“Exactly what we’re telling the media. What did you do, critique her hairdo?”
“I did not let my temper carry me away.”
“Temper? You have a temper? Hey, you did great, you didn’t buy her girlie guff so she showed her claws. I’m proud of you.” She zipped up her jacket.
“Where are you going?”
“To McRory. I’m going to tell him you’re still straddling the fence and may grab Gracey’s offer as something that’s better than nothing. He’s hungry, he can taste it. Let’s see if he can swallow the fifty-buck carbon tax.”
Alone, Margaret tried some yoga breathing. Still your anger, find peace …
A staffer crept in, nervously dropped off a draft of Pierette’s press release. Margaret scanned it. “Fine. Fax it around.”
She turned up her TV — there it was, top of the news, her recession-aggravating, gun-to-the-head ultimatum. Just the tail end of that, then A.J. Quilter from Calgary, proposing to sue Ottawa for his lost profits from Bhashyistan. A mere two billion dollars.
The third son, a clip from his latest infuriating YouTube dispatch. “From where Canada gets this dead leaf as symbol?” Displaying a ragged Canadian flag. “Turns red, falls from tree, decomposes. What else they have — loon, goose, old sailboat. We have snow leopard, Siberian tiger.” A shot of him standing under snarling head trophies. “Still some live in zoo. This is Mukhamet Khan Ivanovich, your unvarnished source of fast-breaking news. Tune in very soon for Operation Storming Ram.”
Still no mention of those poor women from Saskatchewan. Margaret listened awhile to a pundits’ guessing game about Storming Ram, then clicked the set off. Question Period coming up. She might miss most of it while in the foyer with the press. She will control her temper. She will.
Think love and peace.
For the first time since his rise to stardom in this House, Gerard Lafayette found himself on the far back bench to the right of the Speaker. And for the first time in his life, he’d allowed pride — ignoble pride, his one damnable weakness — to provoke him into an act of measureless stupidity.
Stunned by his demotion to the bowels of the Conservative cabinet, he’d reacted unthinkingly, in the heat of the moment, and was now in the throes of regret. He was being tainted as resentful and impetuous. The most savage swipe, from the NDP leader: he had deserted the sinking ship “not like a rat but a spoiled brat.”
A major setback to his ambitions. A miscalculation. He’d expected at least a dozen core supporters to join him, but had commandeered only two, and with an election looming, he had no time to build a base. He could lose his own riding of Montreal Nord.
He sat back, masking his pain, his self-inflicted wounds, as members lauded today’s lot of heroes: three Restigouche campgirls who saved a drowning friend, the winner of an oyster-eating contest, an armless Afghanistan veteran. Lafayette rose wearily to join in the applause.
Claude McRory hurried in late, half shaved, his furred eyebrows screaming for manicure scissors, a bull-faced expression. He beckoned his shadow cabinet to huddle. Lafayette had a sense of what this was about — the parliamentary aide to the Green leader had been observed courting audience with McRory, presumably to barter Margaret Blake’s vote in exchange for an extortionate carbon tax.
He could see heads nodding. The message was clear: Blake’s blackmail had succeeded, she had bound the Liberals to a recession-worsening tax as the price of bringing the government down. The huddle quickly dispersed as Gracey came waltzing in for Question Period.
McRory scrambled to his chair ready to fire one of his wild salvos, but Gracey got the Speaker’s nod.
“Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure of informing this House that I have just met with the governor general, who has proclaimed that this Parliament is to be dissolved forthwith and a general election to be held on Monday, January twenty-fourth. On that date, the people of Canada will decide whether they want their nation to be run by those who seek to represent them truly and honourably or by the tax-and-spenders who in their thirst for power would leave our economy in ruins. Season’s greetings to all. Enjoy the holiday.”
McRory began spouting, but couldn’t be heard over the brave shouts and loud shuffling of government members as their benches emptied. Lafayette saw Margaret Blake enter, looking confused, unaware this Parliament was at an end — probably her political career too, now that she’d failed to enforce her dictates. Le Parti Vert est en ruine.
If I hadn’t found a calendar page in the back of this journal I wouldn’t have even thought of Christmas. A week away. It’s a jolt, and it sent me spinning back to Canora, to home, to merry Christmases past. Being with my husband, my darlings. I’m in trouble …
Get it together.
Okay, just a little crying jag, I’ll start this again, a fresh, dry page.
I lost track of the days because I’ve been on Igor Time. Officially, this is called Death to Soviet Empire month, and today, if I’ve got it right, is Izbar, named after Igor’s eldest son.
Nobody around here takes all that stuff seriously, the renaming of all the days, and stars and rivers. They make jokes about the Ultimate Leader. They name toilet paper after him, and horse droppings. “Don’t step on the Ivanovich,” someone will say.
They call the dictator the Cockroach for Life. “God be praised, it will be a short one,” Aisulu said. She only just found her way here, one of the dissidents who escaped from jail when our soldiers freed everyone. I love her, she is so brave. She had a chance to jump on one of the helicopters but chose to stay and fight. She’d been beaten and raped many times in there, and she can still laugh at Ruslan’s tall stories. She has that tough old bullshitter wrapped around her finger. Redbeard the pirate, we all call him.
Where we are is in the Altay Mountains, which look huge for a girl from Saskatchewan, maybe not as high as the Rockies but close. We’re in a well-guarded valley, with outlooks and snipers up on the rocky ledges, and there are no roads, we had to hike in because the horses were too laden. However, this is as close to paradise as winter permits. It’s one of Igor’s private reserves and no one is allowed in but his park maintenance crew, three guys stationed in a yurt at the end of the road. It had the biggest “No Trespassing” you’ve ever seen, a billboard.
The three of them awoke at dawn and found themselves staring at Atun’s Kalashnikov. After a long talk over a samovar they decided to join us, but maybe out of fear, I don’t know. So we (the rebels, I mean) now have two snowmobiles, three more rifles, extra food. Skis, snowshoes. We’d have had a working satellite phone if the battery hadn’t run out. One of our guys took off with it yesterday, and he’s going to try to buy a battery from a smuggler.
So now we’re squatting the Ultimate Cockroach’s lodge, which he only uses in summer. Massive wooden beams, ten rooms (a den full of animal heads, ibex, bear, lynx, deer, snow leopard), three baths, and hot water. This is because of the hotsprings just a three-minute walk up stone steps to where a bathing pool has been blasted into the rock. The overflow keeps the lodge warm, though it’s dark in here. Ruslan doesn’t want to start up the diesel generator, it makes too much noise. Maxine, Ivy, and I have candles, which I’m using now to write. Maxine is asleep and I suspect Ivy is downstairs with Atun. Doing whatever they do in the darkness. Maxine is resigned to it, sort of, preferring a gun-toting revolutionary to a dope-dealing dropout.
There must be close to seventy people here now, more coming every day, bedraggled and cold, diving into the borscht that Maxine and I keep going on the propane stove. She’s volunteered as head chef, and is dazzling everyone.