Sussex Drive: A Novel (16 page)

I
NDIRA
J
OPAL
, older sister of the president of Pakistan, meandered through A Thousand Years of History, the primo exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. At this rate, it would take Indira longer than a thousand years to appreciate the capitalist evolution of her host country.

It was at times like these that Becky cursed the duties of her unofficial job description; rather than touring boring exhibits, she preferred a session of sit-down beadwork with First Nations women. Less time-consuming for her, and some of those Third World wives were actually very good at the craft and felt a sense of accomplishment, which transferred into positive feelings for Canada. For God’s sake, they were naturals—
natives
, even, themselves. However, the regular First Nations beaders were away on another traditional holiday and as a result Becky was midway between the Hudson’s Bay Company mink pelts and Pacific logging.

She’d been through this maze many times, not only with the spousal corps and their sherpas, who always found that the settler hovels, cobbled together from timber and tin, reminded them of a certain village at home in the southern hemisphere, but also with all her children and their Ritalin-and-juice-addicted classmates, which included hosting sleepovers in the Raven’s Village.

Today, Becky found Canada Hall, without the brigades of students, queasily empty and silent.

Indira stroked the mink and addressed the translator, who asked Becky, “You own this?”

“I wish,” Becky said. “Maybe for my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

Indira smiled at the translation, then nattered on in whatever language she spoke.

“Too hot for Islamabad,” the translator said, holding the pelt.

Becky imagined every strawberry strand of hair on her head tarnishing into rusty silver as tour time dripped to a standstill.

When there were no immediate prospects of ideological conquest or conversion in a social situation, Becky’s intimate knowledge of the most proximate restroom in any government or public edifice was pressed into service. She pulled aside a security aide and sped-walked away on her spike LuLu’s, past the miners panning for gold and the Doukhobor church, toward the closest respite. It was a holiday to get away from the perpetual twilight of the history
exhibit, to pee vociferously, and to take a long time washing her hands and reviving her lipstick. They were going to have to speed it up if Ms. Islamabad was going to be on time for a luncheon reception at the Supreme Court.

“Becky.”

She turned to find Doc, inside the door—and his maleness seemed incredibly inappropriate in the women’s washroom. He was pinning the door shut, keeping security and Third World bladders at bay. He was dressed for the Hill, in an Armani wannabe suit, probably zigzag-stitched by a Hong Kong tailor hired by his girlfriend. Bespoke, bothered and breathless.

“Just FYI,” Becky said, dropping her tube back into the clutch, “this is the women’s.”

“You haven’t returned my calls.”

“
Quid pro quo
. Heard of it?”

“Come on, Becky.”

“What goes around comes around.”

“I’m not here to talk karma.”

“Good.” She moved to go past him out the door.

He didn’t budge. “But we’re facing Karmageddon here.”

“Doc,” she said, “I have a foreign dignitary under my arm, you’re completely out of line, and
DFAIT
will have a stroke.”

“We’ve got a problem.”

“What?”

“We need your help.”

“What?” she said, already sensing what was coming.

“Greg. He’s losing it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“In a few minutes, we’re going into an update and—”

“I already know this.”

“You know the details?”

“No.”

“We’re stripping federal public servants of the right to strike. We’re abolishing pay equity for women.” He paused.

Becky didn’t comment. Yes, women should be in the home, raising their own children. While we’re at it, send the Filipinas back home to raise their own. And, yes, all those secret socialist feminists should tie on their Hush Puppies and heave-ho off Parliament Hill. Of course, the
urbanistas
would kvetch.

“And he’s decided to cancel per-voter public financing of the political parties.”

That got her attention. “Not good,” Becky said. “Not now.”

“That’s what we’re telling him. And Finance is telling him. It’s the time to appear conciliatory. He and Chief, they won’t listen.”

“What about the stimulus?”

“No.” Doc slumped against the door. “Not even a sliver.”

That was grim indeed. Becky pulled out her phone, but there was no signal. The Museum of Civilization was the equivalent of a mummy’s concrete bunker. “How much time?”

“The press is already in lock-up with the fiscal update.”

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“We’re in motion.”

“I can’t change this!”

“You must,” Doc said. “Pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

“I’d like to pull,” Becky said, “a wireless signal.”

“You have to talk to him.”

“Follow me.”

Becky blasted out of the washroom with Doc in tow and told a bored aide to escort Indira through the rest of Civilization and on to lunch. She ducked past the Canadian postal museum and down the escalator to the Great Hall, dwarfed by the Pacific Coast totem poles. Standing in front of a Tsimshian manor, with a monotone drumbeat in the background, she stared across at the shining rump of the Parliamentary Library and a statue of poor murdered D’Arcy McGee, advocate for Confederation, stashed at the rear of Parliament Hill, as she hit the button.

Doc watched her hopefully and stroked a few rogue chest hairs.

“Yes.” Greg actually answered his personal line.

“Greg,” said Becky. “A minute.” She could tell he was being groomed; when his stylist subdued his remaining hair he went into a trance.

“Is this to do with the kids?”

“No.”

Greg hung up.

Doc got it. “Oh my God. Oh my God. He’s night and day since Obama got in. Oh my God. Oh my God. Night and day. Night and day.”

Becky refused to respond. Her husband wasn’t affected
by the threat to global conservatism posed by Obama’s election. It wasn’t the crash of the planet’s financial markets. It was much more than that. She wouldn’t tell Doc if she could, and he was already on the run—jumping over a Haida canoe and bolting up the escalator, saying into his phone, “Mayday.”

Becky squeezed into the back row of the visitors’ gallery of the House as Greg, below, in the Prime Minister’s seat, turned his gaze back to Finance, who was about to deliver the long-awaited economic update. Finance, a Newfie Barbie of Norwegian descent, was fired up, placing the Hill and a nation of citizens on high alert: “financial degradation,” “difficult financial deterioration,” “financial decimation,” “severe financial devaluation” and “financial deliverance.” The final utterance sounded to Becky like reservations for the Big Five banks at the Rapture. She sensed the discomfort of the opposition, most of whom had already premasticated the speech in the lock-up, parsing its guts at the same time as the press. Tai Chi squinted in the dim light and squirmed in his skin as Finance dirged, in a liturgical litany, the fallen saints in the American financial firmament:
Santa AIG, Santa Bear Stearns, Santa Citigroup, Santa Fannie Mae, Santa Freddie Mac
.

“We cannot ask Canadians to tighten their belts without looking in the mirror,” Finance declared, sticking out her Norwegian cleavage. She went on to make the announcement Becky dreaded: the $1.95 per vote paid by Canadians
to each political party, which prevented the unions and corporations from playing ringmaster at the electoral circus, would be terminated. The opposition heard this in the same way they would an order to march out of the House, turn their backs on the Eternal Flame and face a firing squad. This was endgame. Bankruptcy. No funds for travel, party building, policy conventions, internal polling, nada.

Becky noticed that everyone across from her husband in the Commons was looking directly at him, or perhaps at Chief, a shadow lurking. Becky allowed her mind to travel freely for a second and imagined what would happen if the Liberals, Bloc and NDP went bankrupt. The Conservatives would morph, like a nicer Gollum with the ring, into one über-tribe to lead them all.

While Finance ended with an earnest, “We’ll get through this,” Becky did the math. Her husband’s government would transfer approximately 89 cents per man, woman and child from the voter subsidy back to the public piggy bank as stimulus spending. She compared this $30 million with Germany’s $213 billion, Japan’s $275 billion, Britain’s $418 billion, China’s $600 billion and the U.S.A.’s staggering $1.5 trillion. Greg’s belt-tightening, ball-freezing parody wasn’t any form of stimulus—not with the Employment Insurance claims increase of 96.4 percent over the last year and the auto industry tarred, feathered and hitchhiking. What was Greg thinking?
Was
he thinking?

Finance, with a flip of mermaid hair, thanked the Speaker. This was usually the cue for riotous appreciation from the
government benches. The Tories, however, were restrained; there was an extreme nervousness in their team demeanour, particularly after the announcement of fiscal genocide for the opposition. She smelled fear.

The socialist leader, ever sentimental, had the floor. “Instead of an immediate stimulus package to attack the recession, the government is apparently going to attack democracy.”

He received a minority standing ovation. And then the session was over.

Greg and his posse—Chief, Doc, Finance Barbie and a few other loyals—exploded from the House.

As Becky took her leave, she caught sight of the MPs in the opposition lobby. It was disturbing. A Bloc Member from Montreal hugged a Grit from Ontario. A female NDP MP hugged a former Liberal Cabinet minister, also female, a doctor, a person Becky had personally courted for the Tory cause, a prestigious catch. The fiscal update required a confidence vote, and Greg was obviously betting that the opposition wouldn’t vote against it; it was too soon to trigger yet another unnecessary $30 million election. And when they supported the update—by not showing up to vote against it—he’d have the pleasure of watching them cut off their own political welfare.

She was en route to Greg’s second-floor office in Centre Block when she was accosted by Greg’s former mentor and a current member of the King’s Privy Council for Canada, Alice Nanton. Greg had eventually betrayed her, in a good
way, by running against her, trouncing her, and then appointed her to the KPC, for which she wasn’t appropriately grateful as far as Greg was concerned.

“Did you hear what he said?” Alice asked.

“Who?” Becky said.

“The Socialist. ‘The government is apparently going to attack democracy.’ Christ! It’s the first time I’ve ever agreed with that man.” Alice was spooked. “You look like we need a drink,” she said, taking her arm.

“I’d love to,” Becky said, “but I’m popping in on the PM, and then the Pakistani delegation’s over with George at the Supreme Court.”

Alice shrugged in closer to Becky; she’d already been dipping into the well. “What’s going on with him?” she whispered. “What’s the matter with that man?”

Becky wanted to shut that down. “Greg’s fine, just tired. We’ve got the Governor General’s kid staying with us while she’s away.”

“He’s a caution, that one,” Alice said.

Becky stickhandled. “It’s hard to do the good work Greg wants to do. With the minority.”

Alice rubbed Becky’s shoulder, commiserated. “Yes. It’s hard to cut the Leviathan down to size. Like trying to butcher a whale in the middle of the ocean.”

“Something like that.”

“And they’re slippery.”

“Yes.”

“Pull you under.”

“Possibly.”

“But you know, Becky, I haven’t seen him like this—so, so dark—since the Nina Episode.”

The Nina Episode. It took her a few seconds to realize that Alice wasn’t talking about a key political operative beheaded in the Horn of Africa, but about Greg’s depressed pre-Becky
amour
. “Yes, I know that was a tough time.”

“Above and beyond tough.”

Becky was silent. When she was unsure about where an ally was heading, she waited for her own inner direction.

“He was head over heels about her. But, and I quote, after a few years she came to distinctly ‘dislike his vibe.’ And then she dumped him,” Alice said.

“Pardon me?” Becky had always understood that Greg had done the deed.

“Of course, he’s impossible. You know that first-hand. Nobody denies the will of the Great Leggatt, not least a young rural lass with no apparent mind of her own.”

Becky quickly reshuffled her mental deck and dealt. “And such a tragedy, too, that she went off the deep end and was institutionalized, all that.”

Alice looked at her as if she’d gone barking mad. “What are you talking about? Nina wasn’t institutionalized.”

“Uh—”

“She up and disappeared. Don’t you remember?”

“It’s coming back to me now you mention it.”

“She dumped him, he went nuts,
berserk
, quite frankly, and she had to get the order, so many metres distant, and he
still didn’t observe it. So she disappeared. Halifax, Vancouver, someplace she could fade into the weather.”

Becky was suddenly disoriented, crossing a high bridge in the pitch dark. “That’s right,” she ventured.

“I encouraged her to give him a second chance—Greg begged me to ask her—but no cigar.”

They were standing in the Hall of Honour and the portraits of the prime ministers, lining the hall, all stared at her, including benign Avril Phaedra (Kim!) Campbell, now living in Paris with Canada far to the east of her, and Charles Joseph Clark. A Hill decorator and flunky passed by, transporting one of the giant Sitka spruces intended to grace the Hall. She had to brace herself against a shining water fountain that nobody drank from.

“Wait a minute,” Becky said.

“You didn’t know this,” Alice said. “God. How could you not know this?”

Becky wondered the same thing. Umpteen years, after the two or three kids, it should have come up, or Greg’s stepbrother, gregarious Paul, now steering a ministry in the Australian government, could have offered a diplomatically intimate aside—if he knew. Of course, when she’d been seducing Greg after the riding meeting, it was before the glory of Google, back in the nineties when one had to rely on old-fashioned gossip, and back when their grassroots organization was essentially manure for other more mature political parties, and back when the leader-in-waiting had to be groomed, nurtured, garlanded. But, given that this was
the Prime Minister of a nation with a supposedly free press, wouldn’t some enterprising journalist have stuck his nib deep into this dirt? By now?