\nSquirrel was nervous now, for Cloudberry was steering far too near the right bank, close to the notice-board.\n\n'Keep her out, it's a weir!' he cried.\n\n'Oh goody, goody, goody,' squeaked Cloudberry. 'I'll steer right past it, and _then_ you can have the wheel!'\n\nThe unfortunate Squirrel was now dancing with anxiety, and in desperation he thought of a plan.\n\n'Quick, quick, here comes Dodder!'\n\nBut Cloudberry was too wise to be caught that way. 'Oh no, he doesn't, you're having me on\u2014my, but doesn't that weir make a noise!'\n\nThis was too much for Squirrel. He seized hold of Cloudberry's arm and then began a silent but fierce wrestling match. Squirrel, being the larger, had an advantage and with a terrific jerk he threw Cloudberry full-length on the decking. Alas! it was too late. Though he twirled the wheel frantically, some hidden power seemed to have gripped the _Jeanie Deans_. She turned sideways to the current, but that was all. She would not answer to the helm and they were sweeping in towards that hideous precipice with gathering momentum. It was a terrible moment.\n\nStumbling steps came hobbling up the stairs to the bridge.\n\n'For Pan's sake,' called Dodder, 'keep her out; or we'll be down the weir! Here!' he said savagely to Squirrel. 'Give me the wheel.'\n\nThe dull roar of waters was loudening every second, and as if under some dreadful hypnotic power, the ship and her trembling crew were swept with ever increasing velocity towards that fatal lip.\n\nDodder was shouting something in Squirrel's ear but now the drum of the weir was the master sound.\n\nFaster, faster, sped the ship, until she seemed to be flying along. Her puny screws still revolved but they had no effect, and all Dodder's efforts were useless. 'We're going over!' yelled Dodder to the frightened Squirrel, but only his mouth moved, no words could be heard.\n\nThe next moment the ship tilted and slid on the very edge of the fall and then\u2014 _down_ she went with a sickening speed! The thresh of foam, the roar of water, the bangs and bumps, blackness, and icy coldness, all were mixed up together as the waters closed over the boat and her helpless cargo. The time when Baldmoney and Sneezewort were carried over the mill wheel was nothing to this!\n\nAnd after this sudden hell\u2014what?\n\nA calming, a peace, a fading sound of the fall and all four gnomes, as feeble as draggled beetles, bobbed up far downstream. Dodder, handicapped by his one leg, could not swim like the others, and had not Baldmoney grabbed him by the collar he would have gone down to join the fishes and be a feast for the crayfish.\n\nBut somehow or another they struggled to the bank and crept, like drowned mice, into the intricate tangle of the reeds. It was a battle to reach the bank beyond but they made it, half-dead.\n\nFor some moments they lay motionless, gasping and coughing, sneezing and shivering. At last Dodder lifted his head and was violently sick, for he had swallowed a lot of water.\n\n'Ouch! Ach!' he gasped. 'Ouch! What a business!'\n\nHe looked at the others, dimly seen in the darkness among the grass. 'Are we all here? Baldmoney, you safe?'\n\n'Ye-yes, I'm here, Dodder,' came a faint retching voice.\n\n'Sneezewort, _you_ all right?'\n\n'A-a-all right, Dodder,' came Sneezewort's reply, between coughs and gasps.\n\n'Cloudberry, where are you?'\n\n'Here, Dodder!' came the gurgled reply.\n\n'Squirrel?'\n\n'SQUIRREL?'\n\n'WHERE'S SQUIRREL?'\n\nThere was no response. Despite his exhaustion, Dodder somehow got to his feet. 'Squirrel, where are you?'\n\nNo answer.\n\n'Squirrel, are you safe? Answer me!' Dodder was frantic with anxiety.\n\nNo answer, only the wind among the night trees and the now distant undertones of the weir!\n\n## CHAPTER NINE\n\n## _Rumbling Mill_\n\n tter, driven from his holt on the dying Folly, had taken up a new abode under the derelict wheelhouse of Rumbling Mill, on the main river. He and his wife were delighted with their new home. In this deeper water there were more fish to be caught and Rumbling Mill made a splendid headquarters. Indeed, as Mrs Otter said, she blessed the day they had moved, and very soon they produced a family of three cubs to celebrate the house-warming. 'Why we ever stayed up the Folly I can't think!' Mrs Otter had said to her husband. 'This river is _so_ much more fun and it's better for the children!'\n\nAnd in all truth Rumbling Mill _did_ seem to be a 'find'. It was many years since that ponderous iron-shod wheel had revolved in the pulsing life-blood of the river, and even the Mill House itself had fallen into decay. The little plot of ground behind the house, which had once been the miller's orchard, was waist-high in nettles and wild carrot, but the twisted old apple trees, bearded with lichen and decked with mistletoe bushes, still bore red-cheecked fruit in autumn and so far was it from human ken that not even marauding boys visited it; even the stout legs of the little Shoebottom could not walk as far, for it was five miles distant from Mr Shoebottom's shop. Besides, rumour had it that Rumbling Mill was 'ha'nted'.\n\nOld buildings when Mortals have finished with them are taken over by Nature. She rapidly gets to work, colouring the tiles, erasing the signs of cultivation, for She cultivates the ground in Her own way. Into the miller's vegetable garden She had brought masses of lovely weeds, She set the birds to work to sow wild bushes, such as elder and hawthorn, not one tiny inch of ground did She leave unplanted.\n\nSo that now, twenty years after the miller had packed up and gone, the place had reverted to a lovely wilderness which was after Nature's own heart. Blackcap and whitethroat bubbled in the undergrowth, turtle-doves purred among the willows, sedge warblers chattered and sang among the rank beds of waterside vegetation, swallows took up their abode in the tumbledown outhouses, and a pair of white barn owls took possession of the millhouse. Bats moved in and hung upside down among the dim cobwebby beams, mice and rats lived in hundreds under the old threshing floor, grass snakes lived in the orchard, wrens and tits built in the holes in the decaying brickwork, and all through the hot summer days the reed buntings sang their sleepy songs among the crowding willows by the water's edge. 'Chip, chip, chip, tetezeeo! Chip, chip, chip, tetezeeo!' they sang, never moving from the same perch day after day. Oh yes! it was a paradise for wildlings, both for plants, birds, and beasts. Standing there, waist-deep in the wild carrot, and the tall green grass of the orchard, one would never guess at half the exciting things that went on at Rumbling Mill.\n\nYou would not know, for instance, that down among the reeds a sedge warbler's nest had a cuckoo's egg in it (even the sedge warblers did not know that); you would not know of the two goldfinches' nests (one with young and the other with eggs) up in the orchard trees, nor would you hazard that there was a hawfinch's nest in the little Douglas fir close beside the millhouse. That tree, by the way, had originally been planted by the old miller after it had done duty as a Christmas tree for his children one far-off snowy wintertide. You would not know of the white owls, or the swallows and grass snakes and, least of all, would you have guessed some otters had a family under the mossy wheelhouse!\n\nIn no other part of the river would you find such a sleepy beautiful place, so green, quiet and screened by trees.\n\nOtter was teaching his cubs to toboggan down a mud-slide hard by the tail of the old mill pool. They loved it and Otter and Mrs Otter were not above such childish delights themselves. There was no one to see but the white owls and the moon, which shone down on the roofs of the old tumbledown place. It was huge fun. But after a while Otter wearied of it and with a kick of his rudder headed upriver close to the bank. Sometimes he left the water and threaded the reed beds. Once he took to the water meadows and followed up a deep ditch which had no water in it and was overhung by stinging nettles and buttercups.\n\nThis was a short cut and besides, it was nice to leave the water for a space and travel overland. He scared several rabbits, which were hopping about in the moonlight meads and he heard a corncrake 'craking' in the mowing grass.\n\nOtter felt very pleased with life that night. Never before had he felt so excited, so well. He was a perfect animal, at the prime of life, and sleek and powerful as a seal. He played little games with himself now and then, chasing his rudder and rolling over in the dewy grass trying to bite his shadow, until he was quite out of breath.\n\nNot far away he could see the thick trees fringing the river, marking its course as bird-sown trees mark the course of a sunken lane.\n\nAs he ambled along, thoroughly enjoying himself, his mind turned somehow to the gnomes whom he had left far upriver with the _Jeanie Deans_. Soon they would be coming down and Otter did not want to miss his friends. It would be a sad thing if they passed Rumbling Mill without him seeing them. Besides, he was very proud of his family, and wanted to show them off, and perhaps most of all, he wanted the cubs to see the _Jeanie Deans_ , for he had told them all about her.\n\nStill, thought Otter, I can't keep hanging about every night, just on the chance of seeing them.\n\nHe suddenly realized that, what with the tobogganing and his rambling, he was very hungry. He thought of a nice fat roach or grayling and his mouth began to water. So he set off for the river. He soon found he could not be long away from it, from its music and its smells.\n\nHe pushed through a little coppice of oaks and willows until he reached a forest of dock leaves. The ground was black and oozy and a human would have sunk to his knees in it. The mire had a strong wild tang (Otter loved it). It smelt of pike and that made him more hungry than ever. He passed the skeleton of a jack, the white bones gleamed under the moon. It lay beside a moss-grown log, half-buried in the mire. It was the remains of a previous meal of his. He had not devoured it all, only a juicy back steak had been bitten out, the rats had finished the rest.\n\nOtter was so hungry he wondered why he could ever have left it, half-eaten like that!\n\nAll at once he stopped dead. Not far off was a clump of poplars. Even though the night was so calm there was a faint rustle, almost like the sound of the sea, among the millions of leaves which made up those graceful tapering moonlit spires. And somehow, mixed up with that faint rustle, he thought he heard another sound, the sound of pipes playing, _Pan Pipes!_\n\nOtter was very afraid. Pan's guarding arm was not always present, had not a relation of his perished in faraway Crow Wood? He shivered and the dew gleamed in pearls on his close, squat head. But when the animals hear the Pan Pipes there is no turning back; they have to obey.\n\nSo Otter went, slowly as a snail, towards the tall trees, his sleek fur creeping along his spine. As he got near the music slowly died away and Otter began to wonder if he had really heard it. There was an unreality too about the witching night; he half-expected to awake from a dream and find himself tucked up in the holt under Rumbling Mill.\n\nAnd then he heard Pan's voice calling, 'Otter! Otter!' very softly.\n\n'I am here, my Lord Pan,' said Otter, raising his muzzle. 'What is it you want of me?'\n\n'Otter,' went on the gentle voice, seeming very close, yet far away, 'go to Bantley Weir... Bantley Weir. The Little People are in trouble.'\n\nOtter, half-hidden by the dock leaves, raised himself up like a big brown weasel, his forepaws hanging against his furry stomach, his eyes searching the rustling poplars. Had he dreamt it all?\n\n'Bantley Weir... the Little People... ' the words trailed away. There was no sound now save the very faint sweet music of the pipes coming as if from an immense distance, dying on the night wind. With a swift, almost snake-like movement, Otter turned under the docks. He went into the river as silently as a vole and rings went widening and gleaming out of the dark shadow.\n\nHe swam with great power and ease, going through the water was easier to him than going overland.\n\nAnd very soon he heard, in the distance, the murmur of the weir growing louder and louder. As he swam he kept on saying to himself, 'Bantley Weir, the Little People are in trouble, Bantley Weir, hurry! Hurry! Hurry!'\n\nFat fish darted by, pike swirled under the lily pads, but they had no need to fear Otter at that moment. Even his hunger had vanished. One thing was in his mind: _he_ _was wanted at Bantley Weir!_\n\nIn a very short while he reached it. He scrambled out onto a weedy block of masonry just below the great tumbling water-slide where a million flashing bubbles winked and twinked. The sound of this mass of swiftly-moving water was full of music, strange hidden notes and fairy voices, like the clamour of a vast multitude of Mortals playing and talking all at once. He looked about him. The river below the weir seemed deserted. Had he dreamt the whole thing, thought Otter again. Why had he come on this fool's errand? The moon had bewitched him. He shook himself and then took a header into the tumbled thunder at the weir's foot.\n\nThe great force of water drove him down, but Otter loved it as a skier loves the snow slopes on a mountain side. He let the current thrust and spin him, right downriver until the impetus slackened and died. And then, against the far reeds, he thought he caught sight of something show for an instant and then sink from sight. Otter dived again, his wide eyes piercing the green gloom of that underwater parlour.\n\nA few fish darting; a sinuous snake-like root of a lily, slimy, bearded, and beset with water snails; a glimpse of a pebbly bottom, and then\u2014there it was again!\u2014a slow-moving form, sinking and bubbling feebly, just ahead of his nose!\n\nIt looked like the body of a drowned cat. Otter was up to it with one sweep of his rudder. It was Squirrel. Otter's squat muzzle parted as he took the body by the scruff of the neck, in the way he carried his cubs. The next moment he had broken surface and, still with the wet cold body of Squirrel held gently but firmly in his mouth, he landed on a spit of shingle, where fresh-water mussel shells, split open and left by the carrion crows, were strewn about. Gently he laid his burden down and shook his coat in the moonlight, sending out a fine silver spray.\n\nThe poor limp little object that had once been Squirrel, so fluffy and full of life, lay motionless, the water trickling and oozing out from his draggled fur onto the stones.\n\nYet Otter, as he looked, detected that the fur was still greasy though the white cold skin showed between the wet wisps of hair.\n\nWith his nose he pushed Squirrel over on to his stomach and began to apply artificial respiration, such as he once used upon one of his cubs which had been caught on some rusty wire on the riverbed.\n\nOtter worked away in the moonlight, pressing with his paws on Squirrel's back. The moon sank lower behind the trees and two big owls wheeled round overhead. Otter never looked up at them, even when, with mournful cries they swooped low past him.\n\nAnd then, as Otter worked and worked, he felt at last that life was flowing back. The funny little rat-like teeth gasped open once, twice; the tongue moved, the pathetic little eyes, tight closed, flickered, the eye-balls swivelled.\n\nOtter redoubled his efforts. And in another minute or two Squirrel gave a deep gasp and opened full his eyes. He lay on his face, regarding Otter stupidly.\n\n'It's all right, Squirrel, it's me, Otter. You're all right, I fished you out of the weir! It's no good you pretending to be an otter, old chap. You stick to the trees where I can't go. If I climbed a tree I should probably fall and break my neck. Well, it's the same with you. If you try diving and such-like games, you'll drown\u2014see?'\n\nSquirrel did not 'see'. Moreover he had struck his head on a stone on the river bed. He feebly moved his mouth and a little trickle of water came out of the corner. 'I'm so cold,' he whispered.\n\nOtter took him gently by the scruff of the neck. 'You're coming along with me, my lad. I'm going to take you to Rumbling Mill. We'll be there in a brace of shakes, and I'll turn you over to my wife. If I leave you here all night you'll catch your death of cold.'\n\nSo off went Otter, carrying the now feebly-protesting Squirrel, and in next to no time he was back at Rumbling Mill.\n\nMrs Otter came out in an awful fuss to see what Otter had found and they carried poor Squirrel up into the cosy warm chamber in the masonry where green moss draped the door and bright hart's-tongue ferns grew from countless crannies. They bound up his head and bathed his wound. Then the little cubs all cuddled up against the cold little body, as Mr and Mrs Otter tucked Squirrel away to bed with them. And gradually the awful feeling of cold began to ebb away; minute by minute Squirrel felt the full life flooding back into his heart and every artery in his body. A beautiful glow settled on him as the otter cubs cuddled him closer still.\n\n## CHAPTER TEN\n\n## _Squirrel_\n\n n that awful moment when Dodder called aloud on Squirrel and had no reply, his heart seemed to die within him. His rage against Squirrel had been at white heat, for had not he, Dodder, left him in charge of the boat? In a measure it was his own fault, perhaps, for ever giving way like that. And it was perhaps this anger with himself that made him all the more bitter.\n\nBut now, when he realized Squirrel had gone, all his angry thoughts vanished and in their place was a dreadful desolation. We never appreciate things and persons half so much as when we are in danger of losing them. And to Dodder's own astonishment he found he had come to love Squirrel and his merry ways almost as much as he loved his brothers (he was certainly more fond of Squirrel than he was of Cloudberry).\n\nWhen at last they could get their breath all four began a systematic search along the river bank. The Bens, just when they were wanted (as always happens) were not there. They worked their way among the reeds and plants for several hundred yards but no trace of Squirrel was to be found. At last, weary and worn out, Dodder flopped down on a stone.\n\n'It's no good looking any more,' he groaned. 'Squirrel's gone right enough, he may have struck his head on something\u2014on the weir or even the boat, as we went over. We shan't ever see him again, our dear old fluffy Squirrel who was always so happy and full of fun!' And the tears began to well from his eyes.\n\nThe others remained silent. Sneezewort and Baldmoney were weeping too, but Cloudberry remained dry-eyed, though he looked drawn and wretched.\n\n'It was my fault,' said Dodder, 'I should never have let him steer; it's all my fault really. I take the blame. What happened, Cloudberry? You were up on the bridge too; did Squirrel lose his head and steer too near the weir?'\n\nCloudberry gulped and looked at the stones at his feet. 'Yes, he seemed to lose his head entirely when he saw how close we were.'\n\n'Why didn't you warn him?' asked Dodder. 'Surely you knew that it was silly to go so close?'\n\n'I _did_ warn him,' lied Cloudberry glibly. 'I told him to steer out more into mid-stream, but he wouldn't take any notice, it wasn't my fault.'\n\nThere was a long silence. In the east the dawn was coming up. Far away a cow began to bellow like a rich-toned foghorn; it was more of a bray than a bellow. And the gnomes could hear the distant cocks crowing one against the other.\n\n'I can't think where the Bens can be,' said Dodder miserably. He clasped his arms about himself; all were shivering violently. Dodder did not know that whilst they were searching the reeds for Squirrel the Bens had twice passed over the weir, turning their amazed eyes this way and that as they searched for the boat.\n\nThe sun crept over the distant trees, all the birds began to sing, first one, then another, then full chorus.\n\nThe bright cheerful rays at last topped the trees and shot out warming fingers to dry those four miserable little men. Their skin jackets steamed as they sat in the sun.\n\nWhile they waited there, Baldmoney caught sight of a kingfisher. It saw them, checked in mid-air and came to rest on an old mossy post below the weir. There it sat, bobbing up and down like an owl.\n\n'This is a nice how-d'ye-do,' said he. 'Where's your boat?'\n\nDodder pointed to the boiling water at the weir's foot. 'She's down there,' he said grimly.\n\n'Ah, there's thirty feet of water there, so grebe told me,' said the bird. 'She's gone for good. I met an owl downriver.'\n\n'What, Ben you mean?'\n\n'Yes, I believe he said his name was Ben. And I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you.'\n\n'About our friend Squirrel?'\n\nThe kingfisher nodded and sat silent.\n\n'Why, has Ben found him?' asked Dodder in a husky whisper.\n\nThe kingfisher nodded again.\n\n'Dead?'\n\nAgain the kingfisher nodded. As a matter of fact, between you and me the kingfisher rather enjoyed imparting startling and appalling news.\n\nThe kingfisher looked keenly at the little men and shook his head gloomily again. 'Aye, dead, drownded, gnomes; your friend Ben saw him lying on the shingle with Otter mourning over him.'\n\n'Otter?\u2014Was Otter there?'\n\n'So Ben told me,' said the kingfisher in a hollow voice.\n\n'Did Otter find Squirrel?'\n\nThe kingfisher didn't know. 'Oh dear,' groaned poor Dodder again, 'I do wish Otter would come up here and tell us where he found him.'\n\nCloudberry, now he had heard Squirrel was dead, felt safer. He knew that if Dodder ever came to hear that it was he that had been the cause of the accident, then he would be eternally disgraced. For a gnome who does not own up or tell the truth is regarded as an outcast. So Cloudberry, secretly cheered, shook his head sadly and wept crocodile tears. 'Very sad, it is indeed. Squirrel was such a good sort, at times a little impetuous, perhaps, but a likeable animal. I can't think why he steered us over the weir but he always was one to think he could do things better than others.'\n\nDodder's eyes glittered dangerously. 'If you don't shut up, Cloudberry, I'll lay about you with my stick. Squirrel was a much better person than yourself, and I'm not so sure that you weren't the cause of the whole thing. You'd no business up on the bridge, anyway, with Squirrel. You knew my rule.' And as Dodder said this, a sudden thought struck him. He wondered it had not occurred to him before. 'I shouldn't be surprised if it _was_ you who was steering when it happened... were you, Cloudberry?'\n\n'Me?' asked Cloudberry in virtuous surprise. 'Of _course_ not, Dodder, I wouldn't do such a thing!'\n\nDodder eyed him for a moment sternly and Cloudberry's gaze fell under that piercing and penetrating glance.\n\n'Anyway,' ventured the kingfisher, 'the whole thing's over now so what does it matter? You've lost the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ , she lies in thirty feet of water, and Squirrel's drowned. Now what are you going to do?'\n\n'Don't ask me,' said Dodder wearily. 'Come on, gnomes,' he said, turning to the others. 'We'll work our way downriver and see if we can fall in with Otter.'\n\n'Kingfisher isn't exactly cheering, anyway,' said Baldmoney when they were out of earshot.\n\n'Oh, don't worry about him, he's not like our old Folly King of Fishers. He was greedy and all that, but he was a good sort,' said Dodder, and they tramped on in silence.\n\nIt was evening by the time they came in sight of Rumbling Mill, another still evening, hot and quiet. When they saw the lichened roof and tall rose-red chimney poking above the willows, they went forward with caution, for all human habitations were regarded with distrust.\n\nThey had to wait awhile for dusk. They hid among the white bell nettles and Cloudberry teased the banded bumble bees as they went in and out of the flowers with their little pollen bags slung behind either thigh. Cloudberry would wait until a bumble bee had got well in the white flower and then he would hold it tightly and listen to the furious buzzings from within. When at last the prisoner was released it would go back and forth in a furious rage, and then swing away, still grumbling.\n\nAll four gnomes were in a poor way. And they were desperately hungry. They had not had any food for many hours. They sucked the white dead nettle blooms to taste the honey but it was solid food they craved. Cloudberry and Sneezewort were the most ravenous, Dodder and Baldmoney were moping over Squirrel's death.\n\nThe loss of the _Jeanie Deans_ was nothing compared to the loss of their friend. Dodder went over in his mind that day in Crow Wood when they first met him. How good he was to them in his Tree Top House, giving them shelter and food... Behind the old mill roof the sky turned from apricot to saffron, the leaves of the orchard trees were hanging motionless, the gnats came out in thousands.\n\nAnd then an interesting thing happened. Two big brown shapes appeared over the thick trees on the opposite bank and perched on the mill roof. A minute after another owl appeared from nowhere, a barn owl. And the latter attacked the intruders with great vigour. A battle royal began on the roof ridge. The hissing, snapping, and bad language was terrible. 'Why!' exclaimed Dodder, peering through some meadowsweet, 'it's the Bens!'\n\nThe fighting owls fell down the slope of the roof, clawing, scratching, and snapping their big bills, and giving vent to short half-hoots of rage. The white owl screeched like a tom-cat. All three birds flopped down into some elder bushes which grew close to the wheelhouse.\n\nThen a dark shape came gliding out from under the mill and they saw the round neat head of Otter. He swam like a big rat into the bank and they saw him land and make off towards the combatants.\n\n'Otter!' exclaimed Dodder. 'Come on!'\n\nThere was a dreadful scuffle going on among a bed of nettles and when all four gnomes came up they found Otter trying to make the peace. He had Mrs Ben by the leg and the white owl by the wing. Ben was sitting up in one of the apple trees shaking himself and all about them were blackbirds and finches, all chattering and calling out and making a hideous racket.\n\n'What's all this?' said Dodder, shocked beyond measure.\n\nOtter let go the two owls, who immediately came to grips again so that poor Otter had to wade in a second time and, heedless of scratches and nips, part the combatants once more.\n\nThe two birds subsided, panting, in the long grass, and Otter heaved a sigh. 'Oh dear, you owls, why can't you control your tempers?'\n\n'Just you let me go,' hissed Mrs Ben, for Otter still held her by one of her legs. 'How _dare_ you touch me! It's none of your business anyway.'\n\n'Oh yes it is,' said Otter. 'All the animals and birds never quarrel at Rumbling Mill, and I'm not going to have it now.'\n\n'They shouldn't have come on our roof,' said the white owl, 'without as much as a by-your-leave.'\n\n'How were we to know?' said Ben from the apple tree. 'We didn't know you lived inside, how could we?'\n\n'Now just stop wrangling,' said Otter, 'and for Pan's sake let's have some peace. The gnomes are here at last, poor things, and in a mighty poor way they must be too, after their accident. Well, well, well,' said Otter turning to greet them, 'you must be worn out and famished, welcome to Rumbling Mill,' he said heartily.\n\n'It's good to see you, Otter,' cried Dodder. 'It's good indeed. The first bright spot of the day. But never mind about us,' and his eyes filled with tears, 'where is poor Squirrel laid? We heard you had found him drowned.'\n\nThe Otter regarded Dodder's tearful face for a moment, and his bright little eyes flitted from one gnome to another. 'Come this way,' he said quietly. Otter proceeded a few yards through the orchard and then turned round and addressed the mill roof. 'Any more fighting and I'll come up and scrag the lot of you,' he called. But the Bens and the barn owl were nowhere to be seen; from the distant hoots and screeches the battle was going on behind the house once more. Otter, with another sigh and a shake of his head, led the way without speaking to the wheel-house.\n\nFollowed by the gnomes, he slipped with lithe ease through some old rusty railings which leant over the disused bricked-in channel and a moment later they were in a dark tunnel. Up this he conducted them and there, in a cosy little chamber at the end, the gnomes saw an unforgettable spectacle.\n\nThere was Squirrel, dear old Squirrel, with a bandage round his head, teaching the young otters how to play Acorn Hop!\n\nCan you imagine the rush of delight which almost overcame Dodder and Baldmoney? The former stood slightly swaying for a moment and then rushed forward and threw his arms round his old friend and hugged and hugged him until he could hug no more. The young otters danced round, Mrs Otter smiled maternally, and Squirrel was crying with joy. A happy moment indeed. Rumbling Mill had not witnessed a happier one since the miller's wife had twins.\n\nAfter all was over, and Dodder, feeling suddenly very weak and tired, sank down on the floor, Otter slipped away and was back within five minutes with two fat and gleaming roach wet from the mill pond.\n\nThey lit a little fire and roasted them and a happier, more jolly reunion you never saw.\n\n## CHAPTER ELEVEN\n\n## _The Salvage Gang_\n\n t was not until the following evening that the gnomes could 'sit up and take notice', as the saying is. And considering the hardihood of these Little People it only goes to testify what a gruelling experience they must have been through. But after a long sleep, warmth and food, they awoke full of vitality and life and were ready for anything. Otter insisted on showing them all over Rumbling Mill. First they visited the owls up in the house top and to Dodder's relief they found that the Bens had quite made it up with the white owls and were sharing, actually _sharing_ , the same apartment with them! Mrs Ben and Mrs White Owl (whom the former was now calling by the affectionate name of Barny) were apparently bosom friends, and were fussing over three extremely ugly white woolly owlets. Ben and old Barny had gone a-hunting together.\n\nThen Otter conducted them through the old tumble-down threshing and milling rooms, still ankle deep in husks and chaff (the rats had long since finished all the grain) and they wandered about in dark underground cellars and through mouldering outhouses; they explored the orchard and examined with deep interest the ancient mill stones lying one on the other with grooves cut in the massive circular slabs.\n\n'You've struck lucky, Otter,' said Baldmoney. 'I've never seen such a grand place, a place after my heart: shelter from the weather, plenty of good fishing, and as many private apartments as you can possibly want!'\n\n'Yes,' replied Otter, 'it's not a bad little place and nobody ever comes near us, we haven't seen a mortal since we moved in. They say it's haunted or something; maybe that's the reason we're left alone.'\n\n'And think of all those apples, Dodder!' said Baldmoney, as he looked at the apple trees. 'What a feast in the autumn!'\n\n'I don't see why you want to go on downriver,' said Otter. 'Why don't you stay here with us, the Bens, and all of you? It seems to me to be an ideal place for us to settle down.'\n\n'It's an attractive suggestion, and very kind of you,' replied Dodder, 'but I don't think we can do that. We feel that England's no place for the Little People now. Perhaps we might come back, say in a couple of hundred Cuckoo Years, but we've talked it all out you know and made up our minds.'\n\n'Please yourself, of course,' said Otter, 'but I should have thought you'd have been pretty snug here. Besides, now you've lost the _Jeanie Deans_ , it quite beats me how you _can_ go on!'\n\nDodder glanced behind him at his brothers who were playing about on the mossy mill wheel and swinging like mice from the iron bars. 'The fact is, Otter, I wanted a quiet talk with you about her.'\n\n'Come this way then, Dodder,' said Otter, nodding. ' _They_ seem to be amusing themselves and Squirrel's still tucked up with the cubs. I know the very place for a quiet talk, follow me.'\n\nHe pushed through a bed of dead nettle and led the way into a dense reed jungle where a mouldering punt lay completely screened by rank vegetation.\n\n'Nobody will disturb us here,' said the hospitable animal, climbing into the punt. 'Sit down on the seat there and you can talk as long as you like. I often sneak off here for a quiet nap.'\n\n'Well!' began Dodder, drawing out his pipe and filling it. 'I wanted to know whether you could give me some advice. The ship's foundered good and proper, and a kingfisher told us she lies in thirty feet of water under the weir.'\n\nOtter nodded. 'Yes, there's all that just under the weir, what of it?'\n\n'Well,' Dodder hesitated shyly, 'I... I wondered very much, Otter, whether you could go down and have a look at her, see if she's damaged and what you think about our chances of salvage.'\n\nOtter whistled. 'Salvage! Can't see how we can do that, I couldn't move her by myself.'\n\n'No,' said Dodder, 'I don't expect you could, but I wondered whether you and I could talk out a plan and see if there's not some way of getting her up.'\n\nOtter sat on the bottom boards of the punt and twitched his whiskers, a habit of his when he was thinking deeply.\n\n'It _might_ be done,' he said at last, 'though it will be a big job. But before we talk about that, how about me going down and seeing what she looks like, eh?'\n\n'Oh will you, Otter?' cried Dodder gleefully, clapping his friend on the shoulder. 'What a grand fellow you are! I knew you'd help us if you possibly could.'\n\nSo they got out of the punt and made their way along the riverbank towards Bantley Weir. Very soon Rumbling Mill was left behind and Otter, coming to a shingle spit, whispered to Dodder to climb on his back.\n\n'Hold on tightly,' he said, 'I'll go slowly.'\n\nIt was a precarious perch for the one-legged Dodder but he plucked and twisted a bunch of rushes and put it under Otter's chin, like a pair of reins, and the next moment they were out from the bank.\n\nThe cold water rippled along Dodder's left knee but he enjoyed the novel ride; Otter swam so steadily and smoothly, threading his way with great skill through sedges and willow bushes which, in places, grew out from the bank.\n\nBefore very long Dodder could hear the low voice of Bantley Weir coming to them across an arm of the river and soon he saw the mass of trees and the silvery white slope of the falling water.\n\nOtter landed on the bank just below and together they went over the stones along the water's edge. After days of drought the sky was overcast and a fine rain was falling which seemed to bring out the scents of meadow and undergrowth.\n\nDodder showed Otter as best he could where the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ had taken her final plunge and then, with a shake of his muzzle, Otter swam off. Dodder could see his small head forging up on the left of the fall. Then he saw him dive.\n\nOtter went down into the underwater gloom. All about him the currents swayed and pushed him, but by nice adjustment he kept his body 'trim' and as he swam deeper the gloom deepened. Tiny silver bubbles, like beads of quicksilver, netted his smooth short hairs. He swam over a shelf of ragged concrete and a large barbel darted from under the overhanging edge. Otter glimpsed the curious hanging appendages at each corner of its mouth.\n\nNormally that barbel would have been easy meat but he let it go. He knew every inch of Bantley Weir and had caught many a fat fish there among the broken smother of the falls. Millions of bubbles, like champagne bubbles, bored down past him, streaming and tickling along his sleek sides.\n\nHe turned along the weir foot, searching among massive blocks of masonry and large stones. A bright tin lid glittered in the gloom and Otter turned it over with one scoop of his paw and passed on, hunting as carefully as an eel.\n\nA blackened stump of a tree he found, with a wire pike trace, complete with float, caught in it. The float was streaming out on the line with the bore of the current but he saw no sign of the wreck. Moreover he had to come up for air so he twirled sideways and let himself drift and rise. When he broke surface he was well below the shingle where he had left Dodder and the latter had his back to him. He was crouching behind a stone watching the weir foot expectantly, his long ears pricked. Otter smiled to himself. Poor old Dodder, he must find the _Jeanie Deans_ for him, if it took him all night.\n\nHe ran along the shore and shook himself and Dodder, startled, turned to meet him. 'Goodness! you gave me a scare! Well, Otter... any sign of her?'\n\nOtter shook his head. 'Not yet, Dodder, but I'll find her.'\n\nIt was raining heavily now, the drops raising little thorns all over the surface of the weir pool. Everywhere the thirsty earth was drinking deeply and a faint mist lay on the river which smoked upwards, but Dodder ignored the wet.\n\nOtter dived again. This time he searched the river bed some yards below the weir foot. It was not so deep there, the shingle sloped gradually upwards and the race of the current seemed more pronounced. A few cushions of water weed and poa grass streamed out black and waving, like the tentacles of an octopus, and from under them a banded perch with spines erect darted in a swirl of sand. This time Otter could not resist a natural impulse. He headed the fish into an angle between a large stone and an old petrol can and caught it deftly.\n\nWith the fish in his mouth he turned again and then\u2014he saw the _Jeanie Deans_! She lay on her side with her foremast jammed under a rock, and there was a big dent on one side of the funnel. As Otter swam past and over her he saw a squat ugly little fish with a spotted back squirm into the cabin door, a bull head.\n\nWith the fish still in his mouth Otter turned again and bobbed up abreast of Dodder but in mid-river. He swam across to him and laid the perch on the shingle where it gasped once and lay still, though its red fins quivered slightly. 'I've found her, Dodder, she's lying in about ten feet of water, just out there, the force of the current must have washed her down.'\n\n'Is she badly knocked about?' asked Dodder anxiously, hardly glancing at Otter's fine catch.\n\n'Funnel's a bit dented, but I don't think she's holed; let's go back to Rumbling Mill and we'll talk it over!'\n\nDodder grasped the perch by the gills and they set off for home.\n\nIt was raining really hard when they got back to the Mill and Dodder was glad to be out of it. It came down steadily, in warm hissing rods, which blurred the mill pool's surface and came spouting off the old mill roof in rattling silver threads. He found Baldmoney and the rest all grouped round a fire in the old malt house. The young otters were there too. It was the first time they had seen a fire and they were held by it. All, including Squirrel, whom Mrs Otter had tucked up in a sacking shawl, were sitting in a circle listening to Cloudberry. He was in his element, for there was nothing he liked better than showing off, and he thought himself no end of a hero. It was _I_ this, and _I_ that, and how he had gone all the way to Spitzbergen with the Heaven Hounds.\n\nBut on the appearance of Dodder and Otter he looked self-conscious and foolish. His voice trailed away into a thin squeak and it was quite laughable to see him slowly deflating like a toy balloon.\n\nThe truth was, he was afraid of Dodder, and he was afraid also that Squirrel would let out how the accident had happened. He had even begged Squirrel not to say a word and the latter animal was very offended. Just as if he would!\n\nDodder had never once referred to the accident though it was obvious that he thought that Squirrel was to blame.\n\nCloudberry tried to whistle a jaunty tune when he saw Dodder and Otter, and when the former gave him a withering look of contempt he took himself off for a walk in the pouring rain. As he went along he muttered away to himself and then, quite suddenly, he realized how he hated Dodder. The more he thought of him the greater grew his hatred. If ever the true facts of the accident came out, as well they might, then he knew he would be disgraced forever. If only he could find some way of getting rid of Dodder! It was an ugly thought and at first he put it away but it returned like a black and hideous imp whispering on his shoulder, 'Why not get rid of him?' There would be no more snubs, no more being 'put in his place'. Sneezewort didn't count, and Baldmoney was easily handled; he was a good-natured gnome, always busy with his own plans. He, Cloudberry, would become the skipper of the band, he could bend everyone to his will, he would be master of the expedition. So on he stumped up the river bank, all alone in the wind and rain, his hands behind his back, thinking these ugly thoughts. Dodder had only one leg. It would be easy! A knock on the head when no one was looking, a push, and Dodder would sink like Squirrel had sunk, and nobody would be any the wiser!\n\nMeanwhile, back in Rumbling Mill, the fire was burning brightly and all the animals and gnomes crowded round it. 'Let's send for the Bens!' exclaimed Dodder. 'They ought to be here, for we've got to have a meeting, a very important meeting.'\n\n'Better ask the Barnies too,' said tactful Otter, 'we can't leave them out of it, especially as they are now so pally with the Bens.'\n\nSo Sneezewort was sent upstairs to find them and very soon everybody was present and Dodder got to his feet.\n\n'Well, souls all,' he began, 'first of all I want to say something about the welcome we've had here. We won't ever be able to repay Otter for all his kindness, and it's very nice of you all to make us so at home at Rumbling Mill. And now we're here, I've something to say to you.'\n\n'Cloudberry isn't here,' interrupted Sneezewort from the shadows, 'he went out some time ago.'\n\n'Never mind Cloudberry,' said Dodder impatiently, 'we can't wait for him. I'm afraid he is a very different gnome since he went away with the Heaven Hounds, he seems to have changed a lot. But never mind that. What I have to say is this: Otter and I have just been up to Bantley Weir, where as you know, we had the misfortune to lose the _Jeanie Deans_. The blame of the accident rests on my shoulders and I feel I ought to explain how it happened. Against my judgement I let Squirrel here steer the ship and owing to his inexperience he steered too close to the weir. It was just bad luck that I should have chosen that moment to go below. But that's all over and done with. What I have to tell you is this. Otter and I have been up to the weir and Otter very kindly dived for us. He's found the wreck!'\n\n'Found it!' exclaimed Baldmoney. 'Can we get her up?'\n\n'Not so fast, Baldmoney,' said Dodder. 'I'm coming to that. I've called this meeting to discuss the possibility of raising her.'\n\n'Impossible,' said Ben, 'you'll never salvage her.'\n\n'One moment,' said Dodder. 'Otter found her lying, not right under the weir, but in shallower water below it. Evidently the current had washed her there. She lies in not more than ten feet of water. Now, what we've got to do is to find some way of raising her and I want suggestions.'\n\n'I'll make a diving suit,' said Baldmoney at once. 'I'm sure I could.'\n\n' _Do_ be practical, Baldmoney, _please_ ,' said Dodder. 'You can't possibly do that, clever as you are, and if you did, we shouldn't be any nearer to the solving of the difficulty.'\n\n'Let's get Grebe to dive,' suggested Sneezewort, 'he spends most of his life on the river bed.'\n\n'That won't help either,' said Baldmoney. 'He couldn't do any more than I could. Otter's the most likely.'\n\nOtter, who had been sitting very quiet twitching his whiskers and staring into the fire, spoke up. 'I have an Idea, Dodder, if you'll let me speak. I can't raise her by myself, but if I get some of my relations we might do it!'\n\nThere was a pause and the young otters began to jump about in excitement for they were longing to see the famous ship. Mrs Otter had to 'shush' them to silence before Otter could continue.\n\n'My idea is,' he said, 'that we send word to them; I have many relations farther downriver and we'll ask them to come up here and help. At a pinch we can muster seven or eight of them. With our combined efforts I believe we could get her up!'\n\n'A splendid idea!' exclaimed Dodder, clapping his hands, and everyone nodded approval.\n\n'Then it shall be done,' said Otter, after the hubbub had died down. 'We'll send word to them tomorrow by kingfisher, vole, and moorhen.'\n\n'Ben and I will tell them too,' said Mrs Ben.\n\n'Why wait?' put in Barny. 'I'll be off now, if you like. I know where every otter in the river has his holt and now's the time to catch 'em.'\n\n'Very well then,' said Otter. 'You and the Bens can go off right away. Are you sure you know where they live? Willow Holt, Gravelly Reach, Heronbanks?'\n\n'I know,' said Barny impatiently. 'I know them all.'\n\n'Right, then off you go!' exclaimed Otter. 'And tell them we want them up here tomorrow evening at last light!'\n\n## CHAPTER TWELVE\n\n## _Cloudberry Takes a Walk_\n\n loudberry, his black thoughts in accord with the black night, tramped on. After a while the rain ceased and the stars came out, but he was in such an ugly frame of mind the beauty of the fresh moist fields were quite wasted on him. The more he thought of Dodder, the more he wanted to dispose of him. Once Dodder was out of the way he could do exactly as he liked. He'd make them all go round the world, but Squirrel they would leave behind, the silly creature. He couldn't think what his brothers were about, joining up with him in the first place. In fact, why shouldn't he 'bump off' Squirrel too, dead animals tell no tales!\n\nHe left the riverside and made his way to a wild common where gorse bushes, clumps of thicket, elder, thorn, and bramble formed a tangled wilderness. Bub'ms (rabbits) were everywhere, bobbing their white scuts, and several pairs of nightingales were singing lustily. But their song held no beauty for Cloudberry in his present mood, he wanted complete quiet for the hatching of his hideous plans. He sat down under a furze bush and bit his long black nails. The thought of the jolly gathering at Rumbling Mill only made him all the more bitter.\n\nAs he sat there, his eyes wandered among the tangled grass and brambles. Soon he spied two fine edible fungus with their chestnut brown domes gleaming in the shadow. He plucked them and took out his knife to peel off the skin. Gnomes regard these fungi as a great delicacy, much as we prize truffles.\n\nBut all of a sudden he put his knife back in his belt. No, he had a grand idea! He knew how fond Squirrel was of edible fungi. Many times he had seen the squirrels in the woods eating them and had found the brown caps with a piece bitten out of them, much as a piece is bitten out of an apple.\n\nCloudberry knew that were other fungi, wicked poisonous fungi, and some had quite a nice taste. Why not find some Fly Agaric or, better still, Death Cap, that innocent-looking white toadstool which grew in waste places? He could mix them in with the edible fungi and make an appetizing brew! The gnomes were always bringing back mushrooms and other edible fungi for the pot. He could poison off the lot, not only Dodder and Squirrel, but the others too, and he would then have the great distinction of being _the last gnome in the whole of_ _Britain_! What a fuss everybody would make of him then! The last gnome! He was so pleased with himself he skipped about with glee. No need to knock anyone on the head; just mix a few Agarics in with the rest and the deed would be done! It would be an easy matter to pretend to eat some himself. In fact, he could fill their five little porringers (made out of chestnut cups) himself, of course taking care not to put any poison in his own. Cloudberry rubbed his hands together and danced for joy. The next thing was to find some Death Caps or Fly Agaric. The latter is a bright scarlet fungus, spotted with leprous white, a strangely fascinating, yet dreadful growth. He put the two edible fungi in his skin cap and set off into the furze. Not far away was quite a little wood. A likely place!\n\nIt was a difficult matter threading his way through this tangled place but at last he found a rabbit run and this he followed. He had not gone down this very far when he heard the alarm note of a nightingale: 'Ueeee Pew! Ueeee Pew!' Interested, he turned aside, and after pushing about for some time, he came to a mass of privet, white in flower, which made the night air heavy with its strange scent.\n\nBeneath it grew ivy, an ideal place for a nightingale's nest. The parent birds were flying round in a terrible state. 'Oh dear, my babies! My poor babies!' the mother kept wailing. 'Save them! Save them! Help! Help!'\n\nCloudberry stood watching them for some time and then called out, 'What's the matter, what's all the fuss about?' and then he felt a cold little fear. Stoats liked baby birds. If it was a stoat he would make a hasty retreat.\n\n'Help! Help!' called the mother nightingale again. 'The Worm of Death has found my babies!'\n\nCloudberry, who had been poised for instant flight, took heart. 'Where is your nest?' he asked.\n\n'Under the privet!' wailed the poor distracted birds. 'Save them! Save them!'\n\nHe pushed his way very cautiously through the bushes, treading with the utmost care. Under the ground ivy he heard a faint rasping rustle which sent the hair creeping in his beard. He peered closer and suddenly saw, with quite a start, the squat and tapered body of an adder. It was silver grey in colour, exactly matching the grey lichen which grew on the mouldering tree branches which lay about on the ground. He saw its coils smoothly contracting as it gulped down the last of the nightingale babies.\n\nHe could not suppress a shudder. The gnomes had no quarrel with the snakes, nor they with them. The timid grass snakes were their friends and, for that matter, the sinister adders were too. But there was one thing about the adders: they had a disconcerting habit of biting you if you trod upon them or stumbled on them unawares. So Cloudberry stood where he was and called softly:\n\n'Worm of Death! Worm of Death! Are you there?'\n\n'Yessssss!' came the low hissing response. 'I am here, who callsssss?'\n\n'It's me, Cloudberry!'\n\nThere was a silence and then the ivy leaves began to move and rustle and he saw the evil head, with its fat poison glands bulging behind each cheek and the glittering eyes which he dare not meet with his own.\n\n'I hope you have dined well and had good hunting,' said Cloudberry faintly.\n\n'Yesssss! I have had good hunting, gnome! Yessssss! Mossssst satissssssfactory! But what bringsssss you here?'\n\n'We're staying at Rumbling Mill,' said Cloudberry.\n\n'Rumbling Mill! A fassssssinating placcccce!'\n\n'Indeed it is,' said Cloudberry. 'We're on our way downriver but we lost our boat by Bantley Weir so we're staying on with Otter for a bit.'\n\n'Do the white owlsssssss sssssstill live up in the mill housssse?' asked the adder. Cloudberry noticed a distinct bulge in the middle of its black-patterned body and he shuddered again.\n\n'Yes indeed, and they have a nest up in the loft.'\n\n'And have they any nicccccce fat youngssssssters?' said the adder, coming out a little farther from the ivy.\n\n'Yes, they have,' said Cloudberry and then wished he had kept silent.\n\n'Ah,' said the adder, 'ssssstill in down I ssssssuppose?'\n\n'Yes, they are,' said Cloudberry. 'Why?'\n\n'I wassss jussssst enquiring, I do not like the white owlsss but I like baby owletsss, very much, yessssss, very muchshsh, they are asss good assss nightingalessssss, though they do not ssssing sssso sssweetly!'\n\nCloudberry found he was trembling.\n\nMeanwhile the poor nightingales, beside themselves with grief, wailed above their heads.\n\n'What bringssssss you to my pressservesss, gnome?' asked the adder after a pause.\n\n'I was just taking a stroll,' said Cloudberry, beginning to regret he had come and wishing he was back at Rumbling Mill.\n\n'It'sss a good thing you did not ssstep on me in the dark,' said the adder, 'I ssssometimes make misstakes! I like to be warned when gnomes are tressspassssssing!'\n\n'I'm sorry, Worm of Death, I didn't know you lived here.'\n\n'Didn't Otter tell you I wassss here?' asked the snake.\n\n'No, he didn't; he never warned us.'\n\n'Then he ssshould have done. It sssshowsss lack of resssspect.'\n\n'He's been so busy,' said Cloudberry, hopping from one leg to the other.\n\n'What are you carrying in your hat?' asked the snake.\n\n'Edible Fungi, for our supper.'\n\n'You eat that sssstuff?' said the adder. 'You ssssurprisse me!'\n\n'Oh yes, we think it a great delicacy,' said Cloudberry, 'but we do not eat the Death Cap or the Fly Agaric.'\n\nThe adder hissed gently. 'Ah, I know them, they grow not far from here, clossse to my housse, I like the sssmell of them. Yesssss! but you are welcome to them if you wisssssh!' and the adder gave a squirm of mirth at its own joke. 'Come, I will ssssshow you my houssse!'\n\n'Oh,' said Cloudberry, 'if you don't mind, Worm of Death, I won't come just now, I must get back.'\n\n'Oh yessssss you will, you mussssst ssssee my houssse, I'll ssssshow you the way.'\n\nCloudberry was trying very hard not to appear frightened and he did not want to offend the adder so what could he do but follow? And after all, he thought, it might be useful to know where the Agarics grew, _quite_ useful.\n\nSo he followed the adder through the furze. It moved sluggishly because it was full fed. It was also sleepy.\n\n'I musssst sssshow you where I live,' it hissed over its shoulder, 'becausssse you might ssstep on me in the dark sssometime and that would be dissssassstrousssss for all of usssss!' and the little eyes burned more brightly than ever.\n\nAdder led the way under some dark trees to a low ivy-grown bank. Far behind, Cloudberry could still hear the wailing of the poor nightingales. He felt he was in a very evil place.\n\nAfter gliding along the foot of the bank a little way the adder came to a small hole, which looked not unlike a mole-hole. Cloudberry was half afraid that the adder would press him to follow it inside but it was drowsy and wanted to sleep off its supper.\n\n'Thisssss issss my housssse,' said the adder, turning round and regarding him. 'I would assssk you in but I want to ressst. But I'll be ssseeing you again!' it hissed and then, inch by inch, it vanished into the hole. Cloudberry saw the black-patterned tapered body like a nightmarish worm slowly sucking in and then he was alone. A great relief passed over him. He'll be seeing me, will he? thought Cloudberry. Not if I know it!\n\nClutching his hat he turned to go and then he remembered what the adder had said about the Agarics.\n\n'Close to his home', he had said. He followed the bank along a short distance, treading gingerly and gazing about him. Adder's remark about 'minding his step' obsessed him. He felt like a man walking through a minefield.\n\nAnd then, at the foot of the bank under some yews, he saw a clump of glimmering red toadstools. They were the Agarics sure enough. Quickly he gathered them and put them in his hat. And then, suddenly afraid, he turned and ran as fast as he could out of that dark and forbidding place.\n\nWhen at last he reached Rumbling Mill he hid the poisonous fungi in the hollow of a willow hard by the wheel house. They would do for supper the following night, and meanwhile he had to lay his plans.\n\n## CHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\n## _The Raising of the_ Jeanie Deans\n\n he following evening there was great excitement at Rumbling Mill. As soon as it got dark the other otters began to arrive. Dodder and Otter counted them as they came in. Evidently the Bens and Barny had done their job well.\n\nBaldmoney suggested that they should all have a feast before they went to business, but Dodder said nobody could work on a full stomach. 'Let's have a feed when we've raised the ship,' he said. 'Sneezewort can stay and get it ready.'\n\n'I wanted to see the _Jeanie Deans_ brought up,' grumbled Sneezewort. 'I always have to cook and do all the dirty work. It isn't fair.'\n\n'Let's toss up who's to stay then,' said Dodder. 'That's the fairest way.'\n\nCloudberry, who had been listening, suddenly saw that now was his chance; it was as though it had all been planned. It couldn't have worked out better! 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I'll stay and cook the supper. I don't mind, you leave it all to me.'\n\nThis was so unlike Cloudberry, Dodder was amazed. What had come over him? It was astonishing.\n\n'Well, I call that pretty decent of you, Cloudberry,' said Dodder. 'We'll make it up to you somehow.'\n\n'And perhaps you wouldn't mind keeping an eye on my babies,' said Mrs Barny. 'They're as good as gold. I've given them their supper and if you can just look in once or twice to see if they want anything, I'd be obliged.'\n\n'Certainly, ma'am, I'll be delighted,' said Cloudberry. 'What time will you be back, Otter?'\n\n'There's no knowing,' said Otter. 'It may take half the night, if she's jammed tight in the river bed. Expect us when you see us.'\n\nAnd with a wave of a paw he turned upriver and everybody followed behind. Baldmoney carried a strong rope made out of twisted grass, Sneezewort carried a loop of wire they had found in the malt house, and Dodder had a large six-inch nail over his shoulder, which might come in useful as a crowbar. Cloudberry stood by the wheel house and watched the little party out of sight round the bend of the river. The moon would be rising late, the first part of the night would be dark. He sat down on the grass and watched the water. The rain had gone and it looked as though the hot weather was coming back. The night was utterly still. Already the stars were beginning to wink and blink and the sound of the river seemed very loud.\n\nWhen should he prepare his hideous Devil's brew? Should he wait awhile until it was quite dark? Where had Sneezewort put the porringers? In a minute or two he would have a look. His heart beat fast. Rumbling Mill seemed suddenly very hostile and watchful. It was quite eerie to think he was all alone with only the young otters in their holt under the wheel house and the baby Barnies up in the loft. The youngsters had been told to be good children because their parents were going out and they had also been told that 'Uncle Cloudberry' would come and see if they were all right.\n\nCloudberry could not help smiling to himself at the role of nursemaid assigned to him. For a long while he sat on the stones by the wheel house watching the bats flickering above him, hardly visible. Now and then they would suddenly dive close to the surface of the river and chase each other about with tiny mouse-like squeaks.\n\nThe trees about the mill grew very black, as did the water under them. He smelt the almost overpowering smell of river water and slimy weed. A fish splashed out in the mill pool. Otter had said that Rumbling Mill was haunted. Haunted by what? Cloudberry shivered. It was horrid being all alone like this. He stole under the wheel house and listened. The baby otters were sleeping soundly. He had better see if the baby Barnies were all right too. He wasn't taking any chances, he didn't want a soul to see him fetch the fungi.\n\nHe stole into the door of the mill house and started to climb the rickety stairs. Rats scuttled about in the darkness and made him very jumpy. The old house was full of clicks and rustlings and quiet subdued footfalls. How dark it was in here! But gnomes can see well in the dark; to a Mortal it would have been utter blackness.\n\nHist! What was that? He thought he heard Dodder's halting tread on the stair! No... only his guilty conscience. He must pull himself together. He would see if the Barnies wanted anything, then he would go and fetch the fungi from the hollow tree and prepare his ghastly brew. By this time tomorrow night he would be the last gnome in Britain, what glory would be his! He went on up the stairs. Soon he found himself in the loft.\n\nCobwebs hung from the beams, draped like grey rags from rafter to rafter. Through a large gap in the roof a star was winking down at him and up in one corner under the tiles he could see a smudge of white, which was the woolly bodies of the baby Barnies. They seemed to be wide awake, snapping their bills at him in quite a friendly way.\n\nCloudberry tiptoed back to the stair head. Once again he thought he heard Dodder's halting step below, but it was only his imagination. Now he would go and prepare his deadly brew which would rid him of all his troubles and bring him such glory. He stopped again. The well of the staircase seemed like a pit. He thought he heard a faint rustling below, like autumn leaves. A rat perhaps? Cloudberry, suddenly filled with a strong desire to get out of the mill into the open air, started to scurry down the stairs like a scared mouse.\n\nMeanwhile Bantley Weir was the scene of feverish activity and excitement. Never before had so many otters been gathered at that spot. And somehow or another many of the River Folk had got wind of what was happening and the shores on either side were thick with water voles and water birds. Grebe was there, yes even aristocratic grebe! And he offered to dive with the otters and help put the wire hauser under her. Otter led off, followed by his relations, and they dived down, one after the other, like a school of porpoises. Dodder, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort, together with the Bens, stood about on the shingle watching the dim water below the weir. Now and again they saw a round head bob up for air and then down it would go again.\n\nOtter led his band to the wreck unerringly. She lay as he had last seen her and the first job was to free the mast from under the stone. It took three of the otters working together to do it. Then the wire was pushed under the hull. This was a more difficult matter and took some time, necessitating several trips to the surface for air. But at last the task was done, the wire was passed under the hull and pulled tight by strong teeth (this had of course been Baldmoney's idea!).\n\nThen with three otters at the stern and three at the bow and Otter and a companion hanging on to the wire, they began to pull her towards the shore. Though she was a heavy ship she moved much more easily than was to be expected, and it may be that there was still some air in her bulkheads.\n\nIn any case, after about an hour's hard work, a cheer went up as the delighted crowds saw the mast of the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ once more appear above the surface of the river. It was a more difficult matter when they got the ship into the shallow water and the otters had to work very hard with frequent pauses for breath. And then at last, not a couple of hours after the operations had started, the ship was high and dry on the shingle! All hands set to work. She was tipped on her side and all the water drained from her hull and when this was done Baldmoney and Squirrel went below to see what damage had been done, while the tired and exhausted otters took 'an easy' on the shingle.\n\nOf course it was only to be expected that the interior of the ship had suffered a good deal. The cabin was in an awful state. But the sopping skin rugs and coats were spread out to dry on the stones and with the help of Dodder and the owls, it was not very long before the _Jeanie Deans_ was looking quite presentable once more.\n\nWhile the others attended to the interior of the cabin, Baldmoney got to work on the engine. It was red with rust and at first it looked as though she would never be able to voyage again. But by scraping away with his knife he got rid of most of it, and when they tried the key they found she was all in order.\n\nDodder was delighted, indeed he was so overcome with gratitude to the otters, he could hardly find words to thank them. At last the time arrived to start her up and take her downriver. Squirrel, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort went aboard, and with a grand flotilla as escort\u2014a flotilla composed of grebes, water voles, otters, and the owls, she at last moved off under her own power on her way to Rumbling Mill.\n\nIt seemed a miracle that everything should have gone so well! As Dodder said to Baldmoney, 'What we want now is a nice hot day tomorrow to dry her out. The bunks won't be fit to sleep in for some time but she isn't damaged much.'\n\n'And I'll soon get the dent out of the funnel,' said Baldmoney, looking up at it as he stood by Dodder's side, 'and the foremast's broken too. We shall have to fit another, we must have a smart ship.'\n\nDodder sighed a happy sigh. He was once again at the wheel of his beloved _Jeanie Deans_ , everything was all right with the world.\n\nAt last they saw Rumbling Mill in the distance and very soon, on a word from Dodder, the engine was shut off and the good ship came gliding gently in to her anchorage under the wheel house. They tied her up securely and then, thanking the otters, who were dropping off downriver one by one, Dodder came ashore, followed by Squirrel, Baldmoney, and Sneezewort.\n\n'Now for some supper,' said Baldmoney, rubbing his hands. 'A good job done, if you ask me. I wonder what Cloudberry has got for us, I feel as though I could eat anything!'\n\n'And so do I,' said Dodder heartily, mopping his forehead, for it was a hot night and the work had been hard.\n\nBut when they peeped into Otter's house, where they always had their meals, all was in darkness. The young Otter cubs were sleeping peacefully, but there was no sign of a fire or of any supper laid. Mystified, Dodder and the others searched the mill from top to bottom.\n\nCloudberry had completely vanished!\n\n'I can't make him out at all,' said Dodder. 'He said he'd have supper for us when we came back, what _can_ he be doing?'\n\n'Perhaps he didn't expect us back so soon,' said Sneezewort.\n\n'P'raps he's gone fishing,' said Otter.\n\nUp in the loft the young owlets were safe and sound. They said that 'Uncle Cloudberry' had come to see if they were all right about an hour after the others had left. It was all very, very mysterious! At any rate they did not let this little mystery spoil their triumph. Everyone turned to and prepared supper and it didn't take long for Otter to bring in some nice fresh perch. And as to Squirrel, there was plenty for him. The store of nuts in the hold of the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ had not suffered in any way, and everyone voted that the night's work had gone without a single hitch.\n\nBut what had happened to Cloudberry?\n\nIf he had had his way, the happy party now sitting down to a jolly supper would be partaking of his poison, and the dawn of a new day would have found him the master of the _Jeanie Deans_ and with the distinctive title of the Last Gnome in Britain!\n\nBut Pan had willed it otherwise. It was Pan who whispered into the ear of the Worm of Death away on Bantley Heath that three white owlets in down would make him a fine supper. It was Pan who guided those sinister coils to Rumbling Mill and it was he who cleverly arranged that the panic-stricken Cloudberry, his guilty mind full of his own dreadful project, should elect at that moment to come tumbling down the mill-house stairs! As the Worm of Death had warned Cloudberry, it was wise to tread carefully when adders were about.\n\nAnd so it was, that as the Worm of Death ascended the dark stairway, with his mind full of what a nice meal those three owlets would make, Cloudberry planted one foot on the squat and banded body. The Worm of Death struck right, struck left, and his wicked teeth went home. Rat, lizard, owlet, or gnome, they were all the same to the Worm of Death. He made his leisurely meal and departed. He would save up the young owlets for another day.\n\n## CHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\n## _Holidays_\n\n hen, on the following morning, there was still no sign of Cloudberry, the mystery deepened. But I cannot say that anybody bothered their heads very much. Dodder ventured the opinion that he had gone off on another of his lonely travels and that their absence from the mill that night had given him the opportunity to slip away. And as time went by and still there was no sign or clue, this explanation was more or less accepted. Then Sneezewort, returning from a fishing expedition from the direction of Bantley Weir, found Cloudberry's belt and knife on the edge of the river. The Worm of Death, finding this indigestible, had got rid of it as he made his way back to Bantley Heath.\n\n'He must have fallen into the river somehow and drowned himself,' said Dodder. 'Either that, or he dropped the knife as he went off on another of his voyages of exploration, in which case we can't go and look for him again.'\n\nSquirrel, poking about by the millhouse, also discovered the collection of fungi, but there was nothing to suggest any connection with Cloudberry.\n\nA chance remark by Dodder brought to light the truth about the loss of the _Jeanie Deans_ and after learning Squirrel's story, the disappearance of their evil-minded brother was not referred to again. It was all very sad. Cloudberry had once been a good gnome, but his roving life had changed him entirely. But there were much more important things to think about than the disappearance of the ne'er-do-well.\n\nThe _Jeanie Deans_ had to be made shipshape again and there was much work to be done, both on her and in her. Luckily the weather was hot, which was just what the gnomes wanted. Baldmoney spent two whole days hammering the dent out of the funnel\u2014a tedious, noisy, and warm business.\n\nSneezewort and Dodder got to work on the inside of the cabin, polishing the woodwork and scrubbing the bunks; there was not much time to enjoy those glorious summer days and nights.\n\nBut in their idle moments they would slip away to fish or ramble along the riverside, and sometimes, when the weather was excessively hot, Baldmoney and Sneezewort went for swims with Otter. He knew every mile of the river about Rumbling Mill and what games they had, rolling naked about among the buttercups, or playing hide-and-seek among the bullrushes and reed mace!\n\nIt was astonishing how quickly the young Barnies grew up. It was not long before they were out of the nest and sitting in a row along the roof ridge, like so many hideous gargoyles, hissing to be fed.\n\nThe baby otters were now out and about too and sometimes Otter would take them all, gnomes included, to toboggan on the mud slides. This was a great treat and Baldmoney and Sneezewort loved it. Never before had they had so much swimming and Otter said that if they stuck at it they would soon swim as well as he did. He even taught them how to hunt fish. This was great fun. In the evenings, after the heat of the day, the cubs, Baldmoney and Sneezewort and Otter would go off to some favourite hunting ground of his and there he would set some fat roach or perch 'on fin' and the hunt would be up. They worked with considerable technique. Otter would 'head' the fish and the gnomes would help him corner it under the bank or against a stone. At those times, Dodder, being barred from such sports by his disability, would go off alone and hunt up his many friends.\n\nHe enjoyed those rambles by the lush river banks, looking up the various families which were just beginning to find their legs and wings. Once he saw a cuckoo perched on a fence post 'birds-nesting'. When a cuckoo wants to find a nest in which to lay its eggs it just sits still in some likely spot for hours on end, watching the other birds. This was a dodge which the gnomes themselves practised and it is one of the most productive ways of finding birds' nests and saves much needless effort and painful scratches.\n\nThis cuckoo on the post missed nothing. She saw the tree pipit soaring over his singing tree on the edge of a cornfield and after a while she saw him go down among the green grass on the headland where his mate was sitting. And the cuckoo watched a pair of sedge warblers building in some sweet briar close to the river, and the reed warblers likewise, busy among the tall bullrushes' stems, and made up her mind where she would lay her eggs. The reeds in which the reed warblers built were the real bullrushes, which have no brown woolly heads like pokers (the latter are the reed mace). The true bullrush has a feathery graceful flower head. As the cuckoo sat in the sun she wagged her spotted tail from side to side like a pleased dog. Dodder had never seen that happen before.\n\nAnd everywhere the fields, woods, and copses were full of baby things just out of the nest: thrushes, blackbirds, moorhens, dabchicks, blackcaps, whitethroats, garden warblers, and finches. Their varied squeaks for food were insistent.\n\nDodder was able to save many a little life. He found a baby song thrush which had fallen into the river. He fished it out and sat it in the sun until it had dried and then gave the mother thrush a sound rating for neglecting her children.\n\nHe found a young blackbird, whose parents had deserted it, a puffed-up ball of misery who was unable to find any food for itself. Dodder dug it worms from a mossy bank, taking care to kill the worm before giving it to the baby bird, just as he had seen the old birds do.\n\nHe fed this youngster for three days and gave it lessons how to fend for itself. He saved a whole family of field mice from a weasel, and when that little spring of steel, clothed in brown fur, swore and chittered at him, Dodder drew his knife and looked so terrifying that even the weasel had to retire. He found a baby bullfinch with a broken leg. He made a splint out of a pigeon's quill and mended it.\n\nOne result of these kind actions was that whenever he went hobbling along the river bank, he was followed by a string of baby things which clamoured to be fed. It would have done a Mortal good to see that funny little gnome with his peg leg and his kind wrinkled little face like a Pied Piper of Fairyland, followed by a procession of nondescript infants. They used to come and wait around Rumbling Mill for his appearance and as soon as he showed himself a shout would go up, 'Here comes Daddy Dodder,' and he would get no peace. The others laughed at him but Dodder was secretly delighted. There was nothing he liked more than helping the birds and beasts. Indeed, he was the most popular person in the district. His skill as a doctor spread like wildfire, and it was not very long before mothers brought their ailing children to him to ask him for advice. One mother thrush was very worried because her family was suffering from a common internal disorder. 'More greenfly, madam!' Dodder boomed at her. 'More greenfly! How can you expect them to be well? And try a spider, madam, if the trouble continues, there's nothing like a spider as a purge.' (Which is very true: a spider is as good as castor-oil.)\n\nTaking advantage of this pause in their journey, Mrs Ben, despite all advice to the contrary, prevailed on her husband to consent to a family. She foolishly laid two eggs in the old Barnies' nest (with their permission, of course). But one night, when she had left them for an airing, a rat ate them, much to old Ben's secret relief. It was too late in the year, anyway, to start a family, and at any moment the ship would be ready and the gnomes would want to be moving on.\n\nOccasionally Dodder would explore the cornfields, wandering about among the green forests which were so mysterious, and he would see the scarlet skirts of the poppies drooping over him, looking almost black against the evening sky.\n\nDown among the cornstalks, Dodder chatted with harvest mice and field voles, enquired after their families and admired their cosy little nests. He passed the time of night with hedgehogs and frogs, and chatted with the moles about the dry hot weather. They had their runs deep down under the corn which led to the river. Moles are thirsty creatures and need to drink fairly frequently.\n\nIt was fascinating to stand or sit among those million, million cornstalks and hear the wind passing over, and to see the half-formed heads of grain, green as yet, bending and swaying all in unison.\n\nOnce his wandering took him to Bantley Heath where the Worm of Death lived (or used to live). The fact is, though not a soul knew about it, save a few startled lizards and mice, that two days after Cloudberry's disappearance, the Worm of Death set out again to keep a date with the young Barnies in Rumbling Mill. But a prowling fox had spied it and bitten it behind the head, and that was the end of the Worm of Death.\n\nDodder rambled through the furze and passed the very door of the adder's house. Even though it was now tenantless, evil was in the air and he was glad to be out of the wood.\n\nSometimes Squirrel accompanied him on these evening walks. Since his dreadful experience at Bantley Weir, Squirrel was shy of water and he enjoyed accompanying Dodder on his 'rounds'.\n\nThey made a quaint pair, as they ambled along in those summer twilights, chatting together. Very often, after the day was over, the twain would get out the dinghy and row about among the lily beds, fishing for perch and roach, setting night lines, or simply lying up among the reeds. Dodder smoking and watching the gnats adancing, Squirrel pretending to catch imaginary fleas in his fluffy tail.\n\nIt sometimes happened that a boatload of Mortals passed by Rumbling Mill, but this was of rare occurrence, for even they seemed shy of Bantley Weir. And once they saw the river keeper walking among the buttercups, armed with a long pole with which he destroyed the moorhens' and dabchicks' nests. But needless to say, he never found the gnomes, and after he had gone Dodder and Squirrel would rescue the eggs\u2014if they were unbroken by the staff\u2014and replace them in the nest.\n\nBut the fishing season was at hand, for it was now the middle of June, and Otter said that there would soon be anglers about, especially near Bantley Weir. Moreover, Baldmoney pronounced that the _Jeanie Deans_ was now fit for sea, and with every passing day the knowledge that they must be on the move once more became obvious.\n\nThis short holiday by the summer river was delightful, Rumbling Mill was a dangerously alluring Lotus Land. These halcyon days could not last for ever and Dodder felt in his bones that soon they must say goodbye to all at Rumbling Mill and continue their journey. Already there were signs that summer was well upon his golden-footed way.\n\nThe buttercups in the fields had begun to lose that first bright flush of varnished yellow and the starling families had left their nests and were down among the mowing grass, churring in their loud and insistent voices. The elder was in flower, another sign, and the crops were now coming into unripened ear.\n\nMany early swallow families were out. They used to gather in a row on the mill-house roof, twittering ceaselessly, and that new music struck a strange uneasy chord within the memory. Dodder, when he heard them, remembered those autumn days on Poplar Island, when they were marooned there after the loss of the _Dragonfly_. And then the green summer trees and the lush water meadows seemed for an instant faded and brown, and he thought of the misty mornings and of the first gold spots in the elms along the hedgerows.\n\nSomehow or another, the nightly gatherings and jolly suppers at Rumbling Mill now seemed to be more precious, more precious because everyone knew that time was getting short. The Otter cubs had developed into fine young creatures, swimming and diving almost as well as their parents, and the eldest had already caught his first fish unaided. One evening the Barnies summoned everyone to the loft to witness the young ones take their first real flight.\n\nIt was a great moment as the two anxious parents sat with them on the roof ridge and wheedled and coaxed the trembling owlets to trust themselves to the unstable air. The Otter cubs had been the same, their first plunge into water had been a nerve-racking experience.\n\nThe youngest owlet refused for a long time to launch away, not even the coaxing of Mrs Barny and the Bens could persuade it. And at last they had to call upon Dodder to use his influence. By kind words and reassuring motions, and a promise of a fat mouse all to itself from Mrs Barny, that terrified ball of woolly feathers launched itself, with a wild hoot, into the air.\n\nIt glided several hundred yards and landed upside down in an elder bush, panting but triumphant.\n\nBaldmoney, who was as interested as any at this performance, seemed strangely moved. His eyes glistened when he saw the owlet gliding away and clapped his hands with delight. 'If only we could fly,' he said to Dodder, 'how _lovely_ it would be! If only we had wings.'\n\nBut Dodder was not so sure. 'We aren't built for flying,' he grunted. 'I'd rather feel the firm earth supporting me, thank you!'\n\nBut afterwards Baldmoney was seen up in a corner, busy over his notebook, not speaking to anyone, and oblivious of the world.\n\nAs Squirrel remarked to Dodder, 'Old Baldy has some new Plan on the go. I was watching his face when the young owlets flew away. I believe he's got some mad hare-brained scheme he's working out, you mark my words!'\n\n## CHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\n## _The Anchor Weighs_\n\n do not know whether Dodder, in the quiet hours when he roamed alone through that dear country, ever entertained the idea of abandoning any further voyagings in the _Jeanie Deans_. It is unlikely. Once gnomes say they are going to do a thing, they do it. But I would hesitate to say that he was not tempted. Looking back on their Folly Brook days I think that Dodder may have realized that this lovely old ruined mill by the river, beset with trees and golden meadows, where the fish were weighty and the company was so congenial, was a good place to be. And now the River Folk had begun to accept them as one of themselves. Good friends form strong ties and Dodder knew this. He knew that the longer they stayed, the more these ties would bind them and the harder it would be to tear themselves away.\n\nNever before had Dodder been able to do so much good and be such a help to all those pathetic little people who creep and run, walk and fly, whose existence depends so much on the whim of weather and twist of chance. By a kind act here, and a good deed there, Dodder had won the hearts of all at Rumbling Mill; it was a very, very happy place, upon which the sun always seemed to shine and where dark clouds were unknown.\n\nBut the Mortals, who had been noisy enough of latter years up the Folly Brook began even here in this remote spot to be noisily evident again. Strange lights hung in the sky at night, swinging balefully, like priests' censers. Curious rod-like beams sprang up and toyed with the stars, and sometimes red glares smouldered afar off, as of immense bonfires. Distant doors seemed to slam and the droning thunderbirds passed over, invisible but menacing.\n\nOne night, as they all sat under the wheelhouse after supper, laughing heartily at a new game invented by the young otters called 'Ben Knows Best', Rumbling Mill suddenly heaved up and groaned aloud from every ancient timber and joist. Tiles crashed loudly to the ground and the old rose-red chimney, after tottering and swaying for a split second like a drunken man, plunged down with an appalling splash into the mill pool, shearing away the peak of the gable and driving a shoal of perch quite frantic with terror.\n\nThis sudden shock was so terrifying, so outrageous, that for a moment or two everybody was frozen with fear. Then in a body they rushed from under the wheelhouse into the open air.\n\nDodder shook his head sadly. 'Dear, dear, dear, they _are_ noisy tonight, bless their little hearts!' And Mrs Otter tried to comfort the young otters who were whimpering under a willow.\n\n'It's all right, dears, it's only a thunderbird dropping its eggs.'\n\n'We don't like thunderbirds,' sobbed one of the young otters. 'Why don't they lay their eggs somewhere else?'\n\nDodder sighed. 'I remember the time when there weren't such things as thunderbirds. Britain was much quieter then. I liked it better.'\n\n'Let's go and see if the ship's all right,' suggested Baldmoney with a very anxious look on his face. So they all trooped along to her moorings. She was unharmed, though a flying slab of stone had narrowly missed her.\n\nRumbling Mill, shaken out of her four hundred odd years of peace and quietness, was full of dust and frightened cheeping mice. Dodder tried to calm them as well as he could and Ben, sitting on the mill top, called out that he would come down too and knock some sense into them, an offer which was not at all appreciated by the mice and which soon brought them to their senses. In an hour or two the incident was forgotten by most of them, but Dodder's mind had been definitely made up. Britain was no place now for the Little People and he thought of an island, far away in a grey lough, where no Mortal came and he sighed. A long, long way to travel, a weary way, o'er land and sea and mountain perhaps. But there was peace there, so Woodcock had told them, with no sound but the ripples on a stony shore and the cry of the Heaven Hounds upon their own restless journeyings. Woodcock was a very wise and sensible bird, Dodder had always had a great respect for him, a very silent bird, but with a tall head, full of wisdom.\n\nA day or two later he thought the time had come to call a meeting\u2014the last meeting, to discuss their plans and wind up their affairs and to say goodbye to all their many friends.\n\nHe sought out Baldmoney. The latter was tucked up in a dim corner muttering to himself and drawing busily. When he heard Dodder's approach he shut up his notebook and looked very self-conscious.\n\n'Baldmoney.'\n\n'Yes, Dodder?'\n\n'I want a word with you in private. Tell Ben to come too, to the old punt in the Mill Leat.'\n\nBaldmoney nodded and, putting his precious notebook in his pocket, he went to fetch Ben. That notebook he valued more than any other of his meagre possessions. He had, I am afraid, taken it off the workbench in Mr Shoebottom's workshop. The first three pages were filled with drawings and notes in Mr Shoebottom's handwriting, such as 'Two 350x17s, Bantley, Sat.' 'Five to One on Black Cap, nap, 2-15' and the mysterious remark, 'Spotted Cow, May 16, Bowling Club dinner' all of which was (naturally) Greek to Baldmoney.\n\nWhen Ben had been found and summoned they trooped off to the punt among the weeds to hear what Dodder had to say. He stood up, cleared his throat and blew his nose.\n\n'It's about Woodcock's island.'\n\nBen muttered 'Hum ha,' and nodded his head and looked very wise. Baldmoney said nothing.\n\n'What happened the other night has sort of shaken me up,' continued Dodder. 'I think we've been inclined to let things slide lately. Well, that's not surprising. There's something about Rumbling Mill that makes one feel that way, and Otter and everyone have been so kind and jolly that it has been hard to think of other things. Well, what I've to say is this. We must start, start as soon as possible. You, Ben, know how far it is, 'cos Woodcock told you.'\n\n'You mean to Woodcock's island?' asked Ben, blinking and scratching his beak bristles with one claw.\n\nDodder nodded. 'Yes, Woodcock's island. You all know as well as I do how the summer's getting on, and we must be getting on too. We've got to reach the sea and then we've got to get across to Woodcock's island, though _how_ we're going to do that Pan only knows!'\n\nBaldmoney seemed to be about to say something. He put his hand in his pocket for his notebook but after a glance at Dodder thought better of it and remained quite still.\n\n'Well,' said Ben, after a pause, 'it's a good flip, a tidy flip.'\n\n'You mean _step_ ,' corrected Dodder. 'We aren't birds, we haven't wings.'\n\n'Step then,' said Ben. 'It's just the way you look at it.'\n\n'What do you call a good step, Ben?'\n\nBen scratched his beak again, looked at Baldmoney out of the corner of his eye, winked, and then said, 'Oh, it'll take us into October if we start tomorrow.'\n\n'October!' gasped Dodder. 'As long as that?'\n\n''Fraid so,' said Ben gravely. 'That's if Baldmoney's plan works out all right.'\n\n'And what _is_ Baldmoney's plan?' asked Dodder rather impatiently.\n\n'Don't ask that till we reach the sea,' said Ben, with an air of great finality. 'You'll only pooh-pooh the plan if we tell you now.'\n\nDodder grunted. 'Well, if you think we're going to sail across the Irish Sea in the _Jeanie Deans_ , I'm staying right here at Rumbling Mill, cos it can't be done.'\n\n'I don't suggest for a moment that we should!' burst out Baldmoney. 'I've a much better plan than that. I thought\u2014' He caught Ben's eye and dried up. 'I thought... er... that is\u2014'\n\n'Thought what?' said Dodder. 'What are you stopping for?'\n\n'Oh, nothing!'\n\n'Very well then,' said Dodder a trifle huffily, 'you needn't tell me if you don't want to. I'll trust you both to see us safely there. If it had been one of Cloudberry's plans, now, I _should_ have been uneasy.'\n\nBaldmoney and Ben looked pleased at the compliment.\n\n'Very well,' he continued, 'we'll start as soon as we can provision the ship. As you know, all the grain was spoilt at Bantley Weir. We've got to get fresh supplies aboard as soon as may be, and that's going to mean a lot of work. It's all right for you, Ben, you can pick up a mouse where you like and when you like, but we've got to rustle around. The acorns aren't ripe, which complicates matters. All we can do is to fish and fish for all we're worth, get 'em dried out and smoked, and then trust to luck. No doubt there'll be plenty to eat on Woodcock's island\u2014I hope so anyway.'\n\nThe next few days were rather strenuous. There was all that bustle and activity one associates with impending departure. The young otters romped about, getting under people's feet, and then looking very solemn when they remembered they were not going too.\n\nMany of the River Folk came to say goodbye and thank Dodder for all he had done for them and one hedgehog completely broke down and went into hysterics. Otter had to pour water over her before she recovered. Otter fished and fished and the gnomes did too until they had amassed ample stores. The minnows, small dace, and roach were slit and dried, then smoked over a fire in the old mill house.\n\nSquirrel ranged far and wide among the adjoining woodlands and came back with sackfuls of edible fungi and other delicacies dear to a squirrel's taste. Dodder's stock of wine, sadly depleted, was broken into for the final farewell supper on the last night at Rumbling Mill.\n\nA great number of River Folk attended that farewell dinner and of course all the otters who had helped them raise the _Jeanie Deans_ were asked and they attended, bringing with them relations of _theirs_ , whom Otter or Mrs Otter had never met. But as there was enough for everyone it didn't matter, though, as Mrs Otter told her husband afterwards, it might have been very awkward.\n\nEvery water vole for miles around was invited, and the kingfishers, moorhens and grebes, and many reed and sedge warblers were asked too. Of course the owls had to be on their best behaviour and pretend that they never as much as _looked_ at voles and mice, which was very comical because they pulled such funny innocent faces.\n\nNo less than fifteen hedgehogs arrived just before the meal (I had that from PeeWee the willow wren, so I believe it) and every Animal Banquet ever held paled before that sumptuous repast.\n\nBub'ms attended, though they hadn't been asked (bub'ms were considered rather 'rumty too' if you know what that means) and they all sat down (or perched) about the old threshing floor, there naturally being no room in the holt under the wheelhouse.\n\nFrom first to last the whole thing went with a swing, and as many as liked sampled Dodder's excellent berry wines. When at last the feast was over, of course Dodder had to make one of his rather tedious speeches and everyone pretended to listen very reverently. One of the hedgehogs, who had had perhaps just too much of the wine, began to weep maudlin tears.\n\nWhen the speech-making was over (Ben had to get up on a crossbeam and have his little say), Otter gave the toast of a good journey and a safe arrival. He made such a pretty speech there was even a tear in the bub'ms' eyes and then they all adjourned to the banks of the mill pool for a concert by the nightingales. This was a very good idea of Otter's, who had thought it all out beforehand. Some of the birds were suffering just a little from overeating but there were so many singing at once it didn't matter in the least, and the lovely notes floating out of the dark willows by the river bank were ravishing.\n\nAt last the party broke up; everybody voting it the best Animal Banquet that had ever been held. Yet, through it all, Dodder had to keep a very firm hand on his feelings, as you might well imagine.\n\nAnd when the last bird had flown away and the last vole had waved goodbye they all went back to Rumbling Mill and helped Mrs Otter clean up the mess.\n\nAfter the riotous time they had had, the place seemed suddenly forsaken and forlorn. Conversation was forced, subdued snuffles were heard from the young Otters and Barnies.\n\nDodder, buckling on his belt, found himself alone with old Otter and the two completely broke down, weeping, in each other's arms.\n\n'C-c-come back, dear Dodder,' gulped Otter, when at last he could speak. 'You know that Rumbling Mill is always w-w-waiting f-f-for you and yours, if ever you return.'\n\nWith an effort Dodder mastered his feelings too. 'Goodbye, old friend, I'll think of you a lot and may Pan watch over you and keep you safely too!' Then he turned abruptly and hobbled out of the wheelhouse with a lump as big as an oak-apple in his throat.\n\nIt was 'all aboard' then. The last farewells were taken, Mrs Barny and Mrs Ben kissed each other by locking their bills in the owls' kiss, and the sight of this brought a smile to the lips of Dodder, who remembered the sight of the fighting owls falling into the nettles on their first night. He needed a sense of humour anyway, just then.\n\nIt was 'Anchor up!' and 'Let loose forrard,' and then came the clicking of the key.\n\n'Goodbye, Otters, goodbye, Barnies! Pan keep you!'\n\n'Pan keep you!' came back the answer from the fragrant river's gloom. And then the screws began to churn and inch by inch the gap between the side of the _Jeanie Deans_ and the wheelhouse widened. The young Otters had made streamers out of Traveller's Joy, which they held in their teeth and one by one these became taut and broke as the ship drew farther from the bank, and as the bows turned ever outwards the Bens took off from the mill roof and floated away soaring with many a mournful hoot. Soon Rumbling Mill began to grow smaller in the moonlight until at last, with a final sigh, which was almost a groan from everyone, the dear old place was hidden by the willows.\n\nThe _Jeanie Deans_ dropped down the silent river, once more bound upon her journey, a journey that had begun so long before at a place called Poplar Island, far away up the Folly Brook.\n\n## CHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\n## _Exit_ Jeanie Deans\n\n or a week after the sad farewell scene at Rumbling Mill, the _Jeanie Deans_ made good progress. Of course the gnomes had plenty of excitement such as boatloads of Mortals, fishermen and such-like trifles. Once the wash of a steam launch nearly swamped them as they were hiding among the reeds. But their luck still held. At the rate they were going Dodder reckoned they would soon be nearing the sea. Ben and Baldmoney spent many hours poring over complicated plans. Dodder would often see them during the day (when, incidentally, Ben should have been sleeping) with the notebook laid on the cabin skylight and Baldmoney busy with his pencil. He sucked it a lot and stroked his beard and Ben would nod or shake his head at some remark of Baldmoney's and at times terrific arguments broke out. It was all very mysterious. Sometimes Dodder would pretend to see if there was anything on the fishing line which they always put out over the side when the ship was at anchor. He would stroll down the deck whistling and take sly sidelong glances at the busy pair, but when Baldmoney heard the familiar hobbling step he would shut up his notebook with a snap and remark in a loud voice to Ben 'that it seemed difficult to have any privacy these days'. Once Dodder managed to take a peep at the notebook when Baldmoney was away fishing but he could make nothing of it. Then something occurred which gave him an inkling what was in the wind. I have mentioned the thunderbirds which were really at the bottom of all their troubles. Every day they saw scores of them passing over, sometimes flying like Heaven Hounds in close formation, sometimes singly.\n\nAnd whenever the familiar drone of their engines broke the silence Dodder would notice that Baldmoney seemed unusually interested. Of course, being very cunning, he pretended to take no notice of this new habit, but he began to have a vague suspicion that Baldmoney had some fantastic notion in his head of building a _flying machine_.\n\nNow Dodder knew that such a thing was quite beyond the ingenuity of any gnome. Besides, what was the use? It would be better to persuade Sir Herne to take them over the sea, or even Ben. Had not Cloudberry once flown all the way to Spitzbergen on the back of a Heaven Hound? So why, in Pan's name, a _flying machine_? The more he thought about it the crosser he became. What was Baldmoney thinking of to entertain such an absurd idea? How could they ever make an engine? Really, it was quite beyond all common sense.\n\nSupposing Baldmoney persisted in his crazy notion. Supposing, when they reached the sea, he began to waste their precious time in building a thunderbird, what would happen? They would be stranded perhaps, right out on some desolate marsh with no woods and no cover and the winter would be upon them. They could never retrace their steps back to Rumbling Mill which, after all, did offer safe sanctuary and jolly company.\n\nPoor old Dodder began to sleep badly; he began to wish they had never left Rumbling Mill at all. Each night when they weighed anchor he began to feel a cold fear clutch at his heart. Every beat of the screws was taking them away from security into the dread unknown and a freezing death on some lonely strand.\n\nIt soon became apparent that he must say something to Baldmoney and he made up his mind that if his fears proved correct he would absolutely refuse to go another yard. Even if they had to walk all the way back to Rumbling Mill, he would refuse to go any farther down the river to certain death by exposure.\n\nIf only Ben had made some arrangements with the birds then he would not have worried so much. He knew how easy it was to ride on Sir Herne's back, for instance. He remembered how once on his journey up the Folly to join the others, in those early days of exploration, how Sir Herne had given him a ride. Of course it was terrifying enough, but he had enjoyed it\u2014afterwards. To trust the whole party to one of Baldmoney's crazy inventions was asking too much. He would not entertain the idea for a moment.\n\nSo one hot afternoon when he spied the conspirators busy as usual over the notebook, Dodder plucked up his courage and decided to have it out with them.\n\nHe knocked out his pipe and came stumping down the deck, trying to appear at his ease.\n\n'Can't get any peace nowadays,' said Baldmoney with a sniff as he heard Dodder's footsteps on the decking.\n\nBen gave a wink and scratched behind his ear in an irritable fashion and the twain waited patiently for Dodder to pass by.\n\n'I want a word with you both,' said Dodder, 'now I've got you here together. Of course I know what you're going to say, that it's none of my business, and that my job is to steer the ship and take you safely to the sea. Well, we can't be far off now and I think you ought to tell me what plans you've got.'\n\nA silence ensued. Ben made a sort of muffled hoot in his throat and looked at Baldmoney. Baldmoney looked at Ben and seemed acutely uncomfortable.\n\n'We'll tell you when we get there,' said Baldmoney at last. 'There's no need for you to worry us like this.'\n\nDodder's face grew red with anger, and Ben looked as though he wished himself miles away in some quiet ivy-clad oak.\n\n'I must insist on knowing,' said Dodder. 'I'm the leader of this expedition and if you won't tell me then we'll go no farther\u2014not a single mile will we go, so there!'\n\nBaldmoney heaved a deep sigh and looked glumly at Ben for guidance. Ben shook his head and looked the other way. Dead silence ensued.\n\nA fish splashed out in the river and a mother moorhen swam past with a whole string of sooty wheezing chicks valiantly struggling after.\n\n'You talk to him, Ben,' whispered Baldmoney.\n\n'Well,' said Ben clearing his throat nervously, 'we can't tell you yet, we really can't, because our plans aren't quite cut and dried.'\n\n'And if you won't go on,' broke in Baldmoney, 'then you'll have to stay behind. Sneezewort, Squirrel, and the Bens will go with me to Woodcock's island and\u2014and\u2014 well, that's all we've got to say. I'm sorry, but there it is.'\n\nDodder stumped off without a word and as soon as he was out of earshot Baldmoney heaved another sigh. 'I _knew_ it! I knew it! Dodder's going all crusty now because we won't tell him. If we do he'll be just the same, I know him so well. If we tell him what our plan is he'll still say he won't go another yard. It was just the same when we made our boat, the _Dragonfly_ , you remember; he said it was all poppycock and that he'd stay at home. He's as stubborn as anything.'\n\nBen apprehensively eyed the distant figure of Dodder who was elaborately pulling up one of the fishing lines over the stern. 'D'you _really_ think he means what he says\u2014d'you _really_ think he'll refuse to weigh anchor tonight? If so, we're in the soup. It's a long way still to the sea and it's farther to Rumbling Mill and that's what the old fellow is thinking of. Anyway, the _Jeanie Deans_ can't go back upriver against this current. We're in a fine old mess, if you ask me.'\n\n'D'you think Squirrel could knock some sense into him?' asked Baldmoney. 'We can't leave the old thing behind, even though we said we would; it wouldn't be half the fun without him and I believe he knows it. Oh dear, what _are_ we to do?' Baldmoney drummed his fingers on the skylight.\n\nMeanwhile, as Dodder pulled up the fishing line, he found his head was in a whirl. So they wouldn't tell him even now, when he said he would go no farther. He had thought at least that Ben would have told him. Was he being unreasonable he asked himself? He remembered the time he had been left behind at the Oak Tree and how miserable he was. Now he had said he would go no farther he must stick to his word. It was all very awkward. At last an idea struck him. Why not ask Baldmoney point-blank if they intended to build a thunderbird? If Baldmoney answered in the negative they could go on; if he said they _were_ going to build one then he was justified in refusing to go any farther. Yes, the more he thought of the idea, the more he liked it.\n\nHe pulled up the wet line, re-baited, and flung it out once more. Then he turned round and went stumping down the deck to Ben and Baldmoney who were still sitting on the skylight looking the picture of misery.\n\n'I've been thinking over what I said,' said Dodder to them, 'and there's one more thing I'm going to ask you: I've a notion what your plan is and I'm going to ask you straight out! Is it a flying machine you have in mind? If it is then what I said earlier holds good. The ship goes no farther tonight. If it isn't, then we'll weigh anchor at sundown, same as usual. Will you answer me that? Is it a thunderbird you're going to build?'\n\nDodder noticed a look of relief pass over Baldmoney's face. 'I'll answer you that, Dodder, it isn't a thunderbird, is it, Ben?'\n\nBen, who still seemed rather uncomfortable, shook his head. 'No, it isn't a thunderbird, Dodder, cross my mouse-tails it isn't!'\n\nIt was Dodder's turn to look relieved. 'Right, then I'll believe you, and I'm glad, because I know you could never build one, not if you tried for ever so long.'\n\n'Of course we couldn't build a thunderbird!' exclaimed Baldmoney. 'How could we? What made you think we could?'\n\n'I've seen you looking at them a lot,' confessed Dodder, grinning for the first time for days. 'Every time one goes over I see you take a good look and then rush off to your notebook, that's why I thought you meant to build one. You're clever, Baldmoney, but not clever enough for that, I know a gnome's capabilities! Well,' he went on, 'now we've cleared the air a bit we'll see how Sneezewort's getting on with the supper because we'll weigh anchor at last light.' And away went the funny little man whistling the tune of the 'Gnomes' Shanty'.\n\nBaldmoney looked at Ben, Ben looked at Baldmoney.\n\n'We told him the truth, didn't we?' said the former. 'It isn't a thunderbird, is it?'\n\n'No, I suppose not,' said Ben, 'not a _real_ thunderbird.' He was a very truthful owl and he still seemed a little uncomfortable.\n\n'Well, now off you go and have a good sleep, Ben,' said Baldmoney. 'You look tired out, old bird, and this strong light is bad for your eyes. Mrs Ben will be wondering where you are, I'll be bound.'\n\nAs soon as supper was over and all the things had been washed up (Mrs Ben came along and gave them a claw), the anchor was weighed and the _Jeanie Deans_ set out.\n\nThe bats were already abroad and all the fishermen had gone home leaving little crumpled scraps of cast paper and crusts of bread on the bank, round which the water voles were gathering. It was too late also for boats to be out, even the loving couples had gone home, and the gnomes had the river to themselves. It was a perfect night, windless and full of stars.\n\nThe Bens, as usual, had gone off downriver ahead of the ship, picking up a mouse here and there around the stackyards. As for the gnomes and Squirrel, they had dined well.\n\nWhite mists lay like fine-drawn veils about the water meadows and many mallards were busy, quacking and flying above reedy backwaters.\n\nCows stared at them as they went by. Nearly all were lying down, their big mouths moving sideways as they chewed the cud, and numberless cockchafers boomed to and fro, sometimes banging into the boat. One big fellow hit the funnel an awful crack and lay insensible for quite a time on the bridge, much to Dodder's annoyance.\n\nDodder was now much more happy in his mind. He knew Baldmoney and Ben would not tell him a lie, so it was not a thunderbird after all; so what _could_ it be? Still, he wouldn't raise the matter again, and he had not forgotten that Pan was watching over them; _he_ would see they came to no harm surely.\n\nHe puffed contentedly at his pipe and watched the dark cliff of a willow swim towards them and pass slowly astern. Somehow there was a strong hint of late summer in the air. In the flat river meadows the hay had been cut and carted, the aftermath was already springing green. And the buttercups had gone and the elder with them, no longer did their sweet smell make the night air heavy. In the luminous darkness the meadowsweet lining the river bank seemed very white and glow-worms gleamed in the damp grass. At the end of the summer, you may have noticed that there is a peculiar smell about the fields; it isn't that first fresh smell, and mingled with it is the faint tang of cattle and sheep and mature plants and leaves.\n\nAnd the swallows too, they were beginning to band together. It wouldn't be long before the harvest. Dodder sighed. There would be no more moonlight expeditions to glean the wheaten ears from Lucking's fields below Moss Mill: it was all very sad.\n\nFar ahead he heard the Bens hooting and in a few moments he saw the black silent shapes appear on their starboard beam.\n\nBoth birds came to rest, Mrs Ben on the ship's mast and Ben upon the bridge. They came quite noiselessly and alighted so gently that the _Jeanie Deans_ only gave a faint rock and never altered course.\n\n'Bad news,' said Ben briefly. 'Shut off your engines, Dodder.'\n\nDodder pushed the lever and the beat of the screw stopped abruptly. Only the chuckle of water along the sides of the ship broke the silence.\n\n'There's a big weir ahead,' said Ben. 'Bigger than any we've come across yet and to go over will be asking for trouble\u2014in fact, it would be suicide!'\n\n'Make fast,' grunted Dodder to Baldmoney, who ran to the bow of the ship. Squirrel jumped ashore and tied the _Jeanie Deans_ up to a reed stem.\n\n'Let's go and have a look at it,' said Dodder, making for the gangway which, in the meantime, had been lowered by the obliging Sneezewort. They all trooped ashore and crept down the bank. The grass was high and wet with dew, masses of willow herb made the going hard. Soon they heard the dull thunder of the great weir, which grew louder as they approached.\n\nIt was a beautiful sight in the moonlight: the eerie tossing manes of white foam, the ghastly eddies and foam clots, the slowly revolving rafts of broken reed, endlessly swinging in circles in the backwaters.\n\nAcross the river, almost opposite the weir, was a cottage and behind it a clump of magnificent poplars. But the sound of the night wind, which had sprung up in the last hour and was playing in those silvered columns, was drowned by the tumult of the falling waters. The gnomes had to shout to make themselves heard.\n\n'We'll never make it,' bawled Dodder in Baldmoney's ear.\n\nBaldmoney nodded his head and his face was very miserable. Ben, who had meanwhile been sitting on one of the big wooden posts of the weir itself, wagged his big head at them, as though it was no good thinking of ever risking the descent in such a Niagara of waters.\n\nAfter standing a while looking at the rushing river as though they thought some miracle would happen, they turned back and made their way towards the anchored boat, the sound of the weir dying behind them.\n\nDodder wagged his head. 'Ben's right, we're in a fix. I don't know what to do. If only the otters were here we might have portaged round it but we can't do it by ourselves, even with Squirrel's help.'\n\n'I don't see why we shouldn't try,' said the latter animal, who all the time had been skipping about in the moonlight, 'we got her out of Shoebottom's shop.'\n\n'That was different,' replied Dodder. 'There was a hard road and the ground sloped. It's tough going here with all this willow herb and boggy ground. There's only one thing I can think of and that is to cut the boat adrift and let her take her chance and try and salvage her below the weir. There _is_ a chance she will not sink, especially if we batten her down.'\n\nThis really seemed the only solution and after much arguing they decided to take this course. Baldmoney and Sneezewort volunteered to go out in the dinghy below the weir and try to take the _Jeanie Deans_ in tow. The portaging of the dinghy was an easy matter for them and without delay this was done. They untied it from the stern and carried the little boat well below the weir. They found the effort all they could manage through the thick herbage. After seeing Baldmoney and Sneezewort push out into the calm water, Dodder went back to the anchored ship. His heart was very heavy as he untied the rope. If the _Jeanie Deans_ was to be wrecked a second time the outlook was pretty black and their chances of continuing their journey very remote.\n\nFor some time the little gnome sat among the rushes with the rope in his hands. He could feel the pull of the river like some subtle monster trying to draw the _Jeanie_ _Deans_ away. It was really an awful moment. It was like saying goodbye to a very dear and well-loved friend and they had come to regard the ship as part of themselves. In it they had shared so many joys and sorrows and braved so many dangers and adventures. Then, with a prayer to Pan, Dodder let go the rope and sat there, drawn by an awful fascination as the ship slowly, slowly receded from the reeds. There she was now, going out into mid-river, drifting helplessly round and round. Sometimes he saw her full length, the empty bridge with no figure at the wheel, the vacant decks, the funnel shining in the moonlight. They had taken from her hold some of the things they treasured most\u2014their spare moleskin coats, their fishing rods and gear, the Acorn Hop board and many another cherished possession, but their pictures they had to leave.\n\nNow she was bow on, appearing half her size, and all the time she was sliding down towards that dreadful weir. Dodder found that he had to run to keep up with her, a difficult matter with his bone leg. Soon he was panting and puffing, for it was a hot night, and he fought the willow herb stems which seemed to purposefully bar his way. Soon the vegetation hid her from view and he saw the dear ship no longer.\n\nMeanwhile, Baldmoney and Sneezewort, waiting in the dinghy below the weir, gazed with straining eyes upstream. Ben was visible now and again, wheeling on slow wings against the stars, obviously keeping watch on the helpless drifting ship.\n\nTheir eyes were glued on the white crest of the distant weir whose dull thunder reached them. And then they saw a tiny black object appear at the top. In a second it vanished from view amidst the foam and tossing spray and the awful minutes ticked by and no boat reappeared. Ben circled and circled again, hooting mournfully, and soon Sneezewort began to snivel.\n\n'She's gone down,' he sobbed. 'We shall never, never see her again. Oh! why did we ever do it? Why? Oh! why?'\n\nBaldmoney did not reply. 'Row nearer,' he said, but their puny efforts were of no avail against the quickened current of the river and they fell back again and again.\n\nBen came gliding over. 'It's no good, gnomes, she's gone to the bottom,' he called down to them. 'I _knew_ she would! I told you so!' And alas what Ben said was true.\n\nThe _Jeanie Deans_ had at last come to the end of her adventures, her last voyage had been made.\n\nA sunken bar of iron at the foot of the fall (round which was tangled many a fisherman's trace and line) had pierced the bowels of their faithful ship, and there, transfixed below the seething bubbles at the weir foot, she was gradually being pounded into little pieces. First her funnel went, then the bridge and all her superstructure. Her plates were riven apart, the bunks and woodwork split and shattered.\n\nSoon, as Baldmoney and Sneezewort sorrowfully rowed towards the shore, they beheld an exhausted and weeping Dodder staggering along the bank.\n\nAnd all the comforting words of the Bens and Squirrel and his brother gnomes, could not take those tears away. The little man seemed utterly broken; he sat rocking to and fro among the dewy grass, his whole minute frame shaken by sobs.\n\nIt was all very sad and unfortunate but, as Ben pointed out, if they had all been aboard her they might have been drowned and that would have indeed been a terrible thing. Though the future seemed black they had at least their lives and perhaps something would turn up, as it had done in the past, to give them renewed hope and courage to carry them to their journey's end.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\n## _Baldmoney Gets to Work_\n\n rom what Peewee the willow wren told me, the loss of the _Jeanie Deans_ was a severe blow to everyone concerned. The news of the accident filtered through to the Stream People back at Rumbling Mill. But of course that was a long time afterwards and it was too late for the otters to do anything about it, otherwise I am sure they would have set out at once to render assistance to their friends, even though they were so far away. It's surprising, though, how news gets about; bird tells bird, water vole tells vole, some chance remark by a King of Fishers perhaps, and soon _everybody_ knows! You may be sure the good ship was mourned, as well she might be, but everyone who heard the news did the same thing, they heaved a sigh of relief and said, 'Well, there's one thing, souls, the gnomes are safe.' And that was the general opinion, which just goes to show how high Dodder and his brothers stood (and do not let us forget Squirrel and the Bens) in the estimation of the Stream People. Of course the real truth of the Cloudberry incident never leaked out. The Worm of Death, being dead himself, was the only one who had known the truth, which we may say was a very good thing. Cloudberry had never been so popular as his fellows but it would have cast a slur on the good name of gnomes in general had the facts become known.\n\nNow it would have made a lot of difference had there been kind friends to comfort the little men when they lost their fine ship. It is true, they had the Bens and Squirrel, but the wild people take a little knowing, you have to live with them, as the gnomes had done at Oak Tree Pool or Rumbling Mill, before there is intimacy or friendship.\n\nThe scene of the dreadful disaster described in the last chapter was called Windover Weir. I mention the fact because it plays an important part in this story in so far as it is the place where Baldmoney became a hero and the saviour of them all. It was a pretty place, though not wild and forsaken like Rumbling Mill, and everything was on a much grander scale. On either side were rich water meadows with a dear little village and church with a steeple spire hidden in elms only a mile from the weir. It was a favourite resort for picnic parties (human ones, of course; no animals would ever hold a meeting there for that reason). There was the little cottage hard by where the man lived who looked after the weir and controlled the water and his name was Nathaniel Threadgold. He had a wife, a portly rosy-faced woman with a moustache, and their cottage was called Windover Cottage. Nathaniel suffered from rheumatics, as he was always getting wet, but they were a very happy couple. They kept hens (white ones), a pig, and two black-and-white goats which were always tethered in the little apple orchard behind the cottage. And the goats had two little kids, dear creatures, who were always up to some tricks or other. In the winter Mr Threadgold kept them in a byre, or shed, at the end of the meadow, but in summer he left them out all night. It was not very long before the goats and kids became firm friends of the gnomes and very useful they proved to be; for, in addition to helpful advice, the nanny-goat supplied the little men with plenty of milk and asked for nothing in return.\n\nWhen the _Jeanie Deans_ did not reappear from the uneasy depths of Windover Weir, the Bens and Squirrel had a hard time trying to comfort the three gnomes. The latter were so prostrated with grief they swore that they would go no farther, that after a rest of a day or two in some quiet spot they would retrace their steps, and take up their abode with their old friends at Rumbling Mill.\n\nOf course this was really impossible because they could never have trudged back all those miles before summer's end and Ben pointed this out to them. 'No,' said the wise good bird, 'don't do that; take my advice and find some snug spot hard by the river here and settle down for the winter. We'll look after you, we'll see you come to no harm, and then in the spring you can make your way back to Rumbling Mill!'\n\nAnd so after many more tears and arguments (some of them very heated) they cast about for some temporary home. As usual, Ben came to the rescue. He knew a little quiet lane, he said, not half a mile from the river, which was the very thing. It had steep banks crowned with old thick hawthorns and sloe bushes and nobody ever passed that way save when, in the autumn, the sloes were ripe. Then Mrs Threadgold would go there with the goats to gather them (the goats followed the Threadgolds about like dogs). Her sloe gin was famous, as many an Oxford undergraduate could testify.\n\nBen had learnt all this from the nanny-goat, to whom he had told the whole story.\n\nAnd so it was that at last Dodder was won over and everyone trooped over the night meadows to see the place.\n\nIt certainly was a very secluded and exclusive spot; Dodder took to it at once. The hawthorn roots were coiled like snakes and stuck out in ledges and cables from the steep banks and under them were caverns and caves as snug as anything. Moreover, ground ivy was very plentiful, and ferns, cowslips, hemlock, lady's smocks and brambles completely screened these secret places and hollows from any prying gaze.\n\nAs for Baldmoney and Sneezewort (and Squirrel too) they fell in love with the place. 'As snug a hedge as ever I did see!' exclaimed Baldmoney, and Ben who was sitting by on a fence post nodded his head like a mandarin's as much as to say, 'What did I tell you!'\n\nTrue, it was a bit of a come-down to live in a hedge after Rumbling Mill or the Oak Tree House. In the old, old days the gnomes who dwelt in hollow trees regarded themselves as a cut above Hedge Gnomes, but as there were no Hedge Gnomes left it didn't matter very much.\n\nAnd better still, very soon after they arrived, a dormouse called and made their acquaintance. She was a dear little soul, as round as a golf ball and so friendly. And it was she who introduced them to a hedge-pig and it was the hedge-pig who whispered in an awed voice to Dodder that just up the lane a little way there lived a fern-bear or badger.\n\n'Well, let's go and see him,' said Dodder at once, 'and present our compliments. I've a notion that if we've got to stay here for the winter he'll give us some help.'\n\nSo, with the dormouse and the hedge-pig leading, the whole party called on Mr Brockett. They caught him just emerging from his front door under a screen of ferns and after Hedgepig had explained their visit and how the gnomes had lost their boat, he seemed overjoyed. As a matter of fact, Mr Brockett led a very lonely life up Sperrywell Lane, as lonely as Squirrel's had been in Crow Wood. After all, dormice and hedgehogs and the like are very good and worthy people, but you cannot carry on an intelligent, sustained conversation with them. Gnomes and squirrels were an entirely different cup of tea.\n\n'Come in, come in,' he said, when Hedgepig had faltered through his story. 'I'm a lonely old bachelor and I've lived here all by myself for more years than I care to remember. Only too delighted to help you all I can. Come in, come in, all of you!'\n\nThey followed him down into his underground fortress and as they stumbled along in the gloom, Baldmoney nudged Dodder and whispered, 'Not so bad, what?' and Dodder whispered back, 'We're in luck, I do believe!'\n\n'Have some honey,' said Mr Brockett, sitting down like a large woolly bear on a bed of bracken. 'I've some lovely honey!'\n\nThe gnomes made polite sounds and Sneezewort, who had forgotten to remove his hat, was given a terrific dig in the ribs by Squirrel.\n\n'I heard all about your journey up the Folly,' said Mr Brockett, when everyone had set to with a will and sounds of suckings and smackings filled the gloom.\n\n'You heard all about it?' exclaimed Dodder, looking very surprised, licking first one finger then the other. 'Whoever told you?'\n\n'Oh, I forget. I get about a lot at night you know, mucking around Windover Weir. Someone told me, a vole or somebody, or perhaps it was Dabchick. Yes, now I come to think of it, it was Dabchick told me. But I thought there were four of you. Where's the other one?'\n\n'Oh, you mean Cloudberry,' said Dodder. 'Well... Cloudberry began to be very difficult, very difficult indeed and... well... er... he went off again one night and we haven't seen him since. He always was such a fellow for going his own way, didn't seem able to settle down anywhere.'\n\n'Well,' said Badger, 'since you have honoured me with a visit I can only say that Pan must have brought you here to cheer up a poor lonely old creature! I shall be more than delighted to welcome you here to Sperrywell Lane and you can live in my house as long as you wish. It will be warm in the winter and then perhaps if you want to go back to Rumbling Mill you can, but for my part, I'd much rather you stayed here with me. Everything I have is yours and any advice I can give you is more than welcome. I suppose I know this part of the country better than most.'\n\nThe gnomes made polite noises in their beards, Sneezewort grinned, and Ben nodded his head and winked at Squirrel.\n\nAll this shows how kind the animals were to one another. In the same way Squirrel had welcomed the gnomes to share his drey in Crow Wood and now, to think of the gnomes living apart from the Bens was quite unthinkable. All this made for a certain cosiness. Shelter from the weather, warmth, and plenty of nice things to eat, these things drew the refugees together.\n\nAs Mr Brockett had so graciously given them the run of his house, the gnomes were delighted. Yet if it was to be their winter quarters it lacked one essential thing for complete 'snugness', and that was a fire. Mr Brockett had seen fires made by Humans, he had seen bonfires in the fields in the autumn time and had even warmed himself by their dying embers in the quiet of autumn nights, but he had never contemplated having one to sit by in his own home. So that when the enterprising Baldmoney suggested that they should make a chimney to carry off the smoke, Mr Brockett was very dubious. Yet the gnomes painted such wonderful pictures of their Animal Banquets at Oak Tree House and of the good times they had there that the old gentleman began to be quite excited at the prospect, because fern-bears like nothing better than to be cosy in the winter months; they are the cosiest animals on four legs and very clean too in their habits.\n\nSo they set to work, Badger burrowing with his big claws, and the gnomes taking their turn with pointed pieces of wood. It took a long time to drill that hole and they had to call in the help of a couple of local moles to finish the job. The shaft of the chimney came out inside a decayed ash stump growing in the bank above. When it was finished the gnomes lit a fire and it was quite an excitement for them, and especially for Badger, who was beside himself with delight, vowing that he would never go to sleep in the cold weather, as he had always done so hitherto. He sat and warmed his furry stomach and dozed in the genial warmth just as though it was bitter January time. The flue drew beautifully and they followed the principle they had adopted in the Oak Tree House of never lighting their fire save on windy wild nights when the smell of the smoke or the sight of it would not be noticed.\n\nAnd in addition to this great luxury, Baldmoney and the others got busy making shelves in the subterranean galleries and fitting an inner door of oak wood to keep out the night air.\n\nAll this might have appeared unnecessary to the casual passer-by as it was still summer time and it was hard to imagine that winter ever came to that dreamy and secluded spot. Yet the blackberries were reddening on the brambles, which showed that winter was not so very far away.\n\nNot only that; Dodder, returning from one of his nightly fishing expeditions at Windover Weir, came burdened with a hatful of gorgeous mushrooms. These were duly fried and eaten for supper the next night, but Badger, after tasting one, spat it out and vowed he would never taste another.\n\nSquirrel was the one for mushrooms and he knew other edible fungi which were just as nice or nicer. It is not generally known that squirrels eat many wild fungi in the woods and are passionately fond of them.\n\nOf course Dodder brought in some fine catches of fish which were smoked over the fire; in fact, it was quite like old times in Oak Tree House.\n\nMr Brockett never tired of hearing of the great adventure up the Folly and of all the happenings in Crow Wood. To tell the truth, the old fellow sometimes reflected to himself as he went about his nightly hunting, how pleasant his life had become and how he enjoyed the company of his new-found guests. He even blessed the night the _Jeanie Deans_ foundered at Windover Weir, for if the accident had not happened he would never have seen the gnomes and would have continued in his old way of life.\n\nOccasionally he was accompanied on his nightly wanderings by Baldmoney and Sneezewort, and even Squirrel gave up his beauty sleep to go with him. As soon as the first stars began to show they would go trotting off, up the dusky tunnel of Sperrywell Lane and out into the open water meadows where the mists lay in thick white layers. Once they met a wood dog (which was their name for a fox) but as Mr Brockett was with them the sinister beast passed by with wrinkled lip and wicked sneer. Mr Brockett had never liked foxes, they were dirty, evil-smelling beasts, and since he had heard of the episode of Sneezewort and the wood dog up the Folly Brook, his opinion of them had been even lower.\n\nMany a chat they had with the goats in the orchard, though Mr Brockett would not go near the cottage; it was a rule he had made and a very wise one too: 'Keep clear of Man dwellings'.\n\nEvery night either Dodder or Sneezewort would go and milk the nanny, bringing home the rich rather goaty-flavoured milk in cunning little wooden pails they had made. It was wonderful the way those gnomes transformed Mr Brockett's house into a comfortable residence. Every convenient corner held a cupboard, beautifully made, complete with a door which fastened. In them they stored all kinds of things: mushrooms and smoked minnows, various edible wild fruits, and all the precious odds and ends they had saved from the _Jeanie Deans_. I forgot to mention that Dodder had even salvaged some of the little wine shells, but when he tapped one of them he found that the water had got in, probably when the ship was sunk at Bantley Weir, and the wine was spoiled. But as the elderberries were just coming on, Dodder used to spend many hours of the day preparing the berries so he was kept pretty busy. Sneezewort helped him and also did most of the cooking and collecting of firewood, so these two were well employed.\n\nOnce Baldmoney had finished making numerous shelves and cupboards he found himself without very much to occupy his days. He frequently went fishing, but to tell you the truth, much of his time was spent in Ben's company. Ben and he would sit for hours with their heads together, sometimes sitting on the top bar of a gate or stile or an old tree stump. It was obvious that the mysterious plan was still being discussed and that Baldmoney, at any rate, had no intention of spending the winter at Sperrywell Lane.\n\nAbout thirty yards from Mr Brockett's front door, deep among the bracken, Ben and Baldmoney had found a sandy cavity where the roots of the sloe bushes overhung, forming a natural ceiling. Baldmoney called it his workshop, but he said no word about it to either Sneezewort or Squirrel and he was very careful to say nothing to Dodder about it. The only other person who was let into the secret was Yaffle, a green woodpecker, who lived in a tall ash tree at the top of the lane. Yaffle was a very fine fellow with a military bearing. He had a beautiful suit of green feathers, a thick black moustache and a crimson top to his head. He was an expert on timber and from him Baldmoney had learnt all he knew of carpentry.\n\nUnder cover of darkness, or during the day when Dodder and Sneezewort were busy in Mr Brockett's house, the three conspirators would foregather in the workshop and muffled hammerings might be heard at times and sounds of drilling and boring.\n\nYaffle could be seen flying towards Sperrywell Lane with long pieces of wood in his bill and Baldmoney paid frequent visits to the tall reed beds by the riverside, returning laden with lengths of cut tough reed.\n\nThe truth cannot be hidden any longer from you, they were making a machine which outwardly closely resembled an aeroplane! And I must say that it was being made with the most exquisite skill. In length it was no less than three feet long and the span of its wings stretched from one side of the workshop to the other. The framework of the body was being built in sections and firmly morticed together, and inside the body were little bucket seats made from hollow reeds and one big seat halfway down which was four times the size of the others.\n\nSquirrel had been surprised one day when Baldmoney asked him his waist measurement. Squirrel said that he hadn't the slightest idea and Baldmoney had measured him. Squirrel thought that Baldmoney was making him a suit of clothes and told him that it would be a waste of time, he had never worn clothes and didn't intend to begin now. Pan had given him an all-weather suit of fur and it would be a waste of time. Baldmoney chuckled and said he had had a bet with Ben about Squirrel's waist measurement and he wanted to make sure. But all the same, Squirrel was very suspicious and kept his eyes open.\n\nMeanwhile, day by day and night by night the framework of Baldmoney's invention was pieced together, until the whole machine was completed, bar the covering of the spars and struts.\n\nIt had two doors, one on either side of the body or fuselage and you may be sure that Baldmoney had let himself go on cupboards and such-like. Later he had to take some of these out again, because of the increased weight. Ben, who knew all about aeronautics, implored Baldmoney to cut down such luxuries to a minimum.\n\n'It's no good, Baldy, you must keep her light or she'll never be airborne.'\n\nAnd Baldmoney would sorrowfully undo the work of hours. After all, Ben knew best.\n\nAt last, towards the end of July, the skeleton of the machine was completed. And then came the problem of finding a waterproof covering of some sort, which was both light and tough. It really was a problem and many suggestions were made.\n\nYaffle suggested leaves, which was stupid, and Ben was inclined to think that mouses' skins might serve but it would have been a long business catching enough mice and stitching the pelts together. Besides, as Baldmoney pointed out, when the skins became wet the weight of the machine would be so great that it would never fly.\n\nIn despair Baldmoney thought of the goats, Mr Threadgold's goats. They were always ready to be helpful and after consulting with Ben and Yaffle, Baldmoney decided he would let them into the secret. So it was agreed and on the twenty-fifth night of July the three conspirators slipped away to Mr Threadgold's orchard.\n\n## CHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\n## _Wonderbird_\n\n hey found the goats asleep under the apple trees. There was little moon, but against the stars the unripened apples were clearly visible.\n\nBaldmoney stole up to the sleeping nanny and poked her gently on the nose.\n\n'Nanny-goat! Nanny-goat! Wake up please, we want your advice.'\n\n'Hey! what's that you say? Who is it?'\n\n'Baldmoney and Ben\u2014we've come to ask your advice on a very important matter, and we're very sorry to disturb you at this late hour.'\n\n'Not at all, not at all,' said the good-natured creature. 'Go ahead.'\n\n'First of all,' said Baldmoney, 'we must ask you to keep what we are going to tell you a complete secret. We don't want a word breathed to anyone, least of all Dodder and Sneezewort.'\n\nThe nanny-goat nodded her head.\n\n'Well, it's this. Ben and I here are making a Wonderbird, which we hope will be the means of us reaching Woodcock's island.'\n\n'Yes,' said the nanny-goat, 'I understand, I know all about your journey, of course, because Ben told everything and how you lost your ship at Windover Weir.'\n\n'Well, the fact of the matter is, that we've got her pretty well made, but we're stuck for one thing and that's some sort of light, waterproof fabric with which to cover the framework. We've thought of everything: leaves, skins and so forth, but all are unsuitable. It must be able to keep out the wet, you understand, and not be too heavy.'\n\n'Um,' said the goat, getting slowly to her feet, 'let me think now. It's no good asking my husband, _he_ never has any ideas. Well,' said she, after a long pause, 'it seems to me you want some sort of light material. Now what about one of Mr Threadgold's shirts?'\n\n'Mr Threadgold's shirts!' exclaimed Baldmoney. 'But what would Mr Threadgold say? We can't take the shirt off his back, can we? I agree that some such material is what we want; it would be light and tough, but would it be waterproof?'\n\n'Ah! that's the question,' said the goat, 'that I don't know. He wears his shirts in all weathers, so I suppose it must be.'\n\n'Yes, but we've got to get hold of his shirt first,' said Ben. 'That won't be an easy matter, I'll wager.'\n\n'As easy as eating fallen apples,' replied the goat. 'There's one of his shirts hanging on the line now behind the cottage. Why not go and see?'\n\n'But it's stealing,' said Baldmoney. 'We gnomes never steal, not from anyone.'\n\n'Well, anyway, why not go and have a look at it,' said the goat, 'and come back and let me know.'\n\nSo off Baldmoney went to the cottage and Ben, flying after, perched on top of the post which held the clothes-line.\n\nMrs Threadgold had forgotten to take in the washing and a whole line of it hung there against the stars.\n\nWith a cautious look at the blind uncurtained windows of the cottage, which seemed to be watching them from the bowers of red rambler roses, Baldmoney went up the post as nimbly as a harvest mouse. He wormed his way along the line, ignoring three pairs of socks, two pairs of stockings, a petticoat belonging to Mrs Threadgold, a pair of pants and drawers, until he came to Mr Threadgold's shirt. It was certainly a beautiful shirt, a blue linen one, and the more Baldmoney felt its texture and the more he looked at it, the more he felt sure it was the very thing.\n\n'I don't like stealing,' said Baldmoney to Ben, who all this time had been watching from the top of the post, 'but I can't see that we shall ever find anything else, which will do as well.'\n\nAnd then, giving way to temptation, he pulled the clothes pegs and the fine blue garment fluttered like a tired ghost to the grass below. Rolling it quickly up, and with a guilty glance back at the cottage, they hurried back to the orchard and spread the shirt out upon the ground.\n\n'It's certainly a lovely shirt,' sighed Baldmoney.\n\n'The very thing,' said Ben. 'We shall have to have it, there's no other way.'\n\n'Have it then,' said the goat, as though the shirt were her property. 'He has plenty more and I'm sure he wouldn't mind you using it if he knew the facts.'\n\n'I don't like taking it\u2014it's a Pixie Trick, but there's no other way out...' Baldmoney slowly rolled up the shirt and hoisted it on to his back.\n\nNext morning when Mrs Threadgold went out to bring in the washing she gasped in astonishment. Mr Threadgold's best Sunday shirt had completely vanished, only the two clothes-pegs lay on the grass below. 'Well I never did!' she exclaimed. 'Where can it be?'\n\nShe searched all over the orchard and all about the cottage. Then she ran in to tell her husband who was just finishing his breakfast of ham and eggs.\n\n'Have you tuk your best shirt off the line, Nathaniel?'\n\n'Me best shirt? No, not I!'\n\n'Then it's bin stole!' gasped Mrs Threadgold. 'Someone's bin in the night an' pinched it.'\n\n'That's what come o' leavin' the wash on the line all night,' said Nathaniel, putting a large slice of ham into his mouth. 'I shall 'ave to buy another now, drat it.'\n\n'But 'oo could it be?' wailed Mrs Threadgold, who was almost weeping, for she was a thrifty soul.\n\n'Some tramp, I 'spect. Anything else missin'?'\n\n'No, only th' shirt.'\n\n'You're lucky then, Rose; they might ha' had the lot\u2014your smalls an' all!'\n\n'Ah well, some poor soul's got a shirt to 'is back; it serve me right for leavin' out the wash, I suppose.'\n\nMeanwhile back in the workshop, Mr Threadgold's shirt was no longer recognizable as a shirt. It had been cut into wide strips and Ben and Baldmoney were busy fastening it over the framework of the Wonderbird. It was sewn on with a bone splinter needle fashioned by Ben and the thread was made of tough dried bents. Once the skeleton of the body was covered the machine began to look most workmanlike and soon the whole body was covered, save the wings. It certainly appeared very smart in its fine blue covering.\n\nBut Ben, sitting wearily back on his tail and scratching his bill with one feathery claw was doubtful. 'I don't believe it's waterproof; a shower of wet and it'll be as heavy as lead. We ought to have tested it first.'\n\n'Well, let's test it now, before we cover the wings,' said Baldmoney. 'I'll get some water.'\n\nHe stumped out and soon reappeared with one of their little buckets full to the brim. Stepping back a pace he threw the contents all over the body and the fabric turned from bright blue to a sodden darker hue.\n\n'Heavy as lead,' groaned Ben. 'It'll never do at all.'\n\n'I'm afraid it won't,' said Baldmoney, glumly surveying the dripping length of the Wonderbird. 'We'd be down in the sea in no time at all.' He almost felt like weeping.\n\n'Never mind,' said Ben cheerfully, 'it will come in useful for shirts, once a shirt always a shirt. We've got to live and learn. Before we undo all our work let's ask Yaffle. He's a wise bird and he might make a suggestion. I'll go and find him,' said Ben. 'He's sure to be up in the ash tree.'\n\nHe found Yaffle asleep in his hole up in the ash and in a very short time he was back with Ben. They found Baldmoney looking mournfully at the Wonderbird and shaking his head. The woodpecker looked all over the machine, tested the material with his bill, looked thoughtful and spoke.\n\n'This stuff's worse than useless, but I'll go and see Kackjack, he's the bird to consult in a matter like this. I wish you'd asked me before getting the shirt; goats are always unreliable, well-meaning and all that, but no sound sense. Kackjack now, _he's_ as cunning and wise as any of us, an out-and-out rascal and a bit of a thief, but I've a notion he'll find the very thing.'\n\n'Who's Kackjack?' asked Ben. 'Do I know him?'\n\n'Yes, I 'spect you do, he's a jackdaw who lives in the steeple of Chilcote Church over the meadows. I'll go and have a word with him.'\n\nYaffle found Kackjack perched on the weathercock of the steeple. He explained the whole matter to him and the jackdaw looked slyly at him out of his cunning little white eye.\n\n'Oh ho! so the gnomes are taking to flying, are they? Whatever will they be up to next? So they want my advice, eh?'\n\n'Yes please, Kackjack, if there's anyone who would help, it's you.'\n\n'Mrs Bomfrey at the Red Lion has another baby\u2014born last month,' said Kackjack, looking more sly than ever.\n\n'I don't see what _that_ has got to do with it,' said Yaffle. 'It's of no interest to us how many she has.'\n\n'Mrs Bomfrey hangs the washing on the line every day, yards of it and Mrs Bomfrey's babies need a lot of things.'\n\n'Meaning?'\n\n'Nappies, for instance, if you would know the brutal truth. Mackintosh ones.'\n\n'Ah! Ha! Now I see your meaning,' said Yaffle admiringly. 'That sounds more like the real thing.'\n\n'It is,' said Kackjack, 'it is. Leave it to me, Yaffle,' and the cunning rascal winked prodigiously and launched himself into space.\n\nThat evening when Ben and Baldmoney were taking a much-needed rest in the workshop, the ferns shook at the entrance and there peered in the roguish head of Kackjack. He had something in his bill: a three-cornered square of waterproof silk.\n\n'Turns water like a duck's back,' said Kackjack, laying the material on the floor of the workshop and hopping sideways. 'I've got six more outside, shall I bring them in?'\n\nBaldmoney took up the oiled silk and spat on it. Then he dipped it in the bucket of water and drew it out. The moisture ran off in little pearls. 'The very stuff, Kackjack, how clever you are. How did you get them?'\n\n'Oh, it was easy. There was nobody about, I just pinched them off the line. My, but that's going to be a wonderful machine,' said the jackdaw admiringly, stepping back and half-closing one eye.\n\n'You won't tell anyone, will you?' said Baldmoney. 'We're keeping it a dead secret and if Dodder gets to know of it he will begin to be difficult.'\n\n''Course I won't tell,' said Kackjack, who had never kept a secret in his life. 'But how are you going to fly it? You haven't got an engine.'\n\n'We've thought all that out,' replied Ben. 'If you must know, I'm going to tow it. It's a glider, so it won't need an engine.'\n\n' _Very_ clever,' said the jackdaw, hopping all round the machine and trying to open one of the doors, 'very clever indeed. I might have made it myself.'\n\nWith their new material, Ben and Baldmoney worked far into the night. They ripped off Mr Threadgold's shirt and cut the waterproof silk into neat strips, sewing them tightly to the framework just as they had done the shirt. They barely stopped for a bite to eat and Mrs Ben had to do all the hunting. Towards morning, she brought her husband a mouse. Baldmoney was so excited he never ate anything at all.\n\nIn a day or so the whole machine was complete: the wings and fuselage were covered, the job was done save for a little work in the interior.\n\nI wish you could have seen that Wonderbird because it really _was_ the best thing Baldmoney had ever made. When it was finished I do believe he thought more of it than he did of the _Jeanie Deans_.\n\nThe machine was fitted with a skid at the end of each wing and one under the body, and the final touch was when Baldmoney painted the name WONDERBIRD on each side of the fuselage forward of the wings.\n\nThey made a long tow rope of plaited fibres and attached it to the nose and now it only remained to take a trial flight. It was wonderful how they had kept the secret: Dodder, Squirrel, and Sneezewort had no idea of its existence.\n\nAll the same, Dodder must have had his suspicions. Baldmoney was absent from Mr Brockett's house for hours at a stretch and he looked tired and worn and slept badly.\n\n'I'm afraid Baldmoney's been working too hard at his Secret Plan,' Dodder confided to Squirrel one night, as they sat fishing at Windover Weir. 'Have you noticed anything?'\n\n'Yes, I have; I believe that he and Ben are up to something. They're making another ship, I think, but I don't know for certain.'\n\n'I'm not going to risk my bones any more,' growled Dodder. 'We could never get another ship like the _Jeanie_ _Deans_. We're comfortable enough at Brockett's\u2014in fact I don't see why we should move at all. The old chap seems to have taken a fancy to us and we shall be as warm as anything through the winter. Fishing's good, so why should we move at all?'\n\nSquirrel swung in his line and re-baited the hook, and sighed.\n\n'I'm happy enough too, up Sperrywell Lane. I'm inclined to agree with you, Dodder. I don't really think that Baldmoney and Ben are unsettled; they are never happy unless they are making things. I shouldn't let it worry you. We won't move from Sperrywell Lane, not till next spring, anyway.'\n\nBut Squirrel was wrong; their peaceful happy days were swiftly drawing to a close and the whole party was soon to be bound on a more perilous journey than they had ever dreamed of.\n\n## CHAPTER NINETEEN\n\n## _The Fire at Mr Brockett's_\n\n n the last night of July, Mr Brockett, Squirrel, the gnomes, and Mr and Mrs Ben were busy playing Acorn Hop inside the badger's house. A good supper had been disposed of and the night was stormy and cold. In the fireplace the ruddy flames leapt merrily, sending strange distorted shadows from those assembled round the cheerful glow.\n\n'I'm tired of Acorn Hop,' said Dodder, pushing the pieces off the board. 'Let's play \"Ben Knows Best\".'\n\n'No, let's have a sing-song,' suggested Squirrel, 'like we used to in the old days at Rumbling Mill.'\n\n'I'd rather someone told ghost stories,' said Sneezewort.\n\nBaldmoney yawned. 'I'd rather have a nap.'\n\n'You're always sleepy these days,' said Dodder. 'You don't get enough rest. Anyway, let's put some more wood on the fire. Sneezewort, pop outside and get some more sticks.'\n\nGrumbling, Sneezewort sulkily obeyed. Why was he always sent on errands? They kept their wood stacked close to the entrance of Mr Brockett's house. He picked his way along the sandy passages, winding in and out until he felt the cold night air blowing in upon him from the outside world.\n\nHe stood awhile listening to the sound of the wind raving in the branches of the old ash tree up above. Flying wild clouds scudded overhead and now and again he heard the eternal voice of the weir swelling and dying on the night wind.\n\nHow cosy they were down below, sitting round their bright fire! He thought he heard the far crying of curlews. These long-billed birds were never seen far inland save on the autumn migrations and these birds he heard now must have been already starting on their journeyings.\n\nHe thought of them high, so high, up there amidst the flying clouds in the wild night. Everywhere animals and birds were tucked up cosily in their various homes, the water voles and rabbits and numberless birds of every kind. Summer seemed to be running away very fast. How nice it was to think they had such a secure fortress in which to face the dread days of winter!\n\nShouldering a bundle, he went back down the passage, shutting the door behind him.\n\n'What's the night like?' asked Baldmoney as Sneezewort reappeared.\n\n'Wild and eerie, dark and dreary, and I heard some curlew a-crying.'\n\n'They are thinking of the Autumn Flying,' said Ben. 'I know what it is, even a stay-at-home old chap like me!'\n\n'Now, Ben, don't talk rubbish,' said Mrs Ben. 'You're too old for such nonsense.'\n\n'Well, my dear, I used to get about a bit before I married you, and I can't help these things. It's always the same when I feel the autumn coming, I want to be up and away somewhere, over the hills and far away!'\n\n'Don't talk like that, _please_ , Ben,' said Dodder. 'Cloudberry used to carry on like that. Put some more sticks on the fire, Sneezewort.'\n\n'Yes, yes, let's make a great big fire,' broke in Squirrel eagerly. 'It's as cold as cold tonight. Let's make the biggest fire we've _ever_ made!'\n\nSo they piled on more wood and yet more wood until the vivid flames were darkened.\n\nThen they sat in the flickering light watching the red and orange tongues lick and creep and begin to devour the mass of boughs piled above. Mr Brockett, sitting back on his couch of bracken, surveyed the happy scene. He was an animal of few words. That night he felt very happy and contented. Jolly surroundings, entertaining company, and a glorious fire to sit by\u2014why, a few months back he would never have dreamt of such good times! To think that once he lived here all alone in the dark. Why it was a dungeon then!\n\nBrighter grew the flames, licking and curling. Mr Brockett smiled happily. 'Tell me some more about the trip up the Folly, Dodder,' he said at last.\n\n'But I've told it all once, twice, many times!'\n\n'Let's hear it again, I don't mind.'\n\nSo Dodder settled himself more comfortably in the warm firelight and told all over again how they made the _Dragonfly_ , how he was left behind and helped by Sir Herne, and how they came at last to the dreaded Crow Wood and met with Giant Grum.\n\nAnd all the time he was retelling that immortal tale, the flames went leaping higher and higher until the heat became quite uncomfortable. Bright gold sparks fell down the chimney; more followed, then a large piece of charred wood, all glowing and sparkling, crashed down into the hearth.\n\nEveryone jumped as though each had received an electric shock. An acrid smoke began to fill the chamber and their eyes began to smart.\n\n'Phew!' exclaimed Baldmoney. ' _What_ a smeech of smoke!'\n\n'I believe our chimney is a-fire,' said Squirrel suddenly, and just then another piece of lighted brand came crashing down. It was touch-wood from the ash above.\n\nAt that, everyone started up in alarm. Chairs were overturned and a flying spark ignited Mr Brockett's bracken bed.\n\nIn a minute it was alight and there was a mad scramble for the passage. Up the winding corridors they ran and arrived, gasping and puffing, in the open air. And there a terrible spectacle met their affrighted gaze. The old touch-wood ash tree was spouting a mass of fire like some huge engine chimney. Gold sparks were flying upwards, it seemed as if the very bowels of the earth were gushing fire.\n\nIt was a good thing that nobody was in the room below. This was now a seething mass of flame and billows of choking smoke began to waver up through the doorway. Not a living thing could exist down there; they had escaped in the nick of time.\n\nPoor old Mr Brockett was aghast. The glow of the fire, the reflection of the flames on the dense clouds of oily smoke, truly presented an awesome sight. Other animals began to gather around, their eyeballs glinting in the hellish blaze, rabbits, hedge-pigs, and affrighted birds.\n\nEveryone was talking at once. Someone suggested that the gnomes should try and put out the fire by water but their little pails held so little.\n\nMeanwhile, down below, in Mr Brockett's house, the hungry flames crept along the sandy walls. Cupboards and sideboards, chairs and tables, made with so much care by Baldmoney, became alight, one after the other, and greenish choking smoke came forth from the door like poisonous gases.\n\nMr Brockett was distracted. Why had he ever let the gnomes build a fireplace in his house? Why had he ever taken them in! Now his house was ruined, he would never get rid of the smell of burning, even when the tree had burnt itself out!\n\nBy now the conflagration had begun to attract attention from other people beside animals and birds. Mrs Threadgold, who was letting the cat out for the night, saw the dull leaping glow on the far side of the river and against it were silhouetted the branches of the pollard willows by the weir. She ran back to Mr Threadgold, who was smoking his pipe by the kitchen fire.\n\n'Nathaniel! Nathaniel! There's summat afire up at Sperrywell Lane, looks like a rick or summat, there ain't no house that way, be there?'\n\n'P'raps it's an airyplane a-burnin',' said Mr Threadgold, hastily slipping his feet into his carpet slippers and shuffling to the door. From the threshold of the cottage they could now see bright tongues of fire peeping and winking above the thick bushes of the lane.\n\nFarmers and others, attracted by the flames, were already making their way across the fields and of course at their coming the animals made themselves scarce. The gnomes and their friends, hurrying down the lane to find some shelter, almost ran into a party of labourers who had crossed the river by Windover Cottage. They crouched under a bramble bush while the men went by and heard them talking among themselves.\n\n'It's th'ole touch-wood ash,' said one.\n\n'An' a fine old blaze he do make,' said another.\n\nThen came Farmer Goosegrass from Chilcote Farm with a watercart and soon gallons and gallons of water were cascading down into Mr Brockett's dwelling. The burning wood hissed and sizzled and soon the underground house was full of water; you never saw such a mess in all your life.\n\nIt was well after midnight before the flames were put out and weary men were able to return to their homes, marvelling one with another how the fire had started.\n\nAnd when Mr Brockett and the gnomes came to inspect the damage, it was truly appalling. Water stood inches deep in the main living-room and everywhere there was the ghastly smell of wet charred wood. To think of living there now was quite impossible. What worried the gnomes was that all their treasures had been consumed in the fire: their spare clothes, the Acorn Hop board, everything but what they stood up in.\n\nWhat worried Mr Brockett was that there was no other suitable sett (which is the name for a badger's house) in Sperrywell Lane and it takes years to dig a really good roomy place. The only thing for him to do was to move to another disused sett in a quarry over beyond Chilcote village, and that was not nearly so safe as that in Sperrywell Lane, there were too many keepers there. But it was the only place.\n\nPoor old Mr Brockett, it _was_ hard lines on him, and the gnomes really felt very sorry for him because they had been the cause of the whole catastrophe.\n\n'No more fires for me, thank you,' said the old badger grimly, as he surveyed the ruins of his home. 'I don't mind you living with me but I won't have anything to do with that stuff. You can come with me to Chilcote Park if you like, but mind\u2014no fires!'\n\nDodder drew Baldmoney aside.\n\n'This is going to be difficult,' he said. 'We _must_ have a fire, we've always been used to it, we can't go and live with him. We must find some other place!'\n\nPoor little men, one cannot help feeling sorry for them, as well as for Mr Brockett. It was the third time their home had been broken up. 'I don't know what we shall do or where we shall go.'\n\nBen nudged Baldmoney and whispered something in his ear. Baldmoney cleared his throat.\n\n'Look, Dodder, Ben and I have something to tell you. We don't have to find another home, not here anyway. The only place where we shall find any peace is Woodcock's island.'\n\n'What's that you say?' gasped Dodder, wiping his grimy face with his sleeve. ' _Woodcock's island!_ But that's far away and we can't get there now we've lost our ship!'\n\n'Oh yes we can, if you promise not to be difficult. Ben and I have been working for weeks on our Plan and it's finished now. Come and look at it.'\n\nRather heartlessly leaving Mr Brockett to survey the ruins of his home, Baldmoney led the way down the lane and pushing aside the ferns ushered Dodder into the workshop.\n\nAs soon as the latter caught sight of the Wonderbird, he stopped short. 'But you told me it wasn't a thunderbird; I _won't_ go in a thunderbird!'\n\n'It isn't a _proper_ thunderbird,' said Ben gently, 'it's a glider and I'm going to tow it. There's room inside for everybody, including Squirrel and we believe it will be the means of quitting this country for ever and taking us safe and sound across the Irish Sea.'\n\n'Look inside,' wheedled Baldmoney, knowing full well the latter's weakness for cunning woodwork. 'See if it isn't the most comfortable machine that's ever been made. Here, try this chair, we've made it for you so you can look out of the window.'\n\nDodder sat down in the little reed chair. It certainly _was_ very comfortable, as comfortable as the _Jeanie Deans_. He looked along inside the plane and saw how neatly everything had been fitted up with little lockers and cupboards; even a little closet in the tail of the plane.\n\n'Um ha, it certainly is a nice looking bit of work, but how do you know it will fly?'\n\n'We are sure it will fly. Ben says so and Ben knows best.'\n\n'Um,' said Dodder, still looking very doubtful. 'Well, I might as well break my old bones in this as in anything, I suppose.'\n\n'And we'll try it out tomorrow,' exclaimed Baldmoney, feeling a rush of thankfulness that Dodder had taken it so well. 'Of course, if it won't fly that's that, and we'll have to stay, but if it does as we think it will, will you come to Woodcock's island?'\n\nDodder, sitting back in his little chair, and gazing around him with an admiration he could not disguise, nodded his head.\n\nMeanwhile, Sneezewort and Squirrel, covered as they were in smuts and smelling of wood-smoke, were inspecting every inch of the Wonderbird, both inside and out. They poked their noses into the cupboards, they inspected a very beautifully drawn chart which Baldmoney had made of their coming journey (he had got all the details from Woodcock long ago) and Sneezewort was especially intrigued with the little lockers by each seat. These were let into the wall of the plane and were of course only a few inches deep. He pushed aside a little sliding panel and there was a neat package, three inches by three, wrapped in oiled silk.\n\n'What's this, Baldmoney?'\n\nThe inventor, with a proud smile, undid the package. 'Parachute; Ben says we must all have parachutes, and he helped me make 'em.'\n\n'What's a parachute?'\n\n'Fancy not knowing what a parachute is! Why, it's a little umbrella, rather like the ladybirds have, and you strap it on your back and if anything happens to the plane\u2014as of course it won't\u2014then you can jump out and float down to the ground in safety.'\n\n'And supposing you are over the sea?' asked Sneezewort.\n\n'Well, the same thing happens\u2014how silly you are, Sneezewort!\u2014and anyway we shan't have to use them. For Pan's sake, don't mention them to Dodder or he'll get scared and think that the Wonderbird isn't safe!'\n\nWhile Baldmoney had been showing Sneezewort the parachutes\u2014which I forgot to mention were made of Mr Threadgold's shirt, which had come in useful after all\u2014Squirrel was examining the windows. These were made from little squares of celluloid. Kackjack had produced a quantity of it from the garage dump in Chilcote village. It had originally formed the back panel to an old Morris car. Only Baldmoney could have fitted those windows so neatly and efficiently. There was an emergency exit at the back of the plane and over each bucket seat was a tiny rack to hold odds and ends. Originally there had been many other gadgets but Ben had persuaded, nay insisted, that they should all be taken out again. All down the centre of the roof were little fibre slings such as one sees in an underground train. These were of course in case passengers should want to go and wash their hands in the closet at the back.\n\nAfter making a final inspection of the Wonderbird, everyone lay down on the floor of the workshop and had a sleep. They had been through a great deal in the last few hours; the reek of the fire was still about their clothes and all were unspeakably dirty. But washing would have to come later. Ben, whose tail feathers had been singed, looked a sorry sight, but the fact that Dodder had proved so amenable over the Wonderbird compensated for a lot and, quite worn out, everyone was soon fast asleep.\n\nNot so poor old Mr Brockett. He snuffed and grunted about the ruins of his house and twice he tried to penetrate to the inner room, but the smell and dirt and water drove him back. Moreover he felt hurt that the others had forsaken him in his hour of distress; the earth seemed to have swallowed them up. And feeling extremely put out and wishing he had never set eyes on the gnomes, he at last took himself off to Chilcote Park just as grey dawn was setting every farmyard cock a-tiptoe. Faint wisps of steam still curled up from the interior of the ash stump which was now no more than a blackened hollow shell and on an oak close by an astonished Yaffle was gazing at the night's work, wondering what on earth had happened. He had slept through the whole drama and had never even smelt the fire, or heard a sound!\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY\n\n## _Wonderbird Tries Her Wings_\n\n can make no excuses for the treatment meted out to Mr Brockett, I hold no brief for the gnomes, Bens, nor Squirrel. I can only think that it was a case of sheer thoughtlessness on their part, such as children are wont to display at times in their relations to their elders.\n\nThe fact that it was entirely due to their 'modern improvements' that Mr Brockett's house had gone up (or down) in flames, did not occur to them, and they thought no more about it. Of course, it was not surprising. Their heads were full of the Wonderbird and her coming trial flight; in fact, the tense atmosphere was very similar to that time immediately prior to the launching of the _Dragonfly_ in the far-off Folly days.\n\nThe morning following the fire dawned bright and fair. The sun shone and not a cloud was to be seen in the whole ocean of sky. But to risk a flight in broad day was not advisable, because Windover Weir was, as I have said before, by no means a lonely spot; indeed, now that August Bank Holiday was so close, it was to be expected that there would be many picnic parties in the water-meadows all about.\n\nSo all that lovely day the gnomes and Squirrel had to fret and pace up and down in the shadow of the ferns and undergrowth waiting impatiently for evening to cast its mantle upon the river valley.\n\nThe Bens were wiser: they spent the hours of light in Chilcote Church tower, a very owly, ratty place. Kackjack met them there and he would keep the two birds awake by talking and chattering until Ben had to shut him up. 'How can we get any sleep if you are going to chatter, chatter, chatter, from hour to hour the way you do? Don't you know that we want to try out our Wonderbird tonight and how can we be fresh and have our wits about us if we get no sleep?'\n\nAnd Kackjack was very rude and said that if it hadn't been for him (Kackjack) they wouldn't have been able to finish the Wonderbird at all. But the wise Bens held their peace and Kackjack soon got tired and popped out of the lancet louvres of the tower and left them to a quiet nap.\n\nHow musty it was within the tower, how very old it smelt\u2014like a cave! For company they had numerous spiders and bats. Ropes, massive wheels, and mighty bells hung silent and moveless, but the church clock kept measure of the dusty hours with a solemn 'Tick! tock! Tick! tock!' This sound had been the lullaby for countless Kackjack babies and owlets too. And as the sunbeams wheeled gradually across the uneven floor of the belfry (in those rays were suspended millions of dust particles so that they seemed solid bars) the clock woke up each hour, whirrings started from some hidden source and the echoing sombre tones went rolling forth across the quiet churchyard with its yews and unclipped graves.\n\nAt last, when the drowsy sun of that late summer afternoon had described a half-circuit of the floor, and when the bands of martins and swallows had ceased to twitter and hawk about the tower and had taken themselves off to the telephone wires outside the Red Lion, the Bens awoke and rubbed their bills, blinked and blinked again, and wondered where they were. Of course\u2014the Wonderbird! The Wonderbird was to have her trial flight that very evening! They shook their feathers, which still smelt of wood-smoke, and Mrs Ben tried to tidy up her husband for his tail was very singed.\n\nThen they kissed each other, by locking their bills like pigeons do, popped through a broken slat in the lancet and glided away towards Sperrywell Lane. They found as much excitement there as when the _Dragonfly_ set sail from Oak Tree House, or the _Jeanie Deans_ from Rumbling Mill. Dodder was a bit annoyed but Baldmoney felt extremely important. And at the last moment who should turn up but that vulgar Kackjack! The vain bird strutted about telling the crowd that he had made the Wonderbird, but nobody believed him.\n\nAt last, when the sun sank behind the tall poplars by Windover Weir and the river gleamed like a metal blade in the last of the light, Dodder cleared a way through the spectators and formed them in a wide semicircle in the lane. Rabbits and hedge-pigs were in the majority and at the last moment Ben thought of the goats and knew how upset they would be to miss the fun. So they sent Sneezewort and Squirrel across to the orchard to untie them and very soon the old he-goat and his nanny and two kids came bounding like stags up the lane, all their tails straight up in the air like startled deers'.\n\nBaldmoney had made a little wooden trolley and with the help of the others they lifted the Wonderbird aboard it. She was wonderfully light, thanks to Ben's minute instructions. And then they pulled it up the lane in the twilight and all the animals and birds came crowding after, talking excitedly.\n\nBen had found a suitable place for the launching: it was from a steep little bank at the top of Sperrywell Lane. It faced the river valley and the grass was short and fine, nibbled by generations of rabbits.\n\nTwilight was deepening into night when the great moment drew near and the whole river valley was cloaked in a white mist. Not a breath of wind was blowing and the only sound in the tranquil air was the low talk of Windover Weir in the distance. The hum of the crowd had been hushed into a tense expectancy, everyone spoke in whispers.\n\nA bramble rustled in the ditch and for a moment rabbits and birds were poised for flight. But it was only Mr Brockett. He came lumbering out of the ditch with never a word, and the gnomes and Squirrel felt very awkward and ashamed. They had not even let him know about the launching of the Wonderbird! But the old fellow, by some strange inner vision, felt something unusual was going on at Sperrywell Lane and so had come to see for himself.\n\nSquirrel arranged the tow rope in a cunning bridle around Ben's shoulders and with a gay wave of his hand Baldmoney climbed into the body of the machine. Inwardly he was quaking with fear and excitement, outwardly he was the bold aviator about to set out on some record-breaking flight.\n\nHe made his way forward to the cockpit and felt for the joy-stick which controlled the plane. Many weeks of coaching by Ben had given him a very good idea of how to fly the Wonderbird and now he was glad to find his head clear and senses keyed up; he remembered everything he had been told.\n\n'Good luck,' Dodder shouted up at the little window where they could just see the top of Baldmoney's skin cap.\n\nSquirrel, standing well out on the grass in front of Ben, dropped his paw, which was the signal for Ben to get under way. The owl ran along the ground as fast as he could and Sneezewort and Dodder pushed the Wonderbird from behind.\n\nOn the smooth grass her skids ran easily. Faster, faster they went for the brow of the hill and at last Ben opened his spotted wings and beat along like a swan trying to leave the water into a head wind.\n\nThe Wonderbird rocked a little, her wings dipped this way and that, just touching the grass. Ben was now airborne, the rope became taut, and the next instant the Wonderbird was airborne too, rising gracefully into the air and keeping an even trim.\n\nUp, up they went, old Ben flogging away in front, the graceful Wonderbird following behind, out, out of the river mists, until they were lost to view! A subdued cheer went up from those assembled round about and soon everyone was babbling excitedly one to another.\n\nAnd in a little while eager eyes made out the form of Ben, still towing the glider, heading in from the direction of Chilcote. They passed right overhead at a height of fifty feet or more, turned and came back. The tow dropped, Ben did a quick turn and came to rest on a gate post and the Wonderbird, turning gracefully again, came gliding in to make a perfect landing on the grass, scattering the rabbits and birds right and left. Only one accident occurred and that was to a hedge-pig, who was struck on the nose by one of the wing skids. He rolled over and over but picked himself up none the worse.\n\nThen the door flew open and Baldmoney stepped out, grinning all over his little red face.\n\n'Bravo! Bravo!' said everyone. 'Well done, Baldmoney! Well done!'\n\n'There's nothing much wrong with her,' said Baldmoney, blowing on his hands. 'The only thing was it was jolly cold up there. We shall have to make some extra thick coats and gloves. But as for the plane, she couldn't be better!'\n\n'Three cheers for Baldmoney and the gnomes!' shouted an excited otter who, unknown to anyone, had come up from the river to see what all the to-do was about. 'Three cheers for the clever air-gnomes!'\n\nBut Baldmoney took Ben by the shoulder and thrust him forward. 'Here is the real hero, souls,' he cried. 'Ben is the one to deserve your cheers, Ben knows best!'\n\nAnd every animal and bird took up the cry amidst great laughter. 'Ben Knows Best! Ben Knows Best!' and the cries echoed around the little hill.\n\nPoor old Ben was so confused he didn't know which way to look.\n\nOf course, the birds were the most interested spectators. They hopped on the wings and peeped into the cabin and discussed all the fine points of the Wonderbird.\n\nSoon Dodder had to act as policeman, and waving his stick he headed them off, for Baldmoney feared the Wonderbird might be damaged, and you never know to what length souvenir hunters will go and there were several kackjacks in the crowd, as sly as sly.\n\nNow the flight was over and the Wonderbird had proved her paces she was lifted back on to the trolley and a little after midnight was safely back again in the workshop down Sperrywell Lane. Everyone felt very happy and pleased, especially Ben and Baldmoney, who had worked and planned for so long. It was indeed a sweet hour of triumph for them.\n\nAnd best of all, Dodder was as excited as any, and thought that the Wonderbird was the finest thing they had ever built! And I am glad to say they showed some civility to poor old Mr Brockett and instead of allowing him to go back to Chilcote Park, they persuaded him to stay the night with them in the workshop. The gnomes said how sorry they were they had ever suggested building a chimney in his precious sett. The badger took it all very well and everyone was happy, I am glad to say, and though they would have liked to take Badger with them in the plane, of course that was _quite_ out of the question!\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\n\n## _Airborne_\n\n or the two days following the trials of Wonderbird, the gnomes set to work to make extra flying equipment. The Bens hunted as they had never done before and brought them mole and mouse skins and the little men stitched and stitched all day long and half the night.\n\nThey made thick fur gloves and helmets, and warm duffle coats, and even fur boots. Even then they found time to collect together a store of food to take with then on the journey. Squirrel made a completely new set of fishing gear and Yaffle seemed very busy also and they saw little of him.\n\nAt last all was ready and one evening a crowd again assembled on the flying field at the top of Sperrywell Lane, only this time an even larger number of animals and birds were gathered together. They meant to give the gnomes a grand send-off. And early in the evening who should appear but two of the otters from Rumbling Mill _and_ the King of Fishers, _and_ dear old Watervole!\n\nHow they had got to know beats me, but, as I said before, news spreads quickly in the wilds. It must have meant a very long journey for their old friends from Rumbling Mill. It was all very touching, especially as time was so short, and the gnomes had barely a moment to greet their well-loved comrades. Each and all had so much to tell but alas! there was no time for talk, not even time for an Animal Banquet. I think Mr Brockett was very impressed to see how many friends the gnomes had made. He never realized their popularity and how distinguished were his erstwhile guests.\n\nIt was a perfect night for the take-off. A gentle breeze was blowing from the west right on to the top of the hill. The Wonderbird had never looked so trim and workmanlike. Squirrel went round her and examined the skids and tested them, Baldmoney tested the controls, and Sneezewort went round her with a duster, removing invisible specks of dirt from her sides and wings. And of course, just before the take-off, a starling must needs make a mess on one of the wings! The poor bird did not mean to, it was sheer excitement. But it had to be washed off and Baldmoney was fuming to be off.\n\n'I can't believe you are _really_ going to leave us and this island of ours,' said the King of Fishers. 'I only hope you will find the fishing as good on Woodcock's island!'\n\n'Think of us sometimes,' cried the Otters from Rumbling Mill. 'Give a thought to us back here in the old country!'\n\n'Don't forget the old days by the Folly,' squeaked Watervole. 'Pan keep you, give you an easy journey and bring you back again safe and sound!'\n\nBaldmoney climbed aboard first, putting on his new fur gloves in a professional manner and giving a jaunty wave to the assembled multitude. Then followed Dodder (he had to be helped up into the plane by Sneezewort), then came Squirrel, carrying a bag of nuts in his teeth, and finally Sneezewort, who raised both thumbs at the crowd. The door was shut-to and Ben, who all this time had been looking over his shoulder like a restive greyhound, settled himself grimly into the towing harness.\n\nJust at that moment a breathless Yaffle appeared with swift and dipping flight over the bushes. He was carrying something square in his bill. He came breathlessly through the crowd and lo and behold, he presented Sneezewort with a new Acorn Hop Board, which he had made all himself!\n\nThe door of the plane shut-to again and now the heads of Dodder and Baldmoney could be seen peering out of the windows, laughing and nodding and waving their hands.\n\nFirst Mrs Ben took off in front, then Ben put down his head and charged like a bull along the hilltop. The tow rope dipped and tightened and the Wonderbird began to move swiftly forward over the grass.\n\nBreathless, the crowd watched, never a sound was heard as the glider left the ground and then a great cheer went up, the animals waved, the birds flew hither and thither over and above the moving plane.\n\nAway they went, out over the valley, dwindling smaller and smaller, heading for the last glow of the sunset sky.\n\n'I can still see them!' squeaked a field vole, dancing up and down on tiptoes. 'Goodbye! Goodbye!' shouted the Rumbling Mill Otters, and then, when the two tiny specks melted into the infinite distance, the crowd dispersed their several ways, feeling life was very tame for stay-at-homes. Soon the little hill was empty, save for one lonely and wistful figure\u2014poor old Mr Brockett. Tears were running down his furry cheeks, he sat hunched like a sick bear, his striped head sunk in his shoulders. I think he was more cut up than anyone. He had tasted a few short weeks of utter bliss, weeks which had been even worth the fire!\n\nBaldmoney at the controls had hardly time to glance out of the windows. His eyes were on the tow rope and the flying shape of Ben. The old owl was flying with slow and measured beats and ahead, acting as pilot, was Mrs Ben.\n\nDodder and Squirrel, who had good seats, both with windows, gazed down like Lords on the landscape below. They saw the steeple of Chilcote Church swim under; they looked down into the tops of the rounded elms and neat cottage gardens, all very dim in the gathering darkness.\n\nIn a short while, a matter of minutes, the village and river had been left behind. They did not catch a glimpse of the goats because of the apple-trees. The poor beasts had been unable to attend the final send-off.\n\nWoods and parklands, mansions and hamlets, ponds and streams, all passed below in slow succession. The ponds, reflecting the last light in the sky, shone like crystals, the rivers and streams as silver threads.\n\nBen was climbing. Baldmoney, his eyes on the chart and on his instrument panel (it was too dark to see Ben now) felt exultant. How smoothly the plane rode the air! There was no thump of screw nor jarring of machinery, only faint squeaks in the framework and the low hiss of the wind about the windows.\n\nPoor Sneezewort was in the dark interior at the back; he could see nothing but the portly back of Squirrel and a bit of Dodder's fur cap.\n\nMaking the most of his opportunities he slyly opened one of the cupboards close behind him but was disgusted to find only spare clothing. He tried another which he was sure contained food, but it was locked. The cunning Baldmoney had seen to that.\n\nDodder leant back in his seat and sighed, half in relief and half in sorrow.\n\n'Well, it was a grand send-off, Squirrel.'\n\n'Yes indeed, the best we've ever had.'\n\n'But it's sad saying goodbye. I _hate_ goodbyes!'\n\n'So do I,' replied Squirrel heartily. 'That's the worst of making friends.'\n\n'Where are we now, Baldmoney?' asked Dodder, trying to peep over the pilot's shoulder.\n\n'Getting near the sea, I should say. Keep a look-out for it, any minute now!'\n\nThe moon was rising and very soon they saw the land below grow dark and then lines of white appeared. They were the breakers beating on a lonely beach.\n\nThe gnomes had never seen the sea, nor had Squirrel; the spectacle was awe-inspiring. Soon the land was left behind and beneath them was nothing but sea, which looked as solid as the land. A ship was visible here and there, very small and far-away, trailing a long streamer of white behind it like a snail on a garden path.\n\nAnd then veils of moonlit cloud began to hide the void beneath, massed woolly blankets hid everything and they seemed to be flying through an unreal dream-world. Ahead of the Wonderbird the Bens were now invisible, flying with measured beats. And soon (thrilling sight!) they passed a flock of birds, they knew not what, flying in the same direction as themselves.\n\nDodder poked Squirrel and pointed, but at that moment the fog hid them from view.\n\nMore cloud and yet more clouds swam by, over them sometimes, veiling the forms of the Bens. It was eerie for Baldmoney, sitting forward in his pilot's seat, to see the tow-rope disappearing into nothingness ahead, and to feel the invisible agency gently towing them along.\n\nOccasionally they felt the jar of a wind pocket, the plane lurched and dropped a foot or so, and Baldmoney felt his heart jump into his throat. The sensation was very like that of a boy who is flying a kite in a high wind who feels the line slacken and then pull taut again.\n\nThe whitish clouds grew more sombre and soon they seemed to dive into a blackness as of moonless night. Sharp raps smote the windows and the sides of the Wonderbird. It was rain. Ben, out in front, began to be a little weary. They were heading straight into the storm, and his feathers began to feel heavy, the tow rope to chafe his shoulders.\n\nBut in a moment or so they were through the cloud and, once more, there was the shining limitless sea all green and grey, and crinkled in the moonlight, while overhead the stars shone bright and clear.\n\nIt was a wondrous spectacle to the intrepid air-gnomes. It was certainly the most thrilling adventure they ever had. No wonder Cloudberry had enjoyed his trip with the Heaven Hounds, if it was anything like this! And they could enjoy it more in the cosy security of the Wonderbird.\n\nWhat a clever fellow was Baldmoney, thought Dodder, as he sat back in his comfortable chair, he really _was_. To think he could build such a Wonderbird!\n\n'We'll be sighting the Irish coast soon,' called the pilot over his shoulder.\n\n'You don't say so!' exclaimed Dodder. 'D'you really mean that?'\n\n'Yes, according to my chart we should, in the next hour at any rate!'\n\nThe lulling action of the glider made Dodder almost drowsy. He would awake with a start and wonder where he was and then smile happily when he knew.\n\nNow a subtle change began to take place. Instead of the moonlit sea they saw a faint whitish vapour which grew more and more dense as they progressed. It looked exactly like a snow-covered landscape except there was nothing to break the monotony of the expanse\u2014no tree, no hedge, nor wood.\n\n'Fog,' muttered Baldmoney, drawing in his breath. 'I expect Ben will try and get below it.'\n\nAlmost at once, the tow rope began to slant downwards. Cunning bird! He was going down through the fog to get his bearings! The gnomes felt a little queer as they began to drop down towards that woolly blanket and for the first time they felt an insecure feeling in the pits of their stomachs.\n\nIt was rather like going down in a lift. Then the luminous vapour arose and engulfed them and they could not see a thing. Thicker it grew and thicker, but still they flew on into nothingness.\n\n'Don't like this fog,' said Baldmoney, looking very grave. 'Just our luck to choose a foggy night. But don't let's worry, Ben will see us through.'\n\nIn actual fact, Ben was getting very tired. The constant strain of the tow-rope bridle about his shoulders and the impenetrable fog was worrying him a lot. He went down and down, lower and lower; but still he could see nothing. Was there land beneath or sea? How could he tell?\n\nAnd as he dropped he heard a sound\u2014the uneasy chafe and sullen splash of waves. They were almost in the sea! Out of the murk arose a hungry foam-flecked roller which sank again from sight.\n\nSharply he pulled up.\n\nThe sudden slackening of the tow rope made Baldmoney almost sick with fear. But the thorough training he had received from Ben stood him in good stead.\n\nHe pulled back the joystick and the Wonderbird answered at once. They swept upward again in a graceful glide. Beads of perspiration glistened on his brow. Meanwhile, in the rear, Dodder had been thrown violently forward and Squirrel seemed to be hanging round his neck. Sneezewort was upside down in the rear of the plane, gasping and puffing.\n\n'Phew!' said Baldmoney. 'That was a near thing; we nearly hit the sea!'\n\n'Please be careful,' piped Dodder faintly. 'Don't try any of those tricks again.'\n\n'Better be on the safe side and put on your parachutes,' retorted Baldmoney. 'With this fog anything might happen. I'm doing my best, I can't do more.'\n\nAll the gnomes had been taught how to put them on by Ben and they were accordingly adjusted. Squirrel's of course was bigger than the others but it worked on the same principle. Once these were fixed I think everyone felt a little safer. Baldmoney had some difficulty in putting on his but with the help of Dodder, they managed it.\n\n'We should have put them on before we started,' puffed Baldmoney, red in the face with the exertion, 'but in the hurry and bustle I forgot.'\n\n'I hope we don't have to use them,' said Dodder nervously.\n\nMeanwhile poor Ben was becoming very weary indeed. They had gained altitude but the effort had been very exhausting and the fog showed no signs of lifting. The journey which had begun so well and with so much promise was now rather like a bad dream to all concerned. But bravely Ben flew on into the gloom, hoping for the best and the chance of the fog lifting. After a while things seemed to be a little easier. Whether Ben got his second wind I do not know, but he certainly felt stronger and everyone felt more confident. After all, they were not doing so badly, considering!\n\nDodder began to doze again and then he felt a craving for his pipe. He pulled it out, filled and lit it, and the blue clouds of fragrant weed filled the interior of the Wonderbird. Now and again Squirrel or Dodder would pull back the window and peer out, but the cold wind soon made them slide the window to again. They were very glad of their warm coats.\n\nBaldmoney looked keenly at the chart. 'Must be over the land now surely,' he said to himself, and then aloud, 'We ought to have reached the coast ten minutes ago!'\n\n'There's no telling,' said Dodder, knocking out his pipe. 'With this fog we can't see a yard, nor can Ben.'\n\nThe stuffy atmosphere of the cabin, due to the tight-shut windows, made Dodder begin to nod again. He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he remembered was Squirrel shaking him violently by the arm. 'Dodder! Dodder! Something's burning!'\n\nDodder was awake in a moment and Baldmoney, screwing half-round in his seat, sniffed the air. Something was indeed burning! They seemed haunted by fire! And it wasn't tobacco\u2014 _it was the Wonderbird_.\n\nA spark from Dodder's pipe which had fallen unnoticed under his bucket seat had set fire to the floor and the horrified gnomes and Squirrel, looking down, saw the oiled silk was well alight. What a terrible moment! What a terrible death confronted them! And quite unconscious of it all the gallant Ben was plodding ahead in the fog and thinking how well they were getting along!\n\nNow at this crucial moment only a clear head and a calm nerve could have saved them all from certain death. It is in such moments that the best in a man or a gnome becomes evident and Baldmoney was no longer Leader of the Ship. It was Dodder\u2014Dodder, who many months before, had saved Sneezewort from the jaws of the Wood Dog up the Folly.\n\n'We shall have to jump,' he said in a quiet voice. 'In a minute or two the whole thing will be alight. Sneezewort, is your parachute fastened properly?'\n\nSneezewort, ashen of face, could only nod. Baldmoney started up from the controls and clambered over Dodder. There was danger of a sudden panic which would have been fatal, and the Wonderbird, with no one at the controls, lurched and plunged sideways dragging Ben head-over-heels.\n\nLuckily the towing bridle came adrift from the startled and unhappy bird and the next moment he saw the glider plunging like a flaming torch towards the earth or sea.\n\nBut as it fell, first one small figure, then another, dropped from it. First fell Baldmoney, then Sneezewort, then Squirrel, who was emitting thin and threadlike squeaks of terror, then Dodder, and as they hurtled through space Ben saw a puff of material above each falling victim and heaved a sigh of relief. At any rate the parachutes _had_ opened and all four of his friends were drifting and floating gently down in the fog.\n\nThe firebrand which had once been the Wonderbird, was no longer a bird of wonder but of horror. It plunged meteor-like into the murk, becoming, after a second or two, a mere dull illumination in the horrid vapour of night and finally vanished from Ben's gaze.\n\nDown, down, the gnomes and Squirrel floated, swinging slightly from side to side. Those first few awful moments had been the worst, when they felt themselves drawn by the pull of earth. But now it was extraordinarily restful, sinking down so gently in the clammy mist. Each had lost sight of the other, each felt absolutely alone and forsaken, yet there was a serene sense of peace and soft motion.\n\nDodder, swinging like a spider from a thread, looked up and saw above him the billowing bowl of Mr Threadgold's shirt. Wonderful shirt! Glorious shirt! A shirt destined for the final drama which was now being enacted!\n\nThe crying of birds passed him and he heard the rustle of wings. This surely was the end of all their earthly adventures! Strange years, strange years\u2014Cuckoo Years they had called them\u2014when they lived in such peace and quiet in the old Oak Tree. Uneasy years, when Cloudberry left them and then, passing before his mind, he saw again the _Jeanie Deans_ reposing on the sand at Poplar Island, and the journey and homecoming amid the snow to the safe haven of the Oak Tree and Cloudberry standing smiling there!\n\nHappy months at Rumbling Mill! Happy times with Mr Brockett! And now this was the end!\n\nBut see\u2014what was that wondrous illumination directly below which grew brighter every moment until it seemed to fill the world. Was he falling into the sun?\n\nAnd as he fell this light was shut out as if by a moving blind\u2014to appear and grow again with an even greater intensity until Dodder was quite dazzled with its glory. At that moment his leg struck something hard, he felt a terrific blow on his chest, and then all was a darkness as profound and silent as the deepest night!\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\n\n## _At the Knockgobbin Light_\n\n onsciousness for Dodder began as a slowly growing radiance and a low soothing surge of watery sounds and many birds' voices.\n\nAs the seconds passed, all his faculties gradually returned. He found that he was lying on some sort of hard surface, his face turned towards the sky, while overhead that blinding light, which seemed brighter than the sun in all his splendour, alternately lightened and darkened.\n\nFeebly he moved his arms and his one good leg. About him was tangled the harness of his parachute, the blue shirt almost enveloped him. Where was he? What had happened? Then he lay quite still trying to piece together his thoughts. Bit by bit the events of the last few hours fitted in; he remembered the start from the Flying Field, the sad farewells, the sight of the dusky landscape passing below. Ah! now he knew\u2014the Wonderbird had caught fire, they had jumped for their lives, and now here he was lying in a queer place, the like of which he had never seen before.\n\nThis blinding light which swelled and faded, the continual twitter and chatter of sweet bird voices above him and from all sides\u2014was this the Gnomes' Heaven? Certainly the bird music suggested it. And as at last he felt his strength returning he sat up, freeing himself from the enveloping ropes and tangle of his parachute.\n\nImmediately above his head was a vast iron grill behind which the light swung, and perched on the wires and along the railings close by were hundreds and hundreds of birds, all chattering excitedly. Their wings filled the air; some hovered and clung to the grill like moths fascinated by a candle, others fell down, dazed and exhausted, on the platform where Dodder lay.\n\nAfter a while he was aware that a very small voice was making itself heard in his left ear, and turning his head he saw close beside him a common house-mouse. It had not the refined accent of a dormouse or hedge-vole, it dropped its aitches, so to speak, but it talked in a delightful brogue which reminded Dodder of Woodcock.\n\n'Sure, but it's a woeful knock you've had and a bruise on your head as big as a cherry. But lie still where you are, and soon ye will be better.'\n\n'Where am I, House-mouse?' groaned Dodder, relieved beyond measure that here at last was someone to talk to.\n\n'Faith, but it's the Knockgobbin Light where ye are, and fancy you not knowing it! How did you come here, seeing as you have no wings like the birds?'\n\n'We came in the Wonderbird\u2014a glider you know\u2014and it caught fire, and we all had to jump with our parachutes and then\u2014I don't know what happened.'\n\nSuddenly the house-mouse let out a squeak of fear. 'Och! is it two owls I see on the top of the Light yonder?'\n\n'They won't harm you,' cried Dodder, staggering to his feet. (Oh blessed birds, so they had not deserted him.) 'They won't touch you\u2014' The mouse was trying to hide under Dodder's parachute. '\u2014it's only the Bens, they won't harm any of my friends.'\n\n'I'll not be trusting them,' whimpered the mouse. 'I'll be away to my hole.'\n\n'Don't run away, House-mouse, I tell you they won't harm a hair of your head. Hi, Bens! Bens! Come down here... It's Dodder and there's a friend of mine with me\u2014House-mouse\u2014who's afraid of you!'\n\nDown swooped the two birds, alighting on the rail close beside them.\n\n'Ben! Ben!' cried Dodder, laying his hand on the shoulder of his old friend. He noticed the feathers had been worn away all round the owl's neck, so that the wrinkled yellow skin showed. 'How _glad_ I am to see you both. This is House-mouse\u2014or should I say Lighthouse-mouse?' said Dodder correcting himself. He introduced the little creature, who was trembling visibly.\n\nThe Bens bowed in a courtly fashion and set him at his ease.\n\n'Lighthouse-mouse tells me we're at Knockgobbin Light.'\n\n'Is this the Knockgobbin Light?' gasped Ben. 'Then we've reached Woodcock's island after all!'\n\n'But where is Squirrel and the others?' said Dodder. 'Don't say they've gone, don't say you haven't seen them!'\n\nHere the mouse piped up. 'Please, if you mean another gnome and a squirrel, they are farther along the gallery, I saw them as I came along.'\n\n'Let's go and find them,' gasped Ben, 'and see if they are all right and no broken bones. _What_ a crowd,' said the owl as he shouldered a passage through the thronging birds.\n\n'It's the night of the Autumn Flying,' squeaked Lighthouse-mouse, as they hurried along close behind Ben, 'they've been arriving since the fog came down; we get all sorts of folk on the night of the Autumn Flying.'\n\nBen, leading the way, tripped over an exhausted housemartin. 'Beg pardon, I didn't see you,' said the kind old owl, helping it to its feet. The little bird was too scared to reply but lay cowering at the foot of the great lantern. All it could say was 'Oh! Oh!'\n\nBefore very long, as they elbowed their way through the press of birds, all of whom had the appearance of a large multitude of very weary travellers at some great terminus, Ben caught sight of Squirrel. The tired animal was leaning against the railings gingerly feeling with his paw a large lump, as big as a hedge-sparrow's egg, over his right eye. And Sneezewort, with the complete back missing from his skin pants, was busy making a bandage out of a scrap of rag. They did not hear or see the approach of the Bens and Dodder. Squirrel was moaning 'Oh! my poor head! Oh! my poor head!' and Sneezewort, who seemed little the worse, was trying to comfort him.\n\n'Cheer up, Squirrel old man, you'll soon be yourself again, we're lucky to be alive if you ask me. I expect poor old Dodder and Baldmoney have been smashed to pieces or drowned.'\n\nDodder brought his hand down on Sneezewort's shoulder.\n\n'Dodder!'\n\n'Sneezewort!'\n\n'Dodder, _and_ the Bens too, if I'm not dreaming. Look, Squirrel, who's here!'\n\nSquirrel seemed to forget all his troubles. He hugged Dodder and then the Bens and so joyful was the reunion that quite a ring of interested birds formed round them.\n\nMeanwhile Lighthouse-mouse was hanging back, watching it all; feeling, for the moment, rather out of the picture.\n\n'But where is Baldmoney!' exclaimed Squirrel. 'Isn't he with you?'\n\nThe gnomes looked anxiously about.\n\n'Haven't seen a sign of him,' said Sneezewort, 'but he may be in the crowd somewhere.'\n\n'Yes, he may,' said Dodder hopefully. 'It's hard to tell with all these people.'\n\n'Where _have_ all these birds come from?' exclaimed Squirrel, trying to see over their heads. 'Such a lot of people I never did see!'\n\nLed by the Bens they made a circuit of the Lighthouse gallery but there was no sign of Baldmoney anywhere. Squirrel hopped up on the railing and peered over. Far below were black rocks on which a slow swell was swashing, gurgling and swilling among the fissures and clefts. The fog was lifting a little. If the unhappy Baldmoney had fallen into the sea, or upon those cruel crags, he could not have survived a moment.\n\nBen shook his head dolefully. 'I'm afraid he's gone, souls; we shan't see him again.'\n\nBut Squirrel was more cheerful. ' _I_ turned up all right after that night at Bantley Weir. Pan was watching over me then and he may be watching over Baldmoney. He may turn up safe and sound, he may have landed on the cliff behind us.'\n\nThey peered into the mist where the dim shape of a beetling hillside loomed not a hundred yards distant.\n\nThe wheeling rays of the Knockgobbin Light illuminated that desolate hill for a moment, before swinging round behind them. Yes, there _was_ a chance he might be safe; at any rate, they made up their minds they would not give up hope.\n\nMeanwhile, more and more birds seemed to be arriving. Warblers, martins, swallows, cuckoos, even such homely and familiar people as blackbirds and thrushes, came crowding on to the rails, or hovered stupidly in the full eye of the blazing beacon. It was a spectacle which the gnomes would never forget. So spellbound were they that they gave no thought of how they would ever leave the Knockgobbin Light, of how they would reach the mysterious country which lay so close to them.\n\nBy and by, the mist lifted magically; gleams and flashes of moonlit water revealed the uneasy sea. The smell of it was a new thing, the salty tang and clean scents of wrack, foreshore turf, and brackenny mountain filled their nostrils. With the lifting of the mist the multitudes crowding the rails and lighthouse top began to disperse their several ways. The night was full of many birds and whistling pinions. Curlews and plovers wailed, martins and swallows twittered, finches cheeped and Ben, suddenly feeling very full of himself, uttered a long drawn hoot. One by one the weary travellers took off once more; some heading for the open sea, others turning to the west, to the loom of the land.\n\nAnd very soon\u2014to the great surprise of the gnomes and Squirrel\u2014they found they were alone with only the Bens and Lighthouse-mouse for company. Not a single bird remained!\n\nStill the great light wheeled and swung, but its rays were paler now, for to the east the dawn was breaking and with it came a wind in little icy puffs. The dreadful night was nearly over.\n\nClear and distinct now against the rising sun there jutted a mighty cliff crowned with emerald turf and above the thin keening of gulls Dodder heard the voice of a lark. That tremulous song brought back a rush of homesickness; of other dawns, of Folly days, of the quiet pastures in river valleys, and the harvest fields beside Rumbling Mill.\n\nSomething scurried in the shadow of the lantern. It was Lighthouse-mouse. 'I shouldn't stay here if I were you, for it's Lighthouse Keeper who will be finding ye and there's no cover here.'\n\n'But what are we to do?' cried Dodder, aghast to find their trials and tribulations were not yet over.\n\n'I'll take you down,' said Ben. 'Climb on my back, it isn't far, and I'll come back for you, Sneezewort.'\n\n'But what about Squirrel? He's _far_ too heavy,' said Dodder. 'You could never take him on your back.'\n\n'Quick, give me his parachute,' said Ben. 'I'll fold it up again and he can jump. There is turf below us on this side and it isn't far.'\n\nThey spread out Squirrel's parachute and Ben refolded it cunningly and adjusted the harness round the body of the unfortunate animal.\n\n'I've been nearly killed once,' he whimpered. 'I _can't_ do it again!' It certainly seemed an awful drop, a very different matter too, in daylight.\n\nBut it was the only way, and the Bens and the gnomes half-carried the still-protesting Squirrel to the side, ignoring his squirms and squeaks. Frantically he clutched the rail and looked with horrified eyes at the cliff top underneath. But the next moment someone gave him a push and over he went.\n\nThe parachute opened and, with a sigh of relief, the gnomes saw their friend land safe and sound on the ground below.\n\nAfter thanking Lighthouse-mouse for all his kindness, Sneezewort clambered up on the back of Mrs Ben and Dodder on to Mr Ben and before you could say 'Knife', all were standing on the short sweet turf\n\nHow good it was to feel firm earth under them again!\n\nSneezewort seemed to go quite mad; he rolled about like a puppy, sniffing and clutching the grass. Squirrel, throwing away his parachute, skipped about like one demented, and Dodder soberly stumped up and down, blowing out his red cheeks and sniffing the keen morning air.\n\nOver them towered the grey lighthouse, sharp against the dawn sky, and as Dodder glanced up at the rails so far above, he saw the light go out and the lantern cease to swing. A black figure with folded arms was standing there gazing seawards. It was the Lighthouse Keeper, stretching his legs. They had left not a moment too soon!\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE\n\n## _Woodcock's Island_\n\n hen Baldmoney jumped from the burning Wonderbird he was perhaps more frightened than anyone. He gave no thought to Squirrel and the others, all he knew was that he must get out somehow; in fact, I am afraid he lost his head.\n\nFor a split second he whizzed downwards. Then some invisible hand seemed to reach from above, hook a finger in his harness, and give a jerk to his falling body. His parachute had opened, and he, like the others, was drifting quietly to whatever horror lay below.\n\nAs he swung to and fro he heard the swish of water somewhere, that was all. Down, down, he floated towards the blazing light, just as Dodder and the others had done, but as he had been the first to jump he missed the top of the great lantern by a matter of feet. The rails and blinding light floated by, well out of reach, and the next moment he saw, to his horror, that directly beneath was a pattern of white foam and grey-green roller. Then he hit the water. As Baldmoney weighed only a few ounces it was not a heavy blow and the parachute helped to break it, but the shock of the icy water took away his breath. He struggled exactly like a bee which has fallen into a pond, and the horrible salty stuff rushed into his mouth. He felt himself dropping into the well of water, then up he swung at a prodigious pace as, with a shattering roar, the great wave hurled him far up the rocks, rolling him over and over in a creamy smother of foam.\n\nAs luck would have it, as the roller sucked back for another charge, he managed with his last strength to clutch a limpet shell and there he clung, whimpering, his eyes and nose full of salt water, and feeling half-stunned.\n\nHe had enough sense left to know that in another moment the cruel sea would be on him again, so he staggered to his feet and ran as fast as he could over the slippery and weedy rocks. He had barely reached a patch of sand between two massive boulders when he heard the next roller coming. Shutting his eyes, he wedged himself into a cranny and braced himself for the shock.\n\nA wall of green water, laced with foam and bearing on its crest tags of wet sea wrack, came curling over. The terrified Baldmoney, screwing his head round, saw this horrid mass of water suspended above him, then down it came with an ear-splitting rumble and crash and in an instant he was five feet under.\n\nShutting his eyes and clinging on for dear life, he waited, holding his breath, and then came the terrible drawing suck of the undertow which dragged at him like hungry claws.\n\nSmall pebbles and particles of sand were sucked back past him with a rattling sound. Again he was high and dry as though there was no water within miles. But Baldmoney was too wise to be deceived and getting to his feet once more he scurried over the rocks until he reached a band of rubbish, in which were broken bottles, twisted pieces of wood, old baskets, all the flotsam and jetsam of the sea's playground. Another roller crashed behind him but only the harmless foam reached him. It swilled about his knees in a rustling cream then sank into the bright pebbles.\n\nMoving a few feet beyond the danger point the little gnome sat down, shivering. He had swallowed a lot of sea water and was violently sick. Then he felt better.\n\nThe mist was lifting. On his left reared the dark stack of the lighthouse, sending its rays over the desolate expanse of sea. The fret and roar of the angry waves filled his ears, his teeth were chattering like castanets, but he was held by an awful fascination of the wild and desolate scene.\n\nAnd as he watched, with his knees drawn up under his beard and his hands clasped, he saw the mist draw off the ocean and the moonlight once again cast its eerie rays upon the dismal wastes of water.\n\nThe Knockgobbin Light sent out its long and brilliant fingers, blinding him as they turned in his direction. In the half darkness, white gulls flew by like ghosts, and to the east, behind the sombre shoulder of the hill, the sky was beginning to pale with the dawn.\n\nBaldmoney knew not where he was, he had no idea upon what desolate strand the Fates had cast him, whether his companions were alive or dead. He regarded himself as the only survivor and how he was going to make shift for himself was beyond his understanding.\n\nHe began to feel extremely hungry. What with his rude immersion and his cold and wet condition he felt he could sit down to a really good breakfast. So he at once began to cast along the foreshore to find something to eat.\n\nIt did not take him long to reach a rock covered with limpets. He knew they were shell-fish of some sort and he at once set to work. But all his efforts were fruitless. He hammered them with stones and tried to prise them off with his hunting knife, but it was all to no purpose. Very soon, however, salvation appeared in the shape of a large black bird with a grey hood. It was very like Kackjack, only larger, and it came hunting down the tideline towards Baldmoney. Now and again it alighted upon the wet sand and bore aloft a shell, which it let drop, to shatter the hard mussel upon the rocks. Down dived the bird again and made his feast. It seemed to Baldmoney a good way of getting one's breakfast, so without more ado he hurried along the sand, picking his way over snake-like coils of glistening seaweed and bladder-wrack, until he came up with the strange bird.\n\nBaldmoney, who always believed in being polite to foreigners, took off his skin cap which (strange to say) had survived his battle with the sea, and made the crow a polite bow.\n\n'Is it a gnome that I see?' asked the astonished crow, stopping in the middle of gulping down a large piece of mussel.\n\n'My name is Baldmoney,' said our hero, 'and I am, I believe, the sole survivor of an accident which happened in the night and in which, through Pan's Providence, I have escaped with my life. You see before you a poor hungry castaway, not knowing to what country the fates have brought him, nor what further tribulations may befall him.'\n\n'Och! but I'm sorry for ye,' said the crow, who was obviously a 'local', 'but as to your being hungry, why it's me that will find you something to eat. My name is Hoddie. I, like you, have little in the world, save a suit of feathers and perhaps a better notion than most people how to look after myself. As to where ye are, it's strange ye should not be knowing that. Yonder is the Knockgobbin Light and this soil on which ye stand is Ireland, the best country in the whole wide world. And it's you I'll be congratulatin' for your deliverance. Was it a ship that was wrecked?'\n\n'No, Mr Hoddie, 'twas not a ship but a Wonderbird which the Bens\u2014they are owls, you know\u2014and myself built, away in England.'\n\n'Oh, so it's England, is it, that you've come from? I should have known it now I come to think a little, for I know by your manner of speaking you are no Irish gnome.'\n\n'Then this _is_ Woodcock's island?' said Baldmoney. 'It's the very place we were making for when the fog came down. I think Ben lost his way\u2014Ben was towing us you see\u2014and then Dodder's pipe set fire to the plane\u2014he _would_ smoke, of course\u2014and a spark from it set us all ablaze and we had to jump for our lives. Our friend Squirrel, who was making the journey with us, and my two brothers, Dodder and Sneezewort; I fear they have been drowned and I shall never see them again!'\n\n'It's hard on you, all alone in a strange country with no kith nor kin to comfort ye. But let it never be said we lack hospitality in this island. First ye shall have something to be putting inside of ye. D'you like mussel, fresh mussel?'\n\n'I've never tasted sea mussels,' said Baldmoney truthfully, 'only freshwater ones. We find them, you know, in our streams and ponds at home, and sometimes we find pearls in them.'\n\n'Oh, to be shure yes, _I_ find pearls now and then and give them to the Leprechauns way back in the Mourne mountains. But I'll get busy and it's a fine breakfast I'll be getting you if you will but sit on the rock there and have a little patience!'\n\nSo Baldmoney sat on the rock indicated by Hoddie while the good-natured bird went beating down the tide.\n\nA blaze of silver and gold showed in the east, the whole rugged coast was now clearly visible, the jutting tongue of land on which stood the Knockgobbin Light, the jagged rocks beneath, and the white rollers fretting on the shore, all were now distinct; landwards rose a line of blue hills higher than any Baldmoney had ever seen.\n\nNow the new day was born the white gulls came streaming from the cliffs and far out, off Knockgobbin Light, a gannet was diving into the surf getting his breakfast.\n\n_What_ a night it had been, thought Baldmoney; what a terrible dream the whole thing seemed and, despite Hoddie's kindness, what would he do all alone in a strange land?\n\nHe had heard before that there were still Little People in Woodcock's island, indeed from what Hoddie had let drop about giving the pearls to the Leprechauns this fact was now confirmed, but he knew not what manner of Folk they were. They might prove hostile to him and he wasn't sure that Leprechauns were gnomes at all. They might be elves or pixies who are mischievous, quarrelsome little creatures, who are only half as intelligent as a gnome.\n\nAll he wanted was to see the familiar and dear faces of his own kith and kin and he felt he could face any trials or dangers which might be forthcoming.\n\nBut though he hopefully scanned the cliffs and shore he saw no sign of any survivors from the wreck. His fervent prayer was that the Bens would be somewhere near. They at any rate would be safe unless, dazzled by the great lantern, they had broken their necks, as many another feathered traveller had done. But he looked in vain for the familiar shapes of the owls; only multitudes of white gulls weaved in front of the towering stacks.\n\nBefore long he spied his saviour returning. The crow circled overhead, hovered like a kestrel and a fat mussel shell came whizzing down\u2014smack!\u2014on the rock beside him. Eagerly picking out the shell fragments from the juicy orange fish, which appeared not unlike a nicely poached egg, he set about his meal with pardonable gusto.\n\nThe Folly mussels had been nice and so had those they found on Poplar Island, but this mussel!... no words of mine can convey how delicious it was and how it tickled Baldmoney's palate. He was famished and he ate and ate and barely had he finished one when smash!\u2014another lay beside him\u2014until he could eat no more.\n\nHe wiped his mouth on a piece of seaweed and fumbled for his pipe. Though not such an inveterate smoker as Dodder, Baldmoney enjoyed his after-breakfast 'draw' and he was disgusted to find his tobacco\u2014made out of dried, wild mint leaves\u2014was a sodden mess. So he laid it out on top of the rock to dry. The scent of it made him very homesick, for that mint had been gathered at Rumbling Mill.\n\nHoddie was very attentive. Having fed his guest he came and perched on a rock close by and preened himself and hunted for fleas. Baldmoney, feeling he must make some return, offered to help. It was a service he had frequently done for the Bens and his other bird friends. The fleas were nasty grey flat creatures which sidled between the feathers, but Baldmoney was as sharp as a monkey and very soon Hoddie had not one left.\n\nI may be taken to task for mentioning this performance but pests such as ticks and lice are a constant source of worry to all kinds of birds and wild animals and Baldmoney thought no more of the business than you and I do of cleaning our teeth.\n\nBy the time Baldmoney had finished, his tobacco was dry and filling his favourite pipe (cut from a hazel up the Folly Brook), he found some dead grass, twisted it up into a spill and lit it by means of his flints which he always carried in an inner pocket. Hoddie was very interested, for he had never before seen a gnome smoke and such a practice was unknown among the Leprechauns.\n\n'Now, what's to do?' asked Baldmoney, when he had got his pipe well alight. The sun had warmed him and dried his skin clothes and he felt particularly 'beany' and full of vigour. It was partly due to realization of his miraculous escape. No doubt Pan had engineered it and if so the Bens and the other gnomes were probably safe too. At least he sincerely hoped so.\n\nHoddie, sitting in the sun, and no longer irritated by his unwelcome guests, also felt pleased with life in general. 'If I were you,' said he, 'I shouldn't be leaving this place just yet. Your pals may turn up and I'm thinking of an excellent temporary home for you and not very far away to be sure.'\n\n'Indeed, and where is that, pray?'\n\n'It's an old wreck I'm thinking of, just round the next cliff. It's well up on the rocks and the highest tide won't reach it, not enough to cause you any inconvenience. She's the _Rose Marie_ , a crab boat, which came ashore six years ago; she stove her bottom in on the rocks. That's the place where ye'll be as snug as snug.'\n\nThe suggestion sounded quite good to Baldmoney and so crow and gnome walked along the shore until, on passing a mass of rock, he saw the remains of the ship lying among some weedy slabs not thirty yards away. Four shags were perched on her battered bow drying their wings. They held them out wide apart, now and again giving them a little shake.\n\nNow there is something very fascinating about an old wreck, and Baldmoney, who still loved ships, was entranced with her. Her mighty timbers were draped in seaweed and there was an exciting smell of sea water, weed and fish about her, and she was crusted with limpets and barnacles.\n\nMost of the hulk had been smashed and broken by the waves, but the fo'castle remained almost intact and no better place could be imagined in which to make a temporary home. There was shelter and it would not be difficult to find firing. Enough wood lay about to keep him in fuel indefinitely.\n\nBaldmoney could see that Hoddie was anxious to be off, for he had a call to pay on a jackdaw along the cliffs to discuss some matter or other, and after promising to be back before sundown, the crow flew away and Baldmoney was left alone. Now the stress and strain was over, he felt very tired. The sun was strong and anyway gnomes dislike bright daylight. So he crawled into a corner of the old fo'castle and finding a comfortable bed of dried seaweed he lay down for a nap. The sleepy wash of waves and the still more lulling cries of gulls soon sent him into a deep slumber.\n\nIt was strange to think that only twenty-four hours before he and the others were up Sperrywell Lane, so many leagues across the sea. So much can happen in a little time!\n\nIt was a peaceful spot: the weed-strewn wreck, its curved timbers and rotting decks glistening in the bright sunshine; the white receding foam sliding and returning up the sand; the wheeling gulls dipping and flashing against the blue sky; the vivid green of the cliff-top turf\u2014all made up a perfect picture.\n\nWithin the old fo'castle the sounds of breakers, gulls, and wind seemed to echo strangely. What junk lay about in the bowels of the wreck! Rusty chains, each link heavier by many times than Baldmoney, a huge anchor, encrusted with barnacles, the remains of old spars and cordage, oyster and mussel shells dropped by birds, the carcass of a herring gull almost as big as a goose, its juices dried so that it smelt only of the sea and bleached bone; bottles; three old crab pots which had not held a prisoner within their bars these many years; bent nails and masses of bladder-wrack cast there and now dried and glittering with salt: all these things had one smell as a common denominator\u2014the smell of the sea.\n\nThe shadow from the old crab boat sidled round on the sand, the tide began to turn again and advance over the rocks as it had done for\u2014oh! I don't know how many times.\n\nIt crept on until at last it touched the rotten beam of the old crab boat at the stern. Hoddie had been right about high water. The fo'castle was never covered, even by the highest tide. When on that fearful night of storm and wind six years before, the sea had struggled to crush and drown the _Rose_ _Marie,_ the very wind which had striven to encompass its destruction had hurled her far up upon the rocks out of the reach of further torture. So Baldmoney was as secure as if he were leagues inland by the Folly Brook.\n\nThe beards of seaweed which grew on the stern timbers and which were wetted twice daily by the tides, began to float out flat, rejoicing in the coming of their life's blood, and crabs came, sidling between the crannies and crevices of the old hulk. Numberless little fish came a-visiting, peering with fixed expression into the weed tangles, and weary jellyfish sought refuge for a brief half hour ere the tide should drop once more.\n\nBaldmoney slept on and as he slept he dreamt a dream. It was springtime on the Folly Brook and the catkins were hanging over the stream, but for all the joy of awakening life he was tortured by a dreadful fear. He must hurry, hurry, hurry, for they had lost the key of the _Jeanie Deans_ and could not wind up the engine. Away over Moss Mill a terrible storm was gathering, the sky inky black and slashed with vivid forks of lightning.\n\nBut Dodder had lost the key and not all their efforts could reveal its hiding place and all the while those menacing clouds were drawing ever nearer.\n\nAnd then Dodder found it in one of his old jacket pockets and everyone tumbled aboard, Squirrel too, and the Bens. Off they went down the river but the storm kept gaining on them until the sky grew so dark Dodder had to light the cabin lamp. Those fearful shafts of zizzling light whipped up the waters; waves began to break over the boat. The _Jeanie Deans_ was filling, filling, until at last, with a lurch, she sank and Baldmoney seemed to be falling through miles of space... He opened his eyes, and there he was, in the weedy timbers of the old crab boat and not a foot away stood a group of people, familiar people. At first, Baldmoney thought he was still dreaming. There was Dodder, grinning from ear to ear, Squirrel fluffing his tail, and Sneezewort hopping about on one leg; there were the Bens, perched on the side of the boat, peering down at him and blinking, and there was... who do you think?... why, Woodcock, dear old Woodcock, with his high, wise head and friendly eye!\n\nDodder stumped forward, walking carefully because the seaweed was so slippery. 'Wake up, Baldmoney, wake up, old fellow, thanks to you we've made the trip and everyone's safe and sound!'\n\n'Safe and sound!' muttered Baldmoney rubbing his eyes. 'Oh dear, am I still dreaming? Come here, Dodder and let me hug you, Sneezewort too, Woodcock, Squirrel, and the Bens! I thought I should never see you again!'\n\n'We've got Woodcock to thank for that,' said Dodder, clapping his hand on the worthy bird's shoulder. 'Hoddie told him he'd met a gnome on the beach and he sent us all along here and, what's more, Baldmoney my boy, Woodcock's island, his own _special_ island he told us about, is only an hour's march over the hills, we'll be there before sun-up tomorrow!'\n\nBaldmoney could not speak, his heart was too full. He sat looking first at Dodder and then at the others and he felt unutterably thankful. In his ears was the low wash of the waves and high overhead a star was winking. And as they all stood there in the shadows of the old crab boat, each one of them heard another sound above the voice of the sea. It was a sound which they had heard before, a long, long time ago, that same music which floated out in the moonlit glades of Crow Wood, the same which Otter had heard at Bantley Weir.\n\nOff came their caps, Woodcock inclined his bill, and the Bens bowed down until their big spotted foreheads touched the timbers of the boat. Can you guess what that sound was? Of course you can! It was the Pipes of Pan!\n\nThere is a green little island set in a grey, grey loch in the very heart of the blue hills. On the island is a ruined chapel where an old saint lies sleeping, the wild geese take their rest there and the rabbits play. Hard by is a wood of bog oak where Squirrel takes his pleasure and in the ivied ruin the Bens have reared several families of woolly owlets, each with an Irish accent, but that is not to be wondered at. No mortal disturbs the Little Grey Men save in the fishing season when anglers sometimes land to eat their midday sandwiches under the crumbling walls of the hermit's cell. But the boatmen do not like going there, they say the place is haunted, and that sometimes, on wild autumn and winter nights, a tiny light is seen winking in and out among the chapel stones. But you and I are wiser. We know that the light is from the gnomes' fire as they grill their supper of troutlings.\n\nAnd now I suppose you will be asking, will the Little Grey Men ever come back?\n\nAll I can say to that is that the Stream People have not forgotten them and not a spring passes but every moorhen chick, every new vole baby, every otter cub, is told by its parents of the Little Grey Men, of how they lived long ago on the Folly banks and sailed away in the _Jeanie Deans_ , and how, one day, they will see them again.\n\nAs for me, great lumbering mortal that I am, I believe that too, and every spring when I see the catkins breaking I keep my eyes and ears open. And if you take my advice, you will also. After all, the Stream People must know what they are talking about!\n\n## About the Author\n\n'BB' was born as D. J. Watkins-Pitchford in 1905 in Northampton-shire. He studied at the Royal College of Art and was for many years the art master at Rugby School. He has written many books for both children and adults, all of which reflect his naturalist's knowledge and passion for the countryside. _The Little Grey Men_ and its sequel, _Down the Bright Stream_ , are two of his most well-known and best-loved books and in 1942 _The Little Grey Men_ won the prestigious Carnegie Medal.\n\nMore eBooks from Oxford\n\nThe last four gnomes in Britain live on the banks of the bubbling Folly brook. They are perfectly happy with their quiet life, except, that is, for one\u2014Cloudberry.\n\nRestless and longing for adventure, Cloudberry sets off to follow his dream. But when he doesn't return, the remaining gnomes must begin a perilous journey to find him.\n\nThis enchanting story was the winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal.\n\n_Winner of the Carnegie Medal_\n\nWhen Tom is sent to stay at his aunt and uncle's house for the summer, he resigns himself to endless weeks of boredom. As he lies awake in his bed he listens to the grandfather clock chiming in the hall downstairs.\n\nEleven... Twelve... Thirteen...\n\nThirteen! Tom races down the stairs and finds, outside the back door, a wonderful garden. A garden everyone told him didn't exist. Tom's midnight garden is full of magic and adventure, and children too. Are they ghosts? Or is it Tom who is really the ghost...\n\n_This haunting and magical story is one of the best-loved children's books ever written._\n\nA girl sits in a dusty room, crammed to the rafters with books. Sunlight dances on the covers, between which are stories of magical worlds and faraway places\u2014lands of princesses, kings, giants, and real children too.\n\nEleanor Farjeon was that girl, who was so enchanted by her little bookroom that she recreated it by writing this wonderful collection of short stories.\n\nThis charming book was the winner of the prestigious Carnegie Medal.\n\nThe Ninth Legion marched into the mists of northern Britain\u2014and they were never seen again.\n\nFour thousand men disappeared and their eagle standard was lost. It's a mystery that's never been solved, until now...\n\nNow a major motion picture filmed as _The Eagle_.\n\nPeter sees the model ship in the shop window and he wants it more than anything else on earth. But it is no ordinary model. The ship takes Peter and his brother and sisters on magical flights, wherever they ask to go. They fly around the world and back into the past. But how long can you keep a ship that is worth everything in the world, and a bit over... ?\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nFirst published in 2015\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Kerry O'Brien 2015\n\nFront cover photograph: Greg Barrett\n\nBack cover photograph: courtesy of ABC-TV\n\nAll other photographs, except where otherwise indicated, courtesy of the Keating Archives.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian _Copyright Act 1968_ (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.\n\nAllen & Unwin\n\n83 Alexander Street\n\nCrows Nest NSW 2065\n\nAustralia\n\nPhone: (61 2) 8425 0100\n\nEmail: info@allenandunwin.com\n\nWeb: www.allenandunwin.com\n\nCataloguing-in-Publication details are available\n\nfrom the National Library of Australia\n\nwww.trove.nla.gov.au\n\nISBN 978 1 76011 162 5\n\nISBN 978 1 76029 219 5 (special edition)\n\neISBN 978 1 92526 848 5 (ebook edition)\nCONTENTS\n\nIntroduction\n\nTHE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1944\u201375\n\nThe land of the Fibro house\n\nBleak times for Labor\n\n'You haven't got a second to lose'\n\nRebuilding the soul\n\nThe battle for Blaxland\n\nThe boy from Bankstown goes to Canberra\n\nThrills and spills\n\nThe Dismissal\n\nTHE ROAD TO REFORM, 1976\u201386\n\nTwo lost years\n\nThe Hayden years\n\nThe reins of power\n\nThe float\n\nThe Accord comes of age\n\nThe banks\n\nOut with the old\n\nTaxing the relationship\n\nFROM TREASURY TO THE LODGE, 1986\u201391\n\nThe banana republic: no turning back\n\nThe media: policy and payback\n\nThe 1987 election\n\nIndustry: a new world for sure\n\nOf budgets and bacon\n\nThe winds of recession\n\nOpera, leadership and the Holy Grail\n\nTHE PRIME MINISTERSHIP, 1991\u201396\n\n'Old dogs for a hard road'\n\nForeign policy\n\nA republic\n\nMabo\n\nThe new march of reform\n\nThe politician & the professor\n\nIn his own right\n\nA new foe\u2014but reform goes on\n\nCreative Nation\n\nKeating vs Howard\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\nINTRODUCTION\n\nI have known Paul Keating for 40 years. I was first introduced to him in the non-members' bar of the old Parliament House when he was a hungry young backbencher in the Whitlam Opposition in 1975, and I suppose I was a hungry young journalist working for an ABC program called _This Day Tonight_. I met him again the day he became Gough Whitlam's youngest and last ministerial appointment, three weeks before the Dismissal. He already had the swagger and an eye for a good suit, and he had future leader written all over him.\n\nI saw Keating at work inside the political system when I was press secretary to Whitlam in his final stint as Opposition leader in 1977, and to deputy leader Lionel Bowen until 1980. Keating was constantly in and out of both offices, his influence and stature growing by the month. I watched him cut his teeth as a brash young parliamentarian. I was also exposed as much to the views of his enemies as his friends, and heard all the criticisms as well as the accolades.\n\nOver the decades of watching politics closely and after countless television interviews with Paul Keating, many of them tense, we have developed what might be described as a relaxed professional relationship rather than a friendship, within which he's never stopped being a political animal and I've never stopped being a journalist.\n\nIt's a lonely business, politics. Friendships between politicians aren't impossible and can be deep, but most seem to have a limited life. Very few endure. Journalists, on the other hand, are so endlessly fascinated by power that they wouldn't know whether a relationship with a politician is friendship, or just a reflection of that fascination mixed with varying degrees of respect and mutual self-interest.\n\nWhen we were negotiating the ABC television series, apart from a request for minimal intrusion on his family life, Keating's only caveat was that the conversations be more discursive than the combative style of the usual _7.30_ political interviews, which was what I'd intended anyway.\n\nYou can still be the tiger, he said, and I'll be the tamer.\n\nWhen we recorded the conversations for the series, my focus was so centred on the challenge at hand that I dismissed all thought of extending the material into a book. Besides, there were already three biographies, Don Watson's prime ministerial portrait, and various other credible accounts of Keating's time as Treasurer and Prime Minister.\n\nWhat ultimately drew me to this exercise, apart from the overwhelming response the series created, was that our sixteen hours of conversation left me with as many questions as they gave me answers. Powerful medium though it is, the limitations of television and the tyranny of the ticking clock meant that after the extensive edit, many topics were touched on but not exhausted, and others were not even raised. For instance, media policy has always been one of the great Labor obsessions, and no one was more obsessed than Paul Keating, but I felt if we didn't have the time to tackle that topic properly then we shouldn't waste precious time on it at all.\n\nI was particularly frustrated, and I know Keating was too, by the impossible task of doing justice to the policy and politics of four-and-a-quarter years of the prime ministership in one hour. Looking back twenty years after it all ended, I was surprised how much ground there was to cover, and how much was left unanalysed.\n\nWe are never going to get an autobiography from Paul Keating, which is pretty extraordinary given his impact on modern Australia. He's been consistent in saying that for many years. Yet it's clear he cares about his place in history, which was his incentive in cooperating with the television series and now the book. At the same time I could see as we travelled through the years that reliving the times is surprisingly painful for him, a tacit acknowledgement that even the most successful political lives do come at a cost. Probably the more successful, the bigger the cost.\n\nKeating's regret and frustration over the relationship with Bob Hawke is particularly palpable, that such a productive partnership could end so bitterly, and he and Hawke will never agree now on why it failed. On the one hand, Keating wants the strength of the relationship and its legacy to be properly understood. On the other, you get the sense he'll never come to terms with his own bitterness over its ultimate collapse.\n\nIn the same way, he still seethes at his recollections of the schism between he and his office and the Labor Party's campaign office during the 1996 election campaign. He will never accept that party officials might be smarter on campaign strategy than a leader who had been making sharp political judgements daily for thirteen years, and is particularly angry that they didn't give him even a sliver of a chance of beating John Howard. It says something about the intensity and complexity of the man that he still can't let go all these years later.\n\nI have read a lot of biographies over many years, some of which have been superb. But often you emerge with a sense that the authentic voice of the subject is leached out to varying degrees in the filtering process. David Marr's biography of Patrick White was one wonderful exception, not least because Marr had the great good sense to let White's own voice come through from his copious letters.\n\nWith a political autobiography you might get the authentic voice of the politician but the self-serving side of the enterprise will not be tempered by the challenge of an honest broker that you will hopefully get from a biographer.\n\nI am neither Paul Keating's biographer nor his ghostwriter, and I'm not aware there's been an exercise quite like this before. What I think and hope has emerged with this book is an amalgam of the two; that along with the Keating's authentic voice in a series of freewheeling conversations, are some robust challenges to his account of the political history he lived through and his part in it; and that readers get enough of both to make up their own minds about what this notable political life represents.\n\nIn shaping those conversations I have drawn on many thousands of pages of Keating biographies and other excellent accounts of the political times in which he lived, including biographies of other politicians, autobiographies, memoirs, political diaries and other works of political history including Paul Kelly's seminal work; on thousands of newspaper articles collected week by week through Keating's career, many unflattering to him; hundreds of pages of interviews recorded with all the key Hawke Cabinet ministers for the ABC's groundbreaking _Labor in Power_ series; Cabinet documents and Keating's own extensive notes of milestone meetings such as the Mabo negotiations, providing further intimate insights to history.\n\nI found Keating's digitised newspaper archive fascinating to flick through because, even allowing for imperfections within stories, the patterns that emerged from issue to issue, from event to event as recounted or analysed by five or six different reporters or commentators, were often very revealing of the times. And then there were the insights from his comments in the margins.\n\nAs well as the sixteen hours of conversations for the ABC series, I recorded a further sixteen hours in a series of sessions in Keating's Potts Point, Sydney office over eighteen months. Many of the questions were less about the detail of policies than about getting a true sense of how he functioned, how he related to others, how he won his big reform battles, how he regrouped after the losses, and his methods as he came to dominate both his party and the Parliament. But within the framework of Keating's account of those times, what I really wanted to do was provide an intimate study of leadership wrapped in a powerful and complex personality, including, as Patrick White so nicely put it, the flaws in the glass.\n\nKeating said to me at one point that this exercise had justified his determination not to write an autobiography, that this process had forced him to think about and deal with many questions that would never have occurred to him to reflect on\u2014and that it was therefore more complete than anything he might have written himself.\n\nThe book is peppered with remembered conversations in quotes. It goes without saying these are paraphrased from memory and should be judged in that light, but very often the sense of them is substantiated by the record, or by the accounts of others.\n\nMy one concession to Paul Keating through this process was to allow him to read back through the edited material, not to change the sense of anything he'd said or to take anything back, but occasionally to improve the flow of his words for the page. I felt he had a point: that we were recording the whole conversation orally, but it was to be published in book form. He was true to his word. No attempt at censorship, no changes of heart, but a definite improvement at times in the way it read.\n\nI wasn't interested in being drawn into direct comparisons between Keating and other post-war political leaders. Too many complications, too many what ifs. It's the sort of pontificating that's better left to dinner parties and university lecture halls. It is enough for me to see this man, flaws and all, as one of the standout figures since Federation.\n\nKeating was surrounded by talent, particularly in the Hawke Cabinets and happily acknowledges that the Australian public's extraordinary love affair with Bob Hawke made a huge task of reform easier, but no one had a more ambitious agenda than he did in those years, and no one who was there doubted his influence, and often the stamp of his authority on the outcomes. That's why he wears the second worst recession in Australian history more than anyone else engaged in public policy at the time. His response is classic Keating: I'll take responsibility for the recession if you'll also give me credit for the 20-plus years of continuous growth and low inflation that have followed.\n\nThere is never one complete picture of any phase of political history. There are too many prisms. I hope this adds to the mosaic, and to the understanding of how one man came to power, and used it.\n\nTHE LAND OF THE FIBRO HOUSE\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was understandable that Australians would stick with the government that had got them through the war, just as it was understandable that the soothing, persuasive presence of Robert Menzies and a promise of steady-as-she-goes stability would be irresistible to many of those same voters three years later in the Cold War environment that was escalating on the other side of the world. But not even Menzies' most ardent fan would have dreamt for a moment that he would lay the ground for conservative rule for the next 23 years.\n\nThat was the world Paul Keating grew up in\u2014albeit in a Catholic, working-class, Labor household\u2014but it only goes part of the way when seeking to understand one of the most fascinating, colourful and dominating characters to walk Australia's political stage.\n\nSydney's western suburbs in those days were epitomised by Bankstown, the population solidly working class, and almost exclusively white, but in Keating's memory it had a greater sense of community than adjoining suburbs. The young Keating was not the only boy who had learned to dismantle a car by his teens, but not many in Keating's place and in his time would have been driven by such burning curiosity to so voraciously soak up his eclectic range of cultural pursuits. It was one thing to be inspired by classical music, first heard by chance, at the age of twelve, or to be drawn to the perfection of an antique watch at fifteen, even though these things were exotic in his own home, let alone the neighbourhood. It was quite another to pursue them so passionately, so early, in the same way he would come to absorb and pursue politics and his place at the tables of power.\n\nThere's a moment in the Keating interviews that didn't make it to air, where he recalls meeting a young Leo Schofield browsing through catalogues in a central Sydney antique shop\u2014the beginning of a lifelong friendship\u2014and musing over what on earth had spawned these two unlikely characters, the boy from Bankstown and the escapee from outback Brewarrina. Keating attributes it to the search for perfection, but why?\n\nIn seeking to peel back the layers of any complex personality, you'd start by looking to the parents and the home environment. It's easy to assume that having learned his politics at his father's knee\u2014a father steeped in Labor history and Catholic social values who had parlayed his boiler-making trade into a successful engineering business\u2014that Matthew Keating was the driving force. That might explain the politics, but it doesn't explain the driving ambition or hunger that got Keating to within one caucus vote of joining the first Whitlam Ministry in 1972 at 28 after only one term in Parliament, which to this day would have enshrined him as the youngest minister in Australian history; or that saw him seize the prime ministership at forty-seven. For that, as he acknowledges, look to the women of the family\u2014his mother and grandmother.\n\nPaul Keating grew up in the long shadow cast by the devastation of World War II. In January 1944, as he was tasting life for the first time in the cocoon of his parents' classically humble fibro house, the Allied forces had begun their drive up through Europe's underbelly in Italy in preparation for the Normandy invasion. On the Eastern Front the Red Army had entered Poland and was also advancing on the Baltic countries. In the Pacific, there was much bloody conflict to come, but the writing was on the wall for Japan.\n\nTwo of Keating's great wartime heroes, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, were already making postwar plans for Asia and Europe. His other hero, John Curtin, was in the process of driving a historic shift in Australia's primary postwar alliance from England to America.\n\nBy the time Matthew and Min Keating's first-born started processing his first conscious memories, the war was over, but the family photograph of his Uncle Bill, a casualty at the hands of the Japanese, sat in the living room as a constant reminder right through his childhood. That small icon, the family conversation it sparked, and what it came to represent to young Keating, would have a big impact on Australia's future foreign policy.\n\nOne of the things people came to associate most with the Keating persona was the air of swaggering confidence, of a man dancing very definitely to his own drumbeat, something not many political leaders can easily lay claim to these days. Where did the inner confidence in the rightness of his judgements, the strength of conviction spring from?\n\nLeaving school and going off to work at such a young age may have been normal enough for the times, even joining his trade union. But when I thought back on what I was doing at fourteen and fifteen, joining a political party would have been one of the furthest things from my mind. I'd only barely begun to notice girls.\n\n**PJK:** I was caught up in the Labor Party from a very early age, and there was a tribal quality to it. Your typical local branch allocates a grid of streets to members, which they letterbox, and also a polling booth to man on election day, so I used to join my father, running round with a bag, letterboxing, and in the polling booths. I was doing this from about ten. And we would always lose\u2014you'd pick up the Sunday paper, and you'd lost again. My father held Menzies in contempt and could never see why a moderate Labor Party, appealing to the great body of the community, couldn't get elected. But I was intrigued by politics and public life.\n\nI was very conscious of the black cloud of the Second World War and for my twelfth birthday my father bought me a book called the _Last Days of Hitler_ by Hugh Trevor-Roper. He was a British intelligence agent who had the job of piecing together Hitler's final days in the bunker in Berlin in 1945, and confirming his death. My father's brother had died in the death marches in Sandakan in Borneo in March 1945 and his picture sat on the piano at the family house, so I was very conscious of that.\n\nWhat I could never quite understand was why good people failed to stop Hitler when he was at his weakest, when he made the incursions into the Rhineland and the Sudetenland. The person who stopped him was Churchill, and I came to a view early in life that in the great business of enlargement\u2014small movement here, big movement there\u2014the profession with the greatest leverage was public life, and the archetypal leader was the big-brained, heroic Churchill, the one person who wouldn't trade with the criminal, Hitler. I was drawn to that great moral clarity. I thought, if this is the business this guy is in, then this is the business to be in. And of course there was Roosevelt in the Pacific war.\n\nWhen I started work in Sydney at fourteen I used to go to the book dealers Berkelouws, who were then in King Street, and I'd pick up back copies of the _Strand_ magazine because Churchill used to write for _Strand_ every month in the 1930s. These were the bad years for him politically. He'd mostly be writing about the European scene or about himself or about English history, but I had this interest in him.\n\nBankstown, where I was born and raised, had a great clannishness about it, and it was as if it had a sort of border around it. The next suburb, Punchbowl, was completely different. It didn't have the same sort of cohesion.\n\nIn those days people used to attend church, Sunday Mass, and kids you were at school with would turn up with their parents. They'd come out of mass at nine, and still be there at twenty to ten, still chatting out the front. So there was that tribal sense of the place, and the Labor Party used to meet in the band hall on Bankstown Oval, in a little timber hall. Those things together gave it a sort of cohesion. You belonged to something. So when I first started turning up to meetings I already knew some of the people in the room, but I was the youngest person there by a lot of years.\n\nIt was the land of the fibro house. It was square kilometres of fibro houses and old cars in the late 1940s and 1950s. We started out with an Austin 7 and then later moved to a Morris Oxford. The guy next to us had a Vauxhall Wyvern. Everyone repaired their own vehicles and there was a local traffic in spare parts. There was in these communities a great sodality\u2014it's an old word now, sodality. But there was a great sodality, and because everyone had modest incomes\u2014they were not poor, they were not poverty stricken, but they had very modest incomes\u2014the standard of living was only moving up ever so slightly.\n\n**KOB:** I can remember being shocked as a journalist when I researched a story on Queensland and discovered that in the era I was born into, immediately postwar, only 13 per cent of secondary school-aged children actually stayed in school. The others did what you did, left school at fourteen or fifteen. Most of the boys went into trades or semi-skilled work, or maybe clerical jobs like you, while most of the girls had jobs without much career orientation because they assumed they'd be leaving work when they got married and start a family. What sort of a student were you at De La Salle College?\n\n**PJK:** I was an impatient learner. I always wanted to pick up stuff that I was interested in. If I wasn't interested, then I dropped off. In a class of 30, I'd always come about eighth, ninth or tenth. And every year at the bottom of the report card it would say, could do better. Going to university wasn't anything like the priority for most families it is today. You wouldn't even think about it today because kids go to Year 12 at eighteen years of age and then go to university. That was not true of my class\u2014four or five went on to do the higher school certificate, then called the leaving certificate, and then only maybe one or two of them went to university. Maybe only one.\n\nI think I picked up a Catholic sense of social justice, that is, we all arrive equally and we go out equally. Also the poison of racism\u2014I think I took that from it. I don't know that they teach you too much at the De La Salle Brothers that is unique, but they certainly drilled that into you.\n\nI was also into a bit of behavioural science in the classroom. I used to score the teachers for their ability to teach and pass across ideas. When they'd chew a kid out I'd think, I wouldn't have quite done that. Maybe I'd have done this, but not that. I was always\u2014always\u2014looking at behaviour and I think preparing for something bigger, but I didn't know what that was.\n\nI particularly remember one teacher, Brother Bernard Hawkins. He quit the monks later, but he used to bring in one of those big spool tape recorders with Question Time from Parliament on it. In those days, Labor people like Eddie Ward and Doc Evatt and Clyde Cameron and people like that would stand out. He used to do that every week when Parliament was in session, and we'd hear the cacophony of Question Time.\n\nWe'd all have to be quiet and he'd stop and decipher what the debate was about.\n\nI can't recall now whether I was riveted to each thing, but you got the sense of it, and there were certain people we liked and enjoyed. Ward was one. Les Haylen was another and there were people around like Arthur Calwell who people focused on.\n\nI don't think I was necessarily ambitious by nature, but I was always trying to find the sense of things. What did it all mean? I was a bit like the pigeon doing the rounds before it decides which way is home. I was trying to work out where things were in life, what made sense. I was keeping my interest in politics alive but living an adolescent life, like most people did.\n\nIn the middle of my last year at school, my mother took me to a school careers night, where they looked at your mark, your aptitudes and discussed this with you and your parents. The careers advisor, who was quite a skilful sort of guy, said he thought I should try architecture or panel-beating, of all things. Now, the panel-beating could have come from my interest in the shape of things. It's not as silly as it sounds, and also the architecture, and my mother said, 'Oh well, you know, he does have an interest in public life and I think if he's thinking about anything in his life, it's the prime ministership of Australia rather than doing other sorts of work.'\n\nMy mother had great ambitions for me. She didn't quite know what they were, but she knew I was not going to be put in a slot. She used to say, 'I told Dad to get out of the railways, that he'd go nowhere there. He had to get out of there and start his own business.' Dad was a sweet-hearted guy. He didn't believe in conflict at all\u2014he wanted everything more or less smooth and resolutely nice, whereas Mum would be into the conflict.\n\nShe was like a lot of women of her time: born in the 1920s, suffered the Depression, then the Second World War. They never really got their shot at life. So, in a frustrated kind of way, they would try to direct their husbands and then their children. That was certainly the case with my mother. I think my mother in a modern world was a killer, an absolute killer!\n\nMy grandmother and my mother invested a ton of love in me, especially my grandmother in the early years. She thought I was the bee's knees. My mother used to say later that if Dad said anything harsh to me, my grandmother simply wouldn't eat. She'd just get up from the table and walk away. That was her protest against Dad correcting me. I walked around with grandmotherly and motherly love, and I think it radiates for you and gives you that kind of inner confidence. It's almost like wearing the asbestos suit\u2014you go through the fire but you're not going to be burned because someone loves you. You are complete, you are together.\n\nI remember a survey years ago of members of Parliament. About 68 per cent of members were the first child of the family, and that was probably because of the same investment that parents put into the first child. It's true of my father as well as my mother in a different way if someone puts you on a pedestal. The first big pedestal-builder was my grandmother. It's something that sticks with you all your life. It has always stuck with me. I always think about her. In fact I went to her grave very recently because I thought again, there is the person who most believed in me. You have to go through life with someone thinking you're special, giving you the love quotient when you have to get the sword out in real combat.\n\nI was twelve when my grandmother died. Her death was the most harrowing thing that had happened to me. She thought I was the most special person on the face of the earth. It wasn't just some sidebar affection from a happy grandmother: it was a very focused affection, and you think, well, whatever else happens to me I've got that\u2014I've got that completeness and I do think that that completeness does carry you through the hellfire. You need other bits and pieces to help you. In my case, often the music and things like that and friends, but what sticks to you is that investment, that huge affection and emotional investment.\n\n**KOB:** In the era you started work, Bob Menzies was coming to the end of his first decade as Liberal Prime Minister. Australia was still riding on the back of the wool boom, the Labor Party was riven with deep ideological differences, but trade union membership was strong, and the unemployment rate rarely strayed over 2 per cent. You would have been very impressionable, starting work at the Sydney County Council at such a young age. Your biographer Edna Carew wrote that even as a young clerk you left home dressed like the chairman of the board.\n\n**PJK:** That was from my mother. She always had me dressed up. I was always well dressed. They used to call the clerks the shiny bums. But at work I had to wear a dustcoat, otherwise you got sprayed with transformer oil, a mineral oil that's not good to be around.\n\nI was at the Sydney County Council transformer-handling depot where they used to bring transformers in and recondition them. They were attended to by electrical fitters and labourers. The labourers did the bullocking and all the dirty jobs while the electrical fitters did the trade work. There were about 60 of them there and you saw it all\u2014the language, the profanity; you could have cut the language with a knife, and there was an art form to it. And they had the kinds of jokes, humour of a kind that has gone from Australian life now. All the time, the jokes.\n\nAnd you'd hear how someone's run off with someone else's missus and someone else has done this and someone else has done that and then someone's got caught for stealing and so on. The whole grab bag of things that made up Australian life\u2014it gave me great respect for these people, for people who had nothing to sell but their time, who had developed a set of focal skills and who were dedicated sorts of people, but wild. Wild. It was a snapshot of working-class Sydney.\n\nDad started as a tradesman, got himself a diploma in engineering, then was an inspector on the railways. And then with two other chaps started a business making ready-mix concrete machines, the ones you see on the back of the trucks. His was really the first firm to make these in Australia, and the batching plants that went with them. So it became a successful small- to middle-sized business in our area.\n\nHe had a great latitude about his attitude to business He was loyal to Labor to a fault, but at the same time he knew that the days of robber-baron capitalism were over with the Depression. You just mostly had people with modest amounts of capital trying to turn them into businesses and employ people. He had a lot of reasonableness in his view, and I think I picked that up from him.\n\nDad was very kind by nature. There was a chap who was a labourer, and Dad had trained him to be a welder and then paid him tradesman's rates. Anyway, we were standing on a polling booth, my father and me. It was a by-election, and this fellow, Joe, I forget his surname, came down and I handed him the Labor how-to-vote card. Or Dad might have. He said, no, Mattie, I'm not taking that one. And this is a guy my father had lifted up to a tradesman's wage, and Dad said, 'Poor, silly bugger. You know, you try to help these people but some are beyond help.'\n\n**KOB:** What was his influence on you politically?\n\n**PJK:** Well, it was the whole view about the Menzian era, right? If you think of the country as a kind of rock, you had the social strata, the Cambrian, the Permian, the Jurassic, but there was no energy coming through it. There was no oil and gas. No sparks. There was a block. A block. Uncompetitive, presided over by the court of a political dandy, the master of the glib phrase, and yet there were people trying to assemble capital and make it work.\n\nWhat was apparent to my father and apparent to me through him was that it was so difficult to corporately save, so difficult to garner capital, so difficult to borrow money to invest, and there was a great struggle in building businesses. Therefore one of the primary influences he had on me was that the Liberals couldn't do capital. It wasn't beyond the wit of man to do capital but the Liberals couldn't do it. He didn't see Labor in one camp and capital in another because his very life was about spanning the two, and principally through him I picked up that same notion.\n\n**KOB:** Your father died very young\u2014he was 60\u2014and I think you were the last person in the family to see him alive.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he was walking round to put a bet on a horse at the TAB and he died sitting on the side of the road. I was washing the car nearby and someone came by and said 'where is number eight?' And I said, 'Oh, that's my parents' place. He said, oh, well look, it must be your father. I don't think he's well.'\n\nSo I then went up the hill. There he was, stretched back across the footpath, but dead. It took me a decade to get over it\u2014a decade to even talk about it, and it is always with me. I mean, it's a great thing, parental love and love of parents. Losing a parent is a hell of a loss, and if the parents are close to you, you never get over it. But you don't want to get over it, you know? There is a place for sadness and melancholy. There is a place. You don't want to be sparkling and happy all the time. You need the inner life, the inner sadness. It's what rounds you out.\nBLEAK TIMES FOR LABOR\n\nLooking at today's Labor Party, where lines are more likely to be drawn around personalities and factional loyalties than ideology, it's hard to imagine the depth of emotion and ideological difference that led to the great Labor Split of 1955 and fanned deep enmities for decades, presenting successive Liberal governments with the gift that kept on giving, particularly at the federal level.\n\nThe great Labor character Fred Daly, who was in Parliament from 1943 under Curtin, to 1975 under Whitlam, captured the mood within the Labor caucus at the time of the Split like no one else I've heard or read. Describing a brawl between the Labor leader Doc Evatt and his supporters, and a group of anti-communist, largely Catholic MPs from Victoria, over a motion to spill the leadership positions, Daly wrote:\n\nI will never forget the scene when Eddie Ward, a real hater, called for a division. To everyone's amazement Evatt leaped onto the table, pencil and paper in hand, red-faced and excited, and triumphantly called out, 'Get their names, get their names!' It was Evatt and Ward at their hating best.\n\nSome of his supporters stood on chairs around the room repeating the call 'Take down their names' as members crossed the floor to vote. It was a degrading and disgusting spectacle\u2014twenty-eight members lined up like Japanese war criminals by colleagues with hate, vindictiveness and triumph written all over their faces.\n\nPaul Keating was eleven at the time, but his father, whose Catholic anti-communism was almost as ardent as his loyalty to Labor, would have relived his pain around the kitchen table over the massive damage caused by the Split. And as a mover and shaker within the local branches, Matt would have readily reflected the air of bitter intrigue that was dogging his party. The worst of the Split was concentrated in Victoria and Queensland. To some degree the NSW branch of the Labor Party managed to quarantine itself from the damage, but the depth of searing bitterness permeated the whole party. The Split was more deeply cemented with the formation of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 1957, and Labor supporters grew weary watching election after election until 1972, when Liberal governments were returned with DLP preferences.\n\nThe environment inside both the industrial and political arms of the labour movement was little better by the time young Keating began to impose his presence on the branch and state structures of the party in his late teens to early twenties. It was fascinating to watch him close his eyes tight in concentration at 69 and take himself back 50 years to the hate-filled days of those branch and conference battles\u2014even for the fledgling warriors in Young Labor. The one great constant for the Right in NSW in its battles with the Left was that it was backed by largely Right-controlled Labor state governments from 1947 to 1965.\n\n**PJK:** It was virtually a shooting war in my early years. People wouldn't talk to one another. The factionalism was bad and it was also still sectarian. Many people in the Left belonged to the Masonic Lodge, while the ruling group in New South Wales was heavily but not exclusively Catholic. This was an important undercurrent of the whole thing. In our branch we were all like-minded characters, but if you went to the branch next door you'd find a different view of the world altogether, and those ideological differences would all collide at the state and federal electorate councils.\n\nNSW was the state that didn't really split, so the Right largely held together in NSW. Federally the party was dominated by the Left, and while the contest between Right and Left in NSW was great, the Right was assisted by the fact that we held government through that period, which gave the party legitimacy, and gave the moderates in the party the upper hand the Left was never able to strike down.\n\nBut the contest at branch level was severe. So you had this bitter intellectual tug of war, and overlaying it was the Cold War. It's gone now, thank goodness, but the Split left an intolerance to moderate Catholic Labor members, and threaded through it all was the contest between Masons and Catholics that also permeated society.\n\nWhen I started work you would see job ads in a Sydney newspaper that said 'Catholics need not apply'. It was still around in a big way. It always amused me why these roaring lions of the Left would end up in the Masonic Lodge, with all of its ceremony. I never quite got that, but they were mostly in the Lodge in those days, so there was a sense that they were coming at you socially and politically.\n\n**KOB:** But there was also this very strong view on the Left of Labor that the Catholic Church had far too much influence inside the Labor Party and that people like B.A. Santamaria and Archbishop Mannix were pulling too many strings.\n\n**PJK:** They were, and that was the cause of the Split in Victoria, but in New South Wales the hierarchy of the Catholic Church decided that Catholic Labor people should stay in the party, that it shouldn't split off, and that was perhaps their great gift to the place.\n\nThe church took the view that it should remove itself from the daily battle. So while there were these Catholic-influenced industrial groups in the 1950s, in which my father was involved, trying to wrest control of the unions from the Left or the Communist Party of Australia, after the Split the church dropped back. Laypeople on the Right of the Labor Party in NSW then stepped up to the plate\u2014people like Charlie Oliver, John Ducker and Geoff Cahill. They weren't necessarily Catholics, but some people like Barrie Unsworth later became Catholic.\n\nThe Left fundamentally controlled the National Executive of the party in those years, and NSW was like an island in the middle of it all, maintaining its legitimacy through its moderate state government. At the branch level you still had a real cross-section of people. You had labourers, people who worked on the garbage service at the council. You had fitters and turners. You had people who were clerks in the taxation office.\n\nIt was a broad cross-section, but it had a very parochial drumbeat. We'd be discussing whether we were going to have a new street crossing over the railway line, whether it ought to have lights on it, and then the state member of Parliament who was a Labor member would come and give the state government report every month. Then someone would get up either attacking or supporting the federal Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, or supporting Gough Whitlam against Calwell, or earlier Evatt, so you would get a bit of spice that way.\n\nBut our branch, Central Bankstown, was mostly seeing things the one way. It was when you got to the Federal Electorate Council [FEC] level that you'd start to see the contests. That's where it was just a deadly battle to keep control of the party in NSW, which was in the hands of the Left federally.\n\nThe hatreds were visceral. In our FEC, we had one chap who was the secretary of the Left-controlled branch next door, and my co-delegate used to accuse him of not washing. He'd call him Pongo, so the first thing he'd do at a meeting was to sit down, open a bottle of Airwick and pull up the wick and put it on the floor beside him just to make the point. That's how vicious it was. It was so vicious. It was a kind of civil war, in a way. A Cold War inside the Labor Party in those days.\n\nWhen I was a preselection candidate for the federal seat of Blaxland, which took in the Bankstown district, I'd go to some branches, which were dominated by the Left, to muster support. There was one branch in particular, one of the large ones, where the chairman would say, 'We'll hear from the candidates' and of course they'd hear from their guy and there'd be plenty of questions and answers.\n\nThen I'd get up to speak, and not a soul would ask a question, and when it was over you would sit there like you had rabies. Then, as they locked up, they'd stand around out the front and have a bit of a chat, and not a soul would say a word to you. You'd just walk away... just walk away as if you'd had no part in it whatsoever.\n\nThe political dividing line was stark. The Revesby Workers' Club was called the Kremlin because in the vernacular of those days it was run by the Coms. This was one of the big issues. Some people in those days used to say it was all a fantasy to think the Communist Party was actually active in the Labor Party. Well, after the Soviet military occupation of Hungary in 1956 and then particularly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Communist Party splintered in Australia, and many of those people decided to join the Labor Party as the only effective vehicle available to pursue their political commitment. So then you had people on the Left who would not speak publicly against the mixed economy but who would have preferred to nationalise everything. On the one hand there was this old Left dogma about government ownership of the high points of the economy, and on the other hand you had the internationalism of the Communist Party worldwide in the Cold War construct. This affected the Labor Party deeply, so I spent most of my young years fighting to keep moderate Labor people in control of the party in New South Wales.\n\n**KOB:** You've never held back on your antipathy to Bob Menzies during those long years when Labor was in the wilderness federally, but the truth is that whatever you thought of Menzies, he was well and truly helped by your party, which kept finding new ways to beat itself.\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely. Menzies was a specialist in symbols\u2014the Queen, the monarchy, the empire, the Cold War, a fetish about communism, a divided Labor Party\u2014and had an absolute ton of luck. That was Menzies, and we just kept handing it to him on a plate. You had to basically explode the myth that somehow this sort of glib conservative orthodoxy that he spoke of was shown for what it was.\n\nWhen the salad days of postwar growth ran out as they did about the time he retired, and Australia started to fall behind, you saw with Menzies' successors\u2014Holt and Gorton and McMahon\u2014the country went nowhere because it had nowhere to go, and yet, here was the Labor Party, unable to put labour and capital together.\n\n**KOB:** You were very much the young man in a hurry through the 1960s, working your way up through the party structure. How quickly do you think you were switching on to what politics really was about, and how quickly did you decide that you wanted to make a career of it?\n\n**PJK:** I became president of the New South Wales ALP Youth Council at 21, and that's when I started to meet the party hierarchy. I met the State President who was then Charlie Oliver, the State Secretary Bill Colbourne, the Assistant Secretary, John Armitage; so I was in the know. You knew who was on the disputes committee, you knew who was on the various policy committees. In those days there was a great contest between Calwell and Whitlam at the federal level, and we were in favour of Whitlam. And that was a big point of discussion, particularly at the Youth Council.\n\nI had people like the late Frank Walker opposing me from the Left, god love him, and we'd have these really, really snarly battles, and there'd be big fights over credentialing; whether their credentials were in order, so that would go off to the credentials committee. Every delegate was fought over, every credentialing was fought over, every little bit of policy expression was fought over, and while that was happening there were these big battalions fighting for control of the trade unions. In my years the battle was led by John Ducker in New South Wales and Barrie Unsworth. So there was an industrial fight going on and there was the party branch and organisational fight also going on and the battle was around the future of the Labor Party. Would we ever see Labor back in government? Would we ever see a moderate federal Labor Party again, an electable moderate federal Labor Party?\n\n**KOB:** Were you each as ruthless as each other, the Right and the Left?\n\n**PJK:** Oh yeah, oh yeah. But the Left were shockers. They were always cheating.\n\n**KOB:** But there would've been cheating on both sides, I'm sure.\n\n**PJK:** There was. Everything was fought over, but it did one thing for you. It trained you in combat, particularly at those big conferences. The NSW conference had met every year at the Town Hall, since 1893, a thousand people every year, and you stood up there surrounded by your peers for three days. Everything you said was noted for or against you, and if half of them didn't like you they would be stamping their feet, so you'd have this massive drumroll. So you got this training.\n'YOU HAVEN'T GOT A SECOND TO LOSE'\n\nPaul Keating stands as an interesting contradiction to the time-worn adage that you can't put an old head on young shoulders. Whether it was by instinct or sheer curiosity, he was drawn from an early age to seek out the tribal elders who could help soften an otherwise steep learning curve. It is a well-documented pattern in his career, starting long before he entered Parliament. The first significant mentor in this vein, outside the family, was Jack Lang, one of the most fascinating and contentious figures in Labor history.\n\nFor most Australians in the 1960s, Lang was a remnant of the past, all but forgotten. On the one hand he had been one of Labor's great early reformers as NSW Premier in two stints totalling four years in the 1920s and early 1930s, but on the other hand he came to be seen as a divisive and destructive force within his party, hated by the supporters of federal leaders such as John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and ultimately expelled.\n\nPhysically large and bold in personality, Lang dominated the parliaments of his day, converting Labor hopes into law in areas such as widows' pensions, child endowment and workers' compensation, abolishing public high-school fees, reforming the arbitration system, legislating for fair rents and establishing a government insurance office.\n\nBut as a sworn enemy of the conservative establishment, including that in Britain, particularly as the Great Depression took hold, Jack Lang sealed his political fate with his determination to defy the British banks with his refusal to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in interest to British bond-holders, while dividing the Scullin Labor Government in Canberra. He was dismissed by the State Governor, Sir Philip Game, in May 1932. In 1943, after public attacks on the Labor Premier in NSW, Bill McKell, and Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, Lang was expelled from the party, but turned up in the federal Parliament three years later with his own party, the Australian Labor (Non-Communist) Party.\n\nBy the time the eighteen-year-old Paul Keating came knocking at the door of his Sydney city office in 1962, Jack Lang cut a lonely figure from the desk where he still put out a weekly political newspaper he'd started in the late 1930s. But Lang could still dominate a room. His father's influence would obviously have been an element behind the visits because Matthew Keating had been a Langite in those contentious years, but the young Keating wanted to tap the history Lang carried in his head. My interest in pursuing this connection was not just to get a sense of what influence the old political warrior might have wrought on him, but also to explore what it said about his single-minded pursuit of power, even at that young age.\n\n**PJK:** Lang's role in the Depression interested me. He had led the fight against the economic orthodoxy during the Depression and he was just a huge figure. In a small place like Sydney was in those days, for someone like Lang to emerge was remarkable in itself. He'd eat the people around him. He seemed to have a political energy and radicalism that the sort of vanilla state Labor Government of my day didn't have. So I went down to his office in Nithsdale Street, just off Hyde Park, and introduced myself.\n\nLang was at Henry Parkes's Federation rallies. He was Henry Lawson's brother-in-law, but he never volunteered to speak about the past. I had to push him, but he'd give you pen sketches of Labor leaders like Bill Holman, Billy Hughes and Doc Evatt, other significant figures like the Chief Justice Sir John Latham or the conservative leaders like Stanley Bruce and Earl Page. He'd fill me in on their little foibles, and the issues of his times, particularly the First World War, the Second World War and the Depression. It was like an intimate condensation of Australian political history from Federation in 1901 through to when I was talking to him in the 1960s. His focus was on the future of the world. He was always interested in things like the common market, how Europe was changing, how the world would change. It was a big brain, and what you got in distilled form was a view of the country's history through to the third quarter of the twentieth century.\n\nI used to see him twice a week for about seven years. Strangely he used to call me Mr Keating and I was only eighteen in those days. He was very formal. I used to address him as Mr Lang. Among other things, I asked him whether I should go on and do a university degree, and he thought for a while before saying, 'Mr Keating, you have too much to learn for a university degree, about the getting of power and the using of it. There are no courses in this.'\n\nSometimes when he was working on his newspaper I would help him with what they call the pull, the lead run for the front page. He used to write in an exercise book and he would write a big essay for the front\u2014no changes, no arrows, no crossing out, it just all flowed out, and sometimes I'd read the handwritten exercise book or other times I'd read the pull. But he had this ability to write with great clarity of mind and do an essay of maybe 2000 words front to back with not a correction, all essentially written in his head. Amazing ability.\n\nHe and I disagreed on a lot of policy fronts like protection and tariffs, and I'd say on much of the world debate I would probably have been on the other side to him. I didn't want that from him. I was okay on the contemporary stuff. I wanted the dynamics, and how the game was played.\n\nWhat I particularly picked up from Lang was his use of language, the force of his language. He had hugely long arms, as if they were concertinaed. They'd come out at you as he talked. He had the celluloid collar and the gold chain, and that big jaw, and he'd say, 'Mr Keating, I'm telling you this', and he'd lean across the table with a look that would bore a hole in you. He was then 87 or 88. There was no one like him then.\n\nHe used to say to me, 'Always put your money on self-interest, son. He's the best horse in the race; always a trier.'\n\n**KOB:** I did an interview with you in 1986 where you described how you learned from Lang to be hard in your judgements. What did you mean by that?\n\n**PJK:** Lang once said to me, 'One of your problems, Mr Keating, is you take people at their word. This is a business where duplicity is the order of the day. Look for the best in people by all means, but keep a sceptical eye peeled for what they are saying to you and what they really mean. What you should look for is the support of the earnest people. There will be a lot whose support you will never have. But you'll never be anyone until you have a reasonable stock of enemies.' It's the issues that sort people out. It's just so true, because having enemies worries some people. For me, it's a badge of honour. It's never worried me that a group of people would have not a bar of me. And that's the way Lang conducted his life.\n\nEven so, I never really took that kind of almost morbid cynicism on board as an operating principle. I always found better in people in public life, and if you go through a caucus like I did for nearly 30 years, you've got to build coalitions and friendships with people. So there are people you trust. I never subscribed to the solitary school, that you're on your own and only on your own, but I did subscribe to the fact that you've got to look at what is said to you and look behind it. You have to end up being a good judge of character and a good judge of what is really being said to you, as well as a good listener.\n\nPeople may be members of a political party, but they get to Parliament in their own right. It's like a team with a captain but the members of the team earn their place independently, so to stitch together majorities in Parliament continually, you've got to look at people to see what their interests are, what things they have in common, what natural point of agreement you have with them, or points of disagreement.\n\n**KOB:** In an interview with journalist Jennifer Hewitt back in 1981, you said that Lang once told you he'd met a person who admired you greatly and that person in the end would be the only one you could trust. Can you remember that story?\n\n**PJK:** I can, now you remind me, and he was talking about me. He was saying the only one you can rely upon is yourself, and that no one would think better of you than you. Another thing he said to me one day, he said, 'Mr Keating, you're a young man and people will tell you you have plenty of time but the truth is you haven't got a second to lose.'\n\nAnd he was right. Because it's a bit like you see in these great tennis matches, the great Grand Slams\u2014you can see where they get lost when someone loses a point, just one point somewhere in the match, and that's the turning point.\n\nA political life is like that, and it's played with enormous dexterity and professionalism. A lot of people think it's all haphazard. There's nothing haphazard about it. It's hugely professional, and therefore you can't miss too many points. You've got to keep going all the time. In truth you don't have a second to lose. That is the truth.\n\n**KOB:** What about Lang's reputation for divisiveness?\n\n**PJK:** He had a reputation for divisiveness, but he never had a divisive bent in the years I met with him. In 1970, when he was 93, I moved a motion to have him readmitted to the Labor Party, which was defeated principally by the State Secretary Bill Colbourne. There were no mobiles in those days, so when that happened I ran down to Town Hall railway station to find a public phone, and rang him up at home.\n\nHe said, 'How did we go?'\n\nI said, 'Well, we got beaten. Not by much but we got beaten essentially by Bill Colbourne's speech'\u2014because Colbourne was with the federal Labor Party in the 1930s, you see, and still carried the bitterness.\n\nAnd Lang said, 'Oh well, old Bill. He's always been a good Labor man.'\n\nHe didn't have a nasty word to say about him. You would have thought he would have had a bit of invective. Lang was finally readmitted the following year. I don't doubt that he was a source of division in the 1930s, but it was never evident in our conversations.\n\n**KOB:** Why were you looking to learn those things from people like Jack Lang at the age of eighteen?\n\n**PJK:** Because he was an indefatigable warrior, Lang. Indefatigable.\n\nRemember that guy, Bob Haldeman, from the Nixon days? He wrote a book called _The Ends of Power_. This phrase, 'the ends of power'\u2014you put the words around your fingers, like strings, and you make them work for you. You've got to know where the bits are and how it all works. So when I became a member of the House of Representatives I made a point of seeking out people in the motor industry, the mining industry, the steel industry, some of the older people who'd built these industries. I was essentially sucking experience from them. Experience that was central to building a composite picture of the economy and the power equation.\n\n**KOB:** But why were you interested in learning about power at eighteen?\n\n**PJK:** Because that was the business I had by then determined I wished to be in. It wasn't that I wanted power for power's sake. You have to understand that the obsession in our household was opposition to Menzies. The Split had already happened, so my interest wasn't primarily an obsession about the Left, it was Menzies. He'd collapsed as Prime Minister when the game turned nasty going into the Second World War, but came back after Chifley had set up the postwar economy. My father thought Menzies was a well-dressed conman. My interest in learning about power was because I shared my father's belief in Labor as the natural party of government, and I saw the possibility of great and truly good works and deeds; that there was a better formula, that you could cut through the conservative orthodoxy in Australia and arrive at something much better.\n\nBut the arraignment of power requires organisation. That's why I spent all that time with Jack Lang and others soaking up the history. That's why I spent a lot of time collecting and reading the _Labor Daily Year Book_. _Labor Daily_ was the party's paper through the 1930s, through the Depression, and they used to have a year book that would have every little detail about the labour movement. For example, it would have the East Sydney Federal Electorate Council with all the delegates listed. Further down you'd have the Glebe North Branch, with the president's name, the secretary and the postal addresses. Then there'd be the Rubber Workers' Union or the Railways' Union, so the whole labour movement was there. And there would be articles written by the various movers and shakers.\n\nIt took me a lot of years to assemble them; my archive started at about 1928 and covered more than a decade. It was the minutiae of labour history, a chronicle of things like the first pension legislation, with a story on how that came about, or workers' compensation. So when I walked into those Labor conferences as a young man of eighteen or nineteen, I pretty well had the whole background\u2014as much as you can get it\u2014the protocols, all the familial connections, the ethos of the movement, both the unions and the parliamentary party, the histories of the splits, the Lang Labor Party and the federal party, the personalities.\n\nThe best guide to the future is the past, so I used to have a look back. How did the Labor Party develop? Where is the jump from Deakin? What energises the first Labor Government? What distinguishes them? Andrew Fisher's first government. There'd be an article written by King O'Malley for instance, about the Commonwealth Bank in 1912, and you'd file it away in your head.\nREBUILDING THE SOUL\n\nSuperficially, by the time he'd become Treasurer and Australians were becoming more informed about his back story, it wasn't too difficult for Paul Keating's political enemies within his party and without to paint him as the elitist who wore Zegna suits, collected French antique clocks, restored a vintage Mercedes and, horror, listened to classical music. He even once gave the Queen a tongue-in-cheek lecture about the history of a silver gilt collection of antique English dinnerware on the dinner table at the Lodge when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister.\n\nBut it wasn't elitism that drove Keating to start immersing himself in the world of classical music when he was barely in his teens, or plunging into the world of 1790s neoclassicism at fifteen, spending several months' salary on an antique watch, or building his philosophy in life from the aftermath of the French Revolution. It certainly wasn't elitism that excited him about a Sydney blues and soul band called the Ramrods, which drew him into a different world of music, with queues of girls around the corner at the venues. It took him no time at all to establish relationships with the entrepreneurs and record companies.\n\nIt would be wrong to suggest that a working-class kid from Bankstown couldn't be passionate about the high-end arts, but it\n\ncertainly wasn't the norm in his day, and it was still exotic by the time he became Bob Hawke's right-hand man through eight years of a crowded reform agenda, and when he replaced Hawke as Prime Minister. With family and politics, these things were and are Paul Keating's lifeblood. The replenishment of the soul. They are the things, he says, that kept him sane. When the going was tough in those early years slogging through the parish-pump politics and bitter ideological disputes in the back channels of his party, building his career block by block, the arts sustained him.\n\n**PJK:** I can actually remember the first time I noticed classical music. I was out riding a bicycle with a friend of mine from school and we went back to his parents' place, a fibro house in Bass Hill. We parked the bikes, and his father was sitting in his shorts and singlet on the wooden veranda that had a sort of rolled-up canvas blind, and he had a piece of music running. It was a short piano concerto and the rhythms of it and the colour of it got my attention.\n\nI said to my friend, 'Would you mind asking your father if he could put it on again?'\n\nIt was a piano concerto written for an English film in 1941 called the _Warsaw Concerto_ by a British composer, Richard Addinsell, who composed in the manner of Rachmaninoff. And it went for about eight or nine minutes. It was a mini-concerto, but very colourful. It had great tonal qualities, tonal poetry I had not heard before. I was hugely thrilled by this piece of music. It was on the second side of the LP. The first side was Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto, and that's really where I began with classical music, at about twelve or thirteen. It's become one of the most important things in my life.\n\nAll of our minds are wired; the DNA is wired for music. You'll even see it in little infants. They'll dance to a tune, or they'll tap their feet. We're wired for it, and the great composers know how to play with us. They write the compositions to pull you in if you are prepared to go with them, and I found that music, particularly classical music, opens up an enormous vista of an altogether different place, a big promotion to your imagination\u2014a big, big energetic hit to the imagination like electricity to the electric motor, the music energises your brain. It used to give me such a lift and still does.\n\nWhen I was learning the repertoire, I'd bring something home from EMI like Otto Klemperer doing Beethoven's _Fifth Symphony_ , that great granite conducting, and you'd think, 'God, this is fantastic.' I'd play them until the records were scratchy. I've always found with classical music that it puts the normal things of life into a clear context.\n\n**KOB:** I wonder how important the music was to you when you were running that gauntlet of hostility you talked about in the Left-controlled branches when you were campaigning for preselection. Those meetings where you were left standing alone outside, feeling humiliated. You must have felt absolutely drained emotionally by the time you got home late at night to an empty bedroom with a head full of negative thoughts.\n\n**PJK:** I used mostly to put on one piece of music when I'd get in the door. It was Chopin's _Barcarolle_. It's a nice lilting thing. Peaceful. You'd pick up the resonances and you'd be out of it, out of the horror stretch and back into the comfort zone, and then I'd work up to something else. If it was late at night it wouldn't be loud. If it was at the weekend, it'd be louder. On the weekends I'd have on the Wagner overtures, _Rienzi_ or _Tannhauser_ , rebuilding the soul, and then I'd go out to do battle again.\n\nFor the toughness of the battle you had to have a system of replenishment, and for me it was always the music, both classical and popular. It was also histories\u2014reading history. I was very keen about histories.\n\nI wasn't so absorbed by politics that I had no social life. I used to go out to places to hear music and meet up with people and have a drink. I ran across a group of musicians at a hotel in Ashfield in Sydney, and this was the Ramrods. They were fantastic. Of their time, and I'm talking about the early 1960s, they were doing the sort of music you couldn't hear played live in Sydney, what I suppose people would identify today with a Tamla Motown sound or soul. Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Ben E. King, Memphis Slim, plus covers of new stuff that was turning up. Something like 'Please Please Me' from the Beatles was a bit too popular for them. It wasn't quite pure enough.\n\nThey were doing Chuck Berry on 'Route 66' or 'Johnny B. Goode'. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and the so-called skiffle groups, were doing the same things in Liverpool and in London, but very few people were doing this in Sydney. We used to get the music from the United States by mail order. I used to go to the rehearsals, and if we got hold of a new record, I'd get the words down while they were picking up the music, and we'd have another song for the repertoire.\n\nI was fascinated with these guys. They were well able to earn money moonlighting at night but some organisational focus and better venues did help. That is where I had a role. We were encamped in certain hotels for years. They were making much more money at night than they were making in their day jobs, so they became quite well off. It was a scream, really. There'd be two or three hundred metres of people round the corner, girls everywhere of course\u2014girls everywhere\u2014and we'd hoon around. I had the Austin Healey 100\/6, and it was a good time.\n\nOne of the guest groups appearing with the Ramrods was the Bee Gees. We had them on two occasions, and on both occasions they were booed off. Their high falsetto voices attracted a few expletives across the stage, and finally they walked out. They came back for a second go, and the same thing happened again. Because the people were there for that black music, that soul music from America in the 1960s, and the Ramrods used to really belt it out, whereas the Bee Gees by comparison were testing a new idiom.\n\nThe Ramrods started recording with EMI on Parlophone. After 1962 Parlophone was the Beatles' label, and it was very hard to crack. I made a point of getting to know the people at EMI, and through them I'd meet other groups coming through. I used to meet all the rock-n-rollers.\n\nThrough EMI, I met Tom Jones. I was very friendly with him. I used to go to his shows at the Silver Spade in the old Chevron Hotel. He was like a black cat on stage\u2014he had all the moves and he had the big, bluesy, black voice. When he did that first song 'It's Not Unusual' it succeeded because black America went and bought it, thinking he was one of them.\n\nI always loved star power. It gives you that charge, whether it's in a very great tennis player or a great singer. I saw Jones at the Silver Spade when I was 21, that's 48 years ago, and he's still singing around 200 nights a year 48 years later. He's an amazingly gifted performer, and full of fun. I saw a film clip of Tina Turner one day, and someone asked her where she got her moves from, and she said, 'Where we all got them from, Tom Jones.'\n\nTom used to carry round this little card from Frank Sinatra, because they used to do the Sands each year in Las Vegas, and Frank used to say, 'You give the suckers too much Tom, give the suckers too much.'\n\nFrank would turn up for his show, they'd start their acts at the same time, and Frank would finish, get dressed again and then turn up at Tom's performance and he'd still be singing. He told Jones he was the greatest singer of Frank's lifetime, so Tom carried this little plastic case with a card from Sinatra. It said, 'Remember Tom, you are the great one.' So I'd turn up, see him perform, then we'd go and have a dinner in Chinatown or somewhere afterwards.\n\n**KOB:** And you got to know the entrepreneur Robert Stigwood. I get the sense you burrowed into that whole scene, pursued it almost like you were pursuing politics?\n\n**PJK:** I knew Stigwood. I wanted the Ramrods to actually write their own material and try their luck in Britain but they were not up for that. They were very talented musicians but I don't think they really wanted to make that kind of investment. A couple of them had just been married and didn't want to give work up and take the big gamble.\n\n**KOB:** Would that have been a turning point for you? Would you have been prepared to walk away from politics at that stage and gone with them to Europe?\n\n**PJK:** I don't know the answer to that. I could have. It's possible, but I would have liked to have seen how I went with the politics, I think, because this was something I knew and this was where the serious side of my head was. But I could just as easily have failed on that front. I could have lost the preselection for the seat of Blaxland and then what would I have done at 24? I would have had to think well, do I try again or do I do something else? What do I do? Do I take music or go back to the family business, which I could also have done.\n\nOne of the other great things I was able to do in those days was to get entry to the EMI classical library. This was in the days of Walter Legge, the great producer at EMI in Britain. So what they now call the EMI back catalogue was largely produced by him. He was married to the soprano, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and he recorded Callas and Nathan Milstein, the violinist, and the great German conductor, Otto Klemperer. These recordings would come to EMI in Australia with 'factory sample, not for sale' stamped on them, so a gentleman at EMI, Kevin Ritchie, said to me, 'Paul, you're welcome to have any of these you like'. These were the great days of classical music in Europe, and these were the great recordings. So I was pursuing this dual interest in popular music on the one hand and classical music on the other.\n\n**KOB:** The other great personal interest in your life that started in those early years was your passion for antiques. You seem always to have been a collector, almost by instinct, particularly drawn by the neoclassical period, and kind of hand in hand with that, the philosophical thinking of the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. I wonder what that tells us about you.\n\n**PJK:** It's instinctive. The first antique that caught my eye as a young man was a watch. It was the most simple elegant pocket watch, and it had engraved on it 'Eleve de Breguet', student of Breguet, and it turned out that Breguet was the greatest watch-maker of all history. This was made in about 1795 and it cost me about three or four months' salary. I was fifteen and I remember bringing it home. And Dad said, 'What have I raised? And you paid three months' salary for it? They could sell you the town hall clock.' He couldn't believe it, but there it was. I had that compulsion to have it because what's common in all this, and I don't want this to sound trite but it is true, it's a search for what approaches perfect.\n\n**KOB:** How did you know at fifteen that there was any perfection about that watch?\n\n**PJK:** I used to go round to Stanley Lipscombe's shop in Bathurst Street, around the corner from the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney where I worked, and Stanley would give me _Connoisseur_ magazine, and I'd go back and read the stuff and get into it. But I'd always look for what was pure, what was clean\u2014clean to the eye, but resolved. That period, the 1790s particularly, was the period I thought had the greatest resolution.\n\nThe Victorian ones there were mostly gold, but this was gold with a silvered dial with a single minute hand, while the hours were in a little box that came up in numerals. And it was flat like an oyster. A wonderful thing. It was just the sheer cleanliness of it, the purity of its design.\n\nI've maintained that interest all my life. I brought my mother home a clock in my first year at work. It was a German thing. It was of an elegant woman with the pendulum swinging on her outstretched finger. Mum loved that clock. Leo Schofield said to me not long ago, 'You know, I don't know where you and I came from. I came from Brewarrina, you came from Bankstown but we end up in Stanley's shop, we end up searching for the same things all our lives.' Do you know that by Leo's late twenties he and his wife Anne had put together one of the great collections of period clothing. The sophistication. And they bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Victoria.\n\nThere's something about your eyes and ears, and I don't know what it is. But it's like my experience with the _Warsaw Concerto_ , a bell rings in your head. A bell in your head or your eyes pick out something that is great. And what you can't see you go looking for in museums or catalogues. All of these interests of mine had a common link, whether it was architecture, decoration, music or people in public life or political thoughts. When you get on the gold seam, when you start going down those pathways, the revelations are huge. You are forever searching for the ideal or what is near ideal.\n\n**KOB:** What was it philosophically that drew you to that brief period in history from the French Revolution, and how did you apply that in your working life?\n\n**PJK:** It's the beginning of the modern political age, when the French National Convention decided to abolish the privileges for the First and Second Estates, to give greater freedom to the Third Estate\u2014the people. Letting any French citizen hold the highest positions in the land. This essentially underwrote modern Europe, the decline of the monarchies, that of absolutism, feudalism and the power of the church. It was also a driving force of the American Revolution. The French Revolution came down like Damocles's sword on the contemporary world, sheering off all that was ancient and expendable, exalting all that was modern. But it was all powered by the Enlightenment.\n\nThe Enlightenment brought with it one commanding idea\u2014that we all arrive in this world with an equal capacity to reason. This may not seem remarkable today but in feudal Europe a person's place and capacity was viewed as a product of their culture and standing\u2014the old historicist idea that one's reasoning was a product of one's background.\n\nSo, it didn't take long before the Enlightenment precept that each of us has an equal capacity to reason turned into a demand for equal rights. And these rights brought further demands for natural laws, the things that Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu proselytised over.\n\nA little historic standback helps here. It should be remembered that the Renaissance with its great flowering of art was conducted within the aegis and philosophy of the Catholic Church. Alberti, Michelangelo and Bernini were all deeply religious. But two centuries later the privileges of the aristocracy and the corruption of the church worked to bring the whole order into disrepute. By the second half of the eighteenth century the social task was to establish a new moral order, a secular one, governed by natural laws\u2014laws of utility that also gave individuals inalienable rights, not the old ones conferred by privilege.\n\nOne needn't have been a social philosopher to pick the outcome. From this combustible vapour the French Revolution exploded, invoking on its path all the virtues and stoic classicism of republican Rome.\n\nThe combustion really brought on two revolutions: the American Revolution and the French Revolution, both of which underwrite the modern political age, the one we live in today.\n\nThis is primarily where my long interest in the Enlightenment and neoclassicism comes from and why I have always been interested in it.\n\nThe art of revolutionary France gave expression to the new secular morality by symbolic reference to the art of ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. It rejected what it saw as the frivolity of the Rococo, the trappings of the aristocracy, pictures by the likes of Boucher and Fragonard or interiors of the kind promoted by Madame Pompadour.\n\nIt's not understood today but in the days before newspapers and public media, political and philosophical ideas were in very large measure transmitted by art. This is why the moralising history pictures by the likes of Jacques-Louis David, such as his _Oath of the Horatii_ , were so powerful as an inspiration in the lead-up to the Revolution. The father drawing an oath from the three centurion sons to do their civic duty while the mother and sisters wept.\n\nThis decorative and moral grandeur went hand in hand with purity of form, with the sobriety of line and rigour of thought. And, in my own way, I sought to apply this kind of thinking to the big public issues of my time\u2014clean, long lines of logic with minimal decoration. That's what I always hoped for. So, the core of my interest was in the revolutionary and republican years of France and not of Bonaparte's empire period that followed a decade later, notwithstanding that some cartoonists liked to dress me up as Bonaparte.\n\nBut, if ever there was an Arcadian period, where Arcadian nostrums ruled, where public sodality was uppermost, it was probably just after the Revolution, after Robespierre but before the Empire. Those ten years, 1794 to 1804, marked the beginning of the modern world. It has certainly had my attention and informed much of my outlook.\n\n**KOB:** Yet you were dealing yourself into the game of democracy, and democracy is the practice of the deeply imperfect. The concept of democracy might be great but the practice of democracy isn't, so you spent your life searching for perfection as a politician in what is a fundamentally imperfect art.\n\n**PJK:** To make significant change, you have to have a revolutionary phase, and the reconstruction of the Australian economy was a revolutionary idea. You have to have an anchor, a notion of what an ideal might resemble. With the ideal in mind, we approach the problems of change but along revolutionary pathways.\n\nI love the straight line of logic, Kerry. Love the long, straight lines. I used to say to the Cabinet, 'We do not cut corners. We're always going to try to get the best we can. Keep the logic with us.' There is no such thing as the ideal, and you would be foolish to try to replicate it, whatever you think it is, but it's a reasonable guide to what you should be doing.\n\n**KOB:** Do you think looking back that some of the manifestations of your interest in neoclassicism were used against you, or seen as a negative for you politically, that there were people out there who might never accept that these were the interests of a working-class Labor politician?\n\n**PJK:** There's no doubt quite a few people may have thought that, but there's another way of looking at it. I have always thought the arts were central to a country, central to a society, holding up a mirror to itself, celebrating itself, and anyone who's had an emotional experience with the arts has that connection. If you haven't had that emotional experience you never quite understand that.\n\nSo I had that, but at the same time I had the working-class mind, the working-class vernacular. In politics, I could tell you what was in the opinion polls before they turned up. I worked in the Sydney County Council for the first six years of my working life among fitters and turners and labourers, and the life was so raw and ribald. Believe me, you wouldn't hear any of that in a university. I carried that with me for life.\n\nBob Hawke used to often say to me, 'Oh, you know you should get out and meet the public.' Bob went from university to Oxford and then was shoehorned into the ACTU. And I'm down here, starting at fifteen, as raw as it can possibly be, and spending a very large part of my time there, and then later as a trade union official to my mid-twenties. I had the whole mindset of working Australia pretty much off pat. Once you are inoculated with the real world there is no antidote. It's always in your bloodstream.\nTHE BATTLE FOR BLAXLAND\n\nHuman nature may be the same across any field of endeavour, but there are some fundamentals that set politics apart from other careers. One of them is that for the individual pursuing his or her hopes and ambitions, politics is a long-term investment that has to be carefully planned but that can unravel in a minute. You can recover from a few bad games on the football field, a few ordinary concerts as a performer, or even a few howlers climbing the business ladder, but one serious error of judgement as a politician can bring years of painstaking work undone. It could be something completely outside your own control like an electoral redistribution that suddenly robs you of a seat, and a place in the parliament. In that regard, it's a tough and unpredictable gig.\n\nPaul Keating learned that lesson early. In 1965, at the wise old age of 21, with a flying squad of supporters on the Right within the ranks of Labor's Youth Council like Laurie Brereton and Leo McLeay, and practical support from his father Matt and old Labor stalwarts in the local branches, Keating began his push for Canberra. His target was the safe Labor seat of Banks, the family heartland. It was Right-dominated and the long-term member, Eric Costa, was quietly planning to retire after the 1966 election\u2014an election, incidentally, in which Menzies' successor as Liberal leader, Harold Holt, had a landslide win. It was also Arthur Calwell's third election loss as Labor leader, and Gough Whitlam stepped into his shoes soon after.\n\nThis was the period where the young Keating was working to cement his place as a front-runner for preselection in Banks, not just relying on old branch loyalties to his father, but building a new base of younger members, and keeping them coming to meetings\u2014the crucial ones at least. Then came the redistribution in 1968 that nearly brought his whole plan undone. He could have kept his push for Banks going but the heart of his power base, the Central Bankstown branch, was now in the seat of Blaxland, and he'd have to knock over a veteran sitting member in Eli Harrison, and, more formidably, a number of Left-dominated branches that had been moved into Blaxland from the neighbouring electorate of Reid. In fact the new Blaxland was an amalgam of branches from four seats, and Keating's political career could have been stillborn. It's how he went about meeting that challenge, to the extent of building his own secure ballot boxes for the preselection vote, and then borrowing from John F. Kennedy on the other side of the world to shape his campaign in 1969, that I was interested in, for the glimpses it showed of the man to come.\n\n**PJK:** The Blaxland I inherited in 1968 was an equal construct of four earlier electorates: a little piece of old Reid, a little piece of Grayndler, a piece of old Blaxland and a piece of Banks. So the happy hunting ground I had in Banks suddenly changed, and I pick up these branches on the Left who, in the main, hated the sight of me. It nearly did me in because I was from the Right of the party. The Left was building up branches, packing in new members to beat me, and I was doing the same. In the end I had this huge retinue of people. I would have to bring them to branch meetings, feed them cups of tea and scones or make sure other people came and picked them up. This was the way preselection ballots were fought in those days.\n\nThat's the period I used to do fourteen or fifteen meetings a month. Every month, I'd go to the lot. The car would almost run without directions. You'd go from one meeting to the other, and if you were then going to a State Electorate Council or Federal Electorate Council, you'd pick up the other right-wing delegates in case they didn't turn up. There was always a big effort going on between the Right and the Left to get the numbers in the SEC and the FEC to appoint delegates to the State Conference. People would fight over getting one place at the State Conference.\n\n**KOB:** You had an E-type Jaguar during this period. Did you actually drive the E-type to branch meetings?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I used to. In fact it met a very sticky end outside a Labor Party State Conference in the Sydney Town Hall. One of my opponents had come out during the conference and poured brake fluid all over it. Brake fluid was a mineral oil and it went straight through paint into metal, and when you touched it, the paint came off on your fingers. That was the last time I ever took a car to a State Conference. The very last time.\n\n**KOB:** When you were battling the Left in the preselection process, it's always intrigued me how you define the difference between legitimate recruitment and questionable branch-stacking.\n\n**PJK:** It's a matter of whether the people have an interest in being in the party, and staying. The test of branch-stacking versus people who are coming as legitimate members is whether they stay, and most of the people who joined the party in my day stayed through their lives. Before the preselection I had the seat of Banks by the throat, but all of a sudden I'm in a new electorate and, and the Left were absolutely determined to knock me off. As it turned out I not only won Blaxland but with my organisation, the Right won the seat of Banks with Vince Martin, who was working in the tax office at the time. So he became the member for Banks in 1969 and I became the member for Blaxland. The Left hated it. The top area of my seat was called the red belt. You don't need any knowledge of geography to work out what that was about.\n\n**KOB:** It was certainly a very heated battle, and the Left had selected quite a well-credentialed candidate, a young academic economist named Bill Junor. When it came to the vote, there was a dispute about whether a branch where the votes were crucial to you should actually have been counted in a different electorate.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, they were crucial. In fact it was Rafferty's rules. The Returning Officer was an old leftie called Murt O'Brien, and they used to vote in shoeboxes, a piece of Sellotape around them, and a slit in the top. And I'm thinking, 'There's five years of my life in these boxes,' so I had thirteen or fourteen wooden boxes made, with locks. This became a big dispute, that I was implying that they were dishonest.\n\nIn the end, on the night I won my preselection, Murt O'Brien wouldn't count the last branch, so we had to get the State Returning Officer Lindsay North out of bed to intervene. He lived in Haberfield and he came over with his trousers pulled on over his pyjamas. You could see the pyjamas underneath. Laurie Brereton was with me standing guard. Laurie rang Gough Whitlam, and it was Gough who got Lindsay out of bed.\n\nLindsay walks in and says, 'What's going on here, Murt? I'll take those boxes.' So he picks up the thirteen locked boxes and puts them in his car and drives off. They were later opened at head office, where all of the ballots were counted\u2014including the ones Murt O'Brien wouldn't include. Without that trip, I wouldn't have had the seat of Blaxland.\n\nThis was all part of the battle for control of the party between Left and Right. The national fight was running perpetually. The Left had control of the party machine federally, and Whitlam had only a few votes up his sleeve as federal parliamentary leader over his rival Jim Cairns who was on the Left. So Gough was keen to see Vince Martin and me preselected because we would represent another two votes for him.\n\nI had a majority of votes in those boxes, including the branch that was in dispute. The Left had run this phoney appeal, and even though the appeal had been heard and knocked over by the State Executive, Murt O'Brien as Returning Office was going to take action on the night to leave the votes out of the count in order to declare Bill Junor from the Left the provisional winner.\n\nThe Left-controlled National Executive would then have been called upon, manipulated to confirm Junor as winner. The Left was completely unscrupulous.\n\n**KOB:** So you're 24 and you've won preselection for one of the safest seats in the country and Gough Whitlam is the new leader of the Labor Party. In many ways it seems to me you two were chalk and cheese\u2014he was highly educated, had an upper middle-class background and was in his fifties\u2014but he must have been impressed with what you'd pulled off.\n\n**PJK:** I'd like to think that but I don't think he was terribly. Gough was a guy with a legal background who saw public life in certain protocols. His father was Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth. By that stage more people were coming into the party with university degrees, and I think he thought that I was just another factional warrior from New South Wales who'd busted through. I was going to vote for him, so that was a tick, but I was part of the Catholic Right like Frank Stewart in the neighbouring electorate who was another of his supporters, whom Gough liked but did not regard as a thinker.\n\n**KOB:** So you saw him as something of a silvertail, and maybe he saw you as somebody he had to suffer on the way through.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I saw him as something of a silvertail, and although he saved the Labor Party with the internal reforms he forced through, I belonged to a wholly different school of politics. I was arriving at a point in time where I wanted to see the Labor Party bridge the gap between capital and Labor, something I thought the Whitlam school of leadership would never do.\n\n**KOB:** If I can reprise your early political life up to this point: you've essentially studied life at your father's knee as he transformed himself from boilermaker to running his own quite successful small- to medium-sized business. You're seeing men who are to become future captains of industry like Sir Tristan Antico passing through his kitchen, you're hearing the conversations.\n\nAt the same time, you're exposed to Labor history from the indefatigable warrior, Jack Lang. So, is the young Paul Keating putting the first pieces of the economic puzzle, the political and economic puzzle together, that were to become your future guiding principles?\n\n**PJK:** That's what I was doing. I thought that the so-called socialisation objective, that is, the government managing the highpoints of the economy like, for instance, the Chifley attempt at the nationalisation of banks, the idea that we could have a sort of a quasi-centrally planned economy run in part by a group of state-owned enterprises, was just old thinking\u2014old, old thinking. The future belonged to a new breed of Australians who had the ability to use capital and employ people, with the primary growth in the economy coming from the private economy, not the public economy.\n\n**KOB:** Even you must find it fascinating to contemplate the story of two parallel lives, Paul Keating and John Howard. Two boys growing up not far from each other, both from fairly humble origins, both inspired by Churchill as kids, both becoming Prime Minister one after the other, but political enemies, polar opposites.\n\n**PJK:** Well, I have always said Churchill would have disowned Howard. He would have regarded him as a rank conservative, too safe and too timid. I mean, Churchill was an adventurer and, when it mattered, a lion.\n\n**KOB:** Howard was inspired by Menzies and you didn't like Menzies as Howard mightn't have liked your Labor heroes either, but the fact is you both came from similar backgrounds but you went in different political directions. That I find interesting.\n\n**PJK:** I think this gets down to the question of enlargement. To enlarge a country like Australia, you have to bring together the motor forces and in my view, that had to be markets, not business.\n\nThe Liberals were always interested in business bodies, cabals, monopolies, duopolies. I wasn't. I was interested in markets, not business. I had faith in markets, in competition. But I wanted that faith in markets to have the movement of markets carry labour in its locomotion. L-A-B-O-U-R, labour.\n\nIn other words, putting together an entirely new amalgam, a sort of consensus. It turned out many years later in 1983 Bob Hawke was trying to do that with his Economic Summit, but I was thinking of it in a much more primal way: robust markets, open banking competition, open financial markets, open product markets, and ultimately a flexible labour market.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard recalls in his autobiography how you once derided him as the bowser boy from Canterbury because his dad ran a suburban petrol station. He said that was a badge of honour for him.\n\n**PJK:** I was making the point in response to something that was said from the other side in the Parliament.\n\nI said, 'Look, we employed a hundred people or more in my family business.' I said, 'I could have been in the Junior Chamber of Commerce, I could have been over there with you. But you think you are there to run the rest of us because you were in small business; alone as the bowser boy in Earlwood.'\n\nI said, 'Doesn't it strike you there's something strange about this?'\n\n**KOB:** And yet, Howard saw that as one of the things that worked against you in the eyes of many Australians. He painted that as you deriding small business, and the people who constituted small business, like his father.\n\n**PJK:** Well, my point was referring to the presumption that the Liberal Party believes it's the born-to-rule squad, born to run the rest of us. In his case, from the bowser at Earlwood. I was simply making the point my family was employing up to a hundred people. We could just as easily have made a stronger claim to run the country.\n\n**KOB:** I'm interested that you took a leaf out of John F. Kennedy's book in your first campaign in 1969, because, again, it's an insight into how you did things in those days. You didn't go to the Labor Party head office for instruction\u2014you looked instead at how Kennedy had run his presidential campaign in America in 1960.\n\n**PJK:** I stole all his graphics. I took all the campaign paraphernalia straight from the Democratic Party in 1960 and used it in 1969. The old way was to do what we called 'snipes'. A snipe is an advertisement you glued to a telegraph pole. I thought that was second-rate, and a bad look. After it was all over, no one ever took them down, and they became counterproductive.\n\nSo I did the first storyboard-sized advertising in Australia, a metre-and-a-half by two-thirds of a metre, on waterproof masonite that we silkscreen-printed. I was the first to do the silkscreen printing of my photograph with iridescent green lettering on a blue background. 'Kennedy for President' became 'Keating for Blaxland'. We put 300 of them up in the electorate so you couldn't go anywhere in Blaxland without seeing one.\n\nThen I bought a school bus from the town of Merriwa, north-west of Newcastle, because one of my great worries was that the Left would go on strike and not work in the campaign. So I bought this bus and spray-painted it white. I had to get a truck driver's licence for the bus and an audio system. I then attached signs: 'Keating for Blaxland.'\n\nIn fact, when I'd won the seat of Blaxland, I switched the signs over and a few weeks later I was driving around Randwick for Laurie Brereton. It had 'Brereton for Randwick' on the same bus, and I'm driving around as the new federal member for Blaxland with the microphone, going around the streets of Randwick proselytising for Brereton in the NSW election. This was the election where I think John Howard was handing out Liberal leaflets at Randwick Middle School.\nTHE BOY FROM BANKSTOWN GOES TO CANBERRA\n\nIn the same way that the 1949 election was a dramatic turning point in postwar Australian politics, so was 1969. In the same way that a new generation of Liberals arrived in Canberra under the rejuvenated leadership of Bob Menzies in his sweeping victory of 1949, so twenty years later it was a new generation of Labor politicians under their charismatic new leader, Edward Gough Whitlam.\n\nMenzies had retired after sixteen years as Prime Minister, Harold Holt had drowned, and the internal instability that had developed under John Gorton's leadership proved to be very costly for the Liberals at the ballot box. Labor recorded a massive 7.1 per cent swing, picking up seventeen new seats, and Whitlam came within four of claiming government. By far his youngest new backbencher was Paul John Keating. In that same year Bob Hawke became President of the trade union movement's supreme council, the ACTU. He was forty.\n\nWhere the party had been hopelessly divided in terms of both personality and ideology for most of its twenty years in the political wilderness, Whitlam's near victory fanned a new hunger for government in Labor ranks that brought with it a chance of a somewhat more united parliamentary party, in the fervent hope that 1972 would be their time. The 1969 result was all the more remarkable given that every state at the time had either Liberal or Country Party governments.\n\nEven so, the old hatreds within Labor weren't about to die overnight. When Keating arrived for the first parliamentary sitting of 1970, that fact was soon made obvious to him, and the presence of four DLP senators in the upper house\u2014five after the 1970 half-Senate election\u2014was a constant reminder of the price Labor was still paying for the Split.\n\nApart from the negatives of incumbency for the Liberals, there were two keys to Labor's claims to office. One was its charismatic leader's determination to drag his party into the modern world with policy relevance across a broad front, and the other was that to gain that relevance he had to reform its hopelessly strangled internal processes, in which a virtual handful of unelected party officials could dictate policy to its elected members, including the would-be Prime Minister\u2014the so-called 'faceless men' syndrome.\n\nThose reforms were to continue through Paul Keating's first term, and although Labor's improved facade of unity was to develop a few cracks as Whitlam continued to push his more contentious policies through, like support for state aid in education, those cracks were overshadowed by ongoing dissent in the Liberal ranks. In March 1971, after his Defence Minister Malcolm Fraser resigned, accusing him of disloyalty, Gorton effectively ended his own prime ministership when a party-room motion of confidence in his leadership was split 33\u2013all. Gorton then took the extraordinary step of using a casting vote against himself, and although it transpired that Liberal Party rules didn't recognise such a vote, there was no coming back. The new Liberal Prime Minister, Billy McMahon, was to prove a disaster.\n\nTo this day Keating remains somewhat reserved in his embrace of Whitlam's place in the pantheon of Labor heroes, but the old bull and the young bull weren't entirely chalk and cheese. Whitlam's crash-through-or-crash mentality was not that far removed from Keating's own instincts for toughness in the face of opposition, and the boy from Bankstown was also later to dominate Parliament with the same irreverent humour but abrasive style as Whitlam did right through his leadership. And both were driven by policy reform. The fundamental difference lay in economic policy, where Old Labor was still steeped in its centralist traditions and the New Labor market economy of Hawke and Keating was yet to emerge, but gestating in young Keating's mind.\n\nThe setting was the old Parliament House, built originally as a temporary dwelling while its early residents argued interminably over where to locate the permanent building. By 1969 it was hopelessly overcrowded, and the more junior MPs had to share offices. Keating shared with another new member, Lionel Bowen, who was new to Canberra but not to politics. Bowen had cut his teeth in both local and state government on Labor's Catholic Right, and his charming affability hid a wily political brain. Just eight years later Bowen was to come within four votes of winning the Labor leadership against Bill Hayden, and later end up as Deputy Prime Minister to Hawke. He was just one of the figures the young Keating assiduously courted on both sides of Labor's ideological divide, but an important one.\n\nThis was all taking place against a background of great national division over Australia's participation in the Vietnam War. In one moratorium against the war in May 1970, an estimated 200,000 people turned out across Australia to march in protest. In Melbourne alone, as many as 100,000 took to the streets. Labor policy was to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam, but its association with the protest movement, including its more vehement members, was a tricky one for Whitlam to manage, and although he appeared at rallies he didn't align himself as passionately as some of his colleagues on Labor's Left, like Jim Cairns. Whitlam took the view that they would only win withdrawal from the war and overturn conscription through the ballot box.\n\nKeating put it more succinctly. When Jim Cairns once chastised him for not wearing a moratorium badge, he told his much more senior colleague, 'I'm not here to protest, Jim. I'm here to be in charge.' We can probably glean from that, that it didn't take Keating long to find his feet in the new environment. In a single decade and not yet 30, he'd come from a clerical job at the Sydney County Council as a young teenager, to an organiser's job in a small trade union representing garbage men, to the nation's capital representing one of the safest seats in the country.\n\n**PJK:** My first impression walking into the Labor caucus of 1969 was that it was hugely divided between the factions, between the Left and the Right, but there was a coming together of the old guard. People like Kim Beazley Senior and Frank Stewart on the Right and Clyde Cameron, Jim Cairns and Tom Uren on the Left, and Frank Crean, who was sort of non-aligned, were coming together to try to capitalise on Whitlam's success in the election and win government next time round. But it was still tribal.\n\nThe day after the swearing-in, I was standing in Kings Hall talking with Kim Beazley Senior. We were leaning over a glass case displaying a copy of the Constitution signed by Queen Victoria, when a fat guy who walked like the comic strip character, the little king, came up to me. He had to sort of tip himself backwards to stay upright, and he said, 'You're the young guy from NSW, aren't you?'\n\nI said yes. He said: 'D'ya want a bit of advice?' and I said, 'Oh yeah...' and he said, 'If you want a career in the Labor Party get yourself a tin suit.'\n\nIt was Vince Gair, the DLP leader in the Senate. Beazley chuckled in his own lofty way. This was really code for Gair saying that, in another time, he would have been with us, yet he's looked across at this madcap Labor Party and he thought he'd offer some sage advice. You picked up friends, but it was so institutional, the whole thing.\n\nThe big federal intervention into the Left-dominated state branch of Victoria over state aid happened in 1970, so that was also fought out inside caucus. You would go to the Members' Bar and one group would stand at one end and one group at the other. Some people on the Right were more likely to talk to Liberals before they would talk to people on the Left. They'd sit in the caucus in their particular corner and their cabal and that was it.\n\nIt was an interesting mix. There were a lot of clever new members who came in in 1969, but with the depth of experience in the older guard, some of whom had been there since before 1949. Fred Daly had been a backbencher under Curtin and Chifley. The frustration among these guys was profound after sitting on the Opposition benches for twenty years\u2014some of them had come to believe that they would never win.\n\nBut I think the 1969 result and Gough's reconstruction of the Labor Party in 1970 and 1971 gave the whole party a sense of excitement and anticipation, so by that stage he had all the old players from the various factions supporting him. You could see the factionalism dying down in the interests of winning, but the underlying antipathy was ever present.\n\n**KOB:** Having scored one of the party's safest seats at such a young age you must have attracted attention from the old hands. You already had a reputation for toughness and clearly you're sending out signals that you are a young man in a hurry, right?\n\n**PJK:** You had to be tricky about it, though. You could not be overtly ambitious, seemingly ambitious. What you do is learn to play the game, get to know people, get to judge them, see what they are really made of, what they really think, and try to put coalitions together inside the place. Coming from New South Wales, I was familiar with all the people on the Right of the party from New South Wales and many from the other states.\n\nBut then there were other people I came to like, like Clyde Cameron. Clyde was on the Left, but he was such a character. I liked Clyde, and you know what? When you like someone they know it, and if you like them they generally like you. So I got on well with Clyde.\n\nI got on reasonably well with Jim Cairns, who was a more distant fellow than Clyde. I got on well with Frank Crean. I used to sit on the table in the parliamentary dining room. They used to call themselves the LOGS\u2014Labor's Old Guard Socialists\u2014and Frank was called father. He would sit up the end of the table and order the wine, and you'd say, 'What have we got tonight, Frank?' and he'd say, 'Well, I've got a very nice wine from the Yarra Valley,' and they'd all put their money in.\n\nI'll leave names out but some people were so mean that they wouldn't order a meal because a cup of tea with a bread roll was available for ten cents, so they would just have a cup of tea and the roll. One guy used to say, 'Paul, you don't need that tea, do you? All the pot?' So he wouldn't even pay the ten cents. He was famous for it.\n\nWe had another table where Kim Beazley Senior sat at the head. His nickname was the Student Prince because he used to do degrees without actually attending the courses. He used to get the lectures and sit the exams. He'd sit up there, thinking, and you would be in the middle of lunch, and he'd suddenly say, 'George III in 1762...' and he'd go on with a monologue about George III or some other matter.\n\nIt'd be so interesting, and at the end we'd say, 'Well, thanks for that, Kim.'\n\nHe'd say that's okay. Kim Senior used to say to me, 'You should do what I do. Don't do the courses, just get the books and sit the exams.'\n\nI could have done that, but I had many things to learn. I think if I had my time over I would have probably done a degree in philosophy, the history of human thought. But I was already reading widely, doing my own degree to my own curriculum.\n\nI shared a room with Lionel Bowen. I was 25 and he was 48, an experienced bloke who had been in state and local government. He was a solicitor and a person marked out for the ministry who knew a lot. He was a complete loner but very canny. I used to listen to him talk and think, 'God, there's a lot I don't know.'\n\nThen you'd run into other clever people like Joe Berinson, who came from Western Australia in 1969, or even people you'd simply call foot soldiers in the game, like Len Keogh or Manfred Cross from Queensland. They just knew a lot, and I thought, 'God, I thought I knew a bit but now I don't know what I know.'\n\nYou'd go to caucus committee meetings and they'd be full of specialists on foreign affairs, specialists on Aboriginal affairs, and everyone went to the economics committee. This was a much higher level of debate than I'd seen in the branch or State Conference structure. For instance, I used to go to the Aboriginal Affairs Committee, chaired by Les Johnston, another chap from the Left who knew a lot, and also attended by Kim Beazley, who was regarded as the intellectual there. There was Gordon Bryant and a whole lot of other people, and they'd all have stories and positions. At that stage, I didn't have the stories or the positions.\n\nI spent a lot of time reading on economics and the fact that we'd been in a long period of postwar growth, which I thought was probably going to change. I was already interested in what they call Kondratiev waves, the long waves of economic growth. I'd picked that up along the way. There was a Russian economist called Nikolai Kondratiev, who believed that economic growth is run by innovation. First you get the innovation, then the infrastructure. For instance, electric light brings the power station, the substation, the cable reticulations. Then it brings heating, radios, air-conditioning. In other words, economic growth is fostered by the innovations of the era and these long innovative waves mostly lasted for 25 years. This wave had begun in 1947 so by 1972 or thereabouts, it was prone to end, particularly if the economy was inflation-prone.\n\nI always regarded inflation as the monkey on everybody's back\u2014the most corrosive thing in the economy. It reduced people's savings, mostly the working class. It reduced the value of their savings and put enormous mortgages on their backs. People with assets did well from inflation but people without them did very badly. What it mainly did was to tear away at the country's competitiveness. I always regarded inflation as something that, as a party, we had to be able to fix and control.\n\n**KOB:** The veteran press gallery journalist Alan Ramsey once compared you in your early years in Parliament to a fictional Hollywood character named Sammy Glick, full of raw intelligence and hungry ambition. And Ramsey wrote that you had 'a hide as thick as an elephant, that you weren't in the place five minutes before you were running in caucus ballots, twisting arms, organising numbers, and generally operating like a political Sammy Glick who'd pick your pockets while he wheedled your vote'.\n\n**PJK:** Well, that's probably a fair enough description of what I was up to in those days. Politeness gets you everywhere, and a bit of charm has its place, and recognising the value in other people. They may not be your people but they all brought something. I had friends on the Left whom I regarded well; people who mattered, so after a while I used to try and break down the divisions. After a while you start to develop a group of unlikely friends who might one day support you in an argument or vote for you in a ballot. You might get two or three here, two there, one there. But all the time I was always trying to soak stuff up. Whitlam said to me one day, 'You seem to have a fascination for all these old men like Connor,' and I said, 'That's because I'm trying to suck experience from them\u2014congealed wisdom.'\n\n**KOB:** Rex Connor was something of a stubborn old loner like Jack Lang. Tell me what it was about Connor that appealed to you.\n\n**PJK:** He was interested in the wealth machinery of the country. Rex and I didn't share a common view about government ownership of what I would otherwise regard as private assets like national pipelines, but he saw the future for Australia as a big exporter of natural gas and iron ore and coking coal\u2014in other words, the very staples we rely on today. This was 40 years ago. When you went to that caucus, people were interested in things like the Vietnam War, they were interested in Aboriginal affairs, social security, but you wouldn't find anyone interested in minerals and energy, hardly anyone. So he was interested in those kinds of industries and he was also interested in the economic debate. So he was a very good thinker and a good interlocutor for me. Compared to most of the people fighting out the ideological party positions, he always seemed to me to have a larger vision of the place. He was also a great interpreter of the mid-century Labor Party mood in New South Wales, from the 1950s to the 1970s. He'd been a member of the State Parliament. So he and I really got on well.\n\nI also used to arrange meetings with people outside Parliament who offered what I'd call distilled wisdom. For instance, I arranged to meet Sir Laurence Hartnett, who was the founding managing director of General Motors Holden, to give me real insights about the car industry. He built the first Holden. He was a chairman of the State Library of Victoria so I met him there a couple of times. He was also involved with the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, which built the Wirraway military training plane at Fishermen's Bend in Victoria in the Second World War, so I went to the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation to learn about the production of aircraft. And also to Hawker de Havilland in Bankstown, where a famous aviator from the Second World War with a famous name, Rollo Kingsford-Smith, was the managing director.\n\nI always felt that Australia had to have a defence capacity. We could never be left like we were in 1942, trying to bring in at the last minute some Hawker Hurricanes or Spitfires from somewhere because we had nothing. You had to have capacity to build these things, so I wanted to learn about the aircraft industry, about defence procurement, about motor cars, about the manufacturing industry generally.\n\nI got to know Ian McLennan, the Chief Executive at BHP. I was very interested in the development of Bass Strait, East Gippsland oil and gas, and his decision to go offshore. What I was doing was hearing it from the masters. If you want to learn something, go to the masters. The thing about people at the end of their careers, mostly they will give you an honest summation of what they found and encapsulate it for you. You're getting really distilled ideas from them, so I used to try and then make sense of it all. Are the tariffs too high? Are we just killing the place by ring-fencing it? I was trying to work out the codes, and trying to reach the people I thought could teach me things.\n\nI also had general histories running in my head. I was fascinated by two things: the French Revolution, as I have said, and the lead-up to the First World War. I was reading the American historian Barbara Tuchman's _The Proud Tower_ , and later in life, books by people like Robert Massie, _Dreadnought_ , the history of the developing antipathy between Germany and Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century. I was especially interested in the fall of the Weimar Republic, of how a Labour Government could not hold power and grasp the massive change wrought by the Depression, including the impact of the US financial markets on Europe\u2014reflecting itself in German inflation and unemployment. The decline of Chancellor Bruning's government and then the rise of Hitler. So I had these interests: the French Revolution, the First World War, Second World War, Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s and finally Hitler.\n\n**KOB:** Through those early years, I know you were also tapping into the senior levels of the bureaucracy, and the senior ranks of the press gallery. Was that all part of the same process, just like you were picking the brains of older Labor people like Rex Connor?\n\n**PJK:** I was always trying to work out where the balance of power lay in the bureaucracy. Fundamentally, I think I had a kind of executive mind. I was working out how to grab hold of the thing and make it work for you. I was working out the relationship between the Treasury and the other departments, how the Cabinet worked, who was good and who wasn't. I also got friendly with Sir John Bunting, who was Secretary to the Prime Minister's Department. I met him at the Commonwealth Club, of all places. He used to meet there every Friday with a small group of the most senior public servants, and I used to stay at the Commonwealth Club occasionally. So I tried to piece together this wide network of people, working out how the place all knitted together. I think Bunting took it as a compliment. He said to me one day, 'You're one of the very few backbench people who ever sought me out.'\n\n**KOB:** I'm surprised he gave you the time of day.\n\n**PJK:** He used to tell me interesting things. He said to me once, 'Poor Harold Holt. When he was Treasurer, he used to die a thousand deaths every day at Question Time. He'd go in, he'd hang onto his files like a safety jacket, and he'd be in a lather of sweat just getting across the issues.'\n\nThis was the kind of stuff that would inform you. In the days of the Liberals, the bureaucracy ran the government. I mean, the ministers had the white cars\u2014actually in those days they were black cars\u2014they had their nominal positions, and there was an operative Cabinet, but nothing like changing the policy as in the Hawke years or my years, nothing like it.\n\nWhat I learned from Sir John Bunting was that what was _de rigueur_ was incrementalism: millimetre movements at a time because there was no political authority, so the bureaucracy could only pinch little movement at a time. When the senior officers met at the Commonwealth Club every Friday night\u2014that's the Head of Treasury, Prime Minister's, Defence and so on\u2014they were swapping yarns but it was really about how they moved the system along. There was no active political authority in the long years of the Menzies torpor. No political authority for change.\n\nI'll tell you a little story. Jim Cairns came up to me once at the men's urinal in the old Parliament House and he said, 'Paul, I'm very disappointed you're not wearing your moratorium badge'. This is the moratorium on the Vietnam War.\n\nI said, 'Well, look Jim, that's the difference between you and me. I'm not here to protest, I'm here to be in charge. I want to run the place. I'm not going to protest to this government. This government is not worthy enough to be called a government.' And if you want to run the place you've got to work out how all the organs function. I did this particularly in the period of the Whitlam Government, I made myself busy going around the bureaucracy working out where all the bits were.\n\n**KOB:** So why were you picking the brains of journalists in the press gallery? What was that about?\n\n**PJK:** Well, I used to go up to the _Financial Review_ bureau and chat with Max Walsh and Fred Brenchley in the days when you had to walk over the old Parliament House roof to get to their offices. They were relatively young people, but they had the ear of Treasury and the rest of the bureaucracy, and often the Cabinet. They would generally have the drumbeat on what was happening inside the Coalition, and when we won government they were covering the Whitlam Government. So they were getting stuff from inside the government and I was tapping into their sources and their views.\n\n**KOB:** You were using Max Walsh in particular, and Brenchley, to take you through the minutiae of how the budget papers came together.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, Budget Statement Two\u2014what to look for, how to read it, what it was really saying, comparing it with the previous year, see what the Treasury was saying, see the movements. That was 1969 to 1972. Gough, of course, had the squeeze on the Coalition for most of that term.\n\nThere are things I'll never forget. I remember John Gorton voting against himself in his party room and handing the prime ministership to Billy McMahon, then coming into the Parliament to announce it, though taking the deputy prime ministership and the Defence Ministry, thereby guaranteeing ongoing instability. In that period I was conscious that the Coalition was going down, that the likelihood of Whitlam winning was rising, and that my chance of becoming a minister was a prospect, though slim. I had to muster all the skills I could, get around the caucus and establish a base for whenever I could put my hand up. That was the drift up to 1972.\nTHRILLS AND SPILLS\n\nAmerican-style political campaigning came to Australia in 1972. It was this country's first presidential campaign, which was exactly the way Labor strategists wanted it. It was also the first time the power of television was fully exploited to win an election. The contrast couldn't have been greater: the little bald guy with big ears and quavering voice, and the tall, silver-haired, good-looking guy with charisma to burn. Gough Whitlam was probably the first political leader in Australia to use a blow-wave to help get him across the line.\n\nEverything that could go wrong for Billy McMahon did go wrong, right down to the portable autocue that kept breaking down at town hall meetings, with dreadful consequences. It fed perfectly into Labor's 'It's Time' slogan and the sense of a government in terminal decline. At one point Party Secretary Mick Young warned Whitlam of the risk that half the electorate had started to feel sorry for McMahon.\n\nEven so, it underscores the innate conservatism of the Australian electorate that even with a Prime Minister who had become a laughing stock, a Coalition majority that was paper-thin, and a media in which even Rupert Murdoch's papers had backed Whitlam, Labor still went into government with a cushion of only nine seats and a hostile Senate. There wasn't much room for trial and error, particularly given the ambitious size of Whitlam's policy program. Up to that point, Labor had only governed the nation for seventeen of the 71 years since Federation.\n\nThere are three keys to understanding what went wrong in the three short years before Labor was back in opposition. One was the 1974 global oil crisis that pushed much of the world into recession. Another was that Labor faced one of the most obstructive Senates in history. The third and most important element was the legacy of 23 years in opposition\u2014that is, the volatile mixture of frustration and bitterness, excitement and expectation, and dangerous inexperience. This might not have mattered quite so much if the Whitlam policy program hadn't been so all encompassing, but for Gough Whitlam, it was a program written in blood, from which he would not take a backward step, no matter the political or economic circumstances. Paul Keating would identify a fourth element to their downfall: the serious lack of economic competence around the Cabinet table, except for Bill Hayden and a handful of others.\n\nAs it turned out, the first two weeks were a powerful portent of what was to come, and of the force of Whitlam's personality on his government. After advice from the Chief Electoral Officer that while Labor had clearly won, the outcome in a number of closely contested seats might not be known until 15 December, Whitlam was so impatient to get 'The Program' going that he persuaded the Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck to swear in Whitlam and his loyal deputy, Lance Barnard, as a two-man government. On the Tuesday after election day Whitlam gave himself thirteen of the 27 portfolios, and over the next two weeks until the full ministry was announced, implemented a whirlwind array of policy decisions, ranging from the repeal of conscription, the recognition of China, reducing fares on the government's domestic airline TAA, taking the first steps to grant Aboriginal land rights down to the release of the previously censored film _Portnoy's Complaint_ and initiating moves to scrap the honours list.\n\nThe serious pursuit of representative politics is undoubtedly one of the toughest games around. Put yourself in the shoes of one of Whitlam's senior shadow ministers, say, Frank Crean or Kim Beazley Senior, who had earned their stripes through all of Labor's trials and tribulations for more than twenty years, all the exhausting and debilitating internal dogfights and the humiliating election defeats. Just as the big payoff and their time in the sun arrives\u2014their chance to pursue their policy dreams\u2014along comes a young upstart called Paul Keating, promising but still an upstart, barely three years in Parliament and no doubt still a kid in their eyes, and he dares to put his hand up for the first Whitlam Ministry.\n\nNot only that, he actually runs in the first ballot for the unofficial inner Cabinet, in essence saying that he regards himself as better than at least one of them. That's certainly how he thought some of those senior shadow ministers might regard it. In the end, the 28-year-old came very close to serving in that first ministry. The writing was clearly on the wall that he would figure large in Labor's future, but there were some sharp political lessons to be learned along the way.\n\n**PJK:** I'll never forget the 1972 election. I went to the big policy launch in Blacktown. There were nearly 2000 people there. We had the momentum rolling our way by that stage. McMahon attacked his own ministry in the middle of the campaign, so we thought we were going to be over the line and, as it turned out, we were. The return of Labor after 23 years was very exciting in the country and in the party. It submerged a lot of the Left\u2013Right dichotomy that had prevailed earlier. Frank Crean was Treasurer, Clyde Cameron was Labour Minister and Bill Hayden had Social Security charged with bringing in Medibank as a universal health scheme.\n\nLooking back, Gough's great legacy is that he saved the Labor Party being marginalised electorally. The destruction of the Socialist Left in Victoria, the Hartley faction, opened up the party to the light of day in a policy sense, and brought people like John Button, John Cain, Michael Duffy and Barry Jones into the mainstream of the Victorian branch. Gough saved the party electorally\u2014a renewal of the kind Tony Blair did for the Labour Party in Britain.\n\nIn policy terms, there were the big foreign policy initiatives: the recognition of China, withdrawal from Vietnam. In domestic policy, Medibank, multiculturalism, greater equality in education, divorce law reform, urban planning and electoral reform. They became big turning points in this country's history.\n\nWhat Gough or his ministry didn't have was knowledge of the wealth management machinery, how the economy operated. It was only later when it became apparent that there was really no link to the business community, that no one had any real idea about how the economy functioned, apart from Hayden, who only became Treasurer in the latter period of the government.\n\nGough only had a shadow ministry of thirteen but there was going to be a full ministry of 27 in government. Gough decided the election would take place in two caucus ballots, the inner thirteen in the morning and the remaining fourteen in the afternoon. I couldn't decide whether to declare my hand and run against the established front-runners from the shadow ministry in the first ballot, because by doing so I was saying to one of the thirteen, I should be there instead.\n\nI asked Rex Connor what he thought, and he said, 'Well, it's a simple rule. If you want to get into the ministry, you run.'\n\nI thought, 'Well, let's go back to first principles here. Do you want to be a minister in this government? Yes. Do you have the courage of your convictions? I hope so.' So I threw my hat in the ring for the first thirteen, and I came sixteenth in the field.\n\nI've kept a record of the vote\u2014I have the file here. I have how I voted and how everyone else voted. Ratting is hard to do in the Labor Party.\n\nLionel Bowen also decided to run even though he wasn't in the old shadow ministry either. He got 24 votes and I got 23. Had it been a total vote for the full ministry I would have been the sixteenth elected out of 27. What happened then, before the second ballot after lunch, was that the rats in the ranks\u2014people from the Right in NSW\u2014attacked me. Some in my own faction closed ranks against me, and fundamentally did me in. People like Bill Morrison and Al Grassby ran the risk of being eliminated if I got up, as was the case with Doug McClelland, a senior senator from the NSW Right. They got onto the party machine in Sussex Street and the message was clear.\n\n'That bloody Keating\u2014unless we shift votes from him, one of us won't get up.'\n\nI remember saying to Lionel Bowen that I'd made a bad decision tipping my hand. I would have been better off running quietly for what was effectively the outer ministry in the second ballot. As it turned out, Lionel got into the ministry and I came twenty-eighth. That is, I was the last person eliminated. I came fifteenth in the ballot for the second fourteen.\n\nI remember John Ducker, the State President of the party, was on a Russian cruise ship at the time, and his sidekick Geoff Cahill had done what the others had asked of him. I sent Ducker a telegram saying, 'John, I wanted to thank you for your efforts on my behalf in the ballot. You and Geoff stuck to me like a limpet mine.'\n\nThey caught up with me on that occasion, but they never caught up with me again. Factionally I was becoming much more powerful in New South Wales so from then on, I pretty much ruled the roost.\n\n**KOB:** I assume you kept building alliances with the party machine that was very much a part of your future?\n\n**PJK:** I certainly stayed in touch with the machine. Some of my colleagues like the Grassbys and the Morrisons would not know what the machine was, but I knew that conference floor like the back of my hand. I knew most delegates on it. I knew where all the battalions came from, and where they were going.\n\nPublic life is about delivering change, and if you don't know how to work the machinery you can't get the job done. Execution is the key. A lot of people in public life have got ideas about doing things, but if people look at my public record, policies were executed because I was able to make the organisms of the Labor Party work for me. You have to have the political and industrial movement working for and with you.\n\n**KOB:** For those who supported Labor in the 1972 election, the Whitlam Government began with high excitement: the drama of the Whitlam\u2013Barnard two-man government, and then the sense of doors being opened, of change. You were inside that process through all the tumult of those three years. What was your view from the inside as things started to change?\n\n**PJK:** Well, it was thrills and spills, with a big emphasis on the thrills because it was a very reforming government. It really did change the direction of the country, in social policy, in foreign policy, in education\u2014in a whole range of things. But then came the closing down of economic growth worldwide, and with it the incapacity to manage the budget\u2014the tearaway levels of government spending. I think Commonwealth outlays grew 23 or 24 per cent in one year alone, whereas in the years that I was Treasurer in the Hawke Government, sometimes we had outlays growing at less than the inflation rate. Or plus 1 per cent. Under Frank Crean and then Jim Cairns as Treasurer, the budget just tore away, which had implications for demand, for interest rates and inflation.\n\n**KOB:** I can remember Clyde Cameron as Minister for Labour deciding quite early on that he was going to use public-service salaries as the pacesetter for wage increases around the country, the end result of which was a wages explosion.\n\n**PJK:** It was. This is how mad it was. I think wages rose 16 per cent within a year, as the Commonwealth salaries underwrote a national wage round. This was completely destructive, firstly, of the profit share in the economy, and then private investment. It was basically the old Labor Party again, the old confusion of ends and means: trying to run wages policy off the public service, trying to grow the economy off the back of the budget, off government spending, rather than private investment. They regarded as nonsense any concern that the attendant bond-selling program and the interest rates that followed would crowd out private investment.\n\nBut let me say one thing in their defence. It's very important to say this about all of them. In economic history, people now refer to the postwar long wave of economic growth as between 1947 and 1974. The oil price spikes associated with OPEC, the Middle East oil cartel, one in 1972 and a second in 1974, and the beginning of tearaway inflation, declining commodity prices, the general decline in investment from about 1965 onwards, meant that you could almost plot, across the world, the end of the postwar cycle of growth. Nobody in Australia could really have known after this long period of growth, that virtually from the day Whitlam was sworn in as Prime Minister the world economy began turning down, and with it the Australian economy.\n\nIt was this unfathomable problem that led them, for instance, into the Cairns budget of 1974, which had outlays growing at 23 per cent that year. In other words, they thought you could get growth off the back of the government sector simply by pumping up the economy. Gough, who had no real idea about any of this, could never have fathomed that just as he arrived, the party was over.\n\nUp to the point when I became Treasurer in 1983, the press gallery mainly responded to four matters only\u2014election speculation, leadership changes, tax cuts and maybe inflation, but certainly nothing about the country's competiveness, savings, productivity, not any of that. If you ask any of the people who were in political journalism then, they would tell you they did not have these matters on the radar screen. Most people in the political debate, including the journalists, assumed the growth would keep going, and the Whitlam Government had only to focus on its distribution.\n\n**KOB:** In the early tumult of the Whitlam years, you're 30, you've never left home. You meet Annita. Can you describe that moment in your life?\n\n**PJK:** This is where my relationship with John Bunting paid off. John Bunting rang me one day and he said, 'Paul, there's a Commonwealth Ministers' Conference on in Zambia and the Prime Minister doesn't think any of the new ministers should leave. As you were the last backbencher eliminated in the ministerial election would you represent Australia? You would go with the status of minister.'\n\nI agreed to go and I met Annita on that flight. So, you see, getting beaten for the ministry actually did me a lot of good.\n\nSome months later Annita came to Australia with her mother and looked me up at Parliament House. I was attending a dinner for the Duke of Edinburgh and I get this note from somebody whose name I didn't recognise staying in a motel, so I rang up. It was Annita and her mother. So I saw them the next day. The next time I saw her was in the Netherlands about six months later, and so it went.\n\n**KOB:** But by the time you marry at 31 you're already well into your political career. You're living and breathing it really, consumed by it. Do you think either of you had the faintest idea how hard it would be to make a marriage and a family fit with that?\n\n**PJK:** The great mistake in the federal system of Australia was to place the capital in Canberra. The idea that we all fly off from homes around Australia on a Tuesday morning and stay in motel rooms for three or four days and join the boys' club, as it was in those days, in the Parliamentary Dining Room, and then back home at the end of the week, is a pretty crazy way to conduct life. And when I became Party President in NSW in 1979 I used to get back to Sydney on Friday morning and go straight to the Administrative Committee of the Labor Party in Sussex Street. So I would leave Tuesday morning and return home Friday night. Long days, long weeks.\n\n**KOB:** Annita is a beautiful, sophisticated, globetrotting woman from Europe. Suddenly she's in suburban Bankstown, alone a lot of the time, with the children when they come along. That must have been incredibly tough. Do you think you realised what you were asking of her?\n\n**PJK:** Well, it was tough and probably, no, I didn't realise quite what it would be like. Nevertheless we did take the opportunity of moving to Canberra when I became Treasurer. This made a big difference.\n\n**KOB:** Were you impressed by Whitlam in Parliament?\n\n**PJK:** He was impressive and he dominated it, but I was a very different political type to Gough. I learned one thing from him. That we shared a common cause on one matter: both of us believed we should be in charge. Now, that may sound trite, but somewhere in your head you have to have that view before you can climb the mountain. Because if you don't have that view, you never make it.\n\nNow, where do we get that belief or instinct? In my case I probably owe it primarily to my grandmother and to my mother, who always thought I was special. So I had that inner confidence. I'm sure something similar happened to Gough. The same thing certainly happened to Bob Hawke.\n\nBut Gough had a parliamentary view of the world that I really did not share. He did hold the contemporary Liberal Party in contempt yet he did not understand their venality or know what to do with it when it became apparent. In the end he wasn't tribal, where I was tribal working-class Labor. In true combat, that matters.\n\nThe other thing I wanted was to be in charge of that big business community out there. I don't think he felt that. I felt once you were in charge of that you were in charge of the whole game\u2014you could have all your social policies sorted.\n\nI think I pretty well had that worked out by the time I came into the Parliament in 1969. It comes back to my father in the Menzies years. We could never work out why a country of working-class people kept electing elitist Tory governments who were not part of them socially and had no capacity to innovate the place.\n\n**KOB:** But you would have seen business leaders as being hand in glove with those same Tories in the same way the unions were hand in glove with Labor. That being the case, you would have seen the business community as being part of the enemy?\n\n**PJK:** I did. But I also knew unless you could operate with business and operate business, it would in the end defeat you. You had to operate it to stay on top while producing the wealth. You had to be in charge of it. In other words, you had to have a framework in which they had a seat at the table, and in the end I believed the framework where they could sit had to be an open market economy.\n\nThe one thing most of these industries shied away from was competition. They all relied on a managed exchange rate, a government licence to operate in the case of the banks, and in television, the Frank Packer two-station rule. All these businesses existed on monopolies or oligopolies.\n\nOne of my first meetings as Treasurer was with the Chairman of the National Australia Bank, Sir Robert Law Smith, who had a property in the western districts of Victoria. He said to me with a plum in his mouth\u2014he could have been from any Tory club\u2014he said, 'Of course, Treasurer, we're in the free enterprise business, we prefer competition,' and I said, 'Well, Sir Robert, so do I. The only difference is, I'm going to give you some.'\n\nHe said, 'Oh, what do you mean by that?'\n\nI said, 'Well, you guys have been featherbedded for years. You have effectively had no competition, we have no real entrepreneurship in the four banks.'\n\nHe said, 'Oh, you think that, do you?'\n\nI wanted to take them on at their own game. One of the things I often used to say about the Liberal Party and about the Labor Party I led, is that the Liberal Party believes in business, companies and cabals, but it doesn't believe in markets. Whereas the new Labor Party believed in markets, not being a captive of business.\n\nThat was a view I wish Gough had brought. If you grew up in the Menzies era you had to take charge of Menzies' constituency, and I don't think there was anything in the Whitlam template\u2014either with him or his government\u2014that displaced the Menzian view of how the place was run.\n\nI used to meet some of the business leaders of their day through my father. You knew people in business, but Australia was a country intermediated by banks. It never had a capital market like the United States. Companies like my father's could not go to a capital market and raise capital. They had to go to a bank. Our bank was the ES&A Bank (the English, Scottish & Australian Bank), a shocking outfit in terms of competitiveness.\n\nSo I cottoned on to what Rex Connor was onto, in terms of the business of the place, the mineral wealth, the fact that we could harness it and grow it, spreading this into the Labor constituency. I cottoned on to that, but I didn't believe in the kind of state socialism that Rex had faith in. I embraced the minerals and the wealth on the basis of a competitive framework where you set up the marketplace, where Labor constructs a new economy, where the government steers the boat, not rows the boat.\n\nOne of the reasons I became Shadow Minister for Minerals and Resources from 1976 onwards was because I was the only one in the show who wanted to deal with these big industries. It was the default job: 'Give it to him, because he wants to do it and we don't.'\n\n**KOB:** If it was a big challenge for Labor to adjust to government after 23 years in opposition, then the same had to be true in reverse for the Coalition. What do you remember of the Liberals in opposition under Billy Snedden's leadership?\n\n**PJK:** I think a substantial part of the Liberal Party had come to believe that their time was well and truly up, and that it was a good time for them to think about their place in public life and to regroup. I know that because in the days before the Whitlam dismissal in 1975 there was quite a degree of social intercourse between the opposing parties during the parliamentary sessions. At night back at the Kurrajong Hotel where a lot of us stayed, Coalition MPs used to speak quite freely. So from that I thought a substantial number of Coalition members believed it was their time to be on the grass.\n\nOn the other hand there was a group of them who didn't think that, who could never accept that they'd been rejected by the electorate. Frankly, I don't believe Snedden had any revolutionary zeal about him. I don't think he was affronted personally or ideologically by the Whitlam Government or its agenda, or felt the need to try to bring the government to an election at a time of the Opposition's choosing, which was the tactic they came to employ in the Senate.\n\nThese were people who supported democracy as long as they were in power. They'd had that power for 23 years, but apparently that wasn't enough, so the Senate became a place of obstruction virtually from the outset, where traditionally it had been little more than a rubber stamp for government legislation. So their tactic was to create a mood of volatility about the government's program, and when the government's popularity suffered, to try to push it to an election and beat it.\n\nIt was people like Reg Withers, and there were a number of them, who were more affronted ideologically by the Whitlam agenda, and I think they boxed Snedden in, and forced him to pursue a more aggressive and disruptive approach. You must remember that the Senate was nowheresville for much of our federal history. The irony for Labor is that it was Lionel Murphy who, when we were in opposition, showed everyone how to give the Senate teeth by strengthening the committee system as a means of attacking the government. Before that it was a bit like old home week in the upper house and they more or less rubber-stamped the legislation of the day. The Liberals learned a lesson from Murphy. Suddenly they could see the Senate's power. It fed their propensity for a fight.\n\nThere was also the savagery of the then Country Party before it became the Nationals. I remember the viciousness with which 'Black Jack' McEwen, Doug Anthony and Peter Nixon in particular, attacked Jim Cairns over his leadership of the anti-Vietnam moratorium campaign when we were still in opposition\u2014running a two-day debate in the House of Representatives, sitting the Parliament until three in the morning, people having their evening meal at midnight so they could move a censure motion quite viciously against Cairns. This was a pretty mean crowd. I would say that combinations on the Coalition side of people like Anthony and Nixon\u2014not so much Ian Sinclair\u2014with disparate elements in the Senate like Reg Withers, came to command the strategy inside the Coalition that pushed Snedden along.\n\nThere was also an anger and contempt for Whitlam on their side. They regarded him as a kind of social traitor who they believed had switched camps and was employing 'high brow' tactics, if you like, against them. Gough had come from a background that they would have regarded as being owned by the conservatives. His father was Solicitor-General under Menzies. It was a classically arrogant attitude on their part, that if you came from the elite then you must be one of them. They really had a hatred for Whitlam and all the things he came to stand for. They never accepted Labor's right to govern for three years, even after 23 years in opposition. They did think they were the born-to-rule squad. They thought Gough was a traitor and they had come to understand that if they used the power they had in the Senate, they might be able to push Labor to an election at a time of their choosing.\n\n**KOB:** In the Hawke\u2013Keating years you came to command the Parliament. I wonder what you learned from Whitlam's parliamentary style?\n\n**PJK:** He definitely commanded the debate and he had ministers who had been in the Parliament a long time in opposition who were both competent and confident in that sense\u2014people like Clyde Cameron, Fred Daly and Frank Crean, and even newer ministers like Lionel Bowen. They had the skills. The government in the House of Representatives had good form about it. That's not to provide a commentary on how the government was doing in the media or in the public's eye, but in the Parliament it dominated the debate, and looked like it was in charge.\n\nAfter the soporific nature of the Menzies years, the excitement and action around the Whitlam Government was like a moth to a flame for the press gallery, with new policy announcements rolling out almost by the day. For ministers to suddenly go from very small offices in the shadow ministry to a lot more staff and a lot more policy action, with press secretaries who'd been working journalists all their lives who had to learn discipline and discretion about the inside information they suddenly had at their disposal, was a big ask. It was a difficult public relations exercise. Not a disaster, but difficult. For the first time ever, a lot of active journalists were suddenly on the inside, sitting in the box seat in the ministers' offices at a time of immense change, having to remove themselves in their heads from the game they had just left.\n\nIt didn't help that the place was set up as it was with the non-Members' Bar on the ground floor off one of the parliamentary quadrangles as a meeting place for journalists and staffers, and even Labor backbenchers every night of the week. It was a great marketplace for stories. The conversations and the information flowed freely. It was a journalist's dream. It was also very hard to maintain any sort of discretion in the internal policy debate within the government with the press gallery just one floor above, in what was essentially a small building.\n\nThere was a set of stairs directly outside the double doors of Labor's caucus room leading up and across to the press gallery, and as a caucus meeting broke up, the journalists would be waiting on those stairs to get their stories. Discretion was impossible. MPs would be standing around in that small space, trying to talk discreetly to each other without success. I can remember coming out one day and a young bearded Paul Kelly coming down the stairs and sidling up to me and asking what had happened on this or that issue. That was the way it was. You just had to glance around Kings Hall to see who was talking to whom. Another section of the press gallery was also directly above the Prime Minister's office and the Cabinet room, so the comings and goings within the government were easily observed.\n\n**KOB:** As the Whitlam years unfolded the impression was created that the government was something of a roller-coaster ride with a certain lack of cohesion. What do you remember of that?\n\n**PJK:** The government had a great factional unity of purpose most of the time, and while at other times there would have been high factionalism in the party and in the caucus through that long period in the wilderness, you did have factional leaders from the Right and the Left with a desire to see a united front in government. So that even though some ministers might not have been at the front of the game, the fact that they were in the game at all was enough to keep the show together.\n\nThe backbenchers who made up the other half of the caucus had to tread very warily in a caucus discussion, to be careful what they said because they'd wear the admonition of the leaders of their own factions. The first caucus chairman was Senator Bill Brown from Victoria and he'd been part of the Socialist Left in his home state, so if one of the 'bad guys' in the Right's terms was actually chairman of caucus, it meant that their adherence to the system had overtaken their former unruliness.\n\nI remember on one occasion I moved a motion in caucus to set up a royal commission into the public service. I didn't think the service was working for us because it had been used to having conservative masters for 23 years and because of the culture of incrementalism, making changes one small step at a time. This motion was really frowned upon because it hadn't come up in the normal way as part of the government's internal conversation. The ministerial presence inside the caucus was quite powerful in providing an equilibrium.\n\nGough's beloved program that he was so obsessive about had very important elements to it, like access and equity in health and in education, particularly higher education, or the big changes in foreign policy that you could fashion a good story about, but we were not that good at actually telling the stories. For all the interest we had from the press gallery, our run rate on storylines and actually telling those stories was low.\n\nGough's speeches were first-rate. The speeches he wrote himself or with Graham Freudenberg were great. But in terms of the general 'shooting star' nature of the program, the storyline in the newspapers lacked an overarching coherence, notwithstanding the virtues of any individual policy story. Each in their own right had important implications for the country but there wasn't in that ministry a sense of internal coherence and discipline, despite the fact that the Prime Minister had a great capacity for storytelling and for the evocation of issues.\n\n**KOB:** Whitlam was obviously very impatient about implementing 'The Program', and you made a speech to the Whitlam Conference of Labor Historians in 1985, the third year of the Hawke\u2013Keating Government, in which you referred to 'the undisciplined dash to implement a decade's worth of reform'. That was one fundamental problem with the Whitlam Government, wasn't it, trying to do too much too soon from a base of relative inexperience? By comparison, although you didn't start government with a program as specific as his, across such a wide policy spectrum as his, nonetheless as your agenda developed you gave yourselves the time to implement it.\n\n**PJK:** Put it this way, if we were reviewing the Hawke\u2013Keating years, the chapters would have a sequence and a coherence about them, whereas, without diminishing any one chapter in the Whitlam book, the last chapter might come second and the third chapter might come eighth. In other words the Whitlam Government didn't have a rolling discipline and coherence about it.\n\nThe caucus in general had picked up on the inchoate quality that the 27-member Cabinet had. When the caucus gets wind that there's strife in the Cabinet on this issue and that issue, it lowers the standing of the Cabinet within the caucus. What happened within those three years was that as the caucus respect for the Cabinet diminished, caucus members were more prepared to chance their arm with their own opinions. So by mid-1974, the faction leaders were becoming less effective and caucus members were more inclined to deal themselves into the policy debates. A lot more independence of mind was being seen within the caucus on particular resolutions that wouldn't necessarily have helped maintain a sense that there was a unity of purpose in the government.\n\nI can remember Gough having to lay down the law to caucus a number of times, sometimes ferociously. But the mere fact that he had to do it was a bad look. Gough was assiduous at attending electorate functions or party events for his backbench colleagues, and he remained that way all his life, but there was no interleaving of the prime ministerial authority with the casual encounter, no real common touch. When I was Prime Minister, members knew they could walk up to me and raise something without getting their head bitten off. If a member came up to me after Question Time to raise something with me, I'd never dismiss them, whereas with Gough you got the message he was in a hurry to get on with his day.\n\n**KOB:** To come back to the Opposition's aggressive strategy in the Senate: they essentially forced Whitlam's hand, calling a double dissolution election in May 1974 after only eighteen months in office, with the threat to block supply hanging over Labor's head, how did all that impact on your side of the Parliament?\n\n**PJK:** We were affronted by the tactic to threaten supply. There was no sense of crisis in the government apart from the fact that key legislation like Medibank was not getting through, but that was our problem. We should not have been obliged to go to an early poll just because the Liberals didn't like being in opposition. It was the Opposition that created the feeling of instability. It was redeemed somewhat by the fact that, although we lost seats, voters put us back into office, which allowed Gough to call a special joint meeting of both houses of Parliament in order to pass the big backlog of legislation that had previously been rejected twice by the Coalition in the Senate. But we should not have had to go to that election, and within twelve months we had a similar threat hanging over our heads again, courtesy of the new Opposition Leader Malcolm Fraser.\n\nBut the joint sitting of Parliament did have something of a salutary effect on us, the feeling that the Constitution was seen to have worked, that a joint sitting was an avenue by which an impasse could be resolved. For instance, I had a big interest with Rex Connor in the _Seas and Submerged Lands Act_ , which the states-centred Opposition had refused to agree to. The High Court had held that the Commonwealth had jurisdiction from the low-water mark where the water laps the beach to the edge of the continental shelf. Connor wanted to put this into law under the _Seas and Submerged Lands Act_. It was resisted by Coalition people like Robert Ellicott who was running the states' rights. I remember how good we felt when we saw that go through. The joint sitting was quite a historic moment to see all that previously rejected legislation go through.\n\nHaving jumped that hurdle we felt we were back in open territory to get on with pursuing the agenda of a Labor Government but the Coalition attitude in the Senate didn't change. The common man in all this was Reg Withers, combined with the general sense among Snedden's colleagues that he wasn't really up to it. I can remember Snedden saying immediately after the 1974 election, 'We didn't win but we didn't lose.' He used to say things like 'My members would follow me through the valley of death over hot coals,' which really just drew everyone's attention to the fact that his hold on the leadership was precarious. Snedden was more or less a traditionalist and the tactics leading to the 1974 election were his undoing.\n\nWhen Malcolm Fraser arrived in the leadership with that upper-class conceit, and apparent disregard for the norms of parliamentary behaviour, and our mob were becoming something of a ragtag show, you could see Fraser wasn't going to be good for us.\n\nThe one bright spot was when Gough removed Jim Cairns as Treasurer and replaced him with Bill Hayden. Jim McClelland replaced Clyde Cameron as Labour Minister and introduced a much more disciplined wages policy. Hayden brought some discipline to the budget in August 1975, and the economic management was looking better. Gough was still a force to be reckoned with, and some solid new ministers were coming in like Joe Riordan and Joe Berinson. There was some hope in the place, but against that, Cameron was angered by his demotion to the Science Ministry and was starting to destabilise the show, and Connor was in strife over the Loans Affair. It was the sacking of Connor and Jim Cairns over the Loans Affair that dragged the show down and robbed the Cabinet of its credibility.\n\n**KOB:** It was in the second half of 1975 that Rex Connor really went off the rails in pursuit of his dream to build big national infrastructure projects and develop Australia's mineral wealth\u2014chasing shonky money men on the other side of the world to borrow money, basically because he couldn't get Treasury's endorsement to raise the kind of money he wanted.\n\n**PJK:** We got into this crazy stuff with Rex and the Loans Affair. He had the Treasury running around trying to stop him raising money in the Middle East to pay for infrastructure in Australia. It was nonsense.\n\nI used to say to him, 'Rex this is crazy, you've got to give this up.' But he wouldn't.\n\nHe would just sit there all night with his ticker tape machine waiting for this Khemlani fellow to produce verification for the loans he was supposed to be arranging. It became an obsession. A big obsession. Gough had a misplaced loyalty in Rex. He should have forced him to stop this earlier than he did. In the end, he sought to fire him rather than correct him.\n\nRex was well meaning and imaginative. He believed in the place, he could see the future, but he never had the right modus operandi to get the industry on his side. Again, the confusion of means with ends.\n\n**KOB:** It gradually became a scandal and the sad irony for you, I imagine, was that when you finally did get to take your place in the ministry it was at Rex Connor's expense because the scandal had consumed him and he had to resign.\n\n**PJK:** Indeed, and I urged him not to resign. I suggested he tell Gough's emissary to go to buggery, and he initially did. Again, as a last word in his defence, he understood the importance of minerals and energy to Australia, and in this day and age a large part of our national income is coming from it. But Rex had the old Labor model in his head, that assets like the pipeline authority had to be owned by the government. Could only do an economic job if owned by the government.\n\nWhen I did get to the ministry I didn't realise I'd only be there for three weeks before Sir John Kerr dismissed the government. But I must say it was a bag of fun. The first full ministry meeting I went to was unbelievably chaotic. Joe Berinson, who hadn't been in the ministry long, said to me, 'When you come in you won't believe how mad it is.'\n\nHe said, 'You think I'm exaggerating, don't you?'\n\nAnd I said, 'Well, I'll wait and see.'\n\nSo when I walked in, not one person says, 'Welcome, it's nice to have you here.'\n\nIt was back to square one, bottom of the class. I knew where Connor sat, so I went to sit in his vacant chair. Immediately, Gough said, 'Don't sit there! You don't sit there!'\n\nI said, 'So where do I sit?'\n\nHe said, 'Bowen, you sit here. Riordan, you take Bowen's seat, Keating, you take Riordan's seat.'\n\nI said, 'I don't care which seat I have, Gough, as long as I have one.' This is in the Cabinet room!\n\nThe constitutional crisis was beginning to appear, and there was a long dissertation from Kep Enderby, who was Attorney-General. He used to speak very rapidly and went on and on, and I saw Gough grimacing and showing his annoyance and then finally it got the better of him.\n\nHe said, 'Enderby you garrulous so-and-so, when will you shut up?'\n\nAnd Enderby says, 'Who, me?'\n\nHe said, 'Yes, you.'\n\nAnd Gordon Bryant, another minister, says to Gough, 'You shouldn't speak to him like that.'\n\nAnd Gough says to Bryant, 'You shut up!'\n\nTo which Bryant replied straight back at him, 'And don't speak to me like that either.' At this point Joe Berinson sent me a note down the table: 'Told you so.'\n\nBy this time the discipline in the Cabinet was badly shaken. The only hope in all this was that Bill Hayden, who had finally become Treasurer had begun dragging the budget back to something approximating what it should always have been. If you look at the Hawke years, and my years as Prime Minister, the solemnity with which the Cabinet process was conducted, the disciplined way people considered Cabinet submissions, where there was a corporate discussion with each minister taking responsibility for their matter\u2014there were light years of difference.\nTHE DISMISSAL\n\nThe seeds for the way in which the Whitlam Government fell in November 1975 were planted in the lead-up to the previous year's double dissolution election. By April 1974, just sixteen months after the election, the Opposition in the Senate had rejected nineteen government bills, ten of them twice. Six of the ten rejected bills qualified as triggers for a double dissolution.\n\nThe Opposition Leader Billy Snedden initially resisted the urging of his Senate leader Reg Withers to delay the introduction of money bills into the Senate, but when he did move to embrace the Withers strategy, Whitlam replied with his own\u2014a double dissolution.\n\nIt was politics played on the cliff edge by both sides. Snedden wanted to force Labor to a lower house election with only half the Senate up for judgement. The threat to the Liberals posed by a double dissolution was twofold. With the full Senate in play, not only might Whitlam win a fresh term in the lower house, but also conceivably gain control of the Senate, which was every conservative's worst nightmare. Even without Senate control, a subsequent joint sitting of both houses would see Labor's major reforms like Medibank passed into law.\n\nIf ever there were grounds for a double dissolution, Whitlam had them, and Sir John Kerr as Governor-General formally agreed. Billy Snedden lost the election in May 1974 by just four seats, but in the process his leadership was fatally damaged. The game changed dramatically from the moment Malcolm Fraser replaced Snedden early the following year, and it wasn't long, with the Whitlam Government barely through the first year of its second term, having only served seventeen months of its first, before Withers was pushing the same advice to Fraser that had proved disastrous for Snedden\u2014blocking supply.\n\nThere have been few more volatile years in Australian politics than 1975. The economy had turned sour with a vengeance, unemployment and inflation were up, and wages had exploded. By the August budget, Labor was into its third Treasurer and its third Deputy Prime Minister since the 1972 election. The government's relationships with some of its most senior public servants were just short of openly hostile.\n\nThen came the Loans Affair scandal involving Rex Connor, who had been closely supported by Whitlam in his bid to fund big infrastructure projects to unlock Australian mineral wealth, which eventually engulfed the government and provided Fraser with his 'exceptional circumstance' to block supply and force an election.\n\nI'm not going to trawl through the massive volume of material written about the events leading up to the Dismissal, because none of the key players have changed their justification for their part in the drama, and never will. For those who want more detail, they can reference Malcolm Fraser's memoirs and Gough Whitlam's book, _The Whitlam Government_. There are countless other books, including one from Sir John Kerr, but if you read Whitlam and Fraser, you've got both sides from the protagonists. There is one startling postscript to the Dismissal that bears a mention in terms of Keating's comments in the interviews. Not long before we sat down to record them, the academic and author, Professor Jenny Hocking, published the second volume of her Whitlam biography in which she revealed from Sir John Kerr's own previously unpublished archive that the Governor-General had been in secret talks with the then High Court Judge Sir Anthony Mason going back months before 11 November. It was known that Kerr had sought last-minute advice from the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick. Kerr's notes for his archive revealed much more extensive consultations with Mason over many weeks, and quite a deal of strategising on Kerr's part well before Fraser had decided to block supply.\n\nThere was even an impromptu conversation with Prince Charles in September at the Papua New Guinea independence celebrations, where Kerr flagged the possibility that he might have to dismiss the government or even that Whitlam might ask the Queen to dismiss him. A presumably startled Prince Charles dropped a few reassuring remarks, but he clearly did pass the message back to the Palace. From Hocking's archival research, Kerr subsequently received a letter from the Queen's Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, referring to Kerr's fears of dismissal at the Prime Minister's hands if he tried to sack Whitlam. Charteris said the Queen 'would try to delay things', but in the end would have to take the advice of the Prime Minister\u2014the very opposite of what her representative in Australia would come to do on her behalf.\n\nTo bring Paul Keating back in, he had just become a minister, he could see Bill Hayden's first budget as Treasurer had brought a discipline and some credibility to Labor's economic management that had been sorely lacking, and although the realist in him knew the next election would inevitably see a conservative government back in power, he thought that might still leave him up to eighteen months to build his own credibility and experience, and climb another rung or two within the Cabinet before the electoral axe descended.\n\nAs coincidence would have it, Keating had two brief Zelig-like moments in the dismissal tableau. He just happened to be present at Whitlam's last meeting with Kerr before 11 November. On the day itself, he was on the Parliament House steps, looking impossibly young as he warmed up an angry crowd that needed no encouragement, before Gough strode through the big double doors, took the megaphone from his most junior minister, and uttered those words that are now sandblasted into history. For a few unforgettable moments they stood side by side, the old bull and the young bull, one's painfully long journey to the top crashing down around him, the other having barely established his base camp.\n\n**PJK:** When I look back at the Dismissal, I think of what Jack Lang had to say about how much you are able to trust people. You've got to look carefully at who is in front of you. Look at their motivations for what they say and do. Look at their background and their ambitions, even thwarted ones, and then make a judgement about whether you can rely on them.\n\nI never got to know Kerr personally before he became Governor-General, but I had heard about him representing various unions on the Right, and in disputes involving the industrial groups. But I had never thought he was one of us. He didn't necessarily need to be one of us, but you would expect a person you're appointing to a position like Governor-General needing to have the balances right. Gough appointed Kerr, I appointed Bill Deane. There was a world of difference in the assessments brought to those two appointments.\n\nIt is absolutely clear that Kerr deceived Whitlam over his intention to sack him. I was with Gough on the last day he saw Kerr before the Dismissal, on the Thursday before. I was there as Minister for Northern Australia appointing the former Labor Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Clem Jones, to be Chairman of the Darwin Reconstruction Commission.\n\nWe had an Executive Council meeting of three\u2014Gough, Kerr and me\u2014but initially I waited outside with Kerr's secretary, David Smith, while Gough and Kerr had a meeting about the state of play over supply. When I was invited in to sign off on the Executive Council minutes, Gough and Kerr were in a huge state of laughter about Lionel Murphy arguing with the Chief Justice Garfield Barwick over a uniform for his female tipstaff. It was all very friendly and relaxed.\n\nIt only took us a few minutes to sign the documents, and as we walked down the long corridor to the car Gough said, 'Look at that leonine mane', referring to Kerr's bouffant head of white hair.\n\nWe get in the car, he sits in the front and turns on the music, and I say, 'Well, he seems all right Gough,' and he says, 'Oh, he'll be okay, he's completely proper.'\n\nI remember that clearly: 'He'll be okay, he's completely proper.'\n\nSo as they sat there laughing together in Government House, Kerr was in the course of deceiving his Prime Minister whose advice he was obliged to take but intended to ignore.\n\nThe Parliamentary Liberal Party was on the point of collapse as it got closer and closer to the brink. Fraser was barely holding his troops together. Kerr saved Fraser by his precipitate action.\n\nOn the morning of the Dismissal, I was despatched as the most junior minister to formally welcome a German government minister at Sydney Airport. On the flight back to Canberra, I sat next to Bob Cotton, one of Fraser's senior senators from NSW, and he said to me, 'Fraser's gone mad, Paul. This can't work and it can't last. I just hope this week will sort itself out.'\n\nThere were a handful of Liberal senators preparing to bail out and I have no doubt, in the end, supply would have been passed. In fact Gough was about to act to solve the political stalemate by calling a half-Senate election, which Kerr knew.\n\nWhen it happened, when the blade came down, a lot of ministers seemed to take it in their stride. I was outraged by it. I said to Fred Daly and to Frank Crean and Frank Stewart that we ought to arrest Kerr, and they thought this was outrageous. They thought I was nuts.\n\nIf I had been Prime Minister I would have been very tempted to have had Kerr arrested. I don't think Gough and the people around him were capable of that kind of thinking. Gough was a legal constitutionalist kind of guy who believed in the institutions. But the institutions were being put asunder.\n\nWhat had happened to us was a coup. As clear as day, a coup. The exercise of the reserve powers is not a matter for the High Court or its judges. It was a matter for the Prime Minister and the Head of State who should take advice from the Prime Minister. And, of course, the Queen, and the protocols of the country. I knew the blade had been lowered, that this was a coup.\n\nYet when I just briefly raised the idea that we should arrest Kerr, it was met with derision. Here was Kerr secretly consulting with the Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, a former Liberal Attorney-General under Menzies, and another High Court judge Sir Anthony Mason, working out how to sack an unsuspecting, democratically elected Prime Minister who still enjoyed the confidence of the House of Representatives.\n\nLooking back, I can only speculate on what I would have done if I had been Prime Minister.\n\nI would have at least called a Cabinet meeting to determine a strategy. I've no doubt that one effect of that would have been not to present the Supply Bill back into the Senate. Malcolm Fraser had undertaken to Kerr that he could guarantee the passing of supply. Fraser had no means of forcing the Supply Bill back to the Senate and he didn't have the numbers in the House of Representatives. The effect of that would have been that Fraser could not have met Kerr's principal condition, the one which he had appointed Fraser as interim Prime Minister to deliver\u2014the guarantee that supply would pass.\n\nAt that point Whitlam and the Cabinet had the option of recommending Kerr's removal to the Queen. Not only had Kerr exercised royal and let us say queenly powers under the powers reserved to the monarch\u2014yet never used\u2014but he did it in a way where he had improperly and secretly invited two High Court judges and other people into the process. All the while refusing to let his Prime Minister know what he was intending. He clearly breached the conventions, if not the law. In which case it would have been completely within Whitlam's remit to recommend to the Queen that she act quickly to remove him. Gough didn't take that path. The Cabinet never met and supply was passed. The rest is history.\n\nI couldn't bear to do nothing, so I was out there on the front steps of Parliament House, on the megaphone warming up the crowd. In fact, if you see the film footage, you will see me handing the megaphone across to Gough as he comes through the door to speak to the crowd.\n\nThere's another thing to say about this period. Before the dismissal of the Whitlam Government, although possibly the mood had changed even earlier when Billy Snedden moved to delay supply in 1974, there was a much greater leavening between the parties.\n\nThere was a civility of sorts that has disappeared since. It all vanished and never returned after 1975.\n\nTWO LOST YEARS\n\nIt would be difficult to exaggerate the depths of despair that gripped the Labor Party in the wake of the Whitlam Government's dismissal, and the devastating election result that followed.\n\nThe cocktail of emotions felt throughout Labor's support base and what was left of the parliamentary party was profound. Shattered hopes and dreams combined with anger at the nature of Whitlam's departure, but the wild ride of the previous three years was just too much for too many voters. For them, the great wave of change that had seemed so exciting and so right at the beginning had been overwhelmed by the political volatility, the economic roller-coaster ride and the scandals.\n\nIn a 6.5 per cent swing to Malcolm Fraser's Liberal\u2013Country Party coalition, Labor lost 29 seats in the House of Representatives. The new government had 91 seats to Labor's 36, a huge cushion of safety for Fraser of 55 seats. Six ministers lost their seats.\n\nLabor was back in the wilderness in the most debilitating way. The worst aspect of all for the party's hopes of recovery was that the now terminally wounded Gough Whitlam continued to lead through the next term in opposition. Whitlam's first instinct in the immediate aftermath of such an unprecedented bloodbath was to seek a successor and bow out, although others suggest it was a somewhat lukewarm effort. He approached Bill Hayden, who had been far and away the most consistent performer in Whitlam's ministry, first as the champion of Australia's first universal health insurance scheme, and then as the last and easily most credible of the three Whitlam treasurers.\n\nWhen Hayden took the call from Whitlam at his Ipswich home in Queensland the night after the election, he was both angry and shell-shocked at the scale of the disaster, having barely held on to his once safe seat by 122 votes to emerge as the only federal Labor MP left in the state. Hayden declined the offer, partly because he knew the leadership wasn't Whitlam's to give, but the jealously guarded prerogative of the party caucus. He was so battle-weary that when Parliament returned he took himself off the Opposition front bench, and started a law degree at the Australian National University as a somewhat disengaged backbencher.\n\nWhitlam's next approach was to Bob Hawke, the nakedly ambitious and charismatic ACTU and Labor Party President. Hawke wasn't even in Parliament, and declined, opting to keep his powder dry for a more auspicious debut.\n\nIn the end the Labor caucus locked in behind Whitlam, but with the unprecedented proviso that the leadership would be revisited mid-term. Clearly there was a significant body within the party wanting to put Whitlam on notice. Paul Keating was one of them: he would have preferred to see Labor's fallen hero deal himself out of the game.\n\nTraditionally only lower house MPs were eligible for the party's deputy leadership, and it says a great deal about the fractured nature of the party in the immediate post-election period that eight people\u2014nearly one in four\u2014nominated for the position. Not only did Keating nominate, he came within three votes of becoming Whitlam's deputy, losing in the final count to Labor veteran and lion of the Left, Tom Uren.\n\nAt 31 years of age, the writing was on the wall. As Gough Whitlam and his rump of a caucus limped on through Malcolm Fraser's first term, Paul Keating emerged as one of his party's two or three most effective parliamentary performers.\n\n**KOB:** After the devastation of the 1975 election, notwithstanding the residual loyalty Labor people felt for Gough Whitlam after the way he'd been removed from office, you believed that his time had come and gone. Can you explain why?\n\n**PJK:** Most of us thought Bill Hayden would put his hand up to contest the Labor leadership after the 1975 election. We thought Gough would step aside, and it came as a surprise that Bill had decided not to run and was going to go back to university. My impression was that Gough had no intention of giving up the leadership after 1975, notwithstanding anything he might have said to Hayden. Bill's decision not to contest the leadership made Gough's re-election a foregone conclusion, even though there were a couple of challengers.\n\nThe deputy leadership was a different issue. I didn't want to run, partly because I didn't want to tie myself to Gough as his deputy, but I had just beaten Mick Young for the last appointment to Gough's ministry only a few weeks before the Dismissal and I didn't want to surrender that advantage to him.\n\nSo I rang Mick and said to him, 'Please don't nominate, because if you do then I'll have to nominate too, and I don't want to. I don't think it's going to advantage either of us much being Gough's deputy. Any longer term decision about either of the leadership positions shouldn't be made now. Would you think about it and let me know?'\n\nWhen I came back to my Bankstown electoral office after lunch Mick had left a message: 'Get your running shoes on.'\n\nIt was psychologically bad, organisationally bad and, in career terms, bad. Tom Uren from the Left was most likely to win, and he did win by three votes from me. I was so pleased he won, because it would have been a poisoned chalice for me.\n\nThere was also a sting in the tail for Gough. Because of the mayhem leading up to the Dismissal, which reflected on his leadership, caucus decided for the first time in the party's history to introduce a midterm parliamentary election for the leaders. In other words, all leadership positions would be declared vacant mid-term, which was a terrible slap in the face for Gough. This meant there was an eighteen-month interregnum after which people thought the real leadership discussion would begin.\n\nGiven the ferment of it all and the massive ups and downs with the Dismissal, the election defeat and the upsurge of Fraser, there was a view that maybe we needed the eighteen months to get our equilibrium back, to find what our coordinates were. Gough had not long settled back into the leadership when the story emerged that he and the party's national secretary David Combe had secretly tried to raise money from Iraq's ruling Ba'athist Party to help fund the 1975 election with the help of Bill Hartley from the Socialist Left in the Victorian branch.\n\nThis showed terrible judgement on Gough's part, because it was utterly compromising, taking foreign money from any source, let alone a despotic regime. I spoke against him in the caucus about it. I thought, 'I am not going to overlook this. This is B-A-D bad.' I said, in the light of it, that Gough should consider his position.\n\nHe must have stewed on this. That evening, almost at the end of the adjournment debate, I was sitting with Lionel Bowen on the Opposition front bench when the doors of the House swung open and Gough strode down the stairs, silver locks flowing in the breeze.\n\nHe came over to me and hit me with a flood of invective: 'How dare you call my position into question in the caucus, you and your mates from NSW.'\n\nHe was referring to the group that had supported him always, as I had.\n\nI was roundly ticked off, and climbed right back into him. Everyone else in the chamber was watching this, and as Gough left Lionel said, 'Christ, that was really bad.'\n\nSadly, what the Iraqi incident did was to rob Gough of whatever ballast and credibility he had left. None of us wanted to see him torn down, particularly by a media campaign that Murdoch's papers were conducting. But there had to be some rebuke because of the tawdry way we were being portrayed in the wider public debate.\n\n**KOB:** How do you remember the mid-term leadership contest of May 1977?\n\n**PJK:** Bill Hayden was back on the front bench by then and in the lead-up to the leadership ballot he told me he was thinking of running for the deputy leadership. He'd had lunch with two senior Labor senators, Jim McClelland and John Wheeldon, to talk it over and they advised him to talk with me, 'because he runs the numbers for the NSW Right in caucus, and because he ran for the deputy leadership himself last time, and you should know what he's thinking about the ballot this time'. They knew Hayden and I didn't have that much of a relationship at that stage.\n\nHayden asked me if I would defer to him in the ballot for deputy leader rather than run myself. I said I would defer to him, but that he would end up being 'Deputy Death'\u2014and was there any point in becoming Deputy Death at that time in his career when he was the heir apparent?\n\nI think it was in his head that by becoming deputy leader he was staking his claim to the leadership down the track but I told him it was not wise for a man who aspired to be leader and Prime Minister to stand as deputy to a leader who was in such a weakened position. I said if he wanted to run for anything, it should be for the leadership. He asked if I thought he could win, and I said I thought he could.\n\nIn the end he did run against Whitlam and was only narrowly defeated. There were only two votes in it. I voted for Bill, although I don't think he ever quite believed that I had. I still have the record of who voted for whom in all those ballots. The late Peter Bowers wrote in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ at the time that those supporting Gough to stay leader could be called either romantics or traditionalists.\n\nIn the mid-term ballot, again I didn't want to run for the deputy leadership for the same reasons, but I felt forced to run because Mick Young again decided to run and I did not want to give him an edge in the pecking order. It was a similar outcome, with Tom Uren getting the deputy leadership again, which suited me.\n\n**KOB:** Having come so close to winning the deputy leadership at such a young age, after having only been in Parliament for six years, what impact did that have on your standing within the parliamentary party?\n\n**PJK:** The electoral defeat of one's opponents and peers inside the caucus certainly helps. Nevertheless many of the people I nominated against and out-voted were senior to me in the caucus\u2014so this did cement my position.\n\n**KOB:** What role did you perform in Parliament under Whitlam through that first term in opposition from 1975 to 1977?\n\n**PJK:** I had a much bigger role in the day-to-day battles against Malcolm Fraser than I'd previously had in Parliament, as did Mick Young. Mick and I supported Gough in the chamber along with Lionel Bowen. Initially I was Shadow Minister for Agriculture and moved up to Minerals and Energy around the end of 1976.\n\nI think at that stage Gough still saw me as a NSW hustler, although he used to say to me, 'You will at least fight. The others just want to lie down, but you will at least fight.' From Gough, that was a compliment.\n\nFraser was a pretty aloof kind of fellow as Prime Minister, much as he probably was throughout his life. Nevertheless the nature of how he came to power, the way he presented himself, his style of speaking, his dismissal of the people around him, most obviously the Opposition, meant that he was a prime target for parliamentary attacks.\n\nI didn't think a great deal of Malcolm as a debater, because he would debate issues in a declaratory way, from on high, with a display of contempt rather than with real discussion or debate. I don't think that worked very effectively in Parliament, but because of the weakened state of the Opposition he had the game by the throat.\n\nLabor actually came back in the polls coming up to the 1977 election, partly because Fraser had had strife with some of his ministers, and he actually relieved Phillip Lynch of the Treasury and gave it to John Howard because Lynch was getting bad headlines over a land deal he was somehow supposed to be involved in. But we were never going to win that election.\n\nTo Whitlam's credit he opened up the party to a whole new generation of talented politicians. Great victory though it was, the 1972 election delivered a pretty tough outcome for Gough in terms of the ministry because he inherited frontbenchers who'd been in Parliament since the 1940s. Fred Daly was elected in 1943, Kim Beazley Senior won Curtin's seat after his death in 1945, and Frank Crean, Clyde Cameron and others entered Parliament in 1949.\n\nBy the time we finally won government in 1972 these people had undeniable ministerial and policy ambitions but they lacked freshness, dexterity and a contemporary link to the community. It was ironic because Whitlam himself presented a dynamic leadership and sense of vision, but he was always battling to make that ministry work. It's also true that after Whitlam intervened in Victoria to force reforms and open up the party, there was an influx of fresh talent into the Parliament, which Bill Hayden, and then Bob Hawke, inherited.\nTHE HAYDEN YEARS\n\nThe Fraser Government's first term represented two lost years for Labor. Short of being handed victory by a deeply incompetent government, Gough Whitlam was never going to win again. As a young press secretary to Whitlam in 1977, I can remember attending a pre-election campaign meeting in Melbourne where Labor pollster Rod Cameron briefed party secretaries and the leader's office that Gough was no longer electable. Whitlam wasn't present, and wasn't informed. To be presented with the political facts of life so clinically would have been a killer blow to his confidence in the shadow of an election, but he knew he couldn't win.\n\nGiven the authority delivered to it through the sheer weight of numbers, the Fraser Government didn't exactly cover itself with glory in its first term. But under Whitlam's leadership, Labor was caught short on new policy or any sense of rejuvenation when Malcolm Fraser went back to the polls a year early in December 1977. The net gain to Labor was just two seats. That night, the man who had led Labor out of the wilderness and back again resigned the leadership.\n\nIn the shadow of Christmas that year I was waiting in Gough's office when he returned from the caucus meeting where he formally tendered his resignation. Bill Hayden was elected to replace him after a close contest with Lionel Bowen. Caucus also chose a new shadow ministry. When I asked him how it went, Gough replied, 'Comrade, if only they'd given me a ministry like this one.' As well he might have, because that shadow ministry was to become, with little change, the first Hawke Ministry that was to deliver by far Labor's longest uninterrupted hold on federal power in its history, thirteen years. One of the key figures on Hayden's front bench was Paul Keating.\n\nThere was a small nucleus of survivors from the Whitlam ministries\u2014Hayden, Bowen, Keating, Ken Wriedt and Tom Uren. But substantially thanks to the internal reforms Whitlam had forced on his party in his earlier years as leader, there was a whole generation of educated, talented and fresh recruits ripe for the picking, including people like John Button, John Dawkins, Ralph Willis, Gareth Evans, Peter Walsh, Susan Ryan, Neal Blewett and Don Grimes.\n\nCompared to his predecessor, Whitlam, and his successors, Hawke and Keating, Bill Hayden was an unlikely Prime Minister in waiting. Diffidence was his stock in trade. In politics confidence might not be everything, but you don't travel all that well without it. Hayden's confidence tended to ebb and flow, and perhaps because he learned from a tough Brisbane childhood not to trust easily, he could be deeply suspicious of the motives of those around him. Paul Keating was later to identify this as the cause of his downfall.\n\nAsk yourself if the following pen picture, taken from Hayden's autobiography, is the self-perception of a successful leader in such a gladiatorial arena:\n\nI knew only too well my shortcomings for the task. Media analysts put them forward cogently enough once I was elected to this position: a natural diffidence of character some described as an inferiority complex, caution about others, a tendency to personal remoteness... all very much products of a disturbed childhood, or so I was informed by the commentators.\n\nThere was also my voice, thin, high-pitched, reedy, even whining, or so I was informed after my election. I took to reading randomly selected tracts from the Bible, alone each morning at Canberra, before my burnt muesli and skim milk, in the interests of putting a bit more timbre in my voice...\n\nCertainly I was the best equipped on ability to be leader of those making themselves available, but that does not say much in favour of any of us who were available.\n\nYou'd think anyone expressing that kind of self-deprecation or ambivalence could not expect to be a successful political leader in such a 'take no prisoners' environment, but working off an extremely low base in his first election as leader in 1980, Hayden claimed a substantial swing back to Labor. If not for a significant campaign setback on capital gains tax, he would have come very close to beating Fraser and becoming Prime Minister.\n\nOne of his new backbenchers from that election was Bob Hawke, a bird of prey by nature as well as by name. Even before he got into Parliament, Hawke had already sounded out Keating to support him in a leadership takeover bid.\n\nBy his fifth year as leader, before he succumbed to the remorseless stalking by Hawke and his influential band of supporters, Hayden had pushed through further internal party reforms, built a highly functioning front-bench team with a new set of policies and a sense of maturity, and must have felt the prime ministership was tantalisingly close.\n\nIn March 1982 Hayden won a by-election in the Liberal-held seat of Lowe in Sydney with a swing of 9 per cent against the government. At a general election a uniform swing of only 1.4 per cent would deliver power to Labor. One of Hayden's supporters up to that time, Keating also had a vested interest in seeing him succeed.\n\nEven though Hawke had not shone in Parliament in his first two years, he had managed to build pivotal help in his leadership quest not only from trade union backers, but from Labor-machine powerbrokers in three key states: Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales. It probably still rankles with Keating that Hawke almost certainly would not have been able to force Hayden out and become Prime Minister without support from the heart of Keating's own NSW right-wing tribe. Chief among them was Graham Richardson, who ran the state party machine and, with Keating, the NSW right-wing parliamentary faction in Canberra.\n\nKeating's own ambitions were clear. He'd come to Parliament from one of the country's most prized Labor seats at 25, barely missed the first Whitlam Ministry at 28, and the deputy leadership of his party by a whisker at 31. He could see his path to the leadership through the late 1970s and early 1980s.\n\nBut Hawke had a fourteen-year head start in life and was launching his bid from a much broader base, and had a higher and more popular public profile. He had much of the industrial movement and a significant bank of rank-and-file support, as well as the fascination of the media and popularity in opinion polls.\n\nAs a Rhodes scholar to Oxford with an economic literacy honed by his years fighting wage cases for the ACTU, Hawke carried an easy and abrasive confidence into any public debate. In these years, the polls were his bible, and in Australian political history, no one else had connected to the broad populace the way he had. He was made for the television age.\n\nKeating could only beat Hawke to the parliamentary leadership if Hayden was able to hold Hawke at bay for long enough to defeat Fraser at an election. Had Hayden done so, Keating would have been in a position to enhance his credentials for succession as the reforming treasurer he became, and as a superior parliamentary performer to Bob Hawke. In those circumstances it would have been a real contest. But the quest for power in politics is littered with 'if onlys' and 'what ifs'.\n\n**KOB:** I know you felt Bill Hayden was the natural successor to Gough Whitlam after 1975, but compared to Whitlam, Hawke or you, or Fraser and Howard on the Liberal side, he had a marked diffidence about his own leadership abilities. Can diffidence or even humility really be a virtue in leadership?\n\n**PJK:** I think the whole idea that the job should be yours, which comes from either an earned confidence or an instinctive confidence, is a necessary attribute for the prosecution of the big prizes of public life: general elections, the articulation of ideas, ascendancies in the ideas market. It's very difficult to do these things without that inner belief. Now, many people would say a lot of people haven't earned these views about themselves and that's true of a lot of us, but Bill's self-doubt was probably more evident in his demeanour than it might have been in other people.\n\nLet me go from either side of that ledger. Bob Hawke, for instance, had the confidence all the time that the job should be his and he was ready to have it, and wanted to take it. That extra energy gives a leader enormous turbo-boosting. Bill Hayden didn't have the inner turbocharge he might have needed, but his self-reflections are also reflections on his own honesty of character, which, ironically, was a great attribute.\n\nWith Fraser's prime ministership diminished, and if he had had a reasonable level of self-confidence, Bill would have been in a position to turn the numbers he had into the prime ministership. He said when he stood down for Hawke that even a drover's dog could have won the election. Bill was much better than a drover's dog. If he'd had a lot keener inner belief, and with the good team he'd drawn around him, and just the killer instinct to keep Hawke off, he would have got there.\n\n**KOB:** I can remember Hayden saying to me once, having just come out of the parliamentary chamber where John Howard was speaking from the government despatch box, 'That guy in there is our biggest problem in the government.' At that stage Howard was Treasurer, and Hayden said, 'He should be our prime target, but the trouble is everyone on our side likes him.' I would imagine if you were leader at that point, you might have liked or respected Howard, but that wouldn't have stopped you going after him.\n\n**PJK:** No. The bifurcation of politics means that those sorts of considerations have to be put to one side. In the end there's got to be that raw energy to capture the job. Bill had enough of it to get eight-tenths along the way. He just didn't have enough of it to blast through and take the prize.\n\nI was pretty certain he would have won in 1983. He had put together the primary team that essentially became the ministry of the Hawke years, and he spent time with people, checked people out and made judgements about them. He nurtured the collective effort, so you had to give him high marks as Opposition leader. Having done an economics degree, he knew that at the fork in the road of national income, the greater proportion of it should go to the private economy, not to the public economy. Other people didn't accept that, but he did. Unfortunately, as a leader, doubt probably got the better of him.\n\n**KOB:** While Hayden was establishing his leadership and the team around him in his first term from 1977 to 1980, Bob Hawke was circling outside. Everyone knew that you also nursed your ambitions for future leadership. Can you describe the dynamic among the three of you?\n\n**PJK:** By 1979 I was president of the NSW branch of the Labor Party and leader of the NSW Right in the federal parliamentary caucus. I was very much in the Hayden camp, trying to reshape the party policies around the person whose public credibility was strong. It's worth remembering of Bill that when he became Treasurer in the Whitlam Ministry in mid-1975 with an unholy mess to clean up, he had fashioned a very credible budget that, for all his talk of economic calamity, Fraser kept intact for the next nine months after the Dismissal.\n\nHawke had built his credentials through the trade union movement and had a lot of barrackers from within it. I was barracking for Hayden. I was not necessarily barracking against Bob, but I was not sure whether he was going to make the jump into parliamentary politics or what sort of parliamentarian he would be. Subsequently he did get elected for the seat of Wills in Melbourne, and then he was on a different battlefield.\n\n**KOB:** The longer Hayden stayed, the more it suited your ambitions, didn't it? It meant you had longer to develop a bit more gravitas, get a bit more experience, build your reputation a little more, which meant the stronger your credentials would be in a leadership contest against Hawke.\n\n**PJK:** Indeed. I would have been completely happy to see Hayden as Prime Minister. He would have made his mark in the job and I don't think he would have worn out his welcome. In fact he intimated to me a number of times he wouldn't stay all that long. In other words he might gift the job to me, and he knew as I knew that the interstate Left had already approached me in 1979, 1980 and 1981 to back me for leadership after Hayden to stop Hawke. In those years they were absolutely opposed to Hawke becoming leader.\n\nTom Uren arranged a meeting for me in his Canberra home in 1979 with Arthur Gietzelt and Bruce Childs from NSW, and Bill Hartley and George Crawford from the Left in Victoria, pushing me as the guy to stop Hawke if Hayden fell over as leader.\n\nWhen I agreed to become NSW Party President in 1979 after John Ducker retired unexpectedly and under pressure from Barrie Unsworth, I knew I was putting the Left support for me in Parliament in jeopardy because I was put into the presidency to hold the line for the Right in NSW. The Left had a stronghold in Victoria, and they were threatening to take control in NSW. That would have been a disaster for the party in policy terms and potentially kept us out of government with the old centralised economic approach the Left still passionately believed in.\n\nIn the late 1970s\u2014it might have been around 1980\u2014I can remember Arthur Gietzelt, as a Left faction leader in the caucus and a junior member of Hayden's shadow ministry, arguing on the front page of the _Nation Review_ against the West German social democratic model and supporting the centrally planned Eastern European model run out of the Soviet Union. That gives you an idea of the confused policy agenda inside the party at the time.\n\nHayden and I, among others, were regarded with suspicion by Gietzelt and others on the Left because we were breaking new policy ground, moving away from the old central planning, using market-based policies to grow the private economy.\n\nJohn Faulkner, who was then part of the new generation from the Left, tells a story of Arthur trying to knock him out of the Assistant Secretary's job in the NSW party machine because he wasn't a Marxist.\n\nThe Left's views on the economy were diametrically opposed to mine and yet they were prepared to back me for the leadership after Hayden, which tells you how strongly they felt about Bob taking the leadership, although they changed their minds later.\n\n**KOB:** In 1980 the NSW Labor power broker and future Premier, Barrie Unsworth, arranged a meeting between you and Bob\n\nHawke in Sydney. Why did he call that meeting, and what was the essence of what was said between you?\n\n**PJK:** Barrie said to me, 'You know I've got to hold our forces together in NSW and at the ACTU, and you know we now barrack for Hawke, and you don't seem to know him very well or have anything to do with him. How about we catch up and have a talk?'\n\nI said I didn't really want to meet Hawke, to be honest. I was happy for him to stay in the industrial sphere, with me in the political sphere. I'd run into him a few times socially, not with great pleasure. Bob used to belt the bottle a bit and all the rest of it. He was always rude, not to me, but to the groups, so I thought, 'I don't really need to meet Hawke.' Barrie said, 'Come on, we want you to meet him.'\n\nWhat Bob wanted to talk about was getting support for the leadership. He said that if he got to the federal Parliament, he would want the NSW Right faction in Parliament, led by me, to support him against Bill Hayden. He said that in the event he became leader and then Prime Minister, there'd be a place for me in that government, and a place for me succeeding him as leader. In that conversation he said he'd only want to stay a couple of terms.\n\n**KOB:** Why would the two of you have been talking about his leadership versus yours at that time? Hayden was performing well as leader, he hadn't yet faced an election and when he did later in 1980, he very nearly beat Malcolm Fraser. This was a period when loyalty to the leader in the Labor Party was still held in very high regard.\n\n**PJK:** I didn't want the conversation. What Bob had in those days was popular appeal with the public measured through opinion polls, but he didn't have the breadth of performance that comes with the hard policy work in Parliament. I didn't think the President's job at the ACTU in the 1970s was sufficient qualification alone to become party leader and Prime Minister. Hayden, on the other hand, had fought a very tough battle as parliamentary leader, cleared out a lot of the 1960s and 1970s policy baggage, and nearly won the 1980 election.\n\n**KOB:** What agenda did you set for yourself through the Hayden years?\n\n**PJK:** By that stage I was the Shadow Minister for Minerals and Energy. I'd been in every mine and every corporate head office in the country umpteen times, so I knew that section of Australian business very well. I also used to participate in the economic debates, but what I was really doing was trying to work out the real story behind the Australian economy. Why was it performing so badly? Why were we condemned to such low growth?\n\nI was trying to find the codes and work out what a Labor approach should be, bearing in mind that it was not beyond the wit of us to make the link between labour and capital\u2014that is, to have the right arraignment of capital and to pull labour in its stead. That's what I always thought we should have, the right arraignment with capital, using labour in its locomotion with an equitable spread of the benefits.\n\nThe shadow cabinet used to meet every Tuesday morning about 9.30 when Parliament was sitting and there weren't enough seats at the table, so some people had to sit around the walls. It was always a coherent discussion because there was an intensity of focus on having a solid policy core to take us into government, and there was an acknowledgement that people had specialisations like Don Grimes on social welfare or Neal Blewett on Medicare.\n\nIt was coherent and cooperative, and never descended into bickering and had a good-naturedness about it. Everyone was aware of the battle to rebuild Labor's fortunes after 1975 and 1977.\n\nThat mood didn't really change when Bob Hawke came into Parliament at the 1980 election, although there might have been a bit of wariness initially in the Hayden camp. People were curious to see how Bob would adapt to the challenges of the new environment, and it's now well recorded that he had difficulty in those early days handling Parliament. It was not a natural forum for him, which was a surprise and disappointment to some of his followers.\n\nYou have to work within the rules of the parliamentary chamber, to know them and be comfortable with them. Bob had difficulty drafting questions which were in order and which were politically effective. He would either be making a preamble or semi-speech in lieu of a question. The rules of the game were not natural to him, so there wasn't too much concern about Bob in the Hayden camp when he arrived, although his purpose was clear.\n\nHe used to sit on the front bench sometimes at night during the adjournment debate and someone would sit down beside him and Bob would pull out the latest _Bulletin_ poll or some other opinion poll and say, 'I don't know whether you've seen this...'\n\nHe had a permanent promotional campaign running, but not rudely. Never disruptive or intrusive.\n\n**KOB:** As a key performer in Hayden's parliamentary team, how consciously were you shaping your debating style and your broad strategic approach to parliamentary engagement?\n\n**PJK:** One has to be an amateur psychiatrist in the game, so one is permanently assessing the colleagues as well as the Opposition. The people on the other side who drew my attention were very descriptive types\u2014people like Doug Anthony, Peter Nixon and Ian Sinclair in the National Party or Phillip Lynch or Malcolm Fraser himself. You could identify the particular views they held and the particular ways they went about proselytising them.\n\nThe game is really quite sophisticated. Many viewers of public life don't quite understand the true level of sophistication that a parliamentary player must have to be effective. The most effective players in the Fraser Government were the nucleus of the National Party. Sinclair was probably the most charming, and Nixon would have been the most effective. The one who most objected to us was Doug Anthony.\n\nI suppose sometimes I was consciously looking for ways to get under their skin, but I was much more intent on injecting real content into debates. In the second reading debates on legislation, if your contributions were reasonable they were covered in the media, and there was a necessary focus on getting your words noticed.\n\nSo, often, if it was a debate, I would be talking around the subjects more than I would be attacking the government. I think the game has descended somewhat now from the level of parliamentary debate I grew up in. In those days there was a lot more trafficking in ideas and information than you might find now. And people were more inclined to sit and listen.\n\nIn debates on matters of public importance, which was one of the devices available to oppositions during which critical issues were raised, you'd be more likely to use those forums to attack the government rather than to be informative, although you'd try to be both.\n\nI don't want to sound absurd here, but the whole parliamentary discussion was more learned then. For instance, if Bill Wentworth, who had been John Gorton's Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, would appear to talk about an Aboriginal issue I'd go and listen to what he'd have to say, because he was genuine and knowledgeable on the subject.\n\nWe all have strengths, and my long suit was that I always made a point of replying to the issues raised, rather than simply gratuitously attacking them. That's why I think I did better than most in Question Time when I was in government because I always took the question seriously and always answered it\u2014but it didn't stop me having a little bit of fun along the way at the other side's expense.\n\nIn opposition, if I were in a debate and Doug Anthony was talking about, let's say, the states' former rights to minerals in the territorial sea before the Whitlam Government had legislated to give the Commonwealth power, and they were trying to bifurcate those powers, I would listen to their reasoning and their arguments, and then address them quite specifically.\n\nI started writing with a fountain pen in the 1970s, and I still do every day, because with a pen you can write faster, while a biro is slower and puts more strain on your wrist. A fountain pen slides over the paper without wrist wear, and if you are listening to someone speaking and you're trying to cover that longhand, then you can write more quickly and get the points down. Once you've done that you have a framework for the reply. Replies to each of the points is as powerful as it is disarming.\n\nIn the first instance you have to be a good listener. Secondly, you should give the person speaking the credit for some intelligence and for having a position. I employed this technique in all my Cabinet years when colleagues would speak in a Cabinet debate.\n\nSo in those early debates from opposition I'd get up in reply and say, 'Mr Speaker, the minister said ten minutes ago...' and I'd be able to quote him precisely.\n\nYou could also use a bit of humour and, where appropriate, a bit of mischief. When little gems came along you stored them in your head, but they have to have genuineness to be gems. They can't be confected. They've got to be real.\n\nFor instance, in the 1977 election campaign I was in the Cooktown Hotel talking with an old drover at the bar and watching the news on a television set on the wall in a corner. An election story came on and Malcolm Fraser's head suddenly filled the screen. In a classic bush drawl, the drover said, 'You know, if I had a dog with eyes as close together as that I'd shoot it.' I filed it away and it came in very handy one day when Malcolm was in full patrician flight in Parliament. It took the wind out of his sails and got a good laugh, so it was effective.\n\nMick Young and I ran the primary opposition against the government in Parliament behind Bill Hayden from 1977 to 1983. On matters of public importance, which were the primary vehicle for the daily assault on the government, mostly the leader wouldn't do them, and the relevant shadow ministers would run each debate.\n\nIt was a good and effective team behind Bill and we enjoyed ourselves, and I was still learning things. You went there thinking you knew some things and then you'd discover you didn't know very much at all. You've got to be able to keep putting the pieces together. It's a bit like the way an MRI works today, a magnetic resonance image of your body or torso. It comes in slices, but when it shows up on a computer screen it presents a complete internal picture, and this is pretty true of public policy and public life. You pick up bits of wisdom in slices, but then you've got to make it whole and give it life.\n\nThat is what I used to try to do: make sense of it all. What does this really mean?\n\nMost of the information people needed in order to have authority in what they had to say was available if they knew where to look. Statement Number Two of the budget papers each year would have a reasonably good picture of the economy, and the explanatory memorandums attached to legislation would give you a reasonable handle on any bills you had to debate, so if you were energetic enough to digest the material and wise enough to analyse it and identify both its policy and political relevance, then you could continue to grow.\n\n**KOB:** You had another meeting with Bob Hawke about the leadership in 1982, by which time he was established in Parliament and pushing Hayden strongly. What prompted that meeting?\n\n**PJK:** The second meeting was about whether the NSW Right would support Bob in his poorly arranged challenge to Hayden in the middle of 1982. Having declared his hand, Bob was marooned with not enough votes. He'd called on a challenge that he couldn't complete.\n\nThe headlines at the time said it all: 'Hawke's target twenty defectors by Friday.' 'Keating is now Hawke's last hope.' 'NSW switches to give Hawke his chance.' And here's the final one: 'How Hawke was dragged back from oblivion.'\n\nIn the end Hayden won 42 to 37. Without our seventeen votes it would have been Hawke twenty, Hayden 59. It would have just about knocked him out of the contest. He might have been able to come back, but it would have been much harder.\n\nWhy Bob had chosen to challenge with so little solid support was a mystery to all of us, particularly me. He'd been encouraged by, of all people, Tom Uren, who had previously been strongly opposed to him. Tom later denied this\u2014and Tom and I did get on well, I thought the world of him\u2014but Bob had been given some Dutch courage and he had such confidence about his own standing that he believed there would be momentum for him.\n\nBut what happened was that this ill-conceived challenge was announced but the votes that materialised for him were actually quite modest. Bill could have crushed him completely if the NSW Right had not swung in behind Hawke. I was the NSW Party President, a senior member of Bill's front bench and, in all manner of things, a Hayden loyalist. But I had lost part of the Right in NSW over one now seemingly unimportant matter.\n\nLabor in opposition had four leadership positions in Parliament: leader and deputy leader in each house of Parliament, and each one of those four became members of the party's National Executive. As party leader, Bill had supported Don Grimes on the Left over Doug McClelland on the Right to the deputy opposition leadership in the Senate, which meant that the Right lost a critical vote on the National Executive.\n\nMcClelland was deeply wounded by Bill's actions and made his displeasure obvious for months thereafter. People in the NSW party machine like Graham Richardson, who felt they had a promise of Bill's support for McClelland, said to me, 'Well, that shows you about your mate Hayden. When you sorely need him for something he runs out on you.'\n\nBill's reason for that action was so ephemeral I've since forgotten it, but it was a mad thing to do. If not for that I believe he would have beaten Hawke off and become Prime Minister.\n\nI had told him that if he stopped worrying about factional machinations, as NSW Party President I could keep his support solid from the Right. I said, let me worry about the Right. But after that move against McClelland, I couldn't hold them all together.\n\nWhat was on display for my colleagues on the Right was Hawke's completely confident view about himself and his ability to displace Fraser, compared with Bill's self-doubt, which was an issue in their minds. They just didn't quite know, notwithstanding how close Bill had come to winning in 1980, whether he would actually lunge over the line in 1983, whereas with Hawke they were pretty sure they'd win.\n\nHawke had a lot of support from the Victorian Right from people like Gareth Evans and Robert Ray, but had I kept my support with Bill it would have split the NSW Right. So the judgement had to be made, and in many respects I had to make it, as to whether we could afford to let the leadership instability continue or whether we'd come to the point of having to make up our minds.\n\nAs much as I had misgivings about Bob's capacity and experience to lead the party through another year of Parliament if Fraser ran full term, because Bob hadn't been handling Parliament all that well, I made the call to go with him as the leader we knew we would win with, as opposed to Hayden, the leader we _might_ win with.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke suggested in the _Labor in Power_ interviews that you basically succumbed to factional pressure in supporting him, to which you rejoined that you were the hitter not the hittee, and Hawke was the beggar, not the chooser. What exactly did you mean by that?\n\n**PJK:** In a sense I saved Bob from himself. I wasn't forced to support him because I still had huge influence in the show and had I chosen to stay with Bill I would have taken a body of our factional members in Parliament with me. By the same token I had been in public life at that point for thirteen years and effectively had never been a minister, other than for a brief few weeks in the Whitlam Government before the Dismissal. There was a risk that the show would run out of puff if we didn't win the next election.\n\nI was having great trouble holding the faction to Hayden. I had great trouble rounding them up. I could have split them. I desperately wanted to see Hayden get his shot at the prime ministership, but with Bob we were certain we would beat Fraser and with Bill we were uncertain, so our bloc of votes went over to Bob. He still lost to Hayden, but only narrowly. And that was really the big stepping stone to the leadership for him.\n\nThe great ongoing issue between Bob and me is that I don't think he ever quite understood that he saw me as just another rung in his ladder to the top, another stepping stone in his career. He'd always had people to smooth the way for him, people in the trade union movement like Charlie Fitzgibbon from the Waterside Workers and Bill Landeryou at the Storemen and Packers, or John Ducker at the New South Wales Labour Council. In his terms I think I was just another one along the way, which was a fundamental error, because it came to affect his judgement about a sensible leadership transition to me down the track.\n\nBob was very magnanimous to Bill immediately after the challenge was resolved in Bill's favour, but it didn't last, because he soon started taking the polls out of his sleeve again to show people. After we lost the Flinders by-election late in 1982, which Labor should have won with a significant swing against the government, things deteriorated around Bill, and it was in that period that he made me Shadow Treasurer to try to strengthen his own position.\n\nI had asked Bill for the Shadow Treasury portfolio after the election in 1980, but he decided then to stay with Ralph Willis. In those days I believed I had a much better model developing in my head for the economy and was in a better position to sell that model than anybody else, including Ralph, but Bill decided to stick with Ralph. By January 1983 he was in all sorts of strife over the leadership and he gave me the Shadow Treasury to help shore himself up against another Hawke challenge.\n\nBy that time I felt I didn't want it. I was running my own race but Bill insisted I take it. I would have preferred the Hawke thing to be settled other than through some surrogate move to make me Shadow Treasurer.\n\nBob was outraged. He said to me, 'He's buggered the lot of us.' He intimated, without asking me outright, that I should reject it.\n\nI said to him, 'Bill's the leader, Bob, and the leader's got the right to change the front bench. It means I've got to go up the big learning curve but what else can I do?'\n\n**KOB:** Hayden's leadership collapsed within weeks of you taking the Shadow Treasury. He stepped down and Bob Hawke became leader. On that same day Malcolm Fraser called an election, thinking he was going to lock Hayden in. Suddenly he was faced with Hawke, who was really in the box seat going into that election campaign. All the impetus seemed to be with him. You must have had mixed feelings watching him step up to realise his ambition, because it was a key fork in the road in terms of your future.\n\n**PJK:** The mixed feelings I had at the time were for Hayden. Politics is actually a very sentimental business as much as anything else. By that stage Hayden and I had been together in the parliamentary party for more than a decade\u2014not personally close, but in a close working relationship. So that day I wasn't thinking about my leadership ambitions, I was thinking about Bill losing his great shot at history.\n\nIt would have been a good time for Hayden to lead. In the Fraser years going into 1983, economic growth under the Liberals was a derisory 1.8 per cent. We more than doubled that. There was the big wages explosion in the Whitlam years, declining levels of competitiveness and the long secular decline in the terms of trade. The value of the things we were buying on the world market in those days, such as colour televisions, videos and motor vehicles were expensive, and the things we were selling like iron ore, coal, copper, lead, zinc were becoming cheaper. In other words Australia was caught in an income vice and the Liberal Government under Fraser had just trotted along.\n\nIt would be no news to anyone the utter contempt with which I hold the Liberal Party because of their incapacity to run the economy, their complete lack of imagination and lack of faith in the Australian people. I'm talking about having the fundamental belief that we can hack it with the best in the world.\n\nThe country went into an industrial museum in the Menzies years and simply faded into the sand.\n\nI was watching all this in the 1970s with the fundamental conviction that this structure was all wrong. I was trying to put the pieces together.\n\nTreasury didn't have the answers either. It could identify the problems, but didn't have the answers. We simply weren't able to get labour and capital together. We had a completely sclerotic financial market, product markets protected by tariffs and quotas, and arbitrarily set wages with inflation locked in through wage indexation. The poison of inflation kept running through the veins of the economy because it was indexed. So we had no chance of being competitive.\n\n**KOB:** But when you talk about your contempt for the Liberals, the fact is that for the bulk of Australia's history after Federation, Australian voters had opted for conservative governments. Either you're saying that the Australian people had a great capacity to get things wrong or the conservatives were getting something right.\n\n**PJK:** Well, voters might have had a capacity to get it right while the salad days of postwar growth carried Menzies and his governments along, but they got it wrong when they returned the Liberal governments of Holt, Gorton and McMahon in those very important years when the long wave of postwar economic growth was coming to an end. My complaint against the Liberal Party was their dumbness, their incapacity to actually structurally change the place. The country was just rolling along, and rolling into the sand.\n\nPolitically they had a divided Labor Party to exploit, particularly in Victoria and Queensland. Menzies had a 10 per cent head start with the DLP, and he had incompetent opponents in the inept Bert Evatt and Arthur Calwell, who just didn't connect with the community at all, despite the fact that Labor under Calwell nearly won the 1961 election. I'll acknowledge that we did this to ourselves. We chose the leaders and we kept them there. With a less divisive leader than Evatt the party would probably never have split.\n\nTime after time the Liberals proved that they weren't broadly up to the job of setting the country up for a prosperous postwar future, and it was very telling at Menzies' final press conference, how little he was able to say about his policy achievements after sixteen years. I mean, you'd hang your head in shame if you'd set the bar that low. The bar was so low that Menzies only had to lift his quasi-royal foot over it to get a pass mark.\n\n**KOB:** One undeniable achievement of the Menzies years was his substantial boost to tertiary education in Australia, which would have come at an extremely important time in Australia's postwar social and economic development. At the beginning of his sixteen years there were something like 12,000 students going to universities across Australia, and by the time his reign had come to an end, it was very close to 100,000. One of the keys to that growth was the Commonwealth scholarships he introduced. I think you'd have to say it was Menzies who began to break the mould where university was the preserve of the elite or the sons of the elite, to a somewhat broader representation at least.\n\n**PJK:** I'm not saying that in sixteen years the Menzies Government achieved nothing. I'm saying the bar was set painfully low. When Hawke and I started our run in 1983, three kids in ten completed Year Twelve at school. When I finished as Prime Minister it was nine in ten, a trebling of Year Twelve retentions.\n\nA great part of that bulk was made up of girls, young women who for the first time completed Year Twelve. And to follow that growth through, we had to treble university places. We took university places from 200,000 to 600,000. This happened with the Dawkins reforms.\n\nWe went from being a country with just a basic primary education and a trickle of kids completing high school and going to university, to one where nearly half the student base was going on to a tertiary education.\n\n**KOB:** When you suddenly had to face an election campaign in 1983 so soon after becoming Shadow Treasurer and a very seasoned opponent in John Howard, who'd been Treasurer for five years, what problems did that pose for you?\n\n**PJK:** It was a very presidential campaign. There was Fraser as Prime Minister with a big personality, and the larger than life Bob Hawke, both surrounded by big campaign teams. There were debates between Howard and me but you'd have to say the preponderance of coverage of that election campaign fell to the two leaders.\n\n**KOB:** Did that let you off the hook somewhat, that so much of the attention fell elsewhere, that you were less likely to have journalists trying to catch you out on some esoteric economic technicality?\n\n**PJK:** I knew enough about the general economic debate to pull myself through that sort of minefield, but my big problem was that we didn't have the kind of credible remedial policies I believed we needed and that we should have had. I was stuck with an economic framework we'd had through the balance of 1981 and 1982 that I didn't particularly believe in but I had to sell.\n\nThe Accord with wages policy as its centrepiece was a key part of Bob's campaign. Ralph Willis was a primary architect of the Accord, and I went with Ralph to meet the key trade union leaders of the Left at the Miscellaneous Workers' headquarters in Sydney. What became apparent to me in that meeting was that beyond broad principles, there was no agreement whatsoever at that stage about how wage restraint would be maintained or how as a group we would exit Fraser's so-called wage freeze.\n\nThe essence of the Accord was that if we could take a softer approach to monetary policy and get a little more growth there could be a trade-off with the unions in return for their restraint on wage claims. But even as late as three weeks before the election there was still no practical agreement under the so-called Accord that Bob had nominally put together with Ralph.\n\n**KOB:** How does it feel to have to do the dance endorsing policy you don't believe in or have doubts about? For instance, you had personally supported the entry of foreign banks into Australia for years, but in the election campaign you had to speak against that in line with your party policy while John Howard was endorsing it.\n\n**PJK:** It doesn't feel good because you're not arguing with any veracity. I was on the record in Parliament six years before, arguing for greater competition in the banking sector, probably through the introduction of foreign banks, and within weeks of the election I announced that we would be revisiting the Campbell Report that recommended foreign banks. Then in the campaign itself I had to oppose such a move. I didn't feel particularly comfortable doing that but the Accord represented a bigger problem for me because, for all the preening that had gone on about us having developed a new way on wages policy\u2014the third instrument of economic policy in tandem with budget policy and monetary policy\u2014in reality there was no wages policy.\nTHE REINS OF POWER\n\nOn election night 5 March 1983, I co-anchored the Seven network's coverage from the Canberra tally room with the veteran political journalist Ken Begg. Tally rooms are now a thing of the past, but those who were there that night will never forget the electric moment in the huge barn-like room packed with expectant Labor supporters when Bob Hawke appeared at the entrance to claim victory with Hazel on his arm, his wave definitely regal in style.\n\nAnother moment I'll never forget that night is Hawke, sandwiched between Begg and me on our election set, when Malcolm Fraser appeared at Melbourne's Southern Cross Hotel to concede defeat. Hawke didn't move or say a word, his gaze locked on the monitor, radiating a fierce concentration as he soaked up the sight of Fraser forcing the words of concession past a quivering lower lip.\n\nIt's a reasonable assumption that two things were driving Hawke's intensity. It was no secret he had been nursing his ambition to lead the country for decades, and this moment was the culmination of that journey. Secondly, as the head of the trade union movement and Labor Party President at the time of the Whitlam Dismissal, there was a personal sweetness to his victory, that he was the Labor hero leading his party back from the wilderness.\n\nIn Hawke's eyes, this was his destiny. Whatever momentary flickers of uncertainty he might have privately felt about the job ahead in the odd quiet moment on the campaign trail, there was no room for any self-doubt that night. Hawke was super-charged with adrenaline and anticipation, believing he could set up Labor for a long run in power.\n\nCelebrating the night with his supporters back in Sydney before flying to Canberra, Paul Keating would have had a somewhat different set of reflections. Yes, there was the sense of triumph in beating Labor's arch-enemy Malcolm Fraser after three terms on the Opposition benches, and the obvious excitement of forging new Labor policy for government, but also a measure of apprehension.\n\nAlthough he had participated regularly in economic debate as Shadow Minister for Resources and Energy for seven years, Keating had only been Shadow Treasurer for weeks, with little time to build important new relationships and establish his credentials with the broad economic and financial community or wrap his head around the language, culture and form of economics and finance. There would be nowhere to hide as he faced an incredibly sharp learning curve in the first months of government.\n\nLabor was inheriting a daunting economic trifecta\u2014double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment and high wages, with a serious terms-of-trade decline in the pipeline and a 50 per cent larger than expected budget deficit. Interest rates were also in double figures.\n\nHand in hand with this, Keating had a set of predetermined Labor policies developed by his predecessor Ralph Willis with which he had privately disagreed substantially while promoting them in the election campaign. He had also inherited Willis's economic advisors who had helped shape and still firmly believed in those policies.\n\nHe also had a potentially hostile head of Treasury in John Stone, who had not endeared himself to Labor in the Whitlam years, who had been a thorn in the side of the Fraser Government as well, and who would have had his own doubts about Labor's economic credentials, based on what he'd seen in the early 1970s. Stone by reputation was a man who firmly believed that the Treasury way\u2014his way\u2014was the only way. Treasury was notorious for putting up briefing papers to governments that only had one point of view.\n\nThere was a desire in senior Labor ranks to see Stone shown the door, and even Stone may have expected to be given his marching orders. On election day, in a speech to students graduating from Sydney University, he appeared to throw caution to the winds, when referring to the campaign: 'All of us must have been reminded of Dr Johnson's famous remark that the appeal of patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel. There may also have occurred to us another aphorism, that empty vessels make the most sound.'\n\nIt's an unusual senior bureaucrat who would so openly express such scorn for politicians, particularly in the circumstances.\n\nCoupled with the challenge of a fledgling Treasurer being expected to sack his head of department virtually as he walked through the door, Keating had a new leader with whom he had no special relationship, who knew he nursed his own leadership ambitions, and who had already made known his preference to give the Treasury portfolio back to his old ACTU colleague Ralph Willis\u2014a preference Keating headed off at the pass with support from his factional comrade Graham Richardson.\n\nWhat Hawke and Keating did have in common was a determination that the lessons of the Whitlam years would not be forgotten, that this time Labor would be disciplined and economically credible from the outset.\n\nIronically, in his very first briefing paper to Hawke and Keating, which revealed a far higher deficit than expected from the final Fraser\u2013Howard budget, John Stone handed them a powerful excuse to dampen the spending expectations of their caucus and Cabinet, and change the whole economic direction of the new government.\n\nWhat was to come, in arguably the most sustained period of economic reform post-Federation, was a catalogue of change that fundamentally transformed the nation, and in the process, the Labor Party as well. Not all of the outcomes were anticipated, like the huge speculative spending splurge through the late 1980s after big changes to the banking system, but the extent of that broad sweep of reform would have been far more problematic without the dynamism and unanimity of purpose of the Hawke\u2013Keating partnership.\n\n**PJK:** It was a great victory over Malcolm Fraser. He had ripped up the rulebook in 1975 and then they ran the economy into the ground. Contrary to the popular view that the Liberals were supposed to be better economic managers, just look at the record. The deepest recession to that point was the one presided over by Malcolm Fraser and John Howard, the biggest declines in GDP in 1981 and 1982, and a second wages explosion\u2014so it was good riddance to them. I was hugely buoyed by the result, and by that stage I was Shadow Treasurer. I believed I would be Treasurer and I was thinking that the whole framework of economic policy had to change. I couldn't run with the old Labor orthodoxy.\n\nThe party had to make the choice of facing a different policy future at this point in its history after nearly a hundred years of socialist-style objectives: management of the economy by government institutions and boosting economic growth by making the budget deficit bigger. And yes, I had some apprehension at that moment. I had only been Shadow Treasurer for a matter of weeks, but anyone who walks on stage, whether a thespian or a politician, has certain nerves in the belly. If you don't have those you'll never be any good.\n\nSo at the same time as I was celebrating a great victory, I also felt a heavy sense of responsibility falling on me. Recovery from recession was the immediate problem. But here was an economy where Australia's terms of trade had been dropping since about the time Menzies retired in 1966. We had double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. We had a budget deficit around 5 per cent of GDP under Howard's last budget. Government spending had gone from 23 to 30 per cent of GDP through the Whitlam and Fraser years. Wages were massively higher than they should have been, the so-called real wage overhang. The profit share was smashed to pieces, and investment had fallen through the floor.\n\nBut as Treasurer, when you get the job, you get the job. You can't suddenly say it's the guy next to you.\n\n**KOB:** It came out much later that Bob Hawke considered going back to Ralph Willis as Treasurer after the election, but you found out at the time. I know Graham Richardson told Hawke it wasn't on but how did you deal with that personally?\n\n**PJK:** Ralph had worked with Bob at the ACTU before he became a parliamentarian, and broadly Bob was comfortable with Ralph as a personality. Ralph was also a trained economist. But Bob was smart enough to know that the models were all wrong. In his heart of hearts he knew that the general framework was way out of date for Australia.\n\nHe'd inherited me as the Shadow Treasurer and all of a sudden he seemed to be having second thoughts. I don't know how seriously he was thinking about it, but it was enough for me to say to him, 'Bob, you try and touch me as the Treasurer and I'm going to invoke the Harry Truman doctrine of massive retaliation, and I mean massive.'\n\nHis response was along the lines of, 'No, no, we're right mate.'\n\n**KOB:** What can you remember of the atmospherics of that first dramatic meeting you and Bob Hawke had with John Stone and other Treasury officials at the Lakeside Hotel the morning after the election, and the revelation that the deficit was far higher than you expected?\n\n**PJK:** It was a very surreal day. We'd won the election, the bureaucrats turned up with the normal sort of brief they prepare for the incoming government, and we were meeting in an atmosphere of urgency because of the run against the currency that had been going on over the fifteen or so days up to polling day. The Reserve Bank Governor Bob Johnston was there as a consequence.\n\nThe Treasury document had a great deal of hyperbole in it about the deterioration of the budget being greater than at any time since the Second World War and so on. What it really meant was that the budget deficit in prospect was nearly 5 per cent of GDP, which would be about $75 billion in today's dollars, outlays were touching 30 per cent of GDP when they'd been 23 per cent a decade earlier, and there was a great deal of pressure on the dollar in the foreign exchange market to boot.\n\nI recall having the discussion at a table sitting in front of the dark and empty downstairs bar at the Lakeside, where Bob and I were staying. There was a pervasive smell of stale beer, which didn't help the mood.\n\nIt's interesting looking back on it now that we were sitting there only hours after winning government, getting a whole new picture on the state of the economy and at the same time having to decide on a quite significant devaluation of the dollar. At least the decision to devalue was more or less cut and dried. It was just pretty obvious that the rate had to go down, but the decision to move in a discrete and large way by ten percentage points meant that the old authority of the calibrated crawling peg system was largely blown away. We were acceding to market pressure, and a consequence of that accession was the destruction of the crawling peg adjustment system we'd been regulating and relying upon for years.\n\n**KOB:** You were new to the job, you knew Bob Hawke had thought about bringing Ralph Willis back as Treasurer, you had a head of Treasury in John Stone who many of your Labor colleagues regarded with hostility and suspicion from the Whitlam years, and you wanted to change the economic canvas. As you prepared to establish yourself with your bureaucrats from Treasury, knowing you were going to have to win their respect and there was a fair chance they'd be looking at this young guy as something of a novice, did you have a clear view about how you were going to approach the job?\n\n**PJK:** No, I didn't, but I did understand one thing\u2014power. I knew how to put the electricity into the cables. When I went to Treasury for my first meeting, John Langmore, who I'd inherited as a senior adviser from Ralph Willis, stood at my office door with his manilla folder full of papers, and I told him, 'John, I'm going to go myself.'\n\nHe said, 'What do you mean you're going yourself?'\n\nI said, 'I'm going on my own. I'm not going to go on the presumption that we have a whole view counter to Treasury, or that they would think is counter to them, particularly through your presence.'\n\nHe said, 'Well, I've waited twenty years of my life to be a senior private secretary to a Labor Treasurer for that trip to Treasury.'\n\nI said, 'Well, John, you're going to have to wait a bit longer,' and I went over by myself.\n\nStone didn't know what to do with me. I walk in without a briefing paper, just a pen, to see the whole Treasury leadership and say, 'I'm working on the presumption that you will serve the government and serve me, but you will have to earn your spurs with me. And you can begin by telling me how you might do that.'\n\n**KOB:** How did John Stone react to that?\n\n**PJK:** He obviously thought this was quite unusual. I think his view was, we give them papers, they take notice of them and then they sign up. Suddenly they had just an inkling that the government might actually start running the policy.\n\n**KOB:** But isn't it true at the same time you were very aware that no minister survives who is not able to carry his ministry with him, who is not able to work with his senior public servants?\n\n**PJK:** If you have any talent you will always find the best talent to have around you, and never fear having talent around you. I was always looking for the best instincts and I had reasonably presumed that John Stone was a loyal Commonwealth public servant and a competent one, and that he would serve the government of the day.\n\nBut as well as sending them a message that the government was here to govern, I needed to win their trust. I always believed in institutions and structures. It's very hard to put new institutions and structures into place, and when you already have them there but they are deteriorating or have been marginalised, then you can probably assume there's something fundamentally wrong.\n\nIn the case of Treasury, they had fallen out with Malcolm Fraser in particular, and as a consequence he had split off the disbursements function into a new Department of Finance.\n\nThere was an independent revenue function with the Taxation Office, which had a set of statutory powers, but at the same time taxation policy belonged with Treasury along with disbursements or outlays\u2014the transfer payments, health, defence\u2014belonged with Treasury too. Fraser split that off to a new Department of Finance, and he'd also built an economic advisory body within his own Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. So Treasury was in the doghouse.\n\nAll this reeked of immaturity. Something was wrong. If Treasury wasn't serving the government properly or the government wasn't requiring the things of Treasury that Treasury was capable of doing, then everything in me said this is not the kind of structure I want to inherit and without question.\n\nI said to them, 'I accept at face value that Treasury should be the primary economic adviser to the government of the day. To the extent this position has been diminished by the events of recent years, let's try to re-establish that, and Treasury's views and the imperatives of Australian economic policy at least will be put at first hand and in a primary way, in any Cabinet I belong to.'\n\nI did think it was important that I went there alone, not being managed or protected by staff. You hear what they say in undistilled form, and they hear your thinking. I thought if I couldn't win their confidence, I could not succeed. Besides, John Langmore possessed old Labor Party views about economic planning and state controls of a kind I thought were entirely inconsistent with the needs of a modern mixed economy, certainly the kind of market-oriented economy I had in mind. His presence would have confirmed in Treasury that his naive views would have an influence on policy.\n\nNotwithstanding, there was a great deal of pressure on me from within the party to dump Stone because of the bad blood between Treasury and the Whitlam Government. I remember Mick Young in particular being vociferous about it, but I had to resist. You've got to remember Australia was a managed economy with a managed exchange rate\u2014the government set interest rates, with a centralised wage-fixing system in which the government had a heavy role.\n\nAs the wider financial world saw Australia, we were running current-account deficits they were funding, and as far as London and New York were concerned, Stone was 'Our Man in Havana', 'Our Man' with Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Salomon Brothers in New York, and Barclays in London.\n\nThe last thing we needed to look like was the Beverly Hillbillies arriving again after the economic instability of the Whitlam Government and the further big expenditure blowouts by Fraser and Howard. Guess what, the hillbillies are back in town and they've decapitated the one guy we know.\n\nI thought the sentiment to get rid of John was both a misjudgement and unfair to him because we were not yet in a position to know what he really thought or would do, but even more than that, the country being wrong-footed in these big global marketplaces would seriously impact on us. What people thought of us really did matter.\n\nI said to Bob, 'You and I are smart enough to be able to make judgements about Treasury and its progress under Stone, so we should reappoint him but keep him under review.'\n\nFrom memory, Bob always supported my view that Stone should stay.\n\nComing into government in the circumstances we did, you get no time to settle in. After the devaluation, the first big challenge for me was the Economic Summit, which Bob had scheduled to bring business and the unions together. The place was in such a ruin. It was a horror stretch. The business community were happy to be consulted but they couldn't offer much. Their profits had been shot to pieces and the country was massively uncompetitive.\n\nAt the same time we felt the economy may turn the corner after the savage recession, with the stimulus of the last Howard budget coming through the pipeline, and we were still coming to terms with the big deficit we'd been left. In my speech to the Summit I had to find my way past Treasury, who wanted to pull the deficit way down, and the Left, who wanted to pump everything up. I wrote the Summit speech in Sydney with David Morgan from Treasury.\n\nOne of my economic advisers, Barry Hughes, wrote a version, which I thought I could not live with. I didn't think it had the understanding of the stimulus already in the Fraser\u2013Howard budget and also the psychological shift I was looking for to move away from the big bang stimulus stuff that Labor had formerly supported.\n\nAt the Summit, we were looking for the right balance between stimulus and restraint. Until then I had these competing factions and views. Technically I still had Langmore on my staff and the influence of others in the big bang camp in the mix. On the other hand we had Treasury saying no, we have to pull everything way down.\n\nThe other big Summit agenda item was the wage distortion in the economy. Wages had blown out under both Whitlam and Fraser. We'd inherited a wage freeze that Fraser put into place before the election, so we had to set the timing to come out of the wage freeze. This was where the Social Accord between the Labor Government and the trade union movement came in. It had been largely authored between Ralph Willis as Shadow Treasurer and ACTU figures like Laurie Carmichael, Charlie Fitzgibbon and Bill Kelty, and sponsored by Bob Hawke before he became Labor leader.\n\nThe Accord was to be a third arm of Labor policy to go with fiscal and monetary policy\u2014that is, with the budget and interest rate settings\u2014and that was a wages policy through the Accord, trading off wage increases for job creation. In the prevailing orthodoxy Treasury regarded the notion of voluntary restraint on wages as a complete nonsense. Nevertheless that was a central policy of the government and we were going to give the Accord a reasonable shot. I wanted only Treasury's compliance in doing what the government reasonably asked of them. This was central to Hawke's campaign, and Bill Kelty's contribution to the Summit, promising wage restraint in return for job creation and a reduction in unemployment.\n\nAfter the Summit I felt I was off and running. We went from there to preparing our first major economic statement in May, reflecting the new financial realities, recasting our election commitments and making cuts to existing programs. I then had to get these proposals through the caucus committees and Cabinet. I spent a lot of time and effort in consultation but in the end, I got the changes through.\n\nI delivered the statement on 19 May 1983, three months after Bob's policy speech. And instead of increasing the deficit by $1.5 billion as the policy speech had proposed, we reduced it by $400 million\u2014a $2 billion shift in the prospective budget balance, which is a ton of money in today's dollars.\n\nBut to come back to the Economic Summit, that was really Bob's forum, Bob's stage, and it was a big success. The central idea he sold in the campaign was reconciliation, reconstruction and recovery. Reconciliation was a big part of the Summit and it set a mood for a new relationship with the unions and also with business.\n\n**KOB:** You've said that you'd made it your business in your early years in Parliament to learn how to cut through the intricacies of budgets and the various budget documents, but I assume that as the new kid on the block, in facing the challenges of your first mini-budget or May Statement, that you would have had to rely heavily on Treasury to show you around the nooks and crannies of the budget process.\n\n**PJK:** The May Statement brought forward measures that would otherwise have sat in the August budget, but the real debate was how big the budget deficit should be. The budget deficit we were led to expect by John Howard was around $6 billion. That had grown by more than 50 per cent by the day we took office to $9.6 billion. But in the modelling from the more expansionary forces in the Labor Party, they were looking at deficit options of between ten and fifteen billion dollars. I regarded this as lunacy. These would be huge numbers in today's dollars.\n\nDeciding on the appropriate deficit was basically what put Bob and me into harness. It was his intuitive view and my own that we had to pull the budget deficit in prospect down, not up. If Ralph Willis had been Treasurer it would have gone up; with me as Treasurer it was going to go down, at least partly on the basis that the stimulus already underway in Howard's last budget was about to pull the economy from recession anyway.\n\nAt that stage, to use the corporate analogy, Bob was chairman of the board and managing director and I was chief financial officer. Later I would become the undeclared managing director under his chairmanship but in that first year he and I were as thick as thieves. He'd press the button on his intercom and say, 'What are you doing mate?'\n\nI'd come up and have a coffee or tea, and he'd offer me a cigar. I'm not a cigar smoker but occasionally I'd have one with him. It was happening all the time. You can't imagine what pals we were. I would spend half of my evenings up there in his office and often at the Lodge for dinners.\n\nWe were on such a roll in that first year and the economic changes we wanted were coming through. Bob luxuriated in all that and so did I. It was a genuine friendship, not just one born out of pragmatism.\n\nWhen Bob invited me to accompany him on his first overseas trip as Prime Minister when he went to America to meet Ronald Reagan, it was a generous act on his part. The Treasurer had no reason to be seeing the American President. I was there basically because Bob liked having me around.\n\nAt this stage of his career Bob was prepared to go on the magic carpet ride. He was getting less cautious and more prepared to do the big deregulatory changes, and I loved that because it fitted my own philosophy and my reason for being around. I wanted to make good policy central to political strategy.\n\nIn my early years in Parliament, the media would mostly get excited by election speculation, tax cuts, leadership changes and budget leaks. And politically there was all this imagery from Menzies such as Reds under beds and tensions with Indonesia. With Harold Holt in 1966 it was the fear of the Vietnamese coming to get us in their _sampan_ s. There were cartoons with big red arrows coming down to Australia from Asia.\n\nNowhere was there a premium on real quality or good policy. Good policy was regarded as some sort of foolish thing you might try, but get burnt for your trouble. But I always believed political strategy should be built around good policy for which I believed there would be a public reward. In other words I took the view that an informed Australian community would be conscientious and that if a government did good and hard things to reinforce the public good, and explained them properly, the public would give you a mark for it. This was a complete change from the old approach to political leadership.\n\nBob's economic instincts were good and he was delighted to find his Treasurer had a commensurate set of similar instincts. The penny dropped for Bob that had he gone with Ralph and the Left of the party, it would have been a different story. Ralph was a great minister and later a great Treasurer in his own right, and a great member of Cabinet, contributing for years, but at that point he would have supported an expansionary budget with the effect of high interest rates crowding out private investment. My key point was that you could not bring the Australian economy back to growth off the back of public investment and public employment. The primary driver had to be private investment and private employment.\n\nIn those first few months of Cabinet meetings my critics would say, 'Oh you've been taken over by Treasury.'\n\nI said, 'No I haven't, but in these respects Treasury is right.'\n\n**KOB:** So, in the early days, who led whom in your relationship with Treasury?\n\n**PJK:** To do the job well as Treasurer you've got to have a model in your head. You've got to stand up in Parliament and argue the economic issues credibly, you've got to stand up in the caucus committees and have the arguments in your head. You can't survive on a handful of briefing notes from Treasury. You can't proselytise someone else's policy.\n\nOne of Australia's biggest problems was that too many treasurers had lived off their briefing notes, using them in Question Time like a security blanket. I was apprehensive in those early Question Times because while I might have the model clear in my head, I wasn't necessarily familiar with finer detail. The questions could come from any angle such as payments to the states, or interest rates, or the budget balance, or it could be about the tax system, so I was somewhat apprehensive. At the same time I was divining a new model that wasn't Treasury's forlorn model and wasn't the big bang model of the Labor Party.\n\nI was very conscious of the high wire I was walking, with everyone watching for a slip. So there was a substantial level of discomfort in those early months, but I built a lot of confidence from the Economic Summit and then the May Statement.\n\nIn the end I was the guy who had inherited the long secular decline in Australia's terms of trade from the middle 1960s. It got to the bottom in 1986, the banana republic year, but it was already there in substance when I arrived. The place had become more closed and more rigid with each year, so you either went along with the orthodoxy and watched it decline further, or you decided to blow the game up and say we're taking a new path.\nTHE FLOAT\n\nThe arrival of the Hawke Government coincided with substantial and irrevocable changes in the global financial sector. The internet and the capacity it delivered to financial traders to move massive amounts of money in the blink of an eye was still more than a decade away, but the borderless world of finance was already well and truly underway.\n\nIn that context, with a fixed exchange rate against the world's other significant currencies, the only way the Australian dollar could be maintained at or close to the rate the government wanted was for the Reserve Bank to buy and sell dollars in the marketplace. If big speculators decided to target the Australian dollar, there was a limit to how far the Reserve could go to resist that pressure. The more the dollar was targeted by investors and speculators, the more unstable it became.\n\nThe arguments for and against the level to set the dollar against foreign currencies were political as well as economic. In principle Treasury was inclined to support a stronger dollar because it tended to help keep inflation lower through cheaper imports. Farmers and miners tended to support a weaker dollar because they could sell their products more competitively to their overseas markets.\n\nIn the decades of Coalition governments, the Liberal Prime Ministers were inclined to take the Treasury line and their frequently politically tougher Country Party (later National Party) partners always argued for a weaker dollar. The effect of the government's decision either way was economically significant in terms of both money supply and interest rates. To put the fate of the dollar more in the hands of a free-flowing market than under the regulatory thumb of government would inevitably open the rest of the Australian financial system to competitive pressures. Once the dollar was floated it would only be a matter of time before pressure would also be felt to adjust wages or to deregulate the labour market.\n\nThe Fraser Government with John Howard as Treasurer had commissioned a sweeping review of Australia's financial system by a well-respected corporate leader, Sir Keith Campbell, whose report in 1981 recommended a complete overhaul of the financial system underpinning the Australian economy. It challenged the Fraser Government to move from a fixed exchange rate for the dollar to a market or quantity-based rate, and to allow commercial banks to set their own interest rates\u2014which were both currently the responsibility of Treasury, in tandem with the Reserve Bank acting as its agent in the market.\n\nFraser and Howard will never agree on which of them was primarily responsible for shelving the recommendation to float the dollar, but Campbell's biggest single opponent was John Stone. He hadn't changed his views by the time Paul Keating came along.\n\nAlthough Keating quickly established his own independent review of the Campbell recommendations, run by former banker Vic Martin, that exercise really seems to have been designed primarily to put a Labor stamp on a failed Liberal initiative to help pave the way for financial deregulation through a suspicious caucus. In any event, Campbell and Martin between them supplied the blueprint for unprecedented financial market deregulation in Keating's first years as Treasurer. In the process he was changing his own party irrevocably.\n\nIn the same way Fraser and Howard have disputed responsibility for their failure to implement Campbell, so too, as part of the bitter legacy of their later battle for the prime ministership, Hawke and Keating now argue over the credit for the float, and the mantle of chief financial market reformer.\n\nAt the time the two seemed to be as thick as thieves. From a distant and competitive relationship at first, the two grew close in their first year in office. It was a turbulent year with myriad challenges for a new Labor Government wanting to modernise itself and the country. Having given up on his desire to replace Keating with Willis, Hawke went out of his way to extend the hand of friendship and Keating responded.\n\nIn that first year, Keating also went looking beyond John Stone for other talented brains to pick in Treasury and the Reserve Bank as well as reshaping the bank of advice in his own office.\n\n**KOB:** The first big reform test for you was the float of the dollar. Thirty years on, it probably doesn't sound like such a big deal, but it was the big landmark moment signalling the start of your whole financial reform agenda. Why was it necessary?\n\n**PJK:** It was necessary because the Australian economy was locked up and uncompetitive and the dollar was too high in value, so it was killing miners and farmers particularly. Forget the tariff-supported industries, it was hitting the internationally competitive ones. The ones that dug up copper, lead and zinc, coal and iron ore were barely competitive because wages were too high and the exchange rate was also too high.\n\nSecondly, you couldn't run an effective monetary policy with a fixed exchange rate where the Reserve Bank opened its shop every Monday morning at nine o'clock and bought all the foreign exchange and then issued Australian dollars. Those dollars then pumped up the money supply, adding kerosene to inflation. You were burning your own inflation rate with the Reserve Bank continuing to add each day to primary liquidity.\n\nThe other thing was that Treasury\u2014Mr Stone _et al._ \u2014had the exchange rate too high in order to make imports cheaper, which they thought would put downward pressure on local prices and thereby hold wages down. So the whole structure was wrong.\n\nI'd begun to crystallise my thinking on the exchange rate when I was the spokesman on minerals and energy after 1975, and doing the rounds of every major mine in the country. I remember in 1977 talking in Mount Isa with Jim Foots, who was the chief executive of Mount Isa Mines, and asking him why, with middling commodity prices, MIM was making no money. He said it was partly that the wage share of the economy was too high, and he said the other big contributing factor was the exchange rate.\n\nThat was when I first started to notice the exchange rate reinforcing uncompetitiveness, being used by the Treasury as an anti-inflationary tool, making imports cheaper to keep downward pressure on local prices\u2014but murdering agriculture and mining in the bargain. So it was no surprise to me as Treasurer that John Stone would be strongly opposed to a float where Treasury would have to relinquish control over the dollar.\n\nThe key influence for me was the Reserve Bank Governor Bob Johnston. The exchange rate was set every Monday morning by four officials: the Treasury Secretary, the Reserve Bank Governor, the Finance Secretary and the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. It was called the crawling peg system and they used to move the rate in discrete adjustments. But once the big players in the financial markets decide they're going to make money off you, you're kidding yourself you can sit every Monday morning doing small adjustments. So Bob Johnston said to me the day after we did the big devaluation in our first week in office, 'Of course, Treasurer, you know the crawling peg system has had it. They've got our number.'\n\nBecause that was so obviously true, all the arguments John Stone and other Treasury officers later made against the float simply seemed hollow to me.\n\nThe only issue therefore was timing, and after presiding over such a big depreciation in the week we formed government, it goes without saying that I had a natural interest in following the dollar's fluctuations over the weeks and months that followed.\n\n**KOB:** How did you go about managing the deep disagreement between the Reserve Bank and your own department, between Bob Johnston and John Stone? That must have been very tricky.\n\n**PJK:** You've got to remember in those days the Reserve Bank was simply a bond-selling agent of the Treasury. It had no great policy standing because the exchange rate was determined by officials and interest rates were fixed in a band decided around the Cabinet table on recommendations from the Treasurer and Treasury. That left the Reserve Bank more or less subordinate, and Treasury looked down its nose at it.\n\nI used to notice in meetings whenever the Governor or the Deputy Governor turned up, they were always very circumspect about what they'd say while the Treasury Secretary and Deputy Secretaries were present, because Treasury was the one calling the policy shots. We had a situation where the leadership at the Reserve Bank believed the system had to change. They had a Treasurer who was listening to them, but they didn't have the bureaucratic standing or the confidence to knock Treasury over.\n\nBob Johnston was an impressive character. He had represented the Reserve Bank at the Campbell Inquiry established by the Fraser Government to review the whole financial system, so he had the entire framework in his head. He had a kind of world-weary composure and he'd often say, 'You know, we've all seen this before, Treasurer.'\n\nHis storyline always had integrity to it, and I bought his view that the existing exchange rate system was finished. But after the devaluation in March we had some six to eight months before the markets came back to attack us again, so we had some time to pave the way to a float. As it happened, the markets gave us the time to prepare, and we needed every bit of it because it was uncharted territory for Australia, and there was a great deal to think through.\n\nAbout May or June at our regular monthly debrief Bob Johnston raised with me the need for an articulated plan to prepare for it.\n\nHe said, 'There's no literature on this, Treasurer, so let's try and get a bit of literature in place.'\n\nI said, 'What we need is a kind of _Gregory's_ ,' which is a set of Sydney road maps, and Bob said, 'You mean a War Book.'\n\nThat was an arrangement agreed between Bob Johnston and me, not with Treasury, though Treasury was always kept informed. Whatever document I had from Bob for the debrief, Treasury also saw, but I never invited John Stone into the conversation I had with Bob Johnston around the monthly board debrief.\n\nUnder the _Reserve Bank Act_ , the Treasurer and the Bank board were charged to agree or endeavour to agree on matters before them, so there had to be that regular debrief from the Bank. But I wanted to be on top of the economic heap, not below it, so I kept Stone over at the Treasury building, away from my discussions with Bob around the prospects of a float. At the same time I knew that Stone was emphatically opposed to a float.\n\nIt's clear from the record that I supported a float, because there's a document written by Johnston to me in July talking about the movement to a quantity-based system, and he mentions the War Book. Bob Johnston and his deputies Don Sanders and John Phillips and I continued to talk through those months. It was never a question of whether to float but when.\n\nMy position on this was pretty clear as early as April 1983. On 4 April, four weeks after I became Treasurer, I did an interview with Ross Gittins in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ where I said I was going to set up a new committee to revise the Campbell recommendations around financial deregulation. This was the Martin Committee. Since you can't have flexible financial markets alongside a rigid exchange rate, I was really telling Gittins we were heading for an open financial economy and, by implication, a market-determined exchange rate. You couldn't be explicit, but there it was, four weeks after I became Treasurer.\n\n**KOB:** The broader public probably couldn't care two hoots about who pushed harder for the float or who said what first, but it is now a source of deep disagreement between you and Bob Hawke.\n\n**PJK:** That might be the case now but it wasn't at the time, nor right up to the point when I defeated Bob for the leadership. Before I took the prime ministership, you never heard any debate about the float. This debate first came to light in the so-called history Bob wrote, _The Hawke Years,_ where he dresses himself as the progenitor of the float. It took him a long time to get around to those claims\u2014a decade, in fact.\n\nI kept Bob completely in the loop through May, June, July. Around May I told him I thought a float was not only inevitable but desirable. This is what I wrote about that discussion in an appendix to John Edwards' book on my time as Treasurer and Prime Minister, published in 1996:\n\nI was completely open with him [Hawke], frank with him. There was no note or minute; the kind of relationship we had and the quality of our close discussions on something as significant as this was such that any written advice would have seemed very strange to him... At any rate he was pleased by my analysis and the conclusion. We had had a weighty conversation, and he believed he was across the main parameters. As often was the case with him after I had sold him on something, he became an enthusiast for it. I would go in with all the argument, weight, passion and persuasion I could muster, and if I could get him interested or committed he would often subsequently be an enthusiast for it. This was very much the case with the float. He had a broad predilection towards it and, upon hearing cogent argument for it, he became committed. But a lot of the engrained difficulties would remain uppermost in my consciousness, but not his. His enthusiasm sometimes turned into impatience while I actually had the task of making a decision work...\n\nThe question was rather when to float and how to float and how to bring the system with us. How we would do it with authority and be able to maintain the authority if it went wrong.\n\nThe discussion in the ensuing months involved watching how the system was performing and how it might perform in a quantity-based environment.\n\nWe were watching, assessing and refining our thoughts. I say 'we', I mean 'me', Johnston, Sanders, Phillips and, by August or so onwards, Tony Cole. This was a big leap for the Reserve Bank. It hadn't done anything like this before. It was convinced, but wary. The markets gave us time but we needed time. And I think we used it well. Getting their measure, sizing the scene up, learning how we would actually do it.\n\nWe were essentially getting ready for the big wave (of market speculation on the dollar) to come as we were convinced it would, having devalued in a big way once before.\n\nBy around September the Hawke office, in its general early government exuberance, regarded the decision to float as a foregone conclusion. By September, watching and waiting and looking at questions of execution it had gone way beyond the limits of its sophistication. A discussion about the future of exchange controls had, I think, barely registered with them.\n\nWhen the next wave came in October we decided at a meeting we had at the RBA building in Canberra to float the forward rate to get the market focussed and to get it thinking and us thinking about how we would manage the spot rate. This meeting was attended by Johnston and some colleagues from the Reserve Bank, Stone and a number of Treasury officials, myself and the relevant people from my office, and Ross Garnaut from Hawke's office. Hawke was not in attendance. In a sense, it was an officials' discussion presided over by me.\n\nAt this meeting Stone said the RBA and the bureaucracy were on the whole ill-prepared for a wholesale change to a full market-based system. He said the RBA was asking the government to commit to it as an act of faith. He said while the managed system had its limitations, it had insulated Australia from the volatility in currency movements and that, by throwing the system open, we as a small economy would be thrown about like a cork in the ocean. He said he believed the exchange rate would also be appreciated, compounding our problems of competitiveness. He said we couldn't be sure that interest rates would be more stable, either. But he said he could agree to free up the exchange market somewhat by the RBA withdrawing from the forward market. This would develop some more depth of experience in the markets in setting the forward rate.\n\nWhile I did not support Stone's view about insulating us from volatility or the 'cork in the ocean' line, or even the appreciation of the rate, the move to a more open forward market would give us a better handle on the system when we eventually threw it open.\n\nI did not condone Stone's histrionics or some of his more extravagant arguments, but a move to a more open forward rate would give the whole system more experience\u2014including the bank. It would also give us more time. I was not entirely persuaded that the bank had faced up to all the exigencies of what an immediate throw to an open system would entail...\n\nThe in-principle decision, by then having well and truly been taken, I believed my job\u2014the Treasurer's job\u2014was to see that when we threw the ball we walked away with a kewpie doll.\n\nI told Stone that I saw the float as inevitable, and notwithstanding some of the more weighty arguments he put against it, the next time we faced a run against us, we would float. And we would do it with or without him.\n\nWhen the big wave came in December, Johnston, Sanders and I discussed the problem all afternoon on the advice we were getting from overseas markets, judging how strong the run might be and whether we felt we should let the rate go.\n\nAs the day wore on and the evidence mounted, our view hardened. I discussed this with Hawke in his office through the late afternoon and evening and talked to a few key colleagues about it. Parliament was breaking up that night for the year, and of course many were not in the mood or of a mind to face such a matter.\n\nBy late evening, we had decided to close the exchange on the Friday or otherwise wear a poultice of funds, and I phoned Johnston at home to tell him. He said, 'You know Treasurer, with the exchanges being closed we will have to have a large discretionary adjustment or a float.' I said to him, 'Get yourself down here tomorrow morning Bob, because we will be doing it. We will be floating. You can deal with Stone's arguments.'\n\nThe group of us\u2014Hawke, I and our advisers, both office and departmental\u2014met in the Cabinet Room and then later on argued the case to the Economic Committee of Cabinet. And that was that.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke told the ABC series _Labor in Power_ that the initiative for the float of the dollar came from within his office. 'Paul Keating had to be brought along,' he said.\n\n**PJK:** That is a complete lie. On Sunday 23 October, Ted Evans, the Head of General Financial Policy in Treasury, wrote to John Stone, saying, 'The Treasurer rang me at home noting his concern with the way monetary growth had been proceeding and referring to discussions the Treasurer had had with the Reserve Bank about the float. When we met with the Treasurer that night he asked for the views of each of us present (Treasury officials) on the proposal to float the dollar, to which he was inclined.' (That is, to which I, the Treasurer, was inclined.)\n\nThis was on 23 October. The float came in December. From March when we devalued the dollar by 10 per cent to September while preparations to float were being developed, the markets basically left us alone. They didn't start to put pressure back on until September.\n\nI introduced a memorandum to Cabinet on 2 November where it is as clear as day I am putting the Cabinet on notice that a float was in the offing. This was formal advice by me to the Cabinet, not a note for file or an off-hand comment.\n\n**KOB:** The Bob Hawke view is reinforced by his economic advisor Ross Garnaut, and by one of your own economic advisers Barry Hughes, who also told _Labor in Power_ that while you were in front of the reform cart on other issues like banking reform, you weren't in the vanguard on the float.\n\n**PJK:** Bob and I were so matey and as one at the time, it is inconceivable that we would have had different positions on so central a matter and one that had been so comprehensively discussed, and over such a long period. The key staffer in my office at the time was my private secretary Tony Cole, who later became Head of Treasury after being Chairman of the Industry Commission. He wrote in 1990, 'I think it's fair to say that both the Treasurer and the Prime Minister had decided a float was on prior to the 28th of October. From then on it was only a matter of when circumstances were right.' Tony Cole was the official person in the office and the one most aware of my thinking. Barry Hughes was a valuable econometrician but he always lived in the shadow of Garnaut's influence.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke said there was a sense that you wanted to float, but that John Stone was holding you by the feet.\n\n**PJK:** That's nonsense. Bob and I had agreed on the float months earlier. The markets had not come back to pressure us until September. In the end we floated on 8 December. So any debate is about the timing within those eight weeks only.\n\nIt's worth making the point that I conducted the press conference for the float. If Bob Hawke had been the true progenitor of the float, as he has later alleged, and it was the most important decision since sliced bread, he would have presided over the press conference himself. But I did the press conference with Bob Johnston. And the reason I did was because Bob Johnston was RBA Governor and the bureaucratic progenitor of the float as I was the political progenitor.\n\nJohn Stone said to me, 'Do I come, Treasurer?'\n\nI said, 'No, John, I can't have you there. You're opposed to it. You'll get asked about it and you will accurately reflect your views, views that have been overridden by the decision of Cabinet. So I can't have you there.'\n\nBob Johnston was a bit embarrassed that he was sitting with the Treasurer, without the Treasury Secretary. This is the first time ever that the Reserve Bank began to look like what we now recognise as an independent central bank. This was hugely significant.\n\n**KOB:** David Morgan remembers that when you had the press conference to announce the float, you were asked whether Stone had been excluded because he disagreed with the float. You responded, 'Well, there's more than one view within Treasury.' He says that sparked a witch hunt by Stone during which Morgan confessed to him that he had in fact expressed his support for the float to you.\n\n**PJK:** David did support the float but was not the only Treasury official to support the float, effectively in defiance of Stone. On the day, it was like riding the tiger's back in part because of Stone's warning that we'd be thrown around like a cork in the ocean. I had said in response to that warning, 'I've got more respect for markets than you have, John.'\n\nIn the end, people will not sell their foreign exchange if it's too cheap and people will not buy someone else's dollar if it's too expensive. In the end, sense and balance matter. The idea that all of a sudden we'd end up with a thirty-cent dollar could only be true if someone were prepared to sell an Australian dollar for thirty cents American. Discerning people don't do things like that.\nTHE ACCORD COMES OF AGE\n\nWhatever doubts Bob Hawke harboured about having Paul Keating as his Treasurer going into government in March 1983 must have been well and truly dispelled by the time 1984 rolled around. With two budget statements and the float of the dollar behind him, Keating's early hesitancy in the job was long gone, and a quick glance at the economic headlines dominating the newspapers in the early months reflected that.\n\nOn 2 January 1984, the _Sydney Morning Herald_ reported that the Australian stockmarket was the best performer in the world. The All Ordinaries Index for 1983 recorded a 59 per cent increase compared to 22 per cent for Wall Street, 29 per cent for London, 23 per cent for Tokyo and 14 per cent for Hong Kong.\n\nThe _Financial Review_ front page for 13 January carried three good news stories for the economy. One reported an increase in employment of 80,000 jobs for December. A second recorded consumer confidence at its highest level for a decade, and a third described Australia's trade performance as improving significantly over the previous six months, including a 20 per cent increase in manufacturing exports.\n\nIn March 1984, just one year after Bob Hawke and Paul Keating arrived in office on the tail of the worst recession since the Great Depression and a nasty deficit surprise, the _Sydney Morning Herald_ carried the lead front-page headline: 'Keating: growth best in 25 years.' Inflation in the year to March 1984 was also down from 11.5 per cent the year before to 7.6 per cent. After one year, the double-digit inflation and unemployment of the Fraser years had gone, and although the final Howard budget and the end of a crippling drought had contributed to some of those improved figures, they still represented an economic and political triumph for the new government and its Treasurer.\n\nAt the same time the radical direction Keating had taken his party away from its old philosophical comfort zone was hardly being welcomed by all across the labour movement. He and Hawke were in lockstep on Labor's enthusiastic embrace of financial markets and a less interventionist approach in its broad economic strategies. In February 1984, Vic Martin delivered his report on financial deregulation, broadly endorsing the Fraser Government's Campbell Report, including the recommendation to allow foreign bank entry into Australia.\n\nIn March Keating had begun circulating the new draft economic policy platform he intended to take to the party's national conference in July. These days the carefully stage-managed and pre-ordained ALP conferences are utterly anodyne. That was not the case in 1984, when the Left decided to fight the Keating agenda.\n\nOne sharp reaction from the Left came from Lindsay Tanner, a fiery young industrial lawyer in Melbourne, who wrote, 'One by one the major distinctions between the ALP and the Liberal Party are being jettisoned, no more so than in the economic sphere. Labor policy and practice are becoming increasingly and more uncritically pro-capitalist... In the longer term Labor cannot sustain a substantial base of business support and remain the political party of the trade unions.'\n\nTanner accused Keating of sanitising Labor's platform to remove anything that might be offensive to business.\n\nKeating's response in an interview with Alan Ramsey in the now defunct _National Times_ on 9 March was typically dismissive: 'I think if I'd had a couple of years in opposition as our economic spokesman I would have ended up having a bit of a stink inside the party about my views. Now if they want to have a stink they have to pull me out of the job.'\n\nPolitics is full of ironies, and Tanner's political journey was one of them. On Labor's Opposition front bench during the Howard years before becoming Kevin Rudd's Finance Minister, Tanner had come to describe himself as a social radical and an economic conservative, the precise opposite of Howard's self-description. Tanner's warning that Labor would not be able to sustain its claim to be the political party of the unions has been neatly turned on its head in contemporary times, when the real issue is how the party extricates itself from disproportionate trade union control.\n\nAnother irony in 1984 was that while Keating was taking on his party's Left over the economic platform, he was forging a whole new working relationship with some of the trade union movement's old firebrands of the Left through the Social Accord. The Accord was the brainchild of Keating's predecessor as Shadow Treasurer, Ralph Willis, drawing on his days as an ACTU researcher, and he ran it as Industrial Relations Minister in tandem with Bob Hawke in the first year or so of government. But having been sceptical of the Accord at first, by 1984 Keating had come to embrace it to the extent that he ultimately became its leading exponent in the government.\n\n**KOB:** Why weren't you enthusiastic about the Accord initially?\n\n**PJK:** Variations of the Accord had broken down in every other place in the world they'd been tried. We'd had two big wage explosions in 1973\u201374 and 1981\u201382, one of which Bob had presided over as ACTU president. So we'd had two big bangs that had destroyed our competitiveness. They were classic pyrotechnic displays. Therefore I thought the idea of trying to trawl around in the trade union movement for some commitment to accept national responsibility for restraining wages was a reasonably forlorn prospect, but I was prepared to give it a go.\n\nIt was also pretty much unformed as a policy beyond the principles underpinning it, as I said earlier in this conversation. All the key union leaders had agreed an incomes policy was a good idea but no one had agreed on any numbers. So we had actually gone into the election with an Accord that had no meat to the agreement. The only specific element was the proposition Bill Kelty put together at the Economic Summit to agree to a wage discount for the Medicare levy. That was the first material agreement under the Accord.\n\n**KOB:** The Accord was Ralph Willis's brainchild when he was Shadow Treasurer. Once you were in government, how long did it take to crank it up to the point where it was seriously in gear?\n\n**PJK:** As long as it took me to get Bill Kelty's trust, which took a while. But in the end you've got to be awfully dumb not to spot value, and Bill was value-plus. Conscientious and real, and in the end he thought the same of me, and you know what? When you like someone they generally like you and on that relationship we built the Accord that served the government and the economy right through the Labor years.\n\nThe first thing that really sparked our connection was superannuation. That was because we'd had a disagreement on super in the May Statement of 1983 when I'd changed the tax treatment on lump sums in superannuation, removing the concessional 3 per cent tax on lump sums. The unions were opposed to it, but I said, 'Look, if we don't bring some sort of equanimity to the taxation of superannuation, we can't extend it to the whole workforce,' and Bill said to me, 'Are you thinking you can extend this to the whole workforce?'\n\nI said, 'Well, that's a possibility. Why should superannuation be the preserve of public servants and managers in business but not for the bulk of the workforce?'\n\nAnd that issue started a cooperative discussion between Bill and me. By the latter part of 1983 or early 1984 it had reached the point where, if the ACTU wanted something, they would see Bob, but they would talk to me first.\n\nThe cooperative model under the Accord was framed so that working people would be cut in on the action. They got a piece of the capital growth of superannuation assets, they got real wages growth, they got access and equity in health, they got access and equity in education, with a trebling of the retention rates in Year Twelve at school, and then later there was enterprise bargaining with a safety net; a national wage case for people who couldn't bargain and a set of formal minimum award rates under that.\n\nOnce the ACTU and the guys on the Left like the Tas Bulls and the Laurie Carmichaels, and some guys on the Right like Joe De Bruyn from the Shop Assistants Union, saw I was their man in government, then the whole Accord process began to work for Bill and for me. Bill was powerful because he was creative and had my ear and we had real, cooperative, creative discussions all the time.\n\nThe wages committee would come to Canberra. There'd be Carmichael and John Halfpenny and others. They'd see Bob in his office directly above mine in the old Parliament House. I remember one occasion he had his dinner delivered on a tray and they sat in a line in the office while he had dinner in front of them.\n\nI remember Laurie Carmichael saying afterwards, 'Christ, mate, we've come back down here to get a feed.' So I would often send Jimmy Warner, my driver, over to Civic for hamburgers, and the real nuts and bolts discussions would go on while the members of the ACTU wages committee would be sitting around the table chomping through big boxes of hamburgers. These meetings would sometimes go past midnight, often with another round of food, with taxis back to their hotels at the end of the night. So there was a good feeling about it towards me and the Treasury.\n\nBy the time Bernie Fraser became Treasury head, he regarded the Accord as an extra dimension to the two traditional arms of policy, fiscal and monetary policy, where John Stone simply wasn't broad enough to learn how fruitful the Accord might be.\n\nFrom the trade union side they came to trust Treasury, which they interfaced through Greg Smith and Ken Henry in my office, with Dr Don (Russell) above them, so the whole model was trusted. The formal Accord structure, freely entered and earnestly complied with, became an effective arm of policy. The relationship became so close that if an ACTU wages committee bloke came to Canberra for something, he'd more than likely leave his bag and operate from our office while attending other meetings around the place.\n\nBy mid-1984 the Accord was intertwined with our whole economic strategy. It had become a partnership in which both sides could see the value in accepting tax cuts as substitutes for wage increases\u2014that costs would drop and inflation would therefore drop, easing pressure on families' costs of living.\n\nWith a different hat on now from his old ACTU days, Bob realised that having this kind of collective power with the ACTU freed up the market to do its best. What it really meant was restraining the top end of the ACTU constituency to make a commitment to the employment of the weaker end of the ACTU constituency; in other words, the strong people in the labour market not cannibalising the interests of the weaker members in areas that couldn't bear the load of generalised wage increases across the board.\n\nIt was driven by a powerful logic. We had the depreciation of the exchange rate causing the landed costs of imports to rise, which promoted inflation. We had the real wage overhang coming out of the 1981 wage explosion under Fraser, Howard and Hawke. Therefore there was an intellectual case for the unions to restrain their top-end power by not exploiting a growing economy that could otherwise deliver more jobs, which was central to everybody's interests, no matter where you stood in the economic debate.\n\nBefore that, managing wages was about managing demand, and traditionally you managed demand by fiscal policy and by monetary policy via interest rates. But in the Fraser years the management of demand had become a game of 'flattening the economy' in an endeavour to curtail wages growth and inflation.\n\nAfter that policy failed it was not a revolutionary idea to get agreements from those representing the top end of the ACTU power structure to accept that the government might endeavour to run a higher growth policy, which would of itself produce more employment. But wage restraint had to be delivered and observed by the ACTU in the broad, delivered on a basis of maturity.\n\nTax cuts were important in this, because they were a cash addition to household disposable income rather than that coming from some inflationary wage round.\n\nGrowth in our first year came from one-off influences like the end of the drought, the fiscal stimulus from the Fraser Government's final budget and a spurt in housing growth. We needed to encourage a pickup in business investment to encourage a more sustained economic recovery with private spending and investment taking over from the fiscal stimulus. Tax cuts became an important tool in compensating for a real wage cut, which in turn acted to pull inflation back.\n\nIn that regard, the new Cabinet, no matter how generally enlightened it was, never saw great virtue in the Treasurer trading away otherwise expendable income for their programs by way of tax cuts, notwithstanding their broad commitment to employment and to economic growth. The economic ministers embraced the argument that the tax cuts were accepted as a mechanism for dampening wages in the name of lower inflation. But the spending ministers in the Cabinet were always cognisant of the tax cut debate because every dollar spent in tax cuts was money they could not call upon. So you always had to sing for your supper with tax cuts because it took so much bread from the spending departments.\n\nThe spending ministers had to be persuaded to accept the notion of a more reasonable economic equation where top-end union power was restrained to produce more moderate wage outcomes in the face of a growing economy, to try to break the dismal legacy that Australia had always had\u2014that in any economic pick-up, benefits were frittered away in senseless price and wage rounds. Fortunately there was enough interest, commitment and maturity in Cabinet to join with a similarly conscientious ACTU executive in giving this kind of agreed policy framework a go.\n\nOne of the big pay offs for the unions under the Accord came in September 1985 when we clinched the deal for superannuation cover for all workers over the next two years. Bill Kelty told the ACTU Congress it had brought their superannuation strategy forward by twenty years.\n\n**KOB:** In May 1984 you had to persuade the full ministry not only to accept significant tax cuts but also to maintain spending constraints in the budget which, over time, would reduce the government sector. Was that a particularly tough statement to sell?\n\n**PJK:** I certainly had Bob behind me, because he wanted to translate the idea of an agreed policy framework that the Accord typified, and give it expression. He wanted to be seen to be getting on with the ACTU and Bill Kelty, with whom he'd had a long relationship. But in those days it wasn't just Bill Kelty. Cliff Dolan was the ACTU President and he wasn't as cooperative to deal with as Bill. Nor was he as cerebral. But the fact that I was getting along with Bill and that as Treasurer I would put my hand up for an Accord-type framework and I would argue for tax cuts in policy unison with the ACTU meant that in any Cabinet discussion I had Bob's full support.\n\n**KOB:** John Edwards has written that in the specific Accord agreement you and Bill Kelty reached for the 1984 budget, you were the primary player for the government. In other words, from 1983 where you and Ralph Willis were sharing the responsibility for the Accord, by 1984 you had become the principal player. He said you worked out in general terms how much would be available for tax cuts and the ACTU would then put forward a proposal on how they would be distributed. Was that how it worked?\n\n**PJK:** It was actually interpreted by the media as the ACTU's $1.3 billion tax-cut package rather than the government's, and that Bill Kelty was the architect of how it should be delivered, but the whole thing was a cooperative venture. When I sat down with the ACTU wages committee in Melbourne in late July 1984, I had Bernie Fraser with me, the new head of Treasury, as well as Tony Cole and Greg Smith, and they were able to run through tax scales and models on the spot.\n\nYou could imagine the general goodwill obtained around the ACTU table when the head of Treasury and the person running its taxation policy are sitting down with the Treasurer with an amount of money on the table and then calculating the scales to see where you could best deliver the money.\n\nFor a start, the unions had never experienced such goodwill or consultation like this in their lives. Treasury had never been actively in a position where it could garner this kind of wage restraint other than by some crushing interest rate burden.\n\nBecause everyone knew what we were doing was revolutionary for Australia\u2014restraining wages growth in a structured way by agreement\u2014then I was always happy to represent it as it was, a cooperative discussion within a cooperative framework.\n\nSometimes I would leave Canberra at night in one of those little Mystere jets, say nine-thirty or ten, arrive in Melbourne about half-past ten, get to Treasury Place around eleven, and we'd start negotiations with the ACTU wages committee from eleven until three or so in the morning. We did that often. Sometimes we'd fly back into Canberra just as day was breaking.\n\nThere was a sort of jollity that pervaded the atmosphere in those rounds of ACTU talks. I had a good guy driving me in Melbourne and I'd send him down to some late-night place to get the usual box of hamburgers at 2 a.m. But it all produced a good spirit around the table.\n\nThe fact that nobody 'split', that nothing was said indiscreetly, that it didn't make it into the papers, was indicative of the support everyone gave it and the importance they saw in it, and it meant that the agreement had the full weight of the ACTU wages committee behind it.\n\nIt underlines the point as to how consultation pays off. And trust. Include people in the problem, and they'll mostly come to the same conclusion.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke has had a few things to say after leaving politics, suggesting that your stamina sometimes let you down. Did you find it hard to sustain that kind of pace?\n\n**PJK:** You couldn't have worked harder. I certainly couldn't have through those years. My GP used to say, 'Paul you've got a constitution like a horse but you just can't keep giving yourself a belting. Something will give.' But I was able to maintain that kind of pressure for years and years, although I hit a rough spot leading up to the 1988 budget that was to give me a health problem I still live with today.\n\n**KOB:** Could you honestly say you took the same approach with business as you did with the union movement?\n\n**PJK:** Where it mattered, I did. Where it mattered. But business interests are spread more thinly. They're not as centralised as the unions were through the ACTU. We would have discussions with people like Bert Evans at the Metal Trades Industry Association (now the Australian Industry Group) with the same degree of trust and confidence we did with the ACTU but not with all business groups. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry were pretty much all carrying the Liberal Party ticket in their pockets, but Bob and I had a good set of relationships with most of the corporations that made up the Business Council of Australia. Not so much with the BCA itself, but certainly with the bulk of their member companies. This was a period of genuine consultation, with the movement forward of economic policy by agreement and consensus.\n\n**KOB:** What can you remember of how the personalities played out around the table with the unions, interacting with those old-style warriors of the Left like Laurie Carmichael, who you would once have counted as your ideological enemies within the labour movement?\n\n**PJK:** Laurie had a great commitment to classical music, as I did. He had a very deep knowledge of repertoire. We'd be sitting in some wages committee and I'd send a note to him across the table, 'Just picked up a recording of Klemperer doing Bruckner's _Fifth Symphony_ live in Budapest in 1952\u2014phenomenal.'\n\nHe'd send a note back, 'What label is it?'\n\nI can remember at a number of meetings he'd bring me two or three discs and I did the same with him.\n\nTom McDonald from the Building Workers, another old warrior of the Left, would come up and see if you could solve a problem with the way some element of the _Tax Act_ worked and suggesting a more sensible way it could work. I'd take a note and see if it could be fixed. So the process had that kind of personal interplay going for it as well as the central discussions.\n\n**KOB:** You must have thought back on how those relationships turned from foes in the old days to friends.\n\n**PJK:** Without Bill Kelty, I wouldn't have had those relationships. He was the one who spanned the old industrial Left, the old CPA (Communist Party of Australia) who, it must be said, were both reliable and constructive. I think they recognised in him his earnestness and conscientiousness and his commitment to them and their workers. He was never really on the Right, more an industrial centrist.\n\nI'm not saying it wouldn't have been possible to have a good working relationship with the ACTU wages committee if someone else had been ACTU Secretary, but I would never have had one with such intelligence operating, because Bill would have worked all the issues through with his people before we turned up, and to the extent that there were issues he couldn't get an agreement about before we all sat down, he would let them negotiate directly with us. It was a very real process, but the glue that held it together was that centrist element in the ACTU, the group that Bill led.\n\n**KOB:** The sense I have of the way you were expanding into your role, is that inside Labor you were increasingly becoming your own man, and increasingly drifting away from your old factional base in NSW.\n\n**PJK:** The Labor Council in NSW, then led by Barrie Unsworth and later by John McBean, lacked what I thought was an appreciation for the wider picture. They could never quite see a system built on low inflation, and how much easier it would be to keep it in place, but getting there was the objective. The fact is, Bill Kelty simply had a superior industrial outlook and strategy.\n\nBy the same token it wasn't just the Left sitting around in those wages committee meetings. The NSW industrial Right would have had its representatives there as well. Bill had good relationships with the Right too, because they all recognised his genuineness and honesty in dealing with them. But from the middle of 1984 onwards, I was more or less running my own race.\n\nAt the same time Bob and I had a pact, and the pact was that the Treasurer could run the policy but would be consultative and wise and would not blow the show up. So when I was delivering those May Statements and budgets, the understanding was that the policy changes would be considered, they'd be tested, and they'd be discussed. And for a very large number of these discussions Bob was there himself as Chairman of the Expenditure Review Committee.\n\nBut in the general negotiation of wages or the broad economic aggregates, I was more or less able to run the show from 1984 onwards, enjoying Bob's confidence as to my ability to do it.\n\nThe 1984 Budget was the first real point of consolidation I was able to present to the public since taking office in March 1993. In that Budget I was able to report that the economy had grown by more than 10 per cent, year on year\u2014the best performance in the 25 years for which quarterly national accounts had been compiled. Over the course of the same year, 230,000 Australians found jobs, compared with the 240,000 who had lost them a year earlier.\n\nInflation had fallen to 6 per cent but during the last six months up to the Budget, was running at an annual rate of around 5 per cent. A big change from the double-digit inflation left to me by John Howard.\n\nIn fiscal terms I was able to bring in a budget deficit for 1984\u201385 of $6.7 billion, a reduction of $1.2 billion over the previous year. As a proportion of GDP it was even more impressive, reducing the budget deficit to 3.3 per cent of GDP, down from 4.3 per cent a year earlier.\n\nThis quite dramatic consolidation had proved the 1983 Budget strategy right. This is what Bob got, having me appointed as Treasurer, rather than Ralph who, along with big-spending merchants like Langmore, would have blasted the deficit into the low stratosphere.\n\nBut the budget was more than about economic growth and fiscal consolidation. It also had a number of goodies for business; for instance, for the first time, group taxation, where companies with common ownership could account in tax terms as a group, being able to offset losses against the income of other companies otherwise separate though commonly owned. The Labor traditionalists would never have done these things.\n\nThis budget set up the 1984 election for Bob, announced in October. But, as we know, he conducted that disastrous seven-week campaign, frittering away large chunks of the goodwill. I had the ball on the tee for him\u2014he only had to hit it. As it turned out, we hung on against Peacock, but with a 1.7 per cent swing against us, costing us four seats.\n\nDuring the campaign I had inflation at its lowest level in eleven years, housing interest rates falling and the opening of the financial system to foreign banks\u2014everything that opens and shuts. I even opened the first shots on national superannuation. We should have absolutely buried Peacock. Instead, Bob allowed him to climb out of the grave.\nTHE BANKS\n\nAt the time Paul Keating entered Parliament, there were many faces of capitalism that Labor traditionalists loved to hate, but probably their symbolic public enemy number one was the banks.\n\nJack Lang had declared war on them in the Great Depression, and in that same period the Federal Treasurer 'Red Ted' Theodore in the Scullin Government was also at loggerheads with them. As Prime Minister in the late 1940s, Ben Chifley had tried and failed to nationalise them. The Commonwealth Bank\u2014the People's Bank\u2014founded under the Fisher Labor Government in 1912, was as close as they would ever get.\n\nIn 1975, facing the Fraser Opposition's blocking of supply in the Senate and at risk of running out of money to pay public servants, among other things, Gough Whitlam had his own contretemps with the banks. He was still trying to force them to underwrite the Commonwealth's bills while he stared down a defiant Senate when Sir John Kerr sacked the government.\n\nA lot of that residual feeling remained within the caucus when Keating embarked on a process of bank reform including the deregulation of interest rates, and the introduction of foreign banks to increase competition but in the process hand the existing Australian banks a bigger share of the market at the expense of non-bank institutions such as building societies and credit unions.\n\nIt's much easier to see the big economic picture when the canvas has been filled than in the painting of it, but it must have dawned on caucus by 1984 that its leaders were determinately forging a path for the party away from the old cornerstones. Fiscal rectitude, wage restraint and financial-market deregulation from the currency to the banks were becoming the order of the day.\n\n**KOB:** After the float, banking reform was squarely on your agenda, and you had always had a bee in your bonnet about a lack of competition in the Australian banking system.\n\n**PJK:** They were deadbeats. Something I first learned from the way the oligopoly of the so-called free enterprise banks treated businesses like my father's. So I always believed in a need for competition, but no one could ever engender any competition. In 1977, six years before I became Treasurer and six years before Bob became leader, I made a speech in the House of Representatives saying we should open Australia up to foreign bank competition. The Managing Director of the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney wrote a letter to all members of staff, pointing to my speech, saying it would destroy the banks' principal lines of business and the sweet spots in the market would be taken by foreign banks. The banks didn't like me and I didn't like them, so there should have been no surprises to them when I became Treasurer.\n\nThe first banker I saw as Treasurer was a fellow named Sir Robert Law-Smith, the Chairman of the National Australia Bank with his Managing Director Jack Booth. They came to see me in my office in old Parliament House around April 1983.\n\nSir Robert, with a plum in his mouth, said, 'Of course, Treasurer, you know we believe in competition.'\n\nI said, 'And do you know what, Sir Robert, I'm going to give you some.'\n\nAnd he said, 'Oh are you? And how might that be done?'\n\nI said, 'I'm going to give you more freedom to take deposits.'\n\nHe said, 'That sounds good.'\n\nAnd I said, 'But I'm going to let in an array of foreign banks to compete for them.'\n\n'Oh,' he said. This was my first discussion with anyone from the banks and that conversation went around the banking world like wildfire.\n\nWhat I gave the banks, in the end, was the gift of a lifetime when I lifted deposit maturity and lending controls. For instance, at that time a savings bank couldn't accept deposits under 30 days. Funds went to things like cash management trusts. We had the haphazard development of permanent building societies, all trying to get around the regulations, as the banks' control of credit continued to shrink.\n\nHow mature is a financial system where the institutions prudentially controlled by the Reserve Bank have a declining share of national credit? So I had to stop the growth of the permanent building societies, credit unions and the cash management trusts and bring the banks back to a position of primacy. At the same time, in their new-found freedom, to address their lack of competitiveness, I wanted the foreign banks to step in. So I gave the banks more freedom but within a new competitive structure.\n\n**KOB:** Banking reform was also an important part of the Campbell Report into financial deregulation that John Howard had commissioned at Malcolm Fraser's behest, and in the shadow of the 1983 election Howard supported the entry of ten foreign banks in line with Campbell's recommendations. You were in your first weeks as Shadow Treasurer and you opposed it. Given your own long-standing support for competition through foreign banks, why did you oppose it just before the election?\n\n**PJK:** I gave Howard credit for articulating a view that the government was inclined to open the banking system to foreign banks. At that time the Labor Party had the head-in-the-sand view that we shouldn't have foreign banks. In a four-week election campaign there was no way I was going to get the shadow cabinet back together to overturn the party's foreign bank policy so, for the period, I was stuck with it.\n\nWhen I first walked into the Treasurer's office after we won the election, there was a copy of the Campbell Report on a shelf, and it had faded in the western sun. The back of the Treasurer's office faced due west, and I said to one of my advisors, Barry Hughes, who had walked in with me, 'This tells you something.' It was a sort of a metaphor for the fact that the Fraser\u2013Howard regime had let the Campbell recommendations lapse.\n\n**KOB:** If, as you say now, you had always supported financial deregulation and knew the float would potentially open the floodgates to other financial market reforms, why did you bother setting up your own expert group, the Martin Inquiry, to review the Campbell Report?\n\n**PJK:** The problem was that the Campbell Report recommendations had not just faded, they had died. There's an orthodoxy about these days which suits Howard and the Liberals to say, 'Oh, we set up Campbell and there was an inevitability about these changes.'\n\nThere was no inevitability. None at all. The Campbell Report had died a quick death. I might add that only Bob Hawke and I supported the Campbell recommendations during the caucus discussions when the report was released, and Ralph Willis was Shadow Treasurer in 1981. I was asking questions of Frank Crean when he was Treasurer in 1974 about the legitimacy of cash management trusts and permanent building societies using regulations to get around the banking system. And I was making speeches supporting foreign bank entry three years after that.\n\nBut let's return to the key point. If you have a core document that is recommending the opening of the financial markets including a floating exchange rate, if you believe in it, you would get it through. It's not good enough for Howard to say he couldn't get it past Country Party ministers like Doug Anthony and Peter Nixon, or he couldn't get it past Fraser.\n\nThe fact is Howard died on the job and the Campbell Report was dead on arrival. Politically I now had to push these ideas through the caucus, which eventually I did. I wanted a new approach that also had some idea about the complexion of the Labor Party. The Martin Report was a political exercise, a new branding.\n\nA lot of Labor members of Parliament were members of their own local permanent building societies and credit unions and they didn't want to see these flows of funds return to the banks.\n\nBut I said, 'You can't have an economy which is capital-adequate with the banking system only controlling 46 or 47 per cent of the credit. Do you believe in the prudentially managed institutions? You tell me you believe in a Reserve Bank.'\n\nThey said, 'Oh yeah, we all believe in that.'\n\nSo I said, 'You believe in the prudentially managed institutions, the big four, being supervised by the Reserve Bank?'\n\n'Yes,' they said.\n\nAnd adequate capital ratios?\n\n'Yes.'\n\nCareer structures?\n\n'Yes.'\n\nI said, 'But you don't believe they should have primacy in deposits, is that what you're telling me? You want these itsy-bitsy credit unions and permanent building societies to grow but you want to hold the banks back. This is not a tenable situation.'\n\nThey had two sets of standards: one for the banks and another for the institutions they liked. So the banks were sitting with a declining share of credit. How can you build a country with a structure like that?\n\nThe caucus was reluctant but I always started with the caucus committees. And almost everyone in the caucus would come to the economics committee. After two or two-and-a-half days running through the arguments, the last six or so MPs who were left would go to get the three o'clock plane to Melbourne or Sydney. And when they drifted off I knew I had the thing in the bag. So, as a technique, I would always run through the arguments for each set of policy changes.\n\nIt was yet another case of the old Labor Party confusion over ends and means. This was about the ability to run a mature banking system funding debt requirements as necessary for the development of housing, for the right to buy a house, for the ability of a developer to build a building or an estate, for the ability of banks to fund small businesses.\n\nNone of that was possible on a grand scale while we had the old regulations. But the Labor Party ends were to see open financing for housing and open financing for business but they never quite understood how to get there. In practice, regulation was largely a set of rules for the rich, while deregulation meant a set of arrangements for the clever\u2014and the clever people had been locked out of Australian business by the regulations.\n\nI used to say, 'We get a choice. Are we with the rich guys or the clever guys?' and the caucus would put their hands up for the clever guys.\n\n'In that case,' I said, 'we have to make these changes.'\n\nNow, this was all a Labor end, but it was not by the traditional Labor means. The traditional means was control. Or what they believed was control.\n\nI said, 'Look, I'll put my arm around the permanent building societies and I'll turn them into banks.'\n\nSo what became the St George Bank was created from the St George Building Society. From the Melbourne Permanent Building Society I created the Bank of Melbourne, which now belongs to Westpac. In fact, both now belong to Westpac.\n\nI said, 'I'll put my arm around the credit unions, making it easier for them to specialise in small loans and personal finance, but we must have a mature structure. Banks must be at the centre of it. But they have to be competitive. Currently, they're slothful and uncompetitive and that's where the foreigners will sharpen them up.'\n\nCabinet had to be convinced of the principles of an argument, but it was easier to persuade in the Cabinet room if there was a groundswell of support coming from caucus. In the end I'd consulted my head off on the banking reforms. I'd sat in those meetings for days.\n\n**KOB:** When you announced the government's approvals of sixteen new trading banks, and you said 'and they said it couldn't be done', who were you addressing?\n\n**PJK:** The system in general, and the Labor Party in particular. In other words, that the Labor constituency in the broad and the banks themselves would together unite to stop the foreign reforms. One classic example was Jack Ferguson, who was Deputy Premier of New South Wales and leader of the Left, standing up at the Labor Party Conference in 1984 saying, 'If I get a choice with these banks I will take our banks rather than these foreign banks,' which was exactly the wrong choice. Right through the grain of the Labor Party, the four banks were confident they could stop the foreign banks.\n\n**KOB:** Looking at the way powerful interests, whether driven by self-interest or by genuine concerns, can align against big reforms with potentially big impacts, is there a formula for changing minds, for winning opponents over, for bringing people along?\n\n**PJK:** As I said earlier, you make the political strategy around good policy rather than around trickery and imagery. In the end if a conscientious community can go to a bank and borrow for a house or an apartment and get the money they need and be able to afford it, they'll give the government of the day a tick. This was not true before 1984, 1985 and 1986, when finally I deregulated housing interest rates. If you have the framework right\u2014and my framework was the internationalisation of the economy and a financial system that got blood to the muscle of the economy\u2014then a conscientious community will give a government a tick for that.\n\nThis is a very important point. Whether it was in the House of Representatives or in those long press conferences I did at Parliament House with the press gallery or on radio, I always talked up to the community. I always assumed they had the sense to know what I was saying and to include them in the conversation as I would a caucus member. If you have that policy of engagement around a big story, then basically you pick up adherents.\n\n**KOB:** By the same token wasn't it a kind of love\u2013hate relationship that the Australian public had with you through those days? You were a very effective storyteller but with a streak of unpopularity.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but the model won us four elections in a row from 1984 to my own win as Prime Minister in 1993. It won us four elections on the trot. We built the new political structure and the new policy structure around good policy. We were burning up political capital each time, but the idea that governments have political capital yet not spend it, which many governments do, means that in the end you pay a price anyway but for not much result.\n\nIn our case, Bob delivered much of the political capital while I fashioned and spent it. But let me say this in Bob's favour. Prime Ministers need reforming Treasurers like they need a dose of rabies. You say, have I got an idea for you, and with it comes a political horror stretch, like removing tariffs, opening up all the financial system, changing the tax system, introducing capital gains and all the other reforms. Most Prime Ministers would say, go away, go away. Bob could see the value of the ideas I brought him and I could see the value his support brought me, and that was the essence of the team we had.\n\nBob and I had a truly cooperative relationship through these times. We had our issues. We had a fight over tax in 1985. We had a fight over the banana republic in 1986. We had a battle over the date and calling of the election in 1987. We had a battle over tariffs in 1988. But nevertheless we always kept the main chance in mind, winning and moving the country forward.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard has said more than once after he became Prime Minister and was dealing with Labor Oppositions that tried to block his attempts at reform that you had a broadly supportive Liberal Opposition in the Parliament in those years of your big push for economic reform. The political battle would have been much harder, wouldn't it, if there hadn't been some reasonable measure of bipartisanship with the other side?\n\n**PJK:** I always appreciated any support the Coalition gave but they egg the pudding. They opposed superannuation cheek by jowl. They opposed every wage increase that arose under the Accord. And you have to remember these contributed to restoring our competitiveness and breaking the back of inflation. They were central. They opposed capital gains taxation and fringe benefits. They were fine about bank deregulation and tariff cuts until John Hewson tried to upbraid me later and boast that he could do it better. But then again, I did not need the Liberals on bank deregulation any more than I did on floating the exchange rate or the move to enterprise bargaining. I carried the heat on all these changes. And you might remember the Liberals opposed native title outright as they cavilled at any plan for an Australian republic.\n\nI love the Road Runner analogy, and used to call Hewson Wile E. Coyote because he was always trying to blow me up. I used to say to caucus, 'The reason I love the Road Runner is because he runs so fast he burns up the road behind him. There's no road left for the others.'\n\nAnd basically that's the policy I pursued. If the Coalition supported me on something, well and good, but I was going so fast anyway it really didn't matter. It fundamentally didn't matter. It was a momentum play. I'm happy to acknowledge their support on some things, but not on the broad scope of changes. Not on wages, not on superannuation, not on a lot of the social policy changes, and not on the tax reforms like capital gains tax. In the end I had to rely on Don Chipp and the Democrats in the Senate to get the changes through. In fact, Don Chipp did more to facilitate many policy changes in my years than any of the Liberals did. But Howard was always a better rewriter of history than Don Chipp was ever likely to be. Chipp was really a first-class individual, a very conscientious and responsible guy.\n\n**KOB:** When you look at the banking sector today what do you see, apart from the big four banks making incredible record profits and becoming ever more dominant? Where is the competition today?\n\n**PJK:** The real competition died in the crisis in 2007 and 2008. I would not have allowed the Commonwealth Bank to buy BankWest. I wouldn't have allowed Westpac to buy St George. I wouldn't have allowed it any more than I allowed them in my day to buy each other. I put the four pillars policy into place to stop them cannibalising each other, and had they done the cannibalisation we would have had a lot of the problems that the American financial system had. We avoided that because the four pillars policy saved us. Saved us from the banks' silly behaviour of trying to get big quickly. When companies try to get big quickly by acquisition, by taking indigestible meals, you end up with problems. Competition in banking took a big step backwards when St George Bank went, BankWest went and the mortgage lenders such as RAMS went.\n\nMy concept of strong competition between banks has in large measure been derailed. Before my reforms the banks had a three-percentage point margin on a housing loan. Three hundred basis points. After the reforms and before the crisis in 2007\u201308 that margin was reduced to 75 basis points; that is, from 300 points to 75 above the official rate. The bank's margin was three-quarters of a percentage point instead of three percentage points. This was all delivered into the mortgagees' pocket, into ordinary householders' pockets. Now they've expanded that margin again, although in fairness to them, nothing like the old days when the banks had that whopping 3 per cent margin.\nOUT WITH THE OLD\n\nThe ALP National Conference in July 1984 now stands as another milestone on the way from old to new for the Labor Party and its economic policies, becoming, as it turned out, a party that many voters today say they have trouble differentiating from its traditional political enemy, the Liberals.\n\nPaul Keating's new economic policy platform was accepted pretty much as he wanted it. Banking deregulation was just part of the story. The old socialist agenda of the radical workers' party that emerged from the bitter shearers' strike of the late 1800s\u2014the socialisation of production, distribution and exchange\u2014the party Whitlam had called a democratic socialist party, was now being called a social democratic party.\n\nThe shift was less than subtle. In some ways the party platform was belatedly giving legitimacy to policies already in train, such as the float of the dollar, bank deregulation and the broad Keating drive to shift economic focus more from government to market. The 1984 conference adopted a formalised review of tax policy and although the Left's desire for a politically troublesome wealth tax had been thwarted, the review opened up other possibilities, including a broad-based consumption tax and a capital gains tax.\n\nKeating by now had the ball very firmly in his court. Although his critics still argued that he was too much under Treasury's doctrinaire influence, he had become much more the master of his universe. By comparison, John Stone, despite his impressive intellect and, by bureaucratic standards, flamboyant personality, must have felt increasingly isolated in his large Treasury office as he watched his influence and authority wane. He had disagreed with the float of the dollar, he disliked the nature of the Accord and wages policy, and could see his stamp on the budget slipping away. He was particularly discomfited by the way his minister would lift the phone to various specialists within Treasury to get their advice directly rather than having it filtered through what they saw as the often dogmatic prism of their boss. No one had run a tighter bureaucratic ship than Stone.\n\nThe ultimate clash between the bureaucrat and the politician was played out around the 1984\u201385 Budget and there could only be one winner. Before the year was out, Stone would take himself out of the game but Keating saw his departure as an opportunity rather than a setback. The learning curve had been conquered.\n\nFirmly backed by his Prime Minister, and increasingly blazing his own trail, by mid-1984 Keating was unchallenged as the second most important member of a formidable Cabinet. As a combination, Hawke and Keating were essentially irresistible on all the big economic reforms. They just had to stay in step.\n\n**KOB:** You were about to present your second budget in August 1984. It was a tricky budget because you had to offer reasonable tax cuts to keep the Accord intact, you had to keep the deficit's credibility intact in the eyes of business and the markets, and you were under pressure to increase welfare payments. Six days before the budget's release John Stone resigned. The timing suggests something must have happened between you.\n\n**PJK:** I think it simply dawned on John that I wouldn't take any more of his nonsense. Statement Two of the budget had come to be recognised as Treasury's work in the budget presentation. The Statement Two draft for 1984 was counter to the government's incomes policy, its fiscal policy and a whole range of other things.\n\nIn the old days the Treasurer, say John Howard, wouldn't write Statement Two or have a role in its writing. It would be written by Treasury and presented to the Treasurer. But in the end it has your name on the front cover and it is published as the government's document. Yet here was a whole litany of stuff written by Stone and his senior officers like Des Moore and Dick Rye, which was counter to the government's policy. So I told John we could not abide their draft.\n\n'Treasurer?' he said. 'Don't you realise this statement is regarded as the Treasury's statement? It's seen by the outside world as Treasury's own statement, yet you're going to direct me to change it or change parts of it?'\n\nI said, 'Yes, John, I'm going to direct you to change it. I present these papers as an official set of documents to the nation with my name on them and they at least should represent the combined or consensus view of the government and the department.'\n\nI said, 'Let me go to some of the sentences.'\n\nAs I went through the text I said, intermittently, 'We just can't agree to that.'\n\nHe said, 'What do you mean we can't agree?'\n\nI said, 'Well, it's got to be struck out, John.'\n\n'Well, that will be a first,' he said. 'No Treasurer to my knowledge has ever said they wanted to alter even a single line in Statement Two.'\n\nI remember Tony Cole from Treasury, who'd come to work in my office, saying to Stone about one of his assertions in Statement Two, 'Well, John, you can't argue with this one...' and Stone said, 'Tony, we don't need some low-brow discussion. If you're giving us instruction to take it out, we'll note it.'\n\nSo Dick Rye, who was Deputy Secretary, took notes as I outlined the objectionable bits. He said at particular points, 'What do you want to do with this, Treasurer?'\n\nI said, 'Delete it all\u2014the whole paragraph.'\n\nWhat Stone had given me was intolerable in the end. Basically he was shoving it up the Government's nose. So in the end I stood him up and knocked it all out.\n\n**KOB:** By this stage John Stone must have felt his power and influence had become seriously diminished within the government, and perhaps even within Treasury. Tell me about the battle that went on over the forecasting responsibilities that had traditionally sat with Treasury alone and on which you wanted wider input.\n\n**PJK:** The forecasts in many respects give dimension to the picture. It is on the forecasts that most of the budget projections of revenues and outlays are built. So the budget deficit or surplus in prospect in very large measure is shaped by the forecast. I had a stake in the forecasts being both plausible and reasonable, because my name as Treasurer was attached to them.\n\nThe economic adviser in my office through this period, Barry Hughes, was first and foremost an econometrician, so he ate, slept and drank forecasts. It didn't mean that just because he was an econometrician he should be a part of the forecasting team, but there was every reason for the Treasurer's office to be a part of the forecasting process, and I was also trying to broaden the base of expertise available to me.\n\nI wanted to open the forecasting up to other departments, and from memory we also included the Prime Minister's Department. We created a new body called the Joint Economic Forecasting Group, the JEFG. Stone fought that very strongly, saying it was a vote of no confidence in Treasury and that the whole sanctity of the budget forecasts would be farmed out to what he used to call 'meretricious players'\u2014staffers and what he called ancillary departments. Rather than seeing it as a virtuous thing to do he believed it would diminish the quality of the inputs into the forecasting process, and remove it from Treasury's exclusive domain. We had a very big disagreement about this.\n\n**KOB:** Much later, after he'd left the job, John Stone released parts of his resignation letter and described the 1984 Budget as a lost opportunity to head off future problems, that is, the banana republic, because he said there was a phenomenal revenue surge that gave you a chance to cut into the deficit much deeper than you did.\n\n**PJK:** Treasury were always like a mangling machine. They always wanted to cut things. But the point was that in Statement Two, Stone was actually being directly critical of our whole incomes policy. We couldn't tolerate that, so once I directed the changes in Statement Two, John knew the game was up. After overruling him on the float and the dismantling of exchange controls, the forecasting system and then Statement Two, the jig was up.\n\nNevertheless, I had had a very civil relationship with him, and had treated him very kindly. It was John who elected not to go with the government's policies. He rang me to say he was going to resign and he wanted to present me with a letter, so I said I'd come to him. In his office he handed me the letter with a brandy and dry, and poured himself a whiskey. It was a very surreal occasion.\n\nJohn Stone's big mistake was to misjudge the opportunity of the first postwar reforming government. From Treasury, he was in the box seat to participate across the financial markets as never before: across the exchange rate, across microeconomic reform including tariffs, privatisation, bank reform, telecommunications and all the other things that followed.\n\nThere was a sense of honour and of public service in John but he was a deeply conservative guy. He could have been the Secretary of Treasury who commanded the great reform years yet he passed it up to become a senator for Queensland in the National Party. When someone once asked Billy Hughes if he was going to join the National Party, he said, 'Son, you've got to draw the line somewhere.'\n\nStone always regarded himself as a toff, an economic toff, and if he'd left the public service and gone to the Liberal Party as a leading contributor and thinker on the conservative orthodoxy that the Liberal Party was supposed to specialise in, one could have understood that. But to have gone to the National Party\u2014and more than that, to the National Party in Queensland which was then a fiefdom run by Joh Bjelke-Petersen\u2014was beyond my capacity to understand.\n\nI do think that a lot of John's objection to the government was to Bob himself. I treated him very respectfully, and he wrote me a very nice note at the end of it, which I still have. The evidence of my treatment of John is clear in the notes he sent me. But I suspect in the end he could not accept the fact that he was working for Bob, because they had both gone to a selective school in Perth called the Perth Modern School, and he saw himself as an intellectual cut above Bob.\n\nAs well as that he had this nuisance Treasurer who wanted to do things that he regarded as ill-advised at best, and at worst risky. We were doing an incomes policy with the ACTU and moving beyond the orthodoxy and, worse still, encouraging more blasphemous elements within Treasury itself, who were going around him to talk to me. He hated the fact that I would deal directly with people like Ted Evans, who was running general finance and economic policy, and with David Morgan.\n\nStone would tear his hair out when he found I'd been speaking to 'his people' without him. His view was that the Treasurer would deal with Treasury through him and him only. All of Treasury's views were to be distilled by him. Instead the Treasurer possessed the unruly habit of talking to subordinate officers.\n\n**KOB:** Stone's departure eighteen months into your first term allowed you to hand-pick his successor, Bernie Fraser. Some of his career choices after formally retiring from public service years later suggest that Fraser didn't quite fit the classic bureaucrat mould. He was to become something of a cult figure, promoting industry superannuation on television, as the tough-looking guy with the broken nose that contrasted with the slow, understated drawl, and he also trained thoroughbred racehorses. What were you looking for in Bernie Fraser and what had your partnership with Treasury become by this point?\n\n**PJK:** I was looking for someone who would serve the government conscientiously, point one; who was imaginative, point two; and who had faith in the model, which included a wages policy, point three. And Bernie fitted all of those categories. Previously it was in Treasury's DNA not to believe in a wages policy. In contrast to Stone, Bernie became a great supporter of an incomes policy, both as Treasury Secretary and later as Governor of the Reserve Bank. But more than that, he just had a can-do attitude. He knew we were on the gold seam, on the biggest economic changes since Federation. He knew he was on the big conveyor belt of change and he was not going to miss a second of it.\n\nBy this stage I was talking freely with various Treasury people as different issues arose, which Bernie thought was a good thing. If, for example, we were going through Statement Two I'd ring up the guy looking at the balance of payments and exports and say, 'What have you got in for grains or what have you got in for wool because I don't want to gild the lily,' and he'd give me a note on it. When I was putting the budget together I'd move over to the Treasury building and relate consistently with relevant officers.\n\n**KOB:** How would you describe your relationship with Cabinet by then, eighteen months in, because they were a pretty strong bunch of ministers, a pretty strong collection of personalities, some of them quite intimidating intellectually? How had their relationship with you and with each other evolved through that first eighteen months?\n\n**PJK:** I think a Cabinet minister has to earn his or her place perpetually. You've got to keep doing the tricks. You've got to have their conscientious support and you should always be seeking to have the group discussion, the corporate mindset, such that the Cabinet is coming with you on the big directions, and that you could never presume that. You can never take the Cabinet cheaply and any minister or Prime Minister who takes the Cabinet cheaply is very foolish, so I tried hard all the time, with every one of them.\n\nYou couldn't rely just on airing arguments in the Cabinet room, but having conversations in advance of a meeting, and discussing the issues further when we came out. If a relevant minister was worried, you'd go and talk things through with him or her in their own rooms.\n\nIn Cabinet you have corporate responsibility, so you're not just considering your own matters but everyone else's as well. The sum total of a proper working Cabinet is greater than the parts. A proper Cabinet produces better results. A proper Cabinet debate, a perpetual debate around central issues, produces a bigger outcome than the sum bits of individual inputs.\n\n**KOB:** On that point I can remember reading in Bill Hayden's autobiography an observation he made about Rex Connor as a minister in the Whitlam Cabinet. According to Hayden, Connor would arrive at the Cabinet table to prosecute his brief, and when he'd finished he'd get up and leave. It didn't matter to him, according to Hayden, what his fellow ministers had on the table.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, tragic. Completely the wrong approach. I'd sit through every Cabinet subcommittee, every Cabinet discussion. In fact I would stay so late that when the note-takers wrote the decisions I would stay back until they were written accurately. Sometimes I'd stay until one or two in the morning to make certain we actually got the decisions we'd agreed. So I would spend inordinate amounts of time on the Cabinet, on individual ministers and on the process.\n\nThe other thing I came to believe was that people are gratified by being taught things. If you want to take people through a process of education they will appreciate it, and we can all go through this process of education all the time. We all love learning things. If you don't take the process cheaply and set the framework and the context well, and make it completely clear, then it's highly likely that their conclusions and your conclusions will be the same. If you follow that process conscientiously you'll mostly get a good result.\n\n**KOB:** Do you honestly believe that the bulk of your colleagues around that Cabinet table would feel that you showed them the same respect that you expected from them to you?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. If you read Neal Blewett's diary published after he left public life, he talks about how self-deprecating I could be. I'd often provide the jokes and the fun as well, something was needed to lighten the moment. I always assumed that to stay in front you needed to keep the colleagues with you.\n\nThat certainly didn't stop me arguing a case. I had a big fight against Kim Beazley's telecommunications reform because I thought it was a second-best model by a long way. That was a really big fight in the Cabinet room, and maybe I pushed it too far, but a big fight is okay provided your track record is truly consultative.\n\n**KOB:** Speaking of consultative, over that period even Hawke's traditional enemies, his old rivals from years past, had a great deal of respect for his consensus style. I think that was pretty much a universal view around that Cabinet table, was it not?\n\n**PJK:** That's true. I had respect for Bob Hawke's consensus style as chairman of the Cabinet, and the trust and autonomy he gave to ministers. It was an important part of the government's success and engineering a decent debate and letting it run so it comes to its natural conclusion doesn't need too much shaping from the leadership.\n\nThis was all in the shadow of the Whitlam years. We all remembered the lessons of those years as well as the triumphs. Gough's ministry and ours were three light years apart. The Hawke Cabinet and my own were the epitome of process and clarity with regard to broad objectives and the consideration of functional departmental roles within those objectives.\n\nThe disciplines we generally had in the Expenditure Review Committee or the full Cabinet bore no comparison with the Whitlam years, although you have to remember that Gough was saddled with a full ministry and no inner Cabinet. Our whole focus on discipline, on high-value discussion, knowing as we did that the sum of the whole was bigger than the inputs in a well-documented and argued case was the hallmark of government\u2014Hawke's and mine\u2014from 1983 to 1996. With few exceptions, that applied to the whole thirteen years. That approach governed the lot\u2014clarity about objectives, clarity as to means and rigour in process.\n\n**KOB:** I'd like to get a sense from you of what some of those other Cabinet personalities were like, and the kind of dynamics they brought to the table. Who were the colleagues you had particular respect for?\n\n**PJK:** Bill Hayden had naturally good instincts on economic issues, and he supported me on the float, on financial deregulation and on many other things. He sat next to me in Cabinet, and I really enjoyed his company and his input. So, too, with Susan Ryan, who was the Education Minister. In the big brouhaha over the 1985 tax package and the consumption tax, she supported me.\n\nNeal Blewett was always a sceptic about rationalist instincts within Treasury but had a good mind and was able to discern value and organise his own portfolio of Health within that framework. Blewett was a very savvy guy and a valuable contributor.\n\nGareth Evans was Attorney-General before he fell foul of a few issues and became Minister for Minerals and Energy, where he was very successful. Through that portfolio he took more of an interest in economic issues and joined the Expenditure Review Committee (ERC). He was on the ERC for a very long time. Gareth was also outstanding in Foreign Affairs when he took over from Bill.\n\nBrian Howe was one of the great learners of the show and he was also brought into the ERC. In his early days under the influence of the old-school Left, he was always bristling with contempt for the Right of the party and the prevailing economic orthodoxy. He also had the biggest spending department, Social Security. But once he joined the ERC and got comfortable in the power structure, he was able to see how, within the limits of the economic aggregates, the avenues for new and better policy could be developed, paid for by other policy adjustments.\n\nHowe was always an enlightened fellow, but being inside that ERC process enlarged his view of the world. In the end I relied a lot on him for many of the big decisions we made through the ERC, policies that you wouldn't otherwise have expected a member of the Left to support.\n\nAt the same time, I did things with him that were important to him. He and I set up the Child Support Agency, which was a big social advance. We got the Tax Office to collect maintenance for children of separated couples through the garnisheeing of wages.\n\nI remember when I first called Trevor Boucher, who ran the Tax Office, to open this up with him, he said, 'Oh surely, Treasurer, you're not going to have us chasing maintenance dodgers along with all the other people we're already chasing?'\n\nHe was a very progressive person, Trevor Boucher, and you could always reason with him. I said, 'You've got to look at what we're going to get out of this, Trevor. I've done a bargain here with Brian Howe, and a part of the bargain will deliver things on the revenue side which will be good for the overall picture. You can strike this down, Trevor, because you're the ones who'll have to make it work, but it will be costly inside the place.'\n\nHe said, 'Of course we'd never strike it down, Treasurer. We'll make it work.'\n\nThe bottom line is this. How many women with children today rely on the Child Support Agency for their core sustenance? This was one measure I can think of at the moment, but one of many that came out of the goodwill that developed between Brian Howe and me.\n\nJohn Dawkins was a very intense kind of person: conscientious, collegiate, committed to the broad philosophy of the government\u2014the internationalisation of the economy\u2014to opening up the then financial and product markets. But in these other areas, and in the shockingly laborious ERC rounds John Dawkins sat there, month in, month out, year in, year out, through all those areas of detailed discussion across every department's spending. Dawkins not only singlehandedly reformed the whole tertiary education sector, he was the most consistent supporter I had.\n\nIn the end these ministers knew more about the government's program delivery than a lot of people in the departments because they'd become completely familiar with the programs, having gone through them line by line for years, whereas a lot of the public servants were moving on, circulating through the departments.\n\nThe core force in the ERC in the early days, with Bob as chairman and me as Treasurer\u2014Peter Walsh, John Dawkins and Ralph Willis as well as, by stature John Button, and later Brian Howe and Gareth Evans\u2014was a pretty formidable and disciplined group.\n\n**KOB:** Describe John Button's personality. Journalists loved him for his sense of humour and impishness, and a great streak of unpredictable candour that produced quite a lot of stories for the gallery.\n\n**PJK:** To say that John Button was mercurial is an understatement. You'd be searching through the superlatives to find the right one, but mercurial is probably the only thing the English language offers us. But that said, it was all to a higher aim, although the higher aim was not always rationally framed. He wanted to move with the government on the internationalisation of the economy and the general positions we were taking, but reserved the right to duck and weave as it might have suited him.\n\n**KOB:** The journalist Peter Bowers once wrote that Button had the ability to dance through a rain shower and not get wet.\n\n**PJK:** Well, that's a very apposite thing to say of him. But you could approach him on a big matter and get a considered and conscientious view. I'd go around to his office to discuss something we hadn't been able to agree on, and he would at least give you the credit of having a rational position, and within that position have a real discussion with you. He wasn't a lush. He wouldn't cheat on you, say one thing and mean another. He wouldn't fob you off with some easy or convenient concession and then rat on you later.\n\n**KOB:** Describe Peter Walsh.\n\n**PJK:** Funny guy, Peter. He was a series of contradictions. We used to call it Doodlakine economics. He came from a wheatbelt town in Western Australia called Doodlakine, which reflected a kind of cockie philosophy in which you capitalise gains and socialise losses, and somehow Peter had got to the point where he found all this deeply offensive and pursued an ultra-rationalist approach to things.\n\nIn doing so he made a very important contribution, always drawing out the contradiction in positions ministers and others would often hold, and he would make a spirited and rational case for particular policies, and he'd often lose his temper on something and throw a few expletives into the equation.\n\nThe thing that characterised his public life was the way he dispensed with cant and humbug when it came to the budgetary process, and although the numbers would often present their own tyranny, he would embrace them and try to fit his philosophy within that framework.\n\nOften I would have disputes with Peter because he never knew when to let up. He lacked judgement. We used to call him Sid Vicious. Sometimes it might take me all afternoon to get a minister to sign off on a savings option\u2014I'd get $60 million out of a program which was a big deal because in those days people would fight over $5 or $10 million\u2014and it would be someone really canny like Neal Blewett, who really knew how to play the system to the advantage of his portfolio when we were on the hunt for serious spending cuts.\n\nNeal was like a fisherman playing a trout on a line. We'd be at it and at it for two or three hours and it would be getting near to the dinner break. It would be twenty to six and I'd have $63 million in savings from a Blewett program within my grasp, and Peter would throw his pencil down and say, 'Neal, we are not agreeing to three new staff positions in this new little sub-agency of yours. We've got to stop this creeping growth in Commonwealth employment.'\n\nAnd Neal would play him along in an argument until Bob would say, 'Well, I think we'll break for dinner,' and up we'd get, with Peter saving three staff positions worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but my $63 million had just fallen off the table.\n\nWe'd come back at eight-fifteen, and Neal would have a new piece of paper ready, offering $31 million instead of $63 million, and we'd have to start all over again. And I'd say to Peter, 'Peter, for Christ's sake mate, you have to be better with the judgements. When we've got a big saving on the block you've got to bring the blade down while you have the chance, rather than keep the blade up while we have a navel-gazing argument about three staff places.'\n\nThose sometime fruitless hunts of his down the rabbit warrens were often the cause of falling-outs I had with Peter over the years. Regular disputes which often would be about support for people on lower incomes. I remember having a real go at him one day when I said, 'The only point in us being in here, Peter, is to help poor buggers like these. Yes, we have to keep trying to garner all these savings, but not chopping off people who really need support.'\n\nI'd gradually move him around, or Bob would overrule him. That said, he was an important contributor to the general task.\n\nAs ERC chairman Bob would most often just let the arguments play themselves out, and would take the opportunity to catch up on other matters. Gareth Evans has written his impressions of Bob as the helmsman and chairman. And he described how Bob would let debates go on interminably, and people would be looking for just a little expression of opinion from him, a little bit of authority and he wouldn't provide it, so the sessions just went on and on. This became de rigueur through the second half of the 1980s.\n\n**KOB:** How had your relationship with Bob Hawke developed by mid-1984 leading up to the budget, with an election not far away?\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely tip-top. Bob and I were hardly out of each other's company, in the business of government or socially. We were a kind of tag team. By the end of 1985, the Tax Summit year, Bob and I were joint managing directors, but through the first term, Bob was chairman and managing director and I was chief financial officer.\n\nBob brought a big bank of public goodwill to the table, which we could draw down and use politically for good policy, and what I brought was a new model for the economy which instinctively Bob supported, whether it was financial deregulation, foreign banks or, later, tariffs.\n\nThe great pity with the ABC's _Labor in Power_ series was that it focused too much on the last six months and our falling out over the leadership at the end, after eight-and-a-half years; years that included something like fifteen budgets and May statements. But for most of those years, Bob and I ran a cooperative regime for the benefit of Australia.\n\n**KOB:** There were some pretty wild moments apart from the last six months.\n\n**PJK:** And I'm happy to talk about the wild moments, but in the end Bob and I got our kicks on Route 66 by seeing the country do better. In the end we were both policy snobs.\n\n**KOB:** How robust was the relationship through some of the tougher policy moments because that would have been a true test of the friendship? Could you in those early years have a serious disagreement without anger?\n\n**PJK:** We occasionally allowed ourselves the luxury of talking badly about each other to our own staff, but that was the end of it. I used to say to him I know what you've said about me, and he'd say the same, but he always supported me when it mattered and I always covered his back when it mattered.\n\n**KOB:** Can you shed light on how such a dynamic relationship was affected by the knowledge that one of you was the Prime Minister and the other one wanted to be? Was it something left unsaid but that nonetheless sat on the table between you?\n\n**PJK:** In the first term there was no issue about me leading the party. I was happy with Bob as Prime Minister. I used to say, 'You know the scene here, Bob, there are two leaders in the one party.'\n\nHe didn't like that so much. That was dirty talk for him, but fundamentally I was not after Bob's job until one serious discussion in 1988, but even then I carried on for three more years.\n\n**KOB:** Can I liken it to say a cricket or a football team that's performing well? The captain's enjoying a long run at the head of the team and there's an heir apparent waiting his turn. But if the heir apparent is ambitious, I imagine even if he's giving complete loyalty to the skipper, with every year that passes he gradually becomes more and more conscious that he has to stay on the top of his game, he has to keep adding to his score, knowing that one serious mistake on his part could knock him out of the calculations for succession.\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely. In my case, I collectively did fifteen budgets and May statements. More than anyone ever in the history of the place. And I'd throw the balls up and say, 'Do I get a clap for that?' and I'd get a clap out of the press gallery and the polls. Then I wouldn't get claps and I'd say, 'Well, what about this one?' and I'd do a new trick. In the end I was doing so many tricks, for so many years, that Bob finally misunderstood the nature of our relationship. It defied reality that he could stay forever, but he tried in the end nevertheless.\nTAXING THE RELATIONSHIP\n\nIf the first two years of government for Paul Keating were about bedding himself in as Treasurer, establishing the budget principles for new Labor, putting the foundations under financial deregulation and gradually becoming more involved in and committed to the social Accord with trade unions, 1985 was dominated by tax. But the reforms that were achieved that year came painfully and messily, played out in a very public way. Perhaps for such far-reaching reform on such sensitive political ground that was always going to be the case, but there was nothing well oiled or carefully planned about the way the debate unfolded, either in Cabinet, caucus or the media.\n\nThe tax landscape that Labor had inherited more than 80 years after Federation included a top rate of income tax set at 60 cents in the dollar and company tax at 46 cents. Tax avoidance and evasion had become so rife that the Fraser Government and its Treasurer John Howard had made themselves deeply unpopular with their own constituency by introducing legislation retrospectively to try to stamp out one of the most blatant tax-avoidance mechanisms contrived by tax lawyers, known as the bottom-of-the-harbour scheme. There was no tax on wealth accumulation such as a capital gains tax or death duties, and corporate fringe benefits large and small escaped the tax net.\n\nThe broad issue of taxation had always been a contentious one for Labor, internally as well as externally. An undisciplined thought bubble from Peter Walsh during the 1980 election about the possible merits of a capital gains tax allowed a somewhat embattled Fraser to unleash a scare campaign about the threat such a tax would pose to the family home, which effectively killed off the very real chance of a Hayden Labor Government. And at the 1984 National Conference, Labor's Left had tried unsuccessfully to have a wealth tax included in the tax policy review approved by conference delegates. Indirect taxation had become over the years an untidy potpourri of revenue-raising.\n\nA prickly internal party debate about tax policy in the shadow of an election was the last thing either Hawke or Keating would have wanted, and 1984 was shaping as an election year, at least in Hawke's mind and at the urging of some of his advisors. At the same time tax reform was increasingly occupying Keating. His discussions within his own office and with Treasury were ongoing, and he and Hawke had both begun to contemplate the idea of a consumption tax.\n\nWhen Hawke finally announced on 8 October an election on 1 December\u2014eighteen months early\u2014he was motivated by several factors. First, a half-Senate election was due anyway. Second, given his unshakable faith in the magic of his magnetic connection to the people and his view that the Coalition leader Andrew Peacock was a weak and easy target, why not go early and expose Peacock to a long, seven-week campaign.\n\nBut a number of unforeseen events seriously affected the political landscape. Hawke had fallen into a bigger emotional hole than people had realised over the news in September of his daughter Rosslyn's heroin addiction.\n\nPeacock turned out to be a far more effective campaigner than Hawke and Labor strategists had given him credit for, and Hawke had gone against advice and agreed to give Peacock a formally structured election debate. The campaign was so tediously long it became a curse for Labor. Hawke has also talked since about the painful injury he carried through the campaign after being struck in the eye at a cricket match.\n\nUnfortunately for the government, Peacock remembered how effectively Fraser had damaged Hayden's campaign in 1980 on speculation of a capital gains tax, and on the basis of the tax review Labor was now committed to, cranked up his own scare campaign on tax. In what was apparently a spur of the moment decision by Hawke to try to neutralise tax as a campaign issue, he committed the second Hawke Government to a Tax Summit with all stakeholders involved. Keating hadn't been consulted and certainly didn't see it coming. He had argued strongly against an early election, and to him the idea of trying to develop effective tax reforms in full public gaze was anathema, but he was stuck with it.\n\nHawke has since swallowed his pride and acknowledged that he did indeed run a bad campaign, which, instead of setting Labor up for longevity, saw a considerably reduced majority and, it would seem, significant damage to his own standing with voters.\n\nLabor's pollster at the time, Rod Cameron, later told _Labor in Power_ the 1984 election, 'based on pure naked pragmatism', was Hawke's greatest mistake. Cameron's polling showed that the electorate resented the early election, the length of the campaign left Hawke overexposed, and the more the electorate saw of him, the more his appeal suffered and the more they came to believe he was just a politician like all the others, and not above the fray.\n\nCameron described the decision to have a debate as stupid, 'based on nothing more than a desire to prove to the electorate that he could beat Peacock', which Hawke then failed to do. The end result, Cameron said, was that despite coming into the election in an enormously strong position, Labor lost 2 per cent of its primary vote.\n\nImportantly, the veteran pollster of countless state and federal elections believed that, based on subsequent polling, in 1984 Hawke damaged his brand for the elections to come. It tarnished his love affair with the nation, and while his popularity remained high in opinion polls, that could no longer be counted on to translate into votes. Not surprisingly, it also had the effect of unsettling his colleagues.\n\n**KOB:** To come back specifically to the period around the 1984 budget, Labor was flying high with Hawke looking likely to exercise his option of an early election. Out of the blue Bob and Hazel Hawke are confronted with the discovery by doctors while their daughter Rosslyn is undergoing a caesarean operation to deliver her first child that her heroin addiction poses a serious health risk to mother and child. You were one of the first people Hawke told. In the intensity of that moment, how did you identify with his emotional upheaval?\n\n**PJK:** Hugely, because that day Bob had to meet with Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the Malaysian Prime Minister. I was with him for the meeting and he broke into tears. Dropping your guard in front of someone like Mahathir would only happen if you were in real emotional turmoil. So the news had obviously knocked him around very badly. Bob fell into a very big hole at that point, and I did everything imaginable to share it, to warm him up and metaphorically rub him down, and keep the show going. He had a lot of support from other colleagues and friends like Peter Abeles, but it was a very bad moment for him.\n\nI felt for Bob and Hazel through that period, but the work had to go on, and what happened over the months that followed is that Bob stopped nourishing the government. I'm not saying his whole leadership ended there, but the leader has to nourish his party and his Cabinet, and the nourishment stopped at that point. If you look at Hawke in the first eighteen months of government, the way he brought the Cabinet together, the way he used the theme of reconciliation so effectively through the Economic Summit, the sort of energy he brought to his support for the big economic reforms of 1983\u201384, you'll see a stark difference compared to what followed.\n\nBob never recovered the leadership and energy he showed in those early days. Through the years 1985 to 1990, it became the case that the Cabinet supported and nourished Bob way more than the other way around.\n\nI had to provide the energy and the leadership to the government in those years on the dominant matters of the day. Bob disputes this, but the events speak for themselves. And so does the record. In 1985 it was the Tax Summit and the final massive tax package in September that dominated the politics of that year. In 1986 it was the terms of trade collapse, my banana republic statement and the budget response to that statement. In 1987 it was the $4 billion of budget cuts in my May Statement that set up the politics of the 1987 election, the date of which I was central in choosing, including the destruction of John Howard's tax package, which I undertook single-handedly. All while bringing the budget back to surplus for the first time.\n\nIn 1988 the year was dominated by the huge May Statement, which included the seminal change in the tariff structure driven by me and bringing forth an August budget with a record $5.5 billion surplus. While in 1989 the agenda was dominated by a bursting economy, rising interest rates, a May Statement with tax cuts to prevent a major wage breakout and a budget surplus of $1.9 billion.\n\nThe newspaper record of the major dailies covering all of those events makes clear that I was the progenitor of the policy responses to those major issues throughout the five years.\n\nAnd not just progenitor but chief salesman. It was unfortunate for Bob personally and for the party that the 1984 election followed so soon after his initial setback. We went into that election flying high as a government. The economy was performing extremely well, jobs were being created at a tremendous rate, the Accord was holding well and we had a handy lead in the polls against a weak opponent in Andrew Peacock. Those of us who were close to the campaign hadn't fully realised how much Bob was still affected until the campaign began to gather momentum.\n\nBob has himself acknowledged that it was not one of his better performances, so what should have been one of Labor's great election victories, adding even more seats to the landslide against Fraser in 1983\u2014and setting us up for other victories down the track\u2014ended up with us giving both votes and seats to Peacock. Over the course of the campaign we lost ground to the extent of about 3 per cent. Instead of being in a great position for the next three years and beyond, we were on notice that we could take nothing for granted and would have to be on our game to win again. It really should have set us up for two terms. Instead, from that point on, we were looking over our shoulder.\n\nThere was one odd moment in the 1984 election when the campaign team had proposed Bob and I both speak at a business lunch at the Regent Hotel in Sydney. I suggested to his staff that it didn't seem a good idea to have both the Prime Minister and Treasurer on the same stage. It seemed like overkill. But they felt it was a good idea for Bob to give a broad overview of the government's virtues and I'd talk specifically about the economy. They were also worried about his performance on the road, and so I was there to bolster him.\n\nBob spoke first from a prepared text and seemed a bit flat. I spoke off the cuff about the economic picture because it was a good story to tell, with growth rocketing along and unemployment and inflation coming down, as well as our financial reforms like the float. It got a good response.\n\nAs we were leaving I said to Bob that I thought it seemed to go down well and he replied, 'My friend, you can have this job when I'm ready to give it to you, and that won't be before 1990 at the earliest.'\n\nThis came right out of the blue. He was a jealous little bugger, Bob. And this comment was a case in point. I had done too well. After that, in sharing a platform with him I always put myself on a handicap. Dropping the presentation down a notch\u2014more often, a couple of notches.\n\n**KOB:** One issue that left Labor somewhat exposed in the 1984 election was the party's commitment at its National Conference to a broad tax review which put things like a consumption tax and capital gains tax potentially on the table, a particularly sensitive issue at any election. Is that why Hawke suddenly announced in a radio interview in Perth in the middle of the campaign that the next Hawke Government would call a Tax Summit to consult widely on any proposed tax changes?\n\n**PJK:** Bob's announcement took me by surprise because I'd spoken to him by phone earlier that morning in his Perth hotel room. We'd talked about the economic issues likely to come up that day and I'd said we could expect the capital gains tax to run as a big issue that day. We'd made no decisions about tax reform but the Liberals were trying to put it onto us, as they had in 1980 when Peter Walsh had made references to a capital gains tax during Hayden's campaign, and it was very detrimental to the Labor Party at that time. So I told Bob to be wary on that front, and ran him back through the points of a statement we'd put out about tax principles. But then the Tax Summit just appeared from nowhere.\n\nA radio presenter named Bob Maumill on 6PR said to Bob something like, What would you say, Prime Minister, to some sort of public event like a Tax Summit or some sort of public discussion about taxation, and Bob agreed that we could have a public process to debate tax reform.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Maumill has since revealed that the Hawke camp suggested he should ask that question. Did you know that?\n\n**PJK:** If that's true it was a complete curve ball. No one in Cabinet had heard of it, and I certainly hadn't heard of it. I wasn't happy with it because it represented a very different proposition to the Economic Summit. The Economic Summit was specifically designed to build a spirit of reconciliation between business and the unions and to lock the unions into the Social Accord.\n\nBut I couldn't imagine a worse way of making good tax policy than by doing it in public. We wanted to make changes of substance after years of neglect, marry good policy with good politics, but that was not the way to do it. The problem with a public process of formulating that sort of complex policy is that a great deal of it was highly technical in nature and extremely sensitive politically. But Bob locked the Summit in that day on radio and we were stuck with it.\n\n**KOB:** Among the thousands of articles in your personal newspaper archive collected through those years, there's a comment piece written by Laurie Oakes during the campaign which noted that some in Labor were asking why the government was being forced to deal with awkward tax questions in a campaign, and you wrote across the article, 'because Bob is all over the shop'.\n\n**PJK:** Well, he was all over the shop. He was in a terrible mental state. Notwithstanding the personal angst and sorrow he had, which was real, when you're in an election campaign, particularly a long one, you have to have discipline and consistency, and we just couldn't get that from Bob.\n\nAfter the election I had to plunge into preparations for the Tax Summit with a team of Treasury officers, to produce a template for significant tax reform. It was a very intense process. From a cold start it was a massive amount of work. For instance, the downstairs cafeteria of Treasury was emptied out, and a team of people was installed there to work on the White Paper. We brought Ken Henry back from New Zealand to head up one of the divisions of the White Paper group and there were a stack of other Treasury officers involved, all overseen by Ted Evans and David Morgan.\n\nIt was an enormous effort. Officers sometimes had to have their children with them, sleeping on mattresses under their desks. The effort the department put in was phenomenal. It was essentially rewriting the tax system in five months, starting with proposals for Cabinet discussion and finally a White Paper for the Tax Summit.\n\nBob and I together decided to proceed with a consumption tax early in the White Paper process after his office and mine met with departmental people from Treasury and Prime Minister and Cabinet. As a bureaucratic group they produced a formula for the tax. But over the period leading up to our Cabinet deliberations, Bob ran hot and cold because some people in his office didn't want it for political reasons. My first substantial discussion with Bob on the consumption tax and other reform aspects was at the Lodge one Sunday in January 1985. Bob was cautious but he was in favour of the consumption tax.\n\nThe argument from Treasury was compelling. Commonwealth government spending had risen from 23.5 per cent of GDP before Whitlam took office to 30.5 per cent as Howard and Fraser finished. Outlays had risen by 7 per cent of GDP, and because the so-called budget razor gang of the Fraser years had failed so dismally to curtail outlays, Treasury had no confidence that we would ever be able to cut government spending sufficiently. So to deal with the budget deficit, which was around 5 per cent of GDP, they believed we had to find extra tax revenue. The personal tax rates were already too high, so Treasury believed it had to come from consumption.\n\nWe also wanted to cut personal tax rates, so we came to the conclusion that Treasury was probably right\u2014we couldn't deal with the legacy of the spending in the 1970s and early 1980s without some new base in taxation, and the obvious one was in consumption.\n\nThe top personal rate that Howard had presided over and bequeathed to me was way too high at 60 per cent. People were avoiding it. It wasn't an effective rate of tax. The company tax rate was too high at 46 per cent, and we were taxing dividends twice. If you were a single trader you were taxed once, if you were a partnership you were taxed once, but if you were incorporated, you were taxed twice.\n\nI could never see the sense of this.\n\nWe also couldn't go on tolerating massive tax avoidance with a major loophole like the absence of a capital gains tax. We had to broaden the tax base, cut corporate concessions and tax fringe benefits where they were untaxed, like motor cars, free meals, credit cards and the like and we could then lower tax rates.\n\nIn the end, we had three options going into the Tax Summit, famously options A, B and C. Option C included the consumption tax, but first we had to debate the whole framework in Cabinet, and that was the biggest debate I'd had to that point. I put my back into it because there were so many elements to consider, and because we knew a lot of them would be contentious within the ministry and the caucus, we scheduled Cabinet discussions in one long run to avoid the risk of leaks.\n\nThe consumption tax wasn't a value-added tax like the GST, it was a once-levied tax at the retail level. And for which I was offering massive overcompensation for people on lower incomes. The ACTU knew that and the welfare lobby knew that, and if they'd had sense they would have taken it. So, the Summit came at the end of a very intense and exhausting process.\n\nIn the build-up to Cabinet's consideration of the draft White Paper in May, I'd have Bob in the tax cart and then he'd get out of the cart and then he'd be back in the cart and then he'd be out of it again. This was partly a hangover of the psychological problems he'd experienced in 1984. But this was now over a year later.\n\n**KOB:** Hawke strongly contests the view that he continued to be affected by his family problems beyond a few weeks. He would argue that the political concerns he had over a consumption tax were real.\n\n**PJK:** Bob can say what he likes, but in the end his staffer, Ross Garnaut, sat in his place in the Cabinet room arguing the case against the consumption tax. In Bob's place. Do I have to say more?\n\n**KOB:** With regard to the intensity of that Cabinet meeting, David Morgan had this to say to _Labor in Power_ as one of the Treasury officials who sat through it: 'Contrary to the taxi driver's view of Paul Keating, he's a remarkably broad, interested and interesting multi-talented man. And I think we saw all of those qualities in his performance over 48 hours-plus. He used rationality, he used his intellect, he used his charm, he used his humour, he used his anger, he used his theatrics, he used his spleen, he used his withering language, all of them turn and turn about, and it was the most remarkable performance I've ever seen in my years inside a Cabinet room.'\n\n**PJK:** We were attempting the grand rewrite of the tax system. There's been nothing like it before nor since, and the department had gone to extraordinary lengths to facilitate a Cabinet discussion around these matters. The country is always beset with the leaden nature of the legacy systems, of legacy policies, and the taxation system was one of the worst.\n\nYou might recall that in the Howard years people were abusing the tax system, largely using capital gains, by the tax-free nature of capital profits, but there was also criminal evasion. Tax avoiders had been supported by Garfield Barwick as Chief Justice of the High Court. Tax administrators like Bill O'Reilly and Trevor Boucher were bewildered as to how they were expected to run a revenue system that leaked like a colander. There was no rationality to it. Capital gains not taxed at all, company income taxed twice, personal individuals taxed at a top rate of 60 per cent, and for private companies, Division Seven tax obliged them to distribute profits to their shareholders, taxed at the full marginal rate. They couldn't retain any earnings\u2014no corporate saving.\n\nSo a company today like Linfox in transport or Visy in paper products could only retain minimal profits to reinvest and expand the business. Because they had to pay 60 cents at the margin on distributions. It was hugely avoided and induced massive distortions.\n\nSo, Treasury and others thought the only way of changing this was not to cut spending in the budget because they had no faith that any government would have the grit to do it in a meaningful way. They believed the only way to fund the extra outlays of the Whitlam\u2013Fraser years and avoid an ever-expanding deficit was to create another base of taxation. This was a 12.5 per cent tax on consumption, so this was included in Option C in the White Paper.\n\nYou've got to see the tax debate in two elements. One, changes to the structure in lowering the top income tax rate from 60 to 49 per cent, of lowering the corporate rate from 46 per cent to 33 per cent, and second, the introduction of dividend imputation; the taxation of capital gains at full marginal rates, and then dealing with a plethora of middle-class welfare such as untaxed fringe benefits.\n\nYou can park that on one side of the 1985 tax debate under the various options A, B and C for the Tax Summit. On the other side you had the consumption tax, which induced no behavioural effects on the economy, but had one virtue only: to pay for the tearaway outlays that the Commonwealth had between 1972 and 1983.\n\nMost taxes do change behaviour. A capital gains tax changes behaviour, a lower company tax rate changes behaviour, dividend imputation changes behaviour in respect of the payment of dividends. The abolition of fringe benefits as a deduction changed behaviour. A consumption tax didn't change behaviour, it was simply a tax. People still bought the things they usually needed.\n\nGoing into the Cabinet debate, I thought to myself that every time the country gets near one of these really big behavioural changes it fails. Every single time. We've had so many tax reviews over the years. Each time the documents are presented, they're left to gather dust. I was determined that this was not going to happen on this occasion. I was completely across all the technical and theoretical aspects and had Bernie Fraser, Ted Evans, David Morgan and Greg Smith for back-up at the Cabinet table. But this was a vast undertaking and I had to sell it to a tough audience around the Cabinet table. I had to give it context and I had to deal with the politics of it.\n\nI had not asked for this debate, it sprang from Bob's radio interview in the heat of an election campaign. But we had to have it. The department rose to the challenge, and we tried to make Cabinet jump to the tune. I was charged up and ready to go, but conscious that Bob was still in the mental trough he had been in since 1984.\n\n**KOB:** But what you were also contending with was the long-held Labor view that taxation should be progressive to protect the limited resources of people on lower incomes, and many of your colleagues would have seen a consumption tax not only as regressive, but also as a political millstone around the government's neck, simply by virtue of being a new tax that would hit every consumer in the country.\n\n**PJK:** The Cabinet went into this reform program aware it was a big change, not simply in Australian terms, but in world terms. You wouldn't find any government in the OECD proposing a change of this breadth. So Cabinet knew it was on the cusp of something big, and knew it had to be a high-grade discussion\u2014high-grade inputs and contributions, the sort of stuff most Cabinets would never be presented with or become party to.\n\nI can recall other ministers saying to me as we'd walk out for a break, how good it was to be part of a discussion running at this level of integrity and creativity. People were saying this. It's been an exhausting day, but what a great conversation we've had. I can remember Susan Ryan saying that to me, I can remember Gareth Evans saying that. But there was resistance. Hayden was worried about it, and so was my old rationalist mate from the ERC, Peter Walsh.\n\nPeter brought his head of Finance, Ian Castles, with him to present alternative scales for income tax, and alternative tax proposals. In the give and take of a big Cabinet with big ideas it's probably reasonable for the Treasurer to believe that the Minister for Finance can introduce tax tables and alternative tax proposals to his colleagues rather than this being done by the head of his department. Personally as Prime Minister I would never have allowed this to happen, but Bob allowed it. So all of a sudden I'm arguing with Ian Castles, a bureaucrat. Peter would introduce a submission but then take a back seat and allow Castles to run the discussion. Here I was, a politician, a Cabinet minister, in a political forum, being obliged to argue with a public servant.\n\nPeter Walsh eventually said in exasperation at the proposed 49 per cent top rate for income tax, 'I thought I joined a party that believed in a progressive tax system.'\n\nI said, 'Well, Peter you did. But it has to be effectively progressive, and one that's complied with rather than abused. So only a PAYE middle-level public servant pays the 60 per cent marginal rate, not anyone else, because they're all into the full range of minimisation opportunities. The current system is replete with tax dodges. What are we seeking to do here? We're seeking to broaden the base of the system and cut the rates. You make more people pay, and you lower the rate they pay at.'\n\nAnd Peter said, 'Okay, that's rational enough. I don't agree with it but it's rational enough. But tell me, why did you nominate 49 per cent as the top income tax rate?'\n\nAnd this is where governments and countries make choices.\n\nAnd I said, 'Peter, I'll give you the answer. To make the philosophical point that the state gets less than half of your income.'\n\nAnd he said, 'That's what I thought,' and he chucked his papers down and put on a real stink.\n\nI said to them, 'Look, I believe in rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but if you let Caesar confiscate the revenue of the country in his dictate, then you'll always have an economy limping along that doesn't have great increments to wealth, where people can't save, where the incentive to work and grow is diminished. These are philosophical matters. Broadly the Labor Party has never believed this, but the Labor Party has been wrong about this for at least the postwar years.'\n\nDavid Morgan refers to my anger in the Cabinet, and I can remember being very snaky when Ross Garnaut, came in. Bob was sitting in Cabinet like he'd been hit with a formalin dart, and he delegated Garnaut to speak on his behalf. So Ross was in there arguing with me against the consumption tax. He wasn't just testing the points I was making, he was making the full broadside against it. I'm dealing with the economics and the politics of the consumption tax and explaining why we had to have it to bridge the gap between government revenue and spending if we were to have any chance of bringing the budget into surplus. I had David Morgan and Ted Evans from Treasury beside me, and in those days they regarded Garnaut as a way less economic mortal than themselves, but they had to restrain themselves because he was the Prime Minister's economic advisor.\n\nIn the dinner break, Bernie, Ted, David and I went to a restaurant and I asked Ted if he thought enough of Garnaut to give him a job in Treasury. Ted ruminated for a while and said, 'Oh yeah, I'd give him a job.'\n\nI asked him what sort of job, and he said, 'I'd think about him for something at AS Level.' An Assistant Secretary is about the fourth level below Secretary. It was not a derogatory comment against Ross but Ted was making clear he was questioning the legitimacy and depth of Garnaut's role in that Cabinet discussion.\n\nSo, with my most senior Treasury advisers looking on, I was fighting Ross, somewhat muzzled. But I had to do it with some restraint because I didn't want to lose Bob altogether. As you know I had him in and out of the cart through the whole process in formulating the reform package. Butchering his advisor was not the best policy but it did take a lot of restraint.\n\nOverall it was a very high-grade debate, with a number of contributions coming from other ministers. The Centre\u2013Left ministers like Hayden and Walsh broadly threw their lot in with the Left, although Susan Ryan stuck with me. Towards the end of a marathon Cabinet debate, Gareth Evans observed that he had now listened for about 48 hours to all the attempts to punch holes in the proposals and that as far as he was concerned all these attempts had failed. This was an important contribution at the time.\n\nFinally it all shaped up as Options A, B and C, which we were to present to the Tax Summit.\n\nAfter three days in Cabinet, Stewart West plucked up the courage to say, 'Paul, I don't think you have a majority here for your package.'\n\nAnd I said, 'Stewart, but do you have a majority to stop me walking out the door with a decision?'\n\n**KOB:** Meaning what?\n\n**PJK:** Meaning that Bob didn't want to put it to a vote, and I was claiming Cabinet had agreed to it. And when I walked out with the Treasury officers\u2014Bernie Fraser, Ted Evans, David Morgan, Greg Smith and Ken Henry\u2014Ted said, 'Christ, that was the toughest meeting I've ever been in! The toughest I've ever been in!'\n\nWhen you look at how hard it was to convince Cabinet, consider then what chance the reforms had in a public forum like the Tax Summit. It was bound to fail. The process was flawed from the start.\n\n**KOB:** The journalist and political historian Paul Kelly has written in his book _The End of Certainty_ that you prevailed in Cabinet because you put your position as Treasurer on the line, and that Hawke wasn't prepared to cut the ground from under you.\n\n**PJK:** Basically Bob was for the consumption tax. His instincts were to have it. The same as mine. Bob and I were both trying to move the country forward on these big aggregates, these big changes, but we had different views of what the traffic would bear. It was a very tough debate and in the end at the Tax Summit, Bob died on me. He did the deal with the ACTU overnight without telling me. He dumped me without informing me.\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly also said, referring to your ultimatum at the end of the Cabinet debate on Option C: 'The result was a dramatic omen. It signified the decline of Cabinet and government during the Hawke era and the rise of the fuhrer principle, the capacity of the man of power to impose unilateral decisions.' I assume he's saying that you were the man of power imposing the unilateral decision on Cabinet?\n\n**PJK:** We met over three days. We started on the Saturday and finished at about three or four on the Monday morning. I'd say Cabinet was probably more or less evenly divided about the consumption tax, but not the rest of the package I had in mind. The other changes were actually more sophisticated than the consumption tax. A tax on consumption represents a big revenue change, but it's not a really big idea. There's no sophistication in taxing consumption, but changing the way capital is formed, taxing capital profits, re-skewing the whole financial and corporate system in favour of the production of income is a sophisticated idea, and that all ended up in the final package in September 1985.\n\n**KOB:** So why did you allow yourself to become so passionately caught up with the consumption tax? You all but staked your career on it.\n\n**PJK:** At that stage I thought the chances of getting Cabinet to cut 5 or 6 per cent of GDP from outlays was pretty low. We either had to increase tax revenue significantly or save the equivalent in spending cuts, the longhand route. Having lost the consumption tax I then embarked on spending cuts but it took me five years.\n\n**KOB:** But when the consumption tax fell at its first hurdle, you just abandoned it?\n\n**PJK:** After the terms of trade collapsed in 1986 I embarked with the ERC on a five-year program to bring outlays back from 30 per cent of GDP after the Whitlam and Fraser years to 24 per cent of GDP. After that we didn't need the consumption tax.\n\nIn some respects it was again the old Labor Party arguing with the new Labor Party. It was the old view about the role of taxation in society against the view I was advocating. I thought there was a clear logic to my position.\n\nOnce you understood that all the tax avoidance schemes were built on the fact that capital profits weren't taxed and that a whole category of individuals took their income from cars, fringe benefits, superannuation and all sorts of other payments, adding to stacks of corporate welfare, we knew that if we broadened the base we could substantially cut the income tax rates. This therefore seemed to me to tick all boxes. We got more equity in broadening the tax base and we got more opportunity in cutting the tax rates.\n\nWe also built in big compensations to cushion people on lower incomes against the initial hit of the consumption tax. Not supporting Option C at the Tax Summit, which included the consumption tax, was the welfare lobby's great mistake. We had massive overcompensation for people at the bottom end. We took the household expenditure survey numbers for 1983\u201384, and where there was very little income to people in the bottom two or three deciles, we imputed a much higher level of income to them than they could ever have had, and gave them compensation for it. But the welfare lobby ran out on me, aided and abetted by the Business Council. Together they shot Option C down.\n\nBut in Cabinet they all said at the end of it, what a fantastic debate it had been at every level. And that's food and drink for a government. That mood permeates to the staff level and goes to the outer ministry and the caucus. And they feel they belong to an organisation that has probity, resourcefulness and ambition.\n\n**KOB:** David Morgan told _Labor in Power_ a small handful of Treasury officials went back to your office at about three or four on the Monday morning after the Cabinet decision to open a bottle of champagne, feeling euphoric because they believed you'd all just played the ultimate grand final, that you had just seen a significant moment in the economic history of the Federation. Their expectation, and I suppose yours, was that with Cabinet support, you'd get full ministry support and caucus support, and that with the work you had done on the ACTU and the welfare groups you were well on the way to getting Option C as official government policy. Can you remember the celebration?\n\n**PJK:** We knew we had slid the thing through, huge as it was, over the heads of the doubting Thomases, although we knew that probably a majority of Cabinet thought it was a great political risk, and maybe one not worth taking. Nevertheless with the scale of the project and force and quality of the debate, we were able to leave with a Cabinet decision. My Treasury guys knew they'd been involved in an unbelievable decision of government that no Treasury would otherwise expect to be part of, and secure. They'd walked in with a monster proposal and walked out with a Cabinet document reflecting it. So yes, they wanted to celebrate. They were over the moon about it.\n\n**KOB:** Is it true, as Paul Kelly wrote, that you called Bob Hawke 'jellyback' for his lack of nerve in that period?\n\n**PJK:** No, that was Peter Walsh. I have never called Bob 'jellyback'. I've called him plenty of things since, but 'jellyback' was not one of them. It was too deprecatory of Bob's values and positions. I never ever used that term.\n\n**KOB:** Kelly again: 'Keating was unable to conceal his patronising attitude towards Hawke, made manifest in repeated private references to having to get Hawke back into the tax cart.'\n\n**PJK:** That's true. But you have to know about power, Kerry. Leave a void and someone will fill it. Bob left a massive void in the power equation through 1985 to 1990, and in a very large measure I filled it. He was off the game for such a long period and that's not just my contention.\n\nOn 13 April 1985 Michelle Grattan wrote in _The Age_ : 'Hawke struggles to counter a creeping lack of confidence.' Paul Kelly wrote in _The Australian_ in May 1985: 'Is the job becoming too much for Hawke?' And there was more of the same in 1986, 1987 and 1988.\n\nIt wasn't just me, it was just obvious. You know the old saying, give a dog a bone and he'll bury it. You leave a hole, someone will fill it. In the end I don't blame Bob for skipping out on the consumption tax. It was a tough ask. But I do blame him for not telling me before he decided to go to the ACTU, in the middle of the night during the Summit, and kill it.\n\n**KOB:** Let me put an alternative proposition as to why Hawke pulled the rug. He was reflecting broad based and genuine fears inside the labour movement, including among a number of your Cabinet colleagues that the risks of losing the next election were too great, and in the end he exercised his prerogative as leader based on that judgement.\n\n**PJK:** I think his nerves went. I worked on the Road Runner principle: running fast and hard; a momentum play. If you run hard enough and fast enough for a great change, you will get it. Look over your shoulder once, and you're dead meat. Belief and advocacy are the keys. Believe in things and advocate them, and bring the public with you by talking up, not down, to them. The political system these days mostly talks down to the community. But if you talk up to people, pay them the respect and the courtesy that they're intelligent enough to understand the central issues, then they will mostly come with you.\n\n**KOB:** But in this instance, the bottom line was that even your mate Bill Kelty at the ACTU and your other trade union allies on the Accord wouldn't support you on Option C. Wasn't that what really killed the package?\n\n**PJK:** What really killed the package was the Business Council of Australia. When Bob White got up and said we won't support options A, B or C, Bill Kelty said to me, 'Well, mate, if the most likely supporters and some of the principal beneficiaries of this consumption tax and this cast of policy won't support it, how can we?'\n\n**KOB:** The unions campaigned against you on the consumption tax at the Summit, but you went for drinks with them after they'd helped roll you, and Bill Kelty presented you with Norman Lindsay's _The Magic Pudding_ , signed by the entire ACTU executive. They'd beaten you, but in the process, as was inscribed in the book, you had won their respect and their trust. How did you interpret that?\n\n**PJK:** They knew that in terms of the big reforms and sticking to the labour movement, they had more access to power through my portfolio as Treasurer than they'd ever had in the entire twentieth century. And while they'd had a disagreement with me on the consumption tax, they weren't going to down me, because downing me was costly. More than that, they liked me and liked dealing with me. But when Bob White and the Business Council dumped us I couldn't really take a whip to Bill Kelty or Simon Crean. By the same token, Bob should not have sold me down the drain overnight at some motel without telling me, but he did. Even so, I pretty well forgave him and kept working cooperatively with him.\n\nWe were trying to do what politicians over the postwar years had largely failed to do. They wouldn't tell the public what should really happen and wouldn't put their neck on the line to make it happen. I wanted a new kind of political leadership built around good public policy, something with uprightness about it. I used to say to Bob, we might last three years, we might last six. However long we last, let's go for broke all the time, let's do the best we can.\n\nI won't pretend the Tax Summit wasn't a setback. But Cabinet knew after the long and detailed debate it had gone through that there was no going back on significant tax reform. It was in the ether.\n\nThe great mistake people made for a number of years after, was that they thought without the consumption tax, the reform package we came up with a couple of months later was a squib. But the final package accepted in September had substantial behaviour-changing characteristics about it and without the consumption tax. This package represented change on a world scale. But because the consumption tax had become a _cause celebre_ , by the time it eventually disappeared, everyone thought the reforms would be a damp squib without it. They were wrong, but that did not make it easier at the time.\n\n**KOB:** Eating humble pie in public is not something most people would associate with you, but you ate humble pie when you fronted up at the end of the Tax Summit and acknowledged that a wheel had come off the cart. You are clearly a very proud man. How hard was it to pick yourself up from that defeat and throw yourself back into the task of framing a credible alternative tax reform package that you and your colleagues could live with?\n\n**PJK:** It was very tough indeed, but I did it. I had to begin with a Cabinet subcommittee, about three weeks later, and then from June to September 1985 I worked on the final package, again with Treasury officials and people from my own office. A package of changes that still hold up today. That is, the top margin rate went from 60 per cent to 49 per cent, then 47 per cent, the corporate rate within two years went from 49 per cent to 39 per cent.\n\nToday governments are flat out cutting one percentage point from the corporate rate. I took it from 49 per cent to 39 per cent and, with it, full dividend imputation. In other words, removing the classical taxation treatment of company tax by taxing company income only once. And that's why investors today like self-funded retirees invest for those franked dividends. The franked dividend came from that 1985 tax package. There was also a fringe benefits tax and the capital gains tax. It was a revolution, and the crucial people in helping to get that package through were John Dawkins, Gareth Evans, Neal Blewett, Peter Walsh, John Button and Susan Ryan.\n\n**KOB:** How easily were you and Bob Hawke able to mend the fracture in your partnership through the rest of 1985, because Edna Carew has written that the Summit was indisputably a new low point in the relationship?\n\n**PJK:** No, the lowest point was the full tax package, because come September Bob didn't want to hear about tax reform at all. He'd had a gutful of it. So basically he'd decided to do the package in. So he set me an enormous hurdle to get it through the full ministry. It's hard enough to get a massive tax change through an informed Cabinet of thirteen or fourteen people. Imagine if you've got to spend three days with 27 ministers, thirteen of whom have never in their lives had to grapple at close quarters with complex economic policy\u2014people like Tom Uren, Arthur Gietzelt, Barry Jones and the like, yet they were all there. The full ministry.\n\nIn one conversation Arthur said to me, 'Well, Paul, we agree with you about capital gains, but we don't agree with you about cutting the top personal rate and we don't agree with you about dividend imputation.'\n\nAnd I said, 'In which case, Arthur, you'll be getting nothing.'\n\nAnd he said, 'What is this, a dictatorship?'\n\n'No,' I said, 'it's a package. We introduce a new tax on capital but on the other hand we lower the tax on income. If you don't want to lower the rates we are not able to broaden the base.' At one stage I told Arthur and Tom they couldn't sell ice cream in the Gobi Desert.\n\nIt went on for three days.\n\nThe low point in my whole relationship with Bob was that he went to Papua New Guinea that weekend and left me alone with the whole reform package. In fact, Gareth Evans had a real go at him. I've got the report quoting Gareth with the headline, 'Tax go-slow rebounds on PM':\n\nAt one stage there was a sharp exchange between Mr Hawke and the Resources Minister, Senator Evans, who complained about the slow pace at which the meeting was proceeding. Senator Evans, a factional ally of Mr Hawke, was worried that the real purpose behind his deliberations was to ensure that no tax package was ever finalised.\n\nAnd that was completely true. That's when the game really got savage. I didn't forget that. It was the only one I can say I never forgave Bob for.\n\nWhen Bob landed at Fairburn Airbase back in Canberra from Papua New Guinea in the evening, he rang me on the car phone and said, 'Paul, Bob here. How did you go?'\n\nI said, 'I got it all through.'\n\nHe said, surprised, 'Got it all through? What, to cut the top rate? And the imputation?'\n\nI said, 'I got the lot through.'\n\nThat was not the way the plan was supposed to go. I'm sure Bob thought the full ministry would basically jam me and throw me back into another ill-defined process.\n\nBob is reported to have said he wanted a meeting of the full ministry to widen the base of support within the party for the final package. This of course is untrue. A case of after-the-event rationalisation to excuse his shabby and unforgivable behaviour.\n\n**KOB:** Another biographer, John Edwards, who worked as your adviser when you were Prime Minister, wrote of the Tax Summit's impact on your relationship with Bob Hawke that: 'It snapped the collegial bond of trust between you and put in its place a harder, more enduring, but wholly mercenary relationship of mutual advantage.'\n\n**PJK:** That's not right. It wasn't mercenary. It's important to understand when you refer to the moments when Bob and I were at odds, that Bob stuck to me and I stuck to him on almost every other thing. The low point is the September 1985 tax package meeting\u2014a meeting around issues of such weight with no Prime Minister present. But that reform is still the core of the Australian tax system with Howard's GST added on.\n\nBut for all that, the show had to go on. The show had to go on. And there was always a point of affection between Bob and me, and I mean that. In the end I was a soft touch for him and he was a soft touch for me. We left it that way for national progress. You've got to elbow your way through the system to get the changes. Public life is only about getting the changes. The system otherwise runs itself.\n\n**KOB:** But what does it say about what real friendship was left when there you were in the middle of putting that final tax package together, and you were in your office writing angry comments about Bob Hawke on your own personal archive of newspaper files like 'The envious little bastard did everything to destroy it'.\n\n**PJK:** He did do everything to destroy that package. Bob got to shockingly low points of bad behaviour. But I could always engineer a better moment with him, and keep the show rolling. The public will never understand the value they got from Hawke and me. Eight-and-a-half years we were together, and the changes were revolutionary. I would kick and shove and gouge, and he would do the same but nevertheless both of us kept our eye on the main chance\u2014the greater good of the place.\n\n**KOB:** How happy were you with the final tax outcome in 1985 as the man whose overarching philosophy was to strive for perfection?\n\n**PJK:** I thought it was phenomenal, and that's why its architecture still forms so much of the tax system today. I took the top rate from 60 to 47. After twelve years of the Liberals, Peter Costello was only able to take it from 47 to 45. Big deal. And in my package, the corporate rate came down from 49 to 39, plus full dividend imputation. I'm quite sure one of the reasons the business community turned to Bob and to me through the 1980s was that massive tax change. It was so pro-capital and so pro-entrepreneurship.\n\n**KOB:** Where were the workers in all this?\n\n**PJK:** The workers got huge benefits. The bottom tax rate went down from 31 to 21, and the tax-free threshold rose. It was the fairest tax change ever. And we clamped down on rorts and tax avoidance with the fringe benefits tax and the capital gains tax. It made us so different from the Liberal Party. Here they were, the men of business in the pinstriped suits. They had run the show for most of the post-war years yet they still had a 60 per cent top marginal rate, taxed dividends twice and let capital profits go free. God help us!\n\n**KOB:** For a man who'd spent his life soaking up lessons from others, what did you learn from that process? How painful were the lessons of necessary compromise to get a result?\n\n**PJK:** I had to take a lot of stick for my trouble through the Tax Summit process. And the Treasury team who had put their backs into it felt the rejection. If ever a department of state worked for a government, Treasury worked for the Hawke Government throughout 1985. It was an excruciating effort on their part. So delivering that massive package in September that year was, in large measure, justification for them, as it was for me.\n\n**KOB:** What evidence was there that the public embraced that package?\n\n**PJK:** It completely changed the way the business community, including small business and the professions, looked at us. In a private company under John Howard's tax system you retained $21 out of $100 of income. After my changes, in that same company you could retain $67 out of $100 of income. If you taxed it at Howard's old corporate rate, and then taxed the distribution at the top personal rate under Division Seven tax, you could keep $21 only. So I trebled the retention of after tax capital in private companies. It revolutionised capital formation in private companies. The Liberals never understood capital or capital impulses.\n\n**KOB:** On the one hand you were driven by this philosophy of the need to create wealth in Australia, with the necessary second strand that a fair share of that wealth reached the greatest number of people. And yet the 1980s also became the decade of conspicuous consumption among the very wealthy, many of whom had done particularly well through your policies. Did that bother you?\n\n**PJK:** Most of the wealth was shared through employment growth, and then through real wages. We had created 1.6 million new jobs. The high flyers were conspicuous but they were a tiny portion of the community. Anyone can lift the top half a per cent up, but who can lift the other 99?\n\nThe business I was in with Bill Kelty was lifting the 99 per cent up with a structure of minimal award rates\u2014best in the world\u2014strong real wages growth after inflation, lower prices through competition, and superannuation. But none of that would have been possible in a low-growth economy. We doubled the Australian economy's capacity to grow. This is a huge claim to be making. It used to grow at 1.6 or 1.7 per cent in the years under Fraser. In our first seven years it averaged 3.5 per cent. That's what produced the huge increment to wealth and brought the equity.\n\n**KOB:** So after nearly three years in the job, with one election behind you, how were the stresses and the strains of the job hitting you?\n\n**PJK:** Getting the policy right was one thing but you still had to do the sales task. You still had to account to Parliament, Question Time and all the rest. These events were always exhausting. It's a big pump-up to do Question Time. To do that highly sophisticated, subtle act every day is a big demand. Done well, it is hugely sophisticated. Often high and complex policy blended with politics.\n\nAs a shadow minister stands for a question, the thoughts are already running through your mind. Who is it? Is it an organised question or a spontaneous one? It's a National Party MP from Gwydir, so as he's walking, you are slicing down through the possible topics he would be likely to ask about. As he gets to the despatch box, you know it might be about wool, or about water, but it will definitely be to do with agriculture.\n\nThe thing for somebody like me was long questions. Because once you get a long question the mental computer has had time to go right through the file. And then at the end of the question you say to yourself, which bat do I select to knock this one into the stand? In other words, you experience the balls coming in slow motion. If you get very good at this, the balls roll up to you in slow motion whereas if you're not across the brief, everything is coming rapidly, and when they come rapidly, generally you're in trouble.\n\n**KOB:** What about the language that you used, and indeed revelled in, that became very much a hallmark of Paul Keating, some of it just one step back from the bar room?\n\n**PJK:** It's an art form. You're on the stage. You must maintain the psychological control. Someone like Alexander Downer would step up to ask me a question and I'd turn to my crowd and say, 'His mother loves him!' I used to call Peter Costello the talking knee and when he'd ask a question I would always turn to my colleagues and tap my knee. They'd all laugh. But those laughs are so off-putting and confidence-destroying. You must be winning in Parliament; you must keep the psychological hegemony, and that means when they come to ask you the questions, you have to have the answers and be psychologically in charge.\n\n**KOB:** Do you accept that while your parliamentary style was a very big part of the government's weapons arsenal, it was also very much a part of why a very sizable block of people didn't like you, they didn't like that aggressive side of you, the arrogance that they perceived from the way you performed?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but what about all the ones who did like it? God, there were millions of them. They still walk up to me in the street, saying, God, we miss those Question Times. Not a week goes by that that is not said to me. Sometimes it would have cost me, but I've always believed in the power of the political metaphor, and not just the power but the legitimacy of the political metaphor, because to speak metaphorically to a community about change is really to educate them in a way that they can absorb and internalise. You're not talking down to them, you're talking up to them. You're giving them a picture around which they can encapsulate the argument.\n\nThe arguments have to be digestible but must also be put with flair and panache in delivery. There also has to be a bit of fun in it. I never took it deadly earnestly. It's a job that has to be done and done to secure public policy changes. I can say that I left public life with feelings of enmity to no one on the Opposition benches.\n\n**KOB:** I'm assuming your music was still incredibly important to you, just as it had been all those years ago in Bankstown when you used your music to reinvigorate yourself.\n\n**PJK:** It did two things for me: it expanded my mind to the possibilities open to me, and I used to get ideas when the music came. I'd always have a pad and a pen to take ideas down. Music for the brain is like electricity to an electric motor. Once the current starts the locomotion begins. Music stimulates you, so I'd be absorbing the music and thinking I could do this or I could do that. But at the same time as exciting me, it would also humble me, and I mean really humble me.\n\n**KOB:** A lot of people would be surprised that you saw yourself as a humble person.\n\n**PJK:** I think I'm actually a very humble person. You can take pride in your work but also have humility. If you are allowing yourself to ride with, say, a Wagner opera or a great work like Bruckner's _Symphony No. 5_ or something like that, the scale of the genius, the scale of the whole thing just tells you, sorry, I'm not in that league. You say to yourself, these people are immortals whereas I am merely mortal. These people, the great composers, are supernatural while I'm down here doing very mundane stuff. It is a great leveller.\n\nI used to listen to orchestral and symphonic works before budgets because they'd pump me up as to the scale of possibilities, but at the same time remind me how ordinary it was; what I was doing. You could do jobs of the kind I was given as best you could and make as big a difference as possible. But in the great scheme of things you are a bit player on a very large stage.\n\nTHE BANANA REPUBLIC: NO TURNING BACK\n\n1986 was a pivotal year for the Hawke Government and for Paul Keating. He later told one of his biographers, John Edwards, 'Up to 1986 we controlled the agenda, and then we did not.'\n\nTwelve months into their second term, and two years after the float of the dollar, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were discovering that the more they moved to free up the economy, the less predictable it became. Call it the unintended consequences of reform, or maybe just a fact of life in the more volatile environment of a freer financial marketplace.\n\nBy late 1985, with the scars fading from a tax debate that had taken up nearly the whole year, Paul Keating was grappling with headlines such as 'Aust dollar hits record low', 'Interest rates soaring as dollar keeps falling' and 'Aust trade problems worsen'.\n\nKeating's banana republic moment in the face of a perceived crisis over Australia's current account deficit was still months away, but the portent was becoming clear. As early as April 1985 the emerging picture was one where imports were far outstripping exports: the Australian economy was substantially reliant on a small handful of commodities to maintain its export base, and manufactured exports were stagnating, heavily exposing the country to the vagaries of world commodity markets. Ironically, the growth the government was presiding over had become part of the perceived problem. Australia's increasing demand for sophisticated manufactured goods was being fed from overseas rather than domestically.\n\nAlso feeding into the current account problem was the traditional imbalance between investment capital coming into the country and the money Australians invested abroad. Because of our size we'd always had to rely on overseas investment. We simply didn't generate enough capital to fund the nation's development. This has been true since the First Fleet weighed anchor in Port Jackson.\n\nIts impact would have been smaller if overseas investment flowing in was used productively to expand the Australian economy. As it turned out through this period, some was and some wasn't. In April 1985, however, the trade picture was deteriorating: the current account deficit stood at $7.57 billion, foreign debt was building and the global markets treated the Australian dollar accordingly. The shrinking dollar would in turn fan inflation because the prices of imports were rising.\n\nThe balance of payments and current account deficit statistics were released monthly, and the irony for Keating in the headlines they were attracting was that he was becoming a victim of his own success. He had set out to educate the parliamentary press gallery to a higher degree of economic literacy than they could ever have boasted in the past, but the more literate they became, the more they understood the problems, including their political significance. Journalists relish political problems because they create news.\n\nBob Hawke in Canberra and Paul Keating, who was in New York, were moved by the April figures to issue simultaneous warnings that Australia was essentially living beyond its means and had to do more to 'earn its way in the world'. In the process they flagged spending cuts in the next month's mini-budget.\n\nIt was then that Cabinet was first put on notice that the government faced a significant structural rather than cyclical problem that could cast an ominous shadow on the economy, affecting budget strategy, broader economic and social policy and ultimately the government's own fate.\n\nThe economy was slowing slightly but still historically strong. New jobs were popping up all over the place and inflation was still trending down, but come November the current account deficit was still being described as horrendous and the dollar was down to around 65 cents against the US currency, a depreciation of 30 per cent across the year.\n\nThe Reserve Bank felt compelled to keep monetary policy tight with high interest rates to coax foreign investors back into the dollar, while the government was locked into the Keating strategy of ongoing budget restraint, with a pledge that Commonwealth expenditure and the budget deficit would not increase as a percentage of GDP.\n\nHousing interest rates had not yet been deregulated and were held at a ceiling of 13.5 per cent, but 'quality bank borrowers' were paying as high as 19.5 per cent\u2014unsustainable in terms of the economy and the politics.\n\nAt a personal level the pivotal relationship between Hawke and Keating had settled back into one of (apparent) cordiality and mutual support within Cabinet, but looking back years later, Keating maintains that in spirit Hawke had still not recovered from his family crisis of the previous year and that the drive, the confidence, the massaging of personalities and issues that he had brought to the Cabinet table as leader in the first eighteen months were now largely absent.\n\nNot surprisingly Hawke vigorously contests the Keating view, and their Cabinet colleagues also vary in their opinions. But there is evidence in the news commentary through this period that senior journalists sensed something was amiss with the Hawke leadership. The question of whether the Prime Minister had lost his mojo remained as ambient noise.\n\nEven though Hawke's popularity was still relatively high in 1986, and John Howard's low by comparison and trending into the teens, the Hawke magic with voters in 1983 had been weakened through the 1984 election. There was no room for complacency. Even Hawke's biographer, former lover and future wife Blanche d'Alpuget publicly described him in March 1986 as depleted.\n\nHere's the thing about leadership and the power that goes with it, and the relationships between those who have it and those who desire it: it can erode and corrode even the strongest of friendships or partnerships, and while the story of Hawke and Keating had a long way to run, it didn't seem to take much after the 1985 tax reform tensions for them to resurface, and back they came with a vengeance after the April 1986 balance of payments figures were released on Tuesday, 13 May, showing another unexpectedly sharp rise.\n\nOn the day Keating chose to say nothing, as if girding his loins for battle. The next day, with Hawke in the air on his way to Japan and China, his Treasurer went on talkback radio with John Laws from a kitchen phone at a Labor fund-raising lunch on the outskirts of Melbourne.\n\nKeating had been talking about trade deficit issues for months now, but not quite as bluntly as this. He even invoked the D word.\n\n'I get the clear feeling,' he told Laws, 'that we must let Australians know truthfully, honestly, earnestly just what sort of international hole Australia is in. It's the price of our commodities. They're as bad in real terms as they were in the Depression. That's a fact of Australian life now. It's got nothing to do with the government. It's the price of commodities on world markets but it means an internal economic adjustment, and if we don't make it now we never will make it. If the government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for. We will just end up being a third-rate economy.'\n\nUnder further questioning Keating eventually said Australia risked becoming a banana republic. The comments may have been off the cuff but they reflected Keating's view that caucus, and indeed many ministers in the traditional spending portfolios such as welfare, were still resisting his arguments to tighten the budget and recognise a new economic reality.\n\nThe next morning the _Australian Financial Review_ observed, 'The dealing screens that dominate the working lives of foreign exchange traders flashed quotes from Keating's talkback conversation almost as he finished speaking.' As one of the press gallery journalists travelling with Hawke subsequently pointed out, in the nine hours it took them to fly to Tokyo the dollar lost four cents, the biggest single drop since the float. The markets went berserk, almost as if the Order of the Banana had been delivered on the nation that day. It was pretty dramatic, not helped by the fact that in stark contrast to Keating's somewhat alarming message, Hawke was briefing journalists on the plane in far less pessimistic terms, with no idea of what Keating had said.\n\nSparks flew across two hemispheres over the next few days. While the travelling press peppered Hawke and his staff in Japan the following day, Keating was not backing away in his speech to chartered accountants: 'All Australians must appreciate that the decline in the terms of trade means a reduction in our national income.'\n\nThe next day, without Hawke's prior knowledge, and in tandem with Industrial Relations Minister Ralph Willis, Keating announced that a meeting of employers, unions and the states would be convened to discuss 'the greatest challenge facing Australia'. In the prevailing mood it was quickly labelled by the media as a crisis meeting. On the table would be a deferral of tax cuts due in September as part of the Accord trade-off with unions in return for wage restraint. The historic first round of compulsory superannuation might also be affected. Even before the April balance of payments figures, Keating had won endorsement from the full ministry for severe expenditure restraint in the 1986\u201387 Budget and 'control of borrowings at both the Commonwealth and State levels'. Now they were being told there was another layer of pressure to absorb.\n\nFor three years the Hawke Government had delivered strong growth, significant reductions in unemployment and inflation, wage restraint and reduced deficits, as well as the reintroduction of Medicare, big tax reforms and a deal to deliver national superannuation across the workforce. So why the sudden sense of crisis? How had it come to this?\n\nIt certainly wasn't a crisis Hawke was easily able to handle well from a distance. In an age when Prime Ministers travel abroad frequently, it's an unwritten rule that it's unreasonable to expect the PM to answer detailed questions about domestic issues while overseas. To try to tackle problems long distance without all the facts or a feel for the nuances is too risky.\n\nIn this instance the story back home was running so hot and strong that neither the journalists nor Hawke could ignore it. Hawke's advisers\u2014later dubbed disparagingly by Keating as the Manchu Court\u2014felt journalists were starting to conclude that Hawke was becoming irrelevant and Keating looked like he was running the country. One Hawke political advisor, Bob Hogg, told the ABC's _Labor in Power_ series eight years later that at least three press gallery bureau chiefs were making plans to leave the Prime Minister's party in Beijing and head back to Australia.\n\nHawke was persuaded to be seen to reclaim control of the government by instructing the acting Prime Minister Lionel Bowen to take charge of Keating's economic conference and leak the fact that Hawke was 'dealing' with Keating. That in turn resulted in headlines such as 'PM pulls Keating into line', 'Angry Hawke rebuffs Keating' and 'PM gets tough with Keating'. Hawke also let it be known that weekend that he'd ordered a phone conference from Beijing for Monday morning with senior ministers in Canberra, including Keating, who presumably would come away feeling suitably chastened in front of his colleagues.\n\nInstead, according to others present for the phone hook-up, Keating sat there as Hawke spoke from Beijing, ticking off each point Hawke made against those Keating had already read in that morning's newspaper stories filed by the journalists travelling with Hawke, and let fly. That, too, was leaked. One unnamed minister who was present wouldn't recount exactly what Keating had said to Hawke, but added, 'I can say he didn't miss his target.'\n\nIn his newspaper archive collected contemporaneously, Keating wrote in the margin of one story from Beijing published in the Tasmanian _Mercury_ headlined: 'Treasurer gets rap from PM' that the story had been backgrounded by Hawke and his senior advisor Peter Barron. Keating noted, 'Hawke is still in his mental fog.' In the margins of a similar story in the _Financial Review_ Keating wrote that the hostility from Beijing was 'all Barron's doing', that Barron had 'told Hawke he looked piss weak'.\n\nWith a less effective, less stable Cabinet and a more effective Opposition, the story of these two dominant figures could have been dramatically different. It might have come to tears much sooner than it eventually did five years later. Even so, for several months the close interest from gallery journalists guaranteed ongoing coverage that distracted from the government's attempts to regain some sense of control over the economy and reassure Australians the problem was in hand. If Keating's warning that the country was headed for third-world status was to be taken seriously and that the country did face a crisis, then the ongoing headlines\u2014'Hawke, Keating: The rift widens', 'A collision of super egos'\u2014were needed like the proverbial hole in the head.\n\nA quite important side-play was also going on. It had begun to be noticed that Keating was no longer as close to his factional power base in New South Wales as he had been. The Right-wing machine in New South Wales, headquartered in Sussex Street on the edge of Sydney's Chinatown, had developed over decades. Its highly disciplined unity at branch and conference level as well as in the state parliamentary caucus was the key to Labor's power base and dominance in the state for decades. Factional leaders such as John Ducker, Barrie Unsworth, John McBean, Graham Richardson and Paul Keating himself when he became State President in 1979, ruled with an iron hand, not always in a velvet glove.\n\nBut the more Keating was driven by the desire to reform, and by 'the long straight lines of logic' as he saw them, the more he found himself in conflict with Sussex Street, although he says he was always able to rely on the loyalty of his factional mates within the parliamentary party. The drift, as he saw it, was from the Sussex Street mob. At one point a senior political correspondent, Mike Steketee, wrote that Keating and Graham Richardson hadn't had a real conversation for six months.\n\nIn 1986 there were two such moments of conflict, one involving Keating's desire to deregulate housing interest rates on which a ceiling of 13.5 per cent had sat for some years. In Keating's view you couldn't open up banking to market forces on some fronts but not on others. Those opposing the move were concerned by the political impact of housing interest rates rising sharply to the market levels of other unregulated rates. Under pressure from factional heavyweights in NSW including Richardson and Neville Wran, Hawke blocked Keating in Cabinet on 20 March. 'Only temporarily', was Keating's written comment in the margin of the following day's newspaper story\u2014accurately, as it turned out.\n\nAnother issue that annoyed Sussex Street was the bold bid by controversial Western Australian entrepreneur Robert Holmes a Court to take over the mining giant BHP. Again, Keating chose to go it alone, opposing calls from within Labor, and most particularly from the NSW Labor Council boss John McBean, the man who inherited the state party presidency from Keating, to intervene and head off a takeover on the grounds that Holmes a Court would break up the mining empire, hitting jobs in the process. Keating argued that BHP did not warrant government protection and that market forces should prevail.\n\nUltimately Holmes a Court went away, and business went on pretty much as usual for BHP and its workers. But it was another breakaway moment for Paul Keating with his traditional NSW allies. He was increasingly running his own race, dancing to his own drumbeat. Sometimes that worked against him, but more often, for him.\n\n**KOB:** When we look now at your banana republic warning, we can see a clear example of how dramatically differently people can react, depending on a choice of words or imagery. You'd been warning about the trade imbalance for a year, but suddenly that one phrase made all the difference in how the problem was perceived.\n\n**PJK:** To contextualise it, the terms of trade started falling in what became a secular decline about the time Bob Menzies retired in 1966, and that decline started to accelerate through the 1970s. The terms of trade compare the value of the things you sell to the value of the things you buy. The things we were selling\u2014wheat, wool, grains, iron ore, coke and coal, copper, lead, zinc\u2014were going down in value, while the things we imported were rising in value, such as colour TVs, VHS recorders, computers. So we were getting poorer. Every Treasurer had ignored it\u2014too hard, under the carpet.\n\nBy the time we got to the mid-1980s we were starting to see a rapid deterioration in the terms of trade. On a graph you can see it very markedly. So by March 1986 our terms of trade were at a record low. They were last at that level in the Depression, from 1931 to 1933. So our national income had been quite dramatically cut. The prevailing economic orthodoxy demanded more remedial changes through the budget process.\n\n**KOB:** Do you remember your closing comments to Parliament in your May Statement of 1985 to justify unpopular cuts: 'If there is a short-term political price in these measures we are prepared to live with it.' This was all about dealing with the terms of trade a year before your banana republic comments. Why did you have to use such a dramatic way to reissue the same warning a year later?\n\n**PJK:** I used to say these things in Parliament rather more guardedly so as not to unduly alarm the community, but making the point that we were in a long secular decline and the decline was accelerating. I couldn't really get any traction on the problem in Cabinet.\n\nIn each of the economic reviews through that period these current account figures were just getting worse and our terms of trade were continuing to go down, but the problems were so big and so difficult to face, Cabinet colleagues would say, 'Well, thank you for that, we've noted that', but there wasn't much appetite for a big structural adjustment of the kind that was necessary.\n\nWe'd been through the issue over many months, but now it was coming to a head. Bob Hawke was in Japan and China, and I blurted out the comment to John Laws from a telephone in the kitchen of a reception centre just outside Melbourne. With the clatter of pots and pans behind me I warned that if we didn't address the fundamental problems, we risked becoming a banana republic. It was not at all premeditated, I simply couldn't keep the truth of it in.\n\n**KOB:** The Reserve Bank Governor, Bob Johnston, told the ABC's _Labor in Power_ series that your comment was 'one of the most statesman-like remarks that had ever been made in Australia. It certainly was a jolt to the community in that they felt at last someone was being candid and frank about the problems'. Johnston recalled that at times you would look pensively out of his window of the bank building at the top of Martin Place in Sydney, wondering whether that was the greatest or most stupid remark you'd ever made.\n\n**PJK:** In the end, you can't be what you are not. You can't bottle up stuff like this. I couldn't, on the one hand, say I was forging a new political relationship with the Australian people, giving them something better than the dross they'd been fed for 40 years, but by the way, we're not going to tell them about the massive decline in our national income. In the end you've got to spit it out. Now, it might have been embarrassing for the government and put a monkey on my back, but it was a monkey I was prepared to wear.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke later wrote in his autobiography that your remarks 'traumatised both the public and the markets, a form of shock treatment gone wrong. Paul had created a disaster for the government'.\n\n**PJK:** That's a post-event re-evaluation. It turned out not to be a disaster, but the turning point in the Australian reconstruction to deal with this big secular decline in the terms of trade that had begun in the 1960s. I've got a copy of the _Age_ here from more than two months before that point. On the front page, 21 March 1986: 'Terms of trade at record low' was the headline. 'Australia's terms of trade were at their worst level since the Depression, the Treasurer, Mr. Keating, said yesterday.' Now the Cabinet knew this was the case, and so too did the economic journalists.\n\n**KOB:** But surely by the same token you can sympathise with how Hawke must have felt, caught on the other side of the world reading reports that his Treasurer was saying the country could become a banana republic, and then seeing the market's panicked reaction. He must have thought, what on earth is Paul up to?\n\n**PJK:** But I had used the phrase 'banana republic' before in a speech overseas. It had been reported, just not the big splash the later reference got. But the way these things happen is not always understood. Issues play on your mind, and you get policy-bilious. All of a sudden you're in a phone conversation in a noisy kitchen to John Laws and out it shoots.\n\nI didn't make the banana republic remark to shanghai Cabinet, though in fact Cabinet was forced to then respond to those remarks all through 1986 and then 1987. Had it not been in a casual, more unguarded conversation in a restaurant kitchen in Victoria, it might not have come out quite that way.\n\n**KOB:** One obvious thing that struck me in reading back through the dramas between you and Hawke over your comments to John Laws was that if he hadn't been flying to the other side of the world as you made them\u2014if he'd been sitting at his desk in Canberra\u2014the blue between the two of you, the sense of crisis, might never have eventuated.\n\n**PJK:** I'm certain that's right. Because Bob would always take notice of what I'd say, he'd always give it serious thought. If he were concerned about something I'd said, the two of us would sort it out in a sensible way. The fact that he was on the other side of the world made that much more difficult, but the timing was completely accidental.\n\n**KOB:** But because the terms of trade figures that triggered your comments had been released a couple of days before and you hadn't yet responded to them by the time he'd got on the plane for Japan, he gave a more guarded response on the figures to journalists on the plane. By the time he arrived in Tokyo the dollar had dropped four cents. The markets were going berserk.\n\n**PJK:** That sense of drama back home caught him unawares, and the gallery journalists were putting him under pressure. I wasn't trying to embarrass him, I was just trying to keep the show going and get some real focus on the fact that we had a very real problem we had to deal with.\n\n**KOB:** The day after your comments to Laws you told a conference of chartered accountants that 'all Australians must appreciate that the decline in the terms of trade means a reduction in our national income'. These were more considered comments but you'd obviously decided to ram the message home. That's almost exactly what you had said a year before, but this time the banana republic context suddenly made them so much more explosive.\n\n**PJK:** The impetus for all this had come from that terms of trade quarterly release in May. The current account deficit rose more sharply, the terms of trade fell much more forcefully than we'd expected. I was recorded at the time by Ross Gittins in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ as saying that they'd dropped by two percentage points in the past three months, and I'd belled the cat on the Laws program.\n\n**KOB:** You and Ralph Willis as the Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations then called a meeting of employers, unions and the states to discuss the issue, which was immediately dubbed by the media as a crisis summit, even though you were using an established forum to have it.\n\n**PJK:** It was a routine meeting; we used to meet regularly. There was nothing extraordinary about the meeting or its timing. The Advisory Committee on Prices and Incomes, the ACPI process, was set up under the Accord with regular meetings, and this was scheduled. It was the media that played it up and beat it up.\n\n**KOB:** But this time you gave it some urgency. You said it was to address 'the greatest challenge facing Australia'. Hawke's advisors obviously became concerned that you were looking more like the PM than Hawke and told him as much. That's when things got testy, wasn't it?\n\n**PJK:** Peter Barron was saying to him, 'You're the Prime Minister and you've got to look like the Prime Minister.'\n\nYou're correct in saying if Bob had been in the country Ralph Willis and I would have just gone upstairs and had a chat with him and said, 'Bob, we can put this on the agenda for the next ACPI meeting' and he would have said, 'Okay, fine'. But the fact that he was abroad looking isolated, with the sense that I was dealing with a crisis back in Australia and Barron saying to him 'you need to look like you're in charge' pushed him into these background briefings against me from Beijing. That was when Hawke said he'd put Lionel Bowen in charge of the meeting to put me in my place.\n\n**KOB:** Another Hawke advisor, Bob Hogg, told _Labor in Power_ years later that at least three gallery bureau chiefs were making plans to leave the PM's party and head back home to where the story was. You can understand why Barron and Hogg were getting anxious, can't you?\n\n**PJK:** I can. They worked for the Prime Minister, not for me.\n\n**KOB:** What can you remember of the phone hook-up Hawke ordered with you and other senior Cabinet colleagues back in Canberra, ostensibly to pull you back into line, which was also leaked in advance, generating headlines like 'Angry Hawke rebuffs Keating' and 'PM gets tough with Keating'?\n\n**PJK:** I ticked Bob off on the phone. I said, 'What are you doing over there, Bob? You're like a chook with its head cut off. What are you up to? You know what I'm doing here. The same things we've been speaking about for months. What's all this about?'\n\nI got right into him. I said it's like a _kabuki_ show. What is this _kabuki_ show you're running? I'm only repeating what I've said to you and have already been saying. The fact that it got picked up on the Laws program is completely incidental to you being abroad, and the meeting Ralph and I talked about was the scheduled meeting of ACPI.\n\nRalph was on the phone hook-up and agreed with the substance of what I said, so before the conversation was over Bob had climbed down.\n\nIt's one thing having this responsibility tipped onto me by virtue of Bob's condition after 1984, but it's another thing to have him objecting to me doing the work. It may have been inconvenient for him to be out of the country, and it may have been true that it looked bad for him, but it certainly wasn't true that I was doing something that was in any way different to what we had broadly already been saying.\n\n**KOB:** But perhaps it revealed an underlying anxiety on his part that you were beginning to represent a real and genuine threat to the future of his leadership, that he could see your influence in the Cabinet room and the media perceptions that inevitably flowed from it.\n\n**PJK:** That may be so but there was also a plaintive helplessness, a sense that Bob didn't know what to do. On the one hand he knew we needed to make remedial changes, and on the other he didn't have the stomach for pushing the framework. He needed me to put the new framework into place and, more than that, he was happy to see the framework put into place. He just didn't want all the pain of it.\n\nThis is where people think they can make a case about Bob Hawke and me being leadership rivals as early as 1985 and 1986. Intellectually it may be true, but in a positional sense it's completely untrue because I was not at all trying to push Bob from the leadership. Not at all. Even more than that, Bob, in a very dependent way, wanted me to keep pushing the changes through, which was to his credit.\n\nThere's no doubt that for a brief period it did strain the relationship with Bob, but it's worthwhile getting this whole period into context. We'd just gone through 1985 with the Tax Summit, the tax reforms later in the year, we'd had the spending restraints through the May Statement and the budget, and now in 1986 we were facing a major decline in the terms of trade, a volatile Australian dollar and, with all that, adjustments to real wages through the adjustment of the exchange rate.\n\nIn the end Bob and most of the Cabinet didn't have the heart for the remedial shift needed to deal with the terms of trade. It was too hard. By May, when I made the banana republic comment, this was the context. Paul Kelly wrote in the _Australian_ , 'Leader with a leadership problem', and he said, 'The profound paradox of Bob Hawke as Prime Minister is that he knows what needs to be done, yet lacks the drive to lead his government to the Rubicon. He is paralysed by inertia at the big decisions.'\n\nBut perhaps the most revealing piece published in that period was written by Bob Hawke's now wife, Blanche d'Alpuget, in March 1986, in a two-part series for the _Herald_ and the _Age_. It was headlined: 'Bob Hawke, a stunning change.'\n\nIt was a two-hour interview, and she wrote: 'The atmosphere felt like lead... observing a man so withdrawn into himself that he apparently did not care whether I listened to him or not. There was a tremendous change to be seen that day, but it was more subtle than dullness. My overwhelming impression was of a lack of vitality; that he was vanishing. I thought Hawke seemed chronically fatigued.' And then she went on to say: 'Going to talk to him for the first time in three years I expected the old zing, and was taken aback by its absence, an absence that seemed poignant and shocking.'\n\nBlanche d'Alpuget knew him well and these were her considered observations. That's really how Bob was.\n\nI'm not blaming Bob for his condition. How could I? I used to help him through all of these policy things when he was in that general state. But we had a collapsing terms of trade, we had a collapsing balance of payments problem. I had talked about it in March, I had talked about it at other times. But with the exception of the economic ministers no one wanted to do anything about it.\n\n**KOB:** By the same token, regardless of what you saw as a general malaise in Bob Hawke, you yourself told _Labor in Power_ about your banana republic comment some years later: 'It wasn't designed to be shattering to the government but in the end it was.' You yourself are saying that your comment was shattering to the government. How so?\n\n**PJK:** It meant that once you let the public in on the secret that you've got a big, big drop in national income, and soon there'll be a change in competitiveness via the exchange rate, then there's going to be a reaction to that, but at least it prepared the public and the markets for a whole lot of remedial policy that subsequently went into place.\n\n**KOB:** But you've said yourself in the past that you're a grenade-thrower and occasionally you blow off a foot. And you also once painted a picture of yourself as the political version of the skier going down a black run with one ski and no poles. In other words, the risk-taker.\n\n**PJK:** I know. I am a risk-taker. But the country had had its leg pulled for 30 or 40 years. For 30 or 40 years. The place was massively uncompetitive, with declining terms of trade. Who else was going to blow the whistle and take this basket case on? But let me say, on his account, when Bob returned from China and we got back to the policies at hand, he very quickly adopted not just my policy framework, but said he and I were on the one page and went out of his way to do that.\n\nThis goes back to the kind of relationship we had, which was so conducive to large public changes. I could show you another newspaper article where it says, 'Hawke swings onside'. So he would have liked me, in some respects, not to do the bomb-throwing, but he also liked the policy space I garnered. He also liked the fact that I wore a lot of the flak.\n\n**KOB:** Can we reflect for a minute about the relationships between ministers and their advisers? You obviously valued your staff, as Bob Hawke valued his. They're important relationships, but they can be complicated, can't they? You're the elected politicians, they, in the end, are the hired guns. Did you ever have to remind your staff of that line in the sand?\n\n**PJK:** I never had to do that with any of my staff. My office was fundamentally managed by public servants: Tony Cole in the first instance, then Don Russell. And other policy advisers in my office also came from the department. My press secretary Tom Mockridge wasn't departmental. He came from the Fairfax group, but my office mostly had a governmental culture. I had a different view from Bob on how governments should best run. Bob had quite influential inputs from people like Bob Hogg and Peter Barron, who were good people but were political advisors. Bob Hogg, Peter Barron and Ross Garnaut were not public servants.\n\nI always believed if you want to run a government on a big policy reform front, as I was doing, you need the departments\u2014in this case, Treasury and Finance\u2014locked in and engaged, and the way for the engagement was through the ministerial office with the department well represented in the office. So my office was too public-service oriented to get involved in political games against Bob's office.\n\n**KOB:** You were clearly hot under the collar when you publicly called Hawke's advisors, particularly Peter Barron and Bob Hogg, and his economic advisor Ross Garnaut, the Manchu Court around that time. What were you saying with that reference?\n\n**PJK:** All this gets back to Bob's mental state. I remember Peter Barron saying on one occasion, 'Bob, I don't fucking care what decision you make as long as you fucking well make one.' This was a staffer talking to his Prime Minister, addressing him like a schoolboy. This was as a consequence of Bob's state of mind.\n\n**KOB:** What did you mean by 'Manchu Court'?\n\n**PJK:** They would sit like courtiers around him, and I would come to Bob's office and he'd be hunched at his desk, and he'd be saying 'Ross says...' or 'Peter says...' and he'd never finish a sentence and they'd pipe up. And on one occasion I spun on them and said, 'You speak when you're spoken to.'\n\nOne of them said to Hawke, 'Are you going to let him speak to us like that?' and Bob says, 'Oh, don't be like that. Don't be like that.'\n\nI'm brought before them knowing they'd be passing an opinion to Bob after I'd left, and they'd intersperse my comments with their own. They always sat in the same position in that narrow office of Bob's in the old Parliament House. I'd be sitting in front of his desk, and their three chairs would be set a little off the wall. You were appearing before the court and the courtiers would say what they thought of you, usually after you'd left.\n\n**KOB:** Your Cabinet colleagues must have also been bemused by the sudden sense of crisis. They were broadly aware of the economic challenge, but suddenly it was critical. What was the mood around the Cabinet table as you told them they had to saddle up again for tough medicine in the 1986 Budget?\n\n**PJK:** For all the ups and downs it was a very conscientious Cabinet, and the economic ministers knew we were up against it. Our national income had been cut and we were running this big and growing current account deficit. So we embarked on another round of cuts in expenditure to reduce the call by the government sector on Australian savings. The advice to us was that this would then, in a mathematical way, reduce the call by Australia on overseas savings and therefore overseas debt. This would be reflected in the 1986 Budget and then in the current account deficit.\n\n**KOB:** In the intensity of the governing process, as Cabinet ministers have less and less time to stay in touch with their caucus colleagues and even fellow ministers, is there a risk of becoming closer to staff than to your political colleagues and the party rank and file? Were you always able to stay adequately in touch with your various constituencies in the government and the party?\n\n**PJK:** I hope I had the skilling. I'd been party president in NSW and I'd been steeped in this stuff from a very early age. I could hear the ants change step in the NSW Labor Party and the Right. All the time I'd have these guys on the phone or coming to my office. It's like trying to conduct the orchestra with the woodwinds doing one thing and the violins doing another. I'd have the woodwinds working nicely for me, that is, my people in the caucus, and with the Cabinet I'd have the violins working down the front, getting the tonal harmonies right. This game for me was always and only about getting the changes through. The political game is only about public policy changes.\n\nDon Argus, who was BHP Chairman at the time, said to me not too many years ago, 'When I speak at meetings of staff about leadership I often mention you, Paul, because you often not only conceived the changes, but you also executed them\u2014put them into place. And that's the key thing I tell these people, that it's not simply a matter of telling the board what they think the policies should be, but executing them and getting them done.'\n\n**KOB:** The caucus did have a very important and legitimate part in that policy process as the elected representatives of electorates all around the country. When you would start the process of selling one of your policy reforms and you knew it was going to be a politically tough sell\u2014either because it challenged a Labor tradition or because there might be some political pain or both, and that push\u2013pull game was going on at the various levels of government\u2014did you always have an end point in mind that factored in the inevitability that you would have to give some ground?\n\n**PJK:** This is a very important point in the whole equation, and you could see it in contemporary politics with the Abbott Government. I made an artform of consultation. I'd have those members of the Economics Committee of caucus around to my office, and we'd throw stuff around for a few hours and I'd get food in when necessary. I would always take them through the issues. You can't always win, but for earnest people\u2014and most of them were earnest\u2014provided they think the guy at the top has a strategy that will work and that you've brought them genuinely into the process, 90 per cent of the time, they'll go with you. But what you can never do is just announce this stuff in a budget or some other forum without that kind of close-in consultation.\n\n**KOB:** There was a lot of talk about the J Curve through this period, when you were grappling with the terms of trade crisis. What was the J Curve and its significance in the economic debate at the time?\n\n**PJK:** The point of the J Curve was that you'd put the changes in place but things would get worse before they'd get better. The graph would measure a downward curve before things got better and the turn up would result in the J.\n\n**KOB:** Did Treasury sell the J Curve to you, and how much faith did you invest in it?\n\n**PJK:** It was really a tool to paint a story with some economic respectability at a time when the economy was sending out distress signals\u2014namely, that remedial measures take time, but when they do kick in, you get a response from them. It was a shorthand way of saying you may not see immediate results from taking the budget medicine. There will always be a lag before it kicks in. It was a piece of poetry that was presented in the media like a piece of poetry.\n\nHere's the _Financial Review_ of August 1986\u2014and you know the _Financial Review_ was always a critic of mine\u2014'Mr Keating's remarkable budget' the headline says. They say:\n\nThe Treasurer Mr Keating has produced a remarkable budget. He has met the most optimistic of market expectations, maintained the high levels of welfare spending, confounded many of the criticisms which the Opposition had signalled in advance, and taken a political gamble that his measures might not be fully effective in time to save Labor at the next election.\n\nThe point is that the strategy I got Bob and the Cabinet into paid off for us politically, and within a month we were getting stories on opinion polls like this one on 22 July 1986 headlined 'The Hawke Government defies political gravity: The Labor Party was up two percentage points to 48 per cent, while 43 per cent supported the Coalition'.\n\nIn the circumstances that was remarkable. We've had the upheaval over the banana republic, and not only have I not led them into a dry gulch, I've led them into the Promised Land. The 1986 Budget and the 1987 May Statement set up our election win in 1987.\n\n**KOB:** Then came the day in July when the Australian dollar plunged to 57 cents, an all-time low. According to John Edwards in _Keating: The Inside Story_ , you sought the advice of the Reserve Bank Governor, Bob Johnston, that day, and he said, 'Frankly, Treasurer, I don't know what to do!'\n\n**PJK:** That's true, but in the end we did a lot of very urgent things, like turning our foreign investment policy inside out. I changed the tax treatment of repatriated dividends and earnings, and I said to Johnston, 'Bob, I'll make this announcement and you throw a ton of money at the rate.' That got us past the immediate problem.\n\nHe had another saying that has always amused me. He said, 'Of course we've got the bottom drawer policy, Treasurer.'\n\nAnd I said, 'What's that, Bob?'\n\nHe said, 'Something will turn up!'\n\nAnd you know, there's a lot of wisdom in that sort of world-weary view of life. Conditions do change and things do turn up.\n\n**KOB:** What was your formal relationship with the Reserve Bank Governor at this point? In personal terms it sounds like you had a very close rapport and a very good working relationship.\n\n**PJK:** We did work closely together but the formal relationship was one where the _Reserve Bank Act_ stipulated that the management of monetary policy should be such that the Board and the Treasurer seek to agree. So there was a statutory requirement on the Governor and his Board, and a statutory requirement on the Treasurer to endeavour to find agreement on the issues that arose. Not that this was always on our minds, but we were always trying to agree with one another, because that's what sensible, good people do.\n\n**KOB:** How serious a crisis was the plunging dollar and what risks did you face if you chose to just sit on your hands, brazen it out and let the market take its course?\n\n**PJK:** The markets would have pounded us into the ground if we hadn't acted decisively. We would have had a very low dollar, another burst of inflation, the wages system probably would have broken down again, so it really meant that when you float you're riding the tiger's back. There's no sentiment in the market. And if you're riding the tiger's back you don't have the luxury of being able to slow down and look backwards. You've just got to keep on going.\n\n**KOB:** Did you have any worries about the ways in which markets can be manipulated, of Australia becoming a target of the serious market players like George Soros, who's been blamed for all sorts of things? If the players are big enough and clever enough, can they actually distort the market?\n\n**PJK:** Already, the Australian dollar was about the fourth or fifth most traded currency in the world. You needed a lot of volume to change that. I had faith in the markets, and I still do. A Soros could take on the UK pound because the fundamentals were on his side. He would never have won against us with the fundamentals against him. If you know how to shift the markets\u2014which I learned\u2014and take the remedial action, you'll stay in front of the game.\n\nOur particular challenge with the 1986 Budget was to go back to the budget that we'd already locked away for printing with the deficit down to $5 billion. But I thought the foreign exchange markets would be looking for more and would still judge us harshly, even though we'd already made significant cuts.\n\nSo, in one big effort, we cut another $1.5 billion and brought the deficit down to $3.5 billion, heading towards surplus. Essentially we did that in one meeting involving Bob and me and our advisers. We wanted ultimately to reach the point where the government's call on Australian savings was zero at worst, or better still, in surplus.\n\nNo government in Australia had ever taken a program-by-program approach to outlay reductions at Cabinet level as conscientiously as the Hawke Government did. That had happened in each of these budgets and May Statements, and as the task got bigger it became that much harder. So we were doing line-by-line items which Peter Walsh would bring along as a savings option from the Department of Finance, and which I'd then barrack for as Treasurer.\n\nIt only worked because these decisions to cut were made at Cabinet level with the authority of the Prime Minister and Treasurer, with the direct involvement of every minister. In the Whitlam and Fraser years they had various interdepartmental committees, but when Treasury officials would ask for cuts from the Health Department, for instance, the health bureaucrats would say, 'We're not going to agree to that.'\n\nSo they never got anywhere. That's why the outlays had grown so inordinately in those earlier years. You needed the political authority at the Cabinet table to say, 'Look, we'll do this with the pharmaceutical scheme, or we'll do that with family allowance benefits.'\n\nBy the end of 1986 we were getting stories like this one in December, 'Dollar soars as interest rates drop'. Not only had the budget been well received, but the dollar had surged back to a six-month high of 67 US cents.\n\n**KOB:** But because of the ground rules you set for yourself you had to keep proving yourself to the markets year after year, so you were constantly jumping through your own hoops.\n\n**PJK:** Two budgets a year for five years. It wore us out. We made a monkey for our own backs, but the country needed the break. Not only was Australia a closed economy, but our inflation had been out of line with our trading partners and the major economies for a decade. You can't hope to exchange your dollar for their dollar if you've had inflation at double their rate for a decade. There's got to be a reckoning, an adjustment to our competitiveness.\n\nIn the end, whether we liked it or not, we lined up for seven to ten weeks a year, ten hours a day, to cut Commonwealth Government spending. And that's why, when Howard and Costello took over in the second half of the 1990s, the structural changes we'd made to the budget allowed things to move back to surplus as growth returned after the recession. Spending programs like the assets test on the pension were structural changes that, once made, sat there for the future.\n\nBy the time we got to August 1986 and finished the budget round we were paralytically tired. But when I announced that we'd got the deficit down to $3.5 billion, it attracted huge support in the marketplace. The dear old _Financial Review_ felt compelled to call it 'Keating's remarkable budget', and the dollar surged to 67 cents on the back of it.\n\nThis was a case of uncharted waters among the OECD countries. Nobody in the western world was doing this. No one would have a Cabinet and a Prime Minister sitting there for ten weeks a year, going through the budget line by line. I remember talking to one of the ministers in the Blair Government about this, and he said Tony Blair wouldn't sit for one hour in such a meeting, much less ten hours a day for ten weeks a year.\n\n**KOB:** Around this time, while you were dealing with the dollar and revising the budget, I was working on a Keating profile for _Four Corners_ with your cooperation, and we filmed a sequence with Bob and Hazel Hawke hosting a Sunday lunch for you, Annita and the kids. It was certainly all sweetness and light between you that day. We even talked about the leadership with the two of you sitting at the table as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouths. Now, pardon the hint of cynicism, but was that mood genuine or was it staged for our benefit?\n\n**PJK:** This is the point: I never took a hard view in those days about the fact that the effervescence and energy and direction that Bob gave the government through 1983 and 1984 had started to dissipate through 1985 and 1986. He'd had a big personal shock and this had gone on, and rather than sit in judgement, I helped him. And when we had one of these discussions about things once, I said, 'Bob, at the end of the year when you're at Kirribilli reading novels over Christmas, you might ask yourself, who's done the right thing by you, sticking to you on the policy, you know?'\n\nAnd he said, 'Oh mate, look, I know', and that's why when you saw Bob and me at the Lodge with Hazel and Annita, it was a genuinely good thing, notwithstanding the fact he didn't like the way the banana republic comment came out.\n\nBut Bob in his conscientiousness knew that we needed these remedial shifts in fiscal policy. Getting there was messy, but then he tacked in behind me and we went on and got it done. Happy days are here again, you see? That was how we worked.\n\n**KOB:** Also in 1986 you moved to deregulate housing interest rates, which were stuck at a ceiling of 13.5 per cent imposed by the previous government. Why did you want to remove that ceiling? To do so was inviting the banks to raise their rates which, if you were a Labor backbencher in a marginal seat, you wouldn't have thought was great politics. I think you even predicted that housing interest rates would rise by 2 per cent as a result.\n\n**PJK:** The rate was fixed at 13.5 per cent for a housing loan up to $30,000, but many people simply couldn't get loans. The $30,000 wasn't enough to buy a property so they'd have to have cocktail loans: the primary loan at 13.5 per cent, then they'd have a secondary loan at a higher rate, and then maybe family money. In other words we had an immature structure and we never had a housing industry that had consistency. It was always boom and bust, boom and bust.\n\nFinancial deregulation turned banks from rationers of credit to creators of credit. In the system, before I turned up, banks were given quantitative restrictions by the Reserve Bank on what they could lend and they would dole that out to the customers they preferred. They were not creators of credit. Once we removed all the deposit and lending controls, including for housing, the banks could then decide the risk profile of their customer in the context of those freedoms. They could decide if they wanted to lend more than $30,000, and whether or not that person's income and the quality of the assets they were lending against were such that the banks could become creators of credit.\n\nThe deal I did with the party was that I would grandfather any existing loan at 13.5 per cent. What I knew and they didn't, was that the average length of an Australian housing mortgage at that point was five-and-a-half years. With inflation coming down it was a reasonable bet that within five years most homeowners would have turned over their mortgage, and that was fine by me. I didn't want to cold-turkey the system with borrowers getting it in the neck and pushing people into variable rate mortgages at higher rates because they had based their calculations of what they could afford at 13.5 per cent.\n\nThis was a huge structural change. The whole housing industry since\u2014the apartment towers you see in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane\u2014could never have happened without it. Today the fundamentals a developer takes to the lending institutions are that they own the site and have the 10 per cent deposits from pre-sales. That's their capital as they raise their debt to fund the development. People couldn't pay the 10 per cent deposit before housing deregulation because they wouldn't know if they could get the other 90 per cent to settle. There were no pre-sales before 1986.\n\nThat's why you had a whole lot of small developers and very few big ones, building only individual quarter-acre houses. You couldn't get anyone to build a 200-unit building because they couldn't get the money\u2014they could not get the banks to lend the development finance.\n\n**KOB:** When Hawke yielded to those opposing your policy to end the 13.5 per cent ceiling, mostly from your own faction in NSW, including the Premier Neville Wran, and blocked you in Cabinet on 20 March, you wrote 'only temporarily' in the margin of one story reporting your defeat the next day. How long did it take you to shift Hawke?\n\n**PJK:** Here are some of the headlines: 'Wran attacks the PM on housing'. It says, 'The ceiling on new home loan rates should have been raised, not abolished, says the NSW premier'.\n\nPeter Barron would have been orchestrating that. Neville never said anything on federal matters without talking to Peter Barron. They would have had a discussion about it. In those days Peter was the best friend in the world with Graham Richardson, who was then the NSW Party Secretary, and they would lunch together. The whole opposition to lifting the interest rate ceiling was orchestrated by Richardson and NSW backbencher Gary Punch, and you could add Wran. And Barron had Hawke's ear.\n\n**KOB:** It still didn't take you long to win back Hawke's support. On 2 April, you had a victory in Cabinet to remove the ceiling on new home mortgages. The _Financial Review_ described the Cabinet meeting as tense and volatile, with a remarkable political backflip by Hawke and a very public victory for you. You were quoted as predicting home interest rates would rise from 13.5 to 15.5 per cent, which sounded almost like a boast. How did you read the politics in all that because some of your colleagues must have thought you were off your rocker to be predicting a 2 per cent interest rate rise as a virtue.\n\n**PJK:** I knew that, but housing is a very big part of investment in Australia and you might recall the radio interview where I criticised the quarter-acre block and the Hills hoist, which drew a lot of flak. I said Australians were being robbed of housing choice and that cities would increasingly become massive suburban areas because we couldn't increase the density. Developers couldn't get the investment money to provide alternatives.\n\nIt followed that having lifted lending maturity controls from banks in 1984 after the float of the exchange rate in 1983, we should not have been stuck in that firmament, with housing mortgages of a fixed rate and ceilings. It simply couldn't stay that way, because the cost of staying that way was that we'd never have a housing industry capable of providing its share of national investment or, with it, housing choice.\n\nIt was the last important piece of financial deregulation, and it was too important to be lost in a factional battle.\n\n**KOB:** You talked earlier about being able to hear the ants change step when your factional colleagues might be getting restless. It didn't take much to hear them change step on this, but you defied that.\n\n**PJK:** I came into a meeting in front of Hawke in 1986\u2014Bob was sitting there in his semi-slumped posture\u2014with Richardson and Gary Punch. Richardson said to me, 'We're not copping this.' I said, 'You'll cop what I give you. When I became Party President I had to hock my reputation to drag you out of trouble and you're telling me you're not going to cop this? Really?'\n\nBob said, 'I don't know why you've got to be so aggressive, I don't know why you've got to go on like that.'\n\nI said, 'Bob, I've got to go on like this because these two are standing in the way of a very important change.'\n\nI left, and Bob sided with them and knocked me over. Days later I came back with the compromise: locking in all existing loans at 13.5 per cent but allowing banks to fix their own rates on new loans. I always knew I was going to have to compromise somewhere. But Australia got an entirely new housing industry from that day on\u2014adequately funded, no more credit squeezes, no more booms and busts.\n\n**KOB:** Did you pay any short-term personal price with the factional mates?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but I was in the slaying business. I gave recalcitrants trouble, not the other way round. You've got to remember that many other factional supporters like the Leo McLeays and the Stephen Martins were on my side. Not unreasonably, Richardson had influence over them, but I always knew that I would have a receptive audience for a good change. Again, if the author of the changes doesn't have the self-confidence and doesn't keep pressing, the system will prop. They will stop you. You've got to have a strategy; you've got to believe in the strategy and you have to transmit the belief.\n\n**KOB:** You seemed to be well and truly running your own race by now because again in the first half of 1986 there was drama around attempts by the Western Australian business entrepreneur and corporate raider Robert Holmes a Court to take over BHP. For many people this was an attack on Australia's corporate icon and unions feared there could be massive job losses in the shake-out, but you said 'let the market prevail'. Once again that put you well and truly at odds with your own Sussex Street power base, didn't it?\n\n**PJK:** This time they lined up with the BHP board, which was an odd alliance.\n\n**KOB:** How hard was it to resist that pressure and why was it important to you to do so?\n\n**PJK:** On what basis does a federal government decide to forbid a market purchase, in this case 30 per cent of BHP stock? Because we like the company, or we like the board or we like the existing management? It was all capricious. The best thing was to stand back and let the Melbourne establishment deal with Holmes a Court, which they finally did with John Elliott. The BHP board engaged Elliott and together they fought Holmes a Court to a standstill and got him to sign a non-compete agreement where he wouldn't go over 30 per cent of the stock. That's how it stayed until the 1987 stockmarket crash.\n\n**KOB:** Would it have mattered if Holmes a Court had taken it over, broken it up and sold it off?\n\n**PJK:** I don't think he was ever likely to break up BHP. I have a view about Robert. He was somebody who went into the bush determined to grab a tiger by the tail. And when he did grab one by the tail he didn't quite know what to do with it but he couldn't let the tail go.\n\nRobert was a speculator who became not just an activist investor but owned a third of the stock. It was an extraordinary achievement. BHP today is a $200 billion company; a third of that is $65 billion. This is Warren Buffet levels of wealth. The remarkable thing was, Holmes a Court had the confidence to persuade the markets to fund his $10 billion investment. When it came to the crunch I don't think Robert had a strategy. That was something the market should have sorted out, not the Cabinet. In the end that was the way it went. Sanity prevailed inside the party.\nTHE MEDIA: POLICY AND PAYBACK\n\nOver more than a century of history, it has become a part of Labor's DNA to regard the media in Australia with suspicion. The traditional Labor view, spawned from its earliest days, was that newspaper proprietors were almost automatically a part of the ruling class, and therefore the natural enemy of organised labour.\n\nBy the time Gough Whitlam came to power in 1972 the party platform included the goal that a federal Labor Government would establish an Australian newspaper commission\u2014essentially a print version of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. It wasn't that the ABC had come to be seen as a Labor ally, but that in Labor's view it was the closest thing Australia had to a genuinely independent media organisation and the least biased.\n\nNotwithstanding the fact that Whitlam had been assisted into office by editorial support from Rupert Murdoch through the _Australian_ , the Sydney _Daily Mirror_ and his recently acquired _Daily Telegraph_ (bought from Sir Frank Packer in the shadow of the election), Whitlam was keen to see an ABC of print. Years later he was still asserting that there was no reason in theory 'why such a newspaper should not become as valuable, respected and authoritative' as the ABC had become as an alternative to the commercial broadcasters.\n\nIronically, in the age of media convergence 40 years later, the ABC of necessity is now competing directly with newspapers on various digital platforms, but at the time newspapers thought the idea of a publicly funded print opponent was outrageous. With bigger policy fish to fry, Whitlam surrendered that dream.\n\nHe did, however, pursue reforms in broadcasting, essentially repainting the commercial radio landscape, and forcing commercial television networks to broadcast a prescribed amount of local content. The Whitlam view of radio was that successive conservative governments acting in the interests of a few large commercial radio proprietors had resisted the introduction of frequency-modulation broadcasting, FM, a vastly superior high-fidelity sound with, as he put it, 'a signal virtually impervious to interference'. His introduction of FM licences as well as extra licences on the old AM band, plus additional FM networks at the ABC, changed the face of radio in Australia. But the structure and nature of print and commercial television ownership in Australia remained the same.\n\nBy the time Hawke and Keating came to power any idea of a public newspaper was well and truly out the window, but both men still had a clear personal interest in pushing media reform. Hawke had been an enthusiastic and successful litigator against media outlets in his ACTU days, but in office, according to John Button, had developed an obsession with trying to have media proprietors on side.\n\nButton, who also had a natural interest in media matters and had been Shadow Minister for Communications under Bill Hayden, later wrote in his memoir _As It Happened_ that 'Hawke had a courageous and capable Minister for Communications in Michael Duffy but his own prime concern seemed to be accommodating the media tycoons [Kerry] Packer and [Rupert] Murdoch'. It was no secret in those years that the Right-dominated ALP machine in New South Wales was close to Packer in the Wran era and beyond.\n\nKeating, on the other hand, had been on the record for fifteen years raising questions about the feasibility of restructuring media ownership so that a proprietor could control either print or television outlets but not both, an idea he'd drawn from American practice. By 1976 Keating cared strongly enough about what he saw as an intolerable concentration of media ownership in Australia that he introduced a private member's bill into Parliament to stop newspaper proprietors buying into radio and television. It was defeated.\n\nWhen the Hawke Government came to power, Australia's significant media owners with both print and broadcasting interests included Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the Fairfax family empire, the Herald & Weekly Times Group and Kerry Packer's Consolidated Press. Newspapers weren't regulated but no individual or company could own or control more than two television stations and eight radio stations.\n\nThe laws didn't discriminate on where the television stations were, and so ignored the fact that to own stations in Sydney and Melbourne, as Packer did, was to command a big slice of the national population. Throw into the mix a bunch of radio stations and a stable of newspapers and magazines, and you had a great deal of concentrated power.\n\nThe Fraser Government was persuaded by Packer in 1979 to commission a domestic satellite that allowed far greater broadcasting penetration into regional Australia, putting almost irresistible pressure on a future government to facilitate genuinely national television networks.\n\nIn mid-1984 the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal urged a complete restructuring of the broadcasting system. The subsequent policy debate within Cabinet through much of 1985 and into 1986 ended with a months-long impasse between Hawke and his Communications Minister Michael Duffy over how much audience reach each television owner should be allowed.\n\nMurdoch (Channel Ten) and Packer (Channel Nine) each had stations in Sydney and Melbourne, which were calculated to deliver a potential audience reach of 43 per cent. Duffy wanted to establish 43 per cent audience reach as the upper limit for ownership for new players, and Packer and Murdoch would have to be content with what they already had.\n\nHawke wanted to restrict newcomers to 35 per cent reach, while allowing Murdoch and Packer to 'grandfather' their existing ownership. Blind Freddy could see the Hawke option blatantly favoured the two media giants, and Duffy wouldn't yield. Gareth Evans, who later replaced Duffy as Communications Minister, has since confirmed in his diary of the time that relations between Hawke and Duffy were poisonous, and that Hawke had become isolated on the issue.\n\nHaving been included in a committee with Hawke, Duffy and Senate Leader Button to resolve what had become an embarrassing standoff for Hawke, Keating seized the opportunity to widen the debate to include all media ownership. With bitter memories still fresh in his mind of how badly he felt Labor had been treated by newspapers in the 1984 election, particularly the Melbourne-based Herald & Weekly Times Group with its powerful readership through much of Australia, Keating was happy to churn up the entire system. He embarked on a campaign to persuade both Cabinet and caucus to embrace what he sold as a solution to the Hawke\u2013Duffy stalemate: removing audience limits on television ownership, but prohibiting any single proprietor from having significant ownership across both print and television.\n\nIn November 1986 Duffy announced a reform that was to change the face of Australian media, based substantially on the Keating model, the so-called cross-media rules. As Keating himself put it, you could be 'a prince of print or a queen of the screen' but you couldn't be both. By the time the reform became law television proprietors couldn't take their station holdings beyond a 75 per cent audience reach, but that still allowed anyone with the cash and the chutzpah to put together a genuinely national television network.\n\nThe Keating reform was seen as less blatantly supporting Packer and Murdoch, but both still emerged as massive winners. Packer consolidated his Nine Network before selling it to Alan Bond for more than a billion dollars, which Packer famously described as a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Before the media reforms Nine had been valued at less than half that amount. The sale catapulted Packer from merely rich to the richest person in Australia. According to Paul Barry in his biography _The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer_ , the newly arrived billionaire privately predicted he'd be buying the network back within three years for half the price. He subsequently got it for a fifth of the price.\n\nMurdoch sold his two Ten Network stations to the retail landlord Frank Lowy for $840 million and a huge profit, but in walking away from television, he added the powerful Herald & Weekly Times newspaper group to his stable, with extensive holdings around much of the country. Murdoch ended up with just short of 70 per cent of Australia's entire print output: capital city, suburban and regional.\n\nAs far as Keating and many other Labor figures were concerned, the Herald & Weekly Times, and the Fairfax Group, which published the _Sydney Morning Herald_ and _Age_ , were Labor's traditional ideological enemies. By the time the dust had settled on these reforms, the Herald & Weekly Times had disappeared, and Fairfax had been greatly weakened, although the latter had at least as much to do with the inept response of the Fairfax board, and particularly young Warwick Fairfax, as it did with the reforms themselves. Keating was perfectly happy with the result, but Packer and Murdoch were both to bite the hand that had fed them just a few years later.\n\n**KOB:** Thinking back to your early years in the Labor Party, did you tend to nurse the same broad view as most in your party about the commercial media in Australia that, by and large, the media proprietors were traditionally pro-conservative and anti-Labor?\n\n**PJK:** I did basically subscribe to that view.\n\n**KOB:** When you first started getting engaged in media policy, when you put up your private member's bill back in 1976, what was your motivation?\n\n**PJK:** I thought the only relief for Labor in the broad media commentary in Australia was that a multiplicity of voices, competition in news and comment, would produce more sympathetic treatment of the Labor Party's position.\n\n**KOB:** Why?\n\n**PJK:** I believed that having many more organisations reporting the same news events and bidding for the same pool of readership or audience would encourage more edge and diversity in the way the news was covered. In the process they would be more attracted to proselytising the Opposition party's views. In other words, while ever the Herald & Weekly Times owned the great bulk of newspapers, much of the rural press and Channel Seven in Melbourne and Brisbane as well as radio, the chances of Labor getting fair and reasonable coverage from those sources were very low.\n\nDitto for John Fairfax & Sons with the _Sydney Morning Herald_ , the Melbourne _Age_ and the _Australian Financial Review_. Rupert Murdoch's influence was growing but still small compared to the others. He'd parlayed his ownership of an afternoon tabloid newspaper in Adelaide into starting the _Australian_ from scratch and buying the Sydney _Daily Mirror_ and then Frank Packer's _Daily Telegraph_ , but he still didn't have the power or the influence of the others.\n\nThe real bar against Labor through those years came from the Herald & Weekly Times, the business Murdoch's father had run, and from John Fairfax & Sons.\n\nI was always impressed by American media legislation at a national level, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) legislation that decreed a structural separation between newspapers and television. An early attempt by the Labor Party to establish its own newspaper, the _Labor Daily_ , failed because despite the valiant attempt and no matter how much effort was poured into it, there was no way a Labor paper would succeed in the market.\n\nWhat Labor was forever going to face in print, radio and television, with the exception of the ABC, was commercially managed organisations, so in my view the only hope we had for reasonable media exposure was competition. That's why splitting them up made such sense to me. That's what led me to the private member's bill in the 1970s and I used to say to our people, 'You've got to be a bit smarter. You've got to pit them against each other, otherwise we'll never win.'\n\n**KOB:** That suggests that you were always seeing media policy through the prism of what was good for Labor. What about what was good for the country?\n\n**PJK:** I used to think, first, what was good for Labor because Labor was the mass party, it was the one that had the broader national interests. Certainly that's what I always believed. But in the prevailing media circumstance it was never able to proselytise its case on anything like an equal basis with the other side of politics. Until 1961 the _Sydney Morning Herald_ never supported the re-election of a Labor Government, and we all know the speculation about the personal reasons why Sir Warwick Fairfax backed Labor in the traditional election-day editorial that year. By the next election he'd switched back to supporting the conservatives.\n\nIn my view we had to break up the owners and put them into boxes, and that's what I sought to do in 1976.\n\n**KOB:** Whitlam had come to government with a media policy that included establishing an Australian newspaper commission similar to the ABC. Were you attracted to Whitlam's idea at the time?\n\n**PJK:** I wasn't unattracted to it, but I didn't really think the big media forces\u2014the Herald & Weekly Times, Fairfax and the rest\u2014would accept an ABC as a direct competitor in print. The ABC was already broadcasting in radio when television arrived so it would have been impossible for the commercial media proprietors to stop the public broadcaster from having its own television network. But can you imagine the campaign those vested interests would have run against a government that tried to create a publicly funded competitor in print and threaten their power and their profits? They'd have slaughtered us.\n\nEverything pointed to going back to a commercial remedy and that had to be about media diversity and competition, not a small handful of large media blocks.\n\n**KOB:** Going into government in 1983, what was your view of Rupert Murdoch, who wasn't always as predictable in his editorial line as the others may have been?\n\n**PJK:** I had a rather more sympathetic view of Murdoch than most of my colleagues did because he was so dynamic. From a relatively small base in Australia he elbowed his way into the British and American markets. He was head and shoulders above any other Australian entrepreneur, and so pre-1983 I viewed him as a fundamentally commercial figure rather than an ideological one, which he is these days. In those days he might sometimes oppose us but he might also support us.\n\nThe Herald & Weekly Times absolutely never supported us and nearly defeated us in 1984 with a strident anti-Labor campaign, particularly against our policy to introduce an assets test for the aged pension. The Melbourne _Herald_ and the Melbourne _Sun_ , the Adelaide _Advertiser_ , the _West Australian_ , the Brisbane _Courier Mail_ , the Hobart _Mercury_ together ran a huge campaign, and the combination of Hawke's poor campaign against Andrew Peacock combined with the Herald & Weekly Times campaign very nearly put us back in opposition after a term of less than two years.\n\nShortly after the election I was in the old Ansett private lounge at Melbourne Airport, and a guy came up and introduced himself as John D'arcy, the Chief Executive of the Herald & Weekly Times.\n\nHe said, 'We should sit down and talk about where we go from here,' and I said, 'Where we go from here is you go. That's where we go from here.'\n\n'I'm sorry to hear those sorts of sentiments come from you,' he said. 'Surely reasonable people can sit down and discuss these things.' I said, 'You guys have all been injected with the Coalition needle. You'll never be any different.'\n\nI brushed him off but I let him know we wouldn't be involved in any conversation with him.\n\n**KOB:** Did you differentiate in your mind between the general reporting of a campaign and editorial comment? Presumably you weren't too fussed if a newspaper wrote an editorial against Labor.\n\n**PJK:** In the case of the Herald & Weekly Times I was concerned about the impact on editorial content of a management decision to try to nail the government over the assets test. A newspaper's proprietor can determine the content and direction of an actual editorial, but not the right to distort the process of fair and accurate news coverage in accordance with accepted journalistic standards, in order to change the outcome of an election. I regarded that as an abuse of their market power.\n\nEssentially when a newspaper management decides to arrange the news presentation for the length of a whole election campaign and vehemently opposes the government over one of the most rational changes ever\u2014putting an assets test as well as an income test on the pension\u2014it can hardly expect to sit down with the government afterwards as if nothing had happened.\n\nYou would expect a conservative organisation to support such a change, not oppose it. You would think they would approve of a conscientious federal government putting an assets test as well as an income test on the pension.\n\nThe further we got into that seven-week campaign against Peacock we became more vulnerable than we should have been, and the Herald & Weekly Times obviously thought they could knock us out as a one-term government.\n\n**KOB:** Media policy came into focus for the Hawke Government with the advent of a domestic satellite in 1984 that delivered a far greater broadcasting reach into regional and rural Australia than had previously been possible. Duffy was the Communications Minister and I'm sure you remember the long and bitter debate he had with Hawke about how to restructure commercial television ownership. It ran through much of 1985, and then ground on through 1986. What can you remember about that debate before you were invited to become a participant to try to resolve the Hawke\u2013Duffy stalemate with a new formula?\n\n**PJK:** People think this policy change was all about nailing major newspaper groups but it actually stemmed from aggregation and multi-channel licences.\n\n**KOB:** All of which was sparked by the introduction of a domestic satellite that Kerry Packer had persuaded Malcolm Fraser back in 1979 that Australia needed. It was no coincidence that it also suited his plans to establish a more powerful television network for himself.\n\n**PJK:** Most people in rural Australia only had two television choices up to that point: their local ABC and one commercial station. And what Duffy's department wanted to do was give those commercial station owners two extra multi-channel licences. These were mostly National Party people and we were going to gift to each of them two licences for free.\n\nHawke and I were on a unity ticket on this. We both thought it was exceptionally dumb. Gareth Evans says in his published diary of those years, 'It became apparent that neither the Hawke nor the Duffy positions had a great deal going for them. Towards the end Keating made a suggestion permitting aggregation but not requiring it, letting the markets produce the results.'\n\nGareth quotes me as saying to Cabinet that the fundamental point at issue had been missed in the whole debate. It was not simply about regional TV but the larger question of media concentration\u2014cross-ownership versus the print media\u2014and it was crucial to look at the Herald & Weekly Times and Fairfax. Gareth wrote that down as I said it in the Cabinet room.\n\n**KOB:** Now up to the point where you interposed that idea Hawke's position had come to be identified very much as pro-Packer and to some degree pro-Murdoch because Murdoch had the Ten Network stations in Sydney and Melbourne.\n\n**PJK:** As always, Bob had no framework.\n\n**KOB:** John Button, who took a close interest in media policy, wrote in his memoir that in the Cabinet discussions Packer and Murdoch were 'like Banquo's ghost loitering behind the Prime Minister's chair'. Fair comment?\n\n**PJK:** That was true. I think that's fair comment. And Gareth writes again on 21 October 1986 about a discussion he had with Hawke and me where we briefed him on 'basically a scheme which set no limits on television station ownership'\u2014in other words, you could network 100 per cent of the country\u2014'other than no acquisition should be in a city or town where the proprietor had control of a print organ'\u2014in other words, you would grandfather existing ownership, but where they wished to buy further television reach they couldn't buy it where they currently owned a newspaper.\n\nSo we were saying to the Herald & Weekly Times, 'You can keep your print and you can keep HSV7 in Melbourne.' We were saying to John Fairfax & Sons, 'You can keep the Melbourne _Age_ and the _Sydney Morning Herald_ and you keep ATN7 in Sydney, but you can't go buying new television stations where you have print.'\n\n**KOB:** And that evolved into the 'princes of print and the queens of the screen'?\n\n**PJK:** That's right.\n\n**KOB:** The only change from that blueprint was that you had to compromise by dropping television ownership from 100 per cent audience reach to 75 per cent.\n\n**PJK:** Bob said, 'Should we accept the Senate amendment?' and I said, 'We'll accept the amendment, Bob, because 75 per cent lets you network all the mainland capital cities. I think that's a goer.'\n\nIt's worth remembering that I had first proposed the principle of limiting cross-media ownership in a private member's bill to the Parliament from opposition in 1976.\n\n**KOB:** Coming back to Button's comment about Banquo's ghost, it was no secret that Sussex Street was very close to Packer, as was the Wran Government. Barron came from Sussex Street to his job as Hawke's senior adviser with that close Packer connection. Hawke's approach was very favourable to Packer, wasn't it?\n\n**PJK:** That's true.\n\n**KOB:** Were you conscious of Barron and Richardson at work there?\n\n**PJK:** I was conscious of their closeness to Packer through Wran. But what I did was give them intellectual structure. Before this reform the Seven Network consisted of HSV7 in Melbourne and BTQ7 in Brisbane, both owned by the Herald & Weekly Times, ATN7 in Sydney owned by Fairfax, and the other capital city stations in the network.\n\nI said, 'Does it really matter to us who owns the Seven network? News presentation is not going to change just because it's owned by one proprietor rather than several. It will still function as a network in the same way it does now, so why not let them own the lot?'\n\nBut they can't go buying a new station like Perth if they own the _West Australian_ newspaper. They can't buy a new station in Adelaide if they continue to own the _Advertiser_.\n\n**KOB:** How intense was the lobbying from proprietors through that whole process?\n\n**PJK:** Huge, particularly by Fairfax. Fairfax always prided itself on being so upstanding, but I had this very, very bolshie lunch arranged by Max Suich, with Greg Gardiner and Fred Brenchley at Suntory, the Japanese restaurant in Kent Street.\n\nSuich opened by saying, 'We think we can beat your cross-media rule in the Senate.'\n\nI said, 'Well, you can do your best.'\n\nHe said, 'We are intent on buying HSV7 against what you propose.'\n\nI said, 'Well, I'll tell you this, Max. I'll get the rule through so you'll be buying it counter to the rule. So what you have got me here to tell me is that you're basically going to try and abort the government's legislation, and will slip under the wire and buy HSV7 before we get the legislation through.'\n\nAt that point Brenchley got up and said, 'This is a lunch I don't think I wish to stay at any longer,' and walked out, leaving Gardiner and Suich.\n\nAt that point Gardiner began to get a little less resolute, leaving Suich somewhat isolated. As you now know, they did go and buy HSV7, for a little less than $400 million, and the cross-media rule did come in and they had to sell it. They suffered a significant loss on that purchase and it was that event that brought Mary Fairfax and Warwick Junior in to make a bid to buy the company. They believed the Suich\u2013Gardiner management was dragging the company down and their investment in it.\n\nWhat happened then is that young Warwick fell under the influence of Laurie Connell and Brian Burke. Strange but true, and that was the end of the Fairfax dynasty until John Fairfax Junior got control of it again years later. But the event that triggered the action of Mary and Warwick was the absolute determination of the Fairfax management, Suich and Gardiner, to pick up HSV7 against the intent of the government's legislation.\n\n**KOB:** Just explain your antipathy to Fairfax.\n\n**PJK:** It was to do with the way Brian Toohey and the _National Times_ were arraigned against me and others connected with NSW Labor for a couple of years. Their whole belief was that the NSW Right was corrupt, and therefore anyone of the Right must be corrupt too. I remember being called by someone well placed within Fairfax one day and told that Toohey and his team were working on a story that when it came out would end my career. After the _National Times_ finally published their big piece on me in 1986, which was a damp squib, Max Suich came to see me in my office in the old Parliament House, walked in as bold as brass and said, 'Well, you've been given a clean bill of health.' I said, 'But Max, I always had a clean bill of health. I didn't need Fairfax to scarify me on the way through.' I said, 'In policy terms I stand for everything the _Sydney Morning Herald_ editorialises for these days, a new economy and all that entails. And what have I got for my trouble? I've been lumped in typically with the NSW Right and I've come in for this treatment with the _National Times_. So you can't expect to have any good relationship with me.' That's what happened.\n\n**KOB:** Max Suich wrote a minute to the Fairfax board after one meeting with you which he said went for five hours. It's not clear exactly when it was but it was before your Suntory lunch. Maybe it was the meeting in your office that you've referred to. Part of the Suich board minute is published in Colleen Ryan's book _Corporate Cannibals_ in which he says: 'The Treasurer is a product of the NSW right wing of the ALP and his conversation is littered with threats, references to getting even, doing deals and assisting \"our crowd\" in business, the press and within the ALP... He also has a very strong feeling about what he calls old money or establishment money, which he describes as dead money stultifying the economy, and he sees great advantages in new money\u2014in which he includes Murdoch and Packer\u2014being given opportunities to knock off old money.' Would you say that has a ring of authenticity?\n\n**PJK:** I only ever had three meetings with Suich. But never one of five hours. There was the one in my office while Treasurer, the infamous one at the Suntory restaurant, and one I had with Suich and Gardiner, the company CFO.\n\nThe Suich\/Gardiner meeting was about Fairfax's ongoing attempts to destroy the Wran Government with the aim of nobbling Wran himself and, in so doing, nobbling the NSW base of federal Labor. I can't recall exactly when that meeting was but I certainly remember the sense of what I said. I told them that Hawke and I regarded the relentless attacks by Fairfax journalists on Wran personally and on the Labor base as attacks ultimately designed to pull the NSW rug from under federal Labor. And that Hawke and I would respond accordingly, with a completely open, public assault on Fairfax. I told them all we wanted was fair and balanced coverage. Nothing more.\n\nAnd I reminded them that Hawke and I were not Doc Evatt or Arthur Calwell, waiting to be kicked around like some immobile or passive target. That we would bite back. Possibly the core of Suich's note came from that conversation. But, of course, the note never carried the nuances or the sophistication of it. Suich was like a lot of journalists nominally on the left: happy to do the bidding of their conservative managers and proprietors.\n\n**KOB:** What about Murdoch? He wouldn't have been inactive through that period.\n\n**PJK:** No, he was up to no good as well. Everyone was consulted about the legislation: Murdoch, Fairfax, the Herald & Weekly Times, Packer, everyone was consulted. I was in Bankstown, attending a function in the electorate on a Sunday, and I was driving past the old Skyline drive-in at Chullora when I got a phone call.\n\n'Is that you Paul? Rupert here.'\n\nBecause I didn't hear the beep-beep signalling an overseas call, I thought he must be calling from within Australia.\n\nHe said, 'Now, look, I want to get this straight. We could bid for the Herald & Weekly Times group but we couldn't keep HSV7 because we have Ten in Melbourne, is that right?'\n\nI said, 'That's right', and explained again what I'd previously told him.\n\nHis great interest was really Queensland Newspapers, which was part of the Herald & Weekly Times stable.\n\nI thought, 'This is very strange.' That is, he might use the opportunity of the open consultation, of the knowledge, to make a bid for the Herald & Weekly Times before the various proscriptions contained in the prospective legislation took effect.\n\nI didn't ask him if he was in Australia but I suspected he was, and stopped the car at the top of the hill at Bankstown and rang Michael Duffy.\n\nI told Duffy, 'We should put a statement out today saying that these rules apply as of a certain time,' and dictated the statement to Duffy's daughter Alana. She typed it down and Duffy released it, I think on AAP.\n\nI got another call the next morning from Rupert, and he said, 'I saw what you guys said. I thought there might be space to consolidate before it goes ahead.'\n\nThat event remained in my memory, that notwithstanding the openness and the consultation, News might have moved to make a bid for the Herald & Weekly Times or the _Courier Mail_ before the prescriptive legislation was either formally announced, enacted or proclaimed.\n\nThere's a word for media proprietors that no one uses these days. Brigands, and if you don't know they're brigands you can't deal with them. You can never make any progress with them because you can never assuage their fundamental brigandry.\n\n**KOB:** What was your relationship with Packer at that point?\n\n**PJK:** In those days, pretty good. He was a blunt character but exceptionally bright. This was his patch. He said to me a couple of times, 'Look, you can't compare me to Rupert. Rupert's run way past me. What Rupert does, I don't do. Rupert's taken on the world. I'm not. I'm staying here.'\n\nHe was interested in the licences here and the way the system ran here. The cross-media rules suited him because he owned no newspapers. But the ability to network the country, buy up Channel 9 Perth and Channel 9 Brisbane because he already owned Sydney and Melbourne meant that he was a net winner from the change. It was his approach to Alan Bond to buy Nine in Perth which Bond owned that led Bond to make the offer Packer couldn't refuse\u2014to buy Packer's holdings in the network for a billion dollars.\n\n**KOB:** How ruthless was Packer at prosecuting his case?\n\n**PJK:** I'd say interested, but not ruthless. For Packer the difference in economic terms between running the Nine Network and getting rental out of Nine Perth, Nine Brisbane and Nine Adelaide and owning them all was not a whole lot different.\n\n**KOB:** How hard was it to get all that through the caucus? They'd become pretty bolshie themselves when you put the cross-media proposition on the table.\n\n**PJK:** The Right of the party\u2014Richardson _et al_.\u2014were very much in favour of the proposals I'd put together. My real problem was Don Chipp and the Democrats in the Senate. But the thing about Chipp was that he was a very reasonable person and he did have the national interest uppermost in his mind. You could sell him a reasonable policy. We cut a trade with him by dropping the television audience reach from 100 per cent to 75 per cent and he fundamentally accepted that media diversity was an important element in the equation.\n\n**KOB:** You would have worked out very early in the piece where each existing proprietor's interests lay. The whole world knew Murdoch's interest in having the Herald & Weekly Times, particularly with his father's connection to it.\n\n**PJK:** Rupert had already made a bid two years earlier, which they'd rejected.\n\n**KOB:** I assume it didn't bother you seeing the Melbourne establishment shaken up by Murdoch.\n\n**PJK:** The Melbourne establishment and the Fairfax view was, 'We decide who runs the government and the country, and yes, the Labor Party got past us in 1972 but it didn't take us long to put them away, and they got past us again in 1983, but in 1984 we'll put them away again.'\n\n**KOB:** I thought James Fairfax, the Chairman of the Fairfax Group, was different from what you describe.\n\n**PJK:** James was, but I don't think James Fairfax was dictating policy. In the end the sentiment within Fairfax had earlier come from Rags Henderson, who was the power behind the throne, and this power passed across to Suich and Gardiner.\n\n**KOB:** When the dust finally settled on what had become your policy, what did you think of the outcome: Herald & Weekly Times gone to Murdoch, Fairfax weakened and ultimately controlled by the Canadian conservative and Thatcher confidant Conrad Black, Murdoch with close to 70 per cent of all Australian print outlets, plus a new generation of television proprietors who didn't last very long\u2014Bond, Skase and Lowy, who all paid too much and were in and out in the blink of an eye?\n\n**PJK:** In the end it was actually a good outcome because what we began with was the Herald & Weekly Times owning television stations plus the _West Australian_ , the Adelaide _Advertiser_ , the Melbourne _Sun_ , the Melbourne _Herald_ , the Hobart _Mercury_ and the _Courier Mail_ in Brisbane, but they also owned every other significant Queensland regional newspaper.\n\nThey also owned the Victorian regional papers, plus agricultural news magazines, and the radio stations. Between Fairfax and the Herald & Weekly Times they just about had the game locked up.\n\nWhat we ended up with was a much more diverse scene. Fairfax, the Herald & Weekly Times and Murdoch all sold off their television interests. The three commercial television networks have all since changed hands.\n\nWhile it is true that we had the bare transfer of the Herald & Weekly Times capital city mastheads to Murdoch, it's also true that the block of assets the Herald & Weekly Times had was broken up. Apart from broadcast assets, the _West Australian_ newspaper was spun off and is now run by Kerry Stokes and the Seven group.\n\nIn Queensland, the most decentralised state in the country, all the city newspapers outside Brisbane, which were owned by the Herald & Weekly Times, ended up with the APN Group, the former O'Reilly chain that bought them as part of the Herald & Weekly Times breakup. I think the diversity became significantly greater than it had ever been.\n\n**KOB:** The one big argument against that is Murdoch and his 70 per cent ownership of print throughout Australia.\n\n**PJK:** From the Labor Party's point of view the Herald & Weekly Times control of print outlets was not only greater than everything Murdoch has now but historically much worse for us.\n\n**KOB:** I would suggest to you that the role the Murdoch papers eventually played against the Rudd and Gillard Governments and for Tony Abbott is arguably worse than what the Herald & Weekly Times tried to do against you in 1984.\n\n**PJK:** I think you can argue that, and that is largely true. But it was also true the Herald & Weekly Times had played its ugly hand for the better part of a century. When you hear people say today that Murdoch has 70 per cent of print, you never used to hear the same people say in yesteryear that the Herald & Weekly Times had over 70 per cent of the newspapers _plus_ television and radio, and always felt it had the right to kick the Labor Party to death. It was a situation that had existed for so long that people just accepted it as the norm. That was okay providing you didn't inhabit the Labor Party.\n\n**KOB:** Can you understand how the anger and frustration you've described, which clearly was a big motivation for you pushing the media reforms, can be easily seen as an abuse of your own power to punish your media enemies and shape a more benign media landscape for a Labor Government?\n\n**PJK:** But here was the complete abuse by the Herald & Weekly Times of their mastheads. And we're supposed to say, 'Oh that's okay, that's democracy, Australian-press style?' Good policy should be put aside while these thugs continue their conservative thuggery?\n\nGetting done by the Herald & Weekly Times offended my sense of political smartness. Having a couple of bovver boys from Brisbane and Melbourne nearly knock us over in a national election, grossly distorting fair reporting in the process. Then they talk about the need for a free media. Give us a break!\n\n**KOB:** The term 'bovver boy' was also applied to you in those days.\n\n**PJK:** Well, let's say a couple of bovver boys ran into a sharper bovver boy.\n\n**KOB:** Nonetheless you put enough store in the newspapers through your political life to build a massive personal archive of many thousands of articles covering Australia's political history as it happened, from 1977 through to the present day, often with your own personal annotations on the side. What drove such a time-consuming exercise for so many years?\n\n**PJK:** In a busy public life you don't really have time to keep a detailed diary. If you went home tired at night and tried to record the Treasurer's day or the Prime Minister's day, you'd spend two hours writing up the first hour. You couldn't keep a note that covered such complex events, changing so quickly day by day. I knew I was presiding over nation-changing events and I wanted some sort of record. The sequence at least.\n\nAll you can do is have a recollection of the period, so what I used to do on a Saturday morning for about an hour was go back to the previous Sunday and cut out a cross-section of all the major newspapers' reports for the week. It might be a piece by Ross Gittins announcing the government was abandoning monetary targeting, or a comment piece by Michelle Grattan, or something by Paul Kelly, Alan Ramsey, Geoff Kitney or Michael Stutchbury. I'd occasionally write a note in the margin and put them away as a kind of _aide-memoire_. It required discipline because you can imagine at times it was the last thing I felt like doing on a Saturday.\n\n**KOB:** How selective was your record? How many stories did you keep that were critical of you?\n\n**PJK:** All my enemies are there. If you're on top of the game you have to stay in touch with your enemies. You can see them as you go through the archive. People like Peter Smark and Paddy McGuinness. Paddy hated the sight of me. I was happy to keep a record of their rantings.\n\nI now have a digitised record of all those articles and it works as a storyline of the reconstruction of Australia through that period. You've seen those books where if you flick the pages, the margin image comes alive like an animation. That's the impression you get by scanning through the archive on a computer. As you press the mouse the stories flick across the screen like a long continuous ribbon showing the national story as it is being told.\nTHE 1987 ELECTION\n\nIt's a fact of life that some political leaders are luckier than others. Of course they still have to be smart enough to capitalise on it. Bob Hawke's arrival in office coincided with the breaking of a drought that had helped cripple the Australian economy and contributed to Malcolm Fraser's defeat. The rains became a part of the nation's economic recovery.\n\nYou could also argue he was blessed with the luck of having Andrew Peacock as his first Opposition Leader. Peacock had seemed born to rule the Liberal Party, was given a dream run into politics, backed by the powerful Victorian Liberal establishment, and was a glamorous and effective Foreign Minister for his time. But tested by a strongly performing government and lacking the drive or killer instinct to match his ambition, he struggled to convince Australians that he had what it took to lead the country. He also allowed himself to be spooked by his party deputy, John Howard, a distraction you can't afford if you're trying to make gains on a formidable government.\n\nAt one point Peacock's popularity sank to 14 per cent, and notwithstanding a strong performance in the 1984 election campaign, he still failed to put the stamp of authority on his leadership, even in the eyes of many of his own colleagues. He had decisively beaten Howard for the job when Fraser stood down in 1983, but Howard had not gone away. As Shadow Treasurer and deputy Liberal leader he was guaranteed a high profile, seemed impervious to the political odium from the recession and big budget deficit that had settled more on Fraser than his Treasurer, and he was still popular in Liberal ranks.\n\nMore than that, Howard had essentially outmanoeuvred Peacock in the battle for ideas. He had become the leader of a powerful group of economic rationalists within the opposition\u2014the so-called Dries\u2014and increasingly they dominated the policy debate in their party room, to the extent that Peacock ended up with a foot in two camps, the rationalist Dries and his own philosophical supporters, the Wets.\n\nIt was no secret that Howard still harboured leadership ambitions, and by mid-1985 Peacock was feeling the heat. Howard has said since that he was doing nothing to stir the situation, and it was hardly his fault that he was outperforming his leader, but there were many observers at the time who would regard that description as more than a little bit disingenuous.\n\nEven after Peacock successfully outperformed the front-running Hawke in the 1984 campaign, Howard inadvertently revealed a scathing condemnation of Peacock's leadership in a phone conversation that was only revealed a year or so later, after Howard had finally replaced him. Melbourne _Sun_ journalist Peter Rees had rung Howard at his home the day after the election for comment. Unfortunately for Howard, he thought he was talking to fellow Liberal, Peter Reith, and proceeded to lambast Peacock as a man who stood for nothing and who had had his chance.\n\n'I don't think Andrew is ever going to be Prime Minister... we have been directionless for eighteen months,' he told the somewhat bemused journalist. 'I'm not certain he won't fall over next year.'\n\nWhen Howard realised his mistake he persuaded Rees not to publish the comments until some future time. Rees subsequently told the story after Howard fulfilled his own prophecy and replaced Peacock in September 1985. In effect Howard was handed the leadership on a platter after an act of woeful strategic misjudgement by Peacock, who allowed himself to be panicked into bringing on a leadership crisis, which he then managed to lose despite having the party numbers.\n\nIn the year that followed Howard had a great deal of trouble settling his party down. It wasn't just about personalities and bruised egos but about ideology, and much of the instability was played out through leaks in the newspapers. Where Hawke and Keating seemed able to recover fairly quickly from their differences, no matter how torrid they might have been in the moment, the Howard\u2013Peacock conflict was both raw and stark.\n\nEven so, perhaps reflecting the uncertainty and crisis created through 1986 by the banana republic comments, the plunge of the dollar and some harsh budget medicine, by late that year the Morgan poll had the Coalition several points ahead of Labor. And although Hawke regularly outpolled Howard as preferred Prime Minister, his 1984 campaign performance had taken the shine off his shield of apparent impregnability.\n\nThen along came Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Australia's second-longest serving premier, with delusions to grandeur. After a record election win in Queensland in November 1986\u2014his eighteenth year as premier\u2014Sir Joh decided that his own brand of folksy but tough conservative populism could be rebranded sufficiently to take him all the way to Canberra and the Lodge. The fact that his National Party was a rural rump everywhere but Queensland, and very much the junior partner of the Liberal\u2013Nationals Coalition federally, didn't deter him.\n\nSir Joh's populism might have worked in Queensland, where he once reduced the Labor Opposition to the size of a cricket team in Parliament, but the idea of him running foreign and defence policy, let alone the economy, lacked credibility then and seems positively ridiculous now. This was a man whose response to protest against a plan to demolish the historic Bellevue Hotel next to the equally historic Parliament on the Brisbane River was to bring in the wreckers in the dead of night. It had disappeared by morning.\n\nWith good reason, history now judges the Bjelke-Petersen reign as one that produced institutionalised corruption, yet at the time some smart people were reported to be flirting with his 'Joh for Canberra' push. One was the former Treasury head, John Stone; another was the prominent South Australian farmer and former cricketer Ian McLachlan. The big surprise when it was reported at the time, although never confirmed by him, was Andrew Peacock.\n\nBefore Joh's campaign ended, he had split the Coalition asunder in Canberra. In February 1987, the _Australian_ commissioned a special Newspoll which reported that 33 per cent of Australians preferred Sir Joh as the 'best leader of conservative politics' in Australia, with Peacock next on 30 per cent and Howard on 17 per cent.\n\nThis was manna from heaven for the Hawke Government. Even so, there was much indecision in the Labor camp about election timing: go early and capitalise on Coalition disunity with the risk that too many voters might still judge them harshly on their recent economic performance, or bank on the economy improving and go later in the year?\n\nIt was a debate that once again put Hawke in conflict with Keating. Not only did Keating want to go early, risking a winter election, but he also wanted to deliver another tough mini-budget in advance. Keating could never be accused of being risk-averse.\n\nThe polls in early May had Labor in its best position since the 1984 election, but Keating was prepared to test the strength of that voter support with even more budget constraint in order to keep the financial markets on side.\n\nHoward was to acknowledge of that period in his autobiography twenty-three years later that in direct contrast to his own side, 'Hawke continued to govern decisively. On May 13 the Treasurer delivered a major economic statement outlining a reduction of $4 billion in the prospective budget deficit. It gave the appearance of a government dealing directly with the economic challenges then facing Australia.' That's not what Howard said at the time, describing the May Statement on the day as 'a con job done by mirrors'.\n\nThe newspaper coverage of the May Statement was peppered with stories of blood-on-the-floor program cuts. A Moir cartoon in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ was indicative: a voter chained to the wall with Keating wielding a whip across his chest, saying, 'Cheer up. Think how good it'll feel when I stop.' Standing in the wings, holding a couple of spare whips at the ready, was the much smaller figure of Bob Hawke.\n\nThe markets loved the May Statement and economics commentator Ross Gittins wrote, 'While no one is likely to thank Paul Keating for zapping the voter's hip pocket, it's probably also true that the government will suffer public disapproval if it's been judged not to have been tough enough.'\n\nExactly two weeks later Hawke announced a double-dissolution election on the pretext that the government's legislation to introduce an Australia Card had been rejected twice in the Senate. That was the one and only point in the campaign at which the unpopular Australia Card had any relevance, as a trigger to get the Governor-General's approval for an election six months early.\n\nDespite a four-seat gain for Labor in the election, the Australia Card then disappeared without trace. But what did re-emerge quite soon after the jubilation of a third straight election victory, something federal Labor had never achieved before, was another round of tension between the two bulls in the political paddock.\n\n**KOB:** Your 1987 May mini-budget delivered the biggest public-sector spending cutback in 30 years, much of it from areas like health, education, welfare and jobs programs. How hard was it to win support for those cuts inside Labor on top of what you'd slashed already?\n\n**PJK:** It was a shockingly difficult task. Because I believed we should go to an election in the middle of 1987, I cancelled an overseas trip to the International Monetary Fund, sat the budget Expenditure Review Committee down for another six or eight weeks and brought the budget forward. In the May Statement we cut $4 billion from outlays. That would be like $15 to $20 billion today. We also foreshadowed tax cuts. That was an absolutely huge change, all designed to strengthen the exchange rate, to put another down payment on fiscal policy, to continue to regain the confidence of the markets and have a stable scene where Bob and I could win another poll.\n\nLet me give you another indication of the relationship I largely had with Bob, and the trust between us. I chaired the Expenditure Review Committee for the 1987 May Statement, where Bob had chaired the previous ERCs. If you think the banana republic comment put a stick of dynamite under the government, just imagine how explosive it was potentially to change entitlements and taxes like we did in that May budgetary round.\n\nYet Bob had complete faith in me doing it. I remember going up to see him at the Lodge and saying, 'Look, mate, there are four or five issues I want your judgement about.'\n\nHe said, 'What are they?'\n\nAnd I'd go through them.\n\nHe said, 'Oh, I think we can live with this one, and I think we can live with that.' And because they were tailored well and crafted well and were fair, there wasn't really a problem getting them through caucus. We didn't have to do the strong-arm stuff to get them through.\n\n**KOB:** Through a process like that, did you personally seek in your own mind to measure the social impact that this was going to be having on households around the country? Did you take a look for yourself to get a sense of how it was actually going to affect people out there?\n\n**PJK:** That's what Labor Treasurers do. We're mostly worried about the 90-odd per cent of people who live on the ebb and flow of the economy and whose fortunes are really set by the big parameters. That's why during my terms, programs like the Family Allowance Supplement, or the huge funding for education to lift Year Twelve retention rates for kids, changes to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme\u2014which drugs went on the free list and which didn't\u2014all those micro-decisions were very carefully thought through.\n\n**KOB:** Did you, from time to time, take yourself out there around the suburbs, the towns, the communities of Australia to actually remind yourself what the real world was like?\n\n**PJK:** Kerry, I didn't leave Bankstown until I was thirty-nine. I lived in a working-class western suburban community in Australia's biggest city, really lived with them for virtually all of my first forty years. After that length of time it comes intuitively to you. You know when people are living in the ebb and flow of the economy, you know how they rely upon government payments, you know how they rely upon the health system, upon education funding for their kids. I also used to do my Federal Electorate Council about every two months.\n\nI'd go back to Bankstown and the branch members would run through their issues, or I'd attend local events. And I'd always get a lecture or two when I turned up at the ACTU. They wanted to be consulted and have things explained to them, but they were pretty much always happy with the explanation.\n\nThe truth is, if you are a conscientious member of the federal parliamentary Labor Party, it's part of your DNA to worry about the people on the bottom. And I'd say that was true of all the ministers who were material to the ERC processes. They were all seriously concerned about the tough budgetary stuff, not just the politics of it all but the personal impact.\n\n**KOB:** The journalist and political historian Paul Kelly wrote of the 1987 mini-budget that it marked a decisive shift at the centre of the country's political gravity to the Right, and the economics commentator Des Keegan, who himself was on the economic Right, wrote that you'd 'won your spurs with the first significant rollback in government spending since World War II, that modern Labor had come of age'. How did you feel, as a Labor Treasurer, to be seen to be leading that shift to the Right, and being lauded by the Right?\n\n**PJK:** In a way, that had to happen. After all the old Labor Party confusion over means and ends, for the first time a federal Labor Cabinet wanted to see the national accounts and the budgetary accounts of the Commonwealth in good shape to deal with the contemporary problems we were facing. So the discipline of running four or five years of outlays at no more than the inflation rate, and often less than population growth, was really quite remarkable.\n\nIt was no surprise in a way that the Des Keegans of the world recognised and gave the government credit for that. But we did it with such a Labor heart that we always protected the most vulnerable people from the hardest impacts. A lot of business welfare went, a lot of middle-class welfare went, but we always tried to stay true to the people at the middle to lower end.\n\n**KOB:** We discussed earlier how so much of your philosophical base came from your father, whose influence was very important to you but who'd died at quite a young age. Did you ever use him as a mental check on yourself as Treasurer\u2014how would Dad have reacted to this?\n\n**PJK:** It's interesting you say that, Kerry, because I often used to say to Don Russell and Tom Mockridge in my office, 'What would the troops at Bankstown think we did for them this week? Are we lifting them up? Behind all the numerology and all the rest of it, in the end, underneath it all, is there value for them?'\n\n**KOB:** Without labouring the point, Labor under Hawke and Keating was not just the moderate Labor Government that you and your father used to talk about all those years ago, building a bridge between labour and business but with a strong working-class backbone. This was a right-wing Labor Government steeped in dry rational economics that was also making a lot of wealthy people wealthier.\n\n**PJK:** But in the old locked-down economy where you had a rigid exchange rate and a sclerotic financial market, a lot of businesses had diminished values. The All Ordinaries stockmarket index was about 450 when I became Treasurer and when I left it was 2600. So the stockmarket had gone up about five times in value. This didn't just reflect wealth for a few but a shift in national wealth and in the creation of growth and jobs.\n\n**KOB:** Another senior political journalist, Geoff Kitney, wrote just before that 1987 mini-budget, 'Keating is dog tired, not just because of the huge workload he's had to carry in the past few weeks, but because of the accumulated fatigue of working at high physical and mental pressure levels for more than four years.' Kitney said everyone else around you was the same, 'People sitting at the Cabinet table like stunned mullets.' How vividly do you still remember those atmospherics?\n\n**PJK:** The discipline of it was shocking: running through line items in social security and education, in science, in trade, in foreign affairs, discussing whether or not we could open a new embassy or a consulate somewhere. It got down to that sort of detail for seven to ten weeks a year for the May Statement, and then several more weeks in the budget round. So yes, by 1987 we were like stunned mullets. And then you still had to do the sales task, you still had to go through the process of parliamentary accountability, the Question Times and the rest of it. In the straitened national circumstances of the kind we found, you had a choice. Either you rose to the challenge or you joined those governments of the past who had swept it all under the carpet. What sustained me, and I'm sure others in that ERC process, was that we were doing what was right fundamentally, trying to give the country a break of a kind it hadn't had for most of the twentieth century.\n\n**KOB:** On the same theme but going back a year, John Edwards wrote in his biography that he met you ten days after the 1986 Budget and found you unexpectedly relaxed, funny and obliging, but suffering a strange sort of mid-life crisis indicating that your 'whole pleasure in the exercise of power had diminished with familiarity'. Had the pleasure of the exercise of power diminished for you by 1986?\n\n**PJK:** The truth is that it is a very long, hard job. There is a time in everyone's political life where political success and political promotion are really central and important to you in a very personal kind of way. But you get to the switch-over point where the real value is the value you add to the country, and that's really what you then think about most of the time. You can't divorce it from your own desire to succeed, but by and large these bigger impulses take over.\n\nNow after floggings of the kind I took doing those sixteen budgetary rounds, May Statements and budgets, lofty ideas about how important you are and how you're enjoying the power tend to evaporate. You become the absolute servant of the show and you take on the headspace of a servant.\n\n**KOB:** I wonder whether by that point you'd come to really understand the essence of power. What was the essence of power for you?\n\n**PJK:** I think you have to be born with an instinct for power. I'm not sure you can learn about the exercise of power. I think you've got to be born with it, grabbing the naked flame and hanging on, surviving the experience, drawing the inclinations of a community into a concentrate, one that you can use to effect change. That's the kind of power I'm talking about, and not being afraid to use it to the best of your ability, and not wasting its power to change.\n\n**KOB:** John Edwards recounts how in that same conversation you talked about the 'arid' nature of politics, and that the longer you continued as Treasurer the more you pondered a remark from an old friend and mentor, the former _Financial Review_ Editor, Max Walsh, who told you, 'You are a conscript of history, and when the rest of us are enjoying our lives you will be chained here doing history's bidding.' Is that what public life had become for you?\n\n**PJK:** That's what it had become for me. That remark was true. I was a conscript of history and I knew it. I was there for thirteen of the hardest years you could imagine. But look at the shift, look at the country now. With 22 years of compound growth, we lead the western world, fundamentally as a result of those changes.\n\n**KOB:** Feeling that aridness of the politics as you had come to see it, what remained of those early passions and dreams, the early inspiration from Churchill that the only game you wanted to be in was public life? Was that still resonating with you?\n\n**PJK:** It was. Basically I'm a public person. I think in public terms. I can't help it. I always do, because public life provides the great leverage. You get into a parliamentary structure where you have a majority in Parliament controlling the executive government and in close personal terms you can move something by a micron. But out there in the big world that small movement on the bridge shifts the country by a mile. In other words, the leverage is profound. Wearying, but at the same time exhilarating.\n\nAs distinct from monetary income, the psychic income from public life is a complete aphrodisiac, a completely different thing. This is why all these people who have done well in the professions and corporations as CEOs and bankers are all bored stiff in their sixties. I see them around Sydney and Melbourne. They're about to join this and they're about to do that. They discover good social works as their social conscience finally pricks them, and sometimes they try to engage me in their social works.\n\nI'm thinking, 'Hang on, I've done my 40 years before the mast, I don't have a need to feel fulfilled! You might, I don't!'\n\n**KOB:** Tired or not, chained down or not, while grappling with the May Statement in 1987, you were also throwing your two bob's worth into the discussions about an early election. You'd opposed the idea when it was first raised in February to go to the electorate in April, but then you changed your mind and felt that you could actually turn a hack-and-slash mini-budget into a political virtue and win an election. You proposed a winter campaign, but some of your colleagues thought you were nuts.\n\n**PJK:** They did. There was a piece by Geoff Kitney, which said as much. He reported a meeting in Hawke's office where we talked about it and they thought I'd lost my marbles. This is what Kitney wrote:\n\nFatigue is how some are accounting for the strange view from Keating's corner of Parliament House about the timing of the election, that it should be called in July. What purpose he had for supporting this view is difficult to fathom, a mid-winter election. It is said that Keating believes the July tax cuts would turn the electorate's mood in the government's favour. To those who understandably cannot accept any of these rationalisations for the Treasurer's snap election talk, the most sensible alternative explanation is foolishness induced by tiredness.\n\nIn fact what I'd said to Bob was this: 'Look, if we have an April poll with the dollar just hovering and the foreign exchange markets ready to dump on us at any moment, we're taking a big risk.'\n\nI said Howard would come out with unfunded tax cuts as the Liberals always did, the markets would say the country, Labor and Liberal, had no real fiscal rectitude, and we'd have the dollar sliding on us in the middle of an election and that would be the end of us.\n\nI said, 'This is my view. Bring the Budget forward, make a much bigger down payment on fiscal policy, consolidate the markets, and off the back of that have a winter election.'\n\nAnd they all burst into laughter.\n\nBut I said, 'If you try an April poll, with absolutely skittish markets, we've got a reasonable chance of crashing and burning.'\n\nAt any rate, because I possessed the horsepower and took responsibility for my suggestions, Bob and the advisors went for it. We cut $4 billion out of outlays and the polls responded really well. The _Australian_ then wrote, 'Springboard for an election! Hawke says early poll hint'. The next thing we were off to 'Hawke's winter battle'.\n\n**KOB:** When Bob Hawke did call an early election for July the veteran journalist Alan Ramsey wrote a very detailed piece about how you had earlier suggested a July election and been ridiculed by Hawke and others. All these years later, reading that, it does read very much as if that analysis had come directly from you, or someone very close to you.\n\n**PJK:** Ramsey liked me at the time. There were moments when he didn't like me, but not at that time, and that article may simply reflect the people he spoke to who knew about my earlier input. But Ramsey was on to Bob. He knew he was just hanging in the job and that the really big directional decisions were being taken or influenced by me. And if not by me alone, by the core of us\u2014Walshie, Dawkins and me.\n\n**KOB:** But looking back now at the reporting of those years, you can see patterns at times suggesting you and Hawke were leaking against each other.\n\n**PJK:** I was never in the leaking business. I was never in the business of wilfully telling journalists stuff. I had no need of encouraging journalists. I ran the show; that gave me the kind of deference I had earned from the gallery.\n\n**KOB:** But there's a difference between wilfully feeding journalists and targeted leaking.\n\n**PJK:** The Kitney piece definitely came from Hawke's staff.\n\n**KOB:** But what about the Ramsey piece?\n\n**PJK:** I don't think and can't remember whether it came from my office but nevertheless, what is the central point? The central point is I picked the propitious moment for the government's third election, set up the May Statement to win it, bolted up the markets and then personally destroyed Howard's tax package. I made Howard wait nine more years for the prime ministership. He had that sleazy tax package, and I made him pay a huge price for it.\n\n**KOB:** There was also the happy fact for Labor that Howard as Opposition Leader was struggling with a divided party and Joh Bjelke-Petersen's destructive push to enter national politics.\n\n**PJK:** That's an accurate reflection of the situation earlier in that year, but our task was to go to the election with credibility, which we did.\n\n**KOB:** Tell me how you went about finding the accounting error in the Howard tax package that created such damaging headlines for the Opposition in the middle of an election campaign. Can you take me through the detective work that pinpointed where the hole was?\n\n**PJK:** In trying to construct a new template for Australia where political strategy was built around good policy, I had subjected the government to enormous personal and corporate pressures in that Cabinet room over all those years doing those budgets and May Statements. I also sought to establish a regime where the same rules applied to the Opposition.\n\nBefore 1987 the Coalition would never have had a set of spending and revenue promises out there before an election. They would never have had a set of costed spending, savings and tax plans for examination, but under the new disciplines I had created\u2014a new notion of Australia's political culture\u2014Howard would have to comply.\n\nBut to do that the Liberals would have had to have the same set of disciplines Labor was applying to itself. That is, if you're going to have tax cuts you have to cost them, you have to account for them, whether you are in government or opposition.\n\nIn 1977 Malcolm Fraser had famously offered voters a fistful of dollars in tax cuts reflected in a crudely illustrated advertising campaign, a promise he then had to renege on. And in 1980 he and Howard beat Hayden with another promised tax cut, where voters could ring a number and find out how much their tax cut would be. So I knew Howard would go back to tax cuts in 1987. He couldn't help himself. Unfunded, unaffordable tax cuts.\n\nSo I put the Department of Finance and Treasury onto costing Howard's tax policy, and did the same in my own office. I said, 'Look, there's no way these numbers will stand up. If he was able to afford tax cuts like these, so would we. There's a hole in there somewhere and I want it found.'\n\n**KOB:** Your senior advisor, Don Russell, says in _Labor in Power_ that it was the Department of Finance that finally located the hole.\n\n**PJK:** I knew we just had to look long enough to find it, and we did. It was billions. I explained it all in a press conference and although Howard played mum for a couple of days he had to acknowledge the error in the end and then it was all over.\n\nI still have the newspaper coverage of that day. It is one of my favourite front pages from thirteen years of public life. 'Howard: My sums wrong.' I nailed him and that destroyed his 1987 election. Now, Howard beat me for the prime ministership in 1996 but I beat him in 1987.\n\n**KOB:** And I imagine he has a favourite poster from the 1996 election.\n\n**PJK:** He'd have one, but I made him wait for the prime ministership for nine years. I dogged him.\n\n**KOB:** So Labor won its third election in a row, and Hawke addressed the Labor caucus after the win and thanked everyone for their contribution. Is it true, as he has since written in his book, that you sulked because he didn't credit the particular parts you played in the victory? In other words, he didn't single you out for praise?\n\n**PJK:** I didn't sulk at all, but I had set up the May Statement and the savings believing they would be popular, a massive set of tax and fiscal changes and secured the support of the markets while convincing Bob to have the July election. I then blew Howard's tax package to pieces. What more had I to do? Bob stood up in the caucus and thanked every minister except me, and Kim Beazley, who was a great pal of Bob's, who shared the office next to me in the old Parliament House, came in and he said, 'Mate, that was the meanest thing I've ever seen Bob do.'\n\n**KOB:** But given what had gone between the two of you before, and given the job ahead, wouldn't the greater wisdom have been for you to roll with it, even if you took offence?\n\n**PJK:** I did roll with it but I'd given Bob his third win and everyone in caucus knew it.\n\n**KOB:** You're essentially saying you gave him that victory, but does that mean he brought nothing to that election campaign? Surely his base popularity always delivered a block of votes to Labor as a starting point, certainly in those days?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he had to lead the campaign, but the popularity this time came not from Bob's reservoir of goodwill but off the back of the government program and the massive savings package. Without this Bob would never have otherwise considered going into that election at that time.\n\n**KOB:** What Hawke does say in his autobiography is that the 1987 election marked the watershed in your relationship, that in your mind, 'the time had come for Labor's most successful leader ever to begin clearing the way for his successor, and the sooner the better.'\n\n**PJK:** I didn't necessarily want Bob to hand the leadership over to me at that point and what's more, I wasn't insisting upon it. But I wanted him to acknowledge that part of our arrangement of two leaders in the one party, was that at some point, in an organised way, he would hand the leadership over to me. And I wanted him to acknowledge that in some way, which he did a year later with the Kirribilli Agreement following the 1988 Budget.\n\n**KOB:** But Hawke said you had a sense of urgency about succession at that time\u2014this is mid-1987\u2014because you believed Labor's time was running out. There was truth in that, wasn't there?\n\n**PJK:** Not then about the succession. But there was some truth that this could have been our third and last Parliament, that we'd never won four before, and that winning the fourth in a row was going to be difficult in 1990. At least I wanted Bob to acknowledge that and have a real conversation about it. Bob remained a popular figure but nevertheless our primary vote dropped from 1983 onwards and was down to 39 per cent by 1990.\n\nEven the Liberal Party put the 1987 result down to me. The reason the Liberals are always so snaky about me is that they put 1987, 1990 and 1993 down to my account. They believe they should have won those elections, which was why they were so vicious to me after 1996\u2014they thought I'd done them more harm than anybody else on our side. And they were right.\n\nI took that as a high compliment by the way, but doing the Liberal Party harm was the business I was in. That was what made me tick.\n\n**KOB:** Hawke said that your focus on becoming leader from then on distorted your analysis of the historical record, and this is what he said in his book: 'Before long, the version according to Paul was that single-handedly he had floated the dollar, deregulated the financial sector, run the Expenditure Review Committee, powered the Government and won the elections. He was the prime mover and in all but name, the Prime Minister.' Is that all that far from what you did come to believe?\n\n**PJK:** In a very large measure much of that was true but I never at any stage set out to diminish Bob's popularity nor his contribution to winning four elections in a row. But it's clear from any reading of the public record who was driving the government from the end of 1984, clear as day.\n\n**KOB:** And these things were playing on you?\n\n**PJK:** Kerry, if you're doing ten weeks a year in an ERC meeting and you're sitting there with a sunshade and a pair of sunglasses to soften the reflected light from the white paper as your health's deteriorating, yes, they start playing on you, believe me. You sit there for eight and ten hours a day, day in and day out, reading through endless stacks of submissions, and after a while it starts to really affect you. You go balmy. In fact we had a formal discussion about changing the colour of the cabinet paper from white to green so we wouldn't get the harsh reflections off it from the fluorescent downlights.\n\nCombine that with the cigar smoke and you can just imagine what it was like. Bob was a massive smoker through a lot of that time. And Peter Walsh and Kim Beazley used to join him. You could feel yourself being worn down, and that happened to me. I was happy to do it for the public and for finding policy solutions and for our victories over the Liberal Party but by that stage the idea that it was all Bob was a fantasy that only Bob would entertain.\n\nBy the same token, the idea that I would have sulked over Bob's failure to acknowledge my efforts in the 1987 campaign to caucus is a nonsense. I had a whole new reform agenda I wanted to introduce and basically I got on with it immediately.\nINDUSTRY: A NEW WORLD FOR SURE\n\nAustralia's first two Prime Ministers, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin, were protectionists. The fourth, George Reid, was a free trader. Sandwiched between them was a Labor Government whose members were split between protection and free trade. Changing governments was like changing socks in the first decade of Federation, but few issues aroused passions more than the debate on tariffs. In those days, the word carried two meanings: protecting fledgling industries in a new nation and a developing economy, but also by implication protecting a white Anglo culture in an alien Asian world.\n\nFor most of the twentieth century, the protectionists prevailed, and by the time Gough Whitlam came to power, the walls sheltering Australia's manufacturers and farmers had grown very high indeed, at least as high as anywhere else in the industrialised world. Farmers who might otherwise have resented the higher internal cost structure that inevitably followed protectionism had long since been bought off with their own forms of protection, thanks to the Country Party.\n\nYou can argue until the cows come home over how strong or durable an industrial base Australia would have been able to build without heavy protection and the foreign investment it attracted, but the bottom line was that by the early 1970s there were many complacent and inefficient factory owners with obsolete machinery and more than a few well-fed trade union officials for whom the tariff wall worked just fine. A powerful combine of bosses and workers had taken shape to fight any government that dared to try to tamper with the system.\n\nAt the same time the import of cheap clothes and other products from the huge pool of cheap labour in Asia was set to explode. Although the bad old days of the White Australia policy were fading, Chinese or Filipino factory workers in so-called 'Free Trade Zones' threatening Australian jobs was an emotive issue.\n\nWhitlam arrived in the job a free trade man. He argued that tariffs had failed to secure employment in protected industries. He said the most heavily protected industries were the least efficient and therefore the least able to adapt to a new industrial world, and that most protected industries were constrained by a small domestic base and not export-oriented.\n\nAs an early priority, the Whitlam Government hand-picked a committee to review tariffs and then in July 1973, Whitlam himself announced a 25 per cent tariff cut across all industries. He later wrote:\n\nI took a cautious attitude to protection because it seemed to me that companies, very often foreign companies, were setting up industries in Australia in the confidence that, no matter how uneconomic the industry turned out to be, governments would always ensure sufficient protection to keep the industries afloat.\n\nSecondly I saw the burden which protection for some industries imposed on other industries which did not receive or need protection. Industries which would never be able to provide products for Australian consumers as cheaply as they could get the products from overseas were compelling other industries to charge unnecessarily high prices to their Australian customers and to charge prices which put their products beyond the reach of export markets.\n\nWhitlam's logic might have been right, and his announcement without warning might have headed off stiff resistance from trade unions and employers in the affected industries, but his crystal ball hadn't identified the global oil price shocks of 1973 and 1974 whose recessionary impact was yet to be felt. Nor was his 'cautious attitude' cautious enough to anticipate the impact on employment of such a big cut across the board in the manufacturing states.\n\nLionel Bowen, who became Manufacturing Industry Minister in 1974, inherited the unenviable job of trying to placate angry retrenched workers at factory gates in Victoria and Tasmania with offers of financial support and retraining. The irony of Bowen's position wasn't lost on him\u2014he was an ardent protectionist.\n\nNotwithstanding the mixed outcome from Whitlam's assault on tariffs in 1973, there was a strong nucleus of powerful senior ministers in the Hawke Cabinet who were convinced of the need to pick up where Whitlam had left off, and Paul Keating was chief among them.\n\nBut the writing was on the wall very soon after Labor came to power in 1983, partly due to the recession which was just starting to taper off as Bob Hawke took office, but also because of fundamental inefficiencies. Two of Australia's biggest manufacturing industries, cars and steel, were in crisis.\n\nBHP Steel had just incurred its first losses in 60 years, and responded with shutdowns and sackings. In October 1982, a horde of angry steelworkers from Australia's three steel cities\u2014Newcastle, Port Kembla and Whyalla\u2014marched on Parliament House and broke down the doors. There was talk inside BHP of shedding its steel arm altogether and focusing entirely on minerals, oil and gas.\n\nIn the heat of the 1983 election campaign Hawke had promised that he would produce a long-term plan within a hundred days of his government to save the industry. It was a tall order because the industry had a poor record of productivity, an abysmal industrial relations record and obsolete technology, and was increasingly vulnerable to cheaper and higher quality steel from Korea.\n\nBut if BHP, which had an effective monopoly on domestic steel production, thought it could order up substantial protection without promising a complete overhaul of its operations, it was to be disappointed, as were trade union officials if they were expecting to give nothing from their side.\n\nHawke was lucky to have John Button as his Industry Minister. Button was an affable but very bright and shrewd industrial lawyer from Melbourne. The veteran journalist Alan Ramsey, who covered eight prime ministerial reigns, once described Button as the best Prime Minister Australia never had.\n\nAfter countless hours of negotiation dealing in equal measure with anger, arrogance, suspicion and entrenched attitudes, Button eventually came up with a five-year plan that provided generous assistance to the industry but with a range of strings attached, including a promise of significant investment in new technology from BHP, workforce reductions through voluntary retirement, industrial dispute settlements adhered to, and a genuine drive for greater productivity.\n\nThe car industry was an even bigger challenge. In protection terms it had become Australia's sacred cow. The Holden leather-and-saddle business had begun in Melbourne in 1856, become a carriage builder in 1885 and begun trimming motor vehicles in 1910. By 1924 it was making more than 20,000 car bodies a year, half of them for General Motors, which bought them out at the height of the Great Depression in 1931. By the time the humble Holden first rolled off the assembly line in late 1948 as Australia's first home-grown car, the company had survived two world wars and a Depression. The Holden sold for \u00a3733, two years' salary for a worker on average income.\n\nBy 1983 the heavily protected industry had now grown to five manufacturers producing thirteen car models from plants spread across five states, which Button later described in his memoir as 'a monument to the stupid side of Australian federalism'. In terms of quality, the words 'lemon' and 'car' became synonymous in the vernacular for various models. Yet imported cars were restricted to 20 per cent of the market, with a tariff protection around 120 per cent, which gave the local industry a huge leg up.\n\nThere were too many unions covering the industry, often with their own distracting ideological and factional disputes, and a fragmented car component sector that was also often in dispute with the car-makers. Ironically, in the context of Button's problems with the steel industry, local car manufacturers had to import steel for their body panels because the quality of BHP's steel was too poor for their needs.\n\nWithin three months of the Hawke Government taking office, GMH sacked 3000 workers and signalled its intention to retrench another 3500, which was indicative of an industry-wide problem.\n\nIn his memoir Button told a very funny story which was as good an insight as any to where the industry was at in 1983:\n\nIn Melbourne a young GMH executive came to see me. In the course of our discussions I said, 'I don't know why you keep on manufacturing the Camira. I don't think it's a very good car. It doesn't sell well. What are you going to do about it?'\n\nHe thought for a moment. 'Well,' he replied, 'we are going to have a new advertising campaign for the Camira.' I expressed some surprise, which he didn't fully seem to understand. Then he left.\n\nA few minutes later there was a knock on my door. 'Come in,' I said.\n\nMy GMH visitor put his head round the door. 'Sorry to interrupt,' he said. 'I just wanted to say Minister, that you're right. The Camira is a shithouse motor car. I know, my wife's got one.' Then he closed the door and left.\n\nA year later Button produced a seven-year plan for the car industry that squeezed protection, phased out quota tariffs and would inevitably lead to a reduction in manufacturers from five to three within a decade, and halve the number of factories. Car models would also be slashed from thirteen to six, encouraging bigger and more efficient production runs of the remaining models. The components industry was also rationalised.\n\nButton later remembered the fiery left-wing metal workers' union heavyweight Laurie Carmichael coming up to him in Kings Hall in the old Parliament House, briefcase in hand, his eyes darting left and right, his long overcoat trailing behind him like a cloak, looking like a courier from the court of Medici. He hissed at Button with a fierce stare, 'You bastard, you bastard. But I'll say this for you. Someone had to bite the bullet, and you've done it.'\n\nThe head of Nissan Motors in Japan reminded Button of a samurai in a Japanese film. 'I thought, if this man had a sword, he would run me through with it.'\n\nThe steel and car plans were both broadly hailed as a significant step away from easy assumptions that struggling manufacturers had an automatic entitlement to suck on the public teat without a substantial quid pro quo for taxpayers as well as consumers and the workforce.\n\nAs a postscript, Nissan closed its Australian manufacturing operations in 1992. Ford is slated to shut down its Australian operations in 2016, and Toyota and GMH in 2017. BHP shut its iconic Newcastle steelworks in 1999 and said goodbye to its steel business altogether in 2002.\n\nBut these were just two of the heavily protected, inefficient industries that ringed the capital cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne.\n\nBy mid-1987, with the steel and car plans firmly in place, on the Monday after the election, I interviewed Paul Keating for _Four Corners_ on Labor's third-term agenda. A full-frontal assault on the whole protection culture of Australian manufacturing was squarely at the centre of his plans. With the big-ticket macro items like financial deregulation and tax reform behind him, he nominated microeconomic reform as his priority, starting with tariffs. Lurking unacknowledged in the background was the privatisation of the government-owned domestic airline TAA (with Qantas a logical next step) and the people's bank, the Commonwealth.\n\n**KOB:** Why were tariff reforms so important to you in 1987?\n\n**PJK:** The whole internationalisation of Australia would have stopped stone dead if we'd achieved flexible financial markets but still had rigid product markets. For me there were three big reform areas that went hand in hand: we had to open up the financial, the product and the labour markets. This was the big opening of the product markets.\n\n**KOB:** John Button was Industry Minister, and he was definitely in the tariff-cutting cart, but immediately after the election you sought to take the Industries Assistance Commission from his portfolio and make it part of Treasury. What was that about?\n\n**PJK:** It wasn't just tariffs I was concerned about, it was the whole structure of industry assistance and the areas of productivity left languishing in the Australian economy. I felt that the Industry Department, as the public-sector partner of industry, shouldn't also be responsible for the Industries Assistance Commission, which had a role to investigate inefficiencies in industry and promote productivity. Treasury, on the other hand, was completely independent of industry and was focused on the need for productivity.\n\nI had a very good relationship with John. There wasn't much he and I didn't talk about and most times on very friendly terms. For a long time I'd said to John, you can't be poacher and gamekeeper at the same time, not when we've still got the tariff mountain to deal with. Apart from Button as Industry Minister, other key ministers like John Dawkins, Peter Walsh, Bill Hayden, Gareth Evans and others were in broad support, and Bob Hawke himself was on board.\n\nThe key point is this. I did an interview with Michael Stutchbury in the _Financial Review_ on 29 May 1987, just weeks before the election. Stutchbury wrote:\n\nEfficiency measures are priorities for Paul Keating. Keating has set his sights for a third-term Labor government on microeconomic efficiency issues.\n\nIn an interview yesterday Mr Keating said the Government had been so overwhelmed by the immediacy of its problems in 1983 repairing the fractured balance between wages and profits, dealing with competitiveness, the terms of trade collapse, rapid adjustments to fiscal and wages policies, that some of the delicate issues in micro policy have been left to be dealt with at another time.\n\n'That's our story. We have intellectually chosen the route of internationalisation. If you're going to internationalise it must be about being efficient in world terms and that's our only place in the future.'\n\nIn other words I was letting him and his readership know that there was some chance of me getting the Industries Assistance Commission after the election. As it turned out Hawke agreed to take the IAC away from Button and his Industry Department and to give it to me.\n\n**KOB:** Did Button try very hard to fight that?\n\n**PJK:** He did, but I think he knew it was a losing battle.\n\n**KOB:** Before your general assault on tariffs, there were the various industry plans that John Button had introduced in the first two terms\u2014the steel and car plans in particular. Would you describe them as curtain-raisers to the main game?\n\n**PJK:** When I became Treasurer, the level of protection for the Australian motor vehicle industry was an effective rate of more than 80 per cent. It was so outrageously high that Button, notwithstanding the car plan, was trying to bring it down from outrageously high to only moderately high.\n\nIt wasn't just about making cuts in tariffs from industry to industry. It was all about the quality and scale of it and what I wanted was a tops-down cut, not an across-the-board cut. With an across-the-board cut, say you cut everything by 20 per cent. That would mean that if an industry enjoyed an 80 per cent tariff, it would only be cut to 60 per cent.\n\nWhat I wanted was all tariffs over 15 per cent to come down to 15 and everything between 15 and 10 to come to 10. So it was a huge qualitative difference, which meant that no matter how high a tariff was, it would come down to 15 per cent, and everything else would come down to 10. It was called a tops-down change and it took me a long time to get John Button into that, and Bob didn't want to knock him over. This is in 1987 and Bob is still in the warp. He didn't want blues or arguments.\n\nI said, 'Bob, if we do it John's way we're still going to be left with high tariffs even if we have a 25 per cent tariff cut.'\n\nThe great bulk of tariffs were really pitched at about 20 and 25 per cent. What I was proposing was a far bigger change than a flat 25 per cent cut across the board.\n\n**KOB:** What was the IAC's role in all that?\n\n**PJK:** Its role was to point out what the structural impacts would be, and then our role was to put adjustment packages in place to cushion the process. A lot of my negotiations with Button were really about the adjustment packages.\n\nThe IAC facilitated the shift by Treasury and the Treasurer away from macro policy\u2014from fiscal and monetary policy\u2014to microeconomic policy, the ability to review any particular sector of the economy.\n\n**KOB:** So essentially you had a broad vision of where you wanted to end up, but putting the building blocks of that vision in place was a gradual process through the late 1980s and into the 1990s once you took over responsibility for the IAC.\n\n**PJK:** For the first time ever, the principal economic department of state, the Treasury, had responsibility for industry assistance and industry review.\n\n**KOB:** How conscious were you of what had happened under Whitlam, when he cut tariffs by 25 per cent in one hit in 1973 and by 1974 all those factories were closing?\n\n**PJK:** It was a different economy by 1987. We now had a floating exchange rate and we'd had wage restraint. Our competitiveness had been restored. Movements in the Australian dollar were greater than the actual impact of the tariffs cuts in some cases. In any event the whole internationalisation of Australia would have stopped stone dead if we'd had flexible financial markets but rigid product markets. We had to open Australia up to competition because the landscape was littered with a potpourri of protection from tax preference to tariffs and quotas to bounty preferences. We had to reallocate what were scarce national resources.\n\nEssentially the deal John and I came to in the end was that he would go for the tops-down formula on the basis that I funded significant adjustment packages, and I negotiated those packages with Bill Kelty in the ACTU.\n\n**KOB:** How crucial was your relationship with the unions through the Accord and your friendship with Bill Kelty in terms of getting union cooperation and support for the tariff cuts?\n\n**PJK:** It was always a great pressure for Bill, but he knew they had to change. The days of highly protected manufacturing industries were over and for Bill it was about getting the right adjustment packages for his various sectors.\n\n**KOB:** Could you have got that agenda through without the Accord relationship you'd forged in the early years?\n\n**PJK:** The tariff cuts had to come, Kerry. You can't have an open economy and a set of industries which are uncompetitive. I wouldn't do any of this stuff without talking to Bill, but you asked me the question would the tariffs have remained because of ACTU opposition, and the answer is, no they wouldn't have remained. The tariffs would have gone. Now, it might have been more bloody, more skin off the nose on the way through, but they would have gone because they had to go.\n\nAfter the relationship between Bob Hawke and me, the next most important relationship over the lifetime of those governments was my relationship with Bill Kelty. I trusted him. He trusted me. His judgement was first rate, and he had a first-class economic mind. He knew what he could sell to his constituency and what he couldn't. I had a reasonable idea of what he could sell and what he couldn't. When he used to say to me he couldn't, I knew he couldn't. I knew he wasn't negotiating. Bill was never into phoney negotiations, never. He was never into that sort of stuff.\n\n**KOB:** Looking at the state of manufacturing today, the rust belts around the major cities, industries like cars and steel in a world of trouble, so many skills lost, jobs exported to Asia. Are you still sure it was the right thing to do it the way you did it?\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely. It advanced us donkeys' years. When I became Treasurer the average rate of protection on a motor car was about 80 per cent. Do you know how poor the quality of Australian cars was? Ordinary working men and women were being asked to pay twice the price to buy a car of very moderate quality, and that was also true of shoes, shirts, underwear, clothing, textiles and footwear.\n\n**KOB:** But many of those factory workers are now staring back at jobs that were wiped out forever. Skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled alike\u2014gone forever.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, gone. And do you know what they found? A better job a week later, in a growing economy with big employment growth. We got them off the factory floor. The aim was not to leave them doing repetitive jobs on a factory floor but to get them off the factory floor doing better professional jobs out in the big service economy we were becoming. All these people got picked up.\n\n**KOB:** You make it sound so simple. A week later they had another job. Do you really think that's how it always worked out?\n\n**PJK:** The labour market in Australia had grown by 25 per cent. We'd created 1.7 million jobs, and with adjustment packages to help their transition those people found better jobs.\n\n**KOB:** A lot of those jobs were in the service sector.\n\n**PJK:** Where would you want to be? Line up at seven-thirty in a blue-collar job on a cold factory floor or work in the service sector, and people said 'Thank you, I'll take the service sector'. But again they didn't lose their job overnight. It took a while. The tariff cuts were made between 1988 and 1991 and then we brought in the second round in the 1991 to 2000 package. So there were thirteen years of change\u2014gradual enough, predictable enough, funded with assistance packages and jobs to take people up as they left. It was absolutely the right thing to do.\n\n**KOB:** Did you ever meet any of these people on the old assembly lines?\n\n**PJK:** Of course I did. I remember talking to one woman at Gloweave and she had glasses like the bottom of Coca-Cola bottles. I said, 'How are you, love?' and she said 'Oh, I've been here thirty years Mr Keating. My eyes are gone and of course sniffing up the lint off the cotton\u2014every time the needle goes up and down there's a little bit of fine lint released\u2014and it's ended up in my chest, so I've got real chest problems and real eyesight problems.'\n\nThis is what slave labour was all about under tariffs and quotas.\n\n**KOB:** But what about the army of long-term unemployed that emerged during your prime ministership? Mostly older men in their forties and fifties who'd lost their attraction in the eyes of employers? I'm not arguing against the tariff reforms, but there were some workers who inevitably paid a heavy price, weren't there?\n\n**PJK:** I don't doubt that's true, but what is also true is that the employment growth in the economy picked up most people who were displaced through the tariff cuts. It may not have taken them all up into permanent or full-time employment, but certainly the great bulk of them had either permanent or casual employment. For many people the part-time employment would not have been the panacea they'd have expected upon losing jobs they'd grown up with. But in an economy which had to go through a transition of the kind Australia simply had to go through, what mattered was to try to retrain as many as possible and to set up new economic opportunities for the businesses which otherwise would have closed.\n\nYou might remember as Prime Minister I also set up the Working Nation policy, which was about case-managing up to 25 people individually under one case manager for a job subsidy, which gave people work for six months. This made very rapid changes to long-term unemployment.\n\nI don't doubt that a body of the workforce suffered, particularly in Victoria, from the structural changes after the tariff cuts but those cuts were also very gradual. We announced them in 1988, and again in 1991, so that most of these major tariffs were reduced to 10 per cent or under by 2001. It basically happened over thirteen years and often the exchange rate fluctuations had a bigger impact than the tariff cuts themselves. The tariff cuts each year were modest.\n\nI don't think there was any easy way to do it, other than a policy which took effectively a decade and a half to implement\u2014where business knew what the likely level of protection was going to be, and where people in jobs knew that the job was not likely to be there into the future and that they should start looking somewhere else.\n\nBut in a peppy economy which just had more and more growth, and more and more jobs, that was the moment, and really the only moment you could implement a policy like this. Because you had some reasonable expectation that the great bulk of them would either get a new permanent full-time job or at least a part-time one.\n\n**KOB:** Privatisation also emerged after the 1987 election as part of the government's agenda, but it seemed that Bob Hawke was the prime mover there initially. There were headlines like 'Hawke bays for blood in the privatisation stakes' and 'Hawke puts asset sales on the ALP agenda'.\n\n**PJK:** The privatisations that mattered were the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, which occurred in the latter part of 1990, and the sale of Qantas during the Keating Government.\n\n**KOB:** Where were you on Labor's privatisation agenda? What did you want to achieve on privatisation?\n\n**PJK:** The point was, having moved the macroeconomy and got to the point where we were starting to produce budget surpluses and then the first round of tariff cuts, it was the microeconomy where we had this stultifying resistance to economic change. There were parts of the microeconomy like tariffs and the tax system where we could make policy changes, and there were the enterprises we owned which should otherwise have been commercial entities, not government institutions.\n\nMost of the instrumentalities were owned by the states, but we owned a couple of the big ones. One was the Commonwealth Bank, which was poorly capitalised. Its only capital injection ever came from me in about 1985 or 1986. It couldn't be a gutsy competitor to the big commercial banks because it simply didn't have the capital, and it had outlived the time it should have remained in the government's ownership.\n\nThat was a natural thing to do. It had the biggest deposit base in the country but it didn't have a deposit base in Victoria and yet it gained that when I bought the State Bank of Victoria and folded it into the CBA.\n\n**KOB:** You might regard the argument against having sold the Commonwealth as a sentimental argument, but many people are angry at what they perceive as a lack of real competition among four dominant commercial banks including the Commonwealth, and say things might have been different; that if only you hadn't sold the Commonwealth it could have acted as a foil to the others.\n\n**PJK:** But it just didn't have the capacity to act in that way. Basically it was a post office bank with the deposits of pensioners, and it had the cast of mind of a post office bank.\n\n**KOB:** Are you saying it would have taken a massive injection of capital by the government for the Commonwealth to build and function as a genuine competitor against the other banks?\n\n**PJK:** In the end you had to develop a private board to, in turn, create a whole new and private ethos in the bank for it to be competitive. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We floated it at $5.60 a share and it has been higher than $90 a share. In economic value it's now in the top twenty banks in the world and the premier bank in Australia. Its service to the country and to Australian society is now far greater than anything it could have done or did do as a government-owned bank.\n\n**KOB:** Notwithstanding the sentiment the public had for it as a government-owned bank?\n\n**PJK:** The sentiment is just misplaced and, at its core, ill-informed. If the Commonwealth Bank didn't have the economic value to the economy that it does today its shares would not be $90. That's a reflection of real economic value and public utility. It's the utility that matters, not who owns the stock.\n\n**KOB:** Are you saying that if it was still in public hands today governments would never have been able to provide the capital to allow it to grow as big as it has, or able to act as a genuinely competitive but more socially oriented pace-setter for the rest of the banking industry?\n\n**PJK:** It would have looked like a large version of the Bank of Queensland. It would never have been a go-to commercial bank, it wouldn't have had the big housing book it has today with the loans it has provided to people to buy their homes, it just wouldn't have been able to make the contribution to the nation's economy that it now does as a sophisticated commercial bank with everything from commercial loans through foreign exchange to stockbroking to personal finance.\n\nBecause it is now unshackled from the capital constraints of a government and its culture has changed, it has done a service to the economy it could never otherwise have done.\n\nI appointed a private board after the first tranche of privatisation. I asked Tim Besley to become Chairman and David Murray to become Chief Executive and, after that, John Ralph became Chairman, so the whole culture of the bank changed. It was capitalised properly on the market and after it got momentum it never looked back.\n\n**KOB:** How tough a challenge was it to sell privatisation to caucus and the broader Labor movement? Of all your reforms this was the one that opponents could link emotionally to Thatcherite-type ideology. How did you deal with that?\n\n**PJK:** The Commonwealth Bank was the hardest to get through caucus, but in the end what allowed it to happen was that the State Bank of Victoria was failing, and it had the biggest deposit base in Victoria. I don't know whether you recall the Pyramid and Geelong Permanent Building Society and the enormous cost to the city of Geelong and to taxpayers when it failed in 1990 with debts of $2 billion. Imagine then the State Bank of Victoria, a bank the equivalent of the former State Bank of NSW.\n\nImagine if the biggest deposit base in the state had been allowed to fail. So, to rescue it as it began to topple, I had the Commonwealth Bank bid for it, and support from the Victorian Premier Joan Kirner, who was also a leader of the Left in that state. I went to the caucus and said, 'If you allow me to sell a quarter of the Commonwealth Bank I will fund what would otherwise be the collapse of the State Bank and the decimation of the Victorian economy.'\n\nI also said that as we got the bank's value up and it improved as an attractive asset we'd sell the next quarter. So we wouldn't be just giving it away. Of course the second quarter then became much more valuable than the first quarter and so on.\n\n**KOB:** Why didn't you sell Telstra, or Telecom, as it was then? Was the Howard Government right to sell Telstra?\n\n**PJK:** It was not right to sell Telstra the way it did\u2014with the backbone. Howard and Fahey should have taken the backbone out of it, the local loop as it was called, and let it stand alone as a public service provider where BT or AT&T or Optus or anyone else could access the network. The Rudd Government had to develop the National Broadband Network because the old backbone was sold into the market by Howard along with the rest of Telstra.\n\nIf the backbone had been retained in public ownership Telstra would have become a business that was about running brands and marketing, so it would have transitioned from an engineering business to a brand and marketing business. So Telstra's brand and marketing would have been attached to that backbone in the same way as Optus, say, would have been similarly attached.\n\nIt turned out John Howard as Prime Minister and John Fahey as Finance Minister did the worst possible thing in Australian telecommunications. It was simply the bare transfer of a monopoly from government to private ownership, which included the network exchange and loop backbone. When the investment banks wanted the backbone separated, believing in public policy terms it should have been separated, Fahey rejected that advice.\n\nThat rejection meant that we had no real competition in telecommunications for nearly two decades, and we are only getting that now with the NBN.\n\n**KOB:** Going back to when you were Treasurer, what was it in your mind that said it made sense to sell the Commonwealth, to sell Qantas, but not to sell Telstra?\n\n**PJK:** I believed Telstra should stay in public hands until we had decided on the terms of structural separation. I would have kept the backbone company in separate public ownership as NBN is today, and the rest of Telstra's business would have become a private business. All telcos would have been using a public switch, one that would have remained within a Commonwealth Government structure.\nOF BUDGETS AND BACON\n\nGoing into their third term after the 1987 election, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating had navigated their way through just four of what was to become thirteen years of Labor rule. But even allowing for the natural self-confidence in both men, they were not to know how many years they had ahead of them. Labor had actually gained seats at the election but its national vote had gone down, and it was already playing on Keating's mind that Labor federally had never won four elections in a row, that it had been a gruelling journey of hard-won reforms and economic and political ups and downs to get this far, and that the road ahead looked equally tough.\n\nIt proved to be much tougher.\n\nKeating had by now already privately expressed the concern that Labor's best years would be behind it by the time he could reasonably expect to take the reins from Hawke, and he couldn't abide the thought that he would continue expending a great deal of blood, sweat and tears on the reform process, only to see his time as Prime Minister cut short. Worse still in his eyes was the thought of a future Liberal Government reaping the economic and political benefits of Labor's efforts\u2014efforts that he considered were largely driven by him.\n\nLeadership transitions in politics are rarely handled smoothly. The headiness of the power and privilege that come with prime ministership is deeply seductive. Bob Menzies is the most recent Prime Minister to retire on his own terms. That was just shy of 50 years ago.\n\nThere was a sense that Hawke had always seen the job as his destiny. He was well on the way to becoming Labor's longest-serving Prime Minister, clearly enjoying the adulation he received whenever he ventured into the electorate, clearly believing he was the best person to lead his party, and was never going to find it easy just to walk away, no matter how many elections he won.\n\nBy now it was clear that Keating was Hawke's heir apparent. The two personalities being the kind of natural headline material they were, the leadership issue was never out of the media spotlight for long. For Hawke it must have felt at times like a slow drip, and even if, as Keating maintains, he had no hand in stringing the press gallery along, the stories were going to be written anyway.\n\nBut the headlines cut both ways.\n\nOne month Keating was profiled as the Prime Minister-in-waiting, and the next, his aspirations were fading. One month Hawke would be said to be preparing the way for succession, the next he would be reported as digging in for the long haul. One month Hawke would be hailing Keating his successor; the next, he'd be throwing in names like Kim Beazley and Mick Young. Sometimes these stories were well sourced and sometimes not, but few were helpful either to Hawke or to Keating, or more particularly to their Cabinet and caucus colleagues.\n\nThere was a period soon after the 1987 election when the tide of sentiment swung against Hawke within the parliamentary party. His move post-election to reshape the ministry into a series of super-ministries was seen as designed to increase his influence in the bureaucracy and move closer to a US-style presidential system. That meant some ministers' and departmental heads' power declining.\n\nAt the same time Hawke was pushing aggressively to reclaim his share of the economic reform mantle, pinning his name to a privatisation agenda that didn't immediately go down too well with the troops. Even some of his close supporters began to actively consider a succession plan before the next election. So up bobbed the leadership stories again, such as the Paul Kelly feature on Keating in the _Weekend Australian Magazine_ , 'Our Prime Minister in Waiting'.\n\nSuch was political life for Labor after 1987 until Keating finally took over more than four years later; whenever he was seen to do well, leadership speculation was never far away.\n\nThe 1987 Budget was a classic case in point. Because the election was in mid-July, the Budget was delivered in September rather than August. There were two particularly notable things about it: one, it delivered a deficit of just $27 million, in effect a balanced budget, the best budget outcome in seventeen years. Two, rather than the traditional post-election budget designed to get all the bad political hits out of the road as far away from the next election as possible, this one read more as if there was an election around the corner.\n\n'Keating's Brilliant Budget' was the bold tabloid headline in Sydney's _Daily Mirror_ (since merged with the _Daily Telegraph_ ). The Melbourne _Sun_ blazed away with 'Budget Bonanza', and in the _Financial Review_ , 'Bulls roar, rates fall as markets cheer Budget'. The Melbourne _Herald_ (since merged with the _Sun_ ) had 'Keating\u2014in full command', headlining a story speculating that he might now be poised to take over the reins from Hawke.\n\nOther stories recorded an immediate voluntary cut in the housing interest rate by the big commercial banks from 15.25 per cent to 14.5, with predictions of a further drop to 14 per cent by Christmas.\n\n'INTEREST DOWN\u2014DOLLAR UP' was the _Australian_ 's headline.\n\nKeating's budget cuts represented the biggest real decline in spending after inflation for 30 years, down 2.4 per cent in real terms, most of this result reflecting the work already done in the May Statement. Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Keating told one television interviewer this was a 24-carat budget in a golden age of economic change.\n\nBut he still had his critics, including economic journalist and author John Edwards, later his staffer and biographer. Edwards described the budget as too smart by half. He pointed out that the books were all but balanced by counting a billion dollars worth of asset sales as a savings measure rather than a one-off windfall. Others said it had only been achieved through a tax bonanza delivered by income-tax bracket creep as more and more workers moved into the highest tax bracket.\n\nThe _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's Ross Gittins wrote that behind the apparent good housekeeping 'lies a complacency borne of fatigue'. He acknowledged it was a budget that kept faith with Hawke's election promise that there'd be no new taxes or no big spending cuts, but identified a risk that the economy might grow too quickly over the coming year as a result.\n\nIndeed the head of steam in the Australian economy that ultimately led to a recession was already building, but it was masked by a world stockmarket collapse just one month after the budget. On Black Monday, 19 October 1987, Wall Street plunged more than 20 per cent, the biggest one-day crash in history. Half a trillion dollars was wiped off share values.\n\nIt had a domino effect around the world. By the end of October, 41 per cent had been knocked off the value of the Australian market. Heavily indebted business entrepreneurs who were relying on corporate expansion to drive their share value must have been quaking in their boots. In a single week, the share value of Robert Holmes a Court's companies, Bell Group and Bell Resources, plummeted 60 per cent.\n\nMarket analysts later were inclined to write the crash off as merely a correction, albeit a dramatic one, for a speculative boom combined with the introduction of computer trading, which had driven a 44 per cent surge on Wall Street over the first half of 1987. But in the immediate aftermath there were inevitable comparisons with the 1929 crash and the Great Depression that followed.\n\nThis was to sway Australia's central bank Governor Bob Johnston against moving interest rates up early in the new year when he might otherwise have done so, as it became clear going into 1988 that the economy was at serious risk of overheating.\n\nJust to accentuate the picture of confusing economic duality, with the shock waves from the plummeting markets still reverberating through the economy, and just six weeks after delivering the budget, Keating and Finance Minister Peter Walsh revised the $27 million deficit forecast to a surplus of $580 million, built off a fresh revenue surge from growth in the economy.\n\nKeating was soon preparing the ground for another May mini-budget and another round of spending cuts, a special premiers' conference to clamp down on state government borrowing, and more wage restraint.\n\nBut the wild horses that had taken hold of the Australian economy driven by unlimited credit from the banks in a newly deregulated environment would not be easily tamed. Recovery on the markets didn't take long, and in Australia it very quickly became business as usual.\n\nIn his regular economic lectures to the gallery, Keating often talked about pulling levers and keeping various balls in the air as he painted the big reform canvas. The Coalition in those years came to see the press gallery as sitting comfortably in Keating's pocket. Senior members of the gallery at least\u2014people like Laurie Oakes, Alan Ramsey and the like\u2014weren't easily gulled, but there was undoubtedly a beguiling quality to the way Keating wove his words with both confidence and conviction, the way he wanted to bring everyone along for the ride, that resonated within the gallery as it did within Cabinet and caucus. Even the Opposition had a grudging admiration, along with a deep frustration that came from so often being outplayed in Parliament, particularly when they should have had the ascendancy.\n\nBut what was looming for Keating and the other economic ministers and the 'official family' on monetary policy\u2014the Reserve Bank and Treasury\u2014over the next two years was a particularly complex juggling act where the levers would be pulled and the engine wouldn't respond.\n\nBy 1987\u201388 Keating and Treasury were talking less and less about the J Curve as their favourite illustration for the message that there had to be a lag between action on the economy and results. But the Twin Deficits Theory, that lower government spending and tight budgets would automatically reduce the current account deficit, was still driving much of the government's strategic thinking through the second half of the 1980s. Unfortunately the reality was not matching the theory.\n\nDespite the good election result in 1987, there was clearly a brittleness in the electorate as evidenced in the by-election for Trade Minister Chris Hurford's seat of Adelaide after he left the Parliament to become Consul-General in New York in February 1988. The seat went to the Liberals with an 8 per cent swing.\n\nThe next month the Unsworth Labor Government in New South Wales was swept from office with a massive swing to the Liberal\u2013National Coalition led by Nick Greiner. Partly it reflected an inevitable reaction to a twelve-year incumbency and Neville Wran's retirement, but this was Labor's traditional stronghold state, and the brand was clearly tarnished.\n\nNonetheless Keating was more concerned with policy than politics when two months later he produced his May mini-budget in 1988, foreshadowing a big surplus.\n\nThe May Statement reflected just how tricky the government's balancing act had become between policy and politics, between the ongoing push for growth and jobs and minimising the risk of over-heating, of managing inflation, the dollar and the current account deficit while ramping up the next round of micro-reform. At the same time the Reserve Bank, with strong backing from Keating, was at last acting with some conviction on interest rates in what became a steady and sustained upward movement that was to last for about twenty months.\n\nThe 1988 May Statement included the first big round of tariff cuts, while cutting company tax by 20 per cent from 49 to 39 cents in the dollar. It foreshadowed further cuts in spending of 1.5 per cent in real terms for 1988\u201389, and forecast a surplus of more than $3 billion, with a promise of income tax cuts the following year in yet another tradeoff under the Accord to keep wages in check.\n\nP.P. McGuinness in the _Financial Review_ described it as 'an impressive affair', but again the _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's Ross Gittins saw it as 'lots of shuffling, but not much action', pointing out that bracket creep had underwritten the surplus by $1.5 billion.\n\nTheir coverage was dwarfed for impact by a five-page cover story in Kerry Packer's _Bulletin_ magazine boldly headed 'The Next Prime Minister', declaring that Keating had started his run for the top job, and citing a new poll to back its claim that Keating was successfully softening his image in preparation for leadership.\n\nThe poll put him alongside Hawke and well ahead of Howard for intelligence, said he was much more inclined to keep his promises than either Hawke or Howard, but was less likable than either of the others. Notably, his approval rating as Treasurer had gone up from 33 per cent to 51 per cent in two years. The figures were interesting enough, but the nature of the _Bulletin_ 's splash, with Keating's cooperation, was provocative.\n\nHawke would not have been amused. Shortly afterwards, the story emerged that he had held discussions with senior colleagues on the possibility of moving Keating from the Treasury in a ministerial reshuffle later in the year. If the speculation had been encouraged from the Prime Minister's office, it backfired. On 17 June, the _Sydney Morning Herald_ ran a front-page story headed 'Hawke forced to deny doubts on Keating'. But within two days a _Sun-Herald_ front page banner set the hares running again: 'HAWKE PICKS NEXT PM. It's not Keating!'\n\nThe story said Hawke had been sounding out 'his closest colleagues' on an early retirement and had also discussed it with his wife, Hazel. It claimed he favoured Kim Beazley and wanted to give him a major domestic portfolio.\n\nIn August 1988, with the current account still misbehaving, although slightly reduced compared to the previous year, and the economy still surging on the back of a massive asset boom, Keating delivered his 'bringing home the bacon' budget.\n\nHis opening words that night made full use of a special occasion. It was the first sitting day in the grand new Parliament House on Capitol Hill, and the historic first day of parliamentary broadcasting for television. Ironically the decision to televise came against the strenuous objections of one P.J. Keating. This was what he had to say:\n\nMadam Speaker, tonight I can report to the people of Australia that the nation is emerging from its most severe economic crisis in a generation. Unquestionably a dramatically better state of affairs now exists than when I warned in 1986 of the threat of Australia degenerating to the status of a banana republic. The Australian people can be proud that they have responded to economic adversity in a manner which the critics claimed was impossible.\n\nHe went on to reveal a forecast that the surplus would hit $5.5 billion, a record surplus up to that point.\n\nIn his traditional press conference recorded inside the press gallery lock-up a couple of hours earlier, the theme was similarly sweeping. His opening lines: 'This is the one that brings home the bacon. This is the budget that pulls the whole game together from 1983 onwards.' One of his most trusted advisers at the time, Seumas Dawes, was to reveal in _Labor in Power_ that the 1988 Budget was particularly important to Keating because he thought it might be his last budget in politics, 'almost as a last will and testament'.\n\nBut the warm inner glow of positive headlines, and whatever sense of goodwill remained in the Hawke\u2013Keating relationship had evaporated within a mere 24 hours. The budget was important politically in rebuilding Labor's stocks towards the next election within the next eighteen months. No seasoned politician would want to squander the goodwill it was generating. But inexplicably to those watching from the outside that's exactly what Hawke did.\n\nIn an ABC _7.30 Report_ interview with Paul Lyneham, Hawke signalled that his Treasurer was expendable and that there was plenty of talent in the wings to replace him if he decided to go. At a _Financial Review_ budget dinner that same night Hawke said he hoped to continue as Prime Minister for years to come. No amount of spin could hide the heavy and provocative message fired directly at his erstwhile friend, and the single biggest driving force within his government. The media had a field day, and the selling process went out the window.\n\nWithin the next 24 hours, Hawke was forced into damage control after a private lashing from Graham Richardson and some straight talking from other senior colleagues. So out he trotted for his next television interview\u2014this time with Ray Martin on _A Current Affair_. Suddenly Keating was the best Treasurer in the world, the best ever in Australia, who'd done a magnificent job for the nation.\n\nNobody was fooled. It descended further into farce after it emerged that in response to a phone call from Richardson, Keating had unloaded all his frustrations, describing Hawke and his actions in the most blistering terms. The conversation came to a sudden end when Keating discovered Richardson was using a car phone\u2014this, in an era when security on car phones was notoriously unreliable. That in turn gave Hawke the excuse to unload on Keating, also by phone, but this time a landline.\n\nWhat had been the government's key strength for five years was now in danger of becoming its greatest weakness.\n\nOn the Monday after the budget, the _Financial Review_ reported Labor's Senate Leader, John Button, saying that Hawke should set a timetable for an orderly leadership transition to Keating, possibly before the next election. It also quoted another senior minister that the best that could now be hoped for between Hawke and Keating was 'an orderly relationship without friendship'.\n\nEven acknowledging the major contributions to social and economic policy by other members of the Hawke Cabinet, and Hawke's own remarkable connection to the public at large that had helped Labor's stocks immeasurably, it was Hawke and Keating together who had spearheaded Labor's longest uninterrupted run in office\u2014and, in the process, changed the whole dynamic of Australia's economy.\n\n**KOB:** I want to come back to the 1987 and 1988 budgets against the background of constraint forced on you by the ongoing trade deficit problems. In the post-1987 Budget you virtually balanced the books with a projected $27 million deficit. When framing that budget and striving to get into surplus, did you start with a set goal to balance the books and then work backwards to find the savings, or was it just your usual hunt for whatever savings you could achieve and then see how close that got you to a balanced budget?\n\n**PJK:** I started with the goals pretty much as they turned out. This was my point, that the 1986 Budget was just a down payment on the national structural adjustment on the lower terms of trade. Had we even contemplated going to an election in 1987 without a further down payment on the budget which came in the May Statement that year, I don't believe Hawke and I would have got through that election without a currency collapse, particularly as Howard was offering those unfunded tax cuts of his.\n\nIf you look at Australia from abroad the government would have been seen to shirk the fiscal challenge while the alternative government was actually offering unfunded tax cuts. What was the point of the budget being back in surplus? So Australia could say there was no call on Australian savings by the government sector. And the markets couldn't find fault with whatever call the private sector made on Australian savings for investment in business growth because theoretically that investment would drive growth in the economy.\n\nThat's why I was heading to budget balance as quickly as I could, and after $4 billion of government spending cuts in the 1987 May Statement I had to go through the process again in the September Budget to bring the budget to balance.\n\n**KOB:** You're clearly proud of the fact that the government won the 1987 election off the back of that tough May Statement, but then the post-election budget in September sounded almost the opposite.\n\nNormally in the first budget of a parliamentary cycle the government takes the opportunity to get its more unpopular measures out of the road so public memories of the medicine have faded by the time the next election comes around. But if you look at the headlines, the 1987 Budget sounded more like a pre-election budget: 'Budget Bonanza', 'Home Rates Slashed', 'Tax Cuts Hint', 'Keating's Brilliant Budget'. You might remember calling it a '24-carat budget in a golden age of economic change'.\n\n**PJK:** Did I? There's some hyperbole in that. The explanation is simple enough. The bulk of the cuts were done in the May Statement. What I wanted to do was get Australia out of the cold while we had the opportunity. With these big headaches with the terms of trade it could not be apparent then that we would ever see anything like we've seen with the commodity boom post-2000, thanks largely to China.\n\nWe were forced to confront the notion that, as a commodity exporter and as an importer of high-technology goods, we'd be running structural current account deficits. The only way we could ask the world to provide international savings and therefore international debt to fund our national lifestyle was if we could say that the Commonwealth budget made no claim on Australian savings.\n\nBut to get out of the cold as quickly as we could I had to take the next step to getting the budget into surplus, which involved some further cuts in spending. But it was also helped by rising tax revenue in the context of continuing economic growth. That's why there was a minimum of political pain in the 1987 Budget and positive headlines. Growth and revenue were strong, and the cuts had been made earlier in the May Statement.\n\n**KOB:** The budget cuts represented the biggest real decline in spending for 30 years, most of which, as you say, had been achieved in the May Statement, but not all the commentary was flattering. Economist John Edwards, for instance, described your efforts as too smart by half. He criticised you for counting one billion dollars of asset sales as a savings measure rather than a one-off windfall\u2014I think you sold the Japanese Embassy real estate for a fat sum\u2014and I can remember the Opposition picking up on that at the time.\n\n**PJK:** John's commentary improved as he gathered experience. In the end money off the budget is money off the budget regardless of where the cuts or windfalls fall. But let me focus on the 2.4 per cent real reduction in spending\u2014that was a 2.4 per cent _real_ reduction in spending below the inflation rate. Budgets have never produced anything like this since. GDP growth was at 2.75 per cent: not remarkable, but not bad, a modest increase in the terms of trade of 2 per cent, yet we achieved a budget deficit of only $27 million, which we were able very soon after to revise to a surplus of $500-odd million.\n\n**KOB:** Ross Gittins and others wrote that it was at least partly achieved through the tax windfall from a booming economy and bracket creep. Gittins also wrote that: 'Mr Keating runs the risk that the economy will grow more quickly than he expects with consumer spending spilling into imports and limiting the improvement in the current account deficit.' Isn't that exactly what eventually happened, which ultimately led to a recession?\n\n**PJK:** Ross had good and bad moments with me. He used to like trying to prod us to get a reaction and to get more done. I kind of spoiled these guys. He and others were hard taskmasters. That was why I remarked about the complimentary _Financial Review_ front page. That was the only front page I ever had of that kind in all those years. As I've said, you'd put all the balls in the air and do your tricks but the best they would give you was mild applause and ask for the next trick. But nowhere else in the world was there anything like a 2.4 per cent real reduction in national budget outlays being undertaken.\n\nWhat happens is that you get confidence effects. All of a sudden you've got a government that's actually bringing outlays back to where they were 25 years earlier. You've got a government that's bringing the budget into surplus. You've got a government with a competitive exchange rate. You've got a government with a falling wage share and a rising profit share. Hardly surprising that it lit up an investment boom.\n\n**KOB:** But at the same time you were supposed to be trying to limit the boom so it didn't get out of hand, which it eventually did.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but what was Gittins arguing? That the big cuts of 1987 should have been even larger, or that the surplus should have been even bigger? The $380 million in new expenditure cuts in the budget on top of the $4 billion we'd identified in the May Statement was only a modest sum but in line with Bob's election commitment. But as a commentator Ross had already put the earlier $4 billion in his pocket and then said, 'Now what are you going to do?' I spoiled these fellows\u2014they kept on expecting trick after trick.\n\n**KOB:** You called it an achievement of historic proportions but within a week it was revealed that Peter Walsh had said in a private briefing in Perth that the budget had been oversold. He was quoted as saying the government lacked the political courage to tackle some 200 welfare programs. How did you react to that?\n\n**PJK:** In public life you're surrounded by people who are not up to the task of getting and managing power. Peter was a great finance minister but was not up to getting and holding power. We had a big run of positive headlines from that budget. Peter never understood that you needed that kind of political approbation to draw down the power necessary to continue making the big changes, and that if you were trying to run an unfashionable budget that had no public support for a clutch of hair-shirt changes, you came unstuck.\n\n**KOB:** Walsh was always about the blunt unadulterated truth, wasn't he?\n\n**PJK:** No, it wasn't an unadulterated truth\u2014or even plain truth. Complaint is not necessarily truth. Without the political skilling to get the things through, it is to no avail. Blunt truth has a place but political skilling is an altogether higher order matter. So-called truth without political facilitation\u2014well, you may as well whistle dixie.\n\nCan I just say something about senators, particularly senators involved in the financial management of the country? They are, of their essence, a more modest form of political life. They don't work on the big canvas, they generally don't have the political skills, they don't have a well-defined electorate to answer to, they can't sell the material, they can't draw down the power and they can't get the changes done. They don't have the same compulsion or frame of reference as a treasurer in the House of Representatives.\n\nBut a treasurer can't do everything. You do need finance ministers and other ministers helping. Some ministers from the Senate are more politically attuned than others, more capable of drawing down political authority from the community and exercising it, but often they don't. As much as Peter Walsh contributed to that gruelling line-by-line budget process over all those years, he was not politically adroit. I still had to set the economic parameters and do the packaging. And when push came to shove, ramrod the budget savings through the ERC (Expenditure Review Committee).\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly wrote the day after the revelations about Walsh's budget criticism that there was a split between the two of you over the pace of change. What defined the split?\n\n**PJK:** Peter had this obsession with what he thought were 'leftie' policies that underpinned the social wage and social security system and he wanted to hop into a lot of social security programs. Some of what he wanted to cut you could justify, but in terms of the macro changes the country had been through and our response to them, there was no basis for any real complaint on his part. There was no basis for rational objection to what the government had chosen to do, including the programs it had chosen to protect rather than to cut.\n\nBeing maudlin about some program he thought touchable because the Left had supported it was really wearying.\n\n**KOB:** For all his eccentricities did you miss Walsh when he went?\n\n**PJK:** I did, and I talked him into staying the first time he wanted to resign. He was a great hand, but he got to the point where the negativity and moods became counter-productive. You have to pull caucus colleagues onto the task and sign them up, not confront and alienate them. Peter made a great contribution but the political job of shaping change and then selling it was not one of his strengths.\n\n**KOB:** In October 1987 you suddenly had to deal with a major global sharemarket crash. How hard was it to read how that was going to affect the Australian economy? Were you getting conflicting advice on its impact or were your various different arms of advice in agreement?\n\n**PJK:** Important question. In the wake of the crash Bob Johnston attended the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers' club in Basel in Switzerland. The BIS believed that the crash portended another 1930s-type Depression; that this was the first shock in what was going to be a large slide in equities across the world.\n\nJohnston returned to Australia with a clear message to keep monetary conditions accommodating and I emphasise the word 'accommodating'\u2014softly, softly. He was particularly worried about the big exposure that the Australian commercial banks faced. They had $10 or $12 billion in debt out to Robert Holmes a Court. They had billions out to Murdoch. They had billions more out to Alan Bond and these would have massive effects on their capital base in the event of collapses. So Bob Johnston was keen to look at financial market conditions and policy and he advised me that he should keep monetary conditions more accommodating when otherwise I should have liked interest rates to rise to keep the boom in check.\n\n**KOB:** What was Treasury saying?\n\n**PJK:** They would have liked to have increased the rates but probably didn't have the courage to say so. I think they went along with the Johnston view, which was a very informed view. This was the consensus in the BIS, that the stockmarket crash was the first instalment of a 1930s Depression phase.\n\n**KOB:** But did you argue the toss with him? When he said 'keep a soft approach on interest rates' did you say to him 'I think they should be higher'?\n\n**PJK:** I did, but I didn't know with certainty what the effects would be either. The markets went down 27 per cent in one hit. It was huge. But when I went to Noosa with the family for a holiday in January and saw cranes everywhere across the skyline, I rang Bob Johnston and said, 'Bob, there's a bear transfer going on up here from stocks to property and we should be rethinking interest rates.'\n\nHe said, 'Oh, I wouldn't let cranes from last year influence you too much, Treasurer.'\n\nI said, 'Well, intuitively I'm telling you, Bob, I think the economy hasn't missed a beat and it's jumped over the stockmarket crash and it's basically still off and running. There's so much pent-up demand that I don't think we can leave monetary conditions soft into 1988.'\n\nHe said, 'Well, let's wait and see.'\n\nAs it turned out, I was right. There was no particular pleasure in being right because it just meant we were storing up problems down the road, but the Reserve Bank did keep monetary conditions soft, with lower interest rates into 1988 against my otherwise firm judgement. By April and May I was telling Bob Johnston and the Board, 'In my opinion we should be putting rates up now because if we don't, we'll just cop a hiding from demand later this year or next.' At this point Treasury was more or less with me.\n\n**KOB:** At the same time as all this was happening, there was a kind of Roaring Twenties mentality going on in the banks. The country was awash with easy money, free-spending entrepreneurs littered the landscape, developers were running amok, and the banks were lending like crazy.\n\n**PJK:** That's right. The banks were trying to protect their base against the foreign banks so they were bankrolling second- and third-rate business propositions just so the foreigners didn't get any share of it in the first flush of deregulation.\n\n**KOB:** And some of the people lining up for money were complete spivs, not to put too fine a point on it.\n\n**PJK:** Well, there was a lot of spivery at the time.\n\n**KOB:** But these were your reforms and this goes to the dilemma of significant reform throwing up unintended consequences. Could you reasonably have been expected to foresee that this was going to happen, or does that let you off the hook too easily?\n\n**PJK:** A whole lot of things came together at once. The real wage overhang had dropped so the profit share had risen, the budget had moved into surplus, confidence had come back to the exchange rate, monetary conditions were more accommodating\u2014all of this turned into a heady mix bringing on a massive boom in investment\u2014investment which the nation had needed for years.\n\n**KOB:** Except that a significant amount of that investment was not productive. A lot of it was speculative and added little to the economy.\n\n**PJK:** But a lot of it was productive, and the fact is we'd had low investment to GDP for donkeys' years in Australia and all of a sudden we have our dream investments happening in a big way, but it was just too big.\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly has written that you went through 1988 wanting the best of both worlds. You wanted to tighten monetary policy but you wanted to deny responsibility, misjudging the clout that was needed to halt the boom. In his view you were saying to the Reserve Bank 'I think we should be putting interest rates up' but you didn't want the risk of electoral odium for being the one fronting the public and explaining why. Kelly says Bob Johnston said subsequently that perhaps he should take responsibility for that because he was saying 'softly, softly'.\n\n**PJK:** I didn't want 'softly, softly'. I wanted to get the impact of an announcement that interest rates were going up substantially. I wanted to put rates up by one percentage point, for a start, and other steps of 1 per cent to tell all the people out there in the marketplace, 'You need to understand that the party has to cool down. The Bank is putting rates up and we're announcing it.' And that's what I was saying to the Reserve. But again, the Bank was new to the business of managing monetary policy under a floating exchange rate.\n\nThey had the problem of the 1987 crash and these big open positions with the banks, with entrepreneurs like Bond and Holmes a Court and Murdoch. They were now prepared to tighten but they had this expression in the bank called 'snugging', which meant they could put the actual official interest rate up or down slightly without people noticing, and I used to say, 'But we want them to notice because we want them to change their behaviour. Having a tighter monetary policy without the impact of an announcement just denies us the effect we're after. It means we're going to end up having interest rates higher for longer.' These days the Reserve Bank publishes a statement after each meeting.\n\n**KOB:** I realise I'm saying this with the great wisdom of hindsight, but did it occur to you then to suggest a system of statements by the Reserve Bank with each interest-rate movement?\n\n**PJK:** These were the first building blocks of an independent Reserve Bank evolving from the bond-selling age before the float and I had to go with the Governor at the pace he and the board thought the Bank, as an institution, should go. I couldn't run the Bank from Canberra and I didn't try. This was the world post-float. In the end the Reserve Bank had to grow up and we all had to grow with it.\n\n**KOB:** But even though the Reserve Bank was now more independent of government than in the past, if you felt so strongly that they weren't moving quickly enough in early 1988 to signal their intent to use interest rates quite toughly to take the heat out of a booming economy, why couldn't you have found a politically acceptable way to start your own jawboning process with strong public warnings that interest rates were well and truly in play if the investment splurge continued, that there were big risks ahead for investors and the working community?\n\n**PJK:** This all gets back to the global stockmarket collapse of October 1987 and the judgement made by the Bank for International Settlements about this. The Australian Reserve Bank was part of the BIS structure and couldn't ignore their advice. No point the Treasurer saying one thing and the Bank not following through.\n\n**KOB:** With a Reserve Bank now more independent of government, did you feel that you had the right to express the concerns publicly that you were expressing privately, about the need for a tougher interest-rate regime to bring growth back under control? Not to imply any disagreement between you and the Bank, but at least telling the investment and business community what was in store if they didn't start reining in the madness?\n\n**PJK:** The _Reserve Bank Act_ had a clause which said the Board and the Treasurer should endeavour to agree. I knew that a very open-minded and courageous fellow like Bob Johnston would take this cautious view about monetary policy in the face of the growing buoyancy in the economy only if he felt he had to. The thing I had to do was convince him that that judgement was in the end wrong: that there wasn't going to be another big collapse and the economy had just gone over the stockmarket crash like a wheel over a pothole; that we'd seen a big growth in non-residential construction and residential construction; that the cities were booming; that the banks were lending like fury to stop the foreign banks encroaching on their traditional customer base; and that the right thing to do was to change the stance of monetary policy.\n\nI took the view that it was not possible to move them publicly without disrupting altogether the relationship I had established in the early development of an independent central bank. This was five years after the float and the move to genuine independence for the Bank, so you can't at the same time wilfully undermine the notion of independence by being seen to be in open conflict with the Bank, or have the markets interpret that you're trying to instruct them on what to do.\n\nWe had to jawbone the Bank privately rather than engage in the risky strategy of trying to publicly jawbone the lenders and the borrowers into understanding that the boom was unsustainable and hope that they'd see sense.\n\nThat's why Don Russell from my office would talk each week to the Deputy Governor John Phillips about monetary conditions and policy, with the recurring question, 'How much more buoyancy do you want to see before you are convinced that your concerns over the 1987 crash are no longer valid?'\n\nJust to give you an idea of what the economy was doing at that time, the growth forecast by the Joint Economic Forecasting Group would periodically revise the previous budget's growth forecast, and in January 1988 they revised it to 3 per cent. By April they'd revised it up to 4.25 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** By May 1988 you'd had another mini-budget, introducing tariff cuts and a 20 per cent cut to corporate tax. Broadly it was supposed to keep the lid on growth again while paying down debt and foreshadowing tax cuts as a payoff for wage restraint, but coming up to the August budget the economy was still running too strongly again, wasn't it?\n\n**PJK:** It was. The budget went into surplus by $5.5 billion, the first massive surplus of its kind, around 1 per cent of GDP or a little under. An Australian first. So again it was tight government spending. And we were picking up the revenue from growth.\n\nAll this produced a very substantial surplus and at the same time we had these big changes in the air after the May Statement, like the cuts in the company rate from 49 to 39 cents in the dollar. Contemporary governments have been flat out cutting 1 per cent in the dollar from the corporate tax rate. In the May Statement of 1988 we cut it by ten percentage points, not 10 per cent, but ten percentage points. It was about a 20 per cent cut in the actual rate. The dollar hit 80 cents. This was really a very, very good period for us.\n\n**KOB:** But, once again, in both mini-budget and the budget proper, you and your colleagues were back in the parliamentary dungeon of the ERC process, the queues of ministers lining up to argue against cuts in their spending programs, the forensic line-by-line hunt to locate more money. More fatigue again?\n\n**PJK:** Same atmosphere, again more fatigue. Tightening Australia's fiscal policy, pulling down the structural level of outlays was a killing task that took the better part of the decade to do. That was when Peter Walsh came to see me.\n\nHe said, 'I'm resigning. I've had it. I honestly don't know how you go on and you've got a finger in every pie. I've had it. I'm brain dead.'\n\nI said, 'Oh Walshie, don't give up. We can get a bit more mileage out of you.'\n\nHe said, 'No, no, not this time. This time I'm going.'\n\n**KOB:** After that 1988 May Statement, in which you announced the first big tariff cuts since Whitlam fifteen years before, you floated for the first time that labour-market reform was the last great area of change to be tackled. You'd had all the other macro reforms, you had the tariff cuts in play. Can you remember how this clear signal from you that you had yet another big reform idea, which threatened nearly a century-old tradition for the whole labour movement, impacted on Bob Hawke, on Cabinet, on caucus and on the unions?\n\n**PJK:** That _Financial Review_ article also reported on my briefing to caucus immediately after the May Statement, which it described as 'a message of hope and a warning':\n\nAs he dropped the document on the table in front of him, he [Keating] said, 'Well here it is folks, all you people who thought you were going to lose your seats at the next election, this'll save you, this'll get us back into government.\n\n'A Labor Government has got to have an ongoing reform agenda. If you don't then you'll be like a dead cat in the middle of the road, being run over by a steamroller.\n\n'By moving to declare labour market flexibility as the next great challenge Mr Keating advanced on to almost the last area of policy ground the federal government has tried to stake out for itself, and into which there may be the trickiest challenge. But whereas on most other issues the government has stolen the Opposition's silver, on this issue voters have a clear choice.'\n\nThe May Statement was negotiated bit by bit with the trade union leadership; the tax strategy, the predictive costs, the removal of restrictions on the operations of government businesses; the personal tax cuts etc. Mr Keating's way to reform is the cooperative, consultative way. Howard's way to labour market reform is reducing union power. These are the hostile lines of difference.\n\nYou've got to understand that the _Financial Review_ , in saying that, understood that Bob Hawke loved the centralised industrial relations system, he loved the Arbitration Commission where he'd built his reputation and credibility, that he would never move to a system of enterprise decentralisation.\n\nBill Kelty and I at that stage had agreed on award restructuring. This was the first step down the road of labour-market deregulation. It had to come. You've got to remember that with award restructuring there were a huge number of awards governing wages and conditions between employers and employees, and there were many layers within awards as well.\n\nAward restructuring and the rationalisation of unions together represented a big challenge in their own right. That was independent of the need to move away from a centralised wage-fixing system. This was the start of that particular reform process but I had to wait until I became Prime Minister to move away from the centralised process to a system of collective bargaining. Bob simply wouldn't have a bar of it.\n\n**KOB:** While all this was going on it seemed, at least according to media coverage, that leadership tensions continued to bubble away. It's notable looking back through your newspaper archive how the speculation continued to swirl around through 1987 and the first half of 1988 for no apparent reason. One minute it's being reported that a succession plan is being put in place to smooth your path, the next minute Hawke has strengthened his position. One minute he's nominating you as his successor, the next he's talking about Beazley or Mick Young. A lot of these things seemed to come out of a clear blue sky but the leadership issue was never quite off the boil, was it?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, because this was all a product of the psychological state Bob was in, which these days he and the Hawke forces wish to deny. But when you talk about all the fluctuating leadership speculation, here's another banner, 'PM's judgement worries the ALP'. This is 14 March 1988: 'Senior members of the Labor Party are seriously concerned about the political judgement of the Prime Minister. The recent upheaval shows alarming signs of turning into a fundamental loss of direction.'\n\nYou see, there was no spiritual nourishment of the Cabinet by Bob from 1984 at least until 1990. And there are repeats of these stories in every year\u20141985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990.\n\n**KOB:** It was always a sexy story for the media, and an easy story in a way, but are you saying that fundamentally there was no structured push for the leadership from you or others on your behalf through those years, but that broadly it was just reflecting an underlying restlessness within caucus?\n\n**PJK:** No, there was no push. Here's another piece by Geoff Kitney in 1988:\n\nOf greatest concern to some senior Labor Party figures in the government and the party organisation are signs Mr Hawke seems to be unaware and unconcerned about the seriousness of the problems his government is now experiencing.\n\nHawke's contact with the Labor backbench and particularly caucus members in marginal seats has been almost non-existent since the election. He has not met once since the election with the marginal seat holders, and there has not been a full ministerial meeting to discuss political strategy.\n\nIn fact there has not even been any real opportunity for the Cabinet to discuss political strategy, and the Treasurer Mr Keating, the sharpest political operator of all in the Cabinet, has been preoccupied with the demands of his portfolio and the problems in the NSW state Labor Party.\n\n**KOB:** Almost immediately after the May Statement Kerry Packer's _Bulletin_ devoted a huge amount of space to you with a cover headline that read in bold print: 'The Next Prime Minister.' The opening sentence simply said: 'Paul Keating has started his run for the top job.' Can you remember what prompted such a big, flattering spread?\n\n**PJK:** Well, these things were popping up. In March 1988, for instance, there's a story headed, 'Hayden anoints Keating as future prime minister'. Then there's 'PM's judgement worries the ALP', that's also March. Then a piece from Warwick Costin in the _Sunday Telegraph_ on 20 March, 'Labor looking to life after Hawke'. Another one, 'Bob Hawke's imperial delusions' from Paul Kelly in the _Australian_.\n\nThere was all this disquiet about Hawke and his leadership, and that was the primary generator of those stories. They did not reflect my ambitions or my restlessness. They reflected Bob. Bob as he had become.\n\nWe then come to the 1988 Budget, where Hawke says the day after the Budget that I was expendable; he didn't need me any more after I'd been keeping 90 per cent of the economic balls in the air for five consecutive years.\n\nUnlike having the Parliament in London or Paris, in an isolated place like Canberra where MPs live in the place morning, noon and night, where every bit of corridor gossip is transmitted through the gallery, you cannot have the Prime Minister in a hole for four or five years, and not have it as the currency of discussion.\n\n**KOB:** But it must have been like Chinese water torture for him, the long, slow drip.\n\n**PJK:** It was, but he couldn't do anything to get himself out of it. Intellectually he didn't seem able to summon the energy to pull himself out of it. I think he understood I wasn't behind the stories because I think he knew that he was the cause of them himself but he didn't know how to remedy it. There was a kind of resignation about it. Bob was in daily contact with me through much of that time. You get a feeling when you're in that kind of intense daily contact whether another person is after you, is seeking to dislodge you, and Bob knew I wasn't after him.\n\n**KOB:** Yet this speculation continued.\n\n**PJK:** But you must remember that a lot of the Centre Left ministers talked regularly and unguardedly to the _National Times_ , the _Financial Review_ and others, and so often they would put commentary around. Peter Walsh was at it perpetually. Some people might have assumed it was me, but it was not me\u2014definitely not me.\n\n**KOB:** Shortly after the _Bulletin_ splash another story emerged that Hawke had held discussions with senior colleagues on the possibility of moving you from Treasury in a ministerial reshuffle. Do you remember that?\n\n**PJK:** I do recall that, and I said to Bob, 'There's no way I'm going to Foreign Affairs or somewhere like that. I'm not giving up the key job to go somewhere else.'\n\n**KOB:** Do you think Hawke was serious?\n\n**PJK:** He didn't have the courage to force it on me.\n\n**KOB:** Is it true, as Paul Kelly has written, that you went into the 1988 Budget hoping it would be your last as Treasurer and trying to make it your best, your 'bringing home the bacon' budget?\n\n**PJK:** That was a possible scenario. You've got to remember that the party had no inclination to change the leadership at that point and Bob had shown no inclination to leave. I was always first and foremost a realist. So I did the May Statement and I did the budget three months later and it nearly killed me doing both but I didn't expect to end up leader of the party as a consequence.\n\nAt the same time I was hoping in 1988 Bob might say something firmly to me about his intentions in the longer run, that it wouldn't just drift on year after year. I couldn't keep doing this indefinitely. It was too debilitating, and I thought we'd reached a point where he might say to me, 'Look I'll go around again for one more election in 1990 and after that I'll take off.'\n\n**KOB:** If, as Kelly wrote, you saw the 1988 Budget as the centrepiece of your ultimate case for the Lodge, might it have been a different budget if you weren't also seeing it in the context of leadership? The underlying point he was making was that the budget papers revealed a level of economic growth that would strain Australia's external deficit again.\n\n**PJK:** The fact is, I had no realistic\u2014and could never have had any realistic\u2014expectation that I would become leader of the party after the 1988 Budget. The caucus wanted to keep Bob and me. Even in my own broad faction on the Right, I wouldn't have had a majority of their votes, and there was no way Bob was going to move.\n\n**KOB:** So you weren't taking soundings, month by month, or even every six months?\n\n**PJK:** No. There was a lot of press criticism of Bob coming through in 1988, but that had had nothing to do with me. Paul Kelly may have written that I thought the 1988 Budget would have been my last, but I can't see how it could have been my last without Bob's acquiescence. That is, his agreement to leave.\n\n**KOB:** Can I just clear up any confusion in what you've said about Bob Hawke as Prime Minister through this whole period? On the one hand you contend that he didn't have the zing of his early years, but on the other hand you don't argue that he was still responsible for 27 ministers, putting in long hours and getting across the briefs with oversight of every piece of policy development in each of those ministries, that he carried a significant part of the foreign policy load, the big international relationships, and he was ultimately responsible for making sure that every political brush fire that flared up across every ministry was put out.\n\n**PJK:** I would confirm that description with not a problem. Of course he was. But rote toil could never amount to inspiration or perspicacity. There was a sense of absence by Bob within the real meaning and purpose of Cabinet leadership.\n\n**KOB:** You certainly scored some triumphant headlines from Budget night 1988, but Bob Hawke made comments in two forums the day after. One was a television interview with Paul Lyneham on the _7.30 Report_ in which he said you weren't indispensable as Treasurer, and that if you chose to leave there were a number of other talented ministers who could do the job well. The other was a post-budget dinner in which he dropped another provocative line that he'd like to be back as Prime Minister for another six such dinners. It's an understatement to say you took exception.\n\n**PJK:** Of course I took exception. In saying he'd stay six more years, Bob was completely failing to understand the nature of his relationship with me and the government, or to even acknowledge it.\n\nSecondly he knew that I had done a superhuman task of getting that big May Statement and the tariff cuts and the rest of it into place, and lining up for another August Budget. There was no hint of acknowledgement of these things from him, no hint of appreciation. The message I took from that was that the partnership was over. I had done too well and that jealousy in Bob got the better of him.\n\nI'm not sure how he expected me to react, but I told him I wasn't prepared to be another one of the handmaidens he'd had for most of his career. I repeated to him what I'd said before, that there were two leaders within the government, and I wasn't going to be treated in this way.\n\nHis timing was a wilful act of vandalism because it completely distracted the public from all the good news we were enjoying from the budget with that massive surplus of $5.5 billion. It had been extremely well received, and the dollar shot up to 80 cents off the back of it. Yet the Prime Minister was happy to punch a hole in it. A hole in the absolute best effort of his own government.\n\n**KOB:** But Hawke and others from his office have said since that what drove his comments at that point was that he was sick of you denigrating him behind his back to colleagues and journalists.\n\n**PJK:** I was too busy with the May Statement and the budget to denigrate anyone. I hadn't had time to scratch. Both had almost consigned me to the sick bed. Imagine in all that me talking to press gallery journalists about Bob\u2014of all things. This is post-event rationalisation by Hawke's rusted-on advisory staff. I never denigrated Bob to a journalist, ever. In my own office I might give Bob a bagging if he did something badly in some ERC round or something of that ilk, but that was it. I never ever took the discussion outside of my office.\n\n**KOB:** Not even to other close colleagues, other MPs?\n\n**PJK:** It was a very professional place. You couldn't go around knocking the Prime Minister among Cabinet colleagues and at the same time maintain equilibrium within Cabinet. You couldn't do that. It doesn't work.\n\n**KOB:** But you know how Canberra operates. You know that indiscretion rules at least as strongly as discretion, gossip rules as much as secrecy, and if the noise were there, then one way or another it was coming from you or your camp followers.\n\n**PJK:** The fact is, I was doing for Bob and the government things no treasurer had ever done before. I had set up and won the previous election in the main, so what we needed was some acknowledgement by Bob that a transition had to come at some point, and to sit down and talk about it, which he patently refused to do. That said, I was so busy doing the May Statement and then the budget out of policy ambition and professional pride. The idea that, at the same time, I was swanning around the press gallery talking about Bob is just a complete nonsense.\n\n**KOB:** But put yourself in his shoes. There had been ongoing speculation in the media about the leadership, then came the 1988 Budget with all the adulatory headlines it attracted for you. Can you understand how unsettled he must have been by them, to make that rather drastic comment about you being expendable?\n\n**PJK:** Of course he was unsettled\u2014he had been outclassed. He was not nourishing the government, he was not providing the leadership, he was not driving the remedial changes to our collapsing terms of trade and the need of the budget to move back into surplus. And with all the structural changes into the bargain. In the end he was sitting there like a bunny in the headlights. And a bunny in the headlights is a very uncomfortable place to be.\n\n**KOB:** I just want to get the chronology right after Hawke's comments to Paul Lyneham on _7.30 Report_ and then the _Financial Review_ budget dinner. Richardson reportedly read Hawke the riot act on your behalf and that prompted Hawke to go back on television to sing your praises to an embarrassing degree. Had you talked to Bob Hawke before Richardson did?\n\n**PJK:** No, I hadn't. But you've got to remember that two budgets a year, in May and August through all those years, were so debilitating intellectually, psychologically and in health terms, to be told after we're back into surplus and the government is back on top, that he doesn't need me anymore was the height of indecency. It was shocking. Low.\n\nSo of course I reacted to it. The point was, he only had to say to me, 'Let's try to get through the next poll and after that I'll hang my gloves up.'\n\nThat's all he had to say. He wouldn't have had to even nominate a time. There didn't need to be any formality. It only had to be genuine. The narcissist in him simply wouldn't allow him to contemplate it.\n\n**KOB:** You've also said you took a hit to your health in the final days leading up to the 1988 Budget. In what way?\n\n**PJK:** It was such a shocking workload, and in the Canberra winter I'd picked up some sort of throat infection. In the five days after Cabinet signed off on the budget and it was being printed, I agreed to visit the electorates of two of my colleagues in Western Sydney. Fundamentally I had the flu, and a throat infection. After spending time in the electorates I did a dinner in the evening\u2014I could barely talk and was sopping wet with sweat by the end of the night. When I went back to Richmond RAAF Base to fly to Canberra I was so weak I could barely get up the stairs of the plane. The next day I saw my doctor and he diagnosed a badly inflamed throat and a chest infection. I had to deliver the budget within a couple of days and he gave me a wide-spectrum antibiotic called Vibramycin, one of the tetracycline family of drugs.\n\nReading the newspapers at 6.30 the next morning in the quiet of Canberra I suddenly heard a buzz in my ear. The drug had given me tinnitus, a whistle in the ear. It turned out subsequently that these drugs were known to attack the hair cells in the inner ear. I'd run myself into such poor health doing the May Statement and then the budget preparations, and struggled to get through budget night to find the very next night, Bob goes out and says, 'I can do without him.'\n\nInstead of us all going out there to sell a high-octane budget, I'm dealing with headlines about how Hawke signals he can live without Keating. The utter villainy of it was manifest.\n\n**KOB:** Are you saying that the state of your health contributed to the strength of your reaction?\n\n**PJK:** No. It was such a wilful, catty statement, so I ticked him off well and truly. And I didn't miss, I can tell you.\n\n**KOB:** At some point in that upheaval after the budget Graham Richardson rang you on his car phone to talk about Hawke's comments, and you dumped on Hawke without realising it was not a secure line. Can you describe that conversation?\n\n**PJK:** I can't remember exactly what I said but I do remember that I was hot with rage about it. I was so disappointed. It was so crude of Bob, made worse by the fact that it was coming from someone who was so vulnerable, and who had surrendered so much of the drive that is fundamental to leadership. I get into you right upfront and when I spoke to Bob I got into him right upfront. I could never be accused of saying anything about Bob that I hadn't said to him face to face.\n\n**KOB:** Was it in the car phone conversation with Richardson that you said the relationship with Hawke was dead in the water?\n\n**PJK:** Something like that. Richardson was angry. He knew Bob had blundered and was worried that I might walk. I can't remember exactly what I said in the heat of the moment but I did call Hawke an envious little so-and-so. But Hawke then went back on television to say what a good Treasurer I was. It was all pretty phoney but nevertheless it took some of the heat out of the public spectacle.\n\n**KOB:** And well into the conversation you suddenly realised Richardson was on his car phone.\n\n**PJK:** I said, 'You're not on a car phone, are you?' And he said, 'Yeah,' and I said, 'You're a bloody fool, Graham,' and I hung up.\n\n**KOB:** Hawke then heard about you sounding off against him on the car phone and not surprisingly took the opportunity to dump back on you.\n\n**PJK:** But the central point about all this is, leave a political void, and someone will fill it. I was simply doing my job for the government as best I could, and the more I filled the void, the more Bob resented it. And he resented it notwithstanding the fact that he knew I was not trying to take him down or bring on a leadership challenge. My mere presence and my style doing the stuff annoyed the hell out of him.\n\nThe economic task was so overwhelmingly large and it was so obvious that I was in charge of it, that while ever I was Treasurer in a big reform phase I surpassed him in the public stakes.\n\nI was due to go to Washington to an IMF meeting the following week, and two of my closest staff said that I should think about my future while I was away. One said I should think very hard about whether I should bother to stay. The other very strongly urged me to resign and leave Parliament. He said, 'Don't think about it, just leave.'\n\nWhen I did think it through I came to the view that if I walked away, Hawke would probably lose the 1990 election and we'd be handing the fruits of all our sweat and toil to the Liberals. Why hand them a completely remodelled economy after they'd sat on their hands for a half-century?\n\nBob and I subsequently had a discussion about the leadership at the Lodge when I got back.\n\nI said, 'Bob I've never asked you for any guarantees about when you would go but the idea that you stay indefinitely and that I stay here doing one handstand after another, one trick after another with all this laborious work, year in and year out, is just not acceptable. I've got to have some acknowledgement from you that you see there's an endgame here.'\n\nI pointed out that the electoral clock was ticking for us, and that our next election was our fourth, that we'd never won four in a row before and that if we did win, we would be on borrowed time. Great companies and great businesses all have succession planning. This was the longest period in government the Labor Party had ever had, and the party deserved a succession plan, and I think I deserved a succession plan.\n\nBut Bob thought he could just continue winning. The ego was never touched.\n\nHe did win in 1990, but with a ton of help from me. I set up the 1990 election and the budget before it, just as I had in 1987. It was the old Stiffy and Mo routine. Without me, the 1987 and 1990 election wins wouldn't have happened.\n\n**KOB:** The postscript to that whole contretemps was the Kirribilli Agreement, the secret meeting at the Prime Minister's Sydney residence where you each had a witness as you signed a deal in which he promised to retire from the job at a sensible time after the 1990 election. Whose idea was it to have a formal agreement?\n\n**PJK:** Hawke proposed the Kirribilli Agreement. I told him I wanted to know what he was doing, and how long he was intending to stay, but the whole idea about his business friend Peter Abeles being there, the formality of it all, was his idea. I then asked to have Bill Kelty there as well but the idea for Kirribilli came from him.\n\n**KOB:** That must have been one of the most surreal moments in your political life, because when it eventually became public it certainly seemed bizarre to the rest of us.\n\n**PJK:** It was kind of bizarre. At that Lodge meeting in 1988, after I'd returned from the United States, he said to me\u2014and I'll never forget this\u2014'Of course, you don't appreciate the significance of my work in foreign affairs, like apartheid, for instance.'\n\nI said, 'Well, Treasury helped you set up the financial sanctions on South Africa. I'm well aware of that, Bob.'\n\nHe said, 'Well, I'm going to be handed the keys to the City of London as an acknowledgement by Britain of my role in the Commonwealth, and I want to stay as Prime Minister at least long enough to have those keys handed to me.'\n\nI didn't know whether to burst out laughing or crying. Here he is, telling me that the reason he wants to stay Prime Minister is to be presented with the keys to the City of London, and he meant it.\n\nWhen he suggested he bring Peter Abeles along as a kind of witness I said, 'Bob, if we're going to do this, you can bring Peter and I'll bring Bill Kelty.'\n\nPeter was a lovely guy and a friend to both of us but he would always be Bob's friend before he'd be my friend in a squeeze, and I couldn't expect Peter to come out in the full glare of the public eye bearing witness to the events, whereas I felt that if Bill Kelty was there as a much more robust public figure, it would put a seal on the deal if there was any dispute later. At least then everyone would know what had happened.\n\n**KOB:** What took place at that meeting?\n\n**PJK:** It was all very polite. We sat in the main drawing room at Kirribilli and after a bit of chit-chat Bob came to the point and said, 'Everyone here is familiar with the purpose of the meeting. I'm prepared to think about leaving the job voluntarily, and according to discussions I've had with Paul, that would be sometime after the 1990 election.'\n\nI said the only thing I needed was at least a year as Prime Minister to garner a larger and different public profile than the one I had as Treasurer before I had to face the electorate in my own right. Since I'd had the tough and sometimes unpopular job of economic reconstruction, I thought it was reasonable to expect some time to establish myself in the leadership role. But given Bob's sensitivities and since he'd made the gesture of having the meeting, I didn't want to press the point about having a more precise timetable for his departure.\n\nThe one really odd moment in the conversation was when Bob decided to give me a bit of a lecture about being more respectful of the colleagues by being on time for Cabinet meetings. If I was late for Cabinet meetings it wasn't long, and usually it would be because I was trying to finesse submissions beforehand about which there was some disagreement, so we didn't have to confront them in the actual Cabinet meeting.\n\nAs Bill Kelty and I were leaving Kirribilli, he had a chuckle over this new prerequisite for being Prime Minister\u2014never being late for Cabinet. The fact is, I could never have got the big changes through Cabinet over those years from 1983 if I had shown my colleagues the contempt Bob seemed to be suggesting.\n\nBob kept insisting on one condition. After we'd shaken hands on the deal, just as we walked out the door, he said again, 'Remember the one condition: any public utterances about this and the bargain's off.'\n\nSo we all walked away with the assumption that the agreement would never see the light of day because there would be an orderly transition at some point.\n\nI think the important thing is that in Blanche d'Alpuget's book, _Hawke: The Prime Minister_ , she said, 'Bob was very happy about the Kirribilli Agreement.'\n\nI believe the reason he was happy was that he never intended to keep the commitment in the first place. I'm completely convinced of that. It became apparent to me by 1989 and into 1990 that Bob had no intention of keeping the Kirribilli Agreement, that he had offered it to me in 1988 to pacify any inclinations I might have had of pursuing the leadership through 1989 and into 1990.\n\nThe key point is that Bob never accepted that there were two leaders in the one government and that, at some point, he had to make space for the other. His vanity led him to believe he was the one and only one. In the end he was prepared to deploy a lie, a deception, to stay on unchallenged for three years\u2014the Kirribilli Agreement.\nTHE WINDS OF RECESSION\n\nIn the modern global economy recession seems to be a recurring fact of life decade by decade. Australia's first postwar recession was in 1952 after a spectacular wool boom and the Korean War. The next was 1961, then 1974\u201375, then 1982, and 1991\u201392.\n\nIn almost all cases, the Australian economic slowdowns coincided with international recessions. The only one we avoided where America and Europe succumbed was in 2008\u201309, when the Rudd Government threw everything but the kitchen sink at the economy by way of fiscal stimulus to keep it growing.\n\nIn his Boyer Lectures in 2006, the former Reserve Bank Governor Ian Macfarlane exhaustively analysed Australia's 1991 recession and pointed out that of the eighteen biggest OECD countries, seventeen experienced a recession in the early 1990s. This wasn't exclusively an Australian slowdown.\n\nWhat seemed different about 1991 compared to other recessions in Australia was that so much of the odium attached very personally to Paul Keating. In previous slowdowns the political blame seemed to lie much more with the Prime Minister than his Treasurer.\n\nMenzies wore the 1952 and 1961 recessions. Politically, Whitlam copped the flak from 1974 rather than Frank Crean, and Malcolm Fraser rather than his Treasurer, John Howard, wore 1982. Menzies nearly lost in 1961, Whitlam and Fraser did lose in 1975 and 1983 respectively, and in all three cases recession was a primary factor.\n\nBut for many Australians who had begun to feel the brunt of the 1991 recession long before it was formally confirmed, this was Keating's recession, not Hawke's.\n\nLooking back, the reasons seem obvious. Keating was the person most associated with the eight years of economic reform preceding it. He was the super salesman who had educated the press gallery and the wider community to a higher level of economic literacy over those years. He was the politician whose air of confidence was often separated from arrogance by a very thin line, whose dominance of the Parliament was of huge strategic importance to the government but didn't always go down well with the public, particularly after television broadcasting was introduced.\n\nAnd finally, when he had to stare down the nation and acknowledge that Australia was officially in recession, he chose defiance over commiseration. This was 'the recession we had to have'.\n\nI remember the press conference. It was one of those moments you instinctively knew at the time was going to become a part of history. The parliamentary committee room was packed to the gunnels, standing room only. We all knew Keating wasn't going to take a backward step. He never did. His press conferences often went for close to an hour and this was no exception.\n\nAs he often did, he painted word pictures and conjured up imagery that caught the attention of even those with a bare working knowledge of economics. At one earlier press conference he had likened the economy to the champagne glass that was so effervescent it was bubbling over the sides. He probably walked back to his office thinking this one had gone all right, and in the sense that he commanded the room, it had.\n\nAs it turned out, the politics were all wrong.\n\nHow had it come to this?\n\nIt is interesting to reflect more than twenty years later on the way Hawke and Keating managed their reform agenda, and how, the further they sailed into uncharted waters, the harder it got.\n\nThe first seven of the Hawke\u2013Keating years yielded average annual GDP growth of 4.5 per cent and annual growth in employment of nearly 3.5 per cent, which was pretty remarkable coming out of the turbulence of the 1970s and the 1982 recession.\n\nUnemployment came down in that period from 10.2 per cent to 5.6 per cent, inflation from 11.5 to 7.5 per cent, and notwithstanding the problems with the current account deficit and at times the wildly fluctuating dollar, the economy was going like the clappers. But even though inflation was down, it was defying all attempts to bring it right down to the historically acceptable level of around 3 per cent. Every time the dollar came down, it undercut other anti-inflationary measures like the wage controls through the Accord.\n\nThe fact that the country was increasingly awash with money didn't help. The entry of foreign banks and the spirited response of domestic banks led local investors and entrepreneurs to throw caution to the winds and embark on what could only be described as a wild lending spree. Paper fortunes were being made as the value of assets soared. Spivs were thick on the ground.\n\nIn his Boyer Lectures Ian Macfarlane, who was a senior Reserve Bank official through the build-up to recession, offers some vivid memories of the madness that prevailed then. He quotes the journalist and economic historian Trevor Sykes: 'Never before in Australian history had so much money been channelled by so many people incompetent to lend it, into the hands of so many incompetent to manage it.'\n\nMacfarlane observed that the more entrepreneurial borrowers had:\n\nseen prices rising quickly for more than a decade, and concluded that the way to increase wealth was to acquire assets whose prices would rise. The best way of doing so was to maximise the use of debt, the interest on which was tax deductible... and the biggest risk takers were the biggest winners for most of the second half of the eighties.\n\nAs a result, credit extended to the corporate sector grew by an average of 25 per cent per annum in the five years to 1989, and the gearing ratio doubled. Share prices rose by eighteen per cent per annum in this period despite the sharp fall in October 1987.\n\nThis was the period when the South African-born upstart Robert Holmes a Court had tried to buy BHP, and the television and tourism entrepreneur Christopher Skase tried to buy MGM in Hollywood.\n\nThe madness extended to a housing boom, particularly after Keating in the 1987 Budget reintroduced negative gearing for investment in residential properties that he had sought to kill off in 1985. By 1989, the Accord was also under heavy strain because the jobs market, too, was caught in the boom mentality and the pressure on wages was enormous.\n\nAs Macfarlane saw it:\n\nThe more borrowing increased, the more asset prices rose; the higher asset prices were then used as collateral for further borrowing. The corporate sector became dangerously over-geared and the banks' loan books were filled with loans to corporations holding over-valued assets. The economy was clearly vulnerable to any contractionary shock.\n\nAccording to Keating, this latter point weighed heavily on Reserve Governor Bob Johnston after the October 1987 stockmarket crash, and explains his reluctance to lift interest rates to put a break on the madness earlier than he did.\n\nIt's interesting that although much of Australia's lending and spending spree was clearly connected to Labor's financial market reforms like the float of the dollar and banking deregulation, many other countries were going through similar asset booms which also ended in tears in the early 1990s.\n\nBut trying to read the Australian economy and calculating if or when to put a brake on became a nightmare for the 'official family' on monetary policy: the Reserve Bank, the Treasury and the Treasurer. Keating's refrain in the years since has been that Bob Johnston was too slow putting interest rates up to cool down the overheated economy, and his successor Bernie Fraser was too slow pulling them down again as recession loomed.\n\nEven if you accept his account that he had urged both governors to act sooner\u2014and there is evidence to suggest that he did\u2014the truth is, they were all flying blind.\n\nThe bittersweet pill for Keating in all this is that by floating the dollar he reduced his own influence over an increasingly more independent Reserve Bank, and in deregulating the banks he inadvertently gave them the means to open the floodgates for at times grossly irresponsible lending, which was inevitably followed by soaring interest rates as the Reserve eventually tried to bring the boom under control.\n\nWhen rates did start moving up from around April\u2013May 1988, they climbed dramatically over the next twenty months; the cash rate rose from a monthly average of a little over 10 per cent to nearly 18 per cent in November 1989. Housing loans went from the fixed 13.5 per cent rate to 17 per cent. You don't need interest rates at those levels for long before the squeeze starts to take effect. But trying to measure how quickly that impact is coming down the pipeline is another matter.\n\nMacfarlane again:\n\nThe issue of how monetary policy could have been better conducted in the 1980s will probably never be resolved. I think we can conclude, however, that to the extent that there was a failure of monetary policy, it was not due to the traditional problem of the government and the central bank being unwilling to take tough measures, but was instead due to a failure to understand the implications of a sudden financial deregulation.\n\nIt was not that there was something fundamentally wrong with a deregulated financial system, or that we should have gone back to the old regulated one, the problem was that we did not understand the transition phase between the regulated and a deregulated system. We had not seen this before in our working lives.\n\nIncidentally, John Edwards notes in his biography of Keating that in the first half of 1989, Macfarlane was 'the most prescient of the forecasters at this point in the cycle' when he warned that a slowdown was on the way and that it would be longer and deeper than Treasury was expecting. Edwards describes a confusing swirl of contradictions within and between the Reserve Bank and Treasury, while Keating was also necessarily taking the political cycle into account with an election likely within a year.\n\nYou could argue that, apart from the inherent problem of calculating how quickly interest rate hikes were impacting on the economy, the government's ultimate failure to read the signs was a cultural one. There has always been rivalry between departments in the battle for policy influence in Cabinet and the power dividend it delivers. This was certainly true between Treasury and John Button's Industry Department through the late 1980s and into the 1990s over tariff reforms. Button's department didn't take kindly to the loss of the Industries Assistance Commission to Treasury after the 1987 election, and there was a perception held by Button and his senior bureaucrats that both Treasury and the Treasurer regarded them as lesser players in the big economic game.\n\nBut while Treasury dealt mostly with the big-picture statistics to keep its finger on the economic pulse, Industry was positioned much closer to the coalface, and dealt regularly with business leaders and factory operators. Button himself spent a great deal of his time going in and out of manufacturing and service sector enterprises across the country. In his memoir published in 1998, Button wrote that:\n\nin the heady days of deregulation euphoria, the [Industry] Department was generally ignored. Among the priesthood [Treasury] my department's views were always suspect, because it had in the past, under different governments, supported industry protection. I thought protection was a mistake from a time of short-sighted policy making. The high priests thought it was heresy, a sin not to be forgiven. But my department knew a fair bit about manufacturing and service industries. For Treasury these areas were 'terra incognita'.\n\nButton's view of the prevailing mood within the government and its senior advisors in 1988 was that nobody seemed to have much idea how quickly interest rate increases would work to slow the economy or what the extent of the increases should be.\n\n'They crept up,' he said, 'seemingly with little effect on the boom. Cabinet had no say in interest rate changes. It was an art form administered by experts. We could merely draw attention to the effects of the changes on business and employment.'\n\nButton said that as Industry Minister he received most of the complaints from business, which he sometimes passed on to Hawke, who thought he was exaggerating. He wrote:\n\nOn November 27 1989 I went to the opening of the Zionist Federation headquarters in Canberra. There were a number of prominent businessmen at the function. I talked to some of them briefly but at length with Richard Pratt of Visyboard. He said, 'I can't see anybody here who will vote Labor at the next election.' He pointed out various businessmen around the room saying things like, 'He's in trouble, that one over there will be broke by Christmas, that one is talking about selling his house.'\n\nButton says he had one of his staffers pass the sentiment on to Keating's principal adviser, Don Russell, who listened carefully and then replied petulantly, 'Why doesn't anyone tell us these things?'\n\nButton recalled how towards the end of 1990 'misery and despair descended on the country like a yellow fog', by which time he was seriously pissed off with both Hawke and Keating. He said, 'Bob Hawke seemed incapable of believing that a recession was about to happen and incapable of believing it when it finally came.'\n\nButton described one Cabinet meeting on 5 November 1990 where they had 'a rare opportunity to discuss the government's overall performance'. Button talked about a high level of business failures and was dismissed by Hawke as the 'resident Jonah', but was supported by Graham Richardson and Michael Duffy, who 'added some depressing stories based on his own electorate which embraced the Melbourne industrial suburb of Dandenong'.\n\nThe next day's _Financial Review_ carried a front-page headline, 'Keating offers touch of steel', with a story from economics correspondent Steve Burrell outlining how Keating had told his Cabinet colleagues to hold their nerve. By that stage interest rates had already been cut five times.\n\nOf Keating, Button said:\n\nI had some sympathy for him. The levers he pulled didn't always start the right engines. He was getting consistently bad advice couched in theoretical jargon. He relied on fatigued models unable to take account of the deregulated economy which he largely had brought about. It was too often provided by a comfortable elite resentful of criticism and intolerant of different ideas... in Cabinet Keating was troubled but continued to speak in Treasury tongues.\n\nAt the end of November 1990, the quarterly accounts confirmed that Australia was in a technical recession\u2014the one we had to have. Inflation was dropping, but at what price? By that point, the enforced slowdown had cost some 250,000 jobs.\n\n**KOB:** So while your relationship with Bob Hawke was again going through its ups and downs in the late 1980s, what was the economy doing?\n\n**PJK:** After the low commodity prices that helped inflict the terms of trade crisis in 1986, commodity prices lifted rapidly in 1988. The Reserve Bank commodity chart shows a big loss of national income in 1987 and then a big surge of income in 1988. Any government would be battling to hold things together. We had had the biggest investment surge in 30 years.\n\nIt was an explosive cocktail of demand. Gross National Expenditure (GNE) rose by 11 per cent that year: there was an enormous income surge coming from exports, an enormous investment surge and a housing and construction boom as well\u2014all happening at once.\n\nWhat I was trying to keep in mind was the dismal legacy of the economic history of Australia. With every boom, we had a wage explosion and with every wage explosion we had high inflation, so after all the pain of constraint reform through the 1980s, I didn't want to just go back to the sorry past with our tails between our legs as wages exploded yet again, as they had leading into 1981\u201382. We had to beat that dismal legacy, I hoped, once and for all.\n\n**KOB:** We know now that a nasty recession was slowly moving on Australia like a malevolent stormfront through this whole period while the Labor gods fought out their personal ambitions. Looking back now, had you only been concerned about your day job, not angsting about leadership or personality conflicts, might you have seen that recession coming with a little more clarity?\n\n**PJK:** Leadership and who was leading did not change the policy workload or the policy settings. Not one iota. It's a matter of written record that I wanted interest rates to rise early in 1988 much faster than the Reserve Bank moved them up. By the time they did, the demand boom was off and running. By the end of 1988 it was a house on fire.\n\n**KOB:** But while on the one hand you've said you supported the idea of the Reserve Bank becoming more independent post-float and therefore couldn't pressure them to raise interest rates earlier than they wanted to, didn't you also say about the Bank in 1989, 'They do as I say,' which clearly implied the absolute opposite.\n\n**PJK:** People misunderstood that. What I was trying to say was that in economic terms we could affect fiscal policy through the budget, interest rate movements through the Reserve Bank and wages through the Accord. I said I have the Reserve Bank on side... or I forget the expression. In other words we're an economy equipped with tools to manage it, that's what I was really trying to say.\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly says that Bob Johnston, with whom you had such a close relationship, was appalled by that comment 'they do as I say,' and didn't know whether to correct you publicly or resign. Did you two ever have a conversation about that?\n\n**PJK:** Bob Johnston said, 'I know what you were trying to say, that you have all the arms of policy ready and working,' and I said, 'Well, I could have chosen the words better.' I think he regarded that as a kind of an apology and he was happy to carry on, but that's what I did mean.\n\nIn the actual operation of monetary policy under me, relations between us were entirely proper. In fact this is an expression Bob Johnston used in his last speech as Governor. He said, 'I must say that relations between the Labor Government and myself and the Bank and its board over the period have been entirely proper,' and they were.\n\nI liked Bob Johnston and he liked me. We were great friends and I would never have done anything to embarrass him.\n\n**KOB:** Can you take me inside that process? It was quite an intimate group really, a handful of people in your office advising you, a handful of senior people at Treasury and a handful of senior people in the Reserve Bank, essentially a very tight little group but not all in sweet agreement with each other. I'm sure you would have been conversing with Hawke too, but Cabinet essentially was locked out of monetary policy at that stage, as the figures bounced around. How frank were the conversations?\n\n**PJK:** The _Reserve Bank Act_ instructs the parties\u2014the Treasurer and the Governor and the board\u2014to endeavour to agree. When the _Reserve Bank Act_ was set up we had an old managed exchange rate system and we were now in a floating system, but nevertheless the Act hadn't changed, so civility and commonsense demanded that we try to run the place cooperatively and we did. So when we would have a policy meeting we'd have the Governor, the Deputy Governor, the Assistant Governor, and we would have the Treasury Secretary often and the person in Treasury running general financial policy and myself and my Principal Private Secretary Don Russell. Maybe six or seven people. They tended to be monthly meetings generally built around each Reserve Bank board meeting.\n\n**KOB:** And in that context you would all have your say with one degree of candour or another, but in the end the Bank Governor and his officers would make their own interest rate decisions. So early in 1988, while you and the Treasury were urging a blunderbuss approach in terms of impact, the Reserve Bank was still fundamentally in disagreement.\n\n**PJK:** In the end the Bank had its way and interest rates didn't rise until May 1988. They should have risen in February, it should have been up 2 per cent in short order, and we should have announced it.\n\n**KOB:** So in the new system you found yourself unable to persuade the Reserve. But John Phillips, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank who was part of all of those discussions, has subsequently said that he remembers no difference of view among you at that time.\n\n**PJK:** There certainly was. In the end Don Russell, my Principal Private Secretary, was ringing Phillips each week saying, 'John, when are you going to move the rates up? You know we've agreed at the last two board meetings to put them up, yet they're not up.' I finally got to the point where I told David Morgan at Treasury, 'If Johnston and Phillips don't put the rates up soon I will actually give them a parliamentary instruction under the Act to do it.'\n\n**KOB:** Can you remember what he said?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he said, 'I don't think we have to get to that, Treasurer.'\n\nI said, 'Look, I can't take this obfuscation any longer, David. All this stuff John's going on about snugging and keeping the rates down\u2014the place is on fire.'\n\n**KOB:** I assume Bob Johnston was in agreement with John Phillips in all this?\n\n**PJK:** Bob was a paid-up member of the Bank for International Settlements, the Reserve Bankers' club, and he was saying, 'Treasurer, we've still got Holmes a Court with $10 billion in debt, we've got Bond with billions and we've got Murdoch for billions, and the banks' balance sheets may not be able to suffer losses of this kind.' Bob did believe the 1987 crash was but an early tremor to a larger earthquake.\n\nI kept expressing my view that we'd skipped over the stockmarket crash as if it were no more than a pothole.\n\nNow, the Reserve Bank has learned its lessons. These days not only does it announce its intentions but it actually publishes the minutes of the meeting showing why the decisions were made. But at the time we paid a price for the Reserve Bank's growing independence and the development of its own protocols. It's ironic because I understood the virtue in the Reserve becoming independent, and I've got the scars down my back to prove it. I should have the words Independent Central Bank tattooed on me.\n\nTurning what was a bond-selling agency of the Treasury into an independent central bank was a good and worthwhile thing, but I couldn't do that and at the same time command monetary policy when it suited me.\n\nNation-building is a tough caper. And building institutions like the RBA helped build the nation. There are prices to be paid in these constructions.\n\n**KOB:** In early 1989 you said in a television interview that interest rates should have been lifted more sharply during 1988 to dampen down strong activity. I take it that wasn't a self-critique, but letting the public know it was the Reserve Bank that hadn't been tough enough, early enough, with interest rates?\n\n**PJK:** The economics commentator Paddy McGuinness used to call them the Reverse Bank because they were always going the wrong way. That was a bit harsh, but in this instance they were too slow on the way up and too slow on the way down. In fact, in 1990 Bernie Fraser as the new Governor announced a monetary holiday on rate reductions, and the markets just pumped a ton of dollars into Australia when they heard that. These were all good intentions, but the fact is the Bank simply didn't pick the massive growth and demand in 1988, from the terms of trade, from investment, from housing, from wages, from profits.\n\n**KOB:** When interest rates really did start moving up they jumped by 6 per cent over about fifteen months. You must all have been stumped, watching interest rates go up at that rate but still not seeming to have an effect.\n\n**PJK:** The demand was so strong nothing seemed to slow it. The other big story was the issue we had with the current account deficit and the balance of payments. The Treasury and the Bank were strong believers in the twin deficit theory, which basically argued that if a country had a significant current account deficit as well as a fiscal deficit\u2014which Australia did\u2014that it could leave us exposed to a sharp and deep depreciation of the currency.\n\nSo in theory if you cut government spending by 2.5 per cent of GDP, you would effectively be cutting the current account deficit by 2.5 per cent of GDP. I had at that stage reduced the budget balance from a deficit of 4.7 per cent of GDP to a surplus of 2.5 per cent; a 7 per cent swing in the balance. According to that theory we had every right to expect that if the government had effected a 7 per cent plus reduction in the call by the government sector on Australian savings, the current account would drop by at least 2.5 per cent. But it simply didn't.\n\n**KOB:** It's worth pondering Ian Macfarlane's reflections in the Boyer Lectures nearly twenty years later, because you respected him as maybe the sharpest of either the Reserve or Treasury officials on how exposed the economy was to a contractionary shock. He said in the Lectures that the failure of monetary policy wasn't due to a reluctance by either the government or the Reserve to take tough measures, but was due to a failure to understand the implications of a sudden financial deregulation.\n\n**PJK:** Dead right. And add to that the Governor's and the Deputy Governor's concern about us rolling back into a 1930s-type Depression. So in other words, we're not even applying the usual monetary restraint that such deregulation might otherwise have brought on, for fear of slumping into a structural depression.\n\nThat's why Macfarlane says we'll never resolve the question of whether monetary policy could have been better exploited to manage the boom, because as the Chief Research Officer at the bank he knew that in accepting the view of the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, the Australian Reserve Bank couldn't apply interest rate policy as it might have otherwise or would have.\n\nI'm sure Ian Macfarlane would agree that without the stockmarket crash and the subsequent advice from the BIS, we would have been able to move sooner to slow the boom and with a less harsh outcome than the recession we had.\n\n**KOB:** Do you agree with Trevor Sykes, the financial commentator and author, that: 'Never before in Australian history had so much money been channelled by so many people incompetent to lend it, into the hands of so many incompetent to manage it.'\n\n**PJK:** I would endorse that. What they don't say, and you have to keep in mind, is that the Australian banks were lending at an unprecedented rate because they were trying to burn off the foreign banks to stop them gaining a foothold in the market. They wanted to take everything off the table so the foreign banks couldn't get a look-in. In the process they picked up a lot of rubbish in their lending portfolios, a lot of ill-advised risk.\n\n**KOB:** You're saying it was a somewhat panicked reaction by the Australian banks?\n\n**PJK:** It was, to try to keep Citibank, HSBC and others from building a base. Stewart Fowler from Westpac said to me at the time, 'Paul, I'm not going to give them an inch. We'll even take the marginal stuff from them.' They were not going to let the plant take root.\n\n**KOB:** By the late 1980s those banks were carrying bad debts like millstones around their necks.\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely.\n\n**KOB:** Do you remember Ian Macfarlane warning in the first half of 1989 that a slowdown was on the way and that it would be longer and deeper than Treasury was expecting?\n\n**PJK:** I remember the Bank taking that view and Ian was their Chief Research Officer at the time.\n\n**KOB:** And what did you think about that?\n\n**PJK:** I thought it was basically right but the settings were already in place and we just had to wait and see what came of it. The Bank at that time was still putting rates up. The one thing the Reserve didn't believe then but believes now\u2014and this is true for the American Central Bank as well\u2014is the public benefit to be gained from public statements revealing the Bank's expectations about the economy and likely interest rate policy.\n\nIn those days, particularly in the John Phillips school of monetary policy, it was like a mysterious black box that should be known only to the Reserve Bank. They never saw the value of the real economic effects flowing from a more open process by the Bank, by public announcements of its intentions on monetary policy.\n\nThese days Glenn Stevens as Governor makes regular announcements and speeches, and even does interviews encouraging the public to pay attention to where policy is going. That has its own beneficial impact.\n\nBut back in those days, while I didn't mind doing brave things when I thought they had to be done, it would have been very brave of a Treasurer to publicly contradict the Reserve Bank Governor when the Governor conscientiously believes there's a very real risk of a deep international recession in the offing.\n\n**KOB:** Through this critical period there was another debate going on inside the government, and this was on the difference between the anecdotal evidence coming from John Button and his Industry Department who were in regular contact with the world of business, including but not exclusive to manufacturing, and the traditionalist economic theory coming from Treasury and the Reserve. What he was saying was that he and his department were not given proper attention when they were feeding back the anecdotal evidence that business was doing it tough. He said he felt very lonely at the time.\n\n**PJK:** I think that was fundamentally true. And when John would say these things to me I would acknowledge I thought they were true. The problem was that I couldn't radically alter the settings. I couldn't more rapidly change the fiscal policy settings, and I had to leave the monetary settings to the Reserve Bank and wait upon the evidence that they were working.\n\nWhen the party gets overheated, it's hard to take the punchbowl away and that's what we were doing. The rates were rising, the cash rate was at 17 per cent because the economy was still running hot. Because the Reserve had been slow getting the rates up, they simply had to stay higher for longer.\n\n**KOB:** Button's view of the prevailing mood within the government and among its senior advisors in 1988 was that nobody seemed to have much idea how quickly interest rate increases would work to slow the economy or what the extent of the increases should be. Cabinet had no say in interest rate changes. He said Treasury saw it as an artform best left to them. Looking back reflectively, was that a weakness in the system, a sense from Treasury that it knew best?\n\n**PJK:** You've got to remember this: at this point in the debate even Treasury's hands were tied.\n\n**KOB:** In the context of what John Button was saying, in May 1989 you were still arguing that the prevailing high interest rates wouldn't push the country into recession.\n\n**PJK:** At that point the Treasury thought there would be a much softer landing. This was not the Bank's view, by the way. Ian McFarlane took a view that we'd have a harder landing than Treasury thought, and it turned out to be the case.\n\n**KOB:** But where were you on whether it would be a soft landing or a hard landing?\n\n**PJK:** I didn't know, really. It was very hard to pick it. It was like the cowboy with the bucking bronco, you wouldn't and couldn't know how high and when you might be thrown.\n\n**KOB:** In June 1989 you received a report from your Joint Economic Forecast Group telling you that the next year's current account was going to be worse, and they couldn't identify the timing of the slowdown. These were your forecasters and you wrote on that forecasting report, 'Noted with thanks. It makes the twin deficit theory look like bullshit.' But this was the theory you'd come to rely on in setting policy to control the boom and avoid the bust.\n\n**PJK:** Exactly. But this wasn't just the prevailing orthodoxy in Australia. This was the international orthodoxy. All the officers who served me had worked in the OECD and the IMF. All believed in the twin identities\u2014between savings and investment.\n\n**KOB:** Button said he had some sympathy for you, that 'the levers he [Keating] pulled didn't always start the right engines. He was getting consistently bad advice couched in theoretical jargon. I suppose in a way you would agree with Button now. You did come to believe Treasury had sold you a pup with the twin deficits theory.\n\n**PJK:** I did. Treasury's argument to me was this: 'We used to run a current account deficit at around 2.5 per cent of GDP for most of the postwar years. We're now running one at 4.5 per cent. So, Treasurer, if you reduce the government's call on savings by 2 per cent of GDP the current account will return to its norm: 2.5 per cent.'\n\nThrough all those years of running tight budgets, I reduced the Commonwealth's call on savings by more than 6 per cent of GDP yet the current account deficit simply didn't behave as Treasury predicted it would. I trebled the task, the response that they had asked and required of me, yet it still didn't change the current account balance the way they suggested it would.\n\n**KOB:** So you became captive to a theory that fundamentally turned out to be wrong?\n\n**PJK:** That's right.\n\n**KOB:** But you're the instinctive politician who, while on holidays in Noosa, sees a multitude of cranes on the skyline, and rings up Bob Johnston and says, put interest rates up.\n\n**PJK:** I know, I picked it at the beginning of 1988. At that stage I was thinking that not only did we have the budget in balance, but it was actually significantly in surplus, so no longer a drain on Australia's savings, but actually adding to savings by running a government surplus. So why then should we be worrying about the private demand by private investors on overseas debt? If it's a deal between consenting adults, and some company in Australia wants to borrow from some financial institution abroad, why don't we let them? Why are we taking that on as our responsibility? As it turns out I was right. My instincts here were right. Ken Henry as Secretary of the Treasury only disavowed the twin deficits theory in 2002, fifteen years later.\n\nOnce I'd moved the budget heavily into surplus there was no way you could hold the government sector responsible for adding to the current account deficit.\n\nSo who was producing it? The private sector was producing it, borrowing to invest and to spend, so what business was that of ours? None, in my view then.\n\nI can remember reading a paper by Professor John Pitchford from the Australian National University arguing this at the time and he was right: I said so at the time to Treasury colleagues. Treasury hated the analysis but it was essentially right. The Pitchford argument struck a chord with me but if you raised it inside Treasury they would come at you vociferously with loads of international precedents. They would say it's mathematically unarguable that these are twin identities. If you reduce your call on savings you'll reduce your call on overseas debt and with it the current account deficit.\n\n**KOB:** So was the Treasury culture too rigid?\n\n**PJK:** Disappointingly rigid. Just not smart.\n\n**KOB:** But this was the culture you'd worked with and sought to change over eight years as Treasurer, which you had decided was too rigid under John Stone's influence.\n\n**PJK:** They didn't quite understand the forces of deregulation and also at the same time globalisation.\n\nAt that stage I had already performed half a dozen miracles, opening up the financial markets and the product markets and balancing the budgets. You get to the point where you reach the limit of what the Treasurer as a person can do within an independent permanent bureaucratic system of the Westminster model.\n\n**KOB:** The irony for me, and for every political journalist from those times, and many members of the public, is that one of the abiding images of Paul Keating through those years as Treasurer was the man who loved painting on the big canvas, the man who loved pulling the policy levers. This was very much part of your act. As it turned out, you were pulling levers but they weren't working.\n\n**PJK:** I pulled a lot of levers that worked. The big structural ones worked. Otherwise we would not have the economy we have today. But the fact is, I was very proper with the bureaucracy. It was true of my relationship with the Reserve Bank and it was true of my relationship with Treasury.\n\n**KOB:** That may be the reality, but I'm thinking more about the kind of image you struck with the broader electorate, that you were in command of the economy and all you had to do was manipulate the levers. Maybe that's why an awful lot of people marked you down as arrogant because when the recession hit it turned out you certainly weren't in command of everything.\n\n**PJK:** No one could be in command of a big boom in commodity prices or of a big boom in investment. And happening concurrently. That said, I had structurally changed the place from the ground up.\n\n**KOB:** Was that the price you paid for the image you painted of yourself with the electorate?\n\n**PJK:** People can confuse pride in one's craft with arrogance. You must have pride in craft and be conscientious in the task, in my case moving these big national aggregates; ones that had never moved for all those years. Nobody in government ever took this stuff on. I did.\n\nBut after the stockmarket crash in 1987 then the boom in 1988 and arguments in the official family as to whether we ought to keep conditions soft or not, it's very hard for the Treasurer to say, I have all the answers. I had a few, a lot of big ones actually, but I couldn't say I had them all.\n\n**KOB:** John Edwards wrote in his Keating biography:\n\nThis was the point at which Keating began to be, as he would later remark, hoisted on his own petard. He was appalled by the long string of bad current account deficits which were now the single most important piece of economic and political news.\n\nHis colleagues, especially Dawkins and Walsh, were depressed and bewildered. In 1985 and 1986 they had counted on the J Curve. It had not worked, or at least not in the way they had expected. Now the twin deficits theory was apparently not working. A six percentage point increase in interest rates over 15 months was apparently not working.\n\n**KOB:** So Edwards was saying at that point you'd become disillusioned with and sceptical of Treasury advice.\n\n**PJK:** I was sceptical that interest rates should be used as a demand management tool for the purpose of dealing with current account objectives. You see, Australia is a large continent operating as a single country. We require a great deal of capital: long railways, multiple ports around a vast coastline, along with mining infrastructure.\n\nIf you take another country with an equivalent population to Australia, like the Netherlands, you can drive across the Netherlands in three hours. The capital requirements of a large continental country like Australia will always be greater than the country's savings, so we would always be running a current account deficit. But the world recognises this and is prepared to fund and bank it because they believe they're banking the continent. That it represents a good bet.\n\nSo therefore this sort of no-no-ville of 'don't run current account deficits because we can never repay them' represented a very poor judgement of our economy's innate strength of being able to offer good investments with good returns on capital.\n\nTherefore my own instincts about this were fundamentally right, but I was told by every person in the economic debate\u2014the Reserve Bank, Treasury, Prime Minister and Cabinet, everybody\u2014that if you change the budget balance by two or three percentage points of GDP then the current account problem will go away because of what they described as the 'twin identities' linkage. It was said with such certitude from all quarters. All quarters.\n\n**KOB:** Have you wondered since if they hadn't been so glued to the twin deficit theory, how different the approach might have been?\n\n**PJK:** Except that the breaking of inflation remained the primary objective. In 1988 to 1990 you had the overlay of monetary policy breaking the back of inflation. Ten years late, no doubt, but done nevertheless. A huge accomplishment.\n\n**KOB:** You had described the current account deficit as public enemy number one, but inflation was right up there. What do you say now, looking back?\n\n**PJK:** Inflation was always the central core virus. Therefore even though we were using monetary policy to manage the current account deficit as a demand management tool, it was also doing the other task of pulling inflation down in tandem with the wages system and the Accord.\n\n**KOB:** Edwards makes a point about Chris Higgins, who became Treasury head after you appointed Bernie Fraser to replace Bob Johnston as Reserve Bank Governor, that he was deeply focused on inflation. How much did that influence your own hawkishness on interest rates at that time?\n\n**PJK:** The anti-inflationary constituency in Australia was very small. This is a very important point. You would assume that the anti-inflation constituency would include the major business organisations, the retailers and so on, but no. They all benefited from inflation. And even the welfare industry had the indexation of pensions. The core anti-inflation constituency ended up being me, Bill Kelty, Bernie Fraser at the Reserve Bank, and Chris Higgins in Treasury. It was a constituency of four, and if you added Don Russell from my office to that, it was a constituency of five. So we were a decade late in doing for Australia what Paul Volcker did in America as Central Bank Governor. A decade late in what I called snapping the inflation stick. Hearing it actually break. We were a decade late in breaking those inflationary expectations. But we did break them.\n\n**KOB:** Was killing inflation part of your judgement when Bernie Fraser as Reserve Bank Governor had said to you he was against another increase in interest rates and you went to Bob Hawke with Don Russell to argue the opposite, that there should be one last increase by a full percentage point?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, inflation had to be drenched with antibodies. But you have to remember that what the tearaway economy did was put the wages system completely at risk. All the gains under the Accord were then put at risk. Kelty was trying under heavy pressure to limit the wage increases but this was in an environment where employers were offering 13 and 14 per cent. The place was on fire with activity.\n\nSo we were about to go back to the dismal legacy of double-digit inflation every time there was a pick-up in the economy. To save the wages system and to save the gains and to break inflation, I felt the strategy of using sharp interest rates needed to apply. A bit like Volcker, really.\n\n**KOB:** Were you making that plain when you were giving those long Keating press conferences?\n\n**PJK:** No, but I used to say inside the place, 'Even if the twin deficits theory is actually wrong, and I think it is, I'd still be employing these rates to break inflation and to protect the wages system.'\n\n**KOB:** Looking back at that recession, the depth to which it bit and the misery it caused, are you sure it was worth the pain to break the inflation cycle?\n\n**PJK:** The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We've had 23 years of compound low inflationary growth. The country is just so much wealthier now. Real wages are up 45 per cent over the period. Countries never look back from a milestone like that. I know I'm repeating myself here, but it's important to stress that if we had not lost those months of earlier interest-rate adjustments owing to the 1987 stockmarket crash, we would have had a much smoother, much more calibrated, less harsh management of the slowdown. We would have let the boom down more gently and still broken inflation.\n\n**KOB:** So how hard was it in that climate to frame the 1989 Budget for August of that year?\n\n**PJK:** I had to introduce significant tax cuts to prevent another wage explosion. The whole system was so overheated with demand, wages were under enormous pressure to blow again, just as they had done in 1981\u201382. We would have lost the whole battle with inflation and nearly a decade of work around the budget, and the Accord would have been lost. It would have been appalling. There was a sense that wages were simply going to explode. In fact Bert Evans at the Metal Trades Industry Association, the voice of manufacturing in Australia, said, 'There she blows.' He thought it was going to all blow away.\n\nBill Kelty was trying to hold the dam wall back at the ACTU and he needed me to help him. I can remember Bill calling me to say that the Shell Company had offered its refinery workers in Melbourne wage increases of 15 per cent that year. Just imagine what that would have done to the inflation rate. It would have flowed right through the whole economy. We needed the ACTU to hold the line, and keep wages within reason against the backdrop of a boom that was threatening to run right away on us.\n\nSo I included tax cuts of $30 a week in the 1989 Budget paid from the surplus, and Bill held the wage increases to 7 per cent rather than 14 or 15 per cent. He did an utterly magnificent job.\n\n**KOB:** One of the criticisms subsequently of your handling of the recession was that the tax cut fanned the flames.\n\n**PJK:** That is a trash argument. Had I not given Bill Kelty the means and some tools to hold back the dam wall and avoid a wages breakout, we would have been back to 1981\u201382 all over again. Essentially the 1989 Budget was about holding and pinning the game that Bob and I had put together from 1983.\n\n**KOB:** In the end you and Bob Hawke sold the 1989 Budget as a double act, a far cry from the previous year. With another election around the corner and the Kirribilli Agreement locked away, was the leadership able to stay in calmer waters through 1989?\n\n**PJK:** I'd given Bob my word I would help him win the 1990 election after the Kirribilli Agreement and I put my absolute back into it. In fact I wrote in the margins of one of the newspaper stories around budget time that this was the hardest three months I'd done in six years as Treasurer. That was, trying to keep Humpty Dumpty together in the face of the big demand explosion of 1988\u201389, putting another Accord together, plugging the dam wall on wages and persuading the ACTU wages committee to accept a $30 tax cut in return for halving their otherwise market-based wage deals.\n\nThe militant unions wanted to go out and get 12 and 13 per cent. They weren't going to take 7. They were telling Kelty to go to hell so we had to assuage these people, which meant another budgetary round of savings to pay for the tax cuts. It was that budget that was the straw that broke the camel's back for some ministers, it was just so tough. The work was debilitating.\n\nYou've got to understand it's in the DNA of trade union officials to drive the best deal they can for their workers. If the Shell Company's offering you 14 or 15 per cent you take it, particularly after six years of wage restraint. I was dragging myself through the budget process, but Bill Kelty was also stretched right out.\n\nImagine, Bill had been preaching wage restraint since the 1983 Summit, and in 1988 and 1989 the unions thought the jackpot had arrived with the companies making huge wage offers. There's poor Bill, his back to the wall, saying, 'We've got to halve these wage rises and that nice Mr Keating's going to give you a $30 tax cut, and they're saying, \"Come on Bill, tell it to the marines\".' He had a huge job holding the wages system together across nearly two years, as I did with the Cabinet. They were all well-intentioned people but they were also tired after six or seven years of this massive juggling to get the structural aggregates right and to get the inflation rate into some sort of low and consistent order. By 1990 the economy had been growing strongly for most of the previous five years, where it had previously been growing at an average of 1.7 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** John Edwards wrote just before the 1989 Budget that support for your policies of high interest rates and deep budget cuts was vanishing within a caucus that was facing an election within a year. Among economic commentators in the business community, he said, the discord within the government was interpreted as a sign that Keating was losing control over economic policy.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but there was support for me too. I remember Alan Wood, who was a conservative economic commentator and no policy friend of mine, saying, 'if someone had told us in 1983 that by 1990 we would have the budget in surplus for three years, that we'd have a 15 per cent reduction in real wages, we'd have the highest profits era in the economy, a 39 per cent corporate tax rate and dividend imputation, we would have said they were dreaming, but Keating has delivered all these things.' Wood also said that the Treasury owed me a better analysis than the twin deficits linkage because it was the twin deficit linkage on the current account that had kept monetary conditions so tight. There was only so much you could have expected me to do by that time.\n\n**KOB:** Can you remember the speech you gave in Sydney where you sent a public message to the Labor caucus saying you wouldn't be distracted by tricks and baubles or spooked by economic ratbaggery? You weren't bothered by the nervous nellies of the backbench. You were in charge. Did that have the deserved effect?\n\n**PJK:** Well, they had all started to wet their pants. That's what happened. Some people who should have known better were starting to panic. There was one headline, 'Keating resists push for mortgage relief'. Graham Richardson and people like him were telling Bob, 'We've got to make housing mortgages deductible like the Americans do.'\n\nYou know how tax-preferred Australian housing is. It's not capital gains taxed, so imagine the sort of society we'd have if interest payments on the family home were deductible as well. But this was a big push at the time and I had to knock it down.\n\nThen in July 1989, after I made the so-called Menzies Hotel speech saying ratbaggery is out, the headlines said, 'Government to stick with Keating's policies'. Basically I acknowledged that things were testy, interest rates were high, the boom wasn't yet subsiding but the government had a strong rational policy in place and that we were not going to wet our pants and go for ratty policies. So the caucus, and then Bob when he came back from Paris, adopted the same line. In other words, 'Richardson, goodbye'. Then the headlines read 'Despairing Labor looks to Keating for a burst of morale'. That was 10 July 1989.\n\n**KOB:** You were facing an election in March 1990 and by the end of 1989 the Reserve Bank and you were finally in agreement that the boom was effectively over. That must have been an enormous relief for you, although the new Governor Bernie Fraser was still holding back on dropping interest rates.\n\n**PJK:** Having taken over from Bob Johnston, Bernie Fraser was ready to start moving rates down, but he wanted to keep the board together and there was one recalcitrant member of the board, a guy called Gordon Jackson, who was the former CSR managing director. He used to always get around in a black three-pieced suit and I used to say to Bernie, 'He looks like a bad priest. This guy will never agree to reduce interest rates, so just knock him over.'\n\n'Treasurer,' he'd say, 'I've got to keep the board together. That's part of the job.'\n\nI said, 'What, we'll have the economy burning to keep Gordon Jackson happy?'\n\nI said, 'Bernie, cut it out. This bloke's a menace.'\n\nAt any rate Bernie got the better of Jackson but it was not until January 1990 that the interest rate reductions first started. I've got that headline too: 'Keating Eases the Screws', 24 January 1990. Then another one in February: 'Hawke's Poll Chances Soar.' That's 2 February, off the back of that interest rate reduction.\n\n**KOB:** It's interesting to see that headline 'Keating eases the screws' because it suggests the media had missed the Reserve's transition to independence and thought you were running interest rate policy. Your reaction?\n\n**PJK:** The media, of course, had not yet picked up that Keating alone was not 'easing the screws' as Keating was concomitantly trying to develop an 'independent' central bank. Keating was asking the new Governor to tease out a policy of monetary easing. Doing it cooperatively with the 'new' RBA, shoehorning them into independence.\n\n**KOB:** With a March election looming and housing interest rates at 17 per cent, your desire to see that cut must have been as much a political consideration as an economic one.\n\n**PJK:** There was a bit of that, but I could not have the economy burning\u2014this is the killer point reflected in a _Financial Review_ story at the time, 'Business Falls in With Labor's Wages Strategy'. In other words, business is saying thank you Mr Kelty and Mr Keating, we agree with you, we don't want a wage explosion and we don't want to go back to 1981. So when you've got both labour and business together, you win. Andrew Peacock had grabbed the Liberal leadership back from John Howard, so we had to beat Peacock again. My job was to assemble the forces of labour and business, which I did.\n\n**KOB:** So on 24 March 1990 Labor and Bob Hawke won their fourth straight election which made Bob Hawke an absolute Labor hero, but you must have been feeling pretty good too. How seriously did you believe at that point that within the next eighteen months, possibly two years, you were going to be Prime Minister in accordance with the Kirribilli Agreement?\n\n**PJK:** Pretty seriously, because I had more than fulfilled my side of the Kirribilli Agreement. Bob was cock-a-hoop at winning in 1990. But I did influence the timing and frame of that election also. When others were talking about not going before July or possibly even as late as August, I told Bob I was more inclined to Ian Macfarlane's view that there was going to be a harder landing than the Treasury view that it would be soft. I counselled Bob to have the election in March just as I had the winter election in 1987. In other words, slip under the wire in case the landing was likely to be tougher.\n\nThe scars from our disagreement in 1988 might not have completely healed but we were going well. There's actually a picture of us in August on the front page of the inaugural _Sunday Age_ , 'And They Said It Wouldn't Last'. After 1988 Bob and I got on really well. Partly because I regarded his commitment as a conscientious one but mainly, and I stress mainly, because I wanted to see the government actually break inflation, yet be rewarded for it.\n\n**KOB:** Interest rates tumbled through 1990 and in the budget that year you declared a $9 billion surplus and said governments can only do so much. It almost sounded like an admission of defeat.\n\n**PJK:** A surplus of $9 billion was 2.5 per cent of GDP. That today is a surplus of $40 billion. This was not because we had a poultice of money coming from the commodity prices because they were nothing like commodity prices during Peter Costello and John Howard's time or Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan's time. These prices were 40 per cent lower than the Howard\u2013Rudd years. They were better than after the 1987 crash but they were still low commodity prices. This surplus came fundamentally from real cuts in government spending representing structural change for future budgets. This came from six laborious years of sitting through the ERC. Having got outlays down, as we tightened our belts, any pick-up in revenue went straight to the surplus.\n\n**KOB:** As I say, interest rates tumbled through 1990 but it was too late. In November of that year you fronted the press gallery with the declaration 'This is the recession Australia had to have.' You've lived with it ever since, haven't you?\n\n**PJK:** I have, but let me also live with the unprecedented 23 years of growth and low inflation that followed. I'll live with responsibility for the recession, but give me the credit for the 23 years of low inflation and the flexible wages system thereafter. For setting up the economy for nearly a quarter of a century. A nation-changing event.\n\n**KOB:** It seems to me that your comment 'the recession Australia had to have' was not driven by the instincts of a Bankstown boy in touch with the public mood, was it? Perhaps more the wordsmith with the love of the metaphor and the clever turn of phrase than the canny Bankstown boy?\n\n**PJK:** I never used this phrase without checking it first with Bob. I went round to see him with Don Russell, and Don has a clear note of Bob saying, 'Well, Paul if you think that explains where we are I'll leave that to you.' He didn't say, 'Oh no, don't use a phrase of that kind.'\n\nIn his book he says, 'Oh no, this was all Keating's doing.'\n\nLet me be clear about this. I'm not blaming Bob for it and I'm not putting it onto Bob. It was my phrase, but he was agreeable to my using it. And the reason was that it was the recession Australia had to have, because had we not had it, wages would have been back to 1981 levels again and inflation would have been back in double digits.\n\nNow, would I have liked a softer landing? Yes, of course.\n\nWould I have liked the Reserve Bank to have put the rates up earlier in 1988 and got them down more quickly in 1989? Yes. But once I was stuck with the RBA's monetary settings I was determined to stuff the inflation genie back in the bottle.\n\n**KOB:** Strictly speaking, it wasn't the recession you had to have if the levers had been pulled correctly, if you, the Reserve and the Treasury had acted together to raise rates earlier and bring them down earlier. I say that with great hindsight, but technically it wasn't the recession you had to have. It was avoidable.\n\n**PJK:** It may have been avoidable but those are big ifs. And again you don't quite know, because Gross National Expenditure was running at 11 per cent all through 1989 with commodity prices rising, a monster investment boom, house prices in Sydney and Melbourne going up 20 to 25 per cent and banks lending like fury. I don't think you can get the Vernier dial with its fine calibration, and the Treasurer and the Reserve Bank saying, 'Oh don't worry, we'll just dial up this nice slow landing for you.' It's not that easy.\n\nIf it were that easy, no country in the world would have recessions.\n\n**KOB:** But you see in your education of the great Australian public about how economies work, you'd led us to believe that all you had to do was precisely that\u2014just pull the odd lever and tweak the calibration.\n\n**PJK:** That's called salesmanship.\n\n**KOB:** Perhaps too good in this instance.\n\n**PJK:** Maybe. But you don't get much time to finesse what you're going to say when a set of figures is released by the statistician and it's bad news. In this instance when the six-monthly national accounts came out, the press conference had already been scheduled for an hour later. You run things through quickly with your office staff, you get a note across from the Treasury almost straightaway. You then bolt around to see Bob and walk into the press conference to explain it as best you can. The frustrating thing about all this was that when the national accounts were revised six months later, there wasn't even a negative number in the second quarter; so technically it wasn't a recession, as it turned out. We only slipped into it by a very slender statistical number. According to the revised figures I would never have had to face that press conference saga and the politics involved.\n\n**KOB:** But, in reality, in terms of its impact on people, it was a recession, wasn't it?\n\n**PJK:** It was a recession, yes.\n\n**KOB:** So in the end what were the lessons learned from that whole thing?\n\n**PJK:** That monetary policy is as much an art as a science. That all this hocus-pocus the Reserve Bank used to pull out about cash conditions this week and cash conditions that week and looking at demand and GNE\u2014none of it was scientific.\n\nIn the end, road feel is more important. I think what a Treasurer does get over time is a feel for the road. Good instincts. If there were any lessons in all this for me, it would be to trust your instincts once you've had time to develop a feel for things. Consider all the data, but where there's confusion or disagreement, in the end, trust your instincts.\n\nIn all the years since I was Treasurer I've invariably picked, pretty accurately, where the economy was headed. Even as a private citizen, you never lose the road feel. Looking back, I can say with all truth that I had a better idea of the big deregulated and open market economy than either the Reserve Bank or Treasury had. I'm certain of this.\n\n**KOB:** After all those long debates with policy advisers within your party, various stakeholders around the place in the years leading up to and including the recession, in the end the buck stopped at your desk. What responsibility ultimately do you take for that recession?\n\n**PJK:** You have to take responsibility for the outcomes. I do take responsibility even though there was a nominally independent Reserve Bank. This is just the hand you're dealt, and if you're the Treasurer you have to take responsibility for it.\n\n**KOB:** Your last big tilt on the reform front as Treasurer was the second round of tariff cuts. There, nearing the height of the recession in March 1991, with jobs evaporating and businesses struggling, you are pushing through a new round of tariff cuts. The climate could not possibly have been worse. There must have been pressure on you inside the party and out on the street not to do that. You must have had a big tussle even inside your own head, some serious soul-searching?\n\n**PJK:** God, yes. I was alone in the end, apart from John Button and John Dawkins. Broadly alone. Nonetheless the Cabinet and caucus accepted my view that, if by 1991, in the second round of tariff cuts, we were not to go to a 5 per cent tariff and smash the tariff wall down, in the end the impetus for the internationalisation of Australia would wilt. You can't conscientiously open up the financial markets and not genuinely open up the product markets. Bear in mind that the shifts we were getting in the exchange rate then were greater than the shifts in the annual tariff reductions. So if you look at the period from 1991 to 2001 when tariffs came down to 5 per cent from 15 and 10, they were really only about 1 per cent a year and 1 per cent a year was often far less than the movements in the exchange rate. The _Australian Financial Review_ front page on 30 January 1991 said it all: 'Keating: \"no retreat\".'\n\n**KOB:** But there was a psychology at work and the psychology of hearing about another round of tariff cuts that were going to affect jobs in one way or another would have been like having the proverbial dead cat in the middle of a party.\n\n**PJK:** Nations get made the hard way. Nation-building is a hard caper and I had to make sure this slothful, locked-up place finally became an open competitive economy. I would have broken my back to get those tariff cuts through, and I did.\nOPERA, LEADERSHIP AND THE HOLY GRAIL\n\nThe Kirribilli Agreement had brought peace and stability back to the Hawke\u2013Keating relationship through 1989 and most of 1990, though the leadership issue did not entirely go away. Remarkably, no word had leaked about the existence of the agreement. Cabinet and caucus sailed on through the 1990 election and beyond in blissful ignorance that, on paper at least, an orderly leadership transition was in the works.\n\nNews of its existence would have been immensely damaging for Labor. Hawke would have become a lame duck Prime Minister overnight in the eyes of the electorate. Caucus would have been angered at the implicit assumption that the Labor leadership and the prime ministership were Hawke's to give.\n\nBut what about the electorate? Hawke had promised at the 1990 election that he would serve a full term, yet here was a formal agreement he'd signed back in 1988, confirming his plan to step down in favour of Keating within a reasonable time frame in the next term. This was no small matter of credibility.\n\nKeating, on the other hand, was the unpopular treasurer with the threat, if not the reality, of recession on his hands. Unemployment\n\nwas surging, interest rates were extremely high and only just starting to come down. The faith of Labor's supporters, like the caucus itself, was being sorely tested. Undoubtedly some potential swingers voted for the Hawke brand, believing his vow to stay the full three years if he won, and arguably may have switched to the Liberals if they'd known that a vote for Hawke was a vote for Keating. As it was, Labor got across the line with less than 50 per cent of the overall vote and only with the critical support of Greens' preferences.\n\nJust as Hawke had been helped in 1987 by a serious split within conservative ranks leading up to that election, he was given a leg up again by Liberal discord in the lead-up to 1990. The bitter Peacock\u2013Howard rivalry flared again in 1989, this time with a dramatic coup in May that saw Howard out and Peacock back in.\n\nHoward had stirred dissent in his own ranks in mid-1988 with an immigration policy outline he called 'One Australia'. He flagged an end to multiculturalism and proposed slowing down the rate of Asian immigration in the interests of social cohesion. But if this reignited Peacock's hopes of a comeback, trouble was developing quite separately on another front for Howard. The prominent Victorian businessman and influential Liberal John Elliott, who wasn't even in Parliament, was quietly developing his own elaborate plan to snare a safe Liberal seat in Melbourne, force a by-election, storm into the leadership over Howard's carcass and become Prime Minister at the next election.\n\nIt became a story of failure through overconfident arrogance, but in the process Elliott stoked the coals of instability that eventually helped Peacock's comeback. A strong nucleus of Victorian Liberals had by then developed an 'anyone but Howard' mentality. Even so no one, including Howard, saw the well-planned coup coming. It was even more remarkable for the fact that Howard's friend and Coalition partner Ian Sinclair was deposed as Nationals leader at the same time by a fairly obscure newcomer named Charles Blunt. Blunt was to lose his seat at the next election.\n\nThe day after the coup I bumped into the Labor Party National Secretary Bob Hogg and the party's pollster Rod Cameron in a Canberra restaurant. They said they were celebrating the Liberal leadership change and told me on background that their private polling had showed Howard had been in a strong position to win the next election; that voters had responded well to his launch of a broad plan for government that he'd called 'Future Directions'. It was less to do with what was in the document than the perception that Howard had a plan for the future and Labor was mired in economic trouble with the added burden of incumbency. They felt that with Peacock the Liberals had handed Labor a 'get out of jail' card.\n\nBut after the 1990 election it was a whole new ball game in Canberra. Peacock, the born-to-rule blue-blood Liberal who had inherited Robert Menzies' seat 23 years before, had fired his last shot and gone, but not before using his influence to ensure that Howard wouldn't return to the leadership either. The party embraced a new face in John Hewson, who had entered Parliament from the then safe Sydney Liberal seat of Wentworth only three years before, with a high profile as an academic economist and a banker. He'd also previously served as an adviser to two Liberal Treasurers in the Fraser years, Phillip Lynch and John Howard.\n\nI attended Hewson's first press conference as leader, where he declared he was not a politician, and that he wouldn't be playing by the old cynical rules. I remember thinking at the time that he was either naively arrogant to believe he could somehow elevate himself and his party above the deal-making and compromise that inevitably went with any liberal democracy, that he could be a politician who wasn't a politician, or he was just developing a new marketing line to sell himself as a political cleanskin, somehow above the dirty fray.\n\nI think now that naive arrogance was closer to the mark. It was to cost Hewson dearly three years later, but over 1990 and into 1991 he made serious inroads on Hawke's popularity. As the nation's economic pain progressed, Hewson played to his strength, selling himself as the man who understood economics better than anyone else in Parliament and had the answers.\n\nHe wanted to take his party further down the Margaret Thatcher-style free market road than it had previously been prepared to go. The first signs of what was to become his radical 600-page policy manifesto, _Fightback_ , started to emerge in his first few months. In August 1990 the Shadow Cabinet gave a tentative nod to a consumption tax.\n\nKeating preyed on Hewson's weakness, which was parliamentary inexperience, particularly as a leader. Where Keating had been living and breathing politics and the parliamentary theatre for decades, Hewson was a confident novice who had more to learn than he thought. Like Keating, Hewson backed himself, but he was a babe in the woods at the rough and tumble.\n\nKeating's cutting responses to Hewson after his ascension to the Liberal leadership, particularly after Keating became Prime Minister, litter the internet, where Keatingisms have a cult following. Day after day Hewson had to sit, trying to look disinterested or with a smile fixed on his face as he absorbed terms like 'feral abacus' and 'a shiver looking for a spine to run up'.\n\nOnce in 1992 when, to shouts of encouragement from his backbenchers, Hewson challenged Keating to call an early election, Keating's response brought the house down:\n\nThe answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly. There has to be a bit of sport in this for all of us. In the psychological battle stakes we are stripped down and ready to go. I want to see those ashen-faced performances. I want more of them. I want to be encouraged. I want to see you squirm out of this load of rubbish over a number of months. There will be no easy execution of you.\n\nFor the ferocity of his attacks and the language he sometimes used in Parliament, Keating paid a price that we can only guess at, but he was always about dominating his opponents psychologically.\n\n1990 had been a tough year for the government and for the nation. Unemployment was edging close to 9 per cent by November when Keating was finally forced to acknowledge that the recession had arrived. Like every other minister around the Cabinet table, he must have been looking forward to the Christmas break, but in thinking about what 1991 would bring, he must also have wondered when Hawke was going to act on the Kirribilli Agreement and his leadership handover. With each new worsening unemployment figure, Labor's chances of winning the next election were diminishing.\n\nBoth men by now would have seen their new year through the prism of the Hewson opposition, and Keating in particular would have been hoping for a year at least, if not eighteen months, in which to bed himself down and have a real chance of beating the newcomer and winning a historic fifth term despite the grim economic backdrop.\n\nThis was the landscape in which Keating accepted the invitation to speak at the traditional press gallery end-of-year dinner. This was a strictly off-the-record event where the guest speaker, always a senior politician, was expected to let his or her hair down and speak with at least a little more candour than usual. Politics unplugged. It was Keating's second appearance and he was to say later that, having got through the first one unscathed, he should have quit while he was ahead.\n\nI was at the National Press Club that night. We knew as Keating got up to speak that Chris Higgins, the relatively young head of Treasury, had died from a heart attack on a Canberra running track the night before. We knew the two men were close, but how close became more apparent that night.\n\nThere are occasions when you can see a politician is speaking from the heart and not necessarily through a political filter. This was one of them. Keating spoke mostly off the cuff and his comments quickly entered political folklore as the 'Placido Domingo' speech. This was Keating as few people had seen him before.\n\nHe has always maintained the speech was not said with the intent of striking at Hawke's leadership, but it is hard to avoid making the connection. Intended or not, it was to shatter what was left of the relationship between the two men at the centre of Labor's success through nearly eight grinding years.\n\nBear in mind the audience was a roomful of political journalists, bound by Chatham House rules, but always hungry for a story. Given the content, there was always a risk that someone would break the code of silence.\n\nTo give proper context to our reflections for the ABC interviews and for this book, here substantially is Keating's speech from that night, as recorded by his then Press Secretary Mark Ryan and not fully published until 1993 in Michael Gordon's book, _Paul Keating: Political Fighter_.\n\nIt's been a low day for me as you know with the death of Chris Higgins. These things come along in your life, and you know somebody well, somebody who is making a serious contribution and making it privately and not going on about it and not getting a great amount of public acknowledgement for it. And when one of those sorts of people go, you feel as if something is happening to you, something moving, the earth is moving on you. Apart from the personal tragedy of it you feel as if you don't quite know where you are.\n\nWe've got to be led and politics is about leading people. Now we've got to the stage where everyone thinks politicians are shits and that they're not worth two bob and all the rest of it and everyone kicks the shit out of us every time we get an increase in our salary. But politicians change the world and politics and politicians are about leadership, and our problem is, if you look at some of the great countries like the United States, we've never had one leader like they've had.\n\nThe United States has had three great leaders\u2014Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt\u2014and at times in their history that leadership pushed them on to become the great country they are.\n\nWe've never had one such person. Not one. While the Labor Party is always talking about how great Curtin is and the rest, Curtin was our wartime leader, and a trier, but we've never had that kind of leadership, and it shows. And it's no good people saying, 'Oh, they're two hundred and thirty million'. They weren't two hundred and thirty million when Thomas Jefferson was sitting in a house he'd designed for himself in a paddock in the back end of Virginia, writing the words, 'life, liberty and the pursuit of human happiness'. They weren't two hundred and thirty million then.\n\nThey weren't two hundred and thirty million when they were getting the ethos of their country together, when they were getting their great architectural heritage together, when they were rooting their values into the soil. They had leadership, and that's what politics is about. It's about leadership, and that's what politicians are about.\n\nNow we are leading this country, this government is leading this country, and I don't think any of us think we are up to the Lincolns, or the Roosevelts or the Washingtons. There are no soldier statesmen lurking around this city. There might be a few who think they're soldier statesmen. But the fact is we're doing our best.\n\nA decade ago, the national ethos of this country was the thirty-five hour week. You work thirty-five hours, you've got the house you wanted, the Commodore in the drive, the weekender. That was it. Well, it wasn't enough. I don't know why we were in that position. It was probably because of the bounty of our resources and our minerals. But we never laid it down in a constitution\u2014well we did at the turn of the century with the signature of the British parliament on it.\n\nWe never said, 'This place is ours and we're going to run it ourselves, and we're going to sit down, we're going to write a constitution which a couple of hundred years later could be as fresh as the day it was written'. These are things we never had.\n\nWe have this chance to pull Australia into one of the preferred countries in the 1990s and beyond. And we really do have this opportunity. It's not beyond us. These problems are not irreconcilable or incapable of being defeated. It just requires a national will and a national leadership to go and do it. But basically that leadership will always be about having a conversation with the public.\n\nLeadership is not about being popular. It's about being right and being strong. And it's not about whether you go through some shopping centre tripping over the TV crews' cords. It's about doing what you think the nation requires, making profound judgements about profound issues...'\n\nThe speech was on a Friday night. On Sunday morning it had been leaked to a journalist, Richard Farmer, who wasn't at the dinner, and published to banner headlines in the Murdoch Sunday tabloids in Sydney and Melbourne.\n\nThe conversation with Hawke that ensued wasn't pretty, and he subsequently used the Placido Domingo speech to justify walking away from the Kirribilli Agreement. Five months later Keating launched his first leadership challenge.\n\nOf Hewson, Keating said that night at the Press Club:\n\nYou all regard him as a fresh face, and good on him. In political terms, he is. He has only just been on the scene a couple of years, but he will never lift economics and politics to an art form. There is no Placido Domingo working under him... I walk on that stage, some performances might be better than others, but they will all be up there trying to stream the economics and the politics together. Out there on the stage doing the Placido Domingo. Hewson is doing the hall attendant number back in the theatre, and if you don't think that kind of panache, that kind of experience matters in the transmission of economic ideas\u2014I mean enough of you write me down and good on you, and a few of you have let me down hard\u2014but I'm still around after eight years and I'm still walking all over those bloody people opposite, and I'll keep doing it.\n\n**KOB:** You'd had a chance to get John Hewson's measure when he became Shadow Treasurer. What was your first impression of him, and how seriously did you take him as an opponent after he'd become Liberal leader?\n\n**PJK:** I took him seriously because the press gallery would pray for anybody who could challenge us. So good, bad or indifferent, he was always going to get a go, and that meant we were always going to have to deal with him. But I regarded Hewson as fundamentally brittle and politically not up to the task.\n\n**KOB:** What would you say were Hewson's strengths and weaknesses?\n\n**PJK:** His strength was an almost manic commitment to his message but the weakness was not being able to deal with the world as it really was, while understanding the progress the country had made with the Accord and inflation, competitiveness, financial deregulation and the rest. His was a view framed by ideology and he couldn't see beyond it.\n\n**KOB:** We know Hawke had a slow start adapting to Parliament back in 1980, but by the time Hewson came along, Hawke had become a pretty seasoned performer, hadn't he?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he had, but he was completely flummoxed by _Fightback._ It's very interesting after all the commentary about my relationship with Bob and the tensions over the leadership, the thing that finally beat Bob was _Fightback_. When Hewson put the _Fightback_ manifesto on the table Bob didn't know what to do with it. I had gone as Treasurer by then and he and John Kerin sent _Fightback_ off to Treasury to be costed. But what was needed from Labor was a political response to _Fightback_ and it never came.\n\nIn the end it was Bob's inability to deal with _Fightback_ that brought him undone at that critical caucus meeting at the end of December 1991.\n\n**KOB:** Going back to December 1990 and your National Press Club end-of-year dinner\u2014the Placido Domingo speech\u2014which caused the final big schism between you and Hawke. You've since said you were deeply affected emotionally at the time because Chris Higgins, the man you'd handpicked as your new Treasury Secretary only the year before and for whom you'd developed enormous respect, had dropped dead of a heart attack the night before.\n\nHow would you describe what was running through your mind as you got up to speak off the cuff and off the record to that room full of press gallery journalists?\n\n**PJK:** I was devastated by Chris's death. He'd gone to Melbourne for the day and came to see me when he got back, at five o'clock. It was such a hot day, around 43 degrees, and he came into my Parliament House office and said, 'I'm going for a run before it gets dark.'\n\nI said, 'Oh Chris, you shouldn't be running today, mate. You can't run your way into immortality.'\n\nAnd he said, 'Maybe not, but it's a habit.'\n\nSo we had our meeting, and out he went to have his run. An hour later I got a message that Chris had died on the running track.\n\nWhen you've been through as many policy battles as I had been through with him, you come to understand that the value of a guy like this is phenomenal, and when I thought of all the charlatans in the system, particularly in the political system, compared to losing a chap of his weight, it really pulled me down, really pulled me down.\n\nYet I had the Press Club dinner. In the poignancy of the circumstances, what was I going to say? So I thought with Chris's memory in mind, the theme should be about the value of leadership, the quest for leadership and for good public policy, that leadership was everything, more or less in tribute to him.\n\n**KOB:** But in that context, even the word leadership passing through your brain, sad as you may have been about Chris Higgins' death, surely you'd have also been thinking about the implications of what you were saying and how they might be perceived by gallery journalists.\n\n**PJK:** Not really, because it was entirely off the record. It is the classic off-the-record, end-of-year deal where the speaker is invited to be relaxed and candid on the very clear understanding that nobody will split. This was the real me speaking, and unguardedly, so I wasn't thinking through any political filter. I just blurted this stuff out. No agenda beyond speaking about the quality of leadership in public life, with Chris Higgins very much in mind. You know broadly what I'd said?\n\n**KOB:** I was there. And at the heart of your speech was your reflection on what great leadership was and that Australia hadn't yet produced a great leader.\n\n**PJK:** That's right.\n\n**KOB:** Wasn't it disingenuous to suggest that you wouldn't have anticipated the offence that Bob Hawke might take from that reference?\n\n**PJK:** This wasn't about Bob Hawke, not at all about Bob Hawke. I was talking about leadership at critical times in a nation's history, and how Australia had not had that leadership at critical times. When the British were trying to defeat the colonists in the United States the Americans had General Washington. When the Union had come apart in the middle of the nineteenth century, America had Abraham Lincoln. And, when robber baron capitalism which exploded in the late-nineteenth century, collapsed in the 1920s and the country headed into a massive Depression, America had Franklin Roosevelt. I said, 'We have never had that kind of leadership.' And by the way, I think that is self-evidently true.\n\n**KOB:** I think everyone there was riveted by what you were saying, your comments on the greatness of Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, but when you came to the line: 'Leadership is not about being popular. It's about being right and being strong. And it's not about whether you go through some shopping centre tripping over the TV crews' cords. It's about doing what you think the nation requires, making profound judgements about profound issues.' Even if every other line in that speech was carefully crafted to avoid even a hint of insult to Hawke, I would suggest that that line alone would have been enough for everyone listening to assume you were having a shot at his leadership, the great shopping-centre campaigner.\n\n**PJK:** In fact, I wasn't. It was really a shot at the press gallery for always buying the line that the shopping-centre strolls were the way politics was done. It was to say to the journalists, 'Look, this is the spin, it's not the substance. In truth it's not the shopping centres that matter, it's not the faux populism that matters, it's the real substance that remains the key to it all.'\n\nIt was really a message from me to the gallery but I take your point that a journalist could have thought I was referring to Hawke. But it was never intended to wound Hawke. I had no intention on that occasion to do so. He was not on my mind at all.\n\nBut even if I had said it, so what? What a criminal thing to say, that truth and substance will always beat shopping-centre visits tripping over TV crews. I mean, even if Bob took it to mean a remark about him, it wasn't such a deadly remark that he was entitled to take such umbrage over it.\n\n**KOB:** Well, the great offence that Hawke took when someone broke the Chatham House rules and fed what you'd said was that, in his eyes, you had slighted John Curtin as Australia's great wartime leader when he confronted the crisis in the Pacific and the threat of invasion.\n\n**PJK:** No, no, no! The great offence was that I didn't compare Hawke to Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. _That_ was the great offence.\n\n**KOB:** He has written that he said to you that he took offence that you had failed to acknowledge John Curtin as a great Australian leader.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he did talk to me about Curtin, but that was only his prop for the greater and real hurt\u2014that I hadn't recognised him as a great leader, that like the Christ child in Joseph's manger, his mother had whispered in his ear at five years of age that he would be the Great One, the great Prime Minister and the great figure of Australia. I hadn't acknowledged this greatness, you see?\n\n**KOB:** Didn't your own mother and grandmother tell you as a young child that you were special? Are you saying that he was unduly affected by those words and came to believe he was destined for greatness but you were not?\n\n**PJK:** I always possessed and still possess a core humility. Bob has never had or known this. Bob is not just a narcissist, he's a pathological narcissist. He actually thinks he is, of his essence, a special person.\n\nBob never possessed the intellectual equipment, the range of interests, the insights to be the person he always thought he was. Whereas I always knew I was a person on the outside looking in; that the party would never volunteer to give me the leadership; that the only way I would get it was by earning it.\n\nEarning it is a different concept to being owed it. I never thought I was ever owed anything, whereas Bob thought he was owed everything. He cheaply seized on the speech as an excuse to repudiate the Kirribilli Agreement and hang onto the prime ministership.\n\n**KOB:** Why didn't you see that coming, at least as a possibility?\n\n**PJK:** Because the speech and its contents were not meant for Hawke. Frankly the ideas in it were beyond, way beyond, Hawke's otherwise limited frame of reference.\n\n**KOB:** But are you seriously saying that there was no point, no moment, when such a supreme politician as yourself, with all the water under the bridge between the two of you, all the ups and downs, didn't see the potential risk of him reading a personal slight in what you'd said?\n\n**PJK:** Well, you were there. You heard it yourself, what did you think?\n\n**KOB:** What I thought, and what a lot of other journalists were saying that night, was that Hawke would inevitably hear what you'd said, and take it as directed at him. We were reading those sentiments into what you were saying.\n\n**PJK:** What, that Hawke was not as great as Washington, Lincoln or Roosevelt? Chris Higgins' death did overtake me, not only the sadness of it, but the value and meaning of his life. And I was sick of the flummery, the nonsense and pettiness that so often pervades politics. That night I gave the gallery credit for supporting me in the big change I sought to bring to public life, and that was to make good policy central to political strategy. This was the end of 1990. We\u2014the press gallery and I\u2014had been together on this journey for nearly eight years. They had been runners in the great building of the new Australia. This is what had happened. And I was urging them to believe in the process. To continue believing in it.\n\nDo you remember I talked about politicians? I said, 'A lot of you think we're not worth two bob, but politicians change the world.' Remember me saying that? 'Politicians make or break the world, and I've offered you a new brand of politics and you have, in the main, run with it. Don't give it up now.' This was the whole point of the remarks.\n\n**KOB:** What was the intent behind your reference to Placido Domingo?\n\n**PJK:** That was only because some journalists had been drawing comparisons between me and John Hewson. I was saying, 'Give me a break!'\n\nI said, 'Look, it's like Placido Domingo. A truly great artist. He may be out of sorts one night or another, but he'll always do great singing.'\n\nThat's what I was trying to say. I was trying to construct a metaphor on the run. But Bob thought it was in his interest to feign hurt and to take this all personally. He had given a solemn agreement at Kirribilli but then used the speech as a lame excuse to break it. I firmly believe he had never ever intended to relinquish the prime ministership. He thought I was another John Ducker or Charlie Fitzgibbon or another of his trade union supporters who would help him on the way but whom he would walk over if he had to.\n\nBob always thought he was special, and whenever there has been commentary about it, that was the way his parents treated him. I know most people treat their children as special but I think by 1990 Bob had come to see himself as the great man sweeping through the careers of the rest of us\u2014all in fulfilment of his preordained destiny.\n\nGod, give us a break. Give us a break! In brutal intellectual terms Bob could only have got a PhD in ordinariness.\n\n**KOB:** Just to stay with the night of the press club dinner for a moment. On the one hand you were talking about the great change you were fashioning on Australian politics, and on the other, that Australia hadn't had any great leaders of vision. You didn't see yourself then as potentially a great leader in the wings?\n\n**PJK:** I knew I had a chance. But Australia is not the United States\u2014what we do doesn't change the world. That's not to invalidate the point that leadership is central and is the key ingredient in public life. Not to invalidate that point, and that at key moments in our history we really need that kind of leadership. That was my point, and Chris Higgins had provided that kind of leadership and he had died the day before. That was the context.\n\nBut then Bob's used the speech to tell me formally in January that because of this speech he's withdrawing his commitment to hand over the leadership. Really. The paltriness of it was compelling.\n\n**KOB:** If it's true that Hawke was at least half-hoping for an excuse to renege on the Kirribilli handover, didn't you give him the perfect excuse? He later said that it just increased his already strong feeling that you weren't ready for leadership.\n\n**PJK:** He would say that, wouldn't he! As I've said before, I believe he basically never ever intended to give me the job. I believe the Kirribilli Agreement was built on a falsehood. That's the truth of it. In the end I had to execute him, and in the end I did.\n\n**KOB:** I'm just rapidly casting forward here to a comment that was made by one of your colleagues at the time of the first leadership challenge a few months later, that it was a choice between an egomaniac and a megalomaniac. And I think the finger was pointed at you as the megalo.\n\n**PJK:** Let's just say I'm a far more humble commodity than Bob ever was or could be.\n\n**KOB:** Is it true that you subsequently asked Peter Abeles and Bill Kelty to seek to reconvene the Kirribilli group, but Hawke wasn't interested?\n\n**PJK:** I don't know whether I did say that, because I wasn't so silly as to think it would turn Bob's head after he had said he was staying. Mind you, at the end of 1990, if the Parliament had gone another four weeks, he would have been in real trouble. The Cabinet and the caucus had had a complete gutful of him. By December there were a lot of stories reflecting that. Go to the record.\n\nEssentially Bob was saved by Saddam Hussein. In January 1991 the Gulf War started and Bob wrapped the flag around himself and went into the command bunker. His decision to commit to the American coalition was the correct one, but Bob used the Gulf War to break the momentum against him in caucus. Clear as day.\n\n**KOB:** Was it really as clear as day to everyone or was that just your subjective perception?\n\n**PJK:** It was as clear as day. The last piece of commentary Paul Kelly wrote for the _Australian_ on 22 December 1990 was, 'ALP deserting Hawke for Keating.' That was as we got up to end the parliamentary year. 'Keating stalks an old enemy.'\n\nHad Parliament for 1990 not wound up when it did I would have become Prime Minister within the month. Hawke was in diabolical trouble when Parliament rose in December. Yet on 15 January 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was holidaying at Surfers Paradise and the moment that happened I knew Bob, the little general, a faux reincarnation of Billy Hughes, would make the patriotic pitch, and so it was.\n\nEvery morning in the Cabinet room we would have a military briefing from General John Baker, the head of the Defence Force. There was a certain monotony to these briefings and they had a certain familiar ring. So I asked him one morning, 'John where did this information come from?' and he said, 'We got most of it from CNN this morning, Treasurer.'\n\nWhen I realised that a lot of our information was just hearsay and the regurgitation of news, I stopped going to the briefings. By the time the war came to an end in May 1991, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait had completely dislocated me politically. If Bob could have slept in the flag, he would have.\n\n**KOB:** At some point you had the conversation where Hawke subsequently said you had dropped what he regarded as a great clanger, where he claims you said that Australia was the arse end of the world and you could always go and live in Paris.\n\n**PJK:** This was a complete lie and a weak apologia for why he decided to break his commitment to an orderly transition of the leadership to me under the Kirribilli Agreement. I had not said this in any of our meetings after my speech at the press gallery dinner. I had said it in Cabinet at least once and maybe a couple of times when someone was arguing against me, and I guess I rounded on this person and I said, 'Look we don't live in the United States of Europe. We have no natural market. There's no great economy next door. We don't live in North America. We're not Canada with the United States at our door.'\n\nI said, 'We're a continent on our own at the arse end of the world. That simply means we have to be better. We have to be open and competitive. We can't rely on the unearned value of size and strength of the market around us. And I made this point a couple of times just to drive home that we were alone on our continent\u201420 million of us\u2014that no one owed us a living and that the only way we could actually garner one was to be good.'\n\nBob had taken my phrase, 'the arse end of the earth', and later tried to say, 'Oh, because of that sentiment I decided to not vacate the leadership.' You have to remember that this bloke had always had everything given to him. Everything and always. Yet here was someone trying to take the candy from him.\n\n**KOB:** You absolutely deny saying, 'I'm not going to hang around forever. Australia is the arse of the world. I can always go and live in Paris.'\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely. It was a complete lie. And what's more I've lived in Sydney for 24 years since. It is true that I had said that I could go to Paris or Britain and lead an interesting life, that I didn't live and breathe politics to the extent that I had no other options in life. But the idea that I would leave Australia because I thought it was an unworthy country is a wicked and sleazy thing for Bob to have said. And, as I've said, the proof in the pudding is that it's twenty-odd years since I left the prime ministership and I'm still here.\n\nI don't believe Bob ever intended to honour his commitment under the Kirribilli Agreement. His wife Blanche says in her updated edition of his biography _Hawke: The Prime Minister_ that Bob was very happy about the agreement because he thought it would pacify me and take the leadership monkey off his back through 1989 and 1990. It bought him time\u2014time enough until he seized on the slimiest of reasons to break his word: 'Because Paul said something I didn't like\u2014I decided to walk away from the commitment.'\n\nFor anyone who saw the _Australian Story_ on Hawke, when confronted with the question, they will notice how weakly Bob gave the answer. I emphasise weakly. Here he has made a solemn commitment to the other leader in the party to move on after nearly nine years in the prime ministership, and he says he is justified in ripping up that commitment because of something I am supposed to have said. But, as he knew, never said.\n\n**KOB:** What finally led you to declare a formal challenge?\n\n**PJK:** I decided in the end that I wouldn't let Hawke obfuscate or tread on me any longer. So in May 1991 I decided to challenge him for the job. I wasn't going to let him off scot-free in breaking his agreement\u2014in the dishonour of it. I was facing another tough budget process to which Hawke was showing every sign of contributing little or nothing. There was a newspaper story from that time, referring to a four-and-a-half hour Expenditure Review Committee discussion about the budget strategy in February. At that discussion, Bob did not make one contribution. Not one.\n\nOne reason our relationship had been so successful was because he was prepared to let me draw down on the popularity, the capital, to push through the big economic changes. But by 1990 he was no longer doing that. He had lushed out. He'd backed Kim Beazley, who was Communications Minister, against me on the reform of the telecommunications sector. Kim was arguing for the merger of Telecom and the Overseas Telecommunications Commission to create mega-com, where I was arguing for an open competitive system.\n\nBeazley was essentially pushing the trade union line. Had I taken that approach from 1983 we would still have been caught in the old model, the old Labor orthodoxy. I was utterly consistent in my approach to telecommunications: get the structure right and trust the markets. I knew that in an open competitive market Telecom would be a very effective player.\n\n**KOB:** Why did you feel the need as Treasurer to buy into the argument?\n\n**PJK:** For the same reason I was directly engaged in arguments for tariff cuts in the manufacturing industry, because it was a critical part of the government's micro-reform agenda for an open, competitive economy.\n\nI said to Bob, 'Let's at least get a proper open competitive model in telecommunications. Let's get away from this idea of a big telecom or a duopoly.'\n\nWhat does he do? He goes with Beazley for the duopoly, right?\n\nI believe Bob's support for Beazley in this was influenced by his desire to maintain his base in the industrial movement including the Telecom unions, as well as the Centre Left faction in the Parliament to help shore up his leadership. He knew Bill Kelty and most of the core ACTU leadership I'd been dealing with for years in the Accord process would back me in a leadership contest.\n\nPaul Kelly in an article records Bob saying, yes, he recognised he'd gone for the sub-optimal economic outcome. So I had a Prime Minister who now was not contributing to the debate, who would not go for the best economic outcomes in microeconomic reform. To put it bluntly, he was no longer useful to me.\n\nThen he made another bad decision after a long prevarication not to allow mining at Coronation Hill on the edge of Kakadu. In the end there were a lot of bad structural decisions, and we get to the big Cabinet budget discussion of February 1991 and he fails to make a contribution!\n\nWhat was the point of keeping the guy? If in the end he was no longer signed up to the economic heavy lifting, then what was the point of his just sitting there? So I decided I was not going to continue to aggrandise Bob by doing another tough budget round and then have him say again at the end, 'Oh by the way, you can leave if you want\u2014there will always be someone to replace you.'\n\nGetting the structural changes for Australia was why I put up with the indignity for so many years: the massive workload and Bob's obvious lack of respect as he came out after the 1988 Budget surplus saying, 'I can do without him.' I then agreed to do 1989 and 1990 on the back of his promise, I set up the 1990 election for him, which he won again, but that still wasn't good enough.\n\nSo here I was, lining up for my ninth budget, full of structural changes again, with Bob announcing he was going to have a long trip abroad, leaving muggins to again do the great man's work. While all the time he is hearing voices that he's the great national leader, the one I failed to acknowledge alongside Roosevelt and Lincoln. He's still there and I'm back to the toil. That's my place.\n\nSo I decided I wouldn't do the budget, which meant I would either walk as Treasurer or I would challenge him. So I decided to challenge. It was the first bit of cold steel Bob had ever experienced. Simply confronting him made it all worthwhile.\n\n**KOB:** When you decided that you were going to formally challenge, what were the key steps you took to line up your support base and tell Hawke?\n\n**PJK:** Graham Richardson was good on that occasion, although he and the other key faction leader Gerry Hand from the Left had wanted to keep the combination of Bob and me going.\n\n**KOB:** And when you decided to go and see Bob Hawke, what did you say to him?\n\n**PJK:** I said, 'Bob, I always told you if I was coming after you, you'd be the first to know. Now, I am coming after you and you are the first to know.'\n\nHe said, 'Can't we discuss this? What have you got to go on like that for? Can't we discuss this?'\n\nHe then went on at length about how he would reconsider the position when he came back from abroad, and that he would think about having another round of conversations about transition arrangements.\n\n**KOB:** So you had that conversation, then you walked out and announced the challenge?\n\n**PJK:** I'd arranged for it to be announced. Richardson gave Laurie Oakes on Channel Nine the details of the Kirribilli deal. That was with my agreement.\n\n**KOB:** Why wouldn't you just be upfront with the public of Australia, walk into a press conference, face the reporters and the cameras and lay it out? Why did that have to be a leak?\n\n**PJK:** It was a matter of timing, because it was a Thursday and Parliament was going to be up for the week. I had to get to see Bob and there wasn't enough time. In fact, I had only barely walked out of Bob's office when the Channel Nine news went to air.\n\n**KOB:** Then you must have had the strategy planned before you walked into Hawke's office. You must have had Graham Richardson primed to give Laurie Oakes the document and the detail before you went in to see Bob Hawke.\n\n**PJK:** That's right.\n\n**KOB:** So he wasn't the first to know. You had your troops banked behind you all ready to swing into action.\n\n**PJK:** In the real and absolute political sense, he was the first to know. What I had meant when I had said that to Bob is that I wouldn't be out there for months undermining him, working to get rid of him, before I formally challenged. I made the decision in May and went straight to him and told him.\n\n**KOB:** Did you think you had a serious chance of winning?\n\n**PJK:** I thought I'd do all right, but I'd fall substantially short. In the end it was 66 to 44.\n\n**KOB:** So you went in knowing you would lose, presumably with two possibilities: you would either go to the backbench and wait for a second challenge, or you would walk away.\n\n**PJK:** That's right.\n\n**KOB:** Which of those was uppermost in your mind?\n\n**PJK:** I think walking out and walking away. At the same time Bob always underestimated, failed to appreciate, what I did for him in the House of Representatives. So I thought it would be interesting to see how he fared without me. My bet was that he and John Kerin as Prime Minister and Treasurer would not be able to handle John Hewson as the new Opposition Leader. And not handle _Fightback_.\n\n**KOB:** It's always puzzled me that if it was so abundantly clear to your colleagues that you were the real leader behind the throne, the real driving force of the government, that Hawke was weary and his time had passed, why did the Labor caucus vote him back?\n\n**PJK:** Because they always wanted power on the cheap. No hard decisions by them. They liked the double act and wanted to keep it. It was also about how the factional votes were directed. The Queensland AWU Branch split the Right. I'd never had all the Right's votes. Bill Ludwig, who was the AWU Secretary in Queensland, was barracking for Hawke and he put very heavy pressure on MPs from the Queensland Right, so it wasn't actually a clean battle.\n\nBut I think Hawke's popularity, as the man who was seen to win four elections was still a strong factor within the caucus and out in his union base. It wasn't the veracity and the integrity of the economic changes or that I had set up the 1987 and 1990 elections that decided the day. It was really what they believed to be Bob's popularity.\n\n**KOB:** Do you think it was also that a lot of your colleagues actually feared the grenade-thrower aspect of your personality? The two sides to Paul Keating?\n\n**PJK:** The thrills and spills maybe\u2014but they were always in the name of trying to make another big mark on the national register. To push the country forward.\n\n**KOB:** But the caucus decision to keep Hawke would have been taken knowing that they were risking losing you, and they were prepared to risk losing you to keep Hawke.\n\n**PJK:** My bet was that they would collapse, and collapse they did. The caucus had a right to a preference but no innate right to be right. Bob and Kerin didn't know what to do with Hewson. He just ran all over them, and in the end Hewson had put together a grab-bag of Margaret Thatcherite policies and presented them as a blueprint for government and then given it a name\u2014 _Fightback_. If Bob had had any real political skill he would have knocked Hewson right over.\n\nWithin six months of becoming Prime Minister I had Hewson on the run with _Fightback,_ but Bob didn't know how to deal with it. Instead of attacking the big ideological agenda behind _Fightback_ you know what they were doing? They were trying to cost his programs. So Bob wasn't responding in Parliament to _Fightback_ , he was having it costed.\n\nThe first thing I would have said to Bob if I'd still been there was, 'Bob, forget about costing his program! Just gut this guy politically!'\n\nBut Bob never had those in-fighting political instincts. He'd always had someone looking after him all his life, carrying him from one thing to another. But when you're alone in the bear pit, that's different. That's the moment of truth.\n\n**KOB:** But you're saying that your predominant thought was that that you'd probably leave. Yet at the same time you were clearly weighing up the likelihood of Hawke's support collapsing, right through the second half of 1991.\n\n**PJK:** I thought I'd see what they did, but I began to think about a life outside the place.\n\n**KOB:** You kept a fairly low profile through that period, but you did make two keynote speeches which were reported pretty closely as one would expect, and still seen by the media and the caucus through the leadership prism.\n\n**PJK:** I'll tell you my motivation for those two speeches. They were both about policy. One was in response to Bob wanting to return income-taxing powers to the states in what he thought was going to be 'the new federalism'. This was an idea Mike Codd had dreamed up when Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department.\n\nHe'd given it to Bob as a kind of make-work program, 'PM, what we need is a far more workable federation, so why not return the income tax powers to the states?'\n\nAfter all the postwar development of a national economy with uniform taxation, every fibre in my being was opposed to that, so I made a speech at the Press Club attacking it. I would have done that whether I was still a member of the Cabinet or not.\n\nThe second speech was to keep a pledge to Bill Kelty and the ACTU. I'd promised the ACTU that I would legislate for compulsory superannuation after the Industrial Relations Commission had knocked back the second 3 per cent superannuation deal and that I would take superannuation to 12 per cent compulsorily.\n\nBob and Kerin were ratting on my commitment to the ACTU. So I made the speech to the Graduate School of Management at the University of NSW, arguing superannuation should go to 12 per cent. And that speech was the basis of what is now Australia's superannuation system; that was the keynote speech. The two speeches were about key policy matters.\n\nSo when Kerin began talking about not being able to afford the further 3 per cent of wages\u2014mainly because Treasury hated the whole idea of compulsory superannuation\u2014Bill Kelty confronted Hawke and said, 'Bob, what in Christ are you up to? Paul's given us the commitment.'\n\nI said to Bill, 'Don't worry, I'll make a speech about this and get this back on track.'\n\nWhen I made the speech, Bob collapsed and they agreed to legislate it and announce it in the budget. But they would only go to 9 per cent, not 12.\n\n**KOB:** What sort of battle was going on inside you as Christmas 1991 approached?\n\n**PJK:** I had already bought an interest in this debt-laden piggery, which I was going to operate as a business. I had put a joint venture together with the leaders of the Danish pork industry in July or August of that year as a business to pursue when I left Parliament. You have to do something when you leave, and I didn't want to be an ambassador or take some other government position. It was going to be business of one kind or another.\n\n**KOB:** Why a piggery? It seemed so far removed from anything you'd want to do in a life after Parliament.\n\n**PJK:** I thought I'd run a business. I had looked at a few different things. This thing was debt-laden but had a ton of possibilities, especially once the Danes became involved, because they were world leaders in that game. So by September, October, November, my mind was right out of the job. The prime ministership had dropped off my radar.\n\n**KOB:** But looking through the newspaper archive the air was thick with speculation about a second challenge through October, November and into December.\n\n**PJK:** I know. But that was coming from my supporters in the Cabinet more than it was coming from me. I actually thought Bob would get through to Christmas and then I'd go. But in the end _Fightback_ beat him. He'd given John Kerin the Treasury when I resigned and Kerin didn't have a clue how to deal with it politically. You remember that farcical press conference where John didn't know what the Gross Operating Surplus was, an event that forced Hawke to dismiss him and make Ralph Willis Treasurer. Bob then made that fatal mistake of bringing Parliament back for one day\u2014the day his destiny ran out.\n\n**KOB:** But before Hawke decided to bring Parliament back for that one piece of legislation about political advertising there was a plethora of stories predicting that a second Keating challenge was in the wind.\n\n**PJK:** I know, that's true, but that was coming from the Right of the party and the Centre Left and in the main it was wishful thinking. Between July and November 1991 I had negotiated a new joint venture agreement with the Danish national pork industry to create a one-million-a-year throughput piggery. That's where my focus was because at that point I no longer expected to be called upon to become Prime Minister. I simply would not have been engaging in that business if I was still seriously planning to take Bob on. I thought the prime ministership had passed for me.\n\n**KOB:** The media perceptions of Hawke by that stage were that he was going terribly. The air was thick with speculation on both sides of politics. I find it so hard to believe, in that climate, with the political killer instincts you had, and having nursed the leadership ambition for so long, that you weren't by that stage on fire with anticipation of launching a successful second challenge and becoming Prime Minister.\n\n**PJK:** I wasn't on fire, Kerry. I'd said after the first challenge that I had had my shot at the leadership, that I'd fired it and lost. I'd made clear that I would walk away from the government without further challenging Hawke. I had challenged him, and the party had made a decision to stick with Hawke.\n\nI thought the only chance I would ever have from there on was Hawke's collapse, but I didn't think he was so weak he would just collapse. That only came towards the end of the year after John Hewson's launch of his _Fightback_ manifesto. Hawke surprised everyone when he revealed that he simply didn't know what to do with _Fightback_. He didn't surprise me because Bob never had self-generated ideas. There was always a minder to provide them. But, on this occasion, the minder had decamped.\n\n**KOB:** But wasn't the former senior party strategist Stephen Smith working within the Parliament to organise your numbers?\n\n**PJK:** No, and once I left Treasury I just had a backbench office with virtually no staff from July through to Christmas. I thought I had done my dash and, notwithstanding the best wishes and well-meaning support from colleagues, I couldn't see how the opportunity would arise through the rest of the year.\n\nIt turned out that Bob's collapse was devastating for him and his followers.\n\n**KOB:** Did Hawke's collapse really take you by surprise?\n\n**PJK:** Not entirely by surprise. The week I got the leadership, you could check the numbers. Labor's popularity had plummeted to 28 per cent of the primary vote in the Newspoll, and 29 or 30 in the _Bulletin_ poll. To all intents and purposes the government was sunk.\n\nI had backbenchers ringing me, saying, 'Bob's doing appallingly in Parliament', and I'd have ministers say, 'Cabinet's become a charade without you there to keep the discipline. Kerin couldn't get a piece of toilet paper through the Cabinet. The place is going to the dogs.'\n\n**KOB:** But for all that you were still planning to just walk away without another fight against a seriously weakened opponent?\n\n**PJK:** I had completely emptied my backbench parliamentary office by the time Hawke recalled Parliament for the one-day sitting. When my friends in the caucus came to my backbench office on 19 December to talk with me, every personal effect I had had been taken to Sydney. It was completely empty. The person most startled when he saw how bare the office was, was Leo McLeay. I will never forget his reaction when he walked in.\n\nHe said, 'Christ mate, you've gone, haven't you?'\n\nI said, 'Yeah, I've gone.'\n\nI was anticipating that I would formally resign from Parliament early in the new year. But then Bob made that fatal mistake that nobody could have anticipated. He called Parliament back for one day to deal with a bill outlawing political advertising. It was a deadly move for him.\n\n**KOB:** Now, the sceptical part of my mind is thinking, what a terrific ploy that would be, what a great way to get a message across to caucus. Move all the stuff off your shelves as a clear sign you're going, and they'll be left to sink or swim with Hawke.\n\n**PJK:** There was no gainsaying on this. Had Parliament not been recalled no one would have known I had already cleared the office. I was going to resign at the end of January 1992. I would not have sat there and ruined their opportunity to win a fifth poll with Bob as leader. I had taken some of my stuff back to my rented house in Canberra and some of it back to Sydney. In my head I was gone.\n\n**KOB:** What are your reflections now on how that second challenge unfolded?\n\n**PJK:** In what was originally scheduled for the final week of Parliament in the second week of December, a lot of things happened. Bob decided to sack John Kerin as Treasurer and appoint Ralph Willis. The headlines weren't helpful to Bob and there was a Newspoll that was favourable to me.\n\nThen late in the week five or six senior ministers who had been strong supporters of Bob's\u2014people like Kim Beazley, Robert Ray, Gareth Evans, Michael Duffy and Gerry Hand\u2014went to see him and told him he should pack up and go.\n\nInstead, Bob sent them packing. So the tremors were in the structure. But the rising of the Parliament for the year, more or less gave him a reprieve. But then he recalled the Parliament for a day. Absolutely deadly. I lived in Canberra so it didn't matter to me; I just rolled down the road and turned up to the office, and the next morning I was the Prime Minister. In effect the caucus drafted me.\n\n**KOB:** Walking into the caucus this time, did you know you were going to win?\n\n**PJK:** No, but I thought I probably would. Kerry, to get the government out of this particular predicament you had to be able to tell the stories. Hewson had so much support in the gallery with _Fightback_ being so uncritically reported and viewed as the new wave of policy. To tackle the ideological fervour of Hewson, you had to have a storyteller in Parliament to do it. And Bob was no storyteller. Bob couldn't tell a real story\u2014a nuanced story, to save his life.\n\nYou had the Liberals saying Labor has been in office for four terms, now is the time to bring back the Thatcherite policies, attack the social wage, bring in the consumption tax. So I thought unless you could project a story and take them on in big-picture terms you didn't have a chance, and no one on Labor's frontbench was in a position to do that. For that reason I didn't think the caucus had much choice, if they really thought about it, but caucuses are always moody and unpredictable.\n\n**KOB:** This had been such a long journey for you. The boy who leaves school at fourteen and joins the Labor Party, whose mother tells the vocational guidance officer you might have your sights on being Prime Minister one day, who starts his working life as a lowly council clerk, a shiny bum, but makes it into Parliament at twenty-five. You're now only 47, but it's been a long and eventful journey. What emotions did you feel as you heard the vote called?\n\n**PJK:** I felt a big weight fall on me. For all the issues between us, I didn't want to see Bob go on these terms. I was sad to see Bob go down like that. You might think that's strange, but there was a point of affection between Bob and me. You've got to know this. That's why I used to think, 'Do the right thing by yourself, Bob, and stick to the agreement.' When he didn't, he opted to fight it out and lost.\n\nI didn't really want to climb over his body to get the job. I would have much preferred an organised transfer of power for both our sakes and for the party.\n\nI said to him in one conversation, 'Bob, you go on time and I'll write the history for you.' That was a very big offer.\n\n**KOB:** What did that mean, 'I'll write the history for you'?\n\n**PJK:** Well, more favourably than he would have otherwise deserved to have it written.\n\n**KOB:** You've told me how you felt sad for Bob Hawke. What emotions did you feel for yourself to reach the pinnacle after all those years?\n\n**PJK:** You're sitting in the caucus meeting; the other man is sitting but defeated. This is a man you've worked with for eight-and-a-half, nine years of your life, for whom you've had a lot of personal affection and regard. In a conversation like this it's hard to capture those soft moments in a long career, particularly between two people like Bob and me.\n\nBut they were there, and I knew what they meant to me, what they meant for my family, what they meant for the caucus. So there was a very humbling moment. And if you examine my press conference immediately thereafter, it's very obvious that I am not some ebullient person who's just had a great victory.\n\nI felt the moment. People might not have expected me to be overtaken by the moment, but I was.\n\nThere was also a moment of thinking, 'What do we do now?'\n\nBecause there was a psychological point there. When you take your head out of a job and drop something as massive as Treasury and you're back as a private person and you're letting all the parliamentary hijinks go, you do a mental change. There is a mental sweep away from it. It's very hard to get your head back into it, especially after six months away from it. The hardest thing I found with the prime ministership was putting my head back in the space. It took me months to put my head back, to return to the prior level of intellectual gymnastics\u2014to intellectual speed. Psychologically, I was well out of it.\n\n**KOB:** Can you remember what you and Annita talked about that night, because this was an event that was to change your lives immensely?\n\n**PJK:** We did talk about it, and I told her some of how I felt about the way Bob chose to go and my regrets about that. She was much tougher on Bob. She said, 'Bob's fiddled you around for years. There was a justice about all this that just had to be.'\n\n'OLD DOGS FOR A HARD ROAD'\n\nTo this day Paul Keating regrets the way he came to power, and the timing. No political leader likes to arrive in office with blood on the floor, if not the hands, but in modern politics that's becoming the rule rather than the exception. In the past 50 years, fifteen federal political leaders from Labor and the Coalition have been forced out of office by their own party. Sixteen if you count Alexander Downer falling on his sword under party pressure in 1995 to give John Howard his second chance as Liberal Leader. Four of the fifteen were Prime Ministers.\n\nBut timing was a real issue for Keating. Talent was thick on the ground when Bob Hawke put his first Cabinet of fifteen together in 1983. Nearly nine years later, Paul Keating and just four other Cabinet originals\u2014John Button, Gareth Evans, John Dawkins and Ralph Willis\u2014were all who remained when he and his ministry were sworn in on 20 December 1991, by one of the best who had gone, Governor-General Bill Hayden.\n\nThe Hawke years had taken their toll. Hawke had created Labor history by leading his party to four successive victories, but Keating now felt he wore Labor's incumbency around his neck like a dead weight. To one of his biographers, Michael Gordon, he described his ministry as 'old dogs for a hard road'.\n\nThe other aspect of timing was to do with the economy. The recession Hawke and Keating had inherited in 1983 was a political blessing for them because all of the pain associated with it was easily sheeted back to their predecessors, Fraser and Howard. As the pain largely disappeared within their first year in office, they garnered much of the credit.\n\nBut as Paul Keating sat down to his first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister, there was no such blessing. In the public's eye the political pain of this recession\u2014the most prolonged in Australia since the Great Depression\u2014was his to wear. Its impact was still striking home savagely: unemployment was at 10.6 per cent and rising on a trajectory that suggested no end in sight. The Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet (PM&C) was advising that it might stay above 10 per cent for the next eighteen months, well after the election.\n\nTo use Keating's own parlance, the inflation stick might have been snapped as a desirable byproduct of the recession, but that was a virtue that did not get much recognition in opinion polls. The first month of the Keating Government was marked by the lowest inflation rate in 28 years, but in terms of the prevailing political mood, the Tanberg cartoon on the front page of that day's _Sydney Morning Herald_ would have struck home. Keating was drawn in classic Tanberg style, champagne bottle in one hand and glass in the other, exhorting a rather glum-looking crowd to 'raise your glasses to a successful inflation rate'. A second figure beside him says, 'The unemployed can't afford champagne glasses.'\n\nThe Morgan Gallup poll had Keating at 25 per cent against John Hewson's 62 per cent. Peter Hartcher reported in the _Herald_ that the fine print of the Morgan poll claimed that 'The most common comment in support of Hewson was, \"I don't like Keating\".'\n\nNo one knew better than Keating that when he faced his first election as Prime Minister in little over a year, he would be harshly judged if the economy was not clearly in recovery and the sense of fatigue that had gripped the Hawke Government replaced by a fresh energy and vision. And, in the wings, Bob Hawke would be saying to his party, 'I told you so.'\n\nIn a television interview before the first challenge in 1991, Keating had promised to bring dash and elan to the prime ministership, and generate change. But after six months on the backbench free of Cabinet preoccupations and the Treasury workload, even he acknowledged it would take time to get his head back into the disciplined space that goes with running a country. After long years of political combat, he would have known that he had to define points of significant difference from the Opposition, not just on the economy, but across the spectrum, to gain an edge when so much was stacked against him. His sense of conviction on issues such as national identity\u2014the flag, the republic, Australia's place in the region\u2014or Mabo and native title when they emerged, certainly helped sharpen the difference between Keating Labor and Hewson Liberal.\n\nBy the time Keating was sworn in, Hewson had had nearly two years as Liberal leader to establish his credentials for the prime ministership, and even more than Gough Whitlam and his policy program in 1972, he had an extraordinarily detailed book of policies giving flesh to his vision for Australia. It helped Keating's search for difference that _Fightback!_ made Keating's version of market-based economics look positively mild, but Hewson nonetheless was a fresh face driven by conviction and certitude.\n\nOn the one hand people were impressed by Hewson; on the other he made them nervous. Fortunately for Labor he was not the kind of personality people easily warmed to, and the sense was evident that the voting public was marking Labor down rather than Hewson and the Liberals up. Three days after Keating deposed Hawke in the caucus vote, the veteran Labor Party pollster Rod Cameron described the election due by early 1993 as a contest between two unpopular leaders: 'the first election in my experience in over 20 years where it really will be about policies.'\n\nBut the chink of light for Keating was that the dislike he'd engendered was built on perceptions of an arrogant, one-dimensional character who was only viewed through the prism of remorseless economic change delivered with a swagger and a promise of great prosperity that had seemed to evaporate in recession. If he could be seen to turn the recession around, undo the damage, paint a bigger, broader, deeper canvas beyond just economics\u2014and scare the living daylights out of Australians with _Fightback!_ \u2014he might just have a chance.\n\nHewson had a plan, Keating needed one. His new Social Security Minister, Neal Blewett, noted in his political diaries later that the clear view within Cabinet at its first meeting on 7 January was that the plan Keating was about to generate with his new Treasurer John Dawkins, which he was calling _One Nation_ , would be the Keating Government's one big chance to pull the 1993 election out of the fire. Blewett also recalls that at a subsequent Cabinet meeting, as _One Nation_ was starting to take shape, Keating was compelled to urge that 'the divisions of the past be put behind us'. The penny must have dropped because by mid-February Blewett and John Dawkins were agreeing over dinner that 'the government is working much better than it had for years' and that Hawke loyalists shared the sentiment.\n\nThe climate in which Keating and Dawkins were planning to stimulate the struggling economy was a tricky one. In the same week they briefed Cabinet on the key ingredients _One Nation_ would develop, newspapers were recording intense pressure on the Australian dollar. On 11 January, the _Sydney Morning Herald_ published two front-page headlines: 'Battered $A facing a bleak future' and 'Teetering on brink of a crisis'. The dollar had dropped 2.5 cents in 36 hours even though it had been heavily supported by the Reserve Bank, with further falls expected, reportedly because foreign investors feared that the government's flagged expansionary plans with billions more in spending would boost inflation again. There was even a suggestion that interest rates might have to rise again. If that happened, the game would be over. The challenge was to come up with a stimulus package big enough to boost confidence without spooking the financial markets. At an annual rate of 1.5 per cent, inflation was now at its lowest level for nearly 30 years, making Keating's case a little easier to argue.\n\nHe was soon busy rounding up public support for _One Nation_ , even before the statement had been written. After a whirlwind round of consultations with business and union leaders, newspapers were reporting a unanimous endorsement from big business. 'All hands to the fiscal pumps' was the headline over Glenn Milne's story in the _Weekend Australian_ of 18\u201319 January, and 'Unions and business agree on state intervention'. It may not have had the atmospherics of Hawke's economic summit in 1983, but it certainly helped to create the effect that Keating had a plan to get the nation back on track.\n\nAt the same time he was trying to tie the recovery into his classic narrative. On the Nine Network's _Sunday_ program in early February he told Laurie Oakes, 'Look, this government taught Australia about economic change. It taught the press gallery about change. It encouraged the public into change. I want to keep the change going but we're now in the hardest parts. We're past the big macro changes. We're now into all these areas of the microeconomy\u2014wharves, ports, airlines, telecommunications\u2014where we're dealing with the states, with private companies, so you can't do it quickly. But I'm trying to do things now which induce a recovery, but at the same time provide a long-term plan for Australia. We're trying to beat the clock in a sense. Australia needs it. It needs it now and that's what I'm about.'\n\nWhile Keating was busy weaving new tales into old, explaining his conversion to Keynes, Hewson was telling Paul Lyneham on the ABC's _7.30 Report_ , 'I think he is one of the greatest political manipulators of all time. He will run any argument, run any issue. He will say and do anything. He will deal with the devil if necessary in order to win the next election.'\n\nBut by and large Keating was succeeding in taking the impetus away from Hewson's _Fightback!_ in these early months, something Hawke had fundamentally failed to do. For the moment at least, the media were focused on a new Prime Minister and a new plan. He was going to need journalists to stay focused, but he wasn't exactly fawning over them. He told Oakes that journalists who thought he was in the business of 'doing bird calls' every other day to give them stories would have to think again: 'Journos are always looking for a story a week. The answer is they can't have one.' (An amusing reflection considering today's expectation of a story a day\u2014 _at least_ one a day, even if it's confection.)\n\nDrawing heavily on the old Expenditure Review Committee (ERC) team minus Peter Walsh, Keating produced _One Nation_ in a month. Dawkins and Willis were there as the two finance ministers, Brian Howe as Deputy Prime Minister, and Button and Evans as the two Senate leaders. The one newcomer was Blewett, who, as Social Security Minister, would have carriage of a lot of the package's elements.\n\nWhen the Keating blueprint for recovery was presented to Parliament on 27 February in the first week of the new Parliament it was reported with all the impact of a budget. Along with the _Financial Review_ 's headline, 'Labor's clever, risky play\u2014Keating gambles on a push for growth and jobs', was a twelve-page summary of the package. The other papers followed suit. Most editorials broadly supported the plan for recovery. At the heart of the package, apart from the big spend of $1.1 billion on roads, rail and ports, and concessions for business, was a promise of two rounds of tax cuts aimed substantially at middle-class voters. Three-quarters of all workers would have their top rate of income tax cut to 30 per cent.\n\nThe political nature of the cuts was clear: they neutralised the tax cuts Hewson had outlined in _Fightback!_ , but where his were designed as compensation for his GST, Keating's were there simply as a counter to Hewson's. They couldn't be claimed as part of the stimulus strategy to kickstart the economy because, like Hewson's, the first tranche wouldn't be introduced until July 1994.\n\nAs always with economic statements, budgets or otherwise, the foundations for any policy promise are only as solid as the Treasury forecasts they're based on. _One Nation_ predicted growth of 4.75 per cent for the following financial year, the start of which was just a few months away. The credibility of the tax cuts was based on that growth forecast and the assumption that it would continue, therefore boosting revenue, which would make the tax cuts affordable and get the budget deficit\u2014forecast to hit $8 billion in the next financial year\u2014back to surplus within four years. Part of that scenario also underestimated the extent to which 'snapping the inflation stick' would rob the government of tax revenue. As Dawkins later acknowledged, lower inflation meant lower revenue.\n\nMarket economists questioned both the growth and deficit forecasts, but initially, _One Nation_ was accepted as a credible platform from which to attack _Fightback!_. By the August Budget, that credibility was badly shaken. Subsequently a disaffected Dawkins said the key growth assumptions came from the Prime Minister's office, not from his own or Treasury, implying that they might have been driven more by political imperatives than economics. True or not, Keating paid the ultimate price when the tax cut pledge unravelled, but not until the 1996 election. Another _One Nation_ forecast, that unemployment would drop to 9.5 per cent by the middle of 1993, also turned out to be heroic.\n\nIn _One Nation_ , Keating reached back to his old friend and Accord partner Bill Kelty to add an element to the mix that Hewson knew the Liberals couldn't match. The Accord had become almost a forgotten strategy under Hawke and John Kerin the previous year. Keating now produced a new commitment from the ACTU to help lock in low inflation by setting wage claims not to exceed the inflation rates of Australia's major OECD trading partners. The argument was that along with productivity gains delivered by a promised new Keating reform to decentralise wage-bargaining, the real increase in wages for the next few years at least would be no more than around 1 per cent. Keating now had a plan to sell and he sold it. He also had a reinvigorated backbench and ministry.\n\nBlewett's diary entry for 3 March confirmed that Keating's political strategy for the year was to use _One Nation_ as evidence he was restoring the economy, use his tax cuts to counter Hewson's, and isolate the GST for a blitzkrieg assault throughout the year. Blewett records Keating telling caucus that with the generally positive acceptance of _One Nation_ , the job was to keep hammering the GST 'to strip away all the fig leaves covering it; what will be exposed is a nasty tax collection of $27 billion'.\n\nOn Tuesday 11 March, the Bureau of Statistics reported that Australia had recorded its second quarter of growth and therefore the recession was technically over. The _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's bold front-page headline read 'Let the recovery begin'. Keating and Dawkins were smart enough not to take a bow.\n\nIn the _Sunday Age_ , Michael Gordon drew a revealing comparison between the lethargy and depression on Labor's backbench when Hawke made a final, desperate economic statement the previous December to belatedly counter _Fightback!_ , and the week just gone, with backbenchers clamouring to get their names on the list of parliamentary speakers in support of One Nation.\n\nThe _Australian_ 's Newspoll the following Tuesday recorded Keating's personal approval rating rising from 27 to 35 per cent, and the government up six points to 41 per cent in its primary vote. By the end of the month, Morgan Gallup showed Keating's personal approval up from 25 to 39 per cent, and Hewson's down from 62 to 50 per cent. Newspoll on 31 March showed Keating passing Hewson in terms of personal approval and Labor on 43 per cent to the Coalition's 44 per cent in the primary vote: four points better than Labor's primary vote at the 1990 election. Even allowing for the monthly fickleness of polls, Labor was at least back in the game.\n\n**KOB:** You'd waited a long time for the power that only comes with one job in this country and you finally had it. How clearly did you know what you wanted to do with that power?\n\n**PJK:** I'd say very clearly. I'd thought about it for a long time, right from the beginning of the government in 1983. The reformation of the Australian economy was conceived radically, not bureaucratically; that is, the opening up of the financial markets and the product markets, and I had flagged my intention to open the labour market. This amounted to the complete dismantling of the whole Deakin structure that emerged post-Federation.\n\nAlfred Deakin put in place the tariff wall and centralised wage-fixing, what's been called the Australian Settlement. The changes from 1983 onwards, those that I superintended, were not designed to alter these things at the margins but to change them wholly, and I always held the view that a change of this scale required a new approach to leadership. I tried to imbue the idea that good policy could become good politics, where we would get away from the lowest common denominator approach.\n\nAs Prime Minister I had another set of objectives. I always thought Australia could be a great country, but to be so required it to have a different idea of itself. That is, an efficient, competitive, open, cosmopolitan republic integrating itself with the Asian region. I'd given the country a new economic engine, so what I wanted to do as Prime Minister was to repoint the raft to the area of opportunity and our ultimate security, which was Asia. In other words, we should look to find our prosperity in Asia and our security in Asia, not from Asia. With the Anglo-style leaders of Australia, the Menzies of this world, strategically we were always looking to secure ourselves from Asia. I knew we could only find our security in Asia.\n\nThe end of the Cold War in 1989 created an opportunity for open regionalism and the rise of China, so more than ever I thought the opportunity was there to advance a radically different view of Australia's place in the world.\n\nThat is why I thought we had to be a republic, and why, amongst other reasons, we had to come to terms with our Indigenous people. We couldn't approach our neighbours in the region as a European enclave continuing to treat our Indigenous people badly. That was the approach I took and it really governed the whole period of my prime ministership.\n\n**KOB:** Did you contemplate the extent to which your views were reflected broadly in the Australian community or how much you might have to change opinion?\n\n**PJK:** I believed in education and teaching. I understood the fundamental importance of education, and I believed I had a role as both Treasurer and Prime Minister in the education of the country, in leading by example and by painting a picture to encourage them to be a part of it.\n\nThere is the old measure of leadership in Australia, that is, how many elections you could win, and then there's a measure of leadership based on the quality and pace of reform. I said when John Howard passed ten years as Prime Minister compared to my four that I would much rather have been John the Twenty-third than Pius the Twelfth, meaning you need the rapidity of the changes, the radical sweep of the changes. It's not a matter of how long you're there and how many elections you win. All that matters is whether the necessary decisions were taken, the core changes made. The rest is bunkum.\n\n**KOB:** Stephen Smith, who was working for you at the time of your second leadership challenge, has since said he would never forget the look on your face when you received the phone call telling you Bob Hawke had called for the leadership ballot that was going to deliver you the prime ministership. He said as you put the phone down he asked you what was up, and you said, 'Mate, I'm carrying such a crushing burden. You know, all this should have happened three years ago.' Do you remember that sense of foreboding?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. I'd had those years of pulling Bob through all those big economic reforms in his down years when I was at the height of my powers. Those jobs run on energy and momentum, and as a government we'd been implementing dramatic policy change across a very broad front for nearly nine years. We'd won four elections, and within a year I'd be facing a fifth election.\n\nI thought Bob and I had an honourable agreement but in the end I had to push him out, which I would have preferred not to have done. If Bob had gone voluntarily even a year earlier, I might have felt much more buoyant. As it was, I had little more than a year to make up massive political ground, find a response to John Hewson's _Fightback!_ , reinvigorate a disheartened government, kickstart an economy coming out of recession and win a fifth poll.\n\nWe were down to about 30 per cent in the primary vote in the _Bulletin_ poll. That's what I inherited from Bob. Fifteen months later I turned that into a primary vote of 45 per cent for Labor.\n\nTo have a chance of pulling that off I had to get out of the box very quickly. The economy was too flat, so we had to put the policies in place to get it going again. But I also wanted to change the whole language of the debate.\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly wrote in the _March of Patriots_ that you nursed a secret fear going into the prime ministership, that your best days were behind you.\n\n**PJK:** I never ever thought my best days were behind me because some of the big jobs remained to be done, namely to peel back the outer cladding of the Anglosphere and to emphatically change the country's orientation towards its future\u2014its future in Asia. That had not been done, and would never be done by a Liberal Government.\n\n**KOB:** But you've also said in our ABC interviews that after six months on the backbench, by the time you actually became Prime Minister, your head was in a different space after walking away from the Treasury job. You said, 'There is a mental sweep away from doing it. It took me months to put my head back in the same space. Psychologically I was out of it.'\n\n**PJK:** It's true it took a while to re-ignite the killer instincts, but I knew one thing very clearly after six months looking on from the backbench. The economy was far soggier than anyone believed, and it needed a serious kickstart, which I gave it with _One Nation_ early in 1992. That package actually worked because the economy was back to over 4 per cent growth two years later.\n\n**KOB:** But it wasn't just you who had to fire up again for a whole new ball game. You had to enthuse Cabinet again. They'd been through those long gruelling years too, been stung by the recession, and by the tensions and bitterness that had developed between you and Bob Hawke. Some of the key talent had also gone.\n\n**PJK:** After years of profound change with all the wear and tear, experienced ministers were dropping out and the game was getting stickier. Those of us who were left had to take more responsibility while new ministers were blooded.\n\n**KOB:** Peter Walsh has since said, 'The man who had kicked, scratched and gouged to become Prime Minister was a bit like the dog that chased cars, finally caught one and didn't quite know what to do with it.'\n\n**PJK:** I knew what to do with it all right. Peter just got very jaded and negative in the end.\n\n**KOB:** John Button, another Cabinet colleague of yours from the start, wrote in his memoir that he thought your best playing days were over, that you 'kicked some brilliant goals and missed some easy ones'. These were people who respected you, who supported you into the prime ministership.\n\n**PJK:** That's in some respects right, and I know there was a view around that my best days were behind me with regard to economic reform, but I proved that wrong. As Prime Minister I took the heat to see all the tariff cuts into place. In the middle of a recession I still oversaw the tariffs continuing to come down. You can't underestimate how tough it was to stick to those guns. I had all my Cabinet supporters asking me to stop. I had Bill Kelty and the ACTU asking me to stop. I said, 'If we stop we're dead.' The internationalism will dissipate.\n\nThen there was the abolition of centralised wage-fixing. Finally with Bob out of the road I could get on with breaking up the centralised wage-fixing system and move to a system of enterprise bargaining. I put that into place. At the same time I legislated the universal superannuation scheme, locking in compulsory contributions to 9 per cent of wages. In all, three massive economic changes.\n\nDespite these big changes on the economic front, some of my colleagues thought that because we didn't do the same gut-busting work as we did on some of the earlier reforms, these great changes were not as important, but we've never looked back, and nor has Australia since. We embedded these great changes, we embedded low inflation, and low inflationary expectations: we gave the economy the flexibility it now has and could never have had under the old protectionist model.\n\n**KOB:** Do you remember your mate Bill Kelty giving you a pep talk in those early days? You were down with a cold and complaining that Hawke had left you with the butt end of the political cycle, and Kelty said, 'Well, give up mate, just fuck off. If you don't think you can win, then leave, but you can beat Hewson. Just don't ever give me this speech again about Bob and the political cycle.'\n\n**PJK:** There's a certain therapy about complaining. You whinge to a friend about something that's bothering you and it makes you feel better. I used to practise on Bill, and he'd get fed up with me, and sometimes I'd get fed up with him.\n\nBut I started out as Prime Minister knowing that very few governments get past ten years. The old brain has to keep jumping hurdles, yet I was lifting my own hurdles and jumping even higher.\n\n**KOB:** You'd always been very careful to try to shield your family from the spotlight as Treasurer, particularly the children, but this was now a very different ball game. I can remember the tabloids going to town on the Sunday after your elevation, with shots of the family and speculation about Annita as First Lady. This was going to be a whole new ball game in personal terms, wasn't it?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, it was, but they were still little kids. Alexandra was just six. Some were still in primary school, with Patrick just in secondary school. After the rented house in Red Hill, the Lodge was a big change for them but in a way they were too young to absorb it. They've all said to me since they wished they'd been older when we got there because they would have had a better sense of what it all meant.\n\n**KOB:** Can you remember how you and Annita tried to explain it to them?\n\n**PJK:** Because they would sometimes come to the big events like the budgets, and had sat in the Speaker's Gallery in both the old and new Parliaments, they were a little in the swim of it. They'd also been to the Lodge with Bob and Hazel and Annita and me on many occasions, swimming in the pool and so on, so they were familiar with the surroundings and what the place meant. They didn't know how it was conducted but they knew the prime ministership was central to the country.\n\n**KOB:** How did you try to preserve some sense of normality for them?\n\n**PJK:** I would always try to come home for dinner at seven o'clock. I would see the top of the ABC _News_ until about seven ten, when we'd start dinner. If they were hungry they might sometimes eat a little bit earlier but mostly we'd eat together. Usually they would then go to their rooms and we had two young women as nannies who were qualified school teachers. We'd let go of Bob's butler, so that saving in the household expenditure funded the nannies, who would help them with their schoolwork. Sometimes I'd join them because some were more attentive students than others.\n\nAlexandra would always say at about eight o'clock, 'Daddy, will you lie down with me', and sometimes I would. In our rented house my two youngest daughters shared a room, and in the Lodge they had one each so Alexandra at six would sometimes feel lonely going to bed on her own. Sometimes I'd drop off as well, and I'd get a knock on the door to take a phone call, and I'd have to creep out so as not to wake her. At about nine o'clock or quarter-past Jimmy Warner would pick me up and we'd go back to Parliament House.\n\nThe kids' routine stayed the same. They still went to ballet classes, they still rode horses. I used to go to the Manuka shops with them every Saturday morning and often we'd give the police the slip because, to be honest, I was never into security. I'd get the kids into the car and we'd be off.\n\nWe'd go through Abels Record Shop and they'd pick up pencils and books and other bits and pieces from the newsagency, and sometimes I'd break the rules and they'd pick up a little bag of lollies each. Then we'd do a walk around Manuka and see people we knew. So I tried to give them what you might call a somewhat normal suburban life in an otherwise very un-suburban setting.\n\nAnnita was still their sheet anchor as she had been through the earlier years but she now had responsibilities, attending functions, making speeches and so on. She took a particular interest in Australian fashion. I think it's fair to say she was the first Prime Minister's wife truly interested in promoting the early detection of breast cancer, and she had a range of other interests that used to take her around the country. When that happened I would try to be at the house in her place.\n\n**KOB:** If you didn't like the fuss around security how did you reach an accommodation with your detail because they must have got sick of constantly playing catch up?\n\n**PJK:** My security detail were great people, but they suffered from my earlier attitudes. I always had instilled in me as a young man, never trust the coppers. And I have permanently been untrusting of police. I didn't want a bunch of them, however well intentioned, driving around, living my life with me. But they did become part of the network and I'm still friendly with each of them years later. The surveillance was something I never quite felt comfortable with, yet they were the epitome of discretion, and showed good judgement in trying not to get in your face.\n\nThe first thing I did when I became Prime Minister was to take the flag off the front of the car. Bob used to sit up with the flag flying and I said, 'Bob, getting around in a Holden with a flag on it is one thing laughing at another. It's like a pig with a straw in its bum. Take the flag off', but he wouldn't take it off. He loved that official flutter. As soon as I took the job I said no flags. We all know what the prime ministership is. You don't need to convince yourself by sitting up there with the flag fluttering\u2014particularly this flag.\n\n**KOB:** You were very decisive in replacing Bob Hawke's Head of Department, Mike Codd, with Michael Keating, whom you knew from Treasury. What drove that? Why was it important to do so early and what were you looking for in Keating?\n\n**PJK:** I always held Mike Codd in high regard. But he and I had completely divergent views about what was later called new federalism. As Treasurer I had opposed the idea of giving back to the states the pre-war taxing powers, in other words, moving away from centralised taxation. I was strongly opposed to that, and since it was essentially a scheme promoted rather formally by Mike Codd, he volunteered to resign. I didn't have to suggest it. I then appointed him to the Qantas board and I think the Telstra board because he was a capable guy and I was at pains to make the point that his departure wasn't a banishment. He kindly volunteered his resignation and I accepted it.\n\nMichael Keating had been Secretary of the Department of Finance and had a highly developed economic view of the world but with Keynesian resonances, which suited me because I had come to accept during my six months on the backbench that we had to have a big shift up in public demand to offset the fall in private demand and to hasten the recovery from recession. I also had to have someone the public service both knew and respected because the Secretary of Prime Minister & Cabinet is effectively the head of the public service and I thought Michael Keating fitted the bill.\n\n**KOB:** You had come to see Treasury as the intellectual powerhouse of the public service. How did PM&C compare to that when you walked in the door?\n\n**PJK:** You've got to do what you say and say what you do. I always believed PM&C could never replicate in its economic division the breadth, depth and quality of Treasury, and as Treasurer I used to say as much. I couldn't now flip my position 180 degrees and try to use PM&C to usurp Treasury. I took the view that the principal economic department of state should remain that and that PM&C should not try to second-guess it. But I still needed PM&C to be alert to all of the issues and able to give me their perspective on the Treasury view, and their views on other departments.\n\nPM&C's relationship with Foreign Affairs is a slightly different matter because in the Westminster system the Prime Minister is, in a sense, the first Foreign Minister. So the shadow role my department played in foreign policy was a legitimately larger role than the department's role in economic policy. I was particularly impressed by two former foreign affairs officers I inherited in PM&C, Allan Gyngell and Michael Thorley. Although they'd spent most of their lives in foreign affairs, they now had a supra-advisory role in my department, which gave them an extra dimension.\n\nFor the position of foreign policy adviser in my office, I co-opted Ashton Calvert, who was DFAT through and through, and whose contribution on foreign policy was exceptional.\n\nSince I had to prepare for a visit from US President George Bush Senior only nine days after becoming Prime Minister, and wanted to fashion a whole new set of priorities, these people were pivotal.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hawke wasn't the only person who'd walked away scarred from the leadership battle. You were scarred, the whole Cabinet was scarred. They were now looking to you to lead them back to that next election. How heavily did that responsibility weigh on you?\n\n**PJK:** It weighed heavily because we were dead meat when I took over. It was John Hewson and _Fightback!_ that finished Bob and it was incumbent on me to smash _Fightback!_ and buckle Hewson. The second thing was to re-engender in Cabinet a sense of optimism and purpose. I began this by embracing Hawke's key supporters, people like Robert Ray, Michael Duffy and Gareth Evans. There was no getting even. I wanted to unify Cabinet and persuade them that we could dig ourselves out of the hole. I'd already said to caucus when I got the job that, 'Hewson is a sort of cold fish washed ashore by the recession and I'll deal with him, but you've got to have the pluck to deal with him too.'\n\n**KOB:** When you were putting your Cabinet together, Neal Blewett wrote in his diary how you rang him to talk about who should be Treasurer. He said, 'Keating was anguished by the decision on the Treasurer, wanting John Dawkins but recognising the blow to Ralph Willis.' How tough a decision was it and what swayed you other than loyalty to Dawkins who'd been perhaps your bravest supporter in your challenge to Hawke?\n\n**PJK:** I had a ton of personal regard and affection for Ralph. And he'd finally got the job he'd always wanted, after John Kerin stumbled and Bob had replaced him with Ralph. Every fibre of goodwill and fair play in me was telling me I shouldn't take it from him.\n\nBut Dawkins, with Peter Walsh and one or two others, which included Ralph, had been at the centre of our efforts to internationalise the country. John was a believer. He didn't have to be cajoled. He was a believer, an activist believer, and he'd sat in on all those ERC meetings for long hours and long weeks for years and years. And if the government was to make the big change I thought it had to make, it had to have a true believer at the centre. And besides me John was the most inoculated. Let's say we were co-inoculated. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made, but then when John resigned I was able to ask Ralph to step up again, which he did.\n\n**KOB:** Blewett also wrote, 'I pressed for Dawkins even though I thought it was a high risk move. Dawkins and Keating might be as likely to exaggerate each other's weaknesses as augment their strengths given similar temperaments and approaches to politics, but risks have to be taken.' Did you identify risks with Dawkins' appointment? What was the risk side of Dawkins' personality?\n\n**PJK:** I did take that into account, but the guy was capable of original thought and direct action. Look at the HECS scheme for university students. As Education Minister John had to face the reality that the country could not afford a free tertiary system, and even though HECS had academic forebears in people like Bruce Chapman, John as the minister had the courage and the foresight to take it on. When we came into government in 1983 three children in ten completed Year Twelve. By 1996 we had lifted that to nine in ten. So we trebled the cohort and because we still wanted the same percentage of school-leavers to go to university, we had to treble university places. John's solution was to charge fees and provide student loans, and pour the fees back into funding the extra university places necessary.\n\nAs Trade Minister he had also put together the historic Cairns Group of agriculture nations as a very effective bloc of middle-power traders. So I wanted him to step up and do the sorts of things I had done as Treasurer. I knew there was always some risk that he might throw a bomb and blow the rest of us up but given my own propensity to occasionally throw a bomb, I could hardly rule out an associate bomb-thrower.\n\n**KOB:** I was struck by the fact that apart from you, there were only four of the original Hawke Ministers left in your first Cabinet\u2014Willis, Dawkins, Evans and Button, and there were a few others from the original outer Ministry. An awful lot of talent and experience had gone.\n\n**PJK:** We had lost a lot of the originals but in the end it is leadership that matters. The spiritual nourishment of the Cabinet matters. Without being bombastic or overbearing, if the leader provides the intellectual framework and the uplift, it's contagious. Properly arraigning the arguments and the authority can get an updraft that lifts the whole Cabinet, and all perform.\n\n**KOB:** You described the first Keating Cabinet as 'old dogs for a hard road'. What did you mean by that?\n\n**PJK:** The old dogs were those ministers who'd cut their teeth on the economic reforms and social policy innovations. Some like Duffy and Blewett and Howe might not have been in the first Hawke Cabinet as they were junior ministers in 1983, but they had been very effective Cabinet ministers for years by the time I became Prime Minister.\n\nRalph Willis was very dedicated with well-calibrated views and a safe pair of hands. We always got on well.\n\nI had a ton of time for Brian Howe even though he was from the Left. He had replaced me as Deputy Prime Minister when I went to the backbench, and I asked him to be Minister for Health, Housing and Community Services. He and I did a lot of things as Treasurer and Social Security Minister. For instance, we set up the Home and Community Care Scheme. We set up the ACAP assessments for aging. We set up the Child Support Agency through the tax system, and, with it the Child Support Scheme. So we had had a good cooperative history. Brian had brought a very conscientious effort and view to the outlays cutting task in the really difficult years, and as a member of the Left that was very difficult for him. So he was a signed up member of the management group if you like.\n\nI also had a ton of time for Neal Blewett. Blewett was a class act from go to woe. He'd been tricky to get savings from as Health Minister, but that was a measure of his competence in protecting his ministry, and his indefatigability. He always kept a clear mind and a sharp eye for the government's best direction.\n\nJohn Button had been on the long road through all the structural changes and even though we'd miss him on some we'd get him on others. Broadly he was for the template and brought real intelligence to the task.\n\nYou could say the same for Gareth Evans, who had held economic portfolios and was by then an exceptional Foreign Minister.\n\nGraham Richardson was really a very competent minister who could speak and write well. You can see even these days in his written articles how well constructed they are, how clear the thought processes are, and being a leader of the Right, he had that authority.\n\nRobert Ray and I sometimes had disputes over things like telecommunications but he was a really conscientious member of Cabinet and a very credible Defence Minister. Defence is such a difficult job. So Robert and I grew to live with each other rather than be bosom pals, but he brought quality to the table.\n\nMichael Duffy I always liked because he was a kind of knockabout black Irishman, so he and I understood each other perfectly. He was also a good and straight thinker.\n\nSo I still had the nucleus of a hardworking, wise and ambitious group. They had been foot soldiers for a long time.\n\nNo one would dispute that the road we had to travel was going to be hard; we had to turn a disastrous political position around within a year. The big challenge was to make serious inroads on Hewson and _Fightback!_ almost immediately and to move quickly with a credible plan for economic recovery and to start creating jobs again.\n\n**KOB:** You and Dawkins had been very close allies through much of the reform and budget process but this was a very different relationship now. How did that relationship shape up in those early stages?\n\n**PJK:** It shaped up really very well. When you finally become the first economic officer of the country, what you say and do matters, so I think John felt this was very liberating for him, notwithstanding the fact that the former Treasurer was just down the corridor as Prime Minister. But I was also a member of the nine-year working bee that had made up the core of the ERC, so we were policy affiliates and policy friends.\n\n**KOB:** You restructured Cabinet to redirect much of the discussion to subcommittees, reduce the size of those committees and the input of junior ministers. Only a handful of Cabinet ministers were across more than a couple of those committees. What was the reason for that, and what was the effect of that?\n\n**PJK:** I was a high believer in the Cabinet process, in an informed Cabinet with ministers free to express their views across the corporate matters of Cabinet, not just within their own portfolio. It meant the government was stronger. I was for anything that encouraged the better framing of those discussions.\n\n**KOB:** There were some at the time who cynically saw that as you accruing more power to yourself, that it was a way for you to control Cabinet.\n\n**PJK:** I think Blewett's diary would tell you otherwise. I wanted a more efficient process. I would always let ministers have their say but as the discussion went on, rather than just watching it fall away weakly I thought it was my job to say, 'Hang on, we're trying to get to a conclusion. We've discussed the elements, there is general agreement around points A, C and D but not B. We can come back to B, but let's think of a package that reflects the elements we're agreed on. If we think that this is an adoptable measure let's try and refine B.'\n\nA good Cabinet process is a bit like a car manufacturer building a car. You get the frame and then you add the doors and put the windows in. Each part has to fit in the overall framework. And in the end you have to be confident the car will do what it promises. Just sitting back and hoping the car will come together mechanically simply because all the craftsmen working on the individual parts are good at their post is not my idea of leading.\n\nThere's a bit of scenery that needs setting here. Recovery from the recession notwithstanding, we had broadly accomplished most of the big economic reforms and put the structure in place for a robust new economy. Cabinet had already shifted the Australian national aggregates and the place structurally, but we couldn't sleepwalk our way into the future.\n\nI was on the record saying it was time to think more about the country we'd been given. One of the first things I said to Cabinet was that when they were handing out continents not many people got one but we did. We've got a continent of our own and a land border with no one. It's incumbent upon us now to see that for what it is, to identify the unique opportunity it represents, and seize it.\n\nMy message to Cabinet was that under my prime ministership we would be shifting more heavily into foreign policy, more vigorously defining our national identity and coming to terms with Indigenous Australia. It was time to move on the spiritual matters, the things that make a nation glow.\n\nI said these things to Cabinet when we first met, so all of a sudden the Keating Government and the Keating Cabinet had a different focus from the one that Bob Hawke had led just a month or so earlier.\n\n**KOB:** I want to try to understand the nature of leadership, particularly as it applies to leading a nation. What gave you the confidence to set a course for the nation, to shrug off the knocks and the setbacks, and what about the part ego plays in political leadership?\n\nThat you can't have strong leadership without a strong ego is a given. Don Watson had a go at this when he said in _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ :\n\nThey need something to protect them against both the critics and the flatterers. The paradox might be that, having fewer personal doubts to distract them, leaders with indomitable egos are most able to govern for all. The distant drum they hear above the popular tumult is the signature of leadership. The balance we seek and never find is between the leader we want to look up to and the leader we want to shoot down.\n\nI think there are aspects of truth in that, don't you?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. Bernie Fraser once said good treasurers are like wise princes and that's pretty right. And that metaphor applies to Prime Ministers as well. A Prime Minister should be a wise prince, using prince in the proper context\u2014a wise leader who's made observations about their country and the possibilities presented by the political moment. Shifting the way the country thinks about itself and the way it functions.\n\nI think there is a great difference between ego and confidence. You've heard me say and it's worth saying again: confidence is not like a can of Popeye's spinach. You've got to earn it through your own tested judgements against difficult circumstances and occasions, but when you have it you have a very new power.\n\nI would like to think that what I had was confidence, but a wary confidence, where I knew I had the vista and the ability to shift the structure but always taking care of the balances and the dangers that inevitably appear.\n\nThis is a different question to ego. Ego is a notion that there's some inherent or vested greatness. This is where Bob and I differed. I've said to you that I believe Bob was a narcissist. I believe that sincerely. I was never that. I had to earn everything the hard way, but one of the benefits of doing it the hard way is that it is the thorough way. So when you climb to the top beyond the long and winding road, you have a lot of earned power. But confidence and power and their judicious use are not ego.\n\nI would say that is the central point of my years as both Prime Minister and Treasurer. If you have properly prepared for the task of leadership, and your central interests are truly for the country and its betterment, you invariably do better. If, however, it's more about you personally and your political advancement, then those compromised notions will invariably detract from your capacity to make the seminal changes. People have often said to me since, 'You guys did so many things', and I've said, 'Yes we did, and do you know why? Because we could see what needed to be done and we had the confidence and commitment to do them.'\n\nI wanted to see Australia change. I was prepared to risk my job virtually all the time to bring that about.\n\nYou've heard me say that if you manage to do something that is both good and true, then there is a surge, a sense of uprightness, perhaps righteousness that lifts you to do better things. But dreaming is central to the task. If you have the imagination and with it the capacity, you will have a Cabinet or government infused with goodness. And if it's infused with purpose, and the central task is the nation's betterment, then the country will just power along. Power along.\n\n**KOB:** You had twelve months to restore some economic credibility in the teeth of the recession before facing the electorate. When did you first realise just how deep the recession now was?\n\n**PJK:** After I left Treasury in mid-1991 I used to go regularly to Sydney where I was restoring a house. I was also getting around Sydney a lot, including putting together a joint venture with the Danish national pork industry after I bought into the Parkville piggery, so I was getting more real-world stories than I might have had in Canberra. I could see the recession was far deeper than we thought it would be, and that both monetary and fiscal policy had to play a larger role in a timely recovery.\n\n**KOB:** The people who'd lost their jobs weren't just victims of the recession, were they? In his diary Neal Blewett noted Ralph Willis telling your first Cabinet meeting that structural change through the tariff cuts was 'causing a holocaust on the employment front' that would be a killer electorally. This was a double whammy for the unemployed.\n\n**PJK:** The structural changes we had made through the tariff cuts had impacts in the real economy, but they were gradual. It took thirteen years from 1988 to 2001 for the tariffs to be abolished. It affected Victoria particularly badly because there was so much protected industry there.\n\nBut the longer-term story was we had such strong employment growth in the years that followed, and as the service economy grew, we were getting big job uptakes. But people did need retraining and support packages of a kind we tried to provide, particularly in Victoria.\n\n**KOB:** Bill Kelty and the Accord were still strategically very important to you in terms of both economic policy and the politics in those early months when he agreed to delay a general wage claim that was due in May. But when he came to you with a union delegation asking for a pause in the tariff cuts while unemployment continued to rise you denied his request. Wasn't that a reasonable ask from your friend and Accord partner?\n\n**PJK:** Bill Kelty and the Accord were important right through the Labor years, whether under Hawke's prime ministership or my own. And it was his members who were particularly affected by the recession. What we were asking of the ACTU and the Accord in 1992 was exactly what we had asked of them to help cement the recovery from John Howard's recession in 1982. In 1992 Bill's support was critical in persuading the strong powerful unions to restrain their wage claims while the government poured its _One Nation_ effort into helping unemployed people find jobs.\n\nBut I couldn't agree to a pause on tariffs. If I had, that would have been the end of the reform momentum and we would never have completed the critical reform of opening up Australia's product markets. It would be a job half-done. It is in times of real stress that a nation's resolve is tested. Does the country mean to change itself or not? In the end there were not many people who wanted to stick with it. Bill was an intellectual fellow and he understood that shifts in the exchange rate in any one year were often greater than the step down in the tariff that year, but it was his job to run the fight on behalf of his membership.\n\nI had to consider the psychological effects. With a game-changing reform like the tariff cuts, it's a tough process getting Cabinet, caucus and the labour movement to jump the really big hurdles. If we baulk at the next hurdle because of a recession then we're permitting some lingering faith in the old model, the old Australia, the old locked-up model. I wanted to make sure there was no residual faith in that model.\n\nIt worried me that if we stopped and looked back we would end up like Lot's wife, turning into a pillar of salt. The moment you rob the reform process of its electricity and energy, its truth, the game falls away.\n\n**KOB:** Inflation was now flat thanks to the recession, but more than one in ten Australians were unemployed. It was heading for a million people registered for unemployment. No matter how effectively you attacked _Fightback!_ you had to have a credible response on jobs.\n\n**PJK:** Immediately after becoming leader I started work, initially with John Dawkins, on a recovery plan for growth and employment. The _One Nation_ package that followed was a classic Keynesian response. Private demand had fallen with the recession and with the high interest rates that had driven it. We had to lift public demand with budgetary expansion: infrastructure projects like the standard gauge railway across Australia through South Australia to Victoria, urgent spending on education support, municipal council projects and direct payments to people to kickstart the place. And it worked\u2014not as quickly as I'd have liked\u2014but by the third quarter of 1994 growth was running at 5 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** There was an immense irony in this. You had spent years as Treasurer cutting budgets, cutting programs and cutting spending, now you were moving in reverse, so the great cutter became the spender.\n\n**PJK:** Keynes said, 'When the facts change I change.' Well, I changed too. When Treasury's projections about a soft landing were demonstrably unbelievable and we were left with a much deeper recession than we should ever have had, it was my job as Prime Minister to lift the demand equation. And the demand equation was a classic Keynesian move to take the budget back into deficit. This idea that John Howard and Peter Costello used to proffer that the budget is like some sort of household account and you have to be abstinent and thrifty and keep it permanently in surplus is the sign of untrained and tired minds.\n\n**KOB:** I can remember one speech of yours where you drew a very similar analogy to the household budget.\n\n**PJK:** Maybe, but it's a simple proposition. If you need to restart private investment as we did in 1983 you pull public investment back, but if you've achieved surplus and you end up with a significant slowdown for other reasons, you let the budget do some work, you let it go into deficit. This is exactly what Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan did in 2008 with the global financial crisis, and when the rest of the world plunged into recession, Australia escaped the trap\u2014and it would have been a very costly trap in economic and social terms. I applied the same principle in 1992, which gradually worked, because growth came back strongly.\n\n**KOB:** Before you gave Treasury to John Dawkins, you did seriously consider becoming Treasurer again as well as Prime Minister. Would that have really been possible?\n\n**PJK:** Ben Chifley was both Prime Minister and Treasurer and state premiers have often opted to act as Treasurer as well. I had the whole economic structure and all the fiscal and policy changes so sharply in my mind that I didn't need to climb any learning curves, so the management of the Treasury portfolio is something I could have managed with the right support structure.\n\n**KOB:** While juggling all of the broad responsibilities that come with the top job?\n\n**PJK:** I'm not understating either job, but when you've been Treasurer for eight years you do get a lot of road feel. Road feel is very important; you turn the wheel slightly, the economy moves slightly. If you're doing it through a surrogate, it's not quite the same. That's not to say it can't be done, but you do not have the certitude that comes with doing it yourself.\n\n**KOB:** But you've already described how exhausted you were through those long budget processes as Treasurer, and I'm sure there were moments as Prime Minister, particularly when you were grappling with Mabo, when you would have been exhausted too. The combination of the two would have been a huge ask.\n\n**PJK:** But it's all about the judgements at the turn\u2014judgements.\n\n**KOB:** Nonetheless Don Russell, your closest adviser, talked you out of keeping the Treasury. What did he say that persuaded you?\n\n**PJK:** I think he was also tired after all his years working with me on the big changes. In the end I took his advice, but looking back had I been Treasurer and Prime Minister, I would have calibrated things more closely.\n\nAs you know I had the big issue of the tax cuts which were part of _One Nation_ , and as we subsequently discovered to our cost Treasury had overestimated the revenue on which our calculations were based. When the time came to deliver the tax cuts the revenue base had by then fallen away substantially. Had I been in closer touch with Treasury when we were working on the tax cuts and forward projections, I might have been more alive to the risk.\n\n**KOB:** But weren't the tax cuts more a political component of _One Nation_ than an economic one? Quite apart from your goal to get the economy going again, you urgently needed to at least neutralise John Hewson's promised tax cuts with tax cuts of your own. Didn't your economic adviser John Edwards brief senior officials on your behalf within days of you becoming Prime Minister that with _One Nation_ you wanted to match Hewson's middle-income tax cut, to promote recovery from the recession and leave Hewson exposed with his GST?\n\n**PJK:** What had happened was that the press gallery had decided to give Hewson, the new boy, a free ride. He had promised huge tax cuts as part of _Fightback!_ and everyone in the gallery assumed they would be funded by the GST, but they weren't. They were not to be funded by the GST. The _Fightback!_ document made that very clear: you had to take the trouble to read it carefully. Hewson was going to fund his massive tax cuts through unspecified cuts in government spending and the normal rise in government revenue\u2014fiscal drag.\n\nI was not going to go to an election with one arm tied behind my back while he was able to run with unfunded tax cuts. At that stage I was the absolute champion cutter of government spending in Australian history\u2014still am\u2014and I'd run four surplus budgets in a row for the first time since Federation. I wasn't going to just hand that inheritance to some blow-in who had never done a budget before, and let him walk away to an election with unfunded tax cuts.\n\n**KOB:** Hewson was a trained market economist and he had been a senior adviser to Phillip Lynch and John Howard when they were Treasurers.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but there was no comparison between that and actually going through the really hard, back-breaking job of seriously cutting outlays. Seven years, five months a year, of ERC and budget meetings. And the courage to take the decisions. Hewson was not in my league, and I was not going to pretend he was.\n\n**KOB:** But you also were compelled by the politics, weren't you? You had to match his tax cuts.\n\n**PJK:** Not really. It wasn't so much a political need as it was that I just wouldn't let him slide in on the notion that his tax cuts were funded by the GST when they were not. Notwithstanding that indolent press gallery giving him an uncritical ride.\n\n**KOB:** But you could have exposed that without having your own tax cuts. Your cuts were there at least as much for the politics as they might have been for the economics.\n\n**PJK:** I was able to have my own tax cuts because there was enough revenue there. There's a thing called fiscal drag where inflation pushes wage earners into higher tax brackets, which then pushes up the overall tax revenue. Every now and again you have to have a tax cut simply to maintain the real incidence of taxation; in other words, giving taxpayers something back from bracket creep to maintain the real and appropriate rate of tax. So, on Treasury's calculation of compound inflation, there was a tax cut due. There was also the growth. That presented us with a political opportunity to provide a tax cut with no GST against Hewson's tax cut, but with a GST.\n\n**KOB:** You had _One Nation_ ready to go for the first week of Parliament in late February. How hard was that from a standing start\u2014new Prime Minister, new Cabinet, new Treasurer, a total reorientation within the public service?\n\n**PJK:** It was just a huge undertaking. It was like doing the Tax White Paper in 1985. It was like an instant budget, and it took all hands to the wheel. It covered a lot of ground but it achieved its immediate purpose, which was to stop Hewson's momentum.\n\nIt was a four-year plan with an overall goal of 800,000 new jobs in that time without risk to the current account deficit. There was more than $700 million for expanded technical education and a billion dollars for infrastructure projects on railways, roads, bridges and ports. For instance, the Anzac Bridge in Sydney was built from the _One Nation_ package.\n\nTo give the economy an immediate kickstart we gave cash payments from $125 to $250 to 1.9 million lower-income families. The cheques went out in April.\n\nAnd then there were the tax cuts. The fact that the package worked in the way we wanted was reflected in the headlines that followed: 'PM's two billion kick start'. 'Keating plays an ace. Can Hewson follow suit?'\u2014that's the _Financial Review_. The story from the _Australian_ 's Newspoll: 'ALP turns the corner with Keating riding high'.\n\n**KOB:** It was presented by you rather than Dawkins, and identified as the Keating Plan. Was that fair?\n\n**PJK:** It was my job to knock over Hewson and _Fightback!_ , and it needed more weight than the Treasurer could provide. Part of the onus on me after replacing Bob was to succeed where he had failed, so I had to identify as the new Prime Minister with the remedial policy. This was my response, leader to leader, and John Dawkins understood that and was happy with it.\n\n**KOB:** It can't have been easy for him to give up his first moment in the sun as Treasurer, and others picked this up. The cartoonist Moir in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ at the time drew a rather haggard-looking Dawkins in his singlet and pyjamas practising a conversation in the mirror while he shaved, saying, 'Look Paul, I'm supposed to be Treasurer, look Paul, I'm the Treasurer of Australia, look Paul, am I Treasurer or not, look Paul...'\n\n**PJK:** John was very much on board with the strategy. He helped frame it and politically it did work because in the 27 March opinion poll my rating is 38 per cent and Hewson's is 37, and in two-party preferred terms, Labor is at 43 per cent and the Coalition is on 44 per cent. The Coalition had a 26-point lead over us in December, so to the extent that the _One Nation_ package was designed to neutralise and deal with _Fightback!_ and for me to deal with John Hewson, the evidence is that it dealt us back in the game.\n\n**KOB:** Here are a couple of the other headlines from the _One Nation_ launch. The _Australian_ : 'PM's jobs and votes grab, fixing a recession to buy an election'. The _Age_ : 'An unashamedly political pitch for votes'.\n\n**PJK:** The government was in a shocking position when I took over\u201431 per cent in its primary vote. Let me repeat that: 31 per cent. In Bob's 1990 election we had slumped to 39 per cent in the primary vote and needed a larger than usual flow of preferences to win; 31 per cent would have wiped us out. We had to get back into the forties. So some popular things had to be done. A lot of good karma had to happen, and it doesn't happen by magic. It has to be engineered.\nFOREIGN POLICY\n\nPaul Keating was born during the preamble to the Cold War, when Britain, America and the Soviet Union were engaged in a deadly race for Berlin, gobbling up as much territorial advantage as they could on the way through. Keating was eighteen months old when America went nuclear against Japan, and five when Mao won his Cultural Revolution and China became communist.\n\nThose three elements then dominated Australia's foreign policy literally up to the moment when Keating became Prime Minister, particularly the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but it wasn't until 26 December 1991 that the might of the Soviet Union formally came to an end after the breakaway of its various member states, until Russia was all that was left of the Kremlin's fearfully powerful empire.\n\nFor Keating this was an enormous opportunity for Australia to deal itself into what would inevitably be a new strategic game in the Asia-Pacific, so he welcomed the serendipitous visit to Australia by US President George Bush Senior just five days after the end of the Soviet Union and six days after the swearing in of the Keating Government.\n\nIt had the potential to be an awkward occasion, not just because it was his first foray into foreign affairs as Prime Minister. This was the most important relationship Australia had, and there was a twist. Bob Hawke as Prime Minister had taken pride in the stark contrast between the Whitlam Government's prickly relationship with America and his own. He claimed a personal friendship with Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz dating from his ACTU days, which he delighted in demonstrating on the golf course.\n\nHawke also made a point of establishing a close rapport with Bush, anticipating he would replace Reagan as President in 1988; the two called each other friends. On a trip to America in June that year and five months before the US election, Hawke cemented that relationship: the Labor Prime Minister and Republican President-to-be were throwing horseshoes\u2014Bush's favourite game\u2014for the Australian media cameras. There was considerable kudos for Hawke in Bush's acceptance of his invitation to visit Australia, only the second American President to do so. The first was Lyndon Johnson 25 years earlier. Bush would be the first President to address the Australian Parliament.\n\nNone of this appeared to faze the new kid on the foreign affairs block. He could have been forgiven for sticking to a safe and conservative departmental brief in the formal talks and gladhanding his way through the rest of the visit. Instead Keating unveiled his idea to establish an ambitious new leaders' forum for the Asia-Pacific region, expanding on the successful Hawke initiative for a ministerial-level economic forum called APEC. Since the world's most powerful nation tended to like its own ideas best, there was clear risk of a rebuff, particularly since it wasn't even formally on the agenda. But the Americans didn't shut the gate.\n\nIn early April 1992 Keating wrote a follow-up letter to Bush, putting his proposition formally on the table, giving it further impact by also writing to Indonesian President Suharto and Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa, raising for the first time with them the case for APEC to become a leaders' forum rather than ministerial. In his reply Bush reiterated what he'd told Keating at Kirribilli in January: that Australia should take the lead because if America did it could be counterproductive, in the Asian region particularly.\n\nWhat followed was a personal quest that took Keating to the doors of every significant Asian leader, negotiating various diplomatic minefields in the process. For instance, China didn't recognise the independent status of Taiwan or Hong Kong, both members of the ministerial APEC, and there was no credible APEC leaders' forum without China.\n\nThe stepping stones Keating used make for a compelling tale, particularly in terms of whether the self-confessed grenade thrower of domestic politics was prepared to temper his style on the international stage. The answer is yes, and no.\n\nCertainly the Keating style of diplomacy was not taken from the Foreign Affairs Department playbook. We all remember the guiding hand at the Queen's back during the opening of the new Parliament House and the labelling of Malaysia's Dr Mahathir Mohamad as a recalcitrant on APEC, and the picture also emerges from face-to-face meetings behind closed doors with some of the world's most powerful leaders, of a man who was still prepared to call a spade a spade.\n\nOne interesting insight is revealed in the book _The Clinton Tapes_ , based on a long series of secret and intimate conversations between Bill Clinton and historian Taylor Branch recorded throughout his presidency. Clinton told Branch of a briefing from Vice President Al Gore who had stood in for him at an APEC meeting in Osaka in 1995. Gore came back with 'a very unpleasant report'. Clinton had chosen to stay home to deal with an emergency government shutdown caused by a hostile Republican Congress. Gore reported that the Japanese were offended and that 'Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating hotly told Gore he had come to Osaka despite a dock strike and paralysed economy back home. Where was Clinton?'\n\nWhite House National Security Council official Stan Roth told Paul Kelly for _March of Patriots_ that:\n\nWhat Keating did was offer a vision to President Clinton of what APEC could be... Clinton came to office more interested in economic issues than foreign policy and as a free trader... It is not an exaggeration to say that Keating inspired Clinton. It's very clear to me having watched this from the White House that this was a special relationship.\n\nBut the big international relationship Keating as Prime Minister sought to make his own was that with Indonesia's President Suharto. Relations between the two neighbouring countries were complex and somewhat chequered to say the least. A wartime minister in the Curtin and Chifley Governments, and future Labor leader, Dr Bert Evatt had acted as a mediator while President of the fledgling United Nations General Assembly in 1948\u201349 to help negotiate Indonesia's independence from its old colonial master, the Netherlands, which would have helped soften Indonesia's view of white Australia's own colonial record in Papua New Guinea and its infamous White Australia policy at home.\n\nBut when Indonesia sought also to claim Western New Guinea from the Netherlands in the mid-1950s, the Menzies Government opposed it. Menzies had come to view Indonesia as a potential security threat, a view that strengthened in the period of Konfrontasi from 1963 to 1966 when Indonesia aggressively resisted Malaysia's claims to Northern Borneo and Australia weighed in with other Commonwealth nations to support Malaysia. Australian troops clashed with soldiers from Indonesia in Borneo during the confrontation, which fell away after President Sukarno lost power following a _coup d'etat_ that led to General Suharto becoming President.\n\nThe relationship gradually thawed but another flashpoint came with Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in late 1975, nine days after East Timor declared its independence from Portugal, during which five Australian newsmen\u2014the Balibo Five\u2014were killed by Indonesian soldiers. Although successive Australian Prime Ministers had been tacitly and pragmatically sympathetic to Indonesia's claim to East Timor, the Australian public's view was at best mixed. That ambivalence was compounded by a massacre of pro-independence demonstrators in November 1991 at Santa Cruz cemetery in the East Timor capital of Dili. An estimated 250 activists were killed when Indonesian soldiers fired on what was essentially a peaceful protest. The massacre provoked strong anti-Indonesian sentiment in Australia, which was still fresh in people's minds five months later when Paul Keating decided to elevate the bilateral relationship's strategic and commercial importance for Australia by making Indonesia his first port of call as Prime Minister.\n\nAs Paul Keating's vision for Australia's place in the world unfolded, central to it was his view that the way we perceived ourselves at home\u2014from a standpoint of real independence and self-respect\u2014would govern how our regional neighbours would perceive and respect us from abroad.\n\n**KOB:** Fewer than two weeks into the prime ministership you had to host George Herbert Bush, only the second US President to come to Australia. You could have played it safe, gone through the motions, and seen him off back to America with no risk of a bad press. After eight years as Treasurer and a spell as Deputy Prime Minister you weren't exactly a foreign policy _ing\u00e9nue_ but you wouldn't have wanted anything going wrong either. You didn't play it that way at all though, did you?\n\n**PJK:** Because I was new to the job I was very careful to listen to the experts\u2014my principal foreign policy adviser, Ashton Calvert, and my own departmental expert, Allan Gyngell. What drove me was my own view that I wasn't going to let a US President visit without doing my best to gain something for Australia.\n\nYou've got to remember that the Cold War was well and truly over, and the Soviet Union had been dissolved the week before I became Prime Minister. This was all fresh in everybody's minds, but I could see the Americans paying no heed to the opportunities these events presented in the Pacific.\n\nAmerican policy in the Pacific had essentially been run by the US Navy since 1945, rarely by the President or the State Department, save for Nixon's foray with Mao. What I was seeking was to try to draw the US into a greater engagement in Asia, not through the navy but through direct White House interest.\n\nIt was slightly awkward that the President had been invited by Bob but that was easily negotiated. As Ronald Reagan's Vice President, George Bush had hosted me at his house when I went with Bob to meet Reagan in Washington in 1983, and we met again at the funeral of Soviet President Yuri Andropov. I represented Australia because I was in Paris at the time. George and Senator James Baker represented America and we were standing in a small group with Margaret Thatcher and Fidel Castro, watching the parade of soldiers goose-stepping through Red Square. It was minus 23 and Margaret was hopping from one foot to the other in the cold, and I said, 'At that rate you'll be trying out for the Paris Opera Ballet.' She said, 'A more chivalrous person would offer their coat,' and I said, 'I'm not as chivalrous as some members of the British Labour Party.'\n\nBy the time we'd got through the long reception line, George Bush was clearly very hungry and invited me back to the US Embassy for hamburgers. So we weren't complete strangers, and when I said on his arrival at Kirribilli House, 'Well, you were meant to be meeting Bob but I'm afraid you've got me, George', he had the grace to laugh.\n\n**KOB:** What were the dynamics at that meeting with Bush? Ashton Calvert told Paul Kelly for _March of Patriots_ that you were 'shameless and compelling' with Bush and his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, that you basically dominated the meeting.\n\n**PJK:** I made it an intellectual event rather than a golf game with a bit of formal chat tacked on. There were just four of us around the coffee table. The President had his National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and I had Ashton Calvert. It was in the main drawing room at Kirribilli House, which was a pretty inadequate space.\n\nI spun a tale through the strategic history of postwar Europe to the end of the Cold War and the important opportunity that presented to the United States in the Pacific and Asia.\n\nWhat I particularly wanted to advance was the idea that the APEC forum originating under Hawke as Prime Minister could be seriously upgraded in importance from a meeting of finance and trade ministers to a powerful regional leaders' forum, not just engaged in economics but strategic issues.\n\nI argued that we could stitch together a very pretty piece of foreign policy, with Australia playing a critical part as a middle power with a foot in the American camp and a foot in Asia. Bush was interested, and when he excused himself for a toilet break, Brent Scowcroft said to me, 'Prime Minister, you have articulated a policy for the United States in the Pacific that we haven't articulated for ourselves.' He said, 'That says something about us.'\n\nIt was a very honest statement and I thanked him for the compliment.\n\nHe said, 'Well, let's see what we can do.'\n\nWhen the President came back the subject warmed up again and we gave it another go-round. It was left on the basis that it was potentially a good idea, but better pursued by Australia than America because, as Bush said, 'They'll see us coming and they'll run a million miles.' He said if we could get all the doubting Thomases into the basket, then perhaps America would come along.\n\nThat was the start of what APEC is now. Bob initiated the original APEC, which was a regional version of the OECD. You show me your statistics and I'll show you mine. It was an important forum, and a necessary stepping stone, but it had no real strategic power. The real power belongs to the heads of government. It belongs to the presidents and the prime ministers and that's where decisions get taken. Once America was committed it would automatically bring a gravitas and strength to the proposal. It would also force the White House to focus on issues in our region in a way it had not done before.\n\nBut first we had to see whether the original APEC constituency would come onboard, and China had to embrace it if the whole thing was to have credibility. That was complicated by the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong were admitted to the original APEC and China wouldn't have a bar of them at a heads of government gathering. I knew I'd always have trouble with Li Peng while ever Hong Kong and Taiwan were there, but it was too late to excise them. So part of my job was to try to drag the Chinese in with Hong Kong and Taiwan. A really hard call.\n\nWithin weeks I had written to every regional leader to get the idea going. I wrote again to Bush and he wrote back, asking again that we take the lead rather than America.\n\n'If we lead I don't think we'll prosper,' he said.\n\n**KOB:** You also singled out Indonesia on your first visit overseas. Why Indonesia?\n\n**PJK:** Because I always believed Indonesia would in the end be the place of greatest strategic importance to Australia, because of that vast archipelago with a population of 230 million people. It takes eight hours to fly across and spans all the approaches to Australia from the north. So where it goes strategically there is much pressure on Australia to go similarly, or to be as influenced by these events. It is also the biggest Muslim nation in the world.\n\nAt the leadership level we'd had virtually no relationship with them. Bob Hawke had visited Indonesia once in eight years. Almost all our dealings with them were viewed through the prism of Timor, particularly after the five Australian journalists were killed in Balibo, which so influenced the debate within Australia.\n\nI always took the view that President Suharto was well disposed towards Australia when he need not have been. Most Australian Prime Ministers made their first overseas visit to the White House. I wanted to break that tradition to make the point that I regarded Indonesia as a supremely important country.\n\nEvery strategic briefing an Australian Prime Minister had from the Foreign Affairs Department would begin with this sentence: 'The election of Suharto's new order government was the event of greatest positive strategic significance to Australia in the postwar years.'\n\nAnd this was true. Had it not been for Suharto managing Indonesia, we would have been spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence, not 2, and we would have had strategic difficulties all the time, but we would never acknowledge this. You would never hear Hawke or Fraser or even Whitlam say it, although Gough did have a reasonable relationship with Suharto. It was true, and I was prepared to say it. I wanted to turn over an entirely new leaf and my instinct about Suharto was right. He had a very benign view of Australia.\n\n**KOB:** You were subsequently criticised for being too close to President Suharto, even subservient to him. What informed the way you actually presented yourself to him, the way you treated him in your dialogue?\n\n**PJK:** The conversational protocols in Asia are very polite. This idea that we pride ourselves on speaking frankly often stands in stark contrast to Asian cultures. They usually don't speak frankly in Asia, and are careful to show regard for the person opposite. You can be direct, you can be frank in a well-tailored way, but not in a way that they would consider rude. You give a head of government or a head of state respect for the position they hold and in Suharto's case he was also much older than me. He'd been around a long, long time so I gave him a fair deal of room. I always addressed him as Mr President and he always addressed me as Prime Minister. We never developed a deeply personal relationship but it was a respectful head of government to head of state relationship.\n\n**KOB:** What was the frankest you got with him?\n\n**PJK:** I had sharp moments with him over East Timor, one where he excused himself to go to the toilet and his interpreter said to me through my adviser Allan Gyngell, 'I think the President's giving you a signal that this discussion has gone to the point where he can't bear it any longer, within the limits of Javanese politeness. If the conversation is to continue at this tempo, I don't think he'll respond any further to it.'\n\nI took the whole Timor issue right up to him, although we never got any credit from the East Timor lobby. At the same time I was always determined that I would never let the relationship fall hostage to Timor.\n\n**KOB:** Neal Blewett recalls your comments to caucus on your return from that first visit, that you had told both Suharto and his Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, that the Santa Cruz massacre was a tragedy, that the Indonesian Government's response was credible. But you warned them that the relationship between the local population and the Indonesian troops was too tough, that they had to establish better relations with the local community and there had to be reconciliation accompanied by real economic development. You also criticised the use of the criminal code against non-violent political protestors. Does that gel with your memory of what you said, and what was Suharto's response?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, that's true. Suharto was, I think, conscripted into Timor. He had been President of Indonesia for over a decade before the military intervention into Timor. And in the context of the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet Union trying to use Cuba as a sort of a staging point in the American western hemisphere, when the Portuguese Communist Party got control of East Timor and they were massacring people, the people around Ramos-Horta for instance, Suharto was encouraged by the United States to do something about it. I think Suharto moved with great reluctance on East Timor, and his wariness turned out to be well placed. There was no profit for Indonesia in ever having occupied East Timor.\n\n**KOB:** You think he felt that?\n\n**PJK:** I'm sure he felt that, although he was prey to the paranoia in Indonesia about its territorial integrity, worrying that the loss of one part of the archipelago might stir unrest in another.\n\nI raised the idea of setting East Timor up as a special economic zone and giving East Timorese children ready access to Indonesian universities. I told Suharto that we would share the cost but there had to be a different set of political protocols.\n\nAnd I more or less had him at that point when I finished the prime ministership. I think I could say with all authority that at the time I left office President Suharto was on the cusp of agreeing to special economic status for East Timor in which we would financially participate. Now the East Timor lobby would paint me and Gareth Evans as lushes who were falling over ourselves to accommodate Indonesia when in fact the opposite was the case.\n\n**KOB:** How did you go about pitching APEC to Suharto?\n\n**PJK:** It turned out that as one of the leaders of the non-aligned movement in the Cold War, Suharto had been locked out of the big discussions about the shape of the world. When I started talking to him about being engaged as one of the central figures in a new APEC leaders' forum with the United States, China and Japan, all of a sudden his eyes lit up. He'd been sitting there mostly just managing Indonesian problems for 30 years. All of a sudden he's getting engaged by the next-door neighbour about the state of the world with the promise of an influential role for Indonesia.\n\nSuharto had great intellectual quality. He was well across all the issues. He knew I wanted a fresh chapter in the relationship and recognised that his new order government had had a positive impact on Australia strategically for a very long time.\n\nI warmed him up to the idea. I told him I would also raise it personally with Prime Minister Miyazawa and he was most interested to hear Japan's response. I told Suharto I would have a better chance of picking up Miyazawa's support if I could tell him that, all things being equal, Suharto would come along with me.\n\n**KOB:** What did you want to walk away with from that meeting?\n\n**PJK:** Apart from kickstarting APEC, I wanted to walk away with the notion that we could restart the relationship around a broad range of issues, a broader country-to-country relationship. In the course of that discussion I proposed to him that we develop a regular ministerial council meeting so that the next set of meetings wouldn't be just the president and prime minister, but the foreign minister, the trade minister, the treasury minister. He and I set up that ministerial council and, to give Howard and Downer credit, they kept that going after I left, and it still goes to this day. More than twenty years later, the Indonesia\/Australia Ministerial Council meets annually. It's a much thicker relationship now than it was when I walked in the door, notwithstanding problems that might flare from time to time.\n\n**KOB:** After that first meeting with Suharto, you received what the Foreign Affairs Department regarded as a very accurate brief of how he reacted to that meeting.\n\n**PJK:** Our ambassador was very well connected to Suharto's inner circle. The feedback was that Suharto regarded the meeting with me as similar to the meeting President Sukarno had had years before with President John Kennedy, who was also a much younger man; that Kennedy had given Sukarno regard and respect and Suharto felt I had done the same with him; that I had ideas, that I knew the issues, and that I could move when it was time to move. Suharto also recognised that I was prepared to turn a genuinely new page in the history of relations between Australia and Indonesia and he was very happy with the meeting.\n\n**KOB:** What view did you take of Australian intelligence gathering in the region when you were Prime Minister?\n\n**PJK:** I viewed it all with reasonable disdain. You might think that sounds strange, but I never found value in this SIGINT stuff, Signals Intelligence. Let's loosely call it spying. I had little time for intelligence and therefore I wouldn't invest either time or authority in it.\n\nMost things Australia needed to know we were able to know by generally asking ministers around the region what they thought\u2014most would tell you. Most of our open notes from our diplomatic posts would give us an adequate picture. Now the SIGINT, which was basically recovered by the Americans, would occasionally reflect something, and we'd have our ear out for particular things. Through the bases in Australia we shared signals intelligence with the Americans, and sometimes some little nugget of genuine strategic importance would turn up.\n\nAllan Gyngell would very occasionally show me things if he thought they were significant enough but the idea of running through all those cables about what someone had said in the Malaysian Cabinet anteroom or some other piece of gossip, I couldn't be bothered with.\n\nI was much happier on the big policy picture and when I met people like Suharto or Mahathir or Miyazawa I'd make my judgements about them. I didn't need to know what they said in their dressing rooms. So I was the non-SIGINT Prime Minister. On the big panoply of issues can you be bothered spending time on this rats and mice stuff? That's the question. I took the view that if you let yourself become hostage to the spooks it warps your perspective.\n\n**KOB:** What about your colleagues?\n\n**PJK:** A lot of them loved it. They loved the idea of access to so-called secret information. Occasionally something would be of some benefit\u2014getting a reaction to an APEC meeting that would give you a steer about what they were thinking\u2014but it's in a different order to bugging someone's telephone or putting bugs in someone's hotel room.\n\n**KOB:** Were you aware that substantial bugging was going on to a significant degree when you were PM?\n\n**PJK:** Not really, no.\n\n**KOB:** What would you have done if you'd found out?\n\n**PJK:** I don't know. I'm a big boy. I know how the big boys play the game so therefore I would always play a certain game but only because prudence dictated that you played a certain game. But there's a difference between prudence and allowing yourself to be alarmed, or alarming the nation through too much reliance on intelligence.\n\n**KOB:** I understand the world of realpolitik without ever having been a part of it. But even so, I wonder how easily you were able to dismiss the dark side of President Suharto's history in seeking to establish this relationship, in embracing him so personally. He had a great deal of blood on his hands over the slaughter of more than half a million Indonesians, men, women and children, including many ethnic Chinese in 1965. And not to put too fine a point on it, Suharto was notoriously corrupt at the expense of his people. How easy was it to dismiss those things or put them to one side?\n\n**PJK:** The thing was, he was unambiguously the President of Indonesia. What were we supposed to do? Just blot Indonesia out for 50 years? We virtually blotted them out for 30 years to our own cost. At what stage do we accept the fact that the Indonesian people had supported this regime and that he was their elected president?\n\nWhat was I to do? Say, 'Oh well, they're not going to like this at the _National Times_ or the _Age_ or the _Sydney Morning Herald_ , so therefore we're not going to have a proper relationship with Indonesia?'\n\nThis is just nonsense and the proof is in the pudding, quite apart from the core of goodwill created with Suharto, which then significantly advanced this pivotal relationship between Australia and Indonesia. Quite frankly, without Suharto I would have had no chance of getting George Bush or Bill Clinton into APEC. Without him I wouldn't have got Miyazawa in Japan. Miyazawa said to me, 'You get Suharto, I will come with you.'\n\n**KOB:** Outline how those events unfolded on APEC after you began to draw Suharto in. Was Miyazawa the next cab off the rank?\n\n**PJK:** Miyazawa was the Finance Minister of Japan when I was Treasurer and occasionally I would have dinner with him in Washington after IMF meetings. He was a very cultivated person and we established a good rapport. So when I saw Miyazawa I was able to say, 'If your inclination is to be in it, I can guarantee you Suharto will be in it.'\n\nChina was the next step with Li Peng. God, was he a tough guy. He wasn't going to have a bar of it because Hong Kong and Taiwan were already part of the APEC ministerial round. China couldn't stomach the suggestion that this gave Hong Kong and Taiwan formal recognition of their independence from mainland China.\n\nAt my dinner with Li Peng he said, 'We won't be there.'\n\nI said, 'Listen, you'll be there. What, the President of the United States is going to be there and the Prime Minister of Japan, but you're not going to be there?' I said, 'You'll be there.'\n\nA Chinese leader is not used to being spoken to like this. His wife said, 'Mr Keating, please have some respect for my husband, he's recuperating from a heart attack.'\n\nSo I got a rebuke from the wife. So I had to tone it down.\n\nThe next day Allan Gyngell, Ashton Calvert and I decided we had to come up with an alternative title for the forum to accommodate the Chinese. We were originally going to call it the APEC Heads of Government Meeting but after the run-in with Li Peng we proposed a change to the APEC Leaders' Meeting so you could be a leader of an economy without necessarily being a head of government. And the protocol would be with a wink and a nod that the person representing Hong Kong and Taiwan would not be the head of the executive government but maybe a senior minister. Technically Bill Clinton was there as the leader of an economy, not a head of government.\n\nIn any event my great friend Zhu Rongji helped me behind the scenes and the Chinese came on board. It was President Jiang Zemin, whom I'd also seen, who delivered on that, and I had to introduce him to President Clinton in Seattle in November 1993 when we had the first APEC leaders' meeting.\n\n**KOB:** What about China's relationship with Japan? Did that pose problems?\n\n**PJK:** I introduced President Jiang Zemin to Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa in Seattle. And that was a very embarrassing meeting and handshake. Jiang Zemin knew he had to be there and wanted to be there, but didn't actually want to shake Hosokawa's hand. But he did.\n\nAnd we had the same kind of difficulty with President Clinton shaking Jiang Zemin's hand. That was something of a stand-off and Bill Clinton would not pose for a photo with smiles. It was interesting to look at the picture gallery when you knew what was going on behind the scenes.\n\nBy the second meeting I had Jiang Zemin doing karaoke with Clinton\u2014that's how much it had changed. When the Chinese President's doing karaoke with the American President, things are getting better.\n\nThis was a little gift of Australian foreign policy to the rest of the world, certainly to the Asia-Pacific world. But without Suharto I would have had no chance. Suharto had imagination and scale.\n\n**KOB:** After George Bush lost office at the end of 1992, how hard did you have to work on Clinton to get his support for the whole APEC idea?\n\n**PJK:** It didn't go well for a while because Clinton initially said that having won the election with his line 'It's the economy, stupid', and having attacked Bush for being too distracted by foreign policy, he couldn't afford also to be seen to be distracted by some new foreign policy exploit in his first year, like a new Asia-Pacific strategic body.\n\nBut at the same time the sweep of the idea appealed to his intellectual vanity. Bill had a great brain and he could see the whole template. So he and his foreign policy adviser Tony Lake thought about it for a while and a couple of months later said, 'What about this for an idea: we'll have our first meeting in Seattle, the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and we'll paint the picture that it's about jobs, jobs, jobs and we're looking across the Pacific to trade and we need a body to run the politics of the Pacific for trade and jobs?'\n\nI said, 'Bill, if that's what you need to sell this, we're in business.'\n\nThe deal I did with Bill Clinton was that we would make the APEC Leaders' Meeting look like an economic body even though it was of its essence a strategic body. If you've got the President of the US, the President of China, and the Prime Minister of Japan sitting there, it is a strategic body.\n\n**KOB:** What sort of a rapport did you strike with Clinton in your very first meeting with him?\n\n**PJK:** I had a very good meeting but in the morning of that day he also had Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat visiting the White House, so I was the second-order player, albeit with a big strategic idea for them. We got on really well and there were things we had in common but powerful, young successful men\u2014particularly American Presidents\u2014can be very hard to deal with.\n\nBut I used the Cabinet technique on him. First I sketched out the opportunity, then teased out the difficulties in making it happen, and then the remedies. I gradually brought it back to a point where we could actually do something very important and well. And it's the old thing, Kerry, there's nothing like the power of a good idea. A good idea properly presented and well argued will always strike a point with a conscientious mind, and this did with Clinton.\n\nBy the time I left that meeting I had him in the bag for something. It's very interesting to look at the Australian press and see the reporting of that meeting. It was clear he was genuinely keen, and within a couple of months I'd actually got him to commit to APEC.\n\n**KOB:** How much continuing contact did you have?\n\n**PJK:** A lot of phone conversations and letters, which he seemed to enjoy. I'd say to him, 'Look, I think I've got Li Peng in a headlock.'\n\nHe understood that sort of language. I'd report on progress with Miyazawa and Suharto, and tell him it just needed a drop of authority.\n\n'A drop of interest and authority from you, and I'll be able to pull all this together.'\n\n**KOB:** How did Clinton strike you as a political operator at a personal level?\n\n**PJK:** He was the most accomplished political figure that I have ever known in the way he connected with the public. Charming is not an adjective you apply to most political leaders, but he was so charming, it wouldn't matter if you were the guy on the door. He would grab your hand with both of his and look you directly in the eye. He had a magic about him.\n\n**KOB:** He was also called Slick Willy\u2014did you see any of the Slick Willy in him?\n\n**PJK:** Maybe, but it was a terrific brain, and he couldn't quite resist the intellectual opportunity of APEC.\n\nI said, 'Look Bill, we're from fraternal parties. I'm doing all the legwork. I'm gifting this thing to you. All you've got to do is be big enough to take the gift.'\n\n**KOB:** Did you really speak to him in those terms?\n\n**PJK:** Absolutely. He loved that sort of political dirty talk. We had a very informal lunch at the second APEC meeting in Bogor in Indonesia three days after he lost the mid-term congressional election to Newt Gingrich through his first term as President. He arrived looking tired, his eyes bloodshot. With all his aides around him he said one of his real points in coming to Indonesia was to hear how we had beaten the Liberal Party, how we'd pushed them to the Right and won. What was the clue? How come the Australian Labor Party had stood on its feet for eleven years against a conservative party similar to their Republican Party? He wanted to know what we were doing right and the Democrats were doing wrong. And so the whole lunch was about how we had split the Liberal Party for years.\n\n**KOB:** And what was your fundamental advice to him?\n\n**PJK:** You push them further to the Right and you run up the centre, pulling in your natural constituency on the Left.\n\n**KOB:** Well, he ended up doing exactly what you'd done, pushing the Republicans to the Right.\n\n**PJK:** But at that point he hadn't done that although I know they were thinking along those lines. We had a most engaging meeting and Allan Gyngell took a long note, one of those notes that will live in history.\n\n**KOB:** You referred to talking dirty with Clinton. What does 'talking dirty' mean?\n\n**PJK:** I'd say power stripped of all the niceties. Clinton had just lost the mid-terms to Newt Gingrich and I talked about how he should rip out the Republicans' throats. Clinton loved it.\n\nWhen John Howard became Opposition Leader someone in my office remarked that he would be hard to beat.\n\nI said, 'You know what I'm going to do with him? I'm going to put an axe right in his chest and rip his ribs apart.'\n\nThat's what I mean by talking dirty. It's power right down to the essence of it. Going for the jugular.\n\n**KOB:** The day after you introduced the historic Mabo legislation into Parliament towards the end of 1993, you flew off to Seattle for that first tentative APEC leaders' meeting. How did you feel as you watched the summit unfold?\n\n**PJK:** I felt some substantial sense of accomplishment. As a measure of Australian foreign policy, we had caused the coming together of the leadership of the Pacific nations, most particularly the Asia-Pacific nations as never before; it was a piece of geopolitical architecture in Asia or across the Pacific like never before.\n\nThat it was being hosted by the United States President in his own country and celebrated as a way of bringing together the trade and prosperity of the region was a a matter of great satisfaction to me. By now I had a very good personal relationship with President Clinton, which helped, but also a very nice relationship with Jiang Zemin and the Japanese Prime Minister and Suharto, and Goh Chok Tong from Singapore\u2014it was a very nice event. I felt very happy that Australia had dealt itself into one of the top tables in the world where before we'd sat outside looking through the window at these kinds of discussions. Not only were we sitting at the table, but we had actually built the table we were sitting at.\n\nAustralia walked away from Seattle with a primary role in foreign policy in the region, and with a sort of bridging role between the United States and East Asia. We certainly walked away with a much thicker relationship with Indonesia and really good bilateral relations with Thailand, Singapore, South Korea and others. We dealt ourselves into the new postwar game, the game of open regionalism, which wasn't possible during the Cold War.\n\nWhen you look back at Bill Clinton's foreign policy history in the eight years of his presidency, the APEC leaders' forum was really one of the most important things he was associated with. He wrote me a very nice letter about it afterwards, and he really enjoyed the second meeting in Indonesia.\n\n**KOB:** There was one discordant note with regard to Seattle, and that was between you and Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, which led you to describe him as 'recalcitrant'.\n\n**PJK:** 'Recalcitrant' meaning he was the odd man out. It wasn't really a rude thing to say, but he decided to take some confected objection to it. He did something similar to Suharto the next year. He wanted his view to be an addendum to the communiqu\u00e9 and Suharto wouldn't have it. He couldn't avoid coming this time because Suharto was the host but he was still playing hard to get. I remember Bill Clinton standing beside me in the urinal on that occasion saying some very tough things about Prime Minister Mahathir.\n\nHe said, 'You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna screw this guy. We're gonna screw this guy.'\n\n**KOB:** Did you enjoy any special place at the APEC leaders' table because even though you'd come up with the idea and driven the whole process, at the end of the day Australia was still dwarfed by the big players?\n\n**PJK:** True, but as the founder I had secretarial rights, so I virtually ran the agenda. Clinton in Seattle or Suharto in Bogor would say to me, 'What do we do now? What item do you want to bring on next?' Quite often I'd sit next to various heads of government, many of whom were not proficient in English, and although they'd have a brief, it would get overtaken by events and they'd get asked to make a comment and wouldn't quite know what to say. I would write them a note and the meeting would move on, and I would run around all the parties, trying to keep the agenda running.\n\n**KOB:** Sounds a bit like a Labor Party Conference.\n\n**PJK:** In a sense yes, because there was a lot of running around with amendments. And to get the Bogor Declaration up, committing the region to free trade in only the second forum, was pretty remarkable. There were many problems between developed and developing countries and a lot of differences to resolve.\n\nIt was President Suharto's proposal but the original draft was written personally by Allan Gyngell and me. Suharto then adopted it and it became his draft, but it was my job to defend his draft and to see that amendments to his draft were not ultra vires of its principles.\n\nSo I had to run between the competing groups, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, all the pushers and the shovers. They were all trying to get their words in, and I'm saying, 'No, don't try and do this, you'll destroy the thing. We can take that but not this.'\n\nSuharto was very grateful for me pulling off that communiqu\u00e9. And so were the Japanese, and in the end the Americans. So I was a sort of sherpa.\n\n**KOB:** And yet in a way it must have been a welcome break from the domestic politics?\n\n**PJK:** It was a break, and fun in a way. You'd try yourself out against these guys, and we found that mostly they weren't at our level. We were like the Wimbledon players. All the work we'd done in the Cabinet over ten years kicked in, and I found that my kind of executive Cabinet play was way beyond your average APEC leader.\n\nThe one big disappointment I had with APEC was that I wanted it to be formally recognised as a strategic as well as economic body. By its very nature, with the people sitting around the table it was strategic, but the formal discussion was broadly limited to trade and economics. Any strategic conversations were conducted as informal one-on-ones away from the floor of the forum.\n\nBill Clinton missed an opportunity there when he baulked at it, others have also disappointed in that regard. The bravest guy was Suharto, who sponsored the Bogor Declaration. If in the formal sense it was going to be confined to trade and economics then I at least wanted the expression of free trade to be real. So I owed it to Suharto to see his paper get up.\n\nThe person who really helped me in that was the then Japanese Prime Minister, Tomiichi Murayama. He was a great bloke. And he then chaired the third meeting in Osaka, which broadly I then ran with him. He was both jolly and good. And he then subsequently protected Australia's position when Mahathir was trying to close us off from attending Asia-centric bodies such as the East Asia Forum. And it was Prime Minister Murayama who pushed further on the Bogor Declaration at Osaka, and then realised what Australia could do in tandem with Japan in foreign policy terms.\n\nClinton missed the third meeting in Osaka, which was a huge triumph. It cemented the Bogor action plan for free trade in the region. It was important for Clinton to be there but Newt Gingrich had used his Republican majority in the Congress to stop the federal budget payments and freeze the budget, and Clinton didn't think he could go to Japan while the budget was frozen. He sent his Vice President Al Gore along, and I chewed Gore out for Clinton's absence and Gore said to me, 'Well, Prime Minister, you make me feel like a skunk at the party.'\n\n**KOB:** Did you know that Gore then faithfully reported your comments back to Clinton when he returned to Washington?\n\n**PJK:** I didn't, no.\n\n**KOB:** There's a book called _The Clinton Tapes_ based on years of secret conversations that Clinton had throughout his Presidency with a respected historian named Taylor Branch, and Branch recounts Gore's 'very unpleasant report from Osaka'. Clinton quoted Gore back to Branch: 'The heads of state were openly hostile to Gore. They said everybody has political problems, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating hotly told Gore he had come to Osaka despite a dock strike and paralysed economy back home. Where was Clinton?'\n\nGore also reported that Murayama was furious because he felt Clinton had insulted all of Japan.\n\n**PJK:** For the American President not to turn up when the Japanese were hosting it was an affront to them and to Murayama personally. So the fact that we stuck to him when the Americans didn't, meant he stuck to Australia in the Howard years.\n\n**KOB:** Do you remember Clinton throwing his arms around you at the D-Day fiftieth anniversary in Normandy and declaring his love for you? How real was that? Did you think that your relationship with him transcended the fundamental disparity that exists as a fact of life between the superpower and the middle-ranker?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. He knew that philosophically I was on his side, although I did say to him I thought he was missing the big post-Cold War opportunity. And I think now he would agree with that. Certainly Hillary Clinton has said that Bill had missed the post-Cold War opportunity. But he was a great guy to be around, the most charming individual you could imagine, and a great conversationalist with a terrific scan of knowledge. And I had some moments with him.\n\nWe went across the Channel on the _Britannia_ \u2014John Major, Annita and me, and Bill Clinton. We went down two lanes of Allied warships floating beside us like a guard of honour, and as we stood on the deck about halfway there, a Lancaster bomber and two Spitfires went over the ship just above mast height. It was very moving.\n\nAnd I had a fantastic meeting with Clinton in Paris with Mitterrand. Mitterrand was a crazy guy, so entertaining. And the three of us did a press conference together. Mitterrand knew I had an interest in architecture and showed me around the Elysee Palace.\n\nHe showed me the Pompidou Room, which was full of plastic furniture, and Mitterrand said, 'You know the thing about Pompidou?' and I said, 'What, monsieur?' and he said, 'Pompidou was full of shit.' 'We're going to have a little treat,' he said. 'I'm taking you to the Salon d'Argent, the room where Bonaparte abdicated, and we'll have coffee at the table where he signed his abdication papers.'\n\nWe were still sitting there when a staff member arrived to tell him Bill Clinton was about to arrive for the press conference, and Monsieur le President hadn't shaved yet. So he asked for an electric razor and shaved in front of a large ancient mirror in the Silver Room, and then we went down to the press conference.\n\nHe was a great figure, Mitterrand, but with a zany quality.\n\n**KOB:** In 1994 you began a very secret process to set up a security agreement between Australia and Indonesia, the likes of which had not been done before. How hard was it to pull that off and what were you trying to secure for Australia?\n\n**PJK:** We had the ANZUS Treaty with the United States, which has been a fundamental cornerstone of our postwar security, but there was nothing like ANZUS with the other state of great material significance to Australia. We had the five-power defence agreement with Malaysia, Singapore, Britain and New Zealand but nothing with the great state to our north, Indonesia. So I wanted to put in place both a formal structure of consultation between us and a declaration of trust that Indonesia had no territorial designs on us and that we had no territorial designs on Indonesia, and that accordingly we could consider our position somewhat in common in the event we ran into adverse circumstances. I wanted to see that as an agreement with the standing of ANZUS and in the language of ANZUS.\n\n**KOB:** Even assuming Suharto himself saw the merit of your proposal, how big an ask was it for him to deliver his end of the deal?\n\n**PJK:** Very difficult for him. He had to deliver the army, which was always a powerful element in the Indonesian equation. He was one of the leaders of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War so every instinct in him would have been not to even entertain the idea. But I had credibility with him because of the benefits he'd enjoyed through the development of the new APEC forum, particularly coming as it did towards the end of his political life.\n\nI said to him, 'Mr President, you're the only Indonesian person who could make this structure happen, for yourself, your country and for Australia. In your passing, the opportunity may never arise again, so why don't we seize the moment? We have no designs on you nor you on us. So why don't we think about the language of an agreement with a consultative mechanism and a proactive quality so if any adverse circumstances do come by, if you happen to be attacked or we were attacked, we have an active quality in the agreement where we consult one another.'\n\n**KOB:** Why did those negotiations have to be conducted in secret?\n\n**PJK:** If it had been known it simply would not have happened. Suharto needed time to get around all the forces in Indonesia to bring on a thing like this. We didn't hear anything for a long time and we thought after a while he'd dropped it altogether. But I caught up with him in Bali in 1995 to prepare for the Osaka APEC meeting in Japan, and he came back to the security idea of his own volition. He said, 'By the way, we've had a year to consider your proposal and I think we can advance it.'\n\nSuharto suggested that we each nominate two people to flesh out the areas to be covered in such an agreement. I nominated General Peter Gration, then Head of the Australian Armed Forces, and Allan Gyngell from my office. The actual work then took place in the few months between the Bali meeting and Osaka. President Suharto and I then agreed substantially at a side meeting of the APEC plenary session that we would enter into a formal treaty arrangement between our two countries.\n\n**KOB:** How much enthusiasm was there for the idea on your own side, particularly within the defence, foreign affairs and intelligence communities?\n\n**PJK:** It was my own idea, and it had no real support in either Foreign Affairs or Defence. Not that they thought it was a bad idea, but that we would be rebuffed for even suggesting it. They liked the idea but thought we would be reaching too far, too fast to secure something that was effectively out of reach. It did have real support in the foreign policy division of PM&C and when I told one senior adviser that Suharto had come on board, he virtually burst into tears, overtaken by the sheer scale and import of the thing.\n\nIt was quite a moment when we announced it and then Gareth Evans signed for Australia and Ali Alatas the Indonesian foreign minister signed for Indonesia, as President and Suharto and I stood behind them.\n\n**KOB:** This was in the shadow of the 1996 election with John Howard as Opposition Leader. Do you think the value of that agreement was understood at the time by the Australian people or do you think the electorate's mind was then firmly planted in domestic issues?\n\n**PJK:** Importantly, it was publicly supported by John Howard and his then foreign policy spokesman, Alexander Downer. I don't think the public might have understood it as I understood it or the government did. The important thing was that it was a great asset for Australia. The great tragedy was that in the subsequent fracas over Timor between Howard as Prime Minister and President Habibie, who followed President Suharto, Habibie abrogated the treaty. For Australia it was like losing the fledgling ANZUS.\n\n**KOB:** Howard wrote in his autobiography:\n\nA metaphor for Keating's attitude to Asia and in particular Indonesia had been his febrile excitement when he concluded secret negotiations for a security treaty with Indonesia just before Christmas 1995. He really believed that this would be seen by the Australian public as a master stroke of diplomacy. I took an excited indeed breathless phone call from Gareth Evans who informed me in utmost secrecy of course that the treaty had been concluded and was about to be announced. The treaty did not shift one vote towards the Labor Party yet one felt the Prime Minister believed it was a real opinion shaper with the Australian people.\n\nWas he right?\n\n**PJK:** No. It was not procured to shift votes. It was put in place to buttress Australia's fundamental security. It was a major diplomatic achievement. I certainly didn't think it was an opinion shaper but it's the Prime Minister of Australia's task to make the country more secure, to make the country more resilient. And I had this almost unique relationship with Suharto, president of our largest neighbouring state, and through his authority was able to put together a treaty of cooperation using similar language to the ANZUS Treaty.\n\nWhy would Howard deprecate that, and why didn't he seek to recover the treaty when he had supported it from Opposition? But against what Howard said years later in his book, his first Defence Minister Ian McLachlan said at the time he regarded the treaty as a key asset for Australia.\n\nThat's why Howard supported it in the first instance. To have lost it was a great shame, and it was a great shame that Howard didn't pursue its retention. But to have pursued its retention would have meant him pursuing a measure of mine, and I don't think he was big enough to admit to its scale and importance. Certainly after President Habibie left, he had the opportunity.\n\n**KOB:** Looking back, do you think that your passion for repositioning Australia in terms of its international linkages gave John Howard the means to paint you as turning your back on old traditions, of going too far in your embrace of Asia?\n\n**PJK:** That's what he argued. In one of his so-called headland speeches he talked of returning to our European traditions. That's what you would have expected someone who thought in the framework of the 1950s and 1960s to say and to think.\n\n**KOB:** He was also a smart politician. He wouldn't have said that if he didn't think it was going to resonate with the public.\n\n**PJK:** He would have said it anyway because that's what he deeply believed. He was the wrong guy for Australia at the time when the panoply of Asia was really opening up to us.\n\n**KOB:** But did you have to move so far so fast in repointing the raft to Asia, as you've put it? The whole orientation of our foreign policy trend was towards increasingly closer ties with Japan, China and India, and the Southeast Asian countries. That was happening anyway.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but not the kind of geopolitical positioning I was undertaking. We had strong trade links with Japan and Bob Hawke had had a first-rate relationship with the then government of China, but Bob had been to Indonesia only once in eight years. The APEC Leaders' Forum was Asia-centric and pan-Pacific. We had never done anything like that, or been in anything like that.\n\nBob, and Malcolm Fraser before him, had spent their major foreign policy effort in the British Commonwealth fighting apartheid. Now, apartheid was a great issue, and in Malcolm Fraser's case so was Zimbabwe, but Australia's vital interests were never in Africa and could never be.\n\nAustralia's vital interests were here, in the region where we live, and I wanted to declare those interests and set up the political machinery for us to participate in those interests. Because of our priorities in government the APEC leaders' meeting, and in Gareth's case the ASEAN regional forum, have Australia's name on the maker's label. The perpetual bilateral ministerial council between Australia and Indonesia has Australia's name on the maker's label. And the security treaty was there, and should still be there, with Australia's name on the maker's label. These are the things conscientious leaders leave behind.\nA REPUBLIC\n\nHaving signalled to Australia during his first trip to Indonesia in April 1992 that he would be forging a new vision in foreign policy, Paul Keating flew to Papua New Guinea for his first Anzac Day as Prime Minister to mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of Australia's fiercest and most costly military battles in World War II, the Kokoda Track campaign.\n\nThis was both political and personal for Keating. Everything about 1992 was inevitably political because this was a battle for survival, and Keating was intent on wrong-footing and unsettling his opponents wherever he could. He had big question marks about Australia's obsession with the disastrous World War I Gallipoli campaign as the birthplace of our national identity and wanted to see a bigger emphasis on Australia's close connection to the Asia-Pacific battles of World War II.\n\nIt was personal because his uncle Bill Keating had died at the hands of the Japanese in the notorious Sandakan death marches in Borneo.\n\nWith John Hewson looking on, Paul Keating spoke at Bomana Cemetery and acknowledged the things about the Anzac legend that had left an indelible impression on the nation, but said such legends 'should not constrain us when we have to change' nor 'confer on us a duty to see that the world stand still'.\n\nThis was no traditional Anzac speech simply lauding the bravery or symbolism of the past. Keating pointedly invoked John Curtin's courage during the war in defying Churchill and demanding that Australian troops in the Middle East come home to defend their own soil from the Japanese. In other words, Curtin put Australia first. The Anzac legend, Keating said, looked back to Britain; Kokoda looked forward to independence.\n\nKeating then flew to the Kokoda Track where Australian troops had stopped the Japanese advance on Port Moresby, and astonished everyone present, including his own close advisers, by kneeling to kiss the ground at the foot of the monument there. This was no copybook Prime Minister.\n\nShortly after, he was picked up by a boom microphone saying to one of a group of children waving Australian flags, 'Don't worry, sonny, we'll get you a new one of these soon.' Incorrigible. But when he then flew to Lae, he told guests at the official lunch it had been the most moving day in his whole career in public life.\n\nKeating was pushing along one of the initiatives he hoped would define his prime ministership\u2014cutting the formal ties to the British crown and setting up the framework for an Australian republic. The debate had really begun when the Queen visited Australia two months before. Even before she arrived Keating had expressed support for changing the flag, or at least removing the Union Jack from the corner.\n\nKeating stirred up two ants' nest while hosting the Queen on the opening day of Parliament for the year on 24 February. When he dared to put a guiding hand on the Queen's back to direct her towards Dame Pattie Menzies at the official reception, the British tabloids had a field day. Their best effort was to dub him the 'Lizard of Oz'. In his welcoming speech he managed to trigger Opposition anger when he observed that just as Britain some time ago had sought to cement its future security in Europe, Australia was vigorously seeking partnerships in Asia.\n\n'Our outlook is necessarily independent,' he said.\n\nJohn Hewson said the speech was embarrassing and ungracious. 'It was an occasion to show respect and not to make a political statement.'\n\nKeating's response came in Parliament on 27 February. Picking up on Hewson's comment suggesting Keating had not learned respect at school, he said:\n\nI learned one thing: I learned about self-respect and self-regard for Australia\u2014not about some cultural cringe to a country which decided not to defend the Malayan Peninsula, not to worry about Singapore and not give us our troops back to keep ourselves free from Japanese domination.\n\nThis was the country that you people wedded yourself to, and even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods, and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it. You would take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from. These are the same old fogies who doffed their lids and tugged the forelock to the British establishment; they now try to grind down Australian kids by denying them a technical school education and want to put a tax back on the poor.\n\nThe same old sterile ideology, the same old fogeyism of the 1950s that produced the Thatcherite policies of the late 1970s is going to produce _Fightback!_ You can go back to the 1950s to your nostalgia, your Menzies, the Caseys and the whole lot. They were not aggressively Australia, they were not aggressively proud of our culture, and we will have no bar of you and your sterile ideology. [Hansard, 27 February]\n\nTo a Dorothy Dix question from Labor MP Daryl Melham, Keating also seized on comments from John Howard, the Opposition's most senior Anglophile, who in also criticising Keating's speech to the Queen had talked about the 1950s as a golden age. Keating mused that the Old Parliament House down the hill could be converted to a museum of cultural history:\n\nWe thought we could put some of the cultural icons of the 1950s down there. The Morphy Richards toaster, the Qualcast mower, a pair of heavily protected slippers, the Astor TV, the AWA radiogram. And, of course, the honourable member for Wentworth and the honourable member for Bennelong could go there as well. When the kids come and look at them they will say, 'Gee, Mum, is that what it was like then?' And the two Johns can say, 'No, kids. This is the future.' Back down the time tunnel to the future.\n\nIt was a performance that incited the Opposition but delighted his own troops, demoralised by the battering they were regularly taking back in their electorates over the effects of the recession, and wearied by the long, debilitating leadership contest between Hawke and Keating. It set the template for what the Opposition, the gallery and the public could expect for the next twelve months, but Keating was also signalling that he was looking for new battlegrounds beyond the economy on which to fight the election.\n\nIn March that first year of the prime ministership, Geoff Kitney wrote in the _Financial Review_ : 'Mr Keating and his advisers believe that traditional Labor Party supporters... are very receptive to the case for a new nationalism. They believe it is striking a positive electoral chord like the Labor Party struck in the lead-up to the 1972 election.'\n\nKeating then established a Republican Advisory Committee which included two identifiable Liberals, Nick Greiner and Malcolm Turnbull, tasked to establish a consensus for a republican model, which he believed had to be conservative and minimalist in nature if it was to win bipartisan support. He then travelled to England to inform the Queen of his intention to carve a path to total independence from the mother country. By April 1994, the Saulwick Poll in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ and the _Age_ registered 70 per cent support for a republic in the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria.\n\n**KOB:** The Queen's visit coincided with your first week in Parliament as Prime Minister. You had a lot on your plate. You were launching _One Nation_ to help pull the country out of recession and get yourself back in the political hunt. As with the Bush visit, you could have played it safe with the Queen, gone through the formalities in the usual way, bid her goodbye and got on with the fray. Instead you chose to use the occasion to open up a new political front.\n\n**PJK:** It was like the Bush visit in the sense that the Queen's visit was already in the pipeline when I took the job. It was an unexceptional speech but in the context of my broader ambition to reshape Australia's role in the region and to sharpen our sense of ourselves and our independence, I wasn't going to let the moment pass to fall back on the usual platitudes to the monarchy.\n\nI had always believed Australia should break away and leave behind forever what I used to call the Menzies torpor of the 1950s and 1960s, the idea, particularly in the minds of the conservative forces, that we should retain formal links to Whitehall and the monarchy. This was the new post-Cold War world and the opportunity to repackage ourselves for the new century. Yet how could we repackage ourselves with the Queen of Great Britain as our head of state and a flag that was a remnant of all that history?\n\nIn welcoming the Queen, I said Australia had to become more independent and now looked to the future: that just as Britain had found its place in the European Union, we too had to find our place in this part of the world. I said in the process, the links between us would change, and the cultural loyalties to the monarchy would change, and that it was worth pondering these things and talking about them. I thought the Queen found this all rather refreshing and that was certainly the kind of indication she gave me personally.\n\n**KOB:** You provided fodder for the British tabloids when you dared to put your arm on the Queen's back to guide her towards some guests at the lunch. They labelled you the 'Lizard of Oz'.\n\n**PJK:** I was trying to direct her to people I knew she knew, including Dame Pattie Menzies and some other senior Liberal dignitaries. She said later, 'Take no notice of them', and I said, 'Well, Your Majesty, can I say this. A British tabloid editor is a particularly low form of human life.' And she said, 'Hmm...'\n\n**KOB:** If you were looking to provoke a reaction with your speech, Alexander Downer, John Howard and John Hewson all obliged. Downer said your speech was poorly conceived, weakly delivered and downright ungracious. He said you would be remembered as Australia's most petty, mean-minded and ungracious Prime Minister since Federation. Now, I don't imagine you were too displeased or shocked.\n\n**PJK:** Talk about come in spinner. I used to say about these guys, 'You try to bait these people but you don't really have to. They actually jump on the hook for you.' The Liberal Party were outraged. Those lickspittles Hewson, Howard and all the rest of them were up in arms, saying I didn't know my place. Hewson suggested I hadn't learned respect at school.\n\nI said in Parliament, 'At least I learned respect for one thing, for Australia. You're the same people who went and took your knighthoods from them after they left us with the fall of Singapore and sought to divert our troops to the Middle East. Left us in jeopardy. When did it ever occur to you that we ought to be pursuing our own independence and foreign policy?'\n\n**KOB:** I'm sure the irony wasn't lost on you that it was Churchill, the person who had inspired you so much coming into your political life, whom you now blamed for the fall of Singapore and for trying to stop John Curtin bringing Australian troops back to defend Australia against the Japanese.\n\n**PJK:** Churchill's intellectual position was that Britain came first, and Germany had to be defeated before Japan. You can understand that from a British perspective, but you can hardly respect it if you're tasked with defending the Australian nation. And this was Curtin's great insight: to switch camps and get the support of the United States, which led ultimately to the ANZUS Treaty.\n\nAnd I said, 'Here you were, all you Tories, turning back to Britain after the war, even after Britain had walked out on you and joined the Common Market. You were still going over there for your knighthoods, still clinging to the whole imperial thing.'\n\nI also raised the issue of the flag. I said, here we are, getting around with the flag of another country in the corner of our flag. Who does that? What great nation gets around with the flag of someone else's country in the corner of their flag?\n\nI used to go to schools in my electorate in the 1970s and one of the little rituals we'd have as MPs was to hand the school a new flag. I used to often say, 'Of course it's the wrong flag, with the flag of another country in the corner', which the teachers would duly note as they raised it up the flagpole. As I went through my political life I was more embarrassed by the thing than I'd ever been\u2014we were telling the world we had this deprecating image of ourselves, with the flag of Great Britain posted squarely in ours.\n\nWe had the opportunity to do as the Canadians had done with their flag, which says all that needed to be said about Canada as a society. Their challenge was much more complicated than ours, being both a French- and English-speaking country.\n\n**KOB:** Some of your opponents took your views on the monarchy and the flag as indicative of your Irish Catholic heritage.\n\n**PJK:** This had nothing really to do with my Irish heritage. I think the whole business about Ireland and the blarney is way overdone in Australia. I don't attend St Patrick's Day events. I never indulged in that nostalgia.\n\nBut over 200 years we'd developed into a robust democracy. We were one of the first to recognise suffrage for women, we'd succeeded in remaking the economy and partly integrating with Asia, yet we still had these misleading and discordant symbols.\n\nI remember saying to John Howard at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 when we were watching the swimming, 'Look, John. They're standing up there getting the medals with the flag around their shoulders but they're trying to hide the Union Jack, each one of them.'\n\nAnd they were: Ian Thorpe and the others were trying to hide the Union Jack to have only the blue and white visible.\n\nAnd he said, 'Well, Paul, you and I just have different ideas about this.'\n\nI said, 'John, give them a break, give them a new flag.'\n\n**KOB:** When you went to Papua New Guinea for the fiftieth anniversary of the big battles of World War II, what did you seek to achieve with the visit?\n\n**PJK:** The Liberals were always soft on the Pacific War. For them it was all about Gallipoli, while our Second World War battles in places closer to home like Papua New Guinea came second. I went to Kokoda to make the point that Gallipoli looked back at Britain, whereas Kokoda looked to our independence, which to me was more relevant to our future.\n\nThe Tories hated it because they always wrapped themselves in the flag to claim a monopoly on our patriotism. For them the flag was all about Gallipoli and Britain. Here I was, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War battles, taking the opportunity to remember a more recent past when our own nation was genuinely threatened, and had to look to the future.\n\n**KOB:** When you kissed the earth at Kokoda was that as spontaneous as we're led to believe?\n\n**PJK:** It was spontaneous, but I wanted to broaden the Anzac legend, and to highlight the fact that bravery and sacrifice were not the preserve of one time and one place, and to remember the courage of young men, militia, in Kokoda and to show my regard for it as a solemn place, a national shrine.\n\nBy doing that I wanted to underline the solemnity and debt we owed them in a very graphic way, rather than simply in a speech that might or might not be reported.\n\n**KOB:** How strongly did you feel the family connection to the Pacific war through your Uncle Bill?\n\n**PJK:** He died in March 1945, as the war was ending. The Japanese marched them from Sandakan to Ranau in Borneo, and shot and bayoneted them as they fell along the way, two thousand of them. What I found particularly galling was that the RSL paid them virtually no regard. They wouldn't say this, but the implication was that somehow they had not measured up. They weren't in the big battles, shooting the 303s, so therefore they were sort of second-rate.\n\nThis used to drive me nuts. I had the bravery of people on the Burma Railway, Sandakan, Singapore, Changi so strongly in my mind that I thought the fiftieth anniversary was the time to speak the truth, and the truth could perhaps best be demonstrated at that event in Kokoda.\n\n**KOB:** But when you say you wanted to shift the emphasis away from Gallipoli, I'm not sure you succeeded because, if anything, the myth of Gallipoli has got stronger.\n\n**PJK:** Howard pushed it very hard as Prime Minister, as you would expect him to do. He's an Anglophile, but Kokoda did speak to our independence as a nation where Gallipoli didn't. I think I shifted the debate. Look at the people who go to Kokoda these days\u2014it has become another national shrine.\n\n**KOB:** In picking these sorts of emotional symbolic issues so early in your term, was that partly about reinvigorating your own troops, getting a bit of inspiration and passion going in the ranks again?\n\n**PJK:** No, this stuff was bubbling away in me all my adult life. But, nevertheless, driving the Liberal Party nuts does lift the spirits on your own side. It drove Hewson nuts, and Howard went spare over it. He thought I was attacking everything he'd ever believed in, every Menzian notion. But regardless of what they had to say, what it did do was to shift public attention to a range of wider and more emotional issues.\n\nI think people said, 'Hang on, as Prime Minister Keating is no longer just the guy with the calculator out doing his budget sums with his economic reforms. He seems to have a bigger view of things\u2014another dimension.'\n\nAt the time I was fighting _Fightback!_ , which I saw as a miserable document trying to desocialise Australia, attacking all the social buttressing we'd had on things like Medicare, minimum award rates of pay, the social security system and so on. But rather than simply tackling _Fightback!_ in its own terms, I was intent on sketching out a new agenda that was about moving Australia into the void created by the end of the Cold War. It was about seeing the continent as a raft and turning it directly into the area of economic prosperity and security. Not security relying solely on some strategic guarantor as we relied on the British Navy and then later the American Navy, but security in Asia for ourselves. In other words, conscious and earned security.\n\n**KOB:** So, in a quite calculated way, you were fashioning a signal to Australia that you were a broader person than simply the guy who'd run the economy for eight years, and caused pain in the process.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but no. No, because in this position, the inner me was emerging publicly and yes, because I did wish to distinguish myself against the lickspittles opposite. These things were always going around inside my head, but these were not issues I could make my own while Treasurer.\n\n**KOB:** You said your visit to Kokoda was the most moving day you'd experienced in public life. That's a big statement.\n\n**PJK:** I had with me a military historian named David Horner, whose father had served in Papua New Guinea in the war. We flew together in an RAAF Hercules over a lot of the war terrain, around some of the mountains and coastline back to Kokoda, so I had a very graphic idea of where the battles were fought, and how difficult it must have been.\n\nAustralians were the first to turn back the Japanese in the Pacific War. The first pushback against Japan and their marines happened at our hands on the Kokoda Track. I was very conscious of that heroism, the singular dedication those young men displayed on behalf of their country and their families, and for everything we'd created here. That's what they were fighting for, and for me it was a very moving thing.\n\n**KOB:** But at the same time it was as if you couldn't acknowledge Gallipoli at all. You've never visited Gallipoli, is that right?\n\n**PJK:** No, and I never will, because the Dardanelles was an ill-conceived campaign from the beginning. Churchill wanted to come to the back of the Germans through Turkey. It was a shockingly executed campaign and there was already a big body of opinion in the British Cabinet from Lloyd George and others who were opposed to it. This was a military disaster for us. But the worst of it was the notion that the country required rebirth and that this happened at Gallipoli. The greatest piece of nonsense ever: that the country needed to find its soul there.\n\nIn other words, forget the development of Federation, forget that we now had a unified country, the great Australian experiment to 1914. What matters is how we behaved in some poorly executed British campaign in Turkey. Really?\n\n**KOB:** But couldn't you find it in you to see past that and go there once, simply as an acknowledgement of the Australian effort? The loss of life. The courage of it.\n\n**PJK:** I acknowledge the courage and the lives sacrificed, I always have, and in Flanders and the Western Front the losses were shocking. But the notion that we had to be reborn and discover ourselves at Gallipoli is such a savage condemnation of all that we had created here and all we stood for as not to be worthy of sustenance. Yet people today still go on with this nonsense.\n\n**KOB:** You raised the issue of the flag again when you were in Indonesia when you talked about blowing aside the baggage of the past, and in Papua New Guinea you made an amused aside to the kids waving the Australian flag, 'Don't worry, sonny, we'll get you a new one of these soon.'\n\n**PJK:** I remember that. That was probably an unnecessary remark and it was picked up by one of those boom mikes. To use a more recent American public relations term, I misspoke.\n\n**KOB:** But did you discern any evidence in the national mood when you became Prime Minister that Australians broadly were fretting about the national flag or that they wanted to cut ties to the constitutional monarchy?\n\n**PJK:** Well, it's the leader's job to paint the new horizon. That's what a leader does, or should do.\n\n**KOB:** Neville Wran said once when he was Premier of New South Wales that you could never afford as leader to get too far ahead of the mob.\n\n**PJK:** I despise those kinds of remarks. They stand for everything I stand against. I've said in the past that when they were handing out continents not many people got one, but we did. And here we are, this massive country with just 23 million of us, now aligned to the fastest growing part of the world. Wouldn't you take every opportunity to capitalise on it? Why would you dumb down your own people?\n\nThe biggest issue facing Australia today is a psychological one. Do we want to be in it, in the Asian construct I mean? Do we really want to be in it? Yet we have to be in it both for our prosperity and our security. So somewhere a leader has to tackle the shibboleths. The shibboleths have to be taken on, and the notion that we should just go along with the mob rather than actually lead them is classic New South Wales hustler politics.\n\n**KOB:** That's the school of politics that bred you.\n\n**PJK:** They bred me, that's true, but they never had any part of me in an intellectual sense. My instincts about leadership were vastly different. And the opportunity to lead today is even more profound than it was when I was there. Twenty years ago you needed a microscope to find the Chinese economy compared to what it is today, the second largest economy in the world, and soon the largest.\n\nLook at the growth of East Asia. The vast bulk of world growth is coming from our region.\n\nBut at what point do we decide we want to be a multicultural cosmopolitan place? At what point do we decide we want to be in it? At what point do we cut the knot with the monarchy? Look at all the recent tomfoolery about the British monarchy and fuss about Prince William as heir. If the poor Brits want to go down that sad road, let them, but let's get out of it while we can. Prince William is probably one of the most congenial royals we've seen, but that is no reason to be fawning over him as our future monarch. It's sick, really sick.\n\n**KOB:** You used to occasionally drop in on the historian Manning Clark in his Canberra home over the years before his death. What attracted you to Clark?\n\n**PJK:** He had the big imagination, and tried to tell us where the yardsticks were in our history, putting down markers against a very big landscape in his head. He was a person who was fundamentally interested in truths: sifting through history to reveal them, paint them and prophesise about them.\n\nHe also loved music and occasionally I'd take something down to play with him. I remember one Saturday afternoon, it was Yehudi Menuhin at sixteen, playing Elgar's _Violin Concerto_ , with Elgar conducting. Elgar was very put out that he had to bring the orchestra together on a Saturday to accommodate a sixteen-year-old boy's itinerary. Menuhin was absolutely in his prime and as he played, Elgar conducted the piece in tears\u2014you can hear it in the music.\n\nManning and I would put passages back on, you know, turn them back and hear them again. Another thing we played and I liked was Elgar's _Enigma Variations_. He also liked Richard Strauss and his tone poem _Death and Transfiguration_. But he was more at the baroque end of the repertoire himself although he was interested enough in the romantics.\n\nI used to drop in on him not to draw any particular wisdom from him but simply because I liked him and enjoyed sharing the music with him. But we did share a lot of common ground. He despised the notion of the Austral Briton and its domination of the political debate, particularly after the First World War\u2014where they imposed their values on society, never thinking of the Australian way and how Australia was entitled to be a society that gave expression to its own mores and values.\n\n**KOB:** On 29 April 1992 the _Australian_ 's banner headline read, 'Furore over PM's flag move. Keating sets ground for new nationalism'. It was a story that you were promising to take your plan for a new flag to Cabinet within weeks but at the same time you pledged that you wouldn't push it through unless there was clear public support. Nothing concrete ever really eventuated, did it?\n\n**PJK:** I did test out the Democrats as to whether they would support it in the Senate, because with their support I could have done it. I proposed to Cheryl Kernot that we fly a second flag as well as the existing flag and she said she couldn't get it up. I said as healthy as having a national competition might be, I'm prepared to recommend and legislate in the meantime that we simultaneously fly the Eureka flag with the current flag, and she wouldn't support it.\n\n**KOB:** In April 1993 you set up the Republican Advisory Committee, chaired by Malcolm Turnbull, and including the former Liberal Premier Nick Greiner, to recommend a framework for a republic. Was this in the best _Yes, Minister_ tradition of choosing a committee that would give you the outcome you wanted?\n\n**PJK:** It was to get a bipartisan examination of the issues with a set of recommendations to produce a model for a republic that the Liberal Party could embrace. Malcolm Turnbull was politically non-aligned at that stage and because of his prominence in the republican debate, was an appropriate person to chair the committee.\n\nIt was crazy, thinking for a moment that you could have a viable republican structure that suited you but didn't suit the conservative parties. Because any referendum would fail. So it had to be one that was written and thought about as something the Coalition could adopt and that's what drove me.\n\nBy 1994 I had a 63 per cent vote in favour of a republic, according to the polls. And this later rose to 70 per cent. I had taken the risk at the 1993 election of making it a significant piece of the party manifesto.\n\n**KOB:** Shortly after you presented the committee report on constitutional change to Parliament, you met the Queen in England and briefed her on your plans for a republic. Was she amenable to the idea and were you able to have a natural conversation with her rather than a formal one?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, it was a good conversation in the drawing room at Balmoral Castle. She told me it had been her grandmother Queen Victoria's favourite room. It still had the original tartan carpets and the faded furniture and looked out over the hills.\n\nI went through the reasons why Australia had reached the point where it had to make a choice about its future as an independent country. I also said I believed that when she visited Australia as the Queen of Great Britain and not as Queen of Australia, there would be even more warmth displayed towards her than the current ambivalence as the Queen of Australia.\n\nWhile she didn't expressly concur with that, she said, 'Well, my family has always tried to do the right thing by Australia and of course I would take the advice of Australian ministers.' In other words, she was the perfect constitutional head of state in making those remarks.\n\nAnd I said to her, 'I know that normally after meetings of this kind, the protocol is to say nothing specific about the discussion, but on this occasion I would like to reveal what you have said.'\n\nThe Queen discussed this with her private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, and they agreed that I should do so. I remember thinking at the time that the Royal Family had already come to the conclusion that Australia would become a republic, and from their point of view almost the faster the better. Prince Charles virtually confirmed that when he came to Sydney in 1994 and said, 'What are you dallying about for?'\n\nWhen John Howard's eventual referendum was defeated, Prince Phillip is reported to have said to friends, 'Don't those Australians know what's good for them?'\n\nWhether he did say it or not I can't be certain, but I'm as certain as we're sitting here that the British Royal Family believes we'd all be better off with them as friends and former relatives, with us as an Australian republic.\n\nWhen I did finally announce the government's preferred model in the House of Representatives in 1995, I rang John Howard as Opposition Leader beforehand to give him an outline, and he interrupted me mid-sentence to say, 'I hope you don't have a popular election in there,' and I said, 'No, I have appointment by both houses of Parliament.'\n\n'Oh good, good,' he said. He didn't want to change the fundamental structure of the system of government, and neither did I. In that same call I urged him to take as long as he liked to respond, and said there would be no static from me.\n\nI said, 'I think I've given you a model you can live with.'\n\nHe said, 'Very good, we'll have a look at it,' and that was it.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard says in his autobiography that the president under that model would have effectively been chosen by the government of the day rather than by Parliament. Your model said both houses of Parliament. How would you have ensured a bipartisan approach to the vote?\n\n**PJK:** I would have been happy for Labor members and Coalition members to have had a free vote in a joint sitting of Parliament, with a shortlist of nominees. The choice could have been a genuine reflection of a free vote of the entire Parliament.\n\nI also said to John Howard in that conversation, 'I have kept the reserve powers in the Constitution. I haven't tried to circumscribe the powers of the Senate to refuse Supply.'\n\nI said, 'John, in a bicameral system where the second chamber is elected by proportional representation, we will always have the potential for deadlocks, and therefore there has to be someone in the system to resolve the deadlocks. Let's just hope it's done more judiciously than Sir John Kerr did in 1975, but the Senate keeps its powers.'\n\n**KOB:** On 7 June 1995, when you presented the model to Parliament, how important a moment was that for you?\n\n**PJK:** It was a really important speech for me, and I wrote large slabs of it. I still have my handwritten drafts. That speech was about Australia's coming out. To say that we'd always have a kinship with Britain and that when the Queen visited the Republic of Australia in future she'd more likely get an even warmer welcome than she would as the nominal Queen of Australia.\n\nThere was a great emotionalism and a standing ovation in Parliament when I made the speech. Something I had not expected. A large number of members from both sides asked me to sign the speech, nearly all of ours and quite a number from the other side. It was the first and only time an Australian Prime Minister had laid out in Parliament a case for a republic, including outlining a model. It was the full monty, and there was a real possibility of it happening. We just needed a bit of scale and bigness from Howard and the Libs, and it would have got there. But in the end he remained the victim of the picket fence.\n\nThe proposition I took to the 1996 election was that if I won I would present a simple question to the people of Australia in a referendum: 'do you believe Australia should become a republic?' The answer to that question already had a 70 per cent approval in the polls. With me pushing, it would have walked in.\n\nBut having won the 1996 election Howard lost Australia the opportunity of becoming a republic through events contrived in that referendum of his. He called a convention to decide on a model, which he knew would split the republican movement, and that split was reflected in the referendum vote in 1999. He asked people both to endorse a republic _and_ choose a model. Had he put the simple question first, as I had intended, the country would have replied in the affirmative, giving the political community an instruction. It was that 'instruction' Howard contrived to eliminate.\n\nHad he put the single question to voters\u2014'Do you think Australia should become a republic?'\u2014it would have been solidly agreed. Then we could have moved to determine the model. Howard and I were at least agreed on one thing, and still agree: that the moment you go to an elected president, a preponderant power devolves to the president. Much more than the Governor-General now. And with one nationally elected person in the system, the authority of the prime minister and cabinet system will be diminished.\n\n**KOB:** But without reliving the whole debate again here, isn't it true that while ever the republican movement is split, and a core group remains that will support the monarchy through thick and thin, it will be impossible to get the required majority of states as well as a majority national vote in order to pass a referendum?\n\n**PJK:** That's why a referendum had to be based on the simple proposition first: do you believe Australia should become a republic?\n\n**KOB:** And you don't believe that the schism in Howard's republican convention between those wanting your minimalist model and those wanting a popularly elected president would have also emerged in the debate on a referendum sponsored by you?\n\n**PJK:** No, I don't, because in the post-1996 Parliament, even with a new Liberal leader, or even with Howard still there, both parties would have wanted to see the minimalist model adopted. The one set out by the bipartisan Turnbull committee.\n\n**KOB:** It was one thing for you to float the idea of a republic but it was quite another to decide that you were going to firmly place it on the public agenda and make it a real political issue. When I read back through the records, even your own office was divided on this.\n\n**PJK:** They're called risks. The leader takes risks and burns up the political capital to see the nation properly set for the future. I was prepared to take the risk at the 1993 election when proposing that we go down the pathway towards an Australian republic.\n\nIn the same vein I gave the Redfern Park address in December 1992\u2014in the shadow of that same election\u2014where I publicly acknowledged to the Aboriginal community all the factors that had contributed to their dispossession.\n\nThis was the election that by all accounts I was supposed to lose, and if I had played it safe as my party friends, the federal secretariat etc., had wanted me to, I wouldn't have made the Redfern Park speech. But the country needed the cleansing, the country required the lift that, on this issue, could only arise from truth.\n\nThis gets back to what I saw as a different kind of leadership for the country, not some consensual model or the one made fashionable these days by media advisers and party officials.\n\n**KOB:** Your critics would say that most particularly you were looking for diversions to draw people's attention away from the economy, which was still feeling the after-effects of the recession very deeply. Unemployment was continuing to climb. How many people do you really think were voting for a future republic or voting for the practical application of Mabo? How many, in contrast, were simply voting against John Hewson's _Fightback!_ and, more specifically, against a GST?\n\n**PJK:** I have no doubt that the people who understood my point about the enlargement of the nation voted for it. Here was John Hewson with his miserable _Fightback!_ , massively carving into the social wage while introducing a GST.\n\nIn contrast I was talking about our future in Asia as an independent country with an Australian head of state; of building a strong new Asian network including a new piece of political architecture like the APEC leaders; of owning up to our dispossession of the Aboriginal people; and building a new bilateral relationship with our neighbour, Indonesia. This was a completely different approach on fundamental issues. Issues I believed Australia had to address, certainly not some diversion from the prevailing economic realities. I'd been fighting economic arguments for nearly a decade at that point. I didn't require diversions to get my economic message over. I was like the Pied Piper on those issues.\n\nThe Liberal Party hated my social and geopolitical program. They hated it. They wanted to stick with the Menzian model, good little Anglophiles waving our little flag with the Union Jack in the corner, bowing to the Queen while paying lip service to our future in Asia.\n\nThey hated my stuff, but as Lang said, you stand for little until you attract a reasonable stock of enemies. The enemies define you as they define themselves.\n\n**KOB:** Here we are, twenty years later, and there's not even a whisper of debate about a republic.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I'm surprised by how little progress has been made in taking that next important step in recognising who we are and what we are. We still have the monarchy and now we have all these incantations around Prince William and the new wife.\n\nWe've gone nowhere since 1996. You can see that failure perpetuating itself in Tony Abbott's restoration of knighthoods and his recommendation that the Queen knight her own husband as an Australian knight. The shame of it.\nMABO\n\nFederal government activism to address the deprivations of Indigenous Australians had been a long time coming. The Holt Government had successfully orchestrated the 1967 referendum, which formally recognised Aboriginal Australians as citizens of the nation, with an undeniable right to vote, 179 years after white settlement. The Whitlam Government introduced land rights legislation and the Fraser Government supported its passage through Parliament, but only to Indigenous residents in the Northern Territory. The Hawke Government established the landmark Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission but essentially squibbed a national application of land rights under pressure from the Burke Labor Government and mining interests in Western Australia.\n\nIn 1991, Hawke also set up the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, chaired by the Western Australian Indigenous leader Pat Dodson, with a goal of achieving national reconciliation by the anniversary of Federation in 2001. Dodson retired from the Council in 1997, a year into the Howard Government, commenting, 'I fear for the spirit of this country.'\n\nThere's no record of any passionate interest expressed by a young Paul Keating on Indigenous affairs. But in one of his early speeches as Prime Minister at the Adelaide Writers' Festival in March 1992, he talked of the need for Australia to come to terms with the nation's original inhabitants. If we don't, he said, 'there will always be a feeling among us that we don't quite belong, that we're not serious, that we're just here for the view.' Within days of the Adelaide speech Keating placed himself more explicitly at the centre of debate on Aboriginal affairs. The opportunity came with the revelation by the ABC of a videotape from a party of off-duty NSW police with blackened faces tugging at nooses around their necks three years before, mocking Aboriginal deaths in custody. The story was followed by another, quoting a Northern Territory minister telling an Aboriginal woman at an Alice Springs meeting 'to get off your fat arse and fix your grog problem'.\n\nIf Australians needed reminding that racism was alive and well in much of the country, this was it. Expressing outrage was a no-brainer for any serious political leader and Keating wasn't alone in the harshness of his criticism. But the revelations coincided with Cabinet consideration of significant recommendations from the Royal Commission, and Keating signalled that Aboriginal affairs would be high on his personal agenda as Prime Minister; that this was 'probably the last opportunity this decade to do something really substantial' about the problems faced by Indigenous Australians.\n\nIn April that year he encapsulated a view of Australia's identity that started with an Aboriginal past, a multicultural present and a future that would be derivative of nowhere else. Asked by James Button of _Time_ magazine whether he thought Australia would become a Eurasian country, perhaps the world's first, he replied:\n\nThe fact that our migrants are increasingly going to come from South and North Asia means these people are going to be a larger component of the Australian population, but it will be a long time before anyone could describe the place as Eurasian.\n\nWe've got a unique opportunity. We're the inheritors of a large and old continent. I'm nearly 50. Four of my lifetimes ago there were no Europeans here. It's important for us to come to terms with the country, to come to terms with Aboriginal Australians, and I don't believe we'll ever succeed at feeling at home in the place without doing that, without ensuring they are justly treated, that they have the same opportunities and living standards as the rest of Australia.\n\nTwo months later, on 3 June 1992, the Mason High Court essentially threw down the gauntlet to Keating to put his money where his mouth was, with the now famous Mabo judgment. It rejected the notion of _terra nullius_ , that the land belonged to no one at the time of white settlement, and found that the concept of native title existed in common law and was validated by a traditional connection to tribal land\u2014not a child of the common law but an ancient title recognised by the common law.\n\nIt was a remarkable and historic judgment that included comments describing Indigenous dispossession as 'our nation's legacy of unutterable shame'. This was not a radical High Court: four of the seven judges had been appointed by Liberal governments. Only one dissented from the ruling.\n\nKeating's speechwriter Don Watson wrote in _Bleeding Heart_ that 'when Keating owned something he invested it with almost a religious force'. As a chorus of alarm arose from special interest groups, and was given further voice by the states, Keating decided to 'own' it, leading the negotiations with all the stakeholders and wrapping it within a legislative framework that might make practical sense and facilitate one of the High Court's most dramatic rulings. It took eighteen months, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and a great deal of distraction for a Prime Minister with a wounded economy to tend, and other policy balls to juggle. It dominated his time, which concerned his colleagues.\n\nThe strongest signal of the depth of Keating's determination to 'own' Mabo was contained in a speech at Redfern Park in inner Sydney on 10 December 1992 to celebrate the Year of the World's Indigenous People. The speech fell in the shadow of an election he was struggling to win, and probably wouldn't have delivered him a single new vote.\n\nHe told a mostly Indigenous audience of 2000, the mood at first subdued and ambivalent, that:\n\n... the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.\n\nIt begins, I think, with that of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.\n\nIt was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.\n\nThe 1967 referendum, introduced by the Holt Liberal Government, had given the Commonwealth scope to legislate on Aboriginal matters and Keating chose to use it.\n\nThe implications of the Mabo judgment were exceptionally complicated, potentially affecting farmers, miners and even amateur anglers, making it ripe for an emotive scare campaign. Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett warned at one point that suburban households in Melbourne were under threat.\n\nThe mining industry strenuously resisted, as did the states and the farm lobby. Miners warned of a flight of investment capital from big mining developments, while pastoral leases took up 38 per cent of Western Australia's land mass, 54 per cent of Queensland's, 42 per cent of South Australia's, 41 per cent of New South Wales' and 51 per cent of the Northern Territory.\n\nMany of the non-Indigenous players wanted Keating to use Commonwealth powers to remove any perceived native title threat to the status quo. The Commonwealth had that power, but only up to 1975 when the _Racial Discrimination Act_ came into law, prohibiting discrimination on racial grounds, including matters of property ownership. After Mabo, that now included native title. So property on which title had been issued after 1975 was especially complex. Meanwhile native title ambit claims were starting to pop up all over the country, in cities and the bush, providing juicy tabloid headlines and easy fodder for the radio shock jocks.\n\nWhile John Hewson and his Liberal colleagues struggled to formulate a position, the National Party led by Tim Fischer was hostile and at times inflammatory. Fischer attacked the High Court and the whole notion of Indigenous capacity to develop Australia the way white settlers and their descendants had.\n\n'Rightly or wrongly,' he told a 1993 National Party Conference, 'dispossession of Aboriginal civilisation was always going to happen. Those in the guilt industry have to consider that developing cultures and peoples will always overtake relatively stationary cultures. We have to be honest and acknowledge that Aboriginals' sense of nationhood or even infrastructure was not highly developed. At no stage did Aboriginal civilisation develop substantial buildings, roadways or wheeled carts as part of their different priorities.'\n\nKeating chose to lead the negotiations with all the stakeholders personally and found himself plunged into a nightmare of opposing forces, including within his own Cabinet and caucus ranks. At the heart of his problem was the fact that Indigenous leaders didn't trust the states and territories to genuinely accept the spirit of Mabo when under pressure from miners and farmers. The states wanted to retain control of land management in their domains. The hostility wasn't just coming from the conservative-controlled states. The Goss Labor Government in Queensland was one of Paul Keating's biggest ongoing headaches.\n\nThe negotiation process was a huge challenge for Aboriginal leaders, in large part because there was no one coherent national Indigenous leadership voice, but many voices representing many communities\u2014rural, regional and urban. No one had the authority to speak for all Indigenous Australians.\n\nInitially, a number of Aboriginal leaders were vociferous in their hostility, and attempts among Indigenous groups to find common cause, and even to sit at the negotiating table, failed. A frustrated Keating, no doubt feeling politically exposed on every front, at one point publicly expressed the doubt that 'Indigenous leaders would ever psychologically make the change to come into a process, to be part of it, and to take the burden of responsibility which went with it\u2014whether they could ever summon the authority of their own community to negotiate for and on their behalf'.\n\nIt took Lowitja (Lois) O'Donoghue, backed by several other powerful Aboriginal figures, to break the deadlock. Mustering her authority as chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) she declared that they would join negotiations, and that the leaders of the Indigenous land councils around Australia would be the negotiators.\n\nKeating underscored the seriousness of his intent by inviting them into the Cabinet room, the heart of Australia's executive government, for their first meeting on 27 April 1993. They came to the table with differing constituencies and some differing views. If there was one sentiment that bound them together it was probably suspicion. The eyes of their nations were on them.\n\nAs Keating was to say nearly twenty years later when giving the Lowitja O'Donoghue Oration, 'In the 204-year history of the formerly colonised Australia, this had never happened. Never before had the Commonwealth government of Australia and its Cabinet nor any earlier colonial government laid out a basis of consultation and negotiation offering full participation to the country's indigenous representatives.'\n\nEven so, the anti-Keating headlines were coming as much from Indigenous critics as other quarters. If he was seen to yield a point to the states, the farmers or the miners, he copped a chorus of criticism from the Indigenous camp, and vice versa. He had to weather the headlines after stormy meetings of Aboriginal leaders from all over Australia, first at Eva Valley in the Northern Territory in August, then in Canberra in October.\n\nKeating was determined to get his legislation through Parliament before Christmas, and set a frenetic pace, working the phones as well as the meeting rooms to find some kind of credible consensus. From October to December these kinds of headlines were commonplace as draft legislation was massaged and fought over: 'Cabinet accused of moral scurvy in Mabo legislation', 'PM fights to save Mabo deal in marathon talks', 'Black fury over Mabo deal', 'Government to bulldoze Mabo legislation', 'Mabo the big blow-up', 'PJK back from the dead on Mabo', 'Aborigines win in Mabo plan', 'Keating dares Cabinet to sack him over Mabo', 'Farmers, miners reject Mabo deal', 'Keating makes Mabo history', 'Farmers dump Mabo', 'BHP boss blasts PM's Mabo bill', and finally, in the early hours of 22 December 1993, 'At last, a Mabo deal'.\n\nInterestingly, Jeff Kennett, a vociferous opponent of Keating's plans for native title early in the debate, became one of its great supporters, and ended up urging federal Liberal Leader John Hewson to back the legislation.\n\nIn the end, the Keating Government relied on a handful of votes in the Senate from the Democrats, two Greens and the Tasmanian independent Brian Harradine to get the native title legislation through, but their support didn't come easily. The Greens had to be dragged to the party even though the legislation was backed by Indigenous leaders.\n\nThe bill established a Commonwealth Native Title Tribunal in tandem with mirrored tribunals in the states. Keating won over his own party in the end and most of the newspaper editorial writers, and the Cape York Indigenous leader, Noel Pearson, was to write many years later that it was the one and only time Indigenous Australians were 'invited in from the wood heap'. But it was to be of dubious political benefit to Keating for the rest of his prime ministership.\n\n**KOB:** You'd been Prime Minister for less than six months when suddenly you were handed one of the biggest challenges I would think any Prime Minister could have\u2014the explosive issue of the High Court ruling in the Mabo land rights case, which had enormous implications both symbolically and legally. How did you read that, and what was your reaction?\n\n**PJK:** My first step was to put out a statement saying I welcomed the Mabo decision and thought it was a chance to turn a new page in the nation's relationship with its Indigenous population. I then acted to take advantage of the High Court decision but it was always going to be a very complex process with a lot of political risk and not much short-term political gain.\n\nLet me put the Mabo ruling into context. I believed there was always something wrong with the notion of statutory land rights: of the Parliament of Australia seeking to give to Aboriginal people land that was never ours to give. In other words there was a phoniness at the core of statutory land rights.\n\nWhat the High Court found on 3 June was that a system of traditional Aboriginal titles had survived the declaration of sovereignty by the British Government where previous High Courts had denied native title under the so-called concept of _terra nullius_ , the land of no one. According to this view there was no Aboriginal nation, so customary traditions and titles to land simply couldn't exist.\n\nThe High Court's ruling in the Eddie Mabo case threw up several options. There was the political possibility of mass extinguishment by the states, which to me was unacceptable. Another was to let a long and complicated process of testing Aboriginal titles by case law, letting it take its course through the courts, which I also thought was undesirable.\n\nThe third option, which I chose, was to take up the challenge of putting the essence of the High Court ruling into effect by Commonwealth legislation, in the process removing the risk of mass extinguishment, particularly in Queensland and Western Australia, which I thought would have been a terrible outcome.\n\nIt was a massive undertaking, which I took on personally because I believed that if the issue did not have the full weight and authority of the Prime Minister, it would never get through. We delivered the legislation within eighteen months of the High Court ruling, just before Christmas 1993.\n\n**KOB:** It interests me that of all the things you were passionate about in your early years, and even your years as Treasurer, there was very little evidence that Aboriginal affairs was a big issue for you before you became Prime Minister.\n\n**PJK:** I always felt it, though. The film _Jedda_ had a big impact on me in the 1950s. I remember seeing it when I was about eleven at the Hoyts Civic Theatre in Bankstown. It was a very powerful film set in the Northern Territory, and in a way it mirrored aspects of the stolen generations. It ended in tragedy for two Aboriginal people and left me with the sense that this was their place and we were all interlopers.\n\nI also had very strong memories of going with my father when I was very young to the boxing at the Sydney Stadium before it was knocked down for the eastern suburbs railway. I used to see people like Dave Sands and the Sands Brothers. I also used to go to Jimmy Sharman's fighting tent at the Royal Easter Show.\n\nI also saw the Sharman boxing troupe in Newcastle. They were pretty much all Aboriginal boxers and they'd get belted for tuppence ha'penny. I'll never forget one guy getting into trouble. He had the light behind him and he got punched in the head. I remember the spray of his spit and sweat, and I said to my father, 'This shouldn't happen. This poor guy can't take punches like that.' He was just a bit of meat out there.\n\nAnd I went away thinking this whole group of Aboriginal boxers in the Jimmy Sharman show was so on the outer, copping the brunt of the game. A respectable white fighter wouldn't take that kind of pounding for next to nothing. Then in the 1970s I knew all about Aboriginal communities in the cities like Redfern in Sydney and I just ended up with a very sympathetic view of them\u2014that's the truth of it.\n\nThe person I most took notice of on Aboriginal policy when I first went to the House of Representatives was Kim Beazley Senior. He made a speech one night about Aboriginal malnutrition which was so powerful that Bill Wentworth, Australia's first minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Gorton Government, moved that the House adjourn for five minutes to recompose itself. You don't see that too often.\n\nGough Whitlam was the first Labor leader to really step up, with the _Northern Territory Land Rights Act_ , as did Malcolm Fraser when he pushed it through Parliament upon becoming Prime Minister. Bob Hawke had the chance to do something at the 1986 Labor Conference by supporting Clyde Holding as Aboriginal Affairs Minister in his proposal for uniform national land rights, using the power conferred by the 1967 referendum.\n\nGraham Richardson and Brian Burke as Western Australian Premier got in Bob's ear opposing it. This was during Bob's long down phase, and I said to him, 'If you and I support this on the conference floor as Prime Minister and Treasurer we'll beat anybody. Don't do a trade with Burke and Richardson.' Bob dropped his support for it and so it sat there in limbo.\n\nWithout the Mabo judgment I would have taken land rights on once I had got past the 1993 election but the High Court took the timing out of my hands.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson said of you that when you embraced an issue you tended to do so with a passion almost akin to a religious force. Is that what happened here?\n\n**PJK:** More or less. They're called events, Kerry. It's like Lincoln and slavery. Lincoln's career typically was not built around the issue of slavery but he ended up wearing it in the context of the American Civil War and it became his defining moment.\n\nWith the High Court decision I could have been a complete lush and said, 'OK, Mr High Court, you want to make these brave decisions, you live with them. You do all the case law that follows. You decide who's got the title, what the title is, who hasn't got the title. And you stop the states extinguishing it while you sit and think about it.'\n\nI didn't do that. I didn't leave the High Court hanging on the limb of its own decision. I embraced the High Court and built that large body of corporate and cultural law so that we could say what the title was, who had it, who could get it, how you would get it and how it would be protected. Such was the urgency, that I worked on the _Native Title Act_ personally in the Cabinet room for seven or eight months of 1993, because it required the authority of a Prime Minister to make all the key decisions as they emerged, and ancilliary ones too: the right to negotiate, rights to exploration, just thousands of issues that had to be dealt with.\n\nI like to think that we could look at this as a case study of a High Court doing something of integrity, matched by a federal government with its own measure of integrity, resulting in something the nation could be proud of. That is, to confront the dispossession while finding a way to give back to Indigenous people the land that had always been theirs.\n\n**KOB:** But back in December 1992, when you committed yourself to the now famous Redfern speech with an election just around the corner, as a seasoned politician with your prime ministership and the fate of the government on the line over such a potentially inflammatory issue, how did you assess the political risk in making that speech?\n\n**PJK:** I was the outsider to win the 1993 election but you've got to practise what you preach. I always believed that you should burn the capital as you run to the poll rather than conserving it, being Mr Safe Guy. A seminal issue like this and its remedy provide the uplift that any political personality needs, doing what is right and good. It gives you the surge, and without the surge, what are you? You're just mucking around with tricky press statements and fleeting appearances at doorstops.\n\nThe risk for us was in Queensland and Western Australia, where many people didn't want that kind of acknowledgement of Aboriginal dispossession, and there was some apprehension in the cities too. There was always pressure to carry on with the orthodox history on this issue, but you've heard my Road Runner analogy, running so fast you burn up the bitumen behind you so there's no road left for the Liberals. That's why I used to label John Hewson Wile E. Coyote.\n\nThe Liberal Party would never have done Mabo. Hewson called it a day of shame when the bill went through Parliament. That dreadful Tim Fischer wrung his hands about it and stirred up negative passions. That's what I was up against, but now with it enshrined, the country's moved forward.\n\n**KOB:** The Redfern address was the psychological launch pad for the Mabo negotiations. It is now regarded as a landmark moment in Australian history because it was the moment you chose to send a message to the nation, but particularly to Aboriginal leaders, that you were serious about Mabo. Did you have a sense of history as you made that speech?\n\n**PJK:** We were celebrating the Year of the World's Indigenous People that year, under the auspices of the United Nations, and the Redfern speech was delivered to mark that. I chose to use that speech to make those declaratory remarks and also to acknowledge the opportunity presented by Mabo. I said that by doing away with the bizarre conceit that our continent had no nation and no owners before the settlement of Europeans, Mabo established a fundamental truth and laid the basis for justice.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson said in _Bleeding Heart_ that it was 'one of those moments when to write for you was an unqualified privilege'.\n\n**PJK:** It was emotional for me. The words were power-packed. In fact Watson reveals some of the origins of the Redfern speech in his book. He recalls a flight in the RAAF VIP aircraft over desert country in Western Australia, and I looked down at the red plains and observed that we would never do any good in our relationship with Indigenous Australians unless we owned up to it all. This was always my view, that we had done the murders, we had broken the traditional way of life, but in the tricky storytelling of Australia no one had come clean.\n\nI had often told Watson of stories from my grandmother of how relatives had used poisoned dampers to kill Aborigines around the Grafton and Kempsey districts in New South Wales. We just knocked them off, destroyed their way of life, but it was all hush-hush.\n\nThe Redfern speech was an opportunity to acknowledge the massive injustice of the dispossession and to point to Mabo as a way forward. I sat through a number of conversations with Watson and my Aboriginal Affairs adviser Simon Balderstone, where we talked about the murders and the grog and the diseases, about the generation of kids taken from their mothers, the whole assimilation policy. The tyranny of it.\n\nWhen I started speaking in Redfern Park, the crowd was quiet but a bit restless. There were even a few jeers. Then all of a sudden they started to really hear what I was saying.\n\nSol Bellear, who was a pioneer of Aboriginal activism in Redfern, came up to me at a function in the Sydney Town Hall an hour later, and said, 'Paul, that speech of yours today. You said some very important things. Emotional things. Things no one else has ever said.'\n\nIt didn't get very much coverage at the time and there was no political benefit for us other than the truth of it. As I've said, what is right and true carries its own power.\n\n**KOB:** What exactly did you want from that speech?\n\n**PJK:** I wanted to acknowledge the original colonial sin, the dispossession, and not to feel guilty. To acknowledge it and all the hurt that attended it; that the nation's soul might be somewhat washed and refreshed by the doing of it. I believed we needed to give ourselves the fortitude and uprightness to approach our regional neighbours with our heads high, not lowered by an incapacity to represent ourselves with integrity.\n\n**KOB:** Some of your more pragmatic colleagues in Labor must have been urging you to bury Mabo, at least until after the election.\n\n**PJK:** That was the majority. A lot of people in the party thought this was a vote loser, and a lot of opposition remained through the negotiation process in 1993. There were also some in the party who thought we didn't go far enough in support of the Indigenous case.\n\nWe began the consultation process in October 1992 but we were halfway through 1993 before the discussions began in earnest. There was a lot of suspicion, anxiety and even hostility on all sides.\n\n**KOB:** You'd never really had an experience in politics like this before, had you, negotiating with Aboriginal people on such a substantial and complex proposition, with the added complication that there was no one leadership group for Indigenous Australia? How did you approach that negotiation and how sharp was your learning curve?\n\n**PJK:** You're right about that\u2014no Australian government had ever negotiated with them. Apart from Gough's Northern Territory _Land Rights Act_ , which he had proposed and Malcolm Fraser promulgated, there was no movement under Commonwealth power. So you're right, there was no one leadership group to deal with, but many different leaders. And I am not sure whether the Whitlam and Fraser governments conducted meaningful negotiations with them anyway.\n\nIt was Lowitja O'Donoghue who stood up when it counted and used her position as ATSIC Chair as a pulpit, but without any formal power or over-arching authority, to declare that the nation's Aboriginal leadership could and would negotiate. It was an act of substantial leadership on her part. She alone decided that the leaders of the land councils would act as negotiators on behalf of the nation's Indigenous peoples.\n\nInviting them into the Cabinet room for that first meeting in April 1993 was meant as a very strong statement of intent on my part. It was the very first time Aboriginal people were brought fully and in an equal way to the centre of the national executive\u2014the very first time. And when they came, broadly representing the land councils and ATSIC with their Ten Point Plan I said, 'I will negotiate with you but do you know how to negotiate? What you have are broadly bald claims and if we don't accept all the claims you'll say true to form, either we are negligent or racist.\n\n'You're in the Cabinet room but it's not just the place you're in, you are in a process. You've been invited in. Are you prepared to negotiate. To recognise that your claims are a starting point from which you are prepared to surrender some that are not centrally important to you but hang on to the things which are? In other words, a real negotiation, weighing interests but with a capacity for sensible compromise?'\n\nI said, 'What you lot are good at is making claims and then taking no responsibility as you walk away back to the purity committees, saying we told the government what we really think of them. So have you the courage to negotiate?'\n\nI put that to the Dodson brothers, to Lowitja O'Donoghue, David Ross and Noel Pearson and the others who were there. 'Have you the sense or the courage to negotiate and accept the burden of that responsibility?'\n\nYou have to remember people like Mick Dodson had been ratted on hundreds of times before so they had a deep scepticism that any government would really do anything for them. Noel Pearson said later that my remarks had really stung him. He said they walked out knowing I was right; that they couldn't just drop a piece of paper on the table and leave. They had to be prepared to take responsibility as a group to sit down and grind through the principles and in a formal process.\n\n**KOB:** What did you learn from that experience?\n\n**PJK:** First, that they had a very clear idea about what they wanted and what the Mabo decision meant to them both culturally and legally. I grew in confidence that in the intellectualism of it, I could negotiate a satisfactory bill that covered their central concerns and the concerns of everyone else who owned a piece of land in Australia.\n\nPeople like Lowitja O'Donoghue displayed leadership of a kind that we had never seen before. Finally they decided to negotiate and although they ratted on me halfway through and belted me again in October, in the end they could see that I knew how to run the caucus and parliamentary system. But more than that, that I wanted to see justice done. Those two points won me their regard and without that regard I could not have done it in the end.\n\nThey had to deal with a very tough constituency of their own. You may remember the Eva Valley meeting in the Northern Territory in August 1993 representing Indigenous communities from all over Australia, which was charged with emotion. There was another mass meeting at Boomanulla Oval in Canberra in October where they burned the draft legislation as a gesture of repudiation.\n\nIn the great weight of the Mabo judgment and all the ups and downs of that high-pressure year, the Indigenous leader with the greatest weight on all the technical and cultural issues was David Ross, the Chairman of the Central Land Council. The courage to drive the organisation came from Lowitja O'Donoghue, and the legal round up was driven principally by Noel Pearson. They were a formidable group.\n\nOne of the legal challenges was to achieve an outcome; to validate post-1975 titles without suspending the _Racial Discrimination Act_. And that was technically very hard to do. Every land title issued after the _Racial Discrimination Act_ in 1975 was now invalid, so a lot of major mining titles were invalid. The question was how to validate them without doing so in a discriminatory way. It took time, but we worked a way through it.\n\n**KOB:** You also argued up hill and down dale with the state premiers. They walked out on you at the first substantive meeting in June 1993 just days after your first tough set of negotiations with Lowitja O'Donoghue and the others.\n\n**PJK:** I've still got my handwritten notes from that meeting. I told them we should view the Mabo judgment as a national issue requiring a national response. That we were taking a cooperative approach but the Commonwealth would not resile from its responsibilities. That the existence of native title in Australia had been confirmed by the High Court and it was our job to give effect to that recognition and deal with it in Australia's land management system.\n\nI made plain from the outset that we would not be attempting to suspend or tamper with the _Racial Discrimination Act_ to validate titles issued after 1975.\n\nI stressed that the single most important objective as far as Indigenous leaders were concerned was that the basic framework for native title should be established in Commonwealth legislation even though there should be complementary state\/territory legislation as well.\n\nI said the native title tribunals could be in the states but they would be subject to a uniform Commonwealth approach, with the federal government retaining the right to take action to avoid having the policy being hostage to a protracted native title negotiation process.\n\nI took them through all the key points and emphasised that none of the principles represented any radical or extreme policy. I said I had not uncritically accepted the Aboriginal peace plan, for example. But in the end they walked away without agreeing to anything.\n\n**KOB:** Can you remember the scare tactics that Jeff Kennett used not long after that, talking about the threat to suburban backyards? Did that surprise you because I know you came to have regard for Kennett?\n\n**PJK:** I never quite understood what Jeff Kennett's motivations were at that first meeting. He always had the ability to be the stand-out guy among the premiers, and I don't believe there's a racist bone in him.\n\nI said, 'Jeff, you've got to remember the part of Australia where Aboriginal society was completely atomised was in Victoria, right? You don't have groups of Aboriginal people with representative strength like you see in Queensland and Western Australia because they were wiped out, atomised in Victoria like they were in the country around Sydney. They were the first ones knocked out. In a sense then you have a greater responsibility.'\n\nWhen they walked away from that meeting with nothing agreed I wrote to them, offering to talk separately with each of them over the next fortnight, but it would depend on them accepting two fundamental premises: that native title was a reality that must be recognised, identified and dealt with justly, and that there must be a national approach.\n\nRichard Court, the Western Australian Premier, claimed I was trampling over state rights and said he'd persist with state legislation to extinguish native title. And he did. That failed eventually in the High Court. Jeff Kennett said my handling of Mabo would become Labor's GST. In other words it would be my Waterloo as the GST had been John Hewson's in the 1993 election.\n\n**KOB:** Geoff Kitney later wrote in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ that 'Jeff Kennett, who had publicly been quite inflammatory in his criticism, emerged from a private meeting with you deeply impressed by both the passion and the grasp of detail in your explanation to him as to why Mabo was important.' Do you remember that meeting?\n\n**PJK:** I do, vaguely. You cannot afford to take on an issue as complex as this one without understanding the many principles at source, which I did. I had said to the states that the Mabo decision had three parts to it: the white part, the black part and the grey part.\n\nThe white part was where the High Court said that following sovereignty and claims by imperial Britain on Australia, any grants of interest in land by a state land manager extinguished native title. So all existing landholders were protected by that extinguishment.\n\nThe black part of Mabo was where land had not been alienated from the Crown or been subject to a freehold grant of interest, and where Aboriginal people could demonstrate a continuing association with the land and maintenance of their traditional culture. They could apply, and in the appropriate circumstances be given title to the land.\n\nSo, to take the formality out of it, the High Court is saying, 'Look, all you whities who've got your blocks of land in the cities, don't worry, because in our judgment those grants of interest will extinguish any claims by Aboriginal people.'\n\nTo the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community the Court was saying, 'To the extent that the Commonwealth or the States have never alienated land from the Crown, you can apply for it and you can get it providing you've maintained an association and traditional connection with it.'\n\nThe difficult part was the pastoral leases. This was the grey part. The pastoral leases broadly covered half the country. The High Court judgment was silent about pastoral leases but the Attorney-General's Department had told me and the Cabinet that, in its view, the High Court judgment implied that the native title was extinguished under pastoral leases by the granting of the lease.\n\nNow, I never accepted that advice and said at the time that I couldn't see why the Court wouldn't, upon reflection, take the view that there could be coexistence of title; that there was no point of conflict in a cow grazing over hundreds or thousands of acres of land, and Aboriginal people at the same time maintaining a traditional way of life across the same land. I accepted the argument that if there was a point of conflict, the grazing imperative would predominate, but if the grazing ceased I could see no reason why the High Court wouldn't take the view that there could be revival of title; that is, that the underlying native title would reassert itself once the pastoral activity had ceased and the lease had been terminated.\n\nSo I was saying to the premiers, including Jeff Kennett, don't make a mountain out of a molehill. There'll be problems here and probably quite a lot of them, but it won't be a problem in terms of the great body of titles across the states.\n\nI also had meetings with people like John Laws, and I give John a lot of marks for this. I said, 'Alan Jones and other commentators may attack Mabo and make friends in the process, but the important thing for you John, is not to be wrong, and if you say that blocks of land are threatened or people's property entitlement to them are threatened, it'll be proven to be wrong. So how can you advance yourself or the program actually being wrong?'\n\nI gave John some documentation and briefings and told him the story about the black, the white and the grey parts of Mabo, and I give him credit for dealing with the issue responsibly. Remember his program went all over rural New South Wales and Queensland. You can imagine the kinds of people who would ring him to complain that Aboriginal people were going to take their land.\n\nThese were the points I'd run through, and when I had a reasonable premier in front of me I could shift them. I think I did shift Jeff Kennett and John Fahey and, to an extent, Wayne Goss, but Western Australia continued to try to extinguish native title rights until the High Court quashed their legislation.\n\nHere's a story by Paul Chamberlin in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ on 6 October, 'Kennett ready to sign deal over Mabo'. It says, 'If there is agreement with Victoria, a similar pact is likely to be made with NSW, Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT.'\n\nBut each time I made a concession with one party, it was likely to set someone else off, but that was how the whole process was conducted. It's called negotiating. Mega-negotiating.\n\nHere's another story in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ on 10 August: 'Goss attacks the PM on Mabo':\n\nThe relationship between the nation's two most senior Labor leaders went close to breaking point over Mabo yesterday with the Queensland Premier resorting to personal attacks on the Prime Minister. Mr Goss said Mr Keating had been misled by bad advice and did not appear to understand the seriousness of the threat to investment. The row between Mr Keating and Mr Goss reflects a significant widening of the Aboriginal land rights debate beyond the specifics of the High Court decision. It also highlights the deteriorating relationship between Mr Keating and Mr Goss.\n\n**KOB:** So did your relationship with Wayne Goss deteriorate through that process?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, it did. I had a very thin relationship with him. It never really recovered.\n\n**KOB:** You'd set yourself an October deadline to get the legislation into Parliament, and every time you got past a hurdle with one party, another one would scream. You must have been moving around them in a constant cycle. When were the breakthroughs?\n\n**PJK:** When the Indigenous leaders accepted my assurances that I wouldn't allow the states to extinguish their rights. When they indicated that they were prepared to work with the notion that they agree to validation of past grants with the Commonwealth paying compensation if it was in the framework of national legislation. With the principles of native title enshrined.\n\nMick Dodson was obviously struck by the clarity I brought to each of the points. He told friends, 'Prime Ministers just don't do stuff to this level. They don't understand this sort of detail so if this guy understands all the detail and he's promising to see it through, then we're going to get something from this.'\n\nHere's a headline from August that year: 'Keating's vow is to stand by Mabo'. That referred to a meeting with the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation where I said if anyone tried to force the government into unacceptable compromise on the basic principles I would get out the blowtorch. I acknowledged it was going to be difficult but told them my government would not be a government of shame.\n\nBut even if the Aboriginal leadership were prepared to be in it we still had to handle validations of land grants after 1975 that satisfied the _Racial Discrimination Act_. Noel Pearson was pivotal in clarifying the ability to implement special measures for the enhancement of Aboriginal people under the _Act_ , which we subsequently provided in a social justice package including the Aboriginal land fund that has now built to nearly $2 billion. A fund to buy back pastoral leases.\n\nOnce we began to find a way to implement the validations without suspending the _Racial Discrimination Act_ the rest became somewhat easier.\n\n**KOB:** In the Geoff Kitney piece I mentioned earlier, he said it was a pity you hadn't spent more time selling the Mabo story to the electorate, that your failure to do so was good reason to question the political sense of your post-election decision to keep your distance from the media. He was referring to the widely held perception that you were still punishing the press gallery for having failed to, in your terms, properly question and expose _Fightback!_ before the 1993 election.\n\n**PJK:** I did a lot of explaining on radio. There's a piece _Four Corners_ ran on the twentieth anniversary of the _Native Title Act_ , showing me arguing the case against racist remarks on the John Laws program. I was out doing a lot of that kind of stuff.\n\n**KOB:** But you were bypassing the press gallery, quite possibly to your cost.\n\n**PJK:** I was dealing with the principals, with the Indigenous leaders, with the Mining Industry Council, with the National Farmers Federation and with the state premiers, and we were running up against a deadline to get it all resolved. We'd adjourn from meetings at 6 p.m. while Sandy Hollway, the Deputy Secretary of PM&C, worked up a note on the current sticking point and we'd be back into it at 8.15 and wouldn't finish until 10 or later. And the same would happen the next day. It just went on and on.\n\nThere was always the possibility of going up to the press gallery and telling them what we were doing but then they would inevitably ask, 'What have you got to report to us?' and I would have nothing to say other than the fact that we were grappling with a set of complexities you wouldn't believe, which is at this point unresolved.\n\nIn any event I'd lost respect for the gallery. A couple of important things happened in the 1993 election campaign. One, that down to almost one or two of them they had all written me off. But secondly, when Michelle Grattan wrote that it was smart of John Hewson not to come to the National Press Club and account to the media in the ritual of the leaders' Press Club appearances in the final week of a campaign, I thought that was indefensible and also indicative of the gallery's attitude generally.\n\nAnd here I was, muggins, who'd been doing hour-long press conferences for nearly a decade and who had gone again to the Press Club, for the eighteenth time since becoming Treasurer, told by an important person in the gallery it was quite smart to ignore the gallery, that it was a smart, political thing to do. Whereas that dumb Prime Minister had turned up, yet again, to account for all the measures.\n\n**KOB:** But how smart politically was it for you to ignore them through 1993? It had been a deliberate act on your part to make yourself much less accessible.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but honour demanded that response. The fact that they were complete rats to the big reform project meant that I could never deal with them conscientiously again. They simply weren't good enough.\n\n**KOB:** Many of them had reported on your work as Treasurer quite conscientiously.\n\n**PJK:** Look, they reverted to type. When I picked them up they only talked about three things: tax cuts, election speculation and leadership changes. I educated the whole body of them on the panoply of issues that required reform. The first time they were tempted even by an inexperienced and rigid person like Hewson, they embraced him without question. Even after the whole of _Fightback!_ had been exposed for the fraud it was and the public had rejected it, they were still hopping into me. And while I was continuing to run probably the largest reform program in the Western world. Not just Australia, the West generally.\n\nThe veracity of that claim is that because of Australia's economic flexibility, induced by our policy changes at the time, Australia has had 24 consecutive years of economic growth since. Unprecedented in the postwar years anywhere.\n\nBut more than that, Australia had the big social graft going on at the same time\u2014superannuation for everybody, native title, the republic and so on. In press and media terms, it was a jamboree. The gallery had never seen anything like it, and haven't since.\n\n**KOB:** Through all those Treasury years you had made the investment, you'd spent more time in dialogue with the gallery than any other politician, and you reaped the dividend, not in their slavish worship of you, but in the extent to which they covered the broad storyline. Now you were basically telling them to get stuffed.\n\n**PJK:** I gave them the clue in the Placido Domingo gallery speech in 1990. I encouraged them to remain participants and not become voyeurs. To remain integral in the great reformation. But their feckless, tinsel instincts got the better of them.\n\nI won't be extravagant or rude in saying I was feeding caviar to pigs, because some, a minority of them, remained true to the big undertaking. But I can say I was working with a very weak side.\n\n**KOB:** But you couldn't look beyond that?\n\n**PJK:** I thought, in the broad, they had dealt themselves out of the game, and that it was doffing my lid too much to deal conscientiously with them again. I still did press conferences but nothing on the scale I used to do. Because in the end you knew you were appealing to a bunch that was populist, tabloid and jaundiced.\n\n**KOB:** Coming back to Mabo, Kitney touches on the seemingly endless nature of the negotiations in another piece in mid-October titled 'PJK back from the dead on Mabo'. He talked about how:\n\nKeating had sat in the middle of all the competing interests and set out to build a consensus layer by layer... Keating has probably never worked so hard on any policy issue. Certainly no issue since he became prime minister has so tested his political skill and stamina or involves such political risk, but by last night the possibility of a national Mabo solution which all the key parties could live with was emerging. If it does and Keating can get it through the Senate, it'll be a personal political triumph.\n\nIt was such a battle to get Mabo through the Senate. How close did you and your Cabinet colleagues come to giving up in those final weeks?\n\n**PJK:** I had Gareth Evans, Robert Ray and Bob McMullan who was the Leader of Government Business in the Senate come and see me to say that they couldn't get it through and I'd have to give it away. Gareth's words were, 'Good try cobber, but we're not going to make it.' I told them we would sit right through Christmas, including Christmas Day if we had to. And that I would flog the Greens who were jamming it. Once they knew I was immovable, then the core decision is kind of made. The rest of it is then facilitation, which Gareth did magnificently and so did Robert Ray. They all did.\n\n**KOB:** I've seen Evans' performance in the Senate described as Herculean. At one point from a Friday to a Monday he was on his feet for something like 48 hours dealing with a Coalition filibuster. Geoffrey Barker wrote in the _Age_ it was a _tour de force_ and possibly his finest moment in politics.\n\n**PJK:** Gareth had fought a long and distinguished fight in the Senate, particularly against the two Greens from Western Australia and the Opposition, and there were desperate moments in the passage of it, but if you want to crunch the big policies through you've got to hold your nerve and squeeze the system.\n\n**KOB:** How did you persuade the Greens?\n\n**PJK:** I certainly threatened them, and badly. Bruisingly threatened them. I said I would come to Western Australia and campaign against them over their scant regard for Aboriginal justice and for their uppity view that they knew better than Aboriginal people what was best for them.\n\nI said, 'This is a classic whities' view. We know better. Here are the senior Aboriginal people in the nation working with the government to see a bill into place but you know better.'\n\nOne of the spin-offs from the _Native Title Act_ , as part of the social justice package and apart from the Indigenous land fund, was to recognise and place on the record the whole process of assimilation where Aboriginal children were taken from their mothers and brought to the towns and cities for what was essentially a white education and white way of life. So that over a long period of time the Aboriginal nation would have disappeared. As I said in the Redfern speech, 'We took the children from their mothers.' Horrendous.\n\nI agreed to set up an inquiry into this, and I asked Ronald Wilson, who was a very decent man on these issues while on the High Court, to take on the job. I knew it would be a big can of worms, a big set of emotional issues.\n\n**KOB:** It was John Howard who received the 700-page report, _Bringing Them Home_ , in 1997, a report concluding that Indigenous families and communities had endured gross violations of their human rights, and that they were acts of genocide aimed at wiping out Indigenous families, communities and cultures vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of Australia. Did you agree with those substantial findings?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, this was the report I had commissioned and I agreed absolutely with its findings. The country needed the cleansing, it needed to recognise that this had happened and to apologise for it.\n\n**KOB:** It would be nearly eleven years before the Rudd Government formally apologised to the victims identified in the report and you attended Parliament that day. How will you remember it?\n\n**PJK:** What sticks in my mind is the Aboriginal women who sat in the galleries in tears as Kevin made the speech. The nation apologises. It was a very, very important day. The injustice can never be overturned because it happened, but at least there is recognition and contrition.\n\nI like to think that the _Native Title Act_ went some way in settling the fundamental grievance of Indigenous Australia, the brutal dispossession of their land and the smashing of their way of life at the hands of an alien imperial power. And Gough said something very nice about this. He said the development of the _Act_ was\u2014and I'll quote him\u2014'a shining example of promptitude in a century-old story of procrastination'.\n\nI spent more than half my political life either as Treasurer or Prime Minister and I got a lot done, but I was especially pleased with native title. Noel Pearson later said in the _Griffith Review_ that:\n\nnever before and likely never again would indigenes be invited in from the woodheap to sit at the main table as they did during those Keating years. This just confirmed the opinion that Aborigines are electoral poison. No more bleeding hearts, no more prime ministerial insistence that the black fellas come in from the cold.\n\nWell, I did insist and they did come in from the cold and they'll own something like 40 per cent of the continent thanks to the _Native Title Act_. And I hope that through that inheritance and that wealth they'll dig themselves out of the hole and move off the woodheap.\n\n**KOB:** Noel Pearson emerged from the whole Mabo process as a very dynamic and articulate young Aboriginal leader and his profile grew enormously from the Mabo negotiation process. I've read that you actually had him to the Lodge one day for quite an extensive conversation over lunch about whether he should go into politics or not. He was asking your advice, is that right?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, that happened. He is an amazing wordsmith and a truly intellectual fellow, and he had leadership qualities that I had rarely seen. But Noel had to make commitments and perhaps one of the flaws in Noel's political character is that he was never quite able to make the kind of commitment which the party system demands. He has a tremendous mind, a very original legal mind and was a great storyteller and spinner of words. These are rare skills.\n\n**KOB:** He subsequently said that the message he took from that discussion was that you were dissuading him from politics, that he would spend a lot of time waiting around in politics, and that he might be better thinking of a career in law.\n\n**PJK:** He could have won preselection for the very safe Melbourne seat of Lalor when Barry Jones retired but in the end he didn't think the time opportune to take it. He then accepted a spot with a law firm in Melbourne and three years later he flirted with the idea of a federal seat in New South Wales. But then he came to a very determinist view that without conservative Australia being part of the compact, the Aboriginal people wouldn't get anything sustainable. I think he was wrong about that, but it seems to have governed his active political life ever since. I think the country has missed the services of someone who, in the broad, had the capacity to be a great leader.\nTHE NEW MARCH OF REFORM\n\nAs Paul Keating was still absorbing the Mabo ruling, he was also dealing himself into two other complex and risky policy areas that had been long-term distractions for the caucus and Cabinet.\n\nOne was the privatisation of the publicly owned Australian Airlines and Qantas: one domestic, the other international, both iconic. The other was shaping the framework for the introduction of pay television. Keating's approach to both was classically high-wire. While his primary focus was on breaching John Hewson's confident march to the next election, he couldn't afford to be seen to drop the ball on policy reform, and these two issues had kicked around without resolution for years.\n\nIn its early days the Hawke Government was aggressively anti-privatisation. Public institutions such as Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank and Telecom with their large, highly unionised workforces were not only icons for the Labor faithful and the federal parliamentary caucus, but a potent weapon to use against the Liberal Opposition, particularly since privatisation was associated with the tough social face of Thatcherism in Britain.\n\nIn September 1985, at the inaugural Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture in Bathurst, Bob Hawke had thundered, 'What in the name of reason is the justification for breaking up and selling off the great and efficient national assets, like the Commonwealth Bank, Telecom, TAA and Qantas? The fact is that this recipe for disaster represents the height of economic irrationality.'\n\nThis wasn't a random observation but preparing the ground to damage the new Liberal leader John Howard, who had just taken over from Andrew Peacock and for whom privatisation had appeal. Hawke, Keating and others had then sought to damage Howard further via a vociferous attack on South Australian Liberal leader John Olsen who had declared that the state election campaign would be a national test for privatisation. Olsen wanted to sell off state assets and lost the election.\n\nImmediately after the 1987 election in which Hawke defeated Howard, who was still pushing asset sales, Hawke put privatisation squarely on Labor's agenda. With Gareth Evans as minister for the new super ministry of Transport and Communication, Cabinet was heading towards a policy of selling off 49 per cent of both Qantas and TAA, which had by now been rebranded as Australian Airlines, but the party was not for turning. Evans instead developed his so-called 'open skies' policy, flagging that the long-standing two-airlines agreement would end within three years and greater competition would prevail. It was a policy area in which Keating was always involved. It wasn't until 1990 that a special national party conference changed the policy platform to allow a 49 per cent sell-off of both airlines. It had rattled around the government corridors through Hawke's last year without resolution.\n\nThe pay-television issue had also languished for years, only coming back into focus with the government's sale of the Aussat domestic satellite to Optus in 1991. Pay television was also risky business within the caucus because media policy was always sensitive, particularly if the big players such as Packer and Murdoch stood to gain. In this case, Murdoch appeared to have no interest at first, but Packer certainly did and made his ambitions plain.\n\nAfter the 1990 election Environment Minister Graham Richardson asked Bob Hawke for the Communication portfolio. Hawke has remained coy as to why he knocked Richardson back, and offended him by giving him Social Security instead. The widespread assumption is that even Hawke thought Richardson was too close to Kerry Packer, despite Hawke's own professed friendship with the media mogul.\n\nWhen he became Prime Minister, Paul Keating didn't have any such concerns, although when he appointed Richardson as Transport and Communications Minister, John Hewson commented that it was like giving Goldfinger the keys to Fort Knox. Conservative governments had almost always had comfortably close relationships with media proprietors, and few were closer than that of Sir Robert Menzies with Sir Frank Packer, Kerry's father, but many in the Labor caucus hadn't yet become comfortable with the access people like Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch now had with Labor governments.\n\nBut just as Graham Richardson was trying to persuade some deeply wary caucus colleagues to embrace a pay-television policy that happened to suit his friend KP, he was forced to resign from Cabinet over an ill-judged business reference for a family member on ministerial letterhead that became known as the Marshall Islands affair.\n\nRichardson resigned from the ministry on 18 May, and Senator Bob Collins was elevated from the outer ministry to replace him. But Packer's interests were still represented by his lobbyist and Bob Hawke's former advisor, Peter Barron, who also remained quite close to Paul Keating.\n\nThen Keating went on the Nine Network's _Sunday_ program with Laurie Oakes on 31 May, and without consulting either Cabinet or caucus, essentially launched a new pay-television policy, interpreted by some as even more friendly to Packer than Richardson's, which was bound to put caucus' teeth on edge. He also announced that the government was going to sell Australian Airlines to Qantas and privatise two-thirds of the merged company.\n\nHis intent, as Neal Blewett wrote in his diaries, was 'to galvanise the party and electorate by a flurry of policy proposals' to get the government's earlier momentum going again after losing Richardson. Keating's intervention certainly had a galvanising effect on every front but he now had to somehow bypass the party platform with the merger and sale of the airlines, and get support for his pay-television proposals through a stubbornly resistant caucus. To lose on either policy would be destructive.\n\nThe justification for the airline sales was that both airlines were struggling, that it made no sense to sell each separately and, according to Finance Minister Ralph Willis, a merger would increase the overall value by $300 million. It had taken a big effort to change the party platform to allow the sale of 49 per cent of Qantas, but what emerged from a late-night Cabinet meeting was a proposal to sell 100 per cent of the combined airline, with a 'golden share' left in the government's hands with a power of veto in the national interest, which Cabinet endorsed around midnight. It passed through caucus the next morning, according to Blewett, after 'a superb political display' by Keating.\n\nPay television was another matter. Every time the issue had come up in the past, the free-to-air commercial networks had argued against it, happy with their protected patch and aware of the inroads cable television had made into mainstream commercial television audiences in America since the 1970s.\n\nIn 1986, the Hawke Government had frozen any move for pay television until 1990, and the ban was extended for at least another year, according to Paul Barry in _The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer_ , because the government believed 'the financial position of the networks was too precarious to compete with pay'.\n\nIn 1991, Kim Beazley as Communications Minister was charged with the sale of the domestic satellite Aussat, and argued that it would bring a much higher price if it could be designated as the exclusive carrier of a new pay-television service. This time the Hawke Cabinet went against the commercial networks' lobbying efforts and announced in October 1991 that licences would be made available for six pay channels to be delivered by Aussat. But the government banned advertising on the new medium for the first five years of operation in response to screams from the commercial proprietors that advertising on pay television would be catastrophic for them.\n\nPolicy confusion took hold once Keating came to office as first Richardson, then Keating himself, sought to change the pay-television formula, each time favouring the three commercial networks, the strongest of which was Packer's Nine Network because the others were struggling to survive. Each time, the caucus communications committee held out for greater media ownership diversity.\n\nThere was relief all round when Keating finally threw up a proposal that excluded the existing networks from the first pay licence with four channels, and gave the new licensee a year's head start before releasing a second two-channel licence that Packer and the other proprietors could bid for. Caucus endorsement avoided a loss of authority by Keating, although the policy was to go through various confusing permutations for more than two years before the final outcome.\n\nWhen the dust finally settled in 1995, Rupert Murdoch, who had earlier expressed no interest, emerged in the pay-television box seat, establishing Foxtel in a 50\u201350 partnership with Telstra using Telstra's cables in the cities for distribution. Packer ended up with no stake in pay television at all\u2014his last throw of the dice, a partnership with Optus sharing the market with Murdoch and Telstra. His failure to clinch the deal was a major contributor to the complete breakdown of his relationship with Paul Keating.\n\n**KOB:** When you became Prime Minister, you inherited two tricky policy areas that had been developed in the dying days of the Hawke years. One was the sale of Qantas and Australian Airlines as two separate assets. The other was the introduction of pay television.\n\nBoth decisions would raise significant money for the budget bottom line, which was important to you in trying to contain the deficit. But both were stalled in caucus when you lost the minister responsible for both, Graham Richardson. Why did you choose to break the impasse so dramatically by announcing new policies on Channel Nine rather than through the Cabinet process?\n\n**PJK:** When I became Prime Minister our stocks were very low. We introduced _One Nation_ , put some life back into the government's performance in Parliament, started to make inroads into John Hewson's leadership and _Fightback!_ , and built some impetus around a more visionary foreign policy and a national debate about who and what we are. By April\u2013May I'd made up about 10 points in the primary vote.\n\nI'd given Graham Richardson Transport and Communications in the new ministry. He was a very able and clever fellow and his street sense was an asset for the party. I'd spent a large part of my life working with him in one way or another and he'd played a part in my accession. He'd made a success of two Cabinet portfolios, and I thought I'd take him on trust and give him the job he really wanted.\n\nHe had made early progress on the privatisation of Qantas and Australian Airlines and in reshaping the policy on pay television but then struck trouble over the so-called Marshall Islands affair. He'd recommended a relative on his office letterhead to the Marshall Islands Government, the relative had done the wrong thing, and Graham was compromised.\n\nTo his credit Richardson resigned, but not before a fair bit of damage was done to the government. So I lost some of the speed and altitude I had gained with _One Nation_. I was trying to get the plane up to cruising altitude and was maybe 70 per cent of the way there when this happened.\n\nI wanted to get the public's attention back on the fact that this was a policy-driven government so I went on _Sunday_ with Laurie Oakes and kicked the process along on three big issues: the future of pay television, the future of the airlines, and the future of technical and further education.\n\nLet me deal with the last one first. From the 1950s onwards about 40 per cent of Year Twelve kids went to university, but many were leaving school before then. We had trebled the number of children completing Year Twelve, so we had to treble the number of university places to keep up the 40 per cent run rate, and we did that by extra funding and through the Dawkins HECS reforms. But the training for the other 60 per cent of school-leavers was woefully inadequate, with kids cascading from school into nothing. It was catch as catch can out there in the state-run TAFE systems. There were no real private training bodies in those days and the states were pulling back on the oars in the TAFE system.\n\nI always had in my mind that the states should have responsibility for primary and secondary education and the Commonwealth should do tertiary education and TAFE. Dawkins had started the TAFE reform process the previous year, and with Kim Beazley as the new Education Minister, we'd put another $720 million into the system for the next three years through _One Nation_. But the talks with the states were dragging on, and some of them were being obstructionist over our proposal to take over the funding, and I didn't want them welching on their commitments to growth in TAFE spending.\n\nOn _Sunday_ I threatened to phase out TAFE funding to the states and build a whole new Commonwealth system of vocational education with a national training authority and much closer focus on the labour market, in some cases in tandem with industries. That got their attention.\n\n**KOB:** In your _Sunday_ interview you threw up a completely different proposition on the privatisation plan for the two government-owned airlines to what Cabinet and caucus had been considering. It changed from selling 100 per cent of Australian Airlines and 49 per cent of Qantas as two separate sales to merging them and selling at least two-thirds of the lot. It sent a rather defiant message to caucus\u2014back me or we all go down.\n\n**PJK:** It wasn't as cavalier as it might have seemed. I never did anything outside Cabinet without talking to the appropriate ministers privately. I always consulted ministers, always. We hadn't yet run this through the full Cabinet but I'd discussed it all with Dawkins and Willis as the two money ministers and Bob Collins as the new Transport and Communications Minister, and we were all in lock step. Not only was the logic right but it would also deliver a much more substantial return to the government through the sale.\n\n**KOB:** You'd always had a hand in any discussions about aviation policy going back to your relatively early days as Treasurer, including the open skies policy. Why the interest?\n\n**PJK:** That's true. I was very keen in terms of the microeconomic reform agenda I picked up after the 1987 election, but even before that I was keen for us to terminate the two-airline policy that was enshrined in legislation. Airfares were agreed to by an independent commission but invariably it was at the request of the parties. There was no element of competition about it at all. This meant that the travelling public never got a break, and if you were a traveller through Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra airports as I was every week, you saw that the people travelling were mostly businesspeople. There were very few people of lower and middle means travelling as tourists or for other personal reasons. In other words, the airlines were really for those people who were well off, at least partly because of the structure. I wanted to get some sort of competition, so we set about removing the two-airline policy.\n\n**KOB:** What part did you play in that and how hard was it to push through?\n\n**PJK:** It took a bit of doing because Peter Abeles was Ansett CEO, and he was Bob Hawke's best friend so the idea of actually terminating the guaranteed gold seam of aviation and chopping it off legislatively was not something Peter welcomed. He thought he could compete in a competitive sense, but as far as he was concerned, when you're on a good thing stick to it. So not surprisingly, he was arguing for the maintenance of the two-airline policy. There were a lot of meetings with Bob, me and Peter Abeles before the two-airline policy actually went down.\n\n**KOB:** How did you find him to deal with?\n\n**PJK:** Charming and reasonable. He had his own objective, namely the absence of as much competition as possible, but if the government insisted on competition and he could also see the sort of civic virtue, he was not a crude businessperson who would try to hang on to it forever. He was in many respects a pleasure to deal with, but only if you knew what you wanted, otherwise his combination of charm and resistance were pretty formidable. At a certain point, I can't quite remember when, he could see the writing on the wall and agreed to let it go.\n\nBut when it got down to Qantas and Australian there were a number of things going on. Qantas was an international carrier at the end of the global line. It built its brand on the kangaroo route to London via Singapore and Bangkok, and then across the Pacific to San Francisco and Los Angeles. But because it was excluded from carrying domestic passengers, often it was flying almost empty aircraft around Australia, between Melbourne and Perth and so on. Yet in the same government ownership was TAA before it changed its name to Australian Airlines, which operated in duopoly with Ansett.\n\nThe proposition now before Cabinet was to sell 100 per cent of Australian and 49 per cent of Qantas, but sell them separately. I figured this would not do anything structurally for either Australian or Qantas, and wouldn't do much for the budget either in terms of dividends or proceeds of sale. So I thought the right answer was to roll them together and privatise them as a much stronger entity. This way Qantas had domestic carriage, particularly on the profitable Brisbane\u2013Sydney\u2013Melbourne routes, and it would rationalise Qantas carriage around Australia for its often empty 747s. This made sense to me.\n\nBy the time we got to caucus with the airline proposal two days after the Oakes interview, Cabinet had already agreed to sell off 100 per cent of the merged airline with the government retaining a golden share that allowed a right to veto in the national interest. It was endorsed by caucus with very little argument.\n\nThe challenge was to extract a strong result from an initial partial sell-off but at the same time make Qantas better. The question then was how to lift the quality of the management group inside Qantas and on the board. It will be no news to anybody that Qantas was one of the boards governments used to put friends on, and while some of these friends were quite competent people, most of them weren't chosen for their commercial or airline experience.\n\nSo I decided that one way to do this was to pick up some of the efficiencies that might come with a partner airline with a strong commercial culture. The two obvious airlines to consider were British Airways and Singapore Airlines with the synergies they might bring with their routes through the Middle East and East Asia, so we ran a kind of Dutch auction between those two for 25 per cent of Qantas.\n\nWhen Don Russell and I visited Singapore Airlines and their executive group in Singapore, my judgement was that in putting their bid together, they overestimated the influence our developing orientation towards Asia would have on our decision.\n\nBritish Airways, on the other hand, had a very good reason to bid more than Singapore Airlines and if you look at the route carriage that existed between Qantas and BA, we flew to Johannesburg and Harare in southern Africa and they had routes that went from Johannesburg and Harare to London. Singapore Airlines had synergies too, but British Airways was the more earnest bidder.\n\nI actually sold the 25 per cent of Qantas from my prime ministerial office in Parliament House to Sir Colin Marshall, the British Airways CEO. It was a very funny morning. The Department of Finance had an assets taskforce but I thought you had to be more an investment banker to run this sort of an auction rather than simply 'give us your prices in an envelope'.\n\nOn the day Sir Colin Marshall was due to come to my office I said to Don Russell, 'I'm going to sell this airline to this guy today, but I'm going to make him pay for it.'\n\nI told Guy, the prime ministerial office butler, 'There may be a moment, Guy, when I press the button but instead of tea, I'll want you to bring in champagne.'\n\nIn the discussion I said, 'Colin, I want you to think of Qantas as the last full free-standing house in Belgrave Square. There's not going to be another one. This is a supra-quality asset.'\n\nAnd he said, 'And Prime Minister, I expect you want me to pay a supra-quality price?'\n\nI said, 'Well, yes, I do.'\n\nHe mentioned a number and I said, 'No, that won't make it.'\n\nHe then had to get Lord King, his chairman, on the telephone. They had a big discussion and finally he came back to meet my price, which I think from memory was well over $600 million for 25 per cent of Qantas.\n\nHe said to me, 'Prime Minister, Lord King and I will meet you on the price but there's one condition, and that is, that if and when you float Qantas you guarantee us you won't sell the stock at a price lower than what we're paying.'\n\nI said, 'Sir Colin, we won't make you look silly. We think we can make the synergies work and get the value of the airline up.'\n\nI pressed the button and Guy came in with the two champagne glasses. I knew it was a big moment when Sir Colin couldn't quite keep his champagne in the glass. His hand was shaking so much that the champagne was running into the cuff of his shirt.\n\nIt was a very big deal for them, and it gave Qantas a huge injection of intelligence. The merger of Qantas and Australian lifted Qantas right up. We then injected some of the capital from the British Airways sale back into the business. Before that Qantas had no discretionary capital. With that and some fresh intellectual oomph on the board we started building Qantas into a superior carrier, which was then subsequently floated.\n\n**KOB:** Why couldn't Qantas have survived and prospered as a government-owned airline like Singapore Airlines or Emirates, with the advantages they're perceived to have in a cut-throat industry, if you assume the nation should always have its own iconic airline?\n\n**PJK:** Before it was freed up commercially, Qantas simply lived on government guarantees. It was perpetually short of capital. As Treasurer I would sign off on the guarantee attached to the leasing of each aircraft but Qantas had no capital to invest in its future, and on a day-to-day basis had only modest working capital.\n\nIn the end you can't run a competitive business on a guarantee. You've got to have capital, and it was struggling. It would only have survived as a government-owned airline with very large funding from Australian taxpayers. Look at the competition for funding within the Abbott Government's budgets. How is the treasurer of the day going to find the money for a large capital injection into the government-owned airline when it's struggling against tough international competition? It's just not going to happen, and it never should happen. Government priorities should not include providing airline seats when myriad carriers are offering loads of them, and at discount prices.\n\n**KOB:** Going back to the _Sunday_ interview, where you were trying to get traction for the government again after the Richardson scandal, what was the imperative for your dramatic intervention on pay-television policy? Why couldn't that be left to the new minister, Bob Collins, to handle?\n\n**PJK:** For years, I had resisted Australia going down the path of a pay-television service built on analogue platforms because I knew the analogue platforms would be superseded before long by superior technology and I thought it was foolish for us to rush into it.\n\nThere we were in the 1980s, trying to get over a big current account imbalance. Why on earth would we have invested in a redundant technology for a service we had so far lived without? So for a number of years in Cabinet I thwarted the movement to pay television for that reason. When it was clear to me that we had a lot of these structural reforms behind us, we had the budget well and truly back into surplus, and the structural outlays under control, and our international profile was better, I thought, well, the country could afford a pay-television service, but the question is what sort of service and who should own and operate it?\n\nIt wasn't a high-order priority and Neal Blewett in his diary records me telling Cabinet in the discussion after _Sunday_ that pay television was 'simply a video shop on a bloody wire', but I wanted the policy resolved, and bringing it on the way I did simply emphasised that our mind was on the job and we had a framework for government. There were two available routes for national distribution\u2014satellite, with rooftop dishes getting smaller, and cable, which would carry much more capacity. We just had to determine the best way to introduce new players into the market.\n\nMy thinking was affected by the fact that the Hawke Government had adopted the wrong policy in telecommunications by giving the country a duopoly between Telstra and Optus rather than a competitive model. I wanted competition in the delivery of television services as well as competition in the telecommunications industry, and I did not want to see Optus have the de facto rights to the alternative television network by virtue of the satellite. It had the monopoly with the satellite and at that stage satellite was the only analogue modality. You would receive it via a dish on your roof in the same way as people in the country still do today.\n\nBecause I knew digital technology was going to make the satellite delivery redundant in the cities, we had to have a policy that did not allow this to fall to Optus by default. The question was how we would inject competition in television services on the ground.\n\nCaucus was very wary of the networks\u2014and with good reason. Not that the caucus was always a great champion of competition. Nevertheless the call to have a greater diversity of ownership running the new pay networks was in my view desirable.\n\nI thought: we've got a new minister, a real discussion going with caucus, inhibitions within caucus about the existing networks, so I looked for a different approach. That is, we end up with four licences available on pay and those licences would go to any competitor outside the three existing commercial networks. That is what we adopted, with the rider that the existing networks could have a share in two additional licences one year later; in other words, giving the new entrants a year's head start. The networks were limited to a total of 35 per cent among the three, and no individual network could own more than 15 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** We've talked about Bob Hawke's relationship with Kerry Packer earlier, but did you have a personal relationship too?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I did. I got on reasonably well with him, but Packer had two views that he put to me often, sometimes in jest, sometimes more as a boast. He would say, 'I believe in monopolies at best, and duopolies at worst.'\n\nAnd the second thing he would say is, 'it's not what you can do for governments, it's what they can do for you.'\n\nOf its essence he was speaking of interests by way of licences and of governments being responsive to him whenever licences were being discussed or opened up. To protect the existing oligopoly of Seven, Ten and Nine, but particularly Nine, he wanted to delay the introduction of pay television until the latest possible moment. And if it was on, he wanted a significant part of it. That was his position and I understood that. I didn't need to be too friendly with him to understand that, but I was friendly enough to have these sorts of conversations.\n\n**KOB:** When the dust finally settled and Murdoch and Telstra emerged as the dominant force in pay television with Foxtel, did that bother you one way or the other? It wasn't exactly adding to the diversity of media ownership.\n\n**PJK:** Because I believed that cable and digital technology gave us the capacity to bring much greater bandwidth to homes than we could ever have done via satellite, I gave what is now Telstra something like $100 million a year in dividend remission to provide an incentive for them to lay cable around the capital cities. That was in effect a big capital boost.\n\nTelstra under the American businessman Frank Blount made the most of the extra $100 million a year, and he and his Telstra executives then chose their content partner from a beauty contest that included Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They went for News because of its Twentieth Century Fox production facilities and programs, which provided the core programming for the Fox network in America.\n\nThere were claims around at the time that the government had assisted Murdoch into the deal to gain political favour in News Ltd's coverage. That was untrue. I still have the file with the Telstra submission in it. I did not even know Telstra was in discussion with Murdoch until it was revealed to me by Frank Blount. Cabinet gave Telstra the go-ahead on the merits of its submission, but I don't think Packer ever believed that. He went barmy about it.\n\n**KOB:** By the same token, you had always put yourself at the centre of media policy reform, and Packer and Murdoch had both done well in the Labor years. But what was left of your relationship with Packer finally evaporated over the ownership and control of Fairfax. Packer had originally tried and failed to find a way into Fairfax in a consortium called Tourang with the Canadian newspaper man, Conrad Black. Black emerged with management control of Fairfax, but with only 20 per cent of the stock, and he wanted more.\n\n**PJK:** What happened was this. After Warwick Fairfax Junior's takeover of Fairfax ended in disaster because he'd borrowed to the hilt at high interest rates and couldn't run the business, the ownership ended up in a sort of no man's land. Conrad Black ended up running Fairfax with the American businessman Dan Colson but, as you say, his shareholding under the foreign ownership restrictions was limited to 20 per cent.\n\nHe came to the government and said, 'Look, everyone at Fairfax thinks I'm just a truant owner and a bit of a joke. The Fairfax management and the managing editors see me as some sort of truancy through the place. If I had a more substantial shareholding I would have authority and without that authority Fairfax can't re-establish its equilibrium.'\n\nEssentially Ralph Willis and I bought that argument and we allowed Black to go to 25 per cent of the stock.\n\n**KOB:** Black wrote in his book _A Life in Progress_ that you had intimated to him that you might actually consider going to 35 per cent after the 1993 election, but that you hoped the Fairfax coverage of the election would be balanced.\n\n**PJK:** No wise government asks for favourable treatment but you can ask for objectivity, and I believed Fairfax became a tyranny run by the journalists, particularly in the hands of John Alexander as editor. I wanted some sort of guarantee from the putative owner or controller that it would return to being a newspaper of record rather than what the _Herald_ had become, a kind of pamphlet, under John Alexander. Black assured me the paper would be objective and, as near as a modern paper could be, a paper of record. On that basis Willis and I agreed that he should be able to raise his ownership to 25 per cent and stabilise Fairfax's ownership.\n\nMeanwhile, having bought the Nine Network back from Alan Bond, Kerry Packer had hung onto his prescribed 14.9 per cent of the shares, and everyone assumed he'd given up his interest in controlling Fairfax. But the assumption proved to be wrong.\n\nConrad Black came to see me one day and I can give you the conversation verbatim. He came in, well dressed with that silk handkerchief in his pocket, and said, 'Prime Minister, I want to ask you a question. This is an OECD country, isn't it?'\n\nI said, 'Last time I looked it was, yes.'\n\n'And the rule of law is paramount in such a society?' he asked.\n\nI said, 'Yes, that's how we normally conduct our affairs.'\n\n'How then can interests associated with Mr Packer have 23.5 per cent of Fairfax when his prescribed limit as a television proprietor is 14.9?' he said.\n\nI said, 'I wasn't aware that he had 23.5 per cent of Fairfax.'\n\nHe said, 'Well, I can assure you he does. Everyone in Fairfax knows he has, which makes me look like a very uncertain proprietor who will soon be eclipsed by the main man. I'm looking for both your guidance and your undertaking on this.'\n\nI told Black if what he said was correct we would insist on the maintenance of the law.\n\nHe said, 'I can ask for no more', and that was the extent of the conversation.\n\nWhen I checked, Black was correct. Packer's organisation had taken advice from some barrister specialising in media law who found what they thought was a loophole. From memory, Packer was in Argentina playing polo, so I spoke to one of his representatives and said, 'Conrad Black's been to see me and I understand Consolidated Press has 23.5 per cent of Fairfax.'\n\nThe answer came back immediately. 'That's right.'\n\nI said, 'You understand what the law says? The prescribed limit is 14.9.'\n\nHe said, 'Everything we are doing is legal.'\n\nI said, 'You may think so but I made the law so I have a particular interest in its maintenance, which means your interest in Fairfax must return to 14.9 per cent.'\n\nHe replied, 'Well, as long as you understand that will mean war, I'll relay the message.'\n\n**KOB:** Was it your old friend Peter Barron you were talking to, who was now working for Packer?\n\n**PJK:** I can't say who it was. But the message was conveyed to Packer, who sent back the return message: 'It's war.'\n\nI said, 'Well, conflict is what I do.'\n\n**KOB:** That was actually reported at the time in the _Sydney Morning Herald_. 'I told Packer yesterday I was in the conflict business. I don't take the troubles, I give them to people like that.'\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I said 'conflict is what I do'. I then asked Michael Lee, who had become Communications Minister, to get an amendment together and I saw Cheryl Kernot and the Democrats and pushed it very quickly through both Houses, which meant the loophole Packer was using was shut off.\n\nI came to understand that Kerry wanted to control Fairfax to get square with the journalists he believed had gone after him maliciously over the references to him in the _National Times_ under a code name in the Costigan Royal Commission. I understood his anger but we had a media diversity policy that he was not entitled to break.\n\nFrom that point on we were on either side of a kind of World War One no man's land. The whole Channel Nine system turned against me, and early in 1995 after John Howard took over from Alexander Downer as Opposition Leader, Kerry Packer took himself onto _A Current Affair_ with Ray Martin to say he thought Howard would make a good Prime Minister.\n\nSo notwithstanding that a rational and good media policy restricting cross-media ownership had delivered a great bounty to his company and to him personally, Packer still reserved the right to go king-making with the conservative leader, all on the basis that I wouldn't let him suborn the Fairfax group.\n\n**KOB:** What about your threat to hand out a fourth television licence for a network devoted to family viewing, rubbing salt into the wound by announcing it on Packer's own network, with Laurie Oakes again? Were you having a bit of fun at Packer's expense or did you actually mean that?\n\n**PJK:** I genuinely felt that there wasn't enough family quality programming on the commercial networks, and in that same period I changed the film classification rules because the networks were showing material at 7.30 and 8 o'clock at night that was becoming increasingly less child-friendly, so the case for a family-friendly network was genuine.\n\n**KOB:** But it didn't bother you that even floating the idea might give Kerry Packer more heartburn along the way.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, and I thought it might just put some ginger into the argument about the viability of the three existing networks. At any rate the fourth network didn't eventuate.\n\n**KOB:** Your friction with Packer continued through the last year of your prime ministership and after he endorsed Howard, you then accused them of doing a secret deal in which Howard would remove the cross-media restrictions on ownership, which would remove any impediment Packer had to buying Fairfax without having to sell his television network.\n\n**PJK:** And Howard did try to overturn the cross-media rule when he got into government.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson records in _Bleeding Heart_ that Peter Barron had told you the Liberals were 'in the bag' about changing the cross-media rules in Packer's favour, and Graham Richardson had said to you, 'Don't drive us to Howard.' But as Howard himself pointed out when you first made the accusation, he'd already made no secret of his desire to change the policy and do away with the cross-media restrictions well before then.\n\n**PJK:** John Howard was too cute and experienced an individual, and Kerry Packer was way too worldly for them ever to have had any formal agreement about any such matter. But I was completely certain that a Howard Government would try to overturn the cross-media rules to the benefit, among others, of Consolidated Press, and I had heard on the grapevine that there had been discussions, and a wink and a nod.\n\n**KOB:** As Watson tells it, you were in Germany. You had a great story to tell of a very successful meeting with Helmut Kohl, Europe's chief statesman, who was clearly impressed. There was kudos to be garnered, but instead you used a media conference to come out punching on Kerry Packer and John Howard.\n\n**PJK:** In truth it was off-message, and I would have been better keeping the punch until we got home, but there we are.\n\n**KOB:** But even if you'd waited until you got home to take Packer on, what would you have gained? Howard says in his autobiography:\n\n**It** was foolish of Keating to pursue a personal vendetta against the owner of the most powerful TV network and also courtesy of his knockabout style, quite a popular figure with many Australians. Keating's obsession with Packer reached absurd proportions when he devoted a large chunk of a news conference in Germany to attacking Packer and alleging some secret deal he'd made with me with regard to the repeal of the cross media prohibitions. This was a ludicrous charge. I had been publicly opposed as far back as 1987.\n\n**PJK:** I'm the only person in public life who ever took Packer on. Ever. This was a person who wielded great influence over a succession of governments, and not one single individual in the polity ever crossed swords with him. I not only crossed swords with him, I gave him a number of beltings. I wanted to make it clear to Packer, you may think we are a bunch of toadies there to do your bidding, but not me.\n\nBut Packer came after me after I'd left politics. If you read Niki Savva's account in her book of how Paul Lyneham volunteered to do Packer's bidding on the piggery claims against me, aided and abetted by the former Liberal Party President Tony Staley, you'll see this was all payback for stopping his attempts to control Fairfax. Now out of office because I wanted to be effective against Packer at the time and not to engage in a public slanging match, after the disgraceful Channel Nine documentary on _60 Minutes_ , I then lobbied Brian Harradine and a number of other senators to stop the cross-media rule change in the Senate.\n\nA journalist said to me at the time, 'Mr Keating, are you going to take a defamation action against Channel Nine and Mr Packer?'\n\nI said, 'No, I have much more expensive remedies in mind for him.'\n\nThe remedy I had in mind was to beat the cross-rule amendments in the Senate, which I succeeded in doing.\n\n**KOB:** Would you have done that anyway to protect what you regarded as a good policy, or were you spurred particularly by that?\n\n**PJK:** I was spurred particularly by that, and I lobbied Harradine, who was the swing player. I convinced Harradine to vote against the proposals when they came into the Senate, so after the attempts to change the policy were beaten, Packer sold out of Fairfax.\n\nAll those _Sydney Morning Herald_ journalists who went on and on about my delinquency as far as the _Herald_ 's interests were concerned forget the fact that I stopped two major proprietors getting hold of Fairfax. One was Rupert Murdoch, who sought my support in 1995 to take control of the _Sydney Morning Herald_ , the _Age_ and the _Financial Review_ , and the second was Packer's creeping ownership with a view to controlling the whole organisation, at which point I have no doubt he would have wrought vengeance on some of those same journalists.\n\n**KOB:** What would you have been required to do to assist Murdoch into his plan to own Fairfax?\n\n**PJK:** His proposal was that he would bid for John Fairfax & Sons on the basis he disposed of the News Ltd mastheads but his proposal was to put them into a trust headed by someone friendly to him. I just said to him I couldn't even think about such a proposal. This occurred at a meeting I had with him when I accompanied Tony Blair to a News Corp executive meeting at Hayman Island.\n\n**KOB:** When you knocked Murdoch back, how did he react?\n\n**PJK:** Like all newspaper proprietors Rupert thought if he had half an adoptable proposition then the government of the day might go along with it to keep him happy, but Ken Cowley, the head of his Australian operation, had told Rupert the chance of me accepting this proposition was zero.\n\nHis proposition was for the News Ltd papers to be put into a trust that would be chaired by Ken Cowley.\n\nI said, 'Rupert, the thing is, you own the current stable of newspapers. No one else is going to buy them from you, and while ever you own them, whether they're in trust or not, we can never think of you owning any of the other mastheads.'\n\n**KOB:** Did he accept that with equanimity?\n\n**PJK:** He didn't remonstrate about it at the time but I think Ken Cowley had conditioned him that that was the answer he would likely get.\n\n**KOB:** Was there a difference between Murdoch and Packer in that regard, as personalities? There was always that bullying side to Packer that he was notorious for. He could be charming one minute and verbally ripping your head off the next.\n\n**PJK:** Rupert was always polite and, in the main, charming, even when you said no. You may pay a price later, but he was always polite.\nTHE POLITICIAN & THE PROFESSOR\n\nIf 1991 was the year John Hewson got the better of Labor's longest serving Prime Minister, 1992 was the year the same John Hewson became Paul Keating's best chance of winning Labor's fifth straight term in office and his first as Prime Minister.\n\nHewson had two great strengths: he was a fresh face and a clean break for a weary electorate from the old familiar faces of the 1980s\u2014Hawke and Keating, Peacock and Howard. Secondly, he had a big new plan to go with the fresh face. He was also a professor AND a doctor of economics, with an air that suggested he knew more than any of those tired old pollies about how to run an economy.\n\nThe political downside of _Fightback!_ , which Keating identified and set out systematically to exploit as the year progressed, was that it was the most radical plan for change ever presented to Australian voters. No portfolio, economic or social, was left untouched. Not only was its centrepiece a 15 per cent goods and services tax on almost everything including food, but the old industrial relations model was to be dismantled; the biggest public asset of all, Telecom, sold lock, stock and barrel; remaining tariffs slashed to zero across the board; and the welfare system given a serious shake-up.\n\n_Fightback!_ was too big in detail and sweep for even discerning voters to properly get their heads around, but they could grasp that it represented more big changes after nearly a decade of Labor reform, and Keating made sure they understood the reach of the new Hewson tax. He had no shortage of lines, but a favourite was to plunge his hand in his pocket as he said, 'You put your hand in your pocket to get some money and you find John Hewson has already been there.'\n\nBut to suggest that Keating's progress through 1992 was free and easy would be a gross overstatement. Polls seesawed through the year, and the economy refused to follow the Keating\u2013Dawkins script. GDP growth at no stage came even close to the heroic _One Nation_ forecast of 4.75 per cent. The same was true of its projection on jobs growth.\n\nOnly inflation represented genuinely good news, but even inflation had its downside because it, along with all the other key economic indicators, affected the credibility of Keating's promised tax cuts, and the pledge to return to surplus within four years. Without growth boosting revenue into the government's coffers, with the fiscal burden of unemployment benefits going up rather than coming down, and without inflation feeding bracket creep, the tax cuts arguably were irresponsible and the surplus unattainable.\n\nBy the time Dawkins' first budget was delivered in August there wasn't an independent economist in the country who regarded the tax cuts as credible. The evidence that Dawkins was feeling the load was his admission that there might be a need for tax increases after the election\u2014a gift to the Opposition.\n\nHewson's main attack on Keating was that _One Nation_ was based on fraudulent figures; Keating's on Hewson was yes, Hewson had a plan, but it was the wrong plan to help Australia out of a recession. It would slow recovery rather than speed it up.\n\nKeating's audacity in seeking to make the recession a negative for Hewson was breathtaking. He was saying, 'Yes, we caused the recession but we can get you out of it. Hewson will make it worse.'\n\nHewson seemed oblivious to the rich potential he was offering Labor through _Fightback!_. You might get away with a minimalist policy outline as Howard did in the 1996 election, but not only did Hewson go so far as to provide a detailed blueprint for radical change, he took pride in filling in the gaps.\n\nOne of the benefits of Keating's massive newspaper archive is the story it tells from the brace of headlines even before you get into the detail. It's uncanny to look back at the 1992 headlines and see the pattern throughout the year of a bad Keating headline followed by a bad Hewson headline, or vice versa. In the _Financial Review_ of 6 July, for instance\u2014'Lib plan to slash youth wages up to 40 per cent'\u2014followed by the _Age_ on 10 July: 'Jobs: a national disaster'.\n\nThere were similarly contrasting headlines right through the rest of the year. Most of Keating's negative headlines\u2014dominated by unemployment figures that came inexorably closer and closer to the politically devastating one million mark, particularly when they were supposed to be going the other way\u2014reflected the simple fact the economy was far slower recovering from the dead hand of recession than Keating had promised.\n\nMost of Hewson's negatives came from the way he kept finding new ways to alienate more and more blocs of voters. He insulted renters by saying you could identify them as the ones with the untidy front yards as you drove through suburban streets. He risked offending childless couples by attacking NSW Labor Opposition Leader Bob Carr as 'a guy who doesn't drive and doesn't like kids'. He catalysed hostility from carmakers with his scorched earth tariff policy reflected in headlines such as '60,000 jobs could go under Libs: Ford'. He earned the wrath of the churches with the toughness of his welfare policies.\n\nEven so, regardless of Keating's competitive position in the opinion polls through most of the year, Hewson was almost always the front-runner. It became clear to Keating as he moved closer and closer to the electorate's judgement that he had to create a climate of anxiety around the GST. He was successful to the extent that more and more pressure built on Hewson from within his own ranks, if not to abandon the GST, at least to soften its impact.\n\nIn early November, Keating upped the ante. He took everyone by surprise, including his own caucus, by announcing that in the event of a Liberal Government, Labor would support the GST through the Senate. The message to voters? Don't think you can get rid of me and avoid the GST. It was the kind of brinkmanship he revelled in.\n\nAs that reality sank in, Liberal anxiety was reflected in headlines through the rest of November: 'Hewson battles unrest on GST' in the _Age_ and 'I'LL RESIGN: Hewson's GST threat' in the _Telegraph-Mirror_.\n\nBy mid-December, Hewson had dumped the GST on food, but Keating's negative headlines on unemployment\u2014'Jobless worst in 60 years'\u2014remained, and the polls flipped back to Hewson. What must have been a personal embarrassment for the Liberal leader with his GST u-turn was nonetheless acknowledgement of a political reality that paid him a dividend.\n\nOn 13 December, a story in the Sydney _Sun-Herald_ detailed a phone conversation between Keating and Graham Richardson weeks before in which Keating asked what Richardson thought of having a 19 December election. According to the journalist Bruce Jones, Richardson said, 'When you wanted to become leader I said to you, \"your job is to bring us out of the wilderness. We can't win but what you can do is make sure we don't get slaughtered.\" If you have an election on December 19 you'll achieve that. We'll lose by a few\u2014two, four, six\u2014but not many. We'll go real close and everyone will say nice things about you.'\n\nAccording to Jones, Keating's reply was, 'Fuck that. I want to win!'\n\nLate in the year Keating had also fanned anxiety over _Fightback!_ 's industrial relations reforms, exploiting a massive backlash among workers in Victoria to newly elected Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett's assault on workplace practice in his own state. What Kennett was doing in Victoria, said Keating, Hewson would inflict on the nation.\n\nOn the day after Labor lost power in Western Australia, Keating announced an election for 13 March 1993, wrongfooting the press gallery in the process, which delighted him. It had been a very long year for the fledgling Prime Minister, and it was now to be an all-or-nothing campaign. He'd successfully changed the landscape and evened up the race, he'd won the psychological battle in Parliament, but almost all the journalists still predicted he would lose, something he would never forget.\n\nThere's no doubt Keating's experience as a campaigner and his well-honed political instincts gave him an edge over the new boy, but perhaps the biggest single blow for Hewson in the campaign was an own goal. The infamous birthday cake interview with Mike Willesee on _A Current Affair_ was devastating. When the architect of a new tax can't answer a simple question of how much GST you'd pay on a cake, where does that leave his credibility on the other 600 pages of _Fightback!_?\n\nAs Keating recaptured momentum in the second half of the campaign, Hewson's inexperience told again as he put his faith on some rather messy and increasingly desperate-looking public rallies, culminating in him losing his voice. It wasn't a good look.\n\nEven so, as Keating sat down with his closest staff in a Sydney Chinese restaurant the night before the election for what looked to be his last supper, no one was confident, including him. His words were quite revealing:\n\nThey are contemplating taking us back. Not with any relish whatsoever. It's Hobson's choice. We want their votes, not their appreciation. We have been able to spin a giant tale, an interesting tale, and they'd like to dispense with us but they're not sure. It's a bit like a mouse trap\u2014you put your finger in and bang.\n\nTheir hearts are going to be beating away in the ballot boxes tomorrow when they put their pencil on the paper. As to whether they strike us down or not, it's quite a thing, striking a government down. You don't do it easily. That's what we're relying on.\n\nWe are the entrepreneurs of political life and are the people who dream the big dreams and do the big things. There are no bigger dreamers than in our office. It's a mixture of econocrats and bleeding hearts. But together we make a pretty powerful combination. If we win it will be the win of the century, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we might.\n\nBut according to Don Watson in _Bleeding Heart_ , Keating told adviser Mark Ryan the next morning on his way to vote in Bankstown that the combination of high unemployment and ten years in office would 'probably bring us undone'.\n\n**KOB:** Politically, your first big shot against Hewson and _Fightback!_ was _One Nation_ , but it was also important, as a new Prime Minister, to re-establish your dominance in Parliament over John Hewson and be seen to do so.\n\n**PJK:** I had to take him very seriously as an opponent because he was way ahead of us in the polls when I took the leadership, and people were impressed with the fact that he had a plan. For better or for worse, he had a plan. But my impression of him was that he was rigid and brittle. He lacked what I call stagecraft; the malleability to move a bit and in a pretty way, when necessary, and also to know when to respond to an argument and when not to. You knew what he'd be asking you and why at Question Time.\n\nI'd seen these investment-banking jokers turn up before. Very few businesspeople do well when they come to public life. Public life has a sophistication about it that's very different from anything they would have encountered in their former career. They don't understand it, and even if they have some sort of a clue, they haven't the skills to capitalise on them.\n\nHere was Hewson with his grab-bag of nasties, trying to market those old reactionary policies as the new way forward. Here we'd led the country out of the old closed economy of the past 80 years, the blue sky was on the other side of the recession, we had broken inflation, and secured strong productivity on the way, had an orderly process of tariff cuts in train, and he was going to hit the country and push it into a kind of ideological Armageddon.\n\nEssentially he was about pulling the Commonwealth budget more rapidly back towards surplus, when the need in the economy was to have the natural stabilisers cushioning the recession. So he was on the wrong tram for the moment, on the wrong foot. But as well as having the wrong economic policy response, politically he also had to carry the bad political and social embroidery of Thatcherism through _Fightback!_.\n\nTo understand why Hewson felt compelled to produce that 600-page document that ultimately became a millstone around his neck, I think you have to look at how I had changed the ground rules for the Australian economic debate as Treasurer.\n\nWhen I came to the job the budget documents only included one year's forward estimates of outlays. I made the whole Commonwealth budget system much more accountable, and after being burnt as Howard was in the 1987 election campaign with his unfunded tax cuts and accounting black hole, I think the Libs were forced to measure up to a new accounting standard.\n\nWe had also pushed the Liberals further to the right, and the combination of these things with Hewson's natural zealotry brought them to _Fightback!_. That was good for us because it gave me some ammunition to fight with. Not only were the economics wrong, but _Fightback!_ was essentially an attack on the social wage of Australia, on all the things that had come to shape the way we saw ourselves as a society\u2014Medicare and the fairness it brought to the health system, the general social security system and the safety net it provided, superannuation, rent assistance and all the other things he was criticising. Essentially he wanted to unwind a large part of the welfare side of the budget.\n\nI thought Hewson was brittle and inflexible and that I would simply outbox him. A rumble, but not in the jungle.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson revealed in his book that although you were well served with various specialised advisers you insisted on keeping your own Question Time files\u2014that was very much your own thing. Four or five well thumbed files that even accompanied you on election campaigns. What went into them?\n\n**PJK:** I have one here. The last one I used is still here in the office. I used to read the papers early in the mornings and I'd just tear any noteworthy story out of the paper, or I'd ring someone in the office and ask them to prepare a note on an issue. I'd make a note of anything Hewson or his senior frontbenchers had said overnight. I'd construct a political framework as opposed to a policy framework, and I would conduct that day's Question Time within that template.\n\nIt's about the mental gymnastics. You're reading so much and mentally processing more and more material; the more you read, the more you comprehend. You just keep on feeding, feeding it so you get to a tremendous level of intellectual speed. After nine years of Cabinet government I had a huge base of residual knowledge. Having sat through all those years of ERC rounds, social security, foreign policy, defence, the infrastructure of knowledge I'd built up was so profound that I could find an answer to most things, even if they hadn't been flagged by the day's events.\n\nI had the field more or less covered. I'd also keep articles in the Question Time file from prominent commentators or economists, or the various business and non-government organisations. I mightn't use them for months, but they'd always come in handy at some point.\n\nI took the view that I could never afford to be caught out. I assumed the responsibility as Prime Minister that I had in the Parliament as Treasurer. I had to be hitting balls into the stand all the time, and if there was a perception that I'd had a bad day in Question Time, I'd redouble my efforts the next day. While laborious, the sport of it always kept me on a high.\n\n**KOB:** Neal Blewett writes in _A Cabinet Diary_ about the pep talk you gave to caucus one day about taking the fight up to the other side in the Parliamentary chamber: 'It's the task of Labor to attack the conservatives constantly. Indeed, we all have to become villains in the cause.' Blewett says you noted a piece of advice from Rex Connor when you first came into Parliament: 'Your job here, sonny, is to bash the Liberals and keep on bashing them all the time.'\n\n**PJK:** He used to say, 'Bash the Libs, bash the Libs.'\n\n**KOB:** Blewett writes: 'Keating urged a volume of sound every time Hewson attempts a monologue before asking his questions. McLeay looked distinctly uncomfortable at this, and Beazley, as a scatological aside, noted a need to wipe down McLeay's seat after Keating had declared his remarks!' Does that bring back memories?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, it does. I used to say to them, 'Our job is never to be passive, never sit there as some sort of passive player in the scenery.' You've got to keep the psychological edge in Parliament, and that means playing all the psychological games.\n\nI used to call Tim Fischer Daisy, as in Daisy the cow, and when he'd get up to ask a question I used to turn to the Labor members and go 'ding-ding, ding-ding' like a cow bell. Everyone on our side would laugh, so he was put off-balance before he'd even reached the despatch box to ask the question. I had stock lines for various of their frontbenchers and our side would react, which always unnerved them.\n\n**KOB:** And did you instruct the caucus to disrupt the other side with noise?\n\n**PJK:** Maybe, modulated, studied noise. It was a tough school and Hewson was a brittle guy who did not go well under pressure. So if you lifted the bar on him, he would invariably fold.\n\n**KOB:** On the other hand your old foot soldier Leo McLeay was a pretty hapless Speaker at times. He knew the rules but he wasn't exactly quick on his feet, and the claims that his independence was compromised wasn't without foundation. When it all boiled down, McLeay the tribal warrior was as much in evidence as McLeay the Speaker.\n\n**PJK:** I would say that was a tribute to him, rather than a demerit. He was smart enough to run the place with intelligence. He looks like the prince now compared to Bronwyn Bishop, who was just so partisan, and so unable to construct any notion of equilibrium, that Leo McLeay looks like Solomon in comparison. And I was pushing the limits in Parliament. I always did, both as Treasurer and Prime Minister. I did make it tougher for the Speaker. But never too tough.\n\nI thought McLeay had great political instincts, and he generally knew when to hit the accelerator and when to hit the brake. There may have been more sophisticated occupants of the chair, but he knew when to let a matter go over his shoulder, when to intervene, when to direct a minister to sit down or wind up his answer or speak to the question. Put it this way, Leo McLeay turned out to be a more competent Speaker than perhaps many in the caucus thought he would be.\n\n**KOB:** But you don't accept that the Speaker in the Australian parliamentary culture is ever going to be truly independent?\n\n**PJK:** No, I don't.\n\n**KOB:** You think if it's a Labor Government there will be a Labor Speaker in every sense of the word?\n\n**PJK:** More or less. But you hope you are not appointing a dummy. One who is smart enough to keep the balance. I'm not so naive as to think either party would produce a truly independent Speaker.\n\n**KOB:** So part of your job as the leader was to exploit the fact that you had a Labor Speaker?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but only to a point. Not burn the Speaker, not to embarrass the Speaker and not make his or her position untenable. In the end, the chamber has to work. Because the Speaker is the keeper. All of us have to respect that\u2014party loyalties notwithstanding.\n\n**KOB:** At one point the Liberals composed a list of Keatingisms to try to undercut your effectiveness in Parliament. I'll read a few: perfumed gigolos, harlots, pansies, scumbags, clowns, pissants, gutless spivs, half-baked crims, nongs, dummies, dimwits, many more. This wasn't just letting off steam or paying out on your enemies, this was psychological warfare.\n\n**PJK:** It was psychological warfare, but a lot of those lines are made up. I've never used a word like 'pissant' in a public place, certainly not in Parliament. I never use expletives in the public domain, ever. I mean ever. And you see those little joke books about me and they've got certain words in, but more often than not, they're not true. But I would have fun with some of the personalities on the other side.\n\nI remember one episode where Peacock was interjecting all the time as Opposition Leader, and I was Treasurer. The Speaker was Harry Jenkins and he chastised Peacock a few times and when Peacock kept it up Jenkins warned that he'd suspend him if he continued.\n\nI then got up and said, 'Mr Speaker, can I say something on the point of order?' I said, 'Can I ask you to exercise some understanding about the Leader of the Opposition? He's been here a long time\u2014I knew him when he had grey hair.'\n\nSo a lot of my interjections are not on the Liberal Party list. Only the ones they thought they might be able to use against me, but they verballed me on a number I never, ever used. I did say some were perfumed gigolos, and I did call Andrew the sunlamp kid. And how could you resist having fun with that killer line from Shirley MacLaine when she said, 'He's the only guy I know with a Gucci toothbrush!'\n\nI've said before you can't win in the country unless you win in the House of Representatives. You can't be persistently behind in the House of Representatives and be winning in the country. You must have the psychological hegemony in the House of Representatives and whatever people say about me, Kerry, I always maintained the psychological hegemony in the House of Representatives. I used to throw these guys around like rag dolls and that's as it should be if you want to stay on top and in charge.\n\n**KOB:** But this also came at a cost for you because while you might have had the psychological advantage in Parliament, there were a lot of voters out there who fundamentally had your fate in their hands every three years\u2014and a lot of those people were not liking the vision of you throwing these people around like rag dolls, as you put it.\n\n**PJK:** But the point was, I got the changes done, didn't I? I got the big ones through. I remodelled the whole economy, and massively increased its wealth. People might say, 'Well, we didn't quite like the way you did that', but I didn't play the public as mugs. I always gave them value.\n\nBut when I had the psychological edge it wasn't simply that I had shaken them up with a few jibes, and this is what's never understood about that side of the parliamentary game. It's a combination of two things. You have to be copperplate good on the text of the answers, technically, copperplate good. And I invite anybody to read the _Hansard_ s of my time. They'll find my answers were always tightly constructed. I always believed a minister should answer the question, and on television or radio or at a general press conference I would take the same approach.\n\nIn Parliament I would always seek to conscientiously answer the question, but do it so tightly it would defeat the political point of the question. But then I would put the political sting in the tail in order to drive the nail into the wall. You've got their hand up on the wall and you drive the nail through it. That was the bit that would get reported, not the tight, technical answer that gave you the authority to drive in the nail in the first place.\n\nThe sting in the tail would only work in the bearpit of Parliament if the answer had a basis in reason and authority. If there is a legitimate reply, and it is competent, knowledgeable and well delivered, then it gives the minister a kind of moral upper hand to make a political jibe at the end.\n\nThat was why I resisted the introduction of television to parliamentary coverage. Before television the press gallery was more inclined to assess the whole picture rather than just the lively bits. It was the funny or the feisty bits that most lent themselves to short grabs on the television news. But I always thought that to stay on your feet in the House of Representatives, to stay psychologically on top, you had to be reasonably fearless in the answers, and be prepared to take no prisoners. If some people marked me down for it, that's the price I was prepared to pay.\n\n**KOB:** Do you remember the long budget session in that first year as Prime Minister, where your economic adviser John Edwards says you were wearing Hewson down, and he wrote:\n\nConcluding a gruelling Question Time on Tuesday, September 8, Keating leant over to Hewson.\n\n'You're white,' he said, 'your face is white, you can't take it.'\n\n'I can take care of you,' Hewson said.\n\n'No, you can't,' Keating replied, 'your face is white.' Edward says Hewson used to whisper at Question Time, 'you're a loser, Keating.'\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he used to say it across the table. It had a rather juvenile quality to it. 'Tell us what you're doing on the weekend, loser! What did you do on the weekend, loser? You're just a loser!' This was the stuff Hewson said across the table. There was no particular cleverness to it.\n\nI did say, 'I love to see these ashen faces; those ashen-faced performances.'\n\nI said, 'That's where I want you and that's where I have you.'\n\n**KOB:** Someone asked Hewson once how he intended to neutralise your attacks on him, and he said he thought about what he could call you and he thought the worst thing he could actually call you was Paul Keating\u2014the biggest weapon he could muster against you was yourself.\n\n**PJK:** It didn't work though, did it? He came second in 1993, as I recall. One thing I would never do, I would never attack them in a personal way about their finances or their family lives or anything like that.\n\n**KOB:** But you did often target their personalities in a very personal way.\n\n**PJK:** Not in a hurtful, personal way. I might refer to the hillbillies on the other side, I might have the odd joke at their expense and play on their insecurities, but I never went after them at a really personal level, which they did with me. They claimed my house in Sydney had been built by Multiplex. The piggery I bought into when I was on the backbench became another focal point for them. Liberal and National Party members owned piggeries or other farms everywhere but when I owned one that was somehow a matter of national moment. They would hop right into me personally using every bit of innuendo they could throw at me. They had a target centred on my back for years and years and years. I resisted the temptation to do that to them but I never let them get on top of me in a broad political sense.\n\n**KOB:** Had you come to accept that by now, while there was a solid minority of people who loved you and were passionate about you, there was also an equally solid minority of people who hated your guts, with a lot of people in the middle who were really quite ambivalent about you?\n\n**PJK:** This is pretty much true of all political leaders. For instance, Labor people hated John Howard. But I think of all those who did like me, who still approach me in the streets these days. The whole notion of contempt for me was broadly a piece of Liberal propaganda which the press gallery swallowed. The actual poll ratings give the lie to this claim. Besides, I lived in sweet equanimity about all that, Kerry. It never worried me a bit. Didn't then, doesn't today.\n\n**KOB:** But just in the purely pragmatic terms of politics, shouldn't it worry a political leader to have such polarisation in the community about you?\n\n**PJK:** A lot of people might have thought, 'We could put a cross against this guy but he does get the place changed.' I was more interested in their appreciation and respect than their love. I didn't need their love. I had enough of that going around me personally but I needed their respect and their appreciation and, in the end, their support.\n\n**KOB:** Who did you respect on the other side as a parliamentary performer in the Hewson years?\n\n**PJK:** Howard was the best, the most politically competent and most mercurial. I think Costello sometimes harmed us by rote, repeating things outside the door of Parliament House every afternoon until they kind of stuck. But in Opposition I didn't think Costello had great political dexterity in the chamber. You remember me saying he was all tip and no iceberg.\n\nHoward's strength was the ability to articulate an issue we may have raised or which was being debated, but then frame it in the Coalition's terms of reference. He was good on his feet and he also knew the value of repetition. If you say something and then you say it twice, and you say it with intonation and you say it with gesture, it's like hammering that nail into the wall. Howard understood the value of the political synonym, he understood the value of repetition and he understood the value of coordinating words with physical gestures.\n\n**KOB:** So repetition was a very conscious part of your performance, very deliberate?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I'd say such and such, Mr Speaker and I'd repeat it, and when the exclamation point is made further with your hands and your arms as the idea reaches its crescendo, then in a way Question Time is a bit like a dance.\n\nI wasn't conscious of every gesture. But, for example, if you say, 'This is going to make a huge difference', and you move your hands wider and wider apart, you are painting a picture of something growing in scale. You're linking the physical gesture with the idea. Or you're saying, 'Under Howard interest rates were 21 per cent at their peak', and you've got your finger up pointing to the ceiling, you're tying the two ideas together.\n\n**KOB:** How important was physical appearance for you in politics?\n\n**PJK:** I think it is very important. I like to think I re-dressed the House of Representatives. After Ming, I brought back the double-breasted suit. I think in public life you should look like you are in charge. Blewett made a point, it may be in the book, that in a really difficult meeting Keating would do two things\u2014he'd wear his power-dressing suits, which were always dark navy with silver or dark blue ties, and he would have the nonchalant game going of having the Christie's or Sotheby's sale catalogues beside him. This was intended to convey the impression that he wasn't as focused as you would think he would be on the argument, but rather distracted by his side interests. But he would then come back to the point, said Blewett, and strike like a black widow spider, making all the authority in his dress count.\n\n**KOB:** And was that right?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, it was right. On days that I thought demanded it I would dress more sharply. I regarded greys as casual, navies as formal, and then the tie combination added or subtracted from the formality.\n\nBut my long suit in the Cabinet had nothing to do with dress. This was why I started using ink pens, which I still do to this day, because you can write so much more quickly with ink. When colleagues were engaged in debate in Cabinet they would often say things unguardedly, and if you got their points down you could use that to effect later in reply. So I would sit there and would be like the black widow spider: I'd wait until they came across the web and I'd then go and snap them, using their own words. Blewett said whenever I turned up in a dark suit, he took that as a sign that authority was going to be vested in certain issues.\n\n**KOB:** In talking about the importance of physical appearance, what about things like height and voice?\n\n**PJK:** I was never blessed with a great voice. If I'd had Barry Jones's voice I could've done miracles in public life, being able to be heard across any chamber with clarity. Like a lot of Australians, I speak from the throat rather than the antrums of the sinus, and it's the nasal resonances that carry. I always spoke from my throat, which was wrong, and my voice wasn't strong. So in many respects I had to play a game of higher content and reason than I might have had to play if I'd had a strong, cut-through voice.\n\nBut I understood early in my career that I would always have to lift my performance and be listened to to make up for the voice.\n\n**KOB:** Outside Parliament the economy was pursuing a course that was defying your _One Nation_ predictions, although inflation was now at its lowest point since the 1960s. In July unemployment hit 11.1 per cent: 963,000 people were registered for work but couldn't get a job. I'm sure you'll remember the headlines. The _Herald_ : 'Australia hits the wall'. The _Age_ : 'Jobs\u2014a national disaster'. The _Weekend Australian_ : 'Don't panic over jobs, Keating'. You must have had the sweats when you saw those figures.\n\n**PJK:** I did think sometimes our days were numbered. But in the end I did sell the public on the central point: in the cause of a better economy and lower endemic inflation and the maintenance of a decent wages system, we have induced a recession that has brought particular pain to the economy and to people. But as true as that is, it is also true that it is this government that has the capacity to get the country out of this particular hole.\n\nBroadly, I think the public bought that argument that the government had found itself in this recession, not wishing to be there, but having got there, was determined to get out, and in the end was more believable on economic policy than the Coalition.\n\n**KOB:** But having been seen to produce the highest level of unemployment since the 1930s, there was no way at that point that you could possibly win the election just on the government's record. You had to hope for a big vote against Hewson and the GST and the total sweep of _Fightback!_ , didn't you, and try to exploit the Opposition accordingly?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, there was a tremendous amount of ideology in _Fightback!_ , and the breadth of it was reflected in the number of groups in the community Hewson managed to alienate.\n\n**KOB:** So my general point is right, isn't it, that you had to rely on turning _Fightback!_ and Hewson himself into the big political negative?\n\n**PJK:** That was the ace in the pack.\n\n**KOB:** In the same week as the unemployment figures jumped, the _One Nation_ forecast for the deficit blew out from $10.5 billion to $13.5 billion in the space of four months\u2014which must have made it even harder for you to spruik your economic credentials. In fact the _Financial Review_ not so kindly pointed out that your $8 billion surplus in the 1989\u201390 Budget had blown out by $21.5 billion in three years.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but bear in mind that through the early to mid-1980s, the Labor Party had completely thrown off the post-Whitlam perceptions that Labor was not a good economic manager. We had reversed the figures and were regarded as better economic managers than the Opposition, by almost two to one. And, of course, we were.\n\nWe maintained that advantage right through the 1980s, and although our reputation took a bruising through the recession, we still maintained the economic reform edge. Remember, we ran the first four consecutive budget surpluses ever and they were as large as 2.5 per cent of GDP. Outlays had been structurally cut, inflation had been defeated after two decades, the tax system had been renovated, the top income tax and company tax rates had been slashed, and we introduced a full dividend imputation system. There were still categories of people who thought this government was pretty good.\n\n**KOB:** But in the first few months of 1992 you'd built a big set of expectations around the _One Nation_ forecasts, one of which was getting back to surplus in four years, but after that first surge back in the polls, the figures kept going against you. The deficit kept getting bigger, the growth wasn't happening as quickly as you'd forecast, the new jobs weren't kicking in as you'd said they would.\n\n**PJK:** It was a great grind but again you can see from the headlines that as we moved through the year I was beating Hewson.\n\n**KOB:** There have been claims since that you essentially manipulated the key economic forecast for _One Nation_ from your office.\n\n**PJK:** That was untrue. Paul Kelly in his book, _March of Patriots_ , spoke to all the key players, including Ric Simes, who was the former senior Treasury econometrician back then in my office, and Kelly was convinced as I think any reasonable person would be that the _One Nation_ forecast was simply a Treasury forecast.\n\n**KOB:** An adviser to John Dawkins at the time, Tony Harris told Kelly in _March of Patriots_ there was 'a big tussle between your office and Treasury with regard to those _One Nation_ forecasts, that Treasury was very opposed to them and relented only reluctantly'. Now that's a pretty specific recall from a respected official who was in the thick of it.\n\n**PJK:** That is completely untrue. Paul Kelly also quotes Tony Harris, saying that in the end Ric Simes was more accurate with the forecasts than Treasury. The point is that Treasury will always resist tax cuts. They're never going to give away revenue without a fight. There was no way that either my office or I confected the level of receipts in prospect. We could have an internal argument about what should happen to those receipts, and whether we should bring the budget back into surplus earlier, but it was Treasury's role to provide the forecasts, and Cabinet's role to decide what to do with the revenue.\n\n**KOB:** After the election John Dawkins said _One Nation_ was your baby, the forecasts were exaggerated and he had to live with the consequences.\n\n**PJK:** The forecasts were never exaggerated. Treasury was trying to have John bring the budget back to surplus more quickly. We all have to live with the consequences of budget forecasts. Budget forecasts can be out of whack six months or even three months after they are presented. The _One Nation_ package was delivered in complete good faith but it did present problems when the revenue slowed as economic activity slowed down.\n\n**KOB:** The respected journalist and author George Megalogenis, has written that as winter 1992 approached you 'first confessed to Cabinet colleagues that the economy might not be generating enough growth and the revenues to pay for _One Nation_ tax cuts'.\n\n**PJK:** I don't know whether I said that explicitly. I can't recall, but it's possible the economy at that stage was not creating enough growth to validate the revenue estimates. Treasury estimates of economic growth have had periods when growth and revenue have been underestimated for years and then overestimated for years. Somewhere in the national income forecasting model it doesn't pick the turn in the economic trend.\n\n**KOB:** John Edwards, your hand-picked economic adviser and subsequent biographer has also written that by mid-June the rapidly increasing deficit suggested that 'the second round of tax cuts would have to be withdrawn'. That was June 1992, nine months before the election.\n\n**PJK:** That's not right. Neither Ric Simes or Don Russell said or believed that in the middle of 1992. I certainly didn't. We would never have gone to the election leaving tax cuts in place knowing that far out we could no longer afford them. We wouldn't have left them all there. It's hard to know where all these conversations go and what people's recollections of them are years later. The key thing is when the government took the decision on the tax cuts in 1992 it was on the basis of Treasury's then estimates of growth in the economy.\n\n**KOB:** The drastic revision of the _One Nation_ forecasts in the budget put further heat on the credibility of your promised tax cuts. The growth forecast was cut by nearly 30 per cent, your deficit went up by nearly 30 per cent, tax revenue was in trouble because inflation was lower than forecast. Peter Hartcher wrote in the _Herald_ that the tax cuts were unaffordable, fiscal madness. Alan Ramsey, in a column that was largely supportive of your budget, said, 'You'd have to believe in Father Christmas if you think the tax cuts Paul Keating talked so enthusiastically about last February remain a viable promise in two years.' Ramsey was right, as it turned out.\n\n**PJK:** He was right, but I don't think it's because Alan is an econometrician. Look, as I have said, we had periods where the Treasury overestimated revenue for years and years and years, and then underestimated it for years and years and years. They underestimated it during the Howard\/Costello years, particularly the boom years and as a result, Costello was producing rabbit-out-of-the-hat surpluses year after year. And in my period from 1992 to 1994, Treasury was overestimating the revenues. These are errors in econometrics, but we simply have to live with the outcome. What can a government do if in fact the principal economic department says the revenue is going to decline? All the government can do is adjust its policy to the forecast decline.\n\n**KOB:** As those _One Nation_ figures looked more and more shaky, there were other headlines reflecting that John Hewson wasn't travelling all that well either. He was becoming your best hope. His announcement that a Coalition Government would halve the minimum youth wage to $3 an hour for under eighteen-year-olds, and $3.50 an hour for eighteen to twenty-year-olds, sparked a lot of negative headlines for the Liberals, which must have been manna from heaven for you.\n\n**PJK:** It was, and combined with his series of attacks on renters, churches, teachers and so on, people had just a hint he might attack the whole social fabric. People thought the idea of taking ordinary kids back to $3 an hour was red-hot in an economy where there'd been lots of growth and wealth, notwithstanding a recession that would pass, leaving the economy in very good shape.\n\nWith the whole blueprint of _Fightback!_ spelt out so specifically across so many areas touching people's lives and with a GST on top, it was beginning to dawn on people that Hewson was about to unleash the whole conservative orthodoxy on the country. But even if you weren't perturbed by the ideology, it was the wrong medicine for an economy struggling to come out of recession. Going to zero tariffs across the whole of industry was a classic example. He even had business leaders speaking out against him.\n\nBut I knew I had to do regular handstands to keep the impetus going and through 1992 and up to 1993 I really did a trick a week. You can see that in the press coverage. Here's Glenn Milne writing in August 1992:\n\nKeating declares psychological war on Hewson. Paul Keating's savaging yesterday of the Opposition's tariff policies as the primitive capitalist abandonment of Australia's industrial base marks the beginning of Labor's attempt to make John Hewson the issue at the heart of the next election. Keating's attack poses fundamental questions for Hewson about the suitability of policies to a recessed economy and seeks to put pressures on one of the Hewson's key weaknesses, his shaky relationship with business.\n\nAs well as sharply lifting the level of political rhetoric Keating yesterday viciously personalised the Coalition's policies as a symptom of Hewson's flawed psyche and extended the increasingly recurrent theme of Labor's compassion.\n\nThis is where Hewson left himself completely open as a target because he seemed determined to prove he was more hairy-chested than we were. He said he'd slash tariffs on motor vehicles to zero. By that stage, with pain and suffering, I'd taken the 90-year-old tariff wall down very substantially. I'd taken cars down from effective protection of 80 per cent to, I think 15 per cent. I don't want to get sharp about this, but I had this jerk telling me, 'I can do better than you. You might have busted the tariff wall, taking it down layer by layer, but I'll kick the last brick out and that'll prove that I'm a more hairy-chested market person than you are.'\n\nHence the headline, 'Hewson's car plan stalls': 'The Opposition's plan to cut protection for the car industry has become a major problem for the Opposition Leader Dr Hewson with criticism yesterday from the Prime Minister, some car companies and his own party. And in the _Age_ : 'The Federal Opposition was last night under pressure on two key policy fronts after a new embarrassment on car tariffs and concern from big business over the plan to open coastal shipping.'\n\nI have that whole saga in a file here in the office. That was my first real break on Hewson and _Fightback!_. I'd made gains on and off through the year, but that was the first time I think the press gallery began to catch on as to how vulnerable he was. The smarter journalists in the gallery knew I had taken years to get the tariff cuts through and stuck with them in a recession against all opposition. He comes along and says, 'I'll top you mate', so I thought, I'll just paint this bloke as an uncompromising fool who doesn't understand what he is dealing with in the car industry, and big business will say we have to watch this fellow. That was my first real break on him.\n\n**KOB:** Two weeks after he announced he was going to halve the youth wage, you had a youth summit where you promoted your new deal with the states to reduce youth unemployment, with a $770 million federal package to shift the 132,000 unemployed teenagers into training courses and subsidised jobs. You and Hewson were both attacking the same problem but with markedly different solutions. He wanted to impose a market solution, whereas you, the old rationalist market supporter, were throwing public money at the problem. I assume the contrast you were drawing was deliberate. You were looking for policies that defined a difference.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, he was revelling in being the hard man, into the old punishing and straightening routine, and by comparison I presented us as inventive, expansionary, kindly. Do you remember he said, coming up to the 1993 election, 'When the Prime Minister says he'll lean back and pull those deserving up behind him, what he's really meaning is he'll pull the rest of us down.' I nailed him on those remarks, and I think that sentiment about him being ratty got around.\n\n**KOB:** By September you were obviously under pressure to shore up the credibility of your tax cuts. It wasn't just that economists were calling them into question because the forecasts used to justify them had changed for the worse, but that the cuts were so far into the future\u20141994 and 1996\u2014made it easier for the Opposition to claim they would never happen. So you felt compelled to write them into legislation, get it passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate. That was when they became the L\u2013A\u2013W tax cuts.\n\n**PJK:** The thing is, when governments portend tax cuts, the public take virtually no notice of them. I felt if I enshrined those tax cuts in legislation that had passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate people would have to take them seriously. Because without a remedial legislative change they would automatically be paid.\n\n**KOB:** Wasn't it the case by then that virtually no one believed they'd happen?\n\n**PJK:** Not virtually no one, but they were called into question by some, and I said the tax cuts had been made for good and proper reasons, and more than that, they've been legislated, they were now L\u2013A\u2013W law. But even in the election campaign the L\u2013A\u2013W tax cuts didn't get any traction. I couldn't get any interest in them. When I said in the election campaign the tax cuts may not be paid and could perhaps only be paid if growth could be maintained, even that didn't attract much attention.\n\nHere's the story on 23 February. 'Tax cuts could be ditched', says PM: 'The Prime Minister, Mr Keating, has conceded for the first time that Labor's planned $6.94 billion in income tax cuts could be ditched if the economy deteriorated.'\n\nHere's another bit: 'The Minister for Finance, Mr Willis, said yesterday that the cuts would be re-examined if the economy performed much worse than expected.' So, before the election both Ralph Willis and I made clear the tax cuts or part of them may be off if economic growth and revenue was insufficient.\n\n**KOB:** I don't understand why that admission didn't threaten to become a very damaging issue for Labor in the campaign.\n\n**PJK:** I can tell you\u2014because the tax cuts never mattered in the electorate. I could never get any traction for them. I couldn't get a line for them.\n\nNow, in the post-election budget in August 1993, we didn't ditch the tax cuts\u2014we in fact brought the first tranche forward\u2014but we did put the second tranche back, and changed them to be paid as superannuation. When that happened we were roundly criticised for a broken promise. We were never as a government given any credit for the honesty of saying before the election that we might ditch the tax cuts if growth wasn't sufficient.\n\n**KOB:** In the second half of 1992 you complained to Cabinet, with some vitriol apparently, about the media coverage, that the government was constantly doing new things but the media saw you all as exhausted. You said you were sick to death of being hounded to jump through hoops, that a great part of the press gallery had known nothing but a Labor government for ten years and had developed a negative mentality against the government out of boredom.\n\nAre you sure they weren't just reflecting a valid scepticism about a Treasurer who had led the country into its deepest recession for 60 years, and who had produced an economic statement with deeply flawed forecasts? Was caucus hearing a bit of siege mentality creeping in?\n\n**PJK:** In the speech I gave to the press gallery at Christmas dinner in 1990 I'd said that the gallery had come along with us in the great reform of Australia and had proselytised in favour of the big structural changes. And I said, don't give us up now because a new player comes along who may seem attractive and distracting\u2014that's Hewson\u2014because he'll never do what we're doing, spinning the economics together and making the structural changes.\n\nThis was a government of a kind Australia had never had in the postwar years. We were sticking to the big shifts in structural policy like the tariff cuts in the face of a recession and in a year when a less committed government might have thrown it out the window to chase votes. Yet the press gallery decided to peel away and go to the queen bee on the other side of the street.\n\nI came to the conclusion that they were no longer interested in reporting the reform task and had been seduced by the idea of a political contest that they in a very large measure had themselves engineered. When Bob Hawke and John Kerin then failed so comprehensively to explode _Fightback!_ , I think the gallery came to believe it was dent-proof.\n\nBy the time I became Prime Minister the journalists had all gone across to the other side. They decamped. The real reform government was still in office doing the big reform work, but I found it very hard to interest them in the continuing adaptation of the framework. For instance, a year later, after the election I abolished centralised wage-fixing after 100 years and legislated compulsory superannuation.\n\nMy complaint against the press gallery was not one of bias. It was a complaint of being feckless.\n\n**KOB:** Even so, when I look back through 1992 there were a lot of headlines that would have made Hewson wince. '60,000 jobs could go under Libs, Ford Australia'. 'Church defends right to strike'. 'Church attack on Fightback grows'. 'GST support stumbles'. By the end of 1992 he was under enormous pressure within his party to change _Fightback!_ , partly because of your attacks on him, but also because of the media coverage. So even by your standards they weren't completely feckless.\n\n**PJK:** Well, they still had to report events. To report news. I didn't have to thank them for that. But these stories occurred only when I started to undo him and we started to shift back to a position of primacy in the polls. Having all faith in the polls the gallery then said, 'Oh, maybe the government is not out of this. We thought it was all over, but maybe it's not all over.'\n\nI had to make a fair bit of our own luck. As I chipped away at _Fightback!_ and it gradually dawned on the gallery that maybe _Fightback!_ was not supreme, was not necessarily a well put together new model for the economy and society, but rather a piece of political ideology put together by a very brittle character, the journalists started to say, maybe we should still take some of the government stuff more seriously. I think that's what happened. We dented their judgement.\n\n**KOB:** We touched on the piggery in talking about your brief period on the backbench. You'd invested in it with an eye to a post-parliamentary future after losing the first challenge against Hawke's leadership. That came back to haunt you as Prime Minister, particularly in the second half of 1992, as the Liberals tried to catch you out in some way. When you became Prime Minister did you sit down and take a hard look at any potential conflict of interest with the piggery and take action to head it off at the pass? Did you call in any expert on that issue and take advice?\n\n**PJK:** Not really, among other things, for the reason that Doug Anthony had had a piggery at his home in his electorate around Tweed Heads when he was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade, and a number of important Coalition ministers, including Malcolm Fraser, had grazing properties, and were able to conduct their parliamentary life and have agricultural businesses. So I didn't see any conflict of interest arising.\n\nThe Liberals tried to make this phoney argument about Commonwealth Bank loans to the piggery I'd invested in. I remember a question in Parliament to Doug Anthony referring to a claim that one of the largest ever agricultural loans written by a bank was provided by the Commonwealth Bank to Doug Anthony. Now, I would never for a moment say that Doug Anthony had used any influence as a minister to secure that funding. But in my case, the funds had been lent three years before I bought into the business. I never, ever asked the Commonwealth Bank for the funds; they were applied for three years before I bought into the piggery. This occurred when Goodman Fielder sold the piggery to cash up to make a bid for the Rank Hovis bread business in London. So it sold the piggery among a group of other assets rather quickly, and the new proprietors borrowed from the Commonwealth Bank before the high interest rates hit. At that stage, I had absolutely no association with the business. In fact, I had never heard of it.\n\nI did deal with the Commonwealth Bank, but on the loans that were outstanding at the time I became a shareholder. And the security for those loans were the piggeries as well as the properties of the former owners, so I was effectively a shareholder in remedy, a shareholder in a sort of financial reconstruction of the business. By bringing the Danish pork industry into it, it meant that all of a sudden what was just a dead loss on the CBA balance sheet for loans earlier advanced by it imprudently, became a complete return funding position for them by virtue of my entrepreneurship.\n\n**KOB:** How distracting was that for you through 1992? This is a year when every ounce of your energy really needed to be poured into the effort of returning the economy to health and winning that election.\n\n**PJK:** It was a bit distracting. But only a bit. They would ask questions in the Senate and John Button or Gareth Evans would promise to check the claim in the question and provide an answer the following day. They'd then come and ask me, and I'd then give them the detail to shoot down each phoney claim. Nothing ever stuck. There was never any basis for their claims. It was just a tactic of political annoyance.\n\nSeven years later, long after I'd left public life when Channel Nine and _60 Minutes_ attacked me, urged by Tony Staley, as federal president of the Liberal Party, John Howard's Attorney-General Daryl Williams asked his department to investigate the facts to establish if there was a genuine basis for an inquiry into my dealings in the piggery. Williams then announced late one Friday so it wasn't reported widely, that there was nothing to investigate. So all of the Liberal Party claims had been voided by their own Attorney-General. But that was cold comfort for me three years after I'd left public life.\n\n**KOB:** So it was a serious distraction to you in office?\n\n**PJK:** It became a distraction, and in the end that's why I sold it.\n\n**KOB:** What about the conflict of interest claim, that the person who ultimately bought your share in the piggery was one of Indonesia's wealthiest businessmen, who was also a close friend of Suharto's?\n\n**PJK:** That was the point\u2014he wasn't. See, the person who ultimately bought the piggery was the one really wealthy Indonesian who stood against Suharto and the cronies, the Soeryadjaya family, the one who had built the great industrial business in Indonesia. The Indonesian equivalent of BHP.\n\nSo while ever the Liberal Party tried to make the claim that the ultimate owner of the business was someone connected with Suharto, everybody who knew anything about Indonesia knew that the Soeryadjayas, particularly old William Soeryadjaya, had been an opponent of Suharto's all those years. They couldn't make that stick. In the end it all fell over, but it was a distraction.\n\nThe Libs always fight dirty. You can see it lately with Tony Abbott's royal commission into Kevin Rudd and the pink batts, and Julia Gillard and the alleged union slush fund. These are attacks on people after they have left public life. That's what they did to me also.\n\n**KOB:** In October, Labor was rocked by Jeff Kennett's landslide victory for the Liberals in Victoria, but it wasn't all bad news for you, was it? The unions came out in force over Kennett's tough new industrial laws and public service retrenchments, including a rally of 100,000 people swamping Melbourne in the biggest protest since the Vietnam moratoriums. You sought to connect Kennett's take-no-prisoners approach to industrial relations to Hewson, John Howard as the Industrial Relations spokesman, and _Fightback!_.\n\n**PJK:** Kennett's victory gave us the opportunity to paint the story that Kennett, Howard and Hewson were all IR ideologues with draconian industrial relations policies that would come at a cost to the ordinary working person. It was a simple message: what Kennett has for you in Victoria, Hewson and Howard have for you right around the country. We tried to give our government response to Kennett's plans a higher purpose. You'll see in the _Financial Review_ on 3 December:\n\nKeating's IR master plan. The federal government has opted for a momentous expansion of the federal arbitration system to stymie the radical labour market deregulation being pursued by the Coalition parties in Victoria. The expansion is also designed to head off major industrial changes made by the Kennett government by bringing state workers under the federal system. The federal government will venture into new constitutional territory for industrial relations to protect workers reluctant to shift to a deregulated system of individual job contracts.\n\nKennett was moving down the road of individual job contracts, which was exactly the Howard\/Hewson policy. I was not identifying with recalcitrant unions, but rather trying to extend the federal government's coverage and expansion of the federal arbitration system to include the state awards.\n\nI argued that Kennett's attempts to cancel the state award system represented a threat to social cohesion, and would put the national economy recovery at risk. That had an immediate effect.\n\nHere's another story: 'Keating takes on Kennett. The ACTU is likely to abandon its international industrial campaign after the federal government announced yesterday it would legislate for workers to escape Kennett's industrial relations reforms by moving to federal awards'.\n\n**KOB:** So Kelty was in there working with you against Kennett, and therefore against Hewson and Howard.\n\n**PJK:** He would have had a role in it, yes. He would definitely have had a role in it.\n\n**KOB:** I take it Howard's announcement at around that time that a Hewson government would abolish penalty rates for workers wouldn't have hurt you either?\n\n**PJK:** No. And Howard's general support for individual wage contracts was a reflection of the Kennett policy, so I was able to glue the Kennett label onto Hewson and Howard.\n\n**KOB:** Your biggest single attack on _Fightback!_ across the year was directed at Hewson's GST. Did you have the grace to feel embarrassed as the man who had promoted the Option C consumption tax as Treasurer in 1985 with every fibre of your being, and who was now virulently opposed to the Opposition's tax on consumption?\n\n**PJK:** No, and I'll tell you why. Back in 1985, after the explosion in government outlays under Whitlam and Fraser, with John Howard as his Treasurer, Treasury simply couldn't believe that any government was capable of seriously cutting government spending to deal with the current account deficit crisis. They didn't think a Cabinet could do it, so the only way to redress the fiscal profligacy of the previous ten or twelve years was to introduce a new tax on consumption.\n\nIt's now history that when I lost the fight to introduce a consumption tax back in 1985, Peter Walsh, John Dawkins and I did what Treasury thought no politician was capable of doing. Over five years of budget purgatory we cut government outlays back from 30 per cent of GDP to 24 per cent. Six per cent of GDP in today's dollars is $90 billion. That achievement voided the need for a consumption tax. It was no longer necessary. Why would I then support a regressive tax on consumption when it wasn't necessary? And their GST was a much more regressive tax than the one I proposed.\n\n**KOB:** On 5 November, you dropped a bombshell on your own troops. You announced in Parliament that if John Hewson won the election you would not oppose the GST in the Senate. In other words, if a Hewson government was elected the GST would be guaranteed to get through. The _Herald_ reported that it surprised your mob and delighted the Opposition. The _Financial Review_ said you'd stunned your Cabinet. Hewson described it as the single most important statement that has been made in many a long time and even celebrated that night with a party in Parliament House. How big a gamble was that? How much confidence did you have that you were right?\n\n**PJK:** I'd thought about it a bit, but on the spur of the moment in Question Time I decided to put a clear proposition to the public. I did not want them to go to the election thinking they could have it both ways: that they could have a change after ten years of Labor but they wouldn't have to suffer the GST because they could safely assume Labor would vote it down in the Senate.\n\nIn effect I said, 'Just in case you are wondering, let me tell you what will happen. If you elect Hewson, you will also get the GST because in the Senate we will vote for it as part of his mandate.'\n\nMy people were horrified\u2014they thought I'd thrown the election away. And for a moment after Question Time I even doubted my own judgement owing to the Liberals' elation!\n\n**KOB:** That's a rare moment of doubt. How much thought had you put it into it before you did it?\n\n**PJK:** Not a lot. People used to say to me, what are you going to say in Question Time today? And sometimes I'd have to say, truthfully, I've got no idea. It would just depend what had happened and what would turn up. But there was Hewson going on endlessly about the GST, and I think I said to my staff, who were undecided about it all, 'You know what, the public think they can have him and not have the GST, and we should say to them, if you take him you get the GST.'\n\nI remember Stephen Smith saying, 'Oh god, Paul, don't say that, don't mention that!'\n\nSo, I'd been thinking about it, but hadn't decided what to do. All of a sudden something happened in Question Time and out it all came. These are the big calls.\n\n**KOB:** And then you thought, Oh.\n\n**PJK:** I thought, oh! The reaction to my remarks was debilitating because of the sheer euphoria on the Opposition side and the resignation and depression on my side. But notwithstanding I believed it was right, I wasn't sure I would convince both parties of the force of my position.\n\nI felt I had to strike again very quickly before the moment was lost, so I arranged an interview on the _7.30 Report_ with Paul Lyneham to articulate the reason for my remarks and the consequences. Having made that decision I needed a period of calm to prepare for the interview. So I went back to the Lodge for dinner and to think through my lines.\n\nI'll let you in on a little secret. Every Friday night in Canberra I used to have acupuncture, and if you have someone who's a really good acupuncturist they can make you very relaxed. What acupuncture does is make you relaxed but brighter. A drug like Valium will make you relaxed but dull. What acupuncture does is make you relaxed but brighter, confident, so I called my acupuncturist friend around to the Lodge to give me half an hour of acupuncture.\n\nIt worked a miracle. He put me to sleep in ten minutes. I went down like a sack of potatoes. When I woke up I was so relaxed and so bright, so confident, I could've gone in and knocked the studio door down. When I sat there in front of Lyneham, I must have been like a Cheshire cat, whereas when I arrived at the Lodge from Parliament House I was in a different frame of mind.\n\nI walked into that studio with no hint of doubt, and the brightness of optimism. As a result I just hit the ball right into the stand. The Liberals realised I'd stuck them with the GST to wear like a hairshirt, and my people watching _7.30 Report_ said, 'God, mate, it might just turn out to be a masterstroke!'\n\nThen Kim Beazley made the opposite judgement on John Howard's promise of a GST in 1998 by saying that he would oppose it, and he lost the election even though he won more than 50 per cent of the vote. You've got to live with the calls you make.\n\n**KOB:** Looking back, the way you describe it sounds like your decision might have gone either way, particularly if close advisers thought it was a bad idea. Who were your political confidantes through that period?\n\n**PJK:** I had a very talented staff and some smart political thinkers in the Cabinet but I talked a lot to the caucus members so I'd pick stuff up. If I was walking between offices and bumped into backbenchers in the corridor I'd stop for a chat. I always made myself available after Question Time in the corridors, and I always had a good feel for the thoughts running through caucus. But on this occasion I came to the conclusion that the community believed they could have Hewson and not have the GST and I wasn't prepared in the end to go the election with that thought in their mind.\n\n**KOB:** You were almost too successful really at that point, with an election not far into the new year, because the more unpopular the GST became in the polls, the more Hewson felt the pressure to change it, despite his threats to resign if the party tried to force him to soften it. You hit the front in the polls again, but suddenly he announced he was going to significantly change the GST. He was a proud man, so he would have been embarrassed, but it worked because suddenly the polls surged back to him. It did change the ball game for you, didn't it?\n\n**PJK:** It did, because he exempted food, which he originally intended to tax, and he also made a remedial change to his so-called dole reforms. He tried to make himself look a little more acceptable, which worked for the moment.\n\n**KOB:** The reaction did underscore that a significant number of voters were looking for reasons not to vote for Labor and Keating. The recession was officially over but the economy still wasn't behaving as you said it would. I interviewed you for _Lateline_ on 19 November, the detail of which showed how fragile the government's own credibility had become, because nine months after its introduction, your growth forecast had been cut from 4.75 per cent to 4 to 3 per cent, and it was about to drop again. You had promised 800,000 new jobs within four years and 150 to 200,000 in the first year, but at that point two jobs were disappearing for every new job created. Even with his changes, Hewson and his program were still your only real hope of winning, weren't they?\n\n**PJK:** They presented a distinguishing alternative. And that suited me. But isn't it true that it's always going to be the Opposition and the nature of the Opposition that decides whether you're going to win or not? We were still the big reforming government, the recession notwithstanding.\n\n**KOB:** Don't they say governments lose elections, oppositions don't win them?\n\n**PJK:** That's true, but here's the _Australian_ on 26 December: 'ALP lifts prospects with Western Australia, South Australia'. That's immediately after Christmas as the media are starting to anticipate an election. 'The Keating government has staged a comeback amongst South Australian and Western Australian voters that would save Labor if repeated at the next election, according to the latest Newspoll.'\n\nSo we were doing something right. I think what was happening was that the community had a look at Hewson and his program and they fundamentally didn't like it.\n\n**KOB:** You needed only to suffer a swing of less than 1 per cent in five seats to lose government. Looking back at it now, that's a very tenuous hold against all the frustration and the hurt and the anger out there. How many others in caucus can you remember who still believed at that point that you could win?\n\n**PJK:** I've got to say of the caucus, they were fighters. They were never going to lie down. They never said, 'Look, we're done, we'll not try anymore.' They were fighters.\n\nA fighting Prime Minister, rather than simply Bob doing his version of the royal wave, an intellectual fighting Prime Minister, is a big encouragement for the caucus to join the fight. So I think our caucus thought we could steal the show if we showed the grit.\n\n**KOB:** I was interested to see, reading Neal Blewett's diary, that you were still pushing policy through Cabinet in late November and into December, policy that had little electoral appeal at the time. There was one issue on which Blewett wrote: 'Rarely had Cabinet been faced with so stark a division between ministerial heavyweights, each with a powerful case.'\n\nMichael Duffy as Attorney-General wanted to revoke a 1986 directive banning gays in the military and Robert Ray as Defence Minister strongly opposed it, despite acknowledging that it was discriminatory. Can you remember your intervention, which swung the debate? I want to know whether it was a totally pragmatic issue for you, or whether you were swayed by a point of principle.\n\n**PJK:** No, no. I had, through my interest in the arts, quite a number of friends who were gay. When I first discovered news of the AIDS virus when first I became Treasurer, I had such concern for homosexual men particularly that when Blewett brought the funding proposals in for the first AIDS campaign, part of his success in getting it was my willingness to fund them. You remember the original one, the grim reaper?\n\n**KOB:** Yes, I do.\n\n**PJK:** I always had a position of non-discrimination in my head about gay people and the gay community. I've never been to a Mardi Gras, I don't go for the razzamatazz, but when the question came up about gays in the military, I felt the case opposing it was prejudicial. The Americans had a policy with the military of 'no see, no tell', which I thought was weak and wrong. It made sense to me to actually support the right of gay people to be part of the armed services, to be who they were and to say who they were. So I came down on that side of the debate.\n\nAnd you're right, there were no votes in it, just like there were no votes in the Redfern speech on Mabo the same month. It was another one of those issues where you have to ask yourself: do you do the political weak-kneed thing or do you do the right thing? I always felt that in a testing moment I wanted to pass the test. That's all. I thought it was right.\n\nYou see, the government was a champion government. Notwithstanding that some senior ministers had retired, it still possessed vigour, scale and substance. But the leader and the Cabinet process have to induce it. Keep the big canvas on the wall, and good ministers will keep adding brush strokes.\n\n**KOB:** On 6 February 1993 Labor was soundly beaten in the Western Australian election, though not as badly as some had expected after the years of WA Inc. and the taint of corruption in the Burke Government. The following day, when most sane people in your position would have been feeling somewhat defensive and wondering how long you could delay your election, you climbed into the family car and drove out to Government House and announced your own election for 13 March, which I thought took chutzpah.\n\n**PJK:** There were some nerves around the office about the timing but when I did decide on the date I did get some fun out of taking the gallery by complete surprise. There was a view that I would go in late March but I opted for 13 March instead.\n\nI drove out to see Bill Hayden at Government House in Annita's red Magna with my three daughters. It was a Sunday morning. I recommended to Bill that we have an election and we had a cup of tea and a scone and a bit of a walk around. And the proverbial good time was had by all. There was not a soul at Government House from the media to record it, much to their chagrin when I called a press conference that afternoon to announce it.\n\nI had a very relaxed view about it all. I was either going to win or I wasn't, but I reckoned I could beat this guy. I had what I hoped would be the political and economic framework more or less set, but whatever happened, I would do my best. Rather than thinking I'm under pressure here, I was very relaxed about it. I was in a lethal mood.\n\nBy the end of the year, even though Hewson had watered down the GST, he'd declared war on so many target groups: nurses, teachers, renters, churches and welfare groups, even business, and I said, 'He is going to have a go at the whole fabric of our country and give you a GST into the bargain.'\n\nI said, 'Under the Labor Party we have developed a really genuine and good social democracy with strong economic growth bonded to a good social wage.'\n\nOn the recession I said, 'We were responsible for the recession being deeper than it needed to be, but we will also get you out of it. No one else will.'\n\n**KOB:** Your timing meant that you were stuck with two new sets of unemployment figures over the course of the campaign. There was one at the start and one at the end, and as luck would have it, in the first one unemployment passed that million mark. That would be a first in Australian history, I would imagine, a Prime Minister calling a poll just as unemployment is about to hit the million mark.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but I was always a momentum player. You're always better to crash through. If you regard these\u2014let's call them the portents of bad news coming\u2014they're like waves at a beach. Technique allows you to handle waves. You find the point where there's less disturbance and where the potential damage to you is minimised. So I would have made judgements about those two sets of figures.\n\n**KOB:** When it comes to the speech for a campaign centrepiece, the policy launch, I know a huge amount of focus from many people goes into what key points should be highlighted and how. It's probably the least spontaneous, most straightjacketed thing a political leader has to do. Informed by polls and focus groups, party strategists and, somewhere in there, the leader and the speechwriter.\n\nDon Watson has described the last night at Kirribilli House before your 24 February policy launch at Bankstown, where you, Watson, Mark Ryan and Don Russell were working on the final draft deep into the night. And there was a big difference of opinion about whether there should be a reference to the republic in there, whether it was a positive in the electorate or not.\n\n**PJK:** In the end, I am a punter. You don't make social changes of this scale and type without a commitment. The problem about the republic was that the political commitment to it in the party had not cut deeply enough, and without political commitment it just languishes. But the moment a Prime Minister is committed to it and its essence becomes clear, it starts to rise in popularity again.\n\nI thought, I have half a chance of winning this election, and if I'm going to win, I'd rather win with some big changes. If I lose, at least I've put the big issues on the table. So in the end I was convinced that without political patronage at prime ministership level the republic had no chance, and if I wouldn't take it on, who would?\n\nBob Hawke used to say _ad nauseum_ we can't touch the republic until the Queen dies. I never accepted the premise. I thought this is the time to make a move, this is the right moment to establish the framework coming up to the centenary of our federation.\n\n**KOB:** Just to indulge the personal for a moment, even allowing for the tight discipline imposed on that speech, there must've been some room in there for emotion. It was at Bankstown where your politics had been spawned. Your father Matt wasn't there, but your mum Min was there with your brother and sister. Annita, who'd carried much of the family load through the parliamentary years, was there, who had seen all the ups and downs from the inside, with the kids. It had been a long ride. When you stood in front of that crowd as the Prime Minister of Australia, did you feel the moment?\n\n**PJK:** It was in the Bankstown Town Hall, which had featured so much in my life over the years. I stood there as the kid from the fibro house at Number 3 Marshall Street, Bankstown, putting out the big nation-building framework speech. There was a poignancy about that.\n\nBaz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin did the set, which gave it a different kind of look, and had a simplicity about it, which pleased me. And you're right, Dad missed seeing me become Prime Minister but Mum was there with the siblings along with Annita and the kids. So it was the culmination of a long, long political innings.\n\n**KOB:** Hewson's GST was always a significant part of your strategy but it wasn't until midway through the campaign and you clearly were not making headway\u2014you'd hit a flat spot\u2014that you demonstrably upped the ante on the GST. You went on _A Current Affair_ with John Hewson and Mike Willesee and pursued Hewson quite aggressively. Not pretty, but effective.\n\n**PJK:** It was one of the things that turned the tide. The Liberals were kidding everybody that they had this GST but they didn't want to talk about the detail of it, and they'd been getting a free ride from the Canberra press gallery on _Fightback!_ for much of the past eighteen months. In the end it was up to me to really make it clear that the GST was an actual threat, that people had a real prospect of getting it. And yes, Hewson didn't come out of that melee well.\n\nThat got me back a bit more momentum, but I also think Hewson called it very badly in his general prosecution of the campaign. He kept having these silly rallies, chanting 'Labor's got to go, Labor's got to go'.\n\nI don't think the public like that kind of street campaigning, with people throwing bottles and scuffles and the rest. He had a very bad last week as a consequence of that while I kept talking about the future. I kept talking about Asia and about our growth opportunities, I kept talking about the social equity of our policies, reminding everyone not to trade all this now for this glib ideological manifesto, _Fightback!_.\n\n**KOB:** There was a telling moment on the night before the 13 March election, when you addressed your last supper with staff and spoke very candidly. The speech was recorded and subsequently came out.\n\n**PJK:** It shouldn't have, but it did.\n\n**KOB:** People listening to you that night were convinced that you didn't think you were going to win.\n\n**PJK:** That may be what they did think, but I said at the end of the speech, we just might sneak in. I could feel the momentum shifting to us. I thought Hewson's last three days were disastrous with the big public rallies and the scuffles in the streets, the anti-Labor chants, and Hewson losing his voice. I thought, 'Well, I hope you keep it up', because I could feel the thing building. You're always better in a big race to be one out and one back, able to power to the front in the last yards.\n\nI thought we might just slide over the line. I couldn't say it with a ton of confidence that night because I didn't have that, but I did think we might just get there.\n\n**KOB:** You described yourself that night as half-economic rationalist and half-bleeding heart.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I said we had changed Australia for the better as no government before had; that we'd walked away from the industrial museum, we'd remodelled the economy, we'd given the country a new engine and a good social wage, that this was social democracy at its best and that I didn't believe the Australian people would turn their backs on that kind of society as the Liberals were enjoining them to do.\n\n**KOB:** In the end were people voting for Paul Keating or against John Hewson?\n\n**PJK:** Probably both. Probably both. I had my rusted on supporters and many didn't like what the Tories had on offer, Thatcherism Mark II.\n\n**KOB:** But without the GST for you to pin on them, they would have won that election surely.\n\n**PJK:** I cannot say. My critics would say no, the Liberal Party would say no, that I wouldn't have won without the GST, but I was pretty good at counter-punching on the big topics. I counter-punched this bloke almost senseless.\n\n**KOB:** When did you start thinking, gee, maybe I've got to start thinking about a victory speech?\n\n**PJK:** During the Saturday on 13 March I went with Annita to Bankstown to vote. I thought then, what am I going to say if we win? The mood in the polling booths was good. There was a sense that things had moved our way. I did have a few words worked out, but the line that night about the true believers was spontaneous.\n\nI don't know whether you recall Bob Hawke standing up in 1983 saying we're going to govern for every one, including those who supported Fraser and all he stood for. After Fraser had divided the country by bringing about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government causing bitter hatred among Labor's followers, Bob got up on the night and said, 'We've won this election not just for our supporters but for everybody including those who opposed us.'\n\nAnd many people in the Labor ranks groaned, thinking, give us a break. The implication of Bob's remarks was that maybe sometimes we might not govern for everybody, but this time we would. Nevertheless I felt a commitment to people who had stuck with the Labor Party in belief of its model, so that's why I said, 'For those who in difficult times have kept the faith, this is the sweetest victory of all.'\n\nJohn Howard and others later talked about my hubris that night but they misread the driving words. I didn't want to accept victory with restraint. I wanted to celebrate it. That's the fact of it. I wanted to give Labor people the sense of victory they'd so desperately wanted and had earned.\n\n**KOB:** You and Hewson had some pretty bruising things to say about each other in that year of campaigning. Here's what John Hewson told Andrew Denton about you on _Enough Rope_ in 2006:\n\n**I** do respect him and I think he had a view for Australia and he fought for it. But I had a very interesting experience as we went back for the resumption of Parliament after the 1993 election. He called me over behind one of the columns and said, 'How are you?'\n\nI said, 'I'm fine.'\n\nHe said, 'No, I mean seriously, how are you? I called you a lot of terrible names in that campaign, a lot of terrible names, and I want you to understand that I didn't mean any of them. I quite like you and I quite respect you, but you've got to understand, mate, that politics to me is a game and I'll say or do whatever I have to, to win.'\n\nThis is him saying that sort of bastard factor, if I could use that expression, is essential to be a good leader in politics, it's something I didn't have.\n\nIs that a fair description of what happened?\n\n**PJK:** Some of it, but not the essence of it. We were walking to the Senate chamber for the Governor-General's speech in the new Parliament.\n\nI had always remembered a story told in the 1970s by a champion Australian boxer named Tony Madigan who lost to Cassius Clay in the gold medal heavyweight bout at the 1964 Olympic Games. Madigan said, 'Clay was so good I couldn't put a glove on him. But he was also kindly, and after he'd obviously spared me a hiding I said to him, \"Thanks for looking after me, Cassius.\"' Madigan said Clay put his arm around him and said with a deep measure of understanding, 'That's alright, Tony.'\n\nThe polls had gone up and down through the year but I was well on top of this fellow politically. I didn't need to scratch him, bite him, hate him. I only had to beat his policies. To paraphrase the essence of what I said to him, I said 'I hope I didn't beat you too much. Beating up people politically is what I do and I had to beat you up enough to win, but I hope I didn't beat you up too much. In the end I have a view about how the country should advance itself and it's very different from yours\u2014that's what I'm fighting about, not you'. That's what I said to him.\n\n**KOB:** Just differentiate for me about what you regard as acceptable battle and unacceptable battle. Why was it acceptable to get in his face with comments like, 'I love to see you ashen-faced', clearly implying that you've got him scared?\n\n**PJK:** That's what I call the battle inside the place\u2014the battle for the balance of the psychological power inside the chamber.\n\n**KOB:** So if he went away really shaken up by that kind of verbal assault, that wouldn't have bothered you?\n\n**PJK:** Not in the least. But it would bother me if I had said something really personal, hurtful or mean that he was hurt and affected by. Like a reference to his personal finances or family. I never, ever touched that stuff.\n\nThis was the election Hewson's party believed he should have won. This was the chap who thought he had it in the bag, and a short time later there he was, like a sort of squashed tomato in Parliament House, having to listen to the Governor-General's speech, which was written broadly by me. So I just wanted to say to him, 'Look, be assured the battle was about the issues, mate, not about you. Don't take it personally.'\nIN HIS OWN RIGHT\n\nIt's hard to imagine a more treasured moment in the career of Paul John Keating than waking on Sunday morning, 14 March 1993, in Kirribilli House, looking out on a glistening Sydney Harbour and hearing the echos of his true believers' speech the night before.\n\nHe'd have had the Sydney _Sun-Herald_ and the _Sunday Telegraph_ waiting on the coffee table downstairs. At a guess I'd say the _Sun-Herald_ would be on top; 'KEATING MIRACLE' would have been hard to avoid. The election had been so close that Melbourne's _Sunday Herald-Sun_ had prepared for both eventualities: 'Hewson in photo finish', 'Keating in photo finish', both of which made way for 'KEATING BACK'. He has all three covers.\n\nBut Keating barely had time to savour the victory before Treasurer John Dawkins was on his doorstep with a message delivered with great intent\u2014and, as it turned out, portent. In the past year, all Dawkins' efforts including his public support for the shaky forecasts of _One Nation_ had been dictated by one goal\u2014setting up the new Prime Minister to win an election. That goal achieved, Dawkins said he intended as Treasurer to be much more his own man. There was a further hint of what that might mean when on his return to Canberra he was met by his namesake, Michael Keating, the head of his department, with confirmation of what everyone really knew by now\u2014that the economy's failure to follow the government's optimistic predictions meant that the promised tax cuts were no longer affordable.\n\nPaul Keating had to wait to see what all that would mean by the time the August Budget was shaped and presented, but in the meantime he'd just secured a fifth term for Labor, won legitimacy for his overthrow of Australia's most successful Labor Prime Minister and, as he saw it, a fresh impetus for his agenda to remodel Australia.\n\nWhile pushing on with Mabo, the republic and a greater reorientation towards Asia in foreign policy, Keating also had other reform fronts to open up. His authority within caucus and Cabinet had been well and truly strengthened. A swing of nearly 2 per cent to the party and a swag of new seats in an election he was supposed to lose will do that for you.\n\nThe ongoing misery of John Hewson did nothing to prick Labor's balloon either. Before the month was out, Hewson was forced by his party room to dump his GST from the Liberal platform, just hours after he said it should stay pending a two-year policy review. For the moment his leadership was safe, but mostly because of an ongoing stand-off between Peacock and Howard forces. Behind the scenes Peacock was doing all he could to ensure that John Howard would never lead the Liberal Party again.\n\nAll of this was a bonus for Paul Keating as he embarked on his next big reform. Trade unions had preceded the Australian Labor Party by more than 50 years. Their first significant industrial campaigns in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1850s saw the introduction of the eight-hour day or 48-hour week, putting Australia in the vanguard of workers' rights around the world. This was an era when a worker could be jailed for leaving work to go to the pub. The Labor Party as the political arm of the labour movement was spawned in the wake of the shearers' strike.\n\nWithin three years of Federation, the template for what was to frame industrial relations in Australia for almost a century was established\u2014the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. Initially sponsored by the country's second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, we were already onto the fourth, George Reid, by the time the act to establish it was passed. It was a system of compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes based on the premise that it would balance the scales between workers and bosses.\n\nNinety years later, informed by a system that had become extremely inflexible in its one-size-fits-all formula, and in which myriad awards had grown like topsy with workplace demarcation disputes commonplace, Keating wanted to turn the system on its head. An award simplification process with union amalgamations was already happening, driven by the ACTU, but Keating wanted industrial negotiations largely taken out of the Commission and put in the hands of unions and employers as a collective bargaining process within an enterprise framework.\n\nOn 21 April, Keating told a luncheon of 800 company directors he intended to deregulate the labour market to allow individual firms to negotiate wages based on productivity improvements, and entrench collective bargaining as the principal form of wage negotiation. The goal underpinning the new enterprise bargaining system was to foster greater flexibility within the wage system, including a greater recognition of individual merit among workers, with productivity gains at the heart of the negotiation process. From the moment the Hawke Government walked down the road of financial market and tariff reforms, labour market reform was just a matter of time, but the inevitability of that didn't make it easy.\n\nOnce again this all came under the umbrella of the Accord with its usual co-sponsor, Bill Kelty, albeit a more fractious sponsor than in the past. Kelty told Paul Kelly for _March of Patriots_ that 'By 1991 Australia was going into an open economy... The productivity growth of some industries was going to be 6 per cent, and of others, minus 2 per cent. You can't sustain a centralised system in an open economy like that, even with all the goodwill in the world'. The Arbitration Commission's role would primarily be retained to guarantee a wages safety net for the lowest paid workers.\n\nThe friction between the government and the unions largely came from Keating's decision to appoint a fellow New South Wales factional scrapper, Laurie Brereton, as his new Industrial Relations Minister, which really signalled Keating's intent to keep the unions honest. While there was a core of support among senior trade union leaders, there was also a great deal of unrest and suspicion. This was a serious shakeup of the only system the members had ever known. Most of the big employers were broadly on side.\n\nSo while deep in his negotiations on Mabo, staying in some sort of contact with John Dawkins over what was shaping as a nightmare budget, and trying to convince world leaders to embrace APEC, Keating was periodically called in to play a kind of good cop to Brereton's bad cop, in order to keep Kelty and the rest of the ACTU leadership in the reform camp.\n\nBy September, the government was in deadlock with Indigenous leaders over the Mabo negotiations, in deadlock with the Senate over the budget, and in deadlock with the ACTU over Laurie Brereton's determination to get union agreement for a package of legislation that included a right for non-unionised workers' groups to be able to make enterprise agreements. At one point the Accord itself seemed under threat.\n\nLooking back, Keating acknowledges that he stretched himself too thinly over his second term as Prime Minister. If you're an interventionist leader by nature and also a reformer, the moral of the story is to be careful that you're not fighting on too many fronts at the one time.\n\nThe man who at one point at least half-seriously considered being both Prime Minister and Treasurer had become so preoccupied with his new policies\u2014Mabo in particular\u2014that he hadn't seen the political danger signs building around the 1993 Budget, nor fully registered what John Dawkins had meant when he said post-election he intended to be his own man.\n\nOn 27 April, the _Financial Review_ scored a front-page headline from a long interview with the Treasurer, 'Liberated Dawkins: I'll do it my way': 'Mr Dawkins tells the Australian _Financial Review_ why he wants to be an activist economic manager and outlines his plans to reshape the national agenda away from the Keating shadow.' Fair enough in one sense, because Keating as Treasurer hadn't spent much time in Bob Hawke's shadow, but the difference this time, which both Dawkins and Keating now acknowledge, was that much of the old discipline of the all-important Expenditure Review Committee developed in the Hawke\u2013Keating years, had fallen somewhat fallow.\n\nI got the sense from my conversations with Paul Keating for this book that more than a few of his pre-budget conversations with Dawkins were threaded through some intense stages of his various Mabo negotiations. If so, they and the government paid a big price politically for the budget that emerged.\n\nBy now Keating's reform horizons had further expanded to encompass competition policy\u2014the sort of issue that might cause a journalist's eyes to glaze over, like most things to do with premiers' conferences, but this was another reform with far-reaching consequences and difficult to orchestrate. Dealing with the premiers on reform at any time was worse than herding cats, but introducing competition to public monopolies that tended to be revenue gravy trains for governments, and setting up something like a national electricity grid were not conducive to easy overnight policy solutions, and Keating was in the thick of it. A Sydney academic and former McKinsey consultant, Fred Hilmer, had handed the federal government a set of ambitious recommendations riddled with political implications almost immediately after the 1993 election.\n\nThe Australian Competition and Consumer Council was just one important outcome of the competition reforms, and they all took time and energy. Keating was conducting that process at the same time as Mabo, the republic, APEC and the budget. As the year progressed, the front pages of Australia's newspapers reflected as much. There'd be good news on one front and bad on the other, or bad on two fronts at once. Rarely was a front page universally good news. Take these three headlines on the _Age_ 's front page on 22 July: 'Keating wavers on tax', 'No simple route to republic, says Turnbull' and 'Canberra may shield CRA on Mabo claim'.\n\nIn tandem with this Keating was also making far less effort to bring the press gallery along with him, so how much the public was following with any real interest or comprehension is left to guesswork. The only clues at the time really revolved around the regular sampling of voter sentiment in the opinion polls, which mostly favoured Labor through the first few months of 1993, but plummeted disastrously in the budget aftermath.\n\nWhy was the budget so damaging? Because Keating was seen to renege on half of his LAW tax cut package, and secondly, because in the public's eyes he was hitting them with billions of dollars in indirect tax increases to pay for the other half\u2014in other words, giving with one hand, and taking with the other. The message to voters now was that not only had they been shortchanged on the tax cuts, but what tax cuts they were getting, they'd be paying for themselves. What they didn't know at the time was that John Dawkins had originally proposed hitting them even harder.\n\nHaving had to defend in 1992 the _One Nation_ forecasts that were refusing to follow the script, and the heavily criticised tax cuts to deeply sceptical economists and journalists\u2014and, as he saw it, sacrificing his own credibility in his first year as Treasurer to help build Keating's platform for victory in 1993\u2014Dawkins was determined to restore his professional pride through a budget of much greater fiscal purity. In the shadow of the budget, Keating felt compelled to prune back some of what he saw as the harsher measures. Hence his off-the-cuff comment to his speechwriter, Don Watson, on his way to the Press Club for a speech acknowledging the tax retreat in late July, that if Dawkins didn't comply with his wishes, he might have to 'knock his block off'.\n\nThe end result was still a political time bomb. Where Keating had said late in 1992, 'The tax cuts have been legislated\u2014they are not a promise, they are LAW law,' John Hewson could now say in July 1993, 'No one should ever again believe anything the Prime Minister says.'\n\nSomehow, by year's end, Keating chalked up a triumph at his first APEC conference in Seattle, delivered on Mabo and enterprise bargaining, the Accord was back on track, competition policy was in train, the economy was finally starting to gallop along, he was back in front in the polls, and Hewson was on borrowed time. John Dawkins, on the other hand, one of Keating's great stalwarts, had gone, resigning in the shadow of Christmas, giving Keating no opportunity to dissuade him. Looking back now, Keating says the government never recovered from the 1993 Budget, an extremely sore point with Dawkins.\n\n**KOB:** What authority do you think was delivered to you by winning the unwinnable election in 1993, and what difference did it make to what you wanted to do in your first full term? Graham Richardson said it made you the most powerful Labor Prime Minister in history.\n\n**PJK:** It made a huge difference to me. Remember the story about Churchill's driver taking him to Buckingham Palace the night Hitler's armies moved into Calais and Dunkirk? The Dutch queen flees from Holland to London, and that day Churchill is sworn in as Prime Minister.\n\nLeaving Buckingham Palace without any fanfare in the dead of night his driver says, 'Mr Churchill, I'm sorry that you've had to take the prime ministership in such circumstances.'\n\nAnd Churchill says, 'Ah yes, Fred, but you understand now I'm in full command of the field.'\n\nThat is the point. When I won that election I was in command of the field, and it meant I was able to take on some more of the sacred cows within the party, like industrial relations.\n\nI had a clear view of my priorities. Apart from Mabo, the republic and APEC, which I continued to develop, the other big economic reform still to be done was to open up the labour market.\n\nIn the early 1980s I'd opened the financial markets. In the late 1980s I'd opened the product markets with the tariff cuts, with the third large remaining field being the labour market. What we had succeeded in getting under the Accord was aggregate wage flexibility, where on a national basis, wages would move up or move down according to economic and political judgements. But flexibility within industry sectors meant the really productive employee, who deserved better remuneration than the average couldn't secure higher pay from so rigid a system. Nor could you get multiskilling in the workplace where workers were prevented from crossing restrictive demarcation lines. These inflexibilities were holding productivity back\u2014productivity that was otherwise to everyone's benefit; the nation's benefit.\n\nThat was largely because we still had a centralised wage-fixing system, with a lack of flexibility within sectors and within individual enterprises putting a crimp on productivity. Having got the share of national income going to wages and to profits back in reasonable proportions, and having again refired investment, what we really needed was a more flexible labour market, and I regarded that as a primary objective for the second term.\n\nBecause Bob Hawke had been a very effective choirmaster of the centralised system as ACTU President, he would never consider removing the central role played by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission when he was Prime Minister. You might remember his great relationship with James Kirby, who was President of the Commission and Bob's whole love affair with the Commission.\n\nThe idea of turning his back on the Commission as the primary arbiter of wages in Australia was anathema to him. And, I might add, to Ross Garnaut, his alter ego. But I knew that unless we could get the efficiency that would flow from workplace agreements between employees and employers replacing the big national award cases, we wouldn't realise the full productivity benefits and full potential of an open and flexible market.\n\n**KOB:** In April 1993 you laid out your ambitions for what the _Australian_ described as 'a historic deregulation of the labour market', effectively terminating a century of centralised wage-fixing. How tough did you anticipate that would be?\n\n**PJK:** I knew it would be tough, and would cause Bill Kelty some pain and put strain on the Accord, but it had to happen. Bill wanted me to appoint Bob McMullan as Minister for Industrial Relations, and he didn't like it when I told him I was giving the job to Laurie Brereton. Laurie was from the New South Wales Right and Bill didn't trust them.\n\nI said, 'Yes, Bill, but although I have a ton of time for McMullan, you will simply treat him as one of your foot soldiers and roll him into your position, whereas Brereton will unambiguously be mine.'\n\nSo I appointed Brereton, which Bill didn't like but in the end accepted, notwithstanding the fact that he never had a comfortable relationship with Laurie.\n\nBill and I had long discussed reducing the number of awards, making the labour market more flexible coming up to the 1993 election, and he and I had thought about a shift from centralised wage fixation. Bill knew the open economy would put stresses on the rigidity of the centralised system and had said as much. But there had to be a catalyst, so I announced a major overhaul of the whole industrial relations system to entrench workplace or collecting bargaining as the principal form of wage negotiation. That signalled a major reform for the Industrial Relations Commission, which had been re-established, with an adversarial system at its heart.\n\nI believed this adversarial structure needed to be changed. And changed to a culture where employees and employers were able to negotiate in good faith. I said Brereton would consult with industry and unions over the period but this would mean that the Accord would broadly be left only to maintain the safety net of the award system and the steady accumulation of occupational superannuation. I said I wanted to see close to 100 per cent of all workers on federal awards brought under the workplace agreements, and indicated also that I wanted workers under state awards and those without unions to be brought under the new system.\n\n**KOB:** In terms of that national safety net, the national wage case and establishing minimum award rates, that was it as far as the Accord was concerned?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, but Bill Kelty and I shared many unity tickets, as you know. One we definitely shared was the need of a set of minimum award rates for people who could not access the bargaining system, like women and kids in retail, cleaners, people covered by miscellaneous workers' union awards. These people had no power with which to bargain for fair wages and conditions. I didn't want to go down the road of the United States where people on the bottom level were on miserable rates of $5 and $6 an hour, living in penury. I thought as a democratic, industrial society we had to do better than that, and that was always Bill Kelty's view. He was a champion on minimum rates.\n\n**KOB:** In terms of the future of the Accord structure beyond 1993, theoretically the government and the ACTU would still sit down and broadly agree on what wage case would be taken to the Industrial Commission?\n\n**PJK:** Indeed, and that's why in the heady days of growth in 1988 and 1989, when industrial companies were offering employees 12 and 14 per cent wage increases, and Bill Kelty was trying to keep them to 6 and 7 per cent and we were trying to bridge the difference with tax cuts, it was a great battle. But once we succeeded in getting into the period of low inflation, in fact zero inflation in 1993, it became much easier to run an industrial system without the attendant pressure of keeping a perpetual tight rein on wages. Running any industrial relations policy is always tougher in the context of high inflation. In future the wage claims of the wider workforce would be driven by and related to productivity.\n\nOnce we got inflation back to zero and 2 per cent it was much easier, because by then, we had productivity running at 3 per cent. All the structural economic changes were kicking in to double trend productivity. Two percentage points of productivity we were giving to labour, by way of real wages and one percentage point to profits. If you've got three percentage points of productivity to play with and the inflation is only 2 per cent, it's a much easier system to run.\n\nTherefore it was good to get the Commonwealth out of the award system and into enterprise agreements. But at the same time to not turn Australia into some sort of industrial refuse where the least powerful people end up with derisory increases. It is true today, as a result of that policy, notwithstanding John Howard's vicious attempt to smash the safety net with _WorkChoices_ , that Australia still has the strongest set of minimum award rates in the world.\n\n**KOB:** What were your biggest sticking points in terms of getting the changes through?\n\n**PJK:** A lot of members of the Labor Council in New South Wales never agreed with my views. A lot certainly didn't agree with moving away from the Industrial Relations Commission. They loved the old system. And what's more, many expected to be commissioners at some time as well. I'm not saying their positions were driven by self-interest, but they were very caught up in the extended Industrial Relations family.\n\nThis was a really important top-end-of-town club where former employer representatives rubbed shoulders with former trade union representatives and they were shown a lot of deference. It wasn't just the practical tensions of trying to get wage flexibility and better agreements and more productivity, which should've been what they were really about. They were obsessed with the deity of the IRC.\n\n**KOB:** It was a reasonable concern of business, wasn't it, that in some instances a formidable set of powerful unions representing a particular industry could hold that industry to ransom with the threat of industrial action during a negotiation period?\n\n**PJK:** That was true in part but with the right framework, it did give both sides the prospect of writing new agreements, with larger increases in real wages but with greater flexibility built in for employers, and with fewer, simpler awards.\n\nIn the first twenty or so years after the changes to enterprise bargaining in 1993, real wages in Australia grew on average by 1.85 per cent a year. That's around a 40 per cent real increase; the highest rate of increase and one beyond anything in the twentieth century. If you look at the comparable workforce in America, their real wage increases have been around 2 to 3 per cent over the same period: 2 to 3 per cent versus 40 per cent in Australia. That is why Australian cities are full of restaurants, why consumerism is high, that's why people have choices in motor vehicles and services\u2014because they are now wealthier; they now have the money.\n\nI used to say to some of my less enthusiastic supporters, 'This will deliver real wages of a kind you're never going to get from the Industrial Relations Commission. Your remit is to get people increases in the real living standard, not to be part of some process club you might find comfortable.'\n\nIn the Beazley Opposition when there was a debate about going back to centralised wage-fixing, I remember saying behind the scenes, 'Can't you explain how much benefit has accrued to workers from enterprise bargaining?'\n\nAnd one of Kim's frontbenchers said to me, 'Well, that's absolutely true, the gains have been dramatic, but we're not sure ordinary people understand it came from enterprise bargaining, and they feel safer with the IRC.'\n\n**KOB:** Through the year you had headlines like 'Brereton grabs IR powers' with a story describing 'an unprecedented expansion of the Commonwealth's industrial powers'. There was another one: 'Kelty slams Brereton reforms', which carried a very real threat that if you didn't meet Kelty halfway on what you were proposing you'd be humiliated when you addressed the 800 union delegates at the looming ACTU conference. Do you remember that?\n\n**PJK:** Skirmishes went on between Brereton and Kelty around some of these things, and I was using Brereton as a kind of front-row forward to push the changes. Bill knew it was broadly me, so he could attack Brereton rather than attack me. He was first and foremost a tactician. And Brereton was tough in counter-punching.\n\nIn the end there was a very strong intellectual pull towards the bargaining system, and I think my commitment to the award minimums, to the safety net, was so strong that Bill was prepared to take the package. The intellectual weight came from people like Kelty and Laurie Carmichael at the ACTU and Tas Bull of the Waterside Workers. They understood the new framework better than my colleagues at the Labor Council of NSW.\n\nAt any rate, the country got this enormous shift up in flexibility. You have to remember, Kerry, we had a flexible exchange rate, interest rates set in the market and then broadly by the Reserve Bank, not around the Cabinet table. There were rapidly declining levels of protection, so imports were keeping manufacturers honest in terms of prices. Against that we had this rigidity in the labour market. It just didn't compute. The brighter guys in the ACTU knew this, Bill particularly, but around the edges they pushed and shoved to get the structure they wanted. That was okay, by the way. Pushing and shoving is what we all did.\n\n**KOB:** The union movement today is a pale shadow of what it once was. What part did your reforms play in that quite dramatic decline over the past twenty years? And where does that leave the labour movement and the workforce today? In other words, by shifting the system in the way you did, were you ultimately weakening union power, and with it the Labor Party's base?\n\n**PJK:** The truth is, many of the unions have lost their edge. With the great growth in hospitality in Australia for instance, the Liquor Trades Union should have signed up thousands and thousands of people, those who worked in the new jobs in restaurants and bars and so on\u2014but it just didn't happen. The same in tourism\u2014it just didn't happen. The organisational guts fell out of the trade union movement, and instead of responding to the great opening up of the economy and its flexibility, they failed to rise to the new challenges in a changing workforce.\n\nObviously the decline of manufacturing and the disappearance of so many of those traditional blue-collar jobs played a part, but the digital age has changed and is changing the shape of the workforce.\n\nPublic sector unions and unions in areas like oil-refining, shipping and the wharves retained a base, but the middle declined. Now, to what extent were our changes central to that decline? Perhaps to the extent that real wages growth was so strong, the whole imperative of sharp industrial organisation fell away.\n\nIn some unions the quality of leadership had declined. Some of these people had sat for years broadly doing nothing. They sat waiting for the national wage case. All of a sudden they had to go out to enterprises and organise the workforce and negotiate smart agreements. All of a sudden they were being asked to go to this factory, that factory, this retail business, that retail business, and some of them were not intellectually equipped to do it. It didn't suit them.\n\nBut then again, it's also true to say the movement away from a rigid system of award demarcations and central adjustments would probably inevitably have meant that the natural platforms on which union membership had otherwise sat would have been degraded by the flexibility coming into the labour market. But in the end, what's the whole point of an industrial movement? It is to secure increases in real wages and conditions. The new model gave increases in real wages and conditions greater than in any period of the twentieth century, but unions weren't able to adapt to the new landscape while continuing to maintain their significance. In some ways that's problematic because the modern workforce is still open to exploitation. But the worst thing was the unions failed absolutely to take credit for the 40 per cent increase in real wages growth since 1991. They walked away from a world-beating performance.\n\n**KOB:** Competition policy was another of your early reform challenges in 1993\u2014the inefficiencies and protection from competition for some big public enterprises like energy generation and distribution, the heavily regulated ways much of Australian agriculture was run. You'd commissioned the Hilmer Report in October the previous year and Hilmer dropped his recommendations in your lap almost immediately after the election. How important was this in the reform landscape and how tough were the politics it threw up?\n\n**PJK:** The more disposable income people have, the more money they spread through the economy. People get increases in their disposable income in two ways: through growth in real wage, and from falling prices. If people's wages are rising and the price of motorcars and goods is falling, the amount of disposable income available for them to spend or save rises.\n\nThe great problem Australia has always had is that it had a monopolist or an oligopolist view of how the country should operate. This was true in the big industrial sectors, it was true in banking, it's true in retail. The country too easily falls into duopolies or oligopolies, and yet we know prices will only come down through competition.\n\nInflation in the traded goods sector of the economy was then running at zero or near zero because our tariff cuts had promoted real competition between imported goods and locally manufactured goods. By comparison, in the non-traded goods economy\u2014ports, electricity, hospitals etc.\u2014where there was no import competitor, inflation was running at 4.5 per cent or thereabouts. The two sectors came to around 2.5 per cent overall.\n\nThe question then was, how do we introduce competition to those industries that cannot be competed against, like gas, water and electricity? Clearly Australia had to shake up its closed and monopolised sectors, but that wouldn't happen without a lot of agitation by at least some of the state governments. And the workforce in the state-owned enterprises also had a big stake in the game.\n\nI used to say to caucus, 'competition' is our word and we should own it. It has never been part of the Liberals' culture. The Tories don't believe in competition, they believe in business, in the old-boy network, they believe in the boardrooms, the industry cabals, the cosy commercial oligopolies. That's their stock in trade.\n\nWhereas if you represent the great body of men and women as we do, then you want to give them goods and services at lower prices and you want the economy working for them, which means it will fall to the Labor Party, not the Coalition parties, to raise the whole notion of competition. And, in our terms, to make it a Labor value. In other words, we put our faith in the markets, we don't put our faith in business. And there's a great difference between markets and business. Particularly well regulated and competitive markets.\n\nGenuine markets perform in a socially good way whereas business will often be as uncompetitive in any environment as it can get away with. So the whole competition reference that I gave to Fred Hilmer was really in many respects nothing to do with Fred Hilmer, but everything to do with my view and, I might say, Bill Kelty's view, that we had to get prices down in many of these sectors, including in the state sectors, the non-traded good sectors like gas, electricity and water.\n\nThe states had monopoly rents from their enterprises which they then fed into their budgets, so the dividends out of the Elcom of New South Wales or SECV in Victoria or their water bodies were subsidising their recurrent budgets at the cost of consumers. Business was paying too much for these services and also passing that cost on to consumers. Ordinary workers were paying too much for their gas and electricity. It was like an invisible form of regressive taxation.\n\nSo I sought to bring competition policy within a single constructive national framework built around the Hilmer recommendations, with the cooperation of the states through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).\n\n**KOB:** You had at least one activist premier in Jeff Kennett from Victoria, who was right behind this agenda. Did that help?\n\n**PJK:** It was also true in New South Wales before Nick Greiner resigned. His successor John Fahey wanted to do very little\u2014he wouldn't even agree to an accounting separation of electricity generation and distribution, much less do anything structural. He thought it was all a state preserve.\n\nWhen Jeff Kennett was elected he came to see me on the Monday after his election, and he said, 'You know, we're in trouble, with the debts.'\n\nI said to him, 'Premier, the only way you are going to get Victoria out of this hole is to sell assets, and the group of assets most saleable for you are the electricity generators, particularly the old brown coal ones, But to get good prices for these assets you'll have to be able to sell electricity beyond the borders of Victoria.'\n\n'You can have access to that market if we set up a national electricity grid down the east coast of Australia, so where there's a contract, say, for Visyboard in Albury setting up a new newsprint mill, they would invite tenders for their electricity and that might be provided by a Victorian producer, a New South Wales state generator or a Queensland state generator.\n\n'So to be able to get decent prices for your power stations in Victoria, you will have to help me change both John Fahey's and Wayne Goss's minds about the necessity of a national electricity market\u2014with the full separation of generation from distribution.'\n\nAs it turned out, Jeff Kennett did help me do that, he was great, and gradually I turned John Fahey around to the point where we did establish the national electricity market, the NEM, and as a consequence Jeff Kennett was able to sell his power stations at very high prices into that new market. But we had to have a framework for that, and this framework turned up at the Council of Australian Governments around the Hilmer principles.\n\nIt required an injection of capital to physically join the grids together, and eventually I got the states' agreement for the national grid to run from Brisbane to Adelaide, so South Australia came into the grid as well. It took two years but from that day since we've had a national electricity market.\n\n**KOB:** How big a reform do you regard that as now, looking back?\n\n**PJK:** It was gigantic. George Megalogenis wrote in the _Australian_ in December 1994 that consumers would receive $9 billion a year if protection was removed from key sectors, including electricity, water, gas, transport and the legal profession. He was quoting from a major report from the Industries Assistance Commission. The Commission also said federal and state governments would collect another $8.9 billion in revenue. Although more than 80 per cent of the reforms would have to be delivered by the states, the federal government would collect 66 per cent of the revenue windfall flowing from a more efficient economy. My proposition was to give some of that back to the states.\n\nIn April 1995 we signed the intergovernmental agreement supporting a comprehensive national competition policy reform package, and signed agreements implementing the reforms. The reforms involved extending trade practices legislation to state and local government business enterprises and unincorporated businesses, encouraging competition in the business activity of governments.\n\nAll members signed the two intergovernmental agreements, reaffirming their commitment to continuing microeconomic reforms in key industries, and this was reflected in a third agreement which also provided for financial arrangements, including a series of competition payments. We also established the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). We folded the Trade Practices Commission and the Prices Surveillance Authority under the one umbrella.\n\nThis whole process was about establishing principles for the structural reform of public monopolies, and competitive neutrality between the public and private sectors, with price surveillance for institutions with significant monopoly power, and a regime to provide access to essential facilities like pipelines, with a program of reviewing legislation that might be restricting competition.\n\nThe Keating Government promised to maintain real per capita guarantees of financial assistance to the states and local government on a three-year rolling basis plus further financial assistance in the form of competition payments. In other words, if a state did something that promoted competition and the Competition Council agreed, they would be eligible for an incentive payment. We promised to provide a total of $200 million to be shared among the states in the first year, then $400 million in the second, $600 million in the third. By 2000 it would have reached $1.2 billion, but in their first budget Howard and Costello pulled the competition payments out. They didn't think state sector reforms were worth supporting.\n\n**KOB:** What was the make-up of the Competition Council?\n\n**PJK:** The make-up was all about the voting rights and we worked on a formula of two votes and a casting vote for the Commonwealth with a single vote for each state. A lot of good things started to happen.\n\n**KOB:** As Prime Minister, when you're pushing an agenda like this and looking for support, looking to enthuse and convince, how did you treat these guys around the table? Different states, different political dynamics, different personalities. Was it all a set piece, each of you following your script, or was there room for spontaneity?\n\n**PJK:** I always sought to treat them courteously. Charm is a very effective lubricant. Secondly, I didn't discriminate between Labor and Coalition premiers and treasurers because some of the better ones were on the Coalition side. In other words, I took them as I found them and tried to treat them all fairly and reasonably. By and large we developed a cooperative framework.\n\nIt's worth saying that this agenda was not an obvious vote winner. I think journalists and the public often found this dry and boring so you had to want to do it. If you don't have a Prime Minister or a Treasurer interested in promoting competition, then there will never be any, because the system is set up not to provide it. The way oligopolies and monopolies operate\u2014Australia is not set up for competition. So unless you are trying to shape markets, which we do these days with the ACCC and competition policy, and unless you have a federal Treasurer or a Prime Minister trying to pull competition from the pores of the skin of the economy, it doesn't happen. It's a peculiar thing about the conservative parties, they fundamentally don't believe in competition. I'm not overdoing this\u2014they believe in cabals, they believe in easy business accommodations.\n\n**KOB:** And yet under John Howard particularly they were quite determined to break up what they saw as the industrial relations club of employer and union advocates.\n\n**PJK:** That was their anti-union phobia; nothing to do with oligopolies or anti-competitive arrangements. But in terms of market power and pricing power by the big Australian companies and their businesses, certainly in my years, it was only the Labor Party that was interested in competition, never the Coalition.\n\n**KOB:** You and Jeff Kennett were both instinctive political warriors, and of all the state premiers he was certainly public enemy number one for the labour movement at that time. In the latter part of 1992 you'd had a big public fight with him on industrial relations and in the early stages of Mabo you were also in dispute. Yet you two forged a kind of friendship. What was it based on?\n\n**PJK:** He would do things! In the end, if you could get him to agree to things or if he wished to do things, he would actually go and do them. He was a man who made decisions and put them into effect, so I had that point of identification with him. And once he found some common cause between us\u2014for instance, selling the power stations in Victoria, creating the national electricity market\u2014being smarter than average, he would try to reposition himself and bring the other conservative premiers on board. He was somebody.\n\nThe South Australian Premier, Dean Brown, was another Liberal who was also open to this. He and Kennett were, in the end, cooperative with me, which was not the case with John Fahey or Wayne Goss. But ultimately they all tucked in and we got this done. But I found when a Premiers' conference ended, the guy you'd like to have a drink with was Kennett more than the others.\n\n**KOB:** Was there a certain rascal element to him that you liked, a bit of extra spark?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. He was a bit of a rascal, and being one myself, it takes one to know one.\n\n**KOB:** Your biggest political problem in 1993, perhaps of your whole prime ministership, was brewing from the election in March to the budget in August. John Dawkins was obviously smarting from what he felt was the damage to his credibility as the price he had to pay in signing off on those _One Nation_ forecasts and the tax cuts you promised.\n\nIt was a combination of things\u2014an economy that was still not giving you the growth you needed to justify your promised tax cuts and keep a rapidly expanding deficit in check, coupled with a Treasurer who signalled that he intended to be much more his own man in this term. The _Financial Review_ headline read: 'Liberated Dawkins, I'll do it my way. From now on Paul will be much less involved'. How did you interpret that at the time?\n\n**PJK:** Well, it was a bit of a worrying message from him because I'd never at any stage sat on John or circumscribed his action. But it is very difficult being Treasurer to a Prime Minister who had been Labor's longest-serving Treasurer and an active one. John came to Kirribilli after the election. He was delighted we'd won, but said I'm going to be much more assertive in this Parliament.\n\nI said, 'Well, that's fine John. I don't want some mouse in the job. I want someone to have command of the portfolio.'\n\nI said to him, 'John, I've always regarded you as being an independent and wilder spirit, otherwise I would have left Ralph in the job. The mere endorsement by me of you as Treasurer means that your remit is there.'\n\nBut I said to him, 'By the same token you have to always be politically smart. The one thing Bob could always rely upon with me if I took a series of big budget measures through a May Statement or a budget, he would know that politically they would work.'\n\nJohn said, 'Don't you think I've done that?'\n\nI said, 'You have, so I don't think we're debating much.'\n\nI would have liked to think that John's sense of achievement, substantial as it was, and sense of inner confidence, was such that he did not have to make such declarations, and that any issues he had in policy were ones he was able to cope with in the Cabinet context. Ministers go through these phases. People get very tired by the process and they get cranky and despondent and then they get irascible. You have to roll with the punches in the Cabinet room, either as Treasurer or Prime Minister. It happens to a lot of people.\n\n**KOB:** But what he was saying broadly was that he felt he had to go along with your strategy on _One Nation_ , including the promise of tax cuts in that first year to win the election even though he was uncomfortable about them and wasn't sure they could be afforded. But he was signalling to you that he was going to stand up more this time, he was going to be his own man.\n\n**PJK:** It was news to me John was in any way uncomfortable with the _One Nation_ tax cuts or the forecasts at the time. He had been very much my partner through all the really bad ERC years. Peter Walsh too, but it broke Peter and he got out. John also backed me against Hawke and went to see Bob of his own accord in 1988 and told him it was time for him to leave. He'd been very loyal to me and I loved John. I had great feelings towards him. You live in that pressure-cooker environment with these people for a decade or more and you end up with quite deep relationships with them. That's why it hurt me deeply to take Treasury away from Ralph Willis but I made an honest call. Ralph was a very good Treasurer but I honestly thought John would do it better at that time, and I felt I owed it to him.\n\nI didn't think we'd had any dispute over _One Nation_ , over putting the budget back into deficit to pull the economy out of the hole after the recession. But when we got into 1993 Treasury were pushing hard to get back to surplus earlier than they needed to. Well, Treasurers are meant to be alert to what their department is up to. That's what Labor governments expect of their Treasurer, to stop the bureaucrats in Treasury pulling the show down around your ears. It requires some smartness.\n\n**KOB:** Yes, but the deficit kept rising through 1992 and into 1993, and it wasn't supposed to. It was up to $16 billion.\n\n**PJK:** But this was not some budget emergency. As the economy picked up the natural stabilisers would change, unemployment benefits would come down, tax receipts would rise, and gradually the surplus would come back out, finding its equilibrium again. Because the underlying level of structural outlays had been cut so much by John Dawkins and Peter Walsh with me.\n\n**KOB:** It became increasingly clear that the tax cuts were becoming less and less affordable. In April the Reserve Bank governor, Bernie Fraser, was warning of another balance of payments crisis without a medium-term plan to reign in the deficit because growth wasn't doing the job. Markets were getting skittish and so was Dawkins. He was still upset over the way he felt the LAW tax cuts had undermined his credibility as Treasurer. As you got closer to the 1993 Budget he wanted to walk away from them.\n\n**PJK:** He did. He threatened to resign, and it wasn't just a private threat, it was actually reported in the newspapers. He said, 'You can either take my changes in the budget, or I'll go. They'll say you're not up to the changes anymore, and I'll walk away and you'll be left with a smouldering heap.'\n\nThrough this long run-up period of budget deliberations, which usually started around March\u2013April, I was sitting in the Cabinet room working on the native title legislation. I chaired the native title committee of Cabinet, working with the responsible ministers and the Aboriginal community, the mining community, the farm communities. I'd had a big row with the states, who weren't cooperating. So I wasn't quite on the job through the budget process as I'd been in all the other budgets. That's how importantly I valued native title.\n\n**KOB:** Bear in mind that you'd started your time as Prime Minister thinking you could handle being Treasurer as well.\n\n**PJK:** But the reason I said to you I would have preferred to remain Treasurer is I would have seen Treasury coming. They are like the gang who can't shoot straight. They only shoot straight when guided. When Treasury put on a song and dance about pulling the budget back into equilibrium earlier than the natural stabilisers permitted, I would have just told them, from my own experience, to go away. I would have said, 'Don't give me that line please. I don't want to be pulling economic activity back now, when the economy most needs it.'\n\n**KOB:** Nonetheless you did come round to the view that the tax cut formula would have to be changed.\n\n**PJK:** Of course I did. When the facts change, when the aggregates change, I change. As the revenue collections became clearer, prudence kicked in and we started talking about how we should reshape the tax cuts. We eventually decided to bring the first cut forward by two months, but put the second cut back from 1996 to 1998. A pretty sensible thing to do\u2014a right thing to do\u2014and certainly no policy crime.\n\nJohn was determined to be a conscientious Treasurer and what he wanted to do was a good thing in theory\u2014consolidating the budget and doing it earlier. As a former Treasurer I can't criticise him for that in one sense.\n\nBut you've got to be politically sharp too. You've got to stay on your feet in this game, you've got to keep on punching. If you shoot a big part of your own strategy away you're in trouble.\n\nI was quite happy to acknowledge publicly that revenue had been overestimated, that we could no longer do the two tax cuts to the promised timetable\u2014which I had already hinted at during the election campaign. Actually, not hinted at, said. If you're the Treasurer that's what you want the Prime Minister to say, and I was prepared to say it. But John wanted to introduce some other horror elements into the budget as well, like indirect tax increases. That is, bring the overall budget balance back earlier. I did not think, in the prevailing economic circumstances, that this was good policy.\n\nIn the end I intervened and knocked a lot of things out, but the horror stuff that did stay still gave me the biggest caucus problem I'd had, either as Treasurer or Prime Minister. The caucus reaction to that budget was very bad for me and for the government, and that fed a big reaction from the state labour councils and the ACTU. The Democrats played around with it in the Senate and the Liberal Party opposed everything, and it took from August to November to have the budget passed.\n\n**KOB:** Let's take this in stages. John Dawkins told Paul Kelly in _March of Patriots_ that the old ERC gang had broken up: 'Paul was not as attentive as he should have been. Peter Walsh was gone. I wanted to cut Defence, but Paul wouldn't take on Robert Ray... The essential discipline of the Hawke era had gone.'\n\n**PJK:** I don't think the ERC in this period did have the discipline that John and I had brought to it with Peter Walsh in the years when we were doing the big reductions in the budget balance. But I didn't think that our problems were insurmountable either. We just had to accept that with the economy, the budget would not come back into balance as early as Treasury would have liked or had forecast.\n\nThe Treasury was not a politically smart outfit. I had come along as Treasurer and reformed the whole economic structure of the country and given Treasury relevance of a kind it had never had. Not even in the salad days of postwar growth had Treasury had such a preeminent place in policy, or presided over such an enormous program of structural change. Yet within a month of the 1993 election they're trying to tear the budget back into surplus as quickly as possible. I mean dumb, dumb, dumb.\n\nThey should instead have been saying, the natural stabilisers are working here in an economy that is still relatively weak. We don't want to be taking too much cash from it, we don't want to be unsupportive of those who need support, and so the best thing is not to panic about this, just give it a bit of time because growth will restore the budget equilibrium. The underlying level of the outlays was so tight, around 24 per cent of GDP, it was only the cyclical outlays, like unemployment benefits, which were the problem. But instead of saying let's give the country, the economy and the government a break, Treasury were riding John into the ground.\n\nIf I had taken too much notice of the department through all my years as Treasurer, we would never have had a national superannuation scheme, or dividend imputation the way it is now, or the massive cuts to the company tax rate which I presided over. If you blindly follow Treasury you'll be out on the street very quickly. What you've got to do is see where the right balance for the economy lies. That's the job of ministers. If I have any criticism of John, it was not his motives, but the methodology. He took Treasury's interest to heart to such a degree it derailed the government's ability to manage the debate.\n\n**KOB:** But you'd also have to agree with Dawkins when he said that the old disciplines in the ERC of the Hawke era had gone. His implication is that you weren't as attentive as you should have been.\n\n**PJK:** That's not accurate for this reason. The economy was then coming out of recession. The job of policy was to lift Commonwealth activity, not to cut it. The thing is, in terms of the aggregates, we didn't have the same concentration program for program, but why would we continue doing that after doing it for a decade? We didn't need to. But by the same token, there was no spendthrift behaviour. And you can never underestimate the cost of the native title legislation through 1993, and the toll it took on my time. I was caught up with it for at least three days a week through much of the year. That's the sacrifice one has to make to put in place a social change on that scale.\n\n**KOB:** As you drove to the National Press Club to make your speech on 22 July announcing the tax changes, you told Don Watson in the car that if Dawkins didn't calm down you'd have to knock his block off. I assume you meant that figuratively, not literally.\n\n**PJK:** Basically what Treasury had sold John was that we would have to pay for the tax cuts with a whole lot of increases in indirect taxation. That was a gift to the Opposition, giving the tax cut on one hand and taking it back with the other. They sold him the zeal package and John bought it.\n\nJohn's motives were always good. He tried to do a good thing fundamentally, an earnest thing, to bring the budget more rapidly towards surplus. But in the end what it did was lose the government such altitude, and you can see that in the polls. Our position deteriorated so rapidly that it was economically counterproductive. The Treasury view would have been, oh well, bring on a new Treasurer.\n\n**KOB:** When you announced the changes to the tax cuts in July, the journalists had no inkling of the plans to raise indirect taxes in the budget, but even so you suffered political damage. Geoff Kitney asked whether LAW law had become T\u2013R\u2013I\u2013C\u2013K trick.\n\nJohn Hewson said, 'No one should ever again believe anything the Prime Minister says.' How hard is it to take such political embarrassment on the chin?\n\n**PJK:** I did say quite honestly in the election campaign, if the economy slows down and revenue slows down, we may not pay the full tax cuts but nobody, certainly not the gallery, gave me the benefit of flagging that before the election. But then I couldn't get a line for the tax cuts themselves from the press gallery during the election campaign. Absolutely no help in pointing to the tax cuts, but all detriment in pointing to their alteration.\n\nI said to Don Russell a number of times in the campaign, 'I don't know what I've got to do or say to get anyone to focus on these tax cuts.'\n\nI couldn't get a line for the tax cuts! Not a line. That's why I got barely a line for the warning that I may not pay them. Yet the gallery tried to pretend later I'd won the election, in part, because of the tax cuts. They were terrible.\n\n**KOB:** Where were the other ERC ministers in terms of their political antennae on all these sales tax increases that they would have signed off on?\n\n**PJK:** I can't remember now precisely because of my absences in the Mabo discussions, but I don't think the body of ministers liked the political framework.\n\nPart of the success I had as Treasurer was not just getting the big changes, but selling them, and doing so in a way that the Prime Minister was happy with and could live with. This is the great bond that Bob and I had through those years. He would know that if he gave me a job it would be all politically done and dusted. John was now threatening to upset that for me, and he could only go to a certain point, and I would have had to knock his block off, meaning I'd have to put him in his place.\n\nJohn yielded in the end. We did reach a compromise, but the compromise was most unsatisfactorily portrayed publicly, and after the 1993 Budget I don't think I had any great prospect of winning the 1996 election, so great was the damage.\n\nThe question that should have prevailed in any consideration between John and Treasury was, 'Why is the budget in deficit anyway?'\n\nIt's in deficit because the economy is too weak to push up the revenue, and there are too many people still unemployed, relying on the transfer payments of unemployment benefits. The budget should be there to support them, not ripping the carpet from underneath them.\n\n**KOB:** But even with the indirect tax increases that survived, the budget was still projecting a deficit of $16 billion.\n\n**PJK:** Not a worrying proportion of GDP.\n\n**KOB:** Paul Kelly in _March of Patriots_ asserts that budget was your political death warrant.\n\n**PJK:** That's probably a bit dramatic, but the underlying sense of it is right.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard wrote in his autobiography that it was an outrageous repudiation of your campaign against Hewson in 1993\u2014not only a mangled tax cuts promise, but big indirect tax hikes after attacking Hewson's GST.\n\n**PJK:** Well, it was not smart in the sense that we'd had a good win at the election, we'd won the campaign, but after the budget it seemed the government felt comfortable in repudiating its mandate. Newspoll in the _Australian_ after the budget showed a drop in Labor's primary vote from 41 per cent to 31 per cent. We'd dropped ten percentage points in two weeks. As preferred Prime Minister, I led Hewson 38 per cent to 31 per cent two weeks before the budget. My rating dropped to 27 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** Your old mate Bill Kelty rather succinctly summed it up: 'Paul had said don't vote for a GST, vote for me, and then we increase all these taxes. The budget was a catastrophe.'\n\n**PJK:** The ACTU hated it, as did the labour councils, and so did the public.\n\nI had huge affection for John. He was such a conscientious guy and he'd been through the torment of all the years of the ERC, and I thought, if I can't rely on his judgement, whose can I rely upon? But in the end those important, balanced judgements, I would have been better taking as Prime Minister and Treasurer rather than simply as Prime Minister.\n\n**KOB:** Except that that would have taken a huge and probably unworkable toll on your time.\n\n**PJK:** I know, but then I wouldn't have had the budget outcome that John's budget delivered. That's the point.\n\n**KOB:** John Dawkins was to say later, 'The truth is that Hawke gave Keating as Treasurer more support in Cabinet than Paul gave me.'\n\n**PJK:** That's true only to the extent that John wanted me to support in Cabinet his otherwise broadly unsaleable proposals. My inclination was to back John in all things out of my huge regard for him. But in the end you've got the corporate responsibility of the government and its welfare to think of, which has to come first. When you refer to Hawke's support for me, my retort would be yes, but I didn't give Bob the unadulterated Treasury religion. I gave Bob practical, doable, digestible, saleable measures.\n\nInstead, the whole of Labor's base was in revolt. Here's the _Sydney Morning Herald_ on 31 August:\n\nCaucus forces budget retreat: the government's humiliation increased yesterday with a hostile caucus demanding and getting further concessions to repair the political damage. Participants described the mood as 'mutinous' although the admission by Mr Keating that changes were needed appeared to have headed off any large-scale revolt.\n\n**KOB:** Do you also remember the press conference around that time where the question was asked about the caucus members who'd taken you on and you described them as wounded soldiers who were peeved either because they'd been dropped from the ministry or hadn't been picked for the ministry? Alan Ramsey translated that as you telling them 'up yours', implying it would be 'business as usual from the emperor'. I know you've talked of keeping up a close relationship with caucus, but there were complaints by then that you had become isolated, too caught up in the big policy areas like Mabo and APEC.\n\n**PJK:** There were a number of people spouting that line. I can't remember exactly, but there were a few disappointed ministerial aspirants who were in that group, people who had never made the ministry. And I remember Michael Easson, who was the Secretary of the NSW Labour Council, a member of the Right, calling the budget 'an act of bastardry'. This sort of stuff really fanned the flames.\n\n**KOB:** By this time Labor's primary vote had plunged to 26 per cent against 49 per cent for the Coalition. Hewson had a twenty-point lead as preferred Prime Minister. After the excitement, the euphoria of the true believers' victory, it was gone in less than six months.\n\n**PJK:** The great pity of it was that the government was an exemplary social democratic outfit with all the right balances between reform, consolidation and care. One indifferently constructed budget blew that away.\n\n**KOB:** How do you recover from that? How do you pull the troops back from that?\n\n**PJK:** I did, because by November we were back up to 41 per cent in the polls. By that time the economy was flying along with investment growth at 6 per cent. The headline is 'Keating declares economic victory'. Normal investment growth annually was around 2 per cent. Six per cent was phenomenal, so by the end of 1993 we were back in front, in polling terms.\n\n**KOB:** Even so, John Dawkins had had enough. He'd threatened to quit at a press conference on 21 September over what he saw as lack of support within government ranks as he unveiled his third version of the budget. As Christmas approached he resigned. He walked with you out of the last Cabinet meeting of the year, and in the five-minute walk to your office he told you he was leaving.\n\n**PJK:** It was the last hour on the last day he could practically do it before Christmas. He gave me no inkling. I would have preferred to have seen him weather this particular period and come back out into the sunlight on the other side, which he had more than enough capacity to do, but he decided for reasons best known to himself and without any notice to me, to resign.\n\nI said to him, 'John, don't. Come into the office, let's talk about it.'\n\n'No,' he said, 'that's why I've given you no notice. I don't want to be turned around, because I know if I listen to you long enough I will be.'\n\nSo he'd made his mind up. I received his resignation with great regret and much sadness because by then we'd got the budget through and I thought we faced a much better period going into 1994. I was sorry he was leaving but I then had to make the decision to replace him, and I had no hesitation in giving the job to Ralph Willis.\n\n**KOB:** Even though you were back in front in the polls by the end of the year, voters never forgot the fractured promise of the LAW law tax cuts, did they?\n\n**PJK:** And what was the outcome? The first round was paid in full and paid early. The second round we were forced to postpone, as I'd hinted in the election campaign, and they're the ones Peter Costello and John Howard cancelled when they came into government in 1996. This was the second round of the LAW tax cuts that we decided to convert to a 3 per cent superannuation contribution for every wage earner. We decided to pay them as savings, not as cash, to take their super from 9 to 12 per cent. The people who broke the LAW promise in the end were Peter Costello and John Howard. That is a matter of record.\n\n**KOB:** You can't say they broke a promise they'd never made. It was your promise, not theirs.\n\n**PJK:** But they were the ones who were attacking us for changing the LAW tax cuts. Had they done nothing but simply inherit Ralph Willis's 1995 Budget, everyone's superannuation contribution today would be at 12 per cent as those tax cuts were perpetually paid into people's accounts. So, having made such a song and dance about us reneging on the LAW tax cuts, Howard and Costello then knocked out the 3 per cent super contribution in their first budget. They killed the second LAW tax cut.\nA NEW FOE\u2014BUT REFORM GOES ON\n\nNo one's bulletproof in politics, but for a time in 1994 Paul Keating gave a good impression of it. The headlines through January alternated between great news for the economy and Hewson's ongoing struggles within his own party.\n\nThe stockmarket was at its highest levels since the 1987 crash, and the message was starting to sink in that Australia was going to have a strong recovery without an outbreak of inflation, the magic combination that had evaded governments after the previous two recessions. On 21 January, the _Australian_ reported the Reserve Bank's view that 'the Australian economy has moved up a gear into a strong and sustainable recovery that will bring higher economic growth, more jobs and lower inflation'. For Ralph Willis, the nicest guy in any Cabinet, having previously been robbed of Treasury twice, the stars were finally aligning. One of his first jobs as John Dawkins' replacement was to upgrade the budget forecasts\u2014growth up from 2.75 to 3.5 per cent, inflation down from 3.5 to 2 per cent.\n\nMore bad news for John Hewson came from the tough, ambitious Bronwyn Bishop, who'd set her sights on becoming Australia's Margaret Thatcher, and moving from the Senate to the House of Representatives, Hewson firmly in her sights. As it turned out her ambition wasn't matched by ability and her run fizzled, but not before damage was done. More ominously, John Howard, the self-described Lazarus with a triple bypass, was peeking around the party-room door, allowing himself to dream again.\n\nThe _Australian_ 's front page on 2 February neatly summed up Hewson's misery: 'Bishop leaves way open for Hewson challenge' and 'Economic signs the best for 30 years'.\n\nEven when Keating lost one of his more promising ministers, Alan Griffiths, over allegations that he'd used ALP funds to help support a sandwich shop in which he was a partner, the polls didn't waver. The first Newspoll for the year had Labor's primary vote back in the forties, with Keating leading Hewson by a comfortable ten-point margin as preferred Prime Minister.\n\nThen Prince Charles dropped in for a visit and made it plain he and his mum wouldn't be fussed if Australia became a republic: 'I'm not going to run around in small circles, tear my hair out, boo-hoo and throw a fit on the floor as if somehow, like a spoilt child, your toy's been taken away.' Keating didn't mind that at all.\n\nEven when he lost a second minister, Ros Kelly, within weeks, less for the sin of pork-barrelling marginal Labor electorates than for the politically incompetent way in which she dealt with the ruckus, the Liberals obliged Keating with another internal distraction. From the _Australian_ : 'Howard fuels Liberal tension. Rift with Hewson over policies widens'. Without the Liberal shenanigans, Keating's ruthless use of Parliament in defending Kelly could have cost him quite dearly. When Hewson moved a censure motion over Keating's failure to sack her, Keating orchestrated a wall of noise from his own backbench to seriously disrupt Hewson's speech. When Howard got up to complain about the strategy and Speaker Steve Martin failed to rein it in, he was supported by spontaneous applause in the public gallery. It was a reminder of what many people didn't like about Keating.\n\nAlan Ramsey was characteristically blunt in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ :\n\nWe often think he's Mandrake or Houdini. He thinks he's Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Marco Polo and Genghis Khan all wrapped in one sleek feline package. Since last March the power of the emperor is complete, and he now administers it, often effectively, just as often wilfully, with all the overtones of the street thug that Keating, beneath all that style and clever language and personal brilliance, cannot stop himself from being.\n\nKeating kept flying high with his reform agenda, with headlines again trumpeting his latest breakthrough with the states\u2014by now all but one had conservative governments\u2014on competition policy. In the _Australian_ , 'PM, States in deal to carve up monopolies', and the _Financial Review_ , 'Competition revolution. Canberra to fast track its reforms'.\n\nThen came another headache for Hewson. The former Western Australian Labor Premier, Carmen Lawrence, actually recorded a swing to Labor in the by-election for Dawkins' seat of Fremantle, almost unheard of in mid-term by-elections.\n\nThis was the period in which Keating felt impregnable enough to announce he intended to cut back his Question Time appearances to two a week during parliamentary sessions, the first Prime Minister to do so. In the process, not only was he playing to the Opposition's mantra that he was arrogant, but he was blunting one of his party's most lethal weapons. For all the ups and downs in Keating's political career, there was one constant you could never take from him: his ascendancy in Parliament. But the misgivings of colleagues and advisers fell on deaf ears. The wind was in his sails.\n\nAnd still the momentum kept running Labor's way. Growth surged to 4 per cent, leading the western world, and the OECD declared Australia was in its best shape for a decade. In the mid-March Newspoll, Labor's primary vote jumped to a commanding 45 per cent and Keating had opened up a 21-point gap on Hewson in personal approval, 46 to 25. After four years, the Opposition Leader was on borrowed time.\n\nPerhaps this would have been a good time for Keating to revise his hostility to the press gallery. He had further reforms in mind, somewhat more inclusive ones like tackling long-term unemployment, and a supportive media was a damn sight better than a resentful one.\n\nAs Don Watson observed in _Bleeding Heart_ , 'Paul Keating would always be Paul Keating, which meant extended smooth sailing was out of the question.' But the gallery had comprehensively written him off in the 1993 election and as Watson also wrote, 'Nothing in his nature would allow him to forgive; even when it was clear that his contempt only made their spite and revenge more certain.'\n\nIn May 1994, Hewson finally tumbled\u2014not to Bishop or Howard\u2014but to the cherry-cheeked son of the Adelaide Liberal establishment, Alexander Downer. He'd stayed out of trouble as Hewson's new Shadow Treasurer, but there's nothing more exposed in politics than leadership.\n\nThe cartoonist Bill Leak summed it up in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ that week. He drew Keating as a dentist in his surgery doorway with bloodied white coat, calling 'Next!' Hewson's head is in a rubbish bin by the door, and Downer looks on as an unsuspecting and cheery Billy Bunter schoolboy.\n\nBut that's not quite the way it ran in the early weeks of Downer's leadership. Teaming up with another relatively untried young Turk Peter Costello, Downer soon rocketed to the top of the polls, taking his party with him. The public reaction had little to do with the so-called Liberal Dream Team, and everything to do with the fact that Downer was neither Keating nor Hewson.\n\nIt was now close to mid-term in the electoral cycle and once again Keating had slipped down the mountain. The biggest question would be whether he retained the interest to make yet another effort to claw his way back up to the top. On the one hand he'd always treated Downer with amused disdain and found him easy sport in Parliament; on the other hand the economy was now throwing up a rather ominous new hurdle. Growth was galloping along so strongly that, although inflation remained low, the Reserve Bank Governor, Bernie Fraser, was threatening to put interest rates up again to nail inflation down for the future.\n\nIt was against this backdrop that Keating considered giving the game away, becoming only the second postwar Prime Minister to leave on his own terms.\n\n**KOB:** You must have felt real relief going into 1994 as the good economic figures started to flow. And after all the anger from the 1993 Budget you had the calm and under-rated Ralph Willis as your new Treasurer, although no sooner was growth up than you had to start worrying about containing it. The _Herald_ 's headline at the time: 'Rates fear as growth soars'.\n\n**PJK:** The economy started to come good with a vengeance in 1994. The _Financial Review_ carried a headline on 6 January: 'Investors scramble for shares'. The Reserve Bank in January had hailed a strong recovery and inflation came out at 1.9 per cent for the year. In February the stockmarket hit a record high. Here's another _Fin Review_ headline: 'Economy runs hot, inflation falls flat' and the 1993\u201394 growth forecast was now revised up to 4 per cent.\n\nIn political terms we were back on top. On 1 February, the _Age_ reported Labor's primary vote up to 43 per cent, which put us well in front in two-party preferred terms and I led Hewson as preferred Prime Minister by 38 per cent to 28 per cent.\n\n**KOB:** I guess it's always good to be in front but once again this reflected enormous volatility in the electorate, didn't it?\n\n**PJK:** Volatile, that's true. But whether I was up or down in the polls I was still relentlessly pressing on with reform. Unemployment had finally started coming down but long-term unemployment was a black mark on the nation. In the labour market, unemployment is like a pool of water. As people fall in, if they're adaptable enough or lucky enough, they swim across it and get to the other side and back into employment. But other people get stuck in the pool and have to be helped to the other side. You can't do that just by wishing them well. You've actually got to make the effort to help them manage their life back to employment.\n\nA lot of traditional blue-collar jobs were disappearing. I could see that we would have a pool of long-term unemployed people as a consequence of structural reform and the recession. No matter how much we were seeking to lift employment growth and people were finding jobs, it wasn't a neat equation. The long-term unemployed were left out, and I regarded this as a social tragedy. I wanted to do something about it, so I asked Michael Keating and the department to produce a policy paper to come up with some answers.\n\nI was disappointed with the departmental drafts; something got lost in the movement between departments. It seemed to have developed into a story of defeat rather than hope. The drafts didn't have the flavour and essence of what I was after. In the end, in large part, I constructed the Cabinet submission myself and broadly wrote a lot of the explanatory memorandum from the Lodge. This was to be Australia's first substantial statement on employment in 50 years.\n\nWhen the Prime Minister has to construct Cabinet submissions and personally write the public presentation, it says something about the bureaucracy.\n\nI had Don Watson sitting by the fax machine in his Parliament House office as I fed material through from my office at the Lodge where I could have peace and quiet. Because I had the carriage of the whole idea in Cabinet, I had in my head the whole sense of the Cabinet discussion and the whole development of the policy, which no speechwriter could ever have. So I told Watson I would write the public service memoranda myself and that that could inform the speech. It took me about three or four days to do it.\n\n**KOB:** What does that say about your style of leadership? You seem to have been very much an interventionist within portfolios. Bob Hawke had an extremely talented ministry, but he also gave them the room to run their own portfolios. Here you were personally negotiating Mabo, personally shepherding the world's most powerful leaders into a new regional forum and, as you say, effectively writing a new national employment policy blueprint.\n\n**PJK:** As Prime Minister, Bob was a delegator, and that's okay, but he also had me to superintend the whole policy framework and identify the broad philosophical directions. Being a delegator is great if you have someone to delegate to. I still had a very strong team of ministers but I didn't have someone fulfilling the role I had done for Bob. I was a different sort of Prime Minister from Bob, but in a sense, in the circumstances, I was obliged to be.\n\nWe brought out the _Working Nation_ white paper, we took some comments from the community, refined the policy and then I announced a four-year $6.5 billion package targeting unemployment, $4.8 billion of which was for the long-term unemployed. They were the centrepiece, but it was a package addressed to the whole complex challenge of unemployment. I said in a speech to the Press Club the next day that where the 1945 white paper on unemployment sought to help a million service people to demobilise, _Working Nation_ would seek to remobilise a million unemployed.\n\nThe essence of _Working Nation_ was a kind of contract that we would offer the long-term unemployed a job place and a job subsidy providing they took the work. They couldn't turn their nose up at it. This was a new activist model, and I think we had one case manager for every 24 people. A case manager would get to know each person in their pool, and would stay in close touch with their progress, including talking with their employer. Remarkably, around 70 per cent of those people maintained their jobs at the end of the subsidy period.\n\n**KOB:** One of your very early mentors, the political and economic journalist Max Walsh, described _Working Nation_ as 'Field of dreams management, a dangerous road paved with good intentions'. He was recognising the irony that Keating the budget cutter, the rationalist reformer, was now Keating the Keynesian spender, Keating the deficit man.\n\n**PJK:** More than that: Keating with a heart, with a Labor heart. You could never expect the _Financial Review_ editor to proselytise with a Labor heart. You can expect them to talk about all sorts of things about economic reform and the budget balance but not the very real social cost of these kinds of changes. Newspapers like the _Financial Review_ would always proselytise in favour of economic change and structural adjustment, but not similarly in favour of policies to support the people hurt through the adjustment process, the real people at the end of the queue. We took the view that if we were to inflict those kinds of changes on the economy, and desirably we were, we then had to pick up those people who had taken the butt end of the change.\n\n**KOB:** I can remember asking at the time you announced the policy how you could guarantee employers wouldn't just cynically let the person go after the subsidy ran out and replace them with a new person and a new subsidy.\n\n**PJK:** We anticipated that by offering employers a $500 payment to keep the job compact employee on for at least three months after the subsidy had ended and in its first two years it ran very successfully. For 70 per cent of people to stay in the job was hugely successful, a ground-breaking answer to a worldwide problem.\n\n_Working Nation_ was a world first. The Blair Government picked up the essence of it in Britain in 1997 and ran with it. That wouldn't have happened if it had not been seen to have worked. It's a tremendous statement when the country says to people who've been out of work for six to twelve months, 'We are interested in you, and we will assign someone to you who will take a personal interest in your retraining and recommend a job subsidy go with you.'\n\nIt remains one of the things I was most proud of and I think it behoves a country to do things of this kind in the circumstances. The _Working Nation_ program was one of the first casualties of the first Costello budget. The Howard Government walked away from _Working Nation_ , which was a great pity because rarely has a government done anything as kindly or as conscientious as this.\n\n**KOB:** It was also in May that John Hewson finally toppled from what was left of his leadership pedestal. The rumblings had been building through the year. There was a sense of the inevitable. Alexander Downer was the surprise replacement, but only because Andrew Peacock had worked very hard to keep John Howard out. Were you surprised to see the sudden elevation of Alexander Downer? It was inexplicable to many in the gallery.\n\n**PJK:** Yes. Although it was obvious that the Coalition had to replace Hewson, I was surprised that they would choose Downer, of all people. I'd always treated him as a figure of fun so when he got the job, I thought I would very quickly get on top of him. I thought, well, the most dangerous guy for me has actually gone, things will get easier.\n\n**KOB:** Peter Costello had accepted the deputy's job, but probably could have had the leadership if he'd chosen to go for it. Could you understand his judgement?\n\n**PJK:** No, I couldn't understand it, because I thought he was the person I would most likely face in the end. In a way I felt sorry for Peter Costello on that occasion because I thought he'd either knocked himself out of the ring or he'd been advised not to have a go. He had the chance but he didn't step up to the plate. Perhaps it was symptomatic of what came later when Howard stayed on but Costello wouldn't seize his moment.\n\n**KOB:** Instead they were marketed as the Dream Team, making a virtue of the team combination rather than Downer standing alone as a strong leader. But even allowing for the fact that he did not have a big public profile or leadership recognition in the polls, public opinion swung very strongly behind him\u2014arguably a message of anyone but Keating.\n\n**PJK:** I think after you've been on your feet making the kind of changes I'd been making for eleven years, and after the horror budget of the previous year, you had an inkling that they would consider anybody else if they thought they could get away with it. So Downer appeared and straightaway his vote went up and ours went down. It was another comment on the state of the Coalition, by the way, that Hewson only lost by 43 to 36, a matter of only four votes.\n\n**KOB:** By now it's mid-year. Some of your colleagues and the journalists are starting to speculate that you seem bored. Paul Kelly in _March of Patriots_ quotes your foreign policy adviser, Allan Gyngell, as saying:\n\nThe longer he went, the more tedious Paul found politics and the more focused he became on policy\u2014whether it was Mabo or APEC, Indonesia or 'super'. The political staffers would get furious because they wanted him at the Dubbo RSL, but Paul's fascination, more and more, became policy ideas.\n\nWould you agree broadly with that?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I think that's right. In the end I was only about the changes. It's hard to tell people this today, but the whole point of a public life is public change. It's about the policy shifts. If you allow the tedium of the daily political rituals to overtake you, then the whole impetus for the policy changes begins to wane. If you look at the years I was Prime Minister, from 1991 to 1996, I never lost a moment in terms of the changes. Not a moment. Even coming up to the end, I locked away the big security treaty with President Suharto just before the election. I never lost a moment in policy terms, so the criticism about my prime ministership substantially is that I should have been more political. I used to remind people I did win the fifth election.\n\n**KOB:** And yet you were such a political animal and you had earlier devoted so much time to getting the politics right. On a trip to Europe in June 1994, Tony Wright wrote in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ about the conversation you had with the travelling journalists over drinks at the ambassador's residence in Paris:\n\nAt one point Keating was asked about his apparent lack of interest in politics in recent times. He had arranged it so he spent less time in Question Time, and when he was there he sometimes looked distant, peering off into space.\n\n'Oh, that,' said Keating, 'that's my Jack Benny look.'\n\nWhat was your Jack Benny look?\n\n**PJK:** Jack Benny had a particular look. He'd be talking with somebody and he'd look away, almost to say, 'Look what I've got here.' That was my look of confected disdain. It wasn't really disdain. I'd like to say I'd sometimes have this look, a bit like a rattlesnake dozing, with an eye on some piece of prey. But I was always ready to strike.\n\nI remember President Mitterrand had an answer to a similar question once which I much admired. A journalist said, 'Monsieur le President, you seem more relaxed these days, less on your game.'\n\nMitterand said, 'Yes, I'm like a cat, but I still have my claws.'\n\nWell, I was a bit like a cat, and I definitely had my claws.\n\nBut the reason I reduced my presence in Question Times was only to do with policy, because Question Time is such a chronic disruption to the daily tasks. If you've got a big reform program running it's just so hard to keep doing the kabuki show.\n\n**KOB:** By the same token, you were your party's best weapon in that Parliament and you were reducing the capacity of that weapon. You've always talked about the importance of having the psychological edge in the Parliament. Wasn't that an irritation you should have been prepared to bear?\n\n**PJK:** As it turned out, I think I made the wrong judgement. If I had my time over again, I wouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have given them the free kick, just grinned and borne it, but every time I went into Parliament it was a distraction from the main game. On non-Question Time days, I used to get so much done.\n\n**KOB:** Tony Wright continued in that piece in the _Herald_ : 'Pressed on his alleged boredom, Keating declared, \"Look, I'm sick of day-to-day politics, I'm sick of the Opposition, I'm sick of you lot. What I'm about is kicking the big goals.\" Here he pretended to kick a football. \"And the important thing to remember is I don't give up.\"'\n\nI assume that was an accurate reflection of how you felt, sick of day-to-day politics?\n\n**PJK:** I'd won the election I was not supposed to win, and some of the advice I was getting was to slow the pace and give more time to the politics. My judgement always was that you had a limited time in public life and that you didn't have a second to lose. These very important changes like _Working Nation_ , the republic, the foreign policy initiatives all demanded time through 1994. The idea that I should become a Neville Wran figure living off the front page of the _Daily Telegraph_ with a 24-hour spin cycle\u2014I just couldn't do it.\n\nNo matter how cleverly I played it, I was up against the odds of winning a sixth election\u2014sixteen straight years of Labor\u2014so the risk was always there. Why compromise my commitment to policy to make token appearances in shopping malls or at vacuous doorstops?\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson says around this time you also discussed giving it all away with a handful of close confidantes. The Kerry Packer lobbyist, Peter Barron, urged you to do a Wran and leave at the top of your game. Geoff Walsh, who had been Bob Hawke's media adviser and was now on your team, thought you should go, that you'd struggle to win the next election. How close did you come to taking their advice?\n\n**PJK:** Not at all close, but they did advise that and I took their advice both carefully and kindly. They meant well.\n\n**KOB:** But hadn't you canvassed their views? Wasn't this playing on your mind?\n\n**PJK:** No, this just happens in the course of friendships. I think both Peter Barron and Geoff Walsh suggested to me that I should go at the end of November that year. Kim Beazley was Deputy Prime Minister and I don't want to diminish Kim in saying this because he was a very capable minister, but there was nobody in Labor at that time with quite the fighting spirit or the arraignment of power against the Coalition that I had. So without wanting to sound like Bob, saying that he's the only one who could win an election ever, I still thought I was a better chance of winning in 1996 than anyone else.\n\n**KOB:** Very few political leaders in this country over more than a century have chosen the timing of their own departure. Menzies was one of a tiny handful. Did wanting to choose your own timing rather than having it decided for you feature in your thinking at all?\n\n**PJK:** I don't think it matters. What matters is what you do with the time given to you. You've got to be a fighting unit to the end. That's my belief.\n\n**KOB:** It was through this period that Bob Hawke released his autobiography\u2014in August 1994\u2014and he didn't really try to hide his feelings towards you, did he? Did that get through your defences?\n\n**PJK:** No, but it did damage and the party disowned him as a consequence. It was a dreadful, sleazy attack on me. He showed no judgement, no decency and no loyalty to the party. And every bit of jealousy that Bob ever held, and there was much of that, he blurted out in that poorly written book.\n\n**KOB:** You don't think he would have felt he didn't owe you loyalty anymore, that you'd knocked him over?\n\n**PJK:** I had covered for Bob for six years. Who does that for any Prime Minister? Tony Wright covered Bob's book launch in the _Herald_ on 17 August and quoted Hawke saying that I was in poor physical and mental condition and buckled under pressure. On the top of the newspaper on the day in question, which is now in the National Archive, I wrote, 'The truth is that from the moment Hawke learned that Rosslyn had been injecting herself with drugs, he mentally collapsed. He went politically comatose. It was the same semi-comatose state that led him to commit us to an ill-conceived tax summit on a radio station in Perth during the 1984 election campaign. I carried him on my back for years; Hogg and Garnaut _et al._ simply smothered for him.'\n\nNow, that's very uncomplimentary to Bob, but it's completely true.\n\n**KOB:** In his book he was critical of your response when he asked your advice on whether Australia should contribute to the coalition America was putting together for the first Gulf War after Iraq invaded Kuwait in early 1991. He said you responded, 'What's America ever done for us?'\n\n**PJK:** As I said a day or two later in 1994, this was a complete lie, and it's easy to illustrate why. There are two contradictory accounts on the public record as to what I was supposed to have said at that meeting, both of which could be attributed to Bob, and both wrong.\n\nThe first account was written in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ a little while after the meeting saying that I had supported immediate and strong action against Saddam Hussein. That was wrong, but it was a leak that must have come from Hawke's office, and it subsequently came back to me that he had told people on the Left of the party that I was a warmonger. I was all about supporting the UN and going after Saddam Hussein.\n\nThree years later in his book he had a completely different account of the same meeting in early 1991. That I didn't support the United States, that I queried what America had ever done for us, and that John Button and I had to be dragged to the decision to make a commitment to America. Button shot that down when he volunteered that it was he who had asked what America had ever done for Australia, not me.\n\nWhat actually happened was this: I was Deputy Prime Minister by then and Bob called me to a meeting about the flashpoint in the Middle East. Michael Duffy was there as acting Foreign Minister and I think Hugh White was there as Bob's defence adviser.\n\nBob as usual was slumped behind his desk and said in those sort of half-finished sentences that characterised his conversations: 'Paul, we might get a call from the President overnight, and we probably have to make a decision about whether we will participate in this military exercise in Iraq.'\n\nI said, 'Well, this is my view: I don't really believe in supranational bodies like the UN, where sovereignty is passed across to an international body. It rarely works, and the vetoes in the Security Council of the United Nations have more or less rendered it impotent on the big issues.'\n\nI said, 'If you were really brutal about the UN you would say it's a lemon. But the Cold War has just finished and here is Saddam Hussein marching across borders into Kuwait, a smaller state, and the United Nations for the first time in the postwar years without the Soviet veto, is putting its hand up to say, \"Let's organise a force and let's deal with this incursion.\" If the United States under the leadership of George Herbert Bush is prepared to lead a coalition of forces which carry a mandate from the United Nations, I can't see why we wouldn't support them.'\n\nHe said, 'So you would support them, is that what you're saying?'\n\nI said, 'Yes, Bob, I would support them, but let me ask you some questions\u2014what about your mate, Mulroney in Canada, where is he?'\n\n'Oh well,' he said, 'I had a conversation with Mulroney and he's thinking about it.'\n\nI said, 'What about John Major?'\n\nHe said, 'Oh, I think he's in the same boat.'\n\nI said, 'So the natural allies, the larger countries, they're not going to do much, right? What I think we should do is to say we'll support the United States and the Coalition, but if we get in early and quickly our entry price will be low. They'll want the moral support rather than the material support or the equipment.'\n\nSo I said, 'I understand from the briefing we've got a frigate in Aden and a tanker in the Middle East somewhere. Why don't we put the tanker and the frigate up the top of the Gulf and call it quits?'\n\nBob then asked whether I thought we should commit planes.\n\nI said, 'No, Bob, no planes. I've told you what I think the terms should be: two ships up the top of the Gulf. We put our hand up early, no troops, no planes.'\n\nThat is an accurate recount of what I said at the Gulf War meeting with Hawke. I wrote on the _Sydney Morning Herald_ story when it came out: 'This story was leaked from Hawke's office'. Hawke then called a second, wider meeting, and it was at that meeting that John Button asked what America had done for us.\n\nWhen the full bitchiness of the book became evident, even Bob's erstwhile supporters in the party rounded on him. Here are some of the published comments. Howe said, 'Frankly in the 1990s he's not there; Paul Keating is there.' Bob Collins commented that autobiographies were a personal arrogance. Barry Jones said there's a feeling of disappointment and regret. The headline in the _Age_ : 'The ALP rounds on Hawke'.\n\nThen Creighton Burns in the _Age_ writes a piece called 'Hawke's bitter fruit', and the _Telegraph Mirror_ in Sydney on 16 August has a front-page headline with pictures of Jones, Richardson, Bob McMullan, Howe, Collins and Con Sciacca saying, 'Hawke cast adrift, deserted by old allies.'\n\nSo he did himself enormous harm by showing not a shred of loyalty to the party that had given him the prime ministership.\n\n**KOB:** Distracting though that might have been, you had bigger problems looming on the economic front. Growth was galloping now; in fact, growth for the September quarter pushed the annual rate to 6.4 per cent, the highest growth since 1985. That should have been great news but it carried implications for inflation. Bernie Fraser put interest rates up in August, October and December of 1994 by a total of 2.75 percentage points, all of which you were forced to defend. It was the first rise in rates since the height of the recession, and must have brought back bad memories for a lot of people.\n\n**PJK:** There were two things about that. I was central to the development of an independent Reserve Bank, and both Bernie Fraser and I did not want to see inflationary expectations rise again. So it was right for the newly independent Governor of the Reserve Bank to put his hand up to say, 'Sorry, but we've got to put a ceiling on inflation. We can't let the genie out of the bottle again after ten years of pain and effort.'\n\nI could have squeezed Bernie, rung him and argued the case to minimise our political pain, but in the end I wanted to break inflationary expectations, as did he, and while it was absolutely bad for me, it was completely right for the country.\n\nI was prepared to live with that decision, but it was the Keating economic policy that had broken the back of inflation along with the Reserve Bank\u2014the Accord, the tax cuts in lieu of wage increases, the high interest rates through 1988\u201389, which I encouraged and had to bear and took responsibility for. More than any other public figure, in partnership with Bill Kelty, I had the breaking of inflation notched on to my belt. I was happy to join Bernie Fraser in nailing inflationary expectations.\n\n**KOB:** But didn't you have a meeting with Bernie Fraser at the Lodge where you argued for less than the 1 per cent rise he intended in August, which persuaded him to ease that first increase back to 0.75 percentage points?\n\n**PJK:** One per cent was a big hit. Bernie accepted the argument for moderating that first rise slightly. I couldn't have forced that decision on him but I did have the right to make the argument.\n\n**KOB:** You must still have winced when it happened.\n\n**PJK:** Those three rises hurt me because John Howard seized on them to talk about five minutes of economic sunlight when he replaced Alexander Downer as Coalition leader in 1995. But what really cost me in the end was that Bernie and the Reserve Bank didn't lower the rates before the 1996 election. By then it was clear that short-term influences on the CPI had gone, and that underlying inflation remained modest with wage claims well and truly in check, so the right thing to have done in economic terms\u2014never mind the politics\u2014would have been to start cutting the rate in 1995.\n\nKelty and I smashed inflation. I had the Reserve Bank put the rates up and I took responsibility for the recession. That's what broke inflation. By the end of 1995, the Keating Government had earned the right to see interest rates coming down. Certainly, in early 1996. But Bernie and the bank thought it would be 'political' to touch them before the poll. As a consequence, the bank left the rates untouched through the 1996 election, giving no indication as to their direction.\n\nThe 'reward' of lower rates was delivered by the bank, to of all people, Peter Costello on 1 August 1996. Imagine Costello or the Liberal Party being able to break Australian inflation. They could barely spell it, much less understand it. Yet the Reserve Bank put the low interest rate crown on Peter Costello's head twenty weeks after he took the job. Institutions like the Reserve Bank and the Treasury treat their masters with a mix of inappreciation and indifference, including those who have done things beyond their wildest dreams.\n\nThe end result of that sustained effort over the life of the Hawke and Keating Governments, Kerry, is 24 years of low inflationary growth. That represents a big lift to the Australian economy over a very long period of time. In 1994 we did crack the inflationary expectation nut. We might have used a sledgehammer to crack the nut, and I fear that Bernie might have cracked my nut too.\n\n**KOB:** He has said since 'The notion that it betrayed Keating is one that I found hurtful. Paul has had no more staunch defender than me.' All three interest rate increases were supported by the government.\n\n**PJK:** Bernie Fraser had a very positive view about the Accord and the government I led and served as Treasurer and he was an extremely conscientious public servant. There's no doubt about that, but I believe he was too slow bringing the rates down in 1990 and the same in 1995.\nCREATIVE NATION\n\nIt took Alexander Downer fewer than three months of very ordinary leadership to squander his substantial lead over Paul Keating in the polls. In August 1994, after one of the briefest political honeymoons in Australian history, particularly after an error-strewn trip through the Northern Territory's Indigenous communities, Downer's approval rating slumped seventeen points. For the first time Paul Keating moved ahead of him as preferred Prime Minister.\n\nDowner's stocks sank even lower a few weeks later when he suggested that the recently released party policy on domestic violence\u2014under the banner of a broader policy manifesto called the 'Things That Matter'\u2014could alternatively be called the 'Things That Batter'. He managed to send up his own party policy\u2014never a good idea if you want to be taken seriously as a fledgling leader\u2014and outraged everyone in the country who cared about domestic violence. The leader of the Dream Team had become the Liberal Party's worst nightmare.\n\nAt that point Keating could be forgiven for feeling pretty good about his position. Not only had he won the unwinnable election, he'd now seen John Hewson off, and must have been looking on Alexander Downer as an unexpected gift from the Gods.\n\nIt was in this climate that Keating added the arts to his policy ambitions. Given the number of pies he had his finger in as Treasurer it was hardly surprising that he would be an interventionist Prime Minister across the policy spectrum, and almost nowhere was he more opinionated or more passionate than on the arts. In putting _Creative Nation_ together with his Arts Minister, Michael Lee, a process that had begun early in the year with Lee's predecessor Bob McMullan, he again sought to prod Australians to reflect on the kind of country Australia was or should aspire to be.\n\n'It is very much an attempt,' Keating said, launching the document on 30 October 1994, 'to lay the foundations of a new era, to pull the threads of our national life together to ride the waves of global change and create our own. I hope this will be the day we said goodbye to our postcolonial era, to the dark days of our cultural cringe.'\n\nAs well as a $250 million boost to funding for cultural institutions, the report also linked the policy to economic goals. It defined culture as 'that which gives us a sense of ourselves' and sought to break down some of the elitism attached to the traditional arts, stressing its commitment to funding projects reflecting cultural diversity. It argued that culture created wealth, employed 336,000 Australians, generated $13 billion a year and made an essential contribution to innovation, marketing and design. One-third of the $250 million went to support information and multimedia entertainment services. This was the first government recognition of the information superhighway\u2014the internet age.\n\nThe seeds for the digital and multimedia aspects of the arts package were sown in February that year in conversation with Bill Gates and Microsoft's Australian director of advanced technology, Daniel Petre. Microsoft was then the unchallenged giant of the digital age. Petre subsequently told Mike Gordon for the _Weekend Australian_ that Gates had remarked to Petre as they walked away from the meeting that Keating was one of the smartest leaders he had met, 'and Bill meets them all and he doesn't give compliments lightly'. Keating apparently had impressed them both with his 'big vision' and conviction that the new multimedia could serve two goals if handled properly: 'It could place Australia at the leading edge of the information revolution, and protect and promote the nation's cultural identity.' Hence Keating's determination to marry the artistic with the economic.\n\n_Creative Nation_ had Keating's fingerprints all over it. As Treasurer he had been inspired to create generous creative fellowships to support talented mid-career artists, writers and performers who were struggling to fund their own work, after discovering the brilliant pianist Geoffrey Tozer supported himself on $9000 a year as a piano teacher. Tozer was one of the first recipients.\n\nAs Prime Minister he was no different. On 8 October Anne Davies wrote in the _Sydney Morning Herald_ that Keating had set the cat among the pigeons at a Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert when he remarked that Australia's orchestras would be forever trapped in mediocrity while ever they were run by the ABC. Released from those bonds, they might have a chance to become world class. Eighteen days later that's exactly what happened, as part of _Creative Nation_. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was untethered from the ABC and given $7 million in new funding to increase the number of players to the international standard of 110, increase salaries, provide more for world-renowned guests and allow for more touring and recording activities.\n\nIf this was a political document, as some inevitably claimed, its merit in that regard was dubious because the post-1996 critics in his own party argued that his 'obsession' with policies such as Mabo, the republic and the arts delivered few votes and may have even lost some, while diverting Keating from issues far closer to the hip pocket of the electorate rather than appealing to the heart or the imagination. But to this day Keating continues to argue it is the job of the leader to paint the nation on a big canvas, with all the parts coming together to tell a complete story.\n\nHe told me on _Lateline_ on the night he released _Creative Nation_ that 'these are strands of our national life that one looks at, whether it is fidelity to the unemployed, whether it is a focus on our creativity and our culture, whether it is on the truth of Mabo, whether it is on the shift to Asia with APEC, it's plaiting the strands into a whole. So, I see this as an important strand in the rope of Australia'.\n\nBut the _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's front page the next day reflected the two sides of Keating's political coin at that point: the main headline read 'Keating's $252 million big picture', and immediately below, 'Spending surge signals 1% interest rate rise'.\n\nThe vision, and the reality.\n\nPaul Kelly subsequently wrote in _March of Patriots_ that 'Keating's dilemma can be precisely stated\u2014he wanted his prime ministership to be defined by a transformed national identity but this quest lacked grass-roots electoral backing. He was unable to resolve this conundrum.'\n\n**KOB:** Michael Lee was the Minister for Communication and the Arts when _Creative Nation_ was launched, but how much of that document came from you?\n\n**PJK:** Well, a large part of it was me because I always believed the arts were central to a society like ours and that a good society is able to look at itself in the mirror, know what it is and who it is. I think the arts provide this kind of reflection and, more than that, the fantasy of creativity and imagination. These acts are purely creative and not derivative.\n\nYou can say science is a derived art, in that we are adding to an existing bank of knowledge by further exploration. But a Mahler symphony never existed before Mahler created it. It began and ended with Mahler. It's purely an artistic creation, purely an act of creativity. So the creativity of the arts and also the performance within the arts, where we try to get near the sublime, were things I always thought the country needed and was entitled to.\n\nI could also see the digital economy coming. And even though the internet was not a name that existed in the _Macquarie Dictionary_ at that time, you could see the facilitation of digital technology and microprocessing. These were the two things that drove _Creative Nation_ , and in Michael Lee I had a good and willing minister.\n\n**KOB:** The website the _Conversation_ wrote in a feature on _Creative Nation_ 's twentieth anniversary last year that it was 'the first Commonwealth cultural policy document in Australia's history'. What does that say about how we, as a nation, up to that point, valued our arts and culture? I know Gough had had a crack at it, and Gorton too, but what does that say, if this was the first broad cultural policy document in our history?\n\n**PJK:** It says there's something wrong with us, that's what it says. You need to have emotional experiences with the arts to engender the kind of commitment I had to them. But once you have it, once you put your foot on the gold seam, it pulls you along with such fantasy and reward that you want to share it with the country. These are not pleasures or secrets one should keep, but rather disseminate. And it didn't matter for me what it was.\n\nI remember being invited to a dance performance for Graeme Murphy's fortieth birthday at the Sydney Dance Company. He had choreographed a ballet to the music of Shimanovsky. It was phenomenal: the mind-boggling cleverness of the choreography, not just the quality of the dancing.\n\nI asked Graeme if the event was recorded and he said no.\n\nI said, 'That is really tragic.'\n\nSo I rang Nick Shehadie, the SBS Chairman, because you couldn't get the ABC to do anything quickly, and I said, 'Nick, I want you to do me a bit of a favour.'\n\nHe said, 'What's that, PM?'\n\nI explained what would be lost to the arts if the ballet went unrecorded and said, 'I wonder whether you guys could take two or three cameras down and record it for posterity.'\n\nHe called me back a few days later and said it could be done but not within the existing SBS budget.\n\nI said, 'What are the staff estimating it might cost?'\n\nHe said, 'About $30,000.'\n\nSo I said to Don Russell, send SBS the $30,000 and we'll have this recorded, and it was. This is the fascination with the sublime, or getting close to it, that only the arts really deliver. And I always wanted the whole country to have the chance to experience those feelings.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard said in his memoir that, 'To be a successful political leader you've got to identify with a certain strand or current in Australian life.'\n\nHe could never work out which strand to identify you with. He was talking about the kind of cultural nerve that political leaders tap into. Hawke loved his horse-racing, for instance. Howard loved his cricket. You seemed to have absolutely no passion for sport. Do you think any of that really mattered?\n\n**PJK:** I don't think it mattered, no. I actually had some passion for sport but it was not particularly publicised. I wasn't engaged by rugby or rugby league although I had some interest in Australian rules. I used to sit through all the main heavyweight boxing title matches and always watched Wimbledon from beginning to end.\n\nAs a young man I was a competitive swimmer in the shallow end of the Olympic hopefuls, let me put it that way, so I always had a natural interest in sport. But Patrick White struck a chord with me when he said that sport had addled the Australian consciousness. I felt there was a real risk that sport was addling the consciousness at the expense of other things of real value in our culture. I found myself gravitating to the spiritual uplift of things like music, dance and theatre and writing, areas of Australia that I thought were too often forgotten, certainly not preferred by government. And I tried to lift those things up rather than being simply another cricket tragic or another rugby league tragic.\n\nI wanted to do and say some important things about the arts, particularly in the context of the coming digital age, and I offered, I think, $250 million of extra funding. For the arts that was a lot of money for the major companies who operated on very tight budgets, maybe the equivalent today of $500 to $600 million.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson describes how, right on the deadline to finish the _Creative Nation_ statement, it was sent to you at the Lodge late at night. This is the old fax machine again, I guess.\n\nWatson wrote: 'At 1.30 in the morning he phoned me back and read out to me a long section on the new media, which he had just written. \"With the information highway,\" it said, \"we have crossed the technological Rubicon.\"'\n\nWatson wrote, 'No one in any office or department could've written the section better.'\n\nCan you remember that?\n\n**PJK:** Yes, I can vaguely remember it because I wrote a lot of these statements myself and with Watson. At that stage, Kerry, the internet was in its infancy but people were just starting to find their way gingerly around it and this was a revolutionary development in the digital age. So a large part of the _Creative Nation_ spending was actually targeted to steer the artistic institutions in the direction of those digital formats. Seems trite to say today. We tried to encourage by particular funding initiatives, particular companies to do particular things.\n\nThese days the internet is simply part of life, like the oxygen we breathe. I thought then we could reach a point where the digital technology would underwrite a new creativity, and if we were early and quick about it, we would be in there at the beginning. That's what encouraged me into it. If you look at George Miller's film _Happy Feet_ or no doubt at his current production, _Fury Road_ , all this microprocessing expands the horizons of all creativity.\n\n_Creative Nation_ had two strands. One was a focus on new prospects in the digital age. The other was financial support for and refurbishment of the traditional artistic institutions.\n\nOne of the things I personally did was to take the Sydney Symphony Orchestra out of the ABC. Australia, like a lot of countries, had radio orchestras in each of the states, but in Australia they'd become the happy hunting ground of the ABC musicians' club. It meant a kind of equalisation of standards had developed across the country, whereas what we needed to do was reach up and produce an international standard that the old model wouldn't allow.\n\nThe end result is that we've since seen the Sydney Symphony Orchestra develop to a point where it's as good as any orchestra in the world. Not long after, it was followed by Melbourne. It was achieved with a funding boost of about 25 per cent. Without that kind of initiative from the government with direct patronage from the Prime Minister I don't think these things would have happened.\n\n**KOB:** A bit Medici-like, don't you think? The sort of old-style patronage of the arts like Renaissance Florence, but on a national landscape. Was that good policy for the nation or personal indulgence?\n\n**PJK:** This is a country that will never be able to fully support a flourishing arts community on a purely commercial model. We just don't have the scale, the critical mass. The state of the arts in a country goes to the heart of what a nation is. There's a great talent bank out there but only a small percentage will rise to the top without well-funded support from government, and you would never know what we'd deprive ourselves of as a nation in the process.\n\n**KOB:** Can I get a sense of how much influence you had on arts policy through all those Labor years, even when you were Treasurer? Were you always a part of that discussion?\n\n**PJK:** I was always a part of that discussion and I'd always kick it along. Donald McDonald came to me a couple of times wearing his Opera Australia hat before he went to the ABC, and he said, 'Treasurer, the Australian Opera is still losing money on the orchestra, which is in Melbourne. We've cut back and cut back, and we're still losing.'\n\nHere was an arts administrator, trying to do the right thing, trying to give the country a lift in the productions of the Australian opera. And yet the accounting imperative is on him, trying to make the numbers work with the costs of the orchestra for the whole thing for the year.\n\nI said to him one year, 'OK, Donald, give me the bad news, what do you need?' I think he said $250,000. So I just gave him the $250,000.\n\nThe same happened with Graeme Murphy and the Sydney Dance Company. One year he was about $130,000 short; I gave him the $130,000. Why wouldn't you?\n\n**KOB:** The way you describe it, doling out a bit here to record Graeme Murphy's dance and a bit there to Donald McDonald to top up the opera, sounds like you personally were making very subjective judgements on behalf of the government and the public.\n\n**PJK:** There was some subjectivity about it, but in my own defence, although I preferred going to performances of the symphony orchestras than to the opera, I would listen just as intently to a plea from the Australian Opera as I would the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I would do the same if we were talking about one of the smaller companies or one of the dance or artistic companies. But why wouldn't I? The money was critical to the companies; it was never wasted. They had no chance of getting big financial sponsorship like the sports codes\u2014in a pinch, they only had the Commonwealth to help them.\n\nThen there were the Australian Artists Creative Fellowships, which I set up in the 1988 Budget to reward and give economic support to artists of accomplishment in mid-career, people who really had enormous ability but had peaked in their artistic attainments and yet couldn't commercialise them. Were we to just lose them, or try to hang on to them?\n\nFrank Moorhouse wrote his trilogy on the League of Nations, the first of which was _Grand Days_ , from the first awarded grants. That trilogy could never have been written without the creative fellowships. Garth Welch, the dancer, had one. There were all manner of people like my friend Geoffrey Tozer, who was the greatest pianist Australia had ever produced.\n\nSome were for three years and some for five years, at around $75,000 a year. They were designed so the recipients could concentrate full time on their creative effort and didn't have to run around doing other work. These were highly gifted artists who, through no lack of effort on their part, might not be able to live on their artistic earnings.\n\n**KOB:** What of the criticism that with _Creative Nation_ you were paying the arts community back for support at the 1993 election?\n\n**PJK:** That was low-rent political comment. I would have done _Creative Nation_ even if they had barracked for John Hewson, but even the arts had to draw the line somewhere.\n\n**KOB:** When your friend Geoffrey Tozer won his second Keating award, as the Creative Fellowships had become known, that attracted criticism. Did you have a hand in his selection for that award or, for that matter, the first one?\n\n**PJK:** The inspiration for the Australian Artist Creative Fellowships came from Geoffrey's poverty. I thought it was a national shame that a genius who was playing with Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in the Albert Hall in London at fifteen years of age and winning awards across Europe would return to Australia and end up teaching kids at my son's high school for $9000 a year to pay the rent\u2014and have to get there on a pushbike.\n\nBecause he was the inspiration for the awards I encouraged him to put an application into the Australia Council. The second time around Geoffrey had to take his chances. He put his application in and the panel awarded him again.\n\n**KOB:** He was in the end a tragic figure, not the first musical prodigy to be so, not particularly worldly. Were you drawn to that sense of vulnerability in him, because you helped him in all kinds of ways at a personal level as well?\n\n**PJK:** Not really. I was simply drawn to the magic of the playing. He was in a class of his own. I first heard him play at my son's high school concert. Geoffrey carried too much weight and he walked onto the stage with a bad gait, looking like a blob in an ill-fitting suit, and I thought 'Who is this guy', and then he just exploded. I was completely hooked on the magic of his playing. This is someone playing like Gilels, one of the great twentieth-century pianists.\n\nI thought, never in my lifetime would I ever have the pleasure of such proximity to such greatness.\n\nOn one occasion when I was in London as Treasurer, I rang a man named Brian Couzens, Managing Director of Chandos Records, which was the greatest recording company in Europe at the time, and he agreed to see me. His office was at Colchester to the west of London.\n\nWhen we sat down he said, 'Why on earth would the Treasurer of Australia want to see me?'\n\nI said, 'Because I want to tell you about an Australian pianist who I think plays like someone in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, like Gilels, or Busoni, or people of that ilk.'\n\nI gave Couzens two tapes of Geoffrey's work but he wasn't interested because he said he'd had doctored tapes from artists in the past to try to get through the door. But he agreed to see Tozer if he came to England.\n\nI said to Couzens, 'In the period of his two fellowships, Geoffrey has worked up three very important works. They are the three piano concertos of Nikolai Medtner, never recorded before.' Medtner was Rachmaninoff's master, and the music is so complex very few people can play it.\n\nHe said, 'No one can play Medtner.'\n\nI said, 'Well, he'll play it and he'll play it for you, and what I'd like you to do is to record the three.'\n\nHe said, 'Well, that's a very big cost to us, he'd have to be really unbelievably good to do it.'\n\nSo I went back to the embassy and paid for the cost of the hire car because I didn't want anyone saying I was indulging myself at the Commonwealth's expense. I then personally paid Geoffrey's fare to London and went through some repertoire with him.\n\nCouzens subsequently sent me a note saying, 'He is absolutely fantastic. It's like music from another age. But more than that,' he said, 'he gets the orchestra ready, and by the time the conductor arrives there's no work left for him to do. Tozer has already taken them through the music.'\n\nHe said, 'This man can do anything. If he's playing Purcell, he plays like an Englishman. If he's playing Medtner he sounds like a Russian. If he's doing Liszt, he sounds like a Hungarian.'\n\nIn the end Geoffrey did 33 recordings with Chandos, and the first one, the three piano concertos of Nikolai Medtner, won the French Gold Prize, the Diapason d'Or, and missed winning the American Classic Grammys by one place to Yo-Yo Ma. That was the first time round. He was phenomenal.\n\n**KOB:** You helped him renovate his house, didn't you, or helped him paint it?\n\n**PJK:** I encouraged him to buy the old convent in Queanbeyan, which was a very large building on the hill, because the Catholic Church always had the best locations. It was large; not derelict, but empty. I suggested he make one wing a music studio and a mini concert hall, live there himself, have artists in residence and make it a music centre.\n\nI said, 'You would always find work in Canberra as the best pianist in the country, and you would have your own place.'\n\nThe last thing I did on the day before I became Prime Minister was rollerpaint Geoffrey's bedroom. Mark Ryan and I were there in overalls on ladders and planks, painting Geoffrey's bedroom.\n\nThe next morning in the shower I had to remove the dried paint off my face to front up to the caucus. So it was all ready for him to move in. But then his manager, Reuben Fineberg, talked him into selling it. Fineberg convinced Geoffrey he wouldn't be able to rely on the fellowships to continue to pay the mortgage.\n\nI said, 'Look, Geoffrey, this is nonsense because you still have something like another $150,000 of fellowship money, so you'd wind up with a mortgage of virtually nothing.'\n\nHe said, 'Oh, we've already exchanged contracts.'\n\nSo he went ahead with the sale, which was a great pity because he would have lived a more anchored existence there, and I don't believe he would have got into the social trouble he got into in Melbourne later, being left alone after his mother died and after Reuben died.\n\nGeoffrey himself died in a very sad way. He'd had hepatitis earlier in his life, which affected him when he drank, and his health deteriorated rapidly. In the end he lived and played in some sort of squalor in a rented house in Melbourne.\n\n**KOB:** When he died in 2009 still a relatively young man, you were a pallbearer at his funeral and you didn't hold back in the eulogy. Stuart Rintoul wrote in the _Australian_ that you let loose the reins on your anger, lacerating the nation's musical establishment for treating Tozer with indifference, contempt and malevolence.\n\n**PJK:** I think those were Rintoul's words. I didn't say contempt and malevolence, but he was reflecting my anger. What happened was that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra failed to give Geoffrey any work in the last decade of his life.\n\n**KOB:** Why do you think that was?\n\n**PJK:** Because they felt we have the local genius under our nose so we're obliged to take him, are we? Whereas what used to happen in these orchestras is that they'd pick up a great violinist or a great tenor from Europe, and the agency would say, 'You can have this cellist or this violinist but we also want you to take so and so pianist to play a particular thing.'\n\nI don't know whether you'd call it snobbery on the part of the program managers of these orchestras to take Europeans over Australians, but there was no pianist in the world playing in a higher form than Geoffrey.\n\nOne of their complaints was that he would improvise, a bit like Liszt did. Liszt was a great improviser. I remember Geoffrey doing one of the big Liszt works, the _Mephisto Waltz_ , I think it was, which is a huge piece. There's a lilt at the end and you could just hear 'Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong'. It just drifted in for a second and then drifted out again, and everyone laughed. But that was frowned upon. He had this huge Chopin-like ability and they'd say, 'too clever, too clever!'\n\n**KOB:** You said Tozer deserved to be remembered alongside Nellie Melba, Percy Grainger and Joan Sutherland, but for the last fifteen years of his life he was left to moulder away, largely playing to himself in a rented suburban Melbourne house.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, that's the thing. I said in the speech, we all thought he had enough resources to sort of hang on, but it turned out he didn't. So he's one of the tragic losses of my lifetime. I have his picture here in the office.\n\nI always thought it was an indication of our relative cultural poverty that we don't put a premium on true greatness in the arts. If Tozer had been a soccer star, he'd have been getting millions of dollars a year and being acclaimed in every newspaper every other week. Here was someone of world standing living in poverty at the gate of the national capital, and the nation was oblivious to his prodigious talent and energy.\nKEATING VS HOWARD\n\nJohn Howard records in his autobiography that when Alexander Downer and Peter Costello were elected to the Liberal leadership midway through 1994 he felt a completely new era had arrived, and for him, it had an air of finality about it. He says he wrote in his diary at the time: 'On Friday 20 May 1994 I was given my last chance ever to reclaim the leadership of the Liberal Party and again seek the prime ministership of my country.' Interesting insight into the uncertainties and surprises of politics from a man who went on to serve as PM for twelve years.\n\nHow quickly things can change in politics, not unlike the dynamics of a cricket test. Within three months, as Downer began sinking into the mire of his own ineptitude, Howard was starting to take calls, and began to hope again, particularly when his _bete noir_ , Andrew Peacock, announced his retirement from politics in September, breaking the cycle of their enmity. By October, Howard now says, there was a strongly held view in the Liberal Party that if Downer hadn't noticeably recovered by Christmas, Howard would be drafted to replace him. In December, Howard was made aware of internal party research that suggested the Opposition could lose 30 seats under Downer.\n\nThe dilemma Downer presented to Paul Keating was exquisite. As 1995, the final year of the electoral cycle, approached and Downer's position worsened, what was Keating to do? Even with three big interest rate hikes to help him, Downer was simply not skilled enough to recover from his lapses. Keating could either coddle Downer and try to keep him there\u2014a pretty unlikely option in the bearpit of Australian politics\u2014or he could help see him off as quickly as possible and hope he had enough time to do it all again, probably with Howard, before the next election.\n\nThe other proposition, running to an early election against Downer after less than two years, was never seriously considered by Keating, not least because of the risk that the Liberals might do what Labor had done in 1983, and change leaders as an election campaign began. It had certainly worked for Hawke.\n\nHoward also revealed in his book that Tony Abbott, one of his close supporters who had arrived in Parliament via a by-election earlier in the year, was pressing him to undo the damage done to him by his own remarks back in 1988 urging caution on Asian immigration. Abbott arranged an interview for Howard with his friend Greg Sheridan for the _Australian_ , which duly ran in January 1995 with the headline 'I was wrong on Asians, says Howard'.\n\nWhile Downer wallowed and Howard built his support backstage, Keating continued his journey of ups and downs\u2014garnering what credit he could for what was a major foreign policy triumph at the second APEC Leaders' Summit in Bogor, Indonesia, working closely with President Suharto to cajole the powerful and the paranoid around the table into signing a free trade manifesto for the region\u2014but then returning to another round of interest rate hikes from the Reserve Bank.\n\nTwo of his ministers, David Beddall in Resources and John Faulkner in Environment, were in dispute over the future of woodchip and logging licences. Beddall, a junior minister and a right-wing factional hack who didn't bring much political skill to the table, wanted to issue more licences to log in old-growth forests. Faulkner, who was in Cabinet, was intractably opposed.\n\nKeating tried and failed to resolve the deadlock before Christmas with the Greens, whose preferences would be vital at the next election, growling at the edges. So as the negative woodchip headlines continued to build for Keating and the loggers threatened mayhem, Howard quietly stitched up a leadership transition deal with Alexander Downer.\n\nOn Australia Day 1995, Australians woke up to 'Howard's day of triumph'. Lazarus was back, and Keating had a year to claim his third and toughest Liberal scalp within one parliamentary term. One of Keating's worst memories in a very long career would have been to look on helplessly as Howard made his way through a blockade of logging trucks to get into Parliament House. Howard didn't have to say much to exploit the sense of a government in chaos.\n\nThe Howard honeymoon was further assisted by the kind of Jekyll and Hyde economy that had developed. The magic combination of healthy growth, projected at 5.5 per cent, and low inflation continued but Keating had to suffer headlines through the weeks leading up to the May budget such as 'Willis sounds the alarm\u2014Fears of BoP blowout force fiscal tightening' in the _Financial Review_. It was based on revised budget forecasts showing the current account deficit jumping by $8 billion to $26 billion for the year and expectations of spending cuts and tax increases in the budget grew\u2014all grist for Howard's mill, which he skilfully exploited in his first week in Parliament.\n\nOn 14 February, a _Herald_ -McNair poll gave the Liberals a 47 per cent primary vote to Labor's 37 per cent\u2014a potential Howard landslide. It was the same pattern as happened early in Downer's leadership, but John Howard was far less likely to squander it.\n\nIt was in this period that Keating chose to take on Kerry Packer very publicly after the media giant's attempt to thwart the cross-media rules and buy control of the Fairfax newspaper group. Keating accused Packer and Howard of stitching up a 'wink and a nod' deal in which a Howard Government would dump the cross-media rules in return for Packer's support.\n\nAt the same time Keating had become convinced that John Alexander, the editor of the _Herald_ , a Fairfax paper, and subsequently hired by Packer, was also running a hostile campaign against him. He wrote across one _Herald_ front page on the fight with Packer, 'Only a fool would think Howard hasn't come to terms with Packer. Barron told me he has. But Alexander is Packer's man at the _Herald_ '. Keating collected a long run of _Herald_ headlines that were critical of the government, many of which he argued were inaccurate and unjustifiable. It was another distraction the government didn't need.\n\nIn late March there was a further gift to Howard, this one from Keating himself. He allowed Ros Kelly, having lost her ministry in the 'sports rorts' scandal, to resign from Parliament, triggering a by-election for her normally safe Labor seat in Canberra. It was a debacle. On the same weekend that voters in New South Wales rejected the Liberal Government and narrowly embraced a new Labor Government led by Bob Carr, voters in Canberra dumped massively on federal Labor in an 18 per cent swing, bigger even than the disastrous rejection for Labor in the Bass by-election of 1975, which had signalled the beginning of the end for the Whitlam Government.\n\nOne fringe benefit for Howard in coming to the leadership in the final year of the electoral cycle was that his mere presence as a new and more credible leader than his two predecessors guaranteed that virtually everything Keating did that year would be seen through the political prism, therefore with heightened cynicism, certainly by the media.\n\nThat was true for the May Budget. Keating's budget announcement that the rest of the Commonwealth Bank would be sold, netting $3 billion, was reported as a ploy to allow the Treasurer, Ralph Willis, to boast a small surplus for the next financial year, and 'a surplus run not seen since the 1980s'. The budget ultimately delivered the Howard Government a $10 billion deficit, and Peter Costello would later claim credit for the long run of surpluses.\n\nThe politically tricky part in this budget for Keating was that he backed away again from the second tranche of the tax cut he'd originally promised in 1992\u201393, converting it instead to a 3 per cent government contribution to workers' superannuation, which would be delivered in full by 2001\u201302. That would have sounded a long way off in May 1995, with as many as two elections in between, but it attracted largely positive headlines, although the _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's 'Keating abandons tax cuts' wouldn't have helped.\n\nNicholson in the _Australian_ depicted Keating behind the wheel of a large American convertible in a workshop. Ralph Willis, as the mechanic, had the engine out, and sitting on Keating's lap was the voter depicted as a young woman. With his arm around her Keating is saying, 'Ralph's working on a long-term project and I'm working on a short-term project.' That was about as easy as it got through 1995.\n\nAs the budget was about to be presented, the Court Liberal Government in Western Australia announced the terms of reference for a Royal Commission to scrutinise Carmen Lawrence's role as Premier in the tabling of a petition in the State Parliament that was subsequently seen to contribute to the suicide of a woman named Penny Easton. Like many other royal commissions, this one had political overtones.\n\nLawrence by now was one of Keating's most senior and high-profile ministers running the Health portfolio, and Keating decided from the outset that he would defend her to the hilt. He vigorously pursued the Commission through the Parliament as only Keating could, no doubt damaging it in the process, but that too became a big distraction for him and took much of the oxygen away from his primary battle, which was to gain the upper hand over Howard.\n\nHoward was very consciously a policy-free zone throughout the year in stark contrast to John Hewson and his cherished _Fightback!_. Instead he gave a series of what he called headland speeches to sketch outlines of his policy directions with not much detail. When Keating tried to goad him into releasing his policies, Howard simply said he wouldn't capitulate to psychological warfare. His shadow cabinet endorsed his determination not to release policy detail until the election campaign. A Tanberg cartoon showed reporters saying to Howard at a doorstop, 'You're not telling us anything,' and Howard replying, 'That's the policy.'\n\nKeating continued to have occasional policy wins, such as his breakthrough agreement with the states on competition policy in which the states would garner billions for delivering a breakup of various public monopolies and promote greater efficiencies and drive productivity\u2014but this was hardly a sexy issue for rank-and-file voters around the country.\n\nIn June, Keating released his blueprint for a republic with a referendum before the turn of the century, with a simple line, 'We are all Australians. We share a past, a present and a future. Our Head of State should be one of us.' The largely positive coverage the next day was accompanied on the front page of the _Financial Review_ by a warning from the Reserve Bank Governor, Bernie Fraser, that speculation that interest rates might have peaked was premature. In other words, not only were they staying high for now, they might yet go higher. Once again the economy's strength was a two-edged sword for Labor.\n\nThe polls were slightly kinder for Keating in June and July. After the release of his blueprint for a republic, a poll commissioned by Melbourne's _Sunday Herald Sun_ registered 59 per cent support for a republic by 2001, with 62 per cent support in Victoria. Howard moved soon after to say that a Howard Government would have a referendum on a republic, and would even campaign for a republic if a constitutional convention set up by his government identified which model it supported.\n\nThis was a pattern through the year. If a policy difference between Labor and Liberal threatened to cost him, Howard would soften the difference. On tariffs, where Hewson had threatened a scorched earth zero tariffs approach, Howard's shadow minister for Industry, John Moore, flagged the possibility that even the rate of Keating's tariff cuts might be slowed.\n\nThe other poll that gave Keating momentary hope was the _Herald_ -McNair poll in early July, which showed that a fourteen-point gap in favour of the Liberals had closed to four points, the closest margin since Howard's ascension to leadership. The broadly positive economic news continued, but always with a political sting. On 14 July, the _Financial Review_ headline read, 'Markets soar as bulls roar', but while ever there was a hint that the economy might overheat, Bernie Fraser was always going to keep interest rates up. Although inflation remained remarkably low, Fraser was keeping a critical eye on wages growth.\n\nKeating's antipathy to John Alexander's editorship of the _Sydney Morning Herald_ continued. In the second half of July the _Herald_ ran a front-page lead headed, 'Howard plan for growth and unions'. Written by political correspondent Tony Wright, the story said Howard had a plan he said would provide higher growth but also solve what he called a current account deficit crisis. Wright added that Howard had failed to spell out the details. Keating noted at the top of the page: 'Wright says Howard failed to release policies but Alexander gives him the front page for what otherwise should be a page five report.'\n\nHaving upset expectations and won the New South Wales election, Bob Carr reneged on a clear promise to lift road tolls from two freeways in Western Sydney. It was a nasty double bunger for voters who might still have been harbouring resentment against federal Labor for playing around with its tax cuts. Keating wrote on that story, 'This will really hurt us', and there's no doubt it did.\n\nRalph Willis was at least winning headlines hailing 'Labor's economic fightback' and reporting that the worst of the current account deficit problems were over.\n\nThe _Australian_ 's Newspoll in mid-August seemed to confirm the trend to Labor, with both parties now neck and neck, each with 43 per cent of the primary vote, and both leaders level-pegging on 40 per cent as preferred Prime Minister. It was such a dramatic improvement from the previous poll that Keating wrote beside it 'Cannot be right'.\n\nAt the end of August the _Age_ flagged that the perceived current account crisis was over, with the headline 'Exports lift, $A soars', but Bernie Fraser was still in the wings warning that if interest rates were going to move at all, it would be up.\n\nIn February, Howard had mocked Labor's recovery from recession, pointing to the big interest rate rises in 1994 with the claim that Australians had had little more than five minutes of economic sunlight. This must have resonated with the public through the year because in September, Labor took the unusual step of taking out full-page newspaper advertisements saying that Australia had now enjoyed sixteen consecutive quarters of growth, 3.7 per cent for the past year, overall the best result for 24 years. The idea had been pushed on a reluctant ALP National Office by Keating himself and strongly resisted by ALP National Secretary Gary Gray. Keating won out, but according to Don Watson in _Bleeding Heart_ , Keating's dislike and mistrust of Gray grew from that point on, ending in deep friction through the election campaign.\n\nAgainst this, Labor was suffering distracting headlines about Carmen Lawrence and the Western Australian Royal Commission. Howard has subsequently argued that Keating should have cut Lawrence adrift. Through September Keating ripped into the Royal Commission in federal Parliament, and had moments when he morphed into a rampant barrister. But it was all to no avail. The distractions proved too costly, and Lawrence fell on her sword. The Commission ultimately recommended charges of perjury against Lawrence, which she eventually faced in court and was found not guilty\u2014but not until 1999.\n\nAs the year neared its end, Keating attended his third APEC leaders' meeting in Osaka, where he and Indonesian President Suharto met on the side and clinched their historic security treaty. He also racked up further credit on the regional free-trade agreement.\n\nBut back in Australia, industrial bedlam reigned. The unions were locked in battle with the mining giant CRA (now Rio Tinto) over its determination to push through individual contracts for its workers. Two days before Keating was due to fly out to Osaka, 3000 coal miners walked off the job at Weipa, and the ACTU warned that a five-day waterfront strike would follow.\n\nKeating intervened, thought he'd resolved the dispute and said so publicly as he flew off to Japan. By the time he got off the plane, the dispute had blown up again. What happened next threw Keating completely. His great mate Bill Kelty decided to call on the old Labor hero, Bob Hawke, who'd become such a public Keating critic, to argue the ACTU case against CRA in the Industrial Relations Commission.\n\nNext to the _Sun-Herald_ headline, 'HAWKE THE PEACEMAKER' Keating had written 'this is Bill at his silliest'. It was followed in the next day's _Financial Review_ with 'Hawke splits Labor mates'. The case was eventually resolved, but it wasn't Paul Keating kicking goals in Osaka that attracted the most news coverage over the next few days.\n\nOne interesting contradiction emerged in the opinion polls and continued into the campaign. Before and after the election it was accepted as a given that Paul Keating was on the nose with the electorate, an assumption that went all the way back to the 1993 election. And yet Keating's approval rating as Prime Minister was often equal to Howard's and sometimes better. For instance, an _Australian_ Newspoll on 30 November asserted that Keating was seen as more capable of managing the economy by 43 per cent of voters, compared to Howard's 35 per cent. His leadership approval rating actually improved further over Howard's through the campaign.\n\nAs the election loomed closer, Keating's poor regard for the press gallery was more than matched by his frustration with his own mob. He had walked away from his 1993 victory angry at what he saw as the defeatist attitude of the party machine through the election campaign and his belief that veteran Party Secretary Bob Hogg had told at least one journalist he expected Labor to lose.\n\nThat anger was nothing compared to the contempt he developed for Gary Gray, Hogg's replacement. On 9 October, the _Herald_ ran a story detailing how Keating had attacked the veracity of Labor's own internal polling, which suggested the government was in serious trouble. Keating particularly went after the 'nervous nellies' who had leaked the polling to newspapers, describing them as childish. Next to that quote, Keating had written in the margin, 'Gray'. The relationship was poisonous by the end of the campaign.\n\nOn 27 January 1996, Paul Keating made his second trip to Government House as Prime Minister to seek approval for an election on 2 March, this time to Sir Bill Deane rather than Bill Hayden. But there was also a new Liberal Leader, a much more elusive one, an extremely jaded electorate and Keating stood at the foot of a very steep hill. Only four days earlier _The Australian_ 's headline, taken from Newspoll, was: 'Libs leap to 10-point lead over Labor.'\n\nHe may have been capable of contemplating defeat, but he was biologically incapable of surrender and ran his campaign accordingly. Where the Howard campaign had one script, Labor's campaign had two: Gary Gray's and Paul Keating's. Nonetheless, on 20 February, with nine days to go, Newspoll showed Labor had halved the Coalition's lead to 4 per cent. It was simply a bridge too far.\n\nHoward said at the time, 'If you think he's smug and arrogant now, just imagine what he would be like if he wins again. Just imagine'\u2014a premise that sat neatly with one of their more effective negative ads against Keating.\n\nIn the final days two events killed off whatever chance Labor had left. One was when Bill Kelty promised an industrial war against a Howard Government. At a union rally in Melbourne with Keating in attendance, Kelty raged, 'If they want a fight, want a war, then we will have the full symphony with all the pieces, all the clashes and all the music.'\n\nJohn Howard noted later in his autobiography, 'this may have pleased the assembled throng, and the Prime Minister, but it was poison to the Australian public.'\n\nActually, it didn't please Keating at all. He hadn't even wanted to be there.\n\nThe other event that went savagely against Labor was a bizarre episode involving anonymous documents sent to Labor and the Democrats purporting to reveal confidential correspondence from the Liberals as evidence that a Howard Government planned to heavily cut state grants. The Democrats chose to ignore them, but while Keating was in the air between Cairns and Adelaide, Ralph Willis's office and Gary Gray at Labor's campaign headquarters decided to release them as evidence of Liberal chicanery, with disastrous results. The documents were fakes.\n\nElection day was the day John Howard silenced the true believers and ended Paul Keating's long political career in a landslide.\n\n**KOB:** Alexander Downer managed to get himself into all sorts of trouble through the second half of 1994. I imagine all your instincts were to keep going after him, but I would have thought the last thing you would have wanted as you got closer to an election was to see the Liberals come up with yet another leader and have to start all over again. Did you consider the possibility of going somewhat soft on Downer for a time at least, to try to keep him in the job until the election, although I'm not quite sure how you'd go about doing that.\n\n**PJK:** You can't ever play that game. There is a difference between trying to preserve an opponent and not running one over, but this guy was so denuded of confidence so quickly that he was making his own mistakes and would have gone, with or without my further efforts.\n\nThe press gallery were desperate for someone to put up against me, and this gave Howard an easy run. There was his great apologia interview in the _Australian_ from Greg Sheridan under the editorship of Paul Kelly to say that Howard wasn't really a little suburban racist, as he had formerly been painted by his own utterances, that he had seen the light and was a fit and proper person to be the next Prime Minister. So the first real support for Howard occurred in the _Australian_. This was in January 1995 while Downer was still technically the leader.\n\n**KOB:** The first time you faced Downer in Parliament after he became leader was 26 August 1994. By that time he'd already done himself a lot of damage with voters in only three months. Christine Wallace wrote in the _Financial Review_ : 'If Paul Keating were any more relaxed he would stop breathing.'\n\nYou quipped, 'All by himself, single-handedly he took himself from the top of the poll to the bottom of the poll.'\n\nYou didn't seem to have to do much at all.\n\n**PJK:** I used to say he was a sook. Here's a front page in the _Age_ : 'Downer a policy sook'. Sook is a very Australian word, and if you can actually attach it to somebody it's very bad for them. He made enough mistakes for me to use it. I said, 'The one thing the Australian people will never tolerate is a sook.' This idea got around, then when I'd bait him he would actually jump on the hook for me.\n\n**KOB:** Once you felt you'd got his measure in the polls, did you give serious thought to an early election? Surely some of your strategists would have favoured that, you were so far in front.\n\n**PJK:** A lot of people did encourage me to do that and I did give it some thought but the public doesn't like opportunistic behaviour. These three-year Parliaments are too short and they're hard to win and hard to earn. In a five-year term like in Britain, maybe you could justify going to an election after four-and-a-half years, but the Australian electorate doesn't like its government serving only two-and-a-half years of a three-year term. They think it's a bit tricky.\n\n**KOB:** When Howard did become leader in late January his first gift came courtesy of your Cabinet. In December you'd become embroiled in a war between loggers and environmentalists, reflecting policy differences within the government over woodchip policy. David Beddall as Resources Minister wanted more logging in old-growth forests. Environment Minister John Faulkner was opposed.\n\n**PJK:** They did the government no good in their management of this and gave us a large problem.\n\nI was particularly angry with David Beddall because, without proper Cabinet consideration, he had increased the woodchip quota, which meant increased logging of old-growth forests. I had been building a bridge to the environment movement and had, only a month or so before, made a personal commitment to environmental protection. But both Beddall and Faulkner handled it badly. Notwithstanding my efforts to resolve the issue in a sensible way, by January Parliament House had been ring-fenced by a blockade of logging trucks instigated by the forestry union, the CFMEU.\n\nIt was a completely unnecessary act by the CFMEU and an absolute gift to Howard, and his arrival at Parliament House as the new Liberal leader was through the cordon of timber trucks. It did the government and me enormous harm. It was a dream run into the leadership for Howard because Downer had just buckled and at the same time it looked as though a government of order and discipline was actually a government in chaos.\n\nBob Collins, who was the Transport Minister, persuaded me to meet the loggers in his office, coming into the second week of their blockade. Bob introduced me to one of the union organisers, a guy with a gold neck chain, and Bob said, 'I don't think you two have met before,' and I said, 'Yes, we've met. I've been meeting spivs like you all my life. Of course I know you.' I said to them, 'You know the two trucks at the front ramp blocking the cars, the iridescent red one with the chrome horns and the iridescent blue one? I want you to think what they're going to look like when I put a tank tow vehicle across the top of them.'\n\nThey said, 'You've got to be joking', and I said, 'I've got two tank tow vehicles on standby at Puckapunyal waiting to be loaded onto a railway flatbed car. If this continues I'll get them up here and run over the top of your shiny trucks, and what's more, I'll push the rest of them into the lower ring road, regardless of the consequences.'\n\nBob Collins said, 'I think you mean this,' and I said, 'Absolutely I mean it.' They were gone the next day, but the damage was done, including to a lot of green preferences at the election. Looking back I really regret not clearing their trucks.\n\n**KOB:** You were also at war with the Editor of the _Sydney Morning Herald_ , John Alexander, at that time. How did that help you?\n\n**PJK:** He was an avowed enemy of mine. I always thought he had the worst case of small man's syndrome I'd ever known. Late 1995, going into 1996, it was almost laughable, the daily headlines against the government in the _Herald_. I wrote across one headline, after ten consecutive negative ones, 'The _Sydney Morning Herald_ 's royal flush of bile.'\n\nAt one point I did discuss with my staff putting up a display of the _Herald_ 's headlines in A3 format in the gallery and personally pointing out all the distortions and explaining why they represented a corruption of the news, but they talked me out of it. I should have followed my own instincts.\n\n**KOB:** You'd seen two leaders off, but John Howard was the danger man, wasn't he?\n\n**PJK:** Yes. I had to then beat a third leader in three years, and that was a tough call, particularly when I knew Howard was going to get an absolutely free ride from the the press gallery. And he was getting a completely free ride from his major promoter, the _Australian._\n\nWhen Howard came in, I wasn't worried about my capacity to knock him over, but I was worried about whether I'd have enough time to do it. If he'd got the job a year or eighteen months earlier, that would have suited me just fine. The fact is, Kerry, I beat two Opposition leaders in two years. I couldn't quite beat three in three years.\n\nI'd landed the killer blow on Howard in 1987 and if there'd been a four-year Parliament this time, instead of three, there was every chance I'd have beaten three Liberal leaders in four years, but the odds were against me. When you are in your fifth term looking for number six, that's sixteen consecutive years, or four American presidential terms in a row\u2014you are stretching the friendship with the electorate.\n\n**KOB:** But I don't think Howard was ever again going to give you the opening he gave you in 1987, nor did he make a policy target of himself the way John Hewson did.\n\n**PJK:** I was now dealing with a much more wily character and I took Howard completely seriously. I knew he was the ultimate conservative. He said himself he was the most conservative leader the Liberal Party had ever had, and he was. But he got an enormous lift in support, particularly from the craven press gallery.\n\n**KOB:** The same press gallery you once prided yourself on having in your thrall.\n\n**PJK:** But I was truly in the nation-building business. Who else was? Yet it behoved them to be seduced by Howard's flimsy headland speeches bereft of any policy detail. They bought the Kelly\/Sheridan line that he was no longer the old John Howard, the white-picket-fence John Howard with the conservative views.\n\n**KOB:** But who says the press gallery should be in one camp or the other?\n\n**PJK:** No one. But they were giving a free and easy ride to an Opposition absolutely without a framework, when the government had frameworks everywhere. Their so-called policy releases, when they had them, were glib one-page summaries.\n\nYou know what? The journalists were bored with a then twelve-year-old government and wanted something new. There was one rule for me and another rule for Howard. I remember saying in a press conference that if I produced rubbish like Howard, they would down me the next day.\n\nAnd Laurie Oakes piped up and said, 'Yeah, but you're too good, Prime Minister. We have you on a high handicap.' In one sense a compliment, but that's how blatant it was.\n\nAs a result Howard sailed through 1995 on a wing without even needing a prayer.\n\n**KOB:** But you're overlooking the things that had gone wrong for you that the electorate was not going to forget, like the 1993 horror budget and the big interest rate hikes of 1994, all the inevitable accumulated baggage of the recession years and the high unemployment.\n\n**PJK;** No, I'm not overlooking those things and of course, a lot of that was real. But it was to some extent offset by headlines about the stockmarket reaching a record high\u2014it doubled that year\u2014about the economy hitting top gear, about the May 1995 Budget showing an average of 4 per cent growth over the next four years. The economy was really solid. Even Howard admitted after he won the election, 'I couldn't possibly say I wasn't given a good economy.'\n\n**KOB:** In his first week in Parliament as leader John Howard made clear what his strategy was going to be and it was what he saw as your Achilles heel: that same economy. His first two questions were on interest rates and tax increases, followed by a rowdy censure motion on the economy.\n\nHe said Australia under you had enjoyed 'a bare five minutes of economic sunlight'. Now, you love the great political metaphor. You'd have to acknowledge that wasn't a bad one.\n\n**PJK:** It was clever but it wasn't true. We'd had at that stage four straight years of economic growth. It was a piece of high cynicism by Howard. Bernie Fraser came out and corrected him and then the Liberal Party attacked Fraser for being partisan. We then ran ads showing the official figures for sixteen consecutive quarters of growth. But that piece of cynicism, the five minutes of sunshine, our friends in the press gallery gave that a run everywhere. So it was a clever metaphor but it had more impact than it deserved to have.\n\n**KOB:** You've previously talked about your favourite front-page headline from politics, which came from the 1987 election campaign: 'Howard: My sums wrong'. Well, the headline John Howard had framed came from that first parliamentary week in 1995 after he'd become leader and it said, 'Round One, the day Keating met his match'.\n\n**PJK:** The bottom line was that we had come out of the recession strongly, we were enjoying consistently strong growth, and interest rates had had to go up briefly because we were growing too strongly. That's not five minutes of economic sunlight, that's protecting a rapidly growing economy from inflationary expectations, and it's paid a big dividend to Australia ever since. Twenty-four years of dividends. In the end if you want to change Australia inexorably and for the better and ambitiously, you'll lose skin doing it.\n\n**KOB:** When did you realise that you were in trouble with John Howard?\n\n**PJK:** I knew that when Downer inevitably went and John Howard got the job, we would fall back again in the polls. This is more or less true today as well: whenever a leader gets into a poor situation and loses the job, the new leader gets a lift. I also knew I would have no more than a year to get on top of him. That in itself didn't trouble me because I had always been on top of him\u2014in the house, out in the electorate at large and at critical moments like the 1987 campaign. Psychologically, I well and truly had Howard's measure. But the timing was tight.\n\n**KOB:** Everything you say about John Howard suggests that you dislike him with a passion. If that was so, do you think you were able to analyse him dispassionately in order to work out a strategy to beat him?\n\n**PJK:** Actually, I don't dislike Howard. Let me be clear about that.\n\n**KOB:** That would surprise a lot of people.\n\n**PJK:** I don't dislike him. But he represented all that I stood against. He represented a return to the mediocrity of the past, a return to the old value system. The fact that we were a multicultural country engaging much more with Asia and needed the uplift of things like a republic and that independence of thought\u2014were things he was never going to provide, and that's what I stood against. Not John Howard personally, because I would have preferred John Howard to a lot of Coalition leaders. What I stood against was his policies.\n\n**KOB:** So who did you prefer Howard to?\n\n**PJK:** I preferred him to Peacock because he was a more serious guy. I'd prefer him to the likes of Doug Anthony and Peter Nixon because they were political savages who had joined with Malcolm Fraser in blowing the system up in 1975. I don't believe John Howard would have done that. I preferred him to Hewson for the fact that he was a foot soldier making his way through the infantry like I had done over a 30-year period, rather than coming in late and pretending somehow to be above politics.\n\nI absolutely accepted the genuineness of John Howard's commitment to public service.\n\n**KOB:** Yet it always sounded very intense with you.\n\n**PJK:** Yes, because it needed to be. Howard was a combatant. He was a combatant. And that was the business we were in. I always respected that in him, and I would like to believe he respected that in me.\n\n**KOB:** We talked much earlier about the parallels between you and John Howard in your early lives. You both came from working-class backgrounds in western Sydney, raised not far from each other. Both touched by family loss in world wars. Both from a young age admiring Winston Churchill. Both of you strongly influenced by your fathers' politics and therefore ending up in diametrically different places politically. But I guess the starkest difference is personality.\n\n**PJK:** It's interesting how these things happen but you do get a choice in public life. You can be on the side of the angels, that's the great body of working people, or you can be on the side of the people with capital and position. The Liberal Party barracks for the people with capital and position. The Labor Party barracks for the people who've got nothing to sell but their time.\n\n**KOB:** But here's the irony. When John Howard did become Prime Minister he stayed there for twelve years and one of the biggest reasons he stayed there for so long was that he was seen to have the support of the people who became known as Howard's battlers, who had formerly been Labor's constituency, the working people.\n\n**PJK:** In part that's true. But Howard opposed every wage increase to my knowledge from 1983 to the time he became Opposition Leader for the second time, opposed every one for the people who battled most. I knew he would attack the safety net I'd set up with enterprise bargaining. That's the thing that protects low-paid women and kids in jobs, and he attacked that with _Fightback!_ as John Hewson's Industrial Relations spokesman, and then ultimately as Prime Minister with _WorkChoices_. He claimed to be the battlers' friend but his industrial relations policies were the most vicious ever on the battlers. The true party of the battlers, of the ordinary people, was and only is the Labor Party.\n\nYou get a choice in these things and in my early life I wanted to lift 95 per cent of the people up, not 5 per cent. I didn't want to lift up Vaucluse and Bellevue Hill in Sydney or Toorak in Melbourne. I wanted to lift the whole society.\n\n**KOB:** Here's another irony: you _did_ lift up Vaucluse and Toorak. A lot of rich people became a lot richer through your reform agenda.\n\n**PJK:** In a growth economy that happens. But the hard thing is to lift the 95 per cent, and give them support like access and equity in health with Medicare; access and equity in education by boosting retention rates in high school and entry to university; a universal superannuation scheme and strong employment. These were reforms for the national economy but also for the vast bulk of Australians. Howard ended up on the side of preference and capital. I ended up on the side of the mass of working people.\n\n**KOB:** He ended up with significantly better support from middle-class Australia and battler Australia through his time as Prime Minister.\n\n**PJK:** That is immaterial to the main point. Without the reforms of the Hawke and Keating Governments this could never have happened. Those changes doubled the economy's capacity to grow. Doubled it, and doubled trend productivity from 1.5 per cent to 3. Of those three percentage points, 2 per cent went to working people, and 1 per cent went to profits. Two per cent a year for the twelve years Howard was in office gave people a 20-odd per cent increase in real wages. No thanks to John Howard, but thanks to the changes Hawke and I and the Labor Party presided over.\n\nA new government can't just lift things like real wages overnight. It takes a decade to achieve something like that. So he was a lucky guy, Howard. We gifted him thirteen years of major economic reform by virtue of him winning the 1996 election. No Australian political leader has ever had such a gift as John Howard had when he won in 1996. As I've said colloquially, hit in the backside by a rainbow.\n\n**KOB:** Why do you think you polarised people so much?\n\n**PJK:** I'm not sure I did polarise people. The recoded approval ratings I enjoyed don't support this.\n\n**KOB:** Do you really not think you had a capacity to polarise? There was one poll in 1989, for instance, which featured in Michael Gordon's biography on you. One-third of the people surveyed thought you were the bees' knees. Some even found you sexy. One-third hated your guts, and the third in the middle still didn't like you but rather admired what you did and thought you knew what you were doing. I would call that polarisation. One-third love you, one-third hate you.\n\n**PJK:** But I think that would be pretty much true of John Howard too. I think it's more or less true of all of us at the top of the game. One-third loves you, one-third hates you and one-third are swingers. But you can't pursue a program of the kind I pursued with these enormous changes for nearly one-and-a-half decades and walk away smelling like a rose to everyone. Either you are conscientiously in there to give people a better country, a richer society and a better way of life or you're not. And you're going to lose skin along the way. That's just what it's about\n\n**KOB:** Your last year of office was clearly a struggle politically. The economy was performing strongly again but the polls weren't reflecting that. The Labor historian and former politician, Rod Cavalier, has said that your broad vision agenda based on the republic, native title, engagement with Asia, multiculturalism and the arts cut no ice with the electorate at large, especially core Labor voters. John Howard has acknowledged that this is precisely the kind of sentiment he set out to exploit.\n\n**PJK:** I don't accept Rodney Cavalier's characterisation. I thought Cavalier lived a very trivial political life and is in no position or vantage point to comment whatsoever on the scale or depth of the things I was doing. They were light years beyond the Macquarie Street frame of reference.\n\nAn Australian republic will be as important to Australia in the future as it was then. Building political architecture in the Pacific will be as important to Australia in the future as it was then. The changes to a more efficient wages system and the lifting of real wages will be important to Australia in the future as they were then, and native title, of which Cavalier was a critic, will be important to the Aboriginal community and to all of us in the future as it was then. I think there's a great risk, Kerry, of taking notice of armchair critics who have an ephemeral commitment to the broader community and who don't understand risking political capital in lifting the country up.\n\n**KOB:** But they weren't all armchair critics. Paul Kelly wrote in _March of Patriots_ that late in 1995 your speechwriter Don Watson sent a distress signal to your old right-hand Don Russell, who was by then Australia's Ambassador in Washington, to come back and 'help get the ship back on the road', as Watson put it.\n\nHe said Russell 'found Keating hemmed in and isolated. He was absorbed in the issues close to his heart, the republic, Mabo, the arts and foreign affairs. The government got little credit for growth in the economy or for its array of social welfare programs'.\n\nDid Russell say those things to you at the time?\n\n**PJK:** Some he did. Don Russell famously was my most effective private secretary and to have him back coming into an election was a great godsend for us. He thought like I did. You could put us in two separate rooms and give us three problems and the answers would be more or less the same. Russell's ability was to coordinate the office and all the various policy responses, and at that stage, I was up against it. Of course I was.\n\n**KOB:** But Kelly also said of this man who thought like you:\n\nIn Russell's view, Keating had dressed as a Labor traditionalist to beat Hewson in 1993 and forgot to reposition after the victory... Russell was adamant\u2014Keating 'should have come back to the Right but he didn't'. In terms of the 'econocrats and bleeding hearts model' it was too much 'bleeding hearts'. This was no way to beat John Howard.\n\n**PJK:** But you get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps once chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance to build a significant piece of political architecture in the Pacific. You get one chance to embed superannuation. I wasn't going to give those up.\n\n**KOB:** But wasn't the evidence there that while you were preoccupied with these things, other elements of what you regarded as good economic news weren't getting through to the grassroots and to swinging voters, with private polling showing your economic credentials not resonating anymore with the Australian people?\n\n**PJK:** This was just focus group hype put around at the time by people like Gary Gray. The 1995 Budget was full of good economic news. We were projecting 3.75 per cent growth for three years, an extra 3 per cent in superannuation contributions, the doubling of maternity allowances with inflation at 2 per cent. And a further $12 a week in wage increases. What else should we have been doing?\n\n**KOB:** But the contention was that because you had your other preoccupations as Prime Minister that weren't grassroots issues, you weren't adequately selling the real grassroots issues to the people who were going to determine the government's fate at the next election.\n\n**PJK:** You'll also find Don Watson saying in his book that it wouldn't have mattered what we did, we couldn't get a line for it with the Canberra press gallery. He makes this point over and over. And if you got a line you got it for only one day. They were all about changing the government. It was very difficult.\n\nWatson asked in his book, 'What have we got to do, send up smoke signals? What do people want us to do?'\n\nI'd do the television interviews, I'd do one big statement after another. We persuaded the ACTU to adopt the Reserve Bank medium-term inflation target of 2 to 3 per cent across the cycle, which had to be a world first. Imagine signing up organised labour to the central bank's inflation target. Yet the gallery would only go through the motions of reporting seminal events of that kind.\n\n**KOB:** Do you accept that those things weren't getting through to the people who ultimately voted you out of office? Is it possible that journalists were losing interest because people had stopped reading or listening?\n\n**PJK:** Some of it got through, of course it did. But the point is that when the trends start running against you it's very hard to reverse them. Meanwhile John Howard was doing those hollow headland speeches. That's around the time Laurie Oakes acknowledged in the press conference that the gallery had me on a handicap. In other words Howard by comparison was given a soft ride. It's very hard to beat that.\n\n**KOB:** But you can see from our conversations how engaged you had become in your policy agenda, of which Mabo was the outstanding example. You buried yourself in a lot of big policy areas, even virtually writing or rewriting some policy statements yourself. The balance between your attention to policy and your attention to the politics had changed. Is that a reasonable observation?\n\n**PJK:** In a sense, but, of course, not absolutely. You can't be in the game I was in and not be accountable and not be out there on the television shows and on the radio. I was still doing that. I still did a lot of media and to an extent I bypassed the gallery and went to John Laws and others. I went on shows like _60 Minutes_ , on _7.30 Report_ and on your _Lateline_. It's not as if I'd gone home.\n\nI'll acknowledge that the recession damaged me to some extent within the gallery, but substantially it was the mere appearance of John Hewson as a viable alternative for the Liberals to the decade of bickering between Peacock and Howard. And when Hewson fell they hailed Downer and Costello as the Dream Team. Downer was so awful as leader they couldn't keep that up, so they then latched on to the born-again Howard, even though he was a mobile policy vacuum.\n\nIt was the boredom factor, the feckless factor. When journalists go to restaurants around Canberra with ministers or go to social events and get closer to Cabinet ministers and gain greater access to informed discussion, they like the connection to power, they like getting glimpses of the view from the inside. But by 1993 they were in the tenth year of this, and journalists had had their umpteenth lunches and dinners with their favourite Labor politicians and there was little more to discover.\n\nI said to them when I came to the prime ministership that the broad economic reforms had been done and that in the 1990s we would see the biggest economic boost to Australia you could imagine\u2014low inflation, high growth, high productivity and high wages growth. And they thought I was just mouthing politically attractive stuff to help my case. What's more, their response was, oh, this bloke's lost it, but the predictions were true, and proved to be true. And I said, no, I haven't given up, I'm now on another big project that is also fundamental to the future of the country, but they'd stopped cooperating.\n\nWhen I became Prime Minister I did so from a position of complete fidelity to the interests of the broad community. I always wanted people to see and understand the value I saw and my deep interest in them rather than me doing phoney things in shopping centres and the like where I was joining in the game of trivialising their attention.\n\nThat's not to say one should not be humorous, witty or engaging. I believed in all of those things, but I could never make myself believe in these hollow appeals to the vacuous centre, because I always felt once I went there I would become just like many of the others before me.\n\n**KOB:** What do you mean by the vacuous centre?\n\n**PJK:** Where people are amused by silly trivial things, or where you've convinced yourself that people are so easily flattered by a televised handshake in a fruit shop or on a factory assembly line they will reward you for it in the opinion polls. Really?\n\n**KOB:** You famously said as Treasurer that when you had to pull the switch to vaudeville you would, but in a way you never really did.\n\n**PJK:** What do you mean I never really did? I entertained the country for nearly a decade and a half. My parliamentary performances still remain a daily hit on YouTube. They get hundreds of thousands of hits. I gave them a lot of theatre in the Parliament but it was high brow. I always wanted to talk up to the public. The idea that the people out there were a bunch of nincompoops who couldn't recognise a cheap line or a cheap trick in a shopping mall was an insult to them and offensive to me. Once you succumb to those strategies you deny yourself the bigger pulpit.\n\n**KOB:** Do you think a price you paid for that attitude was that it made it easier for your political enemies to paint you as elite and aloof?\n\n**PJK:** They were going to paint me that way in any event. Look who I was competing against. I could have used the 1993\u201396 Parliament to bend the curve against the odds for a sixth parliamentary term. I could have devoted most of my time to doing vaudeville. But I had got the prime ministership after eight hard years as Treasurer, and after winning in 1993, I knew it might be no more than a four-year prime ministership and my whole focus was on using those years to promote big changes, the big beliefs.\n\nI thought the public's discernment in seeing value and understanding what I was doing would in the end pay off. The problem I had was that the value of the economic work was only becoming apparent as I left. Even though we'd had four-and-a-half years of growth by that time, it was coming out of a recession off a low base and it only became apparent in the following Parliament how completely powerful my changes were. Had I won the 1996 election there was a big political dividend waiting. The deficit would have disappeared, interest rates would have come down, and the prosperity would have been undeniably linked to the Labor reforms.\n\n**KOB:** Had you won, you would have walked away sometime in that term, wouldn't you?\n\n**PJK:** The likelihood is I would have turned the government over to Kim Beazley early enough not to handicap his chances of winning a seventh term for Labor. I would not have done to Kim what Bob Hawke did to me.\n\n**KOB:** Don Watson said the perception was that Keating operated alone. Regardless of how much collegiality you felt you participated in through those Labor years, are you at heart pretty much a loner?\n\n**PJK:** I was a loner perhaps, in the way I set my goals, but I was very much not a loner in the Cabinet context. I always believed in the Cabinet process and treated the Cabinet with great seriousness. You can't make changes on this scale without the Cabinet and caucus coming with you. And despite how some of the cartoons may have depicted me, you can't rule the Labor Party like some sort of emperor.\n\n**KOB:** That's an intellectual commitment you're talking about, working through the Cabinet or caucus, but what about your natural instinct, the kind of person you are by nature?\n\n**PJK:** I might have been somewhat alone on the mission at times but certainly not alone in the doing of it.\n\n**KOB:** The Scottish poet Robbie Burns is famous for his line, 'Oh to see ourselves as others see us'. Do you think you were good at seeing yourself as others saw you or didn't you spend any time thinking about it?\n\n**PJK:** Probably not enough, but you've got to remember this. Even in 1996, after thirteen years, I ended up with 38.75 per cent of the primary vote. Bob Hawke won in 1990 with 39.2 per cent. In 1993 I won 45 per cent of the primary vote. The difference in Labor's primary vote between Bob's win in 1990 and my loss in 1996 is less than half of one per cent.\n\n**KOB:** But it was a very different story after preferences were counted, and you lost a lot of seats. It was a landslide for Howard.\n\n**PJK:** That's because Democrats and Greens support fell away. But it's not true that the message wasn't getting through because for a while there in 1995 Labor's primary count in the polls was back up to 41 per cent. I was actually a show of getting up against Howard but the Labor Party absolutely failed to support me in the election campaign.\n\n**KOB:** In August you appointed the respected High Court Judge Sir William Deane as the Governor-General. Can you take me through the process of choosing Deane? Just what exercised your mind?\n\n**PJK:** The head of my department, Michael Keating, had given me lists of potential nominees for Governor-General, which had a lot of names you might recognise, but Bill Deane wasn't one of them. I didn't think any of them necessarily had the breadth, depth, technical understanding or compassion that I thought Deane would bring to the job. I'd also heard on the grapevine that Deane had become somewhat tired of writing judgments and there was some talk of him retiring.\n\nOne day Michael Keating said to me, 'PM, I keep sending you these notes about the governor-generalship but I don't hear from you!'\n\nAnd I said, 'Well, you're hearing now, Michael. I have decided on somebody: Sir William Deane.'\n\nMichael didn't immediately recognise his name because he wasn't on any of the lists.\n\nQuite apart from Bill Deane's obvious virtues, I felt confident with a head of state who understood all the constitutional issues around the governor-generalship, the prime ministership and the Cabinet. Unlike Sir John Kerr in 1975, this was a man who was without caprice but who had the values I thought a Governor-General at this point in our history should have. It's probably true to say that Bill Deane believed Australia should be a republic but I did never inquire of him, nor did he give me an indication. I thought he was not just stable, but miles better than stable.\n\n**KOB:** Through much of the second half of the year you were dogged by coverage of the Western Australia inquiry set up by the Court Liberal Government, which became known as the Easton Royal Commission. It involved Carmen Lawrence as the former WA Premier in a case related to a woman called Penny Easton and the tabling of a petition that was claimed to trigger her suicide three days later.\n\nLawrence was an important addition to your Cabinet team\u2014highly articulate and credible. The Royal Commission threatened her career. You stuck by her and painted the inquiry as a kangaroo court. How distracting was that for you and the government as a running sore?\n\n**PJK:** It was very distracting, but if you believe and understand someone to be innocent of a claim of this kind, made against them in a royal commission, one which had been structured by a government of the opposing party and where the commissioner seemed to be doing that government's bidding, then I felt I was in no moral position to stand Carmen Lawrence down. Commissioner Marks accepted the West Australian government's political terms and its limited terms of reference.\n\nIf Carmen had insisted she should stand down, I probably would have accepted her resignation, but she wanted to fight on and I fought on with her. Subsequently I made a mockery of Marks in the Parliament. I visited ridicule and contempt upon him after shredding his utterances daily.\n\nEvery day in Question Time, I went through the transcript of the Commission hearings from the previous day, and Roger Giles QC, the barrister representing Carmen Lawrence, said he would have been pleased to have done as well himself in any courtroom in the country. I took that as a reasonable compliment.\n\nHere's a story on 9 September:\n\nEaston Inquiry in disarray. The Easton Royal Commission is verging on chaos after Commissioner Marks conceded yesterday his inquiry was almost impossible to control. Mr Keating leapt on Commissioner Marks' comments that he'd been placed in an irrecoverable position because of the inquiry's restrictive terms of reference. Mr Keating said the admissions by Mr Marks were a sad testimony to the jaundiced political task he'd been given. Mr Marks acknowledged his findings would be open to doubt.\n\n**KOB:** But politically you lost.\n\n**PJK:** I think in a broadly political sense, we lost.\n\n**KOB:** In mid-November the Royal Commission found that Lawrence had lied and acted improperly to promote her own personal political interest. You responded by declaring complete confidence in her. Isn't there a point where your responsibility to the credibility of the government outweighs loyalty to the individual?\n\n**PJK:** Arguably yes, but it had all the appearance of a kangaroo court and I just wasn't able to say, 'Look, I'm going to forever indelibly mark in history our implicit belief that you, Carmen, were party to this and as a consequence I'm standing you down.' Incidentally, she eventually went to jury trial on three counts of perjury and the charges were dismissed.\n\n**KOB:** John Howard said of the Carmen Lawrence matter in his autobiography that in keeping Lawrence on you violated an important principle of the Westminster system, that a minister should resign or stand aside when his or her continued membership of the Cabinet is damaging the government. Howard said that if you had applied that principle to Lawrence a great deal of prime ministerial energy over 1995 would have been conserved for other pursuits.\n\n**PJK:** No humbug please. He would say that. In his first term he either stood down or saw off five ministers, three parliamentary secretaries and his own chief of staff through scandal or perceived conflict of interest. I never believed any guilt attached to Lawrence and that she was indeed the victim of a political show trial. That's the difference.\n\nWhat did hurt me though, was the by-election for Ros Kelly's seat of Canberra, after she resigned from her ministry and then Parliament. In hindsight, I should have asked Ros to stay on in Parliament for the twelve months until the election. And I'm sure she would have agreed. There was a savage swing against us in the by-election, but Labor was still back up to 41 per cent in the primary vote in Newspoll on 19 December 1995. From that by-election hole I had fought my way back\u2014again. And my personal approval was at 42 per cent to Howard's 34 per cent.\n\nThis was not much different from the same period in the 1993 election cycle, so I strongly believe a great campaign in 1996 could still have made a great difference. A 41 per cent primary vote for Labor in an election would almost always be enough to give us victory on Democrat and Green preferences. But the federal organisation of the party went missing in action. In Flanders, the Federal Secretariat had taken the train to Paris.\n\n**KOB:** In November\u2013December you had two setbacks on the industrial front. There was the threat of a five-day waterfront dispute and a potentially more damaging blue over individual work contracts between unions and the mining giant CRA in Weipa in North Queensland in November, which threatened to develop into a crippling national strike. You took off for the APEC summit in Osaka after announcing that the Weipa dispute had been resolved, but before you'd landed in Osaka the deal had come apart from the ACTU end. Bill Kelty then offended you mightily by inviting Bob Hawke to represent the unions before the Industrial Relations Commission. That must have tested the friendship.\n\n**PJK:** I had more or less settled the CRA dispute with Tim Pallas from the ACTU, but as I flew out for Osaka, Bill Kelty decided he wouldn't accept the terms I had agreed with Pallas. I don't know why Bill decided to be unhelpful at this stage, but I took great umbrage and exception to Bill and the ACTU President Jennie George inviting Bob in on the act. Clarence Darrow, perhaps; Gary Glitter, no.\n\nOnly the year before Bob had attacked me up hill and down dale with his paltry book and great lie that I had said Australia was the arse end of the earth, among other petty things. He said he thought Downer would beat me at the next election. Bob was completely disloyal, and I was up against it with Howard. And suddenly here he was, limping back on the stage, invited there by Bill. That saga took all the oxygen from what was a very important story for us with APEC.\n\n**KOB:** How badly did that affect the friendship? The way I've read it, it sounds like it knocked you for six.\n\n**PJK:** It put a big dent in the friendship for quite a while, but Bill and I were great friends before that incident and we have remained great friends ever since.\n\n**KOB:** On 27 January you announced the election for 2 March. Only four days before, the _Australian_ 's Newspoll had recorded a ten-point lead to the Coalition with you and John Howard on the same 39 per cent approval rating as preferred Prime Minister. The _Sun-Herald_ predicted the campaign would be 'one of the most bitterly fought and personal campaigns in history'. Was that right?\n\n**PJK:** I wouldn't say bitter, but it was important for each of us to beat the other, and with Howard's history I thought we could use his own record to down him. This is a guy I had very low regard for in policy terms.\n\nGoing into 1996 they had no policies and were trying to pretend they were us, the Labor Party. In other words they were trying to say as their radio ads had said, 'won't it be nice on polling day because where both parties will have the same policies on industrial relations, both parties will have the same policies on Medicare'. In other words, you can change leaders without losing the policies that are important to you.\n\nAs Pamela Williams noted in her book _The Victory_ on the 1996 campaign, page 149: 'While the debate raged [about when to release policies] around Howard, his Chief of Staff Nicole Feeley had some concerns of her own because if Howard did decide to release the policies early she knew there was little to offer.'\n\nI'll repeat, 'little to offer'. This was his Chief of Staff speaking.\n\nShe said, 'The policy was just simply not ready.' Now, this was the true position of the Liberal Party. They had no policies ready up to January 1996.\n\n**KOB:** Also according to Pamela Williams' book, many of your caucus and Cabinet colleagues were becoming frustrated with the sense of disorganisation in your office, that you were coming to meetings late, going home early, sometimes still in your pyjamas at the Lodge at midday.\n\n**PJK:** That is just nonsense. No one in the Prime Ministership had ever worked at my level. That was all stuff given to Williams by Gary Gray, who had taken over from Bob Hogg as the National Secretary, running the party machine. Gary Gray and I ended up with no relationship after the 1996 election. I believe he was incompetent and lacking fortitude. I went to the election with no support from the party office, and then he made an opportunistic speech at the National Press Club disavowing responsibility for the loss, and compounded it by giving Williams material against me for her book. In the book he proudly boasts that he had persuaded the campaign committee not to run the very strong anti-Howard ads John Singleton had prepared and not to inform me of their decision. That is, to lie to me, the leader. This, he says, explicitly in Williams' book. At a critical point in the campaign I wanted a boost to the advertising budget to run the negative ads against Howard and Williams records on page 301 Gray telling Robert Ray, who was on the campaign committee: 'We'll keep him happy and tell him we'll deliver it. But we can't, it's a complete waste of money.'\n\nWilliams also has the Liberal Party campaign director, Andrew Robb, revealing the cynical way they planned their negative personal ads against me right through the campaign. While at the same time Gary Gray is rejecting some very telling ads by Singleton against John Howard \u2014ads that would have laid Howard bare. One was on Medicare and another was on industrial relations, using Howard's own words.\n\nSo I fought the 1996 election without effective advertising support and the first clue I got was a call from John Singleton himself, whose advertising agency was making the ads for Labor.\n\nHe rang me while I was on the north coast of New South Wales, 'Paul, I think you should know you might have a problem. I've done these ads which are deadly to Howard, using Howard's own words against him. We've got him on the John Laws program in 1987 when he said Medicare was a disaster and he'd rip it up, and then he rips a piece of paper. It was all captured on film and I've really got him in the frame. I think they're killer ads and I showed them to Gary Gray.' But Singleton told me Gray said, 'John, you book them, you pay for them.' That's the first inkling I had that Gray and that seditious campaign committee were ratting on me.\n\nBy 1996 Howard was telling the press gallery he'd had a change of heart and that he was actually adopting the Labor policy on Medicare and industrial relations, and the gallery accepted it like lambs. I said to the journalists at one point, 'If John Howard told you he was actually a wombat would he be a wombat or would he be John Howard?' They just looked at me. Howard had opposed these policies all his life.\n\nBut the Labor Party's own strategists were worse. The message from Singleton was that they were not going to support me. To this day I believe Howard was completely vulnerable, but Gray decided not to fight, not to run the ads.\n\n**KOB:** And why do you think they wouldn't support your ideas?\n\n**PJK:** They were saying words to the effect of 'That silly Prime Minister thinks he can actually win. We know he can't win, the numbers are against him, and we're not going to destroy our coffers spending for a lost cause. What we should do is preserve the money now, try to minimise the losses, and give ourselves the chance to come back next time around'.\n\nI used to call Gary Mr Two Step. He was always going to win in two elections. He could never think of winning in one go, making the big effort to snatch victory like I did in 1993.\n\n**KOB:** On the other hand he reportedly called you Captain Wacky.\n\n**PJK:** I had run a really exemplary campaign, including easily winning the last televised debate against John Howard. He was not in my league. I was relying on the rats and mice. I had seen the Howard advertisements that Singleton had put together. They would have been deadly to Howard. Ten or eleven days before the election I wrote a letter to Gray essentially saying, 'Gary, where are the ads?'\n\nI got no reply. No reply to the Prime Minister from the campaign director and Federal Secretary. He boasted later through Pamela Williams that he had told Singleton only he and John Della Bosca from the campaign committee could approve the ALP ads and without that endorsement Gray would refuse to pay the bill. Here's a direct quote from the book that obviously came from Gray, 'If Keating phoned with any ideas he was to be given a hearing but then ignored.'\n\n**KOB:** Williams also says in the book that Gary Gray believed polling had shown that all your negative attacks on Howard through the year had not shifted the polling to Labor.\n\n**PJK:** Newspoll had me as preferred Prime Minister to Howard all through February, 42 to 38, 43 to 37 and in the last week of the election, 45 to 40, but through that whole period Gary Gray was arguing I was on the nose. If you were the party office, wouldn't you at least support your incumbent Prime Minister, who's got you to within shooting distance of a victory?\n\nThe Labor Party's archaic structure was such that all the smarts a political leader could bring to the table every hour of every day in the House of Representatives over a three-year period could then be undermined by the fools running the party organisation for the last four weeks of a three-year political cycle. It was a hopeless situation and when the federal office of the party offered me life membership a decade later I refused it. I didn't want their accolade. I hold the Federal office of the Labor Party in complete contempt.\n\n**KOB:** What was your mood going into the 1996 election?\n\n**PJK:** I knew I was up against it but I always liked fighting one out and one back, sitting off the front runner, but the question this time was whether, in the final lap, I could bridge the gap. I was asking Australians to elect a Labor Government for the sixth time in a row. But I felt by then at least the Australian people knew I would always have a go. People had a clear choice between the vibrant new model of Australia I had provided and the old fossilised one championed by Howard.\n\nBy comparison Howard told voters he thought we should all be relaxed and comfortable, which was a line for those who were feeling tired of the long march of reform, and enough of them said, 'Yes, John, that's probably right, we're tired of that Mr Keating pushing us around.'\n\n**KOB:** I think it might have been stronger than 'that Mr Keating'.\n\n**PJK:** Maybe, but they are damn lucky Mr Keating had been pushing them around for a decade and a half. Damn lucky.\n\n**KOB:** Why do you think Gary Gray came to see you as Captain Wacky?\n\n**PJK** That was post-election rationalisation by him to muddy the waters in an attempt to exonerate himself. There was nothing 'wacky' about my performance in the campaign. Malcolm McGregor, writing a campaign diary for the _Financial Review_ as a former Labor strategist, said on 1 March 1996: 'Keating has been very disciplined and maintained his focus without much to sustain him in the published polls.' He went on to add, in the same piece, 'Labor needed more from its paid media.'\n\n**KOB:** Gray and other campaign workers talked about your personal involvement in some of the campaign minutiae when you were supposed to be out there leading the big fight against John Howard, that you allowed yourself to get caught up in things like arranging the seating for the launch, or the time you put into selecting the music for your walk to the stage at the launch.\n\n**PJK:** The leader is always asked about these things. They would have drawn my attention to what they had in mind for particular elements of the launch, like they would in any campaign. I'm quite certain in the same circumstances the federal director of the Liberal Party would have shown these sorts of things to John Howard. He would have said, 'Yeah that's all right, that's not all right.' That would have been no distraction for me.\n\n**KOB:** But doesn't this fit the picture of the sometimes idiosyncratic guy who always insisted on running his own race, doing things his way, not always a team player?\n\n**PJK:** A team player? What, with the incompetents in the party office? Team? Look at the party's federal office. It consisted of an executive director and a handful of others. The demands of political life in the House of Representatives mean that every day you are with sophistication tailoring the questions or the answers. You're making sophisticated political judgements minute by minute and being judged in turn by your colleagues, your opponents, the press gallery and the electorate. My judgements were honed over decades. You're making calls on election timing, on the language of policy and announcements. All of that reflected smartness is supposed to stop four weeks before an election, and these clodhoppers from the party office are supposed to take over and tell you how you should be conducting the public election campaign. They were oafs. Mugs not up the the sophistication of the task.\n\n**KOB:** But there have been Labor campaigns where significant credit has fallen to the strategists in the party machine. Can you really credibly claim that people in the party machine automatically were clodhoppers?\n\n**PJK:** Mostly clodhoppers, but not all, no. Certainly in my two election campaigns as Prime Minister I did not have the active and unqualified support of the party office. And that's simply a matter of record now, on Gary Gray's own admission.\n\n**KOB:** Bob Hogg ran the campaign in 1993 and he came to that job with a great deal of political experience. He'd been credited as the architect of John Cain's rare win for Labor in Victoria in 1980, had been involved in many state and federal campaigns, and served as Bob Hawke's political adviser through his most successful years as Prime Minister. He'd earned a lot of respect in the party.\n\n**PJK:** The difference between Gary Gray and Bob Hogg is that Bob had some real talent and a wider view of the world. I didn't believe that Gary was up to the job. I ended up with a relatively polite relationship with Bob Hogg, as he had supported me against Bob Hawke, but in the end I had no relationship with Gary.\n\nBob Hogg is on the record during the 1993 campaign saying he didn't think we would win, and told journalists as much. My complaint is that the party office should have been a fighting unit with victory as its goal, particularly when the parliamentary leader is prepared to put up a strong fight. I didn't need the party secretary to be the oracle. You don't find people like Tony Nutt in the Liberal Party behaving like this. The problem the Labor Party has is that a long run of federal secretaries regarded their real constituency, their key one, as the Canberra parliamentary press gallery. They defined themselves by their media image, relevance and influence on the gallery. Somehow we breed these media-centric people. The Liberals never seem to do that. Their federal officers remain much more anonymous.\n\nI used to say to them, 'Hang on, I'm the one who's going to lose skin here, what have you got to lose? All you've got to do is back me in.'\n\n**KOB:** They certainly had skin in the game to the extent they, too, were dedicated to seeing a Labor Government running the country.\n\n**PJK:** In 1996 we had this incompetent, lazy show wanting, in their own halting way, to reshape the smartest and most effective political language of the past decade. To recut my words and phrases, my instincts.\n\n**KOB:** Eleven days out from the election Newspoll showed that you'd closed the gap to 4 per cent on the primary vote; you'd cut the Liberal lead in half, but it would still take a huge surge from there. You couldn't afford a single error.\n\nWhat an irony that three days later your old mate and fellow warrior Bill Kelty tried to come to your rescue with a declaration of war on John Howard and his industrial relations policies and it backfired. He threatened wage demands of up to 30 per cent. Don Watson wrote Kelty had responded to Howard's comfortable and relaxed line by calling him Captain Snooze. Unfortunately, said Watson, he didn't leave it there.\n\n**PJK:** I was campaigning in the central west and the Blue Mountains in a bus and Don Watson was insisting I turn up for this union rally in Melbourne with Bill. I wasn't convinced about turning up for a big jamboree of trade unionists in the middle of an election campaign but, under pressure, I went.\n\nBill was devastated the next day when he saw the impact of his speech. He was trying to draw an unmistakable line of difference between Howard's take no prisoners industrial relations approach and ours. The Liberals interpreted it as industrial blackmail. They made the most of the fact that I was at the rally, and I started then travelling back down in the polls.\n\n**KOB:** At what point did you know for sure you had lost?\n\n**PJK:** In the last week when Ralph Willis as Treasurer decided to publish letters which had been sent to Willis anonymously, supposedly from within the Liberal Party, allegedly between Costello and Kennett to say that a federal Liberal Government would cut state grants after the election. It was three days before the election where every single thing we did was amplified and critical.\n\nI was flying from Cairns to Adelaide and without any consultation with me, Gary Gray, the campaign director, with David Epstein, the head of the national media liaison office, and Ralph's private secretary, David Cox, gave the tick to Ralph to make a fallacious statement that a Liberal Government would make savage cuts to state grants, and he had letters to prove it.\n\nBy the time I landed in Adelaide three hours later the damage had been done. My instincts after decades of political life would have told me it was a set-up. They should have waited to consult with me. I would have said don't bother with it. Don't even touch it. If I had seen these letters there's no way I would ever have fallen for it. But Gary, Mr Process, did not even observe the process of consulting the leader on so critical a matter, three days before the poll.\n\n**KOB:** That may have been the killer blow but do you really think the election hadn't already been lost by then?\n\n**PJK:** The _Sydney Morning Herald_ said I lost six percentage points in their McNair poll in that final week. Six percentage points from the beginning of the final week up to election day. In other words, I had lost all momentum. My speech to the National Press Club that week was probably the best political speech I had given as Prime Minister, but the lunch was dominated by questions about Ralph Willis and the letters. I got no coverage for the content of the speech.\n\nAnd Howard had had a very ordinary week. He'd had a bad interview with John Laws and then he fell off a stage, which could have become a sort of totem for the fact that things were starting to get ragged for him. And they were. I felt I had the momentum rolling the previous weekend to come home strongly. Let me remind you of some polls and headlines that weekend.\n\nThe _Australian_ front page, Tuesday 20 February 1996: 'Strong swing back to ALP\u2014Newspoll', 'Labor has more than halved the Coalition's lead in the past week and now trails by just four points.' That is, requiring two points to change.\n\nThe _Financial Review_ , 22 February 1996: 'Howard suffers through a third day of stumbles\u2014cracks are emerging in Howard's campaign for the Lodge.' The _Weekend Australian_ , 24\u201325 February 1996: 'Keating closes in on Howard\u2014the momentum of the election campaign changed this week.'\n\nThe Sydney _Sunday Telegraph_ front page 25 February 1996: 'Labor surge', 'A national poll conducted for the _Sunday Telegraph_ shows Labor and the Coalition with 50 per cent of the vote each after distribution of preferences.' 'The Prime Minister, Paul Keating's rating as preferred Prime Minister has risen from 47 per cent in January to 50 per cent last Thursday and Friday.'\n\nThe Melbourne _Herald Sun_ front page, 25 February 1996: 'Neck and neck\u2014Keating closes the gap on Howard', referring to the same _Quadrant_ poll.\n\nAnd, the _Daily Telegraph_ front page, Monday 29 February 1996: 'Keating's night\u2014Prime Minister outpoints \"aggressive\" Howard in final debate.' The report said Howard failed to derail Paul Keating's election momentum.\n\nI had momentum but the problem was, after Willis and the letters, we just sank.\n\nYou have to have every gun blazing in that last week. You need all the advertisements running your way. You need all the psychology running for you. In the end I didn't have them.\n\nI turned up on the tarmac in Adelaide and Mike Rann, who was Labor Opposition Leader in South Australia at the time, came up to me and said, 'Paul, while you were in the air Ralph Willis has made this press statement about the Liberal Party intending to introduce state income taxes but now he's had to come back to the media and admit the letters are fakes.'\n\nAs I walked off the tarmac I said to Watson and Russell, 'That's the end of it. We'll never pick up after this', and we never did. It was obvious to me and others that the letters were planted by somebody from the Liberal Party. But this was another Gray masterstroke.\n\n**KOB:** Election night 1996 was such a contrast in mood to your true believers' speech three years before. How did you feel on that Saturday night as you prepared your statement of concession?\n\n**PJK:** It was a very different mood that night and I knew I would be facing a defeat. I had been in public life for 27 years. I'd been either Treasurer or Prime Minister for half of that time so I couldn't say I had been robbed. In a healthy democracy countries make changes and I always thought winning a sixth election was going to be a tough mountain to climb. Annita and I were at the Bankstown Sports Club in Sydney with my staff and there was an obvious sense of foreboding about the place. We knew we would have to face the crowd and say the things that needed to be said with all the stoicism we could muster.\n\nI said that the Liberal Party had been forced to adopt our policy on industrial relations, on health, on education and on superannuation to be able to win. It had to say all those things to win the election, so I said that at least the Labor Party had made a new marker in social democracy in Australia. That's what a political party's supposed to do: to put the new building blocks into place. I wished John Howard and his government well, which I meant\u2014said and meant\u2014and made what I hope was a generous speech both to my own party and to the Opposition, and left.\n\n**KOB:** This was the end of a very long road for you, one that began all those decades ago helping your father to letterbox for Labor as a kid. This night was a moment that would be enshrined in history. If you had to distil it down, what was the essence you wanted to capture in that moment as you were seen to face the music, to face the judgement of the Australian people?\n\n**PJK:** While acknowledging we had lost, I wanted to make it clear that Labor had created a new standard, a newly made economy with a strong social framework, one having a premium on fairness and equity, with a new orientation in the region. While there was now a new government, these key reforms of Labor would be broadly maintained. And by the time the country had come back to Labor twelve years later, broadly they had been.\n\n**KOB:** How do you feel that in the end it was John Howard, the man you'd once dismissed as the bowser boy from Earlwood, who brought you down?\n\n**PJK:** We all get carried out in the end, Kerry, even John Howard was carried out by Kevin Rudd. He even lost his seat of Bennelong. We all get carried out in modern political life. In the end they catch up with you. The big question is, what sort of a trail can you blaze, and with what sort of elan.\n\n**KOB:** You've spoken throughout these conversations about the legacies of the Hawke and Keating years, including your prime ministership. How do you feel about the way the Labor leaders who succeeded you, Kim Beazley and then Simon Crean, became very defensive about the Keating legacy, about the recession, and about the deficit you left for the Howard\u2013Costello Government, which of course they exploited as you had exploited Fraser's and Howard's in 1983.\n\n**PJK:** Kim and the others were too defensive, to their own detriment. There was a great deal to be proud of, of Labor's legacy under Bob and me, which more than offset any negative sentiment left from the recession. And while Howard and Costello were busily claiming credit for turning a Labor deficit into a surplus\u2014which would have come back anyway as the economy grew\u2014people should not have been allowed to forget that it was a Labor Government under Hawke and Keating that converted a big Liberal deficit in 1983 under John Howard into four surpluses in a row, which was unheard of at the time.\n\nLabor had presided over the biggest and most intense transformation of the economy in Australian history. And we're still reaping the benefits today. What did Beazley need to be defensive about?\n\nThe joke about Howard and Costello claiming what an achievement it was to struggle back into surplus is that all they had to do was simply wait two years for growth to do its job and the budget would have naturally whirred back into surplus anyway. The reason that was possible was because of all the structural outlays\u2014work we had done in all those years in the Expenditure Review Committee.\n\nThe difference between achieving a surplus when I was Treasurer and when Costello was Treasurer was that we started with the neglected inefficient economy and had to fashion a new model, while they had the new efficient framework to work within. We had to work ceaselessly with years of real cuts\u2014reducing spending from 30 per cent of GDP to 24 per cent\u2014to produce our four years of surplus, while their surplus would have been delivered by the revenue from the economic growth they inherited from Labor, even if they had made no cuts at all. Subsequently their surpluses were sustained by the massive budget dividend from the mining boom, much of which John Howard squandered on middle-class welfare and tax cuts to buy votes.\n\nIn other words, the big bogey of the Keating deficit was only a bogey because the Labor Opposition was unable or unwilling to explain that as the deficit was a direct result of the recession with reduced revenue and higher unemployment payouts, it would disappear as the economy came back, significantly assisted by the structural reforms we had put in place.\n\n**KOB:** I want to move to more personal things now. Politics has many ironies, one of which is that in the altruistic sense the politician is giving him or herself to the public, while at the personal level it's a very self-absorbing pursuit that can come at great cost to the people around them, the people they love and care about the most.\n\n**PJK:** It is first and foremost a vocation. You can't do this for a quarter of a century without a guiding light. And what is the guiding light that keeps this enormous effort running? It is the wellbeing of the community at large, the wellbeing of the Australian people at large. The people close to you become part of the compromise.\n\nPeople say about public life, 'Well, everyone knows what they're getting into', but they don't, really. I think both the politician and the family get into this not knowing just how long it will take, nor how scarifying the demands on family life are going to be, and on individual time and the impact on children and the rest. It's an enormously challenging thing to do and it's mystifying to me why the public don't have a higher regard for people in public life, because most are certainly not going there for the money. It's really only to advance the national interest but you do it at great cost to yourself and your family.\n\n**KOB:** I understand that sentiment but you also have to recognise the other side of the coin, which is that so often politicians let themselves down, whether it's being seen to be giving themselves overly generous superannuation schemes or pay rises while asking workers to moderate theirs, or abusing the privileges.\n\n**PJK:** I don't think there are two sides to this coin, Kerry. It's a very modestly paid profession for the enormous demands it makes on people's time, their privacy, their whole personal life. If you're doing what you were elected to do it might be high on the psychic income, the intellectual income, but it is certainly low on the monetary income compared to many other occupations. It is also very high in the stress on families and on people's personalities and private lives.\n\n**KOB:** When it was over, all over, the dust had settled, you did hit something of a hole. You wouldn't have been human if you hadn't: 27 years of parliamentary life, thirteen years of Cabinet government, four-plus years at the apex suddenly all comes to a screeching halt, rejected by the nation you felt you'd done so much for. How deeply did it affect you?\n\n**PJK:** My wife and I separated at the end of 1998. That's had a much greater impact on me than losing the election. Some people may have assumed that I was kind of disoriented or something similar but it wasn't really about losing the election. I never liked losing, but you couldn't expect to go on winning forever\n\n**KOB:** Did the demands of politics come at the cost of your marriage?\n\n**PJK:** It was a contributing factor, particularly those last three years as Treasurer and the fact that Bob pulled the wool over my eyes with the Kirribilli Agreement. That period put a very big strain on me and on my family. That shocking workload over such a long period of time.\n\nWe lived in three rented houses in Canberra while I was Treasurer. I know this comment will be jumped on by some; the way the Commonwealth treats its most senior ministers in this country, with the policy load they carry, is pretty shocking. Having decided to bring the family to Canberra and put the kids in school there so we could have some semblance of a normal life, we had to scramble around every couple of years looking for another place to rent because the owners would come back from a diplomatic post or somewhere else and you'd be punted out.\n\nThe alternative for me as Treasurer would have been even worse: continuing to live in Sydney but being hostage to the job in Canberra and playing almost no part in the family's life. In Britain the Chancellor of the Exchequer is housed in Downing Street next to the Prime Minister's residence and office. In Australia, the demands on a Treasurer trying to do the job conscientiously are hard on you and very hard on the family.\n\n**KOB:** In terms of leaving politics, what about the seduction of power, having it and using it? Did you miss that?\n\n**PJK:** You should only ever want power to use it. Some people in public life want it because they're attracted to the trappings, to power for its own sake. I have never had any regard for those sorts of people, and in the end they are found out. I believe the only thing that can sustain you through the hellfire of it all is the holy grail of national improvement. I was always driven by national improvement. I'd go after each reform as best I could and for the highest quality each time. And if that's not driving you, I don't know how you would keep going.\n\nI understood power and I certainly used it. You don't get to use it unless you understand it and are comfortable with it. Someone said grabbing the naked flame and hanging on\u2014you've got to grab the naked flame and hang on. And I think if you are afraid of power and don't know how to use it, then you can't hope to achieve the changes the country really needs.\n\n**KOB:** Still in the personal vein, you've said Bob Hawke came to be pathologically narcissistic. You don't think there was anything of the narcissist in you?\n\n**PJK:** I'm a complete shrinking violet compared to Bob. An absolute shrinking violet!\n\n**KOB:** But you saw nothing of the narcissist in you?\n\n**PJK:** I was always proud of my work, but I don't think I was ever narcissistic in the way I understand the term. I never needed to bask in the reflected glory of those around me, to feel self-worth. I don't think even my enemies would throw that charge at me.\n\n**KOB:** But there had to be a very strong ego driving you for you to have such self-belief, such self-faith and confidence.\n\n**PJK:** I've got a healthy ego and I've got a lot of earned confidence. You know my saying that in politics and in life you don't just take in your confidence as something like a can of Popeye's spinach. Confidence has to be earned. But once you have it, it gives you the power to make the big judgement calls.\n\n**KOB:** Sometimes confidence can breed arrogance.\n\n**PJK:** It can, but mostly it gives you strength to make tough calls and the ability to craft things that people without the same degree of experience and confidence wouldn't comprehend doing or be able to do. To be an effective political leader, you need a large measure of confidence and judgement.\n\n**KOB:** You were there 27 years in the end. You were barely an adult at 25 when you came into Parliament. You must have learned some lessons, not just about politics, but about human nature, about yourself, about life. What are the lessons that stand out to you, the lessons that really resonate?\n\n**PJK:** Lang was right in one thing: you really don't have a second to lose. History flicks by very quickly. So if you want to be in the business I was in you've got to take every opportunity you can to gain political power, and then use it wisely and effectively, for the right reasons, having a sense of the dynamism of the society and the country, rather than some static model; an idea of how it's changing or should be changing in the times you are living in and the part you can play in that.\n\n**KOB:** Can you see how you grew decade by decade?\n\n**PJK:** I can see how I got better at the job. If you're any good, you do get better at it.\n\n**KOB:** You told a German newspaper in an interview a few years ago that you would have made a better Prime Minister now than you were then. In what way?\n\n**PJK:** Being older and wiser; getting around the world for another twenty years, looking at developments in the international economy, particularly in this rapidly growing part of the world, looking at the way the domestic economy has further developed, industry by industry, and with it the financial markets.\n\nThrough most of my life I had a kind of public rounding on one side, but I've now had twenty years of another rounding in the private economy. So today I would be smarter in the job but I wouldn't quite have the energy I had for those reams of paper that came with the Expenditure Review Committee rounds of the 1980s. I don't think I'd fancy sitting through all that again.\n\n**KOB:** That almost suggests an argument for taking a slightly longer route into politics, experiencing life out in the wider world first, coming into politics later, so that you might have ultimately been a smarter Prime Minister.\n\n**PJK:** That could conceivably be true, Kerry. But it's the hit-and-miss game of Australian public life. If one does not have a House of Representatives seat that is relatively safe, you cannot get the consistency. And if you don't have it relatively early, you cannot build the position in the party.\n\nYou might also have noticed how many people who have been successful in business or some other pursuit and have moved into public life and failed. Some of them have made the mistake of assuming that the political game is not as skilful as the world they had succeeded in. But it is skilled and it is super-sophisticated. Some arrived as shooting stars, as skyrockets, but many dead sticks fell to earth. I'd like to think you could go and have a private life and then drift into Parliament in one's late forties or fifties and make a big contribution in public life. But I don't think that necessarily gives you a public head.\n\nOne thing John Howard and I do have in common is that we both had and have a public head. We think in public terms. We are not industry people with a latent longing for public service. We are first and foremost people with public heads. And I think it's very hard to develop instincts for that culture out of the game, out of the structure of public life.\n\n**KOB:** In your Placido Domingo speech in 1990 you said that up to that point there'd been no great leader in Australia. You were drawing a comparison with a handful of the great American leaders who faced great crises and rose to greatness through them. How close do you think you came to being a great leader?\n\n**PJK:** That will be for someone else to judge. But my focus was this: I always wanted to see Australia become a great country, but I believed then and believe now it can only be a great country with a new idea of itself. And that new idea has to require, of its essence, a new approach to leadership. It cannot be accelerated incrementalism, it can't be a sort of suboptimal consensus. It has to be the rather more radical, holistic approach.\n\nI tried in my way to affect such a change, admittedly, a lot of it at the back end of my time in government, but I tried in all those bigger areas\u2014foreign policy, social policy and economic policy\u2014to affect such a change. But Australia has still to make a further jump, and it won't make it without that kind of leadership.\n\n**KOB:** You've said the sum of the parts of Cabinet were greater than the individual efforts of any of you. Do you think that might also have been true of your partnership with Bob Hawke, that together you were a greater force than either of you would have been apart?\n\n**PJK:** I would agree that was true in the policy framework of the Hawke Government. That is, Bob had a bank of political goodwill and an ability to use that goodwill in the Cabinet process. I had a new economic framework for the country, and broadly he supported me in that framework. We saw eye to eye on many things, and I was prepared for nearly nine years to hold a subordinate position, to draw that power down to make secure those changes.\n\n**KOB:** You've also said in the past that he envied you. That may or may not be true, but don't you think that you might also have envied him his popularity, his charisma, that phenomenal connection he had to the people?\n\n**PJK:** I never envied Bob. I just wanted him to keep spending the political capital. I was never for preserving it. I wanted to burn it up to get the changes. I just wish he had had the judgement and the discipline not to hang around so long. It would have been in his interests and my own, but particularly in his interests, to have gone when he said he would, rather than to be dragged out of the job, which was bad for him and bad for me.\n\nWe were both interested in doing big things and in the thrill of the chase, and that's where we found common cause. There was the tension in 1988 leading up to the Kirribilli Agreement, but then for most of the next three years we continued that great partnership. Finally it ended in tears, but how many partnerships of that kind last eight-and-a-half years? Not many. But the Keating Government is an entirely different matter. There there was no Bob, no compromises. An entirely new canvas and loads of paint. Its program of national identity and orientation has no equivalence in Australia's federal history. It was Jackson Pollock and Picasso all mixed into one potent policy pot.\n\n**KOB:** You're talking about two brilliant artists, at least one with a touch of genius, who made up their own rules as they went along. They could indulge their passions and their eccentricities, and dance to their own tune. What is the comparison you're drawing?\n\n**PJK:** These people looked at the world and saw the possibilities and expressed what they saw in a very different way. In broad political terms, our program was a lot like that. A new way of looking at our opportunities, our symbols and sense of ourselves; the resonances of Australia. Occasionally, paint was splashed with a Pollock-like flourish, while in other ways, the deconstruction of the old order had Picasso-like overtones.\n\n**KOB:** There is one policy initiative in your government that we haven't discussed but would be remiss to leave out because it has since become one of the most divisive issues in Australian politics, and that's the question of asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia by boat. Yours was the first to walk down the road of mandatory detention in remote Australia, when Gerry Hand was Immigration Minister in 1992 at a time when there weren't a lot of boats coming to Australia. Was that your only alternative?\n\n**PJK:** To be honest, it was not a great human rights issue for Cabinet at the time because Gerry was the leader of the Left faction from Victoria as well as the minister.And the Left had the most libertarian views in the party about migration and settlement. In very large measure for me and the Cabinet in the broad, if Hand was advising the Cabinet to set up detention centres for the orderly processing of asylum-seekers, always within the framework of the philosophical Left, then he would have the human rights issues covered.\n\nHis point was that Immigration was losing track of people before they were able to properly test their bona fides as refugees, to assess their health and keep in touch for subsequent processing. He wanted a temporary holding point. From memory the proposition went through Cabinet virtually without debate. When the Immigration Minister tells you his Department is losing control of the process, and this was the remedy coming from the leader of the Left, we accepted it. There was no political heat at the time that I can recall, so our antennae were not up.\n\nThe difference between having a temporary processing point under us and the quasi-penal settlement it became under John Howard, and even more so now, is really quite stark.\n\n**KOB:** What do you think of the course Australia has taken since?\n\n**PJK:** I think I would have come at the problem differently had we been presented with a problem of high-volume boat arrivals. The issue is that the people coming in boats to Australia don't leave the Middle East by boat. They fly to Malaysia first.\n\nThey take the boat for the final part of the journey. Therefore I think relationships with Malaysia and Indonesia were always crucial in preventing the traffic from happening. My view would have been that if the people who were genuine refugees were able to make their way here, they should be settled in Australia. If they were economic refugees who were not fleeing for their lives, but simply seeking a better life, using criminal smugglers in the process, that was a different question.\n\nAny government I ran would have tackled the problem in its totality, not just in our own waters. The problem is that Howard corrupted the debate with _Tampa_ , trying to wedge the Labor Party. If the Labor Party had forcefully resisted him at the time, the issue would not have the atmospherics it has today. That accommodation of Howard's jingoism set off a virus in the bloodstream of the Australian polity that has never abated.\n\n**KOB:** Twenty years after leaving Parliament, how do you reflect on the state of politics in Australia? In truth there's no evident inspiration, no real passion, no real leadership on either side. It's become just another profession, hasn't it, as opposed to a calling in which nobility sometimes flourished?\n\n**PJK:** It has become too much of a profession which obliterates the instincts for national ambition, the commitment to do what is both good and right, as I've said before. There's no substitute for leadership, so when the big ideas are put together and a leader pushes them, it generates a flux that draws in other comment and support. But when those big ideas are not in evidence and the momentum isn't there, the flux never materialises. Then the static takes over and the static is now writ large by social media and the vacuous news cycle. I still believe that the power of the big idea or the power of a guiding light will always take precedence over the static of the Twittersphere or anything like it. It's more the pity that enough people in public life don't believe that.\n\n**KOB:** What is left of the Labor Party you joined as a kid?\n\n**PJK:** I think the Labor Party is still faithful to the true and best interests of the great majority of Australians, that is, the great body of working people. I think it retains that sentiment. And I believe it tries to look for the societal turns or the big trends in picking the right pathway for its well-placed sentiment.\n\n**KOB:** Many of the people who gave the Labor Party its heart, people like Clyde Cameron, Mick Young and their like, came not just from the trade union movement, but from the shop floor\u2014in the case of those two, from the shearing shed. And they brought a lot of those down-to-earth, real-life experiences with them, and that's where their passion came from. They came up through the Labor ranks side by side with its educated class, people with white-collar jobs and professions. There was a diversity in the ranks that doesn't exist anymore.\n\nThe unions are rapidly losing relevance as evidenced by the steep decline in membership, and their failure to sign up young Australians entering the workforce. Even the party's name has become a _non sequitur_ , and I wonder how Labor stops itself from becoming the blurred other party to the conservatives like the Democratic Party in America now seems to be. The traditional channels from the party back to working people are largely gone.\n\n**PJK:** It is true the party has become a professional party, there are too many 'professional' politicians these days, there isn't enough openness to the broad community and to the growth of that community. The bank of talent making its way from across the whole workforce culture has withered and the party is no longer open enough to the modern workforce. Some of the best seats in the House of Representatives go to people who are not going to add value. The party is not open to the new professional and business classes, which carry a share of people with good Labor values.\n\nNot too long ago a traditional tradesman might have been a plumber with a ute, a dog and his tools. That person today might employ twelve or thirteen people and run a little business. That person should be a Labor person but we've let them go. We've lost them. As the nature of the workforce has changed we haven't changed with it. The influence of unions within the party is now too great, and I'm speaking as a person who was an active trade unionist in the workplace and then a union organiser. The union presence has, in the broad, become a corrupting influence, and I don't mean that in a money sense but in a policy sense. In the sense that the union influence is denying access to the Parliament for a wider bank of thought and talent.\n\nAny party that so confines itself to one area of talent must suffer on its shortsightedness, and the Labor Party is suffering as a consequence of this. It's got to open up, but you'll notice that notwithstanding debates about the organisation of the party over at least a decade, there have not yet been the shifts in the openness of the system at a federal or state level.\n\n**KOB:** How have you filled your time since leaving Parliament? Public life seems to have ended for you the day you walked out of Parliament. How have you enriched your life to fill the void after 27 years of public purpose?\n\n**PJK:** I have a formal position in investment banking, a very clever business providing investment advice to corporations. You get to see all the various elements of the economy at work against an international backdrop, so it keeps me across what's really going on in the economy. That's very uplifting. I have continued to lobby governments with some success, to lift superannuation from 9 to 12 per cent and to retain dividend imputation.\n\nI spent nine years trying to frame the reconstruction of the western side of Sydney's central business district with the so-called Barangaroo Project, dealing with four premiers, a number of treasurers and umpteen departments. That's now coming to fruition. The CBD of Sydney resides on a spur that is three kilometres long and one kilometre wide, and you get just one chance every century to get something like this done. I gave that all the executive ability I could muster for eight-and-a-half years, and I think it will change the way Sydney works into the twenty-first century.\n\nI'm chairman of the International Advisory Board of China Development Bank, which has a balance sheet three times the World Bank. It is the most important policy bank in China, so I get an insight into the domestic Chinese economy and the bigger, strategic conversation among the leadership. I've enjoyed that. I occasionally turn up in the United States, I occasionally go to Japan, I occasionally go to Indonesia, and so I generally keep a region-wide feel.\n\n**KOB:** Is there a loose network of wise old heads among the leaders of the world from the past?\n\n**PJK:** Henry Kissinger sits on my board, as did Paul Volcker until recently. What you find with accomplished people is that they remain accomplished. They continue to think in original terms. They don't allow themselves to be embedded in the orthodoxy.\n\nIt's another version of what I said earlier\u2014if you want a quick meal, go to a busy restaurant. If you want ideas, go to a head that's been turning them over. I've got to say by the same token, I don't think old leaders' clubs have much going for them; those sodalities of old leaders. I think they're all old hat.\n\nBut if you have a particular focus and you're on a board doing a particular thing with people who have done important things as leaders in the past, invariably you find their mind is modernising all the time; turning all the time to the contemporary problem. It's a pleasure to be in the company of these sorts of people.\n\n**KOB:** You've told me one regret you have is that you didn't study music at university when you left Parliament, that you'd have liked to give yourself the chance to build the skills to conduct an orchestra.\n\n**PJK:** Yes. I should have taken on the discipline of walking through the front door of music, rather than coming to it from the back. I have a great memory for symphonic music. I can sit and, in my terms, conduct most of the large symphonic works, certainly in the romantic period at the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. But that is not like being note perfect, and to be note perfect you have to be on the score. And I'm not on the score. And I should have been. It was something I should have done.\n\n**KOB:** How big a regret is that?\n\n**PJK:** A big regret. I picked up the problem with tinnitus back in 1988 during the 1988 Budget, and that doesn't take kindly to being belted at a symphony concert. I could have done without that, but to be able to pick up a major manuscript and be able to read it competently would have been a great pleasure, something new to accomplish.\n\n**KOB:** You told me early in our conversations that you still visit your grandmother's grave. You two obviously had a very strong bond. What did you think when you went out there recently?\n\n**PJK:** I am very conscious that it was my grandmother and my mother who invested such a bank of love in me. One of my biographers said, 'I think it led Paul Keating to the point of view he didn't therefore need the love of anyone else.' That's not true. But it is true to think that you need at least one person in the world who thinks you're special.\n\n**KOB:** So when you go out to her grave, what do you reflect on?\n\n**PJK:** Just to think, I'm near you. I'm still here, you're still my grandmother. I still love you.\n\n**KOB** And since we're talking in this vein, what's the spiritual side to Paul Keating? Some people might say the soul, the core? Do you see yourself as a spiritual person now?\n\n**PJK:** If you mean spiritual in a deeply religious sense, no, but I am spiritual. I think the tension between passion and reason is the pathway to an enlarged life. If it's all about reason, all just about a process of deduction or about scientific discovery, and if it's not informed by passion and intuition, then I think the outcomes for your life personally and for public life are much more limited.\n\nThis is why I think the music, architecture, decoration, neoclassicism, all of these things give me a sense of a perfection, a nirvana, which you need to balance the reasoning part of your life, where passion and reason vie with each other, and move you onto a larger plane. That's how I've found it. I would feel barren without the romantic dimension and the sustenance these things bring you, living instead in a purely rational world.\n\n**KOB:** In these later years, you must have had moments where you've reflected on the personal cost in your life, the emotional cost to you and to those around you of taking on such an all-consuming pursuit.\n\n**PJK:** Those who loved me paid a price being around me. There's no doubt about that. They all pay a price being around us in public life. But in the end, in the crucible, in the furnace, what is it all about?\n\nI always shied away from the phoney, what I thought were phoney inclinations towards the public, to say things to give people a sugar moment, where in fact, the earnest soul does the really important thing. In the end, after a long public life, I look around cities like Sydney and Melbourne, and I see how much richer, wealthier, how much more prosperous they are today than the relative poverty I found at the end of the 1970s. It's a world of difference. I look around and I feel good about it.\n\n**KOB:** What epitaph would you like?\n\n**PJK:** That he did his best. And his best may not have been good enough, but it was the best he could do. I never shortchanged the public ever. I'm sure there were other Prime Ministers as conscientiously committed to the Australian public as me but none more.\n\nI was only interested in outcomes for them. I took them into my confidence on radio, on television, in the long press conferences. I tried to involve them in the same debates we were having around the Cabinet table. This might sound like a statement of the obvious but these days particularly, I'm not sure it is.\n\nThe greatest compliment you can pay to the Australian public as a politician is to conscientiously include them in the conversation, and I was prepared to go through the tortures of the damned to lift the place up. And lift it up I think we did.\n\nUncle Bill Keating, who died at the hands of the Japanese on the notorious march from Sandakan in Borneo in 1945.\n\nThe two women who invested Paul Keating with 'a ton of love'\u2014Beatrice Chapman with her daughter Minnie, circa 1940.\n\nA definite family resemblance. Matt Keating with his son the future Prime Minister, Sydney 1944.\n\nThe family home of Paul Keating's childhood, 3 Marshall St, Bankstown.\n\nYoung Paul (third row, second from the right) in his last year at De La Salle College, Bankstown, 1959.\n\nKeating for Blaxland, 1969. Modelled on JFK's 1960 campaign for President.\n\nThe beloved E-type Jaguar that met a tragic end outside a NSW Labor Conference.\n\nPaul Keating sponsors Jack Lang back into the Labor fold after decades of exile, July 1971.\n\nPaul and Annita at their formal wedding party in Oisterwijk, The Netherlands, 17 January 1975. Min Keating (left) and Annie van Iersel look on.\n\nPaul Keating, Gough Whitlam's youngest minister, on the steps of Parliament House about to hand his leader the megaphone to address the crowd on 11 November, 1975. (MICHAEL RAYNER, FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\n\nThe first Hawke ministry on the steps of the old Parliament House, Canberra, March 1983. (Paul Keating is in the second row between Clyde Holding and Kim Beazley Jnr.) (FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\n\nAustralian treasurers don't often get White House access, but Prime Minister Bob Hawke brought Keating along on his first visit to US President Ronald Reagan, June 1983.\n\nThe first Keating budget, Canberra, August 1983.\n\nThe first big reform. As Treasurer, Paul Keating announces the float of the dollar with Reserve Bank Governor Bob Johnston, Canberra, 9 December 1983.\n\nPaul Keating learned the value of talkback in his early Treasury days. He even arranged a Reserve Bank briefing for John Laws. Circa 1984.\n\n1985. When a wheel fell off the consumption tax cart.\n\nPaul Keating with Bill Kelty. The second most important partnership of the Hawke-Keating years. (GREGG PORTEOUS, NEWSPIX)\n\nNot the way he'd intended to go. Bob Hawke's last day as Labor's longest-serving Prime Minister after losing the caucus vote to Paul Keating in Canberra, 19 December 1991. (TIM CLAYTON, FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\n\nNot the way he'd intended to become Prime Minister. The victor walks from caucus surrounded by supporters, 19 December 1991. (ANTHONY WEATE, NEWSPIX)\n\nA classic family portrait\u2014Katherine, Annita, Alexandra, Paul, Caroline and Patrick\u2014in their rented home in Forrest, Canberra, 1989.\n\nEleven days into the prime ministership Paul Keating hosts US President George Bush Snr, New Year's Day 1992.\n\nGeorge Bush Snr recruiting the next generation of allies. The Keating children en route from Sydney to Melbourne on Air Force One, January 1992.\n\nA key first step in a new foreign policy agenda. Paul Keating visits President Suharto in Jakarta, April 1992.\n\nA key ally in getting the APEC leaders concept up, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miazawa with Paul Keating in Tokyo, September 1992.\n\n'The most moving day in his whole political life.' Kissing the ground at Kokoda, Papua-New Guinea, 26 April 1992. (FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\n\n'We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.' Paul Keating's milestone Redfern Park speech signalling his intent to deliver on Mabo, 10 December 1992. (PICKETT, FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\n\nNobody had worn a more regular path to the National Press Club. Paul Keating as Prime Minister 1992.\n\nPaul Keating and his first Treasurer John Dawkins. A close political friendship that hit troubled times. Parliament House, 1992.\n\nThe sweetest victory of all. Paul Keating wins the unwinnable election. Bankstown Sports Club, Sydney, 13 March 1993. (ANTHONY WEATE, NEWSPIX)\n\nCementing the first APEC Summit. US President Bill Clinton and Paul Keating at the White House, September 1993.\n\nClinching a point at the third APEC leaders' summit in Osaka, Japan, November 1995.\n\nImagine the mixed emotions behind the smiles. The final staff meeting of the Keating prime ministership, March 1996.\n\nStill managing a wry smile as he concedes defeat after four years and three months as Prime Minister at the Bankstown Sports Club, 3 March, 1996. (PHIL CARRICK, FAIRFAX SYNDICATION)\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThere are of course, people to acknowledge and thank for their part in the production of this book, first and foremost Paul Keating. He had a big stake in the game but even so he was more generous with his time than he needed to be, and when necessary he brought the same focus and flourish to it that he did to any of his big policy passions all those years ago.\n\nI had no idea what I was getting into with this book, so I am particularly grateful for the skill and insight the Allen & Unwin team brought to the project, particularly Sue Hines, Foong Ling Kong and Rebecca Kaiser. Their support was warm and consistent.\n\nThe original Keating project, the four part ABC TV interview series, was also supported by a small but excellent team of craftsmen led by Ben Hawke and Justin Stevens, and their efforts too are reflected in the book. It was also a big call for Mark Scott and Kate Torney to so vigorously endorse four hours of unadulterated talking head television. I don't think that's ever happened on Australian television before.\n\nSue Javes, my partner and trusted sounding board for 36 years, has been as sharp as a tack in her advice\u2014although she did muse at one\n\npoint that she now had some understanding of what Princess Diana meant when she said it felt at times as if there were three people in the marriage.\nNOTES\n\nBLEAK TIMES FOR LABOR\n\nPages 14\u201315: 'I will never forget the scene when Eddie Ward...', Fred Daly, _From Curtin to Kerr_ , p. 28\n\nTHE HAYDEN YEARS\n\nPages 106\u201307: 'I knew only too well my shortcomings for the task...', Bill Hayden, _Hayden_ , p. 311\n\nREINS OF POWER\n\nPage 130: 'All of us must have been reminded of Dr Johnson's famous remark...', Geoff Kitney, _National Times_ , 13\u201319 March 1983\n\nTHE FLOAT\n\nPages 149\u2013153: 'I was completely open with him...', John Edwards, _Keating_ , p. 543\n\nTAXING THE RELATIONSHIP\n\nPage 215: 'The result was a dramatic omen...', Paul Kelly, _The End of Certainty_ , p. 162\n\nPage 218: 'Is it true, as Paul Kelly wrote, that you called Bob Hawke \"jellyback\"?', Paul Kelly, _The End of Certainty_ , p. 162\n\nPage 223: 'Tax go-slow rebounds on PM...', _Sunday Telegraph_ , 22 September 1985\n\nPage 224: 'It snapped the collegial bond of trust...', John Edwards, _Keating_ , p. 278\n\nTHE MEDIA: POLICY AND PAYBACK\n\nPage 267: 'Hawke had a courageous and capable minister...', John Button, _As It Happened_ , p. 227\n\nPage 276: 'It became apparent that neither the Hawke nor the Duffy positions...', Gareth Evans, _Inside the Hawke\u2013Keating Government_ , p. 238\n\nPage 279: 'The Treasuer is a product of the NSW right wing...', Colleen Ryan, _Corporate Cannibals_ , p. 173... Since the first edition of this book was published, Max Suich has disputed Paul Keating's Account of the Suntory Lunch, including a denial that Fred Brenchley left the lunch prematurely. He has also disputed that Fairfax had intent to destroy the Wran government or 'nobble' the NSW base of federal Labor. Paul Keating stands firmly by his account.\n\nTHE 1987 ELECTION\n\nPages 290\u201391: 'Hawke continued to govern indecisively...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 164\n\nINDUSTRY: A NEW WORLD FOR SURE\n\nPages 311\u201312: 'In Melbourne a young GMH executive came to see me...', John Button, _As It Happened_\n\nOF BUDGETS AND BACON\n\nPage: 364: 'Bob was happy about the Kirribilli Agreement', Blanch d'Alpuget, _Hawke_\n\nPages 367\u201368: 'Macfarlane observed that the more entrepreneurial borrowers had...', Ian Macfarlane, 'The Search for Stability', Boyer Lectures\n\nPages 369\u201370: 'The issue of how monetary policy...', Ian Macfarlane, Boyer Lectures\n\nPage 370: 'Macfarlane was 'the most prescient of...', John Edwards, _Keating_\n\nPage 371: 'Button wrote that...', John Button, _As It Happened_\n\nTHE WINDS OF RECESSION\n\nPage 387: 'This was the point...', John Edward, _Keating_\n\nOLD DOGS FOR A HARD ROAD\n\nPage 442: 'the first election in my experience...', _Sun-Herald_ , 22 December 1991\n\nPage 442: 'the divisions of the past...', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 32\n\nPage 442: 'The government is working much better...', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 51\n\nPage 463: 'They needed something to protect them...', _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 189\n\nPage 446: 'to strip away all fig leaves', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 66\n\nPage 449: 'Mate, I'm carrying such a crushing burden...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 34\n\nPage 451: 'The man who had kicked...', Peter Walsh, _Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister_ , p. 251\n\nPage 451: 'kicked some brilliant goals...', John Button, _As It Happened_ , p. 402\n\nPage 452: 'Well, give up mate...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots,_ p. 54\n\nPage 457: 'Keating was anguished', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 17\n\nPage 463: 'They need something to protect themselves against...', Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 189\n\nPage 465: 'causing a holocaust...', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 24\n\nPage 470: 'Didn't your economic adviser John Edwards brief...', John Edwards, _Keating_ , p. 456\n\nFOREIGN POLICY\n\nPage 476: 'a very unpleasant report' and 'Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating hotly...', Taylor Branch, _The Clinton Tapes_ , p. 316\n\nPage 477: 'What Keating did was offer a vision...', Paul Kelly, _March of the Patriots_ , pp. 171\u20132\n\nPage 480: 'Shameless and compelling', Paul Kelly, _March of the Patriots_ , p. 162\n\nPage 483: 'Neil Blewett recalls...', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 101\n\nPages 502\u201303: 'A metaphor for Keating's attitude...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 227\n\nA REPUBLIC\n\nPage 508: 'I learned one thing...', Paul Keating, _Hansard, House of Representatives_ , 27 February\n\nPage 523: 'John Howard says...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 217\n\nMABO\n\nPages 529\u201330: 'The fact that our migrants...', James Button, _Time Magazine_ , 6 April 1992, p. 17\n\nPages 533\u20134: 'In the 204-year history of the formerly colonised Australia...', Paul Keating 'The Lowitja O'Donoghue Oration', Adelaide, 31 May 2011\n\nPage 540: 'one of those moments...', Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 291\n\nPage 556: 'never before and likely never again...', Noel Pearson, 'White Guilt, victimhood and the quest for the radical centre', _The Griffith Review, 'Unintended Consequences'_ , vol. 16, 2007. Also published in _The Age_ , 19 May 2007.\n\nTHE NEW MARCH OF REFORM\n\nPage 561: 'the financial position of the networks...', Paul Barry, _The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer_ , p. 471\n\nPages 577\u20138: 'in the bag' and 'Don't drive us to Howard', Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , pp. 555\u20136\n\nPages 578\u20139: 'It was foolish of Keating...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 216\n\nTHE POLITICIAN & THE PROFESSOR\n\nPage 590: 'It's the task of Labor...' and 'Keating urged a volume of sound...', Neal Blewett _, A Cabinet Diary_ , p. 139\n\nPage 595: 'Concluding a gruelling question time...', Michael Gordon, _A Question of Leadership_ , p. 211\n\nPage 603: 'first confessed to Cabinet...', George Megalogenis, _The Longest Decade_ , p. 68\n\nPage 603: 'the second round of tax cuts...', John Edwards, _Keating_\n\nPage 621: 'Rarely had Cabinet been faced...', Neal Blewett, _A Cabinet Diary_ , pp. 267\u20138\n\nPage 624: Difference of opinion on policy launch, Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 331\n\nPage 629: 'I do respect him...', interview with Andrew Denton, _Enough Rope_ , ABC-TV, 7 August 2006\n\nIN HIS OWN RIGHT\n\nPages 633\u20134: 'By 1991 Australia was going...', Paul Kelly, _The March of_\n\n_Patriots_ , p. 136\n\nPage 657: 'Paul was not as attentive as he should have been', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 217\n\nPage 659: If Dawkins didn't calm down, Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 217\n\nPage 661: mangled tax cuts promise, John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 201\n\nPage 662: 'Paul had said don't vote for a GST', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 220\n\nPage 662: 'The truth is...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 221\n\nA NEW FOE\u2014BUT REFORM GOES ON\n\nPage 677: 'The longer he went...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 92\n\nPage 668: 'I'm not going to run around...', interview with Paul Kelly, _The Australian_ , 7 February 1994\n\nPage 669: 'We often think...', Alan Ramsey, _Sydney Morning Herald_ , 23 February 1994\n\nPage 676: 'The longer we went...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 92\n\nPage 679: 'Peter Barron urged you...', Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 501\n\nPage 686: 'The notion that it betrayed...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 119\n\nPage 692: 'to be a successful...', George Megalogenis, _The Longest Decade_ , p. 310\n\nPage 693: 'Don Watson describes...', Don Watson, _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart_ , p. 517\n\nKEATING VS HOWARD\n\nPage 703: 'Tony Abbott, one of...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 207\n\nPage 712: 'This may have pleased...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 224\n\nPage 723: 'There was one poll...', Michael Gordon, _A Question of Leadership_ , p. 192\n\nPage 725: 'In Russell's view...', Paul Kelly, _The March of Patriots_ , p. 241\n\nPage 734: 'in keeping Lawrence on...', John Howard, _Lazarus Rising_ , p. 216\n\nPage 737: 'that is, to lie to me...', Pamela Williams, _The Victory_ , pp. 226, 301\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nBOOKS\n\nBarry, Paul _The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer_ , Bantam, Australia, 1993\n\nBlack, Conrad _A Life in Progress,_ Random House, Sydney, 1993\n\nBlewett, Neal _A Cabinet Diary_ , Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1999\n\nBranch, Taylor _The Clinton Tapes_ , Simon & Schuster, New York, 2009\n\nButton, John _As It Happened_ , Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1998\n\nCarew, Edna _Paul Keating Prime Minister_ , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992\n\nDaley, Fred _From Curtin to Kerr_ , Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1977\n\nD'Alpuget, Blanche _Hawke: The Prime Minister_ , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2010\n\nEdwards, John _Keating: The Inside Story_ , Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1996\n\nEvans, Gareth _Inside the Hawke Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary,_ Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2014\n\nFraser, Malcolm & Margaret Simons _Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs_ , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2010\n\nGordon, Michael _A Question of Leadership: Paul Keating Political Fighter_ , University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993\n\nHawke, Bob _The Hawke Memoirs_ , William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1993\n\nHayden, Bill _Hayden: An Autobiography_ , Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1996\n\nHoward, John _Lazarus Rising: A Personal and Political Autobiography_ , HarperCollins, Sydney, 2010\n\nHocking, Jenny _Gough Whitlam: His Time_ , The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2012\n\nJones, Barry _A Thinking Reed_ , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2006\n\nKelly, Paul _The End of Certainty_ , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1992\n\nKelly, Paul _The March of Patriots_ , Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009\n\nMegalogenis, George _The Longest Decade_ , Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2006\n\nMegalogenis, George _The Australian Moment_ , Penguin Group, Melbourne, 2012\n\nKeating, PJ _After Words: The Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches_ , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011\n\nRyan, Colleen _Fairfax: The Rise and Fall_ , The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2013\n\nRyan, Colleen & Glen Burge _Corporate Cannibals: The Taking of Fairfax_ , William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1992\n\nWalsh, Peter _Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister_ , Random House, Sydney, 1995\n\nWatson, Don _Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating PM_ , Random House, Sydney, 2002\n\nWhitlam, Gough _The Whitlam Government, 1972\u20131975_ , Viking\/Penguin Books Australia, Melbourne, 1985\n\nWilkinson, Marian _The Fixer: The Untold Story of Graham Richardson_ , William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1996\n\nWilliams, Pamela _The Victory_ , Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997\n\nUren, Tom _Straight Left_ , Random House, Sydney, 1994\n\nOTHER SOURCES\n\n_Labor in Power_ , ABC-TV series, 1993\n\nThe Keating Archive\n\nMacfarlane, _Search for Stability_ , 2006 Boyer Lectures, ABC Radio\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n\"The New Black ought to be the New High Standard for dark fiction anthologies. It's loaded with intelligence and talent. Every one of the pieces in this extraordinary compilation is worthy of your full attention.\"\n\n\u2014Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door\n\n\"The New Black is a great collection of incredibly unique fiction. I honestly liked every story in here, and I usually don't say that about an anthology. It was also nice to encounter so many authors with whom I was unfamiliar. A strong compilation of talent\u2014very strong.\"\n\n\u2014Shock Totem\n\n\"There's depth to darkness, a richness waiting for those who have the patience to let their vision adjust to it. Rembrandt knew that; it's there in the voluminous shadows that wrap around the figures in his paintings. So did Poe: it's the note sounding underneath the stories his narrators tell us. And so do the writers Richard Thomas has assembled for The New Black. At this point in our shared history, it's no secret that those things closest to us,our family, our memory, may be full of night. What is remarkable is what the writers in this book succeed in telling us about that darkness, what shapes they discern within it. A showcase of some of the most exciting writers at work today, The New Black is not to be missed.\"\n\n\u2014John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies\nThe New Black\n\nEdited by Richard Thomas\n\nForeword by Laird Barron\nCONTENTS\n\nForeword: Eye of the Raven  \nLaird Barron\n\nIntroduction   \nRichard Thomas\n\nFather, Son, Holy Rabbit  \nStephen Graham Jones\n\nIt's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks   \nPaul Tremblay\n\nThat Baby  \nLindsay Hunter\n\nThe Truth and All Its Ugly  \nKyle Minor\n\nAct of Contrition  \nCraig Clevenger\n\nThe Familiars  \nMicaela Morrissette\n\nDial Tone  \nBenjamin Percy\n\nHow  \nRoxane Gay\n\nInstituto  \nRoy Kesey\n\nRust and Bone  \nCraig Davidson\n\nBlue Hawaii  \nRebecca Jones-Howe\n\nChildren Are the Only Ones Who Blush  \nJoe Meno\n\nChristopher Hitchens  \nVanessa Veselka\n\nDollhouse  \nCraig Wallwork\n\nHis Footsteps are Made of Soot  \nNik Korpon\n\nThe Etiquette of Homicide  \nTara Laskowski\n\nDredge  \nMatt Bell\n\nSunshine for Adrienne  \nAntonia Crane\n\nFuzzyland  \nRichard Lange\n\nWindeye  \nBrian Evenson\n\nAcknowledgments\nEYE OF THE RAVEN\n\n1.\n\nAt heart, I prefer the bleak and the horrific. Horror with a capital H. Doesn't matter whence it springs. Nonetheless, I was weaned on the hard stuff. Jim Thompson. James M. Cain. John D. MacDonald. Stephen King. Shirley Jackson. The Brothers Grimm. Noir, horror, and fairytales are all bound together with barb wire and blood, you see.\n\nIf I may be so gauche as to quote an essay I once wrote about a fabulous author of noir named Pearce Hansen:\n\n\"There is a peculiar synergy between noir, crime fiction, and horror. It wouldn't surprise me, were I to analyze it more thoroughly, that John D. MacDonald, Donald Westlake, and Robert Parker tales of hard boiled modern day knights, treacherous scoundrels, and sloe-eyed vamps and the assorted skullduggery sum and sundry found themselves enmeshed within had as much or more to do with my becoming a horror writer than the bloody works of King or Barker.\"\n\nAs a kid, I loved crime and westerns, the real deal fairytales, and the authentic myths. Not the sanitized, abridged, vetted iterations we were dosed with at school. The unvarnished ones where Snow White burned the Queen's feet in red hot iron shoes, where heroes were betrayed by their lovers before dying awful deaths, or the gods went down in smoke and thunder and left Man alone in a cold, remote part of the cosmos. The secret to my fascination with noir is that as a tradition it cleaves so close to horror that it might've hatched from the same egg. Horror and noir are as mercurial as vast oil slicks upon the ocean\u2014solid, primitive objects that nonetheless flow and shift with the currents.\n\nIn order to get a handle on the icepick that is the new black, it's instructive to look at the old black. The old black is a tradition that extends at least back through the mists to the gaslight era and Edgar Allan Poe. Classic noir shines like the moon in an austere nightscape, as cold and cruel as a raven's eye.\n\nNoir: a dark, bitter seed that blooms into strange and cold life. It is associated with crime and starkness. Sexual deviance. Frequently, it has served as the mantle of the hardboiled and the hard cases of film and literature. Again, mirroring conservative horror, noir often functions as a filter of dark, dark morality. Its tropes and leitmotifs are legendary. Honor among thieves; double-crosses; femme fatales; skullduggery; the betrayal of lovers; the inversion of polite society's code. Good or evil, you get what's coming and what's coming is dreadful. Because the sad fact is, the universe is a dreadful place.\n\nThere's a thousand ways to die in the naked city. And more ways being invented every day.\n\n2.\n\nOne night during the spring of 1995, James Ellroy stepped into the living room of my brain and made an adjustment to the television set. He clicked the dial to a notch between the engraved numerals, and the snowfield resolved into a psychedelic horror show. Its imprint remains permanently branded upon my imagination. At the time, I'd taken berth upon a salmon processor traveling the Bering Sea. We'd shut down the machinery and dimmed the lights in the hold after the eight consecutive fifteen hour shifts. Our vessel weighed anchor and began to chug along a forty-eight hour vector toward the next rendezvous with the fleet. When not comatose in their bunks, the majority of crew entertained themselves with booze, endless tournaments of gin rummy or dominoes, and marathon VCR sessions in the lounge. A deckhand from Seattle, among the two or three bibliophiles lurking aboard the ship, knew of my interest in Joseph Wambaugh and Martin Cruz Smith, and that sort of thing in general. He went into his stacks and loaned me a beat to hell copy of White Jazz. I wolfed it down. After that, it was, as they say, on.\n\nWhite Jazz is a knockout crime novel, but also something new and strange, just as Patrick McGrath's Spider and Stewart O'Nan's Speed Queen and A Prayer for the Dying took the genre in strange and terrifying directions. We're witnessing a refinement of the ever-replicating mutation in the works of Donald Ray Pollack, Craig Davis, Kaaron Warren, and Gillian Flynn. And of course, new black or old black, masters such as Tom Picirrilli, Joe Lansdale, and Jack Ketchum prove with every new book that they never went anywhere. They are alive and well and spinning webs in the dark, just like the new bloods.\n\n3.\n\nThe darkness has built like nightfall thickening and clotting at the edge of the horizon. What's here between these covers has been on its way for years. Literature is a process of assimilation. Authors are always in conversation with themselves and with those who came before. Authors push back and redefine. It is punch and counterpunch.\n\nThere's a subtle distinction between neo-noir and the tradition it has inexorably transformed. Or, perhaps, we're witnessing an iceberg calving from the great central mass that has accreted over the decades. If you've followed the genre, the trend is unmistakable. Otherwise, what's awaiting you in this anthology might come as a bracing splash of ice water. In either case, you're in for a treat. Crime is not necessarily the molten core of this contemporary machine. Nor are the characters necessarily of the hardboiled variety. Indeed, the contemporary narratives are far from hidebound. When you get down to brass tacks, neo-noir simply means dark fiction, and even within that niche, there's a hell of a lot of territory to cover. Here in this new century, ideas and plots of neo-noir have picked the locks and run amok. It's a fascinating time to be a fan.\n\nFrom the mouth of Harry Angel in Angel Heart: \"Today is Wednesday, it's anything can happen day.\" That's neo-noir twenty-odd years down the road\u2014a snarling ball of tragedy, absurdity, and menace. It's a southern gothic, and it's a bloody mystery set in the wilderness, or a Peckinpah-worthy massacre among the stars. Anything can happen, and it can happen to anyone. Certainly the criminals and the cads will find themselves more readily subsumed by the forces of darkness. Provenance is always a prime consideration in these matters of the human heart. Even so, you don't have to be a bank robber or an embezzler; you don't need to be an adulterer or a con artist. Not in the multiverse of the new black. You simply have to draw breath. All it takes is a misstep, an honest miscalculation, the injustice of being in the wrong place at the right time. Then X marks the spot and you are in the soup.\n\nIt bears reiterating: The noir universe has always been a dreadful place. Baby, with neo-noir the neighborhood just took a turn for the worse. Rules are out the window, the physics of morality, ethics, and fair play smashed to powder and in the wind. Reality is on a permanent vacation. This universe is more about guidelines in sand, passwords that are randomly overwritten, splinter cells and half-enunciated shibboleths. Maybe this particular cosmos is a yearning, sentient thing that longs to right its scales. Maybe it understands nobody is truly innocent. Blood pays for blood. We all get what we paid for in the end. Maybe that's what matters. Maybe that's what we need to hold onto when we're navigating through the dark.\n\n4.\n\nRichard Thomas has assembled a hell of a rogues' gallery. These writers cover a spectrum of genre and lit fiction. Some of these names are familiar\u2014Paul Tremblay has written crime novels about a narcoleptic P.I. knocking around the mean streets of Boston, horror collections, and a dystopian masterpiece. Brian Evenson recently penned a magnificent collection of surreal horror called Windeye. Evenson, long championed by no less a literary light than Peter Straub, will blow your doors off with his high-powered writing. Much of his work is steeped in the kind of psychological darkness that would make the aforementioned McGrath and Ellroy flinch. His weapons of choice are allegory and symbolism and magic realism that shrills a reed of bones with echoes of Kafka and Borges. Stephen Graham Jones owns a bibliography that a giraffe could wear as a floor-length stole. I consider him among the best living genre writers. No one captures the jaded innocence of youth nor the laconic expressiveness of the disaffected better than Jones, and no one surpasses his command of a Dali-esque stream of conscious delivery. Meanwhile, Benjamin Percy is bringing the fang and fur set back to prominence with his novels that blend pulp and literary sensibilities in a way that has ignited his career like a rocket.\n\nHowever, keep your eye fixed upon the rising stars herein\u2014Tara Laskowski's clinically macabre narration, the mounting dread that radiates from Matt Bell's icy miracle girl, or the pedal to the metal horror brought you by Micaela Morrissette and her little...friend. There's more, of course. A lot more of the dark side of the imagination waiting to spike you in the eye, and it will. But it's not my remit to spoil the pleasure of discovery.\n\nSo, now it comes to this, the hour of the wolf, the tap of the raven at the sill. In a few moments you will descend upon a dark odyssey into a realm of exquisite derangement. Turn the page and behold a panoply of the macabre, the sinister, and the inexplicable in all its grotesque splendor.\n\n\u2014 Laird Barron\n\nOctober, 19, 2013\n\nRifton, New York\nINTRODUCTION\n\nIf you've read Laird Barron's brilliant foreword and aren't in the mood to hear me gush about the twenty authors in this collection and my personal stories of inspiration, failure, and fulfillment, then by all means, skip ahead to the first story and dig right in. I totally understand, and won't hold it against you, my friend. But, if you'd like to hear how this collection came to be, and why I selected these specific stories and authors, then read on. You might find it interesting.\n\nA strange series of events brought me back into the world of writing, editing, and teaching at the age of 40 years old. I remember seeing the movie Fight Club, and then later, discovering that there was a book by some guy named Chuck Palahniuk. After working my way through all of his books, excited by his fresh, transgressive voice, I ran across a website called The Cult. It was there that I discovered a community of fans and writers that seemed to be of a similar mindset. That got me to The Velvet and a trio of authors that were writing something called \"neo-noir\" fiction. As you may (or may not) know, neo-noir simply means \"new-black.\" I fell in love with the written word all over again, and it inspired me to start writing.\n\nOne of the first classes I took at The Cult was with Craig Clevenger. I'd read both of his books, The Contortionist's Handbook, as well as Dermaphoria, after having worked my way through Palahniuk, and the trilogy by Will Christopher Baer (Kiss Me Judas, Penny Dreadful, and Hell's Half Acre). Craig was a brilliant instructor, and I learned a great deal from him. At the end of the class he encouraged me to send out one of my stories, \"Stillness,\" and I hesitated. He said it was done, perfect, good to go\u2014do it, already, he said. So I did. And I sent it to all of the wrong places, The Paris Review and The New Yorker, a ton of literary journals that were totally inappropriate, but eventually I sent it to Cemetery Dance. They said the magazine was backed up, but they'd like it for Shivers VI, an irregularly published anthology. I was disappointed\u2014I'd never heard of the anthology, but I knew the press, so I said yes, of course, sounds great. Six months turned into a year, and the book finally came out\u2014and my story was published alongside two of my heroes, Stephen King and Peter Straub. I think I may have cried. (This will be a recurring theme.) I was hooked. I'll always owe Craig for this start to my writing career, and his voice, his inclusion in this anthology was essential\u2014not because I need to pay him back, but because his writing has inspired me for years. \"Act of Contrition\" is a dark, layered story that packs a punch.\n\nOver time, I got more involved in writing communities, and attended my first AWP conference in New York City. It was overwhelming, and beautiful, and daunting. Stephen Graham Jones was the third member of the Velvet trio, so when I saw he was on a panel with another author I'd just started reading, Brian Evenson, I knew I had to attend. Both of these authors have been blending the best of literary and genre fiction for as long as I've been reading them, starting with Stephen's All the Beautiful Sinners and Brian's The Wavering Knife. Both of these gifted authors write with an attention to the language, a sense of unfurling tension, and the ability to let the terror slowly sink in until the epiphany of resolution is almost debilitating. \"Father, Son, Holy Rabbit\" was the first story that I thought of when building this collection, and \"Windeye\" immediately came to mind as well. Both stories have endings that are earned and unexpected, not twists, but dark understandings that have now become truth.\n\nAt about the same time, I started attending readings here in Chicago. One of the first that I went to was the Quickies! series, run by Lindsay Hunter and Mary Hamilton. The night that I read, with gifted voices such as Blake Butler, Amelia Gray, Jac Jemc, and Ben Tanzer, I also learned that Lindsay was not just the host, but an author. This was October of 2009. I would start my MFA the following January. Later, when Daddy's came out, Lindsay's first collection, I realized how gifted she really was. Her story \"That Baby\" will always stay with me, the final words about nipples and lit matchheads forever burned into my brain.\n\nAlso at that first AWP, I heard a man named Roy Kesey read a story. I was so blown away that I picked up his collection, All Over. He spoke about his struggles, how he tried for years to get into an elite literary journal, the Kenyon Review. The rejections piled up and he was about to stop submitting to them, when he finally broke in. They took his story, \"Wait.\" When he told them that he didn't think they liked his writing, they responded by saying that they'd been fans for years. Just goes to show you how fickle and subjective this business can be. That story was later selected by Stephen King for the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology. His story in this anthology, \"Instituto\" is my favorite of his\u2014funny and dark and original.\n\nIt was in my MFA program that a good friend of mine Drew McCoy introduced me to \"Refresh, Refresh\" in The Paris Review, by Benjamin Percy. I picked up the collection, and have been a fan ever since. Another author who isn't afraid to write horror with a literary voice, I selected \"Dial Tone\" because I think it's a little less known than some of the other stories in that collection, and it has a tension throughout that I love. The Wilding and Red Moon are his two novels, and both are innovative works. When I heard that he was taking on werewolves (called lycans) I wasn't sure how it would turn out, but Red Moon is simply amazing.\n\nEarly in my career I can remember reaching out to Matt Bell, asking him for advice, and he always took the time to respond. As I became a fan of Dzanc Books and the work they were doing there, I got to know him better. But it wasn't until Cataclysm Baby that I was sold\u2014such a surreal, powerful and touching dark novel. I knew that Matt needed to be in here, too, and his story \"Dredge\" is a bit of contemporary noir that fit perfectly.\n\nWhen I started writing book reviews for The Nervous Breakdown, one of the first books I read was In the Mean Time by Paul Tremblay. It was a fascinating mix of short stories\u2014science fiction and horror, neo-noir and fantasy, a perfect blend of the kind of writing I was starting to get into. If he didn't make me aware of the genre (or sub-genre) of magical realism, he at least primed me for the voices that I would read later\u2014Aimee Bender and Kelly Link, for example. His story \"It's Against the Law to Feed the Ducks\" is one of the few stories I've ever read that made me cry. And I'm not ashamed to admit that. Maybe it was being a new father at the time, maybe it was the honesty of the story, but his original look at a post-apocalyptic world has stayed with me for many years.\n\nAround this time I can remember running across PANK at an AWP, probably here in Chicago. I met Roxane Gay for the first time, and once I got over how exciting the magazine was, I realized she was a gifted author as well. I was still struggling to get my work accepted, and when she took my story \"Splintered,\" a contemporary \"choose-your-own-path\" bit of neo-noir adventure, it gave me a huge dose of confidence. As I started to see her name more and more often, in other publications I was chasing, I realized that I hadn't read a story of hers that was anything close to average or expected\u2014she was a slugger, hitting them out of the park every single time. I was so thrilled to see her get into the Best American Short Stories 2012 anthology with her story, \"North Country.\" It was very difficult to select just one of her stories, but \"How\" filled a niche in this collection\u2014maybe you'd call it rural noir, but whatever you label it, it's a powerful, touching story that holds back nothing.\n\nAs I continued to dig into neo-noir voices, mixing in the literary voices of my MFA program, I picked up new work by Craig Davidson, and realized he was slowly becoming one of my favorite authors. It started with the collection Rust and Bone, and then his novel The Fighter, followed by Sara Court. To hear that he just made the Giller long list for his novel Cataract City (which isn't even OUT yet in the U.S.) makes me even more impatient to get my hands on it. And being allowed to include the title story \"Rust and Bone\" from his debut collection in this anthology is a bit of a gift as well.\n\nAbout this time I traveled to St. Louis (where I grew up) to be a part of the Noir at the Bar reading series, run by Scott Phillips and Jed Ayres. It was there that I first met Kyle Minor. I'd been aware of his writing, but hadn't read that much of it, just one collection, In the Devil's Territory. Later, I would run into him again at the release party for Frank Bill down in Corydon, Indiana, celebrating Crimes in Southern Indiana. After getting over the thrill of meeting Donald Ray Pollock, I reminded myself to read more of Kyle's work. When I ran across \"The Truth and All Its Ugly,\" I was floored. I guess I have to admit that this may be the second story in this collection to make me cry\u2014I'm turning into a real faucet here. As Kyle continues to gain attention, I'm again grateful to Sarabande Books for letting us include this story, as his new collection, Praying Drunk, is about to hit the streets.\n\nIt was at another AWP, Denver 2010, where I heard Joe Meno read, following Dorothy Allison, I think, which is a nearly impossible feat. I'd actually published a story of his in a little rag I guest edited, Colored Chalk, but Joe was on fire that night, and it spurned me to pick up more of his work, such as Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails. He provides some much needed humor in this collection, but underneath the jokes and uncomfortable laughter is a sadness that really got to me, in \"Children Are the Only Ones Who Blush.\"\n\nAs my writing continued to expand, I started writing my first novel, and joined a group called Write Club. It's a private community of like-minded authors who have been striving to publish and break out. It's been thrilling to see many of our group get agents, book deals, and break into elite magazines and journals. Two authors, Nik Korpon, and Craig Wallwork, have done exactly that. Both write gritty narratives, with Nik often focusing on the Baltimore streets, and Craig on rural English country sides. But I selected stories from these two emerging authors that are closer to the fantastic and horrific, slipping in and out of realities, asking us to suspend our disbelief, and open our minds to the possibilities. Where Nik makes me fear a possible future where our dreams can be stolen, Craig scares me to death with a haunting that feels all too possible. Nik's story \"His Footsteps are Made of Soot,\" and Craig's \"Dollhouse\" were two voices that I knew immediately needed to be in this collection.\n\nRebecca Jones-Howe is another author that has emerged from one of my writing communities\u2014LitReactor, where I write a column, Storyville. When I compared Lindsay Hunter to Mary Gaitskill, in an article I wrote for Flavorwire, \"10 Essential Neo-Noir Authors,\" Rebecca's voice is another one that came to mind, reminiscent of the heady mix of sex and violence that Gaitskill so eloquently writes. In the workshops over at LitReactor, I always enjoyed her writing. When she won the first War, a competition pitting some 60+ authors against each other in an NCAA-style series of brackets, I knew I wasn't the only person to recognize her gifts and formidable abilities. Her story \"Blue Hawaii\" was my favorite of that competition.\n\nMy book reviews continued over at The Nervous Breakdown. I ran across a little book called Zazen, one of the first Red Lemonade titles. Richard Nash has always had his thumb on the pulse of the writing community, so it was an easy sell. What Vanessa Veselka did with that narrative struck me as being very original, a literary mind dealing with heavy political issues, layers of tension stacking one upon another, a story that slowly gets under your skin. That same lyrical and haunting quality is evident in her story, \"Christopher Hitchens.\"\n\nAs I started to fill up this anthology, I dug deeper for voices that I may have missed, searching for those last few authors to fill the collection. It's difficult to put a finger on what neo-noir is, my definition differing than someone schooled in noir vs. horror vs. dark literary fiction. I've been a fan of Akashic Books for a long time, and as I picked up book after book, The Heroin Chronicles got my attention. Antonia Crane is another unique voice, tapping into her past experiences to write alluring, complicated, and touching stories that often show the underbelly of the various sex worker industries. But what makes her story, \"Sunshine for Adrienne\" so powerful is not the titillation, but the humanity, desire, hope and fear that rests behind it.\n\nAnother name that kept popping up on my radar was Richard Lange. Maybe it was Dead Boys back in 2008, or Angel Baby, that just came out, but I dug in deeper and found another voice that explored the world of neo-noir, the new black, with authority and depth. The subtle knowledge and unease that descends on the reader in \"Fuzzyland,\" is a hypnotic read, leaving behind sadness, frustration, and understanding.\n\nI wanted more weirdness, and as I looked around my office, I didn't have to go that far to trip over the tome that is The Weird, edited by Jeff and VanderMeer. If you've ever read the magazine Weird Tales, you know about Ann (now at Tor). And to miss the body of work that is Jeff VanderMeer, is to ignore a powerful voice in fantasy and crime (e.g., Finch). So their names on the cover of this 1,152-page monolith meant only one thing\u2014quality. Micaela Morrissette's story \"The Familiars\" taps into every horror that a parent and child can conjure up\u2014something under the bed, noises in the dark, abduction, possession, and the unknown.\n\nWhich leaves Tara Laskowksi and her story \"The Etiquette of Homicide.\" What made this story a must-have for this collection was the unique formatting\u2014a recipe for disaster, you could say. A strong voice in the crime and dark fiction arenas, Tara makes you pay attention, and mix up all of her ingredients to create a compelling story that builds on the classic noir staples.\n\nEach and every author in this collection has been an inspiration to me\u2014as an author, a reader, and a student of the imagination. These are the stories that stay with me when I close my eyes at night and try to go to sleep. These are the voices that push me to take more risks with my own writing. These are the authors you should keep an eye on, pick up at bookstores, garage sales and libraries, making them your own personal teachers of the macabre.\n\nI wanted to take a moment to thank Victor David Giron, Jacob Knabb, Ben Tanzer, Alban Fischer, and everyone else at Curbside Splendor, as well as Carrie Gaffney and Nik Korpon at Dark House Press for their support\u2014I couldn't do this without them. I hope you enjoy this collection and come back for more. I can't call you my Dear Constant Readers yet, as Stephen King likes to say, but I hope I can in time.\n\n\u2014 Richard Thomas\n\nOctober 23, 2013\n\nChicago, IL\nThe New Black\n\nX\n\nFATHER, SON,   \nHOLY RABBIT\n\nSTEPHEN GRAHAM JONES\n\nBy the third day they were eating snow. Years later it would come to the boy again, rush up to him at a job interview: his father spitting out pieces of seed or pine needle into his hand. Whatever had been in the snow. The boy looked at the brown flecks in his father's palm, then up to his father, who finally nodded, put them back in his mouth, turned his face away to swallow.\n\nInstead of sleeping, they thumped each other in the face to stay awake.\n\nThe place they'd found under the tree wasn't out of the wind, but it was dry.\n\nThey had no idea where the camp was, or how to find the truck from there, or the highway after that. They didn't even have a gun, just the knife the boy's father kept strapped to his right hip.\n\nThe first two days, the father had shrugged and told the boy not to worry, that the storm couldn't last.\n\nThe whole third day, he'd sat watching the snow fall like ash.\n\nThe boy didn't say anything, not even inside, not even a prayer. One of the times he drifted off, though, waking not to the slap of his father's fingernail on his cheek but the sound of it, there was a picture he brought up with him from sleep. A rabbit.\n\nHe told his father about it and his father pulled his lower lip into his mouth, smiled like the boy had just told a joke.\n\nThat night they fell asleep.\n\nThis time the boy woke to his father rubbing him all over, trying to make his blood flow. The boy's father was crying, so the boy told him about the rabbit, how it wasn't even white like it should be, but brown, lost like them.\n\nHis father hugged his knees to his chest and bounced up and down, stared out at all the white past their tree.\n\n\"A rabbit?\" he said.\n\nThe boy shrugged.\n\nSometime later that day he woke again, wasn't sure where he was at first. His father wasn't there. The boy moved his mouth up and down, didn't know what to say. Rounded off in the crust of the snow were the dragging holes his father had made, walking away. The boy put his hand in the first footstep, then the second, then stood from the tree into the real cold. He followed the tracks until they became confused. He tried to follow them back to the tree but the light was different now. Finally he started running, falling down, getting up, his chest on fire.\n\nHis father found him sometime that night, pulled him close.\n\nThey lowered themselves under another tree.\n\n\"Where were you?\" the boy asked.\n\n\"That rabbit,\" the father said, stroking the boy's hair down.\n\n\"You saw it?\"\n\nInstead of answering, the father just stared.\n\nThis tree they were under wasn't as good as the last. The next morning they looked for another, and another, and stumbled onto their first one.\n\n\"Home again home again,\" the father said, guiding the boy under then gripping onto the back of his jacket, stopping him.\n\nThere were tracks coming up out of the dirt, onto the snow. Double tracks, like the split hoof of an elk, except bigger, and not as deep.\n\n\"Your rabbit,\" the father said.\n\nThe boy smiled.\n\nThat night his father carved their initials into the trunk of the tree with his knife. Later he broke a dead branch off, tried sharpening it. The boy watched, fascinated, hungry.\n\n\"Will it work?\" he asked.\n\nHis father thumped him in the face, woke him. He asked it again, with his mouth this time.\n\nThe father shrugged. His lips were cracked, lined with blood, his beard pushing up through his skin.\n\n\"Where do you think it is right now?\" he said to the boy.\n\n\"The\u2014the rabbit?\"\n\nThe father nodded.\n\nThe boy closed his eyes, turned his head, then opened his eyes again, used them to point the way he was facing. The father used his sharp stick as a cane, stood with it, and walked in that direction, folded himself into the blowing snow.\n\nThe boy knew this was going to work.\n\nIn the hours his father was gone, he studied their names in the tree. While the boy had been asleep, his father had carved the boy's mother's name into the bark as well. The boy ran the pads of his fingers over the grooves, brought the taste to his tongue.\n\nThe next thing he knew was ice. It was falling down on him in crumbly sheets.\n\nHis father had returned, had collapsed into the side of the tree.\n\nThe boy rolled him in, rubbed his back and face and neck, and then saw what his father was balled around, what he'd been protecting for miles, maybe: the rabbit. It was brown at the tips of its coat, the rest white.\n\nWith his knife, the father opened the rabbit in a line down the stomach, poured the meat out. It steamed.\n\nOver it, the father looked at the son, nodded.\n\nThey scooped every bit of red out that the rabbit had, swallowed it in chunks because if they chewed they tasted what they were doing. All that was left was the skin. The father scraped it with the blade of his knife, gave those scrapings to the boy.\n\n\"Glad your mom's not here to see this,\" he said.\n\nThe boy smiled, wiped his mouth.\n\nLater, he threw up in his sleep, then looked at it soaking into the loose dirt, then turned to his see if his father had seen what he'd done, how he'd betrayed him. His father was sleeping. The boy lay back down, forced the rabbit back into his mouth then angled his arm over his lips, so he wouldn't lose his food again.\n\nThe next day, no helicopters came for them, no men on horseback, following dogs, no skiers poling their way home. For a few hours around what should have been lunch, the sun shone down, but all that did was make their dry spot under the tree wet. Then the wind started again.\n\n\"Where's that stick?\" the boy asked.\n\nThe father narrowed his eyes as if he hadn't thought of that. \"Your rabbit,\" he said after a few minutes.\n\nThe boy nodded, said, almost to himself, \"It'll come back.\"\n\nWhen he looked around to his father, his father was already looking at him. Studying him.\n\nThe rabbit's skin was out in the snow, just past the tree. Buried hours ago.\n\nThe father nodded like this could maybe be true. That the rabbit would come back. Because they needed it to.\n\nThe next day he went out again, with a new stick, and came back with his lips blue, one of his legs frozen wet from stepping through some ice into a creek. No rabbit. What he said about the creek was that it was a good sign. You could usually follow water one way or another, to people.\n\nThe boy didn't ask which way.\n\n\"His name is Slaney,\" he said.\n\n\"The rabbit?\"\n\nThe boy nodded. Slaney. Things that had names were real.\n\nThat night they slept, then woke somehow at the same time, the boy under his father's heavy, jacketed arm. They were both looking the same direction, their faces even with the crust of snow past their tree. Twenty feet out, its nose tasting the air, was Slaney.\n\nThe boy felt his father's breath deepen.\n\n\"Don't . . . don't . . . \" his father said, low, then exploded over the boy, crashed off into the day without his stick.\n\nHe came back an hour later with nothing slung over his shoulder, nothing balled against his stomach. No blood on his hands.\n\nThis time the son prayed, inside. He promised not to throw any of the meat up again. With the tip of his knife, his father carved a cartoon rabbit into the trunk of their tree. It looked like a frog with horse ears.\n\n\"Slaney,\" the boy said.\n\nThe father carved that in a line under the rabbit's feet, then circled the boy's mother's name over and over, until the boy thought that piece of the bark was going to come off like a plaque.\n\nThe next time the boy woke, he was already sitting up.\n\n\"What?\" the father said.\n\nThe boy nodded the direction he was facing.\n\nThe father watched the boy's eyes, then nodded, got his stick.\n\nThis time he didn't come back for nearly a day. The boy, afraid, climbed up into the tree, then higher, as high as he could, until the wind could reach him.\n\nHis father reached up with his stick, tapped him awake.\n\nLike a football in the crook of his arm was the rabbit. It was bloody and wonderful, already cut open.\n\n\"You ate the guts,\" the boy said, his mouth full.\n\nHis father reached into the rabbit, came out with a long sliver of meat. The muscle that runs along the spine, maybe.\n\nThe boy ate and ate and when he was done, he placed the rabbit skin in the same spot he'd placed the last one. The coat was just the same\u2014white underneath, brown at the tips.\n\n\"It'll come back,\" he told his father.\n\nHis father rubbed the side of his face. His hand was crusted with blood.\n\nThe next day there were no walkie-talkies crackling through the woods, no four-wheelers or snowmobiles churning through the snow. And the rabbit skin was gone.\n\n\"Hungry?\" the boy's father said, smiling, leaning on his stick just to stand, and the boy smiled with him.\n\nFour hours later, his father came back with the rabbit again. He was wet to the hips this time.\n\n\"The creek?\" the boy said.\n\n\"It's a good sign,\" the father said back.\n\nAgain, the father had fingered the guts into his mouth on the way back, left most of the stringy meat for the boy.\n\n\"Slaney,\" the father said, watching the boy eat.\n\nThe boy closed his eyes to swallow.\n\nBecause of his frozen pants\u2014the creek\u2014the father had to sit with his legs straight out. \"A good sign,\" the boy said after the father was asleep.\n\nThe next morning his father pulled another dead branch down, so he had two poles now, like a skier.\n\nThe boy watched him walk off into the bright snow, feeling ahead of himself with the poles. It made him look like a ragged, four-legged animal, one made more of legend than of skin and bone. The boy palmed some snow into his mouth and held it there until it melted.\n\nThis time his father was only gone thirty minutes. He'd had to cross the creek again. Slaney was cradled against his body.\n\n\"He was just standing there,\" the father said, pouring the meat out for the boy. \"Like he was waiting for me.\"\n\n\"He knows we need him,\" the boy said.\n\nOne thing he no longer had to do was dab the blood off the meat before eating it. Another was swallow before chewing.\n\nThat night his father staggered out into the snow and threw up, then fell down into it. The boy pretended not to see, held his eyes closed when his father came back.\n\nThe following morning he told his father not to go out again, not today.\n\n\"But Slaney,\" his father said.\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" the boy lied.\n\nThe day after that he was, though. It was the day the storm broke. The woods were perfectly still. Birds were even moving from tree to tree again, talking to each other.\n\nIn his head, the boy told Slaney to be closer, to not keep being on the other side of the creek, but the boy's father came back wet to the hip again. His whole frontside was bloodstained now, from hunting, and eating.\n\nThe boy scooped the meat into his mouth, watched his father try to sit in one place. Finally he couldn't, fell over on his side. The boy finished eating and curled up against him, only woke when he heard voices, scratchy like on a radio.\n\nHe sat up and the voices went away.\n\nOn the crust of snow, now, since no more had fallen, was Slaney's skin. The boy crawled out to it, studied it, wasn't sure how Slaney could be out there already, reforming, all its muscle growing back, and be here too. But maybe it only worked if you didn't watch.\n\nThe boy scooped snow onto the blood-matted coat, curled up by his father again. All that day, his father didn't wake, but he wasn't really sleeping either.\n\nThat night, when the snow was melting more, running into their dry spot under the tree, the boy saw little pads of ice out past Slaney. They were footprints, places where the snow had packed down under a boot, into a column. Now that column wasn't melting as fast as the rest.\n\nInstead of going in a line to the creek, these tracks cut straight across.\n\nThe boy squatted over them, looked the direction they were maybe going.\n\nWhen he stood, there was a tearing sound. The seat of his pants had stuck to his calf while he'd been squatting. It was blood. The boy fell back, pulled his pants down to see if it had come from him.\n\nWhen it hadn't, he looked back to his father, then just sat in the snow again, his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth.\n\n\"Slaney, Slaney,\" he chanted. Not to eat him again, but just to hold him.\n\nSometime that night\u2014it was clear, soundless\u2014a flashlight found him, pinned him to the ground.\n\n\"Slaney?\" he said, looking up into the yellow beam.\n\nThe man in the flannel was breathing too hard to talk into his radio the right way. He lifted the boy up, and the boy said it again: \"Slaney.\"\n\n\"What?\" the man asked.\n\nThe boy didn't say anything then.\n\nThe other men found the boy's father curled under the tree. When they cut his pants away to understand where the blood was coming from, the boy looked away, the lower lids of his eyes pushing up into his field of vision. Over the years it would come to be one of his mannerisms, a stare that might suggest thoughtfulness to a potential employer, but right then, sitting with a blanket and his first cup of coffee, waiting for a helicopter, it had just been a way of blurring the tree his father was still sleeping under.\n\nWatching like that\u2014both holding his breath and trying not to focus\u2014when the boy's father finally stood, he was an unsteady smear against the evergreen. And then the boy had to look.\n\nSomehow, using his poles as crutches, the boy's father was walking, his head slung low between his shoulders, his poles reaching out before him like feelers.\n\nWhen he lurched out from the under the tree, the boy drew his breath in.\n\nThe father's pants were tatters now, and his legs too, where he'd been carving off the rabbit meat, stuffing it into the same skin again and again. The father pulled his lower lip into his mouth, nodded once to the boy, then stuck one of his poles into the ground before him, pulled himself towards it, then repeated the complicated process, pulling himself deeper into the woods.\n\n\"Where's he going?\" one of the men asked.\n\nThe boy nodded, understood, his father retreating into the trees for the last time, having to move his legs from the hip now, like things, and the boy answered\u2014Hunting\u2014then ran back from the helicopter they were dragging him into, to dig in the snow just past their tree, but there was nothing there. Just coldness. His own numb fingers.\n\n\"What's he saying?\" one of the men asked.\n\nThe boy stopped, closed his eyes, tried to hear it too, his own voice, then let the men pull him out of the snow, into the world of houses and bank loans and, finally, job interviews. Because they were wearing gloves, though, or because it was cold and their fingers were numb too, they weren't able to pull all of him from the woods that day. They couldn't tell that an important part of him was still there, sitting under a blanket, watching his father move across the snow, the poles just extensions of his arms, the boy holding his lips tight against each other. Because it would have been a betrayal, he hadn't let himself throw up what his father had given him, not then, and not years later, when the man across the desk palms a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth all at once, then holds his hand there to make sure none get away, leans forward a bit for the boy to explain what he's written for a name here on this application.\n\nSlade?\n\nSlake?\n\nSlather, slavery?\n\nWhat the boy does here, what he's just now realizing he should have been doing all along, is reach across, delicately thump the man's cheek, and then pretend not to see past the office, out the window, to the small brown rabbit in the flowers, watching.\n\nSoon enough it'll be white.\n\nThe boy smiles.\n\nSome woods, they're big enough you never find your way out.\nStephen Graham Jones\n\nis the author of eleven novels and three collections. Most recent are The Last Final Girl, Growing Up Dead in Texas, and Zombie Bake-Off. Up soon are Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth, The Least of My Scars, and The Gospel of Z. Jones has some hundred and fifty stories published, many collected in best of the year annuals. He's been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, a Colorado Book Award finalist, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for fiction and an NEA fellowship in fiction. He teaches in the MFA programs at CU Boulder and UCR\u2013Palm Desert. More at demontheory.net or twitter.com\/SGJ72.\n\nIT'S AGAINST THE LAW TO FEED THE DUCKS\n\nPAUL TREMBLAY\n\nSaturday\n\nNinety plus degrees, hours of relentless getaway traffic on the interstate, then the bumps and curves of rural route 25 as late afternoon melts into early evening, and it's the fourth time Danny asks the question.\n\n\"Daddy, are you lost again?\"\n\nTom says, \"I know where we're going, buddy. Trust me. We're almost there.\"\n\nDotted lines and bleached pavement give way to a dirt path that roughly invades the woods. Danny watches his infant sister Beth sleep, all tucked into herself and looking like a new punctuation mark. Danny strains against his twisted shoulder harness. He needs to go pee but he holds it, remembering how Daddy didn't say any mad words but sighed and breathed all heavy the last time he asked to stop for a pee break.\n\nDanny says, \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know I was going to be five in September.\"\n\nEllen holds a finger to her chin and looks at the car's ceiling for answers. \"Are you going to be ten years old tomorrow?\"\n\n\"No. I will be five in September.\"\n\n\"Oh, wow. I didn't know that, honey.\"\n\nTom and Ellen slip into a quick and just-the-facts discussion about what to do for dinner and whether or not they think Beth will sleep through the night. Danny learns more about his parents through these conversations, the ones they don't think he's listening to.\n\nIt's dark enough for headlights. Danny counts the blue bug-zappers as their car chugs along the dirt road. He gets to four.\n\n\"Daddy, what kind of animals live in these woods?\"\n\n\"The usual. Raccoons, squirrels, birds.\"\n\n\"No, tell me dangerous animals.\"\n\n\"Coyotes, maybe bears.\"\n\nTheir car somehow finds the rented cottage and its gravel driveway between two rows of giant trees. Beth wakes screaming. Danny stays in the car while his parents unpack. He's afraid of the bears. They don't celebrate getting to the cottage like they were supposed to.\n\nSunday\n\nThey need a piece of magic yellow paper to go to Lake Winnipesauke. Danny likes to say the name of the lake inside his head. The beach is only a mile from their cottage and when they get there Danny puts the magic paper on the dashboard. He hopes the sun doesn't melt it or turn it funny colors.\n\nDanny runs ahead. He's all arms and legs, a marionette with tangled strings, just like Daddy. He claims a shady spot beneath a tree. He doesn't know what kind of tree. Ellen and Beth come next. Beth can only say 'Daddy' and likes to give head butts. Tom is last, carrying the towels and shovels and pails and squirt-guns and food. Danny watches his parents set everything up. They know how to unfold things and they know where everything goes without having to ask questions, without having to talk to each other.\n\nDanny likes that his parents look younger than everybody else's parents, even if they are old. Danny is a round face and big rubber ball cheeks, just like Mommy. Ellen has a tee shirt and shorts pulled over her bathing suit. She won't take them off, even when she goes into the water. She says, \"You need sun screen before you go anywhere, little boy.\"\n\nDanny closes his eyes as she rubs it all in and everywhere. He's had to wear it all summer long but he doesn't understand what sun screen really means. Sun screen sounds like something that should be built onto their little vacation cottage.\n\nX\n\nDanny is disappointed with the magic beach because there are too many other people using it. They all get in his way when he runs on the sand, pretending to be Speed Boy. And the older kids are scary in the water. They thrash around like sharks.\n\nLunch time. Danny sits at the picnic table next to their tree, eating and looking out over Winnipesauke. The White Mountains surround the bowl of the lake and in the lake there are swimmers, boats, buoys, and a raft. Danny wants to go with Daddy to the raft, but only when the scary older kids are gone. Danny says Winnipesauke, that magical word, into his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It tastes good.\n\nA family of ducks comes out of the water. They must be afraid of the older kids too. They walk underneath his picnic table.\n\nEllen says, \"Ducks!\" picks up Beth, and points her at the ducks. Beth's bucket hat is over her eyes.\n\nTom sits down next to Danny and throws a few scraps of bread on the sand. Danny does the same, taking pieces from his sandwich, mostly crust, but not chunks with a lot of peanut butter, he eats those. The ducks get mostly jelly chunks, and they swallow everything.\n\nTom stops throwing bread and says, \"Whoops. Sorry, pal. It's against the law to feed the ducks.\"\n\nHe doesn't know if Daddy is joking. Danny likes to laugh at his jokes. Jokes are powerful magic words because they make you laugh. But when he's not sure if it's a joke or not, Danny thinks life is too full of magic words.\n\nHe laughs a little and says, \"Good one, Daddy.\" Danny is pleased with his answer, even if it's wrong.\n\n\"No really, it says so on that sign.\" Tom points to a white sign with red letters nailed into their tree. Danny can't read yet. He knows his letters but not how they fit together.\n\nEllen says, \"That's weird. A state law against feeding the ducks?\"\n\nDanny knows it's not a joke. It is a law. The word law is scary, like the older kids in the water.\n\nDanny says, \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know it was against the law to feed the ducks.\"\n\n\"Okay. So, I can just go order a pizza and some hotdogs for the ducks, right?\"\n\n\"No. You can't feed the ducks. It's against the law.\"\n\nDanny eats the rest of his sandwich, swinging his feet beneath the picnic table bench. The scary older kids come out of the water and chase the ducks, even the babies. Danny wants to know why it's not against the law to chase the ducks, but he doesn't ask.\n\nX\n\nTheir cottage has two bedrooms, but they sleep in the same bedroom because of the bears. Danny sleeps in the tallest bed. There's a ceiling fan above him and after Daddy tells a story about Spider-man and dinosaurs, he has to duck to keep from getting a haircut. That's Danny's joke.\n\nBeth is asleep in her playpen. Everyone has to be quiet because of her.\n\nDanny is tired after a full day at the beach. His favorite part was holding onto Daddy's neck while they swam out to the raft.\n\nDanny wakes up when his parents creep into the bedroom. He is happy they are keeping their promise. He falls back to sleep listening to them fill up the small bed by the door. He knows his parents would rather sleep in the other bedroom by themselves, but he doesn't know why.\n\nX\n\nDanny wakes again. It's that middle-of-the-night time his parents always talk about. He hears noises, but gets the sense he's waking at the end of the noises. The noises are outside the cottage, echoing in the mountains. He hears thunder and lightning or a plane or a bunch of planes or a bunch of thunder and lightning and he is still convinced you can hear both thunder and lightning or he hears a bear's roar or a bunch of bears' roars or he hears the cottage's toilet, which has the world's loudest super-flush according to Daddy or he hears a bomb or a bunch of bombs, bombs are something he has only seen and heard in Spider-Man cartoons. Whatever the noises are, they are very far away and he has no magic words that will send his ears out that far. Danny falls back to sleep even though he doesn't want to.\n\nMonday\n\nThe beach lot is only half full. Ellen says, \"Where is everybody?\"\n\nTom says, \"I don't know. Mondays are kind of funny days. Right, pal?\"\n\nDanny nods and clutches the magic yellow paper and doesn't care where everybody is because maybe this means Daddy and him can spend more time out on the raft.\n\nThey get the same spot they had yesterday, next to the tree with its against-the-law sign. They dump their stuff and boldly spread it out. Beth and Ellen sit at the shore. Beth tries to eat sand and knocks her head into Ellen's. Tom sits in the shade and reads a book. Danny takes advantage of the increased running room on the beach and turns into Speed Boy.\n\nBy lunch, the beach population thins. No more young families around. There are some really old people with tree-bark skin and a few older kids around, but they are less scary because they look like they don't know what to do. The lake is empty of boats and jet-skis. The ducks are still there, swimming and safe from renegade feeders.\n\nTom swims to the raft with Danny's arms wrapped tight around his neck. Somewhere in the middle of the lake, Tom says, \"Stop kicking me!\" Danny knows not to say I was trying to help you swim. Danny climbs up the raft ladder first, runs to the middle then slips, feet shooting out from beneath him, and he falls on a mat that feels like moss. Tom yells. Don't run, be careful, watch what you're doing. Danny doesn't hear the words, only what's in his voice. They sit on the raft's edge, dangling their legs and feet into the water. Daddy's long legs go deeper.\n\nTom takes a breath, the one that signals the end of something, and says, \"It is kind of strange that hardly anybody is here.\" He pats Danny's head, so everything is okay.\n\nDanny nods. Commiserating, supporting, happy and grateful to be back in Daddy's good graces. He's also in his head, making up a face and body for a stranger named \"Hardly Anybody.\" He can't decide if he should make Hardly Anybody magical or not.\n\nThey wave at Mommy and Beth at the shore. Ellen's wave is tired, like a sleeping bird. Ellen wears the same shirt and shorts over her bathing suit. Danny wonders how long it takes for his wave to make it across the water.\n\nX\n\nThey leave the beach early. On the short drive back, Tom makes up a silly song that rhymes mountain peaks with butt-cheeks and it's these Daddy-moments that make Danny love him so hard he's afraid he'll break something.\n\nBack at the cottage. Beth is asleep and Ellen dumps her in the playpen. Danny sits at the kitchen table and eats grapes because he was told to. Tom goes into the living room and turns on the TV. Danny listens to the voices but doesn't hear what they say. But he hears Tom say a bad word, real quick, like he is surprised.\n\n\"Ellen?\" Tom jogs into the kitchen. \"Where's Mommy?\" He doesn't wait for Danny's answer. Ellen comes out of the bathroom holding her mostly dry bathing suit and wearing a different set of tee shirt and shorts. Tom grabs her arm, whispers something, then pulls her into the living room, to the TV.\n\n\"Hey, where did everybody go?\" Danny says it like a joke, but there's no punch line coming. He leaves his grapes, which he didn't want to eat anyway, and tip-toes into the living room.\n\nHis parents are huddled close to the TV, too close. If Danny was ever that close they'd tell him to move back. They're both on their knees, Ellen with a hand over her mouth, holding something in, or maybe keeping something out. The TV volume is low and letters and words scroll by on the top and bottom of the screen and in the middle there's a man in a tie and he is talking. He looks serious. That's all Danny sees before Tom sees him.\n\n\"Come with me, bud.\"\n\nDaddy picks him up and plops him down in a small sunroom at the front of the cottage.\n\nTom says, \"Mommy and Daddy need to watch a grown-up show for a little while.\"\n\n\"So I can't see it?\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"How come?\"\n\nTom is crouched low, face to face with Danny. Danny stares at the scraggly hairs of his mustache and beard. \"Because I said it's only for grown-ups.\"\n\n\"Is it about feeding the ducks? Is it scary?\"\n\nDaddy doesn't answer that. \"We'll come get you in a few minutes. Okay, bud?\" He stands, walks out, and starts to close sliding glass doors.\n\n\"Wait! Let me say something to Mommy first.\"\n\nTom gives that sigh of his, loud enough for Ellen to give him that look of hers. They always share like this. Danny stays in the sunroom, pokes his head between the glass doors. Ellen is to his left, sitting in front of the TV, same position, same hand over her mouth. \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know that I could see through these doors.\"\n\nMommy works to put her eyes on her son. \"So, you won't be able to see anything in here when we shut the doors?\"\n\n\"No, I can see through them.\"\n\nTuesday\n\nIt's raining. They don't go to the beach. Danny is in the sunroom watching Beth. His parents are in the living room watching more grown-up TV. Beth pulls on Danny's shirt and tries to walk, but she falls next to the couch and cries. Ellen comes in, picks up Beth, and sits down next to Danny.\n\nHe says, \"This is boring.\"\n\n\"I know, sweetie. Maybe we'll go out soon.\"\n\nDanny looks out the front windows and watches the rain fall on the front lawn and the dirt road. Beth crawls away from Ellen and toward the glass doors. She bangs on the glass with meaty little hands.\n\nDanny says, \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know we were in a spaceship.\"\n\nThere's a pause. Beth bangs her head on the glass. Ellen says, \"So, we're all just sitting here in a cottage room, right?\"\n\n\"No. This is a spaceship with glass doors.\"\n\nBeth bangs on the glass harder and yells in rhythm.\n\nEllen says, \"If we're in a ship, what about Daddy?\"\n\n\"We'll come back for him later.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\"\n\nX\n\nEllen and Beth stay at the cottage. Tom and Danny are in the car but they don't listen to the radio and Daddy isn't singing silly songs. Danny holds the magic yellow paper even though he knows they're going to the supermarket, not the beach.\n\nThey have to travel to the center of Moultonborough. Another long and obviously magical word that he'll say inside his head. There isn't much traffic. The supermarket's super-lot has more carts than cars.\n\nInside, the music is boring and has no words. Danny hangs off the side of their cart like a fireman. He waves and salutes to other shoppers as they wind their way around the stacks, but nobody waves back. Nobody looks at each other over their overflowing carts.\n\nThe line isn't long even though there are only three registers open. Tom tries to pay with a credit card. Danny is proud he knows what a credit card is.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir, but the system is down. No credit cards. Cash or check.\" The girl working the register is young, but like the older kids. She has dark circles under her eyes.\n\nDanny points and says, \"Excuse me, you should go to bed early tonight.\"\n\nTom has a green piece of paper and is writing something down on it. He gives it to the register girl.\n\nShe says, \"I'll try,\" and offers a smile. A smile that isn't happy.\n\nIn the parking lot, Danny says, \"Go fast.\"\n\nTom says, \"Hey, Danny.\"\n\nDanny's whole body tenses up. He doesn't know what he did wrong. \"What?\"\n\n\"I love you. You know that, right?\"\n\nDanny swings on those marionette arms and looks everywhere at once. \"Yeah.\"\n\nThen Tom smiles and obeys and runs with the full cart. Danny melts and laughs, stretching out and throwing his head back, closing his eyes in the brightening haze. There are no other cars between the cart and their car.\n\nWednesday\n\nThey spend the day in the cottage. More sunroom. More grown-up TV. When Tom and Ellen finally shut off the TV they talk about going out just to go out somewhere anywhere but the TV room and sunroom and maybe find an early dinner. Danny says, \"Moultonborough.\" They talk about how much gas is in the car. Danny says, \"Winnipesauke.\" They try to use their cell phones but the little LCD screens say no service. Danny says, \"Pretend you didn't know I say magic words.\" They talk about how much cash they have. Everybody in the car. Tom tells Danny it's his job to keep Beth awake. There are no other vehicles on the dirt road and more than half of the cottages they pass are dark. Beth is falling asleep so Danny sings loud silly songs and pokes her chin and cheeks. They pass empty gravel driveways and the blue bug-zappers aren't on. Beth cries. Danny is trying not to think about the bears in the woods. Ellen asks Danny to stop touching his sister's face and then says it's okay if Beth falls asleep. They don't have to look left or right when pulling out of the dirt road. Danny still works at the keep-Beth-awake job Daddy gave him and there's something inside him that wants to hear her cry and he touches her face again. They're into the center of Moultonborough and there's less traffic than there was yesterday. Beth cries and Ellen is stern but not yelling she never yells telling Danny to stop touching Beth's face. Maybe the bears are why there aren't as many people around. Beth is asleep. There's a smattering of parked cars in the downtown area but they don't look parked they look empty. Danny gently pats Beth's foot and sees Daddy watching him in the rear view mirror. The antique stores gift shops and hamburger huts are dark and have red signs on their doors and red always means either stopped or closed or something bad. Tom yells did you hear your mother keep your hands off your sister! They pass a row of empty family restaurants. Ellen says Tom like his name is sharp like it hurts and she says I only asked him to stop touching her face I don't want him to be freaked out by his sister he's being nice now why are you yelling when he was just doing what you asked him to do you have to be consistent with him and she is stern and she is not yelling. They pull into a lot that has one truck another empty restaurant this one with a moose on the roof and they stop. Then Tom is loud again this time with some hard alrights and then I hear you I get it okay I heard you the first time. Tom gets out of the car and slams the door and an older man with white hair that could mean he's magic and a white apron walks out the restaurant's front door. Danny waves. The older man waves them inside. Ellen gets out of the car and whispers but it's not a soft whisper not at all it's through teeth and it has teeth she says don't you dare yell at me in front of the kids. Beth wakes up and points and chews on her rabbit. They go inside. The older man says they are lucky he was just cooking up the last of his non-frozen food so it wouldn't go to waste and it was on the house. Danny thinks about the moose on the house. They walk by the bar and there's a woman sitting on a stool staring up at a big screen TV. Tom asks if they could shut that off because of the kids. The old man nods and uses a big remote control. Danny doesn't see anything again. The old man serves some BBQ chicken and ribs and fries and then leaves them alone. The lights are on and nobody says anything important in the empty restaurant.\n\nX\n\nOn the way back to the cottage they see a lonely mansion built into the side of a mountain. Looking dollhouse-sized, its white walls and red roof surrounded by the green trees stands out like a star even in the twilight.\n\nDanny says, \"What is that?\"\n\nTom says, \"That's called the Castle in the Clouds.\"\n\n\"Can we go see it?\"\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe we'll even go and live there. Would you like that?\"\n\nDanny says, \"Yes,\" but he then he thinks the Castle is too alone, cloaked in a mountain forest, but too open, anyone can see it from this road. He doesn't know what's worse, being alone alone or a watched alone. Danny doesn't change his answer.\n\nX\n\nIt's past Danny's bedtime but his parents aren't ready to put him to bed.\n\nEllen is on the couch reading a magazine that has a tall, blonde, skinny woman on the cover. Tom sits in front of the TV, flipping channels. There's nothing but static. The TV is like their cell phones now.\n\nTom says, \"Well, at least they've stopped showing commercials for the War of the Worlds remake.\"\n\nDanny wants to laugh because he knows it's what Daddy wants. But he doesn't because Mommy isn't. Danny has a good idea what 'war' means even though no one has ever explained it to him. Tom shuts off the TV.\n\nThere are pictures of other people all over the cottage. Now that Danny is allowed back in the TV room, he's looking at each one. Strangers with familiar smiles and beach poses. He looks at the frames too. They have designs and letters and words. Maybe magic words. Danny picks up one picture of a little girl and boy hugging and sitting on a big rock. He doesn't care about those kids. He wants to know what all the letters etched onto the wooden frame say. Those letters wrap all the way around the photo.\n\n\"Read this please, Daddy.\"\n\n\"'Children are the magic dreamers that we all once were.\"\n\n\"Mommy, pretend you didn't know I was a magic dreamer.\"\n\n\"So, you dream about boring, non-magical stuff, right?\"\n\n\"No. I'm a magic dreamer. Are you a magic dreamer?\"\n\nX\n\nEllen sleeps with Beth in the small bed next to the bedroom door, Danny sleeps in his Princess-and-the-Pea tall bed. Tom sleeps in the other bedroom. Alone alone.\n\nThursday\n\nA perfect summer day. The corner Gas 'N Save is open. The pumps still work. Tom fills up the car's tank and five red, two-gallon containers he took from inside the market. Danny is inside, running around the stacks. No one tells him to stop. He climbs onto an empty shelf next to some bread, though there isn't much bread left, and he lies down, breathing heavy from all the running.\n\nTom makes multiple trips from the market to the car. On the last trip, he plucks Danny off the shelf. He says, \"Hmm, this melon doesn't look too ripe.\" Danny giggles and squirms in Daddy's arms. \"But I'll take it anyway.\"\n\nThe older woman behind the counter is smoking a cigarette and has a face with extra skin. She looks like the girl from the supermarket but one-thousand years older. Tom extends a fistful of money and asks, \"Is this enough?\"\n\nShe says, \"Yes,\" without counting it. Danny thinks she is lying and that she just wants them gone like everyone else.\n\nTom buckles Danny into his seat. Danny says, \"What would you do if you were a giant?\"\n\n\"A giant? Well, I'd use a mountain as my pillow and the trees as a mattress.\"\n\nDanny thinks about a Giant Daddy lying on a mountain, crushing all the trees and bears and other animals and the Castle in the Clouds with his back and arms, and his legs would be long enough to crush Moultonborough and the other towns too, maybe his feet would dangle into Winnipesauke and cause huge waves, drown the poor ducks, flood everything.\n\nDanny says, \"That would hurt.\"\n\nX\n\nAt night the electricity goes out, but it's okay because they have two lanterns and lots of candles. They sit in the back yard around a football-shaped charcoal grill eating hotdogs and holding sticks with marshmallows skewered on the tips. The smoke keeps the bugs away. They sing loud to keep the bears away. Danny sits on Mommy's lap and tells stories about magic and the adventures of Speed Boy and Giant Daddy. Then Tom carries him to bed and Ellen carries a candle. They kiss him goodnight. Danny closes his eyes. He almost knows why they are still here when everyone else is disappearing, but he can't quite get there, can't reach it, like the night he tried to send his ears out to the noises.\n\nDanny tries to send his ears out again and this time he hears his parents in the hallway. They speak with one voice. He hears words that he doesn't understand. They might be arguing and they might be laughing and they might be crying but it doesn't matter, because Danny knows tonight was the best night of their vacation.\n\nFriday\n\nDanny wakes up before anyone else and goes into the sunroom. There's morning mist and a bear on the front lawn. The bear is black and bigger than Danny's world, although that world seems to be shrinking. Danny thinks bears, even the dumb-looking Teddy bears, always know more about what's going on than the other animals and it's part of what scares Danny. He's scared now but he wants a better view so he opens the front door and stands on the elevated stoop, his hand on the door, ready to dash back inside if necessary. The bear runs away at the sound of the door and it disappears. Danny hears it crashing through some brush but then everything goes quiet. Why would a bear be afraid of him?\n\nNow that it's gone Danny steps outside, the wet grass soaking his feet. He says, \"Hey, come back.\" He wants to ask the bear, where are all the people? The bear must know the answer.\n\nX\n\nDanny and Ellen sit out back, playing Go Fish at the picnic table. Tom went shopping for supplies, a phrase he used before leaving, by himself. He's been gone most of the morning.\n\nDanny loses again but Ellen calls him the winner.\n\nDanny says, \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know it was a beautiful day.\"\n\nEllen shuffles the cards. \"So it's really rainy and cold out, right?\"\n\n\"No. There're no clouds. And the sun is out and super hot. It's a beautiful day.\"\n\nThey play more card games. They play with Beth. She's almost ready to walk by herself but she still falls, and after she falls, she rips out fistfuls of grass and stuffs it in her mouth. They eat lunch. They nap.\n\nTom comes home after the naps. Supplies fill the car, including a mini-trailer hitched to the back. Tom gets out of the car and gives everyone an enthusiastic kiss and puts Danny on his shoulders. Ellen shrinks as he goes up.\n\nEllen says, \"Did you see anybody.\"\n\nTom whispers an answer that Danny can't hear because he's above Daddy's head.\n\nEllen says, \"What you got there in the trailer?\"\n\n\"A generator.\"\n\n\"Really? You know how to set one of those up?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\nDanny comes back down.\n\n\"Where'd you learn how to do that?\"\n\n\"I just know, okay?\"\n\nEllen goes back to the picnic table with Beth. Tom to the trailer and the generator. There are no more enthusiastic kisses.\n\nDanny watches Tom setting up the generator. He says, \"Daddy, pretend you didn't know this was a beautiful day.\"\n\n\"It's not a beautiful day.\"\n\n\"No, it is! There're no clouds. And the sun is out and super hot. It's a beautiful day, Daddy. I just know, okay?\"\n\nSaturday\n\nThey leave the car at the cottage and walk the mile to the beach. They don't carry much beach stuff. Beth is asleep in the stroller. Danny has on his swimming trunks but his parents are wearing shorts and tee shirts. The trip to the beach is for him. His parents don't know it, but Danny has the yellow magic paper folded up in his pocket.\n\nDanny asks, \"Is today supposed to be the last day of vacation?\"\n\nEllen says, \"I think we're going to stay here a little while longer.\"\n\nTom says, \"Maybe a long while longer.\"\n\nEllen says, \"Is that okay?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nTom says, \"Maybe we'll go check out that Castle in the Clouds tomorrow.\"\n\nDanny almost tells them about the bear. Instead he says, \"Mommy, pretend you didn't know we were still on vacation.\"\n\nThey pass empty driveways of empty cottages. Danny, for the first time, is really starting to feel uneasy about the people being gone. It's like when he thinks about why and how he got here and how are his parents his parents and how is his sister his sister, because if he thinks too much about any of that he probably won't like the answers.\n\nThe beach lot is empty. They stake out their regular spot next to the tree and its duck sign. There are ducks on the shore scratching the sand and dipping their bills in the water. It's another beautiful day.\n\nTom says, \"I don't get it. I thought this is where everyone would want to be.\"\n\nEllen finishes for him. \"Especially now.\"\n\nThe ducks waddle over. They don't know the law. Tom pulls out a bag of Cheerios, Beth's snack, and tosses a few on the sand. The ducks converge and are greedy.\n\nEllen pushes the stroller deeper into the shade away from the ducks and says, \"Are you sure we can spare those, Mr. Keeper-of-the-Supplies?\" It walks like a joke and talks like a joke but it isn't a joke.\n\nDanny says, \"Daddy! Don't you remember the sign? It's against the law to feed the ducks.\" Danny looks around, making sure the people who aren't there still aren't there.\n\n\"It's okay now, buddy. I don't think anyone will care anymore. Here, kiddo.\"\n\nHe takes the Cheerio bag from Daddy. Daddy pats his head. Danny digs a hand deep into the bag, pulls it out, and throws Cheerios onto the sand. The ducks flinch and scatter toward the water, but they come back and feed.\nPaul Tremblay\n\nis the author of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland, and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye, and the short story collections Compositions for the Young and Old and In the Mean Time. He has published two novellas, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Five Chapters.com, and Best American Fantasy 3. He is the co-editor of four anthologies including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories (with John Langan). Paul is the president of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards (www.shirleyjacksonawards.org). He lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts, has a master's degree in Mathematics, and has no uvula.\n\nTHAT BABY\n\nLINDSAY HUNTER\n\nThe baby was normal when it came out. Daddy snipped the cord like nothing, the baby screaming silently till the nurse sucked out whatever bloodsnot was stuck in his throat, then there was no turning back, it was there, his voice, his mouth wide and wider, that baby was all mouth, his cries like a nail being driven into rotten wood. Normal.\n\nDaddy said, let's name him Levis, we always liked Vs in names, and I'd heard the name Levis before but couldn't place it, and besides, that baby was a Levis, it was obvious.\n\nWe took Levis home and he sucked me dry within an hour. Daddy went to the store for some formula and Levis ate that up too. I made a pot of mashed potatoes for me and Daddy and the baby did his best to stick his face into it, his neck nothing more than a taffy pull, his big head hanging so I could see the three curls he'd already grown at the base of his neck, sweaty, looking for all the world like pubes lathered with baby oil, and I shuddered looking at them and chalked that feeling up to postpartum.\n\nLevis wouldn't let Daddy sleep in bed with us, he was clever that way, soon as Daddy slid under the bedcovers Levis would start screaming, that nail torturing that rotted wood, that endless nail, then when Daddy would get up for a glass of something the baby would quiet down, and Daddy and I aren't stupid so soon we figured Daddy could get familiar with the couch for a while if it ensured Levis acted peaceful, and I gave Daddy permission to tend to himself in that way as much as he needed to since I was busy with Levis and couldn't do my wifelies.\n\nLevis grew at night and plenty of mornings I'd wake up to see him laying there with his diaper busted open. Other ladies I've known who have given birth had always chittered on about their babies' growth spurts, but here Levis was 40 pounds within a week and 60 midway through the next, hair on his knuckles and three block teeth scattered amongst his jaws, then when he was one month old he called me Honey, his first word, fisted my breast, his nails leaving little half-moons in my flesh when I pried his hand from me, his grinning mouth showing a fourth tooth, a molar like a wad of gum wedged way back.\n\nDaddy and I had heard of ugly babies, of unnaturally big babies. We'd seen a show once where what looked like a 12-year old boy was in a giant diaper his mother had fashioned out of her front-room curtain, sitting there with his legs straight out in front of him like he was pleased to meet them, his eyes pushed into his face like dull buttons, and the mother claiming he wasn't yet a year. But Levis wasn't on the TV, he was right there, his eyes following Daddy across the room, those eyes like gray milk ringed with spider's legs, and at two months Levis had chewed through a wooden bar in his crib, splinters in his gums, him crying while I plucked them with a tweezer, me feeling that nail in my gut, me feeling something less than love.\n\nWe took the baby to the doctor, Daddy explaining that there was something off about Levis, he was big, he didn't look like other babies, he had teeth like a man, and Levis quiet and studying Daddy like he understood, twirling his finger in his nostril, around and around, pulling it out tipped with blood. The doctor weighed Levis and he was up to 75 pounds and his third month still a week away, the doctor asking what on earth we were feeding him, warning us babies his age shouldn't be eating table food, and me and Daddy scared to say that the night before Levis had lunged for a pork chop, screamed until we let him suck on the bone, Levis making slurping noises like he was a normal baby, like the bone was his momma's nipple, his cheeks like two halves of a blush apple. The doctor sent us home, told us to watch what Levis ate, get him a jumpy chair for exercise. The doctor reaching out to pat Levis' head, then thinking different when Levis grabbed his wrist, the doctor blanching at the thick hair on Levis' arms, Levis giggling like a normal baby playing, just playing.\n\nDuring bath time that night Levis' baby penis stiffened and poked out of the water, Levis saying HoneyHoneyHoneyHoney in his husky baby voice. I called Daddy to finish the bath so I could lay down but Levis screamed until I came for him, wrapped him in a towel, him freeing an arm to reach up and stroke my cheek, for all the world like I was his, like he had me, and there was that stiffy again when I was fitting him with his diaper.\n\nAt six months Levis walked into the kitchen at breakfast and tried to open the fridge himself, Daddy stunned and dropping scrambled eggs from his mouth, and Levis speaking his next word, Pickles. Pickles, Honey, he said, pounding on the fridge door with his hairy chunk fists, and I sliced some bread and butter pickles up for him and that's what he had for breakfast, a whole jar, me noticing that he was only a foot shorter than the fridge door, could almost reach the freezer where Daddy kept his vodka.\n\nOne night Daddy turned to me and we began our special time, I let Daddy do what he would since it had been so long, but soon enough I noticed Levis standing in the doorway watching, that finger in that nostril, and when I made Daddy stop Levis climbed into bed between us and began feeding, something he hadn't done in months, falling asleep with my breast in his mouth, like any other sweet baby, I told myself, like any other sweet baby boy, Daddy going back to his couch for the night, his shoulders hanging heavy, like the pillow he carried was a stone.\n\nAt eight months Levis opened a drawer and found a paring knife, held it to Daddy's gut and giggled, a sheen of drool on his chin, finally pulling the knife away when he got distracted by the ladybugs printed on his T-shirt. Then Daddy left, saying Levis wasn't right, saying he needed to get away, saying he'd be back, driving away while Levis watched him from the window, his baby man hands flat to the window, like everything he saw could be touched that way, me watching Daddy's headlights cut the dark and then the dark crowding right back in behind them, Levis saying Honey? to whatever he saw out that window, maybe even to himself.\n\nLevis came to bed with me, molding his body to mine, rubbing his face on Daddy's pillow sleepily, his breath like garlic, like garlic and meat, didn't even open my eyes when he reached for my breast in the early hours and fed himself. In the morning he woke me, whispering Honey, Honey, smearing the sheets in elaborate patterns with fingerfuls of poop from his diaper, twining his fingers in my hair, Honey.\n\nNormal. Later I bathed Levis and dressed him and we went to the park. For a while I pushed him on the swings, waited for him at the bottom of the slide, did the seesaw with him. When Levis was playing in the sandbox another mother came and sat beside me on the bench, said Your boy is quite large, me saying Yes, me saying Thank you. The woman's son got into the sandbox with Levis and they started building something and the woman went on, said I'm a producer for the local news and we'd love to have your boy on if you're interested, as kind of a feature on local unnaturals, and Levis looking up and showing his teeth, his eyes slitted at the woman, like he heard her, like he understood.\n\nMaybe, I told the woman, when Levis is a little older, the woman saying Fine, fine, smoothing her jeans like she was peeved at the color of the wash, and her son getting up to bring his fat little shoe down on Levis' sandpile, over and over, saying Unh Unh Unh, Levis letting him for a while before grinding a fist of sand into the boy's face, the boy just blinking for a minute like his second hand had stopped, Levis taking the opportunity to grab the boy by his ankle and bring him down to where he could pound on his abdomen with his fists, like any baby with a toy drum, like any baby figuring out how hard to pound to get just the right sound, the boy going Unh Unh Unh.\n\nThe woman said, My Lord, do something, he's flattened my Jared, her running over like her legs were breaking out of concrete molds, her boy saying Unh a little quieter now and me more proud of Levis than I'd ever been and so getting up and walking to the car, Levis saying Honey? Levis standing up to see better, saying Honey, stepping over the boy and out of the sandbox, me getting into the car and locking the doors, key in the ignition, Levis just standing there, the late afternoon sunlight giving him a glow, just standing there with his fists at his sides, looking like a fat little man more than anybody's baby, a little fat man beating his chest now, me pulling out onto the road, Levis wailing Honey, wailing Pickles, getting smaller and smaller in the rearview until I took a turn and he was gone, my heart like a fist to a door and my breasts empty and my nipples like lit matchheads. \nLindsay Hunter\n\nlives in Chicago and is the author of the story collections Daddy's and DON'T KISS ME. Her novel is forthcoming on FSG in the fall of 2014. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.\n\nTHE TRUTH AND   \nALL ITS UGLY\n\nKYLE MINOR\n\n1.\n\nThe year my boy Danny turned six, my wife Penny and me took him down to Lexington and got him good and scanned because that's what everybody was doing back then, and, like they say, better safe than sorry.\n\nHe was a good boy and never got out of hand until he was seventeen years old and we got out of hand together. Around this same time Penny kept saying she was going to leave and stay with her sister in town. She said it enough that we stopped believing her, but the last time she said it, she did it. I remember the day and the hour. Friday, September 17, 2024. Quarter after five in the afternoon, because that's what time her grandmother's grandfather clock stopped when I kicked it over.\n\nDanny heard all the yelling, and he came running downstairs and saw her standing there with her two suitcases and looked at me like I ought to do something. \"Goddamn it, I'm not going to stop her,\" I said.\n\n\"It's your fault she's going,\" he said.\n\nPenny hauled off and slapped his mouth. \"I didn't raise you to talk to your father that way,\" she said, and at that moment I was of two minds, one of them swelled up with pride at the way she didn't let him mouth off to me.\n\nIt's the other one that won out. I reached back and gave her what she'd had coming for a long time now. I didn't knock her down, but I put one tooth through her lip, hit her just hard enough so she would come back to us when she was calmed down.\n\nShe didn't come back, though, and she didn't go stay with her sister, who claimed not even to know where she was. One week, two, then on a Saturday me and Danny had enough. We hauled Penny's mother's pink-painted upright piano out the front door and onto the porch and then we pushed it off and picked up our axes from by the wood pile and jumped down on it. \"You got to be careful, Danny,\" I said. \"There's a tension on those strings that'll cut you up bad you hit them wrong.\"\n\nIt was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I'd tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn't so sure, and now he'd caught on. \"It's what you do with the dead trees,\" he said, like he was reading my mind.\n\nI don't know what came over us after that, and it's not enough to blame it on our getting into the whiskey, which we did plenty. Penny had a old collection of Precious Moments figurines handed down from her own mama and grandmom. Children at a picnic, or playing the accordion to a bunch of birds, or hands folded in prayer, and nearly every little boy or girl wearing a bonnet. At first Danny said we ought to shoot at them\u2014we had everything from assault rifles to a old Civil War service revolver that I'd be afraid to try firing\u2014but then one Tuesday morning\u2014by now it was November, and the old dog pens were near snowed under\u2014he found some of the yellowjackets I had caught in glass Mason jars and forgot about. He found them dead in there and I saw him looking at them and he saw me watching but didn't say anything, just went upstairs and came down with my old orange tacklebox, which was where Penny kept her scrapbooking things.\n\n\"You gonna scrapbook those yellowjackets, buddy bear?\" I said.\n\nHe said his plan was to shellac them, but I could see he couldn't near do it right. I said, \"Here, let me show you how,\" and showed him how to thin the shellac with turpentine and dab it on soft with the paintbrush bristles, which was something I knew from when things were better with Penny and I'd help her with her scrapbooks just so we could sit with our legs touching for a while.\n\nHe got good at it fast, and then we caught more yellowjackets and did what Danny had in mind all along, which was shellac them stiff, wings out like they were ready to fly, and set them on the Precious Moments figurines in a swarm.\n\nAfter a while that stopped being fun, and it kind of took the shock away when every Precious Moment in the house was swarmed like that, plus we were running out of yellowjackets. \"We got to get more minimal,\" Danny said, and I could see what he meant. It's like when I served my country in the African wars. You get to see enough dead bodies and before too long you get used to seeing them, and then you see another and it don't mean one thing to you. But you run into one little live black girl with a open chicken wire wound up and down her face and maybe three flies in her cut up eye, that gets to you.\n\nSo after that, we got strategic. We'd put three yellowjackets right by a brown marbly eye, eye to eye. Or one, stinger first.\n\nNobody but us had got to see what we had done to the Precious Moments until a few days later when Benny Gil, our postman, came by with the junk mail, and Danny saw him and invited him in for a glass of water, and he saw what it was we were doing with the wasps, and he said, \"Son, that's sick,\" but he was smiling when he said it, and it was then I knew he was a person who could be trusted. Up until then, he'd always been asking about my methadone, which I got regular from the pharmacy at St. Claire's Hospital in town, on account of my back pain. He wanted to get some off me because he could trade it for other things he wanted.\n\nThis day I asked him, \"Why is it nobody writes letters anymore?\"\n\n\"It's a general lack of literacy,\" he said, and we started laughing because everybody knew that wasn't why.\n\n\"It's the government,\" Danny said, but he was just repeating what he always heard me say, and I wished he wouldn't get so serious in front of Benny Gil.\n\n\"They're spying,\" Benny Gil said, \"listening in on us right now,\" but he wasn't serious.\n\n\"Best be careful,\" I said, because now was a time to keep it light. \"Benny Gil here is on the government teat.\"\n\nBenny Gil took a sip of his water and smiled some more. \"That one,\" he said, \"and maybe a couple two or three others.\"\n\nDanny caught on. \"It's you we saw across the creek there, in the tall grass.\"\n\n\"I been watching,\" Benny Gil said. He leaned back in the wooden chair, put all his weight on the back two legs. I could see by the look on Danny's face he was still thinking about how Penny would say not to lean back like that because it could put another divot in the wood floor, which was the kind of not-important thing Penny was always worried about. There was a thousand or more divots in the wood floor, and by now another one just added a little extra character.\n\nBenny Gil leaned forward again, put his elbows on his knees so his face was closer to mine. \"I know where Penny can be found,\" he said.\n\nDanny's ears perked up at that.\n\n\"She wants to be found,\" I said, \"and I don't care to find her.\"\n\n\"Irregardless,\" Benny Gil said.\n\n\"Where is she?\" Danny said, and I shot him a look.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Benny Gil said, \"me and your Dad ought to go out back and have a smoke.\"\n\nDanny watched us through the window, and I wonder what it is he was thinking and wonder to this day whether whatever it was he thought had anything to do with what he did later. Surely he saw something changing hands between me and Benny Gil, and he must have seen us shaking hands, too.\n\nWhat he didn't hear was Benny Gil saying, \"God didn't invent thirteen-digit zip codes for nothing,\" or me saying, \"How many?\" or him saying, \"Sixteen,\" or me talking him down to six. Six, I could spare, by careful rationing, and by grinding the white pills into white powder with my pocketknife, and snorting them instead of swallowing, which meant I could stretch out the supply until it was time for a new scrip.\n\nDanny didn't hear any of it, but maybe he knew something of it, because after Benny Gil left, he said, \"You get to hurting again, I know somebody who can get you what you need.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Ben Holbrook,\" he said.\n\n\"That's the case,\" I said, \"I don't want to hear of you talking to Ben Holbrook ever again.\"\n\nI meant it when I said it, but the problem was the methadone got better after I started grinding it up, and once I knew how much better it could get, I had a harder time rationing it, and ran out a week early.\n\nBelieve me when I say I know a thing or two about pain. I was wounded twice in Liberia, and got radiation poisoning from the Arabs in Yemen. Once in Minnesota I split a fourteen-point buck in half on a old fossil fuel motorcycle and broke nearly every bone in my body and knocked one eye crooked, and it stayed that way until I could afford to get it fixed. But, son, you don't know pain until you get what I got, which is a repetitive stress injury in my back from solar panel installations up there on roofs in the heat or the cold. So when the methadone ran out, I forgot about what I said before, and told Danny maybe if he knew somebody he ought to give him a call.\n\nBen Holbrook was a skinny son of a gun, no more than maybe eighteen years old, pimple-faced, head shaved bald so you could see its lumps. Money was not a problem for us. Benny Gil wasn't the only one on the government teat, he just had to work for his. Still, I didn't like the way this bald zitty kid came into our house thinking he was the only one who could set prices in America.\n\n\"Who do you think you are,\" I said, \"Federal Reserve Chairman Dean Karlan?\"\n\nHe was cool as a cucumber. \"Supply and demand,\" he said, \"is the law of the land in Kentucky, U.S.A.\"\n\nMuch as I didn't like it, I knew he was right, and I paid what he asked, which was considerable, and he handed over three brown-orange plastic bottles, which was supply enough for my demand and then some.\n\nSoon as Ben Holbrook left, I went into the bathroom with my pocketknife and dropped two tablets on the sink counter and chopped them to powder and made a line. Then I put my nose low to the Formica and closed off my right nostril with a finger and snorted the line through my left.\n\nI must have left the door open a crack, because I saw Danny there, just outside, watching. He knew it was a thing I was doing, but I don't think he ever saw me do it before.\n\nI knew good and well that wasn't the type of thing I wanted him to see. Any other time I would have thrown a shoe at him if I caught him spying like that. But when you take your medicine through your nose, it hits your bloodstream fast and hard. That's why you take it that way. So my first thought was to throw a shoe, but before that first thought was even gone the juice hit my bloodstream, and there was my boy, his eyes looking at mine through the crack in the bathroom door, and if I ever loved him I loved him more in that now than in any ever, and right alongside that first thought was the second, which came out my mouth the same time it came into my head, even though I knew it was wrong as I thought it and said it. \"Boy,\" I said. \"Come on in here and try a line.\"\n\nSome things you see like from outside yourself and from above, and that's how I see what happened next. Right there, below, there's big old me, and there's my boy Danny, and I'm coming around behind him, putting my arms around him like I did when I showed him how to line up a cue stick at Jack's Tavern or sink a putt at the Gooney Golf, and he's got the open pocketknife in his hand, and I've got his hand in my hand, pushing down on it, showing him how to crush without wasting anything, how to corral the powder, how a good line is made. That's me, leaning down, pantomiming to show him how. That's him, fast learner, nose to the counter, finger to nostril. There's the line, gone up like the rapture. Danny, standing up too fast because he don't know any better, and the trickle of blood down his lip and chin, and me, tilting his head back, cradling it in the crook of my arm, putting the old Boy Scout press on his nose with a wad of toilet paper, saying, \"Hold still now, baby boy,\" and his eyes bright, and his cheeks flushed, and his voice like from a hundred miles away saying, \"Lord, have mercy,\" then, \"Weird,\" and us lying back, then, on the cold tile, his shoulder blades resting on my chest, both of us waiting for the hit to pass so we could take another.\n\nThe days and nights started going by fast after that, and sometimes there was no cause to tell one from the other. One morning or afternoon or midnight, for all I know, I went into my room and found Danny half-naked underneath the bed I shared for all those years with Penny, and when I asked him what he was doing under there, he said, \"She's been after us all this time,\" and I said, \"Who?\" and he said, \"Her,\" and hauled out a stash of scented candles his mother must have left under there, cinnamon and jasmine and persimmon-lemon.\n\nAt first I thought he was talking crazy, but then he pulled himself out from under the bed and walked real close and put the purple jasmine one under his eye and struck a blue tip match and lit the wick, and soon as it started to burn his eye went all bloodshot and swelled up. Even still, I wanted to take up her case.\n\n\"How was she to know?\" I said, but he was looking at me hard. \"Turn around,\" he said, \"and look in that mirror.\" And sure enough, my eye was tearing up and swelling and all the blood vessels were turning red.\n\n\"Benny Gil,\" he said, \"told you where she is.\"\n\n\"That's not strictly true,\" I said, except it was.\n\n\"The general area, then,\" he said.\n\n\"The general neck of the woods,\" I said.\n\nHe went into me and Penny's bathroom, then, and for some reason, even though we had being doing it together, I couldn't go in there just then and do it with him. I could hear him, though, and then I heard a few more sounds I knew but hadn't expected to hear, which were the sounds of him loading my old Browning 9mm, which I kept under the sink in case of emergencies. When I heard that, I got scared, because for a while now I had been feeling, like I said before, like things were getting out of hand, but now, him stepping out of the bathroom, hand around the grip of that nine, I had the kind of proof that makes it so you can't look the other way anymore.\n\n\"Killing,\" I said, \"isn't a kind of thing you can take back.\"\n\n\"I don't mean to kill her,\" he said. \"I just mean to scare her a little.\"\n\nThat was more sensible talk than the talk I had been expecting from him, but still not altogether sensible. He was angry, I knew, after finding those candles, and I can't say I wasn't angry, either, but when you're young and full of piss and vinegar, caution is not a thing you take to naturally, and, besides, neither one of us was going through life in any kind of measured way at that particular point.\n\n\"I'm not saying she don't deserve a little scaring,\" I said. \"When the time comes you'll see me front and center, taking the pleasure you and me both deserve after everything. But what I'm saying is that the time isn't come. Not yet.\"\n\n\"Look around,\" Danny said, and all around us was eighteen kinds of mess, some we'd made, and some that had just kind of grown while we weren't paying attention. \"Sheila,\" he said, which was the name of a dog we'd had once who had abandoned her young before it was time, and all five of them had died, and who I had taken out back and shot because there wasn't one good thing about a dog who would go and do that.\n\n\"We're grown,\" I told him.\n\n\"Not me,\" he said.\n\nThere wasn't much I could say to that, because it was true, but I got him to hand over the Browning, and then he went upstairs and didn't come down for the rest of the night, and I figured he'd be down when he got hungry enough.\n\nI went into the kitchen and made some pancakes and made some extra and wrapped them in foil and put them in the refrigerator so he could have them later. Then I put some butter and maple syrup over mine and ate them and drank some milk and fell asleep in front of a old Wesley Snipes movie and figured when I woke up I'd see if he didn't want to put on his boots and go out into the Daniel Boone National Forest and hike for a while and get cleared out the way the cold air will do you.\n\nWhen I woke up, though, the car was gone, and the extension cord for the battery charger was running from the living room out the front door, and I followed it on out to the side of the house where we parked the car, which was sure enough gone, and with juice enough to go to Lexington and back probably. That's when panic kicked in, and I ran back into the house, toward me and Penny's bathroom, knowing the Browning was going to be gone, but hoping it wasn't, and when I got there and didn't find it where it should have been, I figured there wasn't any way I was going to see Penny alive again, but I was wrong.\n\n2.\n\nIt was Penny who found him. It took some time, but after a while the authorities pieced together what had happened. Around six in the evening, they said, must have been the time I fell asleep. When the house got quiet enough, Danny went out to the shed and brought in the long extension cord and ran it to the car battery. While it was charging he loaded up three assault rifles, including the Kalashnikov 3000, the one made to look like a AK-47, but with the guts of a MicroKal, laser gun and flamethrower and all. He took the Browning, too, and my Bowie knife, and his old play camo war paint, and a cache of armor-piercing bullets, although he never did use any of it except the 9mm. Then he sat down and ate the pancakes I had made, and washed the plate and knife and fork he had used to eat them off, and left them out to air dry.\n\nBy time he got to Benny Gil's house, he had worked himself up into something cold enough that Benny Gil didn't argue, didn't even need to be shown knife or gun to know it was in his best interest to give up Penny's location and get Danny on his way. I don't know what that means, exactly, except to say that Benny Gil is not a person I've ever known or heard of to be afraid of anyone or anything.\n\nWhat Benny Gil told Danny was that Penny was staying with her sister's husband's nephew Kelly, a bookish boy we never knew well because he never came around to family things, probably because he, or more likely his mother, thought he was better than us, from what they call a more refined stock.\n\nKelly was, by then, well to do, UK law degree in hand, specialty in horse law. He even had a office at Keeneland and another at Churchill Downs, and if he thought as highly of himself as he seemed to every year on the television, sitting there next to some half-dead Derby owner who needed a oxygen tank just to breathe, sipping a mint julep, then I'm sure him and Penny made a fine pair.\n\nThere's no way to know it now, but my guess is that Danny, when he heard of it, came to the same idea I did when I first heard of it, which was that something not-right was happening between Penny and that boy, but I put it out of my head at the time because it was too horrible a thing to look at directly.\n\nAt any rate, what happened next is the part of the story that got out into the world. Danny drove east on Interstate 64, stopped at the Sonicburger in Mt. Sterling and ordered and ate a egg sandwich, then headed toward the big expensive stone houses by the airport, where Penny and Kelly was shacked up.\n\nWhen he got there, he rang the doorbell three times\u2014that's what Kelly's security company came up with later\u2014and nobody was home, and I guess he didn't want to wait, and I guess he knew well enough what ended up being true, which was that there was something worse for a mother than to be killed by her son.\n\nAt the funeral, the preacher and everyone else said that wasn't the case, that Danny was sick in the head and that these things happen in the brain, something trips or snaps or misfires, and then somebody is doing something they wouldn't do if they were themself. But I think that's the kind of thing people say when what they want to do is make themselves feel better instead of look straight ahead at the truth and all its ugly. Because what I think and pretty near to know happened goes like this:\n\nWhen he got there, he rang that doorbell three times, and nobody was home, and he got to thinking, and what he was thinking about was clear enough to him, and what he was thinking was that he had come all this way to hurt his mother, and his stomach was full from that egg sandwich, and that Browning 9mm was in his hand, and what if instead of killing her and just hurting her that one time, what if instead he did himself right there where she would have to come home and find him, and wouldn't that be something she would have to live with, and go on living and living and living? And wouldn't that be the way to hurt her again and again, the way she had hurt him and us by running off?\n\nSo that's what he did. He sat down in front of Kelly's front door, and put the muzzle to his right temple, and turned his head so his left temple was to the door, and when Penny came home that night, what she found was the worst thing you can ever find, and when I heard about it, I couldn't hate her the way I wanted to anymore.\n\nAt the funeral, they sat us both on the front row, but far apart from each other, with a bunch of her brothers and other male relatives between us so I would know clear as daylight that I was meant to stay away from her. But before the service got started, the preacher came over and asked if there were things each of us needed to say to the deceased, and we both said yes, but for me it wasn't because I had anything to say to Danny. He was dead and gone and wherever it is he ended up, and that was hard enough to bear without making a show of telling him something he wasn't ever going to hear. It was Penny I wanted to say some things to, and I thought maybe up there next to Danny she might in that moment have ears to hear them.\n\nHer brothers didn't leave the room when the preacher asked, but they did go stand in the back and give what they must have thought was a respectful distance. Me and Penny went and knelt beside the casket, her near his head and me near the middle, maybe three feet separating us. She bowed her head to pray silently, and I did, too, although I didn't right then have any words to say, and then she said some things to Danny too personal for me to repeat, although I don't think it would be wrong to say that the things she said, if they were true, moved me in a way I didn't think I could be moved by her.\n\nWhen she was done, she looked over at me. It seemed like she was able to keep from crying all that time until she looked into my eyes, and I was reminded that it was our looking into each other's eyes that was happening while we were about the business of getting him made in the first place, and maybe that's what she saw that finally broke her down when she looked over at me. Maybe that, and all the years we had together, the three of us, and how there wasn't anyone else in the world who knew what those years were, and how there wouldn't ever be anyone else again.\n\nIt was right then, though I didn't say anything at the time because it didn't seem like the right time, that I decided I couldn't live in a world where Penny would go on being as unhappy as she had been made to be.\n\nFirst thing the next morning I went down to Lexington again and went to the place where we had taken Danny when he was six years old to get scanned. It was gone, boarded up, the part of town where it had been now all but forgotten by people in business to make money. The only place in the storefront where the lights were still on was the WIC food stamp place, and I went inside and was told where to go on the Loop, to a part of town I remembered as Lexington Green but which was now called Stonewall.\n\nThe business had changed its name too, was now called Livelong, and occupied a building the size of a city block. The woman at the front desk said my number was A83, gave me a smartpad to fill in and told me to take a seat.\n\nBy time they called my name I had run my fingerprint and verified all my information and watched the screen that said the scan we had got was old technology, and while the guarantee we had bought was still good, the Danny we would get would eventually wear out, but would not age the way the ones they could make now could. We'd get him six years old, and six years old he would stay.\n\nThey made me meet with a kid in a suit and tie, and all he said was the same thing I had heard from the smartpad. He was looking at me funny, and I said, \"All I want to get is the service I paid for eleven years ago, near to the day,\" and he lowered his head for just a moment, like he was ashamed, and then he said, \"You're entitled to it, and we'll give it to you if you want, but what you need to know is sometimes what you want isn't the same as the thing we can give you.\"\n\nEven though he was a kid, what he was saying was true, and I knew it then, and it made me want to pound the sense out of him, and even so I wanted what I wanted.\n\nI walked out of that Stonewall storefront that afternoon holding the warm flesh hand of a thing that moved and talked and looked for the life of me just like Danny did at six years old, and it was nearly unbearable, at first, to touch him or hear him say, \"Now we're going for ice cream, Daddy?\" and to remember the bargain we had made with Danny the day we took him to get him scanned. You be good through this, we'd told him, we'll take you to get whatever kind of ice cream you want.\n\nSo I said, \"Sure, buddy bear,\" and I took him to up the road to the Baskin Robbins, and he ordered what Danny always ordered, which was Rocky Road with green and only green M&Ms sprinkled over top, and we got a high table for two, and I sat and watched him chew exactly the way he used to chew, and lick the spoon exactly the way he used to lick the spoon. He said, \"Can we split a Coke, Dad?\" and I said sure, and went up to the counter and ordered a large Coke, and when I forgot to get an extra straw, I regretted it the way I used to regret it, because he chewed the straw down to where you could hardly get any Coke out of it.\n\nAfter that he wanted to go walk the old stone wall like we always did when we came to Lexington, so I took him down there and parked the car and got him out and hoisted him up on the wall, and held his hand to steady him as he walked on top of it, and he said, \"Tell me about the slaves, Daddy,\" so I did what I used to do and told him about how all the black people in Kentucky used to belong to the white people, and how this very wall he was walking on had been made by their hands, one stone at a time, and the mortar mixed with probably some of their sweat and maybe some of their blood, too, still in it, and how even with all that Kentucky fought for the Union and could well have been the difference in that war. While I was saying it, I was remembering how I used to believe things like that, and the feelings that used to rise up in my chest when I said them, feelings of pride and certainty, and warm feelings toward my people I had come from. These were stories my own dad and granddad used to tell me and which I was now passing along to my own son, and this little Danny, walking along that wall, holding my hand, said the same thing the other little Danny had said in a moment a whole lot like this one but which couldn't have been, if you think about it, any more different if it was happening on the other side of the world. He said, \"It wasn't right, was it, for people to keep other people to do their work for them? How did anybody ever think it was right?\"\n\nAnd I said the same thing I said then, which was, \"People don't always do what's right, son, but you and me get the privilege of making our own choices, and we have to make good choices. That's what makes a person good, is the choices you make.\"\n\nRight then is when we went off the script. Could be that something was wrong with his making, or could be that I wasn't leading him right, but right at that moment, he took a wrong step and fell. He didn't fall off the wall altogether, but he caught his shoe on a stone that was sticking up at a bad angle, and when he fell, he caught his arm on another stone, and it cut deep into his skin, and when he tried to stand up, he pulled away and didn't seem aware that his skin was caught on that rock. I guess they don't build those things in such a way that they feel pain the same way you and me do, because as he stood up, the skin of his arm began to pull away from what was underneath, which wasn't bone or sinew, but cold lightweight metal, what I now know they call the endoskeleton, and what began to drain from him warm wasn't his own blood, but somebody else's, and the reason it was in there wasn't to keep him alive, but just to keep his skin warm and pink, just to make him look and feel like someone alive.\n\n\"Danny,\" I said. He must have heard the alarm in my voice, and I could tell it scared him. He looked down and saw his metal arm, the skin hanging off it, and the blood pouring out in a way that wasn't natural, and then he gave me a look that sank my soul, and I realized what I should have realized before I signed what I signed, which was that I had got them to make a boy out of something that wasn't a boy. All that was in his head was all that was in Danny's head a long time ago, back when Danny was himself someone different than who he became later, and it wasn't his fault. He didn't know what he was, and the sight of it was more than he could handle.\n\nHis lip began, then, to tremble, in the way Danny's did when he needed comforting, and I lifted him down off that stone wall and took him in my arms and held him and comforted him, and then, in the car, I stretched the skin back to where it had been, and took Penny's old emergency button sewing kit out of the glove compartment and took needle and thread to it and got him to where none of the metal was showing. I didn't take him to Penny's like I had planned.\n\nHe was real quiet all the way home. He just stared straight ahead and didn't look at his arm and didn't look at me. Near Winchester I asked him if he wanted to hear some music, and he said all right, but we couldn't find anything good on the radio. \"How about the football game?\" I said, and he said all right again, and we found the Tennessee Titans and the Dallas Cowboys, and I made a show of cheering for the Titans the way we always had, but when he said, \"How come all their names are different?\" I didn't have a good answer, and after that I asked if he wouldn't mind just a little quiet, and he said he wouldn't mind, and I leaned back his seat and said, \"Why don't you just close your eyes and rest awhile? It's been a long day and I bet you're tired.\"\n\nHe did. He closed his eyes then, and after some time had passed and I thought he was asleep, I stroked his hair with my free hand and made some kind of mothering sounds.\n\nIt was dark when we got to the house. I parked the car by the bedroom window, then went around to his side and picked him up like I was going to carry him sleeping to bed. I held him there in the dark for a little while and thought about that, carrying him up to bed, laying him there, laying his head on the pillow, pulling the covers up around his shoulders, tucking him in. It would have been the easiest thing to do, and it was the thing I wanted to do, but then I got to thinking about Penny, and sooner or later, I knew, she would have to be brought in on this, and even though I thought I had done it for her, I could see now that I had really done it for me, like maybe if I showed up with this little Danny she would come back home and the three of us could have another go of it.\n\nBut already this little Danny was wearing out. I could feel it in his skin. He wasn't warm like he was when I had picked him up, I guess because the blood had run out of him on the stone wall. He was breathing, but he was cold, and a little too heavy compared to what I remembered. There wasn't any future for him, either. I got to thinking about how if I put him in school, everyone would get bigger than him fast, and it would get worse every year, the distance between who he was and who his friends were becoming.\n\nHe was stirring a little, so I put his head on my shoulder, the way I used to do, and patted his back until his breathing told me he was asleep again. Then I went around to the front of the house and reached up to the porch and took down my axe from the wood pile and went off into the woods, down the path I had mowed with my riding mower a few weeks back, and which was already starting to come up enough that I had to watch my step.\n\nI kept walking, him on my shoulder, axe in my free hand, until I reached the clearing. Then, careful not to wake him, I unbuttoned my jacket and got it out from under him and took it off and laid it on the ground. Then I laid him down on it and made sure he was still sleeping. Then I lifted up the axe and aimed it for the joint where his head met his neck and brought it down. In the split second right before blade struck skin, I saw his eyes open, and they were wide, and what I saw in them was not fear but instead some kind of wonder, and then, fast as it had come, it was gone, and all I could tell myself, over and over, was It's not Danny. It's not Danny.\nKyle Minor\n\nis the author of two collections of short fiction, In the Devils Territory (2008) and Praying Drunk.\n\nACT OF CONTRITION\n\nCRAIG CLEVENGER\n\nShe flared in the dark like some wild animal's lone eye in my headlights. White sweatshirt and ragged sunbleached hair, a ghost with her thumb to the road. I slowed to the right and stopped just ahead of her. My tires straddled the broken black edge where the dirt shoulder dropped below the asphalt, the car sloping passengerwise like a sinking boat. Its lopsided timing shuddered through the wheel and into my arms. I nursed the gas, nudged the idle back to its center and kept the engine alive. My brake lights bathed the hitcher in blood then she turned white again, stopped at my passenger side and looked back down the road. Maybe somebody else would stop. But she bent to the window and her eyes said she was long past working those odds or any other. Her sunburn ran deep, patches of skin flaking from her face. Lower lip split open and dried to a hardened hairline of blood.\n\nHow far you going? she asked.\n\nI named some place. I lied.\n\nOkay. She climbed in and pulled at the door but it pulled back.\n\nTry again. Hinge is real stubborn.\n\nShe did. On her third pull I saw headlights in my mirror, a diesel rig snailing around the one-lane curve to my back. Her door was still open when I punched the gas. With no shoulder grade to the road I reckoned maybe six-inches of crumbling curb beneath my chassis. I torqued left onto the highway and scraped my oil pan across a yard of jagged blacktop. A sound I heard through my teeth.\n\nX\n\nCrystal was fifteen and she was my cousin. She wore jean shorts frayed at the top of her thighs, snug like she'd cut off the legs last summer before she started looking the way she did. The way she cocked her hip and bent to scratch her bare foot or chewed a lock of hair tickling her face, oblivious to herself. She caught me looking at her once and I froze, squeezed out a smile with my mouth full of cold meatloaf. She gave no read at all, just picked up the remote and turned her back to me. She caught me a few times after that but never got creeped or let on that she did. But her spell broke anytime she opened her mouth. She was just a kid again, wanting help with a bicycle flat or a ride to the mall.\n\nI pray every day. Crews on the job site got quiet when I came around. Work was drying up and the scarce jobs were going to friends of foremen and subcontractors first. I had to give up my place. I prayed for help. My aunt and uncle had a room and there was lots of development out where they lived. They let me slide on rent, long as I built a new railing for their deck and kept an eye on Crystal from time to time. I prayed more.\n\nThe grid went down during a heat wave so the job cut us loose early. I collapsed on the couch with a cold beer and some solitude. It was August, there was no school. My aunt and uncle were gone for the weekend. I heard the back door open and close and there stood Crystal, bronzed from her afternoons in the backyard and smelling like coconut, wearing a two-piece I could ball into my fist. She looked taller in the doorway. Legs and gold hair meeting at her hips where a more modest suit had cast a shadow of pale winter skin. She drifted toward me, strips of wet light shining from her skin and I saw her every movement in quarter time.\n\nGot any more of those? She didn't sound like a kid this time.\n\nNo. These are my last six. Sorry.\n\nShe didn't whine or plead like she did when I turned down certain movie rentals or enforced her bedtime.\n\nI'll help myself, she said, and stuck her tongue out. She left the room, catwalk-style and I followed the curve of her waist, the shoelace knots at her hips and the stretch of bright yellow fabric in between sliding into itself with each step. A minute passed, slow and hot. I heard the hiss of a bottle cap crimping open.\n\nI shot to the kitchen and she tucked the bottle behind her and ran so I chased her and grabbed her before she could pour it on me and had to pin her and she wouldn't stop laughing and the beer foamed all over both of us.\n\nI knocked that clip out of my head.\n\nI grabbed her wrist and squeezed until the bottle hit the kitchen floor, beer foaming around the shards of brown glass. I can't remember what I said but I may have held her wrist too hard. Crystal locked herself in her room. She didn't come out and I didn't knock. At 4:30 the next morning I slipped a hundred bucks under her door with a note that said her parents would be home after the weekend. Then I left for good.\n\nX\n\nThe hitcher looked older up close, hard years beneath the sun damage.\n\nGot no radio? She spoke slowly, words from a morphine drip.\n\nRadio works fine, was all I said.\n\nShe didn't touch the radio. No one ever does. I'm okay with just the humming road but most people need noise, the talk shows and morning deejays. They need the ad jingles, something they can hum silently to help forget their forty hours every week. She sat frozen with her hands folded in her lap, gearing up to do whatever the ride or a few bucks called for, her body flying solo while she looked away from somewhere inside her head. I didn't want anything. The silence was enough for me, like a sleeping guard dog between us.\n\nX\n\nCrystal and her backyard tanning routine were seven-hundred miles away. I filled my tank, then blinked and found myself staring into the open back hatch of my car. A stray socket wrench, hot to the touch. A ballpoint pen with no cap, a few pennies and bits of dog kibble though I've never owned a dog. I loaded up the provisions I couldn't recall buying moments earlier. Two gallons of drinking water, a dozen granola bars and a canvas knapsack. I had a thin recollection of the air conditioner and the bored liquor store clerk, but they could have been from another stop on a different day. Whatever was clipping the time from my waking activity was getting greedy. I used to zone out for a few seconds, maybe a minute or two. Then the stretches of time got longer and longer. I'd be parked at a job site with my keys in my lap and the half-hour commute wiped clean from my morning. Lately I'd practically been leaving my body.\n\nHey. Can you spare any change?\n\nStraight black hair and pale skin. She was a year older than Crystal, judging by her curves, and dressed for the heat. Gossamer skirt rippling high on her legs and a babydoll top with pink script across her breasts that I couldn't read without staring so I didn't. She was too clean to be homeless and too young to be panhandling.\n\nDo you have fifty cents?\n\nSorry, I said. Can't help you.\n\nWhat's your name?\n\nThe thin silver chain around her waist looked like a wire of sunlight. The cold free-fall rush blew through me and I reckoned every wrong twist of backstory before my keys hit the ground. There was a stepfather or stepbrother in the scene. She didn't know where to get help but she was learning the angles, and I could be one of them. She came through the heat, twisting a rubber band between her fingers. Her flip-flops slapped the soles of her feet but the way her hips moved made everything else quiet.\n\nEzekiel, I said.\n\nFor real?\n\nYeah.\n\nSounds like a Bible name.\n\nIt is.\n\nBut you don't have any money?\n\nNone to spare. I didn't look below her neck. And I didn't look around. If I wasn't doing anything wrong then it didn't matter who saw me.\n\nSomeone peeled out of the gas station and set my pulse loose like a racing dog. A matte-black Nova with a bondo patch on the driver's door screamed through the intersection. I picked up my keys and when I stood up she'd found another mark, a middle-aged business man with a map spread across his steering wheel. Her hazy skirt rode on the current of heat, flaring up to her hips in slow motion. Pale crescents of skin flexed at the tops of her thighs. The skirt settled around her again, like something cast off and drifting to the bottom of a swimming pool.\n\nX\n\nThe hitcher's fingers danced nervously on her lap and tickled the edge of my vision. They went still if I looked at them straight on. Maybe she was playing with me. Maybe she was thinking this ride was her last, that I had a rag for her mouth and a shovel in my trunk. The highway was empty one second and the next I was bearing down on a five-hundred pound elk standing on the dotted yellow divide. I hit the brakes and we swerved. The elk bolted. Big enough to take out my front end and kill us both but it darted like a squirrel, so quick I wasn't sure I'd really seen it.\n\nThe fuck was that? The hitcher had braced herself against the dashboard, elbows locked and eyes wide but she wasn't asking about the elk. The accusation was silent but clear. Maybe I hadn't seen anything.\n\nKeep your hands still, I said. It's distracting. I was parked right where the phantom elk had been, crossways in the dead middle of the highway, a broadside collision set to go.\n\nYou fucking crazy?\n\nYou got a problem then walk, I said, then hit the ignition.\n\nI've been good my whole life, walking that barren firebreak between feeling the rush of caving to temptation but still having the strength to resist. A girl came to my hotel room once, after I called an ad in the paper. Somewhere in west Texas. She took off her clothes and asked me what I wanted. I said I didn't know. Then she opened my door and a guy was waiting there, big guy with a tattoo on his shaved head and lots of earrings. He held out a badge but not for very long. Said he could arrest me or fine me on the spot. I asked him how much the fine was and the girl laughed. Another hitcher had offered to thank me for the ride. I stopped at a liquor store and gave her money for condoms and beer and when she got out I drove away. It was always the same. I never did anything wrong but I never stopped thinking about those things I never did.\n\nI'd lied to that girl in the parking lot. My name wasn't Ezekiel, not yet. That was up to God.\n\nWhen the girl and the big guy left, she'd stuck her business card in my Bible. The big guy laughed when she did that. The glossy pink card had a picture of her chest and a phone number. It was marking the Book of Ezekiel.\n\nI knew a sign when I saw it.\n\nIt's easier to hear God in the desert. Fewer obstructions, so God's got a halfway decent view, plus a man's got fewer things clouding his own sight. Jesus, John the Baptist, all of them, the desert was where they heard God loudest and clearest, where they had their showdown with the Devil. I'd been driving around the desert for weeks since I'd left Crystal's house. Driving and praying, waiting for God to show me where to stop.\n\nX\n\nWe hit the truck lot after midnight. A row of fueling bays the size of a city block with a cashier's booth in the middle, a coffee shop, a cheap motel on either side and a couple dozen eighteen-wheelers. Two hours since I'd picked her up and I don't think she blinked the entire trip, at least not since the elk that I may or may not have imagined, that may or may not have nearly killed us.\n\nThis is good, she said. Right here.\n\nThe cashier's booth was lit up like daylight. I could almost read the newspaper headlines from the far edge of the lot.\n\nJust stop right here, she said.\n\nLet me get you closer. No sense in you walking through a parking lot this size in the dark. You want the coffee shop or just that little convenience store?\n\nLet me out of this goddamned car.\n\nI stopped. Probably a couple hundred yards out on a stretch of empty asphalt. She'd been so docile until now and I was nervous. I hadn't done anything wrong. Her bag strap had caught under the seat. She was fighting with it and cursing under her breath, louder and louder. She flung the door open and jumped out. Then she screamed. She hugged herself and closed her eyes and screamed as loud as she could. She stomped her feet and beat her fists against her head then pointed at my car and screamed for help.\n\nI couldn't lift my hands or move and I felt hot all over.\n\nShe screamed that I'd tried to kill her and then she ran toward the coffee shop.\n\nThe dome light came on in a nearby semi. I reached over and closed the door and drove away as fast as I could, found the nearest onramp and doubled back toward where I'd just driven from. It didn't matter which way I went as long as I kept driving. I prayed for forgiveness, told God I was sorry, that I was ready and just needed a sign. I passed the truck lot on my left, kept to the speed limit and watched for square headlights in my mirror. After a while I was back where I'd first picked her up. At the next juncture I took the unfamiliar road.\n\nShe was the last one. No more inhaling the vapor in Hell's vestibule. I promised God, no more.\n\nI loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. Ford, Peckinpah, Leone. But I had a weakness for the second-rate gunfighter films with cowboys and Indians and cattle barons and railroads. They hotwired the classics then stripped them down in some B-movie chop shop and recycled the good parts as their own. Like when the hero walked into a saloon for the first time and everything stopped. The music went quiet, folks would stare for a minute and then go back to their whiskey or cards. But everyone had to look at the good guy.\n\nMy Sunday school teacher had taught us about life in the Holy Land. She wanted to make the Bible real for us. She taught us about the desert, how the heat wave we once had was nothing compared to life in the Middle East. We learned how they had to preserve food and how risky it was to travel. It took the Israelites forty years to make it to the Holy Land. They only survived because of miracles. John the Baptist ate insects. I'd been driving through the American desert for weeks, where all of those frontier towns from the cowboy movies used to be. The pile of maps and guidebooks in my glovebox agreed on the highways and major roads and most of the big dots but little else. The small towns and the little roads, especially the dirt ones, never matched up. They couldn't agree on exactly where the desert began, or the exact annual rainfall or average temperature. We know as much about the desert now as those people in the ghost towns did. It's hard to make a deep map of a territory that can kill you in a matter of hours.\n\nSomeone showed up in one of those Old West towns by himself, no railroad or wagon train, of course people were going to stare. Because he was supposed to be dead. That's how you knew who the good guy was.\n\nI passed three more elk that night. No close calls but their electric Roswell eyes hovering in the dark startled me every time. It was four in the morning when I found a rest stop with an RV slumbering in the lot and four other cars parked as far apart as they could manage. A stretch of grass with picnic benches, fire pits and a brick hut split into restrooms, its curbside face a mottled black and white mural like a blown-up newspaper photograph. The collage of leaflets came into focus once I was up close.\n\nMissing\n\nHave You Seen Me?\n\nMissing\n\nMissing Since\u2014\n\nLast Seen On\u2014\n\nMissing\n\nMissing\n\nMissing\n\nYoung teenagers and children. Mostly Caucasian, mostly female, last seen wearing anything and everything from the Junior Miss Department.\n\nThe bathroom smelled like an outhouse and had almost as little light. The floor was wet. I held my breath long enough to take a leak then went back to my car. I passed a station wagon with expired tags and a coat hanger twisted around the loose muffler. One if its back windows covered with duct tape and a garbage bag. I locked my doors, let my seat back as far as it could go and draped a T-shirt over my eyes. Before long there came a tentative knock, the way someone knocks to see if you're awake without disturbing you if you aren't. Definitely not a cop. I sat up and saw the face fogging up my window, hands cupped around his eyes to see through the dark. If he'd needed money, gas or a jump start he wouldn't have been smiling the way he was. I gave up on sleeping, started my car and he made the looping pantomime signal for me to roll down my window. I couldn't exactly race my engine, but he got the message that I was driving off and the placement of his foot didn't worry me.\n\nThe high desert had too many elk and too much plant life. Too many places to hide or disappear. And it was full of people hiding or disappearing. If you walked out of nowhere into a room full of strangers nobody would give you a second look. The high desert was no place for a prophet.\n\nBy 10:00 that morning it was ninety-five degrees. Nothing on either side of the road but bleached sand and brittle shrubs as far as I could see. The mountains ahead of me hadn't changed size since sunrise. An hour later my temperature gauge was reaching for the red and the bottle of water in my passenger seat was hot to the touch. I turned on the heat and rolled down my windows and the needle eased back. I drove on, eyeing the mountains and the needle but neither one moved. At the stroke of noon my dashboard blacked out and smoke billowed from my hood. I coasted to the shoulder and once the hissing and smoking stopped, I stepped out and just stood there in the desert. Heat like nothing I'd learned about in Sunday school, silence like I'd never felt in church. A short distance off the road and I'd be standing where no human being had ever walked. It was like being on Mars. A place where a man finds redemption beneath the unyielding sun that burns away his sins and what is left of that man becomes a prophet.\n\nI opened the map and found my place, a scratch of north-south highway hardly worth printing. The nearest town of Jackdaw Flats lay forty miles due west on a faint pencil mark of road roughly parallel to mine, with neither a direct route nor an inch of shade in between. I emptied the hot bottle of water over my head then cloaked myself in a beach towel. John the Baptist didn't wear sunblock. I packed the granola bars and my Bible into the canvas knapsack, slung it over my shoulder then took up a gallon water jug in each hand. There hadn't been anyone else on the road all morning. I crossed the highway without looking, stopped at the edge of the road and prayed. The triple-digit temperatures would drop below freezing after dark. There were definitely diamondbacks, possibly coyotes and the narrow chance of a flash flood. I could be in Jackdaw Flats by morning.\n\nWhen I come in from the desert, everyone will stare at me. And my name will be Ezekiel. \nCraig Clevenger\n\nis the author of The Contortionist's Handbook and Dermaphoria. He divides his time between San Francisco and the Mojave Desert.\n\nTHE FAMILIARS\n\nMICAELA MORRISSETTE\n\nThe boy and his mother wake late in the swampy summer mornings and sit on the edge of the porch drinking their first glass of water and spooning out their wedges of melon and picking the dead heads off poppies with their toes. They brush their teeth side by side at the kitchen sink and sometimes the mother lathers the boy's cheeks with almond soap and pretends to shave him with a butter knife, chattering in an arch accent that aspires to cockney. They fill the wheelbarrow with the boy's stuffed animals and matchbox cars and his wand for blowing bubbles and his kazoo and tambourine and truck down to the pond where the boy lies in the hammock, holding his toys in the air and swooping them up and down and crooning to them, and the mother reads paperbacks in the deep low wicker rocker, pushing the hammock gently back and forth with her foot.\n\nFor lunch there is French bread spread with soft cheese and served with purple pickled eggs and Jordan almonds. They picnic under the sycamore on one of the boy's old bed sheets, patterned with smiling clouds and pastel rainbows, too childish for him now, and suck the candy shells from the nuts, and see who can flick an ant the farthest. The sheet smells as the boy used to, hot heavy cream, slightly soured, and powdered sugar, and cough syrup, black cherry.\n\nThey put on their cleanest clothes and drift through the heat down the dirt road to town, the mother pale beneath a black umbrella and the boy's head swimming in a man-sized baseball cap. They check at the post office for their bills and catalogues and postcards of the town which the mother has sent to the boy on the sly, and they buy a wheel of licorice or a birch beer or a small wooden crate of sour clementines. They also buy a backpack, or some tennis shoes, or a lunch box, for the boy's first day of school, which is nearly upon them. With two pennies they wish in the fountain, and they walk home, carefully matching their steps to the footprints they made on the first leg of their journey.\n\nThey plant mason jars in the garden to steep their sun tea, and they blow trumpeting squeals on blades of grass. They play a game that is both tic-tac-toe and hopscotch with chalk and stones on the cement walkway, and the mother turns the hose on the boy and washes off the chalk and dust and sweat while he shrills and capers. For dinner there are drumsticks, sticky and burnt, off the old gas grill, or hotdogs charred on sticks at the fire pit. Then cold red wine with seltzer water for the mother, and warm milk with vanilla and sugar for the boy, in the swooning, exhausted armchairs of the living room, with the white gauze curtains swelling at every breath of breeze.\n\nThe mother reads to the boy in bed, adventure stories about islands or magic pools or noble lovers or gallant orphans, or the boy tells ghost stories to the mother, in which crushed faces press against the glass of windows, or trees grown over graves sigh and weep and rustle their leaves. The mother sleeps on one side of an enormous mattress, under an avalanche of pillows, and in another room the boy sleeps in a red wooden bed and his legs and arms tumble over the sides.\n\nX\n\nIt's dawn and the boy has woken early when the friend appears. It unfurls from under the bed. Its features have not quite coalesced. Its skin rises up like a blush. The mouth, full of rapid shadows, comes painfully. As the boy watches, its teeth emerge and its eyes take on their hues. It's both gawky and graceful and the boy is touched by the tentativeness of its existence. Its limbs fold out with small tremblings. The boy moves over in the bed and the friend huddles gratefully into the warm depression he leaves. The boy knows not to touch the friend as it is born. Shyly, the boy indicates that the friend is welcome.\n\nThe friend begins right away to tell secrets. Some of them are astounding, and the boy giggles in nervous exhilaration. Some of them the boy already knew without knowing it. The wonderful thing is that the boy has secrets too, and the friend is fascinated, and they whisper under the covers until the mother pokes her head around the door, stirring honey into the first glass of their new batch of sun tea for the boy's good morning. The friend is under the bed so quickly that the boy has no time to feel alarm. But when the mother asks, was he talking to himself, the boy responds without hesitation that he was talking to his invisible friend. His mother smiles and asks what's his friend's name, and since the boy doesn't know, he says it's a secret.\n\nHis mother smiles and looks proud in a forlorn sort of way and brushes back his hair with her fingers and he feels the happy little pokes and tickles of his friend through the mattress, approving him, and all three are happy, and he drinks his sun tea with the honey not quite dissolved, coating his tongue and staying sweet there for some minutes. The damp smell that attends the friend, a stain of its birth, is clogging the air of the room, but the mother says nothing and the boy thinks that perhaps the friend is invisible after all.\n\nX\n\nThat day it rains and the boy and his friend play in the attic. There is a trunk full of clothes and dust and the boy's friend dresses up as the princess and the boy as the minstrel without any money, or the boy dresses up as a monster of the air and the friend as a monster of the deep, or the boy dresses up as a man of the future and the friend holds over his face a helmet that carries the boy through time and space. The rain assaults the roof of the attic. They have stores of crackers and dried fruit and they plant flashlights all over the floor, the beams gaping up at the rafters. There is a box of paper houses that unfold: castles, a Hindu temple, a Victorian country-home. They set these up and populate the rooms with colored plastic figurines from sets of jungle beasts, dinosaurs, and the Wild West.\n\nThe Christmas tree is stored in the attic, still tangled in its lights. The boy and his friend creep in under the lowest fronds, curling themselves around the base, and turn the beams of their flashlights out through the strings of dead bulbs to make them glow.\n\nBetween the panes of the windows are cemeteries of moth wings and wasp heads and fly legs. The attic swells into the rain.\n\nThey find a punchbowl roped in cobwebs and fill it with water and stare in to see the silk awake. They turn off all the flashlights and haunt each other in the dark with sobs and screeches. They roast marshmallows with a butane lighter. The boy recites the alphabet backwards. The friend dances.\n\nX\n\nBy nightfall the sky has cleared and the mother takes the boy out onto the slanting roof of the house and they lie on their backs on the shingles and she shows him the constellations. The dippers, the hunter, the seven sisters, the two bears. The mother tells the boy how the stars are immense balls of flame millions of miles away, and how many of them may already have been dead for hundreds of thousands of years.\n\nHidden behind the stack of the chimney, the friend laughs in derision and reaches out its hand and rubs the pattern off the sky. Then it draws new figures: the claw, the widow, the thief, the cocoon. The planet shudders and rocks and the boy loses his grip and skids down the plane of the roof until the mother catches his hand and pulls him to safety. She bundles him into her arms and totes him down the attic stair, soothing and scolding and breathless, while he cranes his neck to peer behind him at the lights scattering across the dark like startled starlings.\n\nX\n\nThe boy and his friend play in the garden, under the sun. They play in the garden, which is on the edge of the wood, and the trees shade it, many games. They play pick-up sticks, checkers, hide-and-go-seek, and things, and the sun enacts changes in their skin and hair and eyes. They play in the garden, and smile. They smile and smile and smile and smile and smile.\n\nX\n\nThe boy's mother puts an extra cookie on the plate for the friend, but the boy says the friend doesn't eat. She brings an extra pillow for the bed, but the boy says the friend doesn't sleep. What does it do all night then, she asks the boy, doesn't it get bored? Plays in my dreams, the boy tells her.\n\nX\n\nThe boy and his friend make shadow puppets in the afternoon. The boy curtains the windows and holds his hands in front of the lamp and does a bird, a rabbit, a hunchback, a spider. The friend opens the curtains and crouches on the windowsill, a black silhouette against the sun. The sun pulses and shivers in the sky and the outline of the friend flickers and wavers at the edges. Its body makes an ocean wave, a spouting volcano, a hurricane, a shape-changing cloud: giraffe, dragon, whale. The boy crows and claps his hands. The friend grows huge in the window and blots out the light, making the night sky. It spreads its limbs so no sliver of sunlight peeks through and it makes the bottomless well.\n\nX\n\nThe boy's mother sits on the edge of the tub and the steam clings to her; she is composed of droplets. At bath time the friend disappears, the boy says; it hates water. The mother runs the hot when the boy complains that the bath is cooling. She shampoos the boy's golden hair with the tips of her fingers. She rubs the puffs and cracks of deep pruning on his hands. When he announces that the bath is over, she starts a splashing war to make him forget.\n\nThe boy has a duck for the bath, and to play with the duck, an inflatable bear, and to amuse the bear, little pills that pop open into sponges, and to collect the sponges, a net with butterfly shapes sewn into the webbing, and to transport the net, a battleship that sprays water through its nose, and to fight the battleship, a tin rocket that rusts in the water, and the mother cuts her hand on the crumbling metal and the blood makes a blossom in the bath. The boy leaps up and shouts out that his friend is calling and he runs shivering and half drowned out of the bathroom.\n\nThe mother stays behind and bandages her hand into an enormous white paw. When she tucks the boy in that night, she brandishes the paw and growls and tickles his stomach. But he says the friend can smell the rusty blood and he insists that she leave, and she does and wonders if the boy is weary of her or protecting her from his imaginary friend, and she sits for an hour in the window seat in her bedroom, watching trees and clouds move across the reflection of her face in the pane.\n\nX\n\nThe boy and his friend camp out in the tree house. They make believe there's a siege and they're starving to death. They make believe there's a war and they're hidden in a priest's hole. They make believe it's a nuclear winter and they're trapped in a fallout shelter. They make believe they're princes locked in a dungeon by the king's wicked councilor. They make believe they're hermits fasting in a mountain cave. They make believe they're stowaways in the hold of a galleon. They make believe they're magicians tied up in a chest. They make believe they're scientists in a sunken bathysphere. They make believe they've been swallowed by a giant and explore the vast cavern of his stomach. They make believe they're in a spaceship warping through black holes. They make believe they're shrunken to the size of tiny bugs, stuck in a raindrop falling to earth. Sometimes they climb through the trapdoor out into the treetop and sit astride the sturdy limbs and pretend they're galloping on white stallions in a thundering herd of wild black horses.\n\nSometimes they close their eyes and pretend to be blind and they feel each other's faces and the boy is careful not to hurt the friend. Sometimes the friend grooms the boy, picking the bark and sap from his hair and licking the pollen dust from his face. Sometimes the boy curls up in the lap of the friend and the friend asks him questions. What animal would you like to be? What food would you eat if you could only eat one? How would you choose to die? What is your greatest fear? What superpower would be the best? If you could save the world by sacrificing one life, would you do it? What was your first word? What is your earliest memory?\n\nX\n\nThe mother calls the boy into her bedroom and shows him the photographs she has spilled out over the white froth of tumbled linens. The scent of the soap washed into the sheets has always reminded the boy of snow, but tonight it stings his cringing nose, astringent. She shows the boy pictures in dull umbers and maroons, long-ago film, of the boy's parents before he was born. This is his mother, distracted in an itchy sweater, in a cabin on her honeymoon, lamplight the color of cooking oil shining and blurring on her face. Her hair is shorter and it looks rough and blunt and prickly. Her smile is unfamiliar. Here is his father, forehead buried in a dark navy watchman's cap, chin and nose smothered in a charcoal turtleneck, marking off a pale strip of skin out of which black eyes gape, the inverse of the bandit's eye mask.\n\nNow pictures of the boy as a baby, with a fat lolling neck and a glazed expression, bulbous and gaping in a matted blue towel, or seemingly deserted in a flat field on a gray day. The photos get glossier and brighter as they go on. Last year on the ferry, noses and eyelids smashed flat by the wind. This past winter, roasting potatoes in foil in the fireplace here, the lighting off, their hands red and their faces smeared across the exposure. The boy and the mother on the boy's birthday at the zoo. A leather- chested gorilla with blood in its eyes stands behind them as they pose, the spit spray of its roar fouling the glass wall of the enclosure. The boy squirms on the bed, bored and truculent.\n\nIn the night the boy and the friend sneak back into the mother's bedroom and steal the box of photographs. They draw the friend into the pictures: sometimes a black zigzag of shadow at the corner of the frame behind the mother, sometimes a silvery trail the friend makes with the point of a needle, a shape hovering between the boy and the lens. With crayons, the boy draws the friend's scales and the stripes of its fur onto the face of his father, and the friend shades its own eyes within the eyes of the gorilla.\n\nWhen the mother finds the pictures in the morning she cries and screams at the boy, and he takes off, kicking the ground, the corners of his mouth wrenching down despite himself, and runs to the wood, and begs the friend to take him inside, behind the tree line, and the friend does, and comforts him.\n\nX\n\nThe boy and the mother make up and on Sunday they bake cookies for breakfast. They have a collection of cookie cutters and they bake pigs and crescent moons and hearts and maple leaves, royal crowns and saxophones and lighthouses and bumblebees. They sprinkle jimmies on the tops, or push in currants with their thumbs. Shivery with sugar, they bustle into town and the mother, rapid and excitable, buys suspenders and striped shoelaces for the boy's first day of school, and a set of stencils, and stickers that smell of chocolate, bubble gum, peanut butter, and green apple. On the way home she asks casually how the friend will keep busy when the boy is at school all day. It will come with me, says the boy, startled, and the mother, kind and vague, shakes her head with her eyes set on the distance.\n\nWhen they reach the house, the boy tears through the rooms, but the friend is nowhere to be found. At last the boy discovers it in the basement, huddled beneath the stairs, tearing apart a daddy longlegs. I won't go! promises the boy, and any other supplication he can think of. By and by, he's able to coax the friend upstairs, where it scuttles into the boy's bedroom and under his bed. It stays there through the evening and all night, and in the morning the mother sees the boy's face is puffed and flushed as if he's been stung, and his eyes have a queer translucence.\n\nX\n\nThe mother invites the boy and the friend to dance. She pushes the armchairs and ottomans to the outskirts of the living room and sweeps the floor, making an odd pile of broken dried leaves, frayed and twisted threads of gold and purple, small slivers of glass, dust clumps woven in spheres like tumbleweeds, and wasps, curled in on themselves like fetuses, their antennae shattered.\n\nThe mother wears an ivory slip and black opera gloves and, on a long chain, a cameo that chills her through the thin silk of her slip. The boy comes down in his small black suit, which still fits him perfectly. He hasn't grown. The mother rummages in the spare room for a man's dove-gray fedora, which engulfs the boy's ears and slips backward, the brim chafing his neck. Baby's breath is wedged in the band.\n\nThe boy informs the mother solemnly that the friend has sent its regrets. The mother, stymied, asks if he and she might go together to press the invitation, but the boy fuddles the needle onto the record and extends his hand without answering. The boy and the mother waltz awkwardly. Where did you learn to dance? says the mother, I thought I would have to teach you. My friend taught me, says the boy, are you jealous? The mother stares at him. No, she says, that's not it. The needle staggers into a gouge in the record. Oh, dear, the mother says, what a shame. My friend loves this song, says the boy. He puts his arms up trustingly, as if to be carried, high above his head, and his fingers curl around where the shoulders of the friend might be. They sweep about the room, the friend a confident lead, the boy swooning gracefully in its embrace. The mother forms an encouraging smile. I'll get some refreshments, she says, champagne with ginger ale, and lemon ices. Switch off the lights when you go, says the boy, still revolving. The mother hesitates, flicks the switch, and mounts the stairs. Sometime in the night the music skids to a halt.\n\nX\n\nShe knows it's beautiful. She knows what kind of skin it has\u2014blue-veined, with a thick translucence like shellfish, bruising easily in a kind of panic. She knows because it's obvious.\n\nShe knows, because her son has told her, in a voice with a reverential, primal hush, like the silence of dim morning air at ease on still water, that his friend has a wonderful facility of climbing in the trees and running in the tallest, most whipping, stinging grass. She knows that a heartbeat will slow to the rhythm of its voice. She knows its eyes are colors from another spectrum. She knows the fine golden down that covers its limbs; she just knows.\n\nShe knows the ravishable tenderness of its throat. She knows the coils of its ears can provoke a dangerous hypnosis if regarded too long. She knows the razor sharpness of its elbows and the woozy perfume of its breath.\n\nShe knows that the rays of the sun are addicted to its body and that it drinks in the moonlight with upturned mouth. She's never seen it, but she knows. She doesn't know the secrets it shares, the memories it hides, the fears it cherishes, or why it is vying for her son.\n\nX\n\nPast the tree line, just within the wood, is the skeleton of a burned-down barn, and brambles of blackberries and bushes of lady's slippers have gentled the ruins. Past the barn, a deer trail leads through a claustrophobia of clawing saplings and lashing briars, until the wood opens, and the floor is a miniature forest of tiny trees of climacium moss. Long gray vines sway from the canopy; the branches over which they're looped are lost in leaves and in the clouds of spores and insects that laze overhead. The boy grabs a vine and swings. He whoops once, then swoops silently between the trunks on the endless arc of his pendulum. The friend tugs the vine to a halt and brushes the boy's face in apology. Hurry, it says.\n\nThey trudge out of the forest of moss and down a short bank graceful with ferns and irises and ending in a stream that cuts through the wood. Water fleas flash in the current and the boy sees the velvety puffs of silt where crawfish have shot back under rocks with fear of him. Before the water, the friend pants in terror, so the boy tucks it in his pocket and hops carefully across the rocks to the opposite bank. The leaves of the wood rustle and sunshine shakes down in a brief warm muddy rain. Beyond the stream is the dank overhang of the cliff, under which round stones mark out a ring in the mud. There are some curls of burned metal, mildewed spent shells from a shotgun, and bones chewed by an animal. The friend breathes deeply here, and traces its hand against the soot smoked on the rock ceiling, and a silver skin oozes down to blind its eye. Up the back of the cliff they go, grabbing at tree trunks and clawing the dirt to ascend the incline. Then suddenly they've plunged to the top and the summer has fallen away.\n\nThe ground is covered with black and brown leaves, and the wind has shaken the treetops gray. There's a gravestone, white with chips of mica, and with a carving of an arum lily garbled and shallowed by weather, and violets growing all around. All already ready, says the friend. The boy sighs. Let's run away, he says. The friend is silent. I'm hungry, says the boy. You're never hungry now, says the friend, and that's true. The boy shrugs. The friend ruminates, and chews a sprig of poison ivy. Suddenly its hot hiss snakes out and its tongue is in the boy's ear. Poisoned you! cries the friend. The boy screams his laughter and he's running through the wood yelling, I'll find the antidote, and the friend strolls after him, smiling.\n\nX\n\nThe boy and the mother sit Indian style on the boy's bed and play Cat's Cradle. The boy threads his fingers through the string to make the Cradle. The mother slips her hands into the maze. Pinching the taut cord, she whisks the boy's fingers free, and makes the Soldier's Bed. The boy snatches at the intersections, and pulls them through themselves, and the Candles shine in his hands. The mother reaches over awkwardly, and twists the string. Its bite tightens around the boy, and his skin swells and reddens. With a wrench of her wrist, she constructs the Manger between them. The boy's tiny fingers go darting among the knots. Before she knows it, he's imprisoned in Diamonds. We won! exults the mother. The boy smiles at her. His eyes are prisms for the day's light. She sees that there's something he holds in his mouth, gleaming dark and wet. A candy, a tongue, a morsel of mercury.\n\nThe mother reaches slowly for the bowl of water that stands by her son's painting set, on the night table, dips her hand in it, and with a panicked lunge, she flicks the liquid on the boy. It wrenches back on the bed with a jolt and a high-pitched moan. Her hand flies to her throat. She squeezes her eyes closed. Hey! protests the boy. What are you doing? Then he lurches for the bowl and begins to flick her back, in messy muddy splashes. The mother quavers and laughs in great gulps. The paint water soaks into the blankets, patterning her legs and hands with blurred designs, mottled markings, scaly smudges in brownish red and brownish blue and brownish green.\n\nShe lets the boy spill out the whole bowl, and although she changes the linens and blots the bed with towels to soak up the moisture, he still makes her flip the whole mattress before bedtime, so that the friend can nest there with no fear of the wet.\n\nX\n\nThe boy discovers the friend hidden away in the fortress that sprawls across the living room, layer upon layer of sheets and wool blankets and towels and clothes slung between armchairs. The friend is prone, half sunk into the floor, disappearing into the wood like a ship slowly submerging below the skin of the sea. The boy throws his arms about the friend and covers it with chafing kisses. The friend coughs faintly but its eyes flash into brightness, burning the boy where the friend's gaze falls on him. What's wrong? the boy whispers fiercely. What's happened? You haven't gone, croaks the friend, you're here. I'm here, says the boy, of course I'm here.\n\nThe friend and the boy stand up and spin themselves in circles. Even when the dizziness has passed the boy can't remember what's where in the room outside the fortress. The French doors, the fireplace, the grandfather clock have all lost their places. The friend draws three doors for the boy. Where do they lead? says the friend.\n\nThe boy thinks hard. The first door, he says, a garden full of delicious fruit that feels pain when you bite it. Your turn. The friend considers. It says, the second door: a world in the center of the earth where you're turned inside out. You walk backward, talk backward, and see backward. Third door? The boy imagines. Third door, he says, somebody else. You can live in their body, but they control all your movements and your thoughts. The friend laughs. Pick a door, it says. The boy spins and spins until he doesn't remember which door is which. He opens one and falls out into darkness.\n\nX\n\nIn the yard, in her bathing suit and sunglasses, the mother sits rigid in the blare of the sun. Little worms of perspiration nose their way out of her skin and trail across her upper lip. Beside her is a glass of ice water; she picks it up to watch the blades of grass, pale with the cold of the glass, rise shakily from their crushing. Glossy crows settle over the lawn. She lies down but finds she can't endure the crawling of the grass across the back of her neck. A dragonfly comes crashing toward her face and she gasps. A gnat executes stiff seizures in the cold of the ice water. Her fingernails ache from the dirt packed beneath them. She puffs at a dying dandelion to make a wish, and the seeds blow back and stick to her lips and tongue. She plucks at the petals of a daisy, then beheads the whole thing summarily with a jerk of her thumb. Mama had a baby and its head popped off! she sings.\n\nX\n\nThe boy is staring at the lion and he doesn't dare to move. The boy is in the big blue armchair in the living room, with the lamp in the shape of a dancing lady spilling light from the table beside him, but the lion only a few feet away is in darkness, a darkness that grows thicker and thinner, so the boy keeps losing sight of the lion, though neither of them is moving.\n\nInto the boy's dream comes the friend, and the boy feels relief like the sudden release of a waterfall that's been dammed up, and with his eyes he signals the presence of the lion to the friend. The friend stays very still, and the darkness blows like wind over its face, and the boy loses and finds the friend's features for hours. At last the boy comes to wonder, in a rush of urgency, why the friend doesn't slay the lion. Kill it! whispers the boy. Please, kill it! The friend makes a sign and the boy sees that he himself is holding a long dagger. Me? I can't, pleads the boy. Please, kill it. The friend gestures to the boy to make use of the dagger. The boy stares aghast at the lion. Its eyes are mournful like the eyes of the boy's dog that had died, but there's a low growl coming from it like the moans of the tomcats that fight in the yard at night. The boy doesn't move. The lion climbs painfully to its feet and pads over to the boy and lies down beside him. Wondering and trembling, the boy places his hand on the lion's head. The friend spins around, claps its hands, and screams, and the lion's jaws hurtle open and its roar is pounding the boy like blows, and his terror is gagging his throat.\n\nHe comes awake with the friend beside him in bed, laughing and fanning the boy's face. That was a close one! says the friend, twinkling. What were you thinking? You almost got us killed, it giggles, and cuddles. The boy falls back into sleep, with his eyes screwed tight shut against dreams, and his skin smelling sour with dried crust of sweat.\n\nX\n\nThe mother goes in the gloaming to the grave in the wood. She sits. Moths smack against her flashlight and are snarled in her hair. After some time, she climbs back down the cliff and wades into the stream, flinching at the bite of the water on her skin. She drops a ring, a small plastic figurine, and a gray fedora into the water. She makes three wishes. With her toe she buries the ring and the toy in the mud, and she watches the floating fedora tear against some bracken on the bank and be devoured by shadows. On the way home she bats in a fury against the thorns that snag her clothes and beat her legs.\n\nShe sits on the porch. The screaming of the mosquitoes, an incessant and furious anguish, is overwhelming; it seems to the mother that all the darkness of the lawn might be a black cloud of suffering insects; but nothing bites her. There's a damp smell and she feels her skin crawling, flinching away from her bones. Behind her, the screen door slaps against the jamb in the windless, ponderous night, and the mother stays very still, only slightly stiffening her back.\n\nBefore dawn she goes into the boy's room and lifts his body from the bed. She bears him cautiously out of the house to the car, and tucks him into the back seat. His clothes are already folded on the passenger seat. In the minute between the starting of the car and rolling out of their driveway, the mother's alarm grows so fierce that her vision is blurred. Once they gain the public road, it's vanished, and she's calm and deadened. She drives to the school and she parks.\n\nWhen the sun comes up and the doors groan open and the flag struggles up into the pale air above her, she's ready. By the time the buses come marching in disciplined formation up the drive, he's awake. He doesn't seem alarmed by his abduction; just sleepy and bewildered and quiescent. They get his overalls on and his Velcro firmly strapped. He observes the patterns described by the hundreds of small milling bodies with grave interest. She holds onto his hand as far as the classroom door. For some time she sits in the car and watches, but nothing comes or goes until she does.\n\nX\n\nAlone in the house, the friend trickles from room to room, carried by a draught that floats past the curtains, through the walls, and around the doors. The molecules of the air bruise the friend's body and it suffers this.\n\nIn her car, driving, the mother thinks of the friend with shaken pity, and in his classroom the boy draws a picture with a blank face and long arms like tangled ropes and a sky full of dashes like rain falling like arrows or like shooting stars.\n\nThe friend drifts into a cobweb and clings there till its weight rends the strands and it resumes its meandering course. Where it drags along the floor, dust gathers on its skin, smothering the pores. The eyes of the friend empty and its mouth consumes itself. At last, with a sigh, it disperses.\n\nX\n\nAt the end of the day, the mother watches to see that the boy files out with the others, and then in her car she shoots out ahead of the school bus to be ready to greet him when he jumps down the steps to disembark at the end of their drive. He's glowing like a new penny and he navigates the yard in a series of bounds. He has a collage for the fridge, of black horses pasted on a picture of a coral reef, and he has a caterpillar made of pipe cleaners. The mother and the boy nestle the caterpillar in the grass at the base of the sycamore to protect the tree house.\n\nThere are mimeographed lists from the teacher, of Things to Buy and Things to Do, and the boy has won a ribbon for thinking of the most words beginning with A. At lunchtime the other children had raised an outcry over the boy's purple pickled egg, and the mother promises that tomorrow he will have a white-bread sandwich cut in triangles and an apple with a leaf still on the stem. For recess they learned to jump rope while singing songs and afterward the teacher read a story that the boy had never heard, about a child who flies on the back of the wind. The boy runs about the house, visiting the attic and the basement and the bathroom, as if to see how different they've become. He told a girl in his class about the pond and the girl didn't believe that he has one and the mother says that the girl can come and see for herself, with some other of the boy's classmates, if he would like.\n\nDuring dinner the boy bounces up and down, upsetting the jar of cucumber salad. He runs out twice to make sure that he has everything in his backpack that he'll need at school the next day, and three times to check that the caterpillar is still in place, guarding the tree house. He doesn't mention the friend, and his eyes are the color that the mother remembers.\n\nX\n\nBy bedtime the boy is exhausted and the mother tucks him in and sings mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey and he accompanies her in a contented blur of humming that spins around the edge of the tune. When she turns out the light and clicks closed the door he's already quite asleep.\n\nX\n\nHe wakes not because of the volume of the breathing in the room or because of its horrible wet crackling and sucking, but because of the heat the breath gives off, a heat like an anvil, which crushes him into the bed. The windows are fogged over and the moon leaks through the droplets on the glass in weak smears of sickly light, like the ghosts of murdered stars.\n\nHe knows his waking has been noticed, for whatever it is is now holding its breath. He can hear the interminable, deliberate creak of the floorboards where something is shifting its weight under the bed with infinite caution and cunning. Then a terrible quiet. The boy quakes and his spasmodic gasp is like a slap cracking across the silent face of the darkness. The longest pause. At last the bed begins to joggle teasingly and then to rock violently so he can barely keep from sliding off. Every time his hand or foot slips over the side of the mattress he sobs with terror and feels the humid wind where something has just missed its snatch at him. The earthquake in the bed is because the thing is shaking with laughter. Whatever is under the bed is laughing.\n\nThen the laughter stops, and the smell comes up, dank and congealed, and he can feel the putrefying odor worming inside his pyjamas and bloating his skin with its stink, and the monster stretches itself. The room tilts as the monster ripples its spine, voluptuous; and the flayed leather of its body rustles and sucks as it moves, and it unfurls from under the bed, he sees its arm creep out, as if on a thousand little millipedal feet, right there before him, in the same air that's burning and lashing against his own starting eyeballs, and the nails of the thing shred whatever faint moonlight has crept through the steam in the room, and the boy knows, he knows, its head is coming out next, and he hears the cut and the thrust and the singing of its teeth as they emerge, smiling and smiling and smiling.\nMicaela Morrissette\n\nhas been anthologized in Best American Fantasy (Prime Books), The Pushcart Prize XXXIII (Pushcart Press), Best Horror of the Year (Night Shade), and The Weird (Tor and Atlantic\/Corvus). Periodical publications include Conjunctions (where she is the managing editor), Tor.com, Ninth Letter, and Weird Tales.\n\nDIAL TONE\n\nBENJAMIN PERCY\n\nA jogger spotted the body hanging from the cell tower. At first he thought it was a mannequin. That's what he told Z-21, the local NBC affiliate. The way the wind blew it, the way it flopped limply, made it appear insubstantial, maybe stuffed with straw. It couldn't be a body, he thought, not in a place like Redmond, Oregon, a nowhere town on the edge of a great wash of desert. But it was. It was the body of a man. He had a choke chain, the kind you buy at Pet Depot, wrapped around his neck and anchored to the steel ladder that rose twelve hundred feet in the air to the tip of the tower, where a red light blinked a warning.\n\nWord spread quickly. And everyone, the whole town, it seemed, crowded around, some of them with binoculars and cameras, to watch three deputies, joined by a worker from Clark Tower Service, scale the tower and then descend with the body in a sling.\n\nI was there. And from where I stood, the tower looked like a great spear thrust into the hilltop.\n\nX\n\nYesterday\u2014or maybe it was the day before\u2014I went to work, like I always go to work, at West Teleservices Corporation, where, as a marketing associate, I go through the same motions every morning. I hit the power button on my computer and listen to it hum and mumble and blip to life. I settle my weight into my ergonomic chair. I fit the headset around my skull and into my ear and take a deep breath, and, with the pale light of the monitor washing over me, I dial the first number on the screen.\n\nIn this low-ceilinged fluorescent-lit room, there are twenty-four rows of cubicles, each ten deep. I am C5. When I take a break and stand up and peer into the cubicle to my right, C6, I find a Greg or a Josh or a Linda\u2014every day a new name to remember, a new hand to shake, or so it seems, with the turnover rate so high. This is why I call everyone you.\n\n\"Hey, you,\" I say. \"How's it going?\"\n\nA short, toad-like woman in a Looney Toons sweatshirt massages the bridge of her nose and sighs, \"You know how it is.\"\n\nIn response I give her a sympathetic smile, before looking away, out over the vast hive of cubicles that surrounds us. The air is filled with so many voices, all of them coming together into one voice that reads the same script, trying to make a sale for AT&T, Visa, Northwest Airlines, Sandals Beach Resorts, among our many clients.\n\nThere are always three supervisors on duty, all of them beefy men with mustaches. Their bulging bellies remind me of feed sacks that might split open with one slit of a knife. They wear polo shirts with \"West Teleservices\" embroidered on the breast. They drink coffee from stainless-steel mugs. They never seem to sit down. Every few minutes I feel a rush of wind at the back of my neck as they hurry by, usually to heckle some associate who hasn't met the hourly quota.\n\n\"Back to work, C5,\" one of them tells me, and I roll my eyes at C6 and settle into my cubicle, where the noise all around me falls away into a vague murmur, like the distant drone of bees.\n\nX\n\nI'm having trouble remembering things. Small things, like where I put my keys, for instance. Whether or not I put on deodorant or took my daily vitamin or paid the cable bill. Big things, too. Like, getting up at 6 a.m. and driving to work on a Saturday, not realizing my mistake until I pull into the empty parking lot.\n\nSometimes I walk into a room or drive to the store and can't remember why. In this way I am like a ghost: someone who can travel through walls and find myself someplace else in the middle of a sentence or thought and not know what brought me there. The other night I woke up to discover I was walking down the driveway in my pajamas, my bare feet blue in the moonlight. I was carrying a shovel.\n\nX\n\nToday I'm calling on behalf of Capital One, pitching a mileage card. This is what I'm supposed to say: Hello, is this _______? How are you doing today, sir\/ma'am? That's wonderful! I'm calling with a fantastic offer from Capital One. Did you know that with our no-annual-fee No-Hassle Miles Visa Signature Card you can earn 25 percent more than regular mileage cards, with 1.25 miles for every $1 spent on purchases? On top of that, if you make just $3,000 in purchases a year, you'll earn 20,000 bonus miles!\n\nAnd so on.\n\nThe computer tells me what to tell them. The bold sections indicate where I ought to raise my voice for emphasis. If the customer tries to say they aren't interested, I'm supposed to keep talking, to pretend I don't hear. If I stray too far from the script and if one of the supervisors is listening in, I will feel a hand on my shoulder and hear a voice whispering, \"Stay on target. Don't lose sight of your primary objective.\"\n\nX\n\nThe lights on the tops of cell towers are meant to warn pilots to stay away. But they have become a kind of beacon. Migratory birds mistake them for the stars they use to navigate, so they circle such towers in a trance, sometimes crashing into a structure, its steadying guy wires, or even into other birds. And sometimes they keep circling until they fall to the ground, dead from exhaustion. You can find them all around our cell tower: thousands of them, dotting the hilltop, caught in the sagebrush and pine boughs like ghostly ornaments. Their bones are picked clean by ants. Their feathers are dampened by the rain and bleached by the sun and ruffled and loosened and spread like spores by the wind.\n\nIn the sky, so many more circle, screeching their frustration as they try to find their way south. Of course they discovered the body. As he hung there, swinging slightly in the wind, they roosted on his shoulders. They pecked away his eyes, and they pecked away his cheeks, so that we could see all of his teeth when the deputies brought him down. He looked like he was grinning.\n\nAt night, from where I lie in bed, I can see the light of the cell tower\u2014through the window, through the branches of a juniper tree, way off in the distance\u2014like a winking red eye that assures me of the confidentiality of some terrible secret.\n\nX\n\nMidmorning, I pop my neck and crack my knuckles and prepare to make maybe my fortieth or sixtieth call of the day. \"Pete Johnston\" is the name on the screen. I say it aloud\u2014twice\u2014the second time as a question. I feel as though I have heard the name before, but really, that means nothing when you consider the hundreds of thousands of people I have called in my three years working here. I notice that his number, 503-531-1440, is local. Normally I pay no attention to the address listing unless the voice on the other end has a thick accent I can't quite decipher\u2014New Jersey? Texas? Minnesota?\u2014but in this case I look and see that he lives just outside of Redmond, in a new housing development only a few miles away.\n\n\"Yeah?\" is how he answers the phone.\n\n\"Hello. Is this Pete Johnston?\"\n\nHe clears his throat in a growl. \"You a telemarketer?\"\n\n\"How are you doing today, sir?\"\n\n\"Bad.\"\n\n\"I'm calling on behalf of\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, cocksucker. How many times I got to tell you? Take me off your list.\"\n\n\"If you'll just hear me out, I want to tell you about a fantastic offer from\u2014\"\n\n\"You people are so fucking pathetic.\"\n\nNow I remember him. He said the same thing before, a week or so ago, when I called him. \"If you ever fucking call me again, you fucking worthless piece of shit,\" he said, \"I'll reach through the phone and rip your tongue out.\"\n\nHe goes off on a similar rant now, asking me how can I live with myself, if every time I call someone they answer with hatred?\n\nFor a moment I forget about the script and answer him. \"I don't know,\" I say.\n\n\"What the\u2014?\" he says, his voice somewhere between panicked and incensed. \"What the hell are you doing in my house? I thought I told you to\u2014\"\n\nThere is a noise\u2014the noise teeth might make biting hurriedly into melon\u2014punctuated by a series of screams. It makes me want to tear the headset away from my ear.\n\nAnd then I realize I am not alone. Someone is listening. I don't know how\u2014a certain displacement of sound as the phone rises from the floor to an ear\u2014but I can sense it.\n\n\"Hello?\" I say.\n\nThe line goes dead.\n\nX\n\nSometimes, when I go to work for yet another eight-hour shift or when I visit my parents for yet another casserole dinner, I want to be alone more than anything in the world. But once I'm alone, I feel I can't stand another second of it. Everything is mixed up.\n\nThis is why I pick up the phone sometimes and listen. There is something reassuring about a dial tone. That simple sound, a low purr, as constant and predictable as the sun's path across the sky. No matter if you are in Istanbul or London or Beijing or Redmond, you can bring your ear to the receiver and hear it.\n\nSometimes I pick up the phone and bring it to my ear for the same reason people raise their heads to peer at the moon when they're in a strange place. It makes them\u2014it makes me\u2014feel oriented, calmer than I was a moment before.\n\nPerhaps this has something to do with why I drive to the top of the hill and park beneath the cell tower and climb onto the hood of my Neon and lean against the windshield with my hands folded behind my head to watch the red light blinking and the black shapes of birds swirling against the backdrop of an even blacker sky.\n\nI am here to listen. The radio signals emanating from the tower sound like a blade hissing through the air or a glob of spit sizzling on a hot stove: something dangerous, about to draw blood or catch fire. It's nice.\n\nI imagine I hear in it the thousands of voices channeling through the tower at any given moment, and I wonder what terrible things could be happening to these people that they want to tell the person on the other end of the line but don't.\n\nX\n\nA conversation overheard:\n\n\"Do you live here?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Are you Pete Johnston?\"\n\n\"Yes. Who are you? What do you want?\"\n\n\"To talk to you. Just to talk.\"\n\nX\n\nNoon, I take my lunch break. I remove my headset and lurch out of my chair with a groan and bring my fists to my back and push until I feel my vertebrae separate and realign with a juicy series of pops. Then I wander along my row, moving past so many cubicles, each with a person hunched over inside it\u2014and for a moment West Teleservices feels almost like a chapel, with everyone bowing their heads and murmuring together, as if exorcising some private pain.\n\nI sign out with one of the managers and enter the break room, a forty-by-forty-foot room with white walls and a white dropped ceiling and a white linoleum floor. There are two sinks, two microwaves, two fridges, a Coke machine and a SNAX machine. In front of the SNAX machine stands C6, the woman stationed in the cubicle next to me. A Looney Toons theme apparently unifies her wardrobe, since today she wears a sweatshirt with Sylvester on it. Below him, blocky black letters read, WITHCONTHIN. She stares with intense concentration at the candy bars and chip bags and gum packs, as if they hold some secret message she has yet to decode.\n\nI go to the nearby water fountain and take a drink and dry my mouth with my sleeve, all the while watching C6, who hardly seems to breathe. \"Hey, you,\" I say, moving to within a few steps of her. \"Doing all right there?\"\n\nShe looks at me, her face creased with puzzlement. Then she shakes her head, and a fog seems to lift, and for the first time she sees me and says, \"Been better.\"\n\n\"I know how you feel.\"\n\nShe looks again to the SNAX machine, where her reflection hovers like a ghost. \"Nobody knows how I feel.\"\n\n\"No. You're wrong. I know.\"\n\nAt first C6 seems to get angry, her face cragging up, but then I say, \"You feel like you would feel if you were hurrying along and smacked your shin against the corner of the coffee table. You feel like you want to yell a lot. The pain hasn't completely arrived, but you can see it coming, and you want to yell at it, scare it off.\" I go to the fridge labeled A-K and remove from it my sack lunch and sit down at one of the five tables staggered throughout the room. \"Something like that, anyway.\"\n\nAn awkward silence follows, in which I eat my ham sandwich and C6 studies me closely, no doubt recognizing in me some common damage, some likeness of herself.\n\nThen C6 says, \"Can't seem to figure out what I want,\" nodding at the vending machine. \"I've been staring at all these goodies for twenty minutes, and I'll be darned if I know what I want.\" She forces a laugh and then says with some curiosity in her voice, \"Hey, what's with your eye?\"\n\nI cup a hand to my ear like a seashell, like: Say again?\n\n\"Your eyeball.\" She points and then draws her finger back as if she might catch something from me. \"It's really red.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" I say and knuckle the corner of my eye as if to nudge away a loose eyelash. \"Maybe I've got pinkeye. Must have picked it up off a doorknob.\"\n\n\"It's not pink. It's red. It's really, really red.\"\n\nThe nearest reflective surface is the SNAX machine. And she's right. My eye is red. The dark luscious red of an apple. I at once want to scream and pluck it out and suck on it.\n\n\"I think you should see somebody,\" C6 says.\n\n\"Maybe I should.\" I comb a hand back through my hair and feel a vaguely pleasant release as several dozen hairs come out by the roots, just like that, with hardly any effort. I hold my hand out before me and study the clump of hairs woven in between the fingers and the fresh scabs jewelling my knuckles and say to no one in particular, \"Looks like I'm falling apart.\"\n\nX\n\nHave you ever been on the phone, canceling a credit card or talking to your mother, when all of a sudden\u2014with a pop of static\u2014another conversation bleeds into yours? Probably. It happens a lot, with so many radio signals hissing through the air. What you might not know is, what you're hearing might have been said a minute ago or a day ago or a week ago or a month ago. Years ago.\n\nWhen you speak into the receiver, your words are compressed into an electronic signal that bounces from phone to tower to satellite to phone, traveling thousands of miles, even if you're talking to your next-door neighbor, Joe. Which means there's plenty of room for a signal to ricochet or duplicate or get lost. Which means there are so many words\u2014the ghosts of old conversations\u2014floating all around us.\n\nConsider this possibility. You pick up your phone and hear a voice\u2014your voice\u2014engaged in some ancient conversation, like that time in high school when you asked Natasha Flatt out for coffee and she made an excuse about her cat being sick. It's like a conversation shouted into a canyon, its words bouncing off walls to eventually come fluttering back to you, warped and soft and sounding like somebody else.\n\nSometimes this is what my memory feels like. An image or a conversation or a place will rise to the surface of my mind, and I'll recognize it vaguely, not knowing if I experienced it or saw it on television or invented it altogether.\n\nWhenever I try to fix my attention on something, a red light goes on in my head, and I'm like a bird circling in confusion.\n\nX\n\nI find myself on the sidewalk of a new hillside development called Bear Brook. Here all the streets have names like Kodiak and Grizzly. All around me are two-story houses of a similar design, with freshly painted gray siding and river-rock entryways and cathedral windows rising above their front doors to reveal chandeliers in the foyer of each. Each home has a sizable lot that runs up against a pine forest. And each costs more than I would make in twenty years with West Teleservices.\n\nA garbage truck rushes past me, raising tiny tornadoes of dust and trash, and I raise my hand to shield my face and notice a number written on the back of it, just below my knuckles\u201413743\u2014and though I am sure it will occur to me later, for the moment I can't for the life of me remember what it means.\n\nAt that moment a bird swoops toward a nearby house. Mistaking the window for a piece of sky, it strikes the glass with a thud and falls into the rose garden beneath it, absently fluttering its wings; soon it goes still. I rush across the lawn and into the garden and bend over to get a better look at it. A bubble of blood grows from its beak and pops. I do not know why, but I reach through the thorns and pick up the bird and stroke its cool, reddish feathers. Its complete lack of weight and its stillness overwhelm me.\n\nWhen the bird fell, something fell off a shelf inside me\u2014a nice, gold-framed picture of my life, what I dreamed it would be, full of sunshine and ice cream and go-go dancers. It tumbled down and shattered, and my smiling face dissolved into the distressed expression reflected in the living room window before me.\n\nI look alarmingly ugly. My eyes are black-bagged. My skin is yellow. My upper lip is raised to reveal long, thin teeth. Mine is the sort of face that belongs to someone who bites the heads off chickens in a carnival pit, not the sort that belongs to a man who cradles in his hands a tiny red-winged blackbird. The vision of me, coupled with the vision of what I once dreamed I would be\u2014handsome, wealthy, feared by men and cherished by women\u2014assaults me, the ridiculousness of it and also the terror, the realization that I have crept to the edge of a void and am on the verge of falling in, barely balanced.\n\nAnd then my eyes refocus, concentrating on a farther distance, where through the window I see a man rising from a couch and approaching me. He is tall and square-shouldered. His hair is the color of dried blood on a bandage. He looks at me with derision, saying through the glass, \"The hell do you think you're doing on my property?\" without saying a word.\n\nI drop the bird and raise my hand, not quite waving, the gesture more like holding up something dark to the light. He does not move except to narrow his eyes further. There's a stone pagoda at the edge of the garden, and when I take several steps back my heel catches against it. I stumble and then lose my balance entirely, falling hard, sprawling out on the lawn. The gray expanse of the sky fills my vision. Moisture from the grass seeps into my jeans and dampens my underwear. My testicles tighten like a fist.\n\nIn the window the man continues to watch me. He has a little red mustache, and he fingers it. Then he disappears from sight, moving away from the window and toward the front door.\n\nJust before I stagger off the lawn and hurry along the sidewalk and retreat from this place, my eyes zero in on the porch, waiting for the man to appear there, and I catch sight of the address: 13743.\n\nAnd then I am off and running. A siren announces itself nearby. The air seems to vibrate with its noise. It is a police cruiser, I'm certain, though how I can tell the difference between it and an ambulance, I don't know. Either way, someone is in trouble.\n\nX\n\nThe body was blackened by its lengthy exposure to radio frequency fields. Cooked. Like a marshmallow left too long over flame. This is why the deputies shut off the transmitters, when they climbed the tower.\n\nZ-21 interviewed Jack Millhouse, a professor of radiation biology at Oregon State. He had a beard, and he stroked it thoughtfully. He said that climbing the tower would expose a person to radio frequencies so powerful they would cook the skin. \"I'd ask around at the ER,\" he said. \"See if somebody has come in with radiation burns.\"\n\nThen they interviewed a woman in a yellow, too-large T-shirt and purple stretch pants. She lived nearby and had seen the commotion from her living room window. She thought a man was preparing to jump, she said. So she came running in the hopes of praying him down. She had a blank, round face no one would ever call beautiful. \"It's just awful,\" she said, her lips disappearing as she tightened her mouth. \"It's the most horrible thing in the world, and it's right here, and we don't know why.\"\n\nX\n\nI know I am not the only one who has been cut off by a swerving car in traffic or yelled at by a teacher in a classroom or laughed at by a woman in a bar. I am not the only one who has wished someone dead and imagined how it might happen, pleasuring in the goriest details.\n\nHere is how it might happen:\n\nI am in a kitchen with duck-patterned wallpaper. I stand over a man with a Gerber hunting knife in my hand. There is blood dripping off the knife, and there is blood coming out of the man. Gouts of it. It matches the color of his hair. A forked vein rises on his forehead to reveal the panicked beating of his heart. A gray string of saliva webs the corner of his mouth. He holds his hands out, waving me away, and I cut my way through them.\n\nA dog barks from the hallway, and the man screams a repulsive scream, a girlish scream, and all this noise sounds to me far away, like a conversation overheard between pops of static.\n\nI am aware of my muscles and their purpose as never before, using them to place the knife, putting it finally to the man's chest, where it will make the most difference.\n\nAt first the blade won't budge, caught on a rib, and then it slips past the bone and into the soft red interior, deeper and then deeper still, with the same feeling you get when you break through that final restraining grip and enter a woman fully. The response is just as cathartic: a shriek, a gasp, a stiffening of the limbs followed by a terrible shivering that eventually gives way to a great, calming release.\n\nThere is blood everywhere\u2014on the knife, on the floor, gurgling from the newly rendered wound that looks so much like a mouth\u2014and the man's eyes are open and empty, and his sharp pink tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. I am amazed at the thrill I feel.\n\nWhen I surprised him, only a few minutes ago, he was on the phone. I spot it now, on the shale floor, with a halo of blood around it. I pick it up and bring it to my ear and hope for the familiar, calming murmur of the dial tone.\n\nInstead I hear a voice. \"Hello?\" it says.\n\nX\n\nOne day, I think, maybe I'll write a story about all of this. Something permanent. So that I can trace every sentence and find my way to the end and back to the beginning without worrying about losing my way.\n\nThe telling would be complicated.\n\nTo write a story like this you would have to talk about what it means to speak into a headset all day, reading from a script you don't believe in, conversing with bodiless voices that snarl with hatred, voices that want to claw out your eyes and scissor off your tongue. And you would have to show what that does to a person, experiencing such a routine day after day, with no relief except for the occasional coffee break where you talk about the television show you watched last night.\n\nAnd you would have to explain how the man named Pete Johnston sort of leaned and sort of collapsed against the fridge, how a magnet fell to the linoleum with a clack after you flashed the knife in a silvery arc across his face and then his outstretched hand and then into that soft basin behind the collarbone. After that came blood. And screaming. Again you stabbed the body, in the thigh, the belly, your muscles pulsing with a red electricity. Something inside you, some internal switch, had been triggered, filling you with an unthinking adrenaline that made you feel capable of turning over Volkswagens, punching through concrete, tearing phone books in half.\n\nAnd you would have to end this story by explaining what it felt like to pull the body from the trunk of your car and hoist it to your shoulder and begin to climb the tower\u2014one rung, then another\u2014going slowly. You breathed raggedly. The dampness of your sweat mingled with the dampness of blood. From here\u2014thirty, then forty, then fifty feet off the ground\u2014you could see the chains of light on Route 97 and Highway 100, each bright link belonging to a machine that carried inside it a man who could lose control in an instant, distracted by the radio or startled by a deer or overwhelmed by tiredness, careening off the asphalt and into the surrounding woods. It could happen to anyone.\n\nYour thighs trembled. You were weary, dizzy. Your fillings tingled, and a funny baked taste filled your mouth. The edges of your eyes went white and then crazy with streaks of color. But you continued climbing, with the wind tugging at your body, with the blackness of the night and the black shapes of birds all around you, the birds swirling through the air like ashes thrown from a fire. And let's not forget the sound\u2014the sound of the tower\u2014how it sounded almost like words. The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that coursed through you in dark conversation.\nBenjamin Percy\n\nis the author of two novels, Red Moon (Grand Central\/Hachette, 2013) and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House and The Paris Review. His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writer's Award, the Plimpton Prize, the Pushcart Prize and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.\n\nHOW\n\nROXANE GAY\n\nHow These Things Come To Pass\n\nHanna does her best thinking late at night when all the usurpers living in her house are asleep. If it isn't winter, which is not often, she climbs out onto her roof with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She smokes and stares up at the blue black night sky. She lives in the North Country where the stars make sense. Hanna shares her home with her unemployed husband, her twin sister, her sister's husband, their son, and her father. She is the only one who works\u2014mornings, she waits tables the Koivu Caf\u00e9 and nights, she tends bar at Karpela's Supper Club. She leaves most of her tips at her best friend Laura's house. Hanna is plotting her escape.\n\nThe most popular dish at the Koivu is the pannukakku, a Finnish pancake. If Old Larsen, is too hung over, Hanna will heat the iron skillet in the oven and mix the batter\u2014first eggs, beating them lightly, slowly adding the honey, salt, and milk, finally sifting the flour in. She enjoys the ratchet sound as she pulls the sift trigger. She sways from side to side, and imagines she is a Flamenco dancer. She is in Spain where it is warm, where there is sun and beauty. Hanna likes making pannukakku with extra butter so the edges of the pancakes are golden and crisp. Sometimes, she'll carefully remove the edges from a pancake and eat them just like that. She's still in Spain, eating bread from a panader\u00eda, perhaps enjoying a little wine. Then she'll hear someone shout order up and she is no longer in Spain. She is in the middle of nowhere, standing over a hot, greasy stove.\n\nPeter, Hanna's husband, comes in for breakfast every morning. Hanna saves him a spot at the counter and she takes his order. He stares down her uniform, ogling her cleavage and waggling his eyebrows. She feigns affection, smacks his head with her order pad, and hands his ticket to Old Larsen who growls, \"We don't do any damn substitutions,\" but then makes Peter three eggs over easy, hash browns with onions and cheese, four slices of bacon, white toast, and two pannukakku, slightly undercooked. When his food is ready, Hanna takes a break, sits next to Peter, watches him eat. His beard is growing long. A man without a job doesn't need a clean face, he tells her. She hates watching Peter eat. She hates that he follows her to work. She hates his face.\n\nHer husband thinks they are trying to have a child. He wears boxers instead of briefs though he prefers the security of the latter. Peter once read in a magazine that wearing boxers increased sperm motility. He and Hanna only have sex when the home ovulation kit he bought at Walmart indicates she is fertile. Peter would prefer to have sex every day. Hanna would prefer to never have sex with Peter again, not because she's frigid but because she finds it difficult to become aroused by a perpetually unemployed man. Two years ago, Hanna said she was going on vacation with Laura downstate and instead drove to Marquette and had her tubes tied. She wasn't going to end up like her mother with too many children in a too small house with too little to eat. Despite her best efforts, however, she has found herself living in a too small house with too many people and too little to eat. It is a bitter pill to swallow.\n\nWhen she gets off work at three in the afternoon, Hanna goes home, washes the grease and salt from her skin, and changes into something cute but a little slutty. She heads to the university the next town over. She's 27 but looks far younger, so she pretends she's a student. Sometimes, she attends a class in one of the big lecture halls. She takes notes and plays with her hair and thinks about all the things she could have done. Other days, she sits in the library and reads books and learns things so that when she finally escapes she can be more than a waitress with a great rack in a dead Upper Michigan town.\n\nHanna flirts with boys because at the Michigan Institute of Technology there are lots and lots of boys who want nothing more than to be noticed by a pretty girl. She never pretends she's anything but smart. She's too old for that. Sometimes, the boys take her to the dining hall or the Campus Caf\u00e9 for a snack. She tells them she's in mechanical engineering because Laura is a secretary in that department. Sometimes, the boys invite her to their messy dorm rooms littered with dirty laundry and video game consoles and roommates or their squalid apartments off campus. She gives them blowjobs and lays with them on their narrow twin beds covered in thin sheets and tells them lies they like to hear. After the boys fall asleep, Hanna heads back across the bridge to Karpela's where she tends bar until two in the morning.\n\nPeter visits Hanna at the supper club too, but he has to pay for his drinks so he doesn't visit often. Don Karpela, the owner, is always around, grabbing at things with his meaty fingers. He's a greedy man and a friend of her father. Even though he's nearing sixty, Don is always breathing down Hanna's neck, bumping up against her in the cramped space behind the bar, telling her he'd make her damn happy if she'd leave her old man. When he does that, Hanna closes her eyes and breathes easy because she needs her job. If Peter is around when Don is making his moves, he'll laugh and raise his glass. \"You can have her,\" he'll slur, as if he has a say in the matter.\n\nAfter the bar closes Hanna wipes everything down and washes all the glasses and empties the ashtrays. She and Laura, who also works at the supper club, will sit on the hood of Hanna's car in the back alley and hold hands. Hanna will lean against Laura's shoulder and inhale deeply and marvel that her friend can still smell good after hours in that dark, smoky space where men don't hear the word no. If the night is empty enough, they will kiss for a very long time, until their cold lips become warm, until the world falls away, until their bodies feel like they will split at the heart. She and Laura never talk about these moments but when Hanna is plotting her escape, she is not going alone.\n\nHanna's twin sister Anna often waits up for Hanna. She worries. She always has. She's a nervous woman. As a child, she was a nervous girl. Their mother, before she left, liked to say that Hanna got all the sisu, the fierce strength that should have been shared by both girls. Hanna and Anna always knew their mother didn't know them at all. They were both strong and fierce. Anna's husband worked at the paper mill in Niagara until some foreign company bought it and closed it and then most everyone in town lost their homes because all the work that needed doing was already done. When Anna called, nervous as always, to ask if she and her family could stay with Hanna, she had not even posed the question before Hanna said, \"Yes.\"\n\nHanna and Anna are not openly demonstrative but they love each other wildly. In high school, Anna dated a boy who didn't treat her well. When Hanna found out, she put a good hurting on him. Hanna pretended to be her sister and she took the bad boy up to the trails behind the county fairgrounds. She got down on her knees and started to give him head and she told him if he ever laid a hand on her sister again and before she finished that sentence, she bit down on his cock and told herself she wouldn't stop biting down until her teeth met. She smiled when she tasted his blood. He screamed so softly it made the hairs on her arm stand on end. Hanna still sees that boy around town once in a while. He's not a boy anymore but he walks with a hitch and always crosses to the other side of the street when he sees her coming.\n\nOn the nights when Hanna and Laura sit on the hood of Laura's car and kiss until their cold lips warm, Anna stands outside on the front porch, shivering, waiting. Her cheeks flush. Her heart flutters around her chest awkwardly. Anna asks Hanna if she's seeing another man and Hanna tells her sister the truth. She says, \"No,\" and Anna frowns. She knows Hanna is telling the truth. She knows Hanna is lying. She cannot quite figure out how she's doing both at the same time. The sisters smoke a cigarette together, and before they go in, Anna will place a gently hand on Hanna's arm. She'll say, \"Be careful.\" Hanna will kiss her twin's forehead, and she'll think, \"I will,\" and Anna will hear her.\n\nHow Hanna Ikonen knows it is time to get the girl and get out of town\n\nHanna and Anna's father Red lives in the basement. He's not allowed on the second floor where everyone sleeps. When Peter asks why, Hanna just shakes her head and says, \"It's personal.\" She doesn't share personal things with her husband. Her father used to work in the mines. When the last copper mine closed he didn't bother trying to learn a new trade. He started holding his back when he walked around, said he was injured. He collected disability and when that ran out, he lived with a series of girlfriends who each kicked him out before long. Finally, when there was no woman in town who would give him the time of day, Red showed up on Hanna's doorstep, reeking of whiskey, his beard long and unkempt. He slurred an incoherent apology for being a lousy father. He begged his daughter to have mercy on an old man. Hanna wasn't moved by his plea but she knew he would be her problem one way or the other. She told him he could make himself comfortable in the basement, but if she ever saw him on the second floor, that would be that. It has been fifteen years since the mine closed but Red still calls himself a miner.\n\nThe whereabouts of Hanna and Anna's mother, Ilse, are unknown. She left when the girls were eleven. It was a Thursday morning. Ilse got the girls and their brothers ready for school, fed them breakfast\u2014steel cut oats topped with sliced bananas. She kissed them atop their pale blonde heads and told them to be good. She was gone when they returned home from school. For a while, they heard a rumor that Ilse had taken up with a shoe salesman in Marquette. Later, there was news of her from Iron Mountain, a dentist's wife, with a new family. Then there was no news at all.\n\nHanna and Anna have five brothers scattered throughout the state. They are mostly bitter, lazy, indifferent and unwilling to have a hand in the care and feeding of their father. When Hanna organized a conference call with her siblings to discuss the disposition of their father, The Boys, as they are collectively known, said it was women's work and if The Twins didn't want to do that work, they could let the old man rot. One of the brothers, Venn, offered to send Hanna or Anna, whomever shouldered the burden of caring for Red, twenty dollars a month. Simultaneously, The Twins told him to stick it up his ass and then they told The Boys to go fuck themselves. After they hung up, Hanna called Anna and Anna offered to take care of Red until he drank himself to death but Hanna worried that death by drink would take too long. Anna had a child to raise, after all.\n\nIt is an ordinary Tuesday when Hanna decides to go home after working at the caf\u00e9 instead of heading across the bridge to the Institute to play make believe with college boys. She can feel grease oozing out of her pores and what she wants, more than anything, is to soak in a clean bathtub, in an empty house. When she pulls into her driveway and sees Anna pacing back and forth in front of the garage, Hanna knows there will be no bath or empty house today. She parks the car, takes a deep breath and joins her sister who informs Hanna that their mother is sitting on the Salvation Army couch in the living room drinking a cup of tea. Hanna thinks, \"Of course she is.\"\n\nHow Hanna met and married Peter Lahti\n\nAnna fell in love when she was seventeen. His name was Logan, and he lived on the reservation in Baraga. She loved his long black hair and his smooth brown skin and the softness of his voice. They met at a football game and the day after graduation, they married and moved. When Anna left, Hanna was happy for her sister, but she also hoped beyond all hopes that her sister and her new husband would take her with them. She could have said something. Years later Hanna realized she should have said something, but she became the one who stayed. She got an apartment of her own and started hanging out at the university sitting in on the classes she couldn't afford. Peter lived in the apartment next door and back then, he worked as a truck driver hauling lumber downstate so dating him was fine because he wasn't around much.\n\nAfter a long trip where Peter was gone for three weeks, he showed up at Hanna's door, his hair slicked back, beard trimmed, wearing a button down shirt and freshly pressed jeans. In one hand, he held a cheap bouquet of carnations. He had forgotten that Hanna had told him, on their first date, that she hated carnations. He thrust the flowers into Hanna's hands, invited himself into her apartment and said, \"I missed you so much. Let's get married.\" Hanna, elbow deep into a bottle of wine at that point, shrugged. Peter, an optimist at heart, took the gesture as a response in the affirmative. They married not long after in a ceremony attended by Anna and her husband, Red, and three of The Boys. No one from Peter's family attended. His mother was scandalized her boy would marry any child of Red Ikonen.\n\nHow Red Ikonen got his reputation\n\nRed Ikonen had mining in his blood. His daddy and his daddy's daddy had been miners up in Calumet when mining was something that mattered up there and the town was rich and every Sunday the churches were full of good folks grateful for the bounties of the hard earth. As a boy, Red loved his father's stories about the world beneath the world. By the time it was Red's turn to head underground, there wasn't much mining left to do and that was a hell of a cross to bear. He was as a soldier without a war. Red started drinking to numb his disappointment. He married a pretty girl, had five handsome boys and two lovely girls and continued drinking to celebrate his good fortune. The pretty girl left and he drank so he wouldn't feel so lonesome. Finally, drinking was the only thing he knew how to do so that's just what he did.\n\nHe was a tall man\u20146'7\", and he had a loud voice and no sense of how to act right. That sort of thing just wasn't in him. There wasn't a bar in town where Red hadn't started a fight or done something untoward with his woman or someone else's woman. Things had gotten so bad he needed to drive over to South Range or Chassell to drink with the old guys at the VFW who really were soldiers without a war because no one in town wanted to serve him a drink. When The Boys were still in town, bartenders would call and have one of them come get their father. By the time Red Ikonen was drinking so he wouldn't feel so lonesome he had become a mean drunk. He never had a kind word for his boys who drove miles into the middle of the night to bring their drunk daddy back home.\n\nOne by one The Boys left home, tried to get as far away from their father as possible, until it was only The Twins left and then he started doing untoward things with them and it was a small town so people talked and it wasn't long before no one at all wanted a thing to do with Red Ikonen.\n\nHow Laura and Hanna became best friends\n\nLaura Kappi grew up next door to the Ikonens. For a while in high school, she dated one of The Boys, but then he moved away, went to college, and didn't bother to take her with him. Laura was, in fact, a friend to both Hanna and Anna throughout high school. When Anna and Logan moved down to Niagara, Laura saw how lost Hanna was without her twin. She decided to do her best to take Anna's place. Hanna was more than happy to let her. They became best friends and then they became more than friends but they never talked about it because there wasn't much to be said on the subject.\n\nHow Hanna reacts when she sees her mother for the first time in sixteen years\n\nBefore they go inside, Anna reaches for Hanna's waiting hand. They both squeeze, hard, their knuckles cracking and then The Twins go inside. Ilse Ikonen is sitting on the edge of the couch. She is a small woman with sharp features. She has always been beautiful and neither time nor distance has changed that. Her hair is graying around the scalp, her features hang a bit lower, but she doesn't look a day over forty. Red is sitting where he always sits during the day, in the recliner next to the couch staring at his estranged wife. He has tucked in his shirt, but his hands are shaking because he is trying not to drink. He wants to be clear headed but his wife is so damned beautiful that with or without the drink he doesn't know up from down. Peter is sitting next to Ilse, also staring, because the resemblance between his wife and her mother is uncanny. They have never met. Anna's husband Logan is sitting next to Peter, holding their son, half asleep, in his lap. He is deliberately avoiding any eye contact with his mother in law. He is helping his wife with the burden of her anger.\n\nAs soon as they enter the room, Hanna and Anna's stomachs churn. Beads of sweat slowly spread across their foreheads. Ilse leans forward, setting her teacup on the coffee table. She smiles at her daughters. Hanna thinks, \"Why did you offer her tea?\" Anna thinks, \"I was being polite.\" Hanna bites her lip. \"What are you doing here, Ilse?\" she asks.\n\nIlse Ikonen uncrosses her legs and folds her hands in her lap. \"It has been a long time,\" she says.\n\nHanna looks at all the broken people sitting in her living room on her broken furniture looking to her to fix their broken lives. She turns around and walks right back out the front door. Anna makes her excuses and rushes after her sister. She finds Hanna holding on to the still warm hood of her car, hunched over, throwing up. Anna's stomach rolls uncomfortably. When Hanna stands up, she wipes her lips with the back of her hand and says, \"I mean... really?\"\n\nHow Laura finally convinces Hanna to run away with her\n\nHanna sits in her car until Ilse Ikonen takes her leave and gets a room at the motel down the street. After her mother leaves, Hanna drives to campus and goes to the dank room of one of her college boys. She lies on his musty, narrow twin bed and stares at the constellation of glow in the dark stars on the ceiling while the boy awkwardly fumbles at her breasts with his bony fingers. She sighs, closes her eyes, thinks of Laura. Afterward, when the boy is fast asleep, his fingers curled in a loose fist near his mouth, Hanna slips out of bed and heads back across the bridge to Laura's house.\n\nLaura smiles when she opens her front door. Hanna shrugs and stands in the doorway, her cheeks numb, still nauseous. She shoves her small hands into her pockets, tries to ignore the cold. Laura wraps her arms around herself, shifts quickly from one foot to the other. \"Why don't you come in?\"\n\nHanna shakes her head. \"I can't do this anymore.\"\n\nLaura arches an eyebrow and even though she is barefoot, she steps onto her snowy front porch. She gasps, steps onto Hanna's boots, slides her arms beneath Hanna's coat and around her waist. Laura lightly brushes her lips against Hanna's. Hanna closes her eyes. She breathes deeply.\n\nHow Hanna falls even more in love with Laura than she thought possible\n\nWhen Laura can no longer feel her toes, she says, \"We better get inside before I get frostbite and I am forced to spend the rest of my life hobbling after you.\"\n\nHanna nods and follows Laura into her house. It is familiar, has looked mostly the same for the past twenty years and in that there is comfort. Inside the foyer, amidst coats and boots, a shovel, a knitted scarf, a bag of salt, Hanna sinks to the floor and sits cross-legged. Laura sits across from Hanna, extends her legs, resting her cold feet in Hanna's lap.\n\n\"Do you want to tell me about it?\"\n\nHanna shakes her head angrily. \"My mother's back.\"\n\n\"I mean... really?\" she says.\n\nHanna doesn't go home. She calls Anna and assures her sister that she's fine. Anna doesn't ask where she is. She's starting to make sense of things. Hanna lets Laura lead her up the steep staircase lined with books. She lets Laura put her into a hot bath. She lets Laura wash her clean. She follows Laura to bed and for the first time in months, she falls asleep in a mostly empty house. She thinks, \"This is everything I want.\"\n\nAs Hanna sleeps, Laura calculates how much money she has saved, the tread on her tires, how far they will need to travel so that Hanna might begin to forget about the life she's leaving behind. It all makes Laura very tired but then she looks at Hanna's lower lip, how it trembles while she's sleeping.\n\nHow it has always been\n\nThe next morning, Laura hears the knocking at her front door. She wraps herself in a thin robe and takes one last look at Hanna, still sleeping, lower lip still trembling. Laura has always loved Hanna even before she understood why her entire body flushed when she saw Hanna at school or running around her backyard or sitting on the roof outside her bedroom window. Dating one of The Boys a way to get closer to Hanna. Laura would kiss Hanna's brother and think of his sister, her smile, the way she walked around with her shoulder muscles bunched up. Being with the brother was not what Laura wanted but she told herself it was enough. For the first time Laura feels something unfamiliar in her throat. It makes her a little sick to her stomach. She thinks it might be hope. Downstairs, Anna is standing on the front porch shivering. She has a splitting headache. When Laura opens the door Anna quickly slips into the house. Anna squeezes Laura's hand and heads upstairs into Laura's bedroom. Anna crawls into bed behind her sister, wraps her arms around Hanna's waist. Hanna covers one of Anna's hands with hers. She is not quite awake yet.\n\n\"Don't make me go back there,\" Hanna says, hoarsely.\n\nAnna tightens her arms around her sister, kisses Hanna's shoulder. Anna says, \"You have to go back to say goodbye.\" There is a confidence in Anna's voice that reassures Hanna.\n\nHanna sighs, slowly opens her eyes. She sees Laura standing in the doorway. Hanna smiles. \"You don't have to stand so far away,\" she says. Laura grins and crawls into bed with The Twins. Laura says, \"Remember when we were kids and the three of us would lay on your roof at night during the summer to cool down?\" Both Hanna and Anna nod. The three women roll onto their backs and stare at the ceiling\u2014the cracks and water stains, how it sags. \"We were miserable even then,\" Laura says.\n\nHow Hanna finally confronts her mother\n\nWhere Hanna has always been the protector, Anna has always been the voice of reason, able to make the right choices between impossible alternatives. When they were girls and Hanna would plot retribution against anyone who had wronged The Twins, it was Anna who would deter her sister from acting thoughtlessly. When Red Ikonen would stumble into their room drunk and Hanna would try to stab him with a kitchen knife or bite his ear off it was Anna who grabbed her sister's arm and said, \"It's him or Superior Home.\" It was Anna who would sing to her father and stroke his beard and soothe all the meanness out of him. In these moments, Hanna would feel so much anger inside her she thought her heart would rip apart but then she would let the knife fall to the floor or she would unclench her teeth because anything was better than Superior Home, the state facility where motherless children were often discarded until they turned eighteen. They heard stories bad enough to make them believe there were worse things than the stink of Red Ikonen's breath against their cheeks as he forgot how to behave like a proper father.\n\nAnna held Hanna's hand as they walked back to their house, a bracing wind pushing their bodies through the snow. Hanna tried to breathe but found the air thin and cold and it hurt her lungs. As they climbed the porch stairs Hanna stopped, leaned against the railing, her body heavy.\n\n\"I don't feel so good,\" she said.\n\nAnna pressed the cool palm of her hand against Hanna's forehead. \"You get to leave soon,\" she said. \"Hold on to that.\"\n\nHanna stared at her sister. She said, \"Come with us\u2014you and Logan and the baby.\"\n\nAnna shook her head. \"It's my turn to stay.\"\n\n\"Bullshit. We've taken our turns long enough.\"\n\nThe front door opened. Peter glared at The Twins. \"Where the hell were you last night?\" He grabbed Hanna by the elbow, pulling her into the house and she let him. She wanted to save what fight she had left.\n\nIn the living room the scene closely resembled the tableau Hanna stumbled into the previous day with Ilse Ikonen sitting on the couch, poised regally like she had never left and had no need to offer acts of contrition.\n\nHanna tried to squirm free from Peter's grasp and he finally relented when calmly, quietly, Anna said, \"Let go of my sister.\" Peter held a natural distrust of twins. It wasn't normal, he thought, for there to be two people who were so identical. He also harbored no small amount of jealousy for the relationship twins shared. While he was not a bright man, Peter was smart enough to know he would never be as close to his wife as he wanted.\n\nThe Twins stood before their father, their mother, their husbands. They stood in the house where they had grown up filled with broken people and broken things. Anna thought, \"This is the last time we will ever stand in this room,\" and Hanna suddenly felt like she could breathe again. She tried to say something but she couldn't find her voice. Her throat was dry and hollow. The Twins looked at their parents and thought about everything they had ever wanted to say to two people so ill-suited for doing right by their children.\n\n\"I'm sorry to intrude,\" Ilse said, her voice tight, her words clipped. She crossed her legs and fidgeted with a big diamond ring on her left hand. \"I wanted to see how you girls and The Boys were doing, perhaps explain myself.\"\n\nAnna shook her head. \"Explanations aren't necessary,\" she said. \"Your leaving is a long time gone.\"\n\nHanna removed her wedding ring and dropped it on the coffee table. Peter sneered and said, \"Whatever,\" and Hanna rolled her eyes.\n\nThe Twins stood before their father, their mother, their husbands. They sucked in a great mass of air, threw their shoulders back. They had rehearsed this moment more than once but then they realized that with all the time and wrongs gone by, there was nothing worth saying.\n\nHow Hanna, Laura, Anna, Logan and the baby got away\n\nThey piled into Laura's truck, their belongings packed tightly into a small trailer hitched to the back. They sat perfectly still, held their breaths, looked straight ahead.\nRoxane Gay\n\nlives and writes in the Midwest.\n\nINSTITUTO\n\nROY KESEY\n\n-Good afternoon, Instituto de Perfeccionamiento.\n\n\u2013 Hi, good afternoon. Look, sorry to bother you, but I'm calling because I was reading the newspaper yesterday and I saw your advertisement, and I was wondering what, exactly, you are capable of perfecting. And also why the name's in Spanish.\n\n\u2013 All consultations are personal and in person, sir.\n\n\u2013 Yes, but, just in general, what sort of things do you improve?\n\n\u2013 We improve nothing, sir. If we improved things, the institute would be called the Instituto de Mejoramiento. It is not. We are not. It, we, is, are the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento.\n\n\u2013 Okay, but again, sorry, what exactly do you perfect?\n\n\u2013 All consultations are personal and in person.\n\n\u2013 I see.\n\n\u2013 Will there be anything else today, sir?\n\n\u2013 I guess, well, sure, why not. Could you give me the address? I read through your advertisement, read it very carefully in fact, but\u2014\n\n\u2013 We are located on the avenida.\n\n\u2013 The... Sorry, the what?\n\n\u2013 The avenida. The avenue.\n\n\u2013 The... Which avenue would that be?\n\n\u2013 The avenida, sir.\n\n\u2013 Madam, is this some kind of joke?\n\n\u2013 No, sir, it is not. We do not joke here at the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento.\n\n\u2013 Right, okay, but this is a city, madam. A large, not a small but a large-sized city, with thousands of avenues.\n\n\u2013 There is only one avenida, sir.\n\n\u2013 Well, but\u2014\n\n\u2013 We are not hard to find if you are in need of our services. If on the other hand you are not in need of our services, we are quite literally impossible to locate, but then, that wouldn't be such a problem, would it?\n\n\u2013 No, I guess not. One last thing\u2014do you, there at the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento, do you speak, in general, English?\n\n\u2013 We are speaking English now, sir, you and I.\n\n\u2013 Right, but the others, the, um, doctors or therapists or\u2014\n\n\u2013 Perfeccionadores. Perfectioners.\n\n\u2013 Exactly, the perfectioners, do they speak English as well?\n\n\u2013 All consultations are\u2014\n\n\u2013 Yes, yes I know. Well. Very well.\n\nX\n\nHe went. He left his house and got in his car and drove. He turned left, and turned left again, and turned right, and went straight ahead. He turned left and right and left and left and left, and then he hit the avenida. He'd never seen it before, but there it was. He turned right and drove up the avenida until it dead-ended at the bay. There was a white fence or railing along the cliff-top, and a fine view: the bay, the seagulls, the sailboats. For a time he stared at the view. Then he got back in his car and drove down the avenida until it dead-ended at a white fence or railing along a cliff-top overlooking the open ocean. There was a view here as well. Again the seagulls and sailboats, though fewer of both than before. After staring at this new yet familiar view for a time, he got back in his car and drove back up the avenida, and just as he was about to turn right into the maze toward home, there on the corner he saw a sign. Instituto de Perfeccionamiento, it said.\n\nHe parked his car and walked to the door, knocked and opened and entered. Inside was a small lobby or vestibule and to one side was a desk and behind the desk was a woman. She had large dark eyes and creamy skin and short dark hair and a pretty smile.\n\n\u2013 Yes? she said.\n\n\u2013 Good afternoon. You, we, I called earlier and we spoke, you and I, I believe.\n\n\u2013 Yes, sir, we did. One hundred dollars, please.\n\n\u2013 But\u2014\n\n\u2013 Each session costs one hundred dollars, sir, regardless or irregardless, both are acceptable now, of the treatment received.\n\n\u2013 But\u2014\n\nHe waited for her to interrupt him, and she did not.\n\n\u2013 But... isn't that a little, I don't know, irregular? I haven't even seen the perfectionists yet. How do I know\u2014\n\n\u2013 Perfeccionadores, sir. Perfectioners. Not perfectionists, not in any sense of the word. \"Perfectionist,\" sir, while likewise from \"perfection,\" from the Middle English perfeccioun, from the Old French perfection, from the Latin perfectio, perfectus, was first used in or around 1846 to refer to or as signifier for an adherent to the ethical doctrine which states that the perfection of moral character constitutes man's highest good, or alternately b: an adherent to the theological doctrine that a state of freedom from sin is attainable on earth, or alternately 2: anyone disposed to regard anything short of perfection as unacceptable. Perfectioners are something else entirely, and no one ever sees them.\n\n\u2013 Oh.\n\n\u2013 I believe we will start with your skin.\n\n\u2013 My skin? But madam, my skin... Well, okay, but it's not what I had in mind.\n\n\u2013 Rest assured, sir, it's all part of the program, the program that has been chosen on your behalf. For now, try not to worry about the other aspects, the aspects that you did in fact have in mind. Those will be attended to in due time, insofar as they yield to our treatment\u2014all of them, each and every one, insofar as they yield to our treatment, but in accordance with the program, and in due time. Now. Cash, check, or credit card?\n\nHe paid in cash and was shown by the large-eyed dark-eyed creamy-skinned short-haired dark-haired prettily smiling woman into a square waiting room. He sat down in the only chair, and the woman left, closing the door behind her too quickly for him to catch more than a glimpse of her splendid, better than splendid, quite genuinely ideal rump.\n\nThe walls were lined with bookshelves lined with books. After fifteen or twenty minutes of waiting he began to walk around, not in circles but in squares with sharp right angles, inspecting the books. None of them were in English. He wished he had paid more attention to his Spanish teacher in high school, just on general principles, just for the good of the thing, as none of the books were in Spanish either. After fifteen or twenty minutes of walking around in squares he sat down. After fifteen or twenty minutes of sitting he got up again and went to the door of the waiting room. There, he listened. He heard nothing. After five or seven minutes of hearing nothing he opened the door and walked out to the lobby or vestibule. Now there was no one sitting behind the desk. He waited at the desk for nine or eighteen minutes, standing rigidly though not at attention. If there had been a bell or buzzer of any kind, he would have rung or buzzed it. He called out. He shouted. He screamed. At last he rapped his knuckles firmly on the desktop. Then he walked out the door and down the walk and to his parking spot, got into his car, and drove the long drive home.\n\nWhat a gyp, he thought.\n\nX\n\nFirst thing the next morning, he stopped sleeping and awoke. He opened his eyes and stretched, closed his eyes and opened them again. He stretched again. He got up and went to the bathroom and turned on the light and removed his underpants and turned on the shower and looked in the mirror.\n\nHis skin was perfect.\n\nIt was blemishless.\n\nHis acne, the acne that had plagued him, a forty-year plague, the very acne that had served as Elizabeth Wannaker's excuse for not accompanying him to the junior prom, and she'd said it out loud and to his face and in the presence of many persons, his friends and hers, though mostly hers as his lurked a short distance away, It's those zits, Stanley, those zits, do something about those zits and then maybe I'll accompany you to a prom, though not the junior prom as it will be too late for that and anyways I'm hoping Harold Plansky will ask me. Do you know him? His friends? His phone number?\n\nThat self-same acne was gone.\n\nAs were his scars. The thin curvilinear pink line across the top of his left big toe from that time he'd dropped the paint-can, and god alone knows why he'd been painting barefoot, freshening up the trim around the front door like his dad had told him to, and what a weird accident, the can had caught him just right, opened his toe down to the bone, and paint everywhere, blood-colored paint, no way to tell what was injury and what was home improvement and his whole foot hurt like a bitch\u2014that thin curvilinear pink line was gone.\n\nAnd the purple gouge in his left shin from that time he'd been running through the shopping center and had turned mid-flight to see if the bikers were still chasing him and had smacked into the low stone planter\u2014that purplish gouge, filled in and touched up, the same color as the rest of his shin, shin-colored.\n\nAnd the slight pucker in his glans from that mucked-up circumcision\u2014vanished.\n\nAnd the jagged slash down his right cheek from that time his ex-wife had come at him with the bread-knife, not that he blamed her, he'd been heavy on the sauce back then and heavy with his hands\u2014invisible as if undone.\n\nAnd the horrendous molten rippling of his left cheek and ear and part of his scalp from that time he'd gone into the JC Penney's, the whole place on fire, stacks of outerwear and racks of innerwear blazing torch-like, to save the Billingham kid trapped and cowering in the dressing room, who ended up dying anyway the following year, mowed down in a crosswalk by an unknown motorist who did not stop and was never apprehended\u2014all that horrendous molten rippling now baby-smooth.\n\nAnd the five mauve nickel-sized welts scattered irregularly across his chest from that time when RT Pickaxe had run into a whole goddamn battalion of NVA maybe ten clicks into Cambodia, unable to hold the LZ and god was it hot, the perimeter brought in tight, calling for air support, calling for extraction, and he heard a voice, the voice of Johnson, and Johnson said the chopper was delayed but air support would be there in zero-six, would lay it down thick and close and give them a chance; three minutes later there was no one to return incoming fire but Stanley and Rahlan Drot, the rest of the team KIA and broken, and Rahlan Drot, the one Montagnard left who'd been with him from the start, Rahlan Drot with a shattered femur, the gooks closing in, and Stanley had taken Rahlan Drot on his back and oh how he'd run, the brush ripping at his face and the air keening sick all around, he'd hit a trail and no choice now, up the trail he ran, three gooks in front of him and reaching but he put them down, and how he ran, he dodged them all, all but one, a short skinny dude with an SKS carbine, and the bullets opened holes across the front of Stanley's shirt, five holes, black-rimmed and loose-fringed, and he'd dropped Rahlan Drot and fallen, and old Rahlan Drot, good old Rahlan Drot had taken Stanley's CAR-15 and waxed that short skinny gook, had picked Stanley up, an unbelievable thing, Rahlan Drot losing blood, the shattered femur, but he carried Stanley to the secondary LZ that Johnson's voice guided them towards, they'd popped smoke, purple and yellow and red, and the chopper had come, had pulled them out, by god an unbelievable thing\u2014those five mauve nickel-sized welts, they had been polished away.\n\nAnd what had become of Rahlan Drot? Stanley stood staring into the mirror in his bathroom, the light on, the shower running, his underpants balled in the corner. Had Rahlan Drot made it through to the end? They'd kept in touch for a time, but then the letters had stopped. Plenty of reasons why that might have happened, though. Say he made it. Say he is even now an aging man, a smiling happy aging man, the shattered femur healed not by any Instituto de Perfeccionamiento but by time and the body itself, the marvelous body, and Rahlan Drot with his wife, a tiny woman she must be, tiny and lovely and kind, and the two of them tend small fields of rice, and at times in the evening their children and grandchildren come, walking the long walk up and along the ridge, the grandchildren laughing and playing and at times oddly cruel, but only in childish ways, and Rahlan Drot rests in his thatched and stilted longhouse, chats with his wife and his children, watches his grandchildren play.\n\nStanley stared into the mirror, stared at his perfect skin, and an old word came to him, an old and funny and appropriate word, a word his mother had often used back when the two of them were still speaking, and he smiled, and stared at himself in the mirror, and said the word:\n\n\u2013 Gadzooks! he said, perhaps from \"God's hooks,\" swearing by the Crucifixion nails, archaic, used as a mild oath.\n\nOr perhaps Rahlan Drot hadn't made it.\n\nX\n\nOn Sunday he returned to the institute, and the institute was closed.\n\nX\n\nOn Monday he returned to the institute, and the institute was open, and behind the desk sat the large-eyed dark-eyed creamy-skinned short-haired dark-haired prettily smiling woman.\n\n\u2013 Hello, she said.\n\n\u2013 Hello, he said.\n\n\u2013 Are you pleased? she asked.\n\n\u2013 It is a miracle, he answered. Or at the very least miraculous. You even perfected my glans.\n\n\u2013 Not me, sir. The perfeccionadores.\n\n\u2013 Even so. A miracle, or at the very least miraculous.\n\n\u2013 We here at the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento aim to please.\n\n\u2013 But I don't understand. How\u2014\n\n\u2013 You are not meant to understand, sir. You are meant only to be pleased. And now, I believe, your hair. One hundred dollars, please.\n\n\u2013 My hair?\n\n\u2013 Your hair.\n\n\u2013 But my hair, my hair, I like my hair. My hair is fine. Or if it's not, and okay, let's say it's not, let's say it's graying, gone a bit thin on top, but no big deal, no particularly big deal, nothing I can't handle.\n\n\u2013 You're forgetting about the program.\n\n\u2013 Look, okay, the program, but if I want to fix my hair I can just go to the hairdresser and get a damn haircut, can't I. And for a damn sight less than a hundred dollars.\n\n\u2013 If that is what you wish, sir, by all means, you may. If what you wish is to get your hair fixed, you can and may just go to the hairdresser and get a damn haircut. Do not let us stop you. We here at the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento are neither interested in nor capable of fixing things. If we fixed things, the institute would be called the Instituto de Reparaci\u00f3n. It is not. We are not. It, we, is, are the Instituto de Perfeccionamiento.\n\n\u2013 Well, hell.\n\n\u2013 Yes, she said, from the Middle English, and that from the Old English, akin to helan, 'to conceal,' the Latin celare, the Greek kalyptein, compared metaphorically and perhaps also likened literally to war by General W. T. Sherman. Have you come to a decision?\n\nAgain he paid in cash, and again he was shown into the waiting room. Again the chair and the sitting down, again only a glimpse of the ideal rump. Again the bookshelves and books and the fifteen or twenty minutes and the walking around and the sharp right angles and the inspection and the wish. Again the sitting, the getting up, the walking to the door, the listening, the hearing of nothing, the five or seven minutes, the opening of the door, the walking, the lobby or vestibule. Again the nine or eighteen minutes, the lack of bell or buzzer, the calling out, the shouting, the screaming, the firm rapping of the knuckles, the opening and closing, the walking, the long drive home.\n\nX\n\nHe awoke in the morning with perfect hair. Movie-star hair. Thick and wavy and lustrous, unlike it had ever been. He did not have to open his eyes or stretch or get up or go to the bathroom or turn on the light or remove his underpants or turn on the shower or look in the mirror. He awoke and simply knew: he could feel its perfection against his scalp. He would never have to rinse or shampoo or condition ever again.\n\nAnd so it went. Skin, hair, refrigerator, eyesight, wardrobe, gastrointestinal tract, sofa, car, unicycle, hearing, pogo-stick, flooring, plumbing, prostate, wiring, fingernails, and so on. Drive, walk, knock, open, enter, chat, pay, walk, sit, glimpse, wait, inspect, wish, sit, get up, walk, listen, hear, wait, open, walk, wait, stand, call out, shout, scream, rap, walk, drive, over and over.\n\nThen she said, Your program, sir, is complete.\n\n\u2013 What?\n\n\u2013 Your program is complete.\n\n\u2013 No, I don't, it can't be, I'm, we're just getting started, just getting going, just getting into the groove.\n\n\u2013 No, sir, I'm afraid we're not doing any of those things. Your program is complete.\n\n\u2013 Well, okay, but surely there are, there must be, aren't there other programs?\n\n\u2013 Not for you, sir. I'm sorry.\n\n\u2013 But\u2014 But what about my fear of heights? My fear of lows? My nightmares? My echolalia?\n\n\u2013 Sir, you do not suffer from echolalia.\n\n\u2013 But I can feel it coming on right now at this very moment! \"Sir, you do not suffer from echolalia.\" You see?\n\n\u2013 I'm sorry, sir. Your program, your only program, the one and only program for you, it is finished.\n\n\u2013 But what about Rahlan Drot? I'd give anything just to know if he made it, and if he did, to get back in touch, to know that he's okay, doing well, being happy. And what about my mother? She's old, extremely old, ancient and kind-hearted and courageous but we haven't spoken in years\u2014she's never forgiven me for allowing my ex-wife to get away. And my ex-wife, speaking of my ex-wife, beautiful woman, I don't blame her a bit for what happened, and she, well, yes, she remarried, but I heard she's since redivorced, so she's free now, reunattached, and there's nothing in the world I want more than to have her as my ex-ex-wife, to try again, to do right by her this time.\n\n\u2013 I'm afraid that none of those things fall within our purview, sir. That is to say, none of those things yield to our treatment. Your program is complete.\n\n\u2013 But\u2014\n\nAgain she did not interrupt him. He sought a way to end his sentence. He found it nonendable.\n\n\u2013 So I guess this is goodbye, he said.\n\n\u2013 Yes, she said, an alteration of \"God be with you,\" 1573, a concluding remark or gesture at parting; see also \"adios,\" 1837, from the Spanish adi\u00f3s, from a, from the Latin ad, and Dios, from the Latin Deus, used to express farewell.\n\nBack to his car, his perfect car, back to his house, his perfect house. He walked immortal in circles and squares, one perfect room, and then the next. He ran his fingertips across his perfect skin. He ran his hands through his perfect hair. He ran across his perfect carpeting, stumbled over his perfect roller-blades, slammed headlong into a perfect wall, and there was no mark upon it, no mark at all, and his head was also still perfect, no pain, no swelling, no blood, and he ran from his living room to his kitchen to his hallway to his bedroom and the three pictures framed on his dresser: his mother, her apron stained, the rolling pin held up for show, the flour on her cheek, her laughter caught and held; and Rahlan Drot standing next to Stanley, the small brown man and the large white man, their arms interlocked, Rahlan Drot's earlobes pierced and stretched, Stanley's tigersuit faded but clean, this one moment permitted, friendship and trust, this one moment of grace before the next descent; and his ex-wife, the first day of their honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas, behind her the ocean stretched out calmly and bluely, the low white wall of the terrace, the orchid in her hair, he'd told her how beautiful she looked, he'd raised the camera and she'd smiled and averted her eyes.\nRoy Kesey\n\nis a writer and translator living in Maryland. His latest book is the short story collection Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books 2013). His other books include the novel Pacazo, the short story collection All Over, the novella Nothing in the World, and two historical guidebooks. He has received an NEA creative writing fellowship, the Paula Anderson Book Award, and the Bullfight Media Little Book Award. His short stories, essays, translations and poems have appeared in more than a hundred magazines and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction.\n\nRUST AND BONE\n\nCRAIG DAVIDSON\n\nTwenty-seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though differing in shape and density, each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird's wing, a whale's dorsal fin, a gecko's pad, your own hand. Some primates got more\u2014gorilla's got thirty-two, five in each thumb. Humans, twenty-seven.\n\nBust an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. Fracture a tarsus and the hairline's there to stay\u2014 looks like a crack in granite under the x-ray. Crush a metacarpal and that's that: bone splinters not driven into soft tissue are eaten by enzymes; powder sifts to the bloodstream. Look at a prizefighter's hands: knucks busted flat against the heavy bag or some pug's face and skin split on crossing diagonals, a ridge of scarred X's.\n\nYou'll see men cry breaking their hand in a fight, leather-assed Mexies and Steeltown bruisers slumped on a corner stool with tears squirting out their eyes. It's not quite the pain, though the anticipation of pain is there\u2014mitts swelling inside red fourteen-ouncers and the electric grind of bone on bone, maybe it's the eighth and you're jabbing a busted lead right through the tenth to eke a decision. It's the frustration makes them cry. Fighting's all about minimizing weakness. Shoddy endurance? Roadwork. Sloppy footwork? Skip rope. Weak gut? A thousand stomach crunches daily. But fighters with bad hands can't do a thing about it, aside from hiring a cornerman who knows a little about wrapping brittle bones. Same goes for fighters with sharp brows and weak skin who can't help splitting wide at the slightest pawing. They're crying because it's a weakness there's not a damn thing they can do for and it'll commit them to the second tier, one step below the MGM Grand and Foxwoods, the showgirls and Bentleys.\n\nRoom's the size of a gas chamber. Wooden chair, sink, small mirror hung on the pigmented concrete wall. Forty-watt bulb hangs on a dark cord, cold yellow light touching my clean-shaven skull and breaking in spears across the floor. Cobwebs suspended like silken parachutes in corners beyond the light. Old Pony duffel between my legs packed with wintergreen liniment and Vaseline, foul protector, mouthguard with cinnamon Dentyne embedded in the teeth prints. I've got my hand wraps laid out on my lap, winding grimy herringbone around the left thumb, wrist, the meat of my palm. Time was, I had strong hands\u2014nutcrackers, Teddy Hutch called them. By now they've been broken so many times the bones are like crockery shards in a muslin bag. You get one hard shot before they shatter.\n\nA man with a swollen face pokes his head through the door. He rolls a gnarled toscano cigarillo to the side of his mouth and says, \"You ready? Best for you these yahoos don't get any drunker.\"\n\n\"Got a hot water bottle?\" Roll my neck low, touch chin to chest. \"Can't get loose.\"\n\n\"Where do you think you are, Caesars Palace? When you're set, it's down the hall and up a flight of stairs.\"\n\nI was born Eddie Brown, Jr., on July 19, 1966, in San Benito, a hard-scrabble town ten miles north of the Tex-Mex border; \"somewhere between nowhere and adi\u00f3s,\" my mother said of her adopted home town. My father, a Border Patrol agent, worked the international fenceline running from McAllen to Brownsville and up around the horn to the Padre Island chain off the coast. On a clear July day you'd see illegals sunning their lean bodies on the projecting headlands, soaking up heat like seals before embarking on a twilight crossing to the shores of Laguna Madre. He met his wife-to-be on a cool September evening when her raft\u2014uneven lengths of peachwood lashed together with twine, a plastic milk jug skirt\u2014butted the prow of his patrolling johnboat.\n\n\"It was cold, wind blowing off the Gulf,\" my mother once told me. \"M\u00edo Dios. The raft seem okay when I go, but then the twine is breaking and those jugs fill with water. Those waters swimming with tiger sharks plump as hens, so many entrangeros borricos to gobble up. I'm thinking I'm seeing these shapes,\" her index finger described the sickle of a shark's fin. \"I'm thinking why I leave Cuidad Miguel\u2014 was that so terrible? But I wanted the land of opportunity.\" An ironic gesture: shoulders shrugged, eyes rolled heavenwards. \"I almost made it, Ed, yeah?\"\n\nMy father's eyes rose over a copy of the Daily Sentinel. \"A few more hours and you'd've washed up somewhere, my dear.\"\n\nThe details of that boat ride were never revealed, so I'll never know whether love blossomed or a sober deal was struck. I can picture my mother wrapped in an emergency blanket, sitting beside my father as he worked the hand-throttle on an old Evinrude, the glow of a harvest moon touching the soft curve of her cheek. Maybe something stirred. But I can also picture a hushed negotiation as they lay anchored at the government dock, maiden's hair slapping the pilings and jaundiced light spilling between the bars of the holding cell beyond. She was a classic Latin beauty: raven hair and polished umber skin, a birthmark on her left cheek resembling a bird in distant flight. Many border guards took Mexican wives; the paperwork wasn't difficult to push through. My sister was born that year. Three years later, me.\n\nI finish wrapping my hands and stand, bobbing on the tips of my toes. Tug the sweatshirt hood up, cinch the drawstring. Half-circle to the left, feint low and fire a right cross, arm cocked at a ninety-degree L to generate maximum force. Torque the hips, still bobbing slightly, three stiff jabs, turning the elbow out at the end. A lot of people don't like a jabby fighter, a pitty-patter, but a smart boxer knows everything flows off the jab: keeps your opponent at a distance and muffles his offense, plus you're always in a position to counterpunch. And hey, if the guy's glass-jawed or thin-skulled, a jab might just knock him onto queer street.\n\nMy father once took me on his evening rounds. August, so hot even the adders and geckos sought shade. We drove across the dry wash in his patrol Bronco, past clumps of sun-browned chickweed and pokeberry bushes so withered their fruit rattled like hollow plastic beads. He stopped to show me the vents cut through the border fence, chain-link pried back in silvery flaps.\n\n\"Tin snips stashed in a plastic bag tied to an ankle. Swim across the Rio Grande, creep up the bank and cut through.\" A defeated shrug. \"Easy as pie.\"\n\nThe sky was darkening by the time we reached the dock. Walking down the berm to the shoreline, we passed a patch of agaves so sickly even the moonshiners couldn't be bothered. Our boots stirred up clouds of rust-hued dust. Stars hovered at the eastern horizon, casting slivers of metallic light on the water.\n\nMy father cycled the motor, pulling into the bay. Suspended between day and night, the sky was a tight-sheened purple, shiny as eggplant skin. The oily stink of exhaust mingled with the scent of creosote and Cherokee rose. To one side, the fawn-colored foothills of west Texas rolled in knuckled swells beneath a bank of violet-edged clouds. To the other, the Sierra Madres were a finned ridge, wedges of terra cotta light burning though the gaps. A brush fire burned distantly to the north, wavering funnels of flame holding the darkness at bay. Stars stood on their reflections at the Rio Grande's delta, a seam of perfectly smooth water where river met ocean.\n\nMy father fired a flare into the sky. As the comet of red light arced, he squinted at the water's surface lit by the spreading contrail.\n\n\"They don't understand how dangerous it is,\" he said. \"The pulls and undertows. Fighting a stiff current all the way.\" He pulled a Black Cat cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. \"Shouldn't feel any responsibility, truly. Not like I make them take the plunge. Everyone thinks it's sunnier on the other side of the street.\" I snap off a few more jabs as my heart falls into pre-fight rhythm. Sweat's coming now, clear odorless beads collecting on my brow and clinging to the short hairs of my wrists. Twist the sink's spigot and splash cold, sulfurous water on my face. A milky crack bisects the mirror, running up the left side of my neck to the jaw before turning sharply, cleaving my lips and continuing north through cheek and temple. Stare at my face split into unequal portions: forehead marbled with knots of sub-dermal scar tissue and nose broken in the center, the angle of cartilage obtuse. Weak fingers of light crawl around the base of my skull, shadowing the deep pits of my sockets.\n\nThirty-seven years old. Not so old. Too old for this.\n\nOn my fourteenth birthday my father drove me to Top Rank, a boxing gym owned by ex-welterweight contender Exum Speight. I'd been tussling at school, and I guess he figured the sport might channel that aggression. We walked through a black door set in a flat tin-roofed building, inhaling air cooler but somehow denser than the air from the street. The gym was as spacious as a dance hall and dim, vapor lamps set in the ceiling. The ring erected in the center with a row of folding chairs in front. A punching bag platform stood between two dusty tinted windows on the left. An old movie poster hung on the water-stained wall: The Joe Louis Story. America's Greatness was in his FISTS, the tagline read, The Screen's Big Story in his HEART! A squat black man worked the speed bag in a ponderous rhythm while a Philco radio played \"Boogie Oogie Oogie,\" by A Taste of Honey.\n\nA short thin man in his early forties exited the office. He wore a checkered blazer with leatherette elbow patches and a brown fedora with faded salt stains peaking the hatband. \"How you doing, fellas?\"\n\n\"You Speight?\"\n\n\"Exum's up in Chicago with a fighter,\" the man told my father. \"Jack Cantrales. I mind the shop while he's gone.\"\n\nJack made me skip rope for a few minutes, then quoted a monthly training fee. My father shook his hand again and said, \"Be back in a few hours, Eddie.\"\n\nFor the next two years I spent every free minute at Top Rank. As Exum Speight busied himself with the heavyweights, my training fell to Cantrales. Jack was an amiable bullshitter, always joking and free with advice, but later I came to realize he was one of the milling coves known to haunt boxing clubs, the \"gym bums.\" Gym bums were pugilistic has-beens or never-wases\u2014Cantrales's pro record stood at 3-18-2, his sole attribute an ability to consume mass quantities of red leather\u2014who hovered, wraithlike, around promising fighters.\n\nGym bums were also known to squeeze a penny 'til it screamed, and Contrales was typical of the breed: he once slid his foot over a coin a kid had dropped, shrugged, and told the kid it must've rolled into the sewer.\n\nIt was a dime.\n\nNear the end of high school Cantrales booked my first fight at Rosalita's, a honkeytonk border bar. My parents would've never allowed it had they known, so I squeezed through my bedroom window after lights out and met Cantrales at the end of the block. He drove a Chevelle 454 SS\u2014car had get-up like a scalded cat.\n\n\"You loose?\" he asked as we fled down the I-38 to Norias. June bugs hammered the windshield, exoskeletons shattering with a high tensile sound, bodies bursting in pale yellow riots.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said, though I couldn't stop shaking. \"Loose.\"\n\n\"That's good.\" Cantrales had recently switched his fedora in favor of a captain's hat of a style worn by Captain Merrill Stubing on Love Boat. Dashboard light reflected off the black plastic visor, according his features a malign aspect. \"You'll eat this frito bandito up.\"\n\nRosalita's was a clapboard tonk cut out of a canebrake. Acres of cane swayed in the wind's grip, dry stalks clashing with a hollow sound, bamboo wind chimes.\n\nInside was dark and fusty. Hank Snow growled about some woman's cheatin' heart from a heat-warped Wurlitzer. Off in the corner: a canted plankboard ring, red and blue ropes sagging from the ring posts. I bent between the ropes and shuffled to the four corners, shadowboxing. A rogue's gallery of bloodsport enthusiasts swiveled on their bar stools. Someone called, \"Looking sharp, kiddo!\" My opponent was a whippet-thin Mexican in his mid-thirties. White sneakers, no socks, a clean white towel around his neck. His hair plastered to his skull in black ropes. He looked exhausted. Mexican fighters often hopped the border on the night they were to fight, winding up at Rosalita's soaked from the swim and gashed from razor wire, sometimes pursued by feral dogs roaming the lowlands.\n\nI took a hellish beating. The fight was a four-round smoker, each round three minutes long. Those twelve minutes stretched into an eternity, especially the final three, eyes swelled to pinhole slits and gut aching from the Mexie's relentless assault. The guy knew things about momentum and leverage I'd never learned in sparring sessions, how to angle a hook so it grazed my abdomen and robbed my breath, leaving slashes of glove-burned flesh. It was as though he possessed secret information about the exact placement of my organs, finding the kidneys and liver, drilling hard crosses into my short rib. I pissed red for days. Between rounds the bartender\u2014who doubled as cutman\u2014 tended to my rapidly expanding face. He wore a visor, the kind worn by blackjack dealers, Vaseline smeared on the green plastic brim. He'd reach up and scoop a blob to grease my cheeks.\n\n\"You're breaking him down,\" Jack lied. \"Stick and move, Eddie.\"\n\nBy the final round the Mexican looked slightly ashamed. He ducked punches nimbly, sticking a soft jab in my face or tying me up in close. A chorus of boos arose: the shadowy bar patrons were anticipating a KO. The only damaging shot I landed all night was a right hook to the Mexican's crotch. It wasn't on purpose: my eyes were so swelled I couldn't see what I was punching. He took the foul in good spirit, pulling me close until our heads touched, whispering, \"Cuidado, lo blo, cuidado.\"\n\nAfterwards I sat on the trunk of Jack's Chevelle pressing an icepack to my neck. There was a tinny ringing in my ears and the moon held a wavering penumbra. I concentrated on not throwing up. Contrales handed over my fight purse: five dollars, management fee and transportation surcharge deducted.\n\n\"You were tight. Gotta let go with a few bombs or you get no respect. He laid your ass on the canvas five or six times, but you stood up.\n\nCounts for something, right? Little bastard was sharp,\" Jack admitted. \"A dead game fighter.\"\n\nI nodded vaguely, not paying much attention, more concerned with how I'd explain my state to my folks.\n\n\"You fight, you lose. You fight, you win. You fight,\" Jack suggested, heading back inside for a fifth of off-sale Johnny Red.\n\nThe Mexican exited Rosalita's. He moved out into the cane, clearing the razor-edged stalks from his path with still-taped hands. Spokes of heat lightning flashed behind a bank of night clouds, whetting the foothills in crimson light. The fighter walked gingerly, no wasted movement. He stopped at a grove of palmettos and glanced up at a low bronze moon, orienting himself to the land before melting into the trees. I thought about the coming hours as he hiked to the border and scaled the fence, where perhaps a boat was moored amidst the cattails. He'd battle the Rio Grande's currents as they bore him to the far shore, then another hike would bring him to an adobe house in one of the fringing settlements. I pictured his wife and children: his wife's oval face and fine-boned hands, shafts of dawn sunlight slanting low-angled and orange through an open window to touch his daughter's sleeping eyes. The fantasy may've stood in sharp contrast to the abject reality\u2014perhaps the man had nothing worth fighting for\u2014perhaps all that waited was a lightless room, a bottle of mescal.\n\nLooking back now, I do not believe that was the case. Reach a certain experience level, you don't fight without reason. You've seen too many boxers hurt, killed even, to treat matches as dick-swinging contests. Fighting becomes a job, stepping into the ring punching a clock. It's a pragmatic pursuit, opponents' equations to be solved using the chimerical physics of reach, height, spacing, leverage, heart. You'd no more fight outside the ropes than a factory lineman would work a shift for no pay. I entered my first fight for no other reason than to see if I could, testing what I thought I'd known against the unknown reality.\n\nI lost because I was green, yes, but also because nothing was really at stake: my life wouldn't've been substantially better or worse, win or lose. The Mexican stepped between the ropes with the subdued air of a man entering an office cubicle. When he realized it was going to be an easy day he leaned back in his chair, kicked off his shoes. He didn't give the crowd what they wanted, didn't hurt me without cause. His job was to defeat his opponent, and he did. But he wouldn't be there without reason. He fought for the money, and for those he loved.\n\nA family waited on the other side of that river. I know that now. I know what it means to fight for a reason.\n\nThe hallway's lit by forty-watt bulbs set behind meshed screens. The cement perspires, as do the oxidized copper pipes overhead. Rivulets of brown water spill from the joists. The place is a foreclosed steelworks factory. Corkscrews of drilled iron crunch beneath my boots. The air smells of mildewed rock and ozone. Up through the layers of concrete and wires and piping the crowd issues a gathering buzz that beats against my eardrums.\n\nWe fight bare-knuckle, or nearly so. A nostalgic few see it as a throwback to the days when barrel-chested dockhands brawled aboard barges moored off the New York harbor. It's not throwback so much as regression. A dogfight. No referees. No ten count. The winner is the man left standing. Rabbit punches and low blows, eye gouges, headbutts\u2014I once saw a fishhook tear a man's face open, lip to high ear. Fighters score their hand wraps with sandpaper, soak them in turpentine, wind concertina wire around their knuckles.\n\nI fight fair. Try to, anyhow.\n\nI graduated high school in the spring of 1984. Excelling at English and Languages, I was accepted to Wiley College on a scholarship. That August I moved north to Marshall and spent three years living in my sister Gail's basement, studying and continuing to box. Gail's husband Steve was a journeyman carpenter and drywaller; he converted the unfinished basement into an apartment: bedroom and kitchenette, a small training area to skip rope and practice footwork. I'd squirrel myself away during midterms and finals, but otherwise spent my time reading in the family room, shooting hoops on the driveway net, or raiding the fridge. Gail occasionally tripped over my gym kit or spied a pair of hand wraps laid over the armrest of her favorite chair and pitched a fit, but for the most part we got along. Steve was a long-haul trucker circuiting between San Antonio and Sioux Falls. On my twenty-first birthday he bought a case of Lone Star and we sat on the back porch until the flagstones were littered with empties and we were howling at the moon.\n\nWith Steve hauling and Gail landing a teller job at Marshall First Trust, babysitting duties fell to me. My nephew Jacob was ten months old when I moved in. An inquisitive boy with a sweet temperament. The kid was forever crawling out of sight, disappearing around corners or behind curtains, knees pumping so quickly I was sure friction would singe the carpet. We'd play this game where Jake stuck his fingers in my mouth and I'd curl my lips over my teeth and bite down gently, growling; Jake would shriek\u2014a garbled string of syllables, \"eep-ooo-ap!\" or \"yee-ack!\" or \"boo-ta-tet!\"\u2014and pull his hand away. This went on for hours, until I became slightly nauseated by the taste of Jake's hand, a blend of sweat and mucus and the residue of whatever bacterial micro-sites he'd investigated that day. I remember the way Jake's gaze locked with mine, fingers inches from my mouth, his eyes glowing, positively aflame, as though to say\u2014\n\n\"Look at the runt. Gonna get creamed! Run along find your daddy, peckerwood!\"\n\nThe spectators hurl other insults, but these two I pick up clearly. There looks to be a hundred or more, ranged around a barricade of sawhorses stolen from a construction site: bright orange, flashing halogen discs screwed to the horizontal beams. The intermittently blinking lights brighten the spectators' faces in ghostly yellows: a pack of blood hungry crazies waving dollar bills. Moonlight pours through holes rusted in the roof, silver shafts gilding the crossbeams and glossing feathery shapes roosting in the latticework. A hypnotic sound underlies the hollering crowd: a distant, nearly sub-audible clash and cycle, the sound of long-derelict machinery shuddering uneasily to life.\n\nMy opponent is a dreadlocked kid two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me. Goes by Nicodemus. Bare-chested, his arms are swelled, monstrous. Tribal tattoos crisscross the ribbed muscula- ture of his stomach; ornate curlicues encircle his extruded bellybutton, giving it the look of a sightless eye. He turns to his cutman and says, \"Who this, the shoeshine boy? Mus' be my birthday.\"\n\nWe meet in the center of the ring, where the cigarillo-smoking promoter runs down the stakes: a thousand cash to the winner, five hundred to the loser.\n\nNicodemus dry-gulches me while the guy's still laying out the stakes, a hard sucker punch glancing off the high ridge of cheek, splitting bone. The blow drops me to my knees. Chill static wind pours through my skull, electric snakes skating the bones of my arms and legs. Nicodemus shrugs and smiles, as though to say, Hey, you knew the score when you stepped up, then wades in swinging. Guess the fight's started without me. It's not uncommon.\n\nI graduated in '87 and moved north to Pennsylvania. Having trained and fought steadily through college, I'd amassed a Golden Gloves record of 13-1. Teddy Hutch, an Olympic boxing coach, caught one of my fights and invited me to his training facility in Butler. The welterweight division was thin, he said; I could earn a berth on the qualifying squad. The program covered food and accommodation. His prospects worked at a local box factory.\n\nI arrived in Butler late September. The trees and water, even the sky: everything was different. The Texas sky was not completely blue; its colour, I've come to realize, was more of a diffuse lavender. The skies of Pennsylvania were a piercing, monotone blue; they pressed down with a palpable weight. The tattery, see-through clouds I'd known since childhood were replaced with thick cumulus formations. And the cold\u2014me and a Hawaiian boxer named David Tua bundled ourselves in sweaters and jackets on the mildest of fall days, much to the amusement of the Minnesotans and Dakotans in training.\n\nThe prospects were billeted in a ranch house. The land behind fell away to a lake ringed by hemlocks and firs, rising to a wooded escarpment. We roused at five o'clock each morning and ate breakfast at long tables before donning road gear to run a three-mile circuit around the lake. Afterwards we herded into a school bus bound for Olympia Paper, where we spent the next nine hours ranged along canvas belt lines, driven half-mad by the pneumatic hiss of the fold-and-stamp machines. When the shift whistle blew we were driven to the Cyclone, a downtown boxing gym. We trained until eight o'clock before dragging ourselves to the bus, bolting dinner, and flopping into bed for lights out.\n\nIt was a rough life, and a lot of fighters couldn't stomach it: prospects came and went with such frequency Teddy considered installing a turnstile. But the regimen yielded results: I packed on ten pounds of muscle in eight months, and my cardiovascular endurance shot through the roof. My sparring partner was a Dixieland welter- weight named Jimmy Carmichael. Jimmy had a peacemaker of a left cross; we beat each other black and blue in the ring but spent our days off together, catching the Sunday matinee and wolfing thick wedges of pecan pie at Marcy's on Lagan Street.\n\nJake visited that March. Steve was hauling a load up to Rochester and brought Jake along to visit. Steve dropped him off mid-morning, and we arranged to meet later for dinner. I was surprised how much Jake had grown. His cheeks, framed by the furred hood of a new winter jacket, were flush and rosy.\n\n\"How ya been, jellybean?\" I said.\n\n\"I been fine, pal o' mine,\" he said, repeating the greeting I'd taught him.\n\nJake was antsy following the long drive. We walked down to the lake. A low fog rolled across the frozen water, faint ripples thickening into groundmist at the tree line. We held hands. Every fir looked dusted in powdered sugar. Jake's hand slipped from mine as he ran ahead. He said, \"I've never seen so much white.\"\n\nThe lake was a flat opaque sheet. A murder of crows congregated on a tree shattered under a weight of snow. The northern boys skated here on weekends; I saw the ruts their blades had left in the ice. Jake ran out, falling, sliding, getting up, running faster.\n\n\"Hey,\" I called. \"Hey, slow 'er down, big guy.\"\n\nI was raised in a part of Texas where the only ice was of the cubed variety. I'd only seen snow in Christmas movies. I mean, what did I know of ice? I knew it felt good pressed to the back of my neck between rounds. My five-year-old nephew ran heedlessly, hood tugged down around his shoulders, fine sandy hair and clean tanned skin brightened by the sun. What did he know of ice? Perhaps that it melted quickly on a summer sidewalk. Did he even know that much? We were both ignorant. But I should've known.\n\nNicodemus rushes across the ring, jackhammering his fists. He throws a series of haymakers so slow he might as well have telegraphed them last week; I feint from a kneeling position and hammer a left hook into his ass, nailing the sciatic nerve. Shrieking, he limps back. I struggle to my feet and bicycle into the open ring. From time to time someone shouts Nicodemus's name, and under that the distant hum of machinery.\n\nHe throws a looping right that I duck, rising with a short-armed cross to the midriff. He bulls me into a corner. I juke, try to circle clear, but he steps on my foot and hits me with an overhand right. Lips flatten against teeth, mouth filling with the taste of rust and bone. The air shimmers, shards of filigreed light raining down like shiny foil in a tickertape parade. I go down heavily under a sawhorse, staring up at a dark forest of legs.\n\nI can no longer consciously recall the sound that ice made as it broke. Sometimes I'll hear another noise\u2014the low crumple of a beer can; the squeal of an old nail pried from a sodden plank\u2014similar in some way, timbre or pitch or resonance, and realize it lives somewhere inside me now. I remember the fault line racing out to meet him, a silver crease transecting the ice like a cracked whip. It seemed to advance slowly, a thin sluggish snake zigging and zagging; it was as though I had only to holler \"Step back!\" and it would rip harmlessly past.\n\nWater shot up in thin pressurized needles from hairline cracks under Jake's feet. He lurched sideways, outflung arms seeking balance. The ice pan broke in half, plates levering up, a V of frozen water with Jake plunging through the middle.\n\nI laughed. Maybe Jake looked silly going down, mouth and eyes wide, hands clutching at the broken border of ice that crumbled like spun sugar in his grasp. Maybe I could not conceive the danger: I pictured the two of us sitting before the fireplace in the big safe house, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, a mug of hot chocolate, tendrils of steam rising off Jake's wet pants as they dried.\n\n\"Hold on, big fella,\" I said. \"Do the eggbeater!\"\n\nMy boots skidded along the ice. I overbalanced, fell down. Jake churned foam, clothes plumping with water. Everything seemed all right until I saw the fear and confusion, deep thin creases out of place on a face so young; I saw, with the dreamlike clarity that colors all memories of the event, molecular beads of water clinging to his cheeks and nose. I crawled forward, outspread hands distributing my weight. Jake splashed and kicked and called out in a reedy whisper, nose and mouth barely above water. Ice crackling under my hands and chunks of ice floating on the water and the trees of the near shore wrapped in transparent icy layers. So much ice.\n\nHe stopped struggling abruptly, just hanging there, eyes closed, water trickling into his mouth. Only his chin and the tips of his fingers floated clear. I reached the edge and extended a hand. The supporting ridge broke away and my chest and head slipped below the surface. Cold black water pressed against my eyeballs. I caught movement through the brown water and grabbed something\u2014smooth and slim, perhaps a jacket sleeve\u2014but the cold made my fingers clumsy and it slipped through. The lake shoved me back and forth, currents stronger than I'd imagined. Sinewy shapes turned over in the murk, shapes like seal pups at play.\n\nI broke the surface snorting streams of water, wiping away cords of snot. I stared into the swirling blackness in search of movement, a leg kicking, fingers grasping. I plunged my arm in, stirring around, hopeful: a few strands of eelgrass draped over numb fingers. Not knowing what to do, I called his name. \"Jake!\" The word echoed uselessly across the flat expanse.\n\nWhen my voice died away I heard it: a sustained resonant thump. I couldn't tell where it came from. The ice trembled. A dark form was pressed to the chalky sheet a few feet to the left, trapped beneath the surface. It twisted and thrashed, beating the ice.\n\nI crawled towards the shape\u2014crawled on my hands and knees like a fucking infant. Ice pocked with craters and boils from thawing and re-freezing. I saw a dim outline down there, a creature of crude lines and angles. The ice shuddered; fresh-fallen snow jumped off the surface, resettling. My fingers spread across the milky whiteness and ears plugged with frozen lake water, a frantic buzzing between.\n\nI made a fist with my right hand and brought it down. The ice buckled, splintered, but held. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, a white-hot bolt. I raised the right again\u2014my lead hand, the dynamite right\u2014smashing the ice. It broke and my fist plunged into the darkness, grasping frantically, closing on nothing. A powerful current caught hold of Jake and he drifted sideways, beyond my grasp. Something passed through my fingers\u2014a bootlace?\n\nI tracked the shape beneath the ice. The freezing water on my arms crackled like dull metal. My teeth chattered and I called his name. Maybe I was screaming.\n\nPassing beneath a patch of perfectly clear, glasslike ice, I caught his face through the scalloped sheet. Lips and nostrils robin's egg blue, the rest a creamy shade of gray. Cheek flattened to the ice, the buoyancy of flesh pushing him up. Eyes so blue, luminously blue, pearlescent air bubbles clinging to the dark lashes. A sinuous white flash below, silky curve of a trout's belly.\n\nMy right hand was badly broken: knuckles split and flesh peeled to the wrist, a lot of blood, some bones. I slammed my left hand down. The ice fractured in a radiating spiderweb. Water shot up through the fissures. My hand shattered like a china plate. Didn't feel a thing at the time. Jake stopped clawing, stopped thumping. His eyes open but rolled to the whites beneath the fine network of cracks. I hammered my left hand down once more, breaking into the icy shock of the lake. I snagged his hood but the hole was too small so I clawed with my free hand, breaking off chunks, razored edges gashing my fingers to the bone.\n\nFinally the hole was wide enough for me to pull him through. A long swipe of mud on Jake's forehead, hair stuck up in rapidly freezing corkscrews. His nose broken and me who'd done it, smashing ice into his face. I gathered him in my arms and stumbled uphill to the house. \"Please,\" I remember saying, over and over, a breathy whisper. \"Please.\"\n\nErnie Munger, a flyweight mending a broken rib, had spent a few summers as a lifeguard. He administered CPR while the cook rang for help. Munger's thick hands pumped the brackish water from Jake's lungs, pumped life back into him. Jake was breathing by the time the paramedics arrived. They snaked a rubber tube down his throat. Afterwards I stood by a large bay window overlooking the lake. The hole, the size of a dime from that distant vantage, was freezing over in the evening chill; tiny red pinpricks represented my bloody handprints on the ice. The splintered bones pulsed: I'd broken forty-five of fifty-four.\n\nI push off the floor and lean against a sawhorse, waiting for the teeth to align and the gears to mesh again. Nicodemus circles somewhere to the left, dancing side to side, weaving through blue shafts of shadow like animate liquid. Some bastard kicks me in the spine, \"Get up and fight, you pitiful son of a bitch.\" Standing, I wonder how long was I down. Eight seconds? No ref, so nobody's counting. A pair of hands clutch my shoulders, shoving, the same voice saying, \"Get out there, chickenshit.\" I strike back with an elbow, impacting something fleshy and forgiving. A muted crack. Those hands fall away.\n\nNicodemus advances and hits me in the face. He grabs a handful of hair and bends me over the sawhorse, pummeling with his lead hand. The skin above my eyes comes apart, soft meat tearing away from the deeply seamed scar tissue. Blood sprays in a fine mist. I blink away red and smack him in the kidneys. He pulls back, nursing his side. Knuckling the blood out of my eyes, I move in throwing jabs. Nicodemus's skull is oddly planed, a tank turret, deflecting my punches. His fists are bunched in front of his mouth, arms spread in an invert funnel leading to the point of his chin: a perfect opening, but not yet. Reaching blindly, he entangles my arms, pulling me to his chest. He rubs his hand wraps across my eyes and I wince at the turpentine sting. I snap an uppercut, thumping him under the heart.\n\nThe hospital room walls were glossy tile, windows inlaid with wire mesh. Jake lay in an elevated hospital bed, shirtless, chest stuck with EKG discs. Outside a heavy mist fell, making a nimbus around the moon and stars. Teddy'd visited the emergency ward earlier, taking one look at my hands and saying I'd never box again. I was on Dilaudid for pain, Haldol for hysteria. My mind was stark and bewildered. A machine helped Jake breathe. His father sat beside the bed, gripping his hand.\n\n\"Is he\u2014will he be all right?\" \"He's alive, Ed.\"\n\nSteve'd never called me that before. Always Eddie. \"Is he...will he wake up soon?\"\n\n\"Nobody can say. There was...damage. Parts shutting down. I don't know, exactly.\"\n\n\"We were...holding hands. He broke away. He'd never done that before. It was so strange. We were holding hands, then he didn't want to do that anymore. It's only human. I let him go. It was okay. I thought, He's growing up, and that's okay.\"\n\nSteve smoothed the white sheets over Jake's legs. \"The golden hour. It's...a period of time. Three minutes, three-and-a-half. The amount of time the brain can survive without oxygen. Only a few minutes, but the doctor called it the golden hour. So...stupid.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nSteve didn't look at me. His hands smoothed the sheets.\n\nI stalk Nicodemus, keeping left, outside his range. His eyes shot with streaks of red, their wavering gaze fixated on the darkness beyond me. I stab forward, placing weight on my lead foot and twisting sharply at the hip, left hand rising towards the point of his chin.\n\nWhen I was a kid, a rancher with a lizard problem paid a dime for every one I killed. I stuffed geckos in a sack and smashed the squirming burlap with a rock.\n\nWhen my fist hits Nicodemus it sounds an awful lot like those geckos.\n\nThe punch forces his jawbone into his neck, spiking a big bundle of nerves. My hand shatters on impact, bones breaking down their old fault lines. Nicodemus's eyes flutter uncontrollably as he falls backward. He falls in defiance of gravity, body hanging on a horizontal plane, arms at his sides, palms upraised. There's a strange look on his face. Not a smile, not exactly, but close. A peaceful expression.\n\nJake's twenty years old now. Comatose fifteen years. Were it not for a certain slackness of features he'd be a handsome young man. He grows a wispy beard, which his mother shaves with an electric razor. I've visited a few times over the years. I sat beside the bed holding his hand, so much larger than the one I held all those years ago. He smiled at the sound of my voice and laughed at one of our shared jokes. Maybe just nerves and old memories. Every penny I make goes to him. Gail and Steve take it because they can use it, and because they know I need to give it.\n\nThere are other ways. I know that. You think I don't know that? This is the only way that feels right.\n\nNicodemus rises to one knee. He looks like something risen from its crypt, shattered jaw hanging lopsidedly, bloodshot eyes albino-red. Pain sings in my broken hand and I vaguely remember a song my mother used to sing when I was very young, sitting on her lap as she rocked me to sleep, beautiful foreign words sung softly into my hair.\n\nHe makes his way across the ring and I dutifully step forward to meet him. We stand facing each other, swaying slightly. My eyes swelled to slits and he moves in a womb of mellow amber light.\n\nAnd I see this:\n\nA pair of young-old eyes opening, the clear blue of them. A hand breaking up from sucking black water, fist smashed through the ice sheet and a body dragging itself to the surface. A boy lying on the ice in the ashy evening light, lungs drawing clean winter air, eyes oriented on a sky where even the palest stars burn intensely after such lasting darkness. I see a man walking across the lake from the west, body casting a lean shadow. He offers his hand: twisted and rheumatoid, a talon. The boy's face smooth and unlined, preserved beneath the ice; the man's face a roadmap of knots and scar tissue and poorly knitted bones. For a long moment, the boy does not move. Then he reaches up, takes that hand. The man clasps tightly; the boy gasps at the fierceness of his grip. I see them walking towards a distant house. Squares of light burning in odd windows, a crackling fire, blankets, hot chocolate. The man leans down and whispers something. The boy laughs\u2014a beautiful, snorting laugh, fine droplets of water spraying from his nose. They walk together. Neither leads or follows. I see this happening. I still hold a belief in this possibility.\n\nWe circle in a dimming ring of light, feet spread, fists balled, knees flexed. The crowd recedes, as do the noises they are making. The only sound is a distant subterranean pound, the beat of a giant's heart. Shivering silver mist falls through the holes in the roof and that coldness feels good on my skin.\n\nNicodemus steps forward on his lead foot, left hand sweeping in a tight downwards orbit, flecks of blood flying off his brow as his head snaps with the punch. I come forward on my right foot, stepping inside his lead and angling my head away from his fist but not fast enough, tensing for it while my right hand splits his guard, barely passing through the narrowing gap and I'm torquing my shoulder, throwing everything I've got into it, kitchen-sinking the bastard, and, for a brilliant split second in the center of that darkening ring, we meet.\nCraig Davidson\n\nhas written four books: Rust and Bone, The Fighter, Sarah Court and Cataract City. His nonfiction and fiction has appeared in Esquire, GQ, The Walrus, Salon, Nerve, The London Observer, The Cincinatti Review, Avenue, Agni, Event, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, SubTerrain and elsewhere. His first book was made into a film directed by Jacques Audiard, starring Marion Cotillard. Graduate of the UNB Creative Writing Program and the University of Iowa's MFA program. Currently jobless.\n\nBLUE HAWAII\n\nREBECCA JONES-HOWE\n\nThe wheels of the jogging stroller squeak with every turn, timing the anxiety in my chest, making me think of rum rushing from the bottle to a glass. Cold and refreshing. It's the sort of thought that jogging can't push away.\n\nEvery run uphill makes me feel like I'm starting over.\n\nMy calves throb. There's a heat wave in my throat, making every exhale a cough. I wipe at the sweat on my face, smearing the cover-up on my lip.\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\nThe baby starts crying. Leaning over the handle of the stroller, I reach out and touch her cheek. Her eyes close tight and her mouth gapes. Her screeches fill my ears.\n\n\"Please stop,\" I gasp.\n\nShe doesn't. I turn the stroller around, the summer heat bearing down on my walk back home. The squeaking wheels and the baby's wails force me to shut my eyes. Even the speed bump at the entrance to the townhouse complex feels like a burden.\n\n\"Hey, there. Hey!\" It's a male voice calling.\n\nI turn around and the new neighbour jogs past. He's wearing a navy blue shirt and white jogging shorts. A sweatband pushes his brown hair back. \"Hey,\" he says again, jogging on the spot. \"You okay? You don't look so great. You look beat, just totally beat.\"\n\nHe's tall, lean. He scratches at his beard. His pupils are dilated, but I can still see that his eyes are the colour of Blue Hawaii, the first drink I ever had. All I can think of is the chilled pineapple sweetness as my gaze trickles down. He's sweating, and the fabric of his shirt clings to his chest.\n\nMy fingers tense around the stroller.\n\nHe's got a water bottle. He rotates it in his grasp, spinning circles so fast that the water clings to the sides. \"You live right there, right?\" he asks, pointing. \"I know because I saw you. You were in the window with that other girl. You were watching me move all my shit.\"\n\n\"That was my sister, Marie,\" I say. \"I live with her and her baby. She just went back to work after her maternity leave.\"\n\n\"You should come in,\" he says, paying no attention to the crying infant in the stroller. \"You're not busy, right? I can show you my place.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say, looking at him.\n\n\"Come on.\" He jogs backwards, his smile too nice, eyes so intense like Blue Hawaii vacation excitement. \"Come on,\" he urges. \"You can have a glass of water. I promise I'll make it cold and relieving. I promise. I guarantee, even.\"\n\nX\n\nThere's an ant's nest beside his front door, a swarm of black spots crawling around my feet. Inside, his place is barren, the boxes still taped up, stacked beside his kitchen counter. There's a couch in the living room. The suede clings to the sweat on my thighs when I sit down.\n\nHe gets me a glass of water and he sits beside me, watching me while I drink. \"You had a cleft lip,\" he says.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You did at one point, didn't you?\" He rubs at his nose, sniffing. \"I mean, it doesn't look like it, but I can see the scar.\"\n\nMy hand flinches, touching the uneven skin. He catches my wrist, his palm hot, sweaty. I jerk my hand away.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he says. He laughs, reaching out again, rubbing his thumb over the scar. \"I've seen all those pictures of babies with cleft lips. It's crazy that those kids can look so normal, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I guess,\" I say. The scar throbs and I stare down at the floor, thinking like ants are crawling around my feet, flashbacks of my first memories: learning to speak without slurring or spewing spit, trying to explain to classmates why my mouth was so ugly, all that social withdrawal sewn up inside my restructured upper lip. It's hard to breathe. I turn my head and take a drink. The water's cold but it doesn't provide the right kind of relief.\n\n\"Do you want to do something?\" He leans forward, hands shaking, edging toward my leg. \"Do you want to fuck?\" he asks.\n\nMy fingers slip against the condensation on the glass.\n\n\"Sex is just the best when I'm high,\" he says. \"It feels so fucking good.\"\n\nI shift, feeling his grasp on my thigh. \"What are you high on?\"\n\nHis lips curl into a smile. \"It's coke,\" he says. \"It makes me want to fuck you so fucking hard.\" He fingers at the leg of my shorts, pinching the fabric.\n\nMy gaze drifts to the baby, now asleep. Her head's slumped forward. Her eyes are closed and her mucus-filled nose makes sounds every time she breathes in and out, dazed, dreaming.\n\nHe leans in. I can smell his cologne, mixed with perspiration, sweet and salty, something new, something different. I set the glass down on the floor. \"You have to be quiet,\" I say. \"You can't wake her, okay?\"\n\nHe's got a face beyond my league, but he kisses me, eager. His tongue probes past the scar, slipping in deep. A gasp slips up my throat and my limbs go loose, veins running hot, heart throbbing. This is what everything used to feel like when I first started drinking. No tension, just a black hole to fill with anything.\n\n\"My name's Ian,\" he says, climbing over me on the couch. His shaking fingers slide under my shirt, tickling my stomach. He stares me down, his big eyes just dark holes with blue edges. He's somewhere else, somewhere better. He kisses me again, thick saliva in my throat, taking me with him.\n\nHe pulls at my clothes, pulls his shorts down so he can shove his dick between my legs. \"You're so fucking wet,\" he says, grabbing my knees, pushing himself in. \"Fuck,\" he says, his voice forced, shouting. \"You fucking like me, don't you? You fucking want me, don't you, baby?\"\n\nHe wakes the baby. The cries squeal like the stroller wheels.\n\nI shut my eyes as I smooth my palms over his chest, feeling the rapid pace of his heartbeat, the pulsing throbs. Under him, everything else is hard to hear.\n\nX\n\nWhen Marie comes home from work, I sit up straight in the couch, holding the baby, pretending there's nothing to hide.\n\n\"I met the new neighbour today,\" I say.\n\n\"Oh yeah?\" She sets her purse down on the table.\n\n\"His name's Ian,\" I say. \"He's really nice. He showed me his place.\"\n\nShe looks at me. My lip itches and I rub it with my wrist, sniffing. I can still smell the sweat on my skin.\n\n\"How was Emma today?\" she asks, taking the baby.\n\n\"Fussy,\" I say. \"I don't think she likes jogging, the motion of it. I don't think it does anything for her.\"\n\nX\n\nAt night Ian follows me, chases me through the dirt trail beside the highway. The sun beats down on my skin. I can barely run, and he tackles me into the sagebrush, the dirt scraping my knees. There's an ant's nest beside my face.\n\n\"What did your mouth look like?\" he asks.\n\n\"I don't remember,\" I say. \"My mom never took pictures of me.\"\n\n\"It was probably a hole you could slip right into,\" he says. He slides two fingers into the nest and the ants crawl out. I realize he's naked, that I'm naked. I wince, arching myself against his hard-on. He enters me, invades me, and I gasp, the ants finding a new home in my mouth, crawling inside.\n\nI wake up in my bedroom. There's nothing but black outside the tiny window, and I lay there, looking at the shadows, the comfort of them.\n\nX\n\nI put the baby in the stroller, her little mouth filled with a pacifier so she's quiet, non-existent. I walk across the parking lot and knock on Ian's door. He's shaved off his beard and his face is marked with little red nicks. His skin looks sallow. He looks at me with empty blue eyes. There's a plastic bottle of white powder clutched in his hand. I push the stroller in and close the door.\n\n\"I just want to do another line,\" he says. \"That's all I ever want to do. That's all I can think about.\" His voice is low, quiet, the way mine used to sound when going out stopped being about blended drinks and partying, when it became solely about booze, its influence feeding my veins.\n\n\"It's better to talk than to keep it all in,\" I say.\n\n\"What does it matter to you?\"\n\n\"I was an alcoholic,\" I say. \"I know what it's like.\"\n\nHe stares.\n\n\"It's still hard, trying not to think about drinking, knowing it's not an option. Everything's harder now.\" My gaze drops and I lean my head against his chest, breathing in, inhaling the scent of him.\n\nHis fingers curl around the bottle. \"The first time I did it, I felt like angels were in the walls, talking to me, giving me energy and powers. Now the highs never last as long. I never know what to do. Every time I come down, I can't even...I can't do anything.\"\n\n\"You can't be in denial,\" I say, \"You're only going to feel worse.\" My lip twitches. He watches me rub at the scar. \"I tried to cut it open once,\" I say. \"Marie found me in the bathroom with a knife. I told her there was nowhere else for the bullshit to go. The hole had to get bigger. She started crying then. She didn't know what to say. Nobody ever did.\"\n\nHis hand starts shaking, clutching the bottle like a tiny martini shaker. The powder inside looks like drink froth.\n\n\"There's no point taking it out on yourself,\" I say. \"It's better when you're not alone.\"\n\nHe pours a bump on his wrist and he snorts it back. His chest heaves in and out. He looks at me, his lips tight, eyes wide, hot. He smiles. Blue Hawaii vacation relief.\n\nI want it. I want him.\n\nX\n\nMarie wakes me up, walking into my bedroom with the baby wailing in her arms. \"Where's Emma's pacifier?\" she asks. \"You had it this morning. She can't fall asleep without it.\"\n\n\"I don't know\" I say. \"Maybe it fell out at Ian's place.\"\n\n\"What?\" Her face is blurry in the dark. \"You went there again?\"\n\n\"I was talking with him. What's wrong with that?\"\n\n\"You're supposed to be looking after Emma,\" she says.\n\n\"I get bored sometimes,\" I say. \"What do you expect, that I'm just going to sit by myself all day trying to get her to talk?\"\n\nMarie groans. \"I'm not having this argument now,\" she says. She slams the door, but it doesn't mask the sound of the baby's colic cries.\n\nX\n\nIan never unpacks. He tells me that he's started selling stuff to pay for more cocaine. He's so high, so excited, stubble on his face. He lets his beard grow back.\n\nI buy pacifiers. There's a bag of them on his kitchen counter. The baby cries and I pop one in. Her mouth is so pretty, so perfect. Her lips close around the pacifier and she falls asleep like a normal person. Then Ian does another line.\n\nEvery climb up to his bedroom makes me feel like I'm starting over. Blue Hawaii vacation refreshment.\n\nX\n\nHe doesn't have a bed. There's just a mattress on the floor, and it squeaks like the baby's stroller when he fucks me on it. He's shaved again. The scabs are thick, dark, almost black, like tiny ants are crawling on his face. His nostrils are lined in red.\n\nHis room smells like sweat and bile and aftermath. Sickness. His dick slips in, going hard, fast, deep, until I'm moaning, feeling cramps in my abdomen. He groans, pulling out, gushing all over my torso. He rubs his hands over the sticky white, slides two fingers into my mouth, making me taste him.\n\n\"Don't you like me?\" he asks. \"Don't you want me?\"\n\nHe pries my lip up, right where the scar is. \"What's it like, knowing you were born with all the ugly on the outside?\" His voice is aggressive. \"Don't you ever just want to cut yourself open again, make another fucking hole?\"\n\nI feel like insects are crawling in my veins.\n\n\"It used to be so different,\" he says, voice cracking.\n\nI wince, but I can't shake him off. He clings to me, bearing his nails against my skin so they feel like tiny bites, stinging all over. His groan echoes, turns into a cough. My lip throbs.\n\n\"It's never like it used to be,\" he says, his eyes turning red, blinking, tears slipping. It's like a Blue Hawaii vacation gone awry.\n\nHe starts crying, deep moans that sound stuck in his throat. It's how I imagine my cries sounding when I was a baby, when my mouth was still a gaping open mess. I crawl away from him, his sweetness diluted on my tongue.\n\nX\n\nI watch him from the living room window, holding the baby. She cries and I rock her, watching Ian as he bends down over the doorstep, a can of aerosol can of insect killer clutched in his unsteady hand.\n\nMarie comes home.\n\n\"Jessica, are you okay?\"\n\nI shake my head, my fingers flinching, the baby slipping. Marie takes her, pats her back. She looks out the window.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I say. \"I relapsed.\"\n\nMarie looks at me.\n\n\"I'm not going back there. I just wanted to feel like I used to.\"\n\n\"What is going on?\" she asks.\n\nI shake my head, tight-lipped. Outside, Ian turns, looking up at the window, at me, nothing but black filling his gaze. I look away.\n\nX\n\nEmma wakes me, crying again. There's blue behind the white sheer of the curtains. Dawn. Marie's in the living room, trying to soothe the baby back to sleep. She doesn't even notice me.\n\n\"I can take her,\" I say.\n\n\"Huh?\" Marie blinks, looking up.\n\n\"Go to bed,\" I say. \"I can take her for you.\"\n\nEmma settles in my arms, her cries fading. Her skin's warm and soft, her tiny infant fingers reaching out. In the daylight, her eyes glisten bright blue. Normal.\nRebecca Jones-Howe\n\nlives and writes in Kamloops, British Columbia. Her work has appeared in Pulp Modern, Punchnel's and ManArchy, among others. She is currently working on her first collection of short fiction. She can be found online at rebeccajoneshowe.com.\n\nCHILDREN ARE THE ONLY ONES THAT BLUSH\n\nJOE MENO\n\nArt school is where I'd meet my sister each Wednesday, and then, the two of us would travel, by cab, to couple's counseling. Although Jane and I were twins, by the age of nineteen, she was already two years ahead of me in school, and because both of our parents were psychiatrists, and because I had been diagnosed with a rare social disorder, a disorder of my parent's own invention, Jane and I were forced to undergo couple's therapy every Wednesday afternoon. The counseling sessions were ninety-minutes long and held in a dentist's office. As both of my parents were well-known in their field, they had a difficult time finding a colleague to analyze their children, and so they were forced to settle on a dentist named Dr. Dank, a former psychiatrist who had turned his talents to dentistry. He was an incredibly hairy man who smoked while my sister and I reclined in twin gray dental chairs. Dr. Dank did all he could to convince me that I was angry at my twin sister for being smarter and also that I was gay.\n\nOnce I had made the mistake of mentioning to my sister that the doorman of our building was \"handsome\"\u2014to me, he looked like a comic book hero with a slim mustache. She frequently brought this remark up in our sessions as evidence of my latent homosexual desires. She would leave various kinds of gay pornography for me on my bed. I would come from school and find a magazine or videotape lying there and stare at it\u2014at the faces of the oiled, suntanned men and their arching, shaven genitals\u2014then return the magazine to my pillow, and back out of my room like a thief. Jane was nineteen and a sculpture major in art school. She was also taking a minor in psychology through correspondence courses in the mail. Technically, I was still a senior in high school. My sister's sophistication, her worldliness and intelligence were absolutely terrifying to me.\n\nIn the taxi on the way to our counseling appointments, I would stare across the backseat at her, studying her profile. Jane had short black hair; she was skinny and there was a field of freckles on her nose which made her look a lot younger than she actually was. When she wasn't looking, that's where I'd always stare, at the freckles on the bridge of her nose. \"Jack, what's happening with your gym class?\" she asked me. One of the reasons my sister was two years ahead of me in school was because I failed gym, year after year. As part of my social disorder, I was paralyzed by a fear of stranger's bodily fluids, their blood, sweat, spit, urine, even their tears. If someone sneezed near me, I would begin to convulse violently. I was unable to participate in any gym activity where bodily fluids were involved. Because of this, and because my disorder was unrecognized anywhere outside our household, I had failed gym every semester for the last three years and had yet to finish high school.\n\n\"Dad told me you have a new gym teacher this year,\" Jane said. \"Is he nice?\"\n\n\"His name is Mr. Trask. He asked me why I don't participate and I told him I had a medical condition and then he told me to go sit in the bleachers. I'm supposed to meet with him tomorrow to talk about it.\"\n\n\"Did you give any more thought to what we talked about in therapy last week?\"\n\n\"What? That the reason I'm failing gym is because I won't admit I'm gay?\"\n\n\"Dr. Dank completely agreed with me, Jack. You're queer. You're living a lie. The sooner you admit it, the happier we'll all be.\"\n\nI decided then, watching the Chicago Avenue traffic drizzling past, not to argue with her. For all I knew I was queer. I had never kissed a girl. Their bodily fluids seemed incredibly dangerous to me. Also, I had a poster from the musical Miss Saigon hanging in my room, a gift from Mr. Brice, my marching band instructor, the only teacher at my school who had made accommodations for my fictional disorder. Jane might be right. It was entirely possible that I was gay.\n\nX\n\nA day later I met with Mr. Trask, who was a tousled-haired, thoroughly-bearded man. He sat across from me in a swivel chair, his running shorts riding up his broad hairy thighs. If I glanced long enough, I could see the dark cavity of his crotch. As disgusting as it was, it was hard not to stare.\n\n\"Why do you keep failing gym?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm afraid of bodily fluids.\"\n\n\"Well, they're not going to let you graduate unless you pass gym class.\"\n\n\"I know. I've already accepted that I won't graduate from high school. It doesn't bother me.\"\n\n\"Hold on,\" he said, leaning back in the chair, the running shorts inching even higher. \"Here's what we're going to do. Your parents are shrinks right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You get me some Valium and I'll make sure you'll graduate.\"\n\nAfter class, I called my father. A day or so later, I gave Mr. Trask what he had asked for. From then on, I spent gym class watching the other boys my age sword-fighting with upturned tennis rackets and knew I was missing nothing.\n\nX\n\nThe next week, I met my sister Jane for our counseling appointment in front of her art school, where a number of young men and women gathered to smoke cigarettes, looking purposeful and shabby. Jane marched up to me, said hello, and then pointed at a gawky-looking young man who was leaning against the wall, lighting a clove cigarette. \"Look? How about him? Go tell him you'd like to give him a blowjob.\"\n\nI looked way, shaking my head, and said something like, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"You need to grow up. Part of being an adult is dealing with adult feelings. Do you want to end up an old dirty queer getting teenage boys to suck you off in bathrooms or something? Because that's what will happen, Jack. You have to deal with this openly before you sublimate it.\"\n\nI had no idea how I was supposed to answer.\n\nJust then a girl named Jill Thirby came up to us and said, \"My name is Jill Thirby. My father and mother are both famous artists. You may have heard of them.\" Jill Thirby had a yellow dress on and long brown hair. She also had black-framed glasses and these dangly yellow earrings. \"I'm working on this really intense project right now and I was wondering if you guys would like to help.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, staring at her long yellow scarf.\n\n\"Basically, I'm trying to make things fly.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Jane asked tersely.\n\n\"I'm basically attaching hundreds of balloons to different things to see what'll fly and what won't.\"\n\n\"Wow. That sounds cool,\" I said.\n\n\"That sounds fucking stupid,\" Jane cursed. \"That's exactly what the world needs. More childish, performance art bullshit. Why don't you do something meaningful? Like confront what's happening in the Middle East?\"\n\nJill Thirby looked ashamed all of a sudden, her yellow eye-shadow going red. \"You don't have to talk to me like that. I was just trying to be...I'm just trying to do something nice.\"\n\n\"Well, why don't you do something nice somewhere else?\" Jane asked.\n\nJill Thirby nodded, still shocked, and walked away. I looked over at Jane and asked her, \"What's your problem?\"\n\n\"She is my problem. I can't believe how many girls there are like her. Their fathers don't love them enough and so they go to art school and everything they make is this twee, meaningless bullshit. They don't ever deal with anything serious, you know. Like I bet that girl never even heard of the Situationists. I bet she has no idea what's going on in Palestine right now.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Forget it. We're late for Dr. Dank. Let's go,\" she said and then, unfortunately, we did.\n\nX\n\nThat afternoon in therapy, Jane suggested that the real reason I was afraid of bodily fluids was because I was in denial of my own sexuality. I did not argue with her. The whole next week during gym class, I watched the other boys in class doing windsprints, their bodies virulent with overripe sweat. It was the intimacy I did not like, I wanted to tell her. The idea of sharing something vital with someone I did not know or understand.\n\nOutside of the sculpture building the next Wednesday, while I was waiting on my sister, I ran into Jill Thirby again. She was still dressed in yellow, this time with a yellow stocking hat, with a yellow ball on the end. She had yellow mittens on and was chewing what appeared to be yellow gum.\n\n\"Hey,\" I said. \"I wanted to say I'm sorry. You know, about my sister, the other day.\"\n\n\"I don't get why some people have to be so negative. She's really, really mean.\"\n\n\"Have you gotten anything to fly yet?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said, itching her nose. \"I've tried a chair, a pineapple, and a bowling ball. None of them even got off the ground.\"\n\n\"Well, if you ever need any help, I'd be happy to give you a hand.\"\n\n\"What are you doing right now?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" I said, glancing around, seeing my sister was late once again.\n\n\"Do you want to help me then? I was going to try and float a birdcage.\"\n\nA few moments later, we climbed up the fire escape to the roof of the student dorm and stood looking out over the city. Jill Thirby had about fifty red helium balloons with her, which she promptly tied to an empty birdcage. \"Okay, here we go,\" she said, and we both stepped away. The birdcage did not move, though the balloons fluttered back and forth in the wind, dancing ferociously.\n\n\"Maybe you need something smaller,\" I said.\n\nJill Thirby kneeled beside the birdcage, inspecting it, and said. \"Or more balloons possibly.\" I thought about leaning over beside her and trying to kiss her. I think she saw me looking at her in a funny way and said, \"What is it? Is there something in my teeth? It's this weird problem I have. My teeth are too far apart. I always have food stuck in them. My dad's always reminding me to brush them.\"\n\n\"No. I was just...it's nothing.\"\n\n\"Do you want to try and float something else tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said, and took her hand as she stepped back onto the fire escape.\n\nJane was waiting outside the sculpture building swearing to herself when I found her. She squinted at me angrily when I said hello. \"Do you know what time it is? Where the fuck were you? Mom and dad pay by the hour if you didn't happen to notice.\"\n\n\"I was helping out that girl Jill Thirby.\"\n\n\"What? Why were you hanging out with her?\"\n\n\"I don't know. She seems nice. I like her glasses and everything.\"\n\n\"Why are you in such denial? Jesus, Jack, everyone's trying to help you but you're not even trying.\"\n\n\"What did I do?\"\n\n\"Just when we're getting somewhere with your therapy, you decide to ditch your appointment to go 'hang' with a 'girl.' That's textbook denial. Seriously.\"\n\n\"I just wanted to see if she could make something float.\"\n\n\"I guess we should just stop worrying about your severe emotional issues because, all of a sudden, you like some Jewish girl.\"\n\n\"What? She's not Jewish.\"\n\n\"She's definitely Jewish.\"\n\n\"So what? Mom's Jewish,\" I said.\n\n\"You are so completely clueless. Why don't you screw this girl and get it over with? And maybe then you'll be ready to admit what your problem really is.\"\n\n\"I don't want to screw anyone.\"\n\n\"Bullshit. You want to screw her in her little Jew butt.\"\n\n\"I'm going to walk home by myself now,\" I said and then, for once, I did.\n\nX\n\nThe following week I did not wait for Jane to go to couple's counseling. Instead I met Jill Thirby outside the sculpture building and we walked up and down the street looking for things in the trash that we could try and make fly. We were sorting through some garbage cans when she found a small gray cat. It was undernourished and hiding under a moldy cardboard box. Jill Thirby held it to her chest and decided to take it back to her dorm, where we washed it in the common bathroom sink, and then fed it black licorice from the vending machine. \"I have the perfect name for it,\" Jill Thirby said. \"Blah-blah.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" I said. Jill Thirby leaned over and held the cat to her chest, burying her face in the animal's wet gray fur.\n\n\"Do you want to spend the night here?\" she asked me suddenly. \"I don't have intercourse with anyone I don't know intimately, but you can sleep here if you want.\"\n\nI told her okay. Later that evening, as we were lying in bed together, Jill Thirby began to cry. I did not know what was happening at first. I laid there, holding my breath, pretending to be asleep. Her shoulders were shaking, her back trembling before me. She was holding the cat to her chest and the cat was meowing, trying to get free. I thought about putting my hand on her arm or saying something out loud, but I was afraid of what would happen if she knew I wasn't asleep. Finally, I asked her what was wrong, and she said, \"I'm sick of being related to my father and mother.\" Then she sniffled and said, \"But I miss them both a lot,\" and then turned away from me, the cat leaping off the bed. In the darkness, Jill Thirby became quiet and it seemed like she had momentarily disappeared.\n\nX\n\nThe next day I was late for school. I hurried into gym class and took my spot on the wood bleachers and watched the other poor saps running laps. Mr. Trask saw me and climbed the bleachers, and then took a seat beside me, staring off into the distance at something that I don't think existed. He turned and looked at me and said, \"How old are you, Jack?\"\n\n\"Nineteen.\"\n\n\"Nineteen. Jesus. You should have finished school a year ago.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to get out of here?\"\n\n\"Not really. I don't have any idea what's supposed to happen next.\"\n\nMr. Trask nodded, then fumbled through his extremely tight shorts for a pack of cigarettes. He offered me one. I shook my head, feeling pretty uncomfortable all of a sudden. He inhaled deeply and then started to cough, his rasps sounding exactly like a gym whistle, high and tinny. \"I'll tell you something: I don't think anybody knows what the hell comes next. I mean, I see these kids, and some of them walk around like they got it all figured out\u2014they're going to this college or that college or what, I dunno. I'll let you in on a little secret: if someone comes up to you and tells you they got anything figured out, you can be sure of one thing. They're full of it. Because the thing is, as soon as you figure one thing out, you see there's a whole other world of shit you don't understand. The people who think they know it all, those are the ones to beware of. And that's all I got to say about that.\"\n\nI nodded, seeing two pale sophomores\u2014in the middle of the track\u2014begin to collapse from exhaustion.\n\n\"Do you think your dad could get me some barbiturates? I think I need something stronger. I'm having a heck of a time sorting out my thoughts this week.\"\n\n\"I'll look into it.\"\n\n\"Great.\" Mr. Trask nodded and then stood. He held his hands in front of his face like a megaphone and shouted, \"Okay, ladies, bring it in.\"\n\nX\n\nAfter class, I waited around the art school campus all afternoon, hoping to find Jill Thirby again. It was getting dark when I saw her sneaking across the student pavilion with what looked to be several hundred red balloons. I followed her from a distance, watched her as she climbed up the fire escape, back to the roof of the dorm. Halfway up, she heard me climbing beneath her and looked down, then smiled a wide, goofy smile, holding the balloons with one hand, and her yellow stocking cap with the other.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I asked.\n\n\"Today I got a brilliant idea: I decided to try and float myself.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound so good.\"\n\n\"I did some calculations.\" She scrambled into her pocket with her free hand and handed me a piece of graph paper on which was the most incomprehensible drawing I had ever seen: there were numbers and arrows and what appeared to be a cloud of some kind.\n\n\"It doesn't seem like a good idea. Maybe you should practice first.\"\n\n\"With what?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Something not too high.\"\n\n\"That's probably a good idea,\" Jill Thirby said. \"That's something my dad would probably tell me. I guess we could try it from my dorm room. I live on the second floor so if I fell, it wouldn't be so bad.\"\n\n\"Okay, that sounds good,\" I said but as soon as we got to her room, we started to kiss instead, and then Jill was pulling down her long yellow tights, and she had pale yellow underwear on, and then those were off, and I could see her thighs, the plains of her hips, the entire dark world between, and she was saying, \"I usually don't have sex with people I don't know for at least three months,\" but then we did it anyway. For some reason, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I did not think about the danger of bodily fluids. Things were passed between us but it did not bother me. A few minutes later, we were lying in bed, and she still had her yellow stocking hat on with the yellow ball at the end, and I don't know why but I suddenly blurted out, \"Jill Thirby, do you want to be my girlfriend?\"\n\nJill Thirby's face went blank just then. \"I thought you were gay. That's what your sister told me.\"\n\n\"I know, that's what everyone keeps telling me.\" I looked her in the face, her lips smudged with yellow lipstick and asked her again. \"Do you want to be my girlfriend anyway?\"\n\nShe smiled at me softly, blinked once, and then said: \"Thanks but no thanks.\"\n\nI sat in bed and watched her dress quickly. \"You should probably go,\" she said. The cat we had found, Blah-blah, seemed to look at me anxiously, too, and so I got dressed quick and left in a hurry.\n\nX\n\nWhen I got home, my parents and sister were there waiting for me. So was Dr. Dank. For the next two hours I sat in the gray armchair while my sister and Dr. Dank tried to get me to admit I was incredibly unhappy. I told them I had never been happier. \"Jack, how can you be happy?\" my sister asked, arms folded, standing over me. Her silver hairpin looked like a threat, pointing down at me. \"Look at you. You spend all your time alone. You're completely disinterested in dating. You're failing high school. You have no intellectual curiosity. It's not normal, Jack. It's not even abnormal. It's subnormal or something like that.\"\n\nDr. Dank puffed out two nostrils full of smoke and I said, \"I couldn't agree more. It is subnormal. And also, he hasn't been flossing. He's becoming a prime candidate for gum disease.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just admit you're gay so we can all just move on?\" my sister groaned.\n\nI stared at my parents, who hadn't spoken a word since I walked in. My father looked exhausted. My mother looked bored. She had a notepad in her lap, taking notes, though I think she was actually finishing a crossword puzzle. It was pretty obvious, even in their professional detachment, who they were siding with. I sat in the armchair, facing them all, my father pulling off his glasses to clean them. He did this whenever he thought a patient was lying. I knew this because he had told me several times before that psychiatry was as much performance as it was science. Taking off his glasses and cleaning them was one of his signature moves. I tried to look at my mother but she was busy scribbling down the answer to 15 across. Neither one of them would dare to look me in the eye. So I glanced over at my sister, who was still standing above me, arms crossed, her dark eyebrows looking like they had not been groomed in some time. I understood right then that, no matter what, she would always be smarter than me, more sophisticated, as would the rest of my family. I thought maybe this was the reason all of them were, on their own, pretty miserable. I decided right then to just give in and agree and try to make them all happy.\n\n\"You're right,\" I said, looking down at my gray plaid socks. \"It's true. I'm gay. I'm really gay.\"\n\nJane grinned, tears coming to her eyes. She slid her arms around my neck and hugged me savagely, saying, \"Doesn't it feel like an incredible weight has been lifted, Jack?\" and I nodded because it was true in a way. She was hugging me and my father was patting me on the back and Dr. Dank was celebrating by lighting my mother's cigarette. It did feel good to have Jane feel proud of me, even for a moment, even for the absolute wrong reasons. I told everyone I loved them then and that I needed to get some sleep. Before I closed the door, I heard Dr. Dank announce that couples counseling for my sister and I would resume the very next day, and now that everything was in the open, our sessions were going to have to be bumped-up to twice a week.\n\nX\n\nI did not hear from Jill Thirby for almost a month, not until she called me to say that the cat we had found in the trash was dying. She asked me to come over and help her take it to the vet. I didn't have any reason to say no. When I got to her room, Jill Thirby was standing in the door with a small cardboard box: inside the cat was curled up, mewling. Its eyes were barely open and its entire body seemed to shudder. \"He looks bad,\" I said.\n\n\"I know. He keeps crying. I don't know what to do.\"\n\n\"Why did you call me?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because I don't want to go by myself.\"\n\nJill Thirby had looked in the phone book and had found an animal shelter in midtown. We called and made an appointment and then waited at the bus stop. Twice I thought the cat was dead, its rheumy eyes gazing up at us without any kind of life, but then it started to cry again, the sound of which made my hands feel shaky.\n\nAfter we got to the shelter, after we were led down the hall to a tiny examination room, after the vet looked at the cat's scrawny stomach and weak legs and failing kidneys, he suggested Jill Thirby have it put to sleep. Jill Thirby immediately started sobbing. I had never seen anyone crying before like that. She was trying to say something but she was crying too hard and so I took her hand. She had yellow mittens on and I felt the stitches there against my palm and said, \"It's okay,\" and Jill Thirby nodded and then the vet disappeared, taking the cat with him, and we stood alone in the tiny white room, like we were on the set of some soap opera, and Jill Thirby was still crying, and then we were waiting at the bus stop, and then we were getting on the bus, and the whole time we were sitting there, she was still holding the empty cardboard box, and we sat beside each other, watching the buildings go past in a blur, riding past my stop, past the stop for her school, past the part of the city we knew, at that moment wondering who we were, what was going to happen to us, waiting, like everybody else, for someone to tell us what to do.\nJoe Meno\n\nis a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of six novels including the bestsellers Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, and two short story collections including Demons in the Spring. His short fiction has been published in One Story, McSweeney's, Swink, LIT, TriQuarterly, Hayden Ferry's Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American-Review, Fourteen Hills, Washington Square Review, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago Magazine. He was a longtime contributing editor to Punk Planet, the seminal underground arts and politics magazine, before it ceased publication in 2007. His plays have been produced in Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Paris, France. He is a professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.\n\nCHRISTOPHER HITCHENS\n\nVANESSA VESELKA\n\nLyle claims he can cure faith. I asked him to do it. A year ago I wouldn't have, I would have paid to believe in anything. But Elena gets worse every night. She fell asleep in my bed and when I checked on her I thought she wasn't breathing because her little three-year-old face was so gray. It turned out to be nothing but the shadow of the quilt, though. I moved her stuffed sea lion closer to her and she rolled over on it dragging it down to the deep. Moments like those are more than I can take.\n\nThe doctors just tell me to love her. Someone else suggested I pray.\n\nBut belief of any kind at this point feels like being rocked in the arms of an insane mother\u2014faith, that great and breaking bough\u2014not with Elena at stake, I'm done with that.\n\nWhen Lyle gave me his card, I thought it was a joke. It had a picture of a beach on it with that poem about the footsteps. He had crossed out the words and written: You can be alone again. According to his website, he can extract the finest strands of transcendent hope. That's what I'm counting on.\n\nI did break down and pray last night. I thought I felt something. I told Lyle and he said that it's natural. He says faith is the only gateway to no faith. I asked what he meant and he said that beliefs, all beliefs, are like a series of tunnels.\n\n\"What we're after here is an open road.\"\n\nHe showed me the room where it's going to happen. The walls are covered with pictures of Jesus, Shiva, JFK, Osiris, and the Mandelbrot Set. There are big black Xs through each of them. Lining the windowsill were smaller icons\u2014Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Elvis, Malcolm X, Christopher Hitchens, and a woman I recognized from late-night infomercials who sold Ever Bliss\u2122 powdered nutrient drinks. All in cheap plastic frames with the same black X over the image. Lyle had clearly snapped the shot of Hitchens off a TV screen with his phone and printed it out. The frame had no glass so I could see the streaks left by the Sharpie when he drew the X.\n\n\"Nobody is pure anything,\" Lyle said, \"We have to get it all, even beliefs we think don't count.\"\n\n\"But I don't have any faith I just wish I did.\"\n\n\"Same thing.\"\n\nBut it's not the same thing because if I were capable of any real belief I wouldn't be here. I'd be gone.\n\n\"I have no faith to take,\" I said.\n\n\"Besides,\" said Lyle, \"I'll bet you have more faith than you think. It just takes different shapes. In situations like yours it usually just takes different shapes.\"\n\nI thought of my Wiccan high school years and flushed. Then the Marias came to mind, the ones I could only take in Spanish or Bosnian, and the candles for the dead and Mexican rosewater, the vague years of humming rocks and shells and feathers and cigarette smoke blown in all four directions\u2014Lyle was right. Faith was in me. It was like a curtain behind a curtain. Put a gun to my head and ask me if I believe in anything and I'd point to Elena and say, I don't believe in a goddamned thing. Not if she's going to die. But take that gun away? Faith grows back in me like a field of mushrooms. Almost overnight.\n\n\"The first thing I need you to do,\" Lyle said, \"is to write down a history of belief. Like praying you don't get caught stealing candy or calling Christians cowards when you're drunk [!]. It's all the same thing, it all has to go.\"\n\n\"Should I write it on anything special?\"\n\n\"Write it on anything. That's the point.\"\n\nI started that night and went all the way back to second grade when I thought I heard God's voice in a dream. By the time I fell asleep the bush outside my window was filled with chattering finches. I know now what Lyle means when he says faith and no faith is the same thing. I saw both sides of the coin flipping through the air. He means they come from the same place, believing and hating believers, a single tree, and if you don't pull out all the roots it grows back.\n\nX\n\nElena goes to her Dad on Fridays. I don't get a choice in that. The worst part is that if something happens to her over the weekend, I won't be there. The idea that I wouldn't be there when it counted, that I might be out somewhere not even thinking about her when the real stuff happened it just too much. I try not to think about it but I do, all the time. I can't sleep when she's gone.\n\nThere's a revival going on down the street in a vacant lot out there in the weeds, right on the corner. They put up a tent. You can hear the preacher's voice through the PA echoing off the basketball courts in the park two blocks away. I've been hearing it every night. At first it was just annoying. Another thing like gunshots and Greenpeace knocking on your door, stuff you should care about but don't anymore because it happens all the time. All evening and into the night:\n\nGod's got it! God's got it!\n\nAnd all the black voices calling it back.\n\nGod's got it! God's got it!\n\nIf they had been white I would have called the cops.\n\nEvery day I walk through the reedy lot. I see them setting up for the revival. Raking the flattened clumps of grass. Chasing the newspaper tumbleweeds. Bagging the bottles and needles and collecting grocery store circulars, holding them in their hands like garish fans.\n\nThey've been there all summer.\n\nFix it, Jesus! Fix it!\n\nThey yell out all the things that are wrong\u2014\n\nFix it! Fix it, Jesus! Fix it!\n\nThey have a van full of clean white shirts for the converts and they come in all sizes. I saw a man that weighed over 400 pounds get saved. They wrapped him in white like a baby. No one is banned from the arms of Jesus. I imagine myself in white steeped in the smell of starch and irons and lemon water, and for a second, I'm pretty damn sure that if everybody would just get the hell away from me I could ride this feeling down into forever, this moment of grace, but they don't and I can't and it all breaks into smaller and smaller bits, even when they're already so small you think they can't, they do. Faith is like entropy according to Lyle. The heat it gives off is just from decline. It's not a closed system.\n\nX\n\nLyle set up our second consultation at the food court tables by the Orange Julius. He has a face like Eric Clapton's; you'd never recognize him without context. Both times we met I thought it was a stranger approaching me.\n\nThis time Lyle came with diagrams. He set his smoothie down and unfolded a sheet of paper, flattening it with his hand. On it was a genderless human form with tiny lines drawn all over the body. My body.\n\n\"I'm thinking we'll put the needles here.\" He took a slug off his Orange Julius and pointed to a series of hash marks. \"One for every belief.\"\n\nI tried to see the pattern, but couldn't really. Some lines looked like sutures and others more like Amish hex symbols or asterisks. My whole history of hope before me in train trestles and broken rails.\n\n\"Will it hurt?\"\n\n\"Probably,\" he said.\n\n\"Is that the chakra system?\"\n\nLyle looked at me for a second then borrowed a pen and drew another set of lines on the figure. \"You should have told me about that one.\"\n\nLater on that night, I threw a full can of beer at someone's head. I was at a show and it was a singer of this band I knew. He was prancing around, doing the Iggy Pop thing, rolling on glass with bloody handprints and finger streaks all over his chest. When he pulled himself up on the microphone stand I threw the beer can as hard as I could. The Pabst logo spun like a ninja shuriken across the heads of the audience.\n\nLyle says he sees cases like mine all the time.\n\nI punched a wall when they threw me out. When I woke up, my knuckles were swollen and there was dried brown streaks of blood on my hand. After I washed up, I snuck over to see Elena. She and Silas were eating macaroni and cheese for breakfast when I came in. Her cheeks were sticky with orange sauce. In front of her was a huge, half-drunk glass of milk.\n\n\"Is it hormone free?\"\n\n\"They were out.\"\n\n\"I thought we had an agreement.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask you to come over.\"\n\nHe knows how I feel about those things. I keep Elena away from plastic and fish and she's never had antibiotics.\n\n\"That's not the point,\" I said, \"We had an agreement.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and we also had an agreement about you not taking her to the doctor.\"\n\n\"There was something wrong with how she was breathing,\" I said, \"I didn't take her right away, I watched her, for a long time. You would have taken her, too.\"\n\nSilas looked me like I was wearing a wristband or a day pass or something. But I'm sick of seeing patience on people's faces. It doesn't affect me like it used to. You have to be an advocate. Silas will believe anything a doctor tells him. And the doctors say Elena meets all the developmental markers for her age. They say she's fine. But she's not fine. They don't know her like I do and so they can't see what's happening. She's changed. I've watched her now through countless car crashes, slips on the stairs, through terrible accidents on the playground when the bigger kids on the chain bridge pretend to shoot each other and knock her off. She's not the same. It's written all over her. She is going to die. Someday that is going to happen. And even though I don't know when, I know it will be too soon.\n\nX\n\nLater in the week, I took Elena to the doctor so they could check out her lungs again but they wouldn't see me. They just sent out a medical assistant and all she did was weigh Elena. I tried to make another appointment but they said to wait and see how she was doing in a few weeks. The scheduler in the waiting room gave Elena a rubber ball. It was the size of a plum, the color of honey and had a dolphin inside. Elena held it up to the light and showed me all the tiny flecks of glitter. I would rather have had some actual information, but I guess the glitter ball is something. Elena liked it, anyway.\n\nWhen I pulled back up to the house the evangelists were testing the PA system at the revival down the street.\n\nCheck. Good afternoon. Check.\n\nThe man tapped the microphone. The sound was like a concussion grenade.\n\nCheck. Hello. Check.\n\nA shrill squeal rang out and then a loud crack. Someone killed the sound. I tried to get Elena out of the car seat but she didn't want to put her arm through the strap because she had the dolphin ball in her fist and thought I was trying to make her give it up. Like I would take that thing from her? She can have all the glitter dolphin balls she wants.\n\nDown the street, they raised the volume slowly and I heard the man on the microphone's clear voice arc upwards.\n\nHello. Check. Sisters and brothers. Family in Christ.\n\nI know everyone dies but if I were a believer I wouldn't mind. If I were a believer, I would go like a lover to meet my girl the second she was gone.\n\nI asked the guys on the corner to baptize me. I figured it was the only road left. I waited until Friday when Elena was at her dad's and went over right when they were setting up.\n\n\"Please,\" I said, \"I want to be in the arms of Jesus.\"\n\n\"Welcome, sister. What is your name?\"\n\n\"I want to be baptized.\"\n\nI looked around for a pool or some kind of water.\n\n\"Where do you do it?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"In good order, sister, in good order.\"\n\n\"I live close-by. I have a kid pool. It doesn't have to look like anything special. I know it's not about that. I just need it to happen.\"\n\nThe man's moisturized black hands settled on mine. I touched his starched white sleeve. His oiled hair shone, light inside each follicle.\n\n\"Has the Lord called you?\"\n\n\"Not really. But can't I call him?\"\n\nHe patted my hands.\n\n\"Come back later. We'll have you talk to one of the sisters.\"\n\nHe released my hand.\n\nIn that moment I was aglow. I walked back towards the park at the end of the street then around the park and through it. It seemed to me like all the leaves were green moths that had only landed on the branch. I cut through the basketball courts and strolled under the Sugar Maple and Ginko trees. I saw Elena in a yellow field. I was beside her and there was no end.\n\nFrom several blocks behind me I heard the preacher starting up and the crowd beginning to call back at him. My heart jumped because I thought I might have missed my chance to talk to the sisters and that there might be a list for those who want to be baptized and that it might fill up. I might even be told to come back the next night and I couldn't, it I had to be on it this night because I don't know how I will feel tomorrow. I turned and ran back to the revival to see if they were ready for me. They weren't, though. People were just getting started. The man on the microphone wasn't the main preacher, but another man and warming up the crowd as the dusk settled. When the last of the violet sky was gone, the street lamps along Martin Luther King Avenue turned on all at once. They cast wide circles of hazy light on the road through which cars passed breaking them into shards that leapt like shamans, like sparks, and threw a net out over the world.\n\nSisters and brothers, are you ready to call on Jesus?\n\nThe crowd rippled with small waves of energy and began to answer back. The feeling was leaving me. Already. I moved to the back of the crowd to see if that made a difference. I thought if it was all further away, it might feel more real. But as hard as I tried, I couldn't make it stay.\n\nI backed up and backed up until I was on the edge of the lot. Behind me was a tagged Plexiglas bus shelter and I sat down on the bench and waited. When it got darker the evangelists broke out the white shirts. One after another, men and women climbed the stairs to the platform and got saved. The preacher and the callers in their own white shirts moved over the stage like great actors. But it was Kabuki to me then. When they were done they packed the leftover white shirts into cardboard boxes and loaded them back into the van with the sound gear for the next night. I called Lyle and asked him to come and get me.\n\nX\n\nIt was well past midnight when he picked me up in his Crown Victoria. He pulled into the bus stop and I got in. Lyle tapped the dashboard, \"She was a cop car but I got her from a cab company. They sell them after they hit 300,000 miles. Rides like a dream but it's a little hard to get in and out of.\"\n\nI rolled down the window and put my head on the vibrating door. Everybody's going to die someday, sure, but it's different when it's your daughter.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Lyle, \"They don't make these beauties anymore.\"\n\nLyle thinks small talk puts people at ease.\n\nNick Cave came on the radio and he turned it up.\n\n\"Now that guy could really benefit from this procedure. He's all over the place. A shame, too. Dualism is pretty easy to cure. Not like what you've got. A yard full of dandelions seeds with no flowers? That's a tough extraction.\"\n\nLyle turned without signaling. We pulled into the empty parking lot of a peach, two-story commercial building. His office was on the second floor. On the door was a gestural line drawing of a fat woman floating on a cloud that I hadn't noticed it before.\n\n\"I share the office with a massage therapist. She lets me use her table.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we turn on the lights?\"\n\n\"No, leave them off. This is the kind of thing best done in the dark.\"\n\nA wave of nervous energy rippled through me and I was a teenager again. Crashing at the house of some creepy guy, not sure what I was in for. But the difference between me then and me now is that sex with someone I'm not into doesn't scare me. There are worse things. My mind, for example.\n\nI took off my boots and left them by the door. The streetlight from the parking lot was coming through the blinds and when my eyes adjusted, I could see the room almost as I had before, the posters and photos.\n\n\"Are we going to have sex?\" I asked.\n\n\"It's not that kind of thing. But I will need access to you.\"\n\nI remembered the diagrams of my body covered with scratches like someone had used it to notch time.\n\nLyle walked over to his desk and began pulling things out of drawers while I climbed up on the massage table and unbuttoned my shirt. He set up a small tray table near the donut where you put your face when you get a massage and poured some rubbing alcohol into a glass. Walking back the desk, he pulled a chrome Newton's Cradle out of the bottom drawer.\n\n\"We're going to need this, too\" he said and held it up. It was polished like a new toaster and the metal balls knocked irregularly against each other as he carried it over to the tray table. Then Lyle reached over and pulled what looked like a slim book off a shelf, but it wasn't a book. It was a purple, velvet folder full of needles. Hundreds it seemed. I saw them glint for a split second as a truck passed outside and lit the room.\n\nI took off my bra and lay back.\n\nLyle tacked up a poster to the ceiling, directly above my line of sight. Krishna superimposed on a spiral of fractal patterns.\n\n\"I like to think of him as Blue Jesus,\" he said and wrote on the bottom of the poster: There is no real connection but the one you make.\n\nLyle put a thin cover over me. It had a satin edge like a baby's blanket. He lifted the silver ball on the Newton's Cradle then let it fall.\n\nClick, click, click, click.\n\n\"I want you to do it like we talked about.\"\n\nHe picked a needle off the tray and dipped it in the alcohol. But he wasn't wearing gloves or using tweezers or anything. When I asked he said the alcohol was mostly for the burn.\n\n\"Now every time I put in a needle, I'm going to say what belief it's attached to. When I say that belief, I want you to think only of that belief and nothing else. Make sure you take your thoughts all the way to the end. Don't trail off. Faith has to run its course.\"\n\n\"How long do they stay in?\"\n\n\"As long as it takes to break up the belief.\"\n\n\"How will we know?\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll know.\"\n\nLyle smiled and fear hit me, the sense of what I was doing, that feeling of suddenly looking down. I wasn't so sure anymore.\n\n\"If you get distracted, focus on the sound of the ticking. It will never slow down or speed up. Everything else just bends around it. Now that's what I call real eternal.\"\n\nLyle crossed his hands and held them an inch above my body. I could feel the heat of his palms. I thought he would start at my feet or at my head and work from there but he said it doesn't matter what he does, that that's just another system of belief.\n\nThen the first needle went in. He stuck it laterally through part of my forearm, but deeper than you'd think, like he was trying to pin me to me. But I've had tattoos and babies and cigarette and stove burns\u2014nothing can hurt you like an idea can. Go ahead. Stick as many needles in me as you want. I barely felt the next one, only the heat as it radiated out.\n\nHe began to chant.\n\nThe part of you that believes in synchronicity, the part of you that doesn't.\n\nI tried to imagine that each of his fingers had a fishing line coming from it and that and that on the other end were minnows of faith.\n\n\"I used to play music in the background,\" he said conversationally, \"But too many people hid their faith in sound.\"\n\nHe moved his hands and put in another needle.\n\n\"People will attach to anything and for this to work there has to be nothing to hang on to at all. Deep breath.\"\n\nThe part of you that thinks you're alive for a reason, the part of you that doesn't.\n\nYou don't know how many beliefs you have until someone tries to remove them.\n\nLyle said it was important not to fall asleep.\n\n\"If you fell asleep while we were doing this, we'd have to do it all again because two months later you would be trying to sleep all the time. Another deep breath, please.\"\n\nThe part of you that secretly hopes for a personal universe, the part of you that doesn't.\n\nMy skin was hot and my body hummed like a tuning fork. The clicking of the Newton's Cradle syncopated against his speech. I tried to hear a rhythm in it, but couldn't. There wasn't any rhythm but the one I made.\n\nThe part of you that believes in magic parking spaces or the perfect timing of ambulances or that the arc is long but bends toward justice...\n\nIt felt like a thousand fishhooks coming out of me. A tug and they went, my string of guarantees, each a pretty fly wound in bright colors around the hook, my faith. Maybe it was the pain. Maybe I was tired and making it up. I can do that too. But Elena was there and when I saw her I caved, okay, I said, okay, I will. I will give it all up. I want to see to the world again. I'll even whisper that awful thing\u2014I want to be alone. Which was the promise, right? That I could be? Because that's what I want. I want to be alone again.\n\nIn a yellow field I saw Elena flickering behind glass that didn't curve. She wasn't bigger or smaller, just a shape in the weeds. My beautiful three-year-old girl before me, and there's nothing I can do to save her. She flickers like a firefly. God like a golden cloud around her, God not like a golden cloud around her. A reign of angels protecting her, a reign of angels not protecting her. Her choices guided by grace, her choices not guided by grace. Elena in the yellow field\u2014but not guided by grace, not protected by angels, not clouded by god. She throws her glitter ball into the air and that dolphin just spins inside it as it rises.\nVanessa Veselka\n\nis the author of the novel, Zazen, which was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and won the 2012 PEN\/Robert W. Bingham prize for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House, YETI, and Zyzzyva. Her nonfiction has been published in GQ, The Atlantic, The American Reader, Salon, and is included in the 2013 Best American Essays.\n\nDOLLHOUSE\n\nCRAIG WALLWORK\n\nThe cottage where Darcy lived was set within the peaceful district of the Ryburn Valley. It stood on high grounds where heather, crowberry and cotton grass dressed the Yorkshire moorland in shades of green, purple and white. The limestone walls were cinereous in colour, becoming more charcoal when the sun settled behind the hills. The rapport between the snap and spit of burning logs, and cinder trails on the carpet from embers which had jumped from the open fireplace, were commonplace to Darcy. The autumn wind with its tortured voice baying upon every window pane had become her lullaby before bedtime and her birdsong when she awoke. Fear never exploited Darcy's mind, for as her father contested on many occasions, all things can be explained. The low thundering rumble that tore a hole in the night was not that of a monster pushing its way from one world to the next, but the nightly groans from the heifers keeping warm in the farmer's barn across the field. The unexpected squeak of a floorboard was not the heels of a ghost, but instead the yawning of wood as it waned under the heat of water pipes. The illusory evil that supposedly cowered in shadows, or became the cold breath of night that followed her from room to room, was only a mischievous current of air that fussed its way around the dank old cottage. All could be explained. Everything that is, except the dollhouse.\n\nIt was a perfect replica of the cottage in every detail. Shaped gable ends, stone quoining to front corner elevations, and detailed mullion windows with glazing were all perfectly crafted. The entire front of the cottage along with its roof opened to reveal the same three story, eight room accommodation. Stair railings, banisters and newel posts perfectly matched the deep mahogany like those her hands touched every day. The roll top bath was finished with similar gold fixtures and ornate feet, and the only noticeable difference was the absence of furniture in the rooms. But the dollhouse was beautiful in design, and would have probably remained hidden in the attic without Darcy ever seeing it had it not been for the ghost.\n\nDarcy had awaked to a large bang. Believing it to be a door that had swung on its hinges due to the draft, she left her bed and felt the pinch of a cold wooden floor against her bare feet. The faint hue of a silver moon cast the landing in a static haze. Shadows huddled for warmth in every corner and the floorboards moaned and grumbled as each was stirred from their slumber by her tread. Darcy passed her parent's bedroom and pressed her ear to the door. The sonorous breathing of her father bled through the wooden paneling. Their door was firmly closed, as was the bathroom's. As she passed the attic she felt a cool breeze and turned to find the door was open. Crude steps made from wood ascended to a blanket of darkness beyond the staircase. Darcy approached and peered in with a quizzical, almost brazen air of displeasure. As her hand reached for the latch to close the door, she caught sight of a willowy form moving across the attic. She was not alarmed by this revelation, and assumed a car had passed outside; the light from the headlamp throwing a wayward shadow across the wall. A small light switch assured her steps as she made her way up to the attic.\n\nCardboard boxes of various sizes lay strewn across the floor, each labelled for every room in the house. Cobwebs hung from the apex and wooden beams like old rags and the smell in the air was like that of wet shoes and mothballs. A small window confirmed her suspicions that the ghost was only a light passing against the wall. She was about to leave when she noticed a large object covered under a dust sheet in the corner of the room. For years her parents had the habit of hiding gifts and birthday presents in lofts, attics and basements. Her ninth birthday was in three weeks and so Darcy assumed what lay beneath the dust sheet was her birthday present. She crept across the floor and lifted the sheet to reveal the dollhouse. That she had not hinted or requested one mattered little, for upon seeing it in that dimly lit room, she was completely happy to know it was hers.\n\nHer clandestine visits became a nightly routine. Darcy would wait until her parents had gone to bed. She would then leave her bed quietly and visit the attic to see the dollhouse. An increasing number of ornamental furniture and fixtures were being added on each visit that matched perfectly those in the cottage. Her parents must have hired a master craftsman to fashion these items before placing them in the rooms every day. From the sleigh bed in her parent's bedroom to the antique Wellington chest in the living room, all the way to the Georgian oak antique chest of drawers in the dining room, the world she physically lived within had been shrunk to Liliputian size. By the first week, wallpaper had been added, and by the end of the second, the same taupe Saxony carpet covered the living room. But the biggest surprise came three days before her birthday. Darcy arrived in the attic to discover three small figurines had been placed in the dollhouse. Each resembled in the most accurate detail Darcy and her parents. She took them out and marvelled at each. Her father's figurine had the same Roman nose, designer glasses and widow's peak. Cheekbones were prominent and neck lacking in muscle. Her mother's hair was styled into the same bob that flanked a rounded face. Lips were like clam shells and eyes of onyx. Darcy's effigy wore a pretty blue flowery dress, the same she had in her wardrobe and was her favourite of all her clothes. Her auburn hair was tied into a ponytail, much the same way Darcy preferred to wear it. The nose was delicate, its bridge peppered with tiny specks of brown paint. The scar upon her chin that she had gained when she fell from a tree when five years old was etched into the wooden face of her counterpart. The house was complete.\n\nOn the eve of her birthday Darcy visited the attic to play with the house for the final time. She undid the latch and pulled back the front fa\u00e7ade and roof. Everything was there, from the tiny furniture to the bowl of quince in the kitchen. Darcy found her wooden parents lay in their wooden bed, just like her real parents lay sleeping one floor below. To her surprise, Darcy's figurine was in the attic, knelt before a smaller version of the dollhouse, the most recent addition to the collection. Darcy moved her smaller self out of the way to get a better look of that tiny dollhouse. She did not wish to touch it in case it broke. In that moment, a noise like that of shifting feet presented itself behind her. Darcy turned, and for the briefest of moments saw an image of a man. His limbs were extended beyond that of what could be considered normal. He wore no clothes, and while shadows draped him like a veil, Darcy noted deep scars traversing his torso. The fingers of his ribcage were pressed against cyanotic skin, and a long, malformed face like that of a gnarled tree remained devoid of emotion. She had enough time to blink twice before the man disappeared. Darcy sprang to her feet and ran to the area the man had occupied, and with each step that pulled her toward the shadows, she convinced herself it was a trick of the light; a mix of fatigue and the sickly hue of the bulb. The space where he was stood was empty. Darcy reached her hand out to the blackness and found nothing residing there but a cold breeze that tightened her skin.\n\nDarcy returned back to the dollhouse, and as she reached for the small clasp that secured the front of the cottage, she noticed the figurines of her parents were no longer sleeping in their beds. Her father was in the living room, his little wooden effigy lay suspended by a piece of brown twine; one end fixed to the wooden beam fixed to the ceiling, the other end wrapped around his wooden neck. She found her mother's figurine lay in the roll top bath, a trickle of red paint bleeding from her wrists. Both her parent's wooden faces of power pink and cream were bent by fear.\n\nA dull thud came from the rooms below the attic, and in tandem, her heart beat out a similar sound. Darcy got to her feet and ran down the wooden stairs back to the landing. She opened the door to her parent's bedroom and found a feral landscape of bed sheets and nothing more. She called out for her mother, skewering a cry for her father to its end. More stairs. Two at a time. Down she went. The moonlight was split upon the cold slate floor of the kitchen like a gallon of milk. Darcy slipped as she rushed through it and fell on her back. Pain danced up her leg and spine, elbows throbbed. She clambered up and limped to the door that divided the kitchen to the living room and paused to catch her breath. All can be explained, she said like a mantra. All can be explained. The wind was a werewolf trapped in the walls, the moon a phantom consuming the stars. The house creaked and moaned as though the souls of the damned resided under floorboards. The door's handle cooled her sweltering palm as she twisted it slowly and pulled back, releasing a whimper from the hinges. The gap could not have been more than a few inches, but the naked heel of her father's foot suspended in the pastel shades of a lifeless night was enough to force her to not open it any wider.\n\nShe assumed it was tears. The tips of her fingers were darker after she wiped her cheek, but when Darcy felt another large drop upon her face, she looked up. A patch of water had collected on the ceiling, its colour brownish in tone. Darcy moved back and every drip that hit the kitchen floor resembled a short-lived scarlet coronet. To her knees she fell, shaking, sobbing. The bathroom was directly above her. Flashes of a naked wrist cleaved to reveal open veins flooded her fragile mind. She scampered to the sanctuary of a shadow, wrapped it around her shoulders and wept. It had to be a dream. Darcy convinced herself of this. Her parents would not end their lives. They were happy, and they would have never left her alone. The noise from upstairs suggested something, or someone was still in the attic. If it was a dream, she had nothing to fear. If it wasn't, then it was better she was with her parents than in an empty and cold cottage alone.\n\nHer legs had turned weak. Nightgown, drenched with tears. She passed the bathroom without looking in. At the foot of the attic stairs she inhaled deeply, wiped her eyes and took the first step toward the beyond. The world slowed to a crawl. Silence overruled the clamour of what lain among the flotsam of domestic knick-knacks. Even Darcy's weight held no influence on the steps beneath her feet. It was though the whole house was holding its breath in apprehension. She arrived in the attic to find it as it was. The boxes were unmoved, the cobwebs sloth-like as they hung from corners. Shadows hugged miserably to the walls and floor. And there the dollhouse glowed like a Halloween pumpkin in the dim light, a macabre symbol of her fate. There was no change to her parent's figurines, which remained in their varying exhibition of death. But Darcy drew her attention to the small attic in the dollhouse. There was the small crafted model of herself kneeling before the miniature dollhouse, just as she was knelt before the larger one. On closer inspection she noted a red line that scored the throat of the tiny figure. The winter's breath she grew to believe was only a draft fell upon her neck in that moment, and from the corner of her eye a hand came into view. The tips of each finger were sheltered by gauze, blood seeping through as if the toil of intricacy and detail had worn the skin to the flesh. Scars as thick as leaches chartered the hand, and the rasp of failing lungs stirred her hair. The glimmer of a small whittling knife constricted her pupils, and upon her throat its cooled edge prevented the words she longed to speak.\n\nAll can be explained.\n\nAll can be explained.\nCraig Wallwork\n\nlives in West Yorkshire, England. He is the author of the short story collection Quintessence of Dust (KUBOA), and the novels To Die Upon a Kiss (Snubnose Press) and The Sound of Loneliness (Perfect Edge Books). His fiction has appeared in various anthologies, journals and magazines. He is the fiction editor at Menacing Hedge Magazine.\n\nHIS FOOTSTEPS ARE MADE OF SOOT\n\nNIK KORPON\n\nHer skin parts like wet silk under a razor, and even with a gaping hole in her face, she's quite beautiful. Marcel blots sweat from his forehead with the bandana cinched around his wrist. The scent of iodine and Pine Sol hangs so heavily in his basement, it's almost visible. At least it covers the mildew tang usually present.\n\n\"Knife,\" he grunts, stained palm extended.\n\n\"Filet or paring?\"\n\nHe chews on the inside of his cheek, debating, then looks up at me. \"What do you think?\"\n\nAdjusting the clamp light above the table, I lean over the girl, probe her opened cheek with a modified barbecue fork. After a minute, I shrug and suggest the paring knife, and say, \"But you're the doctor.\" He mutters something in French that doesn't sound complimentary. Another brief contemplation, he snatches the paring knife and goes to work.\n\nShe came to us because her smile was uneven and it made her self-conscious. How this girl could despise her appearance is beyond my pay scale, but that's why I assist a surgeon, not a psychologist. Her name is probably just as beautiful as her lips, something that could turn your knees to water as you shout it across the bus terminal, begging her not to leave. Megan, our pseudo-secretary, keeps the clients anonymous, though. Sometimes things happen in home-surgery, and it's easier to be objective when the body doesn't have a name, an address, a way they take their coffee. Everything's easier when history is malleable.\n\nMarcel nudges my arm. Isopropyl alcohol slops over the side of the cup in my hand.\n\n\"Eight inches of fishing line. Please.\" His tone says that he's asked this more than once and I was miles away.\n\nI help him close the girl's face, holding the knot with a finger while he ties the line. It makes me glad that Mom bought me Velcro shoes as a kid, but I can't fall down that wormhole right now. For having fingers as thick as hotdogs, he's surprisingly nimble. He once told me he was a boxer, back where he came up, but I've never known if that was an inside joke.\n\nMarcel snips the line and takes an appraising look, pursing his lips. He looks at me and raises an eyebrow. I nod.\n\n\"Wake her,\" he says, then carries the mixing bowl of cutlery and flatware to the laundry sink in the corner.\n\nHer eyelashes are delicate spiderlegs. Pallid eyelids flutter as she dreams of ethereal places. I brush the back of my hand across her good cheek, warm with blood. Curls of hair pool behind the soft slope of her skull like a puddle of coffee. Lips twitching as if they're hoping for a kiss and I startle when Marcel coughs. He's bent over the sink, scrubbing at a pair of tongs.\n\nI fidget with my hands\u2014as if nothing unusual had happened\u2014then move towards her feet, and, until I glance down and see her arm, she's the most beautiful creature to lie on our table. Just below the crook of her elbow sit three purple dots that could be mistaken for ticks, and if dots like these didn't turn my blood to acid, I could say they were innocuous bug bites, not trackmarks.\n\nTwo jabs on the bottom of the feet wake her, though if it was an ice-pick instead of a needle, she'd be a bloody mess. She jerks to the side, blinking away the haze. I wait for the disorientation to pass before giving rudimentary healing instructions and sending her to Megan in the other part of the partitioned basement.\n\n\"Pretty girl,\" Marcel says, head down into the sink.\n\n\"Mmhm.\" I double-check the nitrous valve and make sure it's closed. A few months ago, I didn't twist it far enough. Marcel thought it was funny at the time, for obvious reasons, but proceeded to berate me for an hour once the drugs wore off. Clowns bounce around the tank in various joyful positions. It's a wonder people will still lay under our knife after we offer them Krusty-brand anesthetic. Then again, we're not exactly your normal HMO.\n\n\"Do you have time to get dinner tonight?\"\n\nThe big hand relentlessly follows the little hand around the face of my watch. Mom will need to eat within the hour.\n\n\"Can I get a rain check?\"\n\nHe's already nodding before I answer.\n\n\"Leave the clean-up for me. You'll miss your bus.\"\n\nX\n\nRain collects in buckets and pots and pickle jars scattered across the floor of our house. The anonymous cheering on her gameshow trickles from upstairs. I light scented candles to cover the smell of damp smoke, then balance a glass of milk, a mug of tea, and a bowl of soup on the orange plastic tray.\n\n\"Mom,\" I shout. \"Did Daniel drop off any bread today?\"'\n\nThe crowd roars at something inanely thrilling.\n\n\"Mom?\"\n\nSomeone wagered too much or bought the wrong vowel and now the crowd is disappointed. I pile a few crackers on the cracked plastic and tentatively shuffle up the steps. The rain falls with a rhythmic plink. Hung in the stairwell are prints of flower paintings, gilded frames around the edges. I remember, when I was younger, Mom would get mad because I'd leave smudges all over the glass. The colors were so vibrant, I had to touch the prints to check if they were real. Now, soaked in water and old smoke, they all look dead.\n\nHer wheelchair is facing the wall when I walk in. 'Jesus, Ma,' I mutter.\n\n\"Henry, darling.\" She raises her hand, feeling for my face. \"I didn't hear you come in.\"\n\nJagged lines of soot stagger along the walls like a cursed mountain range. I nudge her hand with my chin. \"That's because the whole neighborhood is listening to Wheel of Fortune with you.\"\n\n\"It's Press Your Luck.\"\n\n\"Whatever.\" I press my foot against her wheel and turn her towards me.\n\nHer hand flutters like an epileptic moth in the dim light. \"Henry, let your mother say hello to you.\"\n\n\"My hands are full. Just give me a minute.\" I drag a table over with my foot and set her tray down. Rain drips from the roof, cloudy with insulation and ash, and lands on a towel at the foot of the bed. I toss it onto the pile in the corner and place Mom's hands on my cheeks.\n\n\"There's my boy,\" she sighs. Her smile is almost as cockeyed as her pupils, as if they're joined by some of Marcel's fishing line. 'How was your day, darling?'\n\n\"Fine, Mom.\" I wedge the edges of the tray between the armrests of her chair and wrap her fingers around the spoon, guide it to the bowl. \"Eat your soup before it's cold.\"\n\nThe crowd roars again, and I press mute instead of throwing the TV out the cracked window. A blonde who really wants the trip they're offering beats her hands together and looks strikingly like a seal. Through the thin walls, I can hear the junkie next door playing violin. It's more seizure than concerto, but at least he's learned the concept of rhythm in the past year.\n\nI wipe beads of broth from Mom's chin and light a cigarette. Smoke twists from the burning end and dissipates in the grey air. She pauses, spoon halfway to her mouth.\n\n\"I thought you switched from menthol.\"\n\nI drop the cigarette in a soda can and thumb one from her pack. \"I did.\"\n\nShe just smiles.\n\nI watch game show contestants beat their hands together, silently laughing and throwing their arms up in awe. The house smells of dampness, of a dog in the river or unwashed clothing. When the wind blows, I swear to Christ it gets ten degrees colder in here. I close my eyes and visualize smoke filling my lungs, concentrate on the wet air dissolving me. The metal spoon clatters on cracked porcelain. She gives a contented sigh and extends her hand.\n\n\"You almost ready for bed?\" I light a cigarette and set it in her mouth.\n\n\"Thank you, but I was reaching for your hand.\" She gropes my elbow, working her way down to my wrist. Squeezing my palm, head cocked and pupils floating like drowned flies in a pool of yellowed milk, she says, \"Talk to me.\"\n\n\"I am talking to you.\"\n\n\"Real talk.\" She jerks her shoulders, trying to move her chair closer.\n\nI light another cigarette. She slowly shakes her head. A bus passes our house, the wet whoosh making our walls shiver. Rain falls in steady droplets from the ceiling, plinks matching my heartbeat.\n\n\"I'm fine, Mom. Let's get you into bed.\"\n\nI push her to her room, lay out her pajamas, and after she calls out that she's decent, lift her into bed. I kiss her goodnight, and her forehead is cold as a forgotten hallway. She holds my wrist and I turn to leave.\n\n\"If you won't talk, please sing to me.\"\n\n\"Mom,\" I look at my watch, as if I have someplace to be, as if she could even see it.\n\n\"Please, Henry.\" She squeezes my hand again. I sigh and give in. Even through my pants, I can feel that the chair is wet when I sit.\n\n\"What song? Not Johnny Cash, we always do Johnny Cash.\"\n\nShe nestles her head into the pillow and a smile trickles across her face. \"Hank Williams.\"\n\n\"Why do you keep asking?\"\n\n\"Because your father loved it.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" I push the chair back to leave.\n\n\"Henry.\" Her chin trembles despite itself, as she tries to mouth please. \"For me?\"\n\n\"I'll sing you something, but it won't be Hank.\"\n\nShe purses her lips and, eventually, nods.\n\nI hum the opening verse of a Roy Orbison tune she used to play a lot, making up a few of the words I can't remember, and drag the covers up to her chin, pressing them around her body. Sitting on the night table is a framed picture of her with cat's-eye glasses and a pencil skirt, shaking the hand of a man in a suit that looks so expensive, I can practically smell the wool through the photo. She was young, really young. Her first real job, I think, as an assistant at Bethlehem Steel, a few months before the plant shut down. The certificate that the man is handing her used to hang on the wall in what used to be her office, before my father commandeered it and blacked out the windows with tinfoil and duct tape.\n\nHalfway through the bridge and her breaths are slower, longer. I ebb from singing to humming and creep away from her bed, minding the few spots that creak.\n\nFor a blind woman, she can be incredibly crafty, and before I turn off the light, I lay facedown a sheep stuffed animal my father won for her at the State Fair, back when they were dating. It holds a sign in its mouth with I Love Ewe scrawled in what I suppose is sheep-script. Every night I turn it down, and every morning, it's upright again. I tried to tell myself that it was only ghosts, that poltergeists were toying with me, trying to make me insane. Truth is, it's far worse than that.\n\nIt's love.\n\nX\n\nThe unconscious boy sprawled facedown across the table poked a hole in the vacuum of my chest the minute I saw him. His arms could've passed for a January sky finger-painted by a four year-old. The cloud of bruises started around his bicep, drifting down a fading sun the color of pus. His back was less artistic; the shapes of belt buckles competed with spoons\u2013probably wooden, if they left marks like that\u2013and all a similar shade of scarred brown. I paced in the alley, chain-smoking four cigarettes before I could get my head together to operate.\n\nMarcel goes to work on the back of the kid's neck. I ask him what the procedure is and he flaps his arms like a mad duck, mutters a bunch of words and the only ones I can pick up are nerve endings.\n\nI laugh to myself. \"Are you an electrician now, rewiring sensations?\"\n\nHe glares at me above his safety goggles. \"Deadening them.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say, more into my shoulder than aloud.\n\nThe surgery proceeds in forty minutes of silence, broken only by single phrases. Knife. Melon baller. Corkscrew. Hold it, not there\u2013there. Whether he's concentrating or pissed, it doesn't really matter: all I can focus on is the pattern of scarred-brown that covers the kid's back.\n\nWhen Marcel clears his throat, it's my father standing over my mother, laughing, as she's crumpled on the floor. When he re-sterilizes the knife over flame, it's the click of my father's lighter under a tarnished spoon. When he coughs, it's my father with his face in the crook of his arm, hurrying down the steps as smoke billows behind him.\n\nA bright white spot flashes in my eyes. I startle, and Marcel's right hand is reared back to smack me again, his left holding down the boy's head.\n\n\"I said get the goddamn nitrous! He's waking up!\"\n\nI scurry to the tank and drag it over, crush the mouthpiece on the boy's face and in seconds, he's unconscious again. Marcel releases his tentative grip and exhales hard through his nose.\n\n\"Send in Megan. You need to go home.\"\n\nX\n\nThe rain drips. The studio audience cheers. The haunting smoke lingers. My life is a crooked deck of cards: all varying slightly, but basically the same and repeated endlessly.\n\nWhile Mom eats her stew, I excuse myself to the bathroom and, silent as a shadow, grab the stuffed animal from her dresser. I flush the toilet and open the window while the water is still running and throw the sheep into the alley between houses.\n\nShe's stopped eating when I return.\n\n\"Where were you?\"\n\n\"In the bathroom, Ma. I just told you that.\"\n\n\"What were you doing in the bathroom?\"\n\nI light a cigarette and laugh.\n\n\"Don't laugh at me, Henry,\" she snaps. \"What were you doing in the bathroom?\"\n\n\"Christ, what do you think?\" In some remote part of my brain, I'm wondering if she can hear my hands twitching. \"What people always do in the bathroom.\"\n\nShe sits, silent but for the breathing coursing in and out of her nostrils. She takes a deep breath and crosses her arms. \"I'm ready for bed.\"\n\n\"Okay, keep your wig on.\" I wheel her towards her bed and she sticks her arms up like a toddler waiting to be dressed.\n\n\"I want you to sing to me, Henry.\"\n\n\"I sing to you every night.\" I hand her a pair of pajamas. \"Change your clothes first.\"\n\n\"You're the only one I see. I don't need to keep up airs.\" She's gnawing on her bottom lip, and the way her eyes float when she gets angry is almost comical. \"I want you to sing.\"\n\n\"Jesus, fine, whatever.\" I start into an Elvis tune, from his gospel years, and she cuts me off.\n\n\"Hank Williams.\"\n\n\"We've been over this before.\"\n\n\"Hank Williams, Henry. Sing it.\"\n\n\"Damn it, Ma.\" I forget and crush my cigarette on the floor under my foot. It sizzles on the damp surface and the mark is indistinguishable. \"I'm not singing that fucking song. I don't care if it's the only song that won't...won't make your head explode. I'm not going to sing that song.\"\n\n\"But it's all I have.\" Her jaw tightens, lip shivers. \"I love it.\"\n\n\"He loved it.\"\n\nShe flinches, as if I'd hit her. As if she could see me try to strike her. \"He loved you.\"\n\n\"He loved smack and he loved you buying it for him.\"\n\nShe swings her hand, swatting dust particles and drops of rain and coming nowhere near my face\n\n\"Don't talk about you father that way!\"\n\n\"Why, Mom?\" I pace the other side of the bed. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Because he was a good man.\"\n\n\"He tried to burn the fucking house down!\" I knock the picture of her and the man off her night table. \"You're blind and you're crippled, and you're telling me he was a good fucking man!\"\n\n\"Don't scream at me!\" Her voice shatters into a thousand jagged pieces, chest heaving and shaking so hard the armrest falls off the wheelchair. It clatters on the floor, and I look around and the whole scene comes crashing down on me as if the roof finally gave in and aimed itself for the crown of my skull.\n\n\"God. Mom.\" I rush to her side of the bed, to hold her, hug her, sing to her, and apologize, but she uses some kind of echolocation and her hand stings hard across my mouth. She wills the tears back into her eyes and her expression becomes marble.\n\n\"Get out of my house.\"\n\nX\n\nMarcel answers on the third knock. The light over his door is burned out and streetlights cast a golden pall. The bunny on his right foot is missing one ear and his left looks comatose. He regards me with leaden eyes and a grunt.\n\n\"I need an operation,\" I say.\n\nHis kitchen is almost as accommodating as his basement surgery: cardboard boxes half-full of textbooks and home repair manuals line the perimeter, and a rainbow-river of wires runs across the chipped linoleum.\n\n\"Hazelnut?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Do you like hazelnut coffee?\"\n\nI shrug and pull out a chair, moving a grocery bag of antiseptic mouthwash, grilling implements, dental floss and packs of wintermint gum to the floor.\n\n\"You know I'm not a brain surgeon, right? I mean, anything can go wrong.\" His words come in fits and starts, alternating warnings with counting scoops of coffee. \"You've seen that yourself. It probably will go wrong.\"\n\n\"You're a doctor. You can do it.\"\n\n\"Henry,\" he pauses, laughing to himself. \"Look behind you. Second stack from the corner, about waist-high. There's a box labeled head.\"\n\nWhile he roots around in the fridge, I unstack piles, unearthing a box of neurological textbooks. He beckons with his hand, digs halfway down and grabs a book with a blank cover. Bologna sandwich hanging from his mouth, he leafs through two inches of pages, then spins the book to face me and jabs a finger on a diagram of the human brain.\n\n\"Right there, right there, and right there are where your memories are stored.\"\n\n\"I told you you could do it.\"\n\n\"It's not erasing a movie from a video tape, Henry. It's brain surgery.\"\n\n\"And?\" On the counter, the coffee pot coughs and sputters.\n\n\"And those two spots, I could never get to. Not without turning your head into a skull-full of grits.\"\n\nI get up and pour two cups of coffee. \"So what are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\nFingers of steam rise from the coffee like smoke, like ropes of thick grey air that carry cinders and souls. I sip and expect to taste ash.\n\nI point to another set of ridges. \"What about there?\"\n\nHe tilts his head, considering. \"Well, yeah, but there's no guarantee. On any of it. I could do it and make you a drooling idiot. You could lose any memory you have. You could lose random ones and keep the ones you want gone. I could slip and nick another lobe, like this one.\"\n\nHe lays a gnarled finger on the next section. \"That controls language.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"While I'd enjoy you not be able to argue with me, it might affect other aspects of your life. As in you and your\u2014\"\n\nI swat away the idea. \"Yeah, I get it.\"\n\nWe sip our coffee until it's only grounds scattered on the bottom of the cup. He offers half his sandwich, but I push it back to him. I try to stare a hole through his skull, to climb in and rewire his risk-assessment ridges. He won't meet my eyes.\n\nEventually, he stands and stretches. The edge of the sky bleeds pink, drop by drop, ray by ray. He tells me that he needs to take a shower and eat breakfast because there's a consultation scheduled in two hours. He pauses before going up the steps, turns and raises his gaze to mine. It's taken four hours for him to meet my eyes.\n\n\"I used to know a girl once, a singer, back when I was still fighting.\"\n\n\"So that wasn't a joke?\"\n\n\"I didn't always look like this.\" He looks down at the buttons of his shirt, stretched tight and nearly popping free. \"She had one of the most beautiful voices I'd ever heard\u2014still, to this day\u2014that could've taken her anywhere in the world. The only thing holding her back was the idea that things were always better on that other stage.\"\n\nI flip back the edge of a box, pick at a veterinary surgery guide.\n\n\"You're going to do this regardless, aren't you?\" he says.\n\n\"It's either you or drinking four gallons of turpentine.\" In a digging motion, I press a spoon to my forehead until white dots materialize like stars on the horizon. \"Either way, he can't be in here anymore.\"\n\nMarcel only nods. The spoon tinks on the tabletop.\n\n\"Go home and sleep.\" His footsteps echo in the hallway. \"You can come in tonight.\"\n\nX\n\nThe day passes in a breath, and as I kneel beside Mom, tucked under her covers as if she's sleeping, though I can tell from her breathing she's awake. I can't remember a single scene from my entire day. Marcel's voice echoed down the hall, then I was tiptoeing across the Mom's floor, a thief in my own house.\n\nShe rolls over and grunts, still pretending, and her hand falls on the edge of the bed next to mine. I lay mine over hers and sing in a voice barely louder than eyelashes blinking. I swallow bile and dig my fingernails into my thigh and sing the Hank Williams song she and my fuckface father loved. She manages to keep the appearance up and can control her breathing, but the tear welling in the crevice of her right eyelid gives it away. I kiss her forehead and remove my hand, then slink away into the rainy night.\n\nA pelican flies over water that looks like an ocean of sapphires while two palm trees sway in a gentle breeze that barely shifts any of the crystalline sand on the beach. A woman leans over a car from Smokey and the Bandit, the bandana she's using as a bathing suit disappearing between her thighs.\n\nI've worked with Marcel for over two years, and I never noticed the posters he tacked to the ceiling.\n\n\"Nice touch,\" I say.\n\nHe nods, gives a half-smile. \"I wanted to cover all the bases.\"\n\n\"It's only two bases.\" I sit up, leaning on my elbow. 'And that one's bordering on pornographic.'\n\nHe just shrugs and runs the edge of a knife over a tomato, testing the blade, then pours alcohol over it. Blotting it dry, he picks up a needle then sets it down, turns over a pair of tongs and replaces the Saran Wrap over the table. Three more slices in the tomato and I think he's stalling.\n\n\"You promised,\" I say.\n\nHis hand jumps, nicking the thumb. Hand to his mouth, he mumbles, \"You're sure about this.\"\n\nI just nod and lay down, close my eyes. A muted rainbow of dots float across the flesh inside my eyelids. I focus, try to rearrange them into a halftone print of a family portrait with only two people. Inhale. The smell of damp smoke floods my nostrils, and Marcel gave up cigarettes years ago when his wife died of cancer. Exhale. The sound of game-show audiences drowns out scratchy country guitars. Inhale. A fist of cheap cologne, vodka and the burnt baby laxative used to cut dope crushes my nose. Exhale. A whiff of ash, of baby powder, of Mom's shampoo from when I was younger that always reminded me of cut grass. Inhale. Nitrous oxide and Marcel's liquid voice telling me to count to ten. Somewhere beyond my ears, past bloody eyelids and clenched fists and bruised legs and pipe-burnt chests, Hank Williams drags his voice over broken glass in the darkness.\n\nX\n\nStatic white. Fields of snow and the feathers of doves falling around me. A thousand rose thorns stab my fingers and feet. Marcel's voice sends the feathers into spirals.\n\nI blink away the nauseating soot and see a brilliant blue swirl above me. Tiny fists reshape the inside of my head.\n\n\"Henry?\" His voice is made of cotton and I can hardly hear it over the reverberations in my skull.\n\nThe air is tactile and claustrophobic. Hot metal, copper and antiseptic. I blink, tell my fingers to move. One trembles, or that could be my vision.\n\n\"Henry, can you hear me?\" His snaps are cracks of thunder.\n\nI hoist myself up to my elbows, swallow. An anchor must be tied to the back of my head.\n\n\"Do you know where you are? What's my name?\"\n\nHe snaps his fingers to the left, right, left, up and down, testing my reactions.\n\n\"What's your mother's name?\"\n\nI clear my throat.\n\n\"Henry.\" Marcel takes my hand and looks me straight in the eyes. \"Speak.\"\n\nI open my mouth and silence devours me.\nNik Korpon\n\nis the author of Old Ghosts, By the Nails of the Warpriest, Bar Scars: Stories, and the forthcoming Stay God, Sweet Angel (2014). His stories have bloodied the pages and screens of Needle Magazine, Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Out of the Gutter, Speedloader, Warmed & Bound among others, and he is a columnist for LitReactor.com. He lives in Baltimore.\n\nTHE ETIQUETTE   \nOF HOMICIDE\n\nTARA LASKOWSKI\n\nII. On Introductions\n\nAbove all, you must be patient.\n\nIt may take some time to get a full answer, so don't be afraid of a little bit of silence. Prompting, such as \"go on,\" or \"what are you thinking?\" or \"I'm going to beat your face into mashed potato pulp\" will not help and will likely make them nervous. You should also generally avoid finishing their sentences when they pause for a moment. They want to articulate their thoughts in a particular way, so give them enough time to do so.\n\nListen carefully to their answers (but never write them down) and give positive feedback, such as, \"You're doing a good job\" or \"That wasn't that hard now, was it?\" Avoid threats if at all possible. Be sure to give sincere feedback between questions; if they don't think you mean what you're saying, it won't help you.\n\nExpress a positive impression of interacting with them. When it's time for you to part ways, smile and let them know that you appreciated talking with them. If you seem insincere, they may feel discouraged rather than uplifted. It is important to let them know this is nothing personal\u2014it's just your job.\n\nAppendix C\u2014Recipe for Old Fashioned\n\n2 oz bourbon whiskey\n\n2 dashes Angostura\u00ae bitters\n\n1 splash water\n\n1 tsp sugar\n\n1 maraschino cherry\n\n1 orange wedge\n\nMix sugar, water, and Angostura bitters in a tall shaker. Dump in an old-fashioned glass, or if you are traveling, any glass will do. Drop in a cherry and an orange wedge. Muddle into a paste using a muddler or the back end of a blunt instrument (like a spoon, or the handle of a screwdriver). Pour in bourbon, fill with ice cubes, and stir. Drink in three gulps sitting down, shoes off, toes waving into the carpet threads. Repeat. Repeat.\n\nPart 7\u2014The Dance\n\nThere are no rules of protocol. The Client prefers you to use bullets. The gun is like your dick, The Client says. Hold it close, protect it. It makes you Who You Are, they say. A steady hand, scope, sniping away from a great distance.\n\nPrefer something more intimate? A dance, then, with a partner who prefers to hover at the edge of the room, just in front of the floor-to-ceiling velvet drapes. Find him there, approach quietly from behind as not to startle. Put your arms around his and remember the waltz lessons Mrs. Kessel taught you long ago on that gym floor\u2014one two three, one two three\u2014and in Mr. Duncan's home economics class years after that, slicing through chicken quickly, efficiently\u2014with confidence you get right through the bone. Trust the knife, silent like a goodnight kiss. Then pirouette your partner out, one two three, one two three. Thank you. Thank you.\n\nTip the concierge, but not too much. Too much will make him remember you; too little will make him remember you.\n\nPart 10\u2014Laundromats\n\nRemove a bloodstain when it is fresh. Rinse the clothing in cold water. Then blot the bloodstain with some diluted Tide you buy for $2 in the vending machine in the back.\n\nLaundromats are not glamorous. You never see James Bond in a Laundromat at 3:45 a.m., where the 24-hour fluorescent lights at the front entrance speak easy money for the enormous spiders and their webs. They know how to maximize their kills. Some of them you swear you can see breathing.\n\nIgnore the bums sleeping in the corner or wandering through with wild eyes. Ignore the thump, thump, thump, thump of someone's bed sheets in the dryer. Ignore the smell of piss mixed with fabric softener. Focus on you, on getting through, on getting back.\n\nIf all else fails, try spitting on a bloodstain\u2014especially if it's your own blood. Surprisingly, this may help.\n\nOn Dreams\n\nEating late at night makes for more vivid dreams. Eat as early as possible, and avoid drinking heavily right before bed.\n\nShould you wake from one of the Terrible Ones, stand up immediately in the dark and jump up and down until your ankles start to hurt and the blood in your head feels hot. Remember you are here. Remember there is no God. There is just you and the dark and the carpet, the soft shaggy carpet you spent your first reward on that was worth every fucking penny because it is real and more money than your father would've spent on a car back in those days, back in New Jersey where all the houses squat sad and droopy and falling apart and fuck that, all that. Don't think about your parents either, those nights. Splash some cold water on your face and burn a fifty-dollar bill in the sunken marble tub.\n\nWhen the fire dies out, eat the ashes.\nTara Laskowski\n\nis the author of Modern Manners For Your Inner Demons (Matter Press), a short story collection of dark etiquette. She is the senior editor for SmokeLong Quarterly and has published numerous stories online and in print.\n\nDREDGE\n\nMATT BELL\n\nThe drowned girl drips everywhere, soaking the cheap cloth of the Ford's back seat. Punter stares at her from the front of the car, first taking in her long blond hair, wrecked by the pond's amphibian sheen, then her lips, blue where the lipstick's been washed away, flaky red where it has not. He looks into her glassy green eyes, her pupils so dilated the irises are slivered halos, the right eye further polluted with burst blood vessels. She wears a lace-frilled gold tank top, a pair of acid wash jeans with grass stains on the knees and the ankles. A silver bracelet around her wrist throws off sparkles in the window-filtered moonlight, the same sparkle he saw through the lake's dark mirror, that made him drop his fishing pole and wade out, then dive in after her. Her feet are bare except for a silver ring on her left pinkie toe, suggesting the absence of sandals, flip-flops, something lost in a struggle. Suggesting too many things for Punter to process all at once.\n\nPunter turns and faces forward. He lights a cigarette, then flicks it out the window after just two drags. Smoking with the drowned girl in the car reminds him of when he worked at the plastics factory, how he would sometimes taste melted plastic in every puff of smoke. How a cigarette there hurt his lungs, left him gasping, his tongue coated with the taste of polyvinyl chloride, of adipates and phthalates. How that taste would leave his throat sore, would make his stomach ache all weekend.\n\nThe idea that some part of the dead girl might end up inside him\u2014her wet smell or sloughing skin or dumb luck\u2014he doesn't need a cigarette that bad.\n\nPunter crawls halfway into the back seat and arranges the girl as comfortably as he can, while he still can. He's hunted enough deer and rabbits and squirrels to know she's going to stiffen soon. He arranges her arms and legs until she appears asleep, then brushes her hair out of her face before he climbs back into his own seat.\n\nLooking in the rearview, Punter smiles at the drowned girl, waits for her to smile back. Feels his face flush when he remembers she's never going to.\n\nHe starts the engine. Drives her home.\n\nX\n\nPunter lives fifteen minutes from the pond but tonight it takes longer. He keeps the Ford five miles per hour under the speed limit, stops extra long at every stop sign. He thinks about calling the police, about how he should have already done so, instead of dragging the girl onto the shore and into his car.\n\nThe cops, they'll call this disturbing the scene of a crime. Obstructing justice. Tampering with evidence.\n\nWhat the cops will say about what he's done, Punter already knows all about it.\n\nAt the house, he leaves the girl in the car while he goes inside and shits, his stool as black and bloody as it has been for months. It burns when he wipes. He needs to see a doctor, but doesn't have insurance, hasn't since getting fired.\n\nAfterward, he sits at the kitchen table and smokes a cigarette. The phone is only a few feet away, hanging on the wall. Even though the service was disconnected a month ago, he's pretty sure he could still call 911, if he wanted to.\n\nHe doesn't want to.\n\nX\n\nIn the garage, he lifts the lid of the chest freezer that sits against the far wall. He stares at the open space above the paper-wrapped bundles of venison, tries to guess if there's enough room, then stacks piles of burger and steak and sausage on the floor until he's sure. He goes out to the car and opens the back door. He lifts the girl, grunting as he gathers her into his arms like a child. He's not as strong as he used to be, and she's heavier than she looks, with all the water filling her lungs and stomach and intestinal tract. Even through her tank top he can see the way it bloats her belly like she's pregnant. He's careful as he lays her in the freezer, as he brushes the hair out of her eyes again, as he holds her eyelids closed until he's sure they'll stay that way.\n\nThe freezer will give him time to figure out what he wants. What he needs. What he and she are capable of together.\n\nX\n\nPunter wakes in the middle of the night and puts his boots on in a panic. In the freezer, the girl's covered in a thin layer of frost, and he realizes he shouldn't have put her away wet. He considers taking her out, thawing her, toweling her off, but doesn't. It's too risky. One thing Punter knows about himself is that he is not always good at saying when.\n\nHe closes the freezer lid, goes back to the house, back to bed but not to sleep. Even wide awake, he can see the curve of her neck, the interrupting line of her collarbones intersecting the thin straps of her tank top. He reaches under his pajama bottoms, past the elastic of his underwear, then squeezes himself until the pain takes the erection away.\n\nX\n\nOn the news the next morning, there's a story about the drowned girl. The anchorman calls her missing but then says the words her name was. Punter winces. It's only a slip, but he knows how hurtful the past tense can be.\n\nThe girl is younger than Punter had guessed, a high school senior at the all-girls school across town. Her car was found yesterday, parked behind a nearby gas station, somewhere Punter occasionally fills up his car, buys cigarettes and candy bars.\n\nThe anchorman says the police are currently investigating, but haven't released any leads to the public. The anchorman looks straight into the camera and says it's too early to presume the worst, that the girl could still show up at any time.\n\nPunter shuts off the television, stubs out his cigarette. He takes a shower, shaves, combs his black hair straight back. Dresses himself in the same outfit he wears every day, a white t-shirt and blue jeans and black motorcycle boots.\n\nOn the way to his car, he stops by the garage and opens the freezer lid. Her body is obscured behind ice like frosted glass. He puts a finger to her lips, but all he feels is cold.\n\nX\n\nThe gas station is on a wooded stretch of gravel road between Punter's house and the outskirts of town. Although Punter has been here before, he's never seen it so crowded. While he waits in line he realizes these people are here for the same reason he is, to be near the site of the tragedy, to see the last place this girl was seen.\n\nThe checkout line crawls while the clerk runs his mouth, ruining his future testimony by telling his story over and over, transforming his eyewitness account into another harmless story.\n\nThe clerk says, I was the only one working that night. Of course I remember her.\n\nIn juvie, the therapists had called this narrative therapy, or else constructing a preferred reality.\n\nThe clerk says, Long blond hair, tight-ass jeans, all that tan skin\u2014I'm not saying she brought it on herself, but you can be sure she knew people would be looking.\n\nThe clerk, he has black glasses and halitosis and fingernails chewed to keratin pulp. Teeth stained with cigarettes or chewing tobacco or coffee. Or all of the above. He reminds Punter of himself, and he wonders if the clerk feels the same, if there is a mutual recognition between them.\n\nWhen it's Punter's turn, the clerk says, I didn't see who took her, but I wish I had.\n\nPunter looks away, reads the clerk's name tag. OSWALD. The clerk says, If I knew who took that girl, I'd kill him myself.\n\nPunter shivers as he slides his bills across the counter, as he takes his carton of cigarettes and his candy bar. He doesn't stop shivering until he gets out of the air-conditioned store and back inside his sun-struck car.\n\nThe therapists had told Punter that what he'd done was a mistake, that there was nothing wrong with him. They made him repeat their words back to them, to absolve himself of the guilt they were so sure he was feeling.\n\nThe therapists had said, You were just kids. You didn't know what you were doing.\n\nPunter said the words they wanted, but doing so changed nothing. He'd never felt the guilt they told him he should. Even now, he has only the remembered accusations of cops and judges to convince him that what he did was wrong.\n\nX\n\nPunter cooks two venison steaks in a frying pan with salt and butter. He sits down to eat, cuts big mouthfuls, then chews and chews, the meat tough from overcooking. He eats past the point of satiation on into discomfort, until his stomach presses against the tight skin of his abdomen. He never knows how much food to cook. He always clears his plate.\n\nWhen he's done eating, he smokes and thinks about the girl in the freezer. How, when walking her out of the pond, she had threatened to slip out of his arms and back into the water. How he'd held on, carrying her up and out into the starlight. He hadn't saved her\u2014couldn't have\u2014but he had preserved her, kept her safe from the wet decay, from the mouths of fish and worse.\n\nHe knows the freezer is better than the refrigerator, that the dry cold of meat and ice is better than the slow rot of lettuce and leftovers and ancient, crust-rimmed condiments. Knows that even after death, there is a safety in the preservation of a body, that there is a second kind of life to be had.\n\nX\n\nPunter hasn't been to the bar near the factory since he got fired, but tonight he needs a drink. By eight, he's already been out to the garage four times, unable to keep from opening the freezer lid. If he doesn't stop, the constant thawing and refreezing will destroy her, skin first.\n\nIt's mid-shift at the factory, so the bar is empty except for the bartender and two men sitting together at the rail, watching the ball game on the television mounted above the liquor shelves. Punter takes a stool at the opposite end, orders a beer and lights a cigarette. He looks at the two men, tries to decide if they're men he knows from the plant. He's bad with names, bad at faces. One of the men catches him looking and gives him a glare that Punter immediately looks away from. He knows that he stares too long at people, that it makes them uncomfortable, but he can't help himself. He moves his eyes to his hands to his glass to the game, which he also can't make any sense of. Sports move too fast, are full of rules and behaviors he finds incomprehensible.\n\nDuring commercials, the station plugs its own late-night newscast, including the latest about the missing girl. Punter stares at the picture of her on the television screen, his tongue growing thick and dry for the five seconds the image is displayed. One of the other men drains the last gulp of his beer and shakes his head, says, I hope they find the fucker that killed her and cut his balls off.\n\nSo you think she's dead then?\n\nOf course she's dead. You don't go missing like that and not end up dead.\n\nThe men motion for another round as the baseball game comes back from the break. Punter realizes he's been holding his breath, lets it go in a loud, hacking gasp. The bartender and two men turn to look, so he holds a hand up, trying to signal he doesn't need any help, then puts it down when he realizes they're not offering. He pays his tab and gets up to leave.\n\nHe hasn't thought much about how the girl got into the pond, or who put her there. He too assumed murder, but the who or why or when is not something he's previously considered.\n\nIn juvie, the counselors told him nothing he did or didn't do would have kept his mother alive, which Punter understood fine. Of course he hadn't killed his mother. That wasn't why he was there. It was what he'd done afterward that had locked him away, put him behind bars until he was eighteen.\n\nThis time, he will do better. He won't sit around for months while the police slowly solve the case, while they decide that what he's done is just as bad. This time, Punter will find the murderer himself, and he will make him pay.\n\nX\n\nHe remembers: Missing her. Not knowing where she was, not understanding, just wishing she'd come back. Not believing his father, who told him that she'd left them, that she was gone forever.\n\nHe remembers looking for her all day while his father worked, wandering the road, the fields, the rooms of their small house.\n\nHe remembers descending into the basement one step at a time. Finding the light switch, waiting for the fluorescent tubes to warm up. Stepping off the wood steps, his bare feet aching at the cold of the concrete floor.\n\nHe remembers nothing out of the ordinary, everything in its place.\n\nHe remembers the olive green refrigerator and the hum of the lights being the only two sounds in the world.\n\nHe remembers walking across the concrete and opening the refrigerator door.\n\nMore than anything else, he remembers opening his mouth to scream and not being able to. He remembers that scream getting trapped in his chest, never to emerge.\n\nX\n\nWhen the eleven o' clock news comes on, Punter is watching, ready with his small, spiral-bound notebook and his golf pencil stolen from the keno caddy at the bar. He writes down the sparse information added to the girl's story. The reporter recounts what Punter already knows\u2014her name, the school, the abandoned car\u2014then plays a clip of the local sheriff, who leans into the reporter's microphone and says, We're still investigating, but so far there's no proof for any of these theories. It's rare when someone gets out of their car and disappears on their own, but it does happen.\n\nThe sheriff pauses, listening to an inaudible question, then says, Whatever happened to her, it didn't happen inside the car. There's no sign of a struggle, no sign of sexual assault or worse.\n\nPunter crosses his legs, then uncrosses them. He presses the pencil down onto the paper and writes all of this down.\n\nThe next clip is of the girl's father and mother, standing behind a podium at a press conference. They are both dressed in black, both stern and sad in dress clothes. The father speaks, saying, If anyone out there knows what happened\u2014if you know where our daughter is\u2014please come forward. We need to know where she is.\n\nPunter writes down the word father, writes down the words mother and daughter. He looks at his useless telephone. He could tell these strangers what they wanted, but what good would it do them? His own father had known exactly where his mother was, and it hadn't done either of them any good.\n\nX\n\nAccording to the shows on television, the first part of an investigation is always observation, is always the gathering of clues. Punter opens the closet where he keeps his hunting gear and takes his binoculars out of their case. He hangs them around his neck and closes the closet door, then reopens it and takes his hunting knife off the top shelf. He doesn't need it, not yet, but he knows television detectives always carry a handgun to protect themselves. He only owns a rifle and a shotgun, both too long for this kind of work. The knife will have to be enough.\n\nIn the car, he puts the knife in the glove box and the binoculars on the seat. He takes the notebook out of his back pocket and reads the list of locations he's written down: the school, her parents' house, the pond and the gas station.\n\nHe reads the time when the clerk said he saw her and then writes down another, the time he found her in the pond. The two times are separated by barely a day, so she couldn't have been in the pond for too long.\n\nWhatever happened to her, it happened fast.\n\nHe thinks that whoever did this, they must be a local to know about the pond. Punter has never actually seen anyone else there, only the occasional tire tracks, the left-behind beer bottles and cigarette butts from teenage parties. The condoms discarded further off in the bushes, where Punter goes to piss.\n\nHe thinks about the girl, about how he knows she would never consent to him touching her if she were still alive. About how she would never let him say the words he's said, the words he still wants to say. He wonders what he will do when he finds her killer. His investigation, it could be either an act of vengeance or thanksgiving, but it is still too early to know which.\n\nX\n\nPunter has been to the girl's school once before, when the unemployment office sent him to interview for a janitorial position there. He hadn't been offered the job, couldn't have passed the background check if he had. His juvenile record was sealed, but there was enough there to warn people, and schools never took any chances.\n\nHe circles the parking lot twice, then parks down the sidewalk from the front entrance, where he'll be able to watch people coming in and out of the school. He resists the urge to use the binoculars, knows he must control himself in public, must keep from acting on every thought he has. This is why he hasn't talked in months. Why he keeps to himself in his house, hunting and fishing, living off the too-small government disability checks the unemployment counselors helped him apply for.\n\nThese counselors, they hadn't wanted him to see what they wrote down for his disability, but he had. Seeing those words written in the counselor's neat script didn't make him angry, just relieved to know. He wasn't bad anymore. He was a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapist in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn't. They didn't believe him when he said he'd already told them everything he had inside him.\n\nPunter knows they were right to disbelieve him, that he did have feelings he didn't want to let out.\n\nWhen Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.\n\nA bell rings from inside the building. Soon the doors open, spilling girls out onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Punter watches parents getting out of other cars, going to greet their children. One of these girls might be a friend of the drowned girl, and if he could talk to her then he might be able to find out who the drowned girl was. Might be able to make a list of other people he needed to question so that he could solve her murder.\n\nThe volume and the increasing number of distinct voices, all of it overwhelms Punter. He stares, watching the girls go by in their uniforms. All of them are identically clothed and so he focuses instead on their faces, on their hair, on the differences between blondes and brunettes and redheads. He watches the girls smiling and rolling their eyes and exchanging embarrassed looks as their mothers step forward to receive them.\n\nHe watches the breeze blow all that hair around all those made-up faces. He presses himself against the closed door of his Ford, holds himself still.\n\nHe closes his eyes and tries to picture the drowned girl here, wearing her own uniform, but she is separate now, distinct from these girls and the life they once shared. Punter's glad. These girls terrify him in a way the drowned girl does not.\n\nA short burst of siren startles Punter, and he twists around in his seat to see a police cruiser idling its engine behind him, its driver side window rolled down. The cop inside is around Punter's age, his hair starting to gray at the temples but the rest of him young and healthy-looking. The cop yells something, hanging his left arm out the window, drumming his fingers against the side of the cruiser, but Punter can't hear him through the closed windows, not with all the other voices surrounding him.\n\nPunter opens his mouth, then closes it without saying anything. He shakes his head, then locks his driver's side door, suddenly afraid that the cop means to drag him from the car, to put hands on him as other officers did when he was a kid. He looks up from the lock to see the cop outside of his cruiser, walking toward Punter's own car.\n\nThe cop raps on Punter's window, waits for him to roll down the window. He stares at Punter, who tries to look away, inadvertently letting his eyes fall on another group of teenage girls.\n\nThe cop says, You need to move your car. This is a fire lane.\n\nPunter tries to nod, finds himself shaking his head instead. He whispers that he'll leave, that he's leaving. The cop says, I can't hear you. What did you say?\n\nPunter turns the key, sighs when the engine turns over. He says, I'm going. He says it as loud as he can, his vocal cords choked and rusty.\n\nThere are too many girls walking in front of him for Punter to pull forward, and so he has to wait as the cop gets back in his own car. Eventually the cop puts the cruiser in reverse, lets him pass. Punter drives slowly out of the parking lot and onto the city streets, keeping the car slow, keeping it straight between the lines.\n\nAfraid that the cop might follow him, Punter sticks to the main roads, other well-populated areas, but he gets lost anyway. These aren't places he goes. A half hour passes, and then another. Punter's throat is raw from smoking. His eyes ache from staring into the rearview mirror, and his hands tremble so long he fears they might never stop.\n\nX\n\nAt home, Punter finds the girl's parents in the phonebook, writes down their address. He knows he has to be more careful, that if he isn't then someone will come looking for him too. He lies down on the couch to wait for dark, falls asleep with the television tuned to daytime dramas and court shows. He dreams about finding the murderer, about hauling him into the police station in chains. He sees himself avenging the girl with a smoking pistol, emptying round after round into this faceless person, unknown but certainly out there, surely as marked by his crime as Punter was.\n\nWhen he wakes up, the television is still on, broadcasting game shows full of questions Punter isn't prepared to answer. He gets up and goes into the bathroom, the pain in his guts doubling him over on the toilet. When he's finished, he takes a long, gulping drink from the faucet, then goes out into the living room to gather his notebook, his binoculars, his knife.\n\nIn the garage, he tries to lift the girl's tank top to get to the skin hidden underneath, but the fabric is frozen to her flesh. He can't tell if the sound of his efforts is the ripping of ice or of skin. He tries touching her through her clothes, but she's too far gone, distant with cold. He shuts the freezer door and leaves her again in the dark, but not before he explains what he's doing for her. Not before he promises to find the person who hurt her, to hurt this person himself.\n\nX\n\nHer parents' house is outside of town, at the end of a long tree-lined driveway. Punter drives past, then leaves his car parked down the road and walks back with the binoculars around his neck. Moving through the shadows of the trees, he finds a spot a hundred yards from the house, then scans the lighted windows for movement until he finds the three figures sitting in the living room. He recognizes her parents from the television, sees that the third person is a boy around the same age as the drowned girl. Punter watches him the closest, tries to decide if this is the girl's boyfriend. The boy is all movement, his hands gesturing with every word he speaks. He could be laughing or crying or screaming and from this distance Punter wouldn't be able to tell the difference. He watches as the parents embrace the boy, then hurries back through the woods as soon as he sees the headlights come on in front of the house.\n\nHe makes it to his own car just as the boy's convertible pulls out onto the road. Punter starts the engine and follows the convertible through town, past the gas station and the downtown shopping, then into another neighborhood where the houses are smaller. He's never been here before, but he knows the plastics plant is close, that many of his old coworkers live nearby. He watches the boy park in front of a dirty white house, watches through the binoculars as the boy climbs the steps to the porch, as he rings the doorbell. The boy does not go in, but Punter's view is still obscured by the open door. Whatever happens only takes a few minutes, and then the boy is back in his car. He sits on the side of the road for a long time, smoking. Punter smokes too. He imagines getting out of the car and going up to the boy, imagines questioning him about the night of the murder. He knows he should, knows being a detective means taking risks, but he can't do it. When the boy leaves, Punter lets him go, then drives past the white house with his foot off the gas pedal, idling at a crawl. He doesn't see anything he understands, but this is not exactly new.\n\nX\n\nBack at the pond, the only evidence he gathers is that he was there himself. His tire tracks are the only ones backing up to the pond, his footprints the only marks along the shore. Whoever else was there before him has been given an alibi by Punter's own clumsiness.\n\nHe knows how this will look, so he finds a long branch with its leaves intact and uses it to rake out the sand, erasing the worst of his tracks. When he's done, he stares out over the dark water, trying to remember how it felt to hold her in his arms, to feel her body soft and pliable before surrendering her to the freezer.\n\nHe wonders if it was a mistake to take her from beneath the water. Maybe he should have done the opposite, should have stayed under the waves with her until his own lungs filled with the same watery weight, until he was trapped beside her. Their bodies would not have lasted. The fish would have dismantled their shells, and then Punter could have shown her the good person he's always believed himself to be, trapped underneath all this sticky rot.\n\nX\n\nFor dinner he cooks two more steaks. All the venison the girl displaced is going bad in his aged refrigerator, and already the steaks are browned and bruised. To be safe, he fries them hard as leather. He has to chew the venison until his jaws ache and his teeth feel loose, but he finishes every bite, not leaving behind even the slightest scrap of fat.\n\nWatching the late night news, Punter can tell that without any new evidence the story is losing steam. The girl gets only a minute of coverage, the reporter reiterating facts Punter's known for days. He stares at her picture again, at how her smile once made her whole face seem alive.\n\nHe knows he doesn't have much time. He crawls toward the television on his hands and knees, puts his hand on her image as it fades away. He turns around, sits with his back against the television screen. Behind him there is satellite footage of a tornado or a hurricane or a flood. Of destruction seen from afar.\n\nX\n\nPunter wakes up choking in the dark, his throat closed off with something, phlegm or pus or he doesn't know what. He grabs a handkerchief from his nightstand and spits over and over until he clears away the worst of it. He gets up to flip the light switch, but the light doesn't turn on. He tries it again, and then once more. He realizes how quiet the house is, how without the steady clacking of his wall clock the only sound in his bedroom is his own thudding heart. He leaves the bedroom, walks into the kitchen. The oven's digital clock stares at him like an empty black eye, the refrigerator waits silent and still.\n\nHe runs out of the house in his underwear, his big bare feet slapping at the cold driveway. Inside the garage, the freezer is silent too. He lifts the lid, letting out a blast of frozen air, then slams it shut again after realizing he's wasted several degrees of chill to confirm something he already knows.\n\nHe knew this day was coming\u2014the power company has given him ample written notice\u2014but still he curses in frustration. He goes back inside and dresses hurriedly, then scavenges his house for loose change, for crumpled dollar bills left in discarded jeans. At the grocery down the road, he buys what little ice he can afford, his cash reserves exhausted until his next disability check. It's not enough, but it's all he can do.\n\nBack in the garage, he works fast, cracking the blocks of ice on the cement floor and dumping them over the girl's body. He manages to cover her completely, suppressing the pang of regret he feels once he's unable to see her face through the ice. For a second, he considers crawling inside the freezer himself, sweeping away the ice between them. Letting his body heat hers, letting her thaw into his arms.\n\nWhat he wonders is, Would it be better to have one day with her than a forever separated by ice?\n\nHe goes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table. Lights a cigarette, then digs through the envelopes on the table until he finds the unopened bill from the power company. He opens it, reads the impossible number, shoves the bill back into the envelope. He tries to calculate how long the ice will buy him, but he never could do figures, can't begin to start to solve a problem like this.\n\nX\n\nHe remembers: The basement refrigerator had always smelled bad, like leaking coolant and stale air. It wasn't used much, had been kept out of his father's refusal to throw anything away more than out of any sense of utility. By the time Punter found his mother there, she was already bloated around the belly and the cheeks, her skin slick with something that glistened like petroleum jelly.\n\nUnsure what he should do, he'd slammed the refrigerator door and ran back upstairs to hide in his bedroom. By the time his father came home, Punter was terrified his father would know he'd seen, that he'd kill him too. That what would start as a beating would end as a murder.\n\nOnly his father never said anything, never gave any sign the mother was dead. He stuck to his story, telling Punter over and over how his mother had run away and left them behind, until Punter's voice was too muted to ask.\n\nPunter tried to forget, to believe his father's story, but he couldn't.\n\nPunter tried to tell someone else, some adult, but he couldn't do that either. Not when he knew what would happen to his father. Not when he knew they would take her from him.\n\nDuring the day, while his father worked, he went down to the basement and opened the refrigerator door.\n\nAt first, he only looked at her, at the open eyes and mouth, at the way her body had been jammed into the too-small space. At the way her throat was slit the same way his dad had once demonstrated on a deer that had fallen but not expired.\n\nThe first time he touched her, he was sure she was trying to speak to him, but it was only gas leaking out of her mouth, squeaking free of her lungs. Punter had rushed to pull her out of the refrigerator, convinced for a moment she was somehow alive, but when he wrapped his arms around her, all that gas rolled out of her mouth and nose and ears, sounding like a wet fart but smelling so much worse.\n\nHe hadn't meant to vomit on her, but he couldn't help himself.\n\nAfterward, he took her upstairs and bathed her to get the puke off. He'd never seen another person naked, and so he tried not to look at his mother's veiny breasts, at the wet thatch of her pubic hair floating in the bath water.\n\nScrubbing her with a washcloth and a bar of soap, he averted his eyes the best he could.\n\nRinsing the shampoo out of her hair, he whispered he was sorry.\n\nIt was hard to dress her, but eventually he managed, and then it was time to put her back in the refrigerator before his father came home.\n\nClosing the door, he whispered goodbye. I love you. I'll see you tomorrow.\n\nThe old clothes, covered with blood and vomit, he took them out into the cornfield behind the house and buried them. Then came the waiting, all through the evening while his father occupied the living room, all through the night while he was supposed to be sleeping.\n\nDay after day, he took her out and wrestled her up the stairs. He sat her on the couch or at the kitchen table, and then he talked, his normal reticence somehow negated by her forever silence. He'd never talked to his mother this much while she was alive, but now he couldn't stop telling her everything he had ever felt, all his trapped words spilling out one after another.\n\nPunter knows that even if they hadn't found her and taken her away, she wouldn't have lasted forever. He had started finding little pieces of her left behind, waiting wet and squishy on the wooden basement steps, the kitchen floor, in between the cracks of the couch.\n\nHe tried to clean up after her, but sometimes his father would find one too. Then Punter would have to watch as his father held some squishy flake up to the light, rolling it between his fingers as if he could not recognize what it was or where it came from before throwing it in the trash.\n\nDay after day, Punter bathed his mother to get rid of the smell, which grew more pungent as her face began to droop, as the skin on her arms wrinkled and sagged. He searched her body for patches of mold to scrub them off, then held her hands in his, marveling at how, even weeks later, her fingernails continued to grow.\n\nX\n\nPunter sits on his front step, trying to make sense of the scribbles in his notebook. He doesn't have enough, isn't even close to solving the crime, but he knows he has to, if he wants to keep the police away. If they figure the crime out before he does, if they question the killer, then they'll eventually end up at the pond, where Punter's attempts at covering his tracks are unlikely to be good enough.\n\nPunter doesn't need to prove the killer guilty, at least not with a judge and a jury. All he has to do is find this person, then make sure he never tells anyone what he did with the body. After that, the girl can be his forever, for as long as he has enough ice.\n\nX\n\nPunter drives, circling the scenes of the crime: The gas station, the school, her parents' house, the pond. He drives the circuit over and over, and even with the air conditioning cranked he can't stop sweating, his face drenched and fevered, his stomach hard with meat. He's halfway between his house and the gas station when his gas gauge hits empty. He pulls over and sits for a moment, trying to decide, trying to wrap his slow thoughts around his investigation. He opens his notebook, flips through its barely filled pages. He has written down so few facts, so few suspects, and there is so little time left.\n\nIn his notebook, he crosses out father, mother, boyfriend. He has only one name left, one suspect he hasn't disqualified, one other person that Punter knows has seen the girl. He smokes, considers, tries to prove himself right or wrong, gets nowhere.\n\nHe opens the door and stands beside the car. Home is in one direction, the gas station the other. Reaching back inside, he leaves the notebook and the binoculars but takes the hunting knife and shoves it into his waistband, untucking his t-shirt to cover the weapon.\n\nWhat Punter decides, he knows it is only a guess, but he also believes that whenever a detective has a hunch, the best thing to do is to follow it to the end.\n\nX\n\nIt's not a long walk, but Punter gets tired fast. He sits down to rest, then can't get back up. He curls into a ball off the weed-choked shoulder, sleeps fitfully as cars pass by, their tires throwing loose gravel over his body. It's dark out when he wakes. His body is covered with gray dust, and he can't remember where he is. He's never walked this road before, and in the dark it's as alien as a foreign land. He studies the meager footprints in the dust, tracking himself until he knows which way he needs to go.\n\nX\n\nThere are two cars parked behind the gas station, where the drowned girl's car was before it was towed away. One is a small compact, the other a newer sports car. The sports car's windows are rolled down, its stereo blaring music Punter doesn't know or understand, the words too fast for him to hear. He takes a couple steps into the trees beside the road, slows his approach until his gasps for air grow quieter. Leaning against the station are two young men in t-shirts and blue jeans, nearly identical with their purposely mussed hair and scraggly stubble. With them are two girls\u2014one redhead and one brunette\u2014still wearing their school uniforms, looking even younger than Punter knows they are.\n\nThe brunette presses her hand against her man's chest, and the man's own hand clenches her hip. Punter can see how firmly he's holding her, how her skirt is bunched between his fingers, exposing several extra inches of thigh.\n\nHe thinks of his girl thawing at home, how soon he will have to decide how badly he wants to feel that, to feel her skin so close to his own.\n\nHe thinks of the boyfriend he saw through the binoculars. Wonders if boyfriend is really the word he needs. The redhead, she takes something from the unoccupied man, puts it on her tongue. The man laughs, then motions to his friend, who releases his girl and picks a twelve pack of beer up off the cement. All four of them get into the sports car and drive off together in the direction of the pond, the town beyond. Punter stands still as they pass, knowing they won't see him, that he is already\u2014has always been\u2014a ghost to their world.\n\nPunter coughs, not caring where the blood goes. He checks his watch, the numbers glowing digital green in the shadows of the trees. He's not out of time yet, but he can't think of any way to buy more. He decides.\n\nX\n\nOnce the decision is made, it's nothing to walk into the empty gas station, to push past the waist-high swinging door to get behind the counter. It's nothing to grab the gas station clerk and press the knife through his uniform, into the small of his back. Nothing to ignore the way the clerk squeals as Punter pushes him out from behind the counter.\n\nThe clerk says, You don't have to do this.\n\nHe says, Anything you want, take it. I don't fucking care, man.\n\nIt's nothing to ignore him saying, Please don't hurt me.\n\nIt's nothing to ignore the words, to keep pushing the clerk toward the back of the gas station, to the hallway leading behind the coolers. Punter pushes the clerk down to his knees, feels his own feet slipping on the cool tile. He keeps one hand on the knife while the other grips the clerk's shoulder, his fingers digging into the hollows left between muscle and bone.\n\nThe clerk says, Why are you doing this?\n\nPunter lets go of the clerk's shoulder and smacks him across the face with the blunt edge of his hand. He chokes the words out.\n\nThe girl. I'm here about the girl.\n\nWhat girl?\n\nPunter smacks him again, and the clerk swallows hard, blood or teeth.\n\nPunter says, You know. You saw her. You told me.\n\nThe clerk's lips split, begin to leak. He says, Her? I never did anything to that girl. I swear.\n\nPunter thinks of the clerk's bragging, about how excited he was to be the center of attention. He growls, grabs a fistful of greasy hair, then yanks hard, exposing the clerk's stubbled throat, turning his face sideways until one eye faces Punter's.\n\nThe clerk's glasses fall off, clatter to the tile.\n\nThe clerk says, Punter.\n\nHe says, I know you. Your name is Punter. You come in here all the time.\n\nThe clerk's visible eye is wide, terrified with hope, and for one second Punter sees his mother's eyes, sees the girl's, sees his hand closing both their eyelids for the last time.\n\nOSWALD, Punter reads again, then shakes the name clear of his head.\n\nThe clerk says, I never hurt her, man. I was just the last person to see her alive.\n\nPunter puts the knife to flesh. It's nothing. We're all the last person to see someone. He snaps his wrist inward, pushes through. That's nothing either. Or, if it is something, it's nothing worse than all the rest.\n\nX\n\nAnd then dragging the body into the tiny freezer. And then shoving the body between stacks of hot dogs and soft pretzels. And then trying not to step in the cooling puddles of blood. And then picking up the knife and putting it back in its sheath, tucking it into his waistband again. And then the walk home with a bag of ice in each hand. And then realizing the ice doesn't matter, that it will never be enough. And then the walk turning into a run, his heart pounding and his lungs heaving. And then the feeling he might die. And then the not caring what happens next.\n\nX\n\nBy the time Punter gets back to the garage, the ice is already melting, the girl's face jutting from between the cubes. Her eyelids are covered with frost, cheeks slick with thawing pond water. He reaches in and lifts, her face and breasts and thighs giving to his fingers but her back still frozen to the wrapped venison below. He pulls, trying to ignore the peeling sound her skin makes as it rips away from the paper.\n\nPunter speaks, his voice barely audible. He doesn't have to speak loud for her to hear him. They're so close. Something falls off, but he doesn't look, doesn't need to dissect the girl into parts, into flesh and bone, into brains and blood. He kisses her forehead, her skin scaly like a fish, like a mermaid. He says it again: You're safe now.\n\nHe sits down with the girl in his arms and his back to the freezer. He rocks her, feels himself getting wet as she continues to thaw all over him. He shivers, then puts his mouth to hers, breathes deep from the icy blast still frozen in her lungs, lets the air cool the burning in his own throat, the horror of his guts. When he's ready, he picks her up, cradles her close, and carries her into the house. Takes her into the bedroom and lays her down.\n\nHe lies beside her, and then, in a loud, clear voice, he speaks. He tries not to cough, tries to ignore the scratchy catch at the back of his throat. He knows what will happen next, but he also knows all this will be over by the time they break down his door, by the time they come in with guns drawn and voices raised. He talks until his voice disappears, until his trapped scream becomes a whisper. He talks until he gets all of it out of him and into her, where none of these people will ever be able to find it.\nMatt Bell\n\nis the author of the novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, published by Soho Press in June 2013. He is also the author of two previous books, How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby. His writing has been anthologized in Best American Mysteries 2010, Best American Fantasy 2, and 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers. He teaches creative writing at Northern Michigan University.\n\nSUNSHINE FOR ADRIENNE\n\nANTONIA CRANE\n\nThe first man who raped her went blind. Her mom called with the news.\n\n\"That handsome football player you dated got eye cancer in both eyes,\" she said.\n\nAdrienne heard chewing and the wet slurp of Nicorette gum. Her ma chewed two or three pieces at a time and when they lost flavor, she rolled the spit stones into grey balls and stuck them to the kitchen counter. Sometimes the cat knocked them onto the floor and batted them around.\n\n\"You mean Terry?\" Adrienne's asshole clenched. Ma didn't know. All the girls at St. Julian's High School swooned over Terry's tanned wide receiver chest and tennis legs. She heard something being chopped on a cutting board with a steady whack, whack, whack.\n\n\"He's blind as a bat. His poor mother.\" The chopping got faster and faster and more precise. She could slice a carrot into paper-thin pieces in less than thirty seconds. She hated cooking.\n\n\"She's a whack job, Amy.\" Her father hollered in the background. A cupboard door slammed shut. Adrienne heard the refrigerator door make a sucking sound as it opened. She found her pre-work hit and bent spoon in the top drawer of her dresser, but no lighter, she thought. She rummaged around in other drawers where she last saw it and found ticket stubs from a show her father took her to when she graduated high school. It was the Della Davidson Dance Company's \"Ten p.m. Dream,\" an interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. They'd nibbled calamari beforehand next door. Her football watching, beer-drinking father even sported a silky burgundy tie that matched her favorite maroon dress. She took her father's elbow as he led her to the front row, so close she felt the dancers' abdominal muscles vibrate and their snaky necks glisten and strain. She watched them as he watched the music pulse through her skin.\n\nHe liked to look at her pictures of birds too. She'd started drawing turkeys, doves and chickens when she was six years old with accidental skill. Her father couldn't draw an Easter egg if there was a gun to his head. Where he lacked imagination, she swelled with it. Her talents delighted him and bragged about her to his roofing buddies. \"My daughter's a genius,\" he said, while ripping off grubby tiles. He collected her bird drawings and stuck them to the refrigerator door, where they were held in place by metal donut magnets he bought at the hardware store.\n\n\"Her only son. Can you imagine?\" Ma's voice matched the sucking thud the refrigerator door made when it closed. The thing being chopped was gone and in its place, her father's voice: \"Her loser son, still living at home at twenty-nine?\" Her father grunted, which was the same as his laugh. Adrienne pictured him in his stretched white gym socks with a spaghetti noodle dangling from a fork, daring Ma to slap his hand away from her butt, which he pinched, when he wasn't yelling at the TV, drinking Coors light with their orange cat on the footstool near his feet. The skin on his hands matched his face: tanned, calloused and flaking off from working outside in the wind, rain, and dense fog that made roofs wet and slippery. He fell off a ladder and sprained his ankle last year. It swelled like a grapefruit so he managed the office and bid jobs, and farmed out the labor to his friends.\n\nIt was at St. Julian's High School where Adrienne got sneaky. She'd walk silently behind him on her way upstairs to her room. She'd been meeting Terry and getting high, staying out past curfew.\n\n\"Where the hell you been?\" Her father didn't look at her anymore. He held the TV remote in one hand, raised like an arrow, in the other, a beer. He was a channel surfer. There was a steadily growing gulf between them. Her curves brought popularity, lip-gloss, tampons and boys, but also self-righteousness and danger. She became reckless and reticent. He heard her whispering on the phone well after midnight. He smelled alcohol on her breath. She'd become too pretty for her own good, he sensed.\n\n\"Where?\" He asked. He was made of sounds: slurps, moans, burps, and coughs. Startled, the cat leapt off the footstool and ran into the kitchen. She watched varicose veins on his chubby calves travel up to his thighs like a red river. She didn't have to hide her tiny dot pupils or her droopy, rubbery skin than hung on her face. He watched the football game on TV: \"Olson, you pile of shit, you throw like a girl!\"\n\nShe fingered a box of Marlboro's in her pocket.\n\n\"I was out buying smokes.\" She waved the box in the air so he could see it reflected in the TV screen.\n\n\"You're too young to smoke.\"\n\n\"I'm seventeen.\"\n\n\"It's eleven o'clock on a school night, Addy.\" Along with breasts, she'd sprouted a shitty new petulance. Her father disliked the distance between them. He gripped his Coors tighter knowing that if he didn't keep engaging with her, she will have slipped away and it would be too late. Perhaps it was already too late. The amount of rage he felt surprised him.\n\nAdrienne shrugged her shoulders. She walked briskly into the kitchen where her ma buzzed around in slippers, gnashing her gum and talking on the phone aggressively like the women on The View.\n\nThe sun dropped into her tenderloin apartment like a dried, rancid apricot, bringing night. She spotted her lighter on the floor next to the trash. She leaned over and grabbed it. It was out of fluid, but when she tried it anyway, a low flame appeared. A cat meowed.\n\n\"Terry's not a loser. He's ill. How would you like to be blind, hmm?\"\n\n\"Wow, ma. That's awful,\" Adrienne said. The bathroom where she was raped was light blue with no windows. She reached for the soft brown belt on the floor, next to her Lucite stripper shoes. A gray pigeon stood on the single window ledge in her studio apartment. Her hands began to sweat.\n\n\"I'm going to bring them my famous broccoli casserole. You should come with me.\" Adrienne grabbed the belt and tied it around her forearm. She pulled it taught, gripping it with her teeth. Her best wormy vein surfaced inside her left elbow. The sweat from her hands transferred onto the worn leather where there were tiny dots of blood. She pictured diced sweet yellow onions and the hard shell of orange melted cheese on top. Terry would peel the hard cheese layer off and chew it with his bleached Chiclets. He would shake ma's hand with his tennis doubles grip. When he asked about Adrienne, her ma would lie. She'd tell him, \"She's waiting tables and taking World Religions at City College.\" But that was four years ago. It was the story she liked to tell the neighbors. The needle hit the vein nicely and delivered the juicy black heat from Adrienne's belly up to her neck. She levitated from her chest to the top on her head. Butterflies came to mind. She took a dull pencil and drew some on a post-it.\n\n\"If you get on BART now, you can make it in an hour.\" Her ma's voice turned smoky and silver. The chopping sound was back but softer, like a slow finger tapping on water in a bowl. Tap. Tap. Tap.\n\n\"Adrienne, are you still there?\" Her cheeks warmed and her eyes drifted like a plant leaning towards sunlight.\n\n\"I can't go to Oakland tonight, ma. I have to work.\" The space between them stretched far and wide as the Pacific Ocean.\n\n\"Come over for dinner tomorrow night. Spend some time with your father.\"\n\nHer ma's breath was heavy and slow like hers. There was no more gum noise. She heard the oven door close and a timer tick. She felt comfort knowing the casserole was inside and the cheese would spread like butter and the chopped broccoli sizzled, as planned. She heard relief in her ma's mighty exhale. She exhaled too.\n\n\"I can't. I have to make rent for this shitty rat hole apartment.\"\n\n\"Okay, honey. We'll see you on Sunday.\"\n\nAdrienne felt elegant and weightless in her tall, thick black motorcycle boots. They were heavier than she was. She chose a fishnet top to cover the purple red scars that lined her forearms. Her hair was pulled back in a neat, shiny bun. She hadn't washed it in days. When she was high, water felt like nails. Besides, the high rollers liked the tight bun. It read ballerina. Well groomed. Middle class. Her boyfriend, Dennis liked it too. \"You look like a French lingerie model,\" he'd said. They lived together in a dinky apartment on Hyde Street where they listened to trance techno music, counted pigeons and slammed dope. Dennis looked at least forty, with crooked lines around his mouth and creased eyes. But he was twenty-eight, like her.\n\nShe checked her mailbox on the way out and found a red envelope from her father. She shoved it in her costume bag and walked the few blocks to Market Street Cinema, past the garbage that blew over the sidewalk and into the gutter. Fog drifted in and circled her like wet smoke. She gave a light wave to the homeless guy who always tried to sell her stolen perfume. Pigeons picked through the trash and carried off chicken bones in their beaks. Three pigeons in the trashcan; three grams of dope per day.\n\nOn the floor at the MSC, she saw her regular customer, the man in the white shirt, sitting in his usual spot. He was good for a hundred bucks. He sometimes brought her a single red carnation, which she thought was cheap and sad, but she smiled and thanked him and later tossed it into the gutter on Market Street. He glanced at his watch. She climbed over the crossed legs of a guy in a stocking cap, to get to the man in the white shirt. A familiar hand touched her bare stomach as she walked by.\n\n\"Sorry.\" She bent in half to lean in for a closer look. Dennis had a swollen, bruised eye that she could see, even in the dark and he was bleeding from one corner of his mouth.\n\n\"What are you doing at my work?\" The white shirt customer now had a thick blonde gyrating on his crotch. Timing is everything.\n\n\"I was trying to bring you...\"\n\n\"What?\" Dennis uncrossed his legs. His fingers were long and graceful. He hid his face in his hands. Adrienne leaned in and hissed in his ear. He smelled like bleach, dirt and night. His eyes were badly swollen.\n\n\"You are never supposed to come into my work.\"\n\n\"I need...\" Adrienne peeled his hands away from his face and remembered the birthday card from her father. She tore open the envelope and found eighty dollars. He'd written: \"Hope Your Birthday is Ducky\" on top of picture of a fluffy green duck she drew when she was about nine years old. It was her \"duck phase\" her father liked to remind her. She smashed forty crisp dollars into Dennis' sweaty palm. A leggy redhead whispered to a customer next to him, then glanced in her direction. It was obvious they were arguing, and it was making customers tense. The white shirt customer smiled at her. She smiled big. She smiled rectus. She smiled Cheshire. The vein in Dennis' neck bulged, the same way it did when he came. She moved her chest up to his bruised eyes, like she was about to dance for him.\n\n\"Get the fuck out of my work.\" The white shirt customer motioned to her to come over to him. She walked towards him and leaned in to kiss his cheek. Most nights, after work, Dennis took her money and met their dealer. Then they got high together and Dennis played guitar on their dingy brown sheets.\n\n\"Promise me you'll never come into my work,\" she'd said.\n\n\"Promise.\"\n\nThe numbers were good at the MSC. She gave five or eight hand jobs a night and left with seven or eight hundred bucks, enough for six grams. If she only did her share, she and Dennis could stay blazed for a couple days. The next night, she'd come back to work and do it again. And the next day the exact same thing. Never mind the bruises on the backs of her knees. She felt light and graceful on stage. Six years of ballet as a little girl kept her toes pointed and her arms loose. And there was her techno trance music where she got lost on stage.\n\nShe had three songs to get naked. The first one was frantic and unrelenting. She walked on stage slow as caramel, traveling to the side. Back and forth. When the beat got faster, she slowed down even more, pulling her shadow across the length of the stage towards the pole. She grabbed it with one hand and slid down the pole to the floor. She spread her thighs wide and gazed into the black space of the audience. Her chin dropped. Her eyelids closed. Her mouth went slack. Then she caught herself. That was the good thing about techno. It was a loop so she could start right where she left off. She used the pole as leverage to lift herself up to stand. The white lights could trigger a migraine, but this was no migraine. This was blindness.\n\nShe remembered Terry's megawatt smile and million crunches abs. He snuck her into the boy's bathroom after cheerleading practice. The plan was to make out and try his dope. \"'Walking on Sunshine,' Addy,\" he said.\n\n\"What?\" She asked with one hand on her hip. Terry pulled her into the blue bathroom stall and removed his smooth brown belt from his plaid shorts. They dropped down past his knees. He looked slimmer than usual.\n\n\"You should've used 'Walking on Sunshine.'\" He wrapped the belt around her forearm. The dope was brown and gritty but when the fire heated it, it blackened like bubbling vinegar. Terry's arms were so veiny he didn't use the belt. He just flexed. \"'Walking on Sunshine' is the best song for a cheerleading routine,\" he said.\n\nHe stuck the needle in her arm and it stung. The bathroom wasn't blue. It was mint green and freezing. She shivered. \"'Walking on Sunshine' by Katrina and the Waves.\" The dope was a warm liquid kiss inside her skin. She nearly slipped back onto the toilet. He caught her. She laughed.\n\n\"No. We're using 'New Attitude' because it's slow enough for flips.\" He turned her around to face the toilet with her back to him. He yanked on her underwear.\n\n\"Wait,\" she said. She snatched a condom from her makeup bag and ripped it open with her teeth. She dropped the condom. It fell onto the floor. She reached down to pick it up but there was orange piss and curly black hairs where it landed.\n\nThe dope made her queasy. She threw up Diet Pepsi and gummy bear bile and the sweetness mixed with the piss and soap smell. She tasted dope at last: burnt vinegar and warm ash. A dark shadow moved across the bathroom. The room turned blue. She flushed the toilet and the sound was so loud, as if monsters lived in the pipes inside the walls. Terry laughed. He didn't use spit when he put his cock in her ass. He didn't use lube. She didn't feel it or see the blood until later. Speckled lights twinkled behind her eyes. Prism zigzag lightening blurred the edges of the walls, of the toilet, of Terry. She saw her drool trickle from her open mouth.\n\n\"Don't.\"\n\n\"I don't want to get you pregnant,\" he said. Her thin spit was a rainbow thread hitting the toilet water, soft and certain.\n\nLater she'd bleed on toilet paper. Sit on ice. Sleep on her belly. Buy more dope from Terry. He wasn't very good at shooting her up, but Dennis could find a vein in a garbage can.\n\nOn stage, at the MSC, the second song began. It was more manic and fast than the first. It was trance party music where a woman wailed about ecstasy and a little bit of you and me. Adrienne removed her slinky black dress. She stepped out of it like a spider discarding its skin. Her black bra was next. She tossed it to the one man sitting up front. Her pale skin and glossed red lips and sharp cheekbones shimmered under the white lights. She stepped on her dress and tripped. She fell down onto her knees. Her black thigh-high stocking covered the tracks on the backs on her legs but they were needle sore. She slid forward and felt the hot lights pierce her neck. Her tiny swollen hands touched her small breasts. Her chest was flat as an open road. Men loved that about her. She removed her black thong for the man in the white shirt and tossed it in his direction. He removed a twenty from his pocket and set it down on the stage, where she could see it. She crawled closer to him to let him know she saw the twenty. She removed his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. She took his face in her fingers and wiggled it across her skin beneath her fishnet shirt. She felt his pointy nose and wet mouth brush against her nipples. She felt his slick forehead leave a greasy film on her ribcage. She loosened her bun and allowed her black hair to smack her cheeks. She watched the man's expression slide from guilt to anger as if she'd just become his eleven-year old niece.\n\n\"There's more where that came from,\" she said, tossing him her best pre-pubescent smile.\n\n\"You should have used the song I suggested.\"\n\nHe said, \"You should come talk to me after this song.\" He placed a single red carnation on the stage in front of her. She didn't look at it, but she knew it was there.\n\n\"One more song and then I'll come,\" she said. Her fingers lingered on her abdomen but she wanted to scratch her arms. The itch was back.\n\n\"He said: \"You have the best breasts.\" She stared up at the lights that opened her like a bone. She was lighter than air.\nAntonia Crane\n\nteaches teenagers creative writing in Los Angeles when she can convince them to log off of Facebook. Her work can be found in Akashic's The Heroin Chronicles, Soft Skull Press' Johns, Marks, Tricks & Chickenhawks: Professionals & Their Clients Writing about Each Other, The Rumpus, Dame Magazine, Salon, PANK, Black Clock, Slake, The Los Angeles Review and other places. Her memoir Spent is forthcoming by Barnacle Books\/Rare Bird Lit in 2014.\n\nFUZZYLAND\n\nRICHARD LANGE\n\nBig Mike insists I try on his ring. I tell him that's okay, but he's a pushy bastard. He bought it in Reno or won it, which makes it lucky or something. I wasn't listening; the guy's stories go nowhere. He wears the ring on his pinky, but it slips easily over my thumb. He laughs to see that and piles lox onto a bagel.\n\n\"You're going to miss me,\" he says to the waitress.\n\nUpon his retirement next month, I'll inherit some of his accounts. It's supposed to be an honor. This deli, for example. I'll be stopping in once a month for the rest of my life, pushing flatware and dishes and, say, did I mention our special on toothpicks? Unless I screw up, that is. Which happens. Ask any salesman. Buy him a drink. Greek tragedies, man. One word too many, one wayward glance, and we are up shit creek.\n\nThe owner slides into our booth. My read is he's a little skittish coming out of the box. His hand is soaking wet when Mike makes the introduction. I'm cool though. I don't grab a napkin or go for my pant leg. He and Mike pick up where they left off last time, and I put it on automatic. Not that I'm missing anything: golf, golf, golf. It's a gift knowing when to smile or nod or raise my eyebrows without really having to listen, but I worry sometimes that it makes me lazy.\n\nThere's a movie star at the next table, some second stringer whose name I'll never recall. My wife's the one who's great with that stuff. The waitress gets the giggles pouring him coffee, and he smiles. She must be new in town. The flickering of the overhead light is killing me, the silverware clatters. I don't like where my mind's at. A bomb goes off in my stomach, and everything in it climbs back into my throat. I'm thinking about the movie star's money. With money like that you could hire people\u2014a whole squad of detectives, bounty hunters, hit men.\n\n\"What do you say?\" Mike asks me, darting his eyes at the owner, then giving me a look like it's time I jumped in.\n\n\"They raped my little sister,\" I reply.\n\n\"Whoa. Jesus.\"\n\nThat's not what I meant to say, but now that it's out\u2014\"Some motherfucker. Last night. Down in San Diego.\"\n\nRule number one is you do not bring real life into the sales environment; it's not about you. I know that, and I'm sorry, but I am going crazy here.\n\nX\n\nThe bee man interrupts me while I'm shining shoes. Every pair I own, and all of Liz's, too, are laid out on the dining room table. I woke up with a wild hair this morning, and I've been at it since dawn. My fingers are black with polish. I'm so far gone, the doorbell gives me a heart attack.\n\nThe bee man's name is Zeus. His head is shaved, and he has a lightning bolt tattooed on his scalp, above his right ear.\n\n\"They let city employees do that?\" I ask as I lead him down the side of the house to the backyard.\n\n\"We're contract workers. We don't have to wear uniforms either,\" he says. That explains the Lakers jersey.\n\nThe hive is in the avocado tree. I discovered it last week when I heard buzzing while watering the lawn. The gardener quit, so I've been doing all kinds of extra stuff around here. Bees were so thick on the trunk, they looked like one big thing rather than a lot of little ones. They shivered in unison, and their wings caught the sun. I didn't get too close. We have the killer variety now, up from Mexico. They stung an old guy to death in Riverside last year, and, I think, a dog.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Zeus says.\n\n\"Are they Africanized?\"\n\n\"Can't tell. The killers look pretty much like the others, except for they're more aggressive. I'll send a few to the lab when I'm done.\"\n\nI thought I read in the paper that they relocated the hives to somewhere they'd be useful, but Zeus tells me that's too much trouble anymore. He has a foam that'll smother the whole colony, queen and all, in nothing flat. No sooner are these words out of his mouth than a bee lands on his arm and stings him.\n\n\"Hijo de puta,\" he says as he and I hurry away. \"Those bitches are gonna pay for that.\"\n\nX\n\nLiz is drinking coffee in the breakfast nook. She uses both hands to lift the cup, wincing as it touches her lips. Her eyes are red and puffy. Neither of us slept much last night. It's been that way since we heard about my sister a few days ago. Guys laugh when I say Liz is my best friend. They think I'm pulling something high and mighty. Only Jesus freaks love their wives.\n\n\"Maybe it's time for a new mattress,\" I say.\n\nShe yawns and shrugs. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"The guy's here to kill the bees.\"\n\n\"What's that, lightning on his head?\"\n\nI have to eat something, so I scramble a couple of eggs and toast some bread. I smear mayonnaise on the toast and make a sandwich with the eggs. Liz has an apple and a slice of cheese. I get about three bites down before the phone rings.\n\nIt's my sister, Tracy, and she's crying. In our first conversations following the assault she was all facts and figures. Yes, it was horrible; yes, she was pretty banged up; no, the cops hadn't caught her attacker; no, there was no need to drive down, she already had a friend staying with her. This morning, though, she's a wreck. She can't get two words out without battling a sob.\n\nHer ex-husband is up to no good, she says, using the attack as an excuse to press for temporary custody of their daughters. Her attorney has assured her it'll never fly, but she's worried all the same. She keeps apologizing for bothering me, which begins to piss me off. I throw the rest of my sandwich into the trash and pour myself another cup of coffee.\n\n\"We're on our way,\" I say.\n\n\"It's hard, all of this. I can handle it, but it's hard.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't take us a couple of hours, depending on traffic.\"\n\nAfter I hang up, I grab the sponge and start washing dishes. It's one of those days when normal things feel strange. The soap smells bubblegummy, but when I get some in my eye, it hurts like hell. The window over the sink faces the avocado tree, where Zeus, wearing a beekeeper getup now, is spraying what looks like a fire extinguisher. The hive is soon covered with thick white foam. Liz comes up behind me and yanks on the waistband of my sweats.\n\n\"I'll drive,\" she says.\n\n\"I saw an actor at Canter's the other day. Big guy, dark hair. He was in Private Ryan and that Denzel Washington movie. Went out with Hiedi Fleiss.\"\n\n\"Oh, I know. Tom...Tom....\"\n\nShe screws up her face and stares at the ceiling, folding and unfolding the dish towel. The grass is dying out back, even though I have watered and fertilized. A few bees trail after Zeus as he carries the foam dispenser to his truck. One of them veers off and begins bashing its brains out against the kitchen window with a fury that is truly humbling.\n\nX\n\nThe freeway is clear until we get into Santa Ana, a few miles past Disneyland, then it locks up. I punch over to the traffic report. Whichever lane Liz chooses stops moving as soon as she weasels her way into it. She keeps humming three notes of a song she has stuck in her head. My mouth goes dry when I spot flashing lights.\n\n\"There's an exit right here,\" Liz says.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" I reply.\n\nCar wrecks twist me all around. My parents died in one ten years ago now, out there in the desert, on their way back from Laughlin. Big rig, head-on, whatnot. It was an awful mess. My sister lost it. She'd just graduated from high school. She was arrested for shoplifting twice in one week. The second conviction got her a month in jail. I intended to visit, but I was working 12-hour days selling time on an AM oldies station where the general manager told everyone I was gay when he caught me crying at my desk shortly after my parents' funeral.\n\nWhen Tracy was released, she moved to a marijuana plantation in Hawaii. I still have the one letter she sent. In it she asks for money to buy cough syrup and says she's learning to thread flowers into leis. She spends half a page describing a sunset. There's dirt on the envelope. The stamp has a picture of a fish. It made me angry back then, but envy can be like that.\n\nI try to keep my eyes closed until we're past the accident, but the part of me that thinks that's silly makes me look. A truck hauling oranges has overturned, the fruit spilling out across the freeway. Two lanes are still open, and traffic crawls past, crushing the load into bright, fragrant pulp. The truck's driver, uninjured, stands with a highway patrolman. The driver keeps slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and stomping his feet. The patrolman lights a flare.\n\nThings clear up after that. We zip through Irvine and Capistrano and right past the nuclear plant at San Onofre, which looks like two big tits pointing at the sky. The ocean lolls flat and glassy all the way to the horizon, sparking where the sun touches it. At Camp Pendelton, the Marines are on maneuvers. Tanks race back and forth on both sides of the freeway, and the dust they kick up rolls across the road like a thick fog. The radio fades out, and when the signal returns, it's in Spanish.\n\nWe stop in Oceanside for a hamburger. The place is crawling with jarheads who look pretty badass with their muscles and regulation haircuts, but then I see the acne and peach fuzz and realize they're boys, mostly, having what will likely turn out to be the time of their lives. I convince Liz that we deserve a beer, so we step into a bar next to the diner. The walls are covered with USMC this and USMC that, pennants and flags, and Metallica blasts out of the jukebox. It's not yet noon, but a few grunts are already at it. I have the bartender send them another pitcher on me. They raise their mugs and shout, \"To the corps.\" I can't figure out what it is that I hate about them.\n\nX\n\nA fire engine forces us to the side of the road as soon as we get off the freeway at Tracy's exit. I see smoke in the distance. The condo development she lives in rambles across a dry hillside north of San Diego, block after block of identical town houses with Cape Cod accents. The wiry grass and twisted, oily shrubs that pick up where the roads dead end and the sprinkler systems peter out are just waiting for an excuse to burst into flame. There have been a number of close calls since Tracy moved in. Only last year a blaze was stopped at the edge of the development by a miraculous change in wind direction.\n\nWe get lost on our way up to her place. There's a system to the streets, but I haven't been here enough times to figure it out. The neighborhood watch signs are no help, and the jogger who gives us a dirty look, well, better that than gangbangers. They keep a tight rein here. The association once sent Tracy a letter ordering her to remove an umbrella that shaded the table on her patio because it violated some sort of bylaw. I'd go nuts, but Tracy says it's a good place to raise kids. A lucky turn brings us to her unit, and we pull into a parking space labeled VISITOR.\n\nHer youngest, Cassie, opens the door at my knock. She's four, a shy, careful girl.\n\n\"Hello, baby,\" I say.\n\nHer eyes widen, and she runs to hide behind her mother in the kitchen.\n\n\"Cassie,\" Tracy scolds. \"It's Uncle Jack and Auntie Liz. You remember.\"\n\nCassie buries her face in her mother's thigh. Her older sister, Kendra, who's eight, doesn't look up from the coloring book she's working on.\n\nIt's been almost a week since Tracy was attacked, and she still has an ugly greenish bruise on her cheek and broken blood vessels in one eye. She herds us into the living room, asking what we want to drink. The place smells like food, something familiar. \"Cabbage rolls,\" Tracy says. \"You loved Mom's.\"\n\n\"So how are you?\" I ask. That's broad enough in front of the kids.\n\n\"Better every day, which is how it goes, they say. There are experts and things, counselors. It's amazing.\"\n\n\"You see it on TV, on those shows. I bet it helps. I mean, does it?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Sure. Time's the main thing though.\"\n\n\"Come sit with me,\" Liz says to Cassie. She's trying to draw her out of Tracy's lap, give Mommy a break.\n\n\"No,\" Cassie whines as she wraps her arms tighter around Tracy's neck.\n\nMy beer tastes funny. I hold the can to my ear and shake it. This big brother business is new to me. Tracy and I have never been close. We were in different worlds as kids, and since our parents died we've seen each other maybe twice a year. She came back from Hawaii, settled in San Diego, and met Tony. They married in Vegas without telling anyone. Whew! I thought. I'm finally off the hook.\n\nBut Tony's been gone six months now. Tracy used star 69 to catch him cheating. He was that stupid, or maybe he wanted to be caught. I notice that some of the furniture is different, new but cheaper. The couch used to be leather. Tony took his share when he left. Everything had to be negotiated. Tracy got to keep the kids' beds, and he got the TV, a guy who makes a hundred grand a year. It's been downhill since then. Battle after battle.\n\n\"You owe me a hug,\" I say to Kendra. \"I sent you that postcard from Florida.\"\n\nExasperated, she slaps down her crayon and marches over. We scared the hell out of her when she was younger, showing up one Halloween dressed in a cow costume, Liz in the front half, me in back. She'll never trust me again.\n\nShe grimaces when I pull her up onto the couch. \"What's the deal?\" I ask.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"What's shaking? What's new? How's school?\"\n\n\"It's okay, but my teacher's too old. She screamed at us the other day, like, 'Shut up! Shut up!'\" She has to scream, too, to show me how it went.\n\n\"Kendra!\" Tracy says.\n\nCassie sees her sister getting attention and decides that she wants some. She leaves her mother to pick up a stuffed pig, which she brings to Liz, who soon has both girls laughing by giving the pig a lisp and making it beg for marshmallows and ketchup. There's a creepy picture of an angel on the wall. I ask Tracy what that's about. We weren't raised religious. We weren't raised anything at all.\n\n\"It was Kendra's idea. We saw it at the mall, and she was like, 'Mommy, Mommy, we need that.'\" Tracy shrugs and shakes her head. Her fingers go to the bruise on her cheek. She taps it rhythmically.\n\n\"Angels, huh,\" I say to Kendra.\n\n\"They watch us all the time and keep us safe.\"\n\n\"Who taught you that?\"\n\n\"Leave me alone,\" she snaps.\n\nI walk into the kitchen with my empty beer can. Everything shines like it's brand-new. Our mother would wake up at four in the morning sometimes and pull every pot and pan we owned out of the cupboards and wash them. Dad called it her therapy, but that's bullshit. She'd be cursing under her breath as she scrubbed, and her eyes were full of rage.\n\nSomething is burning. I smell it. The fire must be closer than it seemed. I press my face to the window, trying to see the sky, while the girls laugh at another of Auntie Liz's jokes.\n\nX\n\nAsh drifts down like the lightest of snowfalls, disappearing as soon as it touches the ground. It sticks to the hood of a black Explorer, and more floats on the surface of the development's swimming pool where the girls are splashing with Liz. The sun forces woozy red light through the smoke, and it feels later than it is.\n\nI tug at the crotch of my borrowed bathing suit, one thing Tony left behind. My sister sits beside me in a chaise, fully clothed. To hide more bruises, I bet. The rapist got her as she was leaving a restaurant. That's all she told me. In a parking garage. That's all I know. \"I'm lucky he didn't kill me,\" she said afterward. Her hand shakes when she adjusts her sunglasses; the pages of her magazine rattle.\n\n\"Come swim with us, Uncle Jack,\" Kendra calls. She can paddle across the deep end by herself, while Cassie, wearing inflatable water wings, sits on the stairs, in up to her waist. I make a big production of gearing up for my cannonball, stopping short a number of times until they are screaming for me to jump, jump, jump.\n\nWe play Marco Polo and shark attack. I teach Kendra to dive off my shoulders, and she begs to do it again and again. Cassie, on the other hand, won't let me touch her. Liz bounces her up and down and drags her around making motorboat noises, but every time I approach, she has a fit and scrambles to get away. \"You're so big,\" Liz says, but I don't know. I'm not sure that's it.\n\nA man unlocks the gate in the fence that surrounds the pool, and a little blond girl about Kendra's age squeezes past him and runs to the water, where she drops to all fours and dips in her hand.\n\n\"It's warm enough,\" she shouts to the man, who smiles and waves at Tracy.\n\n\"Hey, whassup,\" Tracy says.\n\nShe bends her legs so that he can sit on the end of her chaise. His hair is spiked with something greasy, and his T-shirt advertises a bar. I dive down to walk on my hands. When I come up, they are laughing together. He reaches into the pocket of his baggy shorts, and I swear I see him give Tracy money.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Liz asks as I paddle to the ladder.\n\n\"I want to swim, Daddy,\" the blonde girl yells.\n\n\"Not right now,\" the man answers without looking at her. He stands at my approach, smiles. A salesman. Maybe not for a living, but I've got him pegged. We shake hands professionally.\n\n\"The big brother,\" he crows, jokey jokey. My sister should be more careful.\n\n\"Philip's going to paint my place,\" Tracy says. \"All I have to pay for is the materials.\"\n\n\"Unless we get burned out,\" he says.\n\nShe frowns and puts a finger to her lips, nodding toward the kids.\n\nI scrub my hair with a towel and find that I'm sucking in my gut. It's sick. A flock of birds scatters across the smoky sky like a handful of gravel.\n\n\"You live in L.A.?\" Philip says to me. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nA real tough guy, going for the dig right off the bat.\n\n\"I like the action,\" I reply.\n\n\"I was down there for a while. Too crazy.\"\n\n\"You have to know your way around.\"\n\nI adjust my chair, sit. Philip fingers the soul patch under his lower lip. I'm staring at him, he's staring at me. It could go either way.\n\n\"I. Want. To. Swim. Now,\" Philip's daughter wails.\n\n\"Your mother'll be here any minute.\"\n\nThe girl begins to cry. She stretches out face down on the pool deck and cuts loose.\n\n\"Go to it, Daddy,\" Tracy says, giving Philip a playful kick.\n\nHe stands and rubs his eyes. \"This fucking smoke.\"\n\n\"Nice meeting you,\" I say with a slight lift of my chin.\n\nHe walks over to his daughter and peels her off the concrete. She screams even louder. He has to carry her through the gate.\n\n\"He know what happened?\" I ask Tracy.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nI stare at her over the top of my sunglasses. After a few seconds she says, \"I told him I was in a car wreck.\"\n\n\"So he's not like a friend friend?\"\n\n\"Hey, really, okay?\" she warns.\n\nI throw up my hands to say forget it. She's right. I don't know what I'm doing, all of a sudden muscling into her life. The girls are calling for me again. I run to the edge of the pool and dive in, determined to get Cassie to play sea horse with me.\n\nX\n\nThe kids turn up their noses at the cabbage rolls, so Tracy boils a couple of hot dogs for them. She's more accommodating than our parents were. Seems like a terrible waste of time now, the battles fought over liver and broccoli and pickled beets. And what about when Dad tried to force a lamb chop past my teeth, his other hand gripping my throat? Somehow that became a funny story, one retold at every family gathering to much laughter. Nobody ever noticed that I would leave the room so cramped with anger that it hurt to breathe.\n\nTracy pushes food from one side of her plate to the other as she talks about her job. She manages a Supercuts in a nasty part of town. The owner is buying a new franchise in Poway, and she once promised Tracy that when she did, Tracy could go into partnership with her. Now, though, the woman is hemming and hawing. The deal is off.\n\n\"I turned that shop around. She used me,\" Tracy says.\n\n\"Tough it out,\" I advise. \"Regroup, then sell yourself to her. You have to be undeniable.\"\n\n\"Jack, I quit two weeks ago. I'm not going to take that kind of crap.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" I say. \"Man.\"\n\n\"Sounds like it was time to move on,\" Liz interjects.\n\n\"What I'd like to do is open my own salon.\"\n\nIt's not that I don't understand her disappointment. I made it to sales manager once at a Toyota dealership, but they put me back out on the lot after less than a month, saying I wasn't cutthroat enough. The owner's son took my place, and it just about killed me to keep going in every day. We had debts though. We were in way over our heads. It was a shameful time, but I didn't crack. Two months later Sonny Boy went off to rehab, and I was back on top. A good couple of years rolled by after that.\n\nWhile Liz and the girls clear the table, I follow Tracy onto the patio. She closes the sliding glass door and retrieves a pack of More menthols from its hiding place inside a birdhouse. Placing the elbow of her smoking arm into the palm of her other hand, she stands with her back to the door so the girls can't see her take a drag. It's a pose I remember from when we were kids, a skating rink pose. That's where she and her dirtbag crew hung out before they were old enough to drive. Barely 13, and rumor had it she was already screwing some high school cokehead. Guys called her a whore to my face.\n\nThe backyard is tiny, maybe fifteen by fifteen, no grass at all. A shoulder-high fence separates it from the neighbors' yards on all three sides. I can see right into the next unit: a Chinese guy on his couch, watching TV. The sound of a Padres game curls through his screen door. I tried to talk Tony out of buying this place, but he wouldn't listen. His deal was always that I was too negative. Now Tracy is stuck with thin walls and noisy plumbing.\n\n\"You guys are still the happy couple,\" Tracy says. \"Obviously.\"\n\n\"Most of the time, sure.\"\n\n\"The good part is you don't seem a thing like Mom and Dad.\"\n\n\"We got lucky, I guess.\"\n\nTracy's shoulders jerk. She turns her head and spits vomit into a potted plant. I'm not sure what to do. It would frighten her if I took her into my arms. We're not that kind of people. I'm sorry, but we're not. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and hits her cigarette again, then walks past me to stand against the fence, looking into the neighbor's yard so that I can't see her face. A gritty layer of ash covers everything now, and more is sifting down. The smell of smoke is stronger than ever.\n\n\"I still have some of the insurance money from the accident,\" I say. \"What if you take it? You should get that salon going as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Everything's up in the air,\" Tracy replies. \"Maybe I'll go back to school.\"\n\n\"Use it for that then.\"\n\n\"You've got it all figured out, huh?\"\n\n\"Hey...\"\n\n\"It's funny, that's all.\"\n\nShe kneels to drink from a hose attached to a faucet at the edge of the patio. After the rape, she drove herself to the hospital. Nobody else in the family had that kind of fortitude. Our dad was a notorious hypochondriac.\n\nCarrie slides the door open with great effort and says, \"Mommy, what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Watering the flowers,\" Tracy replies.\n\nX\n\nWe play Uno and Candyland with the girls, and then it's bedtime. Sundays are their father's, and he's picking them up early in the morning. Liz manages to get them upstairs without too much whining on the promise of a story. Tracy gathers the toys scattered about and tosses them into a wooden chest in the corner of the room while I go to the refrigerator for another beer.\n\n\"They love their Auntie Liz,\" Tracy says.\n\nI hope she means that in a nice way. I think she does.\n\nThere's a knock at the door. Tracy looks worried, so I stand behind her as she answers. The police officer on the porch gives us an official smile.\n\n\"Mr. and Mrs. Milano?\"\n\n\"Ms. Milano. He's my brother.\"\n\nThe cop scribbles on his clipboard. \"Okay, well, we're out warning residents that they may be asked to evacuate if this fire swings around,\" he says.\n\n\"Oh God,\" Tracy sighs.\n\n\"Right now things are looking good, but you should be prepared just in case.\"\n\n\"God fucking dammit.\"\n\nWhen the cop leaves, Tracy turns on the TV, but there are no special reports or live coverage. Liz comes downstairs, and I fill her in. She asks Tracy what she wants to pack, and Tracy says, \"Nothing. None of it means anything to me.\" It's embarrassing to hear her talk like that. Liz treats the comment as a joke, though, and soon the two of them are placing photo albums into a plastic trash bag.\n\nI decide to venture toward the fire line to see if I can get more information. Liz insists on coming along. We drive down out of the condos to pick up a frontage road paralleling the freeway. There's an orange glow on the horizon, and we make for that. A new squeak in the car gets on my nerves. I feel around the dash, desperate to locate it, and things get a little out of control. I almost hit a guardrail because I'm not watching where I'm going.\n\n\"Dammit, Jack, pay attention,\" Liz snaps. \"Are you drunk?\"\n\nThe road we're on descends into a dark, narrow canyon dotted with houses, the lights of which wink frantic messages through the trees. We hit bottom, then climb up the other side. As we crest the hill, the source of the glow is revealed to be a monstrous driving range lit by mercury vapor lamps. The golfers lined up at the tees swing mechanically. There is ash falling here, too, and the stink of smoke, but nobody's worried.\n\nWe pull over at a spot above the range and get out of the car to watch. It feels like something teenagers might do. Balls soar through the air and bounce in the dead grass. Liz drapes my arm across her shoulders. She really is great with those kids.\n\n\"Are you sure you don't want a baby?\" I ask.\n\nI watch her face. Nothing is going to get past me. When she wants to be blank, though, she's so blank. \"I've got you,\" she says.\n\n\"No, really.\"\n\n\"Let's keep it simple. That's what I like about us.\"\n\nWe made a decision a few years ago. Her childhood wasn't the greatest either. A gust of wind rattles the leaves of the eucalyptus trees behind us, and the shadows of the branches look like people fighting in the street. When I close my eyes for a second, my blood does something scary on its way through my heart.\n\nX\n\nTommy Borchardt hanged himself in his garage after they gave half his accounts to a new hire. No note, no nothing. Three kids. That's what I wake up thinking about after tossing and turning all night, waiting for another knock at the door.\n\nWe're in the girls' room, in their little beds. They're sleeping with Tracy. On a shelf near the ceiling, beyond the kids' reach, sits a collection of porcelain dolls. The sun shining through the window lights up their eyes and peeks up their frilly dresses. Their hair looks so real, I finally have to stand and touch it. Liz coughs and rolls over. Her clothes are folded neatly on the floor. She was in a rock band in high school. I wish I could have seen that.\n\nDownstairs, I find some news on TV and learn that the fire has changed course and is headed away from any structures. They believe it was started by lightning. Tracy's coffee maker is different from ours, but I figure it out. It's fun to poke around in her cupboard and see what kind of canned goods she buys.\n\nThe kids sneak up on me. I turn, and there they are. I ask if they want me to fix them breakfast, but Kendra says that's her job. She stands on a stool to reach the counter and pours two bowls of cereal. I still remember learning to cook bacon. As far as I was concerned, I was ready to live on my own after that. Kendra slices a banana with a butter knife. She won't even let me get the milk out of the refrigerator for her. Tracy shouts at them to hurry and eat, their dad will be waiting.\n\n\"Is it fun at your dad's?\" I ask as they sit at the table, shoveling Cheerios.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Kendra says like that's what she's been told to say.\n\n\"We have bikes over there,\" Cassie adds.\n\nX\n\nHundreds of pigeons have occupied the shopping center parking lot where Tracy meets Tony to hand off the kids. They perch on the street lamps and telephone poles and march about pecking at garbage. Everything is streaked with their shit. When a car approaches, the birds wait until the last possible second to scoot out of its way. Tracy and Tony meet here because it's equidistant from both their places. He won't drive any farther than he's required to by the court.\n\nI had to beg Tracy to let me come with her. She's worried that I'll start something. I like that, that she's worried, but I assure her that I'll hold my tongue. My hope is that when Tony sees me, he'll figure that she's pulled together some support and back off his custody demands. He's a hardhead though. We almost came to blows once over who was going to pick up a check at dinner.\n\nThe girls wait like little diplomats, wise in their silence. Carrie, strapped into her car seat, reaches out to touch the window of the minivan. Five minutes pass with just the radio playing. I watch the pigeons, the people pushing their carts out of the supermarket and filling their trunks with groceries. A cloud wanders across the sky, and I track the progress of its shadow.\n\nAfter ten minutes I ask, \"Is this normal?\"\n\n\"He's very busy,\" Tracy replies, sarcastic.\n\nThere's a candy store next to the market. It's just opening up.\n\n\"Take the kids in there,\" I say. \"You guys want candy? Take them in there and buy them something. Here's some money. I'll keep an eye out for him.\"\n\nThe girls are imbued with new energy. They screech and bicker and fight for the handle that slides open the side of the van.\n\n\"Look what you started,\" Tracy says.\n\nI shrug as she flips down the sun visor and checks herself in the mirror there. The girls, already outside, practice tightrope walking on the yellow lines painted on the asphalt.\n\n\"Calm down,\" Tracy yells. \"You want to get hit by a car just for some candy?\"\n\nTony pulls up next to the van shortly after they enter the store. He's driving a new Volvo. He squints when he sees me, then gives a lazy wave. I'm all smiles as I hop out and walk around to his open window. He grew up on the East Coast somewhere and moved to California after college. Tracy cut his hair, that's how they met. He works in computers. I rest my palms on the roof of his car and bend over to talk to him.\n\n\"Yo Adrian,\" I say. I used to kid him that he sounded like Rocky.\n\n\"Jack.\"\n\n\"They should just be a minute. The girls were getting cranky, waiting so long.\"\n\nTony lights a cigarette. The ashtray is overflowing with butts. Don't you sometimes see a chick and just want to tie her up and slap her around? He asked me that once while he was still married to Tracy. We were camping in Yosemite, all of us. The women and kids had gone to bed. I remember looking up at the stars and down at the fire and thinking, Whoops! He pushes his sunglasses up on his nose and flicks ash out the window, between me and the car door.\n\n\"How's Liz?\" he asks. \"Good, I hope.\"\n\n\"You know us. Slow and steady.\"\n\n\"Are you still selling, what, restaurant stuff?\"\n\n\"Why do you have to be that way, showing up late and everything?\"\n\n\"Did she tell you to say that?\"\n\nI check to make sure Tracy and the kids are still in the store before continuing.\n\n\"She was raped, man, and you're coming at her with lawyers? Have a little compassion. Act like a human being.\"\n\n\"I said, did she tell you to talk to me?\"\n\n\"I'm her brother. I took it upon myself.\"\n\nI meant to approach this a bit more obliquely. Three years ago, two, I'd have had him eating from my hand, but these days I feel like all the juice has been drained out of me. We stare at each other for a second, then look away at the same time.\n\n\"She was wasted,\" he says. \"Ask her. She was coming out of a bar. She barely remembers. Read the police report. There are doubts.\"\n\nMy vision flickers and blurs. I feel like I've been poisoned. Kendra runs out of the store toward us, followed by Cassie. I push myself away from the car and search the ground for something\u2014a stick, a rock. The pigeons make horrible fluttering noises in their throats.\n\n\"Hi, Daddy,\" the girls sing. They climb into Tony's car. Tracy watches from the store, half in and half out. I wish I was a gun. I wish I was a bullet. The girls wave bye-bye as Tony drives off.\n\n\"Can you believe that a-hole has a Volvo, and I'm driving this piece of shit?\" Tracy says.\n\n\"He shouldn't smoke in front of the kids,\" I reply.\n\nWe pass an accident on the way back to her place, just a fender bender, but still my thoughts go to our parents. When they died I was almost to the point where I could see them as people. With a little more time I might even have started loving them again. What did they stand for? What secrets did they take with them? It was the first great loss of my life.\n\nX\n\nTracy wants to treat us to lunch in Tijuana. We'll ride the trolley down and walk over the border to a steak house that was written up in the newspaper. That's fine with me. Let's keep moving. What Tony said about her is trying to take root, and I won't have it. She's my sister, see, and what she says, goes. I don't want to be one of those people who needs to get to the bottom of things.\n\nWe drive to the station. The crowd that boards the trolley with us is made up primarily of tourists, but there are also a few Mexicans headed for Sunday visits. They carry shopping bags, and their children sit quietly beside them. Tracy and Liz find two seats together. I'm at the far end of the car, in the middle of a French family.\n\nWe skirt the harbor, rocking past gray destroyers big as buildings. Then the tracks turn inland, and it's the back side of trailer parks and self-storage places. The faded pennants corralling a used-car lot flap maniacally, and there's always a McDonald's lurking on the horizon. Liz and Tracy are talking to each other\u2014something light, if their smiles are any indication. I wave, trying to get their attention, but it's no use.\n\nThe young son in the French family decides to sing. He's wearing a Disneyland T-shirt. The song is in French, but there are little fart sounds in it that make his sister laugh. His mom says something snippy to him, but he ignores her. Dad steps in, giving the kid a shot with his elbow that jolts him into silence. There's a faded tattoo on Dad's forearm. Whatever it is has teeth, that's about all I can make out.\n\nX\n\nTo cross into Mexico, we walk over the freeway on a bridge and pass through a turnstile. I did this once before, in high school, me and a couple of buddies. If you were tall enough to see over the bar, you could get a drink. That was the joke. I remember a stripper in a gorilla suit. Tacos were a quarter. The only problem was that the cops were always shaking someone down. The system is rotten here. You have to watch where you're going.\n\nTracy's got things wired though. Apparently she's down here all the time. It's fun, she says. She leads us to a taxi, and we head into town, passing ramshackle body shops and upholstery shops and something dead squished flat. Dirt roads scurry off into the hills where entire neighborhoods are built out of old garage doors and corrugated tin. The smell of burning rubber sneaks in now and then and tickles the back of my throat.\n\nCalle Revoluci\u00f3n is still the main drag, a disco on every corner. It looks tired during the day, like Bourbon Street or downtown Vegas. Hung over, sad, and a little embarrassed. It's a town that needs neon. We step out of the cab, and Tracy laughs with the driver as she pays him off. I didn't know she spoke Spanish.\n\nI want a drink. The place we go into is painted bright green. Coco Loco. They sell bumper stickers and T-shirts. We get a table on the second-floor terrace, overlooking the street. Music is blasting inside, and lights flash, but the dance floor is empty except for a hippy chick deep into her own thing. The waiter is all over us as soon as we sit down.\n\nI order tequila and a beer; Tracy and Liz get margaritas. Some poor guy in a ridiculous sombrero chachas around with a bottle of mescal in one hand and a bottle of Sprite in the other. For a couple of bucks he pours a little of each into your mouth and shakes your head, all the while blowing on a whistle. The sound of it makes my stomach jump. I'm startled every time. When my tequila arrives, I drink it down and guzzle half the beer.\n\n\"You guys wait here,\" Tracy says. \"I have to run an errand.\"\n\n\"In Tijuana?\"\n\n\"Tylenol with codeine, for a friend who hurt her leg. They sell it in the pharmacies.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, Trace...\"\n\n\"It's cool. I'll be right back.\"\n\nShe's gone before I can figure out how to stop her.\n\nEverybody around us is a little shady. It hits me all of a sudden. Not quite criminal, but open to suggestion. A man wearing mirrored sunglasses and smoking a cigar gets up from his chair and leans over the railing to signal someone in the street. His partner is having his shoes shined by a kid with the crookedest teeth I've ever seen. The sombrero guy blows his whistle again, and a big black raven lights on the roof and cocks his head to stare down at us.\n\nX\n\nLiz insists that Tony is full of shit when I tell her what he said in the parking lot. I lean in close and speak quietly so no one else can hear. She says that men always cast aspersions on rape victims, even the cops. \"You should know better,\" she says.\n\n\"I didn't mean anything like that.\"\n\n\"I hope not.\"\n\n\"She can do whatever the fuck she wants. Get her head chopped off, whatever.\"\n\n\"That's nice. That's just lovely.\"\n\nIt's the alcohol. It makes me pissy sometimes. Liz doesn't know the worst of it. Like the time I went out for a few with one of my bosses and ended up on top of him with my hands around his throat. He didn't press charges, but he also wasn't going to be signing any more checks for me. To Liz it was just another layoff. Quite a few of my messes have been of my own making. I'm man enough to admit it.\n\nThe bathroom is nasty, and there's nothing to dry my hands with. My anger at Tracy rises. She's been gone almost an hour. \"Hey,\" I yell to a busboy from the bathroom door. \"You need towels in here.\" He brings me some napkins. I have to walk across the dance floor to get back to the terrace. A kid bumps me and gives me his whole life like a disease. I see it all from beginning to end. \"Fly, fly, flyyyyy,\" the music yowls. \"Fly, fly, flyyyyyy.\"\n\nX\n\nThey still have those donkeys painted like zebras down on the street, hitched to little wagons. I remember them from last time. You climb up on the seat, and they put a sombrero on your head that says KISS ME or CISCO and take a picture with some kind of ancient camera. Liz and I hug. We look like honeymooners in the photo, or cheaters.\n\nThere are those kids, too, the ones selling Chiclets and silver rings that turn your fingers green. Or sometimes they aren't selling anything. They just hold out their hands. Barefoot and dirty\u2014babies, really. So many that after a while you don't see them anymore, but they're still there, like the saddest thing that ever happened to you.\n\nLiz and I stand on the sidewalk in front of the bar, waiting. The power lines overhead, tangled and frayed, slice the sky into wild shapes. Boys cruise past in fancy cars, the songs on their stereos speaking for them. The barker for the strip club next door invites us in for a happy hour special, two for one. It's all a little too loud, a little too sharp. I'm about to suggest we have another drink when Tracy floats up to us like a ghost.\n\n\"You know, Trace, fuck,\" I say.\n\n\"What a hassle. Sorry.\"\n\nA hot wind scours the street, flinging dust into our eyes.\n\nX\n\nThe restaurant is on a side street, a couple blocks away. We don't say anything during the short walk. Men in cowboy hats cook steaks on an iron grill out front, and we pass through a cloud of greasy smoke to join the other gringos inside. It's that kind of place. I order the special, a sirloin stuffed with guacamole.\n\nTracy pretends to be interested in what Liz is saying, something about Cassie and Kendra, but her restless fingers and darting eyes give her away. When she turns to call for another bottle of water, Liz shoots me a quizzical look. I shake my head and drink my beer. The booze has deadened my taste buds so that I can't enjoy my steak. Tracy cuts into hers but doesn't eat a bite. The waiter asks if anything is wrong.\n\nWe go back to Revoluci\u00f3n to get a cab. The sidewalks are crazy, tilting this way and that and sometimes disappearing completely. You step off the curb, and suddenly it's three feet down to the pavement. Tracy begins to cry. She doesn't hide it. She walks in and out of the purple afternoon shadows of the buildings, dragging on a cigarette, tears shining.\n\n\"Must be one of those days,\" she says when I ask what's wrong.\n\nWe leave it at that.\n\nShe cleans herself up in the cab, staring into a little round mirror, before we join the long line of people waiting to pass through customs. We stand shoulder to shoulder with strangers, and the fluorescent lights make everyone look guilty of something. There are no secrets in this room. Every word echoes, and I can smell the sweat of the guy in front of me. Four or five officers are checking IDs. They ask people how long they've been down and what they've brought back with them. When it's my turn, a fat blond woman glances down at my license, matches my face to the picture and waves me through. We're all waved right through.\n\nTracy's mood brightens immediately. In fact, she laughs and laughs as we leave the building and board the trolley. Everything's funny to her, everything's great. The train is less crowded this time. We each get our own row of seats. Just some Marines at the other end of the car, talking about whores. \"Oh, this little bitch, she went to town,\" one of them groans.\n\nTracy reaches into her purse and takes out a bottle of pills, opens it, and pops one into her mouth. She smiles when she catches me watching her.\n\nThe trolley clicks and clacks like it's made of bones. I stretch out, put my feet up. The reflection of my face is wrapped around a stainless steel pole dulled by a day's worth of fingerprints. Tracy dozes off, head lolling. Liz too. I watch the sun set through rattling windows, and all the red that comes with it.\n\nThe trolley lurches, and Tracy's purse tips over. It's one of those big bags you carry over your shoulder. A half-dozen bottles of pills spill out and roll noisily across the floor. I chase them down, mortified. Tracy opens one eye. I spread the bag wide. It's full of pills, maybe twenty bottles, all with Spanish labels.\n\n\"You've got kids,\" I whisper. \"Beautiful kids.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" She grabs the bag away from me and hugs it to her chest.\n\n\"Tracy.\"\n\n\"Look, I didn't ask you to show up; I just didn't say no.\"\n\n\"I wanted to help.\"\n\n\"I fully realize that.\"\n\nI try to talk to her some more, but she pretends to be asleep. Nothing I say means anything anyway because she thinks I've had it easy. Liz is suddenly beside me. She takes my hand in both of hers. The jarheads are rapping. Bitch. Skeez. Muthafucka. I could kill them. I could.\n\nX\n\nWe can see the fire from the freeway. The entire hillside is ablaze. Tracy's condo is up there somewhere. Flames claw at the night sky, and smoke blots out the stars. I don't even know how you'd begin to fight a thing like that. Maybe that's what the helicopters are for. They circle and dip, lights flashing.\n\nTracy is still asleep. She could barely walk from the trolley to the car but wouldn't let us touch her. \"Stop laughing,\" she yelled, so messed up she was imagining things. She's curled up on the backseat now, her arms protecting her head. We decide not to wake her until we're sure of something.\n\nThe police at the roadblock can't tell us much. The wind picked up, and everything went to shit. The gymnasium of a nearby high school has been pressed into service as a shelter. We are to go there and wait for more information. A fire truck arrives, and they pull aside the barricades to let it through.\n\n\"How bad are we looking?\" I ask a cop.\n\nHe ignores me.\n\nI back the car up and turn around, and Liz guides me to the school. We pass a carnival on the way, in the parking lot of a church. A Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a few games. People wander from ride to ride, booth to booth, swiping at the ash that tickles their noses. A beer sign sputters in the window of a pizza parlor. A kid in a white shirt and black vest sweeps the sidewalk in front of the multiplex. His friend makes him laugh. A mile away everything is burning.\n\nMy stomach is cramped by the time we get to the school. I can see into the gym from where I park. Cots are lined up beneath posters shouting GO TIGERS!!! Two women sit at a table near the door, signing people in, and further away, in the shadows by the drinking fountains, a group of men stand and smoke. That's about it. Most people have somewhere better to go. Tony must have told Kendra about angels. What a thing to put into a kid's mind.\n\nA news crew is interviewing a girl who just arrived. She's carrying a knapsack and a cardboard box full of china. They shine a light in her face and ask about what she lost and where she'll go. She says something about her cat. She had to leave it behind.\n\nI close my eyes and bring my fists to my temples. I have to be at work early for a meeting. I can see Big Mike sliding out of his Caddy, squeezing his gut past the steering wheel. He's my mentor, he likes to say. He's been married four times. He gets winded walking to the john. There's nothing lucky about him.\n\n\"I want a baby,\" I say. The words just get away from me.\n\n\"Jack,\" Liz says. I'm afraid to open my eyes to look at her. Tracy giggles in the backseat, and we both turn. She reaches up to scratch her face and grins in her sleep.\nRichard Lange\n\nhas had stories in The Sun, The Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly's Fiction for Kindle series. He is the author of the collection Dead Boys and the novels Angel Baby and This Wicked World. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles.\n\nWINDEYE\n\nBRIAN EVENSON\n\n1.\n\nThey lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers were thicker, so he could not.\n\nLooking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.\n\nHis sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to knuckles, and say, \"I feel something. What am I feeling?\" And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression on her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling, half screaming, she whipped her hand free.\n\nX\n\nThere were other things they did, other ways they tortured each other, things they both loved and feared. Their mother didn't know anything about it, or if she did she didn't care. One of them would shut the other inside the toy chest and pretend to leave the room, waiting there silently until the one in the chest couldn't stand it any longer and started to yell. That was a hard game for him because he was afraid of the dark, but he tried not to show that to his sister. Or one of them would wrap the other tight in blankets, and then the trapped one would have to break free. Why they had liked it, why they had done it, he had a hard time remembering later, once he was grown. But they had liked it, or at least he had liked it\u2014there was no denying that\u2014and he had done it. No denying that either.\n\nX\n\nSo at first those games, if they were games, and then, later, something else, something worse, something decisive. What was it again? Why was it hard, now that he was grown, to remember? What was it called? Oh, yes, Windeye.\n\n2.\n\nHow had it begun? And when? A few years later, when the house started to change for him, when he went from thinking about each bit and piece of it as a separate thing and started thinking of it as a house. His sister was still coming up close, entranced by the gap between shingle and wall, intrigued by the twist and curve of a crack in the concrete steps. It was not that she didn't know there was a house, only that the smaller bits were more important than the whole. For him, though, it had begun to be the reverse.\n\nSo he began to step back, to move back in the yard far enough away to take the whole house in at once. His sister would give him a quizzical look and try to coax him in closer, to get him involved in something small. For a while, he'd play to her level, narrate to her what the surface she was touching or the shadow she was glimpsing might mean, so she could pretend. But over time he drifted out again. There was something about the house, the house as a whole, that troubled him. But why? Wasn't it just like any house?\n\nX\n\nHis sister, he saw, was standing beside him, staring at him. He tried to explain it to her, tried to put a finger on what fascinated him. This house, he told her. It's a little different. There's something about it . . . But he saw, from the way she looked at him, that she thought it was a game, that he was making it up.\n\n\"What are you seeing?\" she asked, with a grin.\n\nWhy not? he thought. Why not make it a game?\n\n\"What are you seeing?\" he asked her.\n\nHer grin faltered a little but she stopped staring at him and stared at the house.\n\n\"I see a house,\" she said.\n\n\"Is there something wrong with it?\" he prompted.\n\nShe nodded, then looked to him for approval.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\nHer brow tightened like a fist. \"I don't know,\" she finally said. \"The window?\"\n\n\"What about the window?\"\n\n\"I want you to do it,\" she said. \"It's more fun.\"\n\nHe sighed, and then pretended to think. \"Something wrong with the window,\" he said. \"Or not the window exactly but the number of windows.\" She was smiling, waiting. \"The problem is the number of windows. There's one more window on the outside than on the inside.\"\n\nHe covered his mouth with his hand. She was smiling and nodding, but he couldn't go on with the game. Because, yes, that was exactly the problem, there was one more window on the outside than on the inside. That, he knew, was what he'd been trying to see.\n\n3.\n\nBut he had to make sure. He had his sister move from room to room in the house, waving to him from each window. The ground floor was all right, he saw her each time. But in the converted attic, just shy of the corner, there was a window at which she never appeared.\n\nIt was small and round, probably only a foot and a half in diameter. The glass was dark and wavery. It was held in place by a strip of metal about as thick as his finger, giving the whole of the circumference a dull, leaden rim.\n\nHe went inside and climbed the stairs, looking for the window himself, but it simply wasn't there. But when he went back outside, there it was.\n\nX\n\nFor a time, it felt like he had brought the problem to life himself by stating it, that if he hadn't said anything the half-window wouldn't be there. Was that possible? He didn't think so, that wasn't the way the world worked. But even later, once he was grown, he still found himself wondering sometimes if it was his fault, if it was something he had done. Or rather, said.\n\nX\n\nStaring up at the half-window, he remembered a story his grandmother had told him, back when he was very young, just three or four, just after his father had left and just before his sister was born. Well, he didn't remember it exactly, but he remembered it had to do with windows. Where she came from, his grandmother said, they used to be called not windows but something else. He couldn't remember the word, but remembered that it started with a v. She had said the word and then had asked, Do you know what this means? He shook his head. She repeated the word, slower this time.\n\n\"This first part,\" she had said, \"it means 'wind.' This second part, it means 'eye.'\" She looked at him with her own pale, steady eye. \"It is important to know that a window can be instead a windeye.\"\n\nX\n\nSo he and his sister called it that, windeye. It was, he told her, how the wind looked into the house and so was not a window at all. So of course they couldn't look out of it; it was not a window at all, but a windeye.\n\nHe was worried she was going to ask questions, but she didn't. And then they went into the house to look again, to make sure it wasn't a window after all. But it still wasn't there on the inside.\n\nThen they decided to get a closer look. They had figured out which window was nearest to it and opened that and leaned out of it. There it was. If they leaned far enough, they could see it and almost touch it.\n\n\"I could reach it,\" his sister said. \"If I stand on the sill and you hold my legs, I could lean out and touch it.\"\n\n\"No,\" he started to say, but, fearless, she had already clambered onto the sill and was leaning out. He wrapped his arms around her legs to keep her from falling. He was just about to pull her back inside when she leaned farther and he saw her finger touch the windeye. And then it was as if she had dissolved into smoke and been sucked into the windeye. She was gone.\n\n4.\n\nIt took him a long time to find his mother. She was not inside the house, nor was she outside in the yard. He tried the house next door, the Jorgensens, and then the Allreds, then the Dunfords. She wasn't anywhere. So he ran back home, breathless, and somehow his mother was there now, lying on the couch, reading.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked.\n\nHe tried to explain it best he could. Who? she asked at first and then said Slow down and tell it again, and then, But who do you mean? And then, once he'd explained again, with an odd smile:\n\n\"But you don't have a sister.\"\n\nBut of course he had a sister. How could his mother have forgotten? What was wrong? He tried to describe her, to explain what she looked like, but his mother just kept shaking her head.\n\n\"No,\" she said firmly. \"You don't have a sister. You never had one. Stop pretending. What's this really about?\"\n\nWhich made him feel that he should hold himself very still, that he should be very careful about what he said, that if he breathed wrong more parts of the world would disappear.\n\nX\n\nAfter talking and talking, he tried to get his mother to come out and look at the windeye.\n\n\"Window, you mean,\" she said, voice rising.\n\n\"No,\" he said, beginning to grow hysterical as well. \"Not window. Windeye.\" And then he had her by the hand and was tugging her to the door. But no, that was wrong too, because no matter what window he pointed at she could tell him where it was in the house. The windeye, just like his sister, was no longer there.\n\nBut he kept insisting it had been there, kept insisting too that he had a sister.\n\nAnd that was when the trouble really started.\n\n5.\n\nOver the years there were moments when he was almost convinced, moments when he almost began to think\u2014and perhaps even did think for weeks or months at a time\u2014that he never had a sister. It would have been easier to think this than to think she had been alive and then, perhaps partly because of him, not alive. Being not alive wasn't like being dead, he felt: it was much, much worse. There were years too when he simply didn't choose, when he saw her as both real and make believe and sometimes neither of those things. But in the end what made him keep believing in her\u2014despite the line of doctors that visited him as a child, despite the rift it made between him and his mother, despite years of forced treatment and various drugs that made him feel like his head had been filled with wet sand, despite years of having to pretend to be cured\u2014was simply this: he was the only one who believed his sister was real. If he stopped believing, what hope would there be for her?\n\nX\n\nThus he found himself, even when his mother was dead and gone and he himself was old and alone, brooding on his sister, wondering what had become of her. He wondered too if one day she would simply reappear, young as ever, ready to continue with the games they had played. Maybe she would simply suddenly be there again, her tiny fingers worked up behind a cedar shingle, staring expectantly at him, waiting for him to tell her what she was feeling, to make up words for what was pressed there between the house and its skin, lying in wait.\n\n\"What is it?\" he would say in a hoarse voice, leaning on his cane.\n\n\"I feel something,\" she would say. \"What am I feeling?\"\n\nAnd he would set about describing it. Does it feel red? Does it feel warm-blooded or cold? Is it round? Is it smooth like glass? All the while, he knew, he would be thinking not about what he was saying but about the wind at his back. If he turned around, he would be wondering, would he find the wind's strange, baleful eye staring at him?\n\nThat wasn't much, but it was the best he could hope for. Chances were he wouldn't get even that. Chances were there would be no sister, no wind. Chances were that he'd be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until the day when he was either dead or not living himself.\nBrian Evenson\n\nis the author of twelve books of fiction, most recently the story collection Windeye and the novel Immobility, both of which were finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann's Tongue. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, at the school that served as the basis for Lovecraft's Miskatonic University.\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n\"FATHER, SON, HOLY RABBIT\" BY STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES. FIRST PUBLISHED IN CEMETERY DANCE #57, 2007. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2007 BY STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"IT'S AGAINST THE LAW TO FEED THE DUCKS\" BY PAUL TREMBLAY. FIRST PUBLISHED IN FANTASY MAGAZINE, 2006. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2006 BY PAUL TREMBLAY. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"THAT BABY\" BY LINDSAY HUNTER. FIRST PUBLISHED IN EVERYDAY GENIUS, 2010. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2010 BY LINDSAY HUNTER. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF FEATHERPROOF BOOKS. \"THE TRUTH AND ALL ITS UGLY\" BY KYLE MINOR. FIRST PUBLISHED IN SURREAL SOUTH 2007, 2007. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2007 BY KYLE MINOR. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF SARABANDE BOOKS. \"ACT OF CONTRITION\" BY CRAIG CLEVENGER. FIRST PUBLISHED IN WARMED AND BOUND, 2011. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2011 BY CRAIG CLEVENGER. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"THE FAMILIARS\" BY MICAELA MORRISSETTE. FIRST PUBLISHED IN CONJUNCTIONS #52, 2009. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2009 BY MICAELA MORRISSETTE. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"DIAL TONE\" BY BENJAMIN PERCY. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MISSOURI REVIEW, VOLUME 30, NUMBER 2, 2007. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2007 BY BENJAMIN PERCY. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"HOW\" BY ROXANE GAY. FIRST PUBLISHED IN ANNALEMMA #6, 2010. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2010 BY ROXANE GAY. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"INSTITUTO\" BY ROY KESEY. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE IOWA REVIEW, VOLUME 34, NUMBER 3, 2005. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2005 BY ROY KESEY. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"RUST AND BONE\" BY CRAIG DAVIDSON. FIRST PUBLISHED IN the fiddlehead #219 AS \"28 BONES.\" COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2004 BY CRAIG DAVIDSON. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF W.W. NORTON. \"BLUE HAWAII\" BY REBECCA JONES-HOWE. FIRST PUBLISHED IN NOVA PARADE, 2012. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2012 BY REBECCA JONES-HOWE. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"CHILDREN ARE THE ONLY ONES THAT BLUSH\" BY JOE MENO. FIRST PUBLISHED IN ONE STORY #122, 2009. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2009 BY JOE MENO. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS\" BY VANESSA VESELKA. FIRST PUBLISHED IN ZYZZYVA WINTER ISSUE, 2012. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2012 BY VANESSA VESELKA. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"DOLLHOUSE\" BY CRAIG WALLWORK. FIRST PUBLISHED IN ATTIC TOYS, 2012. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2012 BY CRAIG WALLWORK. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"HIS FOOTSTEPS ARE MADE OF SOOT\" BY NIK KORPON. FIRST PUBLISHED IN TROUBADOUR 21, 2009. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2009 BY NIK KORPON. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"THE ETIQUETTE OF HOMICIDE\" BY TARA LASKOWSKI. FIRST PUBLISHED IN BARRELHOUSE #10, 2012. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2012 BY TARA LASKOWSKI. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"DREDGE\" BY MATT BELL. FIRST PUBLISHED IN HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW #50, 2009. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2009 BY MATT BELL. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"SUNSHINE FOR ADRIENNE\" BY ANTONIA CRANE. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE HEROIN CHRONICLES, 2013. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2013 BY ANTONIA CRANE. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. \"FUZZYLAND\" BY RICHARD LANGE. FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE GEORGIA REVIEW, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 3, 2002. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2002 BY RICHARD LANGE. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY. \"WINDEYE\" BY BRIAN EVENSON. FIRST PUBLISHED IN pen america #11, 2009. COPYRIGHT \u00a9 2009 BY BRIAN EVENSON. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF COFFEE HOUSE PRESS.\nALSO AVAILABLE FROM DARK HOUSE PRESS\n\n\"Bone-chilling.\"\n\n\u2014PAULA BOMER, author of Inside Madeleine\n\n30-SOMETHING EMILY COLLINS INHERITS HER RECENTLY MURDERED AUNT'S HOUSE, DECIDING TO MOVE TO HEARTSHORNE, OKLAHOMA, TO CLAIM IT AND CONFRONT HER FAMILY'S DARK PAST AFTER HER DEAD MOTHER BEGINS SPEAKING TO HER IN DREAMS, PROPELLING THIS GOTHIC, NEO-NOIR THRILLER TOWARD TERRIFYING REVELATIONS OF MURDEROUS SMALL-TOWN JUSTICE WHEN A HORRIBLE COMMUNITY SECRET IS REVEALED THROUGH THE SUPERNATURAL PULL OF ECHO LAKE.\n\n\"Letitia Trent is the new poet-queen of neo-noir.\"\n\n\u2014KYLE MINOR, author of Praying Drunk\nALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS, INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT IN THE CASE OF SHORT PASSAGES QUOTED IN REVIEWS. 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+{"text":"\n\n# Contents\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nGetting Started\n\nGet Organized!\n\nTime-Saving Routines\n\nThe Ideal Site\n\nSave Time, Save Space\n\nEasy Landscaping\n\nEasy Flower Gardens\n\nHerb-Growing Techniques\n\nSix Tool Tips\n\nBuild the Soil\n\nAll-Purpose Cover Crops\n\nCompost: The Essential Ingredient\n\nLighten Clay Soil\n\nSoil Chemistry Made Simple\n\n11 Special Tips\n\nWhen the North Wind Blows\n\nAll About Seeds\n\nTransplanting Vegetables\n\nIn the Tool Shed\n\nGet A Head Start\n\nTo Stake or Not to Stake\n\nDig In!\n\nVarieties: What to Plant\n\nTiming: When to Plant\n\nRaised Beds\n\nLet Others Do the Work\n\nDealing with Tiny Seeds\n\n24 Planting Hints\n\nThe Care and Feeding of Transplants\n\nTip-Top Tomatoes\n\nPampering Peppers\n\nGrow Edible Perennials\n\nEasy Watering\n\nDon't Forget the Flowers\n\nOut, Weeds!\n\nBeat the Weeds\n\nEat the Weeds\n\nSmother the Weeds with Mulch\n\nTry Black Plastic\n\nThe Weed-Free Asparagus Bed\n\nA Few Final Weed-Beating Ideas\n\nPests and Pestilence\n\nVarmints Spell Trouble\n\nBugs and Diseases\n\nA Dozen Clever Tricks\n\nDon't Coddle Moths \u2014 Protect Fruit Trees\n\nCompanion Planting\n\nHarvesting and More\n\nPick Early, Pick Often\n\nStorage and Such\n\nWinter Protection\n\nFresh Sprouts: The Perfect Winter Crop\n\nIndex\n\nCopyright\n\nShare Your Experience!\n\n# Acknowledgments\n\nThe best part of writing this book was visiting the gardens of many green-thumb enthusiasts who have achieved some measure of \"laziness\" with their hobby and talking with others who shared their tips for more efficient gardening. I am indebted to: Marcia Barber, Ruth and Art Dewey, Closey Dickey, Kit and Tom Foster, Michael Hawks, Charles Hayward, Lesley Howell, Michael Jamieson, Deirdre Kevorkian, Joan Kevorkian, Bob and Eleanor Kolkebeck, Helen and Fabian Kunzelmann, Raymond Lambert, Kathy Link, Alice Moir, John Page, Marjorie Peff, Sally Robinson, Mary Sears, Ann Silverfarb, Nora Stevenson, Betty Vander Els, Philip Viereck, and Reg Young.\n\n# Getting Started\n\nWho are \"lazy\" gardeners? Most are busy people who nevertheless want time in their lives for the feel of cool earth, the solace of planting, the joy of bloom, the satisfaction of producing food, and the taste of fresh picked. They want the most from their gardens with the least effort. Most of us are lazy gardeners.\n\nThe secret to leisurely gardening is good organization. If you tend a garden for the joy of it, you don't want to be a slave to it. Gardeners who are successfully lazy have planned effectively the layout of the garden, the choice of plants, and a schedule of seasonal jobs and regular maintenance, which, timed properly, saves later grief. Five minutes now will save an hour in the future.\n\n## Get Organized!\n\nFirst, decide what you want from your land. Whether you've lived with your landscape for years, have inherited a garden from previous owners, or are planning a new plot, take time to weigh your choices. Paradise is a garden, so when you create a garden make sure it is, for you, more paradise than punishment.\n\nAlthough the primary focus of this book is vegetable gardening, some information on landscaping and flower gardening is included, in the belief that as a wise lazy gardener you will maintain your entire yard and make changes that simplify your gardening chores.\n\nAs you think about those chores, ask yourself a few questions: How much time do you want to spend working the land? Do flowers give enough pleasure to justify their maintenance? Would you prefer to devote your limited time to growing only fruits and vegetables? How large a garden can you keep under control? Have your needs changed over the eras, and have you had the courage to change the garden?\n\nIn seeking answers, consult the experts and avoid costly or time-consuming mistakes. Use your Agricultural Extension Agent, a rich source of general gardening information, literature, and guidance. He or she can give you tips on what varieties of trees, shrubs, flowers, and vegetables grow well in your climate and soil type. Call the County Forester for information on recommended trees or advice on maintaining or improving those you already have. The Soil Conservation Service representative will tell you about local soils. A soil survey can be helpful in making decisions about land use. Some government personnel will even visit your land on request.\n\n# A Master Plan for the Perfect Plot\n\nWhether you are creating a general landscape plan or designing a flower bed or a vegetable garden, **lay it out on paper** first. Use tracing pads of graph paper, available at stores that sell engineering and drafting supplies; it comes in two sizes, 81\u20442 by 11 inches or 11 by 17 inches. You can choose from several grid sizes, but **four squares to the inch** is most practical for laying out a garden to scale.\n\nOne advantage of this method is that you can overlay this year's vegetable garden on last year's to plan crop rotations easily. Note each vegetable variety in the layout and, after you plant, the date of planting. The plan will ensure proper spacing in the garden and will make it possible to calculate how much seed to purchase.\n\nIt is particularly important to plan flower gardens on paper if you interplant perennials and bulbs: you don't want to dig up bulbs after their foliage has ripened and disappeared. Use colored pencils to help visualize the color scheme.\n\nOne gardener keeps a blank sheet of tracing paper over her flower garden plan, and during the summer, as plants bloom, she indicates changes to be made. For instance:\n\n  * Move yarrow to back (it grew taller than expected).\n  * Trade places of coral bells and purple sage (for better color placement).\n\nPlan the moves when color shows and do the moving at optimum time for planting.\n\n## Time-Saving Routines\n\n**Keep a month-by-month schedule of reminders** to make your work in the garden more efficient. In a looseleaf notebook, with a section for each month, list all the general jobs that need to be done, as well as the care particular plants require. The looseleaf format makes it simple to add or change information. For instance:\n\n# April\n\n  * General: work soil when possible.\n  * Asparagus: Fertilize and cultivate.\n  * Currants: Cover with nylon net.\n\n\"I just leave the notebook lying out in the kitchen. It saves time. Before I started this system, I was always flipping through books to find out what needed to be done. It was just so frustrating to remember what to do. This makes it so easy,\" explains an advocate of this method.\n\n**Stroll around your garden daily** , shears or knife in hand. As you savor the sights, snip off dead blooms and pull out obvious weeds.\n\n**One gardener has divided her landscape** into seven sections. \"I never spend more than thirty minutes in any section,\" she says. \"When the thirty minutes are up, I move on \u2014 either to another section or to the tennis court. I may spend only thirty minutes in the garden or a couple of hours, but everything receives some attention regularly, and I never feel behind.\"\n\n# Send a Message to Yourself\n\nHow many times have you reached the garden, then remembered you forgot the ball of twine, the trowel? How many times have you promised yourself to make a note in your garden notebook \u2014 but forgotten it by the time you reached the house? Stop forgetting right now. Put up a post at one corner of your garden. Put a mailbox on it. The mail carrier won't deliver your gardening catalogs there, but you'll find it's a wonderful spot for trowels, twine, your notebook (don't forget a couple of pens or pencils), labels, pruning shears, a piece of worn sheeting from which to rip pieces to tie up the tomatoes \u2014 all those little things essential to gardening.\n\n## The Ideal Site\n\nAmong other things, a vegetable garden needs:\n\n  * Day-long sun (at least eight hours)\n  * Good drainage (a slight slope to the south is ideal)\n  * Protection from cold wind\n\nKeep it **away from trees** (their roots will steal nutrients from the garden) and as **near to the kitchen** as practicable. You'll take better care of a garden that is close to the house. You'll also spend more time there, gather crops more conveniently, and be on the lookout for garden problems and pests.\n\n### A Simple Layout\n\nTo **get maximum sun,** plant tallest crops on the north side of the garden, so they don't shade shorter ones, or make rows run north and south.\n\nLazy gardeners **locate frequently harvested crops closest to the house** to avoid compacting the soil by walking through the garden excessively.\n\n**Plant vegetable families together** in order to aid planning the rotation of crops in subsequent years:\n\n  * Legumes: peas, beans, limas\n  * Brassicas: cabbage, kale, broccoli, collards, cauliflowers, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts\n  * Cucurbits: cucumber, melons, squash\n  * Nightshade family: peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant\n  * Root vegetables: beets, carrots, turnips, salsify, parsnips, radishes, rutabagas, onions, garlic, leeks\n  * Corn\n  * Leafy greens: spinach, chard, lettuce\n\nIf you are going to **cultivate with a rototiller** , make sure the rows are six to eight inches wider than the tiller itself.\n\n**Take advantage of all the space** you have by utilizing vertical cropping, intercropping, and succession planting.\n\n  * Vertical cropping means training sprawling plants to grow up (see the section on staking). Try it with cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, and melons.\n  * Intercropping means planting quick-maturing vegetables such as lettuce and spinach between widely spaced rows of a slow-maturing crop such as tomatoes, or growing squash in with corn.\n  * Succession planting means making a second planting, such as putting in beans where you've just harvested early spinach. Make sure to dig in compost or fertilizer before you replant.\n\n# What You Need, Where You Need It\n\nTry a salad garden \u2014 perhaps a small raised bed \u2014 just outside the kitchen door. Plant ruby and green looseleaf lettuce, romaine, two pepper plants, two Pixie tomato plants, herbs such as basil (sweet and opal), chives, parsley (curly and Italian), and a few marigolds. Put a couple of stepping stones in the center. Often-used herbs are just a snip away, and the palette of greens and varied textures make a garden as eye-pleasing as any purely ornamental planting.\n\n## Save Time, Save Space\n\nMany gardeners are trying methods other than traditional, widely spaced rows of vegetables, methods that promise larger harvests with less work.\n\n### Widen Those Rows!\n\nInstead of narrow rows one plant in width, broadcast seed in broad bands, anywhere from ten inches on up. A row the width of a rake is most practical. This planting method allows you to:\n\n  * Plant more quickly.\n  * Weed less (close planting leaves less space for weeds).\n  * Save watering, as the plants form a \"living mulch\" that shades the earth, traps dew for added moisture and counters drying of the soil by wind.\n  * Grow cool-weather crops such as spinach and lettuce in more heat because it won't bolt as fast in wide rows.\n  * Harvest more vegetables from less space.\n  * Reap a longer harvest from the same planting, since natural competitiveness of the closely spaced crop makes some plants mature earlier than others.\n\nThis system works well with most vegetables, but it can't be recommended for potatoes, tomatoes, corn, melons, squash, and cucumbers.\n\nBroadcast seed in wide rows. A row the width of a rake is ideal.\n\n### Raise Those Beds!\n\nIn this system, vegetables are planted close together on beds that are ten inches wide or more and that are built up six to ten inches above ground level. Walkways run between the beds. Proponents claim higher yields from this method, four times more vegetables per acre than raised by commercial agriculture.\n\nRake smooth the top of a 6- to 10-inch high raised bed.\n\n###### Advantages\n\n  * Drainage is improved.\n  * Soil warms faster, dries out more quickly in spring. That means you can plant earlier.\n  * Close planting leaves little room for weeds, and that means little or no weeding.\n  * Beds are small and all weeds are within easy reach.\n  * Plants provide a \"living mulch,\" shading the soil and keeping it cooler.\n  * No one walks where plants are growing.\n  * Agony of digging deeply in rocky or shallow soils is avoided.\n  * Soil, continually enriched, becomes loose and friable.\n  * Beds can be formed in fall, to be ready for an early start where wet clay soils often delay planting.\n\n###### Disadvantages\n\n  * Beds tend to dry out in summer heat.\n  * Paths between beds can become weedy.\n\nTo overcome these problems, peel thick \"leaves\" from bales of spoiled hay to cover the pathways. Add more hay if weeds sprout.\n\nSides of beds may be contained by pressure-treated lumber, if desired, but this isn't necessary. Indeed, the wooden sides may become a haven for snails. Beds can quickly be reshaped with a hoe or rake.\n\n**NOTE:** When treating lumber or buying treated lumber, whether for raised beds or a back porch, use a copper-based preservative NOT a compound containing either pentachlorophenol or creosote. These are toxic.\n\nRetired friends of mine didn't want to bother with canning and freezing. They did, however, hanker for fresh tomatoes for the table and a few fresh vegetables. The only place with enough sun and away from roots of shade trees was smack in the middle of their back lawn. Two raised beds set side by side seemed to be the solution.\n\nThey rescued wooden pallets from the town dump, treated the lumber with copper naphthanate preservative, and used it to build sides for two beds four feet by nine feet. The lumber was set in trenches and extended eight inches above ground level. They mixed manure, compost, rock phosphate, sand, and peat moss with some topsoil to fill the beds. Their garden held three tomato plants, cucumbers, and squash \u2014 all trained inside wire cages \u2014 twin poles of Kentucky Wonder beans set at either end of one bed, carrots, a few broccoli and pepper plants, and a bit of leaf lettuce, with parsley, chives, and thyme planted around the edges. They decided it was best to concentrate on crops that keep producing rather than those that bear once and are finished. \"It's extraordinary how many things we got in there,\" says the wife.\n\n### It's Okay to Be Square\n\nIn this method, the vegetable garden is laid out in sections four feet by four feet with paths between the squares. As with raised beds, you always walk in the paths, never in the beds. Seed spacing is figured by the number of seeds (or transplants) per square foot. A one-foot square of garden holds, for instance, one pepper plant or four heads of lettuce or nine beets or sixteen onions. Vining crops are trained vertically.\n\nPlant in squares to yield more harvest from less land.\n\n###### Advantages\n\n  * Soil is never compacted by foot traffic, because you can reach everything in the garden from the defined paths.\n  * You get more harvest from less land. You need much less space than you would for the same harvest planted in conventional rows.\n  * Less land in garden means less weeding, less watering, and less compost and other materials to enrich soil.\n  * Overplanting is avoided.\n  * Garden looks neater.\n  * No thinning is needed with the single-seed sowing method.\n  * Crop rotation is easy to figure and doesn't require elaborate planning.\n  * No power tools are needed once the garden is established.\n  * Soil is enriched bit by bit after each square foot is harvested, so no big spring soil preparation is necessary.\n\n###### Disadvantages\n\n  * A system best suited to neat individuals.\n  * Slower planting in spring.\n\nOne gardener I know \u2014 a school principal \u2014 has combined elements of all three of the above layouts with wonderful results. He has raised beds three or four inches high, plants in rows four feet wide, and uses the broadcast method for small seeds and the square-foot method for larger seeds and transplants.\n\nWhen I visited his garden, he explained why he chose this hybrid approach: \"I must make good use of my time. Besides, the busiest times in the garden \u2014 May and September \u2014 are also the busiest times at school.\"\n\nHe gets his fifty-foot-square garden planted in one working day. \"Essentially, all I do is plant and harvest,\" he says. \"The rest takes care of itself.\"\n\n## Easy Landscaping\n\n### Unique Walks\n\nExamine traffic patterns of people and pets before you decide where to put walks or to relocate existing ones. Use walks to direct foot traffic, to provide boundaries for flower or shrub borders, and to divide flower and vegetable gardens into sections, so that you never have to step in planting areas in order to seed, cultivate, or harvest. In the vegetable garden, raised beds and square beds incorporate walks into the garden plan. Flower gardeners warn, \"Never have a wide perennial bed without paths into it, or maintenance is a struggle.\"\n\nTo **avoid weeding** walks, underlay paths with black plastic before covering with crushed stone, gravel, marble chips, crushed sea shells, shredded bark, wood chips, or crushed roofing tile.\n\nIn the vegetable garden, **mowed grass paths** look neat, are easy to care for and the separate beds they create help when planning crop rotation.\n\n**More elaborate walks** are made of slate, flagstone, marble, bricks, broken-up concrete, or slices of cedar or old telephone poles surrounded by wood chips. Invest enough time and effort to make the project lasting and virtually care-free. Good drainage is essential. Put a six-inch layer of gravel, cinders, or sand under the paving material. In northern areas where ground freezes deeply, masonry walks may heave during the spring thaw. In these areas of the country, it is more practical to set everything in a bed of sand instead of using mortar.\n\n### Lawn and Tree Basics\n\nMake an easy, low maintenance lawn by simply **not planting grass.** Just mow whatever happens to grow there. In a season or less a natural lawn will develop.\n\nRepairing empty patches in lawns used to be a tedious job, but no more. Recently some garden supply catalogs have begun offering a lawn repair product most commonly called **turf mats.** The mat looks like a rug and is made from a biodegradable mulch laced with grass seed. To repair your lawn simply prepare the soil, cut the mat to fit the patch, and water twice a day until the grass begins to grow.\n\nKeep lawns in **simple shapes** to eliminate maneuvering with the mower and hand trimming.\n\nDon't scatter trees and shrubs in random fashion over the lawn. Not only will the mower go crazy dodging and swerving through this obstacle course, but a moment of inattention can mean a nick in the bark of a tree, an entry point for insect enemies and disease. Instead, **plant trees in groups,** forming islands in the lawn. Tie the space together and smother sod the easy way by applying a thick layer of newspapers or magazines and covering them with three or four inches of shredded bark or other good-looking mulch. The following season poke holes in the newspaper under the mulch (the sod will have decomposed) and plant drifts of daffodils or other bulbs.\n\nA **ground cover** takes hold quickly in a mulched tree island and, once established, adds texture and eliminates the need to replenish the mulch. You might want to substitute ground covers for lawn in other places, where it is too shady for grasses to grow well or too steep to mow easily. Ground covers can also provide a transition from lawn to woods. Or simply plant ground cover to reduce the amount of lawn to be mowed. Ground covers for shady places are pachysandra, vinca minor, sweet woodruff, lily of the valley, European ginger, winter creeper, ivies, and ferns. In sun, try one of the creeping junipers, ajuga, heathers, or cotoneaster.\n\n**When planning** a tree island, flower garden, or planting bed, use rope or twine and experiment with possible boundaries before you commit to planting. A design on paper may look entirely different when actually planted, and you may need to adjust your proposed scheme several times before you discover exactly the right layout.\n\n**Avoid hedges.** They need to be trimmed.\n\n**Choose hardy plant material,** preferably grown (or acclimatized) in a local nursery, or at least one in your own gardening zone. The less the shock of transplanting, the more quickly it will begin to prosper. You may be tempted to bring in exotics, but if they are not comfortable in your environment, they will be susceptible to diseases, pests, and winterkill \u2014 all of which mean more work for you.\n\n# Trimming for Traditionalists\n\nFor the die-hard traditionalists who insist there are a few places that simply must be hand-trimmed, an old-fashioned, hand sheep shear is the tool to get, advises one of my meticulous gardening friends. \"It's lightweight, sharp, and better than all the fancy gadgets on the market,\" she says. Buy one modified for garden use and sold as an \"English garden shear.\"\n\n### Edging \u2014 A Graceful Touch\n\nEdging beds and gardens by hand can be a time-consuming, unrewarding chore. Time spent in installing permanent edging saves on regular maintenance:\n\n  * Bricks or paving blocks at or slightly lower than lawn level provide a mowing strip, eliminating the need for hand trimming.\n  * Pressure-treated lumber can be used to make raised beds that lawn will not invade.\n  * Commercial rubberlike (really polyethylene) edging with a rounded top can be shaped into curves for a free-form planting bed, then sunk into the earth so only the top lip shows. A flange on the bottom keeps it from popping up, and a steel spike driven in every four or five inches prevents frost heaving. Comes in black or brown. It keeps a pine bark mulch in and grass out of the bed.\n\nCommercial polyethylene edging can minimize time needed for maintenance.\n\n## Easy Flower Gardens\n\nIf you border on woods, create a woodland garden as a **transition from lawn to forest.** Heavily mulch with shredded bark and plant under trees with shade-loving shrubs such as rhododendron, mountain laurel, and andromeda. Add color with easy-care spring bulbs and primroses. Summer bloom from impatiens and fibrous- and tuberous-rooted begonias complements ferns and ground covers such as wild ginger or pachysandra. I have friends who created a garden like this when they moved into a new house. They laid the heavy cardboard from their packing boxes on scythed weeds at wood's edge, piled wood chips on top, and waited a season before planting anything.\n\nInstead of planning and planting flower beds, fill half barrels, crocks, or other large tubs with rich soil mix and plant with bright annuals. This **mobile color** can be placed wherever a perky accent is needed.\n\nWhat about **perennial borders**? Don't they just come up every year without care?\n\n\"That's a popular fallacy about perennial beds,\" insists a devoted gardener. \"People think they're not any work. That notion is for the birds. Once established, perennials are cheaper than annuals, because you don't have to buy new plants each year, but to have a successful perennial bed you must continually divide and replant. I use the English system of massing the border with plants so close together that weeds have no space to grow, but that means I must divide more frequently. And the work in the fall \u2014 cutting down all the top growth \u2014 phew!\"\n\n\"I spend about an hour once a week in my perennial garden.\" says another flower enthusiast. \"But every spring and fall there are times when I go at my garden for whole days, to dig up and replant.\"\n\nSpring bulbs are beautiful to see in bloom, but achingly difficult to plant in the fall. Just think of how long it would take to dig holes for a few hundred crocus bulbs. A new tool, called a **bulb auger,** makes digging those holes a lot easier. The tool fits onto a standard electric hand drill and can dig up to 500 holes in an hour.\n\n## Herb-Growing Techniques\n\nIf you have a sunny spot, try an herb garden. Herbs have no special soil requirements except good drainage, are bug-free, and are among the easiest plants to grow. Perennials include bee balm, catnip, chives, lavender, mints, sage, tansy, tarragon, thymes, wormwood, and yarrow. Marjoram and rosemary are hardy only in warm climates. (Up north, plant them in tubs and use as houseplants in winter.) Feverfew, a biennial, reseeds itself, and you may want some annuals such as basil, borage, calendula, dill, nasturtium, and summer savory.\n\nAn herb enthusiast explains, \"I grow herbs because I can use them in many ways, and I can have a messy garden without excuses.\" She has organized her **herbs in raised beds.** \"It looks attractive even in winter,\" she adds. Each bed holds an assortment of herbs for a particular purpose: drying, tea, medicinal, and fragrance. She keeps culinary herbs just outside the kitchen door.\n\nPesto is one of the bounties of summer and you can have it fast and easy by planting a **thick carpet of basil** in the garden instead of planting the herb in neat rows. As the basil sprouts simply wait until it is a few inches high and harvest it all.\n\n# Restraining Mint\n\nTo **keep mint from spreading** and becoming a nuisance, sink a chimney flue tile in the ground and plant inside its walls.\n\n## Six Tool Tips\n\n  1. 1. Sometimes the labels placed at the heads of garden rows fade in the summer sun until they are unreadable. No matter what type of label you use mark them with a **weatherproof garden or laundry pen** and the writing will be clear and crisp for many seasons. The pens are usually less than $3.00 each and will save you much aggravation and time.\n  2. 2. Hand pruning can make finger joints and hands sore in no time. To relieve some of the discomfort switch to **ergonomically designed pruners.** Instead of the traditional straight handle of most pruners, the new style featured by companies such as Felco and Sandvik have curved handles that make using them much more enjoyable.\n  3. 3. Every few years there seems to be a **new hoe design** touted to be better than its ancestors. In the end the easiest, most efficient hoes to use are the stirrup hoes, the strange looking swoe, and the colinear hoe. Each of these allows fast, easy uprooting of weeds while cultivating the soil.\n  4. 4. Bending over for hours on end while planting the garden can be fatiguing at best. Traditional dibbles made holes for seeds faster than other methods, but they were so short that bending over to make the holes was still unavoidable. A **walking stick with a brass end** makes a nice garden dibble that allows you to make seed holes all day and never bend over once.\n  5. 5. Lots of people have an outdoor thermometer in the garden that serves more for decoration than practical use. Switch that old decorative one for a **max-min thermometer** which will allow you to gauge the climate conditions in the garden much more accurately.\n  6. 6. Of the many ways to easily water the garden and save water at the same time perhaps no product is better than the **soaker hose.** Also called a weeping hose, this hose allows water to leak uniformly at the rate of about one gallon per minute per fifty feet of hose. It can be installed above or below ground and under mulch and uses up to 70 percent less water than conventional watering systems.\n\n# Build the Soil\n\nLazy gardeners know that if you tend to your soil, the tending of your crops will require less time. Make yourself a promise: never plant anything \u2014 tree, shrub, plant, or seed \u2014 unless you have first replenished the soil's organic matter in some way.\n\nOrganic matter improves the physical condition of the soil and increases the availability of nutrients to plants.\n\nWhether your soil is clay, sand, or loam, adding organic matter will improve the way its particles cluster together. Clay is composed of tiny flakes that stick to each other and make clay soil difficult to work, for both the gardener and the soil microorganisms. When wet, it is mucky; when dry, it's like cement. Organic matter helps to bind small particles of clay in aggregates, so that a crumbly structure is formed, with spaces for air. In a sandy soil, organic matter helps to hold moisture and nutrients longer.\n\nIt is amazing to think that 25 percent of \"good\" soil is air and 25 percent water. Organic matter forms only 1 to 5 percent of the soil and the rest is mineral matter. Ironically, all those minerals sitting there are often unavailable to plants. Organic matter can make the minerals available.\n\nA plant can't use raw organic matter. It waits until that matter has been broken down with the help of earthworms and microorganisms, into its basic elements. Humic acid is one product of decomposition, and it helps to make the soil's locked-up minerals, especially phosphorus and iron, available to plants. Practically all nitrogen in the soil comes from decomposing organic matter, which releases ammonia, a nitrogen compound. All this may seem complicated, but nature takes care of it easily. In the forest, when leaves fall to the forest floor, the tree returns to earth the nourishment that will fuel a new spring's growth. We can take a cue from nature and try to return to the soil at least as much as our crops take from it.\n\nGood soil prevents many ills. It gives plants the opportunity for vigorous growth. You can't have vigorous top growth without vigorous root growth, and you can't have root growth without an aerated soil. Organic matter helps to aerate the soil; it also holds moisture and encourages the population of worms and beneficial bacteria.\n\nHealthy plants resist disease and insect attack. Just as carnivorous predators attack the weak of the herd, insects go after weak plants. Healthy plants grow larger and shade out weeds sooner. Weeds come out of a loose, friable soil more easily than from trampled hardpan.\n\nSo build a healthy soil for healthy plants. Water less, weed less, fight fewer pests, and reap more bountiful harvests.\n\n## All-Purpose Cover Crops\n\nGreen manures (also called cover crops) will improve soil quality. A green manure crop is plowed under right in place, adding organic matter high in nitrogen to the soil. In decomposing, it produces humic acid, which helps release locked-up minerals, so you need to add less fertilizer in other forms. A green manure crop also prevents erosion and crowds out weeds. Its root system helps loosen subsoil and bring up minerals. It improves soil structure in the same way that compost does, without the hauling \u2014 a boon to the lazy gardener.\n\nCover crops can be a solution for a gardener who wants to be lazier but can't bear to cut down on the size of the garden. Each year, plant half the space in a green manure and the other half in vegetables. The next season, switch places. You'll have half the work, eliminate many weeds, and be lazily improving your soil at the same time.\n\n# Versatile Cover Crops\n\n## Plant in Spring and Harvest or Turn Under Same Season\n\n**Legumes:** snap beans, soy beans, peas\n\n**Non-legumes:** buckwheat, pearl millet, Sudan grass\n\n### In the South\n\n**Legumes:** cowpeas, hairy indigo, espedeza, soy beans\n\n## Plant in Spring and Harvest Following Spring\n\n**Legumes:** alfalfa, clovers (alsike, red, white), sweet clovers (white, yellow)\n\n## Plant in Late Summer\/Early Fall and Harvest or Turn Under Following Spring:\n\n**Legume:** hairy vetch\n\n**Non-legumes:** barley, bromegrass, kale, oats, winter rye, annual ryegrass, wheat\n\n### In the South\n\n**Legumes:** clovers (bur, crimson), lupines, vetches\n\nOther \"double-duty\" crops you can harvest first, then turn under as green manure, are **soy beans** (and, in the South, cowpeas) and **kale.** Plant kale six weeks before first frost in the North or as a winter crop in the South.\n\nPlant a cover crop of clover or another legume **between rows of corn.** Eliminate the need to weed and have soil replenishment for this heavy feeder ready and waiting.\n\nMy neighbor plants **winter rye** in his garden, section by section, as the seasons's last crops are harvested. A \"piecework\" approach keeps it from becoming a major project. Here in the Northeast, all the winter rye must be sown by October 15, when the growing season slows down, or it won't have a chance to become established before winter.\n\nIn spring, he spreads manure on top of the rye (optional) and plows both under. If desired, you can cut or disk the rye first.\n\n**Annual ryegrass** dies out during the winter, so it is easier to turn under in spring than crops that survive.\n\nAlways **plow under a green manure before it goes to seed.** You don't want to have your soil improver become a weed in the vegetable crop that follows it.\n\n# An Easy Fix\n\n**Legumes** such as peas and beans make a valuable addition to the soil, because they have the ability to \"fix\" nitrogen: take it from the air and bind it to their roots. After the crop has been harvested, merely use a spade or tiller to turn the plants under, right then and there, where they will quickly decompose \u2014 green manuring in its simplest form.\n\nPull a bean plant and examine its root system. You can see the little nodules where the nitrogen-fixing bacteria hang out.\n\n## Compost: The Essential Ingredient\n\nLazy gardeners argue about compost. Some insist nothing can take the place of a shovelful of compost mixed in planting holes for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and members of the cabbage family. Melons, cucumbers, and squash need its richness to send out strong, healthy vines. Use compost to side-dress hungry crops, mix it into the seedbed, or cover fine seeds with it as you plant, they say. Feed your vegetables and flowers with compost, and sit back and watch them grow.\n\nFollowers of Ruth Stout, author of _How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back and Gardening Without Work_ , scoff at conventional composting schemes. \"Why spend all that time carting stuff around?\" they ask. They keep a thick mulch of hay on their gardens year-round, tuck kitchen waste under the hay, and toss all other organic materials on top. \"Let them rot where the plants need them,\" they say.\n\n\"Composting is no bother at all, once you've established a system,\" counter its advocates.\n\nRead too much about compost, and you'll be scared off completely. Carbon-nitrogen ratios, aeration, exact proportions of ingredients, activators, psychrophles, mesophiles, termophiles \u2014 help!\n\nDespite all the hocus-pocus, compost is basically decomposed plant material; it looks like black, fluffy soil. Whether you make it in place as year-round mulch or in a separate bin doesn't matter. Once you've tried compost, never again will you be able to stand looking at crusty, dried-out soil of little tilth.\n\n# No-nonsense Composting\n\nIf you're a purist, you'll follow Sir Albert Howard's lead. He invented **the Indore method,** which calls for building a series of layers with a three-to-one ratio of green matter to manure:\n\n  1. 1. Six inches of green matter (weeds, leaves, etc.)\n  2. 2. Two inches of manure, garbage, or other high-nitrogen source\n  3. 3. A sprinkling of soil (plus ground limestone and ground phosphate rock)\n\nRepeat layers until the pile is four or five feet high. Moisten each layer as you build the pile so it is about as wet as a squeezed-out sponge. Poke holes in it with a rod to aid aeration. Turn the pile in six weeks and use it after three months.\n\nMost of us aren't that organized. We want to recycle biodegradable waste, but we want to do it lazily.\n\nKeep a half-gallon milk carton or similar container next to the kitchen sink. Form the habit of filling it with the **kitchen's vegetable waste:** parings, eggshells, fruit pits and rinds, coffee grounds, tea leaves, carrot tops, cabbage cores, etc. When it is full, toss its contents on the compost pile.\n\n# A Three-Bin System\n\nOrganic gardener Sam Ogden, author of _Organic Vegetable Growing,_ is also an advocate of the powers of time. He uses three side-by-side bins for compost, each about five feet by twelve feet. One bin holds finished compost, one holds last year's slowly rotting compost pile, and the third is for this season's accumulation of kitchen garbage, weeds, spent pea vines, and other garden trash. He covers each layer of green matter (thin layers for better aeration) with a thin layer of soil. Rain provides moisture, and in two years the finished compost is fine, dark, and crumbly. Once this system is working, you'll always have one bin to draw from, so it's rather like an asparagus bed \u2014 two years of expectation and from then on the harvest keeps coming.\n\n\"We have a great pile of compost, more than we'll ever use,\" says my neighbor. \"What's the use of going through all that fuss \u2014 layering, proportioning, turning? Just throw all your weeds, leaves, clippings, and kitchen-vegetable waste in a pile and **let time do it** all.\"\n\n\"You can work at compost as if you're cooking a wonderful French ragout,\" says a gardener who savors her product. \"Try to make it as interesting and diverse as possible.\"\n\nIf you can't wait two years for the three-bin system to mature and you don't want to scavenge, here are three ways to **speed up decomposition** of compost:\n\n  * Increase the ratio of **nitrogen** to carbon in the compost pile. Materials high in carbon include wood shavings, sawdust, dry leaves, and straw. Materials high in nitrogen are fresh grass clippings, fresh manure, vegetable wastes, green vegetation, and fertilizers such as blood meal, fish meal or alfalfa meal. Don't get too much nitrogen or you'll end up with slime.\n  * Increase the amount of **air** in the pile by laying perforated pipe at intervals as you build the pile. Every foot or so in height lay a few pipes horizontally a foot or two apart.\n  * Increase the **surface area** of ingredients by shredding them with a shredder or rotary mower before heaping. (If you want to bother moistening and turning the pile after four, seven, and ten days, you can have finished compost in two weeks.)\n\nThe **French Intensive Method** does not advocate the use of manures or rock powders in compost. It's simpler, they think, to make compost with three layers:\n\n  * One-third vegetation\n  * One-third kitchen waste\n  * One-third soil\n\nThe minimum size for proper heating up of a compost pile is three feet by three feet by three feet. **Heat speeds decomposition** and kills disease-causing organisms and weed seeds.\n\n### Composters Beware!\n\n  * **Sewage sludge** may contain heavy metals.\n  * Don't put bones and other **animal wastes** in the compost pile. They do not decompose quickly and may invite animals to raid the pile.\n\nChicken manure is so strong we are warned about the danger of its burning crops. Sawdust has such a high carbon content we are told to add it sparingly to compost piles and never to put it on the garden without first giving plants a \"booster\" feeding of nitrogen. Sawdust and chicken manure are an ideal combination. The acidity of the sawdust offsets the alkalinity of the chicken manure.\n\n# Composting Materials\n\nMaterials for composting and soil enrichment can be limited to those you generate yourself. If you have imagination and the initiative to scavenge a bit, figuring the time spent in building your soil will mean lush crops that grow with less of your midsummer energy, here's a list of possibilities:\n\napple pomace (by-product of cider-making) | kitchen wastes (vegetable and fruit rinds, parings, egg shells, coffee grounds, tea leaves, etc.)  \n---|---  \nbird-cage cleanings | leather waste and dust  \nbrewery wastes | leaves  \nbuckwheat hulls | manures (horse, cow, goat, pig, rabbit, poultry)  \ncannery wastes | milk, sour  \ncastor bean pomace | mill wastes of lignin, wool, silk, and felt  \nchaff | nut shells  \ncheese whey | oat hulls  \ncocoa bean hulls | olive residues  \ncorn cobs and husks | peanut hulls  \ncottonseed hulls and gin trash | peat and sphagnum moss  \ndust from vacuum cleaner | pine needles  \nevergreen needles | pond weeds  \nfeathers | rice hulls  \nfelt waste | salt hay  \nfish scraps | sawdust and shredded bark  \ngarden residues (spent plants and vines, beet and carrot tops, corn stalks, etc.) | seaweed, kelp, eelgrass  \ngelatin-processing waste | straw  \ngrape pomace (by-product of winemaking) | sugar cane  \ngrass clippings | tanbark  \nhair | tobacco stems and dust  \nhay | woodchips and rotted wood\n\n# Natural Fertilizers\n\nFinely textured materials may be added directly to soil rather than to the compost pile, although the high-nitrogen ones act as activators to speed decomposition.\n\nHigh in Nitrogen\n\n---  \nalfalfa meal | linseed meal  \nblood meal and dried blood | soybean meal  \nhorn and hoof meal | fish meal  \ncottonseed meal (slightly acid)\n\nHigh in Phosphorus\n\n---  \nbone meal | rock phosphate\n\nHigh in Potassium\n\n---  \nwood ashes | granite and marble dust  \ngreensand (marl) |\n\nTo Raise pH of Soil\n\n---  \nlimestone |   \nDolomitic limestone (also contains calcium and magnesium)\n\n### The Convenient Compost Pile\n\n**Where you put your compost pile** will influence your attitude toward it. Think of it as an easy way to dispose of waste you have to get rid of anyhow. It should be near, or even in, your garden. The less hauling you have to do, the more convenient it will be to stockpile and use.\n\nIf you are a scavenger who collects composting materials from other places, try to locate your pile somewhere near your driveway, as well.\n\nGood drainage is important, so too are proximity to a water supply if you live in a dry climate and some shelter from wind.\n\n### Sensible Containers\n\nIt's a good idea to **contain your compost pile** in some way. You can get plans for compost bins that would need a contractor to build. Or you can do it the easy way.\n\nI have a lazy gardening friend who has spotted a few \"retired\" tomato cages (see the section on staking) strategically around her garden as compost makers. She never has to walk far to deposit weeds or spent plants. When she needs a bit of compost to put under tomato, eggplant, or pepper transplants, it's right there. Scarlet runner beans or peas often may be found climbing the outside of the cages, camouflaging their contents.\n\n**Build two bins side by side,** one for adding to, one for taking from.\n\nBuild a bin with **bales of hay.** The hay itself will eventually decompose. Then you can either add it to the pile and replace it with fresh bales, or toss it on your garden as mulch or to be tilled in, depending on the time of year.\n\nIf you have limited space, you can compost in a **garbage can** or drum. Punch holes in the bottom and sides (for drainage and aeration), set on bricks or concrete blocks, and layer materials with soil inside.\n\nCommercial compost containers are also available. Most are designed so the finished compost can be removed through an opening near the bottom. They are quite expensive, however.\n\nToss garden wastes, table scraps, lawn clippings, leaves, and anything else that can be composted into a black **plastic bag** lining a trash can. When the can is filled, add a quart or two of water \u2014 enough to have everything moist but with no excess water. Tie the bag, then dump it out of the can and into a shaded spot. Start another bag. This is anaerobic (without oxygen) composting, so until the materials are completely rotted, they'll have the breathtaking smell of a septic tank, rather than the clean, woodsy smell of an aerobic compost pile.\n\nGerald Smith of the University of Georgia College of Agriculture, suggests this work-free method of composting leaves, which works fine in his mild winter season:\n\nRake **leaves** into plastic bags. Carry them to an inconspicuous and shaded area where they can be stored. Add enough water to each bag to wet the leaves thoroughly. Turn the bags over several times to wet down all of the leaves, then pour out any extra water. Gerald says, \"Broadleaf leaves such as oak, maple, and pecan, collected in the fall, should be decomposed enough to work into the soil by April or May.\"\n\n# Easy Composting\n\nFor a simple system, get a piece of **sturdy wire mesh,** about four or five feet high, and nine feet long. Wire the two ends together, forming a cylinder. Place it at a convenient location \u2014 where you'll be using the compost when it's ready. Fill it with weeds, the zucchini that's outdone itself, a shovelful of soil, then more garden or kitchen wastes. If you feel compelled to turn it, you can simply unhook the cylinder, move it adjacent to the pile, and fork the contents back in. Otherwise, just let it sit and lift or unhook the cylinder when decomposition is complete.\n\n# Compost in Concrete\n\nA three-sided **concrete-block bin** is easy to construct. Lay the block sideways (no mortar), and the holes will help let air in and gases out of the pile. If you want to get fancy, suspend perforated pipe at intervals between the holes in the blocks to promote even better aeration.\n\nOr, lift the pile off the ground with pipes thrust between the second layer of blocks. Place wire mesh on the pipes. Evergreen branches laid on the wire will prevent most of the compost from sifting through the mesh. Build from there with composting materials. No turning is necessary, because of the ten-inch air space under the pile.\n\n### Compost Without a Pile\n\nDo you plan to purchase **a new shrub or tree**? The summer or fall prior to planting, dig the hole. Dig it bigger than you think it needs to be. Layer it with composting materials and soil, building a small compost pit. Mulch lightly. In spring, the hard work of digging is behind you, for the friable soil that now fills the hole will come out ever so easily and be rich and ready to feed your new tree or shrub.\n\nMake **compost for fruit trees** right under the trees. Leave a space three feet from the trunk, then layer materials for composting from there out to one foot beyond the drip line, about two feet high. The \"doughnut\" will feed the tree as it decomposes and do double duty as a mulch.\n\n**Sheet composting** eliminates carting. Spread leaves, manure, grass clippings, weeds, spent plants, and kitchen wastes directly on the soil and till them in. In cold climates, this is a wonderful fall project which disposes of all the leaves that bury lawns. Run a rotary mower over the leaves first and they'll decompose more quickly after they are turned under.\n\n# Composting Methods\n\nTry **strip composting.** Heap organic matter and manure on top of vegetable rows from which early crops have been harvested. The next season simply leave the composted material where it is, and at intervals scoop out a small hole for a shovelful of soil. Plant squash or cucumbers, or other heavy feeders, such as cabbage.\n\nOr use the **two-hole method.** Make one hole between rows in your vegetable garden. Put the dirt aside. Dump the contents of your kitchen-waste container into the first hole. Cover it with dirt obtained by digging a second hole adjacent to the first. Now you have a hole ready for the next time you accumulate a container of parings. To cover it, dig a third hole, and the system continues.\n\n## Lighten Clay Soil\n\nThere's no easy way to convert heavy clay to rich loam. There are ways that are hard work that don't work, and ways that are hard work that do work. In Georgia (and they know what heavy clay is in Georgia) Paul Colditz of the University of Georgia College of Agriculture says there's just one way to do it, \"Add organic matter in large amounts.\"\n\nA thin layer won't do it, he warns. It won't make a bit of difference. \"Spread organic matter at least two inches thick over the soil and work it in to a depth of four to six inches. If peat moss is used, add limestone at a rate of five pounds per 100 square feet. If raw sawdust is added, extra nitrogen should be applied to feed the bacteria that break down this organic material. Broadcast one pound of nitrogen per ten square feet.\"\n\nOther organic materials, such as compost or rotted leaves, can also be used. It takes a lot, as the accompanying table shows.\n\n# Organic Material Needed (To Cover 100 Square Feet)\n\nDepth (inches) | Amount of Organic Matter  \n---|---\n\n6\n\n| 2 cubic yards\n\n4\n\n| 35 cubic feet\n\n3\n\n| 1 cubic yard\n\n2\n\n| 18 cubic feet\n\n1\n\n| 9 cubic feet\n\n(1 cubic yard equals 27 cubic feet)\n\nIf you want to improve the texture of your soil quickly, buy **peat moss** or coarse **vermiculite** in large commercial bales (four cubic feet). Find a nursery or wholesaler to buy from.\n\nSome gardeners with clay soil **add gypsum** at the rate of 20 pounds per 1000 square feet. It breaks up the soil more effectively than sand and keeps it from packing.\n\n## Soil Chemistry Made Simple\n\nSometimes a plant's poor performance results from the wrong pH. Test your soil to determine its degree of acidity or alkalinity. Your County Agent can tell you how to send soil to the state university for testing, or you can buy a home test kit. Do this in the fall. There's less waiting then, since soil labs are not as busy. If the test indicates that lime is needed, applying it in the fall means the soil and lime have time to react before spring planting.\n\nSome plants that like sweet soils\n\n---  \nalfalfa | clover  \nasparagus | cucurbits  \nbeets | iris  \nbrassicas | legumes  \nchard | lilacs  \nclematis |\n\nSome plants that like acid soils\n\n---  \nblueberries | strawberries  \nbroad-leaved evergreens | watermelon  \npotatoes |\n\n**Potatoes** must have either acid or very alkaline soil. If the soil is acid (below a pH of 5) or alkaline (above a pH of 7.5) then they are fine. Otherwise, they get scab. In the East, it's easier to make sure the soil is acid. In Idaho, the alkaline soil gives the characteristic dry, mealy quality to that state's famous potatoes.\n\nTo **make soil more acid,** add elemental sulfur (one-third pound per twenty-five square feet to lower pH one unit).\n\nTo **make soil more alkaline,** add lime (one pound per twenty-five square feet to raise pH one unit). Wood ashes also increase the alkalinity of soil. Use half the amount.\n\nYou know that **ashes** from the fireplace are fine for the garden, but you're not about to trudge through the snow to scatter them there. So you dump them in a cardboard box and put it in the garage. That spells TROUBLE. If there's a single ember in those ashes, it's likely to set the cardboard afire. Use a metal can \u2014 a trash can is fine \u2014 for wood ashes. It will keep them dry until you scatter them in the spring. Limit the ashes to one or two ten-quart pails to 1,000 square feet each year.\n\nHave fun with **hydrangea color** by controlling the pH of the soil. Acid soil (a pH of 4.5 to 5.5) produces blue flowers. Alkaline soil (a pH of 7 to 7.5) gives pink ones.\n\n# pH Preferences of Some Common Crops\n\nAlfalfa | 6.0\u20138.0  \n---|---  \nApple | 5.0\u20136.5  \nArtichoke (Jerusalem)  | 6.5\u20137.5  \nAsparagus | 6.0\u20138.0  \nAvocado | 6.0\u20138.0  \nBarley | 6.5\u20137.8  \nBean, lima | 6.0\u20137.0  \nBean, pole | 6.0\u20137.5  \nBeet, sugar | 6.5\u20138.0  \nBeet, table | 6.0\u20137.5  \nBlackberry | 5.0\u20136.0  \nBlueberry | 4.0\u20135.5  \nBroccoli | 6.0\u20137.0  \nBroom sedge | 4.5\u20136.0  \nBrussels sprout | 6.0\u20137.5  \nBuckwheat | 5.5\u20137.0  \nCabbage | 6.0\u20137.5  \nCantaloupe | 6.0\u20137.5  \nCarrot | 5.5\u20137.0  \nCashew | 5.0\u20136.0  \nCauliflower | 5.5\u20137.5  \nCelery | 5.8\u20137.0  \nCherry, sour | 6.0\u20137.0  \nCherry, sweet | 6.0\u20137.5  \nChicory | 5.0\u20136.5  \nChives | 6.0\u20137.0  \nClover, red | 6.0\u20137.5  \nCorn | 5.5\u20137.5  \nCotton, upland | 5.0\u20136.0  \nCowpea | 5.0\u20136.5  \nCrabapple | 6.0\u20137.5  \nCranberry | 4.2\u20135.0  \nCucumber | 5.5\u20137.0  \nCurrant, red | 5.5\u20137.0  \nEggplant | 5.5\u20136.5  \nEndive | 5.8\u20137.0  \nGarlic | 5.5\u20138.0  \nGooseberry | 5.0\u20136.5  \nGrape | 5.5\u20137.0  \nGrapefruit | 6.0\u20137.5  \nHazelnut | 6.0\u20137.0  \nHickory nut | 6.0\u20137.0  \nHorseradish | 6.0\u20137.0  \nKale | 6.0\u20137.5  \nKohlrabi | 6.0\u20137.5  \nKumquat | 5.5\u20136.5  \nLeek | 6.0\u20138.0  \nLemon | 6.0\u20137.0  \nLentil | 5.5\u20137.0  \nLespedeza | 4.5\u20136.5  \nLettuce | 6.0\u20137.0  \nMillet | 5.0\u20136.5  \nMushroom | 6.5\u20137.5  \nMustard | 6.0\u20137.5  \nOats | 5.0\u20137.5  \nOkra | 6.0\u20137.5  \nOlive | 5.5\u20136.5  \nOnion | 6.0\u20137.0  \nOrange | 6.0\u20137.5  \nParsley | 5.0\u20137.0  \nParsnip | 5.5\u20137.0  \nPea | 6.0\u20137.5  \nPeach | 6.0\u20137.5  \nPeanut | 5.3\u20136.6  \nPear | 6.0\u20137.5  \nPecan | 6.4\u20138.0  \nPepper | 5.5\u20137.0  \nPineapple | 5.0\u20136.0  \nPlum | 6.0\u20138.0  \nPotato | 4.8\u20136.5  \nPotato, sweet | 5.2\u20136.0  \nPumpkin | 5.5\u20137.5  \nQuince | 6.0\u20137.5  \nRadish | 6.0\u20137.0  \nRaspberry, black | 5.0\u20136.5  \nRaspberry, red | 5.5\u20137.0  \nRhubarb | 5.5\u20137.0  \nRutabaga | 5.5\u20137.0  \nSage | 5.5\u20136.5  \nSalsify | 6.0\u20137.5  \nShallot | 5.5\u20137.0  \nSorghum | 5.5\u20137.5  \nSoybean | 6.0\u20137.0  \nSpinach | 6.0\u20137.5  \nSquash, crookneck | 6.0\u20137.5  \nSquash, Hubbard | 5.5\u20137.0  \nStrawberry | 5.0\u20136.5  \nSwiss chard | 6.0\u20137.5  \nThyme | 5.5\u20137.0  \nTimothy | 5.5\u20136.5  \nTomato | 5.5\u20137.5  \nTurnip | 5.5\u20136.8  \nVetch | 5.2\u20137.0  \nWalnut | 6.0\u20138.0  \nWatercress | 6.0\u20138.0  \nWatermelon | 5.5\u20136.5  \nWheat | 5.5\u20137.5\n\nCourtesy of Sudbury Laboratories, Inc.\n\n## 11 Special Tips\n\n  1. 1. **Azaleas** love left-over tea and tea leaves. So do houseplants such as philodendron and rubber plants.\n  2. 2. Spread a thick layer of manure on the **asparagus patch** after the ground freezes in fall. It does double duty as winter protection and an early source of nutrients in spring.\n  3. 3. A Long Island gardener smiles mischievously when you marvel at the size and beauty of his **glorious roses.** \"Just don't try to walk through that bed,\" warns his son. \"It squishes.\" His secret? He visits fishing party boats as they return from salt water outings, and they gladly give him the entrails of fish caught and cleaned by paying customers. Area fish markets are equally obliging. He buries his scavenged treasure among the roses, and they thank him with giant blooms.\n  4. 4. Fill a shaker with **borax** and sprinkle on soil next to beets (provides boron).\n  5. 5. To **provide magnesium** for faster development of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, mix two tablespoons Epsom salts to one gallon of water. Apply one pint to each plant just as bloom begins.\n  6. 6. Mix one-half cup **Epsom salts** to one-half bushel wood ashes. Sprinkle around daffodils as they emerge from soil in spring. Adds potash, lime, magnesium.\n  7. 7. Crushed egg shells mixed into soil around brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.) provide **extra calcium,** which they need.\n  8. 8. Sprinkle **coffee grounds** over carrot plantings to repel the root maggot or around evergreens as an eye-pleasing mulch.\n  9. 9. Most plants benefit from receiving regular fertilizer applications, a process that can be messy and always takes time. To make fertilizing easy try using a **time-release fertilizer** such as Osmocote. The fertilizer is contained in small granules that slowly release their nutrients over many weeks and even months.\n  10. 10.  **Hold back** on nitrogen-rich fertilizer late in the season. Overly rich growth makes plants more susceptible to frost.\n  11. 11.  **Herbs like lime** and gritty soil. If you live in an area where ground oyster shells are available, mix one handful into each planting hole for herbs.\n\n# When the North Wind Blows\n\nAh, winter! The fun begins. You pore over seed catalogs, read of new varieties. If you were smart, you made a list in fall of all the things that did or didn't work last year. Your plans are more practical when you can still remember that the watermelons were hit by frost before they ripened than when the promises of seed catalogs cloud your vision.\n\nAssess the successes and failures of last year's garden. Did you grow what your family likes to eat? No sense nurturing cauliflower if no one will touch it. Did you keep up with the zucchini harvest? Maybe you need only one or two hills this year. Or forget it entirely. Your neighbor will love you for giving him an outlet for his surplus, and you'll have more space for other crops. Are you using all your garden space productively? Perhaps you'll decide to plant in wide rows or square beds this year. Will you put part of your plot in a cover crop, or grow more flowers or a space-user like corn, for which you never had room with your old system? Or is it time to reduce the size of your garden permanently, now that your children have grown up and moved on?\n\nBe realistic. Decide which crops you truly want to grow, and in what quantity. Do you need just enough to eat fresh, or do you want a surplus to freeze, can, or dry? Lay out your garden on paper and order only enough seed to match your plan. Choose disease-resistant strains. Talk to your gardening friends about varieties that have performed well in their gardens. Follow the experts in choosing a new variety. Try an All-America Selection winner; new ones are selected each year by a non-profit organization of seedsmen.\n\nGet as much done as you can before planting time arrives. Winter is not only for planning, it's for organizing and repairing tools, for preparing staking systems (if you use them), for lettering markers to be placed in your garden at planting, for ordering hardware for fencing \u2014 a gathering of momentum so you are all ready for the joy of placing that first seed in moist earth.\n\nUSDA Climate Zone Map\n\n# Frost Date Averages\n\nYou can time your seed sowing, transplanting, and fall-season crops by estimating the average dates of the last frost in spring and first frost in fall in your area. Lookup current first and last freeze\/frost dates by zip code at davesgarden.com.\n\n## All About Seeds\n\nHalf-used packages of seed lie before you. Will you take a chance and plant them next year? What if few germinate? That would be a waste of time and energy. You can throw the old seeds away and start with fresh packets each spring, or you can test the leftovers to find out which batches are still viable.\n\nDampen a paper towel. Lay ten seeds of the same variety on it. Cover with another damp paper towel. To provide continuous moisture, either mist occasionally with water or roll the towel gently and place it in a plastic bag. Label it and put it in a warm place, next to rising yeast dough, perhaps. After the germination time has elapsed (find it on the package) count the number of seeds that have sprouted. Seven or eight is a good number. If fewer than 50 percent have germinated, order new seed.\n\nTry the same experiment in a petri dish, the covered plastic disc scientists use for growing cultures. Put a moistened paper towel, tissue, or damp cotton in the bottom, then lay out the ten seeds and replace the cover. Watch the progress of germination without disturbing the seeds. Radish root hairs are amazing! Keep a magnifying glass nearby to enjoy the show.\n\n**Store seeds** in a cool, dry place. Keep them in a metal canister in a cool cabinet, or place them in a covered glass jar in the refrigerator, with a package of desiccant as a companion.\n\nWhen seeds arrive, **sort and file** them by planting season \u2014 early, middle, and late. Be ready for the blind rush to the garden in spring.\n\nNot all seeds are created equal; some are bigger than others of their kind. A trick to get bigger plants that bear faster and larger yields is to **separate seeds by size.** The largest seeds will generally bear earlier, larger crops.\n\nRay Lambert declares that buying from seed catalogs is the downfall of the over-extended gardener. \"It's too tempting to buy more than you need or have space to grow,\" he explains. \"I buy seed in bulk at the local feed store \u2014 only once and only what I need. The total cost of everything for my fifty-by-fifty-foot garden this year was twenty-five dollars, including transplants.\"\n\n\"I save the most money by growing asparagus,\" states Phil Viereck. \"I harvest fifty to seventy-five dollars worth of tender spears from my bed each year.\"\n\n## Transplanting Vegetables\n\nSome vegetables just hate to be transplanted and produce better crops when direct sown. Save indoor space and transplanting time by planting squash, pumpkin, melons, and cucumbers directly in the garden after the soil warms in spring.\n\n## In the Tool Shed\n\nDuring the winter, end summer's frantic rummaging. **Organize your tools.** If each one has its own hook, you will never waste time searching for it. Pegboard provides a flexible method of storing tools, since you can move hooks around to accommodate new purchases.\n\n**Clean** metal parts of spades, shovels, forks, rakes, and hoes with a wire brush, emery cloth, or steel wool. Apply a protective coating of oil with an old cloth. Floor wax will rejuvenate the handles.\n\nThen set up a **time-saver** for next season. Fill an old pail with sand. Pour into it a quart or so of oil (used motor oil is fine), and mix it a bit. After every use of your hoes, rakes, shovels, and other hand tools, push them into the oily sand a few times. They'll emerge shiny and with a film of oil to keep them from rusting. They'll last a lot longer, and you'll never again have the dreary job of polishing rust off them.\n\nAttach an old rake head to the wall and use it as a **hanger for hand tools.**\n\nRake-head tool hanger\n\n**Paint a band** of red, orange, or yellow on the handles of all your tools. Makes them easier to find when you inadvertently dump them into the compost pile along with the weeds or leave one lying in the grass.\n\nIf you're like many of us, your hoses lie on the garage floor, tramped and tangled, or hang on a single spike, bent and broken. Save the time and money involved in replacing the hose. Drive three spikes into a board so each spike is one point of a triangle. Cut three short sections of hose from that one you ruined by hanging it over the single spike. Cover the three spikes with sections of hose. Now **hang up that new hose** \u2014 and be proud of it.\n\nStoring the garden hose\n\n# A Place to Laze\n\nYour garden shouldn't be shaded \u2014 but there should be some shade nearby \u2014 and this bench should be in it. Build it in two hours, and enjoy it on those warm afternoons when the weeds won't grow much anyway.\n\nYou need an 8-foot 2\" \u00d7 12\" (or wider) for the seat and legs, and a 4-foot 2\" \u00d7 4\" for a brace. Cut two 14-inch pieces from the plank for legs, leaving a seat area 68 inches long. Center the 2\" \u00d7 4\" brace between the legs, glue with exterior-type glue, and attach with 1\u20442\" \u00d7 4\" countersunk flat-head wood screws. Attach legs to seat by gluing and using same size screws. Finish as you please.\n\n## Get a Head Start\n\nIs it really worth the trouble to start seedlings indoors, or is it more practical to wait until spring and buy the few transplants and annuals you need? If you're willing to put in the time to reap the fun of growing your own, don't fool around with narrow windowsills and straggly plants. Grow them under lights for best results.\n\nYou can buy a plant stand for starting seedlings \u2014 or you can invest an hour in a stand that's fine for starting tomatoes and all the rest. You need:\n\n  * Four 2\" \u00d7 4\" \u00d7 72\" uprights\n  * Nine 3\" \u00d7 2\" \u00d7 48\" horizontal pieces\n  * Four 1\" \u00d7 6\" \u00d7 48\" sides of plant area\n  * One 48\" \u00d7 48\" particle-board or plywood shelf\n  * One 60\" \u00d7 60\" plastic sheet, for shelf covering\n  * Two 48\" two-tube fluorescent units with hooks and chains\n\nOptional:\n\n  * One 2\" \u00d7 2\" \u00d7 96\" to be cut into four supports\n\nUse wood screws throughout. Construct shelf frame and end units, then place shelf at a height comfortable for you. Screw the two top bars into position. Mount steel hooks into the underside of the top bars so that light units suspended from them will be centered. Attach shelf to frame and add 1\" \u00d7 6\" side pieces. Place the plastic sheet inside the shelf unit and fill it with peat moss. Keep the peat moss damp to increase humidity around the plants.\n\nBuying 48-inch-long shop lights is a lot cheaper than buying fancy plant lights from a garden shop. Replace one fluorescent tube in each fixture with a grow-light. Keep a distance of 5 to 6 inches from plant foliage to the reflector and give plants 14 to 15 hours of light each day.\n\nPlant stands are ideal for indoor growing.\n\nThe traditional way to start garden seeds indoors relied on planting the seeds in flats and transplanting them to pots. You can eliminate the transplanting step by planting seeds directly into a **plug flat.** These rigid flats have small molded pots built into the flat. Simply fill the individual plugs and sow the seeds. When the plants are large enough just pop them from the flat and plant in the garden. Plug flats come in many sizes to fit just about all types of garden crops and flowers.\n\nSeeds often need uniform heat to germinate well. An easy way to give the seeds the warmth they need is to **put seed flats on top of the** **refrigerator.** The heat from the refrigerator will warm the soil and encourage rapid germination.\n\n**Leeks** are one vegetable worth starting indoors. Their seedlings are so small they'd otherwise get lost among garden weeds, and you'd find yourself pulling up all the leeks \u2014 and then you'd want to pull out your hair, as well. Plant seeds anytime from January on and transplant to a trench when the garden is ready. Apply fine mulch to thwart weeds from the start.\n\n**Parsley,** too, is a good indoor candidate. Plant in March and set out at the same time as leeks.\n\n**Winter squash** needs to have time to ripen completely before first frost. Otherwise, the meat is light covered, not nutty and flavorful, and the squash won't keep well. In northern climates, give winter squash a head start. Start indoors six weeks before setting out. \"We ate our last winter squash in early July,\" says a gardener who can testify to the keeping qualities of squash started in this way.\n\nStart watermelons early, too, and when you move them to the garden, plant through holes in black plastic and give them plenty of water.\n\nYou ask for trouble if you use garden soil for indoor planting. It's likely to be loaded with pathogens. Use sterile, commercial **potting mix,** or make your own:\n\n  * two parts soil\n  * one part compost or leaf mold\n  * one part sand, perlite, or vermiculite\n  * one tablespoon bone meal per quart\n\nSterilize it in a 150\u00b0F oven for one-half hour (which may drive everyone out of the house holding their noses). To stay in your family's good graces, use a microwave oven for speedy sterilization. Put the soil in a plastic bag in which you've punched a few holes. Bake it in the microwave for four or five minutes.\n\nSystems save time. To aid in **spacing seeds in flats,** cut a piece of one-inch-mesh chicken wire the size of a flat. (Put it in a wooden frame, if you want to be fancy.) Lay it on the soil and plant a seed inside each hole for one-inch spacing. You can also plant on two-inch or three-inch centers.\n\nSpace seeds using chicken-wire.\n\n**Foil damping-off organisms,** which cause young seedlings to keel over. Plant seeds in a flat, then sprinkle a one-quarter to one-half-inch layer of vermiculite over the surface. Cover with newspaper to hold in moisture until germination. Remove newspaper when seedlings show. Bottom-water to keep top layer of vermiculite dry and prevent young plants from biting the dust. Between waterings, mist lightly.\n\nWhen it's time to **thin young seedlings** grown indoors, snip off at soil level with scissors instead of disturbing roots by pulling.\n\nIn January, start indoors at least two dozen seeds of **Alpine strawberries.** By late May, you'll have small plants that can be tucked in wherever you have places to fill in the vegetable or flower garden. These beautiful perennial plants will reward you another way \u2014 pick and eat their sweet inch-long fruit throughout the summer as you garden.\n\n# A Portable Cold Frame\n\nPhil Viereck has built a versatile, portable, insulated cold frame that enables him to eat early lettuce. He plants a crop in September and plops the cold frame over it later, to take it through the winter. \"I'm convinced that what saves the lettuce is that it doesn't have extreme changes of temperature quickly,\" he says. \"My biggest problem is remembering to open the glass on warm days. One year I cooked the whole batch.\" Barring that, Phil eats lettuce by April 20.\n\nHe plants his first spring crop in late March. \"I've even sprinkled the seed on ice,\" he says. In late April, he moves the cold frame to this planting. Later, he sets it over Early Girl tomatoes.\n\nThe only problem with cold frames has been the need to ventilate them to control the temperature. This opening and closing of the frame lid gets boring really fast. Instead of doing this job by hand install a **solar-powered vent control.** These gadgets were designed to use the energy of sunlight to operate controls that open and close greenhouse vents. They are just as effective in regulating cold frame temperatures.\n\nGet **early spring lettuce** with little effort. In the fall, punch holes in two plastic containers, dish pan size if you can find them. Put six inches of a rich mixture of topsoil and compost in them, and store them in the cellar or garage. In late winter, moisten the soil well, then sow leaf lettuce to get plants two inches apart. Cover with clear plastic and keep under fluorescent lights 12 to 18 hours a day. Remove the plastic when the seedings appear. As soon as possible, move them outdoors or, better yet, into a cold frame, at least during the daylight hours. You'll be eating this lettuce in less than two months. At first, harvest to thin the plants to six inches apart, then cut off individual plants one inch above the surface of the soil, so they can grow again. Two containers should keep a small family in lettuce until the regular garden crop is ready. Experiment with varieties. Buttercrunch, Grand Rapids, and Salad Bowl grow well together.\n\nThe fastest way to heat the soil of the garden in spring is to use a **clear plastic mulch.** Clear plastic allows sunlight to pass through the plastic to heat the soil and then traps that heat near the ground. Clear plastic mulch isn't used much to heat the soil because it also stimulates rapid weed growth. Black plastic stops weed growth but does not heat the soil as effectively as clear plastic. Now the best of both products have been combined in a mulch called IRT-76 wavelength selective mulch. This product allows the strongest warming rays of the sun to pass through it and warm the soil while blocking the light that weed seeds use to germinate.\n\n\"I've eliminated the time-consuming fuss of moving **tomato seedlings** from flats to small pots to larger pots before setting them in the garden,\" says Closey Dickey. Plant tomato seeds directly in soil mix in-half-gallon milk cartons. Thin to one seedling per carton. When setting out plants, simply slice off the bottom of the carton and slide it up to make a protective collar.\n\nGive hard-coated seeds a jump on germination. Nick them with a file, then before planting soak for forty-eight hours in a solution of one teaspoon Adolph's Meat Tenderizer to one quart water.\n\n## To Stake or Not to Stake\n\nUnder most circumstances, staking newly transplanted trees is a waste of time. The wind moving the trunk of unstaked trees encourages a thicker stem and sturdier growth than that achieved in staked trees. Stake only in windy locations.\n\nHow you handle vining crops, such as peas, pole beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and melons depends on your attitude toward the garden as well as the space you have available. As you plan the layout of next year's plot, choose a system that suits your gardening style.\n\n###### Advantages\n\n  * Fruit is cleaner and less susceptible to damage from rotting, insects, or slugs.\n  * More air and sunlight reach the plants, reducing likelihood of fungus or mildew infection.\n  * Cultivating and harvesting are easier.\n  * Less space is used.\n  * Yields are generally higher (unless you prune).\n\n###### Disadvantages\n\n  * More frequent watering is required. (Mulch to offset this.)\n  * More time is involved in preparing props for vertical growing. (But it may save time later.)\n  * Trained plants that are pruned (tomatoes) have reduced yields.\n  * Pruned tomatoes have more incidence of sunscald, cracking, and blossom-end rot.\n\nSome gardeners can't be bothered with vertical growing. \"We **don't stake tomatoes,** either the determinate [bushy] or the indeterminate [viney] varieties. Nor do we bother to mulch under them,\" says Tom Foster, a gardener with a relaxed attitude and plenty of space. \"We overplant. We have so many, so if we lose some, what difference does it make?\"\n\n\"I don't have the time, and don't want to take the time, to stake,\" says a golfer-gardener. \"I let the tomatoes sprawl. In mid-July, when the soil is thoroughly warm, I put black plastic under them.\"\n\nOthers feel that tiptoeing through tomato or cucumber vines, bending and stooping, searching for ripe ones, stepping on some in the process, and coping with slug holes, rabbit nibbles, and rot is not their idea of lazy gardening. They'd rather spend a little time in winter preparing supports and later enjoy their investment with a more organized garden. Supports should be ready to go into the garden at the same time as seeds or plants.\n\nYou don't know the **difference between determinate and indeterminate** plants?\n\nMost early tomatoes are of the **determinate** type, with short stems and fewer than three leaves on the vine between flower clusters. Determinate tomato plants grow naturally bushy and don't need pruning. They tend to make their growth and then have all the fruit that is set ripen.\n\nLate varieties are usually **indeterminate.** Their stems grow indefinitely, and the fruit ripens over a longer period. Indeterminate varieties respond well to pruning and vertical training.\n\n### Keep Tomatoes Upright\n\nHave all the advantages of vertical growing without the bother of pruning and tying: grow your tomatoes in **cages.** Buy them commercially or construct sturdier ones yourself. Use concrete-reinforcing wire with six-inch mesh. (Wire used for cages should have openings large enough for your hand to reach through for harvesting.) For each cage, cut a section of wire five feet three inches long: the three-inch pieces can be hooked to the other end of the mesh to form the cylinder. Each cylinder holds one plant. You can make the diameter of the cylinder larger (three to four feet) and put three plants inside. Open the cylinders and store flat in winter.\n\nAvoid the possibility of a tumbled cage by driving one **stake into the ground** next to the cage and attaching with wire.\n\nThis wire cylinder and the wooden cage below give all the benefits of vertical growing, without the bother of pruning and tying.\n\nA **wooden cage** is a variation on wire.\n\nWooden cage\n\nSupport tomatoes between two **parallel fences** eighteen to twenty-four inches apart. To make the fences, nail or staple five-foot high hog wire with four-inch mesh to sturdy stakes. Drive stakes into the ground. Plant tomatoes between the fences. As they grow, slide cross-sticks between the fences for additional support.\n\nParallel fences provide much-needed support for tomatoes.\n\nWooden tents are a simple method to keep tomatoes upright. These are constructed of 1\" \u00d7 2\" lumber and fold flat for winter storage.\n\n**Train indeterminate (vining) varieties on string.** Set six-foot high fence posts six feet apart. Stretch sturdy wire between the tops of the posts. Plant tomatoes eighteen inches apart under the wire. Over each plant, tie one end of a piece of twine to the wire and the other end to the bottom of the plant As the tomato grows, prune it to a single stem and train it to the twine. \"You soon learn to twist the string around the tomato, not the tomato around the string, or the tomato breaks,\" cautions County Agent John Page, who uses this system in his own garden.\n\nTraining on twine works well for vining varieties.\n\nStill bent on conventional staking? Bob Kolkebeck buys 1\" \u00d7 2\" lumber in twelve-foot lengths. He cuts it in two at an angle, creating a ready-made point that drives easily into the ground and saves a few minutes of his time.\n\nConventional stakes drive easily into the ground if cut at an angle.\n\nTake a minute to make a figure-eight when you tie a tomato stem to a stake. Loop the tie loosely around the stem, cross it, and tie securely to the sake. Then the tie doesn't become a tourniquet for the plant.\n\nA figure-eight tomato tie lets the plant grow unencumbered.\n\nBy the time my sheets are ready for the rag bag, they are so weak they break every time I try to use them for plant ties. I've had better luck with pre-cut **plastic-covered twistems** , 131\u20442 inches long. They are reusable. Collect and straighten at the end of the season. Or use soft and stretchy strips cut from discarded nylon stockings.\n\n### Ingenious Pea Supports\n\nToo lazy to put in pea fences? **Prop up vines with piles of hay,** \u00e0 la Ruth Stout.\n\nPlant **dwarf peas,** those that grow only fifteen to eighteen inches high, in rows five to six inches apart or in a six-inch wide trench. Plants will intertwine and hold each other up.\n\nUse **pea brush** as our forefathers did. Just after planting, stick twigs of deciduous trees or shrubs into the pea trench. Place them close together so they form a natural latticework for pea vines to climb. After the peas are harvested, just toss the branches in the chipper or brush pile.\n\nFor **conventional pea fencing,** stretch chicken wire on metal fence posts. Make it three to four feet high for regular peas and six or more feet high for the edible-podded variety.\n\n# Sturdy Support for Peas\n\nPrepare pea fencing ahead of time and save work in the spring. Here's how Bob and Eleanor Kolkebeck assemble their fence for edible-podded peas, which need a **tall and sturdy support.**\n\nStaple six-foot high, two-inch-mesh chicken wire to six-foot lengths of 1\" \u00d7 2\" lumber. Put the lumber at each end of the fence and space it at three- to four-foot intervals in between. Roll it up and store it until planting time.\n\nIn spring, unroll the fence and lay it on the ground with one edge touching the planting trench. Wherever there is a lumber strip, drive a three- to four-foot high metal fence post into the ground (much easier to drive than wood).\n\nRaise the chicken wire fence against the metal stakes. Wire the metal stakes to the wooden fence posts, using about three twistems for each stake. You need a friend to help juggle everything. At the end of the pea season, untwist the wires, pull up the stakes, roll the chicken wire and lumber neatly, and store until next year.\n\n\"One year we had a heavy windstorm, and it blew all the pea vines off the fence. We had a lovely fence standing, but all the vines were in a tangled heap on the ground, impossible to put up again. Now we take a few minutes to prevent this. As the vines grow, we simply hold them with twine every foot or two of growth as insurance,\" Eleanor explains. Fasten one end to the first stake, stretch it to the next and wind it around, and so on. Do this on both sides of the fence.\n\n### Bean Poles\n\nPoles for pole beans must be anchored well \u2014 two feet into the ground \u2014 or they'll blow over in a summer thunderstorm. Instead of going to all that work, tie three poles together at the top, spread them **tepee** fashion, then push the bottoms into the soil and plant around them. Children love the natural tepee they form.\n\n# Bean Poles\n\nSet eight-foot high wooden poles three feet apart. Run twine from the top of each pole to the bottom of the adjacent poles, forming Xs for extra climbing space for the beans.\n\nCrossing twine\n\nSave your Christmas trees for bean poles. In our garden, we drive six-foot high metal fence posts into the ground and, with twistems, attach a Christmas tree, its branches cut to short stubs, to extend two feet above the tops of the metal posts. The roughness of the stubby tree trunk provides a good grip for the bean vines, and the metal post the sturdiness they require. (Collect unsold Christmas trees from local markets immediately after Christmas to prepare summer bean poles and use the sheared-off branches as winter protection for perennials.)\n\nOld Christmas tree\n\n### Train Those Cucumbers!\n\nUse a concrete-reinforcing **wire cage** (as described for tomatoes) three or four feet in diameter. Plant cucumber seeds around the circumference. (Use the inside as a collector for composting materials and toss in a bit of manure, to feed the cukes.)\n\n# Cucumber Trellises\n\nRay Lambert uses an old metal **clothesline support.** He drives two stakes under the outer edges of the T and runs twine, just above the ground, from them to the center post. He pokes pieces of twine through the holes in the cross piece of the support and attaches them to the ground string. Under each vertical length of twine he plants a cucumber seed.\n\nOld clothes line pole\n\nMake an **A-frame** for cucumber or squash vines. Construct two wooden rectangles, attach hog wire or nylon trellis netting to the frames, and hinge at the top.\n\nA-frame\n\n### Props for Floppy Flowers\n\nMake **cylinders** of varying heights from green plastic-coated pea fencing with 2\" \u00d7 21\u20442\" mesh. Place over plants in early spring, before they are more than a few inches high. As the perennials grow, their foliage pokes through the mesh so the cylinder is hardly noticeable. (If you wait until the plant needs staking, you may break it as you try to wiggle the cylinder over it, and it will never look natural.) For most plants, there's no need to attach the cylinder to the ground. Occasionally, a heavy delphinium may tip it over. Just poke a stake through the mesh and into the ground. this system works for any \"clumpy\" plant, such a coreopsis, gallardia, baby's breath, or delphinium.\n\nWire cylinder\n\nStraighten the hook of a wire coat hanger and pull the long side of the triangle up to form a diamond. Stick the straightened hook wire into the ground and use two or three to prop up floppy plants. Prepare a supply now to have handy when you need them.\n\n**For peonies,** cut circles of chicken wire the diameter of each peony clump. Drive one stake behind the clump and very early, when sprouts are emerging from the ground, lay the circle over them and the stake. As the peonies grow, let the chicken wire circle rise to keep them from sprawling.\n\nPeony prop\n\nThere are many ways to extend the growing season from cold frames to row covers. But the easiest way to add two weeks to the growing season is to **do nothing at all.** Nature has taken care of it for you. In the last fifteen years the growing season in most of the northern hemisphere has arrived about ten days earlier in the spring and lasted about four days longer in the fall. Scientists aren't sure why this is so, but it is.\n\n# Dig In!\n\nBirdsong fills the air, and the yearning to plant consumes you. Here's where restraint is needed, before the elixir of damp earth intoxicates you. Chant \"Wait, wait,\" and check to see if the soil is dry enough to be worked. Scoop up a handful and squeeze. Open your hand. If the soil sticks together, it is still too wet. If it crumbles, it is ready.\n\nNever work wet soil, especially clay. You may ruin its structure for the entire season and end up tripping over solid, sun-baked clods instead of early lettuce.\n\nDid you incorporate lots of organic matter into the soil in fall? If you do that every year, you will find increasing ease of preparation in spring, as your soil becomes more spongy and fluffy. It will also be ready to work earlier in the spring.\n\n## Varieties: What to Plant\n\nPlant **pole beans** instead of bush beans. Pole beans yield up to twice as many beans as bush varieties and have better flavor to boot.\n\nFor the **fastest crop of carrots,** plant small-rooted varieties that are ready to pull in half the time.\n\nTo avoid thinning carrots, plant **pelleted seed.** Space seed 2 inches apart in rows.\n\nTo grow **straight, well-shaped eggplant,** train slender-fruited varieties to a trellis. As the fruit matures it hangs down from the vine, growing into a slender, straight shape.\n\n## Timing: When to Plant\n\nCool weather crops \u2014 peas, spinach, lettuce, onions, garlic, and brassicas \u2014 can go in as soon as the ground can be worked. The gardening books say beets, carrots, chard, and radishes can be sown in cold soil, but every time I have tried that, they have been decimated by tiny, flea-like insects. They seem to appreciate a couple of week's grace.\n\nIf you're a lazy gardener, you won't try to plant the rest of your garden too early. If the seeds manage to sprout before rotting in cold soil, the plants will probably struggle, and you will fuss and sputter. Most crops need soil that has warmed up.\n\nFind out the average date of the last spring frost in your area (ask your Agricultural Extension Agent or go to davesgarden.com where you can lookup your first and last freeze\/frost dates by zip code). Wait until then to plant beans, sweet corn, and New Zealand spinach.\n\nCrops that need thoroughly warm soil are cucumbers, squash, melons, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and lima beans. Wait at least a week after the average date of the last frost before setting them in the garden (unless you are willing to provide hotcaps or some other kind of protection).\n\nTo **warm up soil** more quickly for heat-loving crops, spread clear plastic over the ground until planting time. (It lets in more heat than black plastic.)\n\nFor an **extended pea season,** plant early, midseason, and late varieties at the same time, as soon as the soil can be worked. This gives better results than successive plantings of one variety. Peas of one variety tend to catch up with brethren planted earlier. Two weeks difference in planting may mean only one day's difference in harvesting. This principle applies to corn, as well.\n\n**Plant corn** when apple blossoms begin to fall.\n\nIn the North, **turnips** planted in spring don't do well. If you have trouble, plant in mid-July for a fall crop.\n\n**Cole crops** (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collards) do best in fall. \"They love cold weather,\" says John Page, Bennington (Vermont) County Extension Agent. He plants these seeds in his garden in mid-July and transplants them to available spaces any time from mid-August to Labor Day.\n\n# Wide Rows\n\nAfter preparing the seedbed, run string attached to two stakes across the garden. Line up one edge of a steel garden rake next to the string and drag it the length of the row. For a wider row, lay out two strings to the desired width and drag the rake between them.\n\nSmoothing ground\n\nBroadcast seed in the raked area, slightly closer together than you would in a conventional row. Press into soil with the back of a hoe or rake.\n\nScattering seeds\n\nWith the rake or hoe, pull soil from outside the row to cover the seed. (Use enough soil to make a covering four times the seed's diameter, or for long seeds, as deep as their length. In clay soil, you can cover a little more sparingly than in sandy soil.) Tamp again. You can cover a planting of fine seeds with a thin layer of straw to help hold in moisture until germination.\n\nTamping in\n\nRaking soil to cover\n\n## Raised Beds\n\nUsing the conventional method, soil preparation for raised beds was a lot of work. It involved double-digging, the contemplation of which would send any lazy gardener to the nearest hammock, plus spading in compost, well-rotted manure, bone meal, wood ashes, and more manure.\n\nThere's an easier way. Start with a well-prepared seedbed, but it needn't be double-dug. Enrich it with compost, manure, other organic matter or fertilizer. The raised beds can be formed with either hand tools or a tiller with hilling attachment.\n\n###### Using hand tools\n\n  1. 1. Mark the bed with stakes and strings. Dick Raymond, author of Joy of Gardening, suggests sixteen inches as a good width. Some gardeners prefer beds three or four feet wide. Make them any convenient length. Walkways can be up to twenty inches wide. (One gardener makes them the width of a bale of hay for efficient mulching of walks.)\n\n  2. 2. Use a rake to pull soil from the walkway to the top of the bed. Stand in one walkway and draw soil toward you from the opposite walkway. After completing one side, do the same from the other side.\n\n  3. 3. Level the top of the bed with the back of the rake. Sides should slope at a forty-five-degree angle. A lip of soil around the top edge of a new bed will help reduce erosion.\n\n###### Using a Tiller\n\n  1. 1. Stake out walkways of two tiller widths.\n  2. 2. Attach furrowing and hilling attachment to the tiller. Set hilling wings to the highest position, so they will push soil upward onto the bed.\n\n  3. 3. Hill-up beds. Line up the center of the tiller in front of the first stake, point it at the stake at the other end of the bed, and guide tiller directly toward it. Repeat on the other side.\n  4. 4. Smooth the top of the bed with a rake.\n\nRaised bed in cross section\n\n**To plant raised beds,** broadcast small seeds as you would for a wide row. Larger seeds such as for bush beans or transplants such as cabbage should be spaced the distances recommended for a conventional row, but the spacing should be in a pattern that lets the leaves of mature plants barely touch one another, providing a living mulch.\n\n### Square Beds\n\nThe first year, till the entire garden space and mix organic matter into it before you lay out the four-foot by four-foot beds with walkways in between. In subsequent years, use hand tools to prepare and plant one four-by-four block at a time. First, divide it in quarters with string or by drawing in the soil. Then divide each of the four squares you have created into four more squares. Now you have sixteen planting units, each one foot square. Plant the recommended number of seeds or transplants within that one-foot square:\n\n  * 16 carrots, beets, onions, or radishes\n  * 9 bush beans or spinach\n  * 4 lettuce, parsley, or Swiss chard\n  * 1 broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, corn, eggplant, or pepper\n\nSummer squash and zucchini, of course, would never make it in a one-foot square. Give them more space. Grow tomatoes and vining crops like cucumbers, winter squash, pole beans, and peas on vertical supports.\n\nWhenever you harvest from a one-foot square, add organic matter, such as compost or well-rotted manure, or fertilizer and dig it in with a trowel. That keeps the soil ready for planting, and preparation is never a major project.\n\n## Let Others Do the Work\n\nHave you selected a **new garden site,** and now you want to prepare it? You can spade it, but that's hard work. Try covering it with black plastic. In one month, and often less, all plant life under the plastic will die, and the soil will have a delightfully soft moist quality. For a much more thorough job, put a hog or two in the area. Pigs will prepare the area more completely than a rototiller. They will eat all the weeds and their roots and will turn over the soil \u2014 and fertilize it.\n\n# Row Markers \u2014 Look, Ma, No Strings!\n\nA picket fence on a hoe? I glanced at the weird contraption lying on the ground next to Ray Lambert's garden. \"That's my row marker,\" he chuckled. \"My grandfather had a homemade row marker. I used features of his and added my own ideas.\"\n\nTo the blade of an old garden hoe he attached horizontally a three-foot length of 1\" \u00d7 2\" lumber. On either end, he centered a one-foot length of lumber, pointed on each end like a picket fence, perpendicular to the first piece. Protruding from the underside, at one foot intervals, are two more pointed pieces, each six inches long.\n\nRay combines elements of wide row, raised-bed, and square-bed methods in his garden. He can use the side of the row marker with three-foot spacing to lay out a three-foot-wide row, or to mark the location of two rows of strawberry plants three feet apart.\n\nHe can flip the marker over and pull it carefully down the center of a raised bed to mark out-one-foot spacing, then pull it across the bed at right angles to the first set of marks to make a grid. If he needs six-inch spacing, he can move the marker over for a second pull halfway between the first marks.\n\nHis versatile and efficient tool eliminates tedious measuring and stretching of strings.\n\n\"I made this set of garden stakes that also can be used for measuring,\" explains one gardener. If you're too lazy to put the pegs in the stakes at the proper distances for your garden, just mark on the stakes with an indelible pencil. Once built, your stakes and your twine are always right there, ready for use.\n\nMarking stake with twine\n\nUse a little **lime** to mark each row before making the furrow \u2014 especially good for lime-lovers like lettuce, beets, and spinach.\n\nDrop a few **radish seeds** in each row as you plant. They will germinate quickly to remind you that something else is planted there. Because they mature so quickly, they serve as a thinning device, since they leave space for the main crop as they are harvested.\n\n## Dealing with Tiny Seeds\n\nHow to avoid thinning or how to thin easily **small-seeded vegetables** like carrots, lettuce, and parsley is a problem all gardeners face. There is more than one solution:\n\n  * Broadcast plantings can be thinned with a rake. Draw a metal garden rake across the wide row or raised bed when seedlings are little \u2014 under one inch tall. Let the rake tines penetrate the soil one-quarter to one-half inch.\n  * Planting seeds thinly and carefully takes a lot less time than laborious thinning after the plants come up,\" insists one **precise gardener.** He's a natural for square-bed planting, in which each seed is planted singly and spaced carefully.\n  * Figure out how much seed you need to plant one row or bed and mix that amount with sand or dirt. Sow evenly.\n\n\" **Don't plant too thickly,** period,\" John Page argues. \"I can take a package of carrot seeds and make them go from here to Chicago. Most people want a little row of carrots. They have a big package of carrot seed. They think they have to plant all of the seeds in that little row. It's no more trouble to plant them an inch apart. If you must thin, do it when they're little. If you wait 'til they're too big, you're a dead duck. When the seedlings are one inch tall, it won't look as though there are any carrots left after you've thinned.\"\n\n\"We plant sparingly to start with and don't thin until the tiny carrots [or lettuce or spinach] are big enough to eat,\" says one efficient gardener. **\"Thin and eat** \u2014 no wasted energy.\"\n\nBuy \"pre-spaced\" **seed tapes** or pelleted seeds (small seeds with a coating that increases their size and makes them easier to plant sparingly). These both cost more than regular seed.\n\nUnless you have knee-deep, soft soil, don't try to grow commercial varieties of **carrots,** or they will fork and split and come out of the soil looking like freaks. Choose a variety to suit the soil \u2014 half-longs are best for most home gardens, and Royal Chantenays for heavy, clay soil.\n\nEven in a **conventional garden layout,** never plant little things like beets, carrots, or onions in widely spaced rows. Instead, plant three or four rows six inches apart, then leave an alleyway. One practical gardener plants three rows of beets six inches apart, pulls the middle row for greens, and lets the two outer rows mature for roots.\n\nTry a wide-row or raised-bed **salad garden.** In a bucket, mix seeds of spinach, chard, assorted leaf lettuces, beets, and radishes. Broadcast and later thin with a rake. The radishes are ready first. When you pull them, you make space. Next comes young spinach. Pull some of that to make space. From then on, just cut off the tops of everything for a continuous crop of greens. Plant a good-sized salad bed in the spring and two smaller ones during the summer. When the chard gets too big to eat raw, cook it.\n\n**Cover little seeds with compost** when planting. Compost holds moisture, is less likely to form a crust, and provides a nutritional boost.\n\nSeeds won't germinate in dry ground. **Keep seedbed moist** after planting.\n\n## 24 Planting Hints\n\n  1. 1. **Soak seeds** of beets, Swiss chard, and peas for fifteen or twenty minutes before planting. Soak parsley, New Zealand spinach, and celery seed overnight to hasten germination.\n  2. 2. Make **multiple plantings** of lettuce. \"I make nine plantings of lettuce each season,\" says a Vermont gardener. \"Sometimes I scrape snow away to plant the first batch.\" He plants only a couple of feet of each variety at a time. \"I don't try to salvage overmature lettuce,\" he declares. \"I turn it under and plant some more.\"\n  3. 3. **Looseleaf lettuces** are quicker and easier to grow than heading types. Plant Romaine for a crunchy, meatier leaf that does quite well in hot weather.\n  4. 4. Start seed of **buttercrunch** lettuce in beds. Transplant seedlings eight inches apart to all the empty spaces in the garden \u2014 next to the peas, between rows of onions, or between young brassicas.\n  5. 5. Plant **early lettuce** between asparagus rows.\n  6. 6. Having **trouble starting lettuce** in hot weather? Since it germinates best in cool ground, Ruth Stout chills the seed in the refrigerator, plants it, then lays blocks of ice over it, and insulates from the sun with feed bags. Try this with late plantings of spinach or peas, too.\n  7. 7. **Does spinach bolt** too soon in your garden? Try New Zealand spinach or grow Malabar spinach on a fence or trellis.\n  8. 8. Leaf crops \u2014 lettuce, spinach, chard, mustard greens, and parsley \u2014 do well in partially **shaded locations.**\n  9. 9. Always inoculate your legume seed before planting. You can buy **legume inoculant,** which looks like black powder, through seed catalogs or from feed stores. It adds a fresh culture of nitrogen-fixing bacteria to the seed, which will increase yield and quality of peas and beans. Moisten seeds and shake with the powder just before planting. A touch of honey on the seeds makes the powder stick better. Keep unused inoculant in the refrigerator until you need it again. There is also a granular type that is sprinkled in furrows as you sow.\n  10. 10. For **earliest peas,** prepare the planting trench in fall. In spring, just push seed into the soil.\n  11. 11. Mark Hebert isn't a lazy gardener. He loves it out there in his large and beautiful garden. But let's say that Mark doesn't believe in doing things the hard way. And when it comes to **raising peas** Mark has an easy way: \"Early in the season, till up a ten-foot square of your garden. Scatter on it one pound of a shorter-bushed pea, such as Little Marvel. Till or rake in the peas, then walk over the soil. And that's it until two months later then you return to harvest them \u2014 and you should harvest fifty pounds of pods from that tiny space. No need for fences or other supports \u2014 the peas will support each other.\" Try this just once, and you'll never go back to the single-row system, trying to get each pea just three inches apart from its neighbor.\n  12. 12. For the vegetable that requires the least effort to grow, we'll nominate the **Jerusalem artichoke.** Plant a few tubers in a bed in one corner of your garden. And that's it. They need little or no care \u2014 the greatest effort probably goes into keeping them from taking over your entire garden. They'll easily discourage the advances of the hungriest insects. Dig them up in the fall or early spring. You'll miss a few \u2014 and they'll grow to provide your crop for the next season. They're delicious and nutritious, fresh or cooked.\n  13. 13. **Lima beans need warm soil.** Pre-sprout seeds before planting to reduce chances of their rotting in the garden. Start them in deep flats in vermiculite or perlite. Limas are \"iffy\" in the North. One year we had a super crop of sweet, tender beans. The next two years, August was wet and cold and the pods never filled, so we reluctantly decided not to give them garden space.\n  14. 14. For the direct seeding of **brassicas** without laborious thinning, put sticks in the ground eighteen inches apart. Plant a few seeds by each stick. Gradually thin to one plant by snipping off seedlings at ground level. Plant the empty spots between the sticks with lettuce or spinach, which will be harvested by the time the brassicas need more space.\n  15. 15. Plant **collards.** You don't have to fight the cabbage worm.\n  16. 16. Learn to recognize \"volunteers.\" Once you plant **dill,** you'll never have to plant it again. Let seeds from a few flower heads scatter each year. Be alert for the feathery green tufts that emerge the following spring and save a few when you cultivate or mulch.\n  17. 17. Have **potatoes without digging.** Place seed potatoes one foot apart on top of last year's mulch, or on a fall deposit of a few inches of leaves, preferably shredded. Cover with a foot of loose hay. When the tops die down, just rake off the hay. You can even steal a few new potatoes during the season without hurting the plant. Carefully lift the hay when potato blossoms begin to drop, break off tiny potatoes from the mother plant and replace the hay.\n  18. 18. Make sure **onion** necks are exposed to sun and not covered with dirt. By harvest time, they will already be partly dried.\n  19. 19. For **cucumber flavor** without cucumber vines, plant the annual herb borage or the perennial salad burnet. Mince and add to salads.\n  20. 20. Stick seeds of **winter squash** in a partly finished compost pile. The squash plants camouflage the pile, which gives the squashes nourishment and the room they need to sprawl. I have vowed never again to let squash grow freely in my garden after the vines from one hill took over a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot space, smothering everything in their path!\n  21. 21. If you do let **winter squash** trail, leave a minimum of five feet between plants. \"We have found fewer plants well spaced give more squash, and they are much easier to pick more quickly,\" says a gardener with lots of space.\n  22. 22. Interplant the second crop of **bush beans** between bands of beets and carrots. In a month, all soil is shaded and there's no place for weeds to grow.\n  23. 23. Plant **cucumbers** between corn plants to give them some light shade, which they like. Both crops like heat and moisture.\n  24. 24. Aim for a **three-year rotation** in your garden, in terms of the plants' needs for nutrients. \n    * Year One, **Heavy feeders:** corn, squash, brassicas, tomatoes, melons\n    * Year Two, **Heavy givers:** legumes (which return nitrogen to soil), such as peas, beans, alfalfa, clover, vetch\n    * Year Three, **Light feeders:** root crops, such as beets, onions, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, parsnips\n\n**Or,** interplant the three types of crops in the same bed.\n\n# Blocks of Corn\n\n\"Corn takes a lot out of the soil. It can take a lot out of the gardener, too, if you don't do it right,\" says a knowledgeable one. To satisfy corn's voracious appetite, dig manure into the soil in spring and give booster feedings when it is eight to ten inches high and again when silk forms.\n\nCorn is wind-pollinated. The male flower is the tassel, the female flower the silk. Every kernel has a silk attached to it. Undeveloped kernels on a cob mean they weren't fertilized. To ensure complete pollination, don't plant corn in one long row. Planting in blocks is best. Here's how one gardener plants corn in raised beds:\n\n### Take Advantage of Companion Planting\n\nSome crops encourage or discourage each others' growth. **Good combinations** are beans and savory, tomatoes with basil or parsley, broccoli and onions, peas and carrots. **Don't** plant onions with beans or peas; they have an adverse effect on each other. (For more information, see the table in Companion Planting).\n\n## The Care and Feeding of Transplants\n\nAlways **harden off** transplants for eight to ten days before you set them out in the garden. Expose them to short then gradually longer periods outdoors. (If you purchase transplants, find out if they've been hardened off. If not, make sure you do it.)\n\nIf seedlings are in flats, **slice the roots** into squares with a knife about a week before transplanting. Repeat the process before removing from flat.\n\nFeed transplants with **fish emulsion** the day before setting them out. If possible, **transplant on a cloudy or drizzly day.** Or set out seedlings in the late afternoon or early evening. It's more comfortable for you, and the plants will thrive without requiring shade or constant watering.\n\nIf seedlings are in **peat pots,** be sure to bury the whole pot. Otherwise peat will draw moisture from the soil to the air.\n\nWhen setting out pot-bound or **root-bound transplants,** gently spread out the roots in all directions. That helps them become reestablished more quickly.\n\n**Give each transplant a boost** by adding a shovelful of compost or well-rotted manure mixed with some bonemeal and wood ashes to the bottom of each planting hole. Do this under tomatoes, brassicas, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, and melons.\n\nWhen you try to **water transplants** with a watering can, does most of the water run off in another direction? Give each transplant its own drip-watering system. Poke a tiny hole in the bottom of a gallon-sized plastic jug. Fill with water and put next to the newly set tomato plant or in a hill of melons after the seedlings are up.\n\n# Mini Greenhouses\n\nWhy risk the possibility of having to replant? **Protect young plants** from being nipped by frost or nibbled by animals. Cut the bottom out of gallon-sized plastic milk jugs. Leave the cap off, for ventilation. Place over seedlings. This acts like a mini-greenhouse. You can also do this over seeds of tender crops. One gardener keeps a jug on her zucchini until the leaves push the jug off the ground.\n\nKeep a drum of **manure tea** brewing for supplemental feeding of transplants or any green thing that needs a quick infusion. Fill a big garbage can about one-eighth full of fresh horse or cow manure, then fill the can with water. Stir occasionally and wait a week or two. This is powerful stuff. Dilute it until it's the color of weak tea before using. Add water to the can after every use. When the water is the color of weak tea, start again, after adding the spent manure to your compost pile.\n\nMake **vegetarian tea** the same way, using stinging nettles or comfrey leaves. The latter are rich in potash, so are good for all vegetables.\n\nA lazy gardening friend brews manure tea from his children's pet rabbit droppings in a five-gallon plastic drum with a cover.\n\nUse a fifty-five gallon metal drum and attach a spigot and valve a few inches from the bottom of the drum. Drill a hole near the top and use an S-hook to suspend a container of manure inside. Fill the barrel with water.\n\nSeveral gardeners who use this system tried a laundry bag for the manure at first, but the cloth disintegrated. Now they're using a different approach. They cut four rectangular holes out of a plastic bucket and put aluminum screening inside. The bucket is filled with manure and suspended in the water from the rim of the barrel.\n\nThe barrel is set on a three-foot wooden stand located at the top of the garden. A length of hose is laid out specifically for manure tea delivery. A nozzle can be attached to spray or removed to dribble manure water on transplants or any crop that needs a quick boost.\n\nThe manure tea in this 55-gallon metal drum can be delivered by hose to any crop that needs a quick boost.\n\n## Tip-Top Tomatoes\n\nTo reduce moisture loss and encourage a strong root system, prune off all but the top rosette and the large leaves just below it. Bury the rest of the stem. If it is leggy, lay it in a trench. The tomato will put out roots all along the stem. One gardener digs a hole or trench deeper than needed, stuffs shredded newspaper in it to help hold moisture, then covers it with soil and places the transplants as usual.\n\nPlant borage among the tomatoes **to attract bees** for early fruit set. If you're a fisherman and sometimes get **trash fish** such as suckers, don't throw them back. Pop them into your freezer. Come planting time, think of the Indians at the Plymouth Colony, and drop them into the soil. Try placing one in a hole dug for a tomato plant, for example. Put the fish in first, then three or four inches of soil, then the plant. As an experiment, put a fish under every other tomato plant, so that you can measure the results.\n\n# Self-fertilizing Tomatoes\n\nRay Lambert digs out an eight- to twelve-inch deep circle four feet in diameter, fills it with manure and compost, and puts a little soil on top. He plants six early (determinate) tomato plants around the circumference of the circle and slips wire cages over them. In the center of the circle, he sets a two-foot high, two-foot diameter cylinder of pea wire. He fills it with manure and compost.\n\nIn dry weather, he lets a hose trickle into the top of the feeding cylinder. He does virtually nothing else \u2014 doesn't prune, doesn't weed, doesn't feed. The cages contain the plants, the plants are close enough together so they shade the soil and no weeds grow, and the center cylinder does the feeding.\n\nHe does the same thing with **late varieties** of tomatoes, but because they need more room, he sets only four plants around one feeding cylinder, two to three feet apart. In mid-August, he chops off the tops, so all growth goes to ripening tomatoes.\n\nTomato cages\n\nGrow tomatoes in **hanging baskets** placed near the kitchen. They are good looking, easy to care for, and are easy to reach come salad time. The best varieties to grow are the sweet cherry types that will yield many delicious fruits over a long season.\n\n## Pampering Peppers\n\nIf you'll be watering your long-season crops such as tomatoes and peppers, mound up a circular dam around each plant, using your hand and a trowel. You'll spend much less time watering, and you won't be wasting the water that would spread out away from the plants.\n\nForm a watering bowl to conserve water.\n\nPeppers **prefer slightly acid soil.** Bury a few book matches under each pepper plant when you set them in the garden. The sulfur in the match heads will increase soil acidity. Make sure to put a bit of soil between the matches and plant's roots.\n\nPeppers are **finicky.** They don't like cold or heat, but prefer a temperature between 53\u00b0 and 85\u00b0F. Mulching plants helps maintain even temperature and moisture. Do plant in rich, well-drained soil and give lots of water.\n\n## Grow Edible Perennials\n\nFor your perennial vegetables and fruits, pick a spot separate from or on the edge of (second best) the main vegetable garden. The easiest way to get a bed started is to stake it out the season before you plant. Cover existing sod with a thick layer of newspapers, magazines, or cardboard. A friend of mine declares that covering sod is the best use she's found for cast-off issues of the Congressional Record. \"They're so thick nothing will grow through them,\" she says. So they don't blow away, pile something on top \u2014 hay, wood chips, sawdust, branches, whatever. By spring, the sod will have decomposed and added green manure to the soil without a struggle.\n\n### Raspberries\n\nRaspberries can be planted right through the mulch and newspapers. Simply dig out a spot for each plant and throw some compost or well-rotted manure in the bottom of the hole before setting the plant. Space plants about three feet apart. Sink red raspberries an inch or two deeper than they were in the nursery. Black or purple raspberries can be set at the same depth at which they grew.\n\nAlways **buy new plants** when you start a raspberry bed. Old ones are too likely to carry disease.\n\n**\"Be ruthless** with raspberries!\" warns one lazy gardener. Plant them in one long row. Whenever suckers try to widen the boundaries of the bed, pull them out! Never plant more than one row wide, or soon they will grow together and you won't be able to get in to pick.\n\nKeep a raspberry bed **heavily mulched,** six inches to a foot deep.\n\nRaspberry canes are biennials. This year's new canes will bear next year (although everbearing varieties will produce a crop on the tips of new canes in the fall). This year's bearing canes will die after fruiting. Cut them at ground level and prune out all the weak new canes as well. In spring you can top the year-old canes so they won't flop over. Remember \u2014 **be ruthless!**\n\n**Prop canes** by driving posts at six-foot intervals on either side of the bed and stringing two courses of wire between them, one at about knee level, the other chest-high.\n\nPlace posts at six-foot intervals to support raspberry canes.\n\nDon't waste time on any but the two best varieties of purple raspberries: Royalty and Brandywine.\n\n### Strawberries Simplified\n\nGrowing strawberries always sounds complicated. To grow them successfully, you need a good system. This year's producing plant will send out runners during the summer. For best fruit, limit the \"babies\" you allow to grow probably to two or four per plant. At the end of each season pull up the mother plants.\n\nSet out new plants four feet apart when leaves of trees begin to unfurl in spring. The first summer, remove all blossoms so that the strength of the plant goes to sending out vigorous runners.\n\nKeep strawberries heavily mulched, preferably with a weed-free material such as straw, salt hay, wood chips, sawdust, or pine needles.\n\n# Grow Strawberries in Straw\n\nHere's how Closey Dickey put in a new raised strawberry bed. In late summer, she laid out a bed seventy-five feet long and four or five feet wide and covered it thickly with newspaper. On either edge, on top of the newspaper, she laid bales of hay, end to end. In the two-foot space between the bales, she piled manure, peat moss, topsoil, bone meal and greensand. From time to time until winter, she stirred this brew.\n\nIn fall's crisp weather, her husband set 2\" \u00d7 6\" pressure-treated landscape boards in the ground, against the hay, for a frame to keep grass out and mulch in.\n\nIn early spring, the Dickeys planted two rows of strawberry plants down the middle of the bed and snipped all blooms that first summer. On either side runners went into the hay, which by now had disintegrated.\n\nEach spring, Closey will take out two-year-old plants and let new runners become established. One year she will have two rows producing in the center, the next year one row on either edge.\n\n### Blueberries\n\nBlueberries need an acid soil, a pH of 5 to 5.6. They are completely intolerant of limey soil, so if that's what yours is, the laziest way to have blueberries is to buy them at the market.\n\nIf you have soil with almost enough acidity, dig in peat, pine needles, or cottonseed meal to increase it. Blueberries like soil high in organic matter. They have few insect pests. Plant them in groups to encourage pollination. (They're not self-pollinating, meaning a single blueberry plant cannot fertilize itself.) Mulch heavily with pine needles.\n\n### Asparagus\n\n**Buy one-year-old roots.** Years ago, it seems, gardeners would dig a trench to China in which to set their asparagus. Lazy gardeners don't bother to dig one that deep, but asparagus are heavy feeders, so you should get some nourishment under their roots at planting time. Dig ten to twelve inches deep and about a foot wide. Lay down four or five inches of compost or well-rotted manure before setting the roots so that they are about six inches below ground level. You can make a little cone of soil under each crown and spread the roots out over it. Set them two feet apart in rows four or five feet apart. Cover with two inches of soil and, during the summer, gradually draw more soil back into the row as the plants grow.\n\nGrow many more spears from the same amount of space by planting **all-male varieties.** These cultivars bear thicker, more numerous spears because they don't go to seed. Some all-male varieties include 'Jersey Giant' and 'Jersey Knight'.\n\nAs tempting as it may be to cut and sample young spears, restrain that impulse. The **plants need two seasons** to grow and build strength before you begin harvesting.\n\n\"The **secret to asparagus** is to fertilize it lavishly,\" explains a gardener whose succulent spears are known throughout her neighborhood. Feed first in early spring at the same time you cultivate, and again when you stop harvesting. After the ground freezes, load up the bed with manure.\n\n### Rhubarb\n\nRhubarb is attractive enough to use as part of your ornamental landscaping. It, too, is a heavy feeder. Dig a generous planting hole, fill it with compost or well-rotted manure, and set roots so that the uppermost buds are two to three inches below the soil surface. Add more rich organic matter each year. Be sure to remove flower stalks as soon as they form, so all the plant's vigor goes to the edible stalks. The only other thing you have to do is harvest those luscious stalks and eat them. But don't sample the leaves \u2014 they're poisonous.\n\n## Easy Watering\n\nDo you water frequently? Leave a section of hose laid out down the center of the garden. Drive double stakes of wood at intervals to keep the hose from decimating the vegetables as you pull it back and forth.\n\nDouble stakes protect your garden from ravages caused by an unguided hose.\n\nAnother gardener, who has several small vegetable plots, drives a stake at the corner of each bed to protect plants while he drags the hose around.\n\nMost of us move sprinklers around to get an even watering in a garden area. It takes time, and the water is rarely spread evenly. A neighbor of mine, starting a garden, set up his sprinkler and staked out exactly where it watered. Those were the boundaries of his garden.\n\nWater the garden with a **soaker hose.** It's easy to install and it makes watering painless thereafter.\n\nA chrysanthemum in the vegetable garden is like a canary in a coal mine. **The mum wilts before other plants** when water is needed, giving you early warning to start irrigating.\n\n**Save your water** from cooking vegetables. Let it cool. Toss out the door on the herbs or salad greens in your kitchen garden, or the flowers, if that's what grows there. In winter, use for houseplants.\n\nDon't be a slave to the water hose. Everyone knows that the best gardens are those that are watered regularly, but hand watering can eat up a lot of time. To remedy this, attach an **electronic timer** to your outdoor garden faucet. They are easy to set, and many run off inexpensive size C batteries. The timers allow the garden to be watered up to eight times a day for just about as long as you want. With this little gadget, you can even water the garden in your sleep.\n\n## Don't Forget the Flowers\n\n**Plant tiny bulbs** such as snowdrops, scilla, crocus, grape hyacinths, and chionodoxa in a place they'll be noticed in early spring but undisturbed during the summer. There's nothing worse than inadvertently digging them up as you cultivate after their foliage has disappeared and you've forgotten they were there. Instead of putting them in a flower bed, try them below light mulch under deciduous trees and shrubs.\n\n**Beware of gifts.** If your flower-gardening friends offer pieces of perennials they're dividing, investigate the plant's growing habits before you plunk it in the ground. It may be a spreader that will take over the garden and become a nuisance.\n\nAlternatively, you may wish to plant perennials that spread quickly. Many people avoid the most vigorous plants, such as sneezewort, tawny daylily, and peach-leaf bellflower, because they spread quickly and need almost no care. Sounds like a great garden to me!\n\nHave you inherited **old flower gardens** with your newly purchased home? \"It pays to sit and watch for a year. If something continues to grow despite neglect, it's hardy. Don't fight it, keep it,\" advises an experienced restorer of old grounds. You may find it easier to relocate gardens using old plant material, rather than trying to refurbish a garden in the same place. You can prepare soil in a new bed and move pieces of plants from the old site when you are ready.\n\n# Out, Weeds!\n\nThe extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.\n\nMost of us aren't that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. We dream of lush crops and flamboyant flowers with few weeds, but we'd like to be able to reach that goal without accepting slavery. So we compromise and let a few weeds grow, or take a different tack and smother them with mulch.\n\n## Beat the Weeds\n\nThe secret to weed control, say knowledgeable gardeners, is to **get them while they're little.** Begin cultivation as soon as weeds appear. It's light work to knock them down then; later, when they're firmly rooted and threatening to take over the garden, eliminating them is hard work.\n\nStudies have shown that vegetable gardens that are weeded all season long have about the same yields as gardens weeded until the crops reach fruit set. This means that rather than weed during those last few weeks, gardeners can grow good crops from the lounge chair.\n\nPeter Henderson wrote this in 1901, and it still applies today: \"In no work in which men are engaged is the adage, 'A stitch in time saves nine,' more applicable than to the work of the farm or garden. The instant that weeds appear, attack them with the hoe or rake. Do not wait for them to get a foot high, or a twelfth part of it, but break every inch of the surface crust of the ground just as soon as a germ of weed growth shows itself. And it will be better to do it even before any weeds show, for by using a small, sharp steel rake, two or three days after your crop is planted or sown, you will **kill the weeds just as they are germinating.\"**\n\n\"Limit the time you spend weeding and **develop a routine,\"** suggests Phil Viereck. \"It's a favorite morning ritual for me. I take a sharp wide hoe and spend twenty minutes each morning cultivating. I do the garden in pieces. Twenty minutes of a garden a day is so much better than three hours occasionally.\"\n\nWant to sail (play golf or tennis, hike, bike, lie in a hammock) in July and August? Weed now and sail later. Skip **spring weeding** and you'll pay all summer. Kit Foster says, \"We put in lots of time weeding in spring and the rest of the summer we weed just one day a week.\"\n\n\"Some people get concerned if there's a weed here and there,\" says Ray Lambert. \"I don't as long as they don't take over the plants. They're part of the garden. I practice **walk-through weeding** in my raised-bed garden. Whenever I walk through, I pull a few of the most insidious weeds.\"\n\nAfter a good rain, when the soil is soft and weed roots give little resistance is the **best time to weed.** Let foliage dry first, to avoid spreading disease.\n\nAn experienced gardener says, \"A crop like peas we don't bother to weed much. By the time the weeds are big enough to bother the peas, the harvest is over.\"\n\nIf weeding isn't your favorite outdoor sport, do what a Charlotte, Vermont, gardener does. \"Weed thoroughly and often early in the season, so the vegetables, even the tiny carrots, get a good start. Then, about July 15, when most vegetables are well up, I wish them well, and tell them they're on their own. By that time they're growing ahead of the weeds, and the few weeds that do come up don't interfere with their growth.\" If he plants fall crops, a late row of lettuce, for example, he'll weed that carefully, just as if it had been started in the spring.\n\n\"When I weed a flower garden,\" says Nora Stevenson, \"I never cart the weeds off in a wheelbarrow. 'All those seeds are just green manure, a source of humus.' I tuck them in the back, behind the flowers, thinly, so they don't mold before they begin to disintegrate.\"\n\nCarry a pair of **pliers** as part of your weeding arsenal. Use them to pull out tough weeds, like tree seedings, that won't succumb to a gentle jerk of the hand.\n\nAnother handy tool is a **dandelion-weeder** or daisy grubber \u2014 good for tap-rooted plants that can't be pulled easily by hand.\n\nTry a **hula hoe** or scuffle hoe. Drag it through the garden, and it cuts weeds below the surface of the soil, at the growing point.\n\n## Eat the Weeds\n\nA weed, they say, is a plant growing where it's not wanted. Learn to love some of your weeds. Think of them as free vegetables. Don't fight them, eat them!\n\nMy asparagus patch bears a luscious crop of early **dandelion greens,** indicators of rich soil. I harvest them with glee before cultivating the bed in early spring. Chopped and tossed in a salad with young scallions, they symbolize all the vigor and strength of a new gardening year.\n\nUse young **purslane** raw in salads, too.\n\n**Lamb's quarters** are a delectable spinach substitute. Whenever you spy a baby in your garden, let it grow a bit, then strip leaves off tough stems, steam, and toss with butter. Once you taste lamb's quarters, you'll search for them everywhere.\n\nOne day, I parked behind a store in our small town and found a huge crop of them growing next to the building. I began cutting and stuffing the weed into all the empty spaces in my grocery bags. \"What are you doing?\" asked the curious occupant of a parked car.\n\n\"Harvesting my vegetable for supper tonight,\" I said, giggling, and left him shaking his head in disbelief.\n\n## Smother the Weeds with Mulch\n\nThe queen of mulch was Ruth Stout, author of _How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back._ She maintained a year-round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, she used twenty-five bales a year. She never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. She just mulched, making compost on the spot, for as the bottom layer of mulch decomposed, it added rich organic matter to the soil \u2014 a continuing process. Ruth didn't bother with manures, but used cottonseed meal or soy bean meal for added nitrogen. She sprinkled it on top of the mulch in winter, at a rate of five pounds to one hundred square feet, so that snow and rain carried it down through the hay by planting time. To plant, she pulled aside the mulch and sowed the seed.\n\nMulch saves weeding, which should make aficionados of all lazy gardeners. Add to that its other virtues. Mulch:\n\n  * Conserves moisture. Mulchers rarely, if ever, water crops.\n  * Reduces compaction of soil when people walk on it.\n  * Keeps hard rain from pounding and compacting soil.\n  * Prevents erosion.\n  * Keeps dirt from splashing on crops during rains, so you spend less time washing leaf crops after harvest.\n  * Protects sprawling crops like tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and squash from direct contact with soil, so there is less chance for rot.\n  * Helps maintain an even soil temperature \u2014 helps it stay cooler during baking summer days and warmer during chilly spring and fall nights.\n  * Encourages earthworms.\n  * As it decomposes, mulch improves the tilth and fertility of soil.\n\nIn **northern climates,** year-round mulch may not work as well as in moderate and southern zones. Tomatoes, for instance, are unhappy in cold soil. Beans need warm soil for germination. Mulch keeps soil from warming up in early spring. Pull it back in planting areas for heat-loving crops so that the soil can bake for a week or two before planting time.\n\nSome northern gardeners till or cultivate until the ground warms up, then mulch for the rest of the summer.\n\nBefore you mulch for the first time, **add extra nitrogen** to the soil. As soil organisms decompose the bottom layer of mulch, they use the nearest available nitrogen \u2014 robbing it from the soil if necessary. This problem is greatest with mulching materials low in nitrogen, such as sawdust, leaves, wood chips, or ground corn cobs. If your plants begin to look yellow or stunted, that could mean they're starving for a shot of nitrogen. Run out there quickly, manure tea or any high-nitrogen fertilizer in hand (sodium nitrate, urea, calcium nitrate, or lawn fertilizer). Once the mulching process gets under way, you can add new mulch on top of old without worry.\n\nMake sure your soil is thoroughly damp before applying mulch. Otherwise, you'll be maintaining soil dryness instead of conserving soil moisture.\n\nDon't be a miser with mulch. **Make it thick** enough so it can do its job of suppressing weeds. Coarse mulches, such as hay or straw need to be eight to twelve inches deep. Finer mulches can be applied more thinly. Something as fine as coffee grounds needs to be only one-half inch thick. When in doubt, add a little extra; it settles more quickly than you think.\n\nIt's easier to **spread mulch on your entire garden,** then part it and plant, than it is to wait until crops are up before mulching. If you do it the hard way, you have the tedious work of placing mulch between and around young plants, and that takes a lot more time.\n\nSave your old **newspapers** \u2014 but not the color pages \u2014 for mulches. Lay them two or three sheets thick wherever you don't want weeds to grow. The papers will gradually disintegrate, and when they do, just add more. Don't like the looks of them in your garden? Then try laying a thicker layer first \u2014 eight or ten sheets \u2014 and covering with a thin layer of straw or some other more attractive mulch. This covering will also keep wind from lifting the newspaper.\n\nOr you can control weeds from the beginning of the gardening season by laying a 1\u20442-inch thick mulch of newspaper in the garden and flower beds. Cover the newspaper with a layer of bark mulch or pine needles for season-long weed control.\n\nGet **a head start** on newspaper mulch in winter. As you finish reading today's paper, staple it to yesterday's. Make strips of newspapers as long as a garden row, roll them up and store until spring. When you need mulch, unroll on the garden.\n\nWhen I was a young, newly married gardening novice, we lived on the seashore. A violent December storm drove high tides within a few feet of our front door. When the water receded, a huge pile of eelgrass and seaweed ringed our home. Too lazy to cart it away, we raked the debris a few feet closer to the house and stuffed it under foundation plantings. Our shrubs got a bonanza of enriched soil and added trace minerals, and we, by accident, became mulching devotees. We noticed, for the first time, all the piles of free eelgrass sitting at the end of the street and carted it home to hold moisture in our sandy soil.\n\nWherever you live, it's worth keeping **year-round mulch** under shrubs and trees to eliminate cultivating and weeding. Shredded bark, wood chips, cocoa bean hulls, pine needles, and leaf mold are all weed-free and pleasing to look at. Under broad-leaved evergreens, use a mulch of cottonseed meal or pine needles to make soil more acid.\n\n**Outline the bed** with folded newspapers before you add mulch \u2014 keeps a neat edge for a longer time.\n\n\"I laugh when I think of our first garden,\" says Deirdre Kevorkian. \"Spindly was the word for those plants. The garden was three times as big as this one, but we got much less produce.\" Now she and Eric have raised beds in a modest twelve-foot by twenty-foot garden, framed with jaunty orange marigolds just inside pressure-treated 6\" \u00d7 6\" timbers. In their small patch, they mulch with **grass clippings.** Every time they mow, they add some more. The carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, beans, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, cukes, and winter squash are healthy and bug-free. \"I haven't weeded yet this year,\" Deirdre boasts. \"It's almost automatic. Plant, mulch, and wait.\n\nI love gardens, but I hate the work.\"\n\nWeed haters are alert for non-commercial sources of mulch. \"I was jogging through a development one autumn and I met a man raking pine needles,\" explains a New Hampshire woman. \"We began talking, and soon I had a promise of an **annual supply of pine needles** for my acid loving plants (such as blueberries), and I also talked him into organizing his neighbors to save leaves for me. Of course, I offered inducements. Every summer, I give each of them a supply of plastic bags to use for collecting my mulch in the fall, and at Christmas I thank them with candy. Each autumn, I cart away in my utility trailer twenty-two bags of pine needles and forty-four bags of leaves. They love me!\"\n\n**Hay is a wonderful mulch** for vegetables. Bales of hay separate easily into \"slices\" that can be laid on soil between rows. Don't worry about the weed seeds that sprout from the hay itself. Simply lay more hay on top, or roll it over. Hay transforms soil into black, fluffy loam.\n\n# Mulching Materials \u2014 From Hay to Z\n\nBe imaginative in collecting mulching materials. Buy if you must, or scavenge from friends or local industries. (Be sure to add nitrogen where noted.) Try:\n\n  * hay (a farmer might be delighted to unload spoiled bales)\n  * straw\n  * leaves (shred or rotary mow first)\n  * hulls or shells from cocoa beans, buckwheat, peanuts, rice, cottonseed, oats, or nuts\n  * grass clippings (ask your neighbors or a lawn-maintenance service to save them)\n  * wood chips (get them from a utility company pruning near overhead wires) (add nitrogen)\n  * shredded bark (add nitrogen)\n  * sawdust (add nitrogen)\n  * seaweed, kelp, eelgrass\n  * ground corn cobs and stalks (add nitrogen)\n  * shredded sugar cane\n  * packing materials (excelsior, shredded paper)\n  * salt hay\n  * coffee grounds\n  * partly finished compost\n  * pebbles\n  * ground oyster shells\n  * newspaper\n  * peat moss (it cakes, is really better dug into soil)\n  * Spanish moss\n  * tobacco stems (but keep them away from tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes)\n\nIf you mulch your strawberries with **grain straw,** you could be planting trouble. The seeds will reach the ground and grow like weeds. Avoid this trouble by breaking open the bales and wetting them so all seeds will sprout before the mulch is used.\n\nIf you raise **blueberries,** you know the chore that weeding around them can be. A little work in September will save you hours of work next spring and summer. Mulch the bushes with ground pine bark, pine needles, or well-rotted sawdust. Spread mulch at least four inches deep, so that it will be at least two inches deep when it settles.\n\n# Protect and Mulch Fruit Trees\n\nAround **fruit trees,** fashion a trunk guard of hardware cloth to keep mice from nibbling. Leave an air space next to the trunk, spread a thick layer of newspaper to the drip line of the branches, and cover generously with hay.\n\n**Peppers** respond best to dark-colored mulches.\n\n**Carrots** love coffee grounds, applied sparingly. Add a touch of lime to offset acidity.\n\n## Try Black Plastic\n\n\"Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,\" explains a Massachusetts gardener. \"I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three-foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.\"\n\nDo your muskmelons sometimes taste like squash? **For increased sweetness,** plant through black plastic. It will heat up the soil several degrees, and that often makes the difference between tasteless and first-rate melons.\n\n\"I can't bear to put holes in my beautiful 6-mil black plastic,\" says one lazy gardener. In April, she rototills, fertilizes, and digs organic matter into the plot where she plans to plant heat-loving crops. She lays large sheets of 6-mil black plastic over the soil and leaves them to kill weeds and heat soil until planting time in late May or early June. She lifts the plastic and carefully stores it, whole instead of holey, until next year; then she plants melons, cucumbers, and other **heat-loving crops** in warm, weedless soil, and lays \"cheap black plastic\" (1.5 mil) around them for continuing easy maintenance.\n\n**Warning:** If you have snakes in your area, they may find the extra heat under the black plastic inviting and crawl under it. Beware!\n\n## The Weed-Free Asparagus Bed\n\n\"Please, please tell me how to keep weeds out of the asparagus patch,\" pleaded one frustrated gardener.\n\n\"My Dad had the **ideal solution** for weeds in his asparagus patch,\" a grower explains. \"He built a fence around the bed, and after the harvest, when the spears had grown up tall and lacy, let his chickens loose inside the fence. They ate all the weeds, kept the asparagus beetle under control and fertilized the soil with their droppings\"\n\nPlant **annual ryegrass** in the asparagus bed after the last harvest in spring. It crowds out other weeds in summer, and dies in the winter. Next spring you'll have mulch already in place, and it won't interfere with emerging spears.\n\n**Cultivate** the patch in early spring, two or three weeks before spears emerge, weed once after cutting, and mulch heavily for the rest of summer. One gardener saves his grass clippings for mulch, since they're weed-free.\n\nThe Ruth Stout way is to **keep the asparagus bed heavily mulched.** Each fall, add eight inches of loose hay. In winter, broadcast cottonseed meal and wood ashes on the mulch. The soil warms more slowly in spring, but the hay also protects the asparagus from tip-kill by late frosts. If you can't wait for those delectable spears, push the mulch aside in spring. Or split the harvest, by removing mulch from half the bed for an early crop.\n\n## A Few Final Weed-Beating Ideas\n\nWeeds in **perennial flower beds** are the gardener's nemesis. How do you enrich the soil and mulch it without introducing weed seeds? \"I have a new system that works,\" says Closey Dickey. \"Never, never again will I add horse manure, and I'm loathe even to use compost. Instead, I topdress every fall with a mixture of peat moss, bone meal, dried cow manure [no weed seeds], and churned-up leaves.\"\n\nWeeds are always a nuisance among **onions and garlic.** A fine, weed-free mulch, such as peat moss or grass clippings, applied soon after planting will lick the problem. You'll have less area to mulch if you plant in wide rows or square beds.\n\nCan't be bothered with mulches?\n\n  * One gardener sets his lawnmower high and mows weekly between his garden rows, forming weed paths between the vegetables.\n  * \u2022 Another says, \"To have a good garden, you have to get down on your knees once in a while. Recently, I've found it pretty difficult to do that. [The speaker is in his mid-eighties.] So I leave four feet between rows and use my rototiller regularly to maintain a dust mulch and keep weeds down. It's a waste of land, but it makes it possible for me to keep a garden.\"\n\nTo **lick weeds,** concentrate for just one year. This approach works particularly well on areas that haven't been gardened before, but may be full of weed seeds. In the spring, till, then **plant buckwheat** at the rate of four pounds per thousand square feet. This is heavy seeding. After it has blossomed, but before the dark seeds form, till the buckwheat under. A day later, plant another crop of buckwheat, again four pounds per thousand square feet. Again, the buckwheat will come up, and so, too, will the weeds, but the buckwheat again will outgrow and eventually kill off the weeds by shading them out. This time, be particularly sure the seed hasn't formed before you till it, or the buckwheat will be the weed you're faced with next year.\n\nAfter tilling in the second crop of buckwheat, plant another cover crop, such as annual ryegrass or winter rye. The result will be three cover crops tilled into the soil, enriching it, plus almost all the weeds eliminated from the site. This is an excellent method to use before raising strawberries since weeds are what usually do in a bed of them.\n\n# A Scythe\n\nIf weeds are growing around the perimeter of your garden, scattering seeds into the garden, cut those weeds with a scythe, then add them to the compost pile. A scythe is a remarkably efficient tool in the hands of an expert. Don't flail at weeds with a scythe. Hold it loosely, comfortably, and move the blade by pivoting your body, keeping the blade parallel to and close to the ground. Stop often to sharpen the blade. A scythe doesn't get dull very quickly, but frequent sharpening is a good way to relax shoulder and arm muscles.\n\nHas your soil been poisoned with herbicides? This could be the case on a lawn that you now want to turn into a flower or vegetable garden. It could take as long as five years for the residue to dissipate. You can speed the process by adding extra organic matter to the soil and deep-watering to wash residues away. If the contamination is bad, you may want to mix activated charcoal with the soil, at a rate of 300 pounds per acre.\n\nIf you are tired of trying to weed between stepping stones and sidewalks, the Primus Weed Torch is for you. This tool kills weeds with a regulated flame. It is fast, easy, and you don't even have to bend over.\n\n# Pests and Pestilence\n\nHere's where the proverbial ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Once the woodchuck has chopped off your beans at ground level, the raccoon has stripped and devoured every ear of corn, and the cucumber beetles have decimated emerging seedlings, you may as well throw up your hands in surrender and hightail it to the nearest farmer's market with wallet in hand.\n\nRecall the lazy gardener's goal and build your soil for fertility and tilth. Insects and diseases do the most damage on unhealthy plants. Robust plants draw their vigor from soil. Check yours for proper pH and sufficient nutrients, keep its organic content high, make sure there's enough water by irritating and mulching, control weeds while plants are little, and rotate crops.\n\nRead the blurbs in seed catalogs to find disease-resistant varieties, choose seeds adapted to your geographic area, and grow plants in season.\n\n## Varmints Spell Trouble\n\n### Fence Defense\n\n\"The woodchuck got to me. He ate EVERYTHING \u2014 an entire row of beans in one night. I couldn't feed him and me, too.\"\n\nIf you're in a country place where the woodchuck and rabbit populations are high, **you need a fence.** Invest some time and effort to construct one that's burrow-proof. Do it in fall, while the memory of crops unsavored (because the varmint got there first) still stings.\n\n# Burrow-proof and Nibble-proof\n\nFriends of mine marshalled their strong sons to install a fence that is 3 feet above ground (stretched on metal fence post(s), 1 foot below ground, and runs 1 foot out horizontally, underground, to discourage burrowing beasts.\n\n**Cover your raised salad bed** to make it nibble-proof. Rig a tunnel of hardware cloth to protect lettuce, spinach, basil, and parsley grown in the bed. Staple the hardware cloth on one side. Attach a pipe to the other side to weigh it down. The pipe rests on hooks screwed into the pressure-treated pine timbers that contain the bed. Handles above the pipes make it easy to lift the mesh to cultivate and harvest. To close in the ends, attach pieces of hardware cloth with clothespins.\n\n# Through Traffic\n\nIf you've decided to fence in your garden, but the creation of a gate sounds technical, consider a **stile.** It's easy to build, offers a place to put things, and makes an easy entrance to the garden. But don't try to run a tiller up over the top!\n\nStile for foot traffic\n\nIf you till, you'll need a fence opening wide enough for garden machinery. Gates can be complicated to construct. Bob and Eleanor Kolkebeck have devised a simple substitute. On each side of their 51\u20442-foot wide fence openings, they drove two metal fence posts (leaving four feet extending above ground) so there is a slot between them. The gate is a 3- by 6-foot wooden frame with hardware cloth stretched on it. It slides between the double fence posts like a sliding door \u2014 no hinges or latches to fuss with. Just remember to close it when you leave the garden!\n\nSliding gate\n\n### Tactics for the Truly Lazy\n\nA four-foot fence won't stop deer from entering your garden? Don't believe it! Lay **four-foot wide chicken wire** horizontally around the perimeter of the garden. Deer won't walk on it. Stake it down so that it lies fairly loosely on the ground.\n\nThe **family cat** prowling the garden will control its population of chipmunks, mice, and young rabbits.\n\nCut plastic gallon milk jugs in half lengthwise. Punch a hole in the bottom to let out rain. Set ripening melons in these contraptions. They help **prevent rot** and keep mice and shrews from nibbling on the melons.\n\nAre rodents feasting on your tulip bulbs? Plant daffodils instead. Their bulbs are bitter, so mice and chipmunks won't eat them.\n\nIf you're determined to have **tulips,** interplant with _Frittilaria imperialis_ bulbs. The two- to three-foot tall plants have pendulous red, orange, or yellow blooms. They exude a skunk-like odor that repels rodents and moles.\n\nA house wren feeds 500 bugs and caterpillars to her babies in one afternoon; a brown thrasher consumes thousands of bugs a day. Spot some simple bird baths here and there in your garden as enticement to **feathered helpers.** Fill large terra cotta saucers, the ones made for placing under flower pots, with water, and set on logs turned on end.\n\nSave **fur** from brushing and grooming your dog. Scatter it in the garden. It deters nibblers and also adds nitrogen to the soil as it decomposes. No dog? Ask the local pet-grooming operation to save fur for you, or try human hair from the barbershop.\n\nBirds are welcome if they're eating the bugs, but do you want them to snitch your berries? Actually, I think it's rather fun to share my raspberries. I enjoy having the catbird perch atop a bean pole, tail switching, emitting scolding sounds as I pick her red jewels. There are always enough berries left for me. If your generosity doesn't match mine, cover your berry bushes and strawberry beds with used **tobacco netting** as the fruit begins to ripen. It can be easily lifted when you want to harvest.\n\nA clever gardener replaces the windows of portable cold frames with screens and sets them over ripening strawberry plants to keep out the birds.\n\n# Birdhouse Plan\n\nWhy should you do all the hard work of getting rid of unwanted insects? Get some help on the job. Make a few **birdhouses** like this one, place them near the garden, and the birds will pitch in hungrily.\n\n**Plant for the birds,** and they'll be less likely to raid cultivated berries. They prefer the tartness of wild fruit, so nurture red and black chokeberry, barberry, wild honeysuckle, autumn olive, Russian olive, mountain ash, staghorn sumac, and mulberry. Barberry and wild honeysuckle can be quite invasive once getting a foothold, so plant wisely.\n\nKeep **ravenous crows** from pulling up newly planted corn. Scatter crow repellent, available at seed stores, on the bed, or mulch loosely with hay after seeding.\n\nI take a tip from Jim Brady. He realized that his corn growing was for the birds \u2014 they got every seedling that came up \u2014 so he tried something different. He laid down a three-foot wide strip of **black plastic,** cut holes in it, then planted the corn through the holes. The birds stayed away from the corn. \"They just didn't like walking on that plastic,\" he explained. He's getting a couple of other benefits from the plastic. The soil is warmer, which speeds the growth of the corn, and there's no weeding, which he misses not one bit.\n\n# Foil the Birds\n\n\"One year, the birds took one peck out of each ripening tomato and then it would rot. It infuriated me,\" explains a Massachusetts gardener who now takes some time to \"foil\" the birds. She and her husband have drilled a hole through the top of each six-foot high tomato stake, and after the stakes are in the ground, they thread twine loosely from stake to stake. Halfway between stakes, they hang four-inch diameter aluminum pie plates. The pie plates must be put up at the same time the tomatoes are planted, not after the birds start eating.\n\n### Coons and Corn\n\n**Raccoons** have an unmatched affinity for ripening corn. I talked with only one gardener who had no problem with raccoon-ravaged sweet corn. His garden is bordered by a pasture. The cows keep the grass cropped and coons and woodchucks won't cross the large, open expanse to raid the corn.\n\nMost of us aren't that lucky. We don't feel like lazy gardeners when all of our work goes to feeding raccoons, squirrels, and woodchucks. Maybe one, or a combination of, these antidotes for varmints in the corn patch will work for you:\n\n  * Put a strand or two of electric fencing around the garden, one six inches above the ground the other fifteen inches high.\n  * Cover almost-ripe ears with a paper bag and secure with a twistem.\n  * Keep a transistor radio playing at night in the corn patch. Stick it in a plastic bag as protection against rain.\n  * Interplant corn with large-leaved pumpkins and squash. Supposedly raccoons and squirrels don't like to walk on the leaves.\n  * Surround early corn with a double row of late corn. Hope the raccoons will think none of the patch is yet ripe, while you feast on the early harvest.\n  * Add a floppy overhang of chicken wire, about two feet wide, to the top of your garden fence. It won't support the weight of animals that try to climb over.\n\n## Bugs and Diseases\n\nLazy gardeners are willing to let a few bugs eat. \"I simply plant too much,\" says one gardener. \"I give my crops rich soil and let them fend for themselves. There are all kinds of bugs, and I don't have time to fool with them, so if they eat half my chard, I eat the other half.\"\n\n\"Most gardeners panic when they see one bug eating,\" says another gardener, who chides the \"spray-happy people who rain destruction on a whole garden for one squash bug. I usually let them eat, and spray only when a crop is really threatened.\" Insect pests will eventually come into balance with their natural enemies, he suggests.\n\nSo encourage the population of **beneficial creatures** such as birds, bats, toads, snakes, spiders, ladybugs, and the praying mantis. They'll eat lots of those pesky bugs, and you'll have more time for summer fun.\n\nThere's a gardener in a town near Toledo, Ohio, who has a mean tennis backhand. During garden season, he's out there practicing it. His targets are those white butterflies that dance over the cabbages and other members of the cabbage family. Eventually, unless he swats them, they land, lay eggs, and from those eggs emerge the hungry **cabbage loopers.** One of those dainty butterflies can lay as many as 300 eggs, and 299 of them may hatch. There's a better, less tiring way of halting the life cycle of those loopers. It's called _Bacillus thuringiensis,_ or BT; or commercially, Dipel, Biotrol, and Thuricide. It's so effective that you can eat broccoli without wondering about trace amounts of toxins, and it's pure enough even for the most committed organic gardener. Spray about once a week during the early weeks of the season, or mix it in a watering can (one tablespoon to four gallons of water) and sprinkle on the plant. Try it if you haven't; you'll never practice that backhand in the garden again \u2014 or use some of the less desirable sprays.\n\nIf **ground-nesting hornets** decide to nest near the garden, watch them carefully from a distance to determine the exact site of the entrance hole. At night, when the hornets have retreated inside the nest, fill a long-necked beer bottle half full of gasoline. Carefully approach the nest, and stick the bottle neck first into the entrance hole. Leave the bottle in place for one week.\n\nIn warm regions, you can reduce cockroach problems by **removing foundation plantings.** Foundation plantings are prime cockroach habitat. Replace them with stone mulch around the house to reduce cockroach populations.\n\n### Get Tough with Slugs\n\n**Slugs** \u2014 hazards in a mulched garden or in damp soil \u2014 especially love new seedlings. If you can't say with aplomb, as does one lazy gardener, \"There's plenty for the slugs and me,\" what can you do?\n\n  * Slugs can't tolerate sharp or **caustic materials** against their soft bodies. Spread a half-inch deep, six-inch diameter circle of sharp sand around new seedings, or try wood ashes, lime, cinders, or diatomaceous earth.\n  * Give them a **beer** party. One former school teacher pours beer into shallow dishes and spots them in her garden for slug bait.\n  * Feeling murderous? Stalk slugs in evening with a salt shaker. Sprinkle them twice for insurance. Or fill a spray bottle with a solution of half-water, half-vinegar and spray on slugs.\n  * Put shingles in the garden as traps. Each morning, lift the shingles and kill the slugs gathered there.\n\n### Cutworms and Other Annoyances\n\nNo lazy gardener wants to replace transplants severed at ground level by **cutworms.** Protect yours with collars pushed one inch into the ground. Make them from:\n\n  * Tin cans with top and bottom removed,\n  * Paper cups with bottoms punched out,\n  * Sections of milk cartons,\n  * Cardboard,\n  * A two-inch square of two thicknesses of newspaper placed around each stem.\n\nThat shovelful of compost thrown in a planting hole helps **protect transplants** against insect attack. If a transplant is put in poor soil, it develops more carbohydrates and less protein than normal. Insects crave carbohydrates, so they flock to the poorly nourished plant.\n\n**Blossom end-rot** on tomatoes is caused by lack of calcium. If you're sure there's enough lime in your soil, it may be a lack of even moisture that is making the calcium unavailable to the plant. Prevent this by mulching and keep lots of organic matter in the soil.\n\nDo you need the shade of a beach umbrella at the seashore to keep from scorching? Like you, tomatoes need protection from the sun. Be a little lazy and don't prune them too severely. To **prevent sunscald,** they need those leaves to shade their fruit.\n\nFor a lazy gardener's attack against root knot nematodes (most prevalent in the South), plant lots of **French marigolds,** whose roots exude a repellent, and keep the soil extra high in organic matter. Beneficial fungi that grow in decomposing humus keep these pests under control.\n\nHill earth over **carrots** to prevent a pesky fly from laying eggs in the top of the carrot root.\n\nLet us have light \u2014 and **scare away the aphids,** which are accustomed to the cool, dark undersides of leaves. Spread a square of aluminum foil under affected plants. Supposedly, the aphids are confused by the increased light and leave. Do this around squash plants, too, to repel the squash bug. If you don't get rid of the bugs, the foil will at least act as mulch to smother weeds and will bounce more light on crops that need much sun.\n\nIf **green lacewings** invade your garden, do nothing but welcome them. Their larvae are death to aphids.\n\nKnow and control your soil's pH. **Keep it sweet** \u2014 almost at 7.0 \u2014 and you'll discourage club root disease in cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, and the rest of the brassicas. Keep scab off potatoes with an acid soil \u2014 below 5 or an alkaline soil \u2014 7 or above. Scab is worst when the pH is around 6.\n\nPlant **white radishes with cucumbers** to deter cucumber beetles.\n\nTired of growing roses just so bugs and diseases have a place to stay? Grow **species roses** instead. Most are carefree and beautiful.\n\n### Sayonara, Japanese Beetles\n\nHire your children to save the garden from **Japanese beetles.** Pay them a penny a bug. In the evening, when the beetles won't fly away, the kids can tiptoe along and brush them from plant foliage into jars of kerosene. Bet they won't even be able to count their catch! Meanwhile, you can relax with a long novel or take in the evening news.\n\nIf Japanese beetle grubs are destroying your **lawn,** introduce milky spore disease, a microbial attack against the larval form of this insect. A little energy invested this year is well spent. Put a teaspoon in the ground every three feet for several years' protection. It's death to the grubs, but leaves the earthworm population untouched.\n\nCheer when you see little round nose-holes in your lawn. They're a sign **the resident skunk** has been feasting at night, ferreting out grubs. What could be better than volunteer pest control while you sleep?\n\nLet a bug trap do all the work for you. It entices Japanese beetles with **a female sex scent** combined with a floral lure. Victims are trapped in a bag and die inside from sun's heat. Replace the bag when it's full. One trap services 5,000 square feet. Be sure to hang it thirty feet downwind of plants you want to protect. If you set it near the plants, it will attract beetles to them.\n\n## A Dozen Clever Tricks\n\n  1. 1. A drop of **mineral oil on corn silk** will keep out worms. Apply to tip of each ear when silks begin to brown, with a medicine dropper, pumptype oil can with a long spout, or a plastic dish-washing detergent bottle. Do it a total of about three times, once every five or six days. What's lazy about this, you wonder? When you harvest the corn, most of the silk will come off with the husk \u2014 for worm-free and silk-free ears.\n  2. 2. If you can prevent plant disease with **good cultural practices,** then you'll never need to use extra time to fight them: \n    * Immediately after a rain when plants are still wet, rest. That way, you won't be in the garden, brushing up against plants and possibly spreading disease.\n    * Locate plants where they'll have good air circulation and plenty of sunlight.\n    * Mulch. It not only saves weeding and watering, but prevents soil-borne diseases from being spread to plants by mud splashed up during rainstorms.\n    * Don't throw diseased plant material into the compost pile.\n    * If you're pruning fruit trees for fire blight, take an extra minute to dip your pruning tool into bleach before each cut and burn infested twigs afterward.\n    * Practice good sanitation. Under roses, for instance, rake up all old rose leaves in fall and spring. They harbor black spot and other fungus diseases.\n  3. 3. To **control mildew,** make a batch of chamomile tea using pure chamomile. Pour the cooled tea into a spray bottle and use on plants such as rosemary and sage to control mildew. Avoid spraying when plants are in direct sun.\n  4. 4. If **early blight** is a problem for your tomatoes, plant the heirloom, \"potato-leaf\" varieties in the spring. These tomatoes are naturally resistant to early blight and will save you from replanting the tomato patch.\n  5. 5. **Scarecrows** were the original remote control way to protect the garden. The latest improvement on the scarecrow idea is the Terroreyes balloon; a fifteen-inch beachball decorated with huge eye designs. The balloon is suspended from a pole on a string and allowed to float free in the breeze. As the balloon moves in the breeze the scary eyes frighten marauding birds away, and you don't even break a sweat.\n  6. 6. Many gardens are magnets to insect pests and controlling them once meant time-consuming patrols through the garden spraying or hand-picking bugs. New **repellents made of garlic oil** can dramatically reduce the bug problems in the garden. Simply spray the product on the crops. The spray does not change the taste of vegetables and quickly becomes odorless to people, but it repels mites, aphids, leaf-rollers, and many more insects for days.\n  7. 7. Dividing rhizomes or tubers of flowering perennials? Dust the cut part with **sulfur** to prevent rotting.\n  8. 8. The usual antidote for **mealybugs** on houseplants is to swab each one painstakingly with a Q-tip dipped in alcohol. Save time and energy. Screw a recycled spray top into the alcohol bottle and spray directly.\n  9. 9. \"I forget white fly, aphids and all those other things on my houseplants,\" says a prolific grower. \"Many people are more meticulous than I. I don't mind bugs. If the infestation gets bad, I never get out the poison sprays. I fill a container with water and **a little soap** and submerge the whole plant for twenty-four hours.\"\n  10. 10. **Aphids flock to yellow.** Fill a yellow dishpan part way with water and set in the garden. Aphids will land on the water and be trapped. They drown and sink.\n  11. 11. If **fire ants** plague you Southern gardeners, pour one inch of Epsom salts in and around their homes.\n  12. 12. When insects do get ahead of your plants, you'll upset natural balances least if you use a botanically derived insecticide. **Rotenone,** which comes from the roots of two tropical plants, derris and cube, has a drawback. Alas, it kills ladybug larvae as well as the bad guys. **Pyrethrum,** made from the dried flowers of chrysanthemums, spares ladybugs and bees.\n\n## Don't Coddle Moths \u2014 Protect Fruit Trees\n\nProtect fruit trees from snails by surrounding their trunks with a three-inch wide collar of **copper sheeting** , one foot above the ground.\n\nLazy gardeners plan ahead. Control next summer's **codling moth** infestation of apple trees. This year, in July, apply a sticky barrier of tanglefoot to apple tree trunks. It will trap codling moth larvae, thereby cutting the population of moths next year.\n\nCatch the ones you missed by hanging a can or two of bait in each tree when apples first begin to develop. Make it with nine parts water, one part molasses, one part honey, and a little yeast. Change weekly for six weeks.\n\nWhen you're itching to plant, but planting season isn't here yet, use some of that extra energy to spray **dormant fruit trees** with miscible oil. In early spring, insects that hatch from eggs laid the previous fall are vulnerable because their egg cases and the protective covering of hibernating scales become more porous and allow the spray to penetrate. It covers the potential pests with a film of oil, which suffocate them. Make sure to do this before any buds open.\n\nTake a few minutes to **clean up the spring** drop from fruit trees to help prevent disease and insect infestation.\n\n## Companion Planting\n\nHerbs are easy to grow and a boon to the gardener who'd just as soon have someone or something else do pest control. Interplant crops with onions, garlic, and marigolds. Try sage, mint, catnip, or dill among your cabbages. Sage, for instance, gives off camphor, which repels the cabbage butterfly. Herbs may discourage insect infestation not only by their specific effects, but by breaking up a large planting of one crop, which is an open invitation to pests.\n\n# Companionable Herbs\n\nHerb | Companions  \n---|---\n\nBasil | Companion to tomatoes; _dislikes_ rue. Repels flies and mosquitoes.\n\nBorage | Companion to tomatoes, squash, and strawberries; deters tomato worm.\n\nCaraway | Plant here and there; loosens soil.\n\nCatnip | Plant in borders; deters flea beetle.\n\nChamomile | Companion to cabbages and onions\n\nChervil | Companion to radishes.\n\nChives | Companion to carrots.\n\nDead Nettle | Companion to potatoes; deters potato bug.\n\nDill | Companion to cabbage; _dislikes_ carrots.\n\nFennel | _Most plants dislike it;_ plant away from gardens.\n\nFlax | Companion to carrots, potatoes; deters potato bug.\n\nGarlic | Plant near roses and raspberries; deters Japanese beetle.\n\nHorseradish | Plant at corners of potato patch; deters potato bug.\n\nHenbit | General insect repellent.\n\nHyssop | Companion to cabbage and grapes; deters cabbage moth. _Dislikes_ radishes.\n\nMarigolds | Plant throughout garden; it discourages Mexican bean beetles, nematodes, and other insects. The workhorse of companion plants.\n\nMint | Companion to cabbage and tomatoes; deters white cabbage moth.\n\nMole Plant | Deters moles and mice if planted around garden.\n\nNasturtium | Companion to radishes, cabbage, and cucurbits; plant under fruit trees. Deters aphids, squash bugs, striped pumpkin beetles.\n\nPetunia | Companion to beans.\n\nPot Marigold | Companion to tomatoes, but plant elsewhere, too. Deters tomato worm, asparagus beetles, and other pests.\n\nRosemary | Companion to cabbage, beans, carrots, and sage; deters cabbage moth, bean beetles, and carrot fly.\n\nRue | Companion to roses and raspberries; deters Japanese beetles. _Dislikes_ sweet basil.\n\nSage | Plant with rosemary, cabbage, and carrots; _dislikes_ cucumbers. Deters cabbage moth, carrot fly.\n\nSouthernwood | Companion to cabbage; deters cabbage moth.\n\nSowthistle | In moderate amounts, this weed can help tomatoes, onions, and corn.\n\nSummer Savory | Companion to beans and onions; deters bean beetles.\n\nTansy | Plant under fruit trees; companion to roses and raspberries. Deters flying insects, Japanese beetles, striped cucumber beetles, squash bugs, and ants.\n\nThyme | Companion to cabbage; deters cabbage worm.\n\nWormwood | As a borer, it keeps animals from the garden.\n\nYarrow | Plant along borers, paths, and near aromatic herbs; enhances production of essential oils.\n\n# Insect-deterrent Plants\n\nPlant | Insect Deterred  \n---|---\n\nAsters | Most insects\n\nBasil | Flies and mosquitoes\n\nBorage | Tomato worm \u2014 improves growth and flavor of tomatoes\n\nCalendula | Most insects\n\nCatnip | Flea beetle\n\nCelery | White cabbage butterfly\n\nChrysanthemum | Most insects\n\nDead Nettle | Potato bug \u2014 improves growth and flavor of potatoes\n\nEggplant | Colorado potato beetle\n\nFlax | Potato bug\n\nGarlic | Japanese beetle, other insects, and blight\n\nGeranium | Most insects\n\nHorseradish | Plant at corners of potato patch to deter potato bug\n\nHenbit | General insect repellent\n\nHyssop | Cabbage moth\n\nMarigold | The workhorse of the pest deterrents. Plant throughout garden to discourage Mexican bean beetles, nematodes, and other insects\n\nMint | White cabbage moth and ants\n\nMole Plant | Moles and mice if planted here and there\n\nNasturtium | Aphids, squash bugs, striped pumpkin beetles\n\nOnion family | Most pests\n\nPetunia | Protects beans\n\nPot Marigold | Asparagus beetles, tomato worms, and general garden pests\n\nPeppermint | Planted among cabbages, it repels the white cabbage butterfly\n\nRadish | Cucumber beetle, in particular\n\nRosemary | Cabbage moth, bean beetle, and carrot fly\n\nRue | Japanese beetle\n\nSage | Cabbage moth, carrot fly\n\nSalsify | Carrot fly\n\nSouthernwood | Cabbage moth\n\nSummer Savory | Bean beetles\n\nTansy | Flying insects, Japanese beetles, striped cucumber beetles, squash bugs, ants\n\nTomato | Asparagus beetle\n\nThyme | Cabbage worm\n\nWormwood | Carrot fly, white cabbage butterfly, black flea beetle\n\nSource: _Gardening Answers,_ Editors of Garden Way Publishing\n\n# Harvesting and More\n\nCan anything equal the crunch of freshly picked and barely cooked young snap beans, the sweetness of peas and corn rushed from garden to pot, or the wonder of a sun-ripened tomato? Memories of the goodness of home-grown produce are what prompted my sons to plead for three vegetables a night when they returned from college for their first vacation. Institutional cooking made them realize that the quality of garden-fresh crops is incomparable.\n\nWe rejoice in the quality of garden-fresh crops, but there are times when we have been overburdened with their quantity. Is there any among us who hasn't wished for a hammock or a cool splash in the ocean instead of the endless row of ripe raspberries screaming to be picked right now, always on the hottest July day? And did you ever wonder, as I have, why, by the time you picked to the end of the row, more berries had ripened at the beginning? I sometimes think a sorceress rules the ripening of raspberries.\n\nHas the nightmare of being buried in a mountain of unshelled peas invaded your sleep? Or that of zucchini grown larger than the dog, larger than your child, too large even to cart to the compost pile?\n\nOne of my gardening friends quips, \"I don't like to harvest. I just like to grow.\" At least once during each season, most of us share that sentiment.\n\n## Pick Early, Pick Often\n\n\"The best solution to tedious harvesting chores,\" says a lazy gardener, \"is to have lots of kids! Corral them to shell the peas, cut the beans, husk the corn, and skin the beets.\" Family bees can be fun.\n\nBut, alas, the kids grow up. Lacking a crew of children, plan a social occasion to mesh with the height of raspberry, pea, or bean season. Bill it as a **harvesting party,** and have a gay time with picking, shelling, and freezing in the same way that folks had with husking bees in times past. It works best with friends who have no garden.\n\nGet them while they're little! This time we mean crops, not weeds. It's not only less work to **pick young crops,** they plain taste better than tough, overmature produce. Regular picking encourages a plant to produce more, so you'll have a better harvest. Small, tender vegetables also take less time and energy to process. Keep the joy in gardening \u2014 never give growing time for a stringy bean, a seedy cucumber or zucchini, starchy peas or corn, a woody beet, bitter lettuce, or tough spinach.\n\nIn early spring, when you crave fresh vegetables, you can fool around with cloches and fight frosts and cold earth to strive for unnaturally early crops, or you can raid the perennial flower garden and the woods for an **easy early harvest.**\n\n  * Cut **daylily** sprouts when they are about three inches high, steam, drizzle with butter, and serve like asparagus.\n  * Grab a knife and rush out to your ground cover of **violets** as soon as young leaves form, but before flowers bloom. Cut a batch to steam and eat, tossed with a bit of butter. They're a green of incredible delicacy, a cross in flavor between spinach and asparagus. Just be sure to get them while they're young!\n  * When the **violets** bloom, put a few in your salad, for color and vitamin C.\n  * Lucky you, if ostrich fern bedecks your yard. Be alert for emerging **fiddleheads** and snap them off when tightly curled and no more than six inches high. (When taller, they are not safe to eat. In fact, they are poisonous once unfurled.) Don't remove more than a third to a half of the shoots from any one plant. Pull each stalk through your fingers to remove the feltlike covering and wash quickly in cold water. Eat raw in salads, steam like asparagus, make fiddlehead soup, or blanch for two minutes and freeze for a mid-winter treat. (If none grow in your yard, a likely place to find them is a silty flood plain near a river bed.)\n  * Leeks in the garden take 120 or more days to mature. For a spring treat without the waiting, enjoy the pungent sharpness of their cousins, the **wild leeks,** found on an early walk in rich woods. Their foliage begins as a tightly curled cylinder, then unfurls to resemble lily-of-the-valley leaves. Chop and add to salads or use for leek soup.\n\nLook for these perennials for an easy, tasty, early harvest.\n\nHere's a simple way to make sure you'll harvest your vegetables when you want them. You can determine the harvest date using the days from planting to harvest listed on seed packets. Put all your vegetables on one chart (see the sample below \u2014 be sure to include specific dates!), and you'll be able to time your produce for such uses as spaghetti sauce, which requires more than one vegetable.\n\nPick fruits and vegetables **in the early morning** when the temperature is cool. To keep them juicy but firm, store in the refrigerator for a hour or so before washing in cool water.\n\nBush beans all come at once and picking can be a back-breaking chore. **Save your back** and extend the harvest for a longer time by choosing pole beans instead. Kentucky Wonder or Romano Italian Pole are delectable steamed when young. If you tire of fresh beans or you go on vacation, let the pods mature and use them as shell beans, either immediately or dried for winter meals.\n\n\"I never bend over to **pick bush beans,\"** John Page says. He explains that, since most of the beans come at once, particularly in determinate varieties, there's no sense in courting a backache simply because you hope to get the few beans that will appear after the main picking. \"Just pull out the bean plant, take off all the beans while you're standing up, and throw the plant in the compost.\" Have a second planting under way for another harvest.\n\nIf you don't want to bother with supports for pole beans, but you'd like to **extend the harvest** for bush beans, choose varieties that produce over a longer period of time: Royal Burgundy, Bush Blue Blake, Cherokee Wax, Eagle, Black Valentine, or Contender.\n\n**Thin fruit trees in spring,** so fruits are six to ten inches apart. Trees will produce larger fruit, will have less damage from worms, and will set more fruit next year.\n\n**Potato growers** in coastal areas should try a trick used in Maine for decades. Dig a trench about six inches wide and six inches deep. Fill it with seaweed. Place chunks of seed potatoes at intervals of ten to twelve inches, then cover them with four to six inches of seaweed. At harvest time, pull back the seaweed and pick up the potatoes. There's none of that tiresome digging.\n\nSave time when you **harvest asparagus.** Instead of cutting the spears from the bed, grab them firmly at the base and snap them near ground level. This causes less damage to the plant and assures that all you pick is tender enough to eat. You will avoid injury to emerging spears by not cutting below the ground, as was once recommended. (That practice is to the advantage of the commercial grower, as it improves the keeping qualities of asparagus, but we homegrowers rush it from garden to pot, anyway, right?) Harvest asparagus every day during the season. Once you let some stalks open into ferns, the harvest diminishes.\n\n**In warm regions,** let three or four mother stalks of asparagus grow up from each plant after the harvest. Then sneak a second season by breaking off some of the new spears that emerge later on.\n\nTo **harvest rhubarb stalks,** hold near the bottom, twist and pull so that the stalk separates where it joins to the plant. Do not cut the stalks, or the juices will run from the cut, weakening the plant; and the remaining stalk will rot, inviting problems. \"Red Valentine is better than the old green-stalked variety which turns gray when you cook it,\" suggests a rhubarb fan. To freeze, chop and put it in a bag \u2014 period. Rhubarb is a favorite among lazy gardeners \u2014 easy to grow, easy to harvest, pest free, and easy to freeze.\n\nThe **best keeper** among winter squashes is Butternut.\n\nTriple-duty vegetables appeal to the lazy gardeners:\n\n  * Try Park's **Kuta squash.** Eat young like summer squash. Eat at midsize like eggplant. Eat at maturity like winter squash. It can be stored at this stage.\n  * Plant Burpee's Triple Treat **pumpkins,** good for jack-o-lanterns, pies, and high-protein snacks from the hull-less seeds. You can eat the seeds raw or roasted. To prepare, scoop them out, wash, and separate from fiber. Spread thinly on paper towels and dry for a few days in a warm, airy place. To roast, toss two cups of seeds with one and a half tablespoons of oil and a sprinkling of salt and place in a 250\u00b0F oven until golden brown. Watch carefully and shake the pan every now and then.\n\nYou get three huge zucchini and search for recipes to use them up. Two loaves of zucchini bread and one cake later, you still have two huge zucchini. Here's where five minutes in the garden daily can save you hours later. **Pick zucchini every day.** When it's only finger-length, even before the blossom falls off, it is a gourmet's delight. Eat raw with a dip or throw thin, raw slices into salads. Saut\u00e9 tender young rounds in garlic and olive oil and sprinkle with parmesan cheese. Pickle whole or vertically sliced young zucchini, using a garlic-dill recipe.\n\n**If zucchini does get ahead of you,** grate it finely (a food processor makes quick work of this), squeeze hard to eliminate as much liquid as possible, bag in one-cup portions, and freeze to use later in soups.\n\nYou're **growing cauliflower,** and you're too lazy to tie leaves over the forming head to keep it white? Partially break a few leaves and let them rest on the developing head, for easy blanching.\n\nBreak cauliflower leaves for easy blanching.\n\n**Young spinach** \u2014 the younger the better \u2014 is delectable in salads or quickly stir-fried or steamed. Eat as much as you can when it's little.\n\nWhen **harvesting cabbage,** cut the head instead of pulling the plant out of the ground. You may get another crop of smaller heads.\n\nCut six to eight inches of stem with the main head of **broccoli** to encourage production of lateral heads. Don't discard that stem when you cook the broccoli. Peel off the tough outer skin and, when steamed, it is just as tender as the florets. Always harvest broccoli when florets are in tight bud. Never let a yellow flower show its face.\n\nCutting broccoli and peeling stem\n\n**Chinese cabbage** likes cool weather. To get it to head in heat, loosely tie up all but the outer eight leaves. Do this about one month after seedlings are set out in the garden.\n\nThe **greens** of those beet seeds you broadcast in a wide row can be picked clean a section at a time. Pull, line up a handful, and snip off the roots with shears.\n\nToo lazy to shell peas? Grow **edible-podded snap peas** instead, for plump peas (with pod) without the work of shelling. Pick, string, and steam or stir-fry briefly, until the pods turn bright green, and eat while still crunchy. Or blanch for one minute and freeze. Steam or saut\u00e9 just enough to warm them up when you take them out of the freezer.\n\nToo lazy to cook them? They're wonderful raw \u2014 just remove the strings. You can have your salad right out there at the vine, or wait until you cut them up and add to early lettuce. Eat them raw like carrots, serve with a dip, or take on picnics as finger food.\n\nToo lazy to string them? Let the eaters do it, as they would shell cold, cooked shrimp.\n\n# The Right Way to String Peas\n\nIf you **string edible-podded snap peas,** there's a right way and a wrong way, says Eleanor Kolkebeck. The right way can save many minutes. The wrong way produces broken strings, wasted time, and a frustrated harvester.\n\nThe right way: Start at the stem end. With a sharp paring knife, cut through the pod just below the cap toward the outside curve and pull off the string down to the tip. Next, cut through the tip and pull the string on the inside curve. It's important to do the outside part first, or the string won't come off in one piece.\n\nSave time when you process snap beans. Cut off only the stem end. The tip tastes perfectly fine, so why bother to cut it off?\n\n**Never twist eggplants** or peppers off the mother plant. Cut or snip off with knife or shears, and leave a short stem on each fruit.\n\n**Don't pull kohlrabi.** To avoid disturbing remaining plants, just cut off below the \"bulb\" with a sharp knife.\n\nIf **Patty Pan squash** just don't seem to be worth the effort you're putting into growing them, perhaps you're harvesting them at the wrong time. Pick them when they're no more than three inches in diameter. That way they're delicious.\n\n\"There's nothing better than a sun-ripened tomato,\" exults a lazy gardener, \"but nothing worse than reaching out to pick one and ending up with a handful of mush, because the mice or rabbits got there first.\" She picks just before the height of ripeness to **foil the varmints.**\n\n**Before a killing frost** arrives, harvest all tomatoes except the tiny ones. Cut the fruits off the vine, leaving two inches of stem on each. The extra time it takes to do this will ensure better flavor after ripening. The tomatoes must be kept in a cool (45 to 50\u00b0F), dark \u2014 this is important \u2014 place. Wrap each one separately in newspaper. Check frequently, for a supply of tomatoes through Thanksgiving.\n\nYour harvest of snap beans is prolific. You've already put enough in the freezer to last the winter. You've eaten all you can fresh. What to do with the rest? **Make dilly beans** for crunchy winter snacks. They're great Christmas gifts for your neighbors, and best of all, they're quick and easy.\n\n# Dilly Beans\n\n## Ingredients\n\n  * 4 lbs. green beans, whole (about 4 qts.)\n  * 1\u20444 tsp. (per pint jar) hot red pepper, crushed\n  * 1\u20442 tsp. (per pint jar) whole mustard seeds\n  * 1\u20442 tsp. (per pint jar) dill seed\n  * 1 clove garlic (per pint jar)\n  * 5 sprigs fresh dill (per pint jar)\n  * 5 cups vinegar\n  * 5 cups water\n  * 1\u20442 cup salt\n\n## Instructions\n\nWash beans thoroughly; drain and cut into lengths to fill pint jars. Pack beans into clean, hot jars; add pepper, mustard seed, dill seeds, garlic, and fresh dill. Combine vinegar, water, and salt; heat to boiling. Pour boiling liquid over beans, filling to 1\u20442 inch of top of jar. Adjust lids. Process in boiling-water bath for five minutes. Remove jars, and if you are using jars with clamp tops, complete seals. Set jars upright, several inches apart, on a wire rack, to cool. Makes about 7 pints.\n\nLazy gardeners, here's an opportunity to sit in the shade and **watch thousands work** for you. Try beekeeping. Bees love to work, and you'll see a steady stream of the worker (female) bees rushing in and out of the hive from dawn to dark, storing honey and pollinating blossoms in your garden and orchard. To get all this, plus 100 or so pounds of honey each year, you'll have to put in about six hours of work a year. Chances are you may spend more time than this with your bees as you get fascinated by the complex social structure that develops in the hive.\n\nYou think about edible flowers and you think, Ugh. But not if those flowers are **chives.** Tuck some in a flower bed, preferably the flower bed nearest the kitchen door, and enjoy the lovely lavender blossoms. Throw a few in your salad bowl for beauty and a mild oniony taste.\n\nBe adventurous and let your **nasturtiums** do double-duty as pest-repellents and gay additions to the salad bowl. Leaves and flowers have a spicy, delicately pungent flavor similar to cress. At potluck suppers, I can always spot a salad brought by my neighbor, Catherine Osgood Foster, author and organic gardener. The artistically arranged garnish of red, orange, and yellow nasturtium blossoms is her trademark.\n\n**Don't grumble** at the zucchini and squash; eat their blossoms before they have a chance to overburden you with produce. Cooks often use the male blossoms, which can be recognized by their long stems. Add to soup, saut\u00e9, dip in batter and deep-fry; or stuff with rice, meat, or cream cheese and bake.\n\nHarness the sun's heat to help **ripen cantaloupes.** Place a flat stone under melons to absorb heat and help them ripen more evenly. No turning necessary.\n\nFor **earlier watermelons,** pinch out blossoms formed after the first two or three fruits are set, or prune the main vine to encourage side shoots, which set fruit earlier. Make sure the watermelon you worked so hard to grow is ripe before you harvest it:\n\n  * Thump it. It should sound hollow.\n  * Look at the rind. It should be yellow where it touches the ground.\n  * Inspect the tendrils at the joint just above the melon stem. They should be brown.\n\nReady to harvest? Cut (don't pull) it from the vine, with a short stem still attached to the melon.\n\nMake cut flowers last longer by filling vases with **only 4 inches of water.** Oxygen is present in large quantities in the top 4-inches of water. Below that the water becomes depleted of oxygen and a smelly soup soon forms in the vase.\n\nTake your **two-week vacation in August,** for best gardening results. By that time your vegetables will be large enough to compete with the weeds, and you won't return to a jungle of intruders hiding a few defeated vegetables. You will miss harvesting some of your vegetables at their prime, unless you time your planting schedule carefully.\n\n**Houseplants** of vacationers will survive for a week or two if encased in plastic. If you plan to be away longer, try this:\n\n  * Soak houseplants well with fish emulsion.\n  * Sink into the ground in a shady place.\n  * Cover rims of pots with a little soil.\n  * Cut back some of the foliage on each houseplant.\n\nYour plants may surprise you by thriving in your absence.\n\n# When to Prune\n\nThe basic pruning rule of thumb is to **give the plant three months of growing time between the time you cut it and when you expect it to bloom.** Months of dormancy do not count.\n\nTry **pruning fruit trees in summer,** instead of in spring, when you are overloaded with planting. Remove all but one inch of new growth of non-fruiting wood. Leave a cluster of three to five leaves at the base. Do this when the base of the new shoot gets woody. This pruning dwarfs the tree, making for easier picking, encourages the development of fruit spurs for larger yields, and gets rid of most of the aphids on new growth.\n\n# When to Prune Shrubs\n\n## Shrubs to Be Pruned After Blooming\n\nThe best time to prune these shrubs that bloom on year-old wood is just after the blossoms have faded. Then the shrub will grow new branches and form the buds that will bloom the following year.\n\n  * _Akebia_\n  * _Amelanchier_ (shadblow)\n  * _Azalea_\n  * _Benzoin_ (spice bush)\n  * _Berberis_ (barberry)\n  * _Buddleia alternifolia_ (butterfly bush)\n  * _Calycanthus floridus_ (sweet shrub, strawberry shrub)\n  * _Caragana_ (Siberian pea)\n  * _Celastrus_ (bittersweet)\n  * _Cercis_ (Judas tree, redbud)\n  * _Chaenomeles_ (flowering quince)\n  * _Chionanthus_ (white fringe)\n  * _Cornus_ (dogwood, without berries)\n  * _Cotinus coggyria_ (smoke tree)\n  * _Crataegus oxyacantha_ (English hawthorne)\n  * _Cydonia_ (Japanese quince)\n  * _Cytisus_ (broom)\n  * _Daphne_ (garland flower)\n  * _Deutzia_\n  * _Exochorda_ (pearlbush)\n  * _Forsythia_ (goldenbell)\n  * _Hydrangea hortensia_\n  * _Jasminum_ (jasmine)\n  * _Kalmia_ (laurel)\n  * _Kerria japonica_ (Japanese rose)\n  * _Kolwitzia amabilis_ (beautybush)\n  * _Lonicera fragrantissima_ (bush honeysuckle)\n  * _Magnolia_\n  * _Philadelphus_ (mock-orange)\n  * _Physocarpus_ (ninebark)\n  * _Pieris_ (andromeda)\n  * _Potentilla_ (cinquefoil)\n  * _Prunus_ (flowering almond, cherry, plum)\n  * _Rhododendron_\n  * _Ribes_ (flowering currant)\n  * _Rosa_\n  * _Spirea_ (bridal wreath)\n  * _Spirea thunbergii_\n  * _Spirea van Houtei_\n  * _Syringa_ (lilac)\n  * _Tamarix_ (spring-flowering)\n  * _Viburnum carlesi, V. lantana_ (snowball)\n  * _Viburnum opulus_ (highbush cranberry)\n  * _Weigela_\n\n## Shrubs to Be Pruned Before the Buds Show Green\n\nShrubs that form flowers on wood grown the same season should be pruned when the plant is dormant.\n\n  * _Abelia_ \u00d7 _grandiflora_\n  * _Abelia schumannii_\n  * _Acanthopanax_ (five-leaved aralia)\n  * _Althea,_ shrubby (Rose of Sharon)\n  * _Amorpha_ (indigo bush)\n  * _Aralia elata_ (Japanese angelica)\n  * _Artemisia_ (sagebrush, southernwood, wormwood)\n  * _Baccharis_ (groundsel shrub)\n  * _Berberis_ (barberry)\n  * _Buddleia_ (butterfly bush, except for _B. alternifolia_ )\n  * _Callicarpa_ (beautyberry)\n  * _Caryopteris_ (bluebeard)\n  * _Ceanothus_\n  * _Cephalanthus_ (buttonbush)\n  * _Clethra_ (sweet pepper bush)\n  * _Cytisus nigricans_ (broom)\n  * _Dievilla sessilifolia_ (bush honeysuckle)\n  * _Euonymus kiautschovica_ (spreading euonymus)\n  * _Fatsia japonica_ (Japanese fatsia)\n  * _Franklinia alatamaha_ (Franklin tree)\n  * _Garrya_ (silk-tassel)\n  * _Hamamelis virginiana_ (witch hazel)\n  * _Hibiscus_\n  * _Holodiscus discolor_ (ocean-spray)\n  * _Hydrangea arborescens_ 'Grandiflora'\n  * _Hydrangea paniculata_ 'Grandiflora'\n  * _Hypericum_ (St. Johnswort)\n  * _Indigofera_ (indigo)\n  * _Kerria_\n  * _Lagerstroemia_ (crape myrtle)\n  * _Lespedeza_ (bush clover)\n  * _Ligustrum_ (privet)\n  * _Lilac japonica_ (tree lilac)\n  * _Lonicera_ (berried honeysuckle)\n  * _Lycium_ (matrimony vine)\n  * _Rhamnus frangula_ (alder, buckthorn)\n  * _Rhus_ (sumac, smoke tree)\n  * _Roses_ (garden bush varieties)\n  * _Rubus odoratus_ (flowering raspberry)\n  * _Salix_ (willow)\n  * _Salvia greggii_ (autumn sage)\n  * _Sambucus canadensis_ (American elder)\n  * _Sorbaria_ (false spirea)\n  * _Spiraea_ (all summer-blooming spirea)\n  * _Staphylea_ (bladdernut)\n  * _Stephanandra_\n  * _Symphoricarpos_ (coralberry, snowberry)\n  * _Tamarix odessana_ (late-flowering tamarisk)\n  * _Viburnum_ (berry-bearing)\n  * _Vitex_ (chaste tree)\n\n### Berry-Picking Time\n\n**Leave two hands free** for harvesting raspberries, blackberries, and highbush blueberries. Tie the gathering bucket around your waist. Pick more berries in less time.\n\n**Don't bother to wash raspberries.** It makes them soggy and is a waste of time. Just eat.\n\n**Pick strawberries early** in the day for best keeping. Sit down on the job instead of reaping an aching back. Rig up a seat that you can tie around your waist with a belt. Use an old stool and cut the legs down to three or four inches. Staple loops of webbing or rope to the seat to hold a belt. Or use a dairy farmer's \"milking seat.\"\n\nA strawberry-picking stool makes for a comfortable harvest.\n\nIf your idea of lazy gardening is to have **one major harvest** of the entire strawberry crop, order all plants of the same variety. \"This year I bought sixty plants, half of one variety and half of another,\" says a gardener who strives for no wasted motion in his garden. \"I wish I'd ordered just one kind. It seems as though I've been picking strawberries forever.\"\n\nDo you have **everbearing raspberries?** Are you like the gardener who has had it with berry picking by the time he has finished harvesting one hundred and ten quarts of strawberries, and bing, suddenly the raspberries are ripe \u2014 red rubies that won't wait even a day beyond readiness to be picked? If you can't face picking under a merciless July sun, eliminate next year's summer bearing and have the luxury of picking bug-free berries in cool fall weather. Mow down to the ground _all_ the canes in fall, even this year's new ones that would ordinarily produce your next July crop. Let the plants put all their strength into next summer's new canes, for a more vigorous, and probably earlier, fall crop at their tips. You also save the tedious work of cutting out only this summer's bearing canes, which die after harvest. It's much less time-consuming to mow down everything. Skeptical? Try it on half your bed.\n\nFor an **unusual treat,** plant golden raspberries and prune for a fall crop only. They'll bear from September first through October. A believer claims they're larger and meatier than reds, with a peachlike flavor.\n\n## Storage and Such\n\n### Freezing Tips\n\n**Freeze green beans whole** to prevent sogginess. Blanch in boiling water for three minutes, cool in ice water, and blot dry before freezing.\n\nChop or slice onions and green pepper and **freeze raw.** Toss into cooked dishes straight from the freezer.\n\nTo **quick-freeze berries,** pour them, unwashed if possible, or well-drained, on a cookie sheet and pop into the freezer. When frozen, spoon into small plastic bags or containers and return to freezer.\n\nBlueberries are almost as good as fresh ones when thawed. Raspberries and strawberries lose their texture. Use them in a jiffy lunch for the working man or woman. In the morning, throw one-half cup frozen raspberries or strawberries, one tablespoon honey, and one cup plain yogurt into a container. Stick it into the refrigerator at work. By lunch time, the berries will be thawed. Stir vigorously and enjoy the rich flavor of summer berries on a snowy day.\n\n**Cucumbers and zucchini don't freeze** well. Take five minutes to pick them while they're young and little, slice thinly, and dry them for mid-winter snacks. It's especially easy if you live in a dry, sunny climate.\n\n**Freeze ripe tomatoes** whole for use in cooking. Wash, dry, place in a plastic bag or container, and then freeze. When you need one, run cold water over it, and the skin will fall away. No need to struggle with immersion in boiling water and peeling before freezing.\n\n**Pick more vegetables** than you'll eat for supper and freeze the extra each night. Avoids a marathon.\n\nIf you must **freeze spinach,** its bulk makes washing a messy chore. To keep from getting water and mud all over the kitchen, do the washing outdoors. Use a large washtub or a child's plastic swimming pool and the garden hose to make quick work of sand and soil imbedded in its crumply green leaves. Prop up on old screen on bricks, concrete blocks, or lumber, and let drippy spinach drain through it before heading back to the kitchen to blanch, cool, pack, and freeze.\n\n### The Many Uses of Herbs\n\n**Pick herbs before noon** for the best taste. Use a food processor for effortless chopping of chives, parsley, basil, dill, chervil, fennel, marjoram, tarragon, and oregano. Freeze the excess in small amounts and pop frozen into cooked dishes for almost fresh flavor.\n\nThrow some butter into your food processor with an herb to be chopped, for **quick herb butter.** Use on fish, meat, or breads.\n\nTo **dry herbs** you can:\n\n  * Spread them out loosely on screens or paper in a warm, dark attic.\n  * Hang in perforated paper bags.\n  * Dry in a 100\u00b0F oven, with the door left ajar. Spread out thinly.\n  * Hang in bunches in the refrigerator for a week to ten days. They will be nice and dry, flavorful, and still have excellent color.\n  * Use the microwave. Place a few herbs on a paper towel and microwave them for a minute or so.\n\nWhen leaves are crisp, strip them off stems and put in closed containers. Small glass jars (baby-food size) are best. (Each time you open a jar, you lose aroma.) Store in a dry, cool, dark place.\n\n**Harvest basil before cool weather** arrives. The flavor of its leaves is best before nighttime temperatures drop below 50\u00b0F.\n\nKeep basil cut so it doesn't flower, but if you miss, use the blossoms for vinegar. In fact, **herb vinegars** are a convenient way to use herbs you're too lazy to dry or freeze, and they make wonderful gifts. Save interestingly shaped bottles from wine or other liquids. Use lots of herbs. Heat vinegar until hot but not boiling. Pour over herbs in a glass or ceramic container. Let sit for two to three weeks. Decant into bottles, filtering through Chemex paper. Use cider vinegar for all herbs except opal (red) basil and chive-blossom vinegar. Good herbs for vinegars are tarragon, dill, marjoram, sage, and thyme.\n\n\"I never have enough artemisia for wreaths, so this year I've planted it all around the inside of my garden fence. It keeps grass from getting into the garden and gives me a bountiful harvest,\" says Alice Moir, maker of herb wreaths. **\"Never cut artemisia before September** first, or it turns an ugly gray. Cut later and it retains a silver look. After cutting, lay it carefully against the inside walls of bushel baskets to dry, and it will be molded into a rounded form for easier wreath-making.\"\n\n**Grow lavender** in a rocky, dry, sunny place (with plenty of lime) where other plants would gasp for water. Enjoy its blossoms all summer, then dry them for sachets. After you strip the stems, use the dry sticks in your fireplace or wood stove for a lovely fragrance.\n\nHate the smell of moth balls? Their fumes are not healthy for humans to inhale, anyway. Harvest and dry part of your herb garden to stuff into bags and hang in closets as a moth repellent. Combine santolina, tansy, and southernwood \u2014 much nicer than moth balls, and good for gifts, too. You can also add camphor, Roman wormwood, costmary, silver artemisia, mint, scented geraniums, lemon balm, lemon verbena, a bit of clove, and a bay leaf.\n\n### Long Life for Root Crops\n\nIf you have a **root cellar,** keep it cool in the fall when it's full of produce by opening ventilators on brisk nights and closing them on warm, sunny days. That's an easy way to keep the temperature and humidity at ideal levels.\n\nChoose to grow thin-necked varieties of **onions** rather than thick-necked ones, and you'll have less incidence of-onion-neck rot in storage. Cure them in sun for a week or two after harvest, then lay screens in the rafters of your garage or attic and spread the onions one layer thick. Leave them there for a month or so. Make sure onion necks are thoroughly dry before clipping to an inch or two. Store in a cool, dry place with good ventilation.\n\nRecall the lazy gardener's rule: Never do today what may never have to be done. You can dig your **carrots** in the fall, knock the dirt off them, cut the tops off, let them air for a day or two, bed them down with layers of peat moss, and then dig them out of the peat moss to eat them. Or you can fluff up a foot-deep layer of straw or hay over your wide row or raised bed of carrots, letting that layer reach out beyond the row by a foot.\n\nWhen a hunger for carrots strikes you, lift up the hay and dig or pull out just the number you want. You'll find the carrots are crisp and even more flavorful than they were in the fall. But don't let them just sit there in the spring, or they will spoil.\n\nOne last thought: Mark the row with a couple of stakes. It's surprising how easy it is to lose a whole row of carrots if the snow gets to be a foot or two deep.\n\nIf you want those **carrots stored** in the house, place them in plastic bags with holes cut in them, and keep them in the refrigerator or some other cold \u2014 but not freezing \u2014 place.\n\n**Parsnips,** too, can be left to winter over with a covering of hay. Make sure you dig them in spring before the tops begin to sprout. Their sweetness is intensified by cold storage in the ground.\n\nStoring potatoes is hard work, but worth it. Cleaning out rotted potatoes is miserable work and ought to be avoided. The **secret to successful storage** is to keep the potatoes in a cool, well-ventilated area, and to keep the humidity as low as possible, and the potatoes dry.\n\n### Fighting Fall Frosts\n\nKale not only withstands frost, its **flavor is improved** with each chill. Twist off outer leaves as needed, before they become heavy and tough. Mulch with a foot of loose straw or hay if you're in a frigid winter climate and continue to harvest all winter.\n\nIf you were too lazy to get your plants covered before that **early fall frost,** don't write off your crops. Spray with a fine mist early in the morning, before sun hits the leaves, and you may earn a reprieve for your plants. Most damage after frost occurs when leaves warm up too fast in the sunshine. If you can thaw them with cool water first, they may survive.\n\n### Crisp Apples\n\nIf you pick or buy a lot of apples in the fall, you face a problem: how to **keep them fresh** for as many weeks as possible. Try getting them cold on a brisk fall night, then storing them in inexpensive styrofoam coolers. Apples tend to dry out when stored in a refrigerator; stored in these coolers, they retain that moisture, and their crisp freshness.\n\n### Get a Jump on Spring\n\nA **late planting of lettuce** can be wintered over. Just cover with a foot or so of loose hay. Do the same with parsley for an early spring supply. It will have a stronger flavor then, but will keep you in fresh parsley until a new planting is ready.\n\nIn **northern climates,** where the ground stays frozen all winter, try a planting of peas in fall, after the ground has frozen. Get a big jump on the next growing season.\n\nWhen autumn leaves fall, run the rotary mower over them before you rake, to reduce their volume and combat matting and blowing. Use them everywhere \u2014 rototill into the vegetable garden, apply lightly around evergreens and shrubs, dig into future tree holes, and add to the compost pile. You can probably even get bagged leaves from your unwise neighbors.\n\nIn the fall, take two hours of a Saturday afternoon as time to **get ready for spring.** If you have a tiller, drain the gasoline from it, drop a few drops of oil into the cylinder, and even change the oil, so come warm weather, when things are rushing, you'll be ready to till.\n\nIf you won't have to bother with spring tilling because you mulch year-round, use that same Saturday afternoon to plan and **mark the rows** for next year's garden, and you'll be all ready for spring planting the minute the soil is.\n\nClean, repair, and **sharpen your tools** before hanging them up for the last time. Take inventory and jot down Christmas present requests to fill your needs.\n\n## Winter Protection\n\nHave you shrubs or perennials that are borderline hardy? A New Hampshire gardener placed large rocks to the northwest of his tender heathers on a south-facing bank. In summer, the rocks add a pleasing design element to the garden. In winter, they absorb the sun's heat in the day and retain some of that heat at night. They also protect the plants from chill northwest winds.\n\nPut bales of hay around **tender plants** to protect them in winter.\n\nStrawberry plants need **winter protection.** Save weeding headaches next season by using a weed-free winter mulch, such as pine needles. You can give the plants a dusting of mulch after the first few light frosts, but wait until the temperature drops to 20\u00b0F before applying it to a depth of three or four inches. By this time, plants will have hardened off. Remove mulch in the spring, but keep it in the alleys between the plants to do double duty as weed-smotherer and as a handy covering for blossoms when a late frost threatens.\n\n## Fresh Sprouts: The Perfect Winter Crop\n\nLazy gardeners, here's a crop that has no weeds or insect pests, needs no soil, grows in any kind of weather, and is ready for harvest in two to five days. Grow your own sprouts in winter, for a continuing supply of high-vitamin greens. All you need to invest is a minute or two a day for rinsing.\n\nUse seeds that have not been chemically treated. Try a variety: mung beans, alfalfa, parsley, watercress, mustard, soybeans, lentils, peas, flax, and cereal grains such as wheat, oats, barley, or rye. (Never eat potato and tomato sprouts. Members of the nightshade family, they are poisonous.) As they sprout, seeds soar in nutritional value. One-half cup of sprouted soybeans contains vitamin C equal to six glasses of orange juice. Oat sprouts are high in vitamin E. As sprouts grow, vitamin B-complex soars.\n\nTo sprout seeds, you need a wide-mouthed jar. Cover it with cheesecloth and a rubber band, or buy plastic-screened sprouting covers that screw on wide-mouthed canning jars. You need two tablespoons of seeds to a quart jar.\n\n  1. 1. Wash seeds in water.\n  2. 2. Soak overnight in a warm, dark place \u2014 one part seeds to three parts warm water.\n  3. 3. In the morning, remove floating seeds. They're sterile. Pour off liquid and save it for soup.\n  4. 4. Rinse seeds in warm water and drain.\n  5. 5. Lay jar on its side in a warm closet. (You may want to put a towel or a pan under it to catch any drips.)\n  6. 6. Rinse three times a day until ready for eating. Keep in the refrigerator after that.\n\nAlfalfa seeds take four to five days to maturity. Leave in indirect sunlight the last day to green up. Mung beans take five days. Wheatberries and lentils are best after three days, and hulled sunflower seeds are ready when barely sprouted, just one day old.\n\nBe sure to wash jars and screens thoroughly between batches with hot, soapy water, to prevent bacterial contamination.\n\nHow do you eat sprouts? Munch on raw sprouts at snack time, toss them in salads, mix with cottage cheese, add to sandwiches instead of lettuce, or sprinkle on soup. Stir-fry or steam them as a cooked vegetable, mix with rice, or add to scrambled eggs and omelets.\n\nKeep winter doldrums at bay with this easiest of crops, and dream of spring, when seeds in dark earth will again sprout in your garden.\n\n# Index\n\nPage references in _italics_ indicate illustrations; **bold** indicates charts.\n\n## A\n\nAcidity of soil. _See_ Soil tips, pH\n\nAgricultural Extension Agent, ,\n\nAsparagus, , , 91\u201392,\n\n## B\n\nBeans\n\nbush, ,\n\nfreezing,\n\nlima, ,\n\npole, 53\u201354, ,\n\nBeekeeping,\n\nBeets, , , , ,\n\nBench (directions), __\n\nBirdhouse (directions), __\n\nBlueberries, , ,\n\nBrady, Jim,\n\nBrassicas, , , , , 70\u201371\n\nBroadcast seeds, , , , 64\u201365\n\nBroccoli, , , ,\n\n## C\n\nCabbage, , , ,\n\nCalcium, ,\n\nCarrots\n\nand coffee grounds, ,\n\ncompanion planting,\n\nand pests,\n\nplanting,\n\nseeds, tiny,\n\nstorage,\n\nand varieties,\n\nCauliflower, ,\n\nClover, , ,\n\nColditz, Paul,\n\nCollards, ,\n\nCompanion planting, , **108\u201311**\n\nComposting tips\n\nin concrete,\n\ncontainers for, 26\u201327\n\ndecomposition, speeding up,\n\nand diseases,\n\nfertilizers, natural,\n\nFrench Intensive method, ,\n\nIndore method,\n\nlocation of, 26\u201327\n\nmaterials for, ****\n\nneed for, 20\u201322, , ,\n\nas seed covering,\n\nsheet method,\n\nstrip method,\n\nthree-bin system, 22\u201323\n\nfor trees and shrubs,\n\ntwo-hole method,\n\nCorn, , , , ,\n\nCounty Extension Agent,\n\nCover crops, 18\u201320, , ,\n\nCrop rotations, , , 10\u201311,\n\nCucumbers\n\nand beetles,\n\nand compost, 20\u201321,\n\nand corn,\n\ndrying,\n\nplanting, ,\n\nstaking, 54\u201355\n\nCucurbits, ,\n\n## D\n\nDickey, Closey, , ,\n\nDilly Beans (recipe),\n\nDisease tips\n\nblack spot,\n\nblossom end-rot,\n\ndamping-off organisms,\n\nearly blight,\n\nfire blight,\n\nmildew, ,\n\nmilky spore,\n\nrotting,\n\nscab,\n\nsunscald, ,\n\n## E\n\nEggplants, , , 57\u201358, ,\n\n## F\n\nFences, use of, , , 95\u201398\n\nFertilizers, , . _See also_ Composting tips\n\nFlowers\n\ncut,\n\ngardens, easy,\n\nharvesting, 113\u201314, 121\u201322\n\nperennials, , , , 113\u201314\n\nplanting, , ,\n\nstaking,\n\nFoster, Catherine Osgood,\n\nFoster, Kit,\n\nFoster, Tom,\n\nFreezing tips, 126\u201327\n\nFrost date averages, __ ,\n\nFruits\n\nblueberries, , , ,\n\nharvesting, 115\u201316, , 125\u201326\n\nplanting, 76\u201379\n\npruning trees,\n\nraspberries, 76\u201377, 125\u201326\n\nstrawberries, , , 77\u201378, , 98\u201399, 125\u201326, 131\u201332\n\ntrees and pests, 107\u20138\n\n## G\n\nGardening tips. _See also_ Composting tips; Disease tips; Harvesting tips; Mulch tips; Pest tips; Planting tips; Soil tips; Tool tips; Watering tips; Weeding tips\n\nlandscaping, easy, 11\u201313\n\nlawn basics, 11\u201313\n\norganization, 1\u20133, 35\u201336\n\nplot, perfect, __\n\npruning, , 122\u201324\n\nroutines, time-saving, 3\u20134\n\nsite, ideal, 4\u20136\n\nwalkways, , ,\n\n_Gardening Without Work_ ,\n\nGarlic, , ,\n\n## H\n\nHarvesting tips\n\nberries, 125\u201326\n\ncrop placement,\n\nflowers, 113\u201314, 121\u201322\n\nfruits, 115\u201316, , 125\u201326\n\nherbs, 127\u201328\n\nvegetables, 115\u201321\n\nyields, higher, , , ,\n\nHay\n\nand composting,\n\nas mulch, , ,\n\nand planting,\n\nfor storing vegetables, 129\u201330\n\nas supports,\n\nand weed control,\n\nfor winter protection,\n\nHebert, Mark,\n\nHenderson, Peter, 82\u201383\n\nHerbs\n\nfor companion planting, **108\u20139**\n\ndrying, 127\u201328\n\ngrowing techniques,\n\nharvesting, 127\u201328\n\nand soil,\n\nuses for, 127\u201329\n\nvinegars,\n\nHoward, Sir Albert,\n\n_How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back_ , ,\n\n## I\n\nInsects. _See_ Pest tips\n\nIntercropping,\n\n## J\n\n_Joy of Gardening_ ,\n\n## K\n\nKale, , ,\n\nKevorkian, Deirdre,\n\nKohlrabi, ,\n\nKolkebeck, Bob and Eleanor, 51\u201352,\n\n## L\n\nLambert, Ray, 38\u201339, , , ,\n\nLandscaping, easy, 11\u201313\n\nLeafy greens,\n\nLeeks, , ,\n\nLegumes, , 19\u201320, ,\n\nLettuce, , , , 66\u201367,\n\nLime, , , ,\n\nLiving mulch, , ,\n\nLumber, treated, 8\u20139,\n\n## M\n\nMagnesium, ,\n\nManure\n\nfor asparagus,\n\nchicken,\n\ngreen, 18\u201320, ,\n\nfor raised beds,\n\nfor square beds,\n\ntea, 72\u201373,\n\nand transplanting,\n\nMeals, , ,\n\nMelons, , , , 70\u201371\n\nMoir, Alice,\n\nMulch tips\n\nclear plastic, ,\n\ndust, using rototiller,\n\nfor fruit trees,\n\nIRT-76,\n\nliving, , ,\n\nmaterials, ****\n\nfor onions and garlic,\n\nand pests and diseases,\n\nfor weeds, how to, 85\u201388\n\n## N\n\nNightshade family,\n\nNitrogen\n\nand decomposition,\n\nin fertilizers,\n\nand frost,\n\nand legumes, ,\n\nand mulch, 85\u201386\n\n## O\n\nOgden, Sam,\n\nOnions\n\ncompanion planting,\n\nand mulch,\n\nplanting, ,\n\nstorage, ,\n\nOrganic matter. _See_ Composting tips\n\n_Organic Vegetable Growing_ ,\n\n## P\n\nPage, John, , 58\u201359, ,\n\nParsley, , , 66\u201367,\n\nParsnips, , ,\n\nPeas\n\nbrush,\n\ncompanion planting,\n\nplanting, , 66\u201367,\n\nsnap,\n\nstaking, 51\u201353\n\nstring, how to,\n\nPeppers, , , , ,\n\nPerennials\n\nedible, 76\u201379, 113\u201314\n\nflowers, , , , 113\u201314\n\nPest tips\n\naphids, ,\n\nbirds, 98\u2013100\n\ncabbage loopers,\n\ncabbage worms,\n\nand cats,\n\ncockroaches,\n\nand companion planting, **108\u201311**\n\ncrows,\n\ncucumber beetles,\n\ncutworms,\n\nand fences, , _96\u201397_ ,\n\nfire ants,\n\nhornets,\n\nJapanese Beetles, 104\u20135\n\nmealybugs, 106\u20137\n\nmoths, 107\u20138, 128\u201329\n\nand natural enemies, , 104\u20135\n\nraccoons,\n\nand repellents, 106\u20137,\n\nroot knot nematodes,\n\nroot maggot,\n\nslugs, , 102\u20133\n\nsnakes,\n\nand soil,\n\nand staking,\n\nand Terroreyes balloon,\n\nworms,\n\nPhosphorus, ,\n\nPlanting tips. _See also_ Composting tips; Mulch tips\n\nbroadcast seeds, , , , 64\u201365\n\ncompanion, , **108\u201311**\n\ncrop rotations, , , 10\u201311,\n\nflowers, , ,\n\nfoundation,\n\nfruits, 76\u201379\n\ngreenhouses, mini,\n\nharden off,\n\nhints for, 66\u201370\n\npests and disease, , 105\u20136\n\npotting mix (directions),\n\nraised beds, 7\u20139, , 60\u201362, ,\n\nrow markers, 63\u201364\n\nsalad gardens, __ , 65\u201366\n\nseeds, tiny, 64\u201365\n\nshortcuts, ,\n\nsquare beds, 9\u201310, ,\n\ntransplants, , , 71\u201373\n\nand watering, 80\u201381\n\nwhat to plant,\n\nwhen to plant, 58\u201359\n\nwide rows, , , ,\n\nPlants. _See also specific plants_\n\nfor acid soils,\n\ndisease-resistant, , , ,\n\nfeeders, heavy, ,\n\nfeeders, light,\n\ngivers, heavy,\n\ninsect-deterrent, **110\u201311**\n\nfor starting indoors, 43\u201344,\n\nfor sweet soils,\n\nPlant stand (directions), 41\u201342\n\nPlastic\n\nblack, , ,\n\nuse of, , ,\n\nPotatoes, , , ,\n\nPotting mix (directions),\n\nPruning, , 122\u201324\n\n## R\n\nRaised bed planting, 7\u20139, , 60\u201362, ,\n\nRaspberries, 76\u201377, 125\u201326\n\nRaymond, Dick,\n\n## S\n\nSalad gardens, __ , 65\u201366\n\nSeed tips\n\nbroadcast, , , , 64\u201365\n\ndamping-off organisms,\n\ngermination, 42\u201343,\n\nhard-coated,\n\noverview, 38\u201339\n\npelleted, ,\n\nplant stand (directions), 41\u201342\n\npotting mix (directions),\n\nsize of,\n\nsoaking of,\n\nspacing,\n\nstarting indoors, 41\u201346\n\nstorage,\n\ntapes,\n\nthinning seedlings,\n\ntiny, planting of, 64\u201365\n\nShrubs, , **123\u201324**\n\nSmith, Gerald,\n\nSoil Conservation Service,\n\nSoil tips. _See also_ Composting tips\n\nclay soils, lightening, 30\u201331\n\ncontaminated,\n\ncover crops, 18\u201320,\n\nand diseases, ,\n\ndrainage, , ,\n\nhumic acid,\n\nhydrangea color,\n\npH, , 31\u201333, ,\n\nreasons for building, 17\u201318\n\ntips, 33\u201334\n\nSpinach, , , 66\u201367, ,\n\nSprouts, 132\u201333\n\nSquare bed planting, 9\u201310, ,\n\nSquash, , , , 70\u201371,\n\nStaking tips\n\nbeans, 53\u201354\n\ncucumbers, 54\u201355\n\nflowers,\n\noverview, , 47\u201348,\n\npeas, 51\u201353\n\ntomatoes, 48\u201351\n\nStevenson, Nora,\n\nStout, Ruth, , , , ,\n\nStrawberries\n\nAlpine,\n\nand birds, 98\u201399\n\nharvesting, 125\u201326\n\nmulch,\n\nplanting, 77\u201378\n\nwinter protection, 131\u201332\n\nSuccession planting,\n\n## T\n\nTomatoes\n\ncompanion planting,\n\nand compost, ,\n\ndeterminate, ,\n\ndiseases,\n\nfreezing,\n\nharvesting, 119\u201320\n\nindeterminate, ,\n\nplanting, , 73\u201375\n\nself-fertilizing,\n\nstaking, 48\u201351,\n\ntransplanting, ,\n\nTool tips\n\nbulb auger,\n\nhand, 60\u201361\n\nhoes, , ,\n\nrake-head tool hanger,\n\nrepairing, , ,\n\nrototillers, , , ,\n\nscythe,\n\nshears,\n\nshed, organizing, 39\u201340\n\ntips,\n\nweeding, ,\n\nTransplanting, , , 71\u201373\n\nTrees, 11\u201313, , , 107\u20138,\n\nTurf mats, 11\u201312\n\nTurnips, , ,\n\n## U\n\nUniversity of Georgia College of Agriculture, ,\n\n## V\n\nVertical cropping, . _See also_ Staking tips\n\nViereck, Phil, , ,\n\n## W\n\nWatering tips\n\nbowl,\n\ndrip-watering system,\n\nhoses, , 40\u201341, 80\u201381\n\nhow to, 80\u201381\n\nand pests and diseases,\n\nsoil, healthy,\n\nand square rows,\n\nand staking,\n\nand wide rows,\n\nWeeding tips\n\nfor asparagus, 91\u201392\n\nbuckwheat, planting, 93\u201394\n\ncultivation, early, 82\u201384\n\nfor food, 84\u201385\n\nand green manure,\n\nby mowing,\n\nwith mulch, 85\u201390, 92\u201393\n\nand pests and diseases,\n\nand raised beds,\n\nsoil, healthy,\n\nand square beds,\n\ntools, ,\n\ntopdressing,\n\nusing black plastic,\n\nand walkways,\n\nand wide rows,\n\nWide row planting, , , ,\n\nWinter\n\ncold frames, ,\n\nprojects for, 35\u201356, 130\u201333\n\nprotection from, 131\u201332\n\nrye, 19\u201320\n\nsquash, , , 116\u201317\n\nWood ashes, , , 33\u201334, \n\n# Other Storey Books You Will Enjoy\n\n## The Complete Compost Gardening Guide\n\nBarbara Pleasant & Deborah L. Martin\n\nEverything a gardener needs to know to produce the best compost, nourishment for abundant, flavorful vegetables.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## The Dirt Cheap Green Thumb\n\nRhonda Massingham Hart\n\nTips and tricks to help pennywise gardeners preserve their budgets.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## Don't Throw It, Grow It!\n\nDeborah Peterson & Millicent Selsam\n\nLush, vibrant houseplants from pits, nuts, beans, seeds, and tubers.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## Down & Dirty!\n\nEllen Zachos\n\nA fun way for a new generation of gardeners to get started \u2014 more than 40 simple projects to ensure success and build confidence.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## The Gardener's Bug Book\n\nBarbara Pleasant\n\nThe health-conscious gardener's guide to safely reduce pests while producing bountiful, environmentally safe, and chemical-free harvests.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## The Gardener's Guide to Plant Diseases\n\nBarbara Pleasant\n\nAn easy-to-use reference that fully describes more than 50 of the most common plant diseases and offers chemical-free remedies for each one.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n## The Gardener's Weed Book\n\nBarbara Pleasant\n\nComplete coverage of the pros and cons of weeds, proven methods for controlling unwanted ones, and illustrations of common varieties.\n\nREAD MORE AT STOREY.COM\n\n**Join the conversation.** Share your experience with this book, learn more about Storey Publishing?s authors, and read original essays and book excerpts at _www.storey.com_.\n\nLook for our books wherever quality books are sold or by calling 800-441-5700.\nThe mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by publishing practical information that encourages personal independence in harmony with the environment.\n\nCover design and illustration by Jane Isabella\n\nText design by Cindy McFarland\n\nProduction assistance by Susan Bernier, Eileen Clawson, and Erin Lincourt\n\nIllustrations by David Sylvester\n\nIndexed by Susan Olason, Indexes and Knowledge Maps\n\nEbook production by Dan O. Williams\n\nEbook version 1.0\n\nJuly 12, 2016\n\n\u00a9 1998 by Storey Publishing, LLC\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means \u2014 electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other \u2014 without written permission from the publisher.\n\nThe information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Storey Publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information. For additional information please contact Storey Publishing, 210 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247.\n\nStorey books are available for special premium and promotional uses and for customized editions. For further information, please call 1-800-793-9396.\n\n# Share Your Experience!\n\nWe value your feedback, and so do your fellow readers. Reviews you leave at your ebookstore help more people find and enjoy the books you love. So spread the word, write a review, and share your experience!\n\nEMAIL STOREY\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**AUTHORS' NOTE**\n\nThe Jaguar Stones are fictional, as are all the characters in this book except for Friar Diego de Landa, the true-life Spanish priest who made one big bonfire of ancient Maya books and artworks. San Xavier is a fictional country based on present-day Belize.\n\n**To Harry, Charly, and Loulou**  \n _k yahkume'ex_\n\n# CONTENTS\n\nCAST OF CHARACTERS\n\nPREFACE: THE DREAM\n\nI. BAD NEWS\n\nII. THE CURSE OF THE MAYA\n\nIII. PUERTO MUERTO\n\nIV. VILLA ISABELLA\n\nV. MAX GOES BANANAS\n\nVI. FAMILY SECRETS\n\nVII. THIEVES IN THE NIGHT\n\nVIII. THE MONKEY GIRL\n\nIX. SHOOTING THE RAPIDS\n\nX. STRANGE WEATHER\n\nXI. RAT ON A STICK\n\nXII. THE FEAST\n\nXIII. MONKEY RIVER\n\nXIV. ITZAMNA\n\nXV. THE OATH OF BLOOD\n\nXVI. THE COSMIC CROCODILE\n\nXVII. TRICK OR TREAT\n\nXVIII. THE CHICKEN OF DEATH\n\nXIX. MONKEY BUSINESS\n\nXX. COUNTING THE DAYS\n\nXXI. PREPARING FOR BATTLE\n\nXXII. THE BLACK PYRAMID\n\nXXIII. CAPTURED\n\nXXIV. THE SHOWDOWN\n\nXXV. HUMAN SACRIFICE\n\nXXVI. MORNING\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nMAYA COSMOS\n\nTHE MAYA CALENDAR\n\nEASY CHICKEN TAMALES\n\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n#\n\n## In Boston\n\nMAX (Massimo Francis Sylvanus) MURPHY: fourteen years old, only child, videogamer, drummer, pizza connoisseur\n\nZIA: the Murphys' mysterious housekeeper\n\nFRANK AND CARLA MURPHY: Max's parents, famous archaeologists\n\n## In San Xavier\n\nOSCAR POOT: head of the Maya Foundation\n\nLUCKY JIM: Uncle Ted's foreman and bodyguard\n\nTED MURPHY: Max's uncle, a banana exporter\n\nVICTOR: waiter at hotel\n\nANTONIO DE LANDA: Spanish aristocrat\n\nRAUL: Uncle Ted's butler\n\nCHULO and SERI: Lola's tame howler monkeys\n\nLOLA (Ix Sak Lol\u2014 _each sock loll_ ): Maya girl about Max's age\n\nCHAN KAN: Maya wise man\n\nOCH and little OCH: village boys, brothers\n\nEUSEBIO: chili farmer and boatman\n\nHERMANJILIO ( _herman kee leo_ ): Maya archaeologist, university professor\n\nLORD 6-DOG (Ahaw Wak Ok\u2014 _uh how walk oak_ ): ancient Maya king\n\nLADY COCO (Ix Kan Kakaw\u2014 _each con caw cow_ ): Lord 6-Dog's mother\n\n## In Xibalba\n\nLORDS of DEATH: twelve lords of the underworld, minions of Ah Pukuh\n\nTZELEK: evil priest and Lord 6-Dog's twin brother\n\n## Maya Gods\n\nIXCHEL _(each shell):_ moon goddess\n\nCHAHK _(chalk_ ): god of storms and warfare\n\nITZAMNA _(eats um gnaw_ ): ruler of heaven, lord of day and night\n\nK'AWIIL ( _caw wheel_ ): god of kingship and lineage\n\nAH PUKUH ( _awe pooh coo_ ): god of violent and unnatural death\n\n#\n\n# Preface  \nTHE DREAM\n\nLord 6-Dog was awakened by the sound of his own screaming.\n\nFor a few moments he lay still on his sleeping mat, trying to shake off the memory of the dream. He told himself to calm down, but still his body trembled and the sweat ran down his forehead (no small journey, as his mother had strapped his head between two boards after he was born to lengthen his skull like a corn cob).\n\n_A howler monkey...?_\n\nSuddenly the door curtain was ripped aside and the royal guards burst in to investigate the noise. They filled the tiny room. Lord 6-Dog quickly composed himself and signaled to them that all was well.\n\nThen it occurred to him that perhaps all was _not_ well.\n\nAs soon as the guards had gone, he examined himself all over, looking for monkey fur. Only when he was sure that his muscular body was still as smooth as a turtle shell did he start to relax.\n\n_But a howler monkey...?_\n\nIt was unthinkable.\n\nHe was the famous Lord 6-Dog\u2014most powerful king, most fearless warrior, most handsome hero of the mighty Maya. Yet in his dream, he'd been an ugly, stinking, flea-infested monkey. How could it be?\n\nWhat did it mean?\n\nLike all his people, Lord 6-Dog took dreams very seriously. But this one was unthinkable. How could a king become a lowly monkey? If dreams were messages from the gods, surely this one had gone astray in the cosmic sorting office....\n\nThen again, perhaps it was _not_ the gods who'd sent this dream.\n\nOnly yesterday, Lord 6-Dog's advisers had warned him about the growing powers of his twin brother, Tzelek. It was no secret that Tzelek coveted the throne\u2014and, as a high priest, he was an accomplished sorcerer. Could he have sent this dream?\n\nLord 6-Dog sighed. It seemed that his advisers were always warning him about something. If it wasn't the machinations of Tzelek, it was a challenge from another city-state or some impending natural disaster. One court astrologer had even foreseen the fall of the whole Maya civilization.\n\nNo wonder everyone was jumpy.\n\nVowing never to tell another soul about his dream, Lord 6-Dog rubbed his heavy-lidded eyes, blew his huge hooked nose, and went outside for some air.\n\nThe royal sleeping quarters were at the top of the palace, and he could see for miles from the terrace outside his rooms. All around him, the silhouettes of other pyramids rose out of the jungle. Facing him, across the plaza, loomed the massive temple where his father, Lord Punak Ha, was buried. And below him, still and quiet, lay the beautiful city of Itzamna, jewel of the Monkey River. Its citizens slept peacefully tonight, trusting the young king they worshipped as a living god to protect them from all misfortune.\n\nLord 6-Dog shivered, even though the night was warm.\n\nStars were twinkling in the jungle sky, and a big round moon was shining down. It reminded him of another night, long ago, when he'd stood on this very spot with his mother, Lady Kan Kakaw. She'd been pointing out the image of a leaping rabbit on the surface of the moon, but little 6-Dog couldn't see it. He'd said it looked like the face of a man to him. How his mother had laughed and kissed him.\n\nHe smiled at the memory. It was a long time since he'd seen his mother happy. Since the death of his father, she'd turned into a bad-tempered old woman who never had a kind word for anyone.\n\nAs if on cue, her angry voice interrupted his reverie. \"Where's that idiot son of mine?\"\n\nLady Kan Kakaw came running out onto the terrace, flaming torch in hand, four long gray braids flying behind her. She slapped her son hard on the head. \"That's for waking me with your screaming.\"\n\n\"I am sorry if I disturbed thee, Mother,\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"'I am sorry if I disturbed thee, Mother,'\" she mimicked in a singsong voice. \"Why must you talk in that old-fashioned way?\"\n\n\"I believe it is fitting for a king to use the language of his ancestors.\"\n\n\"You sound ridiculous.\"\n\n\"So thou art always telling me.\"\n\n\"You young people don't know how lucky you are. In my day, children were seen and not heard.\"\n\n\"I am not a child, Mother. I am nineteen years old.\"\n\nShe peered at him. \"Nineteen already? Is it really five years since your father was taken from us?\"\n\nHe braced himself for her usual speech about how he wasn't fit to lick his father's jaguar-skin sandals. But tonight she seemed distracted. She was just staring out across the moonlit valley, as if mesmerized by the rustling of the treetops and the screeching of the monkeys in the jungle.\n\n\"Is something out there, Mother?\" he asked.\n\n\"Of course not!\" she said, a little too quickly.\n\nHe tried to follow her gaze, but her crossed eyes made it impossible. (Crossed eyes were a sign of beauty, and his mother's eyes had been trained to focus inward by hanging a bead between them when she was a baby.) \"Thou art lying, Mother. What dost thou look at? I command thee to tell me!\"\n\n\"There's nothing to tell.\"\n\n\"Speak\u2014or I will bid Tzelek to rip out thine old heart in one of his rituals.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't dare,\" she said.\n\nLord 6-Dog suppressed a smile. He drew himself up to his full height and tried to look frightening. \"Art thou sure, Mother? The day of 12-Blade approaches, and the people expect a human sacrifice. They would be most impressed if the chosen one were of royal blood. Thine image would be painted on souvenir plates, the poets would write odes in thy memory... unless, of course, thou hast something to tell me, old woman?\"\n\nShe gaped in disbelief. \"How dare you speak to your mother that way?\"\n\n\"I am the mighty Lord 6-Dog. I will speak to thee any way I wish.\"\n\n\"Even you are not mightier than the gods, 6-Dog, and tonight I have found favor with them. Treat me with respect, or you may feel their wrath.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog inspected his mother more closely. There was something different about her tonight. She seemed younger, happier, almost girlish.\n\n\"What nonsense has filled thy deluded old head?\"\n\n\"Oh, I am not deluded. For tonight, the gods blessed me with the most wonderful dream. In fact, before you so rudely awakened me, I was happy for the first time since your father died.\"\n\nTo her son's amazement, the old woman began to whirl around like a temple dancer, her crossed little eyes as bright as two shiny cocoa beans.\n\n\"I dreamed I was a howler monkey,\" she intoned, as if in a trance. \"I was swinging through the trees as free as a bird.... I was sucking on wild plums and spitting out the stones.... I was picking lice off my head and eating them.\" She paused theatrically. \"And I loved every moment of it!\"\n\nShe registered the horror on her son's face, and her performance ended abruptly. \"It's not something a cold fish like you would understand,\" she said.\n\nIf she had not hung her head at that moment\u2014whether in shame or to hide her happiness\u2014she would have noticed her son's expression change from disgust to fascination.\n\nNow he was the one who was mesmerized.\n\nHe could hear his mother talking in the background. But whatever she was rambling on about could not distract him from the small insect that had landed on her head and was now crawling over her hair.\n\nVery slowly, almost tenderly, he leaned over and picked it off.\n\nThen, before he knew what he was doing, the mighty Lord 6-Dog opened his mouth and popped it in.\n\n# Chapter One  \nBAD NEWS\n\nAll was quiet.\n\nSuddenly a flock of parrots exploded from the trees, shrieking and squawking, and three men burst out of the rainforest. One of them pushed a hostage, a young girl, in front of him. The other two shot at anything and everything as they ran across the clearing toward the steps of the pyramid.\n\nThe noise was terrifying\u2014guns shooting, men shouting, birds screeching\u2014but Max tried to stay calm, waiting for the right moment. He knew he would only get one chance. And, armed with only a blowgun, he also knew the odds were against him.\n\nIn the end, it happened so quickly that he hardly had time to think.\n\nJust as the men reached the bottom step, something caught their attention high above Max's head, and they stopped to blitz the treetops with bullets. He crouched behind a log, not daring to breathe, as leaves and twigs exploded and rained down onto the forest floor. An animal shrieked and fell through the branches, landing with a thud somewhere behind him.\n\nIt was now or never.\n\nAdrenaline pumped through his veins as he fired his three darts in quick succession.\n\n_Yes! Yes! No!_\n\nHe'd hit the hostage\u2014again.\n\nGAME OVER.\n\nMax threw down the controller in disgust.\n\nWhat was he doing wrong? He'd jumped over the massive tree roots, sidestepped the boa constrictor sleeping in the leaf pile, bypassed the battalion of army ants, and outswum the hungry crocodiles that lurked under the surface of the river. He'd got everything right, but he still couldn't get past this level.\n\nAnd what was that cross-eyed monkey trying to tell him?\n\nHe grabbed the case and scrutinized the small print. Nope, definitely nothing about cross-eyed monkeys. In fact, no rules at all.\n\nStupid game.\n\nWhere had it come from anyway? It was just lying on his bed when he came home. The case looked new, but it smelled musty, like the gym lockers at school.\n\nAs Max's hand reached for the controller again, a vacuum cleaner roared into life outside his door. No one could shoot a blowgun with that racket going on. He decided to go downstairs for a snack.\n\nOn the landing, he stepped around Zia, the housekeeper and wielder of the vacuum. As usual, she didn't look at him. Or maybe she did. It was hard to tell. Max had never seen her eyes because she wore heavy black sunglasses, even on the grayest of days. In her fist, she carried a crumpled handkerchief to wipe away the tears that often rolled down her cheeks. Max's mother said it was dust allergies and not to mention it. ( _A housekeeper with dust allergies\u2014just what you need_ , thought Max.)\n\nZia had lived with Max's family for as long as he could remember. She rarely spoke, except to discuss household matters with his mother or to whisper in some strange language on the phone. She was just someone who cooked and cleaned and slept in the room over the garage. She never sat with the family or ate with them, and Max was so used to her snuffling around the house that he hardly registered her existence.\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs, he paused by the hallway mirror to check out his hair. (He was trying to grow it, and he'd got into the habit of reviewing its progress in every reflective surface he passed.) He combed his bangs with his fingers and struck a moody pose. His hair was over his ears now, he noted with satisfaction, straight and shiny, the color of roasted chestnuts.\n\nMax called it brown.\n\nThe kids at school called it red.\n\nIt came from his father and all the Irish Murphys before him, with their pale blue eyes and invisible eyelashes. Max had inherited his Italian mother's dark eyes and, one of these days, he intended to dye his hair black and disown the Irish gene altogether.\n\nHe slunk into the kitchen and opened the fridge in search of food.\n\nNothing.\n\nJust a huge dish of Zia's homemade tamales, and he'd rather starve than eat one of them. He'd tried one once, just once, and the memory still made him feel nauseous. They'd looked so tempting, wrapped in their corn husks and tied up with twine like a row of little surprise presents.\n\n_Yeah, the worst surprise of your life_ , thought Max. He'd sunk his teeth into the greasy dough, and the sticky filling had expanded in his mouth like insulation foam. He'd only just reached the sink in time. The worst thing was that Zia had witnessed the whole thing.\n\nCome to think of it, that was possibly why she didn't speak to him.\n\nMax's mother said he was a picky eater. But she was from Venice, Italy, where the local specialty was boiled tripe. Tripe! The stomach lining of a cow! Why would anyone eat tripe in the country that invented pizza?\n\nTripe aside, Max's Italian grandmother\u2014Nonna\u2014was a fantastic cook. And as soon as school finished for the summer, Max and his parents were flying to Italy to see her for a long vacation. In a couple of weeks' time, he'd be eating Nonna's pizza, the dough thin and crisp and chewy all at the same time, homemade tomato sauce, bubbling mozzarella...\n\nMax was still daydreaming about pizza when the back door flew open and his parents, Frank and Carla Murphy, burst in.\n\n\"Mom... Dad... what are you doing here?\"\n\nIt was only fiveish, and they never came home before seven. They were archaeology professors at Harvard\u2014specialist subject, the ancient Maya. It seemed ironic to Max that his parents spent all their waking hours with people who'd been dead as dodos for a thousand years, and neglected him, their own living, breathing son.\n\nBut this was a big year for Maya studies.\n\nMax usually zoned out when his parents talked about work, but even he knew that the Maya calendar, which had counted the days since the world began, was supposed to be coming to an end. The Internet was buzzing with theories about comets and volcanoes and spacemen and tidal waves and polar shifts caused by planetary alignments predicted by the Maya centuries ago.\n\nHis father said it was all hogwash.\n\nBut then, his father could talk for hours about how people should do their own research rather than believing everything they read on the Internet.\n\nMax thought this attitude was shortsighted.\n\nArchaeologists should be pleased to have so many people blogging and spreading crazy rumors about the Maya. At least they were the center of attention for once. The rest of the time, they bored everyone stiff.\n\nAfter all, what had the Maya ever given the world?\n\nNo mummies, no gladiators, no Olympic Games.\n\nJust some tumbledown pyramids and a few old pots.\n\nYet Max's parents couldn't get enough of them.\n\nHis father seemed to prefer the ancient world, full stop.\n\nEven his clothes were ancient. He'd worn the same hideous beige safari jacket for as long as Max could remember. It was covered in pockets, more pockets than any normal person could ever need, and every pocket bulged with notebooks and leaking pens. Add to this a thinning ponytail and a frizzy red beard, and Max wondered if his father ever glanced in the mirror at all. He seemed to have no interest in how he looked. He was always lost in the past, too preoccupied\u2014Max assumed\u2014with the ancient Maya to spare a thought for his appearance.\n\nHis mother went too far the other way. She wouldn't leave the house without lipstick and she ironed creases down the front of her jeans. Max supposed it was an Italian thing.\n\n_\"Ciao, bambino,\"_ she said now, attempting to plant a kiss on his cheek. \"How was your day? Did you like your new video game?\"\n\n\" _Pyramid of Peril_? It's a piece of junk.\"\n\nThe smile faded on his mother's face.\n\n\"It smells bad,\" Max explained. \"And the rules are missing. Where did it come from?\"\n\n\"Zia found it,\" said his mother. \"In a yard sale, I think.\"\n\nMax wrinkled his nose. \"That explains the musty smell.\"\n\n\"There's gratitude for you,\" said his father.\n\n\"It's just that my friends get the new limited edition _Hellhounds 3-D_ , and I get garbage from a yard sale,\" protested Max.\n\n\"I'm not interested in what your friends get or don't get,\" said his father. \"You all spend far too much time playing silly games and sending cretinous messages to each other on Face Space\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not called\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care what it's called. It's a waste of time.\"\n\nMax's mother rubbed her temples as if she had a headache. \"You know, Frank, perhaps we should order this\"\u2014she paused, wincing in distaste at the title\u2014\"Hellhounds game\"\u2014she pronounced it in the Italian way, _'Ell 'Oundz_ , which made it sound a bit more sophisticated\u2014\"to keep him busy while we're away.\"\n\n\"Shopping is not the answer, Carla,\" said his father. \"He needs to learn to make his own entertainment.\"\n\n\"I just thought, with this trip and everything...,\" said his mother defensively.\n\n\"What trip?\" said Max. \"Do you mean Italy?\"\n\n\"No, _bambino_ ,\" his mother said with a sigh. \"We need to talk to you. Something's come up... a dig.... It's very important.... The permits just came through today....\"\n\n\"A dig?\" echoed Max dully. \"When do you go?\"\n\n\"We leave in a few hours' time,\" said his father, trying to hide his excitement.\n\n\"Tonight?\" wailed Max. \"For how long?\"\n\n\"We're... um... we're not sure,\" said his father.\n\n\"But what about the end-of-year concert? My drum solo?\"\n\nHis mother put an arm around him. \"I'm sorry, _bambino_. We'll ask one of the other parents to record it, and we'll watch it when we get back....\"\n\nMax shook off her arm.\n\n\"You're the worst parents in the world!\" he said. \"You've missed every single performance of the school band! You promised you'd come to the end-of-year concert. I've been rehearsing for weeks....\"\n\n\"Calm down, Max,\" said his father. \"It's out of our control. We didn't plan for this to happen. We said we're sorry.\"\n\nHe didn't sound sorry.\n\n\"Can't you wait a couple of weeks?\" Max pleaded. \"Then you could come to my concert and I could come on your dig.\"\n\n\"Not possible,\" said his father. \"These permits are like gold dust. They could be revoked at any moment, and we won't get another chance.\"\n\n\"So where is this dig?\" asked Max sulkily.\n\n\"San Xavier,\" said his father.\n\n\"San Xavier?\" Max sounded outraged. \"But that's where you grew up! You said you'd take me there one day.\"\n\n\"Not this time,\" said his father firmly. \"This trip is work. Hard work.\"\n\n\"But...\"\n\n\"The answer's no, Max.\"\n\n\"Well, just hurry back,\" said Max sadly, \"so we can go to Italy.\"\n\nNeither parent replied.\n\nHis father looked at his watch.\n\nHis mother adjusted the gold hoops in her ears.\n\nWhy wouldn't they look at him?\n\n\"We _are_ still going to Italy, aren't we?\" he asked anxiously.\n\nThere was another moment's silence, and then his father said, \"It looks like we'll have to take a rain check, Max.\" He seemed oblivious to his son's disappointment. \"Let's face it,\" he continued in a cheery tone, \"you're getting a bit old for family vacations. You teenagers want to be with friends your own age, not boring old folks like us. Am I right?\"\n\nMax said nothing.\n\nHis mother read his thoughts. \"I was looking forward to Italy, too, _bambino_ ,\" she said. \"I promise we wouldn't do this if it wasn't very important.\"\n\n_Some people think their kids are important_ , thought Max.\n\nHe tried to look as if he didn't care. He opened the fridge, took out the milk, and gulped it down straight from the carton.\n\n\"Massimo!\" roared his mother. \"Use a glass!\"\n\n_Massimo_ was the name on Max's birth certificate.\n\nAnd there were more.\n\nMassimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy.\n\nLuckily, he'd always been called Max for short, and no one, except his family in Italy and his mother when she was angry, ever called him Massimo.\n\nHe wiped his mouth with the back of his hand\u2014\"Massimo! Use a napkin!\"\u2014and replaced the milk. Then he slammed the fridge door hard enough to make the cans and bottles rattle inside, and gave it a little kick.\n\nHis father raised an eyebrow. \"Very mature,\" he said.\n\n\"What do you expect?\" asked Max.\n\n\"I expect you to think about someone besides yourself for once,\" replied his father. \"We've already explained that we didn't plan on this, but there's no alternative. I've drawn up a full list of activities to make sure you spend your time productively when school ends.\"\n\nHe took a piece of paper out of one of his many pockets, unfolded it, and handed it to Max.\n\n\"'Weeding the yard, painting the fence, washing the windows...,'\" read Max, with mounting outrage. \"When do I get to have any fun?\"\n\n\"I've also included sports activities,\" said his father, \"like running five miles a day, and tennis lessons twice a week.\"\n\n\"What about the things _I_ like to do?\" protested Max.\n\n\"I don't want you frittering away the summer playing video games. It's not healthy, Max. When I was your age, I was outdoors all the time, climbing trees, exploring ruins, swimming in water holes....\"\n\n\"But we live in the middle of Boston,\" Max protested. \"You grew up in the jungle.\"\n\n\"That's right. No shopping malls, no movie theaters, but my brother and I had a fine old time, let me tell you.\"\n\n\"If you had such a fine old time, how come you and Uncle Ted don't speak to each other anymore?\"\n\n\"Massimo! Don't be cheeky!\"\n\n\"As a matter of a fact,\" said his father, \"we'll be staying with my brother for a couple of nights when we get to San Xavier.\"\n\n\"Really? So you're friends again?\"\n\nHis father ignored the question. \"I've made a chart for you to keep track of your progress, so you can monitor your achievements.\"\n\n\"I can't believe this! It's going to be the worst summer ever.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, Max! It can do a fourteen-year-old boy a world of good to be thrown back on his inner resources once in a while\u2014\"\n\n\"But Dad, it takes a lot of inner resources to play _Hellhounds 3-D_ \u2014\"\n\n\"Enough!\" said his father. \"Haven't you got homework to do?\"\n\nMax stomped up to his room and slammed the door. Then he grabbed his iPod, turned his current favorites\u2014the Plague Rats\u2014up to full volume, and threw himself on the bed, fuming with rage.\n\nAfter a while, his mother came in with pizza. She tried to talk to him, but her voice could not compete with the throbbing bass in his ears. Max lay there, nodding along to his music and staring at her blankly.\n\nThere were tears in her eyes as she left the room.\n\n_Serves her right_ , he thought. _She wanted to go to Italy as much as I did. She should stand up to Dad and tell him that his own family's more important than the stupid Maya_.\n\nMax opened the pizza box. Pepperoni Supreme with extra cheese\u2014his favorite. As he gobbled it down, he thought about Italy. Dinners under the orange trees with everyone crammed around one long table... playing pickup soccer games in the piazza... wandering around Venice with his cousins... eating gelato at night in Saint Mark's Square... feeling part of one big happy family.\n\nHe sighed.\n\nBoston was dead in the summer. All his friends would be at camp or away on vacation. To be stuck here with Zia was the pits.\n\nThe next minute, his father was pulling off Max's headphones.\n\n\"I said the taxi's here,\" he yelled. \"Time to go!\"\n\nMax's mother ran in, looking frazzled. \"I'll call or e-mail as soon as I can,\" she said, \"but it's like the Stone Age in San Xavier, so don't worry if you don't hear from us right away.\" She felt his forehead. \"Are you all right, _bambino_? You look pale.\"\n\n\"Of course he looks pale,\" snapped his father. \"He spends his whole life in his room! There's nothing wrong with him that a bit of healthy exercise won't cure. I'm sorry you're not happy, Max, but we can't always get what we want.\"\n\n_You always get what you want_ , thought Max.\n\n\"Remember to wear a hat in the sun\u2014with your fair skin, you have to be careful,\" said his mother, bending to kiss him.\n\nFor once, he didn't duck away.\n\n\"You be careful, too, Mom,\" he said.\n\nA tear rolled down her face.\n\n\"Oh, for Pete's sake,\" said his father. \"Don't do this, Max.\"\n\n\"What am _I_ doing? You're the one who's walking out on his only child.\"\n\n\"You're fourteen,\" said his father, \"hardly a child. There were ancient Maya kings younger than you.\"\n\nOutside, the taxi was revving its motor.\n\n\"Remember to floss twice a day, _bambino_....\"\n\n\"Come _on_ , Carla,\" said his father. \"Zia will look after him. We need to go.\"\n\nAs her husband chivvied her out the door, Max's mother turned back. \"Look up at the moon rabbit, Max, and I'll be looking at it, too. I love you....\"\n\nAnd then they were gone.\n\nThe moon rabbit?\n\nIt sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it....\n\nAnd then it came to him.\n\nIt was an evening long ago. He was sitting on the window seat over there, and his mother was pointing up at the night sky. \"We see the man in the moon,\" she was saying, \"but ancient Maya children saw a leaping rabbit, the pet of the moon goddess.\"\n\nAfter that, little Max had waved to the moon rabbit every night.\n\nBig Max cringed at the memory and went back to thinking about the injustice of the day's events. He was still slightly in shock. This was definitely the worst thing his parents had ever done. And he couldn't believe he'd let them leave without buying him _Hellhounds 3-D_. If only he hadn't wasted so much time being angry. Kicking the fridge was definitely not cool.\n\nHis mother said he got his temper from the hotheaded Irish Murphys. His father said it was her Italian blood that made Max so temperamental.\n\nEither way, he reflected, everything was his parents' fault.\n\nEverything.\n\nHe fixed himself a big bowl of ice cream with fudge sauce and took it into the sitting room to find something unsuitable to watch on TV.\n\nThere was still no sign of Zia. Yet, as he rooted under the sofa cushions for the remote, he felt he was being watched.\n\nHe looked around the room. His mother's prized collection of ancient Maya sculptures looked back at him. Usually these little pottery figures blended into the wallpaper, but tonight they seemed to be perched on the edges of their shelves, following his every move with their hollow clay eyes.\n\nHe slumped down so they couldn't see him anymore. He was still slumped on the sofa watching rock videos when Zia marched in at midnight and switched off the TV.\n\nWhen he didn't move right away, she reached behind him, pulled out the cushion he'd been leaning on, and started beating it furiously. Max got the impression she'd like to beat him as well, so he meekly went upstairs.\n\nHe could still hear her beating up cushions when he got into bed and switched out the light. _It's going to be a long summer_ , he thought.\n\nNext morning, Friday, Max awoke to the smell of bacon frying. Instead of the usual cold cereal, he found a cooked breakfast waiting for him in the kitchen. When he came home from school, a cheeseburger and a piece of homemade blueberry pie were set out on a tray. He was about to take it upstairs, when he heard a familiar snuffle from the sitting room.\n\n\"Zia!\" he called. \"Zia! I'm home!\"\n\nShe didn't hear him. She was kneeling down with her back to him. She'd arranged some of his mother's Maya figurines like an audience in front of her. On the floor between Zia and the figurines, there was something on the carpet. Pebbles, maybe, and bits of yellow corn. She looked like a little girl playing with dolls. Was she trying to feed the statues? Had she lost her mind?\n\n\"Zia!\" he shouted. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nShe jumped at the sound of his voice, but she didn't turn around. With trembling hands, she gathered up the bits on the carpet and stuffed them into her apron pocket. Then she pulled out a duster from her other pocket and started wiping the figurines. \"I clean!\" she said, nodding at him. \"You eat!\"\n\nShe was the weirdest housekeeper in Boston, all right.\n\nFor the rest of the weekend, Max lay around playing video games, chatting with his friends online, practicing for his upcoming drum solo, and gelling his hair into spikes.\n\nA vague sense of unease was growing at the back of his mind.\n\nHe knew his mother had said not to worry if he didn't hear from them, but he couldn't shake off the feeling that something was wrong.\n\nThe days went by.\n\nOn the Friday morning a week and a day since his parents had left, he came down to a breakfast of cold cereal and an e-ticket to San Xavier with his name on it. The flight was departing in a few hours' time.\n\n\"Zia!\" he yelled.\n\nShe walked calmly into the kitchen with an armful of laundry.\n\nHe waved the piece of paper at her.\n\n\"What's this, Zia? Where did it come from?\"\n\n\"They tell me to buy it,\" she said. \"They say you must go there.\"\n\n\"They? Who's they? My parents? They want me to go to San Xavier? But why? What else did they say?\"\n\n\"They say you are special,\" said Zia with a shrug, as if this was the most baffling statement she had ever heard.\n\nShe'd even packed a backpack for him.\n\n\"But what about the last week of school? The concert? My drum solo?\"\n\n\"Go!\" she said. \"You must not keep them waiting.\"\n\n# Chapter Two  \nTHE CURSE OF THE MAYA\n\nTorrential rain beat against the windows of the small plane as it rolled to a stop. Max wiped away the condensation and peered out. Water was streaming in waves over the runway. It wasn't exactly dry land, but he was glad to be on it. It had been a bumpy ride.\n\n\"Welcome to San Xavier City,\" said the pilot glumly. \"The local temperature is ninety-five degrees and the forecast is for rain.\"\n\nAt least English was the official language here, thanks to some British pirates who'd settled this coast three hundred years ago and eventually laid claim to the whole country. Before them, the Spanish had ruled San Xavier. And before them, it had been home to the ancient Maya, whose kingdoms had stretched across Central America from the Caribbean to the Pacific.\n\nMax had learned all this\u2014plus more than he wanted to know about the ancient Maya enthusiasm for human sacrifice\u2014from the in-flight magazine.\n\nHe'd only picked it up because his iPod had run out of juice. But what an eye-opening read it had been.\n\nHe'd leafed through the magazine eagerly, looking for photos of luxury hotels on palm-fringed beaches. But all he'd found were blurry old snapshots of ruined temples and gloomy caves, plus the occasional artist's gory impression of a sacrifice or a bloodletting in progress.\n\nEven the article on flora and fauna was unnerving.\n\nIt seemed that all the biggest, nastiest, ugliest insects in the world had chosen to live in San Xavier. Max was particularly daunted by the picture of a hairy brown spider as big as a dinner plate. And how could such a small country be home to so many species of poisonous snakes?\n\nThe San Xavier tourist board certainly had its work cut out.\n\nBut here he was.\n\nAnd even San Xavier had to be better than a summer in Boston, washing windows.\n\nMax's only luggage was the backpack Zia had packed for him. He pulled it down from the overhead bin and shuffled along the narrow aisle toward the door. Most of the other passengers stayed in their seats, glumly watching as the ground crew pushed a set of rusty steps across the tarmac through the blowing rain.\n\nNo one else seemed keen to disembark, and Max was first in line when the steward swung open the door. It was like standing behind a waterfall. The roar of the rain was deafening, and the wet wind blew in a thick, musty smell of earth and decaying plants.\n\nMax hesitated, savoring his final moment of being dry before ducking into the torrent. By the time he reached the little terminal building, he was literally soaked to the skin. He couldn't have been wetter if he'd been sitting in a bathtub.\n\nAs the official at the immigration desk studied his passport, a puddle formed around Max's feet. Eventually, the official put down the passport, leaned back in his chair, and stared at Max.\n\nAs Max looked back at him, he realized that the man seemed familiar. Where had he seen that high forehead, those heavy-lidded eyes, that huge nose before? Then it hit him. This guy was the embodiment of one of his mother's Maya figurines. Max glanced around the terminal. And there they all were. Behind desks, in lines, slumped in chairs, leaning against walls. Wherever he looked, faces from ancient history stared back.\n\nAnd they didn't look entirely friendly.\n\nThe official's voice, when it finally came, made Max jump.\n\n\"Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" said Max, cringing to hear his full name spoken out loud.\n\n\"What brings you to San Xavier?\"\n\n\"I'm here to meet my parents.\"\n\n\"Ah, the famous Frank and Carla Murphy.\"\n\n\"You know them?\"\n\n\"I know of them.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"It means that your parents make life difficult for government officials like myself. They ignore our warnings. They think they are above such things.\"\n\nThis was news to Max. He'd always thought his parents were the most boringly upright and law-abiding citizens on the planet.\n\n\"Have they done something wrong?\"\n\n\"Tell them from me,\" said the official, as he cracked his knuckles menacingly, \"that they are not welcome here. They may have procured the necessary permits\"\u2014he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together to suggest a bribe\u2014\"but some things are better left alone.\"\n\nA chill ran down Max's spine. The official's eyes were as cold and hard as flint. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine him conducting a human sacrifice.\n\nAt last, Max's passport was stamped.\n\n\"Take care,\" said the official as he handed it back. It sounded more like a threat than a friendly farewell.\n\nMax walked into the arrivals hall. It was a sea of people, noise, and color. He scanned the faces of the waiting throng expectantly. Somewhere in there, his mother would be waving and calling to him\u2014\"Over here, _bambino_ , over here!\"\n\nWhy couldn't he see her? Both his parents were taller than most of the locals who crushed around the barriers. He looked again more slowly.\n\nHis confident smile faded.\n\nIt was unbelievable. Here he was, ready to make a fresh start by a hotel swimming pool\u2014but where were they?\n\nThey were late.\n\nLate for the big reunion scene.\n\nIt was the last straw.\n\nAll Max's feelings of forgiveness evaporated. First his parents abandoned him, then they made him fly two thousand miles on a rickety plane to some snake-infested dump in the rainy season, and then they couldn't even be bothered to pick him up on time.\n\nThrough a gap in the crowd, he noticed a wiry, nervous-looking little man, no bigger than a child, trying to make eye contact with him. Max looked away, but out of the corner of his eye, he was horrified to see the little man darting over.\n\n\"Mister Max?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I am Oscar Poot, head of the Maya Foundation here in San Xavier City, and I have the privilege to work with the great Frank and Carla Murphy.\"\n\n\"Where are they?\" asked Max, returning Oscar's handshake distractedly.\n\n\"I am sorry, but they could not come.\"\n\n\"Why not? Too busy with work, I suppose?\"\n\nOscar nodded. \"You must feel very proud of them.\"\n\nWhat Max actually felt was like he'd been kicked in the stomach. His parents were off somewhere with their beloved ancient Maya and, once again, he was on his own.\n\n\"Where are they?\"\n\n\"I last spoke to them four days ago, on the satellite phone. They were at the Temple of Ixchel.\" Oscar said the name slowly, and the way he pronounced it, _each-shell_ , reminded Max of the wind that whistled every time the terminal doors were opened and of the angry rain that lashed the windows. \"It's in the north, a remote site, Late Classic....\"\n\n\"So when will they be back?\"\n\n\"I do not know,\" said Oscar. \"There was a big storm and we have lost contact. Communications often fail in the jungle, especially in bad weather.\"\n\n\"But they're all right?\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't they be?\"\n\n\"The immigration guy said\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me guess. He told you that Frank and Carla are mixed up in something dangerous?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\n\"People in San Xavier have overactive imaginations. It comes from living with so much history.\" He picked up Max's backpack. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Where to?\"\n\n\"You are to stay with your uncle, Mister Theodore Murphy.\"\n\n\"Uncle Ted?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Is it far?\"\n\n\"To the bus station? Five minutes.\"\n\n\"To my uncle's house?\"\n\n\"It is over the mountains, but only a day by bus.\" Oscar turned up the collar of his jacket. \"Are you ready to run?\"\n\nHis car was parked just a short sprint from the terminal doors, but the rain was so fierce that once again Max got soaked.\n\n\"How do you like this weather?\" Oscar gestured at the dark gray sky as he tried to start up the engine of his battered little car. \"It is most unusual for the time of year. Even the old people say they have never seen anything like it.\"\n\nIt was not much drier inside the car. Max's window refused to roll all the way up, and his face was stung by the rain that pelted in through the gap. His feet were sitting in a pool of water at least three inches deep.\n\nHe was still groping for a nonexistent seat belt as they roared off into the rain, narrowly missing a collision with an airport fuel tanker. The stubby wipers struggled to cope with the volume of water, and Max wondered how Oscar could see anything at all as he wove crazily through the traffic.\n\n\"Are you hungry?\" asked Oscar, as he swerved into oncoming traffic to avoid a large pothole.\n\nMax considered the question. His primary emotion right now was terror at Oscar's driving. Next to that, he was wet, tired, and confused. But underneath it all, he was amazed to detect the ever-present flicker of hunger.\n\nA short time later, they were seated at a rickety table in the bus station caf\u00e9.\n\nMax looked around in distaste. It was the least appetizing eating place he'd ever seen. There was no counter or bar, just a small, low-ceilinged room containing a few ill-matched tables and chairs. The walls were yellowed with cigarette smoke and sticky with grease. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, illuminating the cockroaches that scuttled across the dirty floor. Max tried not to think about the class on food hygiene he'd taken last term.\n\nAn ancient waitress in bright red lipstick, a miniskirt, and carpet slippers made her way over. Max looked at the silvery gray roots of her stringy blond hair as she flicked the crumbs off the table and onto the floor. _She looks like Madonna's great-great-grandmother_ , he thought.\n\nWhile Oscar ordered the daily special for both of them, Max tried to dry himself off with some paper napkins. He noticed that he'd already acquired several nasty insect bites on his arms.\n\nWhen the waitress had shuffled back with their drinks (a glass of evil-smelling fizzy brown liquid masquerading as Coke for Max, a glass of rum for Oscar), Oscar proposed a toast.\n\n\"To your parents,\" he said.\n\nMax didn't even bother to raise his glass.\n\n\"Where does Uncle Ted live?\" he asked.\n\nOscar looked surprised that Max hadn't joined in the toast. It was evident from his expression that he liked the parents a lot more than the son. \"Your uncle runs a banana business near Puerto Muerto,\" he said, a little coolly.\n\n\"Puerto Muerto? 'Dead Port'?\" Spanish was one of Max's least favorite subjects at school, but a few words had seeped into his brain. \"What kind of name is that?\"\n\n\"It is called Puerto because it is an old Spanish port at the mouth of the Monkey River. And it is called Muerto for many reasons....\"\n\nMax wished he'd never asked. \"I'm starving,\" he said. \"I hope the food comes soon.\"\n\nBut Oscar was warming to his theme. \"The port was built for the logwood trade. Do they teach you about logwood?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Max, \"but it doesn't matter. I'm not really\u2014\"\n\nOscar launched into his story anyway.\n\n\"Logwood contained a red dye that was highly prized in seventeenth-century Europe. The trees were felled upriver and floated down to the port, so the water flowed as red as blood. It carried with it the bodies of Maya slaves who died in the logging camps.\"\n\n\"So it's called Puerto Muerto for the dead slaves,\" Max guessed, hoping to put an end to the story.\n\nBut Oscar had not finished. \"It was not just logwood the Spanish stole from us. Every day, they loaded plunder onto their galleons....\"\n\nMax became aware that other diners were straining to overhear.\n\n\"Could you talk a little quieter?\" he whispered. \"People are looking.\"\n\n\"One day,\" proclaimed Oscar, louder than ever, \"a sea chest waiting on the dock bore the crest of Friar Diego de Landa.\" He pronounced the name with great force and infused hatred into every syllable.\n\nMax looked blank.\n\n\"You have not heard of him?\" asked Oscar, in disbelief.\n\n\"Shh,\" begged Max, conscious that all eyes were on them.\n\nBut Oscar was in full flow. \"Diego de Landa was the curse of the Maya. He tortured us, he burned our books, he told the world we were savages.\"\n\nThere was a murmur of assent from the diners.\n\n\"The food's taking a long time,\" said Max, looking pointedly at the old waitress, who'd pulled up a chair nearby.\n\nOscar made a dismissive gesture, as if food was the last thing on his mind. \"Among the ill-gotten gains in Landa's sea chest were two of our five sacred Jaguar Stones.\"\n\nAn ominous whisper went around the restaurant. It reminded Max of a zombie movie he'd seen on late-night TV, where the zombies chanted in unison like, well, zombies, as they moved in, blank-faced, for the kill. The diners' whispering sounded like _\"bah lawm toon oh ob, bah lawm toon oh ob, bah lawm toon oh ob_ , _\"_ and whatever it meant, it sent shivers down Max's spine.\n\n\"What are they saying?\" he asked.\n\n_\"Bahlamtuuno'ob_ ,\" said Oscar. \"It means 'Jaguar Stones.'\"\n\n\"What are Jaguar Stones?\"\n\n\"They are your father's life's work. The five sacred stones and the five sacred pyramids. He is probably the world expert on the subject.\"\n\nMax tried to suppress a yawn.\n\n\"He has not mentioned that to you? That is so typical of your father. He is a genius and yet so modest. Do you know how lucky you are to have such brilliant parents? They are such a wonderful couple, and both so talented\u2014\"\n\nMax was not in the mood to sing his parents' praises. \"So what happened when this Landa guy got the stones back to Spain?\" he asked, to change the subject.\n\nOscar launched back into his tale. \"The ship was lost at sea. The _Espada_ , as it was called, set sail for Cadiz on a perfect day and was never seen again. Some think it was dragged down to the underworld by the weight of the sacred stones. Others think it hit a reef and sank. Who knows? No trace of the galleon or the sea chest has ever been found.\"\n\n\"So the Jaguar Stones were lost forever?\"\n\n\"And with them, my people's future.\" Oscar reached for his rum. \"It was hope that died at Puerto Muerto.\"\n\n\"Things can't be that bad,\" said Max, unmoved. \"Didn't you say there were five Jaguar Stones? What about the other three?\"\n\n\"Lost, all lost.\" Oscar sighed, draining his glass.\n\nHis face brightened as the waitress set down two steaming plates. \"Mmm,\" he murmured, \"who doesn't like tamales?\"\n\n_The revenge of Zia_ , thought Max.\n\nTamales, it turned out, were quite a favorite in San Xavier. There were at least three tamale stands in the bus station, adding their distinctive moldy aroma to the already toxic mixture of exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, and sweat.\n\nBut it was the noise that made Max's eyes water.\n\nHorns blared, doors slammed, adults shouted, children wailed, babies screamed, and underneath it all, tinny piped music screeched out from loudspeakers on poles.\n\nA convoy of gaudily painted buses streamed into the flooded parking lot.\n\n\"That one's yours,\" said Oscar, pointing to a rusty pink-and-green-striped bus that was just pulling in. The name Estelly was painted on its side.\n\nMax watched as Estelly disgorged twice as many people as could possibly have fit inside. The conductor, a boy of about twelve, climbed up onto the roof and threw down the wet bags and threadbare cases, letting each land with a muddy splat. At the same time, a barrage of identical pieces was thrown up at him from all sides, as if he were a goalie in some manic soccer practice. Meanwhile, at ground level, a heaving mass of humanity fought to get on board.\n\n\"They sell more tickets than seats, so you will need to push.\" Oscar handed him his ticket and shoved him into the crowd. Before Max could protest or even say good-bye, he was carried along in the throng toward Estelly.\n\nHe fought his way onto the bus and was instantly enveloped in the reek of too many unwashed bodies packed into too small a space. He found a seat at the back and slid in. Moments later, a fat man in a cowboy hat eased in next to him. Max was now pinned against the window, his feet on his backpack and his knees under his chin.\n\nHe became aware of a tapping on the window. He swiveled his gaze and saw Oscar on tiptoes, way down below, gesturing at him to open the window. \"Something for the journey,\" yelled Oscar, trying to make himself heard above the din of the bus station. He passed up a greasy bag of tamales. \"Good-bye, Mister Max. Your uncle will meet you at Puerto Muerto.\"\n\nAs the driver revved the engine, a question sprang into Max's head. \"Oscar,\" he called, \"if you haven't spoken to my parents in four days, who told you to meet me at the airport?\"\n\nOscar strained to hear him, and he repeated the question.\n\nThe little conductor jumped aboard and banged on the side of the bus with his fist. With a blast on the air horn, the driver crashed the gears and splashed out of the parking lot.\n\nMax was sitting stunned in the backseat.\n\nIt had been hard to hear Oscar's reply, but it had definitely sounded like, \"Zia.\"\n\n# Chapter Three  \nPUERTO MUERTO\n\nOscar was right. Hope had died in Puerto Muerto.\n\nThe streets were lined with wooden shacks. Their tin roofs were rusty. Their walls, once gaily painted, were cracked and stained. On nearly every corner was a dimly lit bar where men hunched over empty glasses. Old women in black sat in doorways, but none bothered to look up as the bus went past. Even the scrawny little dogs lay still, their heads on their paws, while flies buzzed halfheartedly around them.\n\nThe bus entered a rubbish-strewn square and, with a final squeal of brakes, skidded to a stop in front of a crumbling cathedral and a statue of some long-forgotten Spanish general on his horse.\n\nHow the mighty had fallen.\n\nOnce the general and his compatriots, their hands stained red with logwood, had built lavish palaces on this square. Once their wives had paraded around it in the latest European fashions.\n\nBut now the looters themselves had been looted.\n\nTheir palaces were scrawled with graffiti and festooned with washing lines. Their cathedral was an empty shell. And their general was just a droppings-encrusted roost for the pigeons that scratched a living in the square.\n\nMax jumped off the bus, took a deep breath\u2014and almost choked. The salty sea air was overpowered by a stench of rotting fish and diesel oil. Still, it felt good to stretch his legs. Actually, given those blind corners on the mountain roads, it felt good to be alive.\n\n_\"Adi\u00f3s, americano,\"_ called the little conductor, as the bus lurched off in a grinding of gears. When the cloud of exhaust smoke cleared, Max was left standing alone. There was no one around except two shifty-looking men on the cathedral steps, who were smoking and watching him like cats watching a mouse.\n\n_Uncle Ted, where are you?_\n\nIf only he'd asked Oscar for his uncle's address or phone number. All Max knew about him was that _Ted_ was short for _Theodore_ , he was Frank Murphy's older brother, and he'd inherited the family banana business. Max didn't even know what Uncle Ted looked like, although he assumed he had Murphy hair.\n\nMindful of the two men watching him, Max tried to look inconspicuous. This worked for approximately five seconds before he was dive-bombed by a swarm of yellow butterflies who had, apparently, never seen a tourist before. They flapped excitedly around him, trying to land on his head, his face, his hands, any piece of exposed skin they could find.\n\nHe was still swatting butterflies when he saw the two men walking toward him. A knife glinted in the sunlight.\n\nMax started to run. A big car rolled into the square and stopped right in front of him. It was a shiny new Mercedes with blackened windows. In that squalid little town, it looked as out of place as an alien spaceship.\n\nThe butterflies took off in a yellow cloud.\n\nThe two men melted into the shadows.\n\nThe door of the Mercedes opened, and the driver slowly got out.\n\nHe looked like the Maya mafia, a block of solid muscle in a black suit, dark sunglasses, and black leather driving gloves. He wasn't that old, but his twenty or so years had obviously been hard-lived. A long scar ran down his face from his high, sloping forehead to the bottom of one ear. His nose looked as if it had been on the losing end of a fight with an iron bar. From his big bull neck to his barrel chest to his tree-trunk legs, every inch of this guy exuded menace. \"Give me your backpack,\" he said.\n\n\"T-t-take it,\" stammered Max. \"Please don't hurt me. My uncle will be here any minute....\"\n\nThe rear door of the Mercedes opened.\n\n\"He's here,\" said a voice that sounded uncannily like Max's father.\n\n\"Uncle Ted?\"\n\nA handsome but slightly haggard man emerged from the backseat. He wore a cream linen suit and a panama hat. A wisp of reddish hair was visible beneath the brim.\n\nHis pale blue eyes regarded Max sadly.\n\n\"You are Massimo, I presume?\"\n\n\"My friends call me Max.\"\n\n\"Massimo, this is Lucky Jim,\" said Uncle Ted, introducing the driver. \"You don't want to get on the wrong side of Lucky. He comes from a long line of fierce Maya warriors.\"\n\nMax swallowed hard. They weren't exactly making him feel welcome. \"Have you heard from Mom and Dad?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" said Uncle Ted. \"I was going to ask you the same question.\" He looked at his watch. \"Please get in the car, I'm late for a meeting.\"\n\nMax slid into the Mercedes. He was stiff and bruised from the bus ride, and his bones sank gratefully into the soft leather cushions. Enveloped in luxury, with the electric windows tightly closed and the air-conditioning gently fanning him, he allowed himself to relax slightly. He sat back and, without thinking, put his feet up against the seat in front of him.\n\n\"Feet down!\" barked his uncle, getting in next to him.\n\nLucky carefully wiped the imprint of Max's dusty shoes off the leather seat back before slamming the car door. Max got the impression that, if he could, he would have wiped away every trace of him.\n\nThe Mercedes headed out of town, rolling smoothly over rocks and potholes, until they came to a driveway marked GRAN HOTEL DE LAS AMERICAS.\n\n\"Do you live in a hotel?\" Max asked his uncle hopefully.\n\n\"Of course not,\" snapped Uncle Ted. \"I'm meeting a new client here.\"\n\nInwardly, Max groaned. All he wanted to do was collapse into a soft bed.\n\nAs they rounded a curve in the drive, an imposing colonial-style building came into view. It hadn't seen a coat of paint for a hundred years but, unlike the rest of Puerto Muerto, it managed to be charming rather than depressing.\n\nThey drew up at the colonnaded entrance, and a liveried doorman came running over to open the car door for Uncle Ted.\n\n\"Can I wait in the car?\" asked Max.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"You'll do as I say. There are some dangerous people around.\"\n\nUncle Ted pressed a tip into the doorman's hand and strode past him into the hotel. Max followed him through the run-down lobby and out onto a stone terrace overlooking the Caribbean Sea. It was a beautiful spot, with steps leading from the terrace through formal gardens down to a small pebble beach. Uncle Ted and Max sat at a table in the far corner, while Lucky Jim assumed a lookout position in the garden.\n\nThey certainly took security seriously in the banana business.\n\nA waiter in a starched white jacket glided out of a side door and set down little dishes of olives, cashew nuts, and tiny cocktail tamales.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Mr. Murphy. May I bring your usual?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Victor.\"\n\n\"And for you, sir?\" the waiter asked Max.\n\n\"What is there?\" asked Max without enthusiasm, expecting to be offered the vile brown concoction from the bus station caf\u00e9.\n\nThe waiter rattled off a list of brand-name sodas.\n\n\"I'll have a Coke, please. And vanilla ice cream.\"\n\nThe waiter bowed and was gone.\n\nThe clouds were clearing now, and the estuary below sparkled like emeralds in the sun.\n\n\"Is that the Monkey River?\" Max asked.\n\nUncle Ted was sitting bolt upright, his eyes darting nervously around the garden as if he was expecting a ninja attack.\n\n\"What?\" he said irritably.\n\n\"I was just asking if that's the Monkey River down there.\"\n\n\"I hope you're not going to plague me with questions while you're here, Massimo; I'm not running a tourist information center. It was bad enough getting a phone call from that madwoman, telling me you were coming to stay.\"\n\n\"What madwoman?\"\n\n\"You call her Zia, don't you? I told her not to send you, but she wouldn't listen to me.\"\n\nMax watched the boats bobbing on the green water. He didn't know what Zia had been thinking, but she'd made a big mistake. \"I'm sure Mom and Dad will be back soon,\" he said.\n\n\"Let us hope so,\" said Uncle Ted.\n\nThey sat in silence until Victor the waiter came back with their order.\n\nMax poured half the Coke into his glass and carefully dropped a large spoonful of ice cream into it. Then he closed his eyes and sucked it all down until his straw made loud gurgling noises on the bottom of his empty glass.\n\nWhen he opened his eyes, Uncle Ted and the waiter were both staring at him, appalled.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Victor,\" said Uncle Ted. \"I can only apologize for my nephew's table manners.\"\n\nVictor smiled indulgently at Max, then, on the pretext of scraping crumbs off the table, he leaned down by Uncle Ted and murmured, \"Heard anything from the police yet, sir?\"\n\nUncle Ted froze. He looked at Max out of the corner of his eye to see if he'd overheard. He had.\n\n\"The police?\" spluttered Max. \"Is this about Mom and Dad?\"\n\nVictor shot an apologetic glance at Uncle Ted and fled inside.\n\n\"Calm down, Massimo,\" said Uncle Ted. \"The chief of police is a friend of mine. I just asked him to send a chopper up to Ixchel to check things out.\"\n\n\"What things?\"\n\n\"Nothing in particular. Just to have a look round. See if your parents are still there and bring them back if they are. I am concerned that the trails will be blocked after the storm.\"\n\nThere was a shout from the garden.\n\nA flash of steel.\n\nA gardener held up the headless, writhing body of a snake. It was about three feet long, bright red with yellow and black bands.\n\nUncle Ted gave a low whistle. \"It's a coral snake,\" he said. \"You don't want to get bitten by one of those.\"\n\n\"It's the second one he's found today,\" said Victor, who'd come to see what all the shouting was about. \"The rain seems to bring them out.\" He called something to the gardener in Spanish and went back inside, shaking his head.\n\nUncle Ted looked at his watch. \"My client will be here in a moment. Until he's gone, Massimo, I must ask you to stay inside with Victor. Off you go, now....\"\n\nVictor was polishing glasses behind the bar. He regarded Max with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. \"Are you having a pleasant vacation?\" he inquired stiffly.\n\n\"Yes, thank you,\" said Max, sitting at the bar and picking at a bowl of cashew nuts.\n\nVictor's eyes kept darting nervously toward the door onto the terrace, and Max turned to see what he was looking at.\n\n\"We have postcards,\" said Victor quickly, as if to distract him. He indicated a small basket next to the register.\n\nMax flicked idly through the cards. They were dog-eared and too faded to be recognizable. \"Do you know anything about a place called Ixchel?\" he asked.\n\nVictor narrowed his eyes. \"What did you want to know?\"\n\nMax shrugged. \"Just tourist stuff.\"\n\nVictor looked relieved. \"Ixchel is one of the five sacred pyramids of the Monkey River. Ixchel herself was the moon goddess. Her name means 'Lady Rainbow.' The ancient Maya thought rainbows were bad omens. Lady Rainbow was greatly feared.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"When mortals angered her, which was often, she would empty her water jar over us, causing terrible floods and rainstorms.\"\n\nAbove them, the sky was clouding over again.\n\n\"It does seem to rain a lot here,\" said Max.\n\n\"Lady Rainbow has been very angry lately,\" agreed Victor. \"The farmers are worried for their crops.\" He winked at Max. \"Maybe they should make some offerings to her.\"\n\n\"What kind of offerings?\"\n\n\"I am joking. These days, the farmers get their weather reports from TV.\"\n\n\"What kind of offerings did they _used_ to make?\"\n\n\"Jade, incense, sacrifices, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"Human sacrifices?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Sometimes.\"\n\nUpstairs in the bathroom, Max looked at himself in the tarnished mirror. His face was white as death. Human sacrifices, snakes, tamales... he didn't want to stay in San Xavier a day longer than he had to. Maybe when his parents got back from wherever they were, they could all fly to Italy for a proper vacation. They owed him, big-time.\n\nHe turned on the tap. After a lot of banging in the pipes, a trickle of brown water dripped out. He splashed his face. The water smelled of drains. He stumbled into the corridor, intending to stick his head out the nearest window for some fresh air. But what he saw made him jump back.\n\nThere were men with guns all over the garden. They were all dressed in black. Half of them were pointing their weapons at Lucky Jim. The other half were focused on something that was happening directly under the window.\n\nMax flattened himself against the wall and peered down.\n\nThere were two men on the path. One was his uncle. The other was a dark-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and a mustache that curled up at the ends. Like his bodyguards, he was dressed in black, with a short cape around his shoulders and black leather gloves.\n\nThis must be Uncle Ted's client.\n\nThe banana business was evidently more cutthroat than Max had realized.\n\nVoices drifted up to the window.\n\n\"I understand you have certain objects for sale,\" the dark-haired man was saying in a strong Spanish accent.\n\n\"Objects?\" repeated Uncle Ted cagily.\n\n\"Let us not play games, Se\u00f1or Murphy. It has come to my attention that you recently sold a sword, a fine blade of Toledo. I must know where you found this piece.\"\n\n\"I cannot divulge that information.\"\n\nThe Spaniard clicked his tongue impatiently. \" _Bueno_. But you will confirm that it was the sword of Friar Diego de Landa?\"\n\n\"It was sold as such,\" conceded Uncle Ted.\n\n\"If that sword is authentic, Se\u00f1or Murphy, it was last seen in the hold of the ship _Espada_ that sailed from this very port in 1553 and was lost en route to Cadiz.\" He pronounced it _cah-deeth_.\n\n\"I am aware of the history of the piece.\"\n\n\"Then you will know that the same ship was said to be carrying two important stone carvings?\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"Se\u00f1or Murphy, let us get to the point....\"\n\nThe Spaniard clicked his fingers and one of his bodyguards came forward, carrying a metal briefcase. The guard tripped slightly on the terrace steps and before he could regain his balance, the Spaniard grabbed the briefcase from him, pulled out a gun, and pistol-whipped him across the face. As the guard fell to the ground in pain, the Spaniard kicked him savagely in the stomach.\n\n\"Clumsy pig,\" he screamed.\n\n_This guy's a complete psycho!_ thought Max.\n\nThe Spaniard resumed negotiations as if nothing had happened. \"The stone carving that I seek,\" he began, before noticing a drop of the bodyguard's blood on his shiny black boots. \" _Momentito_ ,\" he said, clicking his fingers again. Another guard materialized to wipe away the offending stain.\n\n\" _Bueno_ ,\" said the Spaniard. \"As I was saying, the stones that I seek are the brothers of this one. It is my wish to collect the full set.\"\n\nWith that, he placed the briefcase on the garden wall and unlocked it. The breeze died down and the birds stopped singing as he threw back the lid.\n\nA faint glow emanated from the case. It was was lined with foam, and nestled inside was a glassy black stone about the size of a football. It looked very old and it was crudely carved into the shape of a cat's head with the mouth open, ready to bite. An unpleasant smell, like rotting meat, wafted up to the window.\n\nUncle Ted's face looked even more deeply wrinkled in the glow of the stone. He spoke in an admiring whisper. \"The Black Jaguar of Ah Pukuh... lost for centuries... But where did you get it?\"\n\nThe Spaniard snapped the briefcase closed.\n\n\"I, too, have my secrets, _se\u00f1or_. But I see that you recognize the stone. Tell me, do you have its brothers?\"\n\n\"If I did,\" said Uncle Ted, \"I'd be a fool to sell.\"\n\n\"Everything has its price, Se\u00f1or Murphy.\"\n\nA songbird trilled noisily in a nearby tree. The Spaniard wheeled around and shot it dead. \"I will give you time to think.\"\n\nHe replaced his gun in its holster and strolled casually over to admire a rosebush in a painted pot.\n\nHe picked one perfect red bloom and sniffed it delicately. \"Aaah,\" he sighed. \" _Una rosa muy rara_ , a rare hybrid grandiflora, if I am not mistaken.\" He let the flower drop to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his boot.\n\nIt lay on the path like a smear of blood.\n\n\"It touched me in the heart to hear that your brother and his wife are missing, Se\u00f1or Murphy. How unfortunate. And your nephew is with you now, is he not? It is to be hoped that he does not also... disappear.\"\n\nUncle Ted looked like he might punch the guy in the nose, and Max clenched his own fists in sympathy, mentally egging him on.\n\nThen the moment for retaliation was lost as\u2014 _bang, bang, bang!_ \u2014the Spaniard pumped one bullet after another into the painted flowerpot, his face contorted with rage, until the pot was broken into tiny pieces and the uprooted rosebush fell to the ground. A lizard darted out to hunt for beetles in the spilled dirt, and he would have shot that as well, but he'd run out of bullets. He threw the gun at it and missed.\n\n\"Sell me the Jaguar Stone or you will be sorry,\" he hissed in a fury.\n\nShocked by the force of the Spaniard's temper, Uncle Ted put up his hands to signal defeat. \"May I at least inquire with whom I am to do business?\"\n\nIn a moment of pure cartoon villainy, the Spaniard threw back his cape, stuck out his chest, and looked down his aquiline nose. It was a wonder he didn't twirl his mustache. \"Count Antonio de Landa,\" he announced, making an elaborate bow, \"at your service.\"\n\n\"Landa?\" repeated Uncle Ted in surprise.\n\n\"Yes, Se\u00f1or Murphy, your ears do not play tricks. My ancestor was the famous Friar Diego de Landa. So you see, I am merely seeking the return of my family's rightful property.\"\n\nUncle Ted's eyebrows shot up as if to dispute that claim, but he quickly masked his skepticism. \"Of course, this changes everything,\" he said. \"It will take me a little time to retrieve the object in question, but I will contact you tomorrow to arrange the details of the sale.\"\n\n\" _Hasta luego_ ,\" said Landa. He turned on his heel and was gone.\n\nMax took a few deep breaths, then headed for the stairs. As he went down, he saw Uncle Ted come in from the terrace and say something to Victor. Victor pointed up at the staircase.\n\n\"Ah, there you are, Massimo,\" called his uncle. \"We can go now; my business here is done.\"\n\n\"Uncle Ted, what exactly is your business?\"\n\n\"Bananas, of course,\" he answered.\n\nOut on the terrace, Max could see workmen sweeping up the damage wrought by Landa.\n\nLucky came in and nodded at Uncle Ted. \"All clear, boss,\" he said.\n\n\"Let's go,\" said Uncle Ted.\n\nIt was a beautiful drive along the coast, with banana groves on one side and rolling surf on the other. But Max saw none of it. As soon as his head touched the cool leather of the backseat, he fell fast asleep in the Mercedes.\n\nAs they drove along the rutted highway, a rainbow arched in the sky above them.\n\n# Chapter Four  \nVILLA ISABELLA\n\nAll that night and late into the morning, Max dreamed about snarling jaguars prowling the streets of Boston. He was finally awakened by the tropical sun streaming in through the French windows.\n\nFor a moment he thought he was in a hotel on vacation. But as he took in the bare white walls and plain wooden furniture of Uncle Ted's guest room, he remembered that his parents were missing in action and his uncle was doing shady deals with trigger-happy Spaniards.\n\nHe got out of bed and stepped onto the balcony. The heat hit him like a blast from a blowtorch. A toucan with a beak like an upturned canoe gave a croak of protest and flapped away. A bright green insect the size of a toy helicopter loomed menacingly at him before landing on a purple flower as big as a Frisbee. And everywhere Max looked, yellow butterflies were dancing in the sunshine. Everything was so big and bright and colorful, it seemed unreal.\n\nEven Uncle Ted's house looked like a film set. Villa Isabella sat on a ridge at one end of a sheltered bay. It was an old colonial mansion, built of honey-colored stones that glowed in the sun. But despite its blue-painted shutters and flower-decked balconies, it also had the aspect of a fortress.\n\nFrom the depth of the windows, Max estimated that the walls were two feet thick. He could see a tall, battlemented tower on one corner and, by leaning out as far as he dared, he noted that the lowest floor had arrow slits like a medieval castle.\n\nAn old stone wall, topped by a walkway and fortified with crumbling guard posts, encircled the villa's grounds. Was that to keep predators out or to keep guests in? Max wondered.\n\nFrom his second-floor vantage point, he could see over the wall from the bay on one side to the rainforest on the other. Faint animal sounds\u2014whoops and cackles\u2014floated over from the forest. Max scanned it for signs of wildlife, but the tops of the trees were packed tightly together like evil mutant broccoli and he could see nothing move in their impenetrable green depths.\n\nA blast from a ship's horn made him look toward the sea. The bay was wide and horseshoe-shaped, a natural harbor; a big white yacht\u2014surely Uncle Ted's?\u2014floated at anchor in the turquoise water.\n\nOnly the beach spoiled the picture-postcard view. Instead of fine white sand, this was black and gritty, strewn with palm fronds, old tires, strips of plastic, and other garbage that had washed up in the storm.\n\nBut this was a work zone, not a tourist resort. Along the curve of the bay, about half a mile from the house, there was a large warehouse connected to a pier. A crane was loading crates into the hold of a rusty freighter. This must be the banana business in action. But given the conversation Max had overheard at the hotel, he couldn't help wondering if those crates contained something more valuable than bananas.\n\nHis musings were interrupted by a growl from his stomach. Time to go and find some breakfast.\n\nHe got dressed and peered out of the bedroom doorway. His room opened onto a long corridor lined with suits of armor and oil paintings of stern-looking men with pointed beards, all richly dressed in ruffs and capes. They reminded him of that crazy cape-twirling Spaniard in the garden.\n\nMax followed the corridor to the main staircase. His footsteps echoed loudly as he ran down the huge stone steps leading into the great hall.\n\nWow. He must have passed through this room the night before, but he'd been so tired he hadn't seen it properly. Now its size and scale amazed him.\n\nThe great hall was arranged as a reception room with clusters of antique sofas, dark wood tables, and stiff-backed chairs. Against the far wall was an enormous stone fireplace that could have burned a small forest in one go. A coat of arms with crossed swords was carved into the over-mantel.\n\nIt would have looked like a castle in medieval Europe, were it not for the Maya sculptures occupying every ledge, every side table, every niche. In pride of place in the center of the floor were two gigantic stone heads.\n\nIt was only when he stood in front of these heads that Max realized how big the great hall was. The heads were taller than a school bus and yet not out of proportion for the room. As he looked from one hook-nosed face to the other, they seemed to stare right back at him\u2014one with sadness, one with anger.\n\nMax began to feel uncomfortable. There was a sense of tension between the statues that gave him goose bumps. He reached out to feel the stone.\n\n\"Please do not touch,\" came a voice behind him.\n\nMax turned to see an immaculately groomed old man in a black tailcoat.\n\n\"Welcome to the Villa Isabella, sir. I am Raul, head butler and household administrator. You slept well, I trust?\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you,\" said Max. He turned back to the heads. \"Who are these guys?\"\n\n\"The one on the left is Lord 6-Dog.\"\n\n\"Lord 6-Dog? What kind of name is that?\"\n\n\"It is the name of a great ancient Maya king who united the cities of the Monkey River and brought a golden age of prosperity to the people of this region.\"\n\n\"And who's Mr. Angry next to him?\"\n\n\"That's Lord 6-Dog's twin brother, Tzelek the Black Priest.\"\n\n\"What's his problem?\"\n\n\"In a nutshell, sir, he's a bad loser.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" asked Max, looking quickly from one head to the other, as if to catch them blinking.\n\n\"A classic case of sibling rivalry.\"\n\n\"It's a classic case of sibling rivalry, sir. When 6-Dog inherits the Jaguar Throne, Tzelek is consumed with jealousy. Determined to wrest the throne from his twin brother, he turns to the dark arts. In their final showdown, Tzelek conjures up a demon army and attacks Lord 6-Dog, who counterattacks with his veteran Jaguar Warriors. It is the greatest battle between good and evil in Maya history.\"\n\nMax liked the way Raul told the story in the present tense, as if he were a sports commentator and it was all happening right there and then.\n\n\"Who won?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is not over,\" said Raul cryptically. He rubbed his hands briskly together. \"And now, sir, brunch will be served out on the terrace.\" He pointed to some glass doors farther down the hallway.\n\nMax was heading toward them when, through a half-open door, he noticed a circular room. Thinking it must be the base of the battlemented tower he'd seen from his balcony, he looked inside.\n\nWhat he saw astounded him.\n\nIf the rest of the house was channeling medieval Spain, this room was like something out of a James Bond movie.\n\nWith varnished wood paneling from floor to ceiling, it had the sleek, tight feel of a luxury yacht. Plasma screens hanging from the ceiling transmitted security shots of the house, grounds, and warehouse. On the desk were several laptop computers, some night-vision goggles, and an array of high-tech equipment whose purpose Max couldn't even guess.\n\nHis eye was drawn to a poster-size aerial photograph showing the locations of various Maya ruins. Max tried to find the Temple of Ixchel, but there were too many sites and the captions were too small.\n\nOn another wall was a diploma from the Royal College of Art in London and some old photographs. There were of Ted and Frank as teenagers, striking cool poses in the jungle, and there was Ted holding a red-haired baby. Uncle Ted had no children, had never been married as far as Max knew, so that baby had to be him\u2014little Max. The thought that Uncle Ted kept his picture on the wall made him feel more at home, and he looked around for any other family mementos.\n\nIn front of a window was a brass telescope. It was focused on the luxury yacht he'd seen from the balcony, and Max could just about make out the lettering on the stern: LA ESPADA, CADIZ. _That's a coincidence_ , he thought, _same name as that old galleon in Oscar's story_. But this yacht couldn't have been more twenty-first century. It was bristling with electronic masts and radar dishes.\n\nMax was trying to find the zoom for a closer look, when a hand tapped him on the shoulder.\n\nHe turned to see Raul standing behind him.\n\nWhat was this guy's problem? That was the second time today he'd sneaked up behind Max and scared him half to death.\n\n\"This is Mr. Murphy's private office, sir,\" said Raul.\n\n\"I was just looking at the yacht,\" said Max. \"Is it Uncle Ted's?\"\n\n\"No, sir. It belongs to a Spaniard by the name of Count Antonio de Landa\u2014a most unsavory character, by all accounts. They say he killed his own brother to inherit the family estate. And now, sir, if you don't mind...\"\n\nRaul ushered Max out of the room, pulled the door tightly shut, and stalked imperiously back to the kitchen.\n\nMax went out onto the terrace. It was more like an outdoor room, enclosed as it was on three sides by frescoed walls and fronted by a stone balustrade. It was cooled by wooden ceiling fans and shaded by a yellow awning that gave the light an unreal quality, as if everything was inside a tent.\n\nA table, covered by a starched white tablecloth, had been set for two with china plates, sparkling glass, and heavy silver flatware. A newspaper was placed to one side. Even the newspaper looked ironed.\n\nMax took a seat and Raul appeared behind him.\n\n\"Tea, coffee, or hot chocolate, sir?\"\n\n\"Hot chocolate,\" said Max decisively.\n\nRaul nodded and went inside.\n\nInstantly, Max wished he'd asked for a cold soda instead. He jumped up to follow Raul and change his order but only got as far as the doorway before freezing in his tracks. In front of his astonished eyes, the closed door to the office flew open and Uncle Ted emerged, brushing dust off his shoulders.\n\nHow was it possible?\n\nThere was only one door to that room, and it had been barely a minute since Max himself had vacated it. Had Uncle Ted climbed in through a window?\n\nUnseen by his uncle, Max crept back to his seat to ponder the problem.\n\nA few minutes later, Uncle Ted strode out onto the terrace.\n\n\"Good morning, Massimo,\" he said, a little frostily. \"Raul tells me you've been exploring.\"\n\n\"I was just\u2014\"\n\n\"I must ask you not to poke around. Raul runs a tight ship, and I don't want you making work for him. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Max, \"but I was only\u2014\"\n\n\"The matter is closed,\" said Uncle Ted, as he scanned the newspaper headlines.\n\nRaul brought out a platter of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, a bowl of freshly sliced pineapple, and a big basket of toast, rolls, and pastries. Max watched him as he set the food down. What a tattletale. Was he going to report back to Uncle Ted on every little thing? It was like being five years old.\n\n\"Help yourself,\" said Uncle Ted to Max as Raul gave a small bow and withdrew.\n\nMax took a large spoonful of eggs and picked out the salmon. Next, he cut the crusts off a piece of toast and removed all the raisins from a Danish. Then he settled down to enjoy what was left, surrounded by little piles of rejected food.\n\nUncle Ted set down the newspaper. \"I have good news,\" he said. \"I spoke to the chief of police this morning. Your parents have left the camp, so they must be on their way back. Many of the trails are impassable after the storm, but it turns out they have an excellent guide. He's a local archaeologist who was working with them at Ixchel, Herman something-or-other, and, apparently, he knows the jungle like the back of his hand.\"\n\n\"That's great,\" said Max. \"Did the chopper find anything?\"\n\n\"No, the camp was deserted.\"\n\n\"Was it all neatly packed up?\"\n\n\"Let's leave the detective work to the police, shall we? We'll get a full report later.\"\n\n\"But was it packed up or not?\"\n\n\"Since you ask, clothes and papers were strewn everywhere\u2014due to the storm, no doubt.\"\n\n\"Aha!\" Max pounced on this clue. \"So we know they left in a hurry. Otherwise, Mom would have tidied up. She hates mess.\"\n\n\"I know how she feels,\" said Uncle Ted, pointedly eyeing the piles of discarded food around Max's plate and the drips of hot chocolate on the white tablecloth.\n\n\"If they're on their way back,\" mused Max, \"I wonder why the chopper didn't see them from the air?\"\n\n\"The tree canopy's too thick,\" replied Uncle Ted.\n\n\"The evil mutant broccoli,\" muttered Max.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" said Uncle Ted.\n\n\"That's what it looks like from my balcony.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Uncle Ted. \"But the broccoli\u2014I mean the canopy\u2014is a good thing for our purposes. It blocks out the sunlight, so not much grows on the ground. Makes it easier to walk through the rainforest.\"\n\n\"You said the trails were impassable,\" Max reminded him\n\n\"The storm has done a lot of damage, but I'm sure they'll find a way through. More toast?\"\n\nWhile Max dissected another Danish, Uncle Ted read the newspaper. They'd been sitting like this in silence for a while when Raul came rushing out. \"Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, sir, but you have an urgent phone call.\" From the way Raul avoided his eyes, Max guessed the call was about his parents. As he sat and waited, he threw crumbs of pastry to the little birds that hopped about under the table.\n\n\"The chopper pilot has filed his report,\" announced Uncle Ted when he came back. \"The chief of police told me to stress that it's probably not significant, but they found a gold hoop earring near the cenote and they wanted me to ask you if Carla\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes! Mom wears earrings like that!\"\n\n\"And so do most of the women in San Xavier. It means nothing.\"\n\n\"Where did you say they found it?\"\n\n\"By the cenote.\"\n\n\" _Say-note-eh?_ What's that?\"\n\n\"It's the local name for a sinkhole. The jungle's full of underground lakes and rivers. When the roof collapses, you get a cenote. It's like a deep well. The Maya used to think they were entrances to the underworld.\"\n\nA bell rang in Max's brain. \"Didn't the Maya use them for human sacrifice?\"\n\n\"How did you know that?\" said Uncle Ted in surprise.\n\n\"I read it in the magazine on the plane.\"\n\n\"That figures. They like to lay the human sacrifice story on thick for the tourists\u2014but I'd advise you to take it with a pinch of salt.\"\n\n\"Do the police think Mom and Dad are on their way back?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Are they doing anything to find them?\"\n\n\"There's not much they _can_ do. It's the old needle-in-a-haystack scenario. Forensics are going to run a few tests on your father's jacket, but...\"\n\nMax's blood ran cold. \"They found Dad's jacket?\"\n\n\"Yes, that disgusting old thing with all the pockets.\"\n\n\"But he never takes it off.\"\n\n\"Maybe not in Boston, but it's hotter here\u2014in case you hadn't noticed.\"\n\n\"I've seen him wear it at noon in a heat wave.\" A note of panic crept into Max's voice. \"Was there anything in the pockets?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Why?\"\n\n\"That's where he keeps his research notes.\"\n\nThis was bad. His father would never willingly be parted from his jacket. Max tried to calm himself by taking a sip of hot chocolate, but his hands were shaking too much to hold the cup.\n\n\"Did you know,\" said Uncle Ted, \"that the ancient Maya were the first to make a drink out of chocolate? They served it on special occasions like we serve champagne.\"\n\nMax pushed his cup away.\n\n\"Why are they running tests on Dad's jacket?\"\n\nUncle Ted tried to sound casual. \"It had a mark on it. But I told them, that old jacket was so dirty, it was always covered in stains.\"\n\n\"What mark? What was it?\"\n\n\"It looked like blood, but\u2014\"\n\n_\"Blood?\"_\n\n\"Don't panic, Massimo, it's not Frank's blood. In fact, they don't think it's human blood at all.\"\n\n\"Not human? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"No one understands yet. Things are never what they seem around here. We must wait for forensics to finish their tests.\"\n\n\"When will that be?\"\n\nUncle Ted shrugged. \"Who knows? Things don't move as quickly in San Xavier as they do in Boston.\"\n\n\"Can't you bribe someone?\" suggested Max.\n\nUncle Ted raised an eyebrow. \"Certainly not.\"\n\nThe ceiling fans whirred lazily in the rafters. A honeybee hovered over a flower. A lizard perched motionless on the balustrade. It was as if time had stood still. Max felt jet-lagged and tired and confused. He was angry at his parents, angry at Uncle Ted, angry at the yellow butterfly that was fluttering in front of his face.\n\nHe tried to wave away the butterfly and his hand caught the lid of the chocolate pot, sending the whole thing flying. The pot smashed on the tiled floor. Chocolate dregs spattered Uncle Ted's white shirt, and shards of bone china flew everywhere.\n\nRaul ran out with a dustpan and brush.\n\nUncle Ted poured some water onto a napkin and dabbed at his shirt. \"I must ask you to be more careful while you're staying here, Massimo,\" he said. \"I like an orderly house.\"\n\nBut Max didn't care about a few hot-chocolate stains.\n\nIt was the blood on his father's jacket that preoccupied him.\n\nAs they sat there, the sky darkened to a purple bruise and raindrops began drumming on the canvas awning. When Uncle Ted finally spoke again, he had to shout to make himself heard above the rainstorm. \"There's no sense in sitting around moping, Massimo. You need to keep busy. As of tomorrow, I'm starting you in the banana warehouse.\"\n\nMax looked at him warily. \"How much will you pay me?\"\n\n\"Hard work is its own reward,\" replied Uncle Ted. \"You're living here at my expense. You should be glad to earn your keep.\"\n\n\"That's slave labor!\" protested Max.\n\nBut Uncle Ted didn't seem to hear him. \"Breakfast at five tomorrow, and report straight to Lucky Jim in the warehouse.\"\n\n\"Breakfast at five? But it's my summer vacation.\"\n\n\"You have to rise early in the tropics to beat the heat. If you get an early start, you can look forward to a productive day's work.\"\n\n_Hard work is its own reward? Breakfast at five? A productive day's work?_\n\nMax stared at his uncle openmouthed.\n\n\"Something wrong?\" asked Uncle Ted.\n\n\"You sound like my father,\" said Max in surprise.\n\nUncle Ted said nothing. But his face reminded Max of his mother's expression the day she stepped in dog poop on Boston Common.\n\n# Chapter Five  \nMAX GOES BANANAS\n\nThere's only one way to learn the banana business,\" said Lucky Jim. \"And that's from the bottom up.\"\n\n\"Does that mean I get to drive one of those?\" asked Max, eyeing the forklift trucks that zoomed around the warehouse moving pallets of green bananas.\n\n\"No,\" said Lucky, \"it means you can clean up the beach. See all the old tires and palm fronds and dead fish washed up by the storm?\"\n\n\"But that's a huge job,\" spluttered Max as Lucky passed him the rake.\n\nAs he glumly set to work, he consoled himself that it was better to be outside in the fresh air than sweltering inside the warehouse, even if all the insects in San Xavier had decided to keep him company.\n\nNo matter how much bug spray he used, they attacked him relentlessly. He had so many bites, he looked like a human dot-to-dot puzzle. He was only grateful there were no girls around to witness this deeply uncool turn of events.\n\nAs he worked\u2014or more accurately, slacked off\u2014Max brooded on events at Ixchel. The more he went over things\u2014the bloodstained jacket, the earring\u2014the weirder it all seemed.\n\nAnd then there was the mystery of Uncle Ted. What was he hiding? Every time Max asked to make a phone call or send an e-mail, he was told there was no connection. It was obviously untrue.\n\nThe old Max Murphy, the one who had kicked the fridge in Boston, would have made a scene about it, for sure. But some survival instinct made him hold his tongue. After all, Uncle Ted moved in dangerous circles, and Max didn't want to provoke his anger.\n\nBut why was he trying to cut his nephew off from the outside world?\n\nSometimes, as Max halfheartedly raked the sand, he had a distinct sensation of being watched. He never caught anyone in the act, but he guessed that Lucky Jim had his binoculars trained on him at all times. It made him feel like a performing monkey.\n\nOne morning when the rains came and he was running to the warehouse for shelter, he noticed a space under the loading pier. The tide was out and the rocks were dry. It was the perfect hideout. He could sit on the rocks without being seen by anyone. Plus, he'd be able to hear everything that happened on the dock above, which would help him keep tabs on Lucky Jim.\n\nSurrounded by a curtain of rain, Max sat under the pier and thought things through for the billionth time. It was obvious that Uncle Ted was up to no good. But the question was, did he have anything to do with the disappearance of Max's parents?\n\nHis thoughts were interrupted by noises above him. He realized that the downpour had stopped and work had resumed on the dock.\n\nHe heard his uncle's voice.\n\n\"It's all hands on deck tonight, Lucky. We load at two a.m.\"\n\n\"No worries, boss, the shipment is ready.\"\n\n\"Splendid! And how's that nephew of mine shaping up?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to say this about your own flesh and blood, boss, but he's as lazy as a three-toed sloth.\"\n\nBoth men laughed heartily.\n\n\"Bit of a spoiled brat, eh?\"\n\n\"He's not used to hard work, boss, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"He's an only child\u2014I think he usually gets his own way.\"\n\n\"Should I go easier on him, boss?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. It could ruin everything, him showing up like this. We have to keep him out of the house, at all costs. Raul caught him snooping around the office the other day\u2014and you know what that could lead to. Work him till he drops, Lucky\u2014make sure he's too tired to cause trouble.\"\n\n\"Whatever you say, boss.\"\n\nMax was shaking with rage. So his uncle thought he was a spoiled brat, did he? And cleaning this stinking beach was just a ruse to keep him out of the house? Well, Uncle Ted's game was up.\n\nMax would expose him for the crook he was.\n\nThere was obviously something incriminating hidden in the office. Max thought back to the day he'd looked around. Had he noticed anything strange? Not really. The only strange thing had been the way Uncle Ted had come out of the office without Max seeing him go in.\n\nAnd, just like that, Max knew what he was looking for.\n\nA secret door.\n\nMaybe it led to the battlemented tower.\n\nMaybe there was a money-laundering company up there. Or a passport-forging operation. Or\u2014the idea struck him like a knock on the head\u2014maybe, just maybe, his parents were being held prisoner up there.\n\nNow Max was tingling with anticipation.\n\nIf they were loading a shipment at two a.m., he'd make his first search tonight. Everyone would be out of the house long enough for him to have a good look around. A spoiled brat indeed! For once, Max was proud of the anger that burned in his veins and spurred him on to vengeance. Uncle Ted was going to regret the day he'd ignited the wrath of Max Murphy!\n\nThat afternoon, Max worked with a new energy and enthusiasm. Even Lucky Jim noticed his efforts and signaled his approval from the pier. Max waved to him cheerily. And as he raked, he laid his plans.\n\nStraight after dinner, Uncle Ted excused himself, saying he needed an early night.\n\n_Big fat liar_ , thought Max.\n\n\"Sounds good,\" he said. \"Me, too.\"\n\nOnce in his room, he got ready for action. He found a flashlight in the side pocket of his backpack ( _Thanks, Zia!_ ) and changed into a dark T-shirt and jeans. Then he set his alarm clock for quarter to two and lay down on the bed to get as much rest as possible before zero hour.\n\nWhen the alarm went off, he felt as if he'd just gone to sleep. He forced himself out of bed and staggered to the window.\n\nNo movement at the pier.\n\nHe looked up and down the coast.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nMaybe the rendezvous had been cancelled.\n\nMaybe Uncle Ted really did make it an early night.\n\nThe minutes ticked by.\n\nMax was just about to get back into bed, when he realized that a shadow on the water was actually a boat slowly and silently making its way to the pier. This was it. His big chance. He guessed he had at least twenty minutes before they finished loading and came back to the house.\n\nHe stuck his head out of the bedroom doorway. All was still. The only sound was the beating of his own heart and the tick of an antique clock. He crept into the corridor, past the suits of armor, past the disapproving frowns of the long-dead Spaniards, and down the big stone staircase to the great hall.\n\nUncle Ted's huge collection of Maya sculptures shimmered in the moonlight. With the furniture receding into the darkness, they seemed to hover in the air like ghosts. A faint chatter of insects outside the window fell quiet as Max entered. He felt as if he'd walked in on a secret meeting, presided over by the two great stone heads.\n\nMax hesitated. The heads looked even more alive tonight. Luminous in the moonlight, they seemed to glow from within. He told himself that their animated expressions were just the flickering shadows of the palm fronds at the window.\n\nBut they were looking straight at him.\n\nAnd they did not look pleased to see him.\n\n\"Excuse me, guys,\" he said under his breath, and steeled himself to walk past them.\n\nOn shaking legs, he reached the door to his uncle's office.\n\nIt was closed.\n\nWorse than that, it was locked.\n\nNo, wait, it was just stuck.\n\nHe gently eased the old door open with a creak that seemed to reverberate through the house. He froze, listening for any sound or movement. Nothing. He breathed again. But time was passing. He had to hurry.\n\n_Quickly. Get inside and close the door_.\n\nWhere to look?\n\nHe didn't dare switch on his flashlight in case they saw him from the dock. So with only the moon for light, he started searching the room. He tapped walls, looked behind shelves, lifted rugs for a trapdoor, but found nothing.\n\nWhat had he missed? How can you hide a whole door?\n\nHe sat down on a bookcase that ran under the window and took one last look. He yawned and shivered at the same time. It was cold in this room.\n\nTime to abort the mission and go to bed.\n\nHe put a hand on the edge of the bookcase to push himself up and, as he did so, the rush of cold air took his breath away. It was coming from directly behind him.\n\nWide awake now, he got down on his hands and knees to inspect the woodwork. There was a crack where the bookcase joined the wall. He pulled at the bookcase and felt a slight movement, just enough to tell him that he'd found his secret door. Now he had to find the lock.\n\nHeart thumping, he took the books off the shelves and felt around inside the bookcase. His fingers closed on a small lever. He pushed it down and, with a click, the shelf unit swung away from the wall. He'd done it!\n\nStill on his hands and knees, he was looking straight down into a narrow steel staircase that spiraled into the bowels of the earth.\n\nDown?\n\nThis was not what he'd been expecting at all. He'd been looking for an entrance to the tower, not the dungeons.\n\nBut a secret door was a secret door.\n\nSpurred on by the spirit of revenge, he took a few steps down and pulled the bookcase back into position behind him. When it clicked shut, dim green lights came on to illuminate the stairwell. There was no sound but a faint dripping. Down and down he went, trying not to slip on the wet steel treads. With every step, the temperature dropped another few degrees.\n\nAt the bottom of the staircase it was as cold and clammy as a tomb.\n\nHe stepped under a small archway and into a tunnel hewn out of the rock. All he could hear was the soft hum of machinery and the dripping of water. The tunnel seemed deserted, but he could see arched openings at regular intervals all the way along. Anyone\u2014or anything\u2014could be inside them.\n\nHe crept down the tunnel and looked through the first archway. It opened into a large room, dimly lit by rows of computer screens. The walls were papered with charts and maps. Long metal tables supported stacks of computer hardware and electronic boxes covered with dials and switches. Cables and wires snaked across the ground and lay heaped in coils. Was he dreaming? There must have been a million dollars' worth of equipment in there.\n\nThe next archway revealed a locker room, packed with camouflage gear and wet suits, and after that came a smaller tunnel that sloped steeply downward.\n\nMax followed it for about twenty paces before he tripped on something. The beam of his flashlight revealed several rusty iron rings embedded in the cobbles. As he circled them, trying to work out what they were, he saw water lapping at his feet. Ah, they were boat moorings. The rest of the tunnel was flooded, and Max guessed it led to the open sea.\n\nHe retraced his steps back up to the main tunnel.\n\nWhat was next? he wondered. A weapons cache? An underground firing range? A submarine dock?\n\nBut it was none of those. In fact, the next room was more extraordinary than anything Max could ever have imagined.\n\nHe was standing in the entrance to an Aladdin's cave.\n\nThe long vaulted space was lined with shelves. On them, nestled in foam rubber and laid out as carefully as a museum display, was a magnificent array of Maya artifacts as well as pieces of antique armor and weaponry.\n\nMax stepped in to have a closer look. Nearer the doorway, the pottery was chipped and the swords were broken and rusty. But the farther back he went, the more perfect\u2014and, presumably, more valuable\u2014the artifacts became. At the far end, displayed on double thicknesses of foam, were pieces of jade jewelry, inlaid masks, ornately painted bowls, and beautifully carved stone figurines.\n\nMax had seen it all before.\n\nHow many times had his parents dragged him around museums, oohing and aahing over this kind of stuff?\n\nHe hated it.\n\nHe was just turning to leave and go back to the techno room, when he saw a small metal suitcase on a high shelf. It seemed to be calling to him. Without thinking, he reached up for it.\n\nIt was heavier than he expected, and he nearly fell backward as he pulled it down. Then he flipped open the latches and lifted the lid.\n\nA warm breeze blew out of the case and filled the air with the earthy smell of jungle. Inside the case, nestled in foam, was a head, a cat's head, carved in blood-red stone. The style was primitive, but the head was so full of life and energy, it almost seemed to snarl.\n\nAt that moment, Max felt metal on the back of his neck.\n\n\"Freeze.\"\n\nHe knew that voice. It was Lucky Jim. And he didn't sound like he was joking.\n\n\"Lucky, it's me, Max Murphy, I\u2014\"\n\n\"No tourists allowed down here.\"\n\n\"But I'm not a tourist, I'm\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop talking.\" There was the sound of a gun being cocked. \"Now walk. Or I'll blow your head off.\"\n\nLucky Jim pushed and prodded him back to the flooded tunnel, all the while mumbling into a walkie-talkie.\n\n\"Sit,\" he said, pushing Max down onto the wet cobbles. \"Put your hands behind your back.\" Max felt cold steel around his wrists as Lucky handcuffed him to a boat mooring. A vein as thick as a jungle vine throbbed in Lucky's forehead. \"You're in big trouble, boy,\" he said.\n\nMax was thinking fast. He looked up at Lucky Jim. \"Are you really descended from a long line of Maya warriors?\" he asked.\n\n\"What if I am?\"\n\n\"So why do you allow Uncle Ted to loot your treasures? This stuff should be in a museum. Don't you want your children to see the amazing things the Maya were doing when Europe was still in the Dark Ages?\"\n\nMax thought it was a brilliant speech for the spur of the moment, and he waited expectantly for Lucky to realize the error of his ways. But Lucky showed no trace of shame. Instead, he drew himself up to his full man-mountain height, folded his arms, and sneered down at Max.\n\n\"If I ever have kids,\" he said, \"I'd want to keep them as far away from this stuff as possible. I want them to break free of the past.\"\n\n\"B-b-but what about their heritage?\"\n\nLucky Jim was beyond anger. He was so angry he was almost calm.\n\n\"Heritage? If you want heritage, go to one of those Maya theme parks in Mexico. You can watch a Maya show, eat Maya food, have your picture taken with a Maya warrior\u2014the complete Maya experience. It won't be the real thing, of course, because you tourists don't want the real thing.\"\n\n\"What's the real thing?\" whimpered Max.\n\n\"You really want to know?\"\n\nMax nodded.\n\n\"Time for a history lesson,\" said Lucky Jim, bending down until the pulsing vein on his forehead was inches from Max's face. \"Those old Maya may have been good at pottery and math, but they were ruled by violence and superstition. Problem is, they're still alive. And they're still trying to run things around here. You can call that heritage, but I call it a dangerous reality.\"\n\n\"You're crazy!\" blurted Max.\n\nLucky Jim laughed like a crazy person. \"You tourists don't get it, do you? Maya time is different from your time. Our world is different from your world.\"\n\nHe sat down and leaned back against the tunnel wall.\n\n\"Take those pyramids in the jungle, like the one your parents were working on. You tourists wouldn't be so quick to climb all over them if you knew how many doors to the underworld they conceal. And those doors are still open. Your parents knew that....\"\n\n\"What else did my parents know?\" whispered Max.\n\nLucky Jim grabbed Max by the neck of his T-shirt and pulled him close.\n\n_\"Bahlamtuuno'ob,\"_ he growled.\n\n\"The Jaguar Stones?\" asked Max. But before he got his answer, there was a sound of approaching footsteps.\n\nLucky Jim let him go and stood up. \"I've seen some bad things in the jungle,\" he said as he backed away, \"but I wouldn't like to be in your shoes now.\"\n\nAs Lucky Jim's footsteps faded away, the other footsteps got louder until Uncle Ted stood over his terrified nephew.\n\n\"Got a little lost on our way for milk and cookies, did we?\" he said. \"I'm disappointed in you, Massimo. I distinctly remember asking you not to poke around. The only question now is what to do with you....\"\n\nMax said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He'd been caught red-handed.\n\n\"Lucky thinks we should dump you in the ocean... tell the police you went looking for your parents in the jungle and never returned. It's an interesting idea, don't you think? The undertow would carry your body halfway to Cuba before the sun comes up.\"\n\nMax stared at him in disbelief. How could his own uncle, a man who had held him in his arms as a baby, talk to him this way? \"Now I understand why my father has always hated you,\" he spat.\n\n\"To hell with your father,\" said Uncle Ted. \"It's your own skin you need to worry about.\"\n\n# Chapter Six  \nFAMILY SECRETS\n\nTo hell with your father.\"\n\nThat's what he'd said.\n\nThe words were still ringing in Max's ears as Uncle Ted unlocked the handcuffs and pulled him to his feet. He suddenly knew, with a horrible certainty, that Uncle Ted had killed his parents.\n\n\"Walk,\" said Uncle Ted. \"And don't try anything. The villa is crawling with security guards tonight. And their orders are to shoot to kill.\"\n\n\"You'll go to jail for this,\" said Max.\n\n\"Silence!\" said Uncle Ted.\n\nKeeping Max in front of him, Uncle Ted prodded him back through the tunnels and up the spiral staircase. By the time they emerged into the office, the sun was rising over the sea. Max shivered in the dawn light. He was wet and cold and weary to his bones.\n\n\"Sit!\" said Uncle Ted, pushing him into a chair. \"I can see I need to teach you a lesson you won't forget.\" He opened the desk drawer and took out a vicious-looking hunting knife.\n\nMax swallowed. Was this the knife that Uncle Ted had used to kill his parents? He couldn't take his eyes off its glinting blade. He thought about running, but he was too weak to move. In any case, where would he go?\n\nThis was it.\n\nHis parents were dead. And now it was his turn to die.\n\nThere was just one thing he had to know.\n\n\"Why did you kill them?\" he asked dully.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Why did you kill my parents?\"\n\nUncle Ted looked at him blankly. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nMax looked at the knife.\n\nUncle Ted followed his eyes. Then he started to laugh.\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" he said. \"This rusty old thing couldn't cut butter.\" He crouched in front of an old storage chest and starting working the blade under the lid. \"I keep the knife handy for this,\" he explained. \"Darn thing always sticks. The sea air warps everything.\"\n\nEventually the lid came free, and Uncle Ted pulled a blanket out of the chest. He wrapped it around Max's shoulders. \"How could you think I killed your parents?\" he asked, shaking his head in disbelief.\n\nMax shrugged. \"You were acting suspiciously.\"\n\n\"I'll admit there's no love lost between your father and me, but surely I don't strike you as a murderer?\"\n\n\"Down there\"\u2014Max indicated the secret door\u2014\"you threatened to kill me.\"\n\n\"Did I? Well, I _was_ very angry with you, Massimo. You could have got hurt with your silly games tonight. I'm just trying to keep you safe until your parents reappear.\"\n\n\"So having Lucky Jim stick a gun in my neck was keeping me safe?\"\n\n\"He was trying to scare some sense into you. It's one thing when you slack off at the banana warehouse, but tonight's little escapade was unforgivable. What were you thinking, getting up in the middle of the night and... and\"\u2014he searched for the correct criminal term\u2014\" _trespassing_ like that?\"\n\nMax was unrepentant. \"It's a good thing I did, or I wouldn't have known about that treasure trove down there. It's stolen, isn't it?\"\n\nUncle Ted had the grace to look sheepish. \"That's no concern of yours.\"\n\n\"It is if I'm living here.\"\n\n\"Let us hope you will not be living here much longer.\"\n\n\"So what are you going to do with me? Throw me in the dungeons?\"\n\n\"It's tempting.\"\n\nThey glared at each other for a while, until Uncle Ted broke the silence.\n\n\"Here's what I suggest,\" he said eventually. \"Since I am stuck with you for the foreseeable future, we will have to find a way to live together. From now on, you must obey my rules to the letter. You will stay in your room at night, and you are forbidden to set foot in my office. Agreed?\"\n\nUncle Ted held out his hand to shake on it.\n\nMax thought for a moment. \"I'll shake on one condition.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"You tell me the truth about what's going on around here.\"\n\n\"Why on earth would I do that?\"\n\nMax had seen enough gangster movies to know the answer. \"Because I know too much already,\" he said. \"And because blood is thicker than water.\"\n\nTo Max's surprise, Uncle Ted started to laugh. \"Spoken like a true Murphy!\" he said.\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Frank hasn't told you our family history? Then it will be my pleasure to tell you everything he doesn't want you to know.\"\n\nWhich was how, ten minutes later, Max found himself tucked up on a sofa in the great hall, as Raul brought in a tray of hot chocolate and buttery, freshly baked croissants.\n\nUncle Ted selected a silver photo frame from a collection on a side table. \"Do you know who this is?\" he asked.\n\nMax studied the faded picture of a handsome young farmer in a flat cap and plaid shirt, riding a white horse bareback.\n\n\"Grandpa Murphy?\" he guessed.\n\nUncle Ted nodded. \"Life on the farm was too quiet for him. Soon after that photo was taken, he headed to America to seek his fortune, working his passage on a freighter from Dublin to New York. From there, he hustled and brawled his way south until he pitched up in San Xavier. It was still a young country then, like the Wild West, full of adventurers and opportunists. He tried big-game fishing and logging before winning the banana business in a poker game.\"\n\n\"Grandpa was a gambler?\" Max was half shocked and half delighted to be descended from a poker-playing renegade.\n\n\"From that day forward, he never gambled again. He devoted himself to building up the business until he had enough money to buy this house. He turned it into the finest mansion on the coast.\"\n\n\"Why did he want such a big house?\"\n\n\"He was trying to impress someone.\"\n\n\"A girl?\"\n\n\"Her father.\"\n\nUncle Ted jumped up to get another photograph. This one showed a family posing stiffly in their Sunday best. The women wore flowery dresses, pearl necklaces, and shawls. The men wore dark suits, slicked-back hair, and pencil mustaches. To Max, they looked like a family of tango dancers.\n\nUncle Ted pointed to a stern-looking man. \"Don Jos\u00e9 Pizarro, descendant of the original conquistadores, wealthy landowner, and, most importantly, father of the beautiful Isabella.\" His finger moved to a young girl with long black hair and dancing eyes. \"Naturally Don Jos\u00e9 opposed the marriage of his daughter to the son of dirt-poor Irish farmers. But eventually, won over by the Villa Isabella, he gave his blessing.\"\n\n\"Grandma Isabel was a Spanish aristocrat? Why did Dad never tell me?\"\n\n\"Think about it, Massimo. 'Leading Maya scholar is direct descendant of the very people who tried to wipe out Maya culture.' It doesn't look good on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9.\"\n\n\"But he could have told _me_ ,\" said Max indignantly. \"It's my history, too.\"\n\n\"I bet I know something else he hasn't told you,\" said Uncle Ted. \"Your father has a guilty secret. Something that happened when we were teenagers. In fact, it's the reason he was at Ixchel last week.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" said Max, wide-eyed.\n\n\"So Patrick and Isabella were married, and Frank and I came along. We were so close, people thought we were twins. It's hard to imagine now, but we used to be best friends.\"\n\n\"Why did you fall out?\"\n\nUncle Ted's face clouded over. \"After Mother died, we pretty much ran wild. Frank's always been obsessed with the Maya and he'd drag me out for days at a time, looking for Maya ruins in the jungle. In the summer that changed our lives, we were camping with a friend when we discovered a different kind of ruin. Not a Maya temple this time, but a Franciscan monastery from the days of the conquest. There wasn't much left of it and we wouldn't have stayed, but it started to rain. So we took shelter in the ruins and built a fire against one of the old walls. I don't know if it was the heat of the fire, but the wall suddenly collapsed and there, in the rubble, was a small cedar box. We forced it open, expecting to find gold coins and jewels. What a letdown! It was just some rosary beads and an old book wrapped in deerskin! I was disappointed, but Frank was dancing a jig like he'd scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.\"\n\nMax groaned. \"I've seen him do that dance at weddings.\"\n\n\"Well, this time he had good reason\u2014he'd realized that the old book was the private journal of Friar Diego de Landa! Have you heard of him?\"\n\n\"Oscar Poot called him the curse of the Maya.\"\n\n\"He was bad news, that was for sure,\" said Uncle Ted. \"He single-handedly attempted to wipe out Maya culture. Even the authorities in Spain were shocked, and had him imprisoned in the monastery.\"\n\n\"Did you find his skeleton in the ruins?\"\n\n\"No, he was sent back to Spain to face charges.\"\n\n\"So what happened to the journal?\"\n\n\"Well, that's what we argued about. It was one of the greatest archaeological finds of the century, but your father refused to report it.\"\n\n\"Where is it now?\"\n\n\"Let's just say that its existence is known only to a select few.\"\n\nMax could not believe his ears. His father had been hiding stolen goods all these years. He was an archaeological outlaw, a desperado in a safari jacket.\n\n\"The jacket!\" spluttered Max.\n\n\"What jacket?\" asked Uncle Ted.\n\n\"Dad's old safari jacket! I bet that's where he kept the journal! It must be missing with the rest of his notes.\"\n\n\"Surely he wouldn't have been stupid enough to bring it back to San Xavier?\" Uncle Ted sighed. \"If you're right, Massimo, this is a disaster.\"\n\n\"Why? Because it's priceless?\"\n\n\"No, because it contains a secret that could destroy the world.\"\n\nMax made a face. \"You're supposed to be telling me the truth,\" he said.\n\n\"This is the truth, Massimo. I've seen the journal and I can tell you that Friar Landa had no interest in saving souls. He directed all his energies to finding a certain set of stone carvings with supposedly mystical powers.\"\n\n\"The Jaguar Stones!\"\n\n\"You've heard of them?\"\n\n\"Oscar mentioned them. But what's the harm in a few old stones?\"\n\n\"Landa tortured thousands of men, women, and children to get his hands on them. He believed that if he could gather all five stones together, he would become a living god.\"\n\n\"But that's stupid, isn't it?\"\n\n\"The point is, Max, that Landa believed it\u2014and so will plenty of other power-crazy megalomaniacs. That journal contains full instructions for using the five sacred stones at the five sacred pyramids. If it falls into the wrong hands, every rogue nation on the planet will be racing to find the Jaguar Stones. Major wars have started for less.\"\n\n\"I can't believe Dad's kept this secret for so long. Isn't that against some kind of archaeological code of honor?\"\n\n\"Honor doesn't come into it. Ever since Frank read the journal, he's been obsessed by the idea of putting Landa's instructions to the test.\"\n\n\"But what good are the instructions without a Jaguar Stone?\"\n\nUncle Ted said nothing.\n\nMax did a double take. \"Don't tell me Dad had a Jaguar Stone?\"\n\nUncle Ted slowly wiped his mouth with a napkin.\n\nThen he carefully refolded the napkin and put it down next to his cup.\n\nHe straightened the spoon on his saucer.\n\nHe flicked a crumb off the table.\n\nWhen he could no longer avoid answering Max's question, he spoke in a whisper.\n\nOne word.\n\nOne word that changed everything.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What!\" Max sat bolt upright.\n\n\"Frank had the White Jaguar of Ixchel.\"\n\n\"Where did he get it?\"\n\n\"From me.\"\n\nMax considered this information. \"That carved head in the suitcase on the shelf down there\u2014was that a Jaguar Stone?\"\n\nUncle Ted nodded. \"The Red Jaguar of Chahk.\"\n\n\"Where you _you_ getting them from?\"\n\n\"I think I've said enough.\"\n\n\"But what about your underground cache?\"\n\n\"It's not a cache, Massimo, it's a storeroom. Those limestone caves are the perfect temperature for storing antiques.\"\n\nMax narrowed his eyes. \"Are you forging Jaguar Stones? You promised you'd tell me _everything_.\" He lay back on the sofa and pulled up the blanket, like a child waiting for a bedtime story.\n\n\"It could be dangerous for you to know more, Massimo.\"\n\n\"If you want me to stop poking around, you have to tell me.\"\n\nUncle Ted sighed. \"I'm a smuggler.\"\n\nMax's eyes widened in surprise.\n\n\"Are you shocked?\" asked Uncle Ted.\n\n\"It's just that Dad always says...,\" began Max. Then he stopped himself.\n\n\"I know what Frank says,\" said Uncle Ted. \"He says smugglers and looters are the scum of the earth.\"\n\nMax nodded glumly.\n\nUncle Ted laughed. \"You must have realized by now, Massimo, that I don't give a fig for what Frank says. It was partly his fault that I had to start smuggling. Has he ever talked about what happened when your grandpa died?\"\n\n\"He never talks about the past,\" said Max, \"unless it's about the Maya.\"\n\n\"Patrick Murphy died about twenty years go. I was pursuing my studies at art school in London, and Frank was at Harvard. Neither of us wanted to take charge of family affairs, but Frank insisted it should be me. He said it was my duty as the eldest, but I got the sense he thought my studies were less important. I came back to find the business in tatters. There was a blight in the banana groves and production was at an all-time low. I wanted to close down, but people were depending on me. Lucky Jim's father was foreman at the time and supporting a huge family. I couldn't let them starve. I had to find the money to keep things going until the blight was over. So I decided to put my artistic training to good use and start dealing in Maya artifacts. Frank said I was no better than a thieving conquistador. I thought that was rich, given that he was sitting on Landa's journal, so I called him a few names, too. To cut a long story short, we've been like oil and water ever since. He got to live out his dream digging up old pots, while I stayed in San Xavier, packing bananas.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you go back to London when the blight was over?\"\n\n\"The usual story... _cherchez la femme_.\"\n\nMax looked blank.\n\n\"I fell in love,\" explained Uncle Ted.\n\n\"Who\u2014?\" began Max.\n\n\"It ended badly. That's when I decided to forget about pointless concepts like art and love, and throw myself into making money. Maya artifacts are just another commodity to me\u2014like bananas.\"\n\n\"Dad says\u2014\"\n\n\"Your father is a hypocrite! In public, he denounces the black market, but in private he's been blackmailing me to get him a Jaguar Stone.\"\n\nMax's mouth fell open. \"You're kidding!\"\n\n\"I'm not. He made me swear that if I ever came across a Jaguar Stone, I would pass it straight to him, no questions asked. That was his price for not reporting my smuggling activities. Of course, I never dreamed for a moment that not one, but two Jaguar Stones would fall into my lap.\"\n\n\"Where did they come from?\"\n\n\"It was pure chance.\" Uncle Ted leaned forward conspiratorially. \"One day last year, we'd just set sail with a load of bananas and our 'special cargo,' when the local coast guard pulled alongside to board us for inspection. Luckily, we were using the old Chinese smugglers' trick of towing the loot in a crate underwater. We cut the rope, the crate sank to the bottom of the sea, and there was nothing for the coast guard to find.\"\n\n\"But didn't you lose it?\" asked Max, fascinated by this master class in smuggling techniques.\n\n\"No, that's the clever bit. We fit our crates with small transmitters. If we have to cut one loose, we can track it with a GPS\u2014a global positioning system. The waters around here aren't deep, so we just send down a diver to retrieve it.\"\n\n\"Why don't the coast guards see the signal?\"\n\n\"They do. But there are so many environmentalists tracking whales and dolphins with the same system, no one pays any attention. Even so, we thought it would be wise to lay low for a while. So we left the crate and just monitored the signal for several months. That's when we noticed something strange.\"\n\nMax sat up again. \"What was it?\"\n\n\"The crate was moving toward land. You expect things to drift with the current, but this was like a magnetic attraction. Eventually the signal indicated that the crate was no longer underwater. Yet the depth gauge showed it was still way below sea level. It didn't make sense.\"\n\n\"Was it in an air pocket or something?\"\n\n\"I went down with the divers to find out. Tracking the signal, we found ourselves in an underwater tunnel. We followed it for a hundred yards or so, until it opened into a huge cavern. And I mean huge. I'm talking about Madison Square Garden. When we surfaced and shone our flashlights around, we couldn't believe our eyes. Washed up on the rocks was the wreck of a Spanish galleon. It was the long-lost _Espada_.\"\n\n\"That's the ship that disappeared!\"\n\n\"Exactly! And can you imagine the riches that were in its hold?\"\n\nA ray of sunshine lit up the room, and when Uncle Ted shielded his eyes, he looked like he was blinded by the glare from the _Espada_ 's gold.\n\n\"It took us months to bring up the haul. But the best was yet to come....\"\n\nUncle Ted paused for dramatic effect.\n\n\"On our final dive before the tide changed, we found an old sea chest at the back of the hold. It was perfectly preserved in the cave and there, burned into the wood, was the crest of Friar Diego de Landa! Can you believe it?\"\n\nUncle Ted's face was shining with excitement and Max knew that, this time, Landa's box had contained more than rosary beads and old books.\n\n\"We opened the lid, and a ghostly glow lit up the cavern. Inside the chest, along with a jeweled sword and some solidgold candlesticks, were two\u2014two!\u2014of the legendary Jaguar Stones. One in pure white alabaster and one in ruby-red Mexican fire opal. There in front of me were the White Jaguar of Ixchel and the Red Jaguar of Chahk. What a moment!\"\n\nUncle Ted shook his head at the memory.\n\n\"Your father came for the White Jaguar last week and took it as if it was his birthright. But no matter. I've fulfilled my side of the bargain and I was not expecting to see him ever again\u2014until his son turned up on my doorstep.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Max.\n\nUncle Ted shook his head. \"I'm the one who should be sorry. I've enjoyed our little chat. I haven't talked so much in years. Maybe blood _is_ thicker than water, Massimo.\"\n\n\"Please call me Max.\"\n\n\"I will try and be a better host, Max.\" Uncle Ted smiled ruefully. \"When it comes to houseguests, I've always agreed with Jean-Paul.\"\n\n\"Is he one of your servants?\"\n\n\"Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher. He said, 'Hell is other people.' Of course, he said it in French. But my point is, I don't like visitors at the best of times, and seeing your father always puts me in a bad mood.\"\n\n\"He has that effect on me sometimes,\" said Max.\n\nUncle Ted roared with laughter. \"I'm looking forward to getting to know you, Max. I hope we can make a fresh start.\"\n\nMax nodded eagerly.\n\n\"But no more nocturnal rambles, okay?\" continued Uncle Ted. \"I'm selling the Red Jaguar tomorrow night, and I need you to stay in your room. My buyer is a nasty piece of work, and anything could happen.\"\n\nMax guessed he was talking about the gun-crazed Spaniard. \"No problem,\" he said. He had no desire to bump into that cape-twirling weirdo. It was a shame to miss all the excitement, though. \"Maybe I could help you?\" he suggested.\n\n\"I'd rather you didn't,\" said Uncle Ted firmly.\n\n\"Let me do something safe, like keeping a lookout. There's a great view from my balcony, and I could use those night-vision goggles I saw in your office. Please, Uncle Ted; I'd keep out of sight.\"\n\nHis uncle thought for a moment. \"Maybe it's not such a bad idea. At least I'd know where you were. But you have to promise to stay in your room, whatever happens. These thugs mean business.\"\n\n\"I give you my word.\"\n\nWhen Raul came in to clear away the breakfast things, he saw them shaking hands and smiled to himself as he loaded the tray. It was a long time since he'd seen his boss look so happy.\n\n\"Ah, Raul,\" said Uncle Ted, \"have you packed the boy's lunch?\"\n\n\"What?\" said Max indignantly. \"You mean, after all this, I still have to go and rake the beach?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" Uncle Ted tried to look stern. \"Now get to work.\"\n\n# Chapter Seven  \nTHIEVES IN THE NIGHT\n\nThat evening Max sat on his balcony, waiting for it to get dark enough to try out the night-vision goggles and thinking over everything Uncle Ted had told him. His head was throbbing from information overload. If he were a computer, he would have crashed for sure.\n\nBack in Boston, life had been black and white. Parents led dull lives and went to bed early. Smugglers were low-life jerks. The Maya were dead as dodos.\n\nHere in the jungle, none of that was true.\n\nAll bets were off.\n\nHow had Uncle Ted put it?\n\n_Things are never what they seem around here_.\n\nIt was unsettling, but also exciting.\n\nMax liked the sense of possibility, the idea that he could reinvent himself. He could be irresistible to girls... he could ace tests without studying... maybe he could\u2014dare he even think it?\u2014be an interesting enough person to make his parents want to spend more time with him.\n\nAs he took stock of his current situation, he realized he'd changed a lot already. He'd traveled all this way on his own. He'd survived Lucky Jim's gun on his neck. He'd even bonded with child-hating Uncle Ted. It wasn't a bad start. In fact, tonight, standing on the balcony of his rich uncle's beautiful house, he felt like a new person.\n\nOlder, wiser, more mature.\n\n_That's the spirit_ , he encouraged himself.\n\nHe smiled\u2014a sardonic, James Bond kind of smile.\n\nOut here, with the waves lapping the shore and the sounds of the rainforest beyond the garden wall, it was easy to feel like an international playboy.\n\nMax Murphy, Man of Mystery.\n\nIt had a ring to it.\n\nFinally the sun was setting, and Max inspected the night-vision goggles. They looked like heavy binoculars attached to a web of straps. It took him a while to get them on, but once he did...\n\nBoy, did they work!\n\nIt was fantastic! Everything was cast in a green glow, but he could see almost as well as in daylight. In fact, thanks to thermal imaging and infrared detectors, he could see some things even better than usual.\n\nHa-hah! Those guards patrolling the beachfront thought they were keeping a low profile, but their body heat made them stand out like luminous green ghosts!\n\nExcited, Max turned his goggles onto the rainforest. Surely tonight he'd be able to spot signs of life in the normally inscrutable mass of foliage.\n\nNothing.\n\nNothing.\n\nNothing.\n\nWait.\n\nHe saw a movement.\n\nHe focused in on it.\n\n_Gotcha!_\n\nSomething was coming out of the jungle and heading this way. As Max watched, the faint green glow formed itself into two distinct heat spots. He increased the magnification on the goggles until he could make out two monkeys, one a little bigger than the other.\n\nWith their long tails curved in the air behind them, the monkeys loped quickly toward the perimeter wall. For a few minutes they disappeared from view, but soon appeared again on the edge of the wall. Max smiled to himself. They must sneak in all the time to steal bananas.\n\nThe monkeys certainly seemed to know where they were going, but it was not toward the banana warehouse. They were headed straight toward the house. Max was tingling with excitement. Seeing animals in the wild felt very different from seeing them in the zoo. He kept absolutely still so as not to frighten them away.\n\nWhat were they up to? They seemed to be interested in a particular stone pillar in the garden. Was there some sort of tasty vine growing on it? What was the special attraction? Max's smile faded as he watched the monkeys remove a metal grate off the side of the pillar and climb inside. It must be a ventilation shaft for the underground rooms!\n\nHe kept his eyes fixed on the pillar, but the monkeys had vanished.\n\nJust when he was wondering if he'd dreamed the whole thing (had he fallen asleep for a moment?), the monkeys reappeared.\n\nBut what was that? They were carrying something. Max's jaw dropped when he recognized the metal case containing the Red Jaguar.\n\nThis was not remotely funny anymore. It was deadly serious and Max seemed to be the only one who was aware of it. Where were the guards? Where was Lucky Jim? Where was Uncle Ted?\n\nIf only someone would come before it was too late....\n\nThe monkeys moved awkwardly across the lawn toward the perimeter wall. The case was heavy and they were having difficulty lifting it. But even so, they would soon be over the wall and into the jungle.\n\nMax was in turmoil. Should he shout for the guards and try to convince them that two monkeys had staged a commando raid? Or should he go after the monkeys himself and break his promise to Uncle Ted about staying in his room?\n\nMax made his decision.\n\nA promise was a promise.\n\nHe basked in a glow of self-righteousness. For once, he would act in a mature and responsible manner. He would do as he was told\u2014even if the monkeys got clean away.\n\nHe ran to the door to raise the alarm.\n\nIt was locked.\n\nUncle Ted had locked him in!\n\nSo much for mutual trust and respect!\n\nAs of now, all promises were null and void.\n\nIn a hotheaded rage, Max grabbed his backpack and reviewed the jumbled contents: flashlight, towel, mosquito net, shades, and\u2014what was that, at the bottom?\u2014ugh, granola bars. (He would never, never be that hungry.) What else? He threw in his Red Sox cap for good luck.\n\nReady to go.\n\nHe slung his backpack over his shoulder and climbed over the balcony railing. It was a little high to jump down, but with the aid of a climbing vine he made it to the ground.\n\nUncle Ted was going to be mad.\n\nVery mad.\n\nBut there was no going back.\n\nBesides, if Uncle Ted had trusted him and not locked him in his room, he wouldn't have attempted this crazy escapade. Now he was master of his own destiny. And if he could just get those monkeys to drop the Jaguar Stone, Uncle Ted would have to kiss his feet and beg his forgiveness.\n\nThrough the night-vision goggles, Max spotted the monkeys disappearing over the perimeter wall. He raced across the garden toward them. Steps led up to a battlemented walkway that ran along the top of the wall. Max took the steps two at time and peered over. About forty more feet of lawn lay between the wall and the start of the jungle. He could see the monkeys slowly dragging the case toward the tree line. They seemed to be heading for a gap in the undergrowth, maybe some sort of trail.\n\nMax swung over the wall and found footholds to climb down in the crumbling stone. Then he sprinted across the lawn and... after a moment's hesitation... he plunged down the trail and into the forest. His pace slowed. It was like entering a tunnel. The noise was incredible. _Whook-whook. Whook-whook_. At first, he thought a chopper was circling above him, but then he realized that this deafening sound was coming from the tiny pop-eyed frogs that looked down at him from every tree.\n\nThough no competition for the frogs in the decibel stakes, nocturnal birds were shrieking, insects were buzzing\u2014and every so often something a whole lot bigger would let out a hungry growl that shook the air like a subway train passing through.\n\nMax told himself that the creatures were more scared of him than he was of them, but he doubted it was true. He wanted to turn back. But which would he rather face\u2014a wild beast or an angry Uncle Ted?\n\nHe decided to keep going.\n\nWith every step, the din of the jungle grew louder. The trees rustled and shook. Bats darted in front of his face. Lightning bugs and click beetles lit up his goggles with their fluorescent green trails. He seemed to be surrounded by creeping, crawling, jumping things.\n\n_Okay. Concentrate_.\n\nMax could clearly see the path and he picked his way carefully over the tangled mass of tree roots. His pace was slow and he was grateful the Red Jaguar was so heavy. If it had been lighter, the monkeys could have swung through the trees and he wouldn't have had a chance of following.\n\nAs it was, they continued their slow, shuffling progress until they came to an open space under a tall stand of bamboo. Then they inspected the ground fastidiously before choosing a place to set down the suitcase, like two old ladies getting ready for a picnic.\n\nMax hid behind a tree, hardly daring to breathe. _Any minute now_ , he thought, _I'll run into the clearing, frighten them away, and grab the suitcase_. But as he stood there, gathering his nerve, the bigger monkey opened its mouth and began to roar. Max couldn't believe the sheer volume of it. It was like something out of _Jurassic Park_. If he hadn't seen with his own eyes that it was coming from a monkey, he would have thought a T. rex was loose in the jungle. Make that a T. rex with a megaphone. But who or what was the monkey calling?\n\nA human figure, dressed all in black, emerged from the forest. The monkeys jumped up and down excitedly. The figure patted them and gave them something to eat. The monkeys grabbed at the food and leapt into the trees, whooping and screeching at each other.\n\nThen the figure opened the case and took out the Red Jaguar.\n\nIts glow illuminated the whole clearing.\n\nSuddenly, the air was silent. The insects, the birds, even the tree frogs ceased their calling. The whole jungle seemed to be waiting and watching.\n\nQuickly, the figure wrapped the stone in a cloth and put it into a small backpack. Then he started digging in the ground, scooping out the dirt with both hands until he'd made a hole big enough to bury the metal case. Only when both stone and case were hidden from view did the jungle cacophony resume.\n\nWho was this mysterious thief who trained monkeys to do his dirty work? Was it one of Landa's henchmen? Or a business rival of Uncle Ted's?\n\nAn unearthly noise made Max jump out of his skin.\n\nIt sounded close.\n\nHe peeped out from behind the tree.\n\nThe noise was coming from the thief! With his hands cupped around his mouth, he was making a series of throaty, inhuman growls. Loud monkey grunts rained down from the trees in reply. At one point Max's legs turned to jelly when it seemed the thief was looking directly at him, but it was a false alarm and the thief resumed his \"conversation\" before taking off again into the jungle.\n\nMax followed, trying to be as quiet and light-footed as he could.\n\nIt was harder than before, because the pace was faster and the trail was much less distinct. Even with the night-vision goggles, he had to use all his wits and concentration to keep the figure in view. Roots tripped him, vines clung to him, branches pulled at him. But none of these obstacles seemed to bother his quarry, who made the trek look as effortless as a stroll in the park.\n\nThey came to a stagnant river with a layer of green scum floating on top. A large tree had fallen across it, creating a natural bridge. The thief ran nimbly over the tree trunk and continued up the path.\n\nMax paused before crossing. A division of army ants was marching toward him across the tree trunk. Their column was as wide as the log, and there was no end in sight to their ranks.\n\n_They're only ants_ , he told himself, and stepped gingerly onto the log.\n\nIt was perilously slippery.\n\nMax concentrated every fiber of his being on keeping his balance. Now he could see that many of the ants were dragging prey\u2014dead beetles, wasps, and crickets\u2014underneath their bodies. He stomped on them with his thick-soled sneakers as he inched his way across. He'd made it about halfway when he felt a searing pain in his legs. He looked down to see ants on his sneakers, crawling up inside his jeans. Instinctively, he leaned over to swat at them and fell headfirst into the murky river.\n\nIt tasted disgusting. Max spluttered to the surface and stood up on the oozy bottom. The water came up to his knees. He couldn't see much because his goggles were smeared with mud, but the pain in his legs seemed to be subsiding so he guessed the ants had been washed off. Now he just had to get to the bank without being attacked by bloodsucking leeches or razor-toothed piranhas....\n\nThe glutinous mud of the riverbed made every step a struggle. At one point the suction pulled off a sneaker, and he had to stick a hand in and feel around for it. The thick, green water stank like rotten eggs, and his whole body shook with revulsion.\n\nSomething slimy touched his face.\n\nA piece of weed? A water snake?\n\nSplashing hysterically, he made it to the bank. He sat down on a rock. His heart was pounding. Where was he? What had he done? Dripping wet and trembling with fear, he rammed his sneaker back on. Then he ran his hands all over his body to wipe down every inch of himself. He didn't want any creepy jungle thing to touch any bit of him.\n\nThis was it, the end of the line.\n\nHe would sit here until he was found.\n\nOr until he starved to death.\n\nOr until something ate him.\n\nIt was at this low point that Max realized what an idiot he'd been. He was lost in the treacherous forest, alone, wet, bitten, scared, and hungry. Now the police would have to break off their search for his parents to look for him instead (if Uncle Ted even bothered to report him missing).\n\nHe drew his feet up, put his head on his knees, and hugged himself. His clothes smelled sulfurous and moldy. Overwhelmed by self-pity, he unzipped his wet backpack and looked inside. It seemed to be pretty dry. He pulled out a towel and dried himself off as much as he could. Then he stuck his hand in again and groped around. Among the tangle of mosquito netting and odd socks, his fingers closed on something unnaturally hard and dense.\n\nThe granola bars.\n\nIt had come to this.\n\nMiserably, he unwrapped a bar. He brought the compacted brown mass to his lips. With a heavy heart, he opened his mouth and prepared his tongue to receive the foul-tasting grunge.\n\nThen, in the nick of time, he recovered his fighting spirit.\n\nThings were bad, but not that bad.\n\nHe still wasn't desperate enough to eat a granola bar.\n\nSo he sat on the rock and pulled himself together and thought about what he should do. The most sensible thing would be to retrace his steps. But going back over that ant-covered log was not an option. Nor was wading across that slimy river. And they both paled in comparison with the terror he felt about facing Uncle Ted without bringing back the Jaguar Stone.\n\nHe wiped the last of the mud off his goggles and looked around.\n\nTrees, trees, nothing but trees.\n\nBig, thick trees with buttress roots taller than he was.\n\nTall, thin trees with sinister, twisted trunks and long, sinewy roots, gnarled and warty like a witch's fingers.\n\nHe looked harder. Now he was seeing things.\n\nIn the unreal green light of the goggles, he could see a mark hacked into one of the tree trunks.\n\nIt looked like an arrow. And it was freshly carved.\n\nHe thought again about that late-night zombie movie. _We've been expecting you, Max Murphy_ , cackled the zombies in his head.\n\n_Stop it_.\n\nHe told himself there was a natural explanation for the mark, that it was made by the beak of a giant woodpecker or the teeth of some demented rodent. Possibly something that was watching him right now.\n\nWas something watching him?\n\nHe couldn't see any eyes in the darkness, but he had the same sensation that he'd had on the beach.\n\nSomething was watching him for sure.\n\nHow tasty he must look, sitting on this rock in the moonlight like the last jelly doughnut in the school cafeteria.\n\nAny moment now, something big would come along and eat him.\n\nOr maybe it wouldn't, and he'd be forced to eat the granola bars.\n\nEither way, the future was looking grim.\n\nSomething fell out of the arrow-scarred tree with a thump.\n\nWith his heart in his mouth, Max turned to look. A ripe mango lay squashed on the ground. Squashed and rotten like his hopes for survival.\n\nHe put his head in his hands.\n\nHe was lost in the middle of a jungle. If only he'd marked the way he'd come so he could find his way back. This was Boy Scout 101, and he'd flunked it.\n\nThere was a rustling in the leaves. Two more mangoes fell to the ground and landed by the first one. As Max regarded them miserably, he noticed a faint trail at the base of the tree, eerily illuminated like a ghostly runway by phosphorescent mushrooms on either side.\n\nA trail. Any trail was better than nothing.\n\nHe got to his feet and headed for the mushrooms.\n\nHis feet squelched in the mud as he tramped along, but he no longer cared if he made any noise. He was miserable and tired, and his quarry was long gone. The important thing now was to keep to the trail, watch out for snakes in the leaf litter, and try to find somewhere safe to wait for daybreak.\n\nAfter an hour or so, he came to a part of the forest that was quieter and airier. By now, he was bone tired. His legs ached, his feet ached, his arms ached, his head ached.\n\nHe looked around and saw a massive tree trunk, easily twenty feet in diameter. The bottom of the trunk was bare, but its higher reaches had some kind of vine growing down them. The vine had big leathery leaves and exposed roots that dangled from the tree like bits of frayed rope. Where the trunk split into two, about ten feet off the ground, the crook was cushioned by a thick green mattress of leaves that seemed to have been flattened down, just for him. In Max's exhausted state, it looked as cozy and inviting as a featherbed.\n\nUsing a neighboring tree stump as a step and pulling on the dangling roots to haul himself the rest of the way up, Max reached the crook of the tree quite easily. Then he wedged himself between the branches, hung up his mosquito net as best he could, and lay back, using his backpack as a pillow.\n\nNow all he had to do was watch out for predators and wait for the dawn. As long as he didn't fall asleep, he should be safe here. He scratched the insect bites on his arms and face, and allowed himself to relax a little. He'd been awake for two days and it felt good to finally rest. Stars twinkled in the little patch of sky that was visible through the leaves above his head. Stars meant a clear sky and no rain clouds. His clothes still stank from the river, but at least they were beginning to dry out. He'd survived this far and, with a whole day ahead of him, he was sure he could find his way back to the Villa Isabella. He remembered a time in the distant past when he'd walked through a rainforest like this one. Or was it a video game? Past and present, waking and sleeping, games and reality... it was all merging into one.\n\nIt was surprisingly comfortable in this tree.\n\nAs Max's thoughts settled like roosting doves, the hum of the jungle arranged itself into a soothing lullaby.\n\nHis eyelids felt heavy. He'd close them just for a moment.\n\nSoon he curled up like a baby bird in its cozy nest and nodded off to sleep.\n\n\"Ow! Ow! Ow!\"\n\nThe next thing he knew, he was screaming in pain and terror.\n\nHe'd been attacked as he slept.\n\nHe woke up to find great black hairy hands all over him, pinching him, squeezing him, pulling out his hair by the roots.\n\n# Chapter Eight  \nTHE MONKEY GIRL\n\nThey weren't hands, they were paws. Great hairy paws with long fingers.\n\nMax tried to bat them away, but he was tangled up in his mosquito net and he fell out of the tree. He landed in a heap on his backpack.\n\nSeconds later, the night-vision goggles landed next to him with a dull crunch.\n\nHe peered up to see what had attacked him.\n\nTwo monkeys were sitting high in the branches. One was big and black. The other was smaller and reddish in color. The bigger one was wearing Max's baseball cap. They both had thick hair and wispy beards that would have made them look quite intellectual had they not been baring their teeth and screeching with monkey laughter.\n\nThey looked suspiciously like the monkeys who'd stolen the Red Jaguar. But before Max could study them in any detail, they were off, leaping from branch to branch, still screeching raucously.\n\nMax looked around. The leaf canopy above him blocked out most of the sun, but he could have guessed it was morning just from the energy in the air. Thousands of busy little life-forms scuttled around, intent on getting breakfast before it got too hot to move. Bugs buzzed and whirred and clicked. Birds shrieked and squawked and whooped. Flowers pumped out their heady scents, competing with each other to lure the passing insects like those salespeople who lurked in Macy's doorway with sprays of perfume.\n\nEverything was shrouded in a humid mist. In the dim light, Max felt like he was underwater, but with butterflies instead of fish.\n\nOn the positive side, it was the most amazing morning of his life.\n\nOn the negative side, he was lost, sore, itchy, hungry, smelly, and caked in mud. Somehow he had to find his way back and face the wrath of Uncle Ted. He felt sick at the thought. If only he could have returned in triumph, bringing the Red Jaguar with him. But it was too late for that now.\n\n_Thud!_\n\nA wild avocado, hard as a rock, landed at his feet.\n\nDeep in the foliage he saw a flash of Red Sox cap and heard the whooping of monkey laughter.\n\nMax was sure now that these were the monkeys who'd stolen the Red Jaguar. After all, they seemed to like hanging around humans, they were intelligent in an annoying sort of way, and they were light-fingered enough to have pilfered his baseball cap.\n\nA seed of hope began to grow.\n\nMaybe the human thief and the Red Jaguar weren't far away, either. Maybe Max's triumphal-return scenario was still a possibility.\n\nThere was a crashing of branches as the monkeys moved off through the trees. They seemed to be headed in the direction of the trail. Every so often, they stopped and looked at Max as if waiting for him to catch up.\n\nHe decided to follow them.\n\nAlthough it was just after dawn, the air felt wet and heavy. There was an insistent drumming sound that Max could not identify. As the noise grew louder and louder, water began to drip from the leaves above. Soon the drops became a downpour. Of course! The drumming sound\u2014it was rain on the forest canopy!\n\nMax ducked under a huge leaf for cover. He watched the rain running down the center of the leaf in front of him, and he caught as much as he could in his cupped hands. It was the sweetest water he'd ever tasted.\n\nWhen the deluge was over, a hailstorm of nutshells told Max that the monkeys were waiting for him to resume his trek through the dripping jungle. With his wet clothes chafing, bugs biting him, and thorns tearing at his skin, his high spirits soon plummeted. He trudged along, trying to ignore the voices in his head that were telling him how lost he was, how stupid he was, how doomed he was to follow a pair of crazy monkeys. The voices were right, of course, but there wasn't much he could do about it now.\n\nA shaft of sunlight burst through a gap in the tree canopy.\n\nAt the same moment, Max rounded a turn in the path.\n\nIn front of him was an ancient stone slab, about eight feet tall, standing in a spotlight of brilliant sunshine. Brushing aside the purple flowers that clung to it, he saw that the slab was covered in worn hieroglyphs. A swarm of yellow butterflies danced around his head, and the sun bathed the whole incredible scene in a golden glow.\n\nMax paused for a moment to take it all in: the stone, the butterflies, the smoky scent of the flowers... Smoky? Wait\u2014\n\nHe caught the unmistakable whiff of campfire.\n\nThe thief had made camp!\n\nThe monkeys had led him to his quarry!\n\nThe Red Jaguar was at hand!\n\nBut what now?\n\nHe'd been so intent on the chase, he hadn't considered what he'd do if he actually caught up with the thief. With no knowledge of any combat technique that wasn't computer-generated, how could he hope to overpower this criminal and steal back the Red Jaguar? It might be wiser to follow at a safe distance and wait for the police to show up. But first, he'd take a closer look at the enemy camp.\n\nGrabbing a fallen branch as a weapon, his senses on high alert, Max tiptoed down the path. The trees were thinning out, and he was approaching an open space. For the last ten yards, he crept forward on his hands and knees. Then, using a large tree as cover, he peered into the clearing.\n\nThe remains of a campfire smoldered in the middle. Behind it, some leaning at crazy angles, others lying on the ground, were ranks of carved stone slabs like the one he'd just seen by the trail. And behind them, as if they were guarding it, was a small, square building, half buried by earth and vegetation.\n\nAfter so many hours of traipsing through the tentacled, tangled jungle, it was extraordinary to come upon something so angular, so solid, so... man-made. It should have been a welcome sight, but this architecture was distinctly disturbing.\n\nThe rubble-filled doorway was unmistakably a mouth, edged top and bottom by rows of pointed stone teeth. Above the door, Max made out two square eyes and a flat, stubby nose. The rest of the face was carved into intricate geometric patterns, like a tattooed Maori warrior. The overall expression was of intense malevolence. Even the lack of greenery around the face was sinister, as if the nose and mouth were keeping the facade clear of weeds with their toxic exhalations.\n\nHiding behind the tree, Max scanned the area for signs of life.\n\nNo one.\n\nHe'd arrived too late.\n\nSecretly, he was relieved.\n\nBut hey, he'd been hot on the trail, and he took pride in that. For his first time in the jungle\u2014with no map and no compass\u2014he'd done really well to get this far. He'd slept in a tree, he'd survived the night, and the worst was surely over. This clearing would be plainly visible to the rescue helicopter. If he revived the fire and sent out some smoke signals, he could be back at Villa Isabella in time for lunch.\n\nHe was so busy congratulating himself that he didn't hear the swish of a machete behind him, didn't hear the thief creeping up on him, until a voice whispered in his ear, \"Looking for me?\"\n\nMax spun around.\n\nThere in front of him was the mysterious figure in black.\n\nIt was a girl.\n\nA pretty girl.\n\nShe was taller than him and maybe a little older.\n\nShe had amber-colored eyes and coppery black hair.\n\nShe was wearing black cargo pants, a Ramones T-shirt, and hiking boots. A black sweatshirt was knotted around her waist. She held the machete loosely in one hand with the ease of one who knew how to use it.\n\nMax had the strangest feeling he'd seen her somewhere before.\n\nShe spoke again. \"What took you so long, Hoop?\"\n\nMax was speechless. So many questions were going through his mind. He stood there with his mouth open, until one question formed itself into words.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he stammered.\n\n\"My name is Ix Sak Lol.\" (To Max, it sounded like _Eech Sock Loll_.) \"It's Mayan for 'Lady White Flower.' But most people call me Lola.\"\n\n\"But who are you? Why did you steal the Red Jaguar?\"\n\nShe ignored his questions. \"Come and sit down, Hoop.\"\n\nHe couldn't move. He just stood there, staring at her.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, do excuse my manners,\" she said, affecting a formal bow. \"Please do me the honor of taking a seat in my humble campsite, Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy.\" She led him into the clearing and indicated that he should sit on one of the fallen stone slabs. \"Perhaps you would care for some jungle soda, otherwise known as water?\"\n\n\"How do you know my name?\" he asked, grabbing the canteen she offered him.\n\n\" _Massimo_ is Italian, after your grandfather,\" she announced confidently. \" _Francis_ is after your father. And _Sylvanus_ is after Sylvanus Griswold Morley, the famous archaeologist who excavated Chich\u00e9n Itz\u00e1. He was also a spy, you know.\"\n\nMax stopped drinking and gawked at her in amazement. \"But how...?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I met your parents at Ixchel last week. They talk about you a lot. My friend Hermanjilio Bol\"\u2014she pronounced it _herman kee leo_ \u2014\"was working with them. I went to help him set up camp before your parents arrived.\"\n\n\"Have you heard from this Herman guy?\" asked Max eagerly. \"Mom and Dad haven't come back yet, and Uncle Ted thinks the trails might be impassable after the storm. He thinks your friend is probably leading them to safety.\"\n\n\"I left Ixchel before the storm, and I haven't talked to Hermanjilio since. But I'm sure everyone's okay, Hoop.\"\n\nAnother question formed in Max's addled brain. \"Why do you keep calling me Hoop?\" He tried to copy her pronunciation, which was somewhere between _hoop_ and _hope_.\n\n\"That's what I called you in my head, when I was tracking you. It's short for _chan hiri'ich hoop_ , which means 'little matchstick' in Mayan. With your red hair and your thin little legs, that's what you look like!\"\n\n\"My hair is brown,\" said Max. \"But what do you mean, when you were tracking me? I was tracking you.\"\n\n\"Ha! You'd have been eaten by jaguars if I hadn't kept an eye on you. And what about that crocodile's nest you nearly disturbed when you fell in the river? Or the vampire bat that was hovering around while you slept\u2014in the strangler fig bed that I made for you?\"\n\n\"Liar,\" said Max, but he swallowed uncomfortably.\n\n\"How about the arrow I cut into the tree? And the bioluminescent fungi?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The glow-in-the-dark mushrooms I placed by the trail. You'd still be sitting on that rock, feeling sorry for yourself, if I hadn't shown you the way. Which reminds me\"\u2014she handed him a mud-caked towel\u2014\"this is yours.\"\n\nIt was his, all right. He must have left it by the stagnant river. He shook off the dried mud and pushed the towel into his backpack.\n\n\"I think the phrase you're looking for is _thank you_ ,\" said Lola.\n\n\"What should I thank you for? Luring me into the jungle in the middle of the night? Leading me across that bridge to be attacked by killer ants? Setting those monkeys on me?\"\n\n\"Oh, poor Hoop,\" said Lola, ruffling his hair.\n\nHe pushed her away.\n\nShe pushed him back.\n\nNext thing, they were scuffling on the ground and, a split second later, Lola had Max flat on his back and trussed up with a vine.\n\n\"So, Hoop, admit that I am the better fighter.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Admit it.\"\n\nMax looked her straight in the eyes. \"I admit it, Monkey Girl,\" he said. \"You are the better... thief!\"\n\nLola tightened the vine around Max's body. \"It's not stealing when you take back something that belongs to you,\" she said.\n\n\"Liar!\" squeaked Max, his voice constricted by the vine. \"If it belongs to anyone, the Red Jaguar belongs to the ancient Maya.\"\n\n\"That's what I said.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Max. \"So you're ancient Maya, are you? You're over a thousand years old, and you chop up tourists for human sacrifices?\"\n\n\"Maybe I do,\" said Lola, raising her machete.\n\n\"I'm not stupid,\" said Max. \"Even I know that the ancient Maya disappeared hundreds of years ago. It's a big mystery. Some experts think they were abducted by aliens.\"\n\n\"What experts?\" Lola was laughing so hard, she relaxed the vine a little.\n\n\"I read it on the Internet. The Maya are living in another galaxy, and when their calendar ends this year, they might come back in spaceships to reclaim their land. That's if the world isn't destroyed by a tsunami, of course.\"\n\n\"Do you believe every crazy thing you read on the Internet, Hoop?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't believe you're a Maya. They vanished. Everyone knows that.\"\n\n\"Is that so? Well, maybe I'll vanish and leave you tied up like a tamale.\"\n\nShe walked away and began stamping out the fire.\n\nMax tried to break free of the vine, but he wasn't strong enough.\n\n\"Hey, Monkey Girl...?\"\n\n\"That's not my name.\"\n\n\"Lola...? Lady White Flower...? Untie me!\"\n\n\"How can I? I don't exist, remember?\"\n\nA column of ants was making its way toward him.\n\n\"Stop messing around! Untie me!\"\n\nShe came back and stood over him, hands on hips. \"I'll untie you because I like your parents. But get it into your head that I'm just as Maya as the guys who built that temple behind me.\"\n\n\"Are you a ghost?\" said Max dubiously.\n\n_\"No!\"_ Lola looked like she didn't know whether to laugh or be angry. \"Don't you know that the Maya are still alive? There are millions of us! We didn't disappear. There's no mystery. We just left the old cities.\"\n\n\"In spaceships?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"On foot.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"All sorts of reasons. Drought, deforestation, overpopulation, conquest... but it didn't happen overnight. Different cities rose and fell over time. We've been around for three thousand years. I wear jeans and eat pizza, but I'm still Maya.\"\n\n\"Pizza?\" echoed Max, all other thoughts disappearing at this mention of food. \"Do you have any?\"\n\nLola slashed through the vine with her machete. Then she reached into her backpack and pulled out a little parcel wrapped in a leaf.\n\n\"Here,\" she said. \"No pizza on the menu today.\"\n\nMax opened the leaf and found a rough-looking tortilla filled with a paste of brown beans. He inspected it with distaste. \"Haven't you got anything else?\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" said Lola sarcastically.\n\n\"Some people say the old temples are still alive.\"\n\nMax tried a bite\u2014it didn't taste as bad as it looked. As he wolfed down the tortilla, he looked at the building. \"Did you say that's a temple?\"\n\n\"They think so. The archaeologists just call it Structure Thirteen. They started excavating it a few years ago but they ran out of money. Whenever you see a hill or a mound around here, it's usually a Maya structure waiting to be excavated.\"\n\n\"What a waste! If this place was in the States, they'd dig it out in no time. They'd have souvenir shops and snack bars and costumed interpreters. It'd make a fortune.\"\n\n\"And you think that's a good idea?\"\n\nMax shrugged defensively. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Some people say the old temples are still alive,\" said Lola.\n\n\"I bet it's just a rumor to keep looters away.\" He looked sharply at Lola. \"Are you a looter? Or a tomb raider?\"\n\n\"No!\" she said, shocked at the suggestion.\n\n\"But you stole the Red Jaguar. Are you working for Count de Landa?\"\n\n\"No! I work with howler monkeys, not snakes!\"\n\nMax became aware of several large black and brownish monkeys sitting in the nearest tree, watching them. One of the lighter-colored monkeys dropped to the ground and sat in front of him, regarding him with an air of disappointment.\n\n\"What's the matter with him?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Her,\" corrected Lola, stroking the monkey's head. \"This is Seri. She and her brother Chulo woke you up this morning. Your snoring was disturbing the whole forest.\"\n\n\"Oh, ha-ha,\" said Max. \"I'm amazed I got any sleep at all.\"\n\n\"What a lazy boy you are. I watched you on the beach. I've never seen anyone work so little and complain so much.\"\n\nMax ignored the insult. \"So it was you! I knew someone was spying on me.\"\n\n\"I wasn't the only one. Landa's men are everywhere,\" said Lola as she smoothed over the earth to remove all traces of the campfire. She put a finger to her lips and cocked her head to one side. Max had no idea which of the many forest sounds she was listening to. After a few seconds, she whispered, \"The monkeys say men are coming.\" She shouldered her backpack. \"Can you swim?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"There's a place near here, the Blue Pool; we can give them the slip....\"\n\n\"But what if it's Uncle Ted? I'll tell him how you saved me in the jungle\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, so you admit I saved you?\"\n\n\"No, but I'll say it so he won't be mad at you. We'll give the Red Jaguar back to him and\u2014\"\n\n\"Forget it. Are you coming with me or not?\"\n\n\"To swim in a pool?\"\n\n\"It leads to an underground cave system. There are caves and tunnels under the whole jungle in this area. You're not claustrophobic, are you?\"\n\nMax shook his head, without conviction. He didn't like the sound of this at all. But meeting this girl felt like fate. And besides, she had the Red Jaguar.\n\n\"Let's go then,\" he said, trying to sound casual.\n\nShe fished some waterproof zipper bags out of her backpack. \"Here, put your flashlight and anything else in one of these.\"\n\nWhile Max fiddled with the bags, Lola called to the monkeys. From the wistful tone of the growls, he guessed she was saying good-bye.\n\nThen, with a nod at Max to follow her, she ran across the clearing and into the trees. After a while, the ground sloped down and they came to a large pool with a rocky cliff on the far side. The water was light blue in the shallows, darkening to a brilliant cobalt as the bottom fell away.\n\nLola waded purposefully in, with Max trailing cautiously behind. A few more steps and they had to swim. She seemed to be heading for the cliff face. As they got closer, Max saw a small opening in the shadow of an overhanging rock.\n\nLola swam straight into it.\n\nMax swam to the mouth of the cave and held on to the side, afraid to go farther. All he could see was inky blackness. There was a strange sound like the hissing of gas.\n\n\"Come on, Hoop,\" said an impatient voice from out of the darkness. \"The water's shallow inside the cave. Just swim toward my voice.\"\n\nA few strokes later, his feet touched bottom. He stood for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the dim light coming from the entrance. He could just see Lola several yards ahead, pulling herself up onto a ledge. Max splashed his way over to her and tried to scramble up beside her.\n\nTo his embarrassment, she had to give him a hand.\n\n\"Where are we?\" he asked.\n\n\"Take a look,\" said Lola.\n\nWhen they switched on their flashlights, Max saw that the ledge was in a huge cavern. In some places, the stream below them was narrow; in others, it spilled out into wide expanses of dark, still water. Minerals had seeped through the cave walls, staining them in rich metallic colors of blue, gold, silver, and red. Against this vibrant backdrop, white calcite formations rose up like abstract marble statues.\n\n\"It looks like a cathedral,\" gasped Max. It was then he realized that the hissing sound was coming from the hundreds\u2014maybe thousands\u2014of brown furry creatures that were clinging to the roof of the cave.\n\n\"Bats!\" he whispered to Lola, but she'd gone.\n\nHe could hear her splashing on ahead. He quickly climbed down into the stream and followed her into the darkness.\n\n\"How much farther?\" he asked, but she didn't answer.\n\nThey waded deeper and deeper into the cavern, following the course of the stream. Bats swooped over Max's head, making him duck and stumble. Most of the time, the water came up only to his ankles, but it was cold and the stones on the streambed were sharp, so the going was difficult. It was also slightly surreal, due to the ever-increasing amount of pottery they passed.\n\nPots had been placed in small pools, on ledges, stuffed between stalagmites, tucked into small niches: anywhere there was a pot-sized hole, a pot was filling it. It reminded Max of his grandmother's house in Italy, where every available space was filled with china figurines. But the oddest thing about this display was that every single pot was cracked or broken.\n\n\"What's with all the pots?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Caves were sacred places,\" said Lola. \"People came to this one to pray for rain. They would bring a piece of pottery with them and break it to release the spirits inside. It's a way of saying thank you to the gods.\"\n\nMax was enjoying the image of holding a Maya Thanksgiving at Nonna's house and smashing all her china, when he heard a noise behind them. One glance at Lola told him she'd heard it, too.\n\nThey upped their pace.\n\nPresently, they entered an even bigger cavern, where the stream formed a wide, shallow pool. In this chamber, the tops of the stalagmites had been cut off and the insides hollowed out. Max slipped and bumped into one of them. It rang like a bell, with a low vibration that echoed through the cave. The other stalagmites in the chamber also began to resonate, creating a haunting melody.\n\n\"Idiot!\" hissed Lola. \"You'll lead them straight to us. Don't touch anything else. And stay on the edge of the pool.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it be quicker to just wade straight across?\" he asked.\n\nIn answer, Lola shone her flashlight onto the pool. Several skeletons were lying in the water, their centuries-old bones covered in a layer of calcite, which gave them a more fleshly appearance. Rising from the pool's center was a small island on which a stone altar had been built. On the front of the altar was carved a fearsome figure with bulbous eyes, a long nose, and two curving tusks. In one hand, the figure held what looked like a bolt of lightning. In the other, it held a bowl containing a sinister-looking lump.\n\n\"What's in his bowl?\" asked Max.\n\n\"A human heart.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nMax's own heart was pounding as they circled the rest of the pool.\n\nOn the far side was a narrow cleft in the rock. As they drew closer, he heard a low rumbling. They turned sideways to squeeze through the gap, and as they inched along, the rumbling got louder and louder until it became a deafening roar.\n\n\"Not much farther now,\" called Lola.\n\nThe passageway gave another turn and opened into a tall, narrow cavern. They were on a stone platform overlooking a rushing underground river. Facing outward from each corner of the platform was the stone head of a snarling jaguar. In the center of the platform, steps led down into the raging torrent.\n\n\"It's a dead end,\" screamed Max. \"We're trapped!\"\n\n\"It's the Sacred River of the Jaguar Kings\u2014our escape route!\"\n\nMax looked down at the whirling, surging, foaming maelstrom beneath them. It wasn't possible that anyone could survive in those perilous waters.\n\n\"No way!\" he yelled.\n\n\"It's the only way!\" she yelled back.\n\n# Chapter Nine  \nSHOOTING THE RAPIDS\n\nYou're crazy!\" Max screamed over the noise of the water. \"We can't swim in that\u2014we'll drown!\"\n\n\"The water _is_ a little high,\" conceded Lola. \"But we won't be swimming.\"\n\nMax watched, puzzled, as she climbed up behind a cluster of stalagmites and pulled out a large bundle. When she shook it out, he saw it was a six-foot rubber raft. Rolled up inside were two collapsible paddles and a foot pump.\n\n\"I had a feeling I'd need a fast getaway.\" Lola looked pleased with herself.\n\n\"You planned this?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"But look at the water. Nothing could survive that.\"\n\n\"Where's your sense of adventure, Hoop? You pump, I'll pack. Hurry!\"\n\nHis brain paralyzed with fear, Max inflated the raft and assembled the paddles. Lola tied the backpacks onto the raft's handles and taped the flashlights to the front as headlamps, so their hands would be free for paddling.\n\nShe seemed to know what she was doing.\n\nThey dragged the raft down the steps, and Lola held it steady while Max scrambled in on shaking legs.\n\nBefore Lola could follow him, they were both caught in a powerful beam of light.\n\n\"Stop!\" commanded a heavily accented voice. \"There is no way out. Surrender now, or these will be the waters of your death.\"\n\nMax recognized the lisping tones of Count Antonio de Landa.\n\nHe was ready to surrender there and then, but Lola jumped in and started paddling furiously. They were swept away from the steps and into the darkness.\n\n_Bang!_\n\nA shot echoed in the cave, and a red light high above them illuminated the raft as it careened and bucked in the churning water.\n\n\"What was that?\" whimpered Max.\n\n\"Flare gun,\" said Lola as she dug her paddle into the water. \"They're lighting up the cave to shoot at us.\"\n\nMax started paddling like his life depended on it\u2014which it did.\n\nA burst of gunfire ricocheted off the cave wall. Max threw himself onto the floor of the raft, but Lola yelled at him to get back up. As he dipped his paddle shakily into the water, he braced himself for the bullet that never came. The swift current swept them out of Landa's view, and the last they heard of him was a volley of Spanish curses echoing through the cavern.\n\nThere was no time to relax. The tunnel narrowed and the current strengthened, shooting them into a twisting passageway. They bounced from one wall to another until, soaked in spray, they were swept sideways into a cavern filled with stalactites and stalagmites, like a forest of stone.\n\nAt times, they glided through vast chambers where the water was calm and their flashlights found blind catfish lurking in the depths, their eyes atrophied from centuries of darkness. At other times, the current was fierce and they had no time to look at anything as they struggled to keep the raft off the rocks.\n\nAll the time, Max was trying to keep his mind a blank, trying not to think about the blackness around them, the weird shapes of the rocks, what it would be like to fall into the water, the impossibility of ending this day alive.\n\nThey entered a place where the cave roof had collapsed, and they had to shade their eyes from the blinding sunlight that poured down on them. The water here was a sparkling green, and it flowed slowly as if reluctant to reenter the darkness. All around the chamber, strange forms like giant hairy turnips twisted out of the water and up through the roof of the cave.\n\n\"What are those?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Tree roots from above,\" said Lola. \"They've burrowed down through the limestone to get to this river.\"\n\n\"I can't believe roots could bore through solid rock,\" marveled Max.\n\nLola turned around to look at him. \"Life is hard in the rainforest,\" she said. \"Everything is fighting for survival.\"\n\n\"Including you?\"\n\nShe didn't answer, and they paddled on in silence.\n\nAll too soon, they slipped back into darkness. The river was quiet now and the air was stale. It was getting harder to breathe. The cave ceiling came down lower and lower, and they had to lean back to pass underneath. Sometimes they had to lie completely flat on their backs as they pushed themselves along with their fingertips in the pitch black.\n\nOnce there was the terrible sound of rock scraping on rubber as they got wedged under a particularly low overhang. Then they had to try not to scream and calmly maneuver themselves to the left or the right, to find a place where the raft could squeeze through. (By unspoken agreement, Max did the trying not to scream, while Lola did the calm maneuvering.)\n\n\"Are we nearly there?\" gasped Max. It was so hot, he thought he might dissolve like a lump of butter in a frying pan. Claustrophobia didn't really cover it. There was no air, no space, no light. This raft was like a floating coffin. Except that he knew he wasn't dead because he could hear the blood roaring in his ears.\n\n\"I need you to concentrate, Hoop,\" said Lola. \"Do you hear that roaring noise?\"\n\n\"You can hear it, too?\" asked Max in surprise.\n\nLola nodded. \"It's the rapids.\"\n\n\"Rapids?\"\n\n\"Calm down, Hoop, it's okay. The river splits in two: our branch meanders calmly to the outside, the other way gets a bit wild. We must stay close to this wall. If we drift into the middle and get caught in the current, we'll be swept over the rapids and we don't want that, do we?\"\n\nMax shook his head. He definitely didn't want that.\n\nThey inched along, hanging on to rocks and tree roots to keep them close to the wall. The water was placid on their side, and ahead of them was a silent tunnel filled with darkness.\n\nLola groaned.\n\nShe waved her paddle into the darkness. It made a dull thud. What had looked like a tunnel was a solid wall of black stone. The raft lurched to a stop. The river disappeared under the rock.\n\n\"Now what? We're trapped! You said you knew the way!\" Max was panicking.\n\n\"It's not my fault,\" said Lola. \"The water has risen after the storm.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"How do I know? Just don't freak out, you're tipping the raft.\"\n\nShe pulled one of the flashlights off the front of the raft and shone the light along the surface of the water where it met the wall of rock.\n\nThere was no way through.\n\n\"The rapids it is, then,\" said Lola.\n\n\"No way!\"\n\n\"Let's just go back and check it out. We can't stay here.\"\n\nReluctantly, Max helped her turn the raft and maneuver it back to the splitting point. Bits of vegetation flew along in the fast-flowing water rushing to the rapids. The roaring noise was almost deafening now.\n\n\"I vote we get it over with,\" said Lola.\n\nBefore Max could argue, she pulled his hand off the rock and they were off, slowly at first and then gathering speed until they became one with the roaring river. The twisting tunnel curved sharply down and they shot through it, whirling and pitching. The jumping beam of the flashlight made it hard to see what was ahead. Boulders loomed at them out of the darkness.\n\nMax screamed all the way.\n\n_You'd pay a fortune for this at Disneyland_ , he told himself.\n\nThey struggled frantically to keep the raft centered in the current. A jagged outcrop loomed on the right. Max used all his strength to push off of it with his paddle. The raft hung there for a moment before veering back into the current. Max's paddle, still wedged in the rocks, was ripped from his hand.\n\nCaught off balance, he almost fell overboard.\n\nHe'd just scrabbled back inside when the raft was thrown into the air as they dropped over a small waterfall. He was pitched over the side of the raft and under the foaming water. The current swirled around him and raged in his ears. Everything was black. He couldn't breathe. He didn't know which way was up.\n\nHis lungs were gasping for air.\n\nSuddenly, something pushed him from underneath and he shot up through the surface like a whale rider at SeaWorld.\n\nHe was in some sort of underground lake.\n\nThe water was still.\n\nThe rapids were behind him.\n\nThe raft was about ten feet away. He could see Lola outlined in a circle of light, surrounded by the menacing darkness on all sides. He splashed over through the icy-cold water, trying not to think about what might lurk in its depths.\n\n\"Give me a hand,\" he sputtered, pulling at the side of the raft.\n\n_A hand! A hand! A hand!_ his voice echoed back at him from all directions.\n\n\"Hold on,\" called Lola. \"The raft's full of water.\"\n\n\"Hurry, the catfish are biting my legs.\"\n\nThis wasn't true, but in his imagination they were circling him like sharks. He was sure it was only a matter of time before they pounced.\n\n\"No, they're not! Don't be such a baby!\"\n\n_Baby! Baby!_ sang the echoes, as if the cave walls themselves were taunting him.\n\nLola helped him aboard.\n\n\"Where's your paddle?\" she said.\n\n\"I lost it.\"\n\n\"You lost it?\"\n\n\"I nearly drowned.\"\n\n\"But you didn't drown, did you? I think the Jaguar Kings are helping us.\"\n\nMax remembered how something had pushed him to the surface. He was shivering uncontrollably, out of cold and fear. \"Y-yeah, sure,\" he said as cynically as he could through chattering teeth. \"J-just get me out of here.\"\n\n\"Get a grip,\" said Lola sternly. \"We're coming to the tricky bit.\"\n\n\"The tricky bit? Trickier than those rapids? You've got to be kidding me!\"\n\n\"Calm down, Hoop. The Jaguar Kings will look after us.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh,\" she said, holding up a finger and listening intently. She paddled hesitantly onward, then stopped and listened again. She did this a few times, paddling and listening, paddling and listening, until she announced triumphantly, \"Found it!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The way out!\"\n\n\"But we're in the middle of an underground lake.\"\n\n\"Can you hear that faint sucking noise? This lake drains from below.\"\n\n\"No way!\" said Max. \"Forget it!\" Being sucked through an underwater drain sounded even more terrifying than bodysurfing through the rapids of an underground river.\n\n\"Do you have a better idea?\" asked Lola.\n\nMax looked at her with terror.\n\n\"No? Then we have no choice.\" When she unfixed the one flashlight they had left, darkness fell like dirt on a grave.\n\n\"I'm not getting back into that water,\" he said.\n\nHe heard Lola splash over the side, and then there was silence.\n\n\"Lola? Lola?\"\n\nOut of the darkness, her arm snaked around his waist, there was a quick scuffle, and he was flipped overboard. Spluttering and coughing, he grabbed hold of the side of the raft, too shocked even to protest.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Hoop, it was for your own good,\" she said. \"Just hold on tight.\"\n\nHe didn't need telling twice. He was gripping so tightly, his hands were starting to cramp up.\n\nThere were strange sounds in the dark.\n\n\"What's that noise?\"\n\n\"I'm slashing the raft.\"\n\n\"No!\" he cried, but it was too late.\n\n\"It's done,\" said Lola. \"Just let me put the machete away.\"\n\nWeighted down by the backpacks, the deflated raft started sinking. It would have gone straight to the bottom if they hadn't been holding it.\n\n\"Take a deep breath,\" said Lola, \"and let the current take you. The raft will pull us down. The Jaguar Kings will help us, I promise.\"\n\n\"I can't do it,\" said Max.\n\n\"We'll go on three,\" said Lola.\n\n_\"I can't do it!\"_\n\n\"One...\"\n\n_\"Stop!\"_\n\n\"Two...\"\n\n_\"No!\"_\n\n\"Three!\"\n\nHe heard Lola take a deep breath and then he felt the raft pulling him down as she disappeared under the water.\n\nHe could let go or he could follow her.\n\nHe followed her under the water and heard a roar coming up through the lake. In a panic, he let go of the raft and swam back up to the surface. He gulped great mouthfuls of air, treading water in the pitch black.\n\nWhat now?\n\nHe called Lola's name, and it echoed back at him mockingly.\n\n_Lola! Lola! Lola!_\n\nEchoes surrounded him and closed in on him. The crazy count had been right. These would be the waters of Max's death. When he was too tired and too cold to tread water anymore, he would slide under and drown.\n\nThe current tugged at his ankles.\n\nHis only chance was to follow Lola.\n\nHe took a big breath and forced his face into that black water.\n\nHe swam down.\n\nOne, two, three strokes. The roar was deafening.\n\nFour, five, six strokes. His ears hurt and he felt dizzy.\n\nSeven, eight, nine. His hand exploded with pain as it smashed on a rock.\n\nTen, eleven, twelve. He tried to fight it, but it was too late. He closed his eyes and gave in to the force that was pulling him down and squeezing him and squirting him out like mustard on a hot dog. Pictures from his life flashed before his eyes, faces and places and long-forgotten moments.\n\nStrangely, Max Murphy's last thought was of Zia's tamales.\n\n# Chapter Ten  \nSTRANGE WEATHER\n\nWhen Max opened his eyes, he was lying on his back in shallow water.\n\nSomewhere in the distance he could hear a rushing torrent, but the pool around him was as warm and still as a bath. Light bounced off the water and cast an unworldly light throughout the chamber, reflecting the ripples of the waves on the rock walls above him.\n\nHe was just wondering if this was a special watery heaven for drowning victims, when a familiar voice called him back to the land of the living.\n\n\"Are you going to lie around all day?\"\n\nHe turned his head to one side and saw Lola sitting on a sandbank, cutting the backpacks from the remnants of the raft.\n\n\"Did we make it?\" he gasped.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, \"no thanks to you.\"\n\nMax sat up. His hand hurt like crazy and he guessed the rest of him was covered with bruises. \"Some escape route,\" he grumbled. \"I feel like I've been through a washing machine.\"\n\n\"You're alive, aren't you?\" said Lola. \"Stop complaining.\"\n\n\"So how did we get here?\" he asked.\n\nMax followed Lola's eyes to the jet of water that crashed into the pool from a large hole in the cave wall.\n\n\"We didn't...?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"We did.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\nAs she explained, Lola drew a diagram in the sand. \"The lake is like a bowl, with a hole way down in the side. All we had to do was swim low enough for the current to suck us through.\"\n\n\"How did you know about it?\"\n\n\"My friend Hermanjilio told me. He said that Maya warriors used to prove their bravery by swimming through it, as some sort of initiation rite.\"\n\n\"Ha! So now I'm a full-fledged Maya warrior?\"\n\n\"Never in a million years,\" said Lola. \"Maya warriors were brave and fearless. And handsome.\"\n\nMax made a face at her. \"They had big noses.\"\n\nLola made a face back at him. \"How's your hand?\" she asked. \"That's a nasty gash.\"\n\n\"How do you _think_ it is? It hurts!\"\n\nLola pursed her lips.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Max, \"I didn't mean to snap at you. It's just that some crazy girl made me shoot the rapids in an underground river and then she got me trapped like a hair ball in an underground sink. Oh yes, and some cape-twirling psycho is trying to kill me.\"\n\n\"Don't take it personally,\" said Lola. \"He's trying to kill me, too.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Max admitted grudgingly. He looked around the cavern. \"So how do we get out of here?\"\n\n\"You see that skylight up there?\" Max looked where she was pointing. High, high above them, he could see a pinprick of blue sky. \"I came here once with Hermanjilio,\" she continued. \"We rappelled down from the outside on a rope and pulled ourselves back up. We were planning to come back, so we left the rope in place for next time.\"\n\n\"I don't see any rope,\" said Max.\n\n\"I do,\" said Lola.\n\nShe waded through the water to some rocks on the far side and picked up a length of dirty rope. \"It's fallen in,\" she said. She inspected the end. \"Maybe an animal gnawed through it.\"\n\n\"Or Landa cut it,\" said Max.\n\nThey looked at each other. For the first time, Max saw something like fear on Lola's face.\n\n\"We're going to die, aren't we?\" he said.\n\n\"Of course not,\" said Lola, coiling up the rope and bringing it back with her. \"Hermanjilio will find us.\"\n\n\"What if he doesn't?\"\n\n\"Studies show,\" said Lola, \"that the people who survive emergency situations are usually the ones who maintain a positive attitude.\"\n\n\"We could sing,\" suggested Max.\n\nLola shook her head vehemently.\n\n\"I could tell you about Italy. That's where I'm supposed to be now, sitting down to dinner at my grandmother's house.... maybe thin-crust pizza, chewy on the inside and burned at the edges... or spaghetti with meatballs... or lasagna... or pumpkin ravioli\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop!\" yelled Lola. \"We have to think about something else. How about I show you a bit of the temple to pass the time?\"\n\n\"The sacred pool at the Temple of Chahk.\"\n\n\"What temple?\"\n\n\"This is the sacred pool at the Temple of Chahk, the god of storms and warfare.\"\n\n\"A Maya temple? It must have doors to the outside....\"\n\nLola shook her head. \"Sorry, Hoop. This place was swallowed up by the jungle hundreds of years ago. The whole pyramid is buried under earth and trees. It's really spooky in there, but there's an old map room at the entrance that's worth a look.\"\n\n\"I hate archaeology,\" said Max.\n\n\"It will take your mind off food,\" said Lola.\n\nShe led him to the back wall of the cavern and up some steps carved out of the rock to look like tree roots. The thick carved trunks of the limestone trees stood to attention on either side of a doorway.\n\n\"This is the Map Chamber,\" said Lola.\n\nAs Max's eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that he was in a circular room with a low ceiling. The walls were polished smooth and glowed faintly green with a natural phosphorescence. In the middle of the room was a long stone table with raised carvings on its surface.\n\n\"Isn't it wild?\" said Lola, indicating the table. \"It's a relief map of the Monkey River basin as it would have been a thousand years ago.\"\n\nIt reminded Max of the table he'd played with his train set on when he was little. But instead of stations and railway tracks, the surface of this table had been carved into clusters of little pyramids, palaces, and thatched huts. Five of the pyramids were inlaid with colored stones and connected by a network of stone causeways.\n\nAs Max peered at it, Lola crept up behind him.\n\n\"Gotcha!\" she said, clamping a hand on his shoulder.\n\nMax jumped out of his skin. \"What did you do that for?\" he yelled.\n\n\"Only kings and high priests were allowed in this chamber. If they caught a peasant like you in here, they'd flay you alive and rip out your heart.\"\n\nMax looked around uneasily.\n\n\"So,\" said Lola, studying the map, \"want to see where we are?\"\n\n\"Isn't it a bit out of date?\"\n\n\"The coastline and the river and the sites of the temples haven't changed.\" She pointed to the pyramid colored white. \"Look, there's Ixchel.\" She traced the course of the Monkey River down to the sea. \"There's Puerto Muerto and the bay near your uncle's house.\" She pointed to the red pyramid. \"Here's Chahk, where we are now. And that little green pyramid is the old city of Itzamna, where Hermanjilio lives.\"\n\n\"Is Hermanjilio your boyfriend?\"\n\nLola laughed. \"He's the archaeologist in charge of excavating Itzamna. I told you, he's a colleague of your parents.\"\n\n\"Maybe Hermanjilio will take my parents to Itzamna,\" said Max, assessing the distance from the white pyramid to the green. He noticed that Itzamna was in the middle, with the other four colored pyramids around it. \"What's the significance of the five colored pyramids?\" he asked.\n\n\"Who knows?\" said Lola, looking flustered. But she didn't meet his eyes.\n\nAnd suddenly, he understood.\n\n\"Uncle Ted said there are five sacred pyramids and five Jaguar Stones! My parents had the White Jaguar, and the pyramid at Ixchel is colored white. This place is colored red\u2014and we have the red stone! Yes, I remember\u2014Uncle Ted called it the Red Jaguar of Chahk! It must belong in this temple somewhere! If only we knew how to use it....\"\n\n\"No, Hoop, leave it to your parents\u2014\"\n\n\"Aha! So I'm right, aren't I?\"\n\n\"Yes... No... I don't know.... It's dangerous....\"\n\nWith Lola pulling at him to leave, Max circled the map table, studying it from different angles.\n\n\"Stand here,\" he said. \"If you screw your eyes up, it kind of looks like a headless cat standing on four clawed feet.\"\n\n\"I don't see it,\" said Lola stubbornly.\n\n\"And look! At the end where the head should be, there's a space about the size of the Jaguar Stone. We have to see if the Red Jaguar fits in there!\"\n\n\"That would be a very bad idea.\"\n\n\"But Oscar said the Jaguar Stones are my parents' life's work! I have to try this for them....\"\n\n\"No, you don't.\"\n\n\"Why did you steal the Red Jaguar, if you're scared to use it?\"\n\n\"It's for Hermanjilio, not me.\"\n\n\"Then test it out for Hermanjilio. Come on, Monkey Girl. We're stuck here anyway. What have we got to lose?\"\n\nLola sighed. \"You win. Get the stone. But I don't like it.\"\n\nBefore she could change her mind, Max ran and got the backpacks. Eagerly, he unwrapped the Red Jaguar.\n\n\"It's a bit chipped,\" he said, looking at it closely for the first time.\n\n\"You're bleeding on it,\" she said crossly. She pulled a bandanna out of her back pocket. \"Here, wrap your hand in this and give the stone to me....\"\n\nShe was holding the Red Jaguar over the niche, looking for a way to slot it in, when it seemed to jump out of her hand and click into the space on its own.\n\n\"Told you!\" said Max.\n\nThey waited for something to happen.\n\n\"Nothing's happening,\" said Lola. \"Take it out.\"\n\n\"It's glowing, I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"You're imagining things.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2014look at that!\"\n\nLola gasped. \"It's repairing itself.\"\n\nSure enough, where the stone had been chipped, it was growing back to its original shape. When the stone was restored, the map table began to glow and slowly come to life. The stone river flowed in shining blue plasma. Several temples disappeared under luminous green jungle. The map room lit up as a ball of yellow fire formed over the table and warmed their heads with its heat.\n\n\"That fireball,\" whispered Max, \"I think it's the sun.\"\n\n\"And the map's updated itself,\" said Lola. \"There's your uncle's house and the banana warehouse and that statue of the guy on the horse in Puerto Muerto. And look at this temple\u2014you can't even see it anymore under all the foliage. The jungle's taken over everything. Just like in real life.\"\n\nDark clouds formed over parts of the map, the air flashed with sparks, and it began to rain. Max poked one of the clouds. It felt cold and moist and it moved.\n\n\"Lola, look! This is crazy! I can make it rain wherever I want!\"\n\n\"Wow!\" she gasped. \"Let me try!\"\n\nThey amused themselves by directing the rainstorms for a while, before the same thought occurred to them both at the same time. Their eyes met.\n\n\"You don't suppose\u2014\" began Lola.\n\n\"\u2014that what we do in here\u2014\" continued Max.\n\n\"\u2014has any effect on what happens out there?\" finished Lola.\n\nShe studied the map, found the small hole in the cave ceiling, and blocked it with her finger. Max ran back to the steps. The cavern was dark. \"Move your finger,\" he called. Right away, a beam of light lit up the cavern.\n\n\"It still works after all these years,\" said Lola, her eyes shining. \"Can you imagine the control my ancestors had over their world? They could make it rain. They could divert rivers. They could destroy their enemies' crops. I've never understood how they could sustain so many people in such a small area. This is how they did it! They would never have had a bad harvest.\"\n\nIn the excitement of the moment, Max had a brilliant idea. He began to scratch at the glowing green foliage that covered the little red pyramid. Lola saw what he was doing and instantly understood. \"This might just work,\" she said, as she helped him scrape away the centuries of vegetation until the pyramid was bare and the outline of a door could be seen on the top platform.\n\n\"A way out! We're saved!\" whooped Max.\n\nLola was more subdued. \"Have you ever been inside a Maya pyramid, Hoop?\"\n\nMax thought for a moment. Strange as it seemed, given that his parents spent half their lives at Maya sites, he was pretty sure that he never had. \"I don't think so,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, brace yourself. It's creepy up there.\"\n\n\"It's creepy down here. Let's go!\"\n\n\"Just don't say I didn't warn you.\"\n\nShe pulled out the Jaguar Stone, wrapped it, and put it back into her backpack. Then she took out a candle, lit it, and handed it to Max.\n\n\"Where's _my_ flashlight?\" he protested.\n\n\"You lost it in the river.\"\n\n\"Can't I use yours?\"\n\nWith a sigh of irritation, Lola gave Max the flashlight and took the candle. She led him through a doorway into a passage that quickly became a narrow staircase, zigzagging steeply to and fro, up and up and up. Every so often an ice-cold drip from the ceiling would land on his neck in the darkness, making him jump every time.\n\n\"It's just water, don't make such a fuss,\" said Lola.\n\nThe steps were wet and slippery, but when Max put a hand on the wall to steady himself, his fingers sank into a spongy, putrid-smelling fungus. He slipped over in surprise and, as he got back to his feet, something cold and squelchy landed on his head.\n\n\"Ew! Ew! Ew!\" he cried.\n\n\"It's just water, Hoop!\"\n\nMax ran a hand through his hair and heard something drop to the ground. A huge white centipede, maybe six inches long, like a slug on legs, glistened in the beam of his flashlight.\n\n\"Look at this!\" he called to Lola. \"It wasn't just...\"\n\nBut the centipede had scurried into the shadows.\n\nMax pulled his T-shirt over his head like a hood until the staircase ended and they emerged into a large, roughly hewn room. The ceiling was so low they had to crouch, and the floor was cracked and uneven. On the far side of the room was a doorway, and carved above it was a ghoulish face contorted in agony.\n\n\"Is it this way?\" asked Max, making for the doorway.\n\n\"Stop!\" yelled Lola, pulling him back. \"Don't go in there.\"\n\nNow that Max looked more closely, he saw that the murky interior was scattered with skulls and bones. He sensed that something lurked in there, something dead yet alive, something that was trying to lure him in. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a movement and he leapt back in fear, but it was just a centipede wriggling out of an eye socket in the nearest skull.\n\n\"You're very jumpy, Hoop. Are you sure you want to do this?\"\n\n\"Just show me the way out.\"\n\n\"Up here.\" Lola was standing under a dark square in one corner of the ceiling, pointing up at a narrow shaft that shot up into blackness. \"It's not difficult,\" she said. \"There are footholds, but it's too tight to climb with the backpacks. I'll go up first with the flashlight and let down the rope. You tie on the backpacks, then use the rope to help you get up. Okay?\"\n\n_Bossy, bossy, bossy_ , he thought. \"Just hurry,\" he said.\n\nMax pressed himself into the corner and watched the glow of the flashlight recede.\n\nHe shivered.\n\nWas it fear making his blood run cold? Or was the temperature dropping?\n\nHe held the candle under his chin for heat.\n\nIt was so cold he could see his breath.\n\nHe exhaled slowly, watching how the crystals hung in the air and sparkled in the candlelight. He exhaled again, harder this time. To his horror, a cloud of white breath shot out like spray from a fire extinguisher and\u2014 _No, no, no!_ \u2014put out the flame.\n\nHe couldn't believe it.\n\nHe'd blown out the candle.\n\nHow could he have been so stupid?\n\nThe icy darkness crowded in on him.\n\nThe blackness was suffocating, like a blanket of evil.\n\nWhat was that scratching noise?\n\nFingernails? Centipedes? The presence in the bone room?\n\nHis heart beat faster and faster. He stamped his feet to keep warm and to frighten away anything that might be thinking of scurrying around his feet.\n\n\"Hurry, Lola!\" he called. \"The candle's gone out!\"\n\nBy the time the end of the rope dropped down, a light frost had formed on his head and shoulders. His damp clothes were freezing against his skin. Fumbling with cold, he tied on the backpacks.\n\nHe looked up at the distant circle of light that was Lola's face. Focusing only on her, refusing to think about the darkness that clutched at his feet like invisible fingers, he began to climb. It was hard going and his wounded hand throbbed, but his fear was greater than his pain. He was aware of nothing but the need to maintain upward motion.\n\nEventually, he reached the room above. He threw himself on the stone floor, breathing heavily, while Lola pulled up the backpacks.\n\n\"I told you it was creepy in here,\" she said.\n\nShe relit the candle, and Max looked around. This room was smaller than the one below and empty apart from something in one corner, something that reflected candlelight in its shiny, gelatinous skin, something gently pulsating with the pump of a million heartbeats....\n\nMax jumped to his feet. \"It's a monster! It's alive!\"\n\n\"Frog spawn,\" said Lola. \"I should have warned you.\"\n\nA dark chill was rising out of the shaft and spreading like dry ice. The room was starting to fill with a clammy, foul-smelling fog.\n\n\"Let's keep moving.\" Lola coughed.\n\n\"Me first,\" said Max, grabbing the rope and tying it around him.\n\nThe shaft was shorter this time, and he soon arrived at the top.\n\nA wave of heat engulfed him. It was like entering an oven.\n\nHis cold, wet clothes dried instantly in a haze of steam.\n\nNervously, he shone the flashlight around, wondering what could follow giant centipedes and throbbing frog spawn, but his light found no life-forms of any kind. Apart from the heat, this level was almost pleasant. It had the smallest floor area, but a high ceiling made it less claustrophobic, and all four walls were painted with colorful murals.\n\nWhile he waited for Lola to tie on the backpacks, Max looked closer at the paintings. Mostly they were life-size figures of Maya warriors, monsters, and bizarre animal people with crocodile heads and lobster claws. They were so freaky, it took Max a moment to register the most disturbing thing of all.\n\nThis room had no door.\n\nThey were at the top and there was no way out.\n\n# Chapter Eleven  \nRAT ON A STICK\n\nPhew,\" said Lola, pulling herself up. \"It's hot in here.\"\n\n\"Like a furnace,\" agreed Max, hauling up the backpacks.\n\nHe took out Lola's canteen of water and went to take a swig.\n\n\"Stop!\" protested Lola, trying to take it back from him. \"Give me that. We don't know how long it has to last.\"\n\nMax fended her off and took a long, gulping drink. \"I'm thirsty. What's the big deal?\"\n\n\"This is the temple of Chahk, the god of storms and warfare. The king came here to offer his blood in return for rainstorms to water the corn. Water is life. You should treat every drop with respect, especially in here.\"\n\n\"Let's get out of here then. Where's the hidden door?\"\n\n\"How should I know?\"\n\n\"But I thought you'd been here before.\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio and I stuck our heads in once, but we knew the pyramid was buried under jungle, so there was no point in looking for a door.\"\n\n\"Oh, great,\" said Max sarcastically. \"We're trapped.\"\n\nA lump of self-pity formed in his throat. He hoped the guys at school would know he'd died in the company of a girl. And she definitely wasn't ugly. He pictured their waxy bodies lying side by side in this stone tomb, like Romeo and Juliet. He smiled mistily at Lola.\n\n\"Don't just stand there like a moron,\" she said. \"Help me find the door.\"\n\nMax cast a lethargic look around. His head was pounding from the oppressive heat. It felt like summer in the city, just before a thunderstorm.\n\n\"We should feel for a current of air,\" he said. \"That's what led me to the secret door at my uncle's house.\"\n\nBut there was no current of air.\n\nIt was getting hotter.\n\nMax's throat was so dry he couldn't swallow.\n\n\"I need more water,\" he gasped.\n\n\"No,\" said Lola.\n\n\"Who made you guardian of the water?\"\n\n\"Who made you such a baby?\"\n\nThey searched the room from top to bottom again, but found nothing. The floor was burning their feet.\n\n\"There has to be a hidden switch,\" said Lola.\n\nAfter their third fruitless search, it was getting hard to breathe. They stood on their backpacks to protect their feet and looked at each other in despair, the sweat running down their faces.\n\n\"It's no good,\" said Lola. \"We'll have to go back the way we came.\"\n\n\"No!\" said Max, terrified of what might be waiting in the foul fog below.\n\nHe forced himself to think.\n\n_Head hurts_.\n\n_Think_.\n\n_Throat hurts_.\n\n_Think_.\n\n_If this was a video game, how would it work?_\n\n_Enter a new room. No exit. Look for the clues_.\n\nThere were always clues.\n\nHe stared at the painted figures on the wall in front of him. \"I bet they know the secret,\" he said. He was alarmed to realize that a particularly monstrous character with bulbous eyes, a long nose, and tusklike protuberances looked vaguely familiar. \"Who's that ugly one on the end?\"\n\n\"You've met him,\" said Lola. \"That's the great Lord Chahk. We passed his statue in the Cave of Broken Pots, remember? He was holding a lightning-bolt ax and a bowl with a human heart in it.\"\n\nMax did remember. And, as he stared at Lord Chahk, he began to feel a connection. It was the same feeling he'd had when he saw the metal case on the shelf in Uncle Ted's vault.\n\nHe went over to the painting and examined every inch of it.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe looked into Lord Chahk's goggly eyes.\n\nNothing.\n\nBut the answer was here, he knew it. Call it a gamer's sixth sense.\n\n\"Pass me the water,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" said Lola. \"We have to save it.\"\n\n\"Not for me, for him. It's so hot and dry in here. Don't you think he'd like to feel the rain on his skin?\"\n\n\"You're crazy,\" began Lola, but she didn't try to stop him as he took the canteen and poured the last of their precious water onto the wall above Lord Chahk's head. Max watched expectantly as it streamed down the storm god's face and chest.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nHe shook out the last drop of water.\n\nNothing.\n\nThe water evaporated instantly. The wall was still as dry as old bones.\n\nMax looked at Lola miserably. His throat was so parched that his tongue felt swollen. \"Sorry,\" he whispered. The word had never sounded so inadequate.\n\nBut Lola wasn't listening. She was totally focused on Lord Chahk.\n\n\"Blood!\" she said. \"He wants blood!\"\n\nIgnoring Max's howls of pain, she ripped the bandanna off his gashed hand and pressed his wound against the painted bowl. Then she rubbed the bloodstained bandanna into it as well, for good measure. \"Greetings, Lord Chahk,\" she intoned. \"In return for this blood, we ask for our freedom.\"\n\nAs the blood soaked into the limestone, there was a noise like a frog croaking. Then another and another, until the room echoed with a frogs' chorus. The atmosphere in the room seemed to lift slightly, and the air felt a little cooler.\n\nLola, who was still pressing the bandanna against the bowl, yelped in surprise.\n\n\"What happened?\" shouted Max above the din of frogs.\n\n\"Electric shock\u2014\"\n\nA string of red sparks made their way up from Lord Chahk's bowl to his lightning-bolt ax. There was a flash, a crash of thunder, and the sound of stone rolling on stone.\n\nOne of the carved panels swung out.\n\nLight flooded into the room, momentarily blinding them.\n\nThe croaking grew to a deafening buzz as hundreds of frogs materialized out of the temple walls and leapt across the floor to the open door. For a few seconds, Max and Lola couldn't move for the sea of frogs around their feet. Then, like a wave rolling in to shore, the amphibian tide swept out of the temple and into the torrential rain, with a farewell croak that even Max could identify as pure pleasure.\n\nMax and Lola stepped outside.\n\nRain had never felt so good.\n\n\"We did it!\" yelled Max, punching the air. \"We did it!\"\n\nA flock of parrots screeched disapprovingly as they flew overhead.\n\n\"We make a good team!\" whooped Lola, high-fiving him.\n\nA team. He liked the sound of that.\n\nHe put his head back and tried to catch the rain in his parched mouth, whirling around, letting the downpour wash away the dust of the temple. He felt himself rehydrating like a packet of instant noodles.\n\nHis headache had gone.\n\nHis hand had stopped throbbing.\n\nBut his brain was still in shock.\n\nThe list of contenders for Most Terrifying Experience of This Trip So Far grew longer every day, but the Temple of Chahk won the category hands down.\n\n\"Hey, Monkey Girl,\" he said, trying to sound cool, \"I thought ruins were just a bunch of old stones. That place was definitely alive.\"\n\n\"I warned you,\" said Lola.\n\nThey were about a hundred feet up, on the top platform of a giant pyramid. The tips of other pyramids could be seen rising through the jungle canopy like distant islands in a sea of green. As the rain stopped, a rainbow formed in the distance.\n\nMax uttered a cry of horror. \"Is that what I think it is?\" he asked, pointing with his toe to a large reddish-brown stain.\n\n\"Blood?\" said Lola, unfazed. \"Probably. I'm sure they held bloodlettings and sacrifices up here.\"\n\nMax shook his head in disgust. \"Why were the Maya so bloodthirsty?\"\n\n\"It wasn't like that. Blood was sacred. Blood was the breath of the soul. Blood had to flow to keep the gods happy and the sun shining and the crops growing. Even the king had to shed his blood. The people expected it.\"\n\n\"They must have gone through a lot of kings.\"\n\n\"No, the kings just gave a little blood, a token.\"\n\n\"It's still barbaric.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know.\" Lola looked thoughtful. \"It's interesting, the idea of making a sacrifice for the common good. Like, if people stopped buying mahogany furniture, the loggers might stop chopping down the rainforest....\"\n\nMax wasn't listening.\n\nHe was standing on the edge of the pyramid, staring down into the jungle.\n\nSo this was how it felt to be an ancient Maya king. Above you, the heavens and the gods who spoke through you. Below you, the awestruck faces of your adoring people.\n\nLola touched his arm. \"Let's go.\"\n\nAs she skipped down the steep stone steps, Max picked his way slowly behind her. In the end, he found it easiest to sit down and lower himself step by step. Way below, he heard Lola calling to her monkeys and a distant roar floating back over the rainforest in reply.\n\nWhen he reached the ground, he looked back to see how far he'd come, but the pyramid was already half covered in vegetation. Vines were writhing their way across the platform, earth was accumulating on the steps, and trees were literally growing in front of his eyes. Soon the Temple of Chahk would be hidden again beneath its blanket of jungle.\n\nLola was waiting for him, a length of thick vine over her shoulders, like the snake lady at the circus.\n\n\"Still thirsty?\" she asked.\n\nShe slashed the end of the vine and held it over his mouth like a hose. Sweet water came gushing out.\n\n\"Remember this plant,\" she said. \"Its Mayan name is _Ha Ix Ak_. _Ha_ means 'water,' _Ix_ means 'lady,' _Ak_ means 'vine.' Lady Water Vine has saved many lives in the rainforest.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose she has a friend called Lady Pizza Plant?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Sure, do you want the one with extra cheese?\"\n\n\"Don't even joke about it,\" said Max. \"I'm starving.\"\n\n\"First, we must make camp. Darkness falls fast in the jungle. I'll find saplings to make a shelter. You get wood for the fire.\"\n\n\"Did anyone ever tell you you're bossy?\" said Max.\n\n\"Did anyone ever tell you you're lazy?\" said Lola.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Max proudly, \"all the time.\"\n\n\"In the rainforest, lazy boys get eaten by jaguars. You must start the fire before dark to keep them away.\" She handed Max her machete. \"Ever used one of these?\"\n\n\"As a matter of a fact, I have,\" said Max.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know, son of archaeologists and all that...\"\n\nShe didn't need to know that his previous experience with a machete consisted of swishing through a computer-animated jungle in _Pyramid of Peril_ , that day his parents came home early.\n\nWas that really just two weeks ago? It seemed like another lifetime.\n\nSuddenly, Max remembered where he'd seen Lola before.\n\nLevel two!\n\nShe looked like the girl who was taken hostage in the shoot-out. And now, here they were, having survived a real-life pyramid of peril! For one brief moment Max entertained the possibility that his entire life was just a video game.\n\n\"Hey, Monkey Girl, listen to this,\" he began, but she was gone.\n\nHe hacked his way clumsily into the jungle in search of kindling. Swinging a machete wasn't as easy as it had looked on-screen. But despite his lack of technique, he felt like a Hollywood action hero.\n\nMax Murphy: Man of Mystery and Explorer Extraordinaire.\n\nA movement caught his eye, and he looked down to see a long, brownish-gray snake sliding out of the leaf litter toward him.\n\nMax froze, not even breathing, and tried to remember what he'd read about snakes in the in-flight magazine. He seemed to recall that the more garish they were, the more likely they were to be poisonous. That deadly coral snake in Puerto Muerto had been brightly colored. This snake was drab, apart from a yellow flash under its head. Reassured, he stayed absolutely still as the snake passed six inches to the side of his foot and slithered away into the bush. After that, he was more careful, probing the ground with his machete and checking overhanging branches for reptilian residents.\n\nBy the time he returned to the campsite with an armful of wood, the monkeys had arrived. Seri was sitting grooming herself while her brother, Chulo, still wearing Max's baseball cap, was swinging languidly from a tree branch by his tail. Max's backpack lay open on the ground, and both monkeys were chewing on the dreaded granola bars.\n\n\"Good snack?\" he asked in a friendly tone.\n\nChulo growled in a most unfriendly tone.\n\n\"No, I don't like those bars, either,\" said Max. \"Ever had pizza, Chulo?\"\n\nChulo took off the baseball cap and covered his face with it.\n\n\"So you're a Red Sox fan, too?\" asked Max, reaching for the cap.\n\nChulo snapped at Max's hand and Max quickly withdrew it.\n\nHe decided to get on with making the fire.\n\nAs he chose a patch of flat ground, he could feel Chulo watching his every move. The monkey's critical gaze made him feel self-conscious, and it took him a while to assemble his teepee of twigs, as taught in Cub Scouts.\n\nHe paused to admire his creation before striking the match. Quick as a flash, Chulo jumped on Max's head and scattered the wood with his tail. Then he hopped about, screeching with monkey laughter.\n\nAfter this had happened several times, Max chased the monkey into the forest with the machete. Chulo jumped into the nearest tree and started lobbing fruit. The monkey's aim was deadly accurate, and a large papaya hit Max squarely in the back, sending him sprawling. Seri, meanwhile, paid no attention to any of it. Such mayhem was evidently beneath her.\n\nDespite Chulo's attempts at disruption, Max finally succeeded in lighting the fire. He was complimenting himself on his newfound survival skills, when Lola's voice interrupted his thoughts: \"Who's hungry?\"\n\nThe two monkeys raced to greet her, dancing about and leaping with joy.\n\n\"Gibnut for dinner!\" she announced.\n\n\"Is that like peanut?\" asked Max.\n\n\"It's like this,\" she said, holding up a small animal.\n\n\"It looks like a rat.\"\n\n\"It is a rodent,\" admitted Lola, \"but even the queen of England ate it when she came here. I'll skewer it over the fire and it will be the best barbecue you've ever tasted.\"\n\n\"I'm not eating rat on a stick,\" said Max.\n\n\"Suit yourself.\" Lola shrugged. \"Will you help me make the shelter?\"\n\nShe showed him how to lash saplings together between the trees and cover them with large palm leaves to make a cozy lean-to. While Max laid a floor of wood and moss, Lola prepared the gibnut. Then she pulled a small cooking pot out of her bag and threw in some pointed green leaves.\n\nMax made a face.\n\n\"Jackass!\" said Lola.\n\n\"I just don't like vegetables,\" said Max, sounding hurt.\n\n\"No,\" explained Lola, laughing, \"they're jackass bitters\u2014they're medicinal. I'm going to boil them up to clean your insect bites. They cure everything.\"\n\n\"I'd rather have some antiseptic and a box of Band-Aids.\"\n\n\"Stupid boy! Most of the medicines in your drugstores are made out of rainforest plants! It's just that here you don't pay for the packaging.\"\n\n\"I like the packaging,\" said Max.\n\n\"Spoken like a true city kid,\" sighed Lola, in mock despair.\n\n\"Speaking of packaging,\" said Max, \"what kind of snake has a black head with a yellow flash underneath and a gray-brown body? It's harmless, right?\"\n\n\"Where?\" Lola looked around in alarm.\n\n\"In the forest before. It passed right by my foot.\"\n\nShe put a hand over her mouth in horror. \"It sounds like a fer-de-lance. The locals call it the three-step because, if it bites you, that's how far you get. It's one of the deadliest snakes in the world and it's very aggressive. It's not a bit scared of humans. You had a lucky escape!\"\n\nMax Murphy, Man of Mystery and Explorer Extraordinaire, went very quiet and pale and huddled closer to the fire. He wondered how he'd ever sleep tonight among all those creeping, crawling, biting things.\n\n\"Sure you don't want some gibnut?\" asked Lola.\n\nIt smelled delicious.\n\n\"Just a bite,\" he said.\n\nHalf an hour later, with his belly full of succulent barbecued gibnut, he pulled out his mosquito net to drape across the front of the lean-to and found it ripped and tattered from when he'd fallen out of the tree.\n\n\"No problem,\" said Lola. \"I'll throw this old termite nest on the fire and it will keep the bugs at bay all night. Shame it's an old one or we could have eaten the termites for dessert. They're quite tangy; I think you'd like them.\"\n\nReflecting that Lola was not like any girl he'd met before, Max Murphy stretched out and went to sleep.\n\nLola woke him at sunrise for a breakfast of wild papaya, gathered by the monkeys. Max could tell that Chulo begrudged him every bite.\n\n\"Why do we have to get up so early?\" he asked blearily.\n\n\"If we hike all day, we should get to Utsal by nightfall,\" said Lola.\n\nHike all day? Max groaned. He was still tired and aching from yesterday's exertions. \"What's at Utsal?\" he asked.\n\n\"It's on the way to Itzamna. It's where I grew up. I have friends there.\"\n\n\"Sounds good.\" Max nodded, glad to be heading back to the bright lights of civilization. He reached for the last papaya, but Chulo beat him to it.\n\n\"Hey, you've already had three,\" said Max, chasing the monkey away.\n\n\"Boys, stop fighting,\" called Lola. \"We need to get going. It looks like the rains will come early today.\"\n\nMax looked up. It didn't look like rain at all. There was one wispy little cloud in a clear blue sky. He started to argue, but Lola had already set off.\n\nShe walked so quickly that Max had to trot to keep up. He was breathless and panting when, twenty minutes later, the rains came pouring down.\n\nLola had a knack of springing from one dry spot to another, while Max slogged behind her through solid mud.\n\n\"Can't you slow down?\" he asked.\n\n\"We have to keep up the pace, or we'll never make it in time.\"\n\n_Bossy, bossy, bossy_.\n\nHe tried to make conversation as they walked, but it felt more like an interrogation.\n\n\"What do your parents do?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have no parents.\"\n\n\"What happened to them?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"How can you not know?\"\n\nShe wheeled around. \"Do you know what's happened to your parents?\"\n\nHe began a new line of questioning.\n\n\"How old are you?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Do you go to school?\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio is teaching me.\"\n\n\"Did he teach you to speak English?\"\n\n\"Everyone here speaks English.\"\n\n\"What do you speak at home?\"\n\n\"Yucatec.\"\n\n\"Is that the Mayan language?\"\n\n\"One of them.\"\n\n\"How many are there?\"\n\n\"About thirty.\"\n\nMax gave a low whistle to show he was impressed. \"Go on then, say something\u2014\"\n\n_\"Kanaant awook!\"_\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"'Watch out!'\"\n\nToo late. Max tripped over a large root and grabbed the nearest tree to steady himself. A searing pain shot through his hand. Several long needles were sticking into the fleshy part of his thumb.\n\n\"Let me see,\" said Lola, inspecting the wound. She slashed the tree trunk with her machete as if, bizarrely, she was punishing the tree for hurting him.\n\n\"It's called a give-and-take palm,\" she explained. \"The thorns give you pain, but\"\u2014she peeled off some bark to show him the pink fibrous underside\u2014\"the bark takes it away. It's the only thing that works.\"\n\nMax winced as she pulled out the needles, one by one. \"Where did you get that Ramones T-shirt?\" he asked, to take his mind off the pain.\n\n\"A boy gave it to me.\"\n\n\"What boy?\"\n\n\"A student from New York.\"\n\n\"Did you go to New York?\"\n\n\"I will one day.\"\n\n\"So where did you meet him?\"\n\n\"At Itzamna. Archaeology students come from all over the world.\"\n\n\"Are there students there now?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\nShe pressed the pink fiber onto his injured thumb. The pain stopped almost immediately. \"Better?\" she asked.\n\n\"So is this New Yorker your boyfriend?\"\n\nLola laughed and jumped up. \"We need to move,\" she said.\n\n\"How old is he?\"\n\n\"We'd go a lot faster if you stopped talking.\"\n\nShe set a brisk pace, and Max soon fell behind. This was the opportunity Chulo had been waiting for. When Lola was too far ahead to see, the monkey pelted him with nuts, sticks, and bits of rotten fruit. Whenever a missile bounced off Max's head, Chulo would screech with delight. Once he threw a small iguana, and instead of bouncing off, it dug its claws into Max's scalp.\n\n_Lizard wars_.\n\nLola saw none of this. But just as Max was wrenching the iguana off his head to hurl it back at Chulo, she happened to turn around. Her face was a picture of disbelief.\n\n\"I'm not even going to ask,\" she said.\n\n\"He started it,\" said Max, pointing at Chulo.\n\n\"You should be flattered,\" said Lola. \"He has the crazy idea that you're a threat to his position as the dominant male.\"\n\n\"Why's it crazy?\" asked Max, puffing out his chest and trying to look dominant.\n\nA wild avocado, hard as a rock, hit the back of his neck.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" he demanded, but Lola had already gone on ahead.\n\nA ball of monkey dung whizzed past his ear.\n\nMax sighed. It was going to be a long and vexing morning.\n\n\"Are we stopping for lunch?\" he asked, when the sun was overhead.\n\n\"I wasn't planning on it,\" said Lola.\n\n\"But I'm starving,\" protested Max.\n\n\"You're always starving,\" Lola pointed out. \"But there's usually something to eat around here if you know where to look.\"\n\nShe inspected a fallen palm tree near the trail. \"You're in luck, Hoop,\" she called, as she hacked into the trunk with her machete. The wood was rotten and splintered easily.\n\nMax wondered what there could be to eat in a dead tree.\n\nAnd then the answer was there, under his nose.\n\nThree enormously fat white maggots writhed on Lola's outstretched hand.\n\n\"They're palm grubs,\" she said. \"Some people think they're delicious.\"\n\nStrangely, Max wasn't hungry anymore...\n\n... until, late that afternoon, a waft of smoky fires and cooking smells told him they were close to Utsal.\n\nHot food and ice-cold soda were within reach.\n\nHe picked up his pace. All day long, he'd been imagining a busy town with whitewashed houses, clean bathrooms, and an air-conditioned pizza restaurant. As the hours went by, he'd added an Internet caf\u00e9, a gaming arcade, and an ice-cream parlor.\n\nNow he was really salivating.\n\n\"Welcome to Utsal!\" cried Lola happily.\n\nAll Max could see was a few shacks in a clearing on the riverbank.\n\n\"That's it?\" he said.\n\n\"What were you expecting?\"\n\nMax was too disappointed to answer.\n\nThere would be no pizza, no soda, no ice cream.\n\nNo home comforts of any kind.\n\nAt the end of a miserable day was another miserable night.\n\nHe hated this place already.\n\nA pack of scrawny dogs trotted out to bark at them, closely followed by a herd of children and a rush of women in embroidered blouses and long skirts.\n\nThe women ran joyfully to Lola, arms open, black braids flying behind them. As they hugged her and poured out greetings in Mayan, the children clustered around Max. To his annoyance, the tallest ones yanked his hair to see if it was real. He was just about to ask Lola to have a word with them, when they bounded away like a herd of frightened deer.\n\nMax squinted into the afternoon sun to see what had scared them.\n\nIt was a man. An old man. He looked a bit like a Maya version of Gandalf.\n\nHis hair flowed down in a thick gray mane. His huge hooked nose protruded out of a face so deeply wrinkled, it reminded Max of a pyramid rising out of the tangled jungle. He wore a long embroidered tunic and a necklace of jaguar teeth. He leaned on a carved wooden cane. His ancient, calloused feet were bare.\n\nLola pulled Max forward, but his only thought was to get away, to run and keep on running until he had escaped this stranger's penetrating gaze. The closer the old man came, the more his eyes locked on to Max's brain. They read his mind, they burned into his soul, they reflected his past and future in their watery orbs.\n\nThese eyes gave new meaning to the term _farsighted_.\n\nYet, clouded as they were with cataracts, the old man's eyes were almost blind.\n\n# Chapter Twelve  \nTHE FEAST\n\nHolding his other hand up as if to stop traffic, the old man pointed at Max with his cane. He cleared his throat. Even the birds in the trees stopped singing as the world waited to hear his words of wisdom.\n\n\"Pepperoni Supreme with extra cheese,\" he said.\n\nMax gaped at him. That was exactly what he'd been thinking about before his mind went numb with terror. He started backing away uneasily.\n\nThe old man let out a booming laugh and turned to Lola.\n\n\"Your friend likes pizza, Ix Sak Lol,\" he said.\n\n\"You're right\"\u2014she smiled\u2014\"as always!\"\n\nShe grabbed Max's arm and pulled him forward. \"Max Murphy, meet Chan Kan, village leader and wise man.\"\n\n\"All blessings, Max Murphy, and welcome to Utsal,\" said Chan Kan.\n\nMax nodded and babbled something, too awestruck to form actual words.\n\nChan Kan, still chuckling, turned to Lola. _\"Biix abeel, chan aabil_? _\"_ he said. \"How are you, little granddaughter?\"\n\n\" _Ma'alob, tatich! Kux teech_?\" answered Lola. \"I'm fine, Grandfather! And you?\"\n\nSoon they were jabbering away to each other in Mayan.\n\nMax, still dizzy from Chan Kan's scrutiny, sat down on the grass.\n\nHe looked at the village. It was just a few thatched huts on stilts, clustered around a large central square. All the huts had steps up to an open porch, and most of the porches were strung with brightly striped hammocks.\n\nHe looked at the river, the famous Monkey River. It was wide, green, and fast-flowing. There were a few dugout canoes on the bank and a rickety bamboo landing stage for bigger boats.\n\nA long-necked white heron settled on a tree stump to eat its catch.\n\nSome women came down for water. Each one carried a large earthenware pot on her back, held by a woven strap over her forehead. As they walked back with their heavy loads, they chatted happily to each other and waved at the men who were building something with poles and palm fronds in the main square.\n\nThere was a sense of bustle in the air and a delicious smell of food.\n\nMax's stomach rumbled loudly.\n\nAnd still Lola talked on.\n\nHe was planning how to drag her away without incurring the old man's wrath, when she ran over and sat down next to him. \"Sorry,\" she said. \"Chan Kan likes to talk.\"\n\n\"He's your grandfather?\"\n\n\"No, his family kind of adopted me. But listen, Hoop, he said that Hermanjilio came through here a few days ago.\"\n\n\"With my parents?\"\n\n\"Alone.\"\n\nMax threw a stone at a passing iguana. He missed.\n\n\"Congratulations,\" he said. \"Your precious Hermanjilio is safe.\"\n\n\"He's waiting for us at Itzamna. He'll be able to tell us what happened.\" She laid her hand on Max's arm. \"I wish your parents had been with him. But I'm sure they're fine.\"\n\n\"How far is it to Itzamna?\" said Max in a flat voice.\n\n\"Just a few hours upriver. We'll hitch a lift most of the way.\"\n\n\"Whatever.\"\n\n\"Cheer up,\" said Lola. \"I'm sure we'll find your parents soon. People get lost in the jungle all the time.\"\n\n\"I hate the jungle.\"\n\n\"It's been a tough day. But the worst is over, I promise. We'll have an easy boat ride tomorrow. And tonight you'll be guest of honor at the feast.\"\n\nMax looked up. \"A feast?\" he said.\n\nA small boy and a tiny boy ran over. The bigger one shyly took Max's hand, trying to pull him to his feet. The little one peeped out from behind Lola.\n\n\"This is Och and his brother little Och,\" she said.\n\n\"They have the same name?\"\n\n\"It means 'possum.' We don't use their real names until they're older,\" explained Lola. \"We call all the children possums to trick the evil spirits of the forest who like to steal human babies. Och and little Och have come to show you around.\"\n\nMax nodded at the boys. Then he stood up and combed his hair with his fingers. Och did the same.\n\n\"You've got an admirer, Hoop,\" whispered Lola. \"Och's copying everything you do.\"\n\nMax tried to hide his pleasure. He'd often daydreamed about having an adoring younger brother who would hang on his every word.\n\n\"Show Mister Max where to wash, and get him some clean clothes,\" Lola was telling Och. \"Then Chan Kan wants to speak with him.\"\n\n\"What if I don't want to speak with Chan Kan?\"\n\n\"Don't be a baby, Hoop. It's a huge honor to receive a private audience with a Maya wise man. Movie stars would pay a fortune for it!\"\n\n\"He freaks me out. It's like he can read my mind.\"\n\n\"He can,\" she said. \"See you at the feast.\"\n\nDusk was falling as Max washed in the river. Dusk, otherwise known as Mosquito Happy Hour, was not a good time to be naked in the open air. Och and little Och kept guard for crocodiles, while Max swatted bugs and scrubbed away the accumulated grime of the last few days.\n\nSince Och had given him what looked like a handful of potato shavings to use as soap, he'd been skeptical about his chances of getting clean. But as soon as he dunked his hands in the water and rubbed them together, the shavings frothed up into a sudsy lather. Quite luxurious, actually.\n\n\"This stuff works pretty good,\" he called to Och. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Soap root,\" answered the boy. \"Also good for glue and fish bait.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Max dubiously. But he had to admit that his hair felt squeaky clean and, in between the insect bites, his suntanned skin was peachy soft. He seemed to have acquired some muscles in the last week. In fact, by his usual couch-potato standards, he was feeling positively hunky.\n\nOch held out a clean T-shirt and jeans he'd borrowed from somewhere, and Max got dressed as slowly as he could, trying to put off the moment when Och would take him to Chan Kan. When he could delay no longer, he found himself standing on the porch of a large hut at the edge of the village. Och called out in Mayan and pushed open the door.\n\n\" _Ko'oten_!\" called Chan Kan. \"Come! I've been waiting for you, Max Murphy!\"\n\nMax went inside. The hut was dark and the air was thick with smoke and incense. At first, he couldn't see anything. Then, at the far end of the hut, he made out a large chair, like a throne, draped in animal skins.\n\nIt was empty.\n\n\" _Ko'oten waye_!\" came Chan Kan's voice again. \"Come here!\"\n\nHad he made himself invisible?\n\nMax was halfway over to the empty chair when something caught his eye, low down on the other side of the room. It was Chan Kan's hair shimmering in the candlelight.\n\n\" _Kulen_!\" said Chan Kan, indicating a low stool like the one he himself was perched on. \"Sit!\"\n\nMax sat.\n\nFor a while nothing was said.\n\nMax looked around the room. Behind the old man was a long table covered by a thick striped cloth. Its surface, like every other surface in the hut, was laden with candles, statues, painted pots, and jars of unrecognizable dried-up things. There were no windows, and the walls were draped with animal skins. Masks, carvings, and animal skulls hung from the ceiling.\n\n\"It is time for the world to end and start again.\"\n\nIn the dim light, it looked like a witch doctor's lair.\n\nThe scent of incense was getting stronger.\n\nThe greasy wax candles flared and sizzled.\n\nMax had the strangest sensation that this hut was no longer in Utsal, but spinning in space. If he ran out the door at this moment, he would plunge into empty blackness.\n\n\"Have you seen the yellow butterflies, Max Murphy?\" asked Chan Kan.\n\nMax nodded.\n\n\"Do you know what they are?\"\n\nMax shook his head. He hadn't expected a nature quiz.\n\n\"I'll tell you, Max Murphy. They are lost souls, trapped between worlds, waiting for the changing of _baktun_ s.\"\n\nChan Kan looked at Max expectantly.\n\nMax tried to remember everything he knew about butterflies. \"Are _baktun_ s like cocoons?\" he asked.\n\nChan Kan chuckled. \"In the Maya calendar,\" he explained, \"a _baktun_ is a period of time, like your century, but nearly four times as long.\"\n\nMax looked confused. \"What's that got to do with butterflies?\"\n\n\"It has to do with every living thing. For this _baktun_ has almost passed. It is time for the world to end and start again.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Max, not sure what else to say.\n\n\"You see nothing,\" said Chan Kan. \"You are like a burrowing snake, confined in your own little world. It is time to take wing, Max Murphy, to soar far and wide like a hawk in the sky.\"\n\nMax wished he could take wing on a return flight to Boston.\n\nThe minutes ticked by, and the old man said nothing more.\n\nMax began to suspect he'd fallen asleep. His grandfather in Italy did that all the time, often in midsentence. Max was just about to tiptoe out of the room when Chan Kan's eyelids shot open.\n\n\"Let us see what is in store for you, Max Murphy.\"\n\nChan Kan unwrapped a deerskin bundle and shook its contents in his hand like dice. Nuggets of crystal and dried corn kernels fell onto the rug.\n\nMax had a sudden flashback to Boston: Zia kneeling on the floor with her back to him, bits of something on the carpet in front of her and the Maya figurines arranged around her. She'd said she was cleaning, but now Max wasn't so sure. He was beginning to wonder about Zia. In fact, when he got back to Boston, he had quite a few questions for her. Like where did she get the _Pyramid of Peril_ game? Who told her to buy his plane ticket to San Xavier? And how did she know his parents needed him?\n\nA groan from Chan Kan brought Max back to the smoky hut in Utsal. The old man was peering at the crystals and corn kernels and shaking his head violently. He rearranged the pieces in different combinations, all the time frowning and muttering to himself, but no matter what pattern he made, the results never pleased him. \" _Bahlamtuuno'ob_ ,\" he muttered crossly.\n\n\"The Jaguar Stones?\" asked Max. \"What about them?\"\n\nThe old man spat on the ground and began to wail an incantation. His voice was high and unearthly, and it swooped and soared in the room like a trapped bird. Max could almost see it thrashing around and beating the air with exhausted wings.\n\nSuddenly the voice was inside Max's head, and he was the trapped bird. He was a hawk who longed for the wind and the sky and the wide-open spaces. He was looking down on himself from the smoky ceiling. He saw a boy with reddish-brown hair, small like a mouse, too scared to move.\n\nThen the singing stopped and the hawk was gone and he was himself again.\n\nChan Kan poured out a cup of something, took a swig, and passed it to Max.\n\n\"Drink,\" he said.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"It is the sacred cup that we must share.\"\n\nWith shaking hands, Max lifted the cup. It smelled innocuous, like coconut.\n\n\"Drink,\" repeated Chan Kan.\n\nMax took a sip. His head exploded. Suddenly, there were twice as many crystals and corn kernels on the rug. They danced a jig for him. He closed his eyes. He heard a voice from far away.\n\n\"You face great danger, Max Murphy.\"\n\n\"Is Antonio de Landa coming for me?\" he slurred.\n\n\"The legions of hell are coming for you.\"\n\nMax opened his eyes.\n\n\"Your path will be perilous and difficult,\" said Chan Kan, \"but it was not by chance you met Ix Sak Lol. Like the Hero Twins before you, you must work together to outwit the Lords of Death. The fate of this world hangs in the balance. For good or for evil, one way or the other, the new _baktun_ is upon us, and destruction is all around. The omens are dread indeed.\"\n\n\"But that's your world,\" protested Max. \"It's nothing to do with me.\"\n\n\"There is but one world,\" said Chan Kan. \"And its fate is in your hands.\"\n\n\"But I'm just looking for my parents, I'm not\u2014\"\n\nThe old man leaned forward and wagged a gnarled finger. \"You are like the green macaw, Max Murphy. You flap your wings and complain loudly about nothing. The day is coming when you will be tested.\"\n\n\"Tested?\" squawked Max.\n\n\"It is time for Lord Macaw to fly away,\" said Chan Kan. \"From this day forward, you must be fearless, brave, and strong like Lord Bahlam, the jaguar.\"\n\n\"Please,\" begged Max, \"stop talking in riddles. If you can see the future, just tell me\u2014yes or no\u2014will I see my parents again?\"\n\n\"You will see them...\"\n\nMax sighed with relief. That was all he needed to know.\n\n\"... in this world or the next!\"\n\nThe old man's laughter echoed around the hut.\n\nMax's head was swimming.\n\nThe candles were blazing; the incense filled his nostrils. Every carved mask, every statue, every skull seemed to mock him. He had to get out.\n\nAs he stumbled to the door, Chan Kan called out again. \"Max Murphy?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Trust the howlers.\"\n\nMax sat on the porch steps in the dark and tried to see the funny side of it. Here he was, face-to-face with a Maya wise man in the heart of the rainforest, and the mantra he got to guide him through life was \"Trust the howlers.\" He'd had better advice from a fortune cookie.\n\nBut no matter how hard he tried to make light of it, Max felt sick with fear. On the one hand, Chan Kan talked like someone in a bad kung fu movie. On the other hand, he seemed to know what he was talking about.\n\n_The legions of hell are coming for you...._\n\nMax shuddered and resolved to forget Chan Kan's words as soon as possible.\n\nA mournful booming filled the air.\n\nHad the legions of hell arrived already?\n\nHe threw himself to the ground in panic, covering his head with his hands. Och and little Och appeared out of nowhere and lay down next to him, copying his every gesture. They didn't seem at all perturbed by the noise.\n\n\"What's going on?\" asked Max.\n\n\"They are blowing the conch shells, Mister Max,\" said Och.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"To call the village to the feast.\"\n\nSome pretty girls walked past and giggled to see Max sprawled in the dirt.\n\n\"Why do we lie down, Mister Max?\" asked Och happily. \"Is it a game?\"\n\n\"No,\" snapped Max as he got to his feet. He was too busy brushing off his jeans to notice the hurt look on Och's face.\n\nOch and little Och led him back to the central square, where two thatched canopies had been erected. The feast was to be served under these canopies on low wooden tables, with woven mats to sit on. Many villagers were already seated, the men under one canopy and the women under the other, and they shouted greetings to Max as Och showed him to his place.\n\nMax forgot the indignities of the conch-shell incident when he saw his seat at the head of the men's table. He'd never been a guest of honor before and he was looking forward to it. He sat down cross-legged and beamed graciously at the other diners. Their brown faces smiled back at him, sunburned and wrinkled from working in the fields all day.\n\nMax saw himself through the eyes of these peasants. How rich he must look to them, how well fed and healthy. How envious they must be of his good fortune to be born in a prosperous country. How eager they must be to please this mysterious stranger from the land of plenty.\n\n\"Let's get this party started,\" said Max, helping himself to a gourd of pineapple juice. He drank it down greedily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. \"Good,\" he said, looking around and smiling. No one smiled back.\n\nOch looked horrified. \"No, Mister Max,\" he whispered. \"We do not start until we have given thanks.\"\n\nMax rolled his eyes. Why was everyone in the world obsessed with table manners? He surveyed the faces around the table. In the shadows cast by the blazing bamboo torches, their strong Maya profiles echoed the paintings of the warriors on the wall at Chahk. If they were looking for a sacrifice victim tonight, he had a feeling he knew who'd they pick.\n\nThe thought made him shiver.\n\nHe looked around for Lola and saw her approaching, arm in arm with Chan Kan. Her hair was braided and she was wearing an embroidered square-necked blouse and a long skirt. She looked like all the other women in the village, except that she held her head high instead of demurely cast down. She escorted the old man to his place at the other end of the table, then came to have a word with Max.\n\n\"How's it going, Hoop?\"\n\n\"Did you hear what Chan Kan said\u2014?\"\n\nHe was interrupted by a blast of conch shell.\n\n\"Tell me later,\" said Lola. \"I have to go to the women's table.\"\n\n\"But you can't leave me alone\u2014\"\n\n\"Och will look after you.\" Lola assured him. \"Just remember, eat whatever you're given or you'll insult the villagers and we won't have anywhere to sleep tonight. Got it?\"\n\n\"Got it.\"\n\n\"Have fun!\"\n\nChan Kan stood up and said a blessing in Mayan. It was very long and involved much bowing and passing of gourds and drinking of toasts. Everyone applauded, another toast was drunk, and then someone banged loudly on the table. There was an excited silence as two smiling women carried in a big, black earthenware cooking pot. They set it down in front of Max.\n\nA third woman brought a bowl and ladled some soup into it from the cooking pot. This, too, was set down in front of Max.\n\n\" _Hach ki' awi'ih_!\" chorused the women, giggling.\n\nMax looked at Och questioningly.\n\n\"They say they hope you enjoy it,\" the boy explained, also giggling.\n\n\"Isn't anyone else eating?\"\n\n\"You are guest of honor,\" said Och. \"You must eat first.\"\n\nHe looked in the bowl. Red slop.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Specialty of Utsal\u2014spicy soup with peppers,\" said Och. He licked his lips and rubbed his stomach to show that it was good.\n\nMax took a spoonful. It was spicy, all right.\n\nHe took a swig of juice and looked around the table.\n\n\"Why's everyone staring at me?\" he whispered.\n\nOch giggled again. \"They watch your enjoyment.\"\n\nMax took another spoonful. His gums started to tingle.\n\nIt was the hottest thing he'd ever eaten. Sweat broke out on his forehead. When he swallowed, it burned all the way down to his stomach like a trail of molten lava.\n\nHe took another swig of juice, but it was like throwing gasoline on a fire, and the flames in his mouth flared up ten times worse. He discovered that the longer he paused between mouthfuls, the worse the burning sensation. The only way to survive this trial by fire was to empty his mind and eat as fast as he could.\n\nEarnest faces willed him on. Even Chan Kan nodded his encouragement. What was it the old man had said? _You must be fearless, brave, and strong...._\n\nOnly a few more spoonfuls.\n\nMax's lips had gone numb and his tongue felt twice its normal size. He thought his head might explode. He could no longer taste anything at all.\n\nHe put down his spoon in bleary triumph.\n\nWell, one thing was for sure. He hadn't acted like a green macaw tonight.\n\nAt the other end of the table, Chan Kan was smiling his approval.\n\nFearless, brave, and strong. He had passed the test.\n\nMax smiled back\u2014a flinty, heroic kind of smile, like a Maya warrior who'd just wrestled a jaguar and won.\n\nBut now Chan Kan's smile was turning to laughter, and his laughter was louder than the thunder of rain in the jungle. His shoulders were shaking and tears were running down his face. Everyone at both tables\u2014men, women, children, toothless crones\u2014was guffawing and slapping their legs. Och and little Och were lying on the ground holding their sides.\n\nLola came over from the women's table. She could hardly walk for laughing.\n\n\"What's so funny?\" rasped Max through his swollen mouth.\n\n\"That soup,\" she gasped, wiping her eyes, \"it's a joke they play on tourists. You did great, Hoop!\"\n\nHer words were like salt on a slug. In an instant, Max's good mood shriveled up and died. His face, already pink, turned scarlet with rage. How dare these ignorant peasants make fun of him! They could have killed him with their evil concoction. As it was, his stomach would be on fire for days.\n\nA giggling woman took away the soup dish and set down a gourd of thin white liquid.\n\n\"Drink it,\" said Lola. \"It will take away the heat.\"\n\nHe sipped it cautiously. It took away the heat.\n\n\"Better?\" asked Lola.\n\nHe looked at her accusingly. \"I thought we were a team; I'll never forgive you for this.\" Another thought occurred to him. \"And I suppose it was another of your jokes to get Chan Kan to spook me out?\"\n\n\"What? No, Hoop\u2014\"\n\n\"You set me up!\"\n\n\"But Hoop\u2014\"\n\n\"My name is Max.\"\n\nA platter of fried chicken was brought out, and the woman served Max an extra-large helping.\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" he said, pushing the plate away.\n\n\"Oh, come on,\" said Lola. \"Where's your sense of humor?\"\n\n\"It's back in Boston,\" said Max, \"and I wish I was, too.\"\n\nThen he jumped up and stomped off into the night.\n\nOch ran after him. \"You are to sleep at my house, Mister Max,\" he said. With his little brother in tow as usual, he led the way to a thatched shack and pointed to a hammock on the porch.\n\n\"I'd rather have a bed, if you've got one,\" said Max.\n\nBut he was talking to himself. The boys were gone.\n\nAfter a few false starts, he worked out how to ease himself into the hammock. It was surprisingly comfortable. The woven fabric shaped itself to his body, and the gentle rocking made him feel weightless. He took off his sneakers and let them drop to the floor. Then he lay there, listening to the sounds of music, speeches, and laughter drifting over from the party. Soon, despite the spicy soup sloshing around in his stomach, he fell asleep.\n\nHe was awakened at dawn by the sounds of Och's family going about their day. Still half asleep, he slid out of his hammock and went to put on his sneakers.\n\nA huge, shiny black scorpion looked back at him, waving its claws menacingly. It must have been five inches long and it was standing on the toe of a sneaker. Max guessed it would strike if he moved, so he stood there, frozen to the spot, emitting a low wailing noise to raise the alarm without alarming the scorpion.\n\nOch and little Och and Lola arrived at exactly the same time.\n\n\"Why are you making that noise?\" asked Lola. \"It's time to go.\"\n\n\"Can't move,\" muttered Max. \"Scorpion on shoe.\"\n\nLola and the two brothers crept over and looked at the offending creature.\n\n\"It's a big one,\" whispered Lola admiringly.\n\nOch and little Och nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Don't just stand there,\" hissed Max, \"do something!\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Lola. In one deft motion, she picked the scorpion up by the tail just below the stinger. \"It's one of the biggest I've ever seen,\" she marveled, showing it to the boys. She carried the scorpion over to where Max was now cowering in the corner and dropped it on his shoulder.\n\n\"Oops,\" she said.\n\n# Chapter Thirteen  \nMONKEY RIVER\n\nThe scorpion was climbing slowly up Max's neck.\n\n\"Get it off! Get it off!\" he cried.\n\nOch ran over and held out his hand to the scorpion, all the time making little kissing noises. The scorpion crawled onto his outstretched palm. He gave Max a big smile. \"This is Selma,\" he said. \"My pet.\"\n\n\"Selma?\" repeated Max. \"Selma is your pet? You have a pet scorpion?\"\n\n\"Big ones like Selma aren't dangerous,\" explained Lola. \"It's the little ones you have to worry about.\"\n\n\"You could have told me sooner,\" said Max.\n\nLola shrugged. \"Och wanted to play a joke on you to cheer you up.\"\n\n\"Scorpions aren't funny!\" yelled Max. \"Red-hot soup isn't funny! And that stuff in Chan Kan's hut wasn't funny, either!\"\n\nLittle Och started to cry.\n\n\"I swear I don't know anything about that,\" said Lola. \"What happened? What did he say to you?\"\n\n\"As if you didn't know.\"\n\n\"But Hoop\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't call me Hoop.\" He turned his back and leaned on the porch rail to sulk.\n\nBefore long, a little hand was tugging at his shirt.\n\n\"Breakfast.\" Och was holding up a bowl of glutinous white slop.\n\nMax eyed it suspiciously. \"And what village specialty is this?\"\n\n_\"Saksa,\"_ said Och.\n\n\"Is that Mayan for 'stewed maggots,' by any chance?\"\n\nMax took the bowl and poured the contents over the side of the porch.\n\nSix dogs appeared out of nowhere and began lapping it up.\n\nOch looked at Max accusingly. Lola stood in the doorway with little Och, her mouth open in horror. Little Och wailed louder than ever.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" said Max.\n\n\"That was their breakfast, you idiot,\" said Lola. \"They were going to share their corn porridge with you. I can't believe you poured it away.\"\n\n\"Can't they get some more?\"\n\n\"More?\" repeated Lola contemptuously. \"There is no more. They cook what they need and they don't waste anything.\"\n\n\"They wasted that soup last night.\"\n\n\"They were making it anyway. The tourists are coming today.\"\n\n\"Well, that porridge was disgusting. I did the boys a favor, if you ask me.\"\n\nMax smiled at Och, but the boy's expression was like thunder. With a final black look, he grabbed his little brother's hand and dragged him off, still wailing.\n\n_Stupid kid_ , Max told himself.\n\nBut he felt bad.\n\nHe sat alone on the porch, waiting for Lola say her goodbyes. He couldn't wait to leave this village. But at least he'd learned an important lesson here: from now on, he was going to forget everyone else and look after number one.\n\nWhen Lola had finally finished kissing all the women and hugging all the children, Max followed her sulkily down to the river. Some girls were scrubbing clothes on the rocks, and they nudged each other and laughed when they saw him. He scowled at them, which made them laugh even more.\n\nChan Kan was waiting on the bank.\n\n\"Eusebio is taking his hot chili peppers to market in Lim\u00f3n,\" said Chan Kan. \"He will give you a ride upriver.\" The old man chuckled. \"Please try not to eat all his chilies, Max Murphy; we saw how much you liked them last night!\"\n\n\"Ha-ha,\" said Max unpleasantly.\n\nLola glared at him. \"Thank you for everything,\" she said to Chan Kan.\n\n\"You are most welcome, Ix Sak Lol,\" he replied, lifting her hand to his lips and kissing it. \"Our hearts will travel with you. Please pass on my greetings to Hermanjilio and give him this.\" He pointed with his cane at a large bamboo cage sitting on the grass.\n\nMax and Lola knelt down to peer in the cage. A mangy little black rooster huddled miserably in one corner.\n\n\"His name is Thunderclaw,\" said Chan Kan. \"Hermanjilio will soon have need of him.\"\n\n\"What's the matter with it?\" asked Max, sounding disgusted. \"Does it have a skin disease?\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Chan Kan, \"you refer to his battle scars.\" He smiled proudly. \"The venerable Thunderclaw was once a great fighting cock. His feathers were ripped out over the years, but he was never beaten.\"\n\n\"Poor thing,\" said Lola. \"Well, if anyone can give him a worthy send-off, it's Hermanjilio. He can cook anything.\"\n\nChan Kan turned to Max and put a hand on each of his shoulders. Little electric shocks traveled up and down Max's body.\n\n\"Trust the howlers, Max Murphy.\"\n\nMax curled his lip. Surely even Chan Kan realized that the howler joke was wearing thin. He was trying to formulate a smart reply, when Chan Kan took a leather canteen from his belt, drank a little water, and spat it in Max's face.\n\nWell, perhaps not spat exactly. To describe it more objectively, he walked round and round the horrified Max, spraying a gentle mist of water from his mouth until he'd made a ring of tiny rainbows around the boy's head.\n\n\"Get away from me!\" shrieked Max, trying to shield his face. \"That's so gross!\"\n\n\"You should be honored,\" said Lola. \"Chan Kan has just blessed you with courage.\"\n\nMax looked quickly from one to the other, but he couldn't catch them smirking. He didn't know if it was another joke or not. \"I think you're sick,\" he said. \"You're all sick in the head. I think this village is actually some kind of low-security mental hospital.\"\n\n\"I can't believe you said that!\" exploded Lola. \"These people have shared everything they have with you. How can you be so ungrateful?\"\n\n\"Let me think,\" said Max sarcastically, wiping his face with his shirt. \"They poisoned me, they made fun of me, and they spit on me. Yeah, you're right, I've had a lovely time. Remind me to send them a thank-you note.\"\n\nLola turned her back on him in disgust.\n\n\"I think Eusebio is ready to leave,\" said Chan Kan.\n\n\"All blessings.\"\n\nAt the water's edge, a small, round man was loading big, round baskets into a dugout canoe. When he turned to greet them with his twinkling eyes and his leathery face etched with laughter lines, Max recognized him as one of the chief merrymakers of the night before and took an instant loathing to him.\n\nHe wasn't impressed by Eusebio's vessel, either. He'd been imagining whizzing down the river on a supersleek speedboat, not a hollowed-out tree trunk with an outboard motor. Surely there wouldn't be room for all of them? The boat was already sitting low in the water from the weight of the chili baskets.\n\nAt Lola's call, Chulo and Seri materialized out of nowhere and settled themselves on the bow. Chulo bared his teeth at Max in passing.\n\n_There's some extra weight we could lose_ , thought Max.\n\nEusebio indicated that Max should sit in the stern with the chicken cage. Then Lola and Eusebio pushed the boat into the water and climbed in next to him. It was a tight squeeze, but soon they were all wedged in and on their way.\n\nA little boy was sitting in a tree at the water's edge.\n\nIt was Och.\n\nLittle Och sat on another branch, lower down.\n\nMax waved to them, but they didn't wave back.\n\nLola waved and they waved back enthusiastically.\n\nMax pretended not to care. He dumped the chicken cage on Lola, put on his sunglasses, and stared fixedly upriver.\n\nHe was glad to be leaving this crazy village.\n\nHis stomach was empty and his heart was, too. He felt like an alien, a hungry alien who didn't speak the language. He longed to be home in Boston, playing video games with characters who followed the rules. In real life people were irrational, unpredictable, annoying, and bossy, bossy, bossy.\n\nAn early-morning mist enveloped the boat, and Eusebio concentrated on steering. They zoomed along in silence for an hour or so, until a weak sun broke through and the mist cleared.\n\n\"Time for breakfast,\" said Eusebio, cutting the motor in midstream.\n\nHe pulled out a small cooler from under the chili baskets.\n\nInside were some bottles of water and two tortillas stuffed with beans.\n\n\"I am sorry,\" said Eusebio. \"I did not know you were coming, so I did not bring extra food. But you are welcome to share what I have.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you,\" said Lola, looking meaningfully at Max, \"but we had breakfast at Utsal.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" said Max, taking one of the tortillas and gulping it down in three greedy bites.\n\n\"For you, Ix Sak Lol?\" said Eusebio, offering Lola the remaining tortilla.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"If you are sure,\" said Eusebio, about to take the tortilla for himself.\n\n\"I'll have it,\" said Max.\n\n\"No!\" yelled Lola. \"I can't believe you, Max Murphy! A wild pig has better manners!\"\n\n\"What have I done now?\"\n\n\"You were going to eat all Eusebio's food.\"\n\n\"He offered.\"\n\n\"He was being polite.\"\n\n\"How was I supposed to know?\"\n\n\"Well, try thinking about someone besides yourself for a change! You spoiled the party, you threw away Och's breakfast, you insulted everyone at Utsal\u2014\"\n\n\"What about _your_ manners?\" demanded Max. \"You made me eat the soup, you dropped a scorpion on me\u2014where I come from, we'd never treat a guest that way.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you have any guests\u2014or any friends at all! The world doesn't revolve around you, you know. The villagers at Utsal work hard every day of their lives. If they like to play their little joke on pampered tourists\u2014and, by the way, the tourists love it\u2014it wouldn't hurt you to laugh along. You could have made a lot of friends last night. But you only know how to make enemies. You're the most selfish person I've ever met!\"\n\n\"I'm taking care of number one,\" Max yelled back. \"Isn't that the law of the jungle?\"\n\n\"Stop,\" said Eusebio. It was the first time Max had seen him without a smile on his face. \"You are squabbling like baby parrots.\"\n\nLola hung her head. \"I'm sorry, Eusebio,\" she said, but her apology was drowned out by the sound of the boat starting up again.\n\nMax expected to continue upriver but, to his surprise, they made straight for the bank.\n\nEusebio cut the motor. \"Please get out,\" he said.\n\n\"But Eusebio\u2014\" began Lola.\n\n\"It is the only way,\" said Eusebio. \"Out. Please. Now.\"\n\nWhen Max and Lola had reluctantly climbed ashore, Eusebio tied the boat to an overhanging branch and jumped onto land himself.\n\n\"Follow me,\" he said.\n\nAs they tramped through the forest, clambering over tree roots and ducking under branches, Max and Lola exchanged angry glances.\n\nEusebio paid them no attention. He pointed up at some drab flowers garlanding the branches of a tree. \"Look, my friend,\" he said to Max. \"This is the rare black orchid. In your country, they fuss over it like a newborn baby. So how does this delicate little flower look after itself in the treacherous jungle?\"\n\nThe boatman reached up to pick one, but he wasn't tall enough.\n\n\"You're not supposed to pick them, Eusebio,\" said Lola. \"They're a protected species.\"\n\n\"So much for looking after itself,\" muttered Max.\n\nEusebio waved his hand airily. \"My point is,\" he said, \"that the little orchid has trained itself to be the perfect guest. It lives on the tree, but it feeds from the air and the rain. It takes nothing from its host.\"\n\n\"I knew this was about the tortillas,\" said Max.\n\nBut Eusebio had moved on. \"Over here,\" he was saying, \"is the trumpet tree\u2014so called because my ancestors made wooden trumpets from its hollow trunk.\" He handed Max his machete. \"Hit it,\" he instructed. \"And stand back.\"\n\nMax whacked the tree as hard as he could.\n\nAn unappetizing smell of blue cheese and coconut filled the air.\n\n\"It is the smell of angry ants,\" said Eusebio.\n\nEven as he said it, hundreds of ants emerged from the trunk and swarmed toward the machete marks. \"The tree makes a nectar for the ants to eat, and in return they act as bodyguards for the tree.\"\n\n\"Can we go back to the boat now?\" asked Max.\n\nBut Eusebio had found another specimen, a sinister-looking tree with black tarlike patches on its trunk. \"The mighty poisonwood!\" he cried. \"Its sap burns worse than pepper soup, and the only thing that soothes it is the bark of the gumbo-limbo.\" He indicated a nearby tree with a flaky crimson trunk.\n\n\"They call gumbo-limbo the tourist tree,\" added Lola, \"because it's always red and peeling.\"\n\nMax didn't laugh.\n\n\"The point is,\" gabbled Eusebio excitedly, \"that gumbo-limbo and poisonwood always grow side by side! It is the same for people. On the surface we are different, but our roots are intertwined. We are connected in ways we cannot see and we must use our talents to help each other. Looking after number one may be the law of the concrete jungle, but it is not the law of the rainforest.\"\n\n\"But I'm _from_ a concrete jungle,\" said Max wearily. \"This is not my world.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Eusebio, \"so you're a tourist? A guest that takes without giving? Then you are like this strangler fig.\" He pointed to a huge tree with thick, buttresslike roots. \"This started life as a vine in the top of another tree and grew down, stealing its host's food and light, until it reached the forest floor. When it was firmly rooted, it tightened its death grip around its host's trunk and became a living coffin.\"\n\n\"It was only a tortilla!\" protested Max.\n\n\"And you are welcome to it, my friend,\" said Eusebio, slapping him on the back. \"But have you learned anything from this walk?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Max ruefully. \"I learned that I should've brought sandwiches.\"\n\nEusebio roared with laughter. \"Come,\" he said, \"let us return to the boat and share that last tortilla.\"\n\nAs they walked along, Max fell into step with Lola.\n\n\"I guess I have been acting like a tourist,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Lola, \"you did lose it a bit in Utsal. But hey, maybe I'd act like a tourist if I came to Boston.\"\n\n\"You'd hate it there,\" said Max. \"No snakes, no scorpions, no rat on a stick.\" He looked at her pointedly. \"And the people are normal, too.\"\n\nShe ignored the insult. \"You didn't give Utsal a chance.\"\n\n\"They don't have cell phones or laptops or cable TV. That's all I need to know.\"\n\n\"They choose to live without them. Once you join the consumer society, you have to keep making money to buy things you don't need.\"\n\n\"But surely you don't want to live in a shack with no electricity?\"\n\n\"I think you can have the best of both worlds. I respect the old ways, but I also believe in women's rights and a college education.\"\n\n\"What does Chan Kan think about that?\"\n\n\"He's hoping I'll get it out of my system and come back and marry some boy he's picked out for me.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't, would you?\" said Max, horrified.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Who knows what the future holds?\"\n\n\"All aboard!\" called Eusebio from the riverbank.\n\n\"Race you back to the boat,\" called Lola, disappearing down the path.\n\nAs they thrummed along between high walls of jungle, the boatman pointed out the passing wildlife. It was like traveling through the pages of a children's picture book. There were freshwater crocodiles floating like logs, turtles sunning themselves on rocks, a bright orange iguana on a tree branch, a frigate bird with a chest like a plum tomato, kingfishers, storks, scarlet macaws, and always the clouds of yellow butterflies fluttering along the banks.\n\nIt was all so lush and unspoiled and peaceful that Max could easily imagine he was the first explorer ever to navigate these waters.\n\nHis fantasy was soon disturbed by a whiny, nasal voice.\n\n\"Would ya look at that! See the cute monkeys on the canoe?\"\n\nMax looked back in the direction of the voice and saw a white cabin cruiser speeding up the river behind them. Its deck was thronged with overfed passengers in orange life jackets, and every passenger was weighed down with photographic equipment.\n\nAs the cruiser passed, it listed to one side with the combined weight of the shrieking mass who rushed to the railing to zoom in on Chulo and Seri.\n\nAnd then they were gone, leaving Eusebio's boat rocking in their wake.\n\n\"What just happened?\" asked Max, in shock.\n\n\"Tourists!\" said Lola. \"They're on the Mystery of the Maya cruise. They dock at Puerto Muerto, take a quick trip upriver to Lim\u00f3n, stop at Utsal for lunch, and tick San Xavier off their list. They'll be having margaritas in Mexico tonight.\"\n\n\"It should be called the Mystery of the Tourists cruise,\" said Max.\n\n\"You should know,\" Lola teased him.\n\n_Yeah_ , thought Max, _I should know_.\n\nIn that moment, Max saw the tourists through the eyes of the villagers at Utsal and he understood the pepper-soup trick. He saw himself, last night, sweat pouring down his face, trying to impress the natives.\n\nYeah, it was funny.\n\nHe was glad the rowdy boatload who'd just passed would soon be forcing down the fiery broth. That would quiet them down for a while. And even if their fancy cabin cruiser had a snack bar and a restroom with soft toilet paper, he'd rather be in this hollowed-out log with Lola and Eusebio.\n\nIt was time to take sides.\n\nAs long as he kept comparing San Xavier to Boston, he was no better than one of those tourists. Like it or not, the jungle was his home right now, and he had to make the best of it. Besides, playing video games alone in his room seemed kind of lame compared to zooming up the Monkey River with the wind in his hair.\n\nHe leaned back against the chili baskets to consider this momentous revelation. The sun was getting higher, the day was getting hotter. He closed his eyes. Soon, lulled by the throb of the engine, he fell into a waking dream. It was a parade of disapproving faces, a lineup of everyone he'd upset, offended, or alienated recently\u2014his mom, his dad, Oscar, Raul, Lucky Jim, the entire village of Utsal, especially Och\u2014all set against a hip-hop sound track of Uncle Ted saying, \"He's a spoiled brat,\" over and over again.\n\nThen a new sound joined the beat. A rhythmic _no, no, no_.\n\nHe opened his eyes.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" yelled Eusebio, gesturing frantically from the back of the boat. \"Get your hand out!\"\n\nAs Max had dozed, he'd dipped his hand lazily over the side of the boat. He pulled it in quickly. It wasn't the smartest thing he'd ever done, to trail such juicy bait in a river full of crocodiles. But then again, he reflected, perhaps he'd done a few things lately that weren't too smart.\n\nIt was late morning when Eusebio pulled the boat into the riverbank. Chulo and Seri leapt off and headed into the trees.\n\n\"They know the way,\" said Lola, laughing. \"They'll be there before us.\"\n\nShe hugged Eusebio, thanked him profusely, and showered her blessings on his family. Then she picked up the chicken cage and climbed out of the boat.\n\nNow it was Max's turn to disembark.\n\nHe was dithering over whether to shake hands, when the boatman solved his dilemma by catching him in a suffocating bear hug.\n\n\"Good-bye, Max Murphy, all blessings,\" he said.\n\n\"Good-bye, Eusebio.\" Max took off his shades and handed them to the boatman. \"Here, you need these more than I do. You're headed into the sun.\"\n\nEusebio put on the shades, slapped Max on the back, hugged him again, kissed him on both cheeks, and roared off upriver.\n\n\"That was nice of you, Max,\" said Lola.\n\n\"You can call me Hoop, if you like,\" he said.\n\nAlmost as soon as they began to walk, the rain started bucketing down. It was going to be another wet, miserable slog through the mud.\n\nThen Max remembered his new positive attitude. Determined not to be a whiny tourist, he fashioned a rain hat out of a large leaf, gritted his teeth, and followed Lola in stoic silence.\n\nAfter an hour or so, the vegetation thinned out a little and he could make out a narrow path snaking to and fro up a steep hillside in front of them.\n\n\"Nearly there,\" called Lola. \"Are you okay, Hoop?\"\n\n\"Me? I'm fine,\" replied Max, as jauntily as he could from under his leaf.\n\nLola looked at him suspiciously. \"Why aren't you complaining about anything?\"\n\n\"It's the new me,\" he said. \"I've changed.\"\n\nLola laughed. \"So how does the new you feel about climbing that hill?\"\n\n\"Lead on!\"\n\nWhen they reached the top, the rain stopped suddenly as it had started, and the sun came out.\n\nThe view was incredible. The forest spread out in every direction, from the banks of the Monkey River to the distant purple mountains. But all Max's tired body could focus on was the fact that they were not actually at the top.\n\nThere was one more hill to climb. On its summit, the upper terraces closer to sky than earth, were the partially excavated ruins of a huge stepped pyramid.\n\n\"That's the Temple of Itzamna,\" said Lola.\n\nShe started to run up the path. Then she stopped and came back. \"By the way, there's something you should know before we go up there....\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio is a little\"\u2014she searched for just the right word\u2014\"eccentric.\"\n\n\"What do you mean eccentric?\"\n\nBut Lola and Thunderclaw had taken off up the path to the ruined city.\n\n# Chapter Fourteen  \nITZAMNA\n\nMax followed behind, huffing and puffing up the hill until he reached the Temple of Itzamna. As he got closer, he came face-to-face with a line of monstrous carved faces. One had a pig's snout, another had pop eyes and buckteeth. It wasn't quite the welcoming committee he'd hoped for.\n\n\"Lola?\" he called.\n\n\"Over here, Hoop.\"\n\nHe followed her voice around the side of the pyramid and there, spread out below him, was the glorious ancient city that had once ruled the Monkey River.\n\nSpread out below him was the glorious ancient city.\n\nIt wasn't what he'd expected at all. He'd thought Itzamna would be another boring archaeological site like the ones in his parents' photograph albums\u2014a hodgepodge of taped-off trenches and rubble and piles of old stones, meaningless to anyone but the experts. But this place was at once magnificent and welcoming, like coming home to the most beautiful city in the world.\n\nThe temple was built into the hillside. They were standing on a platform halfway up, about fifty feet above the central plaza. The top of the pyramid was another fifty feet above them. On this side, steep steps led down to the overgrown plaza. Through the middle of the plaza, a raised stone causeway, flanked by more ruins and grassy mounds, ran to another massive structure at the far end of the site. This, too, was only partially excavated, and trees sprang from its upper terraces. But against the hazy backdrop of the forest, with the afternoon sun bathing its white stones in pinks and purples, it looked like a precious jewel on a bed of dark-green velvet.\n\n\"That's the royal palace,\" said Lola proudly. \"It was built over a thousand years ago without metal tools or wheels.\"\n\n\"The Maya didn't have wheels?\"\n\n\"We had them,\" said Lola, \"but we only used them for children's toys.\"\n\n\"Really? You guys weren't as smart as I thought.\"\n\n\"There's not much point in making wheeled carts if you don't have draft animals to pull them,\" she sniffed. \"Besides, we were busy inventing the Maya calendar, the concept of zero, rubber balls, hot chocolate, chewing gum\u2014\"\n\nMax's ears pricked up. \"Chewing gum?\"\n\n\"We call it _chicle_. It's made from the latex of the sapodilla tree. While you're here we could\u2014\"\n\nMax gripped her arm. \"It's a ghost!\" he hissed.\n\nShe followed his eyes down to the plaza, where an ancient Maya king had just emerged from behind a pyramid. He wore a richly embroidered tunic, belted at the waist with a woven sash. His straight black hair was pulled into a thick ponytail on top of his head with a gold ornament. Jade spools bobbed from his ears as he walked.\n\n\"Hermanjilio!\" screamed Lola happily, handing Max the rooster cage and running down to meet this apparition.\n\n\" _Biix abeel_?\" Hermanjilio shouted up to her. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n_\"Ma'alob, ma'alob,\"_ called Lola. \"I'm fine!\"\n\n\"I've been expecting you! Chulo and Seri got here ages ago!\"\n\n\"It's so good to see you,\" said Lola, hugging him. \"And I've got something for you!\" She opened her backpack to show him the Red Jaguar.\n\n\"But how...?\"\n\n\"It wasn't easy! I'll tell you everything later....\"\n\nAs Lola and Hermanjilio chatted on, Max tried to take in every detail of the archaeologist's extraordinary appearance.\n\nHe was in his forties, around six feet tall, and as muscular as an Olympic shot-putter. Kindly brown eyes ringed with laughter lines shone out of his leathery face. With his high forehead, prominent cheekbones, and splendidly hooked nose, he was another portrait out of time. Except, Max noted, no ancient Maya king would have worn battered tennis shoes nor carried a wooden spoon.\n\nSo this was the last person to have officially seen his parents.\n\nNow, at last, he would find out where they were.\n\nLola turned to him. \"Max Murphy, meet Professor Hermanjilio Bol.\"\n\nBefore Max could say anything, a cloud of yellow butterflies descended on his head and shoulders.\n\n\"What an honor to meet you,\" said Hermanjilio, swatting at the butterflies with his wooden spoon. \"These things are everywhere at the moment. They seem to like you, young man.\"\n\nMax flicked the butterflies away and blurted out the question he'd been waiting to ask. \"Have you seen my parents, Professor?\"\n\n\"Please call me Hermanjilio,\" he said. \"I last saw your parents at Ixchel, Max. I thought they'd be back at your uncle's house by now.\"\n\nMax looked visibly deflated. He'd been so sure Hermanjilio would have news. \"Well, what happened?\" he persisted. \"Where are they?\"\n\n\"I don't know. The dig didn't go as planned. We decided to abandon it. The storm came. I'm sure they'll turn up soon. I'm sorry, Max. This business must be awful for you, waiting for them to come back....\"\n\nForgetting he was holding the wooden spoon, he went to put an arm around Max and accidentally poked him in the face. \"Forgive me,\" he said, with a laugh so loud it scared the parrots in a nearby tree. \"I've been cooking all day. Tonight we're having a party to celebrate your safe arrival.\"\n\nMax looked Hermanjilio up and down. \"Is it a costume party?\"\n\nHermanjilio chuckled. \"Pardon my appearance, but it's an academic experiment. My ancestors lived at Itzamna in the Classic and Postclassic Periods. I've been trying to get closer to my roots by seeing life through their eyes\u2014\"\n\nA hideous shrieking sound interrupted his explanation.\n\n\"Thunderclaw!\" said Lola. \"I completely forgot!\" She lifted up the cage to show Hermanjilio. \"It's a gift from Chan Kan.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Hermanjilio.\n\n\"His name is Thunderclaw. He's a black rooster.\"\n\n\"Does he have a disease? What are those scales on his skin?\"\n\n\"Old war wounds. He used to be a champion fighting cock.\"\n\n\"I wonder why Chan Kan would send me a chicken?\" mused Hermanjilio.\n\n\"To cook?\" suggested Max hopefully.\n\n\"But Chan Kan knows I'm trying to live like my ancestors, and they didn't have chickens until the Spanish came.\"\n\n\"Beats me,\" said Lola. \"He just said you'd soon have need of him.\"\n\n\"Well, we don't need him tonight, that's for sure,\" said Hermanjilio. \"There's already enough food for twenty people.\"\n\nAt this news, Max's stomach rumbled loudly.\n\nHermanjilio laughed. \"Let's show Max to his room,\" he said. \"Then you can come and talk to me, Lola, while I finish cooking. Follow me.\"\n\nHe strode off, holding the wooden spoon high in the air like a drum major leading a parade. Max and Lola followed behind until they came to a sudden halt in front of a huge tree.\n\n\"Look up,\" said Lola.\n\nMax looked up.\n\n_Wow_.\n\nAbove them, soaring up and up toward the jungle canopy, was an intricately constructed multistoried tree house, with thatched huts at every level linked by rope ladders and slatted walkways.\n\n\"This is fantastic!\" exclaimed Max. \"It's like _The Swiss Family Robinson_!\"\n\nLola looked at him with interest. \"People live in tree houses in Switzerland?\"\n\nBefore Max could explain, Hermanjilio cut in. \"Lola, please show Max to my room. I'm not using it at the moment.\"\n\n\"But where will you sleep?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Don't worry about me,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I've been sleeping in the palace.\"\n\n\"The palace? Isn't that a little spooky?\" asked Lola.\n\n\"Spooky? You mean haunted?\" Hermanjilio considered the question. \"Well, there's definitely something in the air, particularly at night\u2014latent vibrations or a sympathetic echo, something of that nature. And I've been having the most extraordinary dreams.\"\n\nLola shuddered. \"Please be careful, Hermanjilio.\"\n\n\"I like it. It helps me imagine what daily life was like for my ancestors. I'm even grinding my own corn these days\u2014which reminds me! I need to get back to my cooking! Please make yourselves at home.\"\n\nHermanjilio padded back down the forest path, silent as a hunting jaguar.\n\n\"He's eccentric, all right,\" said Max. \"What a weirdo!\"\n\n\"Follow me,\" said Lola coldly.\n\nThey ascended the rope ladder in silence. Lola showed Max his room and turned to go, all without saying a word.\n\n\"What's the matter? What have I done now?\" he asked. He thought quickly. \"Is it because I called Hermanjilio a weirdo? I'm sorry, I really am. He took me by surprise, that's all. I was expecting the usual archaeologist type. You know, all beard and khaki shorts.\"\n\n\"Like your father, you mean?\" sniffed Lola.\n\n\"I guess so.\"\n\n\"Could your father have done a better job of excavating this place?\"\n\n\"Of course not. It's just Hermanjilio's 'going native' act that threw me.\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio is a native\u2014and so am I.\"\n\n\"Okay, okay! Why are you so touchy?\"\n\n\"I just want you to understand that, as well as being head of Maya Studies at San Xavier University, Hermanjilio is one of the most brilliant archaeologists in the world. He's actually descended from the lords of Itzamna, so he feels a spiritual connection with this place. One day he's hoping to open it as the first totally Maya-run site....\" Lola's eyes were shining. \"He may not have a beard and khaki shorts, but Hermanjilio knows more about Maya history than any foreign archaeologist.\"\n\n\"So that's what all this is about? You want me to say that your friend in the dress is a better archaeologist than Mom and Dad? Well, maybe he is. Maybe the Maya are best at everything! But so what? I just want to find my parents and go home. Can't you understand that?\"\n\nLola looked away.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"Of course you can understand that. You'd like to find your parents, too, wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"I don't even know who they are,\" she sighed. \"Chan Kan found me in the forest when I was little. I was holding a white mahogany blossom, so he called me Lady White Flower. I lived in Utsal until a couple of years ago, when I came to study with Hermanjilio. He's taught me so much, and I won't let anyone make fun of him. Especially not someone who's covered in mud and smells like a skunk.\"\n\nMax put up his hands in surrender. \"You're right,\" he said. \"So where's the river and the soap root?\"\n\n\"I'll show you,\" said Lola. Her eyes twinkled mischievously. \"Unless you'd rather use Hermanjilio's solar-heated shower?\"\n\nMax couldn't believe his ears. A hot shower was beyond his wildest dreams. \"Hermanjilio really is a genius!\" he exclaimed, as a crust of dry brown mud cracked off his clothes and fell to the floor in little pieces.\n\n\"Look in Hermanjilio's closet,\" said Lola. \"I think he has some clean clothes in among the jaguar skins.\"\n\nLater, when Lola appeared for dinner looking amazingly beautiful in a pink-and-orange-striped skirt, a lime-green top, and a brightly woven shawl, with a pink flower behind her ear, Max wished he had tried a little harder to find a shirt that didn't come down to his knees.\n\n\"Wow! You look so clean,\" she said, sounding surprised.\n\n\"You, too,\" he replied, and immediately kicked himself for not paying her a more smooth-tongued compliment. \"I mean, you always look clean, that is\u2014\"\n\n\" _Yum bo'otik teech_!\" said Lola.\n\nMax looked at her suspiciously. Was she insulting him, Maya-style?\n\n\"It means 'thank you,'\" she explained, laughing.\n\n\"Enough talking!\" announced Hermanjilio. \"Let's eat!\"\n\nIt was a magical scene. The plaza was lit with flaming torches and candles in lanterns strung through the trees. Giant fireflies darted across the path, and above it all, the jungle stars twinkled like diamonds.\n\nBut Max had eyes only for the food.\n\nLaid out on a banana-leaf tablecloth was plate after plate of succulent concoctions: a mountain of savory pastries, little fried dumplings, skewers of meat, avocado salad, tortillas, beans, sweet potato fritters, plantains, and a huge platter of tropical fruit.\n\nThat night they feasted like kings. It had taken Hermanjilio hours to prepare the banquet, but it took only minutes for Max and Lola to wolf down their first helpings and come back for more. Table manners were forgotten as they ate with their fingers and talked with their mouths full.\n\nAs he devoured another whole pastry in one bite, Max imagined what his mother would say if she caught him eating like this. Thinking about her made him sad, and he wiped his mouth (albeit on the back of his hand) in her honor.\n\nHe wondered what his parents were eating tonight out there in the jungle. He hoped the smell of this feast would waft to wherever they were and guide them to him. He kept watching the entrance to the plaza, half expecting them to stumble in. But no one came.\n\nFinally, when even Max could eat no more, Hermanjilio stood up and cleared the table. When he came back, he carried a gourd of something that smelled to Max like a mixture of aniseed and gasoline.\n\n\"Maya elixir,\" said Hermanjilio with a wink. \"Now tell me again what happened at Chahk. How clever you were to think of using the Red Jaguar and scraping away the jungle like that and rubbing blood on the painting. I would have given anything to be there....Tell me from the beginning.\"\n\n\"I told you everything before dinner,\" said Lola, \"three times.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you could tell your story now, sir,\" suggested Max, \"about what happened the last time you saw my parents?\"\n\nHermanjilio took another draft of liquor and said nothing.\n\nLola was looking at him strangely.\n\n\"Sir?\" Max begged him. \"My parents are missing, and you're the last person who saw them. You're my only hope.\"\n\nHermanjilio groaned and put his head into his hands. When he looked up, he had tears in his eyes.\n\n\"I can't lie to you any longer, Max,\" he said. \"I saw it with my own eyes. Your parents vanished into thin air.\"\n\n# Chapter Fifteen  \nTHE OATH OF BLOOD\n\nThin air? What's that supposed to mean? How could my parents vanish into thin air? Did a fog come down? Tell me the truth! This isn't one of your Maya legends, this is about my parents! Tell me everything you saw!\"\n\n\"Calm down, Max,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I don't understand, either. One minute they were there and the next minute they were gone.\"\n\n\"But it doesn't make sense,\" said Max, getting angry. \"There's something you're not telling me!\"\n\nLola was staring hard at Hermanjilio. \"There's a lot he's not telling you.\"\n\n\"Lola!\" protested Hermanjilio. \"You know I'm bound by sacred oaths.\"\n\n\"But you said you didn't believe that stuff. You said you only went through with the rituals to please Chan Kan.\"\n\n\"Since I've been trying to live the old way, my feelings on that subject have changed. Besides, there's something in the air right now, something big, and whatever it is, I don't want you two getting mixed up in it.\"\n\n\"We are mixed up in it, Hermanjilio. You have to tell Max everything. He just wants to find his parents. For my sake? Please?\"\n\nHermanjilio sighed. He knew when he was beaten.\n\n\"I will do it on one condition,\" he said. \"The boy must take an oath of silence and seal it with a blood sacrifice.\"\n\n\"He'll do it,\" said Lola.\n\nHermanjilio got up for a moment and returned with a long, bony needle and a thin peel of tree bark. He passed the needle to Max.\n\n\"It's a stingray spine,\" he said, \"sharper than cut glass. My ancestors would have passed it through their tongues, but you can just prick your thumb.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not,\" said Max.\n\nLola grabbed Max's thumb and jabbed it with the stingray spine. Ignoring his cries of pain, she held it over the tree bark and squeezed out a few drops of blood.\n\n\"Now say these words,\" said Hermanjilio. _\"If I should betray the secrets of the sacred stones, may the Lords of Death pluck out my living heart.\"_\n\nAs Max repeated the oath, a cold wind blew across the table, making the candles flicker and spit.\n\nHermanjilio set fire to the bloodstained tree bark and watched in silence as the smoke curled up into the night sky. \"The oath is sealed; I would advise you not to break it.\" He beckoned Max to sit closer. \" _Bahlamtuuno'ob_ ,\" he whispered.\n\n\"The Jaguar Stones?\" said Max, his eyes watering from the toxic cloud of elixir fumes on Hermanjilio's breath.\n\nHermanjilio nodded. \" _Bahlamtuuno'ob_ translates as 'Jaguar Stones' but, to me, it means more than just a set of stone carvings. The Jaguar Stones represent everything that is noble about the Maya: our strength, courage, wisdom, creativity, and our enduring spirit. That's why I have sworn to track them down and put them on display, like the crown jewels of the rainforest, to inspire my people and give them hope for the future.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you just tell me what happened to my parents?\" interrupted Max impatiently.\n\n\"Like everything else in the universe, this story has a natural order,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I am explaining to you how I came to be at Ixchel with Frank and Carla.\"\n\nThe night was getting cool. Lola huddled up to Max and draped her shawl over both of them like a blanket.\n\nHermanjilio fortified himself with elixir and continued. \"With all written record of the Jaguar Stones destroyed by Diego de Landa, they had long ago passed into legend. But like me, Frank Murphy believed they were real and he shared my obsession with finding them. So when he finally got his hands on the White Jaguar, he invited me to Ixchel to witness his experiment.\"\n\n\"What experiment?\" asked Max.\n\n\"He wanted to try and activate the stone. Of course, I didn't think he'd succeed, because no one today knows how the Jaguar Stones worked. Little did I know he was bringing the instruction manual with him!\"\n\n\"What?\" said Lola, looking puzzled.\n\n\"Dad found Friar Diego de Landa's private journal,\" explained Max.\n\n\"No!\" she said, her eyes wide in surprise.\n\n\"It's true.\" Hermanjilio nodded. \"Before the wily old friar burned our books, he copied down our secrets for his own use. Of course, the journal is very old and many pages are missing. But what remains makes it clear that Landa's plan was to steal the power of the Jaguar Stones for himself.\"\n\n\"And now Count Antonio is reviving that family tradition,\" added Max.\n\n\"But this is incredible!\" said Lola. \"Why would Frank keep something like that to himself?\"\n\n\"Think about it,\" said Hermanjilio. \"If the journal was genuine, it was one of the most dangerous documents in human history. Frank feared that some power-crazed madman would seek out the stones and put their power to evil use. He came to Ixchel to end that possibility, once and for all. He wanted to find out if the journal was real or an elaborate fake. If it was real, he intended to burn it\u2014just as Landa burned our books. If it was fake, he would hand it over to the authorities as a fascinating historical document.\"\n\n\"So Dad's a good guy?\" said Max in surprise. Since talking to Uncle Ted, he'd got used to the idea that his family were criminal masterminds.\n\n\"Of course\"\u2014Hermanjilio grinned\u2014\"one of the best. So, Lola and I went ahead to Ixchel to get the local workers started on the excavation. Along the way, we discussed the rumors about the Red Jaguar, and Lola decided to go to Puerto Muerto and find out if Ted Murphy was selling.\"\n\n\"But when I got there, he'd already done a deal with Antonio de Landa,\" said Lola. \"So I decided to repossess the Red Jaguar for the Maya people.\"\n\n\"Steal it, you mean,\" said Max.\n\n\"Some people say that all archaeology is theft,\" said Lola airily.\n\n\"Do you two want to hear the story or do you want a moral debate?\" asked Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Sorry,\" mumbled Max. \"Please go on.\"\n\nHermanjilio cleared his throat. \"So Frank and Carla arrived at Ixchel and we set to work. Frank told me about the journal and asked for my opinion. Late one afternoon, when the local workers had gone, I was lying in my tent studying the journal when I heard Frank and Carla calling to me. They were out by the cenote, the water hole, mixing up fake blood.\"\n\n\"Why would they do that?\" asked Max.\n\n\"They needed a bloodlike substance to activate the White Jaguar. Of course, Friar Landa's journal specified blood from a human sacrifice, but even Frank drew the line at that. Still, to find out if the journal was real or fake, they had to follow Landa's instructions as closely as possible. With the fate of the whole world at stake, there was no room for error. So it was quite a scene out at the cenote. The White Jaguar was sitting on a flat rock, surrounded by all these jars of different blood recipes. With a setting sun behind it, it looked like a scene from a horror film.\" Hermanjilio smiled briefly at the memory. \"By the way, it was also the only time I've ever seen your father not wearing that old jacket of his. Carla had made him take it off because he'd spilled fake blood all over it. Anyway, there we were, admiring the color and viscosity of the winning recipe, when we heard a noise from the camp.\n\n\"It was getting dark, but we could make out figures swarming around the tents. Later I realized they were working for Antonio de Landa, but at the time we thought they were bandits. We had to hide, and fast. There was a cave at water level in the walls of the cenote, so I whispered to Frank and Carla to grab the White Jaguar and swim with it to the cave. I saw them jump in and I was about to follow, but they never hit the water. There was a flash of white light, and they were gone.\"\n\n\"But there were no bodies in the cenote,\" said Max. \"They must have climbed out when it was over.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Hermanjilio, \"you don't understand. They were gone. _Poof!_ They dematerialized, disappeared!\"\n\nMax stared at him. \"So where are they?\"\n\nHermanjilio's hands were shaking as he reached for his gourd. \"I've been thinking about it ever since,\" he said. \"The Jaguar Stone, the blood... I believe the cenote became a gateway to Xibalba that night.\" He pronounced it _she-ball-buh_ , and the sound of it set Max's teeth on edge, like fingernails on a chalkboard. \"I think that's where you'll find your parents.\"\n\n\"Xibalba?\" repeated Max. \"Is it far from here?\"\n\nLola looked at him sadly. \"Xibalba means 'Well of Fear,'\" she said. \"I'm sorry, Hoop, but it's the Maya underworld.\"\n\n\"The underworld?\" said Max. \"Are you saying my parents are dead?\"\n\nAs he put his head in his hands, a yellow butterfly landed on the table in front of him and started lapping up a spill of sickly sweet guava juice.\n\n# Chapter Sixteen  \nTHE COSMIC CROCODILE\n\nIt was impossible to sleep. Several times, Max nearly fell out of his hammock as he tossed and turned, imgining the terrifying events at Ixchel and trying to understand what they meant.\n\nAs far as he could work out, the good news was that his parents had not technically died. The bad news was that they were trapped in some Maya netherworld.\n\nTwo weeks ago, Max would have laughed at such a crazy idea. Now, after his experiences at the Temple of Chahk, he wasn't feeling quite so sure of himself. But even if Hermanjilio's version of events was true, how could two eminent archaeologists like his parents have got sucked into this mess?\n\nIt didn't make sense....\n\nHe finally drifted off to sleep as the rainforest dawn chorus struck up its overture. He was awakened minutes later by Chulo throwing mangoes at his head.\n\n\"If you were going to bring me breakfast in bed, Chulo, you could have chosen ripe ones,\" he complained.\n\nThere was no way he could get back to sleep, so he rolled groggily out of his hammock, pulled on some clothes, and went down to the plaza. Hermanjilio was sitting at the table, deep in thought. There was a plate of tortillas and a bowl of fruit in front of him, but he didn't seem to have touched anything. Max sat down opposite him and sighed heavily.\n\n\"Bad night?\" asked Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Max. \"I can't get my head around this Xibalba thing.\"\n\nHermanjilio nodded sympathetically. \"I'm sure it sounds crazy to you,\" he said. \"But around here, it's the only logical explanation.\"\n\nMax sighed again. \"I was thinking,\" he said, \"if a doorway to Xibalba opened at Ixchel that night, couldn't we just go back there and open it again?\"\n\nHermanjilio shook his head. \"For a start, we don't have the White Jaguar. But even if we did, it's not easy to bring people back. According to Maya legend, they would have to be released by special order of the Lords of Death.\"\n\nMax groaned and laid his head on the table. \"This is impossible.\"\n\n\"Nothing's impossible,\" said Hermanjilio cheerfully. \"At least, not around here.\"\n\n\"So tell me about the Death Lords.\"\n\n\"You swore an oath to them last night, remember? There are twelve of them, let me see....\" Hermanjilio began counting off names on his fingers. \"One Death, Seven Death, Blood Gatherer, Wing, Packstrap, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, and one more... ah yes, Scab Stripper.\"\n\n\"Sounds like the lineup for a heavy-metal festival,\" said Max.\n\nA horrible thought occurred to him.\n\n\"If my parents are in Xibalba, they won't meet these guys, will they?\"\n\n\"I think not. There are nine levels of Xibalba, each more terrible than the last. Your parents would be on the first level, which is said to be more like a waiting room.\"\n\nMax pictured his dentist's waiting room in Boston. He imagined his parents sitting on those hard chairs, flicking through old magazines, blocking their ears against the sounds of pain from within, waiting for their names to be called. Then, with a pang, he realized it was him they were waiting for. It was up to him to rescue them. \"How do I contact the Death Lords?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Hermanjilio. \"It's usually the gods who contact mortals. They talk to us through dreams. The Maya dreamworld runs parallel to the waking world, like two sides of a coin; so a message in a dream is as real to us as a letter in the mail.\"\n\n\"You're a university professor. Surely you don't believe that?\"\n\n\"Since I've been living at Itzamna, I don't know what I believe. In fact, I had a wild dream myself last night. I think it might have been a message from my ancestors.\"\n\nMax took a banana and peeled it miserably. He was sick of all this Maya mystical garbage.\n\n\"I dreamed I was an astronomer here at Itzamna,\" continued Hermanjilio. \"I watched myself enter a secret chamber in the observatory and saw how to gain access in every detail.\" It sounded like an extremely boring dream to Max, but Hermanjilio was bubbling with anticipation and excitement like a child on Christmas Eve. \"This morning, Lola and I are going to put my dream to the test.\"\n\n\"Found them!\" called Lola, clanking into the plaza, carrying armfuls of hurricane lanterns. \"They're a bit old, Hermanjilio. Couldn't we use flashlights?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said firmly. \"We're going to do this the old way\u2014by the light of beeswax candles, just as my ancestors would have done.\"\n\nLola rolled her eyes. \"Did he tell you about his dream?\" she asked Max. \"Are you coming with us to look for the secret chamber?\"\n\nMax shook his head. After the Temple of Chahk, he hoped never to enter another Maya pyramid as long as he lived.\n\n\"Wish us luck!\" called Hermanjilio as they set off across the plaza. Seconds later, he wheeled around and came back. \"By the way, Max, would you keep an eye on that boa up there for me? She's due to give birth anytime, and it's really something to see. Most snakes lay eggs, but boas have live young\u2014as many as fifty or sixty babies, each up to two feet long! Can you imagine?\"\n\nMax looked up. A huge mottled brown snake was curled around the branch above his head. \"Wait,\" he said, stuffing a tortilla into his mouth. \"I'm coming with you.\"\n\nBy the time he'd found a decent lantern and grabbed a few more tortillas, he had to run to catch up. Hermanjilio's voice drifted back across the plaza, chattering with excitement. \"Who would have thought the observatory held such secrets: a hidden chamber beside the ball court.... I remember when we were excavating there\u2014the ground radar said it was solid rock. Ha, and we believed it!\"\n\n\"It was just a dream, Hermanjilio,\" said Lola. \"Don't get your hopes up.\"\n\n\"I'm telling you, I have a good feeling,\" he insisted, \"like everything's been leading up to this moment. Think about it, Lola. I've been looking for years and found nothing. Then\u2014suddenly\u2014two Jaguar Stones surface, and Landa's journal! This dream is the cheese on the tortilla. You can't tell me it's all coincidence.\"\n\n\"That's what worries me,\" said Lola. \"Who\u2014or what\u2014is behind all this? You said yourself there's something in the air.\"\n\n\"You're not getting cold feet, are you?\"\n\n\"I'm just saying that we need to be careful. It was pretty heavy at Chahk. I'd just like to know what to expect in there.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" panted Max, catching up with them.\n\n\"Itzamna was Lord of the Heavens, and Lord of Day and Night,\" said Hermanjilio. \"He's depicted as an old man and, unusually for a Maya god, he was a pacifist\u2014so I wouldn't think there's anything to worry about.\"\n\nThey arrived at a flat, grassy space between two steeply sloping walls. One wall was set against the pyramid; the other had wide terraces built into it like bleachers.\n\n\"What's this place?\" asked Max.\n\n\"It's the ball court,\" said Lola.\n\n\"The Maya played basketball?\"\n\n\"They played a game called _pitz_. See that stone ring sticking out of the wall? You had to knock the ball through it with your hip, knee, or elbow.\"\n\n\"Doesn't sound that difficult,\" said Max.\n\n\"I'd like to see _you_ try,\" replied Lola. \"The ball was as heavy as a solid rubber watermelon.\"\n\n\"Although I've heard they sometimes made it lighter,\" added Lola, \"by wrapping a human skull in strips of rubber.\"\n\n\"Now that's what I call taking sports too seriously!\" said Max.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Hermanjilio, \"but this was literally a game of life and death. The losing team was sacrificed.\"\n\nLola pointed to some carved panels on the side of the pyramid. \"Look,\" she said, \"it's in the Maya creation story. They're playing it on the wall here.\"\n\n\"Who are the two dudes in loincloths?\" asked Max.\n\n\"They're the Hero Twins. They've been summoned to Xibalba by the Death Lords to play the ball game for their lives. Their father has already played and lost.\"\n\n\"Do they win?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Hermanjilio, \"they trick the Death Lords and they rescue their father. He becomes Huun Ixim, the maize god. Maize was revered by the Maya. The upper classes even used to squash their babies' heads between two boards to make them look like corn cobs.\"\n\n\"How did they trick them?\" asked Max.\n\n\"The babies? I don't think they had much choice.\"\n\n\"No, the Hero Twins. How did they trick the Death Lords?\"\n\nBut Hermanjilio was peering at the carved panels. \"Now, in my dream... if I press this glyph here... like so... the door should open....\"\n\n\"Nothing's happening,\" said Max. \"We should go back.\"\n\n\"Not so fast,\" said Hermanjilio. \"The stone's getting warmer under my hand. I can feel a vibration....\"\n\nThere was a grinding sound, and the stone in front of them dropped slowly into the ground, revealing a small, dark tunnel.\n\n\"It worked! It worked!\" Hermanjilio was almost crying with happiness. He stood back and surveyed the tunnel. \"It looks a little tight,\" he said. \"My ancestors were a lot smaller than me. Do you think I'll fit?\"\n\n\"No way,\" said Max, shaking his head. \"Don't risk it. You'll get stuck.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you'll fit,\" said Lola, with absolute confidence. \"If you fit in your dream, you'll fit now.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right,\" said Hermanjilio. He took a deep breath. \"Okay, let's light the lanterns and see what the chamber of Itzamna has in store for us. I'll lead the way.\"\n\nHermanjilio had to get on all fours to crawl into the tunnel. His body filled every inch. Lola went next, and Max brought up the rear. As they made their way slowly down that suffocating passage, cobwebs trailing over their faces, Max wondered what might be waiting for them at the end. Tombs? Skeletons? Evil spirits?\n\nHermanjilio eased himself out.\n\nThen Lola.\n\nThen it was Max's turn.\n\nHe could hardly bear to look....\n\nBut he needn't have worried. There was nothing. The tiny room at the end of the tunnel was completely empty.\n\n\"Well, that was a waste of time,\" he said with relief.\n\n\"Time?\" came a voice behind them. \"What dost thou know of time?\"\n\nThe three of them spun around to see a red lightbulb hovering in the shadows. Wait, it wasn't a lightbulb, it was a nose. A bulbous, glowing red nose.\n\nAs the rest of the apparition slowly took shape...\n\n... the nose took its place...\n\n... on an ancient, wizened face...\n\n... with sunken cheeks and toothless jaws...\n\n... on a head topped with a bejeweled turban...\n\n... from which stringy gray hair fell to bony shoulders...\n\n... adorned with a heavy bead necklace...\n\n... above a hunched and scrawny body...\n\n... his organs visible beneath paper-thin skin...\n\n... and wearing nothing...\n\n... but a voluminous and intricately wrapped loincloth.\n\nAt first, Max thought it was Chan Kan playing tricks. But the more he stared at the hideous old man, the more he realized that this guy was older than time itself. He turned to Lola to ask who she thought the guy was, but all that came out of his mouth was a strange bubbling sound.\n\nLuckily Lola understood him. \"It's not real,\" she said. \"It's like an old hologram or something.\"\n\nEven so, she followed Max's lead and edged into the farthest corner.\n\nHermanjilio was on his knees.\n\n\"My Lord Itzamna,\" he said, bowing his head low.\n\n\"Who art thou?\" croaked the old man.\n\n\"My name is Hermanjilio Bol, my lord.\"\n\n\"What dost thou here?\"\n\n\"I had a dream. I thought my ancestors had summoned me to this place. I am sorry to have disturbed you. We will leave you in peace.\"\n\nHermanjilio stood up and tried to take a step backward. But he could not move. He seemed to be rooted to the spot by an invisible force.\n\nThe old man laughed an eternity-of-smoking-cheap-cigars kind of laugh. \"Thou wilt go when I say and not before. I must know who thou art.\"\n\n\"I spoke the truth, my lord. My name is Hermanjilio Bol.\"\n\n\"Place thy hand against mine,\" commanded the old man, holding up his ancient palm.\n\nHermanjilio turned to Max and Lola for moral support. Sweat was pouring down his face. He looked terrified. They tried to give him encouraging smiles.\n\nHe put his hand palm to palm against the old man's hand.\n\nAnd then he screamed.\n\nHermanjilio was changing. He was becoming different people. Always men, always Maya, always richly attired. As the different faces and bodies appeared in his place, all that was left of him was his scream.\n\nWhen it was over, he slumped to the floor.\n\n\"What have you done to him?\" yelled Lola to the old man.\n\n\"How darest thou, a mere female, address the great Itzamna?\"\n\n\"You don't scare me,\" said Lola, her voice trembling.\n\n\"You're just a trick they laid into the walls when this pyramid was built.\"\n\n\"A spirited wench, indeed.\" Itzamna cackled as Lola swept past him to help Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Hermanjilio weakly. \"It was the strangest feeling....\"\n\n\"I did but show thee thy lineage,\" boomed the old man. \"Arise, Hermanjilio Bol, heir to the great city of Itzamna, direct descendant of the keepers of the royal library and all knowledge since thet world began.\"\n\nAs Hermanjilio staggered to his feet, the old man foraged in the billowing folds of his loincloth. Then, with a flourish, he produced a large bundle. It looked like a football, wrapped up in many layers of rags. He held it out, solemnly, to Hermanjilio.\n\n\"This day, Hermanjilio Bol, I entrust to thee the future of thy people. When the time is nigh, thou wilt know what to do. May good prevail, may evil be vanquished, may the sun rise again on the glories of Itzamna.\"\n\nHermanjilio took the bundle. He looked dazed.\n\n\"Open it,\" commanded the old man.\n\nCautiously, Hermanjilio peeled away the rags. And there, glowing in the lantern light with all the greens of the forest, was a Jaguar Stone of mottled jade.\n\nHe ran a trembling finger over the creature's head, and it seemed to purr with pleasure. Hermanjilio fell to his knees again to thank the old man. \"I never dared hope that one day I would hold the Green Jaguar of Itzamna. My grandfather told me it was lost in the days of the conquest.\"\n\n\"Not lost, merely biding its time. And now, Hermanjilio Bol, go forth into the Star Chamber and accept thy destiny.\"\n\nA doorway appeared in the inner wall. It was black and filled with stars.\n\nTears were streaming down Hermanjilio's face. \"This is the greatest moment of my life... I can't believe it....\" He was babbling and laughing at the same time, as if he'd just won an Oscar.\n\n\"Go forth, Hermanjilio Bol!\" commanded the old man. \"Go forth, Ix Sak Lol and Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy! May you confound your demons!\" He straightened up and pointed toward the doorway.\n\nMax and Lola stared at each other in horror.\n\n\"How does he know our names?\" mused Lola.\n\n\"He's pretty realistic for a hologram,\" observed Max.\n\nWhen they looked again, he was gone.\n\nHermanjilio seemed unfazed by these events. He was cradling the Green Jaguar in his arms like a child with a new kitten. \"Shall we go in?\" he said, stepping inside.\n\n\"No!\" said Max.\n\n\"Let's just take a quick look,\" said Lola, pulling Max through the door of stars. There was a grinding noise behind them. A stone descended from the lintel and sealed them in.\n\nMax groaned.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Lola.\n\n\"Lord Itzamna means us no harm,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I'm sure there's another door on the other side.\"\n\nThey raised their lanterns to cast some light across the chamber. The room was so high that the ceiling remained pitch-black. But none of them noticed this fact. None of them noticed anything but the enormous cube\u2014maybe thirty feet square\u2014that commanded the center of the room.\n\nIts base was a slab of shiny black stone. On each corner of this slab stood a huge statue of a warrior, his arms raised to support an identical slab. It looked like a massive ice-cream sandwich, with black stone wafers. But instead of a thick slice of French vanilla, these wafers held a complex assembly\u2014all in polished wood\u2014of interlocking gears, wheels, and cogs.\n\n\"What is it?\" said Lola.\n\n\"I've never seen anything like it,\" replied Hermanjilio. \"Just look at this workmanship\u2014every component is inscribed with glyphs.\"\n\n\"But what does it do?\" asked Max. \"Can you read the glyphs?\"\n\n\"No, it would take me years to translate them all,\" said Hermanjilio, walking around the machine. \"But I recognize these statues. They're the Bakabs, the four sons of Itzamna and Ixchel. It's their job to hold up the corners of the world. Lola, come here\u2014have you seen this?\"\n\nHe looked around for Lola, but she was nowhere to be seen.\n\n\"Up here!\" she called. \"Come up! There are steps at the back.\"\n\nShe was standing on the machine.\n\nThe steps took Max and Hermanjilio up to a small platform on the same level.\n\n\"Jump across!\" called Lola. \"Wait till you see what I've found!\"\n\nShe was kneeling over a low stone table in the center of the slab. Its surface was inlaid with a jade mosaic of a headless leaping jaguar, and on the beast's shoulders was an empty niche. Above this were two rows of square windows. In each window was a carved stone glyph. Like the pictures on a slot machine, these carvings were attached to a roller that must have been linked with cogs in the machinery below.\n\n\"I recognize these glyphs,\" said Lola. \"They're from the Maya calendars.\" She groaned. \"When I think of the hours Chan Kan spent drilling me on this stuff.\"\n\n\"Then I'll let you do the honors,\" said Hermanjilio with a smile. \"Let's see how much you remember.\"\n\nLola cracked her knuckles like a concert pianist preparing to play.\n\n\"Here goes,\" she said. \"I'm fairly sure that the glyphs on the bottom right are from the Calendar Round. They show a day and a month.\"\n\n\"Correct.\" Hermanjilio nodded. \"And the rest of the bottom row?\"\n\n\"I'm guessing it's the Long Count, which measures time since the world began. You've got the _kin_ , or days; the _winal_ , or months; the _tun_ , or years; the _katun_ , which are units of twenty years; and the _baktun_ , which are four hundred years.\"\n\n\"Bravo!\" cheered Hermanjilio. \"Chan Kan would be proud of you! How about the top row?\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"Then I'll tell you,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Each chunk of time is ruled by a different god, and these are their name glyphs. There must be hundreds of them.\"\n\nMax groaned. \"I can't stand it. It's too complicated.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Lola. \"Except for shamans like Chan Kan, even the Maya don't keep the Maya calendars anymore.\"\n\n\"So, shall we see what happens when we activate it?\" asked Hermanjilio, holding the Green Jaguar over the niche. \"I vote yes.\"\n\n\"I vote no,\" said Max.\n\nThey both looked at Lola.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Hoop,\" she said, \"but I vote yes. Aren't you even a little curious?\"\n\n\"Curiosity killed the cat,\" observed Max primly.\n\nThe Green Jaguar purred as Hermanjilio went to slot it in. Suddenly he drew back. \"Blood!\" he said. \"We need blood! I mixed up a batch when I got back from Ixchel, but it's sitting on the shelf in my storeroom.\"\n\nLola clapped her hand to her mouth. \"I thought it was salsa! I put it in my backpack with some tortillas!\"\n\n\"Perfect!\" said Hermanjilio. \"I told you this was meant to be.\"\n\nLola pulled a small jar out of her backpack and gave it to him.\n\n\"Come on, my little beauty,\" Hermanjilio coaxed the Green Jaguar as he poured the thick red liquid over the niche. Just like the Red Jaguar at Chahk, the stone leapt into place of its own accord.\n\nHermanjilio blew out the lanterns, and they were plunged into blackness.\n\nA breeze brushed Max's face, and the air in that dank chamber became as fresh as a morning at the seaside. There was a series of loud clicks. The machine was coming to life. The clicks were joined by whirrs and squeaks. As the noise of the machine increased, the whole cube began to rock gently from side to side. The stone table was glowing now, and they grabbed on to it to steady themselves as the cube began to buck like a mechanical bull. Max was wondering how long they'd be able to hold on, when the machine seemed to find its groove and fell into a smooth vibration.\n\n\"Look,\" exclaimed Lola, \"the glyphs are changing!\"\n\nHermanjilio was giddy with delight. The carvings were turning over so fast they were just a blur. Gradually they slowed down until each square came to a stop.\n\n\"11-Kawak, that's 11-Thunder!\" yelled Lola, clapping like a winner on a game show. She looked at Hermanjilio. \"Is that today's date?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\" He shrugged.\n\n\"Never mind that,\" said Max. \"I think this room is getting bigger.\"\n\nLola looked around. \"It could be a trick of the light.\"\n\n\"It's no trick,\" said Hermanjilio. \"The walls and floor are receding.\"\n\n\"I don't like the look of this,\" said Max.\n\n\"Me neither,\" agreed Lola.\n\n\"What a couple of wimps!\" said Hermanjilio. \"You're so lucky to share this incredible experience. This might be the greatest moment of your lives.\"\n\n_Or the last moment_ , thought Max.\n\nThe walls and floor fell away. Far below, tiny sparks of colored light rose in spirals and clustered into luminous spheres, spinning out across the blackness to hang in twinkling constellations. Max, Lola, and Hermanjilio looked up in awe as translucent shapes began to form around the star clusters.\n\nIt was beautiful, hypnotic, poetic, amazing, indescribable....\n\n\"It looks like a crocodile with two heads,\" observed Max.\n\n\"He's right!\" cried Lola. \"It's the two-headed cosmic monster!\"\n\n\"It's incredible,\" said Hermanjilio. \"We're standing in the Maya cosmos.\"\n\nMax was bewildered. \"Will someone tell me what's going on?\" he wailed.\n\n\"Think of this chamber as an ancient Maya planetarium,\" Lola explained. \"Those lights are the stars and planets.\"\n\n\"But what's with the crocodile?\"\n\n\"The Cosmic Crocodile represents the Maya heavens; its blood is the rain that falls on Middleworld.\"\n\n\"Why is it always blood with you guys?\"\n\nHermanjilio was trying to point something out, but his voice was muffled by what sounded like a truck hurtling past on the freeway. It got nearer and nearer until a great ball of fire suddenly shot up behind them and made a huge arc over their heads.\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\nThere was light and heat and a booming, terrifying noise.\n\nMax shielded his eyes from the glare and peered through his fingers.\n\nIt was a jaguar.\n\nA fire jaguar.\n\nA massive, flaming, roaring fire jaguar in midleap.\n\n\"What's happening?\" shouted Lola. She sounded as scared as Max felt.\n\nHermanjilio didn't look scared at all. He was shining with happiness. \"It's the Sun Jaguar!\" he exclaimed. \"This is more than the night sky; it's showing the passage of time itself!\"\n\n\"The date's changed! It's on 12-Ahaw\u201412-Lord! Hermanjilio, did you touch something?\" shouted Lola as the fiery beast disappeared behind the edge of the cube.\n\n\"I pressed the day glyph,\" confessed Hermanjilio, \"and it moved one day forward. The jaguar was the sun moving across the heavens. At night it crosses into the underworld.\"\n\nIt was dark again. Max leaned over the edge of the cube. There was something down there. Water. He could see the twinkling stars reflected in its glassy surface far below. \"Is this some kind of time machine?\" he said.\n\n\"I doubt it,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I think it just shows the movements of the stars and the planets. It was probably designed to help the king predict eclipses, plan the best days for rituals, that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"So does the machine represent planet Earth?\" asked Max.\n\n\"There was no such thing,\" said Hermanjilio. \"The ancient Maya believed in twenty-three interconnected worlds, piled up like a stack of tortillas. Our world, which they called Middleworld, was in between the thirteen layers of the heavens and the nine layers of the underworld, Xibalba. So, to answer your question, I'd guess this machine represents Middleworld.\"\n\nMax looked down at the black waters below them. \"Is that Xibalba? Are my parents down there?\"\n\n\"Forget it, Max,\" replied Hermanjilio, reading his mind. \"None of this exists. It's just a working model, an illusion.\"\n\n\"But what is Xibalba? Is it a spirit world, a parallel universe, another dimension...?\"\n\n\"It's all of those and none of them,\" mused Hermanjilio dreamily.\n\nThat was it. The final straw. Max had had enough of meaningless Maya double-talk. He began to hatch his plan....\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\nThe flaming jaguar leapt through the sky.\n\n\"I moved it forward,\" said Lola. \"It's 13-Imix! 13-Crocodile!\"\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\n\"1-Ik! 1-Wind!\"\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\n\"2-Ak'bal! 2-Darkness!\"\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\n\"3-K'an! 3-Maize!\"\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\n_\"4-Chikchan! 4-Snakebite!\"_\n\n_Whoooooomph!_\n\n_\"5-Kimi! 5-Death!\"_ called Lola, like a demented bingo caller.\n\nShe surveyed the conjunctions of the planets with the pride of one who can make the sun rise and fall at her command.\n\n\"What's that?\" she said, pointing to a bright star that was rising in the daytime sky. Instead of twinkling cheerily, it seemed to bristle like a hedgehog.\n\n\"Take cover!\" yelled Hermanjilio as the star let loose with a barrage of flaming arrows. Max dropped to the floor and covered his head with his hands. Sizzling arrows fell on the slab all around him.\n\n\"It's Venus,\" explained Hermanjilio, \"the morning star! To the Maya, it heralded the outbreak of wars and military action. They used to schedule their battles by its cycles.\"\n\n\"Why's it firing at us?\" asked Lola.\n\n\"Move the day forward and maybe it will stop,\" suggested Hermanjilio.\n\nLola pressed the glyph. The Jaguar Sun dove into the sea. Venus shone even more brightly. More flaming arrows hailed down. Max and Hermanjilio took cover with Lola behind the stone control panel.\n\nAs they huddled there, a disgusting odor filled the air.\n\nLola looked accusingly at Max.\n\n\"It wasn't me,\" he said. They both looked accusingly at Hermanjilio.\n\nThe smell\u2014an eye-wateringly pungent cocktail of gas, bad breath, and cigar smoke\u2014got worse and worse until it was too strong to be of human origin.\n\n_Whoooooomph! Whoooooomph! Whoooooomph!_\n\n\"Slow down!\" Hermanjilio instructed Lola.\n\n\"I didn't touch it. The dates are going crazy....\"\n\nWhile the days flashed by and Hermanjilio and Lola huddled over the machine, Max plucked up the courage to put his plan into action.\n\nDodging arrows, he crawled to the back corner of the platform and quickly slipped over the edge. His searching feet found the shoulders of a Bakab statue, and his hands grabbed its head. He worked his way clumsily down the torso and legs, being careful to avoid the wheels and gears that were spinning at high speed just inches away.\n\nWhen he landed on the black slab base, he crouched down and looked into the water. It was as flat as a mirror. All he saw was his own reflection, with the erupting universe behind him. He leaned over to touch the surface. It didn't feel like water. It felt like extra-tough Jell-O, a great rubbery mass of seething evil.\n\nThis was wrong.\n\nHis parents were not here.\n\nHe shouldn't have done this.\n\nHe had just grasped a Bakab to start climbing back up, when a flaming arrow shot straight into his hand.\n\nHe let go.\n\nHe was falling.\n\nHe was plummeting like a stone into the blackness of Xibalba.\n\nHe landed flat on his face.\n\nHe managed to turn over so that he could breathe, but he couldn't break free of the gelatinous surface. He was dissolving into it. The evil black Jell-O was sucking out his soul.\n\nHe lay there helplessly as the cosmic fireworks went into overdrive all around him. Days and nights flashed by. Fireballs crashed and comets blazed, their fiery tails scorching everything in their paths. Stars collided in showers of burning sparks. A few feet above him, he could make out the machine. It was juddering wildly. Its wheels were roaring and screaming in pain. Gears were spinning out of it, end to end, into infinity. A terrible meltdown was in progress, and it was all his fault. He'd disobeyed the rules. He'd tried to breach the fabric of the universe. And now his life was draining out of him.\n\nThrough the smoke and explosions, he saw Hermanjilio's face above him. \"Fight it, Max!\" he was shouting. He was hanging off the machine, leaning out as far as he could, every muscle straining to reach out.\n\nSlowly, painfully, fighting the Jell-O, Max turned over and inched toward Hermanjilio's outstretched hand.\n\nHe was close, so close, when five bony fingers closed around his ankle. He was thrashing and kicking, but he couldn't break free. Something was pulling him down, trying to climb over him, to use him as a bridge between worlds. He felt heavy and drowsy and cold inside, as if mercury had been injected into his veins. His legs were going numb. He was so cold. So cold...\n\nHe felt Hermanjilio's big warm hand close over his frozen fingers.\n\nNow Max was the rope in a tug-of-war.\n\n\"Out! Out! Take the stone out!\" someone was shouting, but the voice was distorted and the words made no sense.\n\nIf only Hermanjilio would release him and let him sink peacefully down to Xibalba. Maybe he'd see his parents. Maybe he wouldn't. It didn't really matter. Nothing mattered anymore.\n\nWith a bang that shook the universe, the wheels and gears of the machine came to a screeching, cracking, shuddering halt.\n\nEverything went black.\n\nThe grip on Max's ankle relaxed, and his will to live came flooding back. He could feel the life rushing back into his veins. His legs were tingling as they warmed up.\n\nHe squeezed Hermanjilio's hand in the darkness.\n\nGrunting with effort, Hermanjilio hauled him onto the bottom slab. \"That was close,\" he said, half holding him up and half hugging him.\n\nAll Max could say was, \"Sorry.\"\n\nA faint light appeared above them. Lola was holding a lantern over the top edge. \"Hermanjilio?\" she called. She sounded like she was crying.\n\n\"I've got him,\" Hermanjilio called back. \"Send down a rope!\"\n\n\"I thought we'd lost you, Hoop,\" said Lola when they got to the top.\n\n\"Me, too,\" he replied.\n\nThey lit the rest of the lanterns and sat there, shell-shocked, just looking at each other. There were no stars, no planets, no Sun Jaguar. They were suspended in blackness, drifting in eternity, with that awful smell still hanging in the air.\n\nMax was waiting for the other two to start shouting at him.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he kept saying, \"it was all my fault. The machine went crazy because I fell off\u2014\"\n\n\"No, it was my fault,\" Hermanjilio cut in. \"I brought you here.\"\n\n\"You saved my life,\" said Max.\n\nHermanjilio shook his head modestly. \"It was Lola who saved us both. She pulled out the Jaguar Stone.\"\n\n\"But I didn't,\" said Lola. \"It stopped on its own.\"\n\n\"What?\" Hermanjilio scrambled to his feet. \"Why would it do that?\" He lit a match and checked the glyphs. \"It says 4-Ahaw, in the month of 3-Kankin.\"\n\n\"4-Lord, 3-Winter Sun,\" translated Lola. \"Do you think it's significant?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Hermanjilio borrowed a pen and paper from Lola and noted down the dates. \"I'll look them up when we get back.\" He tried to sound calm. \"By the way, does anyone have any ideas about how we might do that?\"\n\nThey began to make suggestions, all of them bad.\n\nEach time one of them drew breath to speak, the other two looked up hopefully, only to have their hopes dashed almost immediately. Most ideas were nixed by their creators before they were even formed.\n\n\"What if...? No, that won't work....\"\n\n\"Perhaps we could... Nah, forget it.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,\" Max said, over and over.\n\nBut _sorry_ wasn't going to save them.\n\nHe thought about what Eusebio had said in the rainforest. Something about using your special skills to help each other. Problem was, he didn't have any special skills. He was an idiot in an alien world and he didn't understand anything about anything.\n\n\"Think, Hoop!\" said Lola, sounding desperate. \"You got us out of Chahk by thinking like a gamer. If this was a game, what would you do?\"\n\n\"When a video game crashes, you restart.\"\n\n\"It's worth a try,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\nHe pulled the Green Jaguar out of the slot\u2014it came away easily\u2014and poured on the last of the blood mixture.\n\n\"Fingers crossed,\" he said as he slotted it back in.\n\nWas that a faint breeze?\n\nSlowly, very slowly, the machine shuddered into life. The day glyphs spun back to 11-Kawak, and the Cosmic Crocodile stretched out across the sky.\n\n\"Now quit,\" Max instructed him.\n\nWith difficulty Hermanjilio pulled out the Jaguar Stone. It bit him, but he did not let go. The machine stopped, and this time the walls, ceiling, and floor of the chamber came shooting back. The platform and steps reappeared. Then, most beautiful sight, the stone blocking the tunnel rose smoothly up.\n\n\"Let's go,\" said Lola. She sounded exhausted.\n\nAs Max followed the other two out of the Star Chamber, he paused and looked back. What had happened in there? Who or what had gripped his foot?\n\nHe shuddered and crawled into the tunnel back to the outside world.\n\nHe didn't know that the glassy surface of Xibalba had been a two-way mirror, nor that another face had been looking back at him. He'd didn't know he'd been eye to eye with someone he would have recognized, someone who needed a mortal body to return to Middleworld, someone who'd grabbed his ankle and would soon have possessed the whole of him with his evil being.\n\nBut if Max had caught a glimpse of his opponent, he would have remembered the two great stone heads in Villa Isabella. He would have recalled the story of Lord 6-Dog's jealous brother who opened a doorway to the underworld and unleashed an army of undead warriors.\n\nHe would have recognized the face of Tzelek.\n\n# Chapter Seventeen  \nTRICK OR TREAT\n\nAfter his ordeal in the Star Chamber, Max wanted to be alone. All afternoon, he lay in his hammock, trying to process what had happened. He couldn't stop the images flooding into his brain. He cowered again from the hologram of the wizened old man, heard the booming of the Sun Jaguar, dodged the burning arrows, and\u2014the image he would most like to erase\u2014fell headlong toward Xibalba.\n\nHe shuddered at the memory.\n\nThe Temple of Chahk had been physically challenging, like an ancient obstacle course, but the Star Chamber had challenged his very being. His brain told him none of it was possible, but his eyes knew what they had seen. Somehow, the Green Jaguar had opened the door to another dimension where the laws of physics did not apply. It had taken the hunt for his parents to another level. Now there were no rules. Now he understood, for the first time, why people said that anything was possible in the jungle.\n\nBut was it real? Or just a theater of tricks and illusions?\n\nHis blood ran cold as he remembered the hand pulling him down as he fought to escape the clutches of Xibalba. He inspected his ankle. It was swollen and bruised. You could clearly see where five sharp fingernails had punctured his skin. That was real, all right.\n\nHe climbed down the tree-house ladder and went to look for Lola. She was sitting at the table, chopping a melon.\n\n\"Hey, Hoop. Feeling better?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" said Max. He looked around. \"Have you seen Hermanjilio? I want to thank him again for saving me. He was like Superman in that chamber.\"\n\n\"He's trying to charge up his laptop so he can research all those dates. He's convinced they mean something.\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio has a laptop? He has electricity?\"\n\n\"I told you he's a genius,\" said Lola proudly. \"He rigged up a generator by the waterfall. It's a bit temperamental, but it does the job. He hasn't used it for ages, so he's trying to get it going again.\"\n\nA disheveled Hermanjilio came running through the plaza, leaving a trail of dropped tools and wires and bits of pipe. \"Can't stop,\" he shouted as he passed. \"I've got to fire up the laptop while the generator's working!\"\n\nLater, they took him some food and found him hunched over his laptop, studying a Maya calendar program. Books and papers were strewn around, and he was furiously scribbling notes.\n\n\"How's it going?\" asked Lola.\n\nWhen Hermanjilio looked up, he hardly seemed to recognize them. His eyes were big and wild, and his long black hair was sticking out at odd angles. He looked like a mad scientist. \"I've been trying to make sense of those dates in the Star Chamber,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm sure they don't mean anything,\" said Lola. \"That machine was so old, I'd be amazed if it still worked properly.\"\n\n\"Then prepare to be amazed.\" Hermanjilio took a deep breath. \"Do you recall the first date it showed when we activated it?\"\n\nLola thought for a moment. \"11-Thunder?\"\n\nHermanjilio nodded. \"According to my calculations, that's today in the Maya calendar.\"\n\nMax whistled to show his astonishment.\n\n\"There's more,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Remember how we moved through the days until we got to 5-Death and Venus attacked us? Well, 5-Death is in seven days' time\u2014at which point, Venus is set to rise as the morning star!\"\n\n\"That's incredible,\" marveled Lola. \"This discovery could bring in all the funding you need to finish the excavations.\"\n\nHermanjilio coughed in an embarrassed sort of way. \"Based on these calendar calculations, I'm not sure there's enough time for that....\"\n\nLola looked baffled for a moment. Then the penny dropped. \"Not you as well?\" she exclaimed. \"You're talking about the so-called end of the Maya calendar, aren't you? You're like those hippies at the Internet caf\u00e9 in Lim\u00f3n. They say there's no point in getting jobs because we're in the last months of the thirteenth _baktun_ and the world is going to end. But it's garbage. I've heard you say so yourself; it has no basis in fact whatsoever.\"\n\n\"Just hear me out,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Remember when the machine hurtled through the days until it stopped and everything went black?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Lola.\n\n\"And do you remember the date?\"\n\n\"4-Ahaw 3-Kankin,\" replied Lola straightaway. \"The day of 4-Lord in the month of 3-Winter Sun.\"\n\n\"Just so,\" said Hermanjilio. \"It's the last day of the thirteenth _baktun_.\"\n\n\"I don't care!\" Lola was sounding angry now. \"This end-of-the-world stuff is just New Age hype, and you know it. When the thirteenth _baktun_ ends, the fourteenth _baktun_ begins. End of story.\"\n\nMax opened his mouth to say something, but Lola testily cut him off. \"Spare me your spaceship theory, Hoop.\"\n\n\"I was going to say,\" protested Max, \"that Chan Kan mentioned the end of the world to me.\"\n\n\"He did?\" Lola narrowed her eyes. \"What did he say?\"\n\nMax thought back to his encounter in the smoky hut. \"He said that for good or for evil, the world must end to begin again. And something about destruction and dread omens.\"\n\nLola waved dismissively. \"He always talks that way.\"\n\n\"For good or for evil, eh?\" murmured Hermanjilio. \"That's interesting.\" He typed something into the computer. \"The gods take it in turns to rule the _baktuns_. It says here that Ah Pukuh is next in line.\"\n\n_Awe pooh-coo_. It sounded like a cross between spitting and sneezing.\n\n\"Ah Pukuh!\" said Lola in horror.\n\n\"Ah Pukuh?\" echoed Max weakly.\n\n\"He's the god of violent and unnatural death,\" explained Hermanjilio. \"The Death Lords work for him. He rules the ninth level of Xibalba and he's usually depicted as a bloated corpse, surrounded by dogs and owls. They say he stinks to high heaven. His nickname is Kisin, meaning 'the flatulent one.'\"\n\nLola wrinkled her nose. \"Do you remember that foul smell in the Star Chamber?\"\n\n\"I can't believe you thought it was me,\" said Max, pretending to be outraged.\n\n\"It's not funny,\" said Hermanjilio, shutting his laptop decisively. \"If Ah Pukuh is allowed to take charge, it really could be the end of the world as we know it.\"\n\n\"But it's the ancient Maya world,\" said Max. \"It can't affect us.\"\n\n\"It was the ancient Maya world in the Star Chamber this morning, yet I distinctly saw a bony hand on your twenty-first-century leg,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\nMax got quiet and rubbed his ankle.\n\n\"I need to think,\" said Lola. \"Who wants hot chocolate?\"\n\nThey drank it under the jungle stars. It was real hot chocolate, too, made from ground cocoa beans mixed with water, cornmeal, and chili pepper. Max sipped it tentatively. The bitter, rich, spicy drink tasted nothing like the chocolate milk they drank in Boston.\n\n\"What a day,\" sighed Hermanjilio, lying back. \"How about that Cosmic Crocodile?\"\n\nMax tried to trace the outline of the two-headed cosmic monster in the night sky. No matter how weird the Maya concept of the solar system, it was awesome to be gazing at the same stars they'd plotted on their charts a thousand years ago.\n\nHermanjilio guessed what he was thinking. \"Shall I tell you what the Maya saw on a night like this?\" he said. \"Right above us are the constellations of Turtle, Rattlesnake, and Owl. Over there, where you see the Big Dipper, we see a bird called Seven Macaw. And your Milky Way is our World Tree, with its roots in the underworld, its trunk on the earth, and its branches in the heavens. In legends, it's sometimes called the Road to Xibalba.\"\n\n\"I think I have to go there,\" said Max, \"to find my parents.\"\n\n\"To Xibalba?\" Lola shivered and threw another log on the fire. \"Rather you than me,\" she said.\n\n\"I've been thinking,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Mortals are usually summoned to Xibalba by the messenger, Lord Muan. But Frank and Carla weren't summoned, so I'm sure they'll be released soon. It's all a mistake. We just have to be patient.\"\n\n\"Do you know anyone who's come back from Xibalba?\" asked Max.\n\n\"The Hero Twins?\" suggested Lola.\n\n\"But that's a legend, right?\"\n\n\"It's an allegory,\" explained Hermanjilio. \"The Hero Twins represent the sun and moon.\"\n\nMax sighed. \"There's a thin line, isn't there, between real and not real? Since I came to San Xavier, I don't know what to believe anymore.\"\n\n\"Welcome to my world,\" said Lola.\n\n\"But it always comes back to the Jaguar Stones,\" persisted Max. \"Truth and legend, past and present, this world and Xibalba... the link is always the Jaguar Stones.\"\n\nHermanjilio leaned on one elbow. \"If you want to understand the Jaguar Stones, you must understand the Maya worldview. We believe that all things\u2014plants, animals, stones\u2014have a life force. Our temples are reservoirs for all this natural energy. But it was the great king Lord 6-Dog who worked out how to channel it for the greater good.\"\n\nMax nodded in recognition at the name. \"What did he do?\"\n\n\"He united the five warring city-states of the Monkey River by giving them each a Jaguar Stone and dividing ceremonial powers between them, almost like government departments.\" He drew a map in the dirt with a twig. \"Ixchel in the north was responsible for culture, Itzamna at the center managed education, Chahk to the east ran agriculture, Bolon Tzakab in the south oversaw lineage, and Ah Pukuh in the west was in charge of military affairs. It was a great success. With the Jaguar Stones to help them, the allied cities built one of the most advanced societies of the ancient world.\"\n\n\"Who made the Jaguar Stones?\"\n\n\"We think they were Olmec in origin. The Olmecs preceded the Maya and were famous for sculpture. They passed the Jaguar Stones down to the lords of Itzamna, who used them to wage war on their neighbors and subjugate their enemies. Lord 6-Dog's genius was to understand that a lasting peace would bring greater prosperity. He ruled for fifty years and was adored by everyone except his twin brother, Tzelek. When later kings were too lazy or greedy to continue Lord 6-Dog's work, the people lost faith in them. They decided to hide the Jaguar Stones until better times\u2014and worthier rulers\u2014came along. But what actually came along was Friar Diego de Landa.\" Hermanjilio spat into the dirt. \"And the rest is history.\"\n\n\"Until now,\" said Max. He watched the dancing flames in the fire and tried not to panic. \"Do you still have Dad's old journal?\"\n\n\"Strange you should ask,\" said Hermanjilio. \"When I went back to my tent after the raid at Ixchel, the journal was the only thing missing.\"\n\n\"Antonio de Landa has it?\"\n\n\"I assume so. But without a Jaguar Stone, it's not much use to him.\"\n\nMax winced. \"He has the Black Jaguar.\"\n\nHermanjilio and Lola sat bolt upright, eyes wide, mouths open in horror.\n\n\"How is that possible? Where did he get it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Max. \"But I saw him showing it to Uncle Ted.\"\n\n\"Legend has it that the Black Jaguar was destroyed by Lord 6-Dog in his final battle with Tzelek.\"\n\n\"I saw it with my own eyes. I smelled it. It was the real thing.\"\n\n\"I believe you, Max,\" said Hermanjilio gravely. \"It certainly explains why Landa sent raiders to Ixchel. He needed the journal to tell him how to use the Black Jaguar.\" He gazed into the middle distance, as if he were already watching the terrible events that would soon unfold. \"This is what Lord Itzamna was warning us about. From the journal, Landa will know that the Black Jaguar's greatest power is at the rising of Venus in seven days' time. If he uses it to awaken the Undead Army, he will be invincible. Landa will bring Middleworld to its knees, and Ah Pukuh will deal the deathblow.\"\n\nLola sighed. \"It looks like the hippies were right, after all. The end of the world _is_ coming. What can we do?\"\n\nHermanjilio put his head in his hands and repeated her question to himself, over and over. Then he looked up, his eyes shining. \"There's only one thing we can do. We must use the Green Jaguar to summon Ahaw Wak Ok, the immortal Lord 6-Dog. There's an old altar on top of the main pyramid that was probably used for just such a ritual. We must bring him back to fight for us. Only he has the power to defeat the Black Jaguar.\"\n\n\"This is madness, Hermanjilio!\" cried Lola. \"It's too dangerous. You must talk to Chan Kan. There must be another way....\"\n\nBut Hermanjilio had made up his mind. \"This is why my ancestors sent me the dream. This is why Lord Itzamna entrusted the Green Jaguar to me. Don't you understand, Lola? If good men do nothing, evil will win. I must start clearing the altar in readiness for the ritual.\"\n\nWhen he stood up, he seemed like a different person. Gone was the eccentric archaeologist. In his place, tall and proud, face ablaze with emotion, muscles gleaming in the firelight, stood a noble Maya warrior. He looked magnificent. \"I have found my destiny,\" he said.\n\nAnd then he was gone.\n\nMax and Lola looked at each other.\n\nSomewhere in the forest, a jaguar roared.\n\nMax had a feeling that something important, something life-changing, something earthshaking had just happened.\n\nBut what?\n\nHow had he arrived at this moment?\n\nHe tried to remember the city kid who'd stepped off the plane in San Xavier. He'd survived the grueling bus ride over the mountains, only to be plunged into Uncle Ted's shady world of smugglers, shipwrecks, and psychotic Spaniards. What if he'd never followed the Monkey Girl... never rafted the underground river... never escaped from the Temple of Chahk... never entered the Star Chamber... never heard Hermanjilio say that his parents were trapped in Xibalba, the Maya underworld? Then again, how sane was Hermanjilio? He seemed to think he could save the world by bringing back some dead Maya king. That couldn't be good news.\n\nIt was Lola who spoke first. \"I don't like the sound of this,\" she sighed. \"Maybe we can talk him out of it in the morning.\"\n\nMorning came sooner than they expected. It was well before sunrise when Thunderclaw began to crow\u2014if you could call it crowing. Thunderclaw's idea of a wake-up call was less a _cock-a-doodle-doo_ and more a series of hideous shrieks and cackles that belonged in the sound track of a Japanese horror film.\n\nAfter ignoring the cacophony for as long he could, Max stumbled out of bed. He met a bleary-eyed Lola making her way down the tree-house ladder.\n\n\"Thunderclaw seems to have settled in,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Max, \"let's hope it's fried chicken for dinner.\"\n\n\"Surely you couldn't eat Thunderclaw?\" said Lola, who'd grown inexplicably fond of the mangy little fowl. \"Not now that we've got to know him?\"\n\n\"Just watch me,\" said Max in an evil voice, before running into the plaza, calling: \"Here I come, chicky-chicken, with my eleven herbs and spices....\"\n\nLola ran after him, laughing wildly, and plowed straight into him when he stopped dead a few steps later.\n\n\"What's happened here?\" he said.\n\n\"Looks like we've been raided,\" she whispered.\n\nIn the early light, the camp had an eerie, deserted air. Upended boxes, crates, and files were strewn everywhere, their contents scattered on the ground. There was no sign of Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Why didn't we hear anything?\" said Lola, surveying the mess.\n\n\"Blame that demented chicken of yours,\" said Max.\n\nThere was a rustling of branches above them. They looked up to see Chulo and Seri whimpering and clinging to each other. Lola held out her arms to them, but they stayed where they were.\n\n\"Something's frightened them,\" said Lola.\n\n\"Where's Hermanjilio?\" asked Max, looking nervously around for a corpse.\n\n\"Maybe they've kidnapped him.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\nTheir eyes met, and they said in chorus, \"The Jaguar Stones!\"\n\n\"If Landa's taken the red and the green stones as well, we're in big trouble,\" said Lola anxiously. \"In fact, the whole world's in big trouble.\"\n\n\"Do you know where Hermanjilio was hiding the stones?\" asked Max.\n\n\"No,\" said Lola, close to tears. \"I just hope he's all right.\"\n\n\"Who?\" said a booming voice from behind them.\n\nTheir first instinct was to scream and run. Apart from his eyes, which were encircled in heavy black, the creature's entire body was painted bright red. He wore a red loincloth, and his hair was twisted in an extravagant topknot, decorated with strips of tree bark and parrot feathers.\n\n\"Hermanjilio!\" exclaimed Lola. \"You scared us!\"\n\nMax took in Hermanjilio's costume. \"Is it Halloween today?\"\n\n\"It is like Halloween,\" said Hermanjilio, \"in that the forces of evil are about to run wild among us. But I doubt you'll be getting any candy.\"\n\n\"Very funny,\" said Lola. \"Are you planning to get dressed for breakfast?\"\n\n\"I am dressed,\" said Hermanjilio. \"This is what my ancestors would have worn for the ritual. I researched ancient Maya spirit transmutation at college, but I never thought I'd have a chance to put it into action. We'll need to create some powerful magic tomorrow night, and it's important to get the details right.\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" said Lola. \"You're going too far.\"\n\n\"Look at it this way,\" said Hermanjilio, fixing his topknot. \"If I'm wrong, this is just a fascinating experiment in living history. But if I'm right, my paint and feathers might help us bring back Lord 6-Dog. He's the only one who knows how to fight the evil of the Black Jaguar, the only one who can save his people from a living hell ruled by Ah Pukuh and his Undead Army.\"\n\nLola pursed her lips. She didn't look convinced. She gestured at the papers scattered on the ground. \"Did you make this mess? I thought we'd been raided.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I've been digging out my college notes and looking through my father's old boxes. It's all a bit of a rush. The ancestors would have taken weeks to prepare for something like this. Would you two tidy up for me? I need to fast and meditate to achieve mental purity.\"\n\n\"Sounds like he's going to take a nap,\" whispered Max.\n\nHermanjilio winked at him. \"I do need to conserve my energy\"\u2014he adopted a Shakespearean tone\u2014\"for when the Sun Jaguar returns to the underworld, I must arise and gather the creatures of the night: the silent killer who ensnares, the many-footed stalker, and the sacred flying light.\"\n\nMax and Lola stared at him blankly.\n\n\"At sunset, I'm going into the forest to collect bugs,\" he explained.\n\n\"Why?\" they asked.\n\n\"You'll see. But while I'm away, you need to get yourselves ready.\"\n\n\"Forget it,\" said Lola. \"I'm not wearing body paint.\"\n\n\"That's only for the high priest,\" retorted Hermanjilio. \"You're my acolytes.\"\n\n\"And what do they wear?\" asked Lola suspiciously.\n\n\"Tunics.\"\n\n\"I'm not wearing a tunic,\" said Max.\n\nHermanjilio sighed heavily. \"What you fail to understand is that, unless we stop Landa, you may never see your parents again. If evil is allowed to get the upper hand, they will be trapped in Xibalba.\"\n\n\"Tunics it is,\" said Max.\n\n\"Good. Now listen carefully: collect twelve red pods from the achiote bush and six long strips of bark from the _balch\u00e9_ tree. Then crush the achiote seeds and soak them in water to make a red dye. While they're soaking, look in my office for a bolt of raw cotton. Then sew tunics, one for each of you, and dye them red. Dye two bark strips to make red headbands and soak the rest of the bark in elixir overnight. Ideally we'd brew _balch\u00e9_ liquor in a sacramental canoe, but time is not on our side.\" Hermanjilio wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, like a harassed hostess preparing for a dinner party.\n\n\"You're smudging your paint,\" said Lola.\n\nHermanjilio pointed to the edge of the forest. \"Hurry,\" he said. \"The achiote bush is that way.\"\n\nThen he turned on his heel, and they watched his tall red frame loping across the clearing toward the main pyramid.\n\n\"Do you think he's gone mad?\" asked Max.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Lola. \"But in case he's right about the demon army, I think we should do as he says.\" She cupped her hands to her mouth and roared like a dinosaur to call the monkeys.\n\n\"Am I the only one who isn't crazy?\" muttered Max.\n\n\"I heard that!\" she said.\n\nNext morning, having been woken once again by Thunderclaw's maniacal crowing, Max and Lola inspected their handiwork: two reddish tunics, two red headbands, and a bottle of pungent-smelling _balch\u00e9_ liquor.\n\n\"That dye's strong stuff,\" said Max, surveying his crimson-stained forearms and hands.\n\n\"I'm glad I didn't get any on me,\" said Lola, squeaky clean as usual. \"I wonder what color Hermanjilio will be today?\"\n\nWhen Hermanjilio arrived, the first thing they noticed was that he was still red, albeit a little streaky. The second thing they noticed was that he held a plastic bag filled to bursting with a crawling mass of bugs.\n\nOf the ones Max recognized, there were centipedes, ants, beetles, slugs, cockroaches, worms, maggots, and spiders of every size and color.\n\n\"Come help me thread them onto skewers,\" Hermanjilio urged him. He made it sound like an honor.\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" lied Max. \"Let me wash this dye off my hands. I wouldn't want to contaminate anything.\"\n\nWhile Max pretended to scrub, Hermanjilio grilled the bugs over the fire and ground their charred bodies into a black powder. He was in exceptionally high spirits. He even took the daily downpour as a sign that Lord Chahk was purifying the pyramid for the rituals.\n\n\"But Hermanjilio,\" Max pointed out, \"it rains every single day.\"\n\n\"There is rain, and there is _rain_ ,\" said Hermanjilio. When Max raised an eyebrow, he added, \"As we Maya say,\" and went off with a shake of his ponytail to give thanks to Lord Chahk.\n\nDespite his skepticism, Max felt excited, as if they were getting ready for a party. But what were they getting ready for? He couldn't imagine what the night held in store.\n\nJust before midnight, Hermanjilio appeared in the clearing wearing the pelt of a huge jaguar over his loincloth. The pelt was a little moth-eaten and had obviously been handed down through generations, but it was no less fearsome for that. The creature's snarling head rested on Hermanjilio's head, and the rest of the pelt flowed over his shoulders like a cloak. He had applied more thick red body paint, and he wore a flamboyant creation of feathers and jade beads around his neck.\n\nThey began the dizzying climb to the top of the pyramid.\n\nAs Hermanjilio checked over his basket of ritual paraphernalia, Max and Lola put their tunics on over their jeans and fixed each other's headbands.\n\n\"Here,\" said Hermanjilio, passing Lola a small drum to sling over her shoulder.\n\n\"I can drum,\" Max volunteered.\n\n\"You take this,\" said Hermanjilio, ignoring Max's percussive talents and handing him the cage with Thunderclaw.\n\nWith a jungle moon shining down and the night birds shrieking and wailing like ghosts, they began the dizzying climb to the top of the pyramid. Chulo and Seri tried to follow, but Lola kept shooing them back. Eventually, Hermanjilio tired of the commotion and signaled her to let the monkeys come.\n\nThat was all they needed, thought Max. Now they really looked like a traveling circus. Hermanjilio in his red paint and jaguar pelt, Lola with her drum and her monkeys, himself with a chicken in a cage. What a bunch of clowns.\n\nEventually the motley procession reached the top platform.\n\nIt was completely bare apart from a large stone bowl, which rested on a thick stone column. Around the column was carved a strange creature that was coiled like a snake but feathered like a bird. The creature's wide mouth gaped open, revealing two sharp fangs. Max couldn't help thinking that Chulo would fit beautifully between its huge stone jaws.\n\n\"Is that a snake or a bird?\" he whispered to Lola.\n\n\"It's K'uk'ulkan, the feathered serpent.\"\n\nHermanjilio built a small fire in the bowl and stuck candles on the body of the snake to form a ring of light around the pillar.\n\n\"Here we go,\" he said, raising his arms. \"Fingers crossed.\"\n\n\"Do you know what you're doing?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Relax,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I have a good feeling about this.\"\n\n\"I have a bad feeling,\" said Lola. \"Summoning the spirits could be very dangerous. I think we should stop right now.\"\n\n\"It'll be fine,\" Hermanjilio reassured her. \"I studied this ritual in college, remember? Of course, we don't know the actual words the ancestors would have spoken, but we're fairly sure they used ground-up bugs, copal incense, and human sacrifice.\"\n\n\"Human sacrifice?\" repeated Max weakly.\n\n\"Hermanjilio,\" said Lola, \"you weren't planning on doing any sacrifices tonight, were you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\n# Chapter Eighteen  \nTHE CHICKEN OF DEATH\n\nRun for it!\" screamed Max, jumping up and pulling Lola with him. Hermanjilio caught them both by the arms and held them in an iron grip.\n\n\"Are you mad?\" he said.\n\n\"Are _we_ mad?\" said Max. \"You're the one who's planning to sacrifice us.\"\n\nHermanjilio rolled his eyes in exasperation. \"Of course I'm not planning to sacrifice you. That's why we brought the chicken.\"\n\n\"Not Thunderclaw\u2014?\" began Lola.\n\n\"It is his destiny. This is why Chan Kan sent him. Besides, it is considered a great honor to be chosen for sacrifice,\" Hermanjilio assured her. A tear rolled down her face. \"Thunderclaw is a warrior, Lola. He wouldn't want to end up as chicken stew.\"\n\nShe nodded mutely.\n\n\"Will the gods accept a chicken?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Unless you would like to volunteer...\"\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n\"Then a chicken will have to do. Remember, Thunderclaw is no ordinary fowl. Chan Kan said he was a great champion, a fearsome fighting cock.\"\n\nThey regarded the wretched little creature, huddled in a corner and trembling in his sleep. \"He doesn't look very fearsome right now,\" said Max.\n\n\"Give me a break,\" sighed Hermanjilio. \"As I understand it, there isn't a precise science to these rituals. They're more about showing swagger and confidence. The Maya gods are like children. They like costumes, special effects, and plenty of action. We just have to put on a good show.\"\n\n\"You're bluffing it?\" said Max incredulously.\n\n\"In a manner of speaking. And now, if there are no further questions, please sit down. I'd like to get started.\"\n\nHermanjilio opened several little packages of incense wrapped in banana leaves and threw them into the fire. The flames flared up and cast an orange glow on his face. Pungent smoke billowed out. He began swaying back and forth, chanting in Mayan. Then he took a handful of the black powder made from ground-up bugs and threw it into the flames. It sent crackling sparks flying in all directions.\n\nMore incense.\n\nMore smoke.\n\nMore black powder.\n\nThe smoke was now so thick that Max found it hard to breathe. Through the black clouds, he could see Hermanjilio pouring his blood concoction into the stone snake's mouth before he slotted the Green Jaguar between its gaping jaws.\n\nAt Hermanjilio's signal, Lola tapped the drum in the rhythm of a heartbeat.\n\n_Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum_.\n\nIt carried over the jungle and echoed back again. It reverberated through Max's body, and his own heart followed the rhythm.\n\n_Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum_.\n\nHermanjilio poured _balch\u00e9_ liquor over the fire. Blue and green flames flickered and hissed like snakes' tongues.\n\nSitting down between Max and Lola, he pulled out a ceramic flute and played a simple melody, the same four notes over and over. It was a hypnotic sound that seemed to work on the brain like a drug. The heartbeat of the drum and the song of the flute played faster and faster, over and over.\n\nSoon Max felt a crackling energy around him, as if the night air had become electrically charged. The Green Jaguar started to glow. As it grew brighter and brighter, the snake began glowing, too, beginning with the head and spreading down the back, feather by feather, coil by coil, until the whole serpent radiated a green light.\n\nIt moved.\n\nA coil uncoiled.\n\nMax rubbed his eyes.\n\nIt moved again.\n\n\"Stay completely still,\" muttered Hermanjilio. \"Don't move a hair.\"\n\nAs Max watched in terror, the stone snake unwound itself from the column and slithered around the top of the platform, passing inches from where they sat. It formed its massive body into a circle, nose to tail, and shafts of light rose up, until the body of the snake enclosed a thick column of green light.\n\nWithin the column, wraithlike images of Maya people emerged, appearing faster and faster, until the whole column writhed with ghostly figures.\n\nHermanjilio cleared his throat.\n\n\"It's now or never,\" he said, standing up and facing the column of ghosts. From where he sat, Max could see the archaeologist's knees shaking.\n\n\"Spirits of my ancestors, we are in desperate need,\" boomed Hermanjilio in his most commanding voice. \"We beseech you to help us. Send us your greatest warlords. Send us the spirits of the mighty Lord 6-Dog and his fearless battle chief, the noble Lord Kukab!\"\n\nAs Hermanjilio called out these names, the column of light grew brighter still. Waves of green flames flowed out of it, one after another, across the platform and down the sides of the pyramid. The next wave of flame was headed straight for Max and Lola. They looked at Hermanjilio in terror, but he just winked happily as if everything was normal and they were having a lovely time. Chulo and Seri inched closer to Lola and put their hands over their eyes.\n\nMax held his breath as the green flames licked his legs. They were icy cold. When they touched him, he could remember things he had never experienced. Disconnected images of ancient Maya life\u2014a ball game, a ceremony, a market, a harvest, a jaguar at a water hole\u2014strange smells of spices and fire and jungle, the sounds of battles and birds and women weaving flooded into his brain. It was as if each flame contained the soul and the memories of a long-dead Maya.\n\nThere was a deep, rolling rumble like distant thunder, and two ghostly figures stepped out of the column. As soon as they did so, the light disappeared and the snake rewound itself around the stone column.\n\nOne of the figures strode forward, resplendent in an elaborate plumed headdress. He was covered from head to foot in black body paint, and he held before him an obsidian sword, ready to strike. While the second figure hovered behind, the great warrior peered down at the trembling spectators.\n\n\"Who summons Ahaw Wak Ok, the mighty Lord 6-Dog, and his fearless battle chief, Lord Kukab, to walk again in Middleworld?\" he boomed.\n\nMustering all his courage, Hermanjilio stood up and bowed.\n\n\"It is I, Hermanjilio Bol, descendant of the lords of Itzamna.\"\n\n\"I will hear thy petition, mortal,\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\nThe other figure, who'd been hanging back, now stepped forward and pointed a gnarled finger at Hermanjilio. \"Where are the human sacrifices? Do you dishonor us with no suitable offering?\"\n\nHermanjilio's jaw dropped open. The second warrior looked and sounded like an old woman, a cross-eyed old woman with four long gray braids.\n\nLord 6-Dog turned to stare in amazement at his fellow time traveler.\n\n\"Mother?\" he said.\n\nThe old woman nudged him with her wrinkled elbow. \"Don't just stand there; introduce me.\"\n\nWith reluctance, the king announced her to the astonished audience. \"May I present my mother, Lady Kan Kakaw, First and Most Glorious Wife of the venerable Lord Punak Ha, King of the Monkey River?\"\n\nFollowing Hermanjilio's lead, Max and Lola bowed their heads.\n\n\"Welcome back to Middleworld, Your Divine Majesties,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\nThe old woman was still looking around with dissatisfaction. \"Where are the bodies, the blood, the severed limbs?\"\n\nHermanjilio took a deep breath.\n\n\"Your Divine Majesties,\" he began, \"we would not insult you with a mere human sacrifice. To mark this most illustrious day in the history of Middleworld, we have brought a far greater tribute in the noble body of Thunderclaw, the merciless Fowl of Fear, the notorious Chicken of Death.\"\n\nMax shot Lola a look of total incredulity. \"Fowl of Fear?\" he mouthed.\n\n\"Chicken of Death?\" she mouthed back.\n\nHermanjilio opened the bamboo cage to reveal the scrawny, balding Thunderclaw, who was still in a dead sleep. \"You are familiar with K'uk'ulkan, the serpent with feathers in place of scales?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog and his mother nodded.\n\n\"Now meet his nemesis, the bird with scales in place of feathers. The Chicken of Death is a ferocious warrior who tortures humankind with his terrible shrieks. He struts through Xibalba with claws like razors, and the gods themselves tremble with fear.\"\n\nHe shut the cage door, as if to contain a mighty army.\n\nLord 6-Dog raised an eyebrow. \"I believe I have read of this Chee Ken in the Codex of Tikal.\" He looked into the cage. \"Is it true that with one slash of his talons he can rip off thine arm?\"\n\n\"As you say, Your Majesty,\" said Hermanjilio solemnly.\n\n\"And with one peck of his beak, he can gouge out thine eyes?\"\n\nHermanjilio nodded his assent.\n\n\"And with one shriek, he can banish thy soul to the ninth level of Xibalba?\"\n\nHermanjilio nodded again.\n\nLord 6-Dog looked impressed. He whispered something to his mother, who peered at the bird in disdain.\n\n\"Is it not a bit small?\" she said. \"I would have expected something larger.\"\n\nHermanjilio was ready for this one. \"With respect, Your Majesty, the chicken is like the scorpion: the smaller the body, the deadlier the bite.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said. She seemed to have lost interest in the chicken. \"Now tell me, Lord Hermanjilio, why did you summon us?\"\n\n\"They did not summon thee, Mother,\" snapped Lord 6-Dog. \"They asked for my noble battle chief, Lord Kukab.\"\n\nShe sniffed in disdain. \"Kukab? I could beat that milksop any day. His mother said he squealed like a stuck peccary when she had his teeth filed into points for his birthday. Talk about ungrateful.\"\n\n\"In truth, Mother, thou art the Demon of Gossip,\" sighed Lord 6-Dog.\n\nHermanjilio coughed to get their attention.\n\nLord 6-Dog fixed him with a haughty look. \"So, mortal, what besets my people in Middleworld?\"\n\n\"The evil is among us, Your Majesty. The Black Jaguar roams the earth. Soon the Undead Army will be released and the world will be ruled by Ah Pukuh, god of war and violent death.\"\n\n\"Who summons Ahaw Wak Ok, the mighty Lord 6-Dog?\"\n\nThe old woman turned to her son. \"I told you so,\" she said. \"You should have destroyed that Black Jaguar when you had the chance\u2014and Tzelek with it. Then we could have been sitting under a shady tree in heaven all these years, instead of freezing to death in Xibalba.\"\n\n\"Technically, we're dead already, Mother,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"But I thank thee for thy counsel. Let us hope thou wilt have less reason to reproach me this time around.\"\n\n\"This time around? You mean, we're staying?\" The old woman clapped her hands in delight. \"I've been waiting three _baktun_ s for something exciting to happen.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog bowed to Hermanjilio. \"This is a worthy challenge, mortal. It will be my pleasure to lead thine armies and give them victory over the enemies of Middleworld. I stand before thee as a warrior in my prime. Show me now the body I will fight in.\" He looked around the platform expectantly.\n\n\"Where are the human vessels for our spirits?\" demanded his mother, eyes glittering with anticipation. \"I trust they are of royal birth?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog's eyes came to rest on Max and Lola. \"Surely thou dost not propose that my venerable mother and myself should dwell in these runtish bodies?\"\n\nMax and Lola shook their heads vigorously.\n\n\"Divine Majesties,\" wheedled Hermanjilio, \"forgive my ignorance, but could you not aid us in your present form, as spirits? Times are desperate in Middleworld, and we're a little short on royal personages.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog drew himself up to his full height. He was tall for an ancient Maya, at least five foot six, and his headdress added another three feet of iridescent quetzal feathers. He threw back his magnificently sloped forehead and drew his sword.\n\n\"Fool! Dost thou not know that, once summoned, we cannot easily return whence we came? When the Jaguar Stone is disengaged, we will vanish in the wind like smoke from a fire.\" He slashed his sword through the air. \"That will _not_ come to pass. Produce a host, or I will take thy body by force.\"\n\n\"One moment, Your Highnesses,\" stammered Hermanjilio. \"I must consult with my acolytes.\" He crouched down to Lola and Max. \"Any ideas?\" he asked.\n\n\"I can't believe you didn't know about this,\" whispered Lola.\n\n\"Well, it's happened, so what can we do? We need two bodies\u2014quick.\"\n\n\"What about Chulo and Seri?\" suggested Max.\n\n\"No way!\" responded Lola angrily.\n\n\"But it's perfect!\" said Hermanjilio. \"You always say they're more like humans than monkeys, Lola. This will be fun for them.\"\n\nLola looked doubtful.\n\n\"Frankly,\" muttered Hermanjilio, \"we have no choice. This guy is going to skin me like a gibnut.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Lola reluctantly. \"But your new friends want royal bodies.\"\n\n\"Leave that to me.\" Hermanjilio bowed to the ancient Maya spirits, who were now bickering loudly with each other. They paused in midquarrel to listen to him.\n\n\"If I may have your attention, Divine Majesties, I am pleased to present the two noble bodies that are ready for your immediate possession.\"\n\n\"That sounds more like it,\" said the old woman. \"Where are they?\"\n\n\"Most Beauteous Highness,\" began Hermanjilio, receiving a flirtatious wink for the compliment, \"may I ask you to think once again of the mighty scorpion. For while your new bodies may be small in stature, they are strong in muscle and brave in spirit.\"\n\nThe winking stopped abruptly as the old woman looked around with mounting excitement. \"Scorpions?\" she asked. \"Are we to have the bodies of scorpions? Maybe with the heads of crocodiles? I have seen this fashion on temple walls....\"\n\nHermanjilio seized his chance. \"Although Your Divine Majesty would look fabulous in anything, the style these days is for something a little more... I believe the word in fashion circles is... furry.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat and pointed to Chulo and Seri, who were engrossed in picking lice off each other and eating the proceeds.\n\nLord 6-Dog held up his hand and a beam of light shot out to illuminate the monkeys. \"Howler monkeys? Art thou insane?\" He pointed his sword at Hermanjilio's throat. \"I am the greatest warrior of the Jaguar Kings, a living god, and thou wouldst have me enter the body of a flea-infested howler monkey? Thou shalt die for this....\"\n\nMax could see that Hermanjilio was out of ideas. The archaeologist's eyes bulged in his red-painted face, and his whole body was visibly trembling. Given that he was seconds away from having his throat cut, who could blame him?\n\nMax looked at Lola. She was rooted to the spot, clutching Chulo and Seri to her, all three of them whimpering in terror.\n\nIn that split second, Max realized it was up to him to save the day.\n\nIn which case, they were sunk.\n\nHe didn't want to get involved. He especially didn't want to get hurt. After all, this was a Maya thing, nothing to do with him. But as his brain came up with excuses, his heart told him the truth. He wasn't a tourist anymore. He didn't have the option of watching from the sidelines.\n\nBut what could he do?\n\nA trickle of blood ran down Hermanjilio's neck.\n\n\"Hey, Featherbrain!\" shouted Max, running over to the altar.\n\nLord 6-Dog's fury made his plumed headdress quiver. \"Who dares speak thus to Lord 6-Dog, supreme and sacred ruler of the Monkey River?\" he bellowed.\n\n\"I do,\" said Max, putting both hands into the snake's mouth. \"Because in exactly two seconds, I'm going to pull this Jaguar Stone out of here, and your little Maya butts are going to be ancient history.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog froze, his eyes on the Jaguar Stone.\n\n\"So listen up.\" Max tried to sound braver than he was feeling. \"We haven't got two royal bodies. But we do have two healthy howler monkeys. And it's the howlers or oblivion. You choose.\"\n\n\"Thou wouldst not dare,\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Watch me.\"\n\nThe old woman stared at Max in terror. \"Who is he?\" she gasped. \"His hair burns like the torches of Xibalba. I think we should listen to him, son. He makes a persuasive argument.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog shifted uncomfortably. He had the strangest feeling that this moment was meant to happen. Deep inside him, some half-buried memory stirred like a long-forgotten dream. But a monkey? How could it be?\n\nAt that moment, Thunderclaw woke up.\n\nIt was nowhere near dawn, but that had never stopped him before. Lord 6-Dog and his mother watched in horror as the Chicken of Death arose and crowed its unearthly shriek.\n\nBefore Thunderclaw had finished his first chorus, the spirits of the great warrior-king and his mother exchanged a glance of mutual agreement and flew into the mouths of the monkeys. Like a passing tornado, the force of it knocked the three humans and two monkeys off their feet. All five of them landed flat on their backs with a thud.\n\nFor a few moments, Max lay there, winded and terrified. He was aware of nothing but a green glow in the air and the perfume of incense. He closed his eyes. When he opened them a few seconds later, the night was black again. Only the light of the moon and stars remained.\n\nHe sat up and looked around.\n\nSlowly the two bodies next to him sat up also.\n\nHermanjilio massaged his temples as if he had a headache and rubbed his throat where the point of 6-Dog's sword had been.\n\n\"So,\" came his hoarse voice, \"I thought that went well.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Lola. \"You were nearly skewered by a spirit lord, Chulo and Seri have been possessed by who knows what, you brought back a little old lady instead of a battle chief\u2014and you call that going well?\"\n\n\"I saved the chicken, Thunderclaw,\" said Hermanjilio defensively.\n\n\"You mean Thunderclaw saved you,\" said Lola.\n\n\"It was all part of my plan.\" He sniffed. \"I knew Chan Kan must have sent him for a reason. I'll send him back to Utsal tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I'll miss little Thunderclaw,\" said Lola. \"But I'm glad he's safe.\"\n\n\"How are our guests?\" asked Hermanjilio.\n\nLola shone her flashlight across the monkeys' immobile bodies. Seeing no sign of life, she knelt down and listened to Chulo's chest.\n\n\"Is he breathing?\" asked Max, trying to sound like he cared.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Lola, \"but they're both out cold. We'll have to carry them.\"\n\nBetween them, they hauled the monkeys down the pyramid, across the plaza, and up the ladder to the tree house, where they laid them gently on mats.\n\n\"You guys get some sleep,\" said Lola. \"I'll stay with them.\"\n\n\"Everything will seem better in the light of day,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\nBut he didn't sound very sure.\n\n# Chapter Nineteen  \nMONKEY BUSINESS\n\nLord 6-Dog was awakened by the sound of his own screaming.\n\nFor a few moments he lay still on his sleeping mat, trying to shake off the memory of the dream. He told himself to calm down, but still his body trembled and sweat ran down his face.\n\n_A howler monkey...?_\n\nGroaning, he sat up and ran his hands through his thick black hair. Then a thought occurred to him, and he quickly examined his arms and legs. Upon finding them covered in monkey fur, he let out a muffled scream.\n\n\"It was no dream,\" he moaned.\n\nOn the other sleeping mat, Lady Kan Kakaw sat bolt upright and looked around in alarm. Then, seeing her own furry limbs, she instantly relaxed.\n\n\"It was no dream,\" she exclaimed happily.\n\nShe held out her monkey hands and tested her opposable thumbs. She clenched her fists and flexed her arms. Then she jumped up, stretched her wiry little body, and scratched herself from head to foot.\n\n\"Mother!\" protested Lord 6-Dog. \"Thou art a royal queen!\"\n\n\"Yes, son, and I have a royal itch!\"\n\n\"This vulgarity does not befit thee. Thou mayest look like a flea-bitten howler, but thou dost not have to act like one.\"\n\n\"That's a nice thing to say to your own mother.\" Lady Kan Kakaw tried to look offended, but her attention was caught by a passing moth. She leapt into the air to swat it, only to fall flat on her face.\n\n\"Missed!\" She chuckled. \"A pox on my old crossed eyes!\"\n\nShe'd been a cross-eyed queen and now she was a cross-eyed monkey. As an upper-class Maya woman, her crossed eyes had been a sign of beauty. As a monkey, they made it difficult to focus on small objects. She gamely scanned the room for another victim. Soon her skewed gaze came to rest on a large black fly, and this time she did not miss.\n\nLord 6-Dog watched, appalled, as his mother caught the insect and popped it into her mouth. She noticed his disgusted expression.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked.\n\n\"Thou didst eat the fly. I saw thee.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, did you want it? Shall I catch another one?\"\n\n\"Mother, we are royalty. We do not catch flies.\"\n\n\"I do. And I eat them.\"\n\n\"No, Mother! I forbid it. It is unconscionable.\"\n\nLady Kan Kakaw considered her son's words. \"Our howler monkey hosts are mostly vegetarian, I grant you. But who can resist a fresh, chewy snack?\"\n\n\"I am ashamed of thee, Mother. Pray have some decorum.\"\n\nShe hid her monkey smile behind a paw. \"Cheer up, son. Yesterday, we were spirits floating in a time loop. Today we have living, breathing bodies\u2014what does it matter if they're covered in fur?\"\n\nShe scampered over to Lord 6-Dog and stroked his bristly little head. \"Anyway, I like this stuff, it's very fashionable. I used to have monkey-fur trim around the shoulders of my best robe.\"\n\nShe started making a strange gurgling noise and clutching at her throat.\n\n\"What ails thee?\" asked Lord 6-Dog. \"Did the fly stick in thy gullet?\"\n\nAll this time, Lola had been lying low in her hammock, watching the monkeys and giving them a chance to settle in. As she told it to Max later, it looked like Seri was deliberately choking herself. In a flash, Lola understood the problem.\n\n\"Excuse me, Your Majesties,\" she began.\n\nThe monkeys jumped in surprise, registering her presence for the first time.\n\n\"On thy knees, mortal!\" thundered Lord 6-Dog. \"How darest thou speak to a divine king without permission? How darest thou even look at me? Thou shalt die for this! Mother, call the guards!\"\n\nLady Kan Kakaw staggered to the doorway.\n\n\"I see no guards,\" she rasped, still holding her throat.\n\n\"The royal bedchamber left unguarded? This is an outrage,\" bellowed Lord 6-Dog. \"And where are the servants? I am overheated in this fur. Where is the bearer of the royal fan?\" His disdainful gaze came to rest once more on Lola. \"Where are the other servants? Speak!\"\n\n\"I'm not a servant, but I will be glad to help your mother. I think Seri is throttling her from the inside, to punish her for wearing monkey fur on her robe.\"\n\n\"It was just a bit of trim,\" wheezed Lady Kan Kakaw.\n\n\"And who, pray, is Seri?\" asked Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"She's your mother's... er... hostess. Do you mind if I rub her back?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog looked at his mother's furry body, which was now convulsing on the floor. \"Proceed,\" he said.\n\nLola gently stroked the monkey, crooning all the while in howler language. The monkey responded with a series of protesting squawks. \"I know, Seri, it's not easy to wake up and find an ancient Maya queen living in your body,\" agreed Lola. \"But you'll have to learn to live with each other. It's only for a few days.\"\n\nAfter a few more whimpers, Seri calmed down and released her grip.\n\n\"Thank you, my dear,\" said Lady Kan Kakaw to Lola.\n\n\"I'm sorry about Seri's behavior,\" said Lola, \"it's quite out of character. All this has come as a bit of a shock to her and her brother, Chulo.\"\n\n\"But my dear, I had no idea that monkeys had feelings!\"\n\n\"Of course they don't,\" snapped Lord 6-Dog. \"They're the lowest form of life, rejects from the Great Sky God's first attempt to make mankind. That's why they're all so ugly. Flat-nosed dwarves\u2014\"\n\nLord 6-Dog fell to the floor, clutching his throat.\n\nLola and Lady Kan Kakaw watched, fascinated, as the king and the monkey rolled around, slugging it out in the same body. Lola had never seen anyone try to strangle themselves and bite themselves at the same time.\n\n\"Who are you, my dear?\" Lady Kan Kakaw was asking her. \"What is your bloodline? Who are your family?\"\n\nNot wanting to reveal her lack of parents, Lola answered, \"I am from the house of Chan Kan in Utsel. My name is Ix Sak Lol, but most people call me Lola.\"\n\n\"Lo-la.\" Lady Kan Kakaw rolled her tongue around it. \"I like it. What does it mean?\"\n\n\"It doesn't mean anything. It's just a nickname. You know, something your friends and family call you.\"\n\nLady Kan Kakaw looked wistful. \"Even my mother called me _Ix Kan Kakaw_. I've never had a nickname....\"\n\n\"Let's think of one, right now!\" suggested Lola, glad to change the subject from parentage to nicknames. \" _Ix Kan Kakaw_ means 'Lady Yellow Cocoa Bean,' doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Goodness, no! _Kan_ can be 'yellow,' but it has an idea of ripeness, something perfect and precious. _Kakaw_ is 'cocoa,' but cocoa beans were also money, so there's a sense of treasure and riches. To ancient Maya ears, my name means something like 'Lady Perfect Precious Treasure of Accumulated Wealth Through Judicious Trading of Cocoa Beans.'\"\n\n\"Lady Precious? Lady Treasure?\" suggested Lola. \"Lady Coco?\"\n\n\"I love it!\" said the monkey, jumping up and down with excitement. \"What do you think, son? Do you want a nickname, too?\"\n\nHaving managed to pacify Chulo, Lord 6-Dog was standing on a stool, looking out of the window. \"6-Dog _is_ my nickname, Mother,\" he said. His voice was still hoarse from the self-inflicted throttling.\n\n\"Silly me, how could I forget that? 6-Dog was the date he was born,\" Lady Coco explained to Lola. \"The name his father gave him is unpronounceable even by ancient Maya standards.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog put his head against the screen and inhaled. \"Aaaah, how I have missed the smell of sweet, wet earth.\"\n\nLady Coco sniffed the air. \"Yes, these noses are much better than our human ones. I can smell bananas and mangoes and... oh, that's disgusting!\" She sniffed again. \"It's you, 6-Dog! You need a bath.\"\n\n\"By the quetzal!\" he exclaimed. \"What a torment to have a sensitive nose when one's own body reeks like a dung heap.\"\n\nChoking noises suggested that Chulo had taken offense again.\n\n\"Chulo, stop it!\" cried Lola. \"It's high time you had a wash. Let me show you to the bathroom, Your Majesties. I think you'll enjoy the technology.\"\n\nLola explained how to work the solar shower and, after some hesitation, put out the hand-milled French lavender soap that Hermanjilio had brought back for her from a lecture trip in Europe.\n\nBefore she left them to it, she turned to speak again. \"Please join us in the plaza for breakfast when...\" Her voice trailed off as she took in the extraordinary sight in front of her eyes.\n\nLord 6-Dog, wearing a towel as a cloak, was standing on the sink surveying himself lugubriously in the mirror. Lady Coco was swinging and somersaulting on the shower rail like an Olympic gymnast. Somehow they'd managed to open every single bottle and jar in the cabinet, and the contents were daubed around the bathroom.\n\n\"I'll... um... see you at breakfast, then,\" said Lola, backing out, but the monkeys didn't notice her.\n\nShe was still complaining as she helped Max set the table.\n\n\"You should have seen the mess,\" she fumed. \"Well, if they think I'm cleaning up after them...\"\n\n\"I wouldn't get on the wrong side of them if I were you,\" said Max. \"They're not your friendly monkeys anymore. They could have you sacrificed in the blink of an eye.\"\n\nHermanjilio emerged from the cooking hut with a plate of tortillas and a bowl of fruit. He was limping slightly and he looked dreadful, as though he hadn't slept a wink.\n\n\"I was just saying,\" said Lola, \"that our guests have trashed the bathroom.\"\n\n\"Blame Chulo and Seri,\" said Hermanjilio. \"It probably takes a while for this possession thing to settle down. I'm sure our guests will start acting like nobility soon enough. They just have to learn to control their inner monkeys.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" said Lola, \"I think they're in the wrong bodies. Lord 6-Dog is formal and serious like Seri. But Lady Coco's full of fun like Chulo.\"\n\n\"Lady Coco?\" chorused Max and Hermanjilio.\n\n\"She wanted a nickname,\" explained Lola.\n\n\"I still have to get my head around talking monkeys,\" said Max. \"You really did it, Hermanjilio! You brought back Lord 6-Dog and his mother!\"\n\n\"I can hardly believe it myself,\" said Hermanjilio. \"It's taken it out of me, though. I've got the worst headache of my life this morning and I didn't even drink much _balch\u00e9_.\" He groaned and sat down at the table, laying his head on his arms. \"Wake me up when our guests appear.\"\n\nIn fact, it was the reek of lavender that woke him. You didn't need a monkey nose to know that the two soft and fluffy specimens descending the ladder had used rather a lot of Lola's precious French soap.\n\nShe opened her mouth to protest, but Hermanjilio cut in. \"Lord 6-Dog! Lady Coco! It is an honor to make your acquaintance. If there's anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable, you have only to ask.\"\n\nBut the king and his mother didn't hear him. They were standing in the plaza, transfixed.\n\n\"What is this place?\" asked Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Itzamna,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Itzamna?\" they repeated in bewilderment.\n\n\"Welcome home, Your Majesties,\" announced Lola with a flourish. To her dismay, the monkeys looked distraught.\n\n\"It cannot be,\" said Lady Coco, looking around. \"My Itzamna was surrounded by fields and fertile terraces. Where are the markets, the houses, the workshops? Fifty thousand people lived in this city. Where are they?\" Her gaze settled at the far end of the plaza. \"My palace,\" she wailed.\n\nLord 6-Dog's liquid monkey eyes looked sadder than ever. He pointed mournfully toward the ruins at the other end of the plaza. \"Could that be the great Temple of Itzamna,\" he whispered, \"with its red paint all stripped away?\"\n\nHermanjilio nodded.\n\n\"My father is entombed beneath those stones,\" said Lord 6-Dog angrily. \"What enemy has dared to desecrate his memory?\"\n\n\"That enemy was time, Your Majesty,\" said Hermanjilio. \"The golden age of Itzamna was twelve hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"Twelve hundred years,\" repeated Lord 6-Dog wonderingly. \"Three _baktun_ s. Like a whirlpool, time encircles me and confounds my memory in its bubbling waters.\" He stared intently at Hermanjilio. \"Who art thou, sir? I feel as if I have known thee all my life.\"\n\nHermanjilio looked away from the monkey's intense gaze. \"My name is Hermanjilio Bol. My ancestors were the guardians of the royal library. It was I who summoned you here.\"\n\n\"Then I should thank thee, sir, for I am glad to walk in Middleworld again.\"\n\nWhile the men were talking, Lady Coco was looking longingly at the bowl of fruit.\n\n\"Would you like something to eat?\" said Lola.\n\n\"Yes, please, my dear. Where is the women's table?\"\n\n\"We'll all be sitting together.\"\n\n\"Disgraceful!\" growled Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Delightful!\" cooed Lady Coco.\n\n\"Please make yourselves comfortable, Your Majesties, while I go and fry the eggs,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\nLord 6-Dog looked puzzled. \"Lord Hermanjilio,\" he said, \"thou hast the look of a noble warrior, yet thou dost act like a kitchen maid. Cooking is woman's work. Let us talk, man to man. Send the girl for the food.\"\n\nHermanjilio smiled meaningfully at Lola.\n\nReluctantly, she went to look for the frying pan. It wasn't that she minded cooking, so much as she was bad at it. She hoped these eggs would turn out better than her last attempts, which had bounced off the plates like rubber balls.\n\nLord 6-Dog took the stool at the head of the table, where Hermanjilio usually sat. Hermanjilio, who'd been making his way to the same place, was left standing. For a moment, the monkey and the archaeologist locked glances in a battle of wills. Lord 6-Dog glared at his rival autocratically. Hermanjilio's gaze was bleary but unwavering.\n\n\"Chill,\" whispered Lola to him as she brought in the plates.\n\nHermanjilio blinked rapidly, like someone snapping out of a trance. \"Of course,\" he said, graciously ceding his place.\n\n\"What was that about?\" Max asked Lola.\n\n\"It's the dominant-male thing,\" she said. \"They both think they're king of Itzamna.\"\n\n\"Wilt thou tell me about my people?\" Lord 6-Dog asked Hermanjilio. \"Tell me everything that has happened in the last three _baktun_ s.\"\n\nAs Lord 6-Dog heard about the invasion of the conquistadores, how Diego de Landa had burned all the books, how the Jaguar Stones had been lost, and how all the great Maya cities now lay in ruins, his monkey face grew sadder and sadder.\n\n\"Hast thou no tales of heroism?\" he asked.\n\nHermanjilio thought for a moment. \"There was Nachankan. He was a great Maya lord from the north. When the Spanish demanded tribute, he said he'd give them 'turkeys in the shape of spears and corn in the shape of arrows.'\"\n\nLord 6-Dog laughed a booming howler-monkey laugh.\n\n\"Many Maya lords stood firm,\" continued Hermanjilio. \"In fact, the Maya fought the Spanish for another two hundred years after the Aztecs surrendered.\"\n\n\"The Aztecs? Pah!\" Lord 6-Dog sneered. \"In my day, they were nothing but a pack of swamp-dwelling scavengers.\"\n\n\"A few hundred years later, they got to be quite big,\" said Hermanjilio.\n\n\"They did?\" Lord 6-Dog looked disappointed.\n\n\"At their height, they had ten million citizens,\" continued Hermanjilio. \"Of course, they sacrificed them at an alarming rate. Sometimes they ate the corpses.\"\n\n\"That's disgusting,\" Lady Coco said, grimacing.\n\n\"No wonder their empire only lasted three hundred years,\" said Lola, coming out with a platter of eggs. She sniffed haughtily. \"We Maya have been around for three thousand years. And counting.\"\n\n\"Well spoken, Lady Lola,\" said Lord 6-Dog, cheering up. \"I will wager that the Aztecs yielded to the Spanish like a gaggle of old women.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Lady Coco turned on him angrily. \"That statement is offensive to old women. I'll have you know that an old Maya woman would fight to the death\u2014\"\n\n\"Eggs, anyone?\" said Lola, trying to keep the peace.\n\n\"Omelets!\" said Hermanjilio. \"They look delicious.\"\n\nLola glared at him. \"They're _fried_ eggs actually.\"\n\n\"Thirteen thanks for all our blessings,\" began Lord 6-Dog. He thanked the wild turkeys that laid the eggs, the earth that grew the corn for the tortillas, the trees that bore the fruit, the rain for water to drink\u2014\n\nLady Coco's stomach gurgled loudly. \"And we thank Lord Hermanjilio for his hospitality,\" she said. \"Let's eat!\"\n\nIt was the last civilized moment of the meal.\n\nPerhaps the hunger of twelve hundred years superseded the constraints of table manners. Or perhaps Chulo and Seri were venting their inner monkeys.\n\nWhatever the cause, the breakfast was soon in chaos.\n\nLady Coco started it by sitting on the fruit bowl.\n\n\"Mother! Off the table! Hast thou lost thy mind?\" shouted Lord 6-Dog.\n\nLady Coco considered this question for a moment, then lobbed a banana skin at her son, quickly followed by a ripe papaya that exploded on contact and showered him with black seeds. Lord 6-Dog jumped onto the table to retaliate, and the two monkeys started wrestling, tails lashing, pots crashing, food flying until Hermanjilio and Max pried them apart.\n\n\"And these guys are going to save the world?\" sighed Max.\n\nA small melon bounced off the side of his head. He looked around to see Lord 6-Dog celebrating a direct hit. Remembering that, on the inside, his assailant was a mighty warrior-king, he decided against retaliating. \"That hurt, Your Majesty,\" he said. \"We're on the same side, remember?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog looked mortified. \"My apologies, young lord, but Chulo made me do it. It seems he bears thee much ill will. I will try to control him.\"\n\nBalanced giddily on the back of a chair, Lady Coco brushed bits of food off her fur and attempted to muster her dignity, an effort diminished by the raffia fruit bowl she now wore like a rakish straw hat. \"I do apologize,\" she said, trying to sound refined. \"I can assure you this is not our usual...\"\n\nHer concentration lapsed as she watched her son use his tail to grab a mango and bring it to his open mouth. \"Let me try that,\" she screeched.\n\nSoon both monkeys were fully absorbed in experimenting with their newly discovered prehensile tails.\n\nIt was the craziest breakfast Max had ever experienced.\n\nAt one point, Lady Coco bounced over to perch beside him. \"And who are you, young lord? Are you of royal birth? Who is your father?\"\n\n\"My father is an archaeologist,\" said Max. She looked blank, so he added, \"He studies history.\"\n\n\"A wise man indeed,\" said Lord 6-Dog, nodding sagely. He tipped back his head, poured the last of the juice into his mouth, and upended the empty jug. \"It is only by studying the past that we can predict the future. What has happened before will happen again.\" He turned to Hermanjilio. \"Speaking of which, art thou sure we have not met before?\"\n\n\"I am positive,\" said Hermanjilio quickly. \"And now perhaps we could discuss more pressing matters. How do you propose we stop Count Antonio de Landa from using the Black Jaguar to raise the Undead Army?\"\n\n\"Landa, didst thou say? Was that not the name of the varlet who burned our books?\"\n\n\"That was Friar Diego de Landa. Antonio is his descendant.\"\n\n\"Then it will be my pleasure to take him captive and flay him alive.\"\n\n\"He has bodyguards,\" interjected Max. \"And guns.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog stroked his chin. \"How many armies dost thou command, Lord Hermanjilio? How many warriors will join us in this battle?\"\n\n\"Four.\"\n\n\"Four armies?\"\n\n\"Four warriors.\"\n\n\"This is no time for jest.\"\n\n\"It is the truth. There are four of us: you, me, Lola, and Max.\"\n\n\"Make that five, Lord Hermanjilio; you can count me in,\" said Lady Coco. \"But in all that you have told us, there is one name you have not mentioned.\"\n\n\"And who would that be?\" asked Hermanjilio.\n\n\"Tzelek!\" She spat out the word like a curse.\n\n\"My twin brother?\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"What has this to do with him?\"\n\n\"His old crony, Ah Pukuh, is about to take the reins of power. Do you really think Tzelek would miss such an opportunity to make mischief? It was common knowledge in Xibalba that he was hanging around the surface, trying to find a way through.\"\n\nMax remembered the grip on his ankle in the Temple of Itzamna.\n\n\"Does Tzelek have long, bony fingers?\" he asked.\n\nLady Coco nodded. \"He kept his nails specially sharpened for ripping out hearts with his bare hands. You mark my words, if there's evil afoot in Middleworld, Tzelek is involved in it up to his villainous neck. I'll wager ten baskets of cocoa beans that he's already here. I expect he glimpsed a hole in the gateway and squeezed through it like the cockroach he is.\"\n\n\"Then the question we should be asking,\" said Hermanjilio, \"is whose body is Tzelek living in? And I'm sorry to tell you, I think I know the answer.\"\n\n\"Is it me?\" said Max in a small voice. \"I think he grabbed my ankle in the Star Chamber and tried to suck out my soul.\"\n\n\"Surely you'd know if you'd been possessed by Tzelek,\" said Lola. \"Do you get black moods? Do you think evil thoughts? Are you bad-tempered and irrationally angry?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Max felt nauseous. \"It's me, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Of course it's not you!\" snapped Hermanjilio in exasperation. \"Let us not confuse the emotional turmoil of adolescence with the inner workings of one of history's most evil villains! Guess again.\"\n\nBlank faces stared back at him.\n\n\"Isn't it obvious?\" said Hermanjilio. \"Who's been playing around with Jaguar Stones? Who has an interest in the black arts? Who would welcome an ally like Tzelek?\"\n\n\"Count Antonio de Landa!\" burst out Max in horror.\n\nHermanjilio nodded gravely.\n\n\"Well, that explains why he's been too busy to look for us,\" said Lola.\n\n\"This just gets worse and worse,\" groaned Max. \"Now the evil descendant of one of the most evil men in history has been possessed by the evil spirit of an evil Maya priest. And my parents are caught in the middle of it.\"\n\n# Chapter Twenty  \nCOUNTING THE DAYS\n\nIt was too awful to contemplate: the fiendish Tzelek in league with the ruthless Count Antonio de Landa. Between them, they represented twelve hundred years of absolute evil. Who knew what warped scheme they were hatching?\n\n\"But why would Tzelek come back? What does he want?\" asked Lola.\n\n\"He wants what he has always wanted,\" said Lord 6-Dog, \"to be the supreme and sacred ruler of Middleworld.\"\n\n\"It's such a clich\u00e9,\" said Max. \"Why do bad guys always want to rule the world?\"\n\n\"Deep-seated emotional insecurity masquerading as a superiority complex?\" suggested Lola.\n\nThey all looked at her in amazement.\n\n\"I'm thinking about majoring in psychology,\" she explained.\n\n\"Whatever,\" said Max. \"It's stupid. An ancient Maya madman can't just suddenly appear and declare himself king of the world.\"\n\n\"With his friend Ah Pukuh in charge of the new _baktun,\"_ said Lord 6-Dog, \"he can do whatever he wants.\"\n\n\"And this time,\" said Hermanjilio, \"his power will not stop at the limits of the Maya realm. This time, all humanity will be under his dominion.\"\n\nLady Coco pulled a branch off a nearby tree and stripped the leaves with her teeth. \"At least we know where and when he'll make his first move,\" she said, in between bites.\n\n\"We do?\" said Max.\n\n\"We do,\" confirmed Lord 6-Dog. \"The place will be the Black Pyramid of Ah Pukuh. And the time will be at the rising of Venus on 5-Kimi\u2014or 5-Death, in thy parlance. It is an auspicious day, a day of sacrifice and mourning....\"\n\n\"Most importantly,\" interrupted Lady Coco, \"it is in four days' time.\"\n\nMax swallowed. \"And how far is it from here to the Black Pyramid?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog and Hermanjilio spoke at the same time.\n\n\"One day,\" said the ancient Maya king. \"It is an easy march.\"\n\n\"Two days,\" said the archaeologist, \"and it won't be easy.\"\n\nThey looked at each other in surprise.\n\n\"The straight stone roads your warriors marched on are long since overgrown,\" said Hermanjilio. \"We'll have to hack our way through. We must leave tomorrow. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have much to do.\"\n\n\"Thou art dismissed,\" said Lord 6-Dog imperiously. As Hermanjilio strode away, the king furrowed his monkey brow. \"He is so familiar to me, and yet I cannot place him. Does he remind thee of someone, Mother?\"\n\n\"He has shifty eyes,\" said Lady Coco.\n\n\"Oh no, not Hermanjilio,\" Lola insisted, getting up to clear the table. \"He's the kindest man you could ever meet.\"\n\n\"When is his birthday?\" Lady Coco asked Max.\n\nMax shrugged. \"I have no idea.\"\n\n\"And you, young lord?\" persisted Lady Coco. \"On what day were you born?\"\n\n\"In the Maya calendar?\" he said. \"Who knows.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog and his mother looked at each other in alarm.\n\n\"No wonder Middleworld teeters on the brink of destruction,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"For if mortals have forgotten how to read the days, they are doomed to stumble through time like children wandering across a battlefield.\"\n\n\"What's the big deal?\" asked Max.\n\nLola threw him a cloth to wipe the table. \"Our royal guests believe that a person's entire character and destiny are decided by the day of their birth,\" she explained. \"Like a horoscope\u2014except a bad one could ruin your life.\"\n\n\"And a good one could ensure success,\" pointed out Lady Coco.\n\n\"But how could anyone look at a newborn baby and pronounce it a liar or a thief?\" said Lola.\n\n\"When your future's been decided by the gods, you don't question it,\" replied Lady Coco.\n\n\"Well, maybe you _should_ question it,\" said Lola. \"Did you know that the Spanish used your beliefs against you? They convinced your priests that your defeat was written in the stars, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.\"\n\n\"All history is a self-fulfilling prophecy,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"What has happened before will happen again.\"\n\nLady Coco looked thoughtful. She lowered her voice. \"But you do believe you can beat Tzelek this time, don't you, son?\"\n\nMax and Lola pretended to be engrossed in washing up, while straining to hear the great king's reply.\n\n\"Why dost thou doubt me, Mother?\"\n\n\"Because Tzelek has always wrapped you around his little finger. You must face the truth, 6-Dog. He is evil from his balding head to his stinking feet. You must not give him another chance. He must be stopped.\"\n\n\"I understand the situation, Mother.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't you finish him off last time?\"\n\n\"He is my twin, my flesh and blood.\"\n\nLady Coco spat a nutshell onto the ground. \"No,\" she said. \"No, he isn't.\"\n\n\"What art thou saying?\"\n\n\"Tzelek was born a few minutes after you, but he was not my child. His mother was a witch. She died in childbirth that very day\u2014but not before she'd made me promise to adopt her evil spawn.\"\n\n\"Why wouldst thou, a royal queen, adopt a witch's son?\"\n\n\"His mother vowed that, from that day forward, your lives would be intertwined as you grew up. If I abandoned Tzelek or he failed to thrive, you, too, would wither and die. Your father knew nothing of this curse, and for three _baktun_ s I have kept my silence.\"\n\n\"Tzelek is not my brother? But I always thought he was thy favorite.\"\n\n\"He was always so very jealous of you. When your father died and you became king, he plotted against you constantly. I thought you might be safer if I pretended not to care for you. But all the while, I was trying to help you in unseen ways. I used to pray to the spirit of your father to show me what to do. He was so proud of you, 6-Dog. He still is.\"\n\n\"If I had not gone hunting that day, he might have lived,\" said Lord 6-Dog, looking across to the pyramid of Itzamna, his father's final resting place.\n\nIt had been a day of merrymaking, a _katun_ celebration to mark Punak Ha's first twenty years on the throne. As the elder twin, 6-Dog was expected to stand by his father's side at the ceremony. But he'd slipped away to go hunting instead. How could he have known that Punak Ha would come looking for him? Or that he'd be ambushed while calling his son's name?\n\nWhen 6-Dog had returned with his catch (an armadillo too small to bother cooking), the conch-shell horns and the wooden trumpets were sounding their laments. The next day, preparations began for 6-Dog's coronation.\n\nHis father's murderer was never caught.\n\nLord 6-Dog swore to honor his father's memory by becoming the greatest king that Middleworld had ever seen. Gorgeous and terrible in his black body paint, jaguar pelts, and quetzal-plumed helmet, he had won every battle and subdued every enemy.\n\nBut he had never vanquished his own conscience.\n\n\"Dost thou believe our lives are written in the stars, Mother?\"\n\n\"I believe in second chances, son. What has happened before will happen again. But this time, you can change the outcome.\"\n\n\"I cannot bring my father back.\"\n\n\"But you can sit next to him under the great ceiba tree for all eternity if you win this victory. He is waiting for you, son, in the heroes' heaven. You must deal with Tzelek once and for all.\"\n\n\"Even the mighty 6-Dog may not be strong enough to defeat the combined forces of Tzelek and Ah Pukuh.\"\n\n\"This time,\" declared Lady Coco, \"I will fight by your side. This is my second chance, too, 6-Dog. I promise to be your most loyal and devoted warrior.\"\n\n\"May good prevail,\" he said.\n\nShe nudged him playfully. \"Here's what I think of Tzelek and his cronies.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog watched in amazement as his mother, First and Most Glorious Wife of the Great King Punak Ha, pointed her bony monkey posterior in the air and noisily broke wind.\n\nAnd then, for the first time in more than a thousand years, he laughed until his sides ached.\n\n# Chapter Twenty-one  \nPREPARING FOR BATTLE\n\nAs I see it,\" said Max, \"all that stands between humankind and the end of the world is two talking monkeys, a crazy archaeologist covered in red paint, and a couple of kids with blowguns? Am I right?\"\n\n\"Wrong,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I'll be wearing my black paint this time. Now keep practicing.\"\n\nMax and Lola had been honing their blowgun skills for hours. It was late afternoon, and Max's cheeks were aching, but at least he was starting to hit the target. Lola had graduated to trick shots, and several surprised parrots could vouch for the accuracy of her aim.\n\n\"But it's going to rain,\" said Max. \"Couldn't we take a break?\"\n\n\"What, and miss the chance to practice in wet conditions?\" said Hermanjilio. While Max and Lola shot their blowguns in the pouring rain, Lord 6-Dog brewed up a potion to coat the tips of their darts.\n\n\"Could we not make it a little stronger, Lord Hermanjilio?\" he asked as he stirred his mixture. \"If we added just one small poison dart frog, we would have enough toxin to slay Landa and all his men....\"\n\n\"A sleeping draft will be fine, Lord 6-Dog,\" Hermanjilio assured him hastily. \"These days, we tend to shy away from human sacrifice.\"\n\n\"Have it thine own way,\" muttered Lord 6-Dog. \"But let us hope that Tzelek is equally well versed in the etiquette of modern warfare.\"\n\nWhen all was ready for their journey, they gathered around the campfire for one last meal.\n\n\"This meat is delicious,\" said Max. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Iguana,\" said Lola. \"Would you like another skewer?\"\n\nAs Max chowed down on the juicy lizard, he marveled that his mother had ever called him a picky eater. He reckoned that, these days, he could even eat Zia's tamales without complaint.\n\nEveryone was quiet around the campfire, thinking about the next day's journey to Ah Pukuh. Hermanjilio tried to boost their confidence with tales of daring deeds from Maya legends, but his stories fell as flat as stale tortillas. \"Well, good night, then,\" he said in resignation. \"Get some sleep, all of you. We leave for the Black Pyramid at dawn.\"\n\nThe rest of them murmured their good-nights and began to gather their things. But somehow, with Hermanjilio gone, the atmosphere lightened and they lingered under the stars.\n\n\"Look, son,\" whispered Lady Coco, \"look up at the moon rabbit.\"\n\nMax overheard. \"The moon rabbit? You guys know about that? My mom used to make me wave to the moon rabbit when I was little.\"\n\nLady Coco smiled. \"Mothers have been pointing out the moon rabbit since the world began. It is a good omen that we see it so clearly tonight. It tells us that its owner, Ixchel, is watching over us.\"\n\n\"Ixchel?\" said Max suspiciously. \"The moon goddess? Do we _want_ her watching over us? The waiter at the hotel in Puerto Muerto said she's bad news.\"\n\n\"Like any woman, she has her moods,\" agreed Lady Coco. \"As the old moon, with a serpent headdress and human bones on her skirt, she can be quick to anger. But as the young moon, with her pet rabbit, she's a beautiful woman, creative and caring, a patron of motherhood, weaving, and medicine. It is the young goddess that has smiled on us tonight. She is the mother to us all, and she will protect us like a doe protects her fawn.\"\n\nLola was staring glumly up at the moon rabbit. Max guessed she was thinking of her own mother, whom she had never known.\n\nHe reached out to touch her arm.\n\n\"I'm going to bed,\" she said curtly.\n\nHe got up to walk with her, but Lord 6-Dog pulled him aside. \"Thou hast won favor with Chulo tonight, young lord. It seems that baby howlers also know the moon rabbit. I think he likes thee better now.\"\n\n\"Well, that's one less enemy to worry about,\" Max said with a grin. \"Good night, Chulo; good night, Your Majesties.\"\n\n\"Good night,\" replied Lord 6-Dog, with a courtly bow.\n\n\"Don't let the vampire bats bite!\" added Lady Coco.\n\nMax felt like he'd only just gone to sleep when Lola was calling him to wake up and get going. As he dragged himself down the tree-house ladder, his fear felt like a lead weight in his stomach. For the first time in fourteen years, he wasn't hungry for breakfast.\n\nIt was a somber party that made their way through the jungle, following the overgrown course of the old Maya causeway. Even the monkeys, who usually kept up a constant chatter and crashing of branches, crept silently through the trees as they scouted ahead. Everyone was tense. Every creature that rustled in the undergrowth made them jump, and every new turning seemed fraught with danger.\n\nAs they walked, Lola tried to take Max's mind off things by teaching him about the jungle birds. But the screams of the macaws, the croaks of the toucans, and the screeches of the parakeets made him feel like he was in a haunted house.\n\n\"Why are the birds so noisy in the jungle?\" he asked her.\n\nShe shrugged. \"What do the birds in Boston sound like?\"\n\nMax thought about it. \"I don't have a clue. I guess I'm always wearing headphones.\"\n\nThey made camp before sunset by a rock pool.\n\nAs Max gathered wood, he saw a small green lizard running across the surface of the water on its hind feet, like a miniature Godzilla.\n\n\"Look! Look!\" he called to Lola.\n\n\"It's a basilisk,\" she said. \"Something must be chasing it.\"\n\nThey watched as the little creature reached dry land and ran up a tree.\n\n\"What are you two doing sitting around?\" asked Lady Coco crossly. \"Come and help me get this fire going.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Your Majesty,\" said Lola. \"Max had never seen a basilisk before.\"\n\n\"A basilisk? Where is it?\" Lady Coco sounded horrified.\n\n\"You don't like them?\" asked Lola in surprise.\n\n\"It's nothing personal, but it makes me think of Tzelek. His name means 'Basilisk Lord,' you know. And that's what he is. A slimy, cold-blooded lizard. He even leaves a trail like a lizard, with that crippled foot that drags behind him.\"\n\nThere was a rustling of leaves, and they turned to watch a bright yellow iguana, maybe seven feet long, skin like chain mail, emerge from the bushes. It stopped in its tracks to check them out.\n\nLady Coco regarded it with disgust. \"You could learn a lot about Tzelek by studying his fellow lizards. They are cunning escape artists and masters of disguise. Most of them will shed their own tails to avoid capture. The horned lizard squirts blood out of its own eyes to defend itself.\" She waved her arms wildly at the iguana. \"Scoot! Scram! Shoo!\"\n\nThe iguana, unimpressed by its first encounter with a talking monkey, flicked its tongue at her a couple of times before lumbering down to the rock pool.\n\nLady Coco shivered. \"I sometimes think that all the reptiles in Middleworld are in league with that monster Tzelek.\"\n\nMax surveyed the huge scaly body of the iguana as it drank at the water's edge. As if sensing his scrutiny, it stopped drinking and slowly looked up, its hooded eyes appraising him without a trace of fear.\n\n\"Let's build a big fire tonight,\" said Max.\n\nNext day, through rain and sun, they tramped steadfastly on. By late afternoon, the monkeys' noses detected the first tang of sea air. As they rounded one last hill, a fierce storm blew up out of nowhere. And there in front of them, set against a backdrop of black clouds and angry waves, was the city of Ah Pukuh.\n\nIt was every bit as forbidding as Max had imagined it.\n\nAs the thunder raged and the lightning flashed, he looked across at this ancient city that had taken the ways of darkness to its heart. Through the driving rain, he saw how it was built on a finger of rock pointing into the ocean. At the tip of the finger were the ruins of several overgrown buildings, dominated by a tall, thin-stepped pyramid.\n\nThe Pyramid of Death.\n\nAs Max watched, a bolt of lightning struck the pyramid and threw the stones into sharp relief. For a few seconds, the temple on the top platform was illuminated, and he saw to his horror that a huge skull, maybe twenty feet high, had been carved over the doorway.\n\nMax knew that very soon, maybe tomorrow, he'd have to go through that doorway. It seemed unlikely that anyone who entered would live to tell the tale, and his heart beat wildly at the prospect.\n\nThen all was calm again.\n\nThe storm stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sky turned dusky blue and the birds began to sing. As the setting sun cast its glow over the pale green sea, it looked like a scene out of a travel brochure.\n\n\"It all looks so pretty now,\" said Lola, amazed at the transformation.\n\n\"Don't be fooled, my dear,\" said Lady Coco. \"Malevolence hovers over this place like gas off a swamp.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog nodded sadly. \"It was here that the priests of Ah Pukuh developed their dark powers and Tzelek raised the Undead Army from their slumbers.\"\n\n\"Look!\" whispered Lola.\n\nSquinting into the sunset, Max could see several armed guards moving about on the top platform of the pyramid. Perched high up on the decorative roof comb, on a level with the wheeling vultures, another armed guard scanned the surrounding area.\n\n\"They look like Landa's men, all right,\" said Max.\n\nLola craned her neck, trying to count the guards. \"Hermanjilio, you're the tallest. How many do you see?\"\n\nHermanjilio didn't hear the question. He was staring at the Black Pyramid in a daze. \"This is my destiny,\" he whispered. Max guessed he was giving himself a pep talk for the coming battle and resolved to do the same before he went to sleep that night. Having seen the Black Pyramid, he wished he'd never got involved in this mission.\n\nLord 6-Dog ran up a palm tree. \"I count ten guards. But I cannot see the whole plaza.\"\n\n\"How many do you think there are altogether?\" asked Lola.\n\n\"There is only one way to find out,\" replied Lord 6-Dog. \"The first rule of war is to know thine enemy. I therefore propose that Mother and I infiltrate the guards' camp. We will try to ascertain the whereabouts of the Black Jaguar.\"\n\n\"No!\" cried Lola. \"It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Lady Lola,\" said Lady Coco. \"I know you're worried about Chulo and Seri, but Landa's men have no reason to shoot two friendly howlers.\"\n\n\"They don't need a reason,\" said Lola.\n\nLord 6-Dog stood straight and proud like the warrior he used to be. \"Allow us to do the task we were summoned here to do,\" he said, and started off toward the city.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Lady Coco, \"we'll be careful.\" She gave Lola a quick hug before following her son into the valley.\n\nLola stared after her.\n\n\"She'll be fine,\" said Max. \"Come and help me find some firewood.\"\n\nThey busied themselves making camp at the edge of the jungle.\n\nNight fell.\n\nOccasionally, a shout or a curse or a burst of raucous laughter would drift over from the guards' camp. But no monkeys returned.\n\n\"What's taking them so long? Why aren't they back yet?\" fretted Lola.\n\n\"They can take care of themselves,\" Max reassured her.\n\nHermanjilio was less sympathetic. \"Lola, you must get a grip on your emotions,\" he said. \"This is a war. There will be casualties.\"\n\nA shot rang out in the distance.\n\nLola froze.\n\n\"We're doomed, we're doomed,\" wailed Lady Coco, leaping into the middle of the campsite.\n\nLola held out her arms to the monkey, who was shaking with fear. \"Are you all right? What's happened? Where's Chulo?\"\n\n\"He's here,\" said the voice of Lord 6-Dog, climbing down a tree.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" asked Lola. \"What was that shot?\"\n\n\"I know not. It was behind me... probably a guard discharging his weapon at a tree squirrel. Landa's men are as jumpy as a barrel of bullfrogs.\"\n\n\"Tell them the bad news,\" said Lady Coco. \"Tell them what we heard!\"\n\nLord 6-Dog took a deep breath. \"I am sorry to tell thee that the Chee Ken of Death is in Landa's pay. We heard its infernal crowing from behind the cooking hut. I doubt my sleeping draft will work on that scaly devil.\"\n\n\"A chicken? You were scared by a chicken?\" said Max. He and Lola looked at Hermanjilio expectantly. Surely it was time to come clean about Thunderclaw?\n\nApparently not.\n\n\"Don't worry, Lord 6-Dog,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I believe I am more than a match for this Chee Ken.\"\n\n\"Thou art truly a brave man, Lord Hermanjilio.\"\n\n\"To think you would attack a chicken single-handed,\" said Lola in mock admiration.\n\n\"Will you use a knife\u2014or a fork?\" asked Max.\n\nHermanjilio had the grace to look embarrassed. \"Forget the chicken,\" he said. \"Were you able to find out where they're keeping the Black Jaguar, Lord 6-Dog?\"\n\n\"That we were. The lily-livered coward Landa is still hiding out at sea. It is my assumption that the Black Jaguar is with him.\"\n\n\"That sounds likely,\" mused Hermanjilio. \"He probably won't show himself until the last minute. We must be ready to move quickly. How many guards does he have?\"\n\n\"No more than a score.\"\n\nMax looked blank.\n\n\"That's twenty,\" Lola explained. \"Four to one.\"\n\n\"Let's make this easy on ourselves,\" said Hermanjilio. \"I propose that we drug the guards' food and knock out any stragglers with blowgun darts. When Landa comes ashore, we'll ambush him, steal the Black Jaguar, and be long gone before his guards wake up.\"\n\n\"And then?\" objected Lola. \"Surely he'll track us down and kill us? Landa-slash-Tzelek won't give in just like that. There's too much at stake.\"\n\n\"And let's not forget my parents in all this,\" said Max.\n\n\"First we find the Black Jaguar,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Everything else will follow.\"\n\nMax felt intensely irritated. These archaeologists were all the same. Worrying about their precious artifacts when they should be thinking about human beings. Still, at least the Black Jaguar would give them a bargaining chip with Landa. And if this stuff about Tzelek and Ah Pukuh were true, they might even avert the end of the world. Not a bad day's work.\n\n\"So how do we make a clean getaway?\" he asked.\n\n\"I can answer that,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"I know this place like the back of my, um, paw.\"\n\n\"Why would you know the Black Pyramid?\" asked Max suspiciously. \"I thought only bad guys hung out here.\"\n\n\"While Ah Pukuh himself has always been the most cruel and feared of the Maya gods, the city that bore his name was not always rotten to the core. Before it was corrupted by Tzelek, in the days when good and evil were in balance, Ah Pukuh was one of the five sacred pyramids of the Monkey River. We used to come here to celebrate victories in war. The royal party would stand on the top platform and wave to the cheering crowds below. Then\u2014 _poof!_ \u2014when the smoke cleared, we were gone!\"\n\n\"How?\" asked the rest of them in unison.\n\n\"We would make our way down inside the temple to a secret passage known only to the Jaguar Kings. It led to a labyrinth of caves and tunnels that crisscrossed the whole region. There were exit points all over the jungle.\"\n\n\"Like a Maya subway system?\" suggested Max.\n\n\"I know not about this subway, but I can tell thee it was a merry trick. The people loved it. It was almost as popular as sawing the slave in half.\"\n\n\"Except that sawing the slave in half wasn't a trick,\" pointed out Lady Coco. \"You really did saw him in half.\"\n\n\"If I may bring you back to our escape plan,\" said Hermanjilio, \"why doesn't Tzelek know about this passageway?\"\n\n\"Despite their best efforts, high priests did not know everything,\" replied Lord 6-Dog. \"Passageways like this one were a closely guarded secret, passed down from king to king. It was not just a matter of knowing the way. Tests and traps were built into the walls\u2014a trespasser would not survive.\"\n\n\"How do we know the passage is still there after all these centuries?\" asked Lola.\n\n\"Good question,\" said Hermanjilio. \"Lord 6-Dog, perhaps you could check it out for us? As a monkey, you'll be able to sneak around without arousing suspicion.\"\n\n\"I would do so gladly, Lord Hermanjilio, but this stunted body cannot operate the secret door. One of thy number must accompany me.\"\n\n\"I'll go,\" said Lola without hesitation.\n\n\"Thou hast the heart of a true Maya warrior,\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Lola smiled proudly. \"So where's the nearest entrance?\"\n\n\"There are many places to exit the secret passageway, but there is only one point of entry.\"\n\nLola's smile was fading. \"Don't tell me...\"\n\nLord 6-Dog nodded. \"We must enter through the Pyramid of Death.\"\n\n\"Rather you than me,\" said Max. Then he felt guilty because he could see that Lola was having second thoughts. \"No, I'm sure it'll be fine,\" he said. \"I mean, it can't be worse than Chahk or Itzamna, can it?\"\n\nLola turned to Lord 6-Dog. \"Please tell me what to expect.\"\n\n\"Tell her the truth, son,\" instructed Lady Coco. \"Forewarned is forearmed.\"\n\n\"It is not possible to arm thyself against the Undead Army, but I will protect thee, Lady Lola, I promise thee.\"\n\nLola and Max exchanged anxious glances.\n\n\"I don't like the sound of this,\" said Max. \"It's too dangerous. Who are the Undead Army? What are they?\"\n\n\"Before Tzelek cast his spell on them, they were the lords of Ah Pukuh, all thirteen generations of them, entombed in their final resting place. Now they are the earthly bodies for the Demon Warriors of Xibalba. They lie sleeping in the Black Pyramid, dressed in battle gear, awaiting the call to arms. They feel no pain; they have no fear; they cannot die, for they are dead already.\"\n\n\"But you said they're sleeping, right?\" asked Lola in a small voice.\n\n\"Tzelek cannot awaken them until the rising of Venus\u2014\"\n\n\"We better be quick, then,\" she said, with a note of hysteria.\n\nLord 6-Dog took a deep breath. \"Just one more thing...,\" he said.\n\nShe looked at him, her face a mask of fear.\n\n\"As thou knowest, the god Ah Pukuh will rule Middleworld in the new _baktun_. It is possible that he has come to the Black Pyramid to prepare for his coronation. He may be in there at this moment, feasting with his cohorts and planning his reign of terror. I think it unlikely that our paths would cross. As to what would happen if they did, thy guess is as good as mine. But I have sworn to protect thee, Lady Lola, and I will keep my word.\"\n\nIt was Hermanjilio who broke the stunned silence.\n\n\"That's settled, then,\" he said.\n\n\"You mean they shouldn't go?\" said Max, relieved.\n\n\"No, I mean Lord 6-Dog will take good care of our precious Lola. Meanwhile, I'll take a closer look at Landa's defenses. Lady Coco, please come with me and provide the necessary distractions.\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" said Lady Coco.\n\n\"I order thee to be careful, Mother,\" commanded Lord 6-Dog. He dropped his voice. \"Remember, thou art my most loyal and devoted warrior. I need thee by my side in the final battle.\"\n\nLady Coco smiled at him tenderly. \"Don't worry about me, son. After a lifetime of waving off the menfolk, I'm ready for some action. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go and practice my most entertaining monkey mannerisms.\"\n\nThey all got up to start preparing for their various missions.\n\n\"What about me?\" asked Max. \"What should I do?\"\n\nHermanjilio put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"To you, Max, falls the most important job.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" said Max warily.\n\n\"You will stay here and guard the camp.\"\n\nMax could have cried with relief. He could have thrown himself at Hermanjilio's feet and kissed his battered old tennis shoes. _Yes! Yes! Yes!_ He didn't have to go inside the Black Pyramid. He didn't have to go anywhere near Landa's camp. All he had to do was keep the campfire going and toast the odd tortilla.\n\nThen he realized that Lola and Lord 6-Dog were listening.\n\n\"That's not fair,\" he said. \"Why can't I go on a mission like everyone else? I've trained as hard as anyone. I'm ready to go into battle.\"\n\n\"Then take your orders, soldier,\" barked Hermanjilio. \"You don't have the skills to move through the jungle without endangering us all. We all have our own tasks in this unit. You're staying here, and that's final.\"\n\nMax was so happy he could have danced a jig. He pretended to clench his fists in anger. \"Yes, sir,\" he replied, in the surliest voice he could muster.\n\nLola and Lord 6-Dog shot him sympathetic glances.\n\nHe shrugged as if to say, _You go ahead and enjoy yourselves; don't worry about me_. He attempted a brave smile, then turned away quickly so they wouldn't see it broaden into a grin. No zombie armies for him.\n\n\"Get some rest, everyone,\" said Hermanjilio. \"You're going to need it.\"\n\n# Chapter Twenty-two  \nTHE BLACK PYRAMID\n\nSometime in the early hours, Max was awakened by someone grabbing his shoulder and shaking him.\n\n\"Rise and shine,\" said Hermanjilio. \"It's time to get ready.\"\n\n\"Ready for what?\" slurred Max groggily.\n\n\"You can't guard the camp if you're sleeping.\"\n\nMax rubbed his eyes and peered at Hermanjilio. At first he thought he was still dreaming. In the moonlight, all he could see of the archaeologist were the whites of his eyes and the pink of his mouth. The rest of him was covered in black body paint.\n\n\"Great camouflage,\" he said. \"They won't see you coming.\"\n\nHermanjilio put his hands on his hips and turned his head sideways like a warrior on an ancient Maya fresco. \"They won't see me coming,\" he said, \"because I am the Invisible Jaguar of the Night.\"\n\nMax laughed, then realized that Hermanjilio wasn't joking.\n\n\"Go get 'em, tiger,\" he said under his breath, as Hermanjilio melted into the jungle with Lady Coco scampering at his heels.\n\nLola and Lord 6-Dog were getting ready to head off in the other direction. \"Art thou ready?\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\nShe nodded.\n\nMax tried not to show his glee at being left behind. \"Good luck in the Pyramid of Death,\" he said, trying to sound envious.\n\nLola looked at Lord 6-Dog.\n\nLord 6-Dog looked at Max.\n\n\"Art thou ready?\" he asked.\n\nMax's stomach sank into the ground. \"But Hermanjilio said...\"\n\n\"I do not see him here, young lord, dost thou?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog tossed Max a blowgun. He dropped it. \"But I can't come with you,\" he said. \"Who's going to guard the camp?\"\n\n\"It can guard itself, Hoop,\" said Lola. \"Don't let Hermanjilio bully you.\"\n\n\"Thou wast trained as a warrior, not a night watchman. It is only fitting that thou shouldst join us on this skirmish. It will limber thee up for the main battle tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You looked so disappointed when Hermanjilio ordered you to stay behind,\" said Lola. Her voice was filled with admiration, and Max savored it for a moment before pulling himself together.\n\n\"The thing is,\" he said, \"much as I would like to come with you, Hermanjilio is my commanding officer, and I have to obey him. For all I know, this is a test he's set for me. I can't put my own selfish desires before military discipline. I have to stay here.\"\n\nLola stared at him openmouthed. \"You're scared,\" she said.\n\n\"Am not,\" said Max.\n\n\"Prove it,\" she said.\n\nMax hesitated. What should he do? Save his skin and let a girl think he was scared? Or bluff it out and face the horrors of the Black Pyramid?\n\n\"Ready when you are,\" he said, picking up the blowgun.\n\nLola slapped him on the back. \"Way to go, Hoop!\"\n\nAlmost as soon as they set off, he stumbled over a fallen branch and sent assorted jungle birds flapping out of the trees in fright.\n\n\"Maybe Hermanjilio was right about you,\" whispered Lola crossly. \"Watch where you put your feet!\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Max. \"Should I go back?\"\n\n\"Keep marching, soldier.\"\n\nNearly an hour later, they approached the base of the Black Pyramid.\n\nThe closer they got, the more forbidding it looked.\n\nThe main pyramid had been excavated, but dense jungle covered the rest of the site and gave them cover as they crept closer.\n\n\"Wait here,\" whispered Lord 6-Dog.\n\nMax and Lola waited. The jungle around them was shrouded in the sinister monochrome of night. Black flowers, gray leaves, vines like industrial steel cables, thorns like barbed wire. There was no buzz of life, and the air was as thick and heavy as molten tar.\n\nAs they stood in tense silence, Max's heart was in his mouth. It nearly stopped beating altogether when Lord 6-Dog dropped silently out of a tree in front of them.\n\n\"There are two guards on the pyramid. One keeps watch from the topmost platform, one patrols the base,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Wait here, Hoop,\" said Lola. \"Let us deal with them.\"\n\nMax nodded gratefully. He watched them go, then sat down on a log and waited. And waited. Each minute seemed like an hour.\n\nAt last, Lord 6-Dog returned.\n\n\"Follow me,\" he said.\n\nWith a heavy heart, Max followed him up the side of the pyramid. It was an easy climb for a monkey, but steep and difficult for a boy. By the time they reached the top, Max was sure someone would hear his breathless panting.\n\nBut they were safe. The guard was crumpled on the floor, a blowgun dart sticking out of his shoulder.\n\nLola appeared out of the shadows, and Max helped her drag the sleeping guard beneath the carved skull and into the temple. Max shivered. Evil hung in the air like the smell of fried onions around a hot-dog stand.\n\n\"Light thy torches,\" commanded Lord 6-Dog.\n\nThey switched on their flashlights and gasped. The walls were made entirely of human skulls. While Max and Lola gazed around the chamber in horror, Lord 6-Dog pointed up to a particularly gruesome skull.\n\n\"Reach into the eye sockets, young lord,\" he instructed.\n\n\"How about we lift you up and you do it?\" suggested Max.\n\n\"Art thou afraid of a carving?\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"These skulls are cut out of the limestone.\"\n\n\"They look real to me,\" said Max.\n\nLola pushed him out of the way and wiggled her thumb and forefinger into the eye sockets of the skull. \"I feel something,\" she said. \"It's a lever.\"\n\nThe walls were made entirely of human skulls.\n\n\"Good,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"Now push it down with all thy might.\"\n\nThere was a grinding sound, and the wall began to rotate. As one panel of stone covered the doorway, another panel slid away to reveal a small opening in the back wall.\n\n\"Make haste,\" ordered Lord 6-Dog, stepping through the gap, with Lola behind him. The gap was getting smaller all the time, and Max slid through just before it closed up completely.\n\nHe looked back. All along the wall, holes were drilled into the rock to let observers peer through a row of eye sockets into the first room. Max wondered what horrors had been witnessed from this vantage point.\n\n\"From this moment, be on thy guard,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"The pyramids were always gateways between worlds. But remember that, as the new _baktun_ draws near, they are more alive than ever. Watch thy step and do not deviate from the path. Trust nothing, not even thine own perceptions. Have no fear, or they will use thy fears against thee.\" He patted each of them with a gentle paw. \"Stay close,\" he said.\n\nThe passageway spiraled steeply downward. The atmosphere was damp and musty. With each step, Max felt the air close in.\n\nHe wished he had blinders like a horse so he couldn't see the walls on either side of him. They were covered from top to bottom in gory frescoes that looked horribly realistic in the dim light. Muscular warriors in jaguar-skin tunics plunged their lances into bulgy-eyed enemies. Cowering captives begged for mercy. A Maya priest held a human heart above the blood-spattered body of his victim. Shuffling past these terrifying scenes, Max found it all too easy to imagine himself as a captive being led to the sacrificial altar.\n\nThey made their way down the passageway for another twenty feet or so, until they came to a dead end.\n\n\"We'll have to go back,\" whispered Max, trying to sound disappointed.\n\n\"Wait,\" said Lola, \"maybe this is one of those tricks Lord 6-Dog told us about.\"\n\nThey were both wrong.\n\nLord 6-Dog stared intently at the floor and poked in the dust with his foot until he located some finger holes in one of the flagstones. \"Help me, young lord,\" he said.\n\nTogether the boy and the monkey heaved up the ancient trapdoor to reveal a staircase disappearing down into darkness.\n\n\"After you,\" said Max. Then, almost trembling with fear, he followed Lord 6-Dog and Lola into the unknown.\n\nThe staircase led them into an enormous chamber.\n\n\"There's another pyramid inside this one!\" said Max.\n\n\"They used to build new temples on top of old ones,\" explained Lola.\n\n\"Silence!\" commanded Lord 6-Dog. \"We are entering the burial chamber of the lords of Ah Pukuh. Woe betide the fool who dares disturb their slumber. Touch nothing. Tread only in my footsteps.\"\n\nMax wanted to turn tail and run, but Lola pushed him forward.\n\n\"Don't look,\" she said. \"Just follow Lord 6-Dog.\"\n\nThey began to work their way down the steep stairs cut into the terraced walls of the inner pyramid.\n\nMax knew he shouldn't look.\n\nHe tried not to look.\n\nHe looked.\n\nOn both sides of the steps, reclining on every surface, lay the richly attired bodies of hundreds of dead Maya warriors. Some were nothing but crumbling bones. Others moldered in various stages of decay. But many of them looked fresh, as if they had only just died, their skin still glistening with body paint. All of them wore battle gear, and clutched an arsenal of swords, axes, and spears.\n\nIt was too much. Max made a noise. A sort of muffled scream.\n\nThe eyes of the corpses who still had eyes opened in unison. With a creaking of bones, they sat bolt upright, even the skeletons. Their heads swiveled toward Max.\n\nThis time, Lola screamed as well.\n\n\"They will not hurt thee,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"I am sure of it.\" He didn't sound sure. \"Only the Black Jaguar can bring them to their feet. But let us hurry.\"\n\nMax and Lola did not need telling twice. They went flying down the rest of the steps until they reached the base of the inner pyramid. From there, more steps led down through a hole in the floor.\n\nMax plunged through the hole after the other two and into another long, narrow passage. Lola and Lord 6-Dog were already out of sight ahead of him.\n\n\"Wait for me,\" he called. In his panic to catch up, he missed his step and fell flat on his face. The impact knocked his flashlight from his hand. He watched in horror as it skidded along the floor, bounced off a wall, flickered, and went out.\n\n\"Lola! Lord 6-Dog! Help me!\"\n\nOnly the echoes of his own voice replied.\n\nHe got down on his hands and knees, gingerly feeling around on the dusty floor for the flashlight. Eventually, he found it.\n\n_Please work_ , he prayed.\n\nIt didn't.\n\n\"Lola! Lord 6-Dog! Where are you?\"\n\nThis time he thought he heard a faint response.\n\n\"Lola! Lord 6-Dog! Come back!\"\n\n\"Max? Is that you?\" The voice was far away but getting closer.\n\n\"I'm over here! My flashlight's gone out.\"\n\nNow he could definitely hear footsteps getting closer. He breathed a long and heartfelt sigh of relief. For a moment there, he'd thought he was a goner.\n\nFar down the corridor, a light was flickering toward him.\n\n\"Max, where are you?\"\n\n\"Straight ahead,\" he called.\n\nWho was that? Was it Lola? It didn't sound like her. And yet he knew that voice.\n\n\"Stay there, Max! I'm coming!\"\n\n\"Mom?\"\n\nThe nightmare was over! Here he was, alone in the dark in the Pyramid of Death, convinced he was about to be captured by demons, and who should come along to rescue him but the person he loved most in the world! He was weak with amazement and happiness.\n\n\" _Bambino!_ It is you!\" Carla Murphy hugged her only son and kissed his head. \"How can this be? I thought you were still in Boston! I am so happy to see you, but what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"What are _you_ doing here?\"\n\n\"We have so many questions for each other! But all that matters is that we're together again. Come, let's go and tell your father the good news.\" She took Max's hand and began to lead him down the passageway. \"He's just down here with his friends....\"\n\n\"What friends?\"\n\n\"Oh, they're such nice people. I can't wait for you to meet them.\"\n\nWhat was going on? It crossed Max's mind that a group of nerdy archaeologists must have got together to watch the rising of Venus from the Black Pyramid. In which case, he had to warn them to get out.\n\n\"Mom,\" he said, \"it's not safe in here.\"\n\n\" _S\u00ec, s\u00ec, bambino_ ,\" she said absentmindedly as she looked around to get her bearings. \"Ah, here we are....\"\n\nHer candle illuminated a set of ornately carved double doors. She reached out to knock, but before her hand touched the wood, the doors were flung open. Max blinked with surprise as bright light spilled out into the corridor, bringing with it a pungent aroma and a wave of chattering voices.\n\nA figure stepped out to greet them.\n\nIt was Lola.\n\n\"Hoop!\" she cried. \"Isn't this fantastic? I was going to come back for you, but Carla insisted on getting you herself. She wanted to surprise you.\"\n\n\"And she succeeded,\" said Max.\n\nNow that he could see his mother properly, he registered that she was wearing a long, embroidered dress with a huge jade necklace and a feathered headdress.\n\n\"That's quite an outfit, Mom!\"\n\n\"Isn't it fun? Now come and join the party, _bambino_.\"\n\nMax opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He didn't know where to begin. Taking an arm each, Carla and Lola escorted him into a large room lit by flaming torches. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to clean it out and decorate it to look like a lavish Maya palace. Woven rugs hung on the walls, and a roaring fire blazed in the hearth. All around the room, alcoves had been carved into the walls. If it had been a church in Italy, figures of the saints would have looked down from these niches. But in this room, each space was filled by a large owl. At first Max thought they were stuffed, but as he moved, he noticed their unblinking yellow eyes were following him. At ground level, men dressed as Maya lords reclined on cushioned ledges or stood around in merry groups, filling the air with their cigar smoke and raucous laughter. The festivities were evidently in full swing.\n\nOn a raised platform in the center of the room was a stone table, laden with food and drink. Seated at this table, deep in conversation, were Lord 6-Dog and two other Maya lords. Lord 6-Dog appeared to be demonstrating to them the advantages of his monkey body. It was only when Max drew closer that he realized he knew one of the men.\n\n\"Dad?\"\n\nLike his wife, Frank Murphy was dressed in traditional Maya costume. He stood up when he heard Max's voice and beckoned his son over to join them.\n\n\"Max! What a wonderful coincidence! 6-Dog here has been telling me all about it! But you must come and meet our host! I know you're going to get on famously!\"\n\nMax had never seen his father so animated. He was usually a shrinking violet at parties, just looking for an opportunity to escape. But tonight he was smiling and talking ten to the dozen, like some cheesy TV presenter.\n\nMax guessed he'd been drinking elixir.\n\n_Party on, dude_ , he thought. _Tomorrow, we go home_.\n\nThe nightmare was over.\n\nIt was over.\n\nHe hugged his father and shook Lord 6-Dog's hand, then waited politely to be introduced to the third Maya lord at the table.\n\nHe was obviously supposed to be someone very important because his chair was bigger than the others' and was draped with jaguar skins. He was enormously, disgustingly fat, and his chalky white skin was covered in hideous black bruises. He looked like a bloated body washed up on a beach, the corpse of a plague victim perhaps. To make the effect even more ghastly, he wore rouged cheeks and bright red lipstick.\n\nAs if this character's appearance was not striking enough, his tentlike tunic was covered in little bells that looked like they were carved out of real bone and jingled dully at their wearer's every move. As a finishing touch, his thick black hair was tied in an elaborate headdress, decorated with dried human tongues and shriveled eyeballs that bounced on their nerve cords as he spoke.\n\nMax had never seen someone go to so much trouble for a masquerade costume. The fat suit alone must have cost a fortune, and the makeup was incredible. No expense had been spared. He'd even brought along five massive, vicious-looking dogs that sat behind him in a semicircle, growling and slavering.\n\n\"Eat! Drink! Let us celebrate this joyous reunion!\"\n\n\"Max, I'd like to introduce you to our host, Lord Ah Pukuh.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" said Max, reluctantly going along with the joke.\n\nAh Pukuh held up a finger, as if asking Max to wait a moment. Then he leaned to one side, lifted up one of his huge buttocks, and noisily passed gas\u2014the most noxious gas that Max had ever smelled. He thought he might faint from the fumes. Meanwhile everyone else in the room was laughing, cheering, and clapping. Max's mother was leading the applause. Was this the same woman who had a fit if Max drank from the milk carton? She'd evidently relaxed her standards since she'd been in San Xavier.\n\nCarla indicated that Max should sit next to their corpulent host, while she and Lola took chairs opposite.\n\n\"Welcome!\" boomed Ah Pukuh as Max sat down.\n\nWhoa! The blast of foul breath from the guy's black hole of a mouth nearly knocked Max right off the chair. He tried, surreptitiously, to cover his nose with his hand as the fat guy continued to speak. \"Eat! Drink! Let us celebrate this joyous reunion! What will you have, young lord?\"\n\n\"Nothing, thanks,\" said Max, who was feeling queasy.\n\n\"But I insist!\" said Ah Pukuh. He clapped his hands. \"Bring roast gibnut and hot chocolate for our guest!\" he bellowed.\n\nImmediately, a servant appeared with a loaded plate and a pottery goblet. The gibnut still had its head and tail attached. It lay on the plate like a burned rat. Max surveyed it miserably as the servant filled his goblet with a viscous brown liquid the color of old blood.\n\n\"Dig in,\" urged Ah Pukuh.\n\nCarla screamed with laughter. \"Dig in! It's an archaeologist joke,\" she explained to Max. \"Do eat something, _bambino_ ; you don't want to offend dear old Pookie.\"\n\nMax gave the gibnut a desultory poke with his fork. He pushed back from the table in horror as the rodent opened an eye and turned its head toward him. \"Aaaaagggghhhh,\" he shrieked, jumping to his feet.\n\nThe rodent sat up, looked nervously from side to side, leapt onto Max's shoulder, and sprang from there onto the floor. With a nod from Ah Pukuh, the waiting dogs ran after it and gobbled it down.\n\n\"Mom,\" whispered Max, \"can we get out of here?\"\n\n\"But why, _bambino_? The party has only just started.\"\n\n\"I just want to go home.\"\n\n\"Home? But, _caro mio_ , this is our home now.\"\n\n\"You mean we're going to live in San Xavier?\"\n\n\"I mean that Pookie has invited us to live here, in the Black Pyramid.\"\n\n\"Can we just drop the joke, Mom? I'm tired. I've had enough. You have no idea what I've been through. I thought you might be dead.\"\n\n\"Dead?\" Carla threw her head back and laughed. \"We will never die!\"\n\n\"I'll drink to that!\" Lola cackled as they clinked their goblets in a toast.\n\n\"Mom, have you been drinking elixir?\"\n\n\"Yes, and it's even more delicious than Chianti. Be a good boy and find me some more, would you?\"\n\nMax went over to his father. \"I think Mom's had too much to drink,\" he said. \"I can't get any sense out of her. Will you tell me what's going on?\"\n\n\"Of course I will, Max. We have such good news for you.\"\n\n\"Good news?\"\n\n\"Yes, jumping into that cenote was the best thing we ever did.\"\n\n\"It was?\"\n\n\"If we hadn't done that, we'd never have met Ah Pukuh and the gang. We made friends with them in Xibalba. They're a great crew. And they'll be running the world soon, so we're in a good position. It's all ours for the asking, Max... we'll be rich beyond our wildest dreams.\"\n\n\"Thy father speaks the truth,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"It pains me now to think of all the time I have wasted in pointless combat with my brother Tzelek. Far better that he and I should work together. The entire world will be ours to command.\"\n\n\"You've both gone mad,\" said Max. \"Why are you obsessed with money and power all of a sudden?\"\n\n\"Isn't that what everyone wants, Max? It's why we all go to work.\"\n\n\"No, it's not. You love archaeology, Dad! You've always said you'd do it even if they didn't pay you.\"\n\n\"I've had it with old pots! Be honest, Max, haven't you ever wished that we led a more glamorous life? Or that we lived in a bigger house? What about a hot tub? An indoor pool? One of those plasma TVs you like so much?\"\n\n\"Dad, you sound like the shopping channel. I thought you disapproved of the consumer society.\"\n\n\"That's what I'm trying to tell you, Max. I've changed. Everything's changed. From now on, we're going to live like Hollywood stars. We'll take our vacations in the south of France or anywhere you want to go. We'll reserve a permanent suite at Disney World, if you like. We'll employ a chef to make you fresh pizza every day and all the homemade ice cream you can eat. How does that sound?\"\n\n\"I don't want any of it, Dad. I just want our old life back.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on, Max, there must be something you want. What was that game you kept asking me to buy back in Boston?\"\n\n\"The new limited edition _Hellhounds 3-D_?\"\n\n\"That's the one. Limited edition, my foot! We'll commission the designers to create an edition just for you\u2014 _starring_ you, if you like. Now that's what I call a limited edition! And you'll have all the time in the world to play it, because you need never go to school. You'll have enough money to buy everything your heart desires, so you can just laze around for all eternity.\"\n\n\"Professor Murphy!\" scolded Lola. \"Life isn't just about buying things.\"\n\n\"At last,\" said Max, \"the voice of reason.\"\n\n\"Life is also about the things that money can't buy,\" Lola continued, \"like revenge. Think about it, Max. Chan Kan really made a fool of you with that pepper soup. Wouldn't you like to give him a taste of his own medicine?\"\n\n\"And dost thou not hate the way Lord Hermanjilio orders thee around?\" asked Lord 6-Dog. \"Wouldst thou not like to turn the tables?\"\n\n\"What about that teacher who failed you in woodworking just because you sawed his desk in half?\" put in his father.\n\n\"And that girl who stood you up in seventh grade?\" added his mother. \"She'll be sorry when she sees you driving around Boston in a red Ferrari....\"\n\nMax put his hands over his ears. \"What are you all saying?\" he cried. \"I know I used to be greedy and materialistic\u2014\"\n\n\"And selfish,\" interrupted Lola.\n\n\"And selfish,\" added Max, \"but I'm not like that anymore.\"\n\n\"Of course you're like that,\" boomed Ah Pukuh from his throne. \"All boys your age are like that. And I'm happy to say that most of them never grow out of it. Why, I can remember...\" His reminiscences were drowned out by a barrage of flatulence.\n\n\"The question is, _bambino_ ,\" said Carla, \"are you with us?\"\n\n\"I'm your son, aren't I?\"\n\n\"The continuation of that filial arrangement,\" said Frank Murphy, \"depends on whether or not you decide to turn over a new leaf.\"\n\n\"Is there something in particular you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Since you ask, there is. We would like you to sign in blood right now, committing yourself to the protection of Lord Ah Pukuh. He'll be like a godfather to you and spoil you rotten.\"\n\n\"Just sign,\" wheedled his mother, \"and we'll be together for all eternity.\"\n\n\"Obey thy parents,\" commanded Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"It's a good deal, Hoop,\" added Lola.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" said Max. \"It sounds creepy. I need to think.\"\n\nThe mood in the room changed instantly. The light hardened from a rosy glow of flames to a cold blue ashy glare. The laughter died down. The dogs growled and licked their chops.\n\n\"He needs to think,\" said his mother, mimicking him.\n\n\"He's never needed to think before,\" said his father. \"Why start now?\"\n\n\"What a loser,\" agreed Lola in disgust.\n\n\"Make him breathe smoke from burning chili peppers until he obeys,\" suggested Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Why are you all picking on me?\" asked Max. \"What happened to the happy reunion?\"\n\n\"It might have been a happy reunion for you,\" said his father pointedly.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"To be honest, son, we were happier without you.\"\n\n\"The truth is, _bambino_ , we've never liked you, not from the moment you were born.\" Carla leaned over to Lola. \"You know the type,\" she said in a stage whisper, \"always crying and puking. The mess he made on my silk shirts! I used to pay strangers on the street to hold him so I wouldn't have to. Then there was all the bed-wetting and the nose-picking and the whining. He made my life a living hell.\"\n\n\"Mom...?\"\n\nHis father put an arm around him. \"The truth hurts, eh, son? But having you ruined our lives. We never risked having another child in case it turned out to be as boring as you. I know you thought I worked long hours because I was so interested in the ancient Maya. But, in truth, I just didn't want to come home to you. Half the time, I wasn't even in the office\u2014I was at the movies or a ball game. Other fathers would be there with their sons, but not me. I couldn't bear to be near you....\"\n\nMax's jaw dropped. He couldn't believe his ears. Occasionally, when his parents had refused to let him stay out late or said no to the most expensive sneakers, he'd suspected he was adopted. But he'd never dreamed they hated him this much.\n\n\"You need to start pulling your weight in this family, Max. Just sign the paper and we'll make a fresh start,\" said his father.\n\n\"Yes,\" said his mother, smiling. \"We'll forgive you for everything and be a happy family. It's up to you, _bambino_.\"\n\nIt was tempting to sign and have it done with.\n\nHe was afraid that, if he didn't, he'd never see his parents again.\n\nAfraid that he'd be alone in the world...\n\nAfraid that...\n\nAfraid?\n\n_They will use thy fears against thee_.\n\nMax took a deep breath.\n\nWhat was he afraid of?\n\nThat these sadistic bullies could possibly be his parents?\n\nThat any parents were better than no parents?\n\nThat his parents had never loved him?\n\nHe considered the evidence.\n\nHe remembered when he was little, sitting on his mother's knee and waving to the moon Dog. He remembered all those Saturday-morning soccer games when his father had cheered him on in the rain. He remembered the night the laser printer broke down, and his parents had stayed up till dawn trying to get his fifty-page project on state capitals printed out. He'd gone to bed in tears. But when he came down for breakfast, there was his project, all fifty pages, tied up in a big red ribbon.\n\nWould they have done these things if they thought he was just a nuisance?\n\nThen he remembered his mother's expression on the evening they left for San Xavier, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that his parents loved him.\n\nHe looked at the faces around the table and saw their hate-filled eyes for what they were. He'd let himself be tricked by the demons of hell.\n\nMustering all his courage, he leaned over to Ah Pukuh. \"Is that all you've got, fatso?\" he said.\n\nAh Pukuh laughed loud and long, like the sound of a saw cutting down trees. His multiple chins rippled and shook with merriment.\n\nMax felt very small and very crushable.\n\n\"I've only just begun,\" said Ah Pukuh. \"I have the next four hundred years to torture you, Max Murphy. I know everything about you and I will make you suffer in ways you cannot yet imagine. Surrender now, or you will regret it.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Max. He wanted to sound brave and manly and defiant, but his voice came out as a squeak.\n\n\"Don't do this to us, son,\" cried his parents, as chunks of flesh fell off their faces and Max could see patches of white skull peeking through their peeling, shriveled scalps.\n\nLola touched his arm with a skeletal finger. \"Save me,\" she said. \"There's still time to sign.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Max.\n\nAnd when he looked again, she was a decomposing corpse.\n\nThe stench was overpowering.\n\n\"I told you it wouldn't work,\" said the corpse of Lola. \"We should have just ripped out his heart, like I said. Come on, Pus, you lost the bet. Pay up.\"\n\n\"Not so quick, Scab Stripper. How about double or nothing?\" said the demon of pus, who had so recently been posing as Max's mother.\n\n\"Let's suck his brains out,\" suggested the remains of Lord 6-Dog, who was now just random bits of fur and gristle.\n\n\"Not for me, Blood Gatherer. I'm on a diet,\" said the skull of Frank Murphy. One of his eyeballs fell out, bounced on the table, and rolled onto the floor. An owl swooped down and carried it back to his perch.\n\n\"Set the hounds on him,\" ordered Ah Pukuh.\n\n\"Perfect!\" said the demon of pus. \"Apparently, the boy likes to play a game called _Hellhounds 3-D_. Let us see how he likes the real thing.\"\n\nThe five massive dogs were snarling and foaming at the mouth, waiting for the signal to attack. Max was shaking. He was out of tricks. He was going to be torn limb from limb by a pack of devil dogs in the halls of Ah Pukuh, god of violent and unnatural death. It was certainly a fitting end for a gamer.\n\nAnd then he realized how to win. These guys were no more real than the characters in his games. They didn't understand love or courage or truth. They were casebook cartoon bad guys, motivated by hate and greed. If he refused to play by their rules, he might be able to blow the cosmic circuitry.\n\nAh Pukuh clicked his fat greasy fingers.\n\nThe dogs leapt.\n\n\"I know my parents love me.\"\n\nMax saw the dogs' yellow eyes and their sharp yellow teeth.\n\n\"I am not afraid of you.\"\n\nHe smelled their foul breath and felt their burning saliva that dripped like acid from their foaming jaws.\n\n\"Lord 6-Dog will protect me.\"\n\nTheir bodies barreled against him, and their claws knocked him down. He closed his eyes, bracing himself for the first bite.\n\nAll was quiet.\n\nHe didn't move.\n\n\"Hoop?\" said a voice.\n\nHe opened his eyes slowly. He was back in the corridor, lying flat where he'd fallen in the dark. Lola was crouching over him, holding his flashlight.\n\n\"Hoop!\" she cried. \"What happened to you?\"\n\n\"You won't believe it,\" said Max as she helped him to his feet. \"I've just met Ah Pukuh. But I stood my ground. You would have been proud of me.\"\n\n\"You weren't scared, then?\"\n\n\"A bit. But old Pookie is basically all talk.\"\n\nLola raised a sardonic eyebrow. \"He's not the only one,\" she said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" asked Max, baffled.\n\nShe pointed at his jeans.\n\nHe looked down. There was a large wet patch at the top of his legs. Had he really been so scared of the dogs that he'd wet himself?\n\nProbably.\n\nHe was mortified.\n\n\"There were these five huge dogs\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, did the doggies scare ooo? Poor lickle baby!\" She sneered. \"We should've bwought some diapers for the lickle baby!\"\n\n\"Stop it! I'm not a baby!\" yelled Max. \"You don't know what it was like.\"\n\n\"You're a bit old to go around wetting yourself, Hoop. I'd see a doctor, if I were you. Just wait till the others hear about this\u2014\"\n\n\"No, please,\" begged Max, \"don't tell them.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because it's embarrassing.\"\n\n\"Are you worried about what they'll think of you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, I can tell you what they think of you. They think the same as I do\u2014that you're a jerk. A useless little jerk with stupid red hair and a face like a rat with acne.\"\n\n\"Stop it, Lola! I thought we were friends!\"\n\nShe snorted with derision. \"Why would a hot girl like me ever be friends with a jerk like you? I've been leading you on for a laugh, but now I'm going to tell you the truth. You're sad, you're ugly, you're boring, and you're disgusting. Even when you're not soaked in pee, you smell. You've got bad breath, and those zits on your chin make me feel sick. Nobody likes you, Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy. Even your name is stupid. Everybody's laughing at you behind your back, and they'll laugh even harder when I tell them about this. If I were you, I'd just run away now while there's time.\"\n\nMax sank back to the floor in misery. He felt as gutted as a fish on a slab. It was so unfair. He could see that the old Max Murphy, the couch potato who'd landed at San Xavier airport, hadn't been much of a catch. But he thought he'd improved since then. His face was tan and his body was fitter. He'd tried to be a better person on the inside, too, since that day on the Monkey River.\n\nBut, apparently, it all counted for nothing.\n\nAll Max's bravado melted away.\n\nThere was no point in going on.\n\nMaybe his parents didn't love him after all. How could anyone love him? He was a failure. A creep. He'd always suspected that girls found him repulsive. Now his worst fear had come true.\n\nWait a minute...\n\nHis worst fear!\n\n_They will use thy fears against thee_.\n\nHe looked up. Lola was grinning triumphantly.\n\n\"Give me a kiss,\" he said.\n\nHer smile disappeared.\n\n\"Come on,\" he coaxed, \"why not? You're not such a catch yourself, you know. You've got a big nose and a bad haircut, and you're so bossy you give me a headache. I think you'd be lucky to kiss a hunk like me.\"\n\n\"What?\" she said incredulously.\n\n\"Face it, Monkey Girl, you can't get to me because you're not real. You're a product of my imagination. I don't have to listen to anything you say.\"\n\nHe just had time to grab the flashlight before she melted back into the wall.\n\n_Phew. That was a close one_.\n\nMax got to his feet and started to make his way quickly down the corridor. Running around a corner, he ran smack into Lola.\n\n\"Hoop!\" she cried. \"What happened to you?\"\n\n\"My flashlight broke....\" He flicked the switch to demonstrate, and it came on instantly.\n\n\"It seems to be working now,\" she said.\n\nWas she real or was she a ghost?\n\nHe shone the flashlight on his crotch.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she asked, appalled.\n\nIt was dry. She was real.\n\n\"Hoop, what are you doing?\" she repeated.\n\n\"Nothing.\" He pointed the flashlight away from him. \"It's just that things got a bit weird for a while.\"\n\nHe told her all about the phantom party, except for the bit at the end where her evil twin had appeared to him in the passageway. No need for her to know that his worst fear in the world concerned girls and what they thought of him.\n\n\"Poor Hoop, that sounds awful. Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"So, while we were separated, did Ah Pukuh get at you, too?\" he asked.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"What with?\"\n\nShe shuddered. \"I'll tell you another time. Now, which way? This place has as many tunnels as a termite nest....\"\n\n\"Wait!\" said Max. \"There's something I have to ask you.\"\n\n\"What is it, Hoop? We have to hurry\u2014\"\n\n\"Do I have bad breath?\"\n\n\"What? This isn't the moment to discuss personal hygiene,\" she snapped. \"We have to find Lord 6-Dog.\"\n\n\"Thou hast found him,\" said the monkey, stepping out of the shadows.\n\nMax peered into the monkey's eyes. \"It is you, isn't it?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog held his gaze. \"Indeed it is,\" he said. \"But am I to assume that the spirits have been testing thee with phantasms?\"\n\nMax nodded. \"Did they test you, too, Your Majesty?\"\n\n\"My test will be Tzelek,\" said Lord 6-Dog gravely. \"Remember, this is but a rehearsal. No matter what thou hast endured this night, young lord, worse is to come. So far thou hast been menaced with magic and illusion; on the morrow, thou wilt face the reality of pure evil. Until Tzelek is vanquished, each one of us is in immeasurable danger.\"\n\n\"Do you still think we can vanquish him?\" asked Max doubtfully, but Lord 6-Dog had bounded ahead down the passageway and didn't hear. Max and Lola hurried after him, wrapped in their own thoughts.\n\n\"Was that a yes or a no on the bad-breath question?\" he asked.\n\nShe stopped dead and made a noise like a cat when someone steps on its tail.\n\n\"That bad?\" he said, horrified, cupping his hand on his chin and trying to direct his breath upward so he could smell it himself.\n\nBut Lola was pointing straight ahead. \"Oh no!\" she said. \"I can't bear it.\"\n\nOnce again, the passageway ended in a solid wall. But this time there was no trapdoor, no way forward.\n\n\"What now?\" wailed Lola, reprising her tortured cat noise. \"I just want to get out of here.\"\n\n\"Please don't say we have to go back,\" said Max. \"Anything but that.\"\n\n\"Tsk, tsk,\" Lord 6-Dog chided them. \"Have faith.\"\n\nUsing faint indentations in the wall, he began to climb up the stones. When he reached the ceiling, Max and Lola were astonished to see his head and then his body and finally his tail disappear through the solid rock. A few moments later his head reappeared upside down.\n\n\"The passage is free to the caves,\" he announced. \"We have our escape route. Now follow me and do not hesitate.\"\n\nMax prepared himself for pain as he forced his head up against the ceiling. To his surprise, he met with no resistance, and was able to climb straight through, up into another passageway. The air was less oppressive here and, giddy with relief, he sensed that their escape plan was going to work. The rest was easy, and Lord 6-Dog led them through a network of caves and tunnels, out into the sweet, wet, humming, buzzing, living forest.\n\nIt was daylight by the time they got back to the camp, but Lady Coco and Hermanjilio had not returned.\n\n\"Take a rest,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"I will keep a lookout.\"\n\nHe took off through the trees.\n\nMax and Lola were dead tired and threw themselves down on the grass.\n\n\"What a night!\" said Max.\n\n\" _S\u00ed, \u00a1qu\u00e9 noche_! A most interesting night,\" said a voice behind them.\n\nThey jumped to their feet and spun around.\n\nA dark-haired man dressed all in black clicked his fingers loudly. Men in black sidled out from among the trees and surrounded Max and Lola.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Max, but he knew the answer.\n\n\"I am Count Antonio de Landa,\" said the Spaniard, pointing his goateed chin in the air and making that melodramatic cape-flicking movement that Max had first seen at the hotel in Puerto Muerto.\n\n\"But the big question\"\u2014the count sneered, striding over to Lola and grabbing her roughly by the jaw\u2014\"is who are you?\" As she fought to free herself, he held her face steady in his black leather gloves. \"The gods always like the pretty ones,\" he said. \"They will be pleased with you. Are you ready to sacrifice yourself, my dear? You have an appointment at the altar.\"\n\n\"Spanish scum!\" she yelled, and spat in his face.\n\nHe slapped her hard across the cheek. \"Take them to the ship.\"\n\n# Chapter Twenty-three  \nCAPTURED\n\nW _hump. Whump. Whump_. The high-powered speedboat met each wave head-on as they raced across the ocean. Max and Lola were lying on the floor of the boat, drenched by rain and saltwater spray, their hands and feet bound with rope, their mouths tightly gagged.\n\nIt had all been going so well. Max had been so relieved to get out of the Black Pyramid and get back to the safety of the camp. He was proud of himself for standing up to Ah Pukuh and his demons. And even though their impersonations had been grotesque, their attempts had reassured him that his real parents weren't far away.\n\nAgainst all odds, victory had been within their grasp. Now Hermanjilio, Lord 6-Dog, and Lady Coco would have to fight the forces of evil alone. When Venus rose in the morning, Lola would be tied to the sacrificial altar and... what? What fate did Landa have in store for Max? Would he be sacrificed, too?\n\nHe strained to turn his head until he could see Lola. Her hair was plastered to her face. She looked as seasick as he felt. He thought he might puke at any moment. How would that work with the gag? It was too disgusting to contemplate.\n\nJust when he thought he could hold it in no longer, the boat stopped.\n\nA white yacht towered over them.\n\n_La Espada, Cadiz_.\n\nSomeone yanked him up roughly and hustled him and Lola into a cargo net. Before he knew what was happening, they were scooped off their feet and winched into the air. Next minute they were hanging a few feet above the surface of the ocean. Max thought he could see a shark fin cutting through the water toward them.\n\nWould he rather be eaten first or watch Lola being eaten?\n\nThere was no time to decide, for the cargo net suddenly lurched, swung around, and dumped them heavily onto the deck, like two fat codfish.\n\nLola was carried away in one direction, while Max was dragged off in the other. Two guards manhandled him roughly along gangways and up stairways until they reached a carpeted corridor on an upper deck. Here the guards untied him and removed his gag.\n\n\"Where are you taking me?\" asked Max.\n\nOne of the guards answered in a torrent of Spanish. Max was none the wiser.\n\n\"Is it to Landa?\" guessed Max. \"I have nothing to say to that pig.\"\n\nThe guards seemed to find this hilarious. They nodded and leered as they pushed him toward a set of varnished wooden doors at the end of the corridor.\n\nSo this was it. The long-awaited confrontation with Count Antonio de Landa.\n\nMax wondered if the count had an onboard torture chamber. Well, at least if he was busy torturing Max, it meant he wasn't engaged in sacrificing Lola. Wow! Max got a lump in his throat as he realized that was probably the most selfless thought he'd ever had in his life. But what was the point of being a reformed character if a sadistic Spaniard was about to pull out your fingernails one by one?\n\nMax's thoughts were spiraling into hysteria when the guards pushed him headlong through the doors.\n\nHe went sprawling onto the carpet. When he staggered to his feet, he found himself in a plush, wood-paneled stateroom. There was a long table in the center of the room and red velvet banquettes around the edge. At the far end, a man was standing with his back to the room, gazing out to sea. He was wearing a white linen suit.\n\n\"Uncle Ted!\"\n\nUncle Ted turned around. His face looked even more furrowed. He had dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like he hadn't slept for at least a week.\n\n\"Uncle Ted, what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I could ask you the same question, young man.\"\n\n\"This is Landa's yacht! Are you in league with him? I might have known it!\"\n\n\"I think we should start this discussion with an apology.\"\n\n\"It better be good,\" said Max.\n\nHe waited.\n\n\"An apology from you,\" clarified Uncle Ted.\n\n\"Me? For what?\"\n\n\"Let me think,\" said Uncle Ted. \"For betraying my trust, perhaps? For stealing the Red Jaguar? For doing your utmost to destroy my business?\"\n\n\"Your business?\" Max stared at him in disbelief. \"Don't you understand that the world is about to end and you won't even have a business if we don't stop your friend Landa from waking the Undead Army?\"\n\nUncle Ted looked alarmed. \"What have they done to you? I heard you've been keeping bad company, Max. Have they brainwashed you?\"\n\n\"Me, brainwashed? That's a good one. So how long have you been involved in this plot, Uncle Ted?\"\n\n\"Plot?\" Uncle Ted sounded genuinely puzzled.\n\n\"The plot for Landa-slash-Tzelek to take over the world.\"\n\n\"That's enough, Max!\" said Uncle Ted. \"Can you imagine how worried I've been? First your parents disappear. Then you run off into the jungle with a band of thieves. If this is what it's like to have children, then\u2014\" He stopped himself abruptly and continued in a colder, more businesslike tone. \"All I'm trying to do is recover a valuable artifact for my client. If you'd just tell me what you've done with the Red Jaguar, perhaps we can sort it out without recourse to the law.\"\n\nMax narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Uncle Ted. Either he was an Oscar-worthy actor or he really didn't know Landa's plans.\n\n\"Your client has been possessed by the spirit of an evil Maya priest. He's using the Black Jaguar to release the demon warriors of the underworld.\"\n\n\"Oh, grow up, Max! I don't think you understand how serious this is. Larceny, assault, sabotage, property damage... you and your girlfriend are in a lot of trouble.\"\n\n\"She's not my girlfriend,\" muttered Max. \"If you could just get us off this boat, I'll tell you everything....\"\n\nUncle Ted ran his hands through his hair.\n\n\"I'm afraid that's not possible. The matter is out of my hands. Thanks to your delinquent behavior, Count de Landa is calling the shots.\" Uncle Ted lowered his voice. \"You know I'm no fan of his, Max, but you've forced me to take his side. He's my client and I made a deal with him. Now he wants his merchandise and he won't give up until he gets it. He's ruthless, Max. So stop all this nonsense right now.\"\n\n\"It's not nonsense. It was you who told me that if Landa's journal was not a fake, it could destroy the world.\"\n\n\"I should have kept my mouth shut.\"\n\n\"But Uncle Ted\u2014\"\n\nMax saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned, once again expecting to see Landa. But it was Lucky Jim. He was sitting there, arms folded, staring straight ahead.\n\n\"Lucky, you're a Maya\u2014you know I'm telling the truth. Or is it you who's in league with Landa? I don't know who to trust anymore.\"\n\nLucky Jim ignored him.\n\nUncle Ted stepped forward and stared into Max's eyes. \"Paranoia, stealing, delusions... Have you been taking drugs?\"\n\n\"Of course not! I'm telling you the truth, Uncle Ted! You said yourself that anything can happen, that things are never what they seem around here. If you don't help me stop him, Landa is going to sacrifice Lola to Ah Pukuh.\"\n\nUncle Ted sat down heavily on a banquette. He looked like he was trying hard to keep his temper. \"Let me spell it out. All the count wants is the return of the Red Jaguar.\"\n\n\"No, Uncle Ted, you're wrong! Landa wants to rule the world! Why do you think he's collecting Jaguar Stones?\"\n\n\"It's not my business, Max.\"\n\n\"It is your business! It's all our business! Someone has to stop him! I know you deal with some shady characters, Uncle Ted, but surely even you can recognize pure evil when you see it?\"\n\n\"That's enough, Max!\" Uncle Ted put his head in his hands.\n\nMax turned back to Lucky Jim.\n\n\"Lucky, you know what I'm talking about!\" he said. \"You understand the power of the Jaguar Stones!\"\n\nLucky Jim shrugged. He looked uncomfortable.\n\n\"You were right,\" Max continued, \"the ancient Maya are still trying to run things in this jungle. Last night, in the Black Pyramid, I met Ah Pukuh\u2014\"\n\n\"You tourists should stay out of our temples,\" said Lucky Jim.\n\n\"No!\" yelled Max. \"We've gone way past that. It's not about who's a tourist and who's a Maya. We're all in this together. You can't ignore history anymore, Lucky Jim, because it's playing out right in front of us. Your children will ask you why you didn't try to save them from the living hell that will be their lives when Ah Pukuh takes over. Are you going to blame that on the tourists? Or are you going to do something about it, while there's still time?\" Max's face, red with fury, was right in Lucky's face. Their noses almost touched. \"At least you could tell Uncle Ted that I'm not crazy.\"\n\nSilence.\n\nMax took a softer tone. \"We need you, Lucky! There's going to be a huge battle tonight between good and evil. The immortal Lord 6-Dog is out there right now. We used the Green Jaguar of Itzamna to bring him back. He's inside the body of a howler monkey, and Tzelek is inside Landa....\"\n\nMax's voice trailed off as even he realized how ridiculous it all sounded.\n\nLucky Jim got up and left the room.\n\n\"Now you've gone too far,\" said Uncle Ted, \"making fun of Lucky's heritage. I'm disgusted with you, Max. Here I am, trying to protect you....\"\n\n\"Don't give me that,\" said Max. He was past caring what he said. \"You hate me just like you hate my father.\"\n\nUncle Ted looked genuinely appalled. \"That's not true,\" he said quietly. \"It took me a day or two, but I grew fond of you, Max. You reminded me of myself at your age. Sure, you were a little spoiled, but I thought a few weeks in San Xavier would change that.\"\n\n\"I have changed, Uncle Ted.\"\n\n\"But, sadly, not for the better. Listen to yourself. Evil spirits, human sacrifices, demon warriors... I'm too frustrated to talk to you anymore. You should have stayed in your room that night, Max. You gave me your word and you broke it.\"\n\n\"But my word wasn't good enough for you, was it? I was going to stay in my room until I realized you'd locked the door. Why couldn't you have trusted me? You locked me away like a prisoner.\"\n\nUncle Ted sounded close to tears. \"No, I locked you away like something precious. I just wanted to keep you safe, Max.\" The pain in Uncle Ted's eyes hardened into resolve. \"But now I can see the error of my ways. I'll give you a little time to think about things, and then I'm handing you over to Landa.\"\n\nWith that, Uncle Ted swept out of the stateroom.\n\nThe two guards, who'd evidently been waiting outside the door, barged in and grabbed Max again. They looked disappointed to find him in one piece and did their best to injure him themselves as they pushed and pulled him through hatches and down ladders to the bottom of the ship.\n\nAt the end of a long metal gangway, a door was unlocked and Max was pushed in. He found himself in a small cabin with no porthole and no furniture except for a sink and a metal bunk bolted to the wall.\n\nNow what? Max checked every inch of the cabin for a way out. He pressed his ear against the door, but he could hear nothing. He tried kicking the door for a while, but no one came. He paced up and down. He lay on the bunk. As the hours went by, he grew more and more wretched. This waiting and not knowing was as bad as any torture the creepy count could have devised.\n\nWhat was happening? Where was Lola? How would Hermanjilio and two talking monkeys be able to outwit Landa and all his men? The more he thought about it, the more his heart sank. Whichever way you looked at it, they were in big trouble. And there was nothing he could do to help.\n\nAs he lay on the bunk in that airless cabin, he gradually dozed off. He awoke with a start to the blaring of an alarm. There were men shouting and the sounds of running feet all over the boat. Someone ran past his door and up the stairs. He heard motorboats starting up, revving their engines, and roaring off.\n\nThen all was quiet again.\n\nWhat was going on? Had something happened onshore?\n\nHad Hermanjilio made his move?\n\nMax banged on the door. He kicked the walls. He shouted. After a while, he thought he heard a noise in the corridor. He held his breath and listened as closely as he could.\n\nYes, there it was again. There was something or someone out there.\n\n\"Let me out! Let me out!\" he shouted.\n\nHe heard the lock slowly turning.\n\nSuddenly, the door flew open and a familiar figure half stepped and half fell into the cabin.\n\n\"Uncle Ted! What's happening?\"\n\n\"Some kind of emergency... all gone ashore... good time to escape...\"\n\nMax took in his uncle's slurred speech, his unsteady gait, and the whiskey fumes that wafted from his pores. \"Are you all right, Uncle Ted?\"\n\n\"Had a drink or two with the captain... to get him out of the way.... He's sleeping it off... on the bridge.... You must go now.\"\n\nBefore Max could ask any more questions, Uncle Ted lurched back down the gangway toward the stairs. When Max caught up with him on the deck, he was leaning perilously over the guardrail and pointing at something off to stern.\n\n\"That'll get you to shore.... Think you can handle it?\"\n\nMax peered over the side. A little boat with an outboard motor bobbed below, straining at its rope.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" said Max.\n\n\"Zodiac inflatable... jus' pull the cord and slam it into gear....\"\n\n\"No, I mean, why are you helping me escape?\"\n\nUncle Ted looked like he might cry. \"Turns out I do owe you an apology, Max.... The way they dragged that poor girl off... I think you were right about Landa.... I should have listened\u2014\"\n\n\"Lola?\" interrupted Max. \"Where did they take her?\"\n\n\"To shore...\"\n\n\"I have to go; I have to save her.\"\n\n\"Save your own skin, Max.... Get as far away from here as possible.\"\n\n\"I'm going to find Lola. Are you coming?\" said Max coldly.\n\nHis uncle shook his head. \"What we should do\"\u2014he staggered slightly\u2014\"what we should do is call the police.\"\n\n\"There's no time! Don't you understand? Landa's going to sacrifice Lola. We need to stop him!\"\n\nMax was pulling his uncle toward the ladder down to the Zodiac, but Uncle Ted clumsily disengaged himself.\n\n\"Uncle Ted, come on. Lola needs us!\"\n\n\"Sorry, Max... I'm not the hero type....\"\n\n\"Are you scared of Landa?\" sneered Max.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Uncle Ted.\n\n\"So you'd let Lola die rather than face up to him?\"\n\n\"We Murphys look after number one.\"\n\n\"Well, this Murphy has learned that you can't live your life that way.\"\n\n\"I tried to be a hero once.... It went wrong.... She died.... I should have just called the police\u2014\"\n\nMax impatiently interrupted, gripping his uncle's arms to call him back from his drunken ramblings. \"Where's Lucky Jim? He could help me.\"\n\n\"Lucky? I think you've upset him, Max. He's locked himself in his cabin and he won't come out. I can hear him chanting, and it smells like he's burning incense. If I didn't know him better, I'd think he was doing some sort of Maya ritual. I don't know what's come over him.\" Uncle Ted hiccuped loudly.\n\n\"With Lucky on our side, we might have stood a chance.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to try and talk to him?\"\n\n\"There's no time,\" said Max, climbing over the side of the yacht. \"Wish me luck.\"\n\n\"Max... wait!\"\n\n\"Are you coming with me?\"\n\n\"No, I just want to give you this.\"\n\nUncle Ted passed down a diver's knife on a belt.\n\n\"Good luck, Max.\"\n\nWhen Max was safely aboard, Uncle Ted untied the rope and shouted down instructions. Max pulled the cord with all his might, and the engine roared to life. After a few false starts when he butted the yacht like an angry ram, he got the hang of steering and the Zodiac sped away.\n\nSoon Max could make out the shore and the sinister outline of the Black Pyramid. He headed straight for it, with the motor flat-out. His heart surged, happy to be free again. His stomach, which apparently knew something his heart did not, shrank into a tight ball of fear.\n\nWhat grisly sight would be waiting for him at the temple?\n\nAfter a while, he heard the motor of the yacht behind him. The captain must have woken up and discovered him missing.\n\nHe willed his little boat on across the waves. But, as fast as his inflatable was, the yacht quickly gained on him. The bow got closer and closer until he could feel it looming over him. The captain was clearly trying to run him down.\n\nMax turned sharply. The yacht turned as sharply as it could, but it was no match for the agility of a Zodiac. He was confident that he could outmaneuver it. His only worry was that the captain might radio ahead and tell Landa's men to meet him in their high-speed motor launches.\n\nIn fact, Max should have been worrying about something else entirely.\n\nLike the fact that, at that very moment, the captain was out on the flying bridge, aiming a rifle at him.\n\nAs the yacht closed the gap and loomed over him again, Max started to make his next turn when\u2014 _crack_! A bullet tore into the outboard motor. The engine sputtered. Max turned sharply and started zigzagging to make himself a more difficult target. He was losing speed.\n\n_Crack! Crack! Crack!_\n\nSpouts of water shot up around his boat where the bullets had missed. Max silently thanked Uncle Ted for plying the captain with whiskey. He was horribly aware that it would take only one good shot to deflate the Zodiac and scupper his escape.\n\nBut the damage was done. The outboard motor coughed and shuddered to a halt. He was dead in the water. As he pulled on the cord, praying for the engine to start, he saw the captain taking aim. Even drunk, he couldn't miss now. Max steeled himself.\n\nSuddenly, the captain pitched over the railing and into the ocean. In his place was Uncle Ted, with a big grin on his face. He threw a life ring to the flailing captain and took the wheel of the ship.\n\n\"Pull out the choke,\" Uncle Ted called down through cupped hands.\n\nWith the choke fully out and a few more tugs on the cord, the outboard motor roared shakily back to life.\n\nAs the yacht veered sharply away, it gave a loud blast of its horn.\n\nMax turned and waved, then once again headed for the shore.\n\n# Chapter Twenty-four  \nTHE SHOWDOWN\n\nIt wasn't quite the James Bond moment that Max could have hoped for.\n\nWhen he'd first sped away in the Zodiac, he'd planned to make straight for land and take cover in the jungle before anyone noticed him.\n\nUnfortunately, it hadn't worked out that way.\n\nNow he was puttering along in his bullet-ridden craft, stalling continually and leaving a trail of greasy black engine fluid. He suspected he had a slow leak, as the boat seemed to be getting lower and lower in the water. Eventually the engine gave up altogether, and he had to reach for the oars.\n\nIf one of Landa's guards spotted him now, he was a goner. But why hadn't they spotted him already? Or maybe they had? Maybe they were planning a reception at this very moment?\n\nMax felt distinctly uneasy as he paddled the last few hundred yards to shore.\n\nIt was getting dark. He could make out the shapes of Landa's motorboats pulled up on the sand, about half a mile down the beach. But there was no sign of any crew. There was also, he realized, no sign of any way up to the Temple of Ah Pukuh. A line of cliffs, hidden from the water by a grove of palm trees, formed an impenetrable barrier between the beach and the jungle.\n\nHow had Landa's men got up there? There had to be a trail near their boat landing. He crept along through the palm trees, as fast as he dared. His only thought was to get to the pyramid and find Lola before it was too late. In a few hours, Venus would rise and Landa would initiate the rituals.\n\nBy the motorboats, a thug in black lay facedown in the sand, with a blowgun dart sticking out of his neck.\n\n_Yay, Hermanjilio! One down, nineteen to go_.\n\nThen he saw the way up. A zigzag stairway had been carved into the cliff face. It was steep and narrow and completely exposed. Max knew that once he started climbing, he would be at the mercy of anyone above or below.\n\nTrying not to look down, not to think about snipers, not to think about anything but getting to Lola, he slowly made his way up. The steps were weatherworn and cracked. As he got higher and his head started to spin, he turned his back to the water and climbed up sideways, his fingers clinging painfully to the crumbling rock.\n\nWhen he got to the top, he sat down for a moment to recover. The moon was rising over the sea. No sign of Uncle Ted and the yacht. A bright star hung low in the sky. Could that be Venus?\n\nHe jumped up and headed inland. A path plunged into the forest. Mindful of Hermanjilio's disparaging remarks about his clumsiness, he moved as quickly and as silently as he could.\n\nHe didn't notice the body until he nearly fell over it.\n\nThe guard was sprawled across the path, with a blowgun dart in his neck. The Invisible Jaguar of the Night had struck again! A hundred yards farther on, Max found two more bodies, then another, and another. All felled by blowgun darts.\n\nMaybe they could beat these guys after all. Max was just starting to feel hopeful when he heard the crack of gunfire ahead. The fight was still going on.\n\nWhen he got close to Landa's camp, he left the path and crept on his belly, inching forward until he could spy on the camp from under a bush. Everywhere looked deserted. The rising moon cast a ghostly light over the scene.\n\nWhere was everyone?\n\nMax lay still, his every nerve on high alert. He tried to filter out the cacophony of the rainforest and listen for voices or gunfire.\n\nHe had the unnerving sensation that someone was behind him.\n\nHe thought of the bodies on the path. Had those guards had the same sensation just before they'd been hit?\n\nSlowly, very slowly, he turned his head and looked over his shoulder. There was someone in the bushes, he was sure of it.\n\nCrouching now, Max pulled out his diver's knife. He scanned the undergrowth, but all he could see was the trembling of a fern frond that had recently been disturbed. His heart was beating fast. He listened hard, his ears straining for a clue.\n\nOut of the bushes came a loud fart, followed by peals of laughter.\n\n\"Lady Coco?\" whispered Max.\n\n\"I am in top form tonight,\" she said with a giggle, emerging from her hiding place.\n\nThere was a rustling in the trees and Max looked up to see a small figure in a Red Sox cap climbing to the ground.\n\n\"Lord 6-Dog! I am so pleased to see you!\"\n\n\"I can only apologize, young lord, for the unseemly behavior of my mother,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"She has been making an exhibition of herself all day.\"\n\nLady Coco emitted another barrage.\n\n\"Ignore her, I beseech thee,\" said Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"But what's happening? Where are Landa's men?\" asked Max.\n\n\"They sleep like newborn babes.\"\n\n\"All of them? But how?\"\n\n\"Last night, as we had planned, Lord Hermanjilio slipped into the camp. To our most glorious luck, the cook is a local man named Eligio, whom Lord Hermanjilio knows well. When he heard about Landa's evil plans, Eligio agreed to pour a bottle of my sleeping draft into the lunchtime stew. An hour later, all who had partaken of the stew were out cold.\"\n\n\"It worked!\" cheered Max. \"Then what?\"\n\n\"Eligio hid in the jungle to wait for Landa, while we pursued the stray guards who did not eat the stew.\"\n\n\"Who's 'we'?\"\n\n\"Lord Hermanjilio and myself.\"\n\nThere was a squawk of protest from Lady Coco.\n\n\"Mother helped, too,\" sighed Lord 6-Dog. \"Her duty was to create a loud and malodorous diversion of the kind you just witnessed. While the guards were transfixed in horror, Lord Hermanjilio and I took aim with our blowpipes.\"\n\n\"Way to go, Lord 6-Dog!\" said Max admiringly.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" interrupted Lady Coco, poking a hairy finger into Max's chest. \"Perhaps the young lord would like to compliment me on my diversionary skills. It's not easy maintaining such a high quality of flatulence, you know.\"\n\nMax nodded politely. \"Way to go, Lady Coco!\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said with a regal air. Then she gave a few little toots of acknowledgment and jumped back into the trees to groom herself.\n\nMax turned back to Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Did you get all the guards?\" he asked.\n\n\"Unfortunately not. One of them was able to escape and make contact with the Spanish vessel.\"\n\n\"So that's why they all left the yacht in a hurry,\" reflected Max.\n\n\"We were ready for them,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"When Landa arrived with reinforcements, we ambushed them on the path.\"\n\n\"I fell over some of your victims! Did you get Landa?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog shook his head. \"Instead of leading from the front like a Maya warlord, he hid at the rear like a coward. While we battled his men, he scuttled into the forest with Lady Lola and two of his bodyguards.\"\n\n\"Poor Lola! Where are they now?\" asked Max.\n\n\"They're heading toward the Black Pyramid,\" said Lady Coco. \"Eligio the cook has been taking potshots at them to slow them down. We're hoping Lord Hermanjilio will get there first.\"\n\n\"I thought I heard gunfire. I hope the cook doesn't hit Lola by mistake.\"\n\n\"As I understand it, Eligio is not trying to hit anyone,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"He is merely taunting them, like a buzzing mosquito. Meanwhile, Mother and I are taking up position to attack Landa's flank, if thou wouldst care to join us.\"\n\nHe made it sound like an invitation to tea and scones.\n\nA shot rang out somewhere in the distance.\n\n\"Come,\" said Lord 6-Dog, \"we must hurry.\"\n\nThey worked their way around the edge of the camp to the side of the pyramid. When they had taken cover behind a fallen tree trunk, Lord 6-Dog handed Max his blowgun and his last pouch of darts.\n\n\"Here, young lord,\" he said regretfully. \"Thy lungs are bigger than mine. There are but three darts left. Use them wisely.\"\n\n\"What will you do?\" asked Max.\n\n\"Mother and I will collect some tactical ammunition.\"\n\nBefore Max could ask what that meant, the two monkeys had vanished into the trees.\n\nHe surveyed the scene in the moonlight. Looking up at the Black Pyramid, he thought he could make out Hermanjilio on the top step, blowgun at the ready. Max gave a little wave. Hermanjilio nodded, held his finger to his lips, and pointed across the clearing. Evidently, that was where Landa was expected to emerge.\n\nMax waited nervously. He loaded one of the darts into the blowgun and carefully placed the other two in front of him.\n\nAll was quiet.\n\nSuddenly, a flock of parrots exploded from the trees, shrieking and squawking, and three men burst out of the rainforest. One of them pushed Lola in front of him. The other two shot at anything and everything as they ran across the clearing toward the steps of the pyramid.\n\nThe noise was terrifying\u2014guns shooting, men shouting, birds screeching\u2014but Max tried to stay calm, waiting for the right moment. He knew he would only get one chance. And, armed with only a blowgun, he also knew the odds were against him.\n\nIn the end, it happened so quickly that he hardly had time to think.\n\nJust as Landa reached the bottom step, the two monkeys let loose with a volley of nuts and fruits from high above Max's head. The bodyguards paused to blitz the treetops with bullets. Max crouched behind the log, not daring to breathe, as leaves and twigs exploded and rained down onto the forest floor. An animal shrieked and fell through the branches, landing with a thud somewhere behind him.\n\nIt was now or never.\n\nAdrenaline pumped through his veins as he fired his three darts in quick succession. At the same moment, Hermanjilio fired from the top of the pyramid.\n\n_Yes! Yes!_\n\nThe two bodyguards staggered and then collapsed.\n\n_No!_\n\nLanda pulled Lola in front of him like a shield. One arm was around her throat; the other pointed a gun into her back. She looked half asleep, as if she was drugged, but she was swaying and making little moaning noises as her entire body tried to fight whatever he had given her.\n\n\"Hold your fire!\" Landa shouted. \"Or I will kill the girl.\"\n\nMax kept completely still.\n\n\"And now, I will to count to three. _Uno, dos, tres_. If you do not step out with your hands up, your little friend is dead.\"\n\nMax looked up at Hermanjilio but couldn't see him. What should he do?\n\nHe could make out Hermanjilio on the top step, blowgun at the ready.\n\n_\"Uno!\"_\n\nHis mind raced. Each second seemed like eternity. If he didn't come out, Landa was probably ruthless enough to shoot Lola in cold blood.\n\n_\"Dos!\"_\n\nBut if he did come out, Landa might shoot _him_ in cold blood.\n\n_\"Tres!\"_\n\n\"Stop!\" yelled Max. \"Don't shoot, I'm coming out.\"\n\n\"No... urgh,\" groaned Lola as Landa choked her words by pulling his arm tighter around her windpipe.\n\nMax slowly stood up and put his hands in the air. As he emerged from the underbrush, he took in the whole scene for the first time.\n\nThe brooding menace of the Black Pyramid.\n\nThe two guards sprawled on the lower steps.\n\nLanda swiveling around to shoot him.\n\nThen he saw something out of the corner of his eye, something soaring into the sky behind Landa. So unexpected was the sight that it took his brain a moment to register what it was.\n\nA pineapple. It was a pineapple.\n\nIt sailed through the air in a graceful arc. When it reached its high point, it seemed to hang there for several seconds like a little UFO, hovering in the moonlight. And then the pineapple started its downward trajectory, plummeting to earth with increasing speed.\n\nLanda became aware that Max was focused not on him but on something above him. He turned to look up, only to catch the pineapple squarely in the face. It exploded, sending pineapple chunks and juice in every direction. Landa staggered, and Lola groggily pushed him away.\n\nNow Hermanjilio had a clear target and, as Max watched, a silent dart embedded itself in Landa's forehead. The Spaniard didn't even have time to flick his cape before he crumpled to the ground.\n\nA loud whoop came from the jungle in the same direction as the pineapple.\n\nMax vaulted the log and ran toward Lola, who was slumped on the bottom step of the pyramid.\n\nLady Coco leapt out of the trees and got to her first. \"Lady Lola! Are you all right?\"\n\nLola groaned. She put her hands to her head. \"I feel like I've been drinking Hermanjilio's elixir,\" she said.\n\n\"Landa drugged you,\" explained Max, \"but it seems to be wearing off. Luckily for us, his sleeping potion isn't as strong as ours.\" A loud snore erupted from the Spaniard. \"Anyway, he's getting a taste of his own medicine now.\"\n\nLady Coco jumped up and down in excitement. \"Did you see that?\" she asked. \"What a perfect shot! And I've had no military training, you know.\"\n\n\"It was incredible, Lady Coco,\" said Max. \"You saved my life.\"\n\nLady Coco smiled modestly, but her crossed eyes were shining with pride. \"Did you hear that, son?\" she asked, looking around for Lord 6-Dog. \"I promised I'd make a good warrior\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough talking!\" came a booming voice from the pyramid.\n\nThey looked up to see Hermanjilio making his way down. He seemed to be limping.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" Max shouted up to him.\n\n\"We will all be hurt,\" Hermanjilio called down through cupped hands, \"if we don't get the Black Jaguar and get out of here.\"\n\n\"The Black Jaguar? Landa must have it,\" said Max, running over to the count's prone body. When he moved the Spaniard's cape aside, he saw a large pouch hanging from his belt.\n\nQuickly, Max cut it free with his diver's knife and opened it.\n\nA smell of rotting flesh filled his nostrils, just as it had when Landa had opened his case and showed the Black Jaguar to Uncle Ted in the hotel garden.\n\n\"Found it!\" called Max.\n\nHe turned back to the group in triumph, but Lola and Lady Coco had no interest in Jaguar Stones. They were looking around and calling into the jungle.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Max.\n\nLady Coco looked distraught. \"My son\u2014where is he?\"\n\nMax had a sinking feeling.\n\n\"I heard something fall through the trees in all the shooting....\"\n\nHermanjilio was getting impatient. \"What are you doing?\" he shouted down. \"Bring me the Black Jaguar and let's go.\"\n\n\"We have to look for Lord 6-Dog,\" Max called to him. \"We think he might be\"\u2014he saw Lady Coco's anguished face\u2014\"hurt.\"\n\n\"Just hurry!\" commanded Hermanjilio.\n\n\"I'm too dizzy,\" groaned Lola. \"I'll sit on the steps and wait for you.\"\n\nSo they left the Black Jaguar with her and went back into the trees to look for Lord 6-Dog. It was not an easy task. Very little moonlight filtered down to the forest floor, and the thick foliage made it difficult to search. They found a Red Sox cap hanging on a branch, but no sign of Lord 6-Dog.\n\nIn the end, it was Lady Coco's finely tuned nose that located the spot where her son had landed when Landa shot him out of the trees.\n\nThey found his limp, blood-soaked body under a thorn-bush.\n\nMax put an ear to the brave monkey's chest. Tears welled in his eyes.\n\n\"Is he... dead?\" whispered Lady Coco.\n\nMax held the monkey close and burrowed his ear into its fur. He could just make out a faint heartbeat.\n\n\"No. He's badly hurt, but he's alive.\"\n\nMax tenderly put the Red Sox cap back on Lord 6-Dog's head. Then he carried the monkey's limp body to the base of the pyramid.\n\n\"Lola!\" he called. \"Lola! We found him! We're going to need some of your rainforest remedies.\"\n\nNo answer. She wasn't there. She must have felt better and gone up with Hermanjilio to show him the escape route.\n\nMax laid Lord 6-Dog out in the moonlight where he could take a proper look at his wounds. He'd been shot through the arm, and a second bullet had grazed his hip. It was bad, but not as bad as it had looked at first. Max took off his T-shirt and tore it into bandages while Lady Coco mopped her son's brow with a banyan leaf.\n\n\"Mama's here, little dog,\" she whispered in his ear.\n\nWhen they'd done all they could to tend Lord 6-Dog's wounds, Max gathered up the injured monkey and began to stagger up the temple steps with him. It was surprising how much one howler monkey could weigh. Lady Coco tried to help, but it was slow going.\n\n\"Lady Coco,\" gasped Max, exhausted and only halfway up, \"I think you need to get Hermanjilio. Ask him to come down and help me.\"\n\nShe hesitated. She didn't want to leave Lord 6-Dog's side.\n\n\"He'll be okay,\" said Max.\n\nLady Coco licked her son's face tenderly, then bounded off up the temple steps. When she reached the top, she leaned over and waved before disappearing from view through the skull doorway.\n\nMax kept looking up hopefully, but no one appeared to help him.\n\nEventually he hauled Lord 6-Dog up to the top by himself.\n\nHe was breathing hard from the weight of the monkey and the steepness of the climb. He carried the monkey through the doorway and into the chamber of skulls. He was ready to give Hermanjilio a piece of his mind. How could he let his comrade-in-arms struggle all the way up on his own?\n\nThen Max's resentment was replaced by a new feeling.\n\nIt was called fear.\n\nMake that terror.\n\nThe hairs on the back of his neck rose up.\n\nSomething felt very wrong.\n\nAs his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he looked around the chamber. What was that dark shape on the floor? He gasped as he made out the inert body of Lady Coco, a blowgun dart sticking out of her back.\n\nMax had only one thought. He had to get out of there fast.\n\nStill carrying Lord 6-Dog, he lurched around to go back.\n\nAs he did so, he caught sight of Hermanjilio's arm swinging down with the glowing Black Jaguar in his hand.\n\nThe stone hit Max hard on the side of his skull.\n\nHis head exploded into stars, and he dropped to the ground unconscious.\n\n# Chapter Twenty-five  \nHUMAN SACRIFICE\n\nMax struggled, but he couldn't move. He was pinned down to something. A hideous face leaned over and leered at him. She was the ugliest girl he'd ever seen. And as she smiled, he saw that she had fangs like a vampire bat.\n\nThere was a sickly smell of incense. He could hear the abrasive scraping of a knife being sharpened.\n\n\"Prepare to die, my little fool,\" crowed the Maya vampire girl.\n\nShe licked his face.\n\nHer breath was foul. Her tongue was rough and slimy. He pushed her away, but she kept coming back and licking him. He tried to scream, but she held her hairy black hand over his mouth.\n\nHe was still struggling when he woke up.\n\nHis head hurt. A monkey was licking his face.\n\nHe tried to protest, but a paw was clamped over his mouth.\n\n\"Make no noise,\" said the monkey.\n\nA talking monkey!\n\n\"If he hears thee, he will kill thee,\" it whispered.\n\nMax had heard that voice before. He looked hard at the monkey. Its fur was matted with blood. It was wearing a baseball cap. It curled back its lips and attempted a reassuring smile, which made it look even more freakish.\n\n\"I am Lord 6-Dog,\" said the creature, \"summoned from Xibalba to help thee.... Dost thou remember?\"\n\nIt sounded familiar. Crazy, but familiar.\n\n\"I beg thy pardon if the ministrations of my tongue were offensive. It was the only way to rouse thee. Dost thou promise not to scream?\"\n\nMax nodded.\n\nLord 6-Dog removed his hand. Max considered screaming.\n\n\"No, young lord,\" said the monkey, wagging a hairy finger. \"We have no time for games. We have to stop him.\"\n\n\"Stop who?\" said Max thickly. He was having trouble getting his thoughts together. His fingers explored the huge lump on his head. It felt wet and sticky. The slightest touch sent pain shooting through his brain.\n\nWhere was he?\n\nHe looked around. The walls seemed to be made entirely of human skulls.\n\nThat couldn't be good.\n\nAn eerie gray light flooded in through an open doorway. On the floor, he could make out the body of another monkey.\n\nIts name was Lady Coco.\n\nHow did he know that?\n\n_Trust the howlers_ , said a voice in his head.\n\nAnd then, in a flash, it all came back to him.\n\n\"Lord 6-Dog,\" he whispered, \"are you all right? I was carrying you when... when...\" His voice trailed off. He was about to say, _when Hermanjilio hit me_ \u2014but that couldn't be right. Could it?\n\n\"I am well enough, young lord,\" said Lord 6-Dog. \"The force of the blow knocked me to the floor and brought me to my senses. I feigned death, but I saw everything. Mother is sleeping; we can leave her for the moment. Come now, we must stop him....\"\n\nLord 6-Dog helped Max to his feet.\n\n\"Stop who?\" said Max.\n\n\"Tzelek!\"\n\n\"Tzelek? You mean Landa-slash-Tzelek?\"\n\n\"No, young lord, I mean Lord Hermanjilio-slash-Tzelek.\"\n\n\"What? I don't get it,\" said Max. \"How did Tzelek get out of Landa and into Hermanjilio?\"\n\n\"It appears he was never in Landa. It is my belief that when Lord Hermanjilio opened the gateway at Itzamna for Mother and me, Tzelek sneaked through at the same time. He has been hiding inside Lord Hermanjilio ever since.\"\n\n\"But why didn't we notice?\"\n\n\"It suited Tzelek's purpose to lie low. Like a strangler fig, he lived in harmony with his host until he had taken what he wanted. He has used Lord Hermanjilio to bring him to the Pyramid of Ah Pukuh this night and give him the Black Jaguar. Unwittingly, we have all done his bidding.\" Lord 6-Dog indicated the gray light beyond the doorway. \"And now the rituals have begun.\"\n\nThe horror of the situation sank into Max's throbbing brain.\n\nHe crawled over to the doorway and peered out.\n\nHe was not prepared for the shock of what he saw and he had to clap his own hand over his mouth to keep from crying out.\n\nHermanjilio\/Tzelek was dancing rhythmically around the sacrificial altar. The altar was a huge stone slab, supported at each corner by a column of human skulls. Set into the end facing Max was the body of a jaguar inlaid in black obsidian. On the headless shoulders of this beast, the Black Jaguar radiated its murky light. At its feet, the Red and Green Jaguars added their own glow. The air stank of rotting flesh mingled with pungent incense.\n\nIn the center of this nightmare, lashed to the altar stone by her hands and feet, was Lola.\n\nShe was dressed in a blue tunic, and her skin was daubed in blue paint. She seemed to be awake, but she was limp and lethargic. Her half-open eyes tried to follow Tzelek as he pranced around the altar, chanting. His dance was made all the more macabre by the strange half-limping, half-lurching gait caused by the twisted foot he dragged behind him. In one hand, he carried a small stone bowl. In the other hand, he brandished a long knife.\n\nEach time he circled the altar, Tzelek slashed his own ears and collected the dripping blood in the bowl. When it was full, he stopped in front of the Black Jaguar and let out a piercing howl. Then he lifted the bowl with both hands and dribbled his blood onto the Black Jaguar. The pyramid started to vibrate, as if the whole structure was awakening. Tzelek cackled in delight.\n\nAs Max watched in horror, the Black Jaguar opened its glittering mouth and roared. When the other Jaguar Stones roared in reply, Tzelek smiled like a proud mother.\n\nGlowing eyes flicked on in the black recesses of the skulls supporting the altar stone, and their jaws began to chant a dirge. Rings of light pulsed in waves out of the altar, getting bigger and bigger like ripples in a pond. They rolled across the top of the pyramid and over the edges. They flowed down the steps, vaporizing stray vegetation. When they reached the bottom, they consumed the sleeping bodies of Landa's guards without leaving a trace of them.\n\nWhen the pyramid was as clear as the day it was built, a gray light shone out of the cracks between the stones. Behind the altar, a jagged black hole, a void of nothingness, shimmered like a supernatural heat haze, as if the fabric of the world had ripped apart.\n\nTzelek dipped the tip of his knife into the bowl of blood and traced an incision line on Lola's tunic above her heart. Still crouching at the doorway, Max was transfixed with horror. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Lord 6-Dog tapped him on the shoulder.\n\n\"The time has come, young lord,\" he whispered. \"I will fell Tzelek with a dart. Thou shouldst be ready to pluck out the Black Jaguar from the altar.\" Lord 6-Dog picked up Hermanjilio's blowpipe from the floor of the chamber. It was twice as tall as he was. He loaded it with a dart, lifted it, and took aim. His injured arm buckled instantly from the weight and length of the blowpipe.\n\n\"Blast this feeble body,\" he muttered.\n\nTzelek raised the knife high above his head. The obsidian blade glinted in the moonlight. Seconds before the knife was about to plunge into Lola's chest, Lord 6-Dog gathered every ounce of his strength, lifted the blowpipe, and fired.\n\nThe dart sped straight toward Tzelek's neck.\n\nMax thought he would faint with relief. He crouched like a runner on the starting blocks, ready to sprint to the altar the second the dart hit its target.\n\nTzelek looked up and smirked.\n\nThe dart stopped in midair, inches from his face, and burst into flames. It dropped harmlessly to the floor.\n\nTzelek turned to Lord 6-Dog, hands on hips, and laughed.\n\n\"Oh, puh-lease! You've had three _baktun_ s to prepare for this moment, 6-Dog. Is that really the best you can do? But then, I see you have shrunk in stature since last we met. And you've given up shaving, too. I'm sure the ladies don't find you quite as handsome this time around. You pathetic buffoon! You can't stop me from killing this girl any more than you could stop me from killing your father.\"\n\nLord 6-Dog froze, his monkey eyes fixed on Tzelek.\n\n\"Yes, you heard me!\" crowed Tzelek. \"I killed Punak Ha, your father! I would gladly have stood by his side at the ceremony, but it was you he wanted. It was always you. So I killed him. And I vowed that one day I would have more power than either of you.\" Tzelek raised the knife again. \"This is my day.\"\n\nThere was a bloodcurdling scream\u2014like a dinosaur in pain, like a soul in torment\u2014a roar that awakened every howler in the jungle, and Lord 6-Dog sprang across the platform as if he'd been shot from a cannon. He propelled himself high into the air and landed on Tzelek's face. His tail wrapped around the neck while his paws gripped the head in a vise. A savage expression contorted his features as he sank his teeth deep into Tzelek's nose.\n\nTzelek screamed.\n\nThis was Max's chance. He raced across to the altar and grabbed the Black Jaguar. It writhed and jerked and snapped at his fingers. Pain shot through him, but he did not let go.\n\nHe saw something flying at him.\n\nHe was knocked to the ground by the body of Lord 6-Dog, which Tzelek had pulled off his face and flung at him.\n\nBefore Max knew it, Tzelek had him by the throat. It was Hermanjilio's nose and mouth that breathed their fury on him, but the rest of the face he did not recognize. The eyelids were hooded like an iguana's, and Hermanjilio's laughing brown eyes were black coals glowing red with evil. Max could feel his life being squeezed out as Tzelek's icy-cold hands tightened their grip and once again his sharp nails pierced Max's skin as they had done in the Star Chamber.\n\nWith one last almighty effort, Max tried to fight off the evil priest.\n\nTzelek's lip curled in scorn.\n\n\"You little worm\"\u2014he sneered\u2014\"do you think you can spar with the mighty Tzelek? You disgust me. You are not even fit for sacrifice. Go and join your idiot parents in Xibalba!\"\n\nHe raised Max above his head and prepared to pitch him into the blackness behind the altar. Max tensed and closed his eyes. So this was how his story ended.\n\n\"Drop the boy.\"\n\nMax opened his eyes and looked down in time to see Lucky Jim land a mighty punch on the side of Tzelek's head.\n\nThere was a sound of bone crunching. The evil priest staggered in surprise and dropped Max onto the platform. Lucky Jim dragged him clear and took a flying leap at Tzelek. \"You're going back to Xibalba where you belong!\" he shouted. His huge body hit Tzelek high in the chest, and the two men hurtled together into the void.\n\nThere was no flash, no scream, no smell of burning.\n\nAll that remained was silence.\n\nIn a daze, Max lurched to his feet and tried once again to pull out the Black Jaguar. It scratched and clawed him, but he didn't care anymore. In one supreme effort, he wrenched it out and threw it down.\n\nIt was done.\n\nLike a speeding car suddenly thrown into reverse, the whole pyramid shook from top to bottom.\n\nThere was a crashing sound like thunder. The stones of the pyramid jumped up and down; some even shot out of place. The edges of the black void were sucked back together. In an instant, the hole was gone.\n\nFor a moment, Max lay there, gasping for breath, replaying it all in his mind. Then he sat up and moved his head stiffly, like someone in a neck brace, to look around the platform for Lord 6-Dog.\n\nThe monkey-king was slumped against the temple wall. He was covered with blood, and chunks of his fur were missing.\n\nMax crawled over to him and they sat there, exhausted, leaning against each other.\n\nIt was over. They had won.\n\n\"Tell me, young lord, who was that brave Maya warrior who sent Tzelek back to Xibalba?\" asked Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"His name is Lucky Jim,\" said Max. \"He works with my uncle. We owe him everything. We have to get him out.\"\n\n\"All in good time, young lord. We have won this battle, but we have not won the war. First I must do what I should have done before and destroy the Black Jaguar. I will grind it into powder and scatter it to the winds, that it may never again menace the mortal world.\"\n\nMax pointed to the altar stone. \"It's rising! What's happening?\" he cried hysterically. \"Is Tzelek coming back?\"\n\nThe stone was hovering in midair, supported by a shimmering curtain of red light.\n\n\"Calm thyself,\" whispered Lord 6-Dog. \"I know not what sorcery this is, but as long as the stones are dormant, Tzelek cannot return.\"\n\n\"So who's that?\"\n\nA figure was stepping through the curtain. He had the head of an owl and the body of a man with four gnarled talons on each foot. He wore a feathered cape. The owl-man opened his beak to speak, and the voice that came out was raspy and screechy like a barn door swinging on a stormy night.\n\n\"I am Lord Muan,\" he announced, pronouncing it _moooo-an_ like the hooting of an owl. \"On behalf of their lordships One Death, Seven Death, Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, Wing, and Packstrap, I bring a message for Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy.\"\n\nHe looked at Max for a response, but seeing that the boy was paralyzed by terror, he unrolled a scroll and began to read from it. \"My masters bid me thank thee for the sport thou hast provided since they summoned thee.\"\n\n\"It was the D-D-Death Lords who summoned me?\" stammered Max.\n\n\"It was indeed,\" said Lord Muan. \"They have greatly enjoyed watching thy tribulations and laying wagers on thy survival. They have now commanded me to reveal that thy parents await thee in Xibalba.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" said Max, finding his voice. \"But how do I get them out?\"\n\n\"That,\" said Lord Muan, \"is why I have come to speak with thee.\"\n\nHe made a series of retching noises, stretched his neck forward, and slowly ejected an owl pellet. Max watched in disgust as the hard gray slug of compacted fur and bones rolled along the floor.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" said the messenger, \"their benevolent lordships wish for nothing more than to reunite thee with thy parents.\"\n\n\"They do?\" said Max. \"That's fantastic!\"\n\n\"Do not trust him, young lord,\" gasped Lord 6-Dog through his pain. \"That accursed beak vomits pellets, tricks, and lies.\"\n\n\"I am but the messenger, 6-Dog. And I would rather talk through the beak of an owl than through the hindquarters of a howler monkey.\"\n\n\"How darest thou speak thus to me? I will have thee plucked for thy insolence, thou hooting fool.\" The monkey-king's voice was growing weaker.\n\n\"I think not, 6-Dog. If thou wert worthy of my respect, thou wouldst now be sitting in the heroes' heaven, not in a stinking bag of monkey fur.\"\n\n\"Leave him alone,\" shouted Max. \"Can't you see he's injured?\"\n\nThe owl-man's ear tufts lay flat, his feathers bristled, and he opened his yellow eyes wide. \"I must warn thee, young lord, this discourteous attitude may not be helpful in our negotiations.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Max. \"Just tell me what to do. I'll do anything to get my parents back.\"\n\n\"No, young lord!\" cried Lord 6-Dog. \"Do not bargain with the Lords of Death. Thou canst not win.\"\n\n\"One moment, please...,\" said the messenger. His ear tufts perked up and he seemed to be listening to voices in his head. Max assumed the Death Lords were giving him instructions, like ghoulish TV producers speaking from some cosmic control room. At one point Lord Muan broke off to check a technicality. \"Thou didst say thou wouldst do anything?\"\n\nMax nodded.\n\nLord 6-Dog groaned.\n\nThe messenger stepped forward. \"Good news: thou hast won favor with their lordships. They are prepared to release thy parents.\"\n\nMax's face lit up. \"Did you hear that, Lord 6-Dog?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog was unimpressed. \"It is a trick,\" he said, \"and it stinks like a rotting fish.\"\n\nThe owl blinked rapidly. \"Thy cynicism is unwarranted. In return for the release of Frank and Carla Murphy, my magnanimous masters ask only for one small favor, if and when they should ever need it.\"\n\n\"That sounds fair enough,\" said Max.\n\n\"No,\" said Lord 6-Dog, sounding weaker than ever, \"the Lords of Death cannot be trusted. Who knows what this small favor might entail? Thou canst not make a pact with evil.\"\n\n\"I have no choice,\" whispered Max to Lord 6-Dog. \"At least it will buy us time to rescue Hermanjilio and Lucky Jim.\"\n\n\"I warn thee, young lord, do not underestimate the Lords of Death.\"\n\nMax took a deep breath. \"I will be honored to owe their lordships a small favor in return for the release of my parents.\"\n\n\"Thou hast spoken wisely, Massimo Francis Sylvanus Murphy. My masters will contact thee at the appointed hour.\" Like a used-car salesman clinching the deal, the messenger took a moment to attempt a cheesy smile and then launched into the small print. \"I am required by cosmic law to inform thee that the size of the favor can go up as well as down. If thou shouldst break this pact, thy parents will be dragged back to Xibalba and sacrificed forthwith.\"\n\n\"No good will come of this,\" muttered Lord 6-Dog.\n\n\"Can't you say something positive?\" Max begged him.\n\nLord 6-Dog winced with pain. \"I like the name Sylvanus.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Lord Muan was hunting.\n\nHis owl head rotated to scan the platform until his bulbous eyes settled on the Jaguar Stones. To Max's horror, he picked them up, one by one, and balancing all three in his feathered arms, melted back into the curtain of red light.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" asked Max indignantly. \"He took them all!\"\n\n\"I can talk no more, young lord,\" sighed Lord 6-Dog. \"This body needs to heal and I must rest. For the moment, it is over.\" He stretched out his hairy little limbs and instantly fell asleep.\n\nSeconds later, Frank and Carla Murphy stepped cautiously through the curtain.\n\n# Chapter Twenty-six  \nMORNING\n\nHis mother's hair was greasy and matted. She wore a grubby white shift, and her face looked tired and old. His father, who always looked a mess, was even more disheveled than usual. But, for once, Max didn't care what they looked like. He was just happy to see them.\n\nBut was it really them?\n\nOr had Ah Pukuh sent two more demons to fool him?\n\nHe watched them closely.\n\n_Please let it be them_.\n\nThey were squinting in the early light. They must have come from somewhere dark. They were shielding their eyes with their hands and looking nervously around. Max's heart felt like it would burst.\n\n_Please let it be them_.\n\nHis mother saw him first.\n\n\" _Bambino!_ It is you!\" Carla Murphy hugged her only son and kissed his head. \"How can this be? I thought you were still in Boston! I am so happy to see you, but what are you doing here?\"\n\nHe stood there awkwardly, staring at her matted hair.\n\n_Please let it be them_.\n\nAfter his experience with the demonic doppelg\u00e4ngers, he needed proof that these two hobos really were his parents. He needed to test them in some way. But he was so tired, he could hardly think. He ran his fingers through his hair and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.\n\n\"Massimo Murphy! Use a Kleenex!\"\n\nNo one else in the universe would fuss about manners at a time like this.\n\n\"Mom! It's really you!\" Now he hugged her properly.\n\nShe stepped back and looked at him. \"What's happened to you, _bambino_? Your head is hurt... and what's that on your skin?\"\n\nMax looked down at himself. He was bare to the waist, having ripped up his T-shirt to make bandages for Lord 6-Dog. His arms were still red from dye, and his chest was smeared with black body paint from his tussle with Hermanjilio-slash-Tzelek. Blood from his head wound trickled down his face.\n\n\"It's been a long night,\" he said.\n\n\"It's wonderful to see you, Max,\" said his father, \"but what are you doing here?\"\n\nMax smiled. \"I've been testing my inner resources, Dad, just like you wanted.\"\n\nBehind him, the altar stone sank slowly back into place.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said a drowsy voice. \"Could somebody please untie me?\"\n\n\"Lola!\" cried Max, jumping up and running to cut her free. To his relief, she looked fine\u2014sluggish and hollow-eyed and covered with blue paint, but basically fine.\n\nShe sat up slowly and looked around her. \"Where am I?\"\n\n\"You're safe,\" Max whispered, \"and so are my parents.\"\n\n\" _Ciao_ , Lola!\" called Max's mother, rushing over. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nLola regarded her blankly.\n\n\"It's me, Carla Murphy\u2014we met at Ixchel, remember?\"\n\nLola looked from Max to his mother and father, then her eyes lit up with happiness. \"Hoop, it's your parents! That's wonderful!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Max. \"Yes, it is.\"\n\nA new day was dawning in the rainforest. The air was fresh, the sea was blue, and the forest below them buzzed with the sounds of early morning.\n\nBut there was another sound that was getting louder and louder.\n\nIt was the sound of someone puffing up the pyramid.\n\nA look of terror crossed Lola's face. \"It's not that snake Landa, is it?\"\n\nFrank Murphy looked over the edge. \"No, but it _is_ a snake.\"\n\nFirst Ted Murphy's hands, then his hat, and then his sweaty face appeared as he hauled himself over the top step.\n\n\"Good morning, Frank,\" he said. \"It's good to see you, even if you did just call me a snake. What do you say we bury the hatchet, right here and now? You're the closest family I have, and I thought for a moment I might never see you again!\"\n\nHe stood there on the pyramid, arms open wide, a big grin on his face, until Frank started laughing, too.\n\n\"I never thought I'd say this, Ted, but it's good to see you\u2014it really is.\"\n\nWith that, Frank walked over and hugged his older brother, tentatively at first, but soon with a real rib-crusher of a bear hug.\n\n\"At last!\" cheered Carla, who was laughing and crying at the same time.\n\nUncle Ted turned to Max. \"I'm glad to see you in one piece.\"\n\n\"We won,\" said Max, \"but we lost Lucky Jim.\"\n\nUncle Ted nodded sadly and patted him on the shoulder. \"Lucky knew exactly what he was doing, Max. He said it was time to accept his destiny.\" He looked along the line of bedraggled people and saw Lola. \"And you must be the young lady that Max has told me so much about.\"\n\nLola smiled drowsily.\n\n\"She's still recovering from the drugs,\" Max explained. \"And, of course, she's not usually painted blue.\" It wasn't the greatest introduction to make for a potential girlfriend.\n\n\"It seems to me,\" said Uncle Ted, \"that you could all use a hot shower and a square meal. I hitched a ride over here with the police. I'm sure they'll give us all a lift back. Is everyone fit to travel?\"\n\nFrank Murphy assessed the scene. \"It looks like no one was hurt,\" he said, \"except for that howler over there.\"\n\n\"He's actually Lord 6-Dog, the greatest king of the Monkey River,\" said Max, \"and his mother is inside the temple. We need to get them to a vet.\"\n\nFrank, Carla, and Ted stared at him in bafflement.\n\n\"I think he has a concussion,\" said Carla, feeling Max's forehead.\n\n\"Back me up, Lola! It's true, isn't it?\" Max demanded. \"Lord 6-Dog came back as a monkey.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember that bit,\" said Lola, still sounding dazed, \"but who was that maniac pretending to be Hermanjilio?\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio Bol?\" said Carla. \"Is he here? Is he all right?\"\n\n\"It's a long story, Mom. Can we talk on the way down the pyramid? I'm starving.\"\n\n\"Follow me,\" said Uncle Ted, \"for the best brunch in Central America.\"\n\nWhich was how, on the morning of 5-Death, Max came to be speeding along the coast in a police launch, headed back to Villa Isabella. The monkeys were laid out on banquettes. Frank and Ted were deep in conversation on deck. Carla was in the bathroom trying to fix her appearance. And Lola was sitting in the cabin with Max.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Much better, thank you,\" she said, \"but it creeps me out to think about it. Can you believe that Tzelek was inside Hermanjilio all that time?\"\n\n\"Remember when he clashed with Lord 6-Dog and we put it down to the dominant-male thing?\" Max reminded her. \"And how Lord 6-Dog kept saying Hermanjilio seemed familiar? No wonder Hermanjilio wanted us all to think that Tzelek was inside Landa.\"\n\n\"I should have known something was wrong,\" fretted Lola. \"I kept wondering why Hermanjilio didn't take advantage of having a real, live Maya king at Itzamna, ask him more about the history of the site and so on. It all makes sense now. Poor Hermanjilio. I feel like I let him down.\"\n\n\"You couldn't have known. Even Hermanjilio didn't know.\"\n\n\"We have to rescue him, Hoop.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and Lucky Jim. Any ideas?\"\n\n\"Well, how did your parents get out?\"\n\nMax lowered his voice to a whisper. \"Don't tell Mom and Dad, but I promised to do a favor for the Lords of Death.\"\n\n\"What favor?\"\n\n\"I don't know yet.\"\n\n\"It's been nice knowing you,\" said Lola.\n\n\"Thanks for the vote of confidence.\"\n\n\"It's just that the Lords of Death are ruthless; you can't trust them an inch. They lie and they cheat and they're compulsive gamblers, all of them. And they're completely barbaric. I've heard they like to flay humans and wear their skins as capes.\"\n\n\"I'm dead meat,\" groaned Max.\n\nHe laid his head on his arms. Lola ruffled his hair. He didn't stop her. He turned his head to look at her.\n\n\"You'll help me, won't you, Monkey Girl?\"\n\n\"I don't know about that.\"\n\n\"What? You can't just go back to your old life and forget about me. We're a team.\"\n\n\"What about your old life, Hoop? You'll want to forget that any of this happened when you get back to Boston.\"\n\n\"No chance,\" said Max. He was already imagining how cool it would be to tell the guys at school that he had a Maya girlfriend.\n\nHe tried to take her hand.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she said, pulling it away.\n\nHe decided to tell the guys she was his girlfriend anyway. It wasn't like they were ever going to fly to San Xavier to check it out.\n\nAnd so, eleven days after he'd followed the monkeys into the rainforest, Max returned to Villa Isabella. As he tramped across the beach with Lola, his parents, and his uncle, he could see Raul waiting at the door.\n\nMax waved enthusiastically, but Raul's smile of welcome wavered as he took in their appearance. For a second, Max thought he might shoo them away like beggars.\n\nYou could see his point.\n\nMax was black with red arms.\n\nLola was blue.\n\nHis mother, with her grubby shift and crazy hair, looked like she'd escaped from a lunatic asylum.\n\nHis father and his uncle were carrying what looked like dead monkeys.\n\nRaul surveyed them, one by one, and quickly regained his composure. \"Brunch will be served in twenty minutes. Please make yourselves at home.\"\n\nLady Coco stirred.\n\n\"I smell food,\" she said, springing out of Frank Murphy's arms, her nose twitching furiously to identify the various cooking smells.\n\n\"It's a talking howler monkey!\" exclaimed Raul.\n\n\"Raul,\" said Max, \"may I introduce you to Lady Kan Kakaw, First and Most Glorious Wife of the great King Punak Ha and mother of the immortal Lord 6-Dog. That's him lying over Uncle Ted's shoulder.\"\n\nRaul looked at Uncle Ted, who gave a little nod to confirm Max's story.\n\nIf there was one thing Raul had learned in a lifetime's butlering, it was to keep cool under all circumstances. He drew upon that training now, bowing low to the monkey as if it were the most normal thing in the world.\n\n\"I am honored to meet you, Your Majesty,\" he said.\n\n\"Likewise,\" she said, \"but please call me Lady Coco. Now tell me, Raul, is that banana bread I smell? With just a little hint of nutmeg, if I'm not mistaken?\"\n\n\"My secret recipe,\" said Raul, with a wink.\n\n\"Perhaps I can persuade you to share it.\" She giggled flirtatiously. \"Would you be so kind as to give me a tour of the kitchens?\"\n\n\"But, of course, Lady Coco,\" said the butler. \"Follow me.\"\n\n\"Raul\u2014such a manly name...,\" came Lady Coco's voice as they disappeared down the corridor together, deep in conversation.\n\n\"Apparently, monkeys have extraordinary powers of recovery,\" Uncle Ted commented with a smile. \"Looks like Lady Coco's fine.\" He patted Lord 6-Dog gently on the back. \"There's a vet on his way to look at His Majesty here. Meanwhile, we should just let him sleep.\"\n\nHe laid the unconscious monkey down on a sofa in the great hall.\n\n\"Now, ladies and gentlemen,\" he said, \"there's just time to freshen up before brunch. Let's meet on the terrace in twenty minutes.\"\n\nMax and Uncle Ted made it in fifteen.\n\n\"I just wanted to say to you, Uncle Ted, that, well, you said you weren't the hero type, but you saved my life yesterday. Pushing the captain off the boat like that...\"\n\n\"No, Max, you were the hero. You and Lucky Jim.\"\n\n\"What made Lucky come and help me? I thought he didn't want anything to do with the ancient Maya.\"\n\n\"Lucky has always thought the old ways were nothing but trouble. He wanted his people to join the modern world and leave all that superstition behind. But when he heard you say that Tzelek and Lord 6-Dog had returned, he realized that the past and the future are all one. He said it was time to stand up and be counted.\"\n\n\"And now he's trapped in Xibalba\u2014\"\n\n\"Those ancient Maya won't know what's hit them when they meet Lucky Jim!\" interrupted Uncle Ted with a chuckle. \"I have a feeling he can look after himself.\"\n\n\"This is a lovely house, Mr. Murphy,\" said Lola as she sat down opposite Max. She was wearing one of Uncle Ted's linen shirts as a very fetching dress. The skin on her arms was red from scrubbing, but it still had a distinct blue tinge.\n\n\"So what was it like,\" asked Max, \"being a human sacrifice?\"\n\n\"Max!\" protested Uncle Ted. \"I'm sure Lola doesn't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\"I honestly don't remember,\" she said.\n\n\"What? Nothing at all?\"\n\n\"Well, I remember when you left me sitting on the steps with the Black Jaguar. And I remember Hermanjilio coming down to get it. He was standing over me with those red eyes....\" Her voice was little more than a whisper.\n\nUncle Ted put an arm around her.\n\n\"It's okay,\" he said, \"you're safe now.\"\n\nSafe. _Such a cozy, comforting word_ , thought Max. A word that couldn't apply to him until he'd sorted out this deal with the Death Lords.\n\nHis reverie was interrupted by the arrival of his parents.\n\n\" _Buongiorno_ ,\" trilled his mother, looking like her old, well-groomed, shiny-haired self. She'd wrapped one of Uncle Ted's white tablecloths around her as a long dress, with a hibiscus flower for a corsage. She was as elegant as any New York socialite arriving at a dinner party.\n\nWith perfect timing, Raul appeared with a huge serving dish of crispy bacon and juicy sausages and a platter piled high with barbecued ribs and steaks. These were soon joined by plates of scrambled eggs, fried eggs, and golden hash browns; racks of thickly sliced buttered toast and all kinds of jams; baskets of banana bread, bagels, doughnuts, and pastries; a massive bowl of tropical fruit salad; homemade yogurt; and jugs of cream. Finally, when there was not an inch of space left on the table, he came out empty-handed and whispered something to Uncle Ted.\n\n\"Excuse me, everyone,\" said Uncle Ted. \"Please start without me, and I'll be back in a moment.\"\n\nFor the next few minutes, Max forgot everything that had happened and concentrated on eating. He felt like a warrior returning home to a victory feast. It was only when he thought his stomach was so full it might explode that he applied his mind to the situation again.\n\n\"So what was it like in Xibalba?\" he asked his parents.\n\n\"Wet and misty and cold,\" said his mother, \"like Venice in winter. Everything was in black and white, except for the flaming torches on the street corners and the blood-red water in the canals.\"\n\n\"Hermanjilio thought you'd be in some sort of waiting room,\" said Lola.\n\n\"Exactly right.\" Max's father nodded. \"Mostly, we passed the time talking about you, Max.\"\n\n\"What were you saying about me?\" he asked.\n\n\"For one thing,\" said his mother, \"we agreed that we would never again go away without you. We want to enjoy every second with you while we can.\"\n\nMax laughed nervously. \"You make it sound like I'm going to die or something.\"\n\nHis father put down his knife and fork and looked at him with misty eyes. \"I've learned my lesson, I promise you. I've had a lot of time to think about things, Max. From now on, we're going to do a lot more together, you and me.\"\n\n\"We are? Like what?\"\n\n\"Well... let me see....\" His father cast around for suitable activities. \"You could teach me to play some of those exciting video games of yours.\"\n\n\"Actually, Dad, I think I've had all the excitement I can take for a while. But you could teach me more about the ancient Maya. I hate to admit it, but they're not as boring as I thought.\"\n\nHis father beamed at him.\n\n\"What's that on your tooth, Dad?\"\n\nCarla rolled her eyes. \"I told him he'd regret it, but he wouldn't listen.\"\n\nMax's father pulled down his lower lip to reveal a small piece of jade studded into one of his bottom teeth. \"I took the opportunity to research ancient Maya cosmetic dentistry. It was all the rage in their day.\"\n\n\"Cool!\" said Max. \"Can I get one of those?\"\n\n\"No!\" said his mother firmly. \"It looks like a piece of creamed spinach.\"\n\n\"How about a nose ring? Or some body piercing? Or a tattoo?\" wheedled Max. \"It's all very Maya....\"\n\n\"No! No! No!\" His mother laughed and threw her hands up in mock despair.\n\nUncle Ted slipped back into his chair at the head of the table. As soon she saw his face, Carla stopped laughing.\n\n\"That was the chief of police,\" he said. \"I called him from Landa's yacht last night, once I was sure Max had made land safely. The whole force came speeding out and searched the yacht from top to bottom. Turns out they've been after Count de Landa for quite a while.\"\n\n\"So what's the news?\" asked Max.\n\nUncle Ted looked nervously at Lola. \"Not good, I'm afraid. Antonio de Landa has vanished without trace, and his yacht has disappeared from police custody.\"\n\n\"So he's still out there, flicking his cape somewhere,\" muttered Lola.\n\nMax sniggered.\n\n\"It's no laughing matter,\" said Uncle Ted. \"He's a dangerous man and he won't stop until he gets what he wants.\"\n\n\"But what does he want?\" asked Max. \"The Jaguar Stones?\"\n\n\"Something even more precious by the look of things,\" said Uncle Ted. \"The police found these when they searched his yacht.\" He handed Lola an envelope, and she looked inside.\n\n\"They're photographs,\" she whispered. \"Of me.\"\n\n\"Apparently, he had hundreds of them. Your face, your eyes, your nose, your ears... all taken long-range. He seems to be obsessed with you.\"\n\nShe put her face in her hands. \"Why me?\"\n\n\"Whatever Landa's up to,\" said Uncle Ted, \"you can't go back to Itzamna on your own. It's just not safe.\"\n\nLola looked down at the table. \"I'll be fine,\" she said. \"I'm used to looking after myself.\"\n\n\"A loner, eh?\" said Uncle Ted. \"What will you do?\"\n\nLola shrugged. \"Maybe I'll go back to Utsal. I could carry on with my studies, sort through Hermanjilio's notes, get all his research ready for when he comes back....\"\n\n\"You can't go back to Utsal,\" protested Max. \"Chan Kan will try to marry you off to someone.\"\n\n\"Then I'll go to Lim\u00f3n,\" said Lola. \"I told you, I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"You know, Lola,\" said Uncle Ted, \"I used to think of myself as a loner, until young Max here changed my mind. This big house felt very empty without him. I was wondering if you'd like to stay here until Hermanjilio gets back. I could be your temporary guardian. You could go to school in Puerto Muerto, and I'm sure we could persuade Max to come and visit now and again.\"\n\n\"It's a great idea!\" agreed Max.\n\n\"What do you think, Lola?\" asked Uncle Ted.\n\n\"It's very kind of you, Mr. Murphy,\" she began politely, \"but I couldn't. I don't think... it's just that... well, Hermanjilio said... I mean, I don't...\" She was tying herself up in knots, trying not to offend him.\n\n\"What are you trying to say?\" cut in Uncle Ted gently.\n\n\"You're a smuggler!\" she blurted.\n\nSilence fell around the table. Max thought he detected the hint of a smirk on his father's face, but no one said anything. They were all waiting to see Uncle Ted's reaction.\n\n\"Oh, that,\" he said. \"Truth to tell, after my brush with Landa, I've lost the taste for it. If you'd do me the honor of living under my roof, Lola, I promise to give up my little sideline. I might even take up painting again.\"\n\n\"Say yes! Say yes!\" urged Max.\n\nLola looked around the table. Everyone, including Raul and Lady Coco, was nodding furiously.\n\n\"I'll think about it,\" she said. But she was smiling.\n\n\"Splendid!\" said Uncle Ted. \"That's settled, then.\" He looked happier than Max had ever seen him.\n\n\"More coffee, sir?\" asked Raul. \"And perhaps you'd like to sample one of Her Majesty's muffins?\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" said Uncle Ted.\n\nHis eyes fell on Lady Coco, who was standing behind Raul, wearing a child-size white apron and carrying a tray of little cakes.\n\n\"Cashew and mango,\" she said proudly. \"I made them myself.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you could cook, Lady Coco,\" said Max.\n\n\"Ah yes, young lord. Even queens had to make tortillas for their families. And my tortillas were famous throughout the Monkey River.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, Lady Coco,\" ventured Max's mother, \"but I'd love to know what you think of the kitchen here at the villa. It must be very different from what you were used to in the palace at Itzamna.\"\n\nLady Coco's little monkey face lit up like Times Square. \"It's amazing!\" she gibbered. \"Raul showed me everything! That mixing machine and the refrigerating unit and the cooking fire that turns on and off.... Even the greatest brains of the mighty Maya did not invent such things!\"\n\nMax's father shook his head in amazement. \"I don't know what's harder to take in,\" he said. \"An ancient Maya queen singing the praises of modern kitchen appliances\u2014or a talking howler monkey!\"\n\n\"They'll never believe this back at Harvard, that's for sure,\" agreed Max's mother.\n\n\"Speaking of which,\" said his father, \"are you looking forward to going back to Beantown, Max?\"\n\nMax considered the question. Not so long ago, back in Boston was the only place he wanted to be. But now he wasn't so sure.\n\n\"I guess so,\" he said. He looked at Lola. \"But I'm going to miss this place.\"\n\nHis mother smiled. \"I hope normal life won't be too boring for you, after all these adventures.\"\n\n_Normal life?_ Max thought about the words. What was normal?\n\nHis mother was wearing a tablecloth. His father had a jade-inlaid tooth. They certainly weren't normal parents. But now he knew that was a good thing. He wasn't sure what he'd promised to get them back, but it was worth it.\n\nWasn't it?\n\n\"Mom,\" he said, \"I've been wanting to ask you about Zia....\"\n\nBut his mother was deep in conversation with Lola about Maya weaving techniques. As Max waited for an opportunity to interrupt, a yellow butterfly landed on his hand. He tried to flick it away, but it clung on.\n\n\"What do you want?\" he muttered. \"Leave me alone.\"\n\nThe butterfly waved its antennae at him.\n\n\"You're making a big mistake,\" he whispered. \"I can't help you. I'm not the one. I'd pick another champion if I were you.\"\n\nThe butterfly hovered in front of his face for a moment and then did a little dance, fluttering backward and forward between his chair and the glass doors that led from the terrace into the house. Even Max could not ignore the butterfly's meaning. It wanted him to follow it.\n\nCurious to find out what the insect was trying to tell him, he got up and wandered into the house. He was going to go up to his room, but a movement in the great hall caught his eye. He went in to check on Lord 6-Dog.\n\nAn extraordinary scene awaited him.\n\nThe monkey king was sitting on top of his own great stone head, staring across at the head of Tzelek. The vet had obviously come and gone, as 6-Dog was patched and bandaged.\n\n\"Thy devilish scheme has failed,\" he was saying to the statue of his rival. \"But like a rat who can squeeze through the smallest of holes, thou wilt find a way out of Xibalba. So hurry back to Middleworld, Tzelek, for we have unfinished business. There is still a great battle in the stars for thee and me. But I warn thee, the world has changed and so have I. We are no longer brothers. So go ahead and lay thine evil plans. I will be waiting for thee.\"\n\nAfter a few moments, Lord 6-Dog noticed Max standing below and climbed down to him. \"We have no time to lose, young lord,\" he said. \"I will teach thee everything I know and then, shoulder to shoulder, we will face the legions of hell.\"\n\nThe legions of hell were coming for him.\n\n\"I can't do it,\" whispered Max. \"I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"What talk is this, young lord?\" said Lord 6-Dog kindly. \"And thou a noble warrior? Did we not fight alongside each other on the Black Pyramid? And hast thou not learnt that anything is possible? Why, if the great Lord 6-Dog can hang from a tree by his tail, who knows what else can happen? Perhaps a boy with hair as red as fire can defeat the powers of evil like the blazing Sun Jaguar defeats the night.\"\n\n\"My hair is brown, actually,\" said Max. \"Do you really think I stand a chance against the Death Lords?\"\n\nLord 6-Dog bared his monkey teeth in what he hoped was a reassuring grin and hid his crossed fingers behind his hairy back.\n\n\"Of course I do. Now let us get to work.\"\n\n#\n\n# GLOSSARY\n\nAH PUKUH ( _awe pooh coo_ ): God of violent and unnatural death, depicted in Maya art as a bloated, decomposing corpse or a cigar-smoking skeleton. His constant companions are dogs and owls, both considered omens of death. Ah Pukuh wears bells to warn people of his approach (possibly an unnecessary precaution, since one of his nicknames is Kisin, or \"the flatulent one,\" so you'd probably smell him coming, anyway).\n\nBAKABS ( _baw cobs_ ): Four brothers, the sons of ITZAMNA and IXCHEL, who stand at the corners of the world and support the heavens.\n\n_BALCH\u00c9_ ( _ball chay_ ): A ritual drink brewed from fermented honey, water, and the bark of the purple-flowered balch\u00e9 tree.\n\n_CENOTE_ ( _say note eh_ ): A deep, water-filled sinkhole, like a natural reservoir. There are at least three thousand cenotes in the Yucat\u00e1n. The name is a Spanish corruption of the Yucatec Maya word _tz'onot_.\n\nCHAHK ( _chalk_ ): God of storms and warfare, Chahk was one of the oldest and most revered of the ancient Maya deities. He has two tusklike breath scrolls emitting from his mouth to convey his humid nature; bulging eyes; and a long, turned-up nose. Frogs were thought to be his heralds, because they croak before it rains. Just as the Norse god Thor carries Mjolnir, his enchanted hammer, so Chahk wields the god K'AWIIL as his fiery lightning ax.\n\n_CHICLE_ ( _cheek lay)_ : A natural gum made from boiling the milky latex of the sapodilla tree. Chicle had been chewed by the Maya for centuries but didn't reach North America until 1870 when Thomas Adams, a New York inventor, opened the world's first chewing gum factory. These days, manufacturers mostly use synthetic rubber.\n\nCODEX (plural CODICES): Strictly speaking, any book with pages (as opposed to a scroll) is a codex, but the term is most closely associated with the books of the ancient Maya. Written and illustrated on long strips of bark paper or leather, folded accordion-style, these books painstakingly recorded Maya history, religion, mythology, astronomy, and agricultural cycles. All but three were destroyed during the Spanish conquest. (See DIEGO DE LANDA below.)\n\nGLYPHS: The name given to more than eight hundred different signs used by the Maya to write their books and stone inscriptions. The Maya writing system incorporates signs for sounds and signs for whole words. It is considered to be the most sophisticated system ever developed in MESOAMERICA and did not begin to be decoded until the 1950s. About 80 percent of the most common glyphs have now been deciphered.\n\nHERO TWINS: The twin brothers Xbalanke ( _sh-ball-on-kay)_ and Hunahpu ( _who gnaw poo)_ are the main characters in the Maya creation story. Like their father and uncle before them, the twins are challenged to a ball game in XIBALBA by the LORDS OF DEATH. But where their father and uncle died in the attempt, the twins outwit the Death Lords and take their places in the heavens as the sun and the moon. Their father is resurrected as HUUN IXIM, the Maize God. The story of the Hero Twins is part of the Maya creation story, as told in the POPOL VUH.\n\nHOWLER MONKEYS: With an extra-large voice box that makes them the loudest land animals on the planet, howlers can hear each other up to three miles away. Only the blue whale, whose whistle carries for hundreds of miles underwater, is louder.\n\nHUUN IXIM ( _who knee shim_ ): The reborn father of the HERO TWINS and the Maya god of maize. Huun Ixim has an elongated forehead that resembles an ear of corn. Maya nobility often molded babies' skulls into this shape by binding the infants' heads between wooden boards.\n\nITZAMNA ( _eats um gnaw):_ Ruler of the heavens, lord of knowledge, lord of day and night, and all-round good guy. Itzamna gave his people the gifts of culture, writing, art, books, chronology, and the use of calendars. As a patron of healing and science, he can bring the dead back to life. With IXCHEL, he fathered the BAKABS. Itzamna is usually depicted as a toothless but sprightly old man.\n\nIXCHEL ( _each shell_ ): Like most Maya deities, Lady Rainbow had multiple personalities. As the goddess of the old moon, she is depicted as an angry old woman with a coiled snake on her head, fingernails like claws, and a skirt decorated with human bones. In this guise, she vents her anger on mortals with floods and rainstorms. But as the goddess of the new moon, she is a beautiful young woman who reclines inside the crescent moon, holding her rabbit in her arms. IXCHEL was the patroness of childbirth, medicine, and weaving.\n\nJAGUAR: Called _bahlam_ by the ancient Maya who revered it for its hunting skills, the jaguar is the largest and most ferocious big cat in the Americas. Today, due to the fur trade and the destruction of its natural habitat, the jaguar is in danger of extinction.\n\nJAGUAR STONES ( _bahlam tuuno'ob)_ : A literary invention of the Jaguar Stones trilogy, along with the five sacred pyramids, these five fictional stone carvings embody the five pillars of ancient Maya society: agriculture, astronomy, creativity, military prowess, and kingship. As far as we know, no such stones ever existed\u2014nor did the Maya ever relax their warlike ways enough to forge an equal alliance of five great cities.\n\nJUNGLE\/RAINFOREST: All tropical rainforests are jungles, but not all jungle is rainforest. A tropical rainforest receives at least eighty inches of rain per year. It is home to more kinds of trees than any other area of the world, most of them growing closely together. The tops of the tallest trees form a canopy of leaves about 100 to 150 feet above the ground, while the smaller trees form one or two lower canopies. Between them, these canopies block most of the light from reaching the ground. As a result, little grows on the forest floor, making it relatively easy to walk through a tropical rainforest. If the canopy is destroyed, by nature or by humans, a tangle of dense fast-growing greenery springs up in the sunlight. This is jungle. Its growth provides shade for the rainforest species to reseed and grow tall enough to block out the light once more. This cycle can take one hundred years to complete.\n\nK'AWIIL ( _caw wheel_ ): A god of lightning and patron of lineage, kingship, and aristocracy. He has a reptilian face, with a smoking mirror emerging from his forehead and a long snout bursting into flame.\n\nK'INICH AHAW ( _keen each uh how_ ): The great sun god. By day, he traces the path of the sun across the sky and by night he prowls through the underworld in the form of a jaguar, before emerging in the east each morning.\n\nK'UK'ULKAN _(coo cool con_ ): The feathered serpent, a divine combination of serpent and bird, one of the great deities of MESOAMERICA.\n\nDIEGO DE LANDA (1524\u20131579): The overzealous Franciscan friar who tried to wipe out Maya culture by burning their CODICES and thousands of religious artworks in the square at Mani on July 12, 1549. Even the conquistadores thought he'd gone too far and sent him back to Spain to stand trial. Ironically, the treatise he wrote in his defense, _Relaci\u00f3n de las Cosas de Yucat\u00e1n (1565)_ , is now our best reference source on the ancient Maya. Landa was absolved by the Council of the Indies and returned to the New World as the bishop of Yucat\u00e1n.\n\nLORDS OF DEATH: In Maya mythology, the underworld (XIBALBA) is ruled by twelve Lords of Death: One Death, Seven Death, Scab Stripper, Blood Gatherer, Wing, Demon of Pus, Demon of Jaundice, Bone Scepter, Skull Scepter, Demon of Filth, Demon of Woe, and Packstrap. The Lords of Death delight in human suffering. It's their job to inflict sickness, pain, starvation, fear, and death on the citizens of MIDDLEWORLD. Fortunately, they're usually far too busy gambling and playing childish pranks on each other to get much work done.\n\nMAYA: Most historians agree that Maya civilization began on the Yucat\u00e1n peninsula sometime before 1500 BCE. It entered its Classic Period around 250 CE, when the Maya adopted a hierarchical system of government and established a series of kingdoms across what is now Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. Each of these kingdoms was an independent city-state, with its own ceremonial center, urban areas, and farming community. Building on the accomplishments of earlier civilizations such as the Olmec, the Maya developed astronomy, calendrical systems, and hieroglyphic writing. Although most famous for their soaring pyramids and palaces (built without metal tools, wheels, or beasts of burden) they were also skilled farmers, weavers, and potters, and they established extensive trade networks. The Maya saw no boundaries between heaven and earth, life and death, sleep and wakefulness. They believed that human blood was the oil that kept the wheels of the cosmos turning. Many of their rituals involved bloodletting or human sacrifice, but never on the scale practiced by the Aztecs. Wracked by overpopulation, drought, and soil erosion, Maya power began to decline around 800 CE, when the southern cities were abandoned. By the time the Spanish arrived, only a few kingdoms still thrived, and most Maya had gone back to farming their family plots. Today, there are still six million Maya living in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador.\n\nMAYAN: The family of thirty-one different languages spoken by Maya groups in Central America.\n\nMESOAMERICA: Literally meaning \"between the Americas,\" Mesoamerica is the name archaeologists and anthropologists use to describe a region that extends south and east from central Mexico to include parts of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua. It was home to various pre-Columbian civilizations, including the Maya (from 1500 BCE), the Olmec (1200\u2013400 BCE), and the Aztecs (1250\u20131521). (The Incas of Peru in South America date from 1200 to 1533.)\n\nMIDDLEWORLD: Like the Vikings, the Egyptians, and other ancient cultures, the Maya believed that humankind inhabited a middle world between heaven and hell. The Maya middleworld (yok'ol kab) was sandwiched between the nine dark and watery layers of XIBALBA and the thirteen leafy layers of the heavens (ka'anal naah).\n\nMOON RABBIT: The shadows that look like a man in the moon to people in northern climes are viewed sideways in Central America, where they look like a leaping rabbit. The moon rabbit was the companion of the young moon goddess, IXCHEL. Due to the different vantage point, the moon appears to wax and wane vertically in the tropics, which is why Ixchel is often depicted holding her pet as she reclines on the crescent moon.\n\nOBSIDIAN: This black volcanic glass was the closest thing the ancient Maya had to metal. An obsidian blade can be one hundred times sharper than a stainless steel scalpel, but it is extremely brittle.\n\n_PITZ_ : The Maya ball game was the first team sport in recorded history. It had elements of soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but was more difficult than any of them. Using only their hips, knees, or elbows, the players tried to knock the heavy rubber ball through a stone hoop high on the side wall of the ball court. The game had great religious significance, and the losers were frequently sacrificed.\n\nPOPOL VUH ( _poe pole voo_ ): The Maya Book of the Dawn of Life, the sacred book of the K'ich\u00e9 ( _kee-chay_ ) Maya who lived (and still live) in the highlands of Guatemala. The title literally means \"Book of the Mat\" but is usually translated as \"Council Book.\" The Popol Vuh tells the Maya creation story and explains how the HERO TWINS rescued their father from XIBALBA.\n\nQUETZAL ( _ket sahl_ ): The Maya prized the iridescent blue-green tail feathers of the Replendent quetzal bird for decorating royal headdresses. After the feathers were plucked, the birds would be set free to grow new ones. In Maya times, the penalty for killing a quetzal was death. Today, without such protection, the quetzal is almost extinct.\n\nRAINFOREST: See JUNGLE.\n\nSAN XAVIER: The setting of the Jaguar Stones books, this is a fictional country based on modern-day Belize.\n\nVISION SERPENT: When Maya kings wished to communicate with their ancestors or with the gods, they would hold a bloodletting ceremony to summon the Vision Serpent. The ritual required members of the royal family to pierce themselves and drip their blood onto strips of bark paper. The paper would then be burned and the Vision Serpent was supposed to appear out of the smoke, with the desired ancestor or god emerging from its mouth.\n\nXIBALBA ( _she ball buh_ ): The K'ich\u00e9 Maya name for the underworld, meaning \"well of fear.\" Only kings and those who died a violent death (battle, sacrifice, or suicide) or women who died in childbirth could look forward to the leafy shade of heaven. All other souls, good or bad, were headed across rivers of scorpions, blood, and pus to Xibalba. Unlike the Christian hell with its fire and brimstone, the Maya underworld was cold and damp, and its inhabitants were condemned to an eternity of bone-chilling misery and hunger.\n\n# MAYA COSMOS\n\nWhat did Max, Lola, and Hermanjilio see in the Temple of Itzamna?\n\nThis illustration (based on a painted plate from the Late Classic Period) depicts the three realms of the Maya cosmos: the heavens above, Middleworld (the world of humans), and the waters of Xibalba, the underworld. In the heavens, the two-headed Cosmic Monster (or Cosmic Crocodile, as Lola called it) contains the sun, Venus, and the Milky Way. In the middle of it all is the World Tree, which was brought into being by the king during bloodletting rituals. With its upper branches in the heavens and its roots in Xibalba, the World Tree was the doorway to the otherworlds of gods and ancestors. Communication with these spirits took place through the mysterious Vision Serpent. At the top of the World Tree sits Lord Itzamna as the bird of heaven.\n\n# THE MAYA CALENDAR\n\nThe Maya were fascinated by the passage of time and they developed a variety of astonishingly accurate calendars to track the movements of the sun and the stars. The Maya kings and priests used their advanced knowledge of astronomy to plan their rituals, wage their wars, and manage their agricultural cycles.\n\n## **The Long Count**\n\nThe Long Count counts the days (kin) since the beginning of this creation. (The Maya believed there were three creations. The first two, when humans were made out of mud and wood respectively, were failures. The third creation, this one, when men were made out of corn, was deemed a success.) According to the Long Count, this third creation began, in our terms, on August 11, 3114 BCE. In the Long Count, the Maya year (tun) was 360 days long. Just as our 10-based counting system marks the decade (10 years) and the century (10 \u00d7 10 = 100 years), the Maya's 20-based counting system marks the katun (20 tuns) and the baktun (20 \u00d7 20 = 400 tuns). Some say that the third creation lasts 13 baktuns, giving us an end date of December 21, 2012. There is no archaeological evidence for this claim and Mayan inscriptions indicate that the world will continue far beyond 2012.\n\n## **The Haab**\n\nThe Haab is the Maya calendar closest to our own. It tracks the solar year and is made up of 18 months, each consisting of 20 days, plus a 5-day period called the Wayeb to make a total of 365 days. The Wayeb was thought to be a time of uncertainty and bad luck, when the doors between the mortal realm and the underworld were opened and demons roamed the earth.\n\n## **The Tzolk'in**\n\nThe Tzolk'in was the sacred calendar, used to predict the characteristics of each day and determine the days for rituals, like a daily horoscope. It is made up of 20 day names and 13 numbers, and takes 260 days to go through the full cycle of name-and-number combinations. Each day name has a quality, some good, some bad. For example, Imix (\"Crocodile\") is full of complications and problems, and thus bad for journeys or business deals. The number (1\u201313) determines how strong the characteristic would be. So on 13-Imix, you might want to stay home.\n\n## **The Calendar Round**\n\nThe Calendar Round brings together the Haab and Tzolk'in calendars. It takes 18,980 days (about 52 years) to work through the 260 Tzolk'in days and the 365 Haab days. The Calendar Round is usually depicted as a series of interlocking cogs and wheels\u2014which, in Jaguar Stones: Middleworld, was the inspiration for the \"time machine\" in the Temple of Itzamna.\n\n# EASY CHICKEN TAMALES\n\nEveryone in Central America has their own recipe for tamales. Even Max Murphy would like this one.\n\n## Ingredients\n\n1 bag of corn husks  \n1 roast chicken, off the bone and shredded  \n1 jar of salsa verde or tomatillo sauce  \n6 cups of Maseca corn masa mix for tamales  \n1 cup of corn oil  \n6 cups of chicken stock or broth  \n2 tsp salt  \n1 tsp baking powder  \n1 tsp cumin  \n1 green chili, seeds removed, finely chopped  \n1 clove garlic, crushed and finely chopped\n\n## Method\n\n1. Soften the corn husks by soaking in warm water for at least 3 hours. You'll need to put something heavy on them to keep them under the water.\n\n2. Marinate the shredded chicken in the salsa verde.\n\n3. In a mixer combine the masa mix, oil, chicken stock, salt, baking powder, cumin, chili, and garlic. Mix until you have a soft dough. Add more chicken stock if needed.\n\n4. Spread a heaped tablespoon of the masa mixture into the center of a corn husk (smooth side up, with the wide end of the husk toward you) to make a 3-inch square. Put 2 teaspoons of the marinated chicken and salsa verde on top of the masa. Fold first the left side of the corn husk over the filling, and then overlap with the right. Fold the pointed end toward you. Fold up the wide end over the tip of the pointed end. Tie with a strip of corn husk or kitchen string to make a little package. Continue until all the masa and chicken are used up.\n\n5. Place tamales in a large steamer and steam for about 40 minutes. You'll know the tamales are cooked when they easily separate from the corn husks.\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nIn the course of researching this book, we met a Maya shaman who explained the importance of being bound to others in a tangle of obligations and favors that can never be unraveled or repaid. Certainly words don't seem enough to thank Daniel Lazar, our agent, and Stephen Barr. Thank you also to our wise and witty editor Elizabeth Law and to Mary Albi, Saint Nico Medina, Doug Pocock, Alison Weiss, Rob Guzman, and everyone at Egmont USA for their brilliant ideas, their enthusiasm, their patience, and their commitment to protecting the world's remaining rainforests by using only sustainable paper stocks. Huge, humble, heartfelt thanks to our own personal superhero, Dr. Marc Zender of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, for sharing his immense knowledge so generously and with such good humor. Thanks to Patsy Holden at the University of Central Florida for her thoughts on the Maya worldview, Mark Van Stone at Southwestern College for his insights on 2012, Kathryn Hinds for her eagle-eyed copyediting, and Jordan Brown for letting us use his line. Thank you to Dustin Schaber for fortitude and showmanship above and beyond the call of duty. Also to Alan, Christy, Andrea, Max, Nicole, Heather, Jack, and Mary Anne for their extraordinary help and support in so many ways for so many reasons at so many times and always at such short notice. Thank you to Geraldo Garcia, Karina Martinez, Franklin Choco, and Hugh Daly in Belize; Jesus Antonio Madrid and Jose Cordoba in Guatemala; Oscar Vera Gallegos, Vicente, and Chan Kin in Mexico; Cee Greene, Paul Verbinnen, and Big Guy in New York. Thank you to all the booksellers who've been rooting for us, especially Penny McConnel and Liza Bernard at the Norwich Bookstore, Jill Moore at Square Books Junior in Oxford, Mississippi, Lisa Sharp at Nightbird Books in Lafayette, Arkansas, and Jennifer Stark at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Center. Thank you to Lucinda Walker and Beth Reynolds at the Norwich Public Library. Thank you to all the teachers and schools who've supported and encouraged us, especially Wakefield Middle School in Tucson, Canarelli Middle School in Las Vegas, Edmonds Middle School in Burlington, and the Marion Cross School in Norwich. Thank you also to Donald Kreis, Jessica Carvalho, Trina Boyd, Peter and Hetty, Graham Sharp, James Bowen, the SBJ Book Club, Erik Roush, Andy the chef, Peter Kraus, and Emilio Ortiz. And did we mention Dan Lazar?\n\n**YUM BO'OTIK TE'EX!**\n**EGMONT**  \n _We bring stories to life_\n\nFirst published in the United States of America by Smith and Sons, Inc., 2007  \nThis revised edition published by Egmont USA, 2010  \n443 Park Avenue South, Suite 806  \nNew York, NY 10016\n\nCopyright \u00a9 J&P Voelkel, 2005, 2010  \nAll rights reserved\n\nwww.egmontusa.com  \nwww.jaguarstones.com\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  \nVoelkel, Jon.  \nMiddleworld \/ J. & P. Voelkel. \u2014 Rev. ed.  \np. cm. \u2013 (The Jaguar Stones ; bk. 1)  \nSummary: When his archaeologist parents go missing in Central America, fourteen-year-old Max embarks on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld in search of the legendary Jaguar Stones, which enabled ancient Mayan kings to wield the powers of living gods.  \neISBN: 978-1-60684-179-2  \n[1. Adventure and adventurers\u2014Fiction. 2. Missing persons\u2014Fiction. 3. Kidnapping\u2014Fiction. 4. Supernatural\u2014Fiction. 5. Mayas\u2014Fiction. 6. Indians of Central America\u2014Fiction.]  \nI. Voelkel, Pamela. II. Title.  \nPZ7.V861Mi 2010  \n[Fic]\u2014dc22   \n2009040906\n\nCPSIA tracking label information  \nRandom House Production \u2022 1745 Broadway \u2022 New York, NY 10019\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.\n\nSummary of revisions and updates in this edition can be found at:  \nwww.jaguarstones.com\n\nv3.0\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}