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Eden
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Extract from Eden

Eden Carmichael died on a hot Tuesday afternoon in January. He was found lying across a double bed at one of Canberra's best-known brothels, dressed in a blue and white flowered silk dress and a blonde wig.

Carmichael's loyal constituents felt betrayed by a death of such robust indignity. Not that he had many loyal constituents left. He'd never fully recovered from a spectacular public heart attack, and was rumoured to be retiring before the next election.

Others, who'd never voted for him, were drawn to the politician's death by a mixture of boredom and revulsion. A photograph had been printed in The Canberra Times a few days afterwards, of Carmichael in his flowered dress and wig. He stared at the camera from beneath a mass of yellow hair, one hand clutching the top button of his dress, with a dazed and wondering expression. He could have been drunk. Some of the people who sent protest letters to the newspaper concluded that he was. The most bitter and accusing of them reminded readers how Carmichael had argued that the ACT should change its laws and make prostitution legal, as though being found dead in a brothel was a logical consequence of this, and no more than he deserved.

Others speculated about who had sold the demeaning picture to the paper, whether its publication constituted a breach of privacy, and if it been taken on the day he died. None of these questions was answered in the one editorial the Times ran on the subject, which concentrated instead on the issue of freedom of the press.

More interesting questions, to my way of thinking, were: who had Carmichael been mocking that hot afternoon, besides himself? How had the joke of his last moments been shared?

Details continued seeping out, though not ones that threw light on these particular concerns. I wondered if the published photo was the only one that had been taken, and concluded that it seemed unlikely.

Canberra was a small enough city for any untimely public death to be felt personally. Cracks opened in the minds of citizens whose lives had in no way touched that of the Independent MLA. Television interviewers dug out anyone who had, or could claim, a connection with the man, or the club in which he'd spent his final hour, and the subject of prostitution, which had received little public attention for a decade, was daily in the news.

I lingered over my breakfast, savouring the quiet, and staring at the photograph, attracted to it as so many others were. I hadn't cut it out, but folded the page over and left it at the one end of my kitchen table cleared of children's clutter.

Carmichael faced the camera squarely. His dress looked neat. It fitted him. He wasn't wearing make-up. The picture was cut off just below the knees, so I couldn't see his shoes. He appeared to be a little nervous, as though he was waiting for someone who'd been unaccountably delayed. There was nothing to identify exactly where he was. It was an arresting picture, though not, to my mind at any rate, a degrading one.

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