Famous Last Meals (6 page)

He was holding a gold-coloured box. It felt light beneath his mitten-clad hands, which were numbing with the cold. He was one in an army of children waiting to begin a parade, waiting for a number of important people to arrive: the Prime Minister; Robert Lavallée, who was now Secretary of State in charge of Christmas; the camera team that would film the ceremony of a thousand school children placing brightly-coloured gift boxes at the base of a gigantic blue spruce, viewed live on the evening news. He didn't think about what gift he might be carrying; he was too concerned with staying in line, keeping up with the person ahead of him and abreast of Emma, his partner: two by two they advanced, a boy and a girl, five hundred pairs of Christmas brides and grooms representing the next century of fertility and progress.

She began to cry softly about halfway along the parade route, which began in front of the East Block and wound snakelike across the snow-covered lawn below the Peace Tower. They had not said a word to each other, their eyes meeting only the once when a frantic woman who kept muttering, “There aren't enough boys,” brought them together. Emma was wearing a modest wool pea coat, navy blue, ending at her knees. She had on dark tights and a pair of thin white vinyl boots. When he asked her what was wrong, she stifled her muffled sobs.

“My toes hurt.”

“Too tight?” he asked, looking down at her go-go boots.

“No, cold.” She began to cry again. “They're going to freeze.”

She began to speak very quickly, her voice climbing until it became a high-pitched squeak. She had watched a program about explorers in Antarctica. All their toes had gone black and had to be cut off. This was going to happen to her, she just knew it. She wanted to go home, right away. Her mother was going to wait until the ceremony was all over and then drive her home, but she couldn't wait that long. She couldn't go any farther.

She looked behind her and Adam turned also. Behind them were as many sacrificial pairs as there were ahead. From the outset the line had not moved smoothly, jerking ahead in sections like a Slinky toy. They stopped, and she began to cry louder and to stamp her feet. “I can't feel them, they're turning into ice.” He looked around for an adult. The line began to move again. She stood bent over her gift box, which she hugged tightly to her front, her head bowed, her twin pigtails dangling like bell cords on either side of the shiny gold paper. He kept moving with the line, which behind him split down the middle to go around her, and soon he could no longer see her as she passed haltingly through the bowels of the snake.

He caught a glimpse of her when the line doubled back on itself and headed toward the Perpetual Flame. She was sitting on the ground, her boots barely noticeable where they stood upright on the snow beside her, and another boy was rubbing her feet. Adam craned his neck to look at them as long as he could until it was impossible to do so and keep moving forward. He came, finally, to the base of the Christmas tree and placed his gift where the spotter, a young man in a parka, told him to, his fur-rimmed face looking composed but hinting at annoyance. Of all the things he could have thought at that moment, it was that Emma had not brought her gift forward to be placed with the others, and that the omission would surely be noted, if not on earth then in the spiritual realm where the larger power of Christmas and national pride resided. Even when he overheard a boy ahead of him in line say to his partner, “There's nothing inside. Go ahead, shake it. It's just for
TV
,” the absence of her wrapped box under the tree continued to bother him. A piece out of the larger symbol was missing without her contribution. It was as if someone had set out to build a stylized maple leaf, in patio stones, say, or plastic milk crates, and had forgotten the triangle that sits on top.

Isaac was shaking him awake. Adam groaned and wormed under the sheets, hiding his head under the pillow. Isaac insisted, reminding him of the breakfast meeting. He slid out of bed and put on the same clothes he had been wearing the night before. They shuffled queasily down the hall to join the rest of the interns gathered in the headquarters suite.

Groggy, sheepish, green, they grazed where they stood around a long table where food had been laid: coffee in large thermal urns, fresh fruit, muffins, bagels, scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, sausages, buttermilk pancakes, the hot food kept warm in metal chafing trays heated by spirit burners. Only Pookie was animated, teasing Gilles with affectionate jabs at his fatigue, ego and lack of appetite. He admitted that he functioned poorly before ten in the morning. All he could stomach was black coffee. Unlike the rest of them, Gilles did not look haphazard and slovenly, but he was simmering in a dark pout because he wanted to eat sitting down. “Anywhere,” he said. Adam pictured a greasy, formica-topped diner booth squinting through dusty Venetian blinds at some ugly commercial strip
of roadway.

He wondered why Pookie liked this boy and not Jean-Marc, for example, who was handsomer, or Eugène, who made up for his homeliness with an infectious brand of Franco-vaudevillian humour. But given the choice, he would have chosen Gilles, too, he conceded after consideration, for Jean-Marc always seemed angry and defensive, brooding over perceived slights, and Eugène could be annoying, acting as if he knew everything there was to know about you, his tone increasingly confidential and pitying. “Dear boy,
how
are you?” meaning, “What have you accomplished. Anything? Anything at all?”

Adam's head pounded. He had a goose egg above his left temple and abrasions on that side of his face and on both palms. He remembered jumping to his feet from where he lay sprawled on the sidewalk, brushing the front of his pants, laughing along with the others. He had not felt anything when he hit the sidewalk. After that, where they went next, what they did, how he got back to the hotel, was blank.

He was wretchedly awake, in pain and seriously nauseous by the time Don swaggered into the room. Feeney, as he liked to remind people, had made his first of many tens of millions of dollars before the age of twenty-one, a year younger than Adam was, selling billboard advertising. He was the antithesis of the
PM
, exuding all the flair of a brown plaid sofa in a dimly lit, fake-walnut-panelled basement den.

How much were they loving the food? They swallowed, sucking their teeth clean and smiling their best picnic-in-sunshine grins. They smiled with their eyes and nodded their heads like marionettes, all the while plotting their escape. Too late.

“Kids. Let me tell you. And I gotta say. How many days are we into this race? Mon? Where are you, hon? Two? Three. Whatever. Because, man. Excuse my vernacular. I mean,
mon dieu
it feels good to be here, to be doing this. How many days, the exact number, matters to me less than—hello, that's okay, come on in there, little lady,” he said to Emma as she tried to slip undetected into the room. “We'll get our chronometers synchronized afore too much more of our precious time elapses. Right? Right. What I wanted to say, today of all days, was that this fight, it's gonna depend on three things, and if you remember nothing else, it's gonna be this. Are you with me? I said,
ARE? YOU? WITH? ME?
”

They let fly with limp exclamations of “sure thing” and “
oui, certainment
” and “absolutely.”

“Let's try that again, gang,” and they did, repeating their affirmation until it reached the sought-after volume and unison.

“Great. Super-great, team. We're of one mind on this.”

As Don explained the immediately forgettable three things, Adam wished that the man were one of his own billboards. A billboard said all that it meant to say at a glance. The viewer did not have to stand listening to a scattered, incoherent motivational speaker trying excruciatingly to arrive at his point, a point, any point.

Every cell of Adam's too, too sullied flesh rebelled against this. And the three things are, gang? Blood pooled in his lower extremities. He felt the growing prickly sensation of limbs falling blissfully asleep.

Adam shook his foot. He wanted Don to stop talking more than he wanted to pee, an urgent desire, or feel his toes again, or get his eyes to focus. Just stop, please, desist with this rant that says nothing except, “Here we are,” and “There”
Where?
“is the enemy,” and “It's going to take every ounce
Aren't we a metric country now?
of effort
newtons or kilojoules?
on each and every
Redundancy, two-point deduction
one of you to get out there and take that hill
Analogy? A more symbolic Hill, perhaps?
”

Whipped contrary to their better natures into a manic froth, despite feeling terminal and dumb and inert, they responded fervently to his one-more-times and his I-can't-hear-yous until they were hoarse. When Don left the room to go to a television studio, Monica gave them their assignments for the day. Adam moved his feet, a step here, a step back, as if pushing a cinder block. He wasn't sure his breakfast was going to stay where it was supposed to.

Adam was paired with Oliver, the Winnipegger, to cover a neighbourhood at the north end of the peninsula, its wide base, between Quinpool Road and Jubilee. Even the street names had a sunny, saucy tang: Binney, Bliss, Spring Garden, Summer. Oliver, who was a little younger than Monica, was an agreeable sort. Bright, well read, self-deprecating, he had recently abandoned a Ph.D. in law and was “doing what was expedient” to get himself positioned in the Party for nomination in time for the next general election. He exhibited a brooding intellect that, he admitted, he let out on a short leash only when necessary. In politics, he said, the candidate must appear as smart as but no smarter than the voter.

“But there's no uniform
IQ
in the electorate.”

“Correct. So it's a matter of...?”

“I don't know. Averages?”

“No, perception. How to appeal to the broadest range of people, that's the magic trick. Of the politicians who have been most successful in this country over the years, what would you say was their one attribute that assured them re-election time and again?”

“Ability to network.”

“Nope.”

“Communication with constituents.”

“You would think so, wouldn't you.”

“It can't be sex appeal. Look at Mackenzie King.”

“The answer is unthreatening image. The ideal is a competent
MP
who doesn't keep the voter up at night.”

“You've made a study of this. I'm surprised you went into law and not political science.”

In Oliver's face was the embodiment of his own principle: dependability and civic duty obscuring a lively skeptical mind. The face required shaving twice daily. The forehead was high with a hairline retreating toward male pattern baldness. The eyes were a reader's, weak, the small ears ursine. A thick neck and broad shoulders made him look as if he had worked toting rolled carpet or sides of meat. Adam pictured him taking his coffee break in the lunchroom of a factory or an abattoir, his open textbook propped defensively between him and prying, teasing, suspicious, misreading eyes.

“You never practised law?”

“I always wanted to argue both sides of any given case. I was more interested in cooperative than adversarial jurisprudence. Aboriginal tribal councils, for example, emphasize redress over retribution. That was the thrust of my thesis: adapting native sentencing procedures to white justice. I didn't get very far with it, mainly because my supervisor didn't believe in it, and he was the only one in the department doing work even remotely related to my topic. His thing was the effect of community-service sentencing on recidivism.”

Oliver wanted to tear down most of the prisons and replace them with halfway houses, leaving only the most violent offenders behind bars. Would he make that a crusade if he got elected?

“Eventually. You don't want to scare people off. This kind of thing takes years, decades. It gets done, when the electorate isn't paying attention, by representatives who, as I say, don't appear to be making waves. And it all has to fit into the corset of party discipline. So much power resides in Cabinet now.”

Oliver's calculated, bloodless strategy left Adam feeling chilled. For all that he felt detached from the Feeney campaign, he was disturbed to think that legislative change could happen with so little disclosure.

They reached their assigned neighbourhood after an easy, fifteen-minute walk from the hotel, and agreed to split the area. Usually when he rang the bell or knocked on the door Adam got no answer, and so would leave a flyer in the mailbox: “Sorry we missed you! Your support is important to us. If you have any questions for Don or for the Prime Minister don't hesitate to call. Remember: Don Feeney Gets It Done.” Twice he triggered loud barking, making him feel like a burglar. One man who came to the door swore that he would not vote for “that deadbeat” Don Feeney unless they paid him a million dollars, which was the amount he said Feeney had bilked him out of, back when they were both young salesmen with the same life insurance company and Feeney had tried to convince him to invest ten thousand dollars in a mining project. Something about Feeney was untrustworthy, he said, and so the man had let the opportunity pass. Adam asked why and how not giving Don ten thousand dollars to invest caused the man to lose a million.

“You're not listening, you see. If he had been trustworthy, and by that I am referring to the distance between his eyes, which is not wide, you have to admit, I would have given him the money and I would be on Easy Street today. You have heard of Consumption Sound, have you not?” Adam pretended he had. “Well, there you go. Enough said. Projected ore body in the billions and that's conservative. So don't expect a vote out of me, young fellow, not for a mandarin parachutist who would do such a despicable thing to a friend.”