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| Courtesy Simon Fisher |
If only things had happened differently. All he felt was loss. And a kind of annoyance, frustration, at his own delinquency. Why had things gone so haywire? Where had these ideas come from? Why couldn't things have gone quietly into that good night? Why were they so blessed, so cursed? Why couldn't he have seen, but not been heard? Why be enveloped in such a disastrous course of events?
He had been both lonely and immune to reason. "I take care of you forever, i stay with you forever," didn't mean anything of the kind. Instead he had reaped a whirlwind he didn't even know existed. And yet he had fallen for these dreams of quiet passage. As if his life was already over. "I didn't want to come back to Australia," he told the old woman; and that was true. He hadn't wanted to be here. Five days until the election. Rudd is increasingly shrill. There's defeat already in their eyes. The polls are abysmal. Michael missed being out there in the wide world; missed everything. He didn't want to be a shadow on a dark landscape; a gasp that had already been grunted into thin walls, a sigh of escalation and retreat. He didn't want to be here and he didn't want to be there. He wanted to disappear.
As if in some self contained universe, some self-contained place, he made forever as if to go. And was always thus. A mirror amongst mirrors. A synapse in a complex city. Everything shattered. Everything come home to roost. Oh delinquent stream; vacant gap. And a simple longing. And here everything curled away as if forbidden. He didn't want to start anew but had no choice. And everything squirrelled away, into an invisibility he had worked hard to foster.
People got on with their own lives and he wasn't part of them anymore. He came from the outside and could barely bear to look in. "I don't belong here anymore, finders keepers, losers weepers," went the song; and it played in his head throughout the early Spring days; as if there was no othe theme song, nothing else appropriate. He didn't want to be so lonely anymore, so outside of everything. But he kept to himself while the reformatting process was on. And let the nation decide their new leader. And his enemies muster beyond the horizon. And other people move on into other lives. And a terrible discontent moved upon the water and was gone. And that was that, come and embrace me. A splash in a dark pond. The sound of ducks moving quickly away. And a terrible echo of things that had gone before, heart sunk, the pit of stomach gripped yet again by fear. So he opened his eyes and did the next right thing.
THE BIGGER STORY:
(Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron's failure to win parliamentary backing for military action against Syria has hurt him politically, polls showed on Monday, with most Britons thinking him "reckless" and support for his party falling.
A Comres/ITV poll showed that 59 percent of those asked thought he had been reckless to organize last Thursday's vote on military action without knowing whether he had lawmakers' backing.
Another poll showed the opposition Labour party had increased its lead over Cameron's ruling Conservatives to 10 from four percentage points after the parliamentary defeat, setting back his hopes of being re-elected in 2015.
"The ten point lead is larger than we have seen of late, suggesting at least some impact from theSyria vote," YouGov, the second poll's organizer, said on Monday.
Britain's lower house of parliament voted against Cameron's Syrian plans by 285 to 272 votes on Thursday, inflicting a shock defeat on him even though he had already made big concessions to try to win approval.
It had long been clear that most Britons opposed their country being involved in military action against Syria and did not agree with Cameron, but Monday's polls suggest they think he badly mismanaged the overall situation too.
This was Rudd the underdog, the fighter, the Labor traditionalist. With the party contemplating defeat, Rudd invoked the warrior spirit to rally the movement about which he has often been equivocal.
"Never, ever, ever underestimate my fighting spirit as your Prime Minister," he told the true believers at Labor's Brisbane launch. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were in the audience but not Julia Gillard, who ran the Labor government for most of the past three years.
Introduced by his wife, Therese Rein, who called him a man "who carries his country boy smile everywhere with him", Rudd was joined on stage at the end by his entire family, united in adversity.
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