“Nonsense,” Becky said. “He’ll stay with us. At 24 Sussex. He gets on so well with Martha and the boys.”
“We couldn’t ask that.”
“You didn’t.”
“Oh, Becky, no.”
Becky was on a roll. “And here’s an idea. Does he like Corporal Shymanski?” Becky hopped on one hiking-booted foot.
Lise laughed, as she got it. “Yes. Yes, he does.”
“Well, let’s get Shymanski transferred to Rideau Hall. He’ll be a big brother for Niko. A mentor.” She hauled out her cell and tapped a memo to herself. “By the time Shymanski travels on with you to Africa, Niko can come to us.”
This didn’t entirely make sense to Lise, but she sensed an enormous favour being dangled. “Becky.”
“I’ll keep a close eye on him. Security will be tops—nobody taking off to play hockey. I’ll treat him like my own.”
This sounded too good to be true. And it was, because she didn’t want her son inhaling the same air as Greg Leggatt. Becky, sure. Greg, no.
“And don’t worry about bothering Greg,” Becky said. “We barely see him.”
“Becky, I—”
Becky, misreading, stopped on the trail and turned to face Lise. “It takes a village.”
Lise was pulled into Becky’s arms and pincered in a titanic hug, misted with Becky’s athletically feminine perspiration. She also inhaled Becky’s hair volumizer—definitely a white-girl product. She didn’t think it was a good time to remind her that It Takes a Village was the title of the Antichrist Hillary Clinton’s children’s book, the conceit of which was cherry-picked from a clothesline of African proverbs, translated from Swahili, or lifted from the Kihaya culture, or even Yoruba. Lise had picked up this information on her ouiCare travels.
When Becky let go, Lise found herself stupidly upset.
Becky patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Lise, it’s okay. It’s no biggie. We’re the moms of non-Caucasian boys.”
She was always going on about this. That women were bound by their children, and their children were friends, swimming tethered in the fishbowl of sharky Ottawa with its lobbyists, ambassadors, politicians, pundits, math teachers, choirmasters, coaches, counsellors, pediatricians, dental hygienists, tutors, hairdressers, barbers, hangers-on, and the de rigueur atheists and racists. It was a place where a misfired confidence could result in the fall of the nation, or an intelligence leak could sink a trade deal that would sustain a whole region or, worse, kick the flying buttress out from under the carefully constructed and robustly bolstered self-esteem of a beloved child. A tough and treacherous place, and as mothers, they had to stick together.
Becky produced a piece of pristine folded Kleenex from one of her multitude of mini-pockets.
Lise blew her nose passionately then stabbed the tissue in her back pocket. “Merci,” she said.
“Sa na fey ruin. Moving on.” Becky led again, a certain spring in her step. “Let’s leave it that I’ll ask Greg about René when I spot an opening. He’s been preoccupied with the Hill.”
“With everyone on holiday?”
“Everyone but him.”
“But Greg must be so pleased,” Lise said. “Pauvre Monsieur Triste. The Leader of the Opposition—his polls are abysmal.”
“True, but all our bills are blocked in committees.”
“The Senate, oui.”
Becky went on. “Greg is very frustrated. He’s thinking hard about proroguing this session and calling a fall election.”
“Quoi?” Lise hadn’t known she could screech like that, but the man had just amended the law thirteen months ago and created a four-year fixed election-date cycle. He’d made a big deal about this. He’d overhauled Parliament. “Pourquoi?”
“Greg’s always the first to call a spade a spade.”
“He’ll be called a flip-flop.” In her distress, she said fleep-flope.
“Maybe. For two days, until a volcano somewhere, or the inevitable change in the media cycle.”
Becky was right. The media definitely knew which side their pain was buttered on.
Lise summoned her own considerable personal majesty to deliver her ultimatum. “He would have to have my permission. Bien sûr.”
Becky became quiet, but Lise was exhausted. In ominous silence, they passed a meadow being plundered by pairs of ravens, foraging for those relentless young beaks back at the ranch. Becky’s posture became plus dur, her spine a ridge of steel. She dropped back.
That made Lise even more uncomfortable.
“Becky,” she said, coming to a halt. “Look.”
Becky approached and stopped. Hands on her hips, a leg jutting out, and Lise knew exactly what she’d looked like on the first day of her sophomore year.
“Growing wild,” said Lise. She pointed at the edge of the trail. “A garlic bébé.”
“So it is,” said Becky.
“I’m going to pick it. For René’s salad.”
“Don’t.”
“Pourquoi pas?”
“It’s Crown land, Lise.”
“Il y en a beaucoup!”
“You can’t pick anything on Crown land.”
“Ah, but I am la grosse légume, n’est-ce pas?” Lise crowed. “I am the Big Cheese! I am the Crown, n’est-ce pas?”
Becky cast such a chilly look upon her that Lise froze and took immediate stock of her own weight, muscle and fortitude. It wasn’t conscious; she just did it. In that humid forest in the subdued light of morning, she realized that there wasn’t anybody else around. Lise would even go so far as to tell René later that there was a homicidal glint in Becky’s eyes.
“I wouldn’t touch it if I were you,” Becky said.
“Becky! Are you serious?”
“Yes, Lise. I. Am. You are only the representative cheese.”
The women stood staring at each other in the woods.
Then Lise shrugged. “Hey, c’est la vie.” She looked up at the sky, the colour of laundry rinse water just above, darker beyond. “Regarde ces nuages. I’m going back.”
“See you,” said Becky, not budging.
Lise headed down the trail, but she turned around and took another look.
Becky bent.
Then swooped.
Then swallowed.
4
AT THE GATINEAU HOSPITAL EMERGENCY, Becky kept her head down as she trailed Greg through the waiting room—stacked with children of August and their broken bones, the elderly succumbing to heat prostration and poor nutrition, and a young addict, stretched thin as a rubber, dangling between this realm and the next, muttering in what might have been Cree. She crossed her fingers that there were no listeriosis casualties on site. The four security stayed so close, Becky didn’t dare speak to Greg for fear of how he might react. It occurred to her that the only reason a few people noticed Greg, the Prime Minister, was that their security detail was so actively casing out the ill and their companions. Otherwise, he was any other slightly sunburned bloke—some dude with a blistering rash climbing up his neck—who had the bad luck to end up here on a ravishing summer evening.
Becky had waited to brief Greg about her conversation with the GG. She’d stewed while Martha had prepped and departed for a friend’s pool party back at Manotick, while overseeing Peter and Pablo’s tent set-up on the lawn (for their sleepover, with soon-to-be-gone Corporal Shymanski in attendance to chase the bears), while watching Greg shoo away Doc and Chief, who had jumped on their blowers to the election machinery, summoning them from family reunions and RV excursions and ATV treks and Bible camps all over the rural free world. She’d restrained herself until she and Greg had settled into the extraordinarily uncomfortable matching wicker chairs on the porch. In her straw bag, she’d placed a copy of the late Eugene Forsey’s book parsing Parliament in case she needed to refer to it.
She knew Greg would be incensed at what Lise had so softly threatened. So she approached it carefully. She offered her personal assessment and deeply held beliefs about Lis
e’s psyche. African female: economic migrant heiress in a racist province. Married down: Cree terrorist. Then widow: grief, guilt, single mother of a biracial boy. Married up: Québécois Caucasian Liberal blood. And simultaneously down: lapsed Catholic, aging thespian, black sheep. Overcompensatory grandiosity. Mercurial decision making.
“Cut to the chase,” Greg said. “Will she or won’t she?”
“She’s surrounded with the best advisers.”
“I know, I put them there. Will she or won’t she?”
“She will. Eventually.”
“What did she say, exactly?”
“She said you would have to have her permission.”
Greg rose up. She rose as well. He paced back and forth, breathing heavily, on the porch.
“Greg?” she ventured.
He whirled in the dark, picked up the fig-scented candle in the glass vase from Indigo and threw it off the porch. Then he raised his chair and booted it, and kept after it, down the stairs and out across the grass. She saw the boys, in the midst of shining flashlights in each other’s mouths, cease and desist and scramble after their extremely upset father to illuminate him sending the battered wicker into the lake with an anticlimactic splash.
“Dad?” Peter asked. “Dad? What happened?”
Shymanski, crossing the grass on his one bare foot, a bag of marshmallows and graham wafers in hand, paused.
“What are you all looking at?” Greg said.
Shymanski was stunned. The boys too.
She removed herself immediately. Let him deflect. She fled, praying that none of Greg’s display was on the security cameras, and that nobody else had seen, not even some rogue Soviet satellite in space. While she brushed her teeth, her cellphone pinged. A text message from her dad. Up late again. Or up early for golf. He sometimes teed off at midnight in the summer. She couldn’t read it right now. Couldn’t deal with him too.
About two in the morning, Greg woke her. An excruciating band of pain stretched down his left side and a cluster of pus-filled blisters was hiking up toward his face.
“Shingles,” she said.
This had happened before, on his first day of service as Leader of the Official Opposition, another time of unanticipated and gargantuan stress in his life, mostly caused by the grassroots and Tory diehards. She had prevailed in keeping the media away from him, although they soon learned that no media was very interested in what the Leader of the Official Opposition did anyway. They had to hustle for coverage.
“We have to go to the ER,” she said.
“Oh, fuck that,” he said.
After she’d alerted Corporal Robard, they had sped through the winding and cruelly dark roads of the National Commission Park, past a quartet of raccoon eyes, blazing like those of combative Tamil illegals stashed in the wilderness. Greg was now at this older Quebec hospital, in the hands of the young Pakistani emergency doctor along with an exhausted fourth-year female resident whom Greg refused to look at or answer. It was herpes zoster; they might have to boost the acyclovir because of the attack on Greg’s face, which in a worst-case scenario could affect his eyesight, leaving him blind as Tiresias or Andrea Bocelli. The resident referenced both.
While Becky stayed away, full fathom five, soothing herself with a bottle of water, hugging the hall of the Emergency exit, she couldn’t help remembering what Greg had said as he kicked the chair into Harrington Lake.
“That woman’s going to learn her place,” he said.
HEY EVE
(with thanks to Lennon/McCartney)
From Temptations: The Rock Opera
Hey Eve
Don’t be afraid
Take a big bite
And you’ll feel better
Remember to chew and swallow it down
Then your eyes will open so wi-ide
Hey Snake
Don’t tempt me now
I was told to
Ignore the fruit on the tree
And hang with Adam here on the ground
Our Father is watching over us now-ow
Hey Eve
I’m covering my ears
Take a big bite
Go ’way and leave us alone
Remember an apple a day-ay-ay
Our Father will whack you with a stick-ick-ick-ick
Hey Adam
Let’s have some fun
Eat this apple And let’s go wi-i-i-ild
The second you join me in this sin
La La La La La La La La La La La
Fa La Fa La Fa La Faaaaa
La Fa La Faaaa
Hey Eve
Fa La Fa La Fa La Faaaa
La Fa La Faaaa
Hey Snake
WORDS AND MUSIC BY GREGORY LEGGATT
septembre 2008
5
“ARE YOU GRANTING THE DISSOLUTION?”
“I haven’t been asked yet.”
“Mais—when you are?”
“I can’t discuss it,” she said.
René was hunting and gathering—toothbrush, razor, dental tape, and pomegranate moisturizer for alpha males—in their master bathroom. His leather toiletries kit was swollen. “The Toronto Blob says you will.”
Lise perched on the edge of the tub. “Good for them.”
“But are you going to say yes?”
“Tune in tomorrow.” Lise pinched his closest buttock. He’d gained weight for the role of Father Benedict and his jeans were no longer lifting and separating.
“I am disgusting,” he said.
“Nobody will see when you’re lost in your cassock.”
“Ah, but when it’s off—” He zipped his kit and flew from there to the master closet.
She followed and watched as he flipped through a stack of soft Easter-pastel cardigans.
“On Can Vox breakfast radio—”
“Oui.”
“—the Chief of Staff said it was a done deal.”
“Amen.”
“The Director of Communications also said your approval is a formality—”
“Fini.”
“—like the Throne Speech. The PM puts the words in your mouth—”
“C’est tout.”
René lifted the entire stack of sweaters and placed them beside a mound of professionally rolled yoga pants and trousers in the suitcase resting open on the Duxiana bed.
“René,” she said patiently, “the GG usually does act upon the advice of the Prime Minister and Privy Council. It’s in the Letters Patent.”
He looked her in the eyes. “She is also called upon to consult, encourage and warn.”
She stared right back. “Bien entendu.”
“So are you going to grant his request? To dissolve this Parliament?”
“That is my executive privilege, René.” She’d had it. “You’re being a big fat viceregal bore.” She knew he’d be upset at fat.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Lise. My hope, mon vrai espoir, is that permission for an unnecessary election wasn’t bought.”
“What are you talking about? How bought?”
“By making them grant me a leave. For my film.”
Lise walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door. Vice-reine-style.
Ten minutes later, they bade their farewells in the Rideau Hall foyer.
Niko was with them. Becky had expedited the Shymanski transfer, true to her word, and he already seemed to be fitting in. Niko had screened In Bruges with him the night before and they were quoting lines. Niko didn’t seem affected by René’s impending absence at all.
Lise and René embraced in front of the portrait of Her Excellency Adrienne Clarkson. He held on to Lise tightly even though she was still pissed at him. Complètement.
“Va t’en,” she whispered.
He nudged his hip bone against her in a way that made her want to press hard back. Then he hummed a few bars of “La Vie en Rose.”
She melted. “Phone me,” Lise coaxed.
“Tous les jours, ma chère.”
; “Every day.”
“No missions to Kandahar.”
“Non.”
“Promise?”
“Oui.”
“I’ll be back in November. For the hiatus.”
“Oui.”
“I’ll mail you my absentee ballot.”
She shot him a look.
René had the habit of kissing her as if they were completely alone even when they were in a crowded formal reception or a Loblaws. Particularly in a Loblaws. He could make their contact singularly urgent. He did so then. Niko broke in between them, with his body odour and acne and endearing adolescent bravado, and Lise thought, Toute ma vie est là.
She caught a glimpse of Shymanski watching them, resting his back against a wall. She had the feeling he would have happily embraced them all too. He looked like a man who unfailingly called his mother; this perhaps explained his connection with Lieutenant-Colonel Aisha K., his older Afghan police partner, who had disappeared. Or died.
Margaret Lee appeared and shook René’s hand. “Goodbye, Your Excellency,” she said. “Do break a leg.”
“Ah, Margaret Lee,” René said, “I will miss you most of all.”
He disappeared, pretending to flee his aides-de-camp, out the door. Lise put her arm around Niko.
“You’ll be okay, Maman,” he said, then turned to Shymanski and shadow-boxed him to the Long Gallery. She suddenly heard Niko hammering “Chopsticks” on Glenn Gould’s practice Steinway, accompanied by Shymanski’s steady chords.
In the afternoon, Lise accompanied Niko to his therapist. Dr. Pelletier’s modern home office, in the Glebe, faced out on the Rideau Canal. The interior light was beautiful, calming, even on dark days, and when Lise joined Niko in his sessions, it felt as if her son could fully accept losing son cher papa, handle being a half–First Nations boy with his famous African mother representing Charles, the King of England, and deal with a hip French-Canadian-Caucasian stepfather who sometimes sucked the aforementioned mother’s complete attention. In the winter, while Dr. Pelletier calmly reframed their thinking errors, she heard the ice-skate blades whisking by on the Canal and, outside, walking back to the car, she inhaled the scent of roasting chestnuts in the cold air. Small things that gave order and clarity and major hope. She kept her faith: he was a lonely teenager in a tough hierarchical milieu. She understood why Niko was drawn to the slightly older Martha, who was unspoiled, grounded, and didn’t play social games. Lise thought she would have been a wonderful friend for Niko if she hadn’t been so Christian.
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