Sussex Drive: A Novel (2 page)

Sometimes Greg fell asleep as soon as his head dented the pillow. Other times he glared at the ceiling and complained about the fucking silence in fucking Quebec. One night not long ago, they had lain quietly side by side as the timber wolves howled down Meech Lake way, arousing a vociferous response from the pack skulking around Little Meech. She’d felt surrounded.

Tonight, as Greg, flat on his back, squeaked on in slumber, Becky had to get up.

The windows, all screened, were open wide. The air conditioner in their room, unfortunately, was on the fritz. She looked out on the moonlit lake, where canoes floated like comatose crocodiles, and at the well-fertilized lawn upon which various presidents and dictators had trod, holding tall glasses of iced tea or the strategically featured provincial brewsky. In the undergrowth of the sugar maples, directly to her right, Vladimir Putin had reputedly taken a
very
long leak; she hadn’t been there, but security couldn’t get over
it
, ever. She saw the trampoline she’d set up for their sons to play upon—surrounded by a lofty net that would catch them and fling them back before bones could be snapped or brains wing-dinged. Not far away, the inukshuk, an Inuit rock sculpture of human proportions, stood guard in its ghostly way by the ancient glacial lake.

It was then she heard the cry. Different from the melancholy messaging of
Gavia immer
, the common loon, now stirring their babies to navigate the lakeshore and avoid predators such as the black bear. No, this was definitely human. Hauntingly erotic. Indoors?

She shrugged on her Paris kimono, a gift she’d received with matching gown (and silk thong!) from President Sarkozy’s velveteen-voiced Italian wife, before hurrying down the hall. Prime ministerial staff weren’t allowed upstairs at the Harrington Lake house during the evening hours, but lately she never knew when she’d run into the cleaning people dashing in at the last minute to replenish stacks of plush towels or tucking sanitary napkins into a
bottom drawer in the bathroom. Those for her eighteen-year-old daughter.

The boys were both sound asleep in their bunk beds: Peter on top, of course, a freckled ginger, and Pablo, so different, so dark, below. Both ten years old—one born to Becky via Caesarean in Whitehorse, the other delivered and abandoned by Conchita Maria de la Rosa, a prostitute who died in labour, God bless her soul, in Cartagena, Colombia, thousands of miles away. Becky and Greg had adopted Pablo when he was eight, a sibling
compañero
for headstrong Peter, just before Greg ran for the office of prime minister (and won a hard-earned minority for the Conservatives). Not only had the left-wing media elites treated the party as if they were the redneck northern cousins of the American Republicans, they’d attacked Becky and Greg personally. As if any politician in his or her right mind would adopt a foreign child to influence the outcome of an election or international trade relations.
Hola
.

When she and Greg had married, after he was elected MP for Yukon (potential pipeline crossroads of the North, the territory entrusted with Alaska’s back), the local press said they’d tied the knot to head off controversy from the conservative base about their common-law status. When Greg finally assumed the leadership of the Opposition in 2004 and they’d hiked to Ottawa, to Stornoway, she’d eighty-sixed her maiden surname of Holt and assumed Leggatt. That was also a tizzy-making media furor. So when Pablo, the teeter to Peter’s totter, returned with them from Colombia and critics queried their parental tactics, Greg had handled the
controversy in his cool, dismissive fashion.
Let me be absolutely frank. With all candour
. He’d even invoked the words of the deceased politician he most despised.
A certain Liberal prime minister in his dubious wisdom once said that the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. In this case, the nation has no place in the nursery of the PM
. It hadn’t worked, although she always encouraged him to come out swinging.

It wasn’t until Becky, against Greg’s wishes, had invited one of the country’s mid-list political journalists, a multiplatform pundit at Can Vox (appearing in print and on the small screen), along with all the grade threes at the boys’ elementary school, to windswept Gorffwysfa (otherwise known as the Official Residence, 24 Sussex Drive, or in Welsh as “place of peace”) for flu shot day, and Peter, her little carrot, picked his nose and ate it but nobody else saw, and Pablo rolled up his sleeve to expose his arm with the machete scar and the columnist gasped, and Pablo reacted, and Becky had crouched in her form-caressing pastel floral skirt to comfort him with such tentative, nurturing Spanish and a shy caress of his wild dark hair, that she’d punctured the blimp of public derision.

She had tried not to break down. She’d learned that from the American consultants—the agency that had been able to wangle Greg’s solo stroll through Times Square at five a.m., the street cleaners just out of frame, and an interview with none other than Larry King—one of whom had studied theatre in Fresno or at the Yale School of Drama, Becky couldn’t remember which. The consultant said if you feign crying in a scene, it’s fake. But if you focus upon who or
what elicits sorrow, and you restrain yourself, then bingo, you’ve hit your mark. So she’d wiped her damp eyes, thinking about one of the many cataclysmic skirmishes she’d had with her father when she was a teenager, the camera caught it, and the scribe, Lawrence Apoonatuk, set Becky up as a cross between the Virgin Mary and an Inuit sea goddess mother spirit named Sedna. The polls rose, favouring the Tories. Which worked for Greg; he studied all of them with the martyred dedication of a self-flagellating Pope. He prayed and preyed for that elusive majority.

The boys’ rock-climbing helmets dangled over their headboards, ready for an epic assault the next morning on Epinephrine, Piece of Cake or Little Yellow F***er with the Governor General’s son and a climbing guide. (Becky had talked to Greg about changing the vulgar names of the sites, and he’d agreed that it was an embarrassment to the region but said it wasn’t serious enough to play to the base nationally.)

Their
room was cool, the air conditioning blasting. She stepped over the circus of Bionicles to switch it off, opened the windows and listened.

The boys breathed quietly. In the corner, the gerbils, Mr. Fuzzy and Señor Wuzzy, seemed to be up to no good, rearranging the aspen shavings and corncobs in a cage that, in daylight, resembled the colour-coded interior of a model of mammalian intestines.

Becky decided that she’d heard an animal in heat or had imagined an animal in heat, both of which were equally probable.

She closed the door to the boys’ room and treaded toward Martha’s chamber at the end of the hall, passing her few chosen William Kurelek “Ukrainian Pioneer” paintings, which she loved for their obese blue skies, their flat open promise, and the teensy-mini-weensy atomic blast hiding in plain sight on the horizon. She always had to hunt for it.

The door was ajar. Her daughter wasn’t there. The scent of Hannah Montana cologne hung in the air. The iPod was parked in its dock. Oh, Martha.

The Prime Minister’s Security Service (PMSS) presence at the Prime Minister’s country residence was casually formidable. Security manned in-your-face formal posts at the main entrances to the National Capital Commission’s holdings in Gatineau Park, off Chemin du lac Meech, and a lake lockdown (maintained in ways she didn’t know—frogmen?). Four RCMP lived on site in a guardhouse within hailing distance of the mansion, and there were plainclothesmen dotted around Gatineau Park in the guise of fishermen, mostly. The property itself was rigged with a variety of motion detectors, high-tech alarms, heat sensors and surveillance cameras that usually revealed white-tailed deer, lost mountain bikers and the occasional hippie wanderer in sweat-wicking underwear sucking on a joint.

After a quick check through the rest of the house, Becky slipped on her Smurf blue Crocs (Mother’s Day present—from Greg), unlocked the front door and headed out, down the porch steps to the cool, wet lawn. There were lights on
in both PMO cabins. Probably Doc, the hirsute British Columbia wunderkind with a beard as mangy as a pygmy goat’s, who wasn’t her favourite, and who never slept, was spurring his own aides to keep busy online adjusting the national political conversation on partisan blogs. Either that or he was engaging in Skype sex with his gal pal on the left coast. His arrogance accrued daily.

As she turned to the cabin of the Chief of Staff (“Call me Chief, rhymes with Dief”), the light was immediately extinguished. This senior appointee was clean-cut, scentless, with beautiful marble fingernails. Very aware that he was probably watching her—as Chief saw everything, knew everything, and if he could sleep beside Greg, as well as occupy just about every conscious second of Greg’s life, he would—she moved on. He derived from a murky military background, his CV sprayed with unreadable Middle Eastern names.

Televisions flickered in the RCMP guardhouse. The country had gone Olympics nutty—watching Michael Phelps and his washboard abdomen and the epic sorcery of the opening ceremony, with the little lip-synching singer, and the Beijing Weather Modification Office, in the thick of the monsoon season, shooting rockets armed with silver oxide to seed the clouds and dispense with any rogue raindrop before the global gathering at the Bird’s Nest stadium could be leaked upon.

From where she stood, she could see in the window. Corporal Robard, alone, dug into a plate of nachos while the security camera images of the mansion’s front door, dock, roof, driveway and more were displayed on the screen he
wasn’t watching. Robard’s partner, the popular Shymanski, must have been on patrol and the other two off-duty and in bed. Becky decided not to bother them—yet. Something didn’t connect for her: the animal sensuality of the sound she’d heard and her quiet, well-behaved daughter last seen after the ritual brushing, flossing, etc.

“Mom?”

Becky whirled. “Honeybee.”

And Martha was there, in front of her, wearing her Vimy Ridge T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. Not far from the house, by the trampoline. Had Becky walked right by her when she’d come outside? Had Martha been in the woods? Her tall, dark-haired, serene teen, who’d witnessed her dad castrating the Opposition in the House of Commons at “Take Your Child to Work Day” in grade twelve, who stood solemn-eyed for long hours in the rain on Remembrance Day, whose favourite escape was an episode of Sunday night’s tame
Heartland
on the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster (which Doc called the
Communist
Broadcasting
Corpse
), and who displayed gratitude, if not delight, for an above-the-knee and practical navy blue skort. Innocent, humourless, deferential to everyday citizens, Martha had been conscripted by Greg to his cause more than ever this summer.

“What are you doing?” Becky asked. “It’s the middle of—”

“I forgot my iPod, Mom,” she said quickly. “That’s all.” Her usual ponytail was loosened, the elastic tight around her wrist. “But no worries. I found it. Over by the inukshuk.” She gave a pat to her pocket.

Her daughter wasn’t given to lying, never having had cause or opportunity. Becky wondered what would have suddenly created the need. “Let’s go back in,” Becky said, touching her girl’s elbow. “Before we set off the alarms.”

Becky took a few Croc steps in the direction of the front porch, but Martha looked back toward the forest.

He emerged from the entrance to the trail farthest from the single sodium arc lamp blazing over the parking lot. RCMP corporal Taylor Shymanski slowly,
hop-bump
, concluded his perimeter patrol and raised his hand in a wave.
“Salut, madame.”

“Salut.”

Shymanski was the latest addition to PMO home security; he was also the youngest. A well-known and respected face. Eastern Townships–raised, a Ukrainian sausage-and-poutine guy in his mid-twenties. He’d worked with the Afghan National Police, training recruits, and had also toured central Canada with his Afghan counterpart, Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K. They’d spoken with opinion-makers and participated in think-tank panels about what was and wasn’t happening on the ground in Kandahar. She was a widowed thirty-something police detective whose true surname couldn’t be revealed in order to protect her family. Last February, Shymanski’s Toyota SUV had been destroyed in an explosion outside the governor’s palace. He’d lost his right leg in the blast, and Aisha K., in the same incident, had been abducted and was eventually presumed murdered. It had taken months to reassemble him with the
prosthetic limb and a minute for the GG to pin on the medal. All of this had been a huge trauma, and Greg had taken the kid under his wing. This summer he’d kept the young man—wiry, affable, with furry seventies sideburns and a prematurely wise face—close. Becky privately suspected this particular Afghan file was still on simmer.

He took a while to approach and came up beside Martha.

“Salut, madame,”
he repeated.
“Mademoiselle,”
to Martha. “Is everything all right?”

“To be honest, I came out because I thought I heard something.” Becky was aware of Martha’s breathing. “An animal.”

“Probably me, madame,” Shymanski said. “Crashing through the bush.”

“What did it sound like, Mom?” Martha asked.

“High-pitched,” Becky said.

“Flying squirrel,” Shymanski offered without hesitation.

“You think?” Becky noticed that Martha was taller than him, possibly because of his slight stoop.

“Sure. They’re bouncing off the sugar maples tonight.”

“Get out!” Becky said, ever so awkwardly.

Martha looked down.

“They dodge around trees like Sidney Crosby on the rink.” He waved his crutch in the moonlight. “They have these long flaps of skin that stretch from their wrists to their ankles.”

“It’s true, Mom,” Martha said. “Corporal Shymanski showed us—”

“On the night vision.”

“Right,” Becky said. “Peter and Pablo told me about that.
I bet that’s what I heard, then.” But she suddenly had the sensation of being locked into a soundproof booth, like the ones on TV game shows, and while the show went on and on, she was stranded with her thoughts. Becky found Shymanski pleasant and sympathetic; he could shoot the breeze and, obviously, a weapon or two. But how did a man his age rebound from loss and horror to live and buckle up his plastic limb next to his very real balls every day? He was trying not to look at her daughter’s long legs, so skinny, in the moonlight. Her 110-pound baby with flushed cheeks and erect nipples. The quiet and sisterly presence that had provided the background hum to the PMO the last few months as Becky played camp counsellor to Peter and Pablo.