The High Road

Politics is often a millstone around democracy’s neck, and it had become a noose around mine. But I had an escape plan. I was nearly free. Granted, I’d botched my first attempt. Or rather, I’d been undone by an eleventh-hour shocker completely beyond my control. But that was then. In a day or two, I’d be in the clear. Really.

I was seriously asleep when my BlackBerry chirped. When my eyes could finally recognize our alphabet, I read “B. Stanton” on the screen. Excellent. I’d hoped never to see that name on my BB ever again. Yet here it was. A call from the Liberal leader’s slippery Chief of Staff seldom sent me to my happy place. Just a day or two more.

I spoke quietly, trying not to waken Lindsay beside me. I need not have worried. When she slept, she went straight to the bottom.

“Daniel Addison,” I sighed.

“Is that you, Addison?”

“Uh, no Bradley, I just open with that name to confuse callers. I’m actually Tiger Woods,” I replied, no longer caring about pissing him off on my way out.

“Up yours!” he roared. “You’ve got call display. Why can’t you just pick up and say ‘Hi Bradley’? You knew it was me calling.”

“You mean ‘You knew it was I calling,’” I lectured. Too often, I corrected grammar on instinct, without thinking. “And ‘up yours’ is just so … last century.”

“Fuckin’ pedant. I’ll be gla–”

“And yes, I do have call display,” I interrupted. “But I was praying it might be a wrong number from, say, a Bratislav Stanton, or perhaps his brother Benito. But no such luck.”

I waited for him to speak but he didn’t. So I just kept going. This was kind of fun.

“So what’s up?” I continued. “Wait, don’t tell me, you’re recruiting for
Machiavelli: The Musical
and I made the shortlist. I’m touched, really I am.”

“Yeah, that’s just hilarious, ass-wipe.”

Where was he getting these archaic boys’ camp epithets?

“Listen,” he went on. “Have you seen the
Globe
this morning?”

“Bradley, it’s 6:45. I barely have vital signs at this hour. Why?”

“There’s another fuckin’ story about you and your crazy mountain man. Are you still working the gallery for these puff pieces? ’Cause if you are, I’ll have your nuts,” he threatened.

“Um, yours seem to be quite large enough already, Bradley. But before you have an aneurysm, I had nothing to do with the story, whatever it is. And I’ve not pitched a single journo since the government fell,” I said, and meant it.

“Yeah, well, the piece says your hairy friend might run again. I’m waiting for you to tell me that’s not true. I’m waiting for you to tell me you’re both heading back to your academic sandbox. I don’t want to see either of you on the Hill again. I’m just so tired of that ‘holier than thou’ shit you and McLintock were peddling,” Stanton barked.

“Of course you’re right, Bradley. Putting politics together with honesty, transparency, and the national interest, it’s an outrage bordering on treason,” I sneered. “Now you listen. Don’t get your boxers bunched up. I can tell you that neither Angus nor I has any plans to make any plans to return to politics. We didn’t expect to be there in the first place, and I certainly have no desire to go back. I was trying to get out when all this started, remember? So I’m done, and hearing your warm and caring voice again clinches the deal.”

I heard the click as he closed his cell. What a jerk.

Noose or not, the political junkie in me still needed my morning fix. So in a semi-comatose stupor, I tipped myself out of bed and padded to the front door, my fingers twitching for the newspapers. The first faint traces of morning light angled into the second-storey boathouse apartment and pooled on the hardwood floor.

Outside on the porch the papers lay rolled and waiting, just out of reach from the warmth, and shall we say traction, of the front hall. You’ve heard of black ice – that treacherous and nearly invisible glassy layer that forms on roads when certain meteorological conditions are met. Well, the McLintock boathouse has a similar phenomenon known locally as “porch ice.” With no eaves-trough, the melting snow on the roof drips onto the porch, only to freeze when the sun drops. Angus had mentioned this danger to me in his typical engineer’s dialect, noting something about the floorboards’ coefficient of friction dropping asymptotically to nearly zero. Right, asymptotically. So when I slipped out the front door to fetch the paper, I literally “slipped” out the front door.

In life-threatening situations, the “fight or flight” instinct kicks in. Without consulting me, my body chose “flight,” in the truest sense of the word, so I was compelled to go along for the ride. I managed to sustain a life-saving hold on the doorknob, my only tether to earth, as my foot left the icy porch floor in a hurry. Now I’m not what you would call coordinated … at all. Yet I somehow landed back on the porch without serious injury, my shimmying feet eventually coming to rest more or less under me. But naturally, my momentum slammed the door shut. Scratch that. Locked the door. Think bank vault, or Fort Knox. So there I was, marooned on my own front porch at 6:45 in the morning, the frigid day after Christmas. Did I mention that I was naked? No pants, so no pockets, so no keys.

Bare hands and faces are quite accustomed to braving the harsh temperatures of winter. Other parts of the male anatomy, not so much. I felt December’s arctic grip clamp down on my …
situation. Like pushing an elevator button that’s already lit, I tried the doorknob, oh, fourteen or fifteen times just to confirm with each attempt that the door was indeed still locked. It was. I then decided I had two choices. I could simply bang on the door and face the unbridled humiliation of wakening Lindsay to rescue me, or I could pry open, and crawl through, the narrow side window next to the porch. Easy call.

I slid open the window without incident, even on my friction-less bare feet. I’d not thought it possible to be any colder than I already was, until my bare chest touched the window sill. It was aluminum. When I had shoehorned myself halfway through the deceptively small opening, the “humiliation in front of Lindsay” scenario was looking pretty good. But things were going so well with her, with us, I decided that breaking into my own apartment, naked, was worth it.

I kicked my legs gracefully, almost balletically, scraped through, and landed on the hallway floor, my forehead coming to rest on, er … Lindsay’s bare feet. As I looked up, I saw that “bare” applied not just to her feet. She was holding her stomach and quivering. She was making a Herculean effort to keep her sides from splitting wide open. I was not blind to the humour in all of this, but I did think her hysterics took it a tad too far. In time, she gathered herself.

“I often find the door works quite well also,” she deadpanned.

“Yes, well, I was a C-section baby so I’m drawn to windows,” I quipped without missing a beat. I jumped to my feet to stand next to her, affecting casual indifference, as if nothing had happened. Tough to sell, with hypothermic convulsions, full-body abrasions, and a shrunken … ego. She shivered once, standing so close to my icy body, then headed back to bed. To complete my tribute to the Keystone Kops, the rolled-up newspapers still lay on the porch, mocking me through the window.

After a scalding twenty-minute shower, I returned to bed with the newspapers and all the nonchalance I could muster. Lindsay lay beside me, apparently back in the trough of deep sleep.

Boxing Day is one of my favourite days of the year. The chaos of Christmas is over, and the real relaxing begins. Because of the holiday, the papers were thinner than usual, but the story Bradley had called about actually appeared in both the
Cumberland Crier
and the
Globe and Mail
. I hadn’t been completely honest with
Darth
Bradley. I knew that André Fontaine, staff writer for our local paper, the
Crier
, was working on a feature and had hoped to get broader placement of it. He couldn’t have done much better than our national newspaper.