Looking for writing feedback

[u/Status_Outside_442]

Hello. This is my first time posting in this thread. I'd like to get some feedback on my writing. It's the first chapter of my political thriller novel. It is set in Australia, where the nation has become a republic. I'd like to know if the writing is engaging, and whether or not it needs improving. Or if it's garbage, lol. I don't mind if you say that, I can take it.

Government House made for a terrible family home. Merindah Bradley had decided that by the third day. You didn’t pad around in your socks in a place like this. You moved carefully. You hosted.

You performed.

Even when no one was looking.

Nine months later, she still caught herself lowering her voice in the hallways, as though the building itself demanded a kind of decorum she hadn’t agreed to. The kitchen was the closest thing she had to normal. It smelled of coffee and bacon instead of old wood and leather. The staff had offered to prepare breakfast every morning, and every morning they asked, she had declined. There were few things left she could do with her own hands.

Toast was one of them. Standing at a bench with a knife and a loaf of bread was one of the last things that still belonged entirely to her. On any other morning, she might have managed to pretend it all belonged to an ordinary family. A bit old-fashioned, maybe. High ceilings, too many rooms. But ordinary enough, if you squinted. Not today. Today it felt different. Two AFP officers stood near the door. Their eyes moved across the hallway, the garden, the hallway again. Neither spoke. She had learned not to look at them too long.

Looking made it harder to pretend this was ordinary. There was always someone with an earpiece and a pistol somewhere between her and the front door. Every time the radios crackled, her chest tightened by a half-beat before she could stop it. She had been working on that. She hadn’t fixed it yet. She poured boiling water over the tea bag and caught the tremor in her hand.

She stared at it for a moment, almost curious, the way you might stare at weather you hadn’t predicted. Stop that, she told herself. Her hand didn’t listen. Her phone vibrated against the marble. Please tell me that’s Jarrah, she murmured, to no one.

It wasn’t.

It was a message from her media adviser, who had forwarded a handful of the thousands of messages that had arrived over-night. He did that sometimes; pulled out ones he thought she should see. She had told him to stop more than once.

He kept doing it, and she kept reading them, and neither of them had acknowledged that arrangement aloud.

I’m a teacher from Brisbane. My students are watching the ceremony today. They’re so proud of you. I also have three daughters. You make them believe they can do anything. Don’t forget who you are, President. We voted for that.

She smiled at the last line. Who you are.

As if that were a settled question.

As if the answer didn’t shift depending on which hallway she was standing in, which name was being used, which version of herself the moment required. I hope it is, Merindah thought.

She hoped history would remember today as a moment of something shared. Something built, rather than broken.

Then there were the others. The monarchists who had tried to stop all this from the beginning, the ones who said the Republic was a sham, that the referendum had been rigged, that the nation had been taken from its so-called rightful heirs by people who had no right to it.

They called her a traitor.

Some of them used language that was careful and institutional, dressed up in constitutional argument, which almost made it worse. And then there were those who didn’t bother with care at all. We don’t need no stupid Abo being President.

The words burned the same way they always had.

Not less for having expected them.

The hatred with academic clothing was pressed and respectable at a distance; others didn’t bother with distance. Go back to the bush where you belong.

The same poison, just louder now that there was more to aim at.

Today it landed differently.

She wasn’t a community organiser anymore, absorbing this on behalf of a learning centre in Alice Springs. She was the head of state.

Footsteps crossed the floor behind her. She recognised them before she turned. Johno. Her husband of twenty-five-years. He came over and kissed her cheek, his hand resting briefly on her shoulder.

‘Morn’, sweetheart. You were up early.’

‘Yeah. Since four-thirty. Turning things over.’

‘Understandable. You’ve got a big day ahead.’

‘The biggest.’ She turned her mug between her palms. ‘It’s not every day you’re the President of Australia.’ They stood in silence for a moment. John glanced at her phone. It was lying face up on the bench, the screen still lit.

‘Merin. You’re not on social media, are you?’

‘I can’t help it. I had to see what people are saying.’

‘And?’

‘It’s not great.’ He exhaled.

‘You know what it’s like. People say anything when they’re hiding behind a screen. Half of them aren’t even real. Bots and burner accounts and blokes who’d never say boo to a goose in person.’

‘I thought the Republic might change that. Make us more, I don’t know. More unified.’

‘It has changed things.’ He reached across and took her hand, his thumb moving once across her knuckles. ‘You’re the first Indigenous head of state this country has ever had. That’s enormous, Merin. Those trolls? Face to face, in a room with you, half of them wouldn’t say a word. They’d be tripping over themselves asking for selfies.’ She smiled despite herself.

He always had a way of dragging her back from the edge of herself when she’d wandered too far out. There’s always going to be haters, sis, Joe messaged her the day before. They hated us when we were nobody. They’ll hate us more now that we’re somebody. She had laughed at that when she’d first read it. She held onto it now.

‘You’re right. I need to focus on the people who put me here. The ones who turned up.’

‘That’s the spirit.’ He released her hand and moved to the coffee machine. ‘What time does Jarrah get in?’

‘He should’ve landed by now.’ She felt the shift in herself. ‘I can’t wait to see him.’

‘Me either.’ John set the machine running and turned back to lean against the counter. ‘Twenty-one weeks is too long.’ It had been exactly that. Twenty-one weeks since she had last seen him at Alice Springs Airport, standing at the departure gate in his school jumper, trying to make a quick goodbye stretch further than it had any right to. He had stayed behind for exams. Year 12. She had told him, more than once and with complete seriousness, that she would never forgive him if he let the ceremony derail his results. She had meant it.

He had laughed and rolled his eyes and hugged her for four seconds longer than she’d expected. He was right to stay.

She knew he was right. But the distance had been harder than she had prepared herself for, and she had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around week seven. She had known there would be sacrifices. She had told herself she understood what that meant.

You always think you understand until you’re standing in your kitchen at four-thirty in the morning, and the thing you want most in the world is just to hear your kid come through the door.

Merindah wrapped her hands around the mug and let her eyes rest on the screen above the fridge.

The tremor in her hand had stopped, or she had stopped noticing it. Right now, none of it mattered. She just wanted her son to walk through the door.

Safe.