Many of them had stood up to applaud, but now they settled back down into their seats, a room full of very rich people, watching Holly with shining, hungry eyes.
‘America has been slowly tearing itself apart,’ she began, ‘and the senator’s rivals seem quite happy to accelerate that process. The great thing about Stephen Slaymaker, the unique thing, is that he wants to strengthen America’s foundations so our nation can stay whole and strong. It’s going to mean sacrifices, but sometimes sacrifices are necessary. This country wouldn’t even exist if people hadn’t been willing to make sacrifices.’
That got a big cheer. Sacrifice was always a moving and uplifting idea, and particularly so if you were not the ones who were going to have to make it.
‘The key to asking people to make a sacrifice is to ensure they know that others too are being asked to play their part. That’s why we’ve been working so hard on the Canada angle. It’s only part of the picture. As you know, all the senator’s most ambitious plans are for our own northern states, but we need to show the long-suffering people of those states that they’re not going to have to shoulder the burden, all by themselves, of welcoming in these millions of newcomers. My job is about getting that message over, and I’m pleased to say we’ve succeeded beyond our expectations. It’s almost as if we gave voice to something that people were thinking, but didn’t quite know how to say.
‘Tragically, utterly tragically, three Americans have had to die for this. It’s awful beyond words. But I guess the important thing now is to make sure they didn’t die for nothing...’
Afterwards the Slaymaker team joined their guests, while waiters passed invisibly among them. Billionaires and trillionaires selected drinks and canapes from the trays that appeared in front of them as if from empty air, while their eyes searched the room hungrily for their grateful hosts. Holly wandered among them in her shimmery dress, and they welcomed her eagerly, occasionally asking her questions, but more often instructing her. They were used to being respectfully listened to by those on whom they bestowed their wealth.
Holly was lectured on the constitution, and on free enterprise, and on the appalling decadence of the continent where she’d been born. She was reminded of the need to encourage wealth creators. She was informed that what made America great was that its people stood up for themselves. A twenty-one-year-old billionaire, whose family’s wealth dated back to the cotton fields of the antebellum South, lectured her about the importance of self-reliance. A timber trillionaire called Tracey Patel told her that most Americans had it too easy. The owner of three million low-cost housing units warned her to watch out for kindness. ‘It’s Senator Slaymaker’s one weakness,’ she informed Holly, raising an admonitory finger adorned by an enormous ruby ring. ‘He’s too generous. And I’m afraid it’s America’s weakness too.’ And she made Holly promise her – actually promise her out loud, as if she was a child – to always remember that, and to steer her boss away from the temptation to be too nice. Her own enormous wealth, Patel pointed out, watching Holly’s eyes all the while to ensure she was being listened to with sufficient attention, was evidence she knew what she was talking about.
All their lives, these people had been courted by the ambitious, sought out by the beautiful, flattered by those who depended on them, and reassured by the entire political class that their own entirely selfish pursuit of luxury and power was in fact uniquely virtuous and a boon to everyone. Holly loathed them all, but she had to be nice to them. ‘Hey, Holly,’ Slaymaker would call out to her. ‘Come on over! These great people are dying to meet you!’ ‘Holly dear,’ Eve would murmur, ‘can I borrow you for moment to introduce you to my lovely friend here! I’ve just been telling her how much Steve relies on you.’ And there would be another one of them, watching her with greedy shining eyes, like a pampered child waiting to rip the wrapper from yet another expensive present. Holly had several job offers and three sexual propositions, which she had to deploy all her skills to decline without bruising egos or causing offense. By the end of the evening she was completely drained, as if vampires had been sucking her blood.
She went out by herself to walk in that Japanese garden. She watched the fish under the lilies, the water trickling down over the rocks. It was a beautiful place at night, with its stony outcrops and little trees subtly lit by lamps hidden among the rocks and under the water. Concealed vents silently pumped out warm air around every bench, and a structure of giant transparent petals, fifty feet above her head, had closed over the whole garden to keep out the evening chill. Some of the rooms in the hotel cost $20,000 a night, and for prices like that, guests expected even nature itself to be reimagined from scratch and delivered up for their pleasure. She sat on a stone bench and tried to call Richard but his cristal was turned off, and she remembered he’d said something about going for a drink with some friends. She felt very far away from anything that felt like home.
And in that odd, lonely, disconnected state, she thought of the people who’d died at Peace Arch and for the first time really did grasp, for a few moments at least, that, right now, somewhere out there beyond the fantasy world of this hotel and garden, there were real people consumed by grief because of what had happened. Right at this very moment they were beating on the impenetrable wall of loss. It would dominate their lives, that cold wall, for months and years, and perhaps even forever. And those people wouldn’t have died if it wasn’t for—
‘Hey, Holly! Are you okay?’ Slaymaker had come out to find her. ‘We were all looking for you! I wanted to tell you how well you did! They all just loved you. And we did too!’
‘That’s good.’
He sat down beside her, the large, warm, male presence that Holly usually found so reassuring. But now she wondered who he really was, and whether the Slaymaker she thought she knew was simply a shell, a performance, a screen onto which she’d projected her own needs, her own fantasies. He wasn’t quite the same as the others in there – he was rich, but he wasn’t born to riches, and he didn’t have their sense of entitlement – but maybe he was their dupe all the same, or even their puppet? Being president was an awful lot of work, after all, and work was something you left to your minions.
‘You don’t seem too pleased about it,’ he observed.
‘I’m fine. Just tired. It’s hard work playing a part like that, don’t you think?’
He leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees so he could peer up into her face. ‘I don’t think you are fine, Holly.’
She hesitated. ‘Yeah, okay. Well, if you want the truth, I didn’t like any of those people. I really didn’t like them at all.’
Slaymaker watched her, but didn’t speak, waiting to see what else she had to say. Behind him, a little black duck paddled slowly by over the glowing water of the stream, wandering around the gentle little waterways of its tiny, perfect world.
Reluctantly Holly made herself look him in the eyes. ‘I mean, do you like them, Steve?’
He laughed. ‘Those people? God no! I can’t stand them! Horrible people. Snakes, every one of them.’
He was his old self again suddenly. Holly laughed and, seeing her relax, Slaymaker relaxed too, sitting back again, folding his arms over his chest as he laughed with her, but still watching her closely. ‘None of them know what it’s like to struggle in this world,’ he said. ‘They like to think they deserve what they have, but the truth is they haven’t earnt a penny of it.’
‘But we still have to suck up to them.’
‘Afraid so, Holly. We need a lot of dollars, and I’m pretty rich, but I’m not that rich. I mean, even if we just look at the work you’re doing with those feeders, and your broadscreen ads, and your rallies, it’s cost us maybe twenty billion already, and that’s only part of the campaign.’
‘I guess I’ve always thought of your philosophy as being that people should stand up for themselves, figure out life’s problems their own way and not expect others to do it for them.’
‘Yup. That’s exact
ly what I believe in, Holly. I figure the really good things in life are the things we’ve won for ourselves.’
‘But none of those people have had to win anything for themselves.’
‘Exactamente. They were born with so much money, most of them, that they would’ve had to have been complete idiots not to be able to get even richer.’
‘And your policies are going to let them get richer still by building your cities for you. You’re going to get tax money from everyone and then give it all to this little handful of...well, your word, snakes. I mean, Jesucristo, Steve, no wonder they want to fund your campaign! And you do it all in the name of free enterprise and of hard-working Americans being able to get on and get ahead in their own way, when in reality it’s all about this handful of billionaires, who’ve never had to work hard in their lives, sucking the blood out of the rest of us.’
He regarded her face for a while, his arms still crossed over his chest. She never saw Slaymaker cringe, she never saw him lash out. He had an exceptional ability not to become defensive, or at least not to let defensiveness show.
‘I guess you always get snakes,’ he finally said. ‘I wish you didn’t, but I guess you always do. I suppose your ma and pa would probably say you’re bound to get snakes in a country like ours, but, well, I don’t know a lot about history, but you got some pretty nasty folk in their system too, didn’t you? Some pretty serious snakes. In fact, I’m pretty sure no one’s ever come up with a snake-free system. Maybe it just can’t happen. I don’t read the Bible much, but wasn’t there a snake there right at the beginning? Maybe that tells us something.’
He stretched back, long and lean in his immaculately and very expensively ordinary jacket and white shirt.
‘There are no snakes on my actual team, though,’ he said. ‘Sue, Ann, Phyllis: those are all people who’ve had to work to get where they are. Jed is kind of an exception – his family have been rich for a hundred years – but the thing about him is that he’s a snake that knows he’s a snake. Know what I mean? He’s an honest snake! I tell him as much and he admits it’s true.’
He glanced quizzically into her face. ‘You are right, Holly. Those people are going to get even richer on our building plans. They’re going to get a whole lot richer, and, yeah, that’s why they’re helping us, and paying for your good work and everyone else’s. But I’m not doing this for them. I’m doing it so we don’t have to go on seeing those miserable trails of trucks and cars on our roads, and those beggars on the streets who used to own their own farms. That’s not how America ought to be.’
One of those little ducks was back right in front of them, a pretty little shadow, framed by clumps of bamboo, floating on the very softly glowing water. It called softly. It was as if Holly and Slaymaker were looking from the real world into a kind of heaven where nothing ever happened at all.
‘Well, I guess I always knew the snakes were there,’ Holly said. ‘I just didn’t have to meet them before.’
Slaymaker nodded. ‘Maybe it was a mistake asking you to come to this thing. God knows, you do enough for us already. Let’s make a deal that I let you carry on with what you do best, getting over the Reconfiguring America message, and we don’t involve you in anything else unless you ask. How about that?’ He reached out and squeezed her hand. ‘I’d hate to lose you, Holly, and not just because your smart idea has probably won me this election. I just like having you around, you know? Your British accent. Your sharp tongue. The way you ride a horse with no fear at all. I’d hate to lose all that.’
She smiled and briefly put her own hand over his to show him her moment of alienation was over. She loved the times she was alone with him. She loved his presence. She’d never really thought before about the way people used that word ‘presence’ in the sense of authority or charisma, but it struck her now that it meant exactly what it said. When Slaymaker was with you it felt like he was really here. Rick knew he ought to be, but there was always something distracting him. Her parents had always maintained a fastidious distance from everything. Her friends flickered restlessly in and out of being present, distracted every few minutes by their jeenees, or by their own preoccupations. But Slaymaker was just here.
The duck called softly, a sound that came from only a few yards away, and yet was somehow in another world.
‘I like working with you, Steve,’ she said. ‘I like the way you let me be me. I said I’d help you with this election and I will.’
‘I know that, Holly, but I meant afterwards. When I’m in the White House. I want you to carry on working with me then.’
‘In the White House?’ Holly repeated dumbly, and a strange emotion came over her which she couldn’t even have named. Like being hemmed in and being released, both at the same time.
CHAPTER 40
He was alone with Alice in her apartment late at night, and that was a big step. But then he was inside her and that was another thing entirely. Only a small thing, one might say, when you actually considered what was entailed, a marginal overlap of two bodies that had previously only existed side by side, and a small, familiar, quite ordinary sensation. But a step had been taken that couldn’t be reversed or talked into non-existence.
He was inside her, and he couldn’t change that now, so he persevered. He and Alice ground and grunted away for a short time and then some part of him outside of his conscious control decided to pull the plug on the whole unpleasant thing and he came. Cold clarity returned at once: sex, after all, is basically a delivery system, and it shuts down as soon as it’s done its job. The world was not about to end, or not for a while at least, and actions did still have consequences. He longed to be alone. Alice pressed her face into his shoulder, hiding herself against his skin. He made a quick calculation to see if there was still time to catch the last train back out to Schofield, but there definitely wasn’t.
They rolled apart.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, ‘that was kind of inept.’
‘It’s never easy the first time, I don’t think. Except in movies, and movies always lie about sex.’
‘I guess.’
‘And...well, there’s Holly, isn’t there? You’re still with her. We should have waited.’
‘She’s far away in DC with Slaymaker. Meeting a bunch of trillionaires.’
‘But she still exists.’
Richard reminded himself that he’d always liked Alice, that he’d always found her attractive, and that, in terms of interests, he had much more in common with her than with Holly. But right then, he couldn’t summon up any liking at all. The one aspect of her that dominated his perception of her was a certain naivety born of privilege – ‘Why do we have to have borders at all?’ – that he had occasionally been irritated by in the past. It was as if, he thought, the cosseted nest she’d grown up in was so far from the machinery of the world that she didn’t even know it existed.
He wished he could be in his own bed, by himself, without this entire evening having happened, and he sensed that she felt pretty much the same. But, rather than face their discomfort, the two of them began to kiss again, and biology reinstated its incentive scheme. This second time worked better in a physical sense. If he tried hard, narrowing his consciousness right down to a kind of tunnel vision, he could even describe what he was experiencing as pleasure. They came together and then tried to sleep, though both knew that in their agitation they would wake at some point and fuck yet again, and that each time they’d get a little better at it, a little more used to it.
Alice did sleep, or, if not, she gave a very good imitation of it, but Richard couldn’t. He lay awake, listening to the wind blowing through the trees outside. Soughing, that was the word for it, he thought, but it was really just white noise, like a waterfall or waves on a beach. Sometimes the wind blew up and it suddenly became louder, as molecules of air – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water – rushed toward an area of lower pressure. Sometimes it faded to almost nothing. The material world out there was doing its own thi
ng, as it always had done, and would do still when no one remembered Alice or Holly or him.
PART 3
CHAPTER 41
In the summer of the third year of Slaymaker’s presidency, Holly had taken three days out for a long-planned break in Vancouver with her old friend Ruby. Tomorrow, Ruby was going to take her to some art shows. Today, their first day, they’d been out watching seals on an island in the strait, and soon they were going to eat in what Ruby thought was the city’s most interesting Sino–Canadian restaurant. Holly felt as if she was twenty years old again, right back in her first few months in America, during the wonderfully happy early days of her friendship with Ruby. She’d come to New York without any clear plan, other than putting an ocean between herself and England. She didn’t know anyone there, and she felt no affinity with the people in the place where she worked, so she was very much alone. The city, with all its millions of people, felt hidden away from her behind its brick and concrete walls, leaving her with only the streets. And they were just conduits people passed through. She’d been sitting by herself in a bar on Green-wich Street, drinking gin and mint, and feeling very small and alone, when Ruby had come up to talk to her. Ruby was twenty-five then, and had been living in New York for five years. She’d heard Holly’s foreign accent and seen she was alone. They got on straight away. Ruby introduced Holly to all her friends and showed her round the city. New York was no longer behind a wall. Holly was inside.
Let Us Be True Page 21