Consumption (17 page)

Resentment is inherited as reliably as an accent. And Robertson’s decision to leave the country entirely had been informed by this insight. And if he lost his doltish-sounding Midlands accent in the process, then so much the better. Pauloosie’s speech had been formed only in the Arctic and knew nothing of northern England except for his rare habit of ending declaratory sentences with “what?” But the resentment had come through the line as immutably as his blood type.

On arriving in the financiers’ offices, Robertson had been greeted by a South African geologist and an engineer—he had met these two in Yellowknife a month earlier and it was they who had asked him to come to Toronto. Their names were Van Rensburg and De Kock, and they were both in their early thirties and uncomfortable-looking in their suits and new shoes. As they shook hands with him, he was
reassured by their calloused hands. They showed him into a small office, where they settled him in and offered coffee. As he stirred sugar into his cup, the two of them looked at each other anxiously. “So perhaps we should start with you two telling me what you want me to do here,” he said.

Van Rensburg was the designated spokesman. “Mr. Robertson, what we need from you is to allay the concerns of our backers about the local political climate. Especially as it concerns large-scale mining developments.”

“How do you propose I do that?”

“They’re worried about the land claims negotiations, and whether the Inuit advocacy groups might simply oppose any development in order to reserve the land for traditional use.”

“Well, they might.”

“Yes. Our question to you, then, is what can be done to persuade them otherwise?”

“Doing anything could stir up sentiment against the idea.” He sipped his coffee. “You’re foreign and talk funny.”

De Kock shrugged, as if to say there was little he could do about that. “So whatever is to be done would have to be thought out well,” Van Rensburg ventured, leaning forward in his chair.

“Yes …”

De Kock spoke: “I wonder if we could ask you to tell our compatriots that you will come up with an approach you could recommend to us. Them.”

“I’m here to make it look like you’ve anticipated all the possibilities.”

They answered together, “Yes.”

Robertson nodded.

“If the mine goes ahead it could be very rewarding for your group. For you,” De Kock said.

“I have some ideas about what you might do.”

“Excellent.” All three men looked at one another.

“Let’s join the others,” Van Rensburg said.

The two men showed him to an empty meeting room. Through the window, the largely residential parts of Toronto stretched out to the north in all their green and leafy expanse. He saw a cyclist making her way down Yonge Street. To the east he could just glimpse Lake Ontario, which, in its domesticated ease, couldn’t have looked less like Hudson Bay if it had been filled with lime-flavoured gelatin.

The financiers filed in, followed by another knot of engineers and geologists. They all sat down, and Van Rensburg introduced Robertson to the group. He smiled at each of the men in turn and watched them assessing him, taking in his cheap suit, and wondering what to make of it, given who he was, where he was from. De Kock began the presentation. There was a flip chart and slides of the tundra, graphs of diamond prices, summaries of cost estimates from Siberian diamond mines.

The proposed site was located a hundred kilometres northwest of Rankin Inlet. The land there had been sparsely populated even by the standards of the Inuit prior to contact, then when the settlements were built it had been essentially cleared of humanity. The Back River dominated this landscape and ran heavily with char in the spring and, four weeks later, the autumn; but the forage was sparse and the
tuktu
smaller and less numerous than in other areas of the tundra. The Netsilkmiut, who had once lived along the banks of the Back River, had been drawn first to the sea and were now folded into the richer and more populous places around them. The people who had dwelt in the area of the mine had been dispersed among several different communities—Repulse Bay, Baker Lake, Rankin Inlet. There had been work done by anthropologists on these people, but what mattered to the miners was that they were hard to identify, and did not speak with one voice. Robertson revised his estimation of Van Rensburg’s thoroughness: these people were not amateurs. The geologist sat down.

One of the financiers rearranged his papers. His name was Stumpf. He was thick and plethoric, and at ease in expensive
clothes. Robertson detected in him an enthusiasm for the project alongside a certain impatience for the city, for the backwater he had had to travel to in order to discuss the proposal. As he looked at the notes he had just taken, his florid cheeks seem to pulse slowly, and then he looked out the window, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “Mr. Robertson, I would like to thank you on behalf of our organization, for attending this meeting. As I think you understand, we are all extremely excited about the potential for a high-yield diamond mine near Back River. The engineering and technologic obstacles seem surmountable. What we need to know from you is the nature of the local politics. Will your townspeople oppose such a development? What would win their favour? How ought we to proceed?” The older man sitting across the table from Robertson leaned back and clasped his hands together behind his head, looking at Robertson. Robertson decided to speak directly to him, clearly the real power in the room.

“My townspeople need jobs, Mr. Stumpf. Sixty per cent of our young people are unemployed. Our territorial government runs an annual deficit of fifty million dollars on a population of thirty thousand and still there are not enough homes for people to live in. We need jobs, we need revenue, and we need this mine to be built.”

“Is this view unanimous?”

“No.”

“Who differs?”

“There are two camps you need to be aware of. One is loud but inconsequential: the environmentalist schoolteachers and junior civil servants who are in the north briefly and remember the fun they had in college protesting logging on the West Coast.”

Stumpf blinked uncomprehendingly.

“But they are not taken seriously, either in government or among the townspeople. Of more concern to you will be the independent Inuit land claims organizations, NTI and KTI. These are bodies set up to receive land settlement money from the government, to invest it and administer its dispersal. The influential young Inuit all work
for them; they employ several bright and aggressive lawyers outright and they have three of the largest law firms in the country on retainer. Some of the locals feel that these organizations have been co-opted, but there are not many who hold that view. NTI and KTI have money, is the thing, and they have lawyers. When they get wind of this, they will be all over you.”

“What can we do about that?”

“Buy them off.”

“Just like that?”

“Offer an up-front disbursement to every household in the area and publicize the offer at the same time you make it. There is no history of the kind of development money you are proposing being spent up there. Nobody will know in advance how much money is at stake. The faster you do it, the less it will cost you.”

“How much will they require?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Yes.”

“It goes without saying that everything will have to be completely legal.”

“Of course. There’s another thing you might do.”

“Which is?”

“There’s no hospital anywhere on the west coast of Hudson Bay north of Manitoba. The government is finally making plans to start erecting one over the next several years, but the capital funding is still being worked out. It could take years.”

“We will build a first-class one by next summer.”

The talk turned away from him, toward the size of the investment—about one billion pounds sterling in capital the first three years. There really
are
diamonds in the tundra, Robertson thought. Another five billion in the following ten years and the mine looking to be profitable by year four. Robertson wondered how he was going to pull this off.

He had time to kill before his flight. He headed to Queen Street West, thinking he might find a gift for Justine and Marie, music or a T-shirt, or something. He was baffled by the array available. He asked a pubescent sales clerk for advice, who took in his suburban dress and suggested a Duran Duran shirt. Temporarily confident in the success of that mission, he found Edwards Books & Art and wandered in—Marie had asked him for
The Silmarillion
. Walking into the warm night, he leafed through it and marvelled at the eccentricity his daughter had been able to cultivate in their tiny town. Pauloosie hadn’t wanted anything from the city.

He stopped in the Horseshoe Tavern and drank a bottle of Labatt Blue. He ordered a bacon cheeseburger with extra pickles. He drank another bottle of beer. He looked around the place, and was surprised to realize that he was the oldest man in the bar and the only one not wearing jeans. He paid his bill and picked up his bag of gifts and walked back outside. There was a pay phone on the corner. It was an hour earlier in Rankin Inlet and he decided to call home. There was a long satellite pause.

“Hey,” she answered.

“How are things?”

“They’re okay. How did the meeting go?”

“It went very fast. I’m coming home tomorrow.”

“Wow, you got paid a lot for one day’s work.”

“An hour and a half’s work.”

“Even better.”

“What did Balthazar say about Marie?”

“He said the X-ray hasn’t changed. There’re still scars, from when she was sick as a baby, but nothing new. He sent her sputum off for tests. It’s going to take three months for the culture to grow, he says.”

“You told him she coughed
blood
, didn’t you?”

“No, I kept that a secret.”

Pause.

“You’re pretty worried about her, huh?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad you’re coming home early. I hope these tests turn out okay.”

“I’ll be in at eight.”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“I left my truck at the airstrip. I’ll just drive myself home.”

“Okay.”

Robertson walked back to his hotel in the summer heat, the kids passing him in T-shirts and gauzy skirts—so beautiful, these boys and girls. She said she was glad he was coming home. Clear as day.

That summer, Marie and Justine’s days stretched out in front of them in an elastic, almost-infinite emptiness that matched the tundra horizons around them. They rose whenever it occurred to them—the sky was light for all but a few hours after midnight—then fed themselves and eventually made their way outside, where people laughed and spoke loudly at all hours. The children played street hockey at 4 a.m. with as much enthusiasm as they did at 4 p.m.

Marie had spent the previous summers out on the tundra gathering cloud berries and collecting specimens of flowers and insects. One year she had carried home a great winged monstrosity that none of the elders had recognized, though everyone from the south did: a dragonfly, not seen this far north before.