The High Road - Softcover

Chapter One
 
 
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 myBB 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 eavestrough, 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 frictionless 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.
 
I propped myself up on my pillows, taking care not to shake the bed unduly, and opened the Globe. Four photos accompanied the story. There was a shot of Professor Angus McLintock receiving a teaching award from the U of O Engineering Society. Another showed him sitting in Baddeck 1, the hovercraft he’d designed and built in the boathouse workshop below me. Yet another photo, taken just outside the House of Commons, featured Angus flanked by yours truly and Muriel Parkinson, whose smile actually made her look younger than her eighty-one years. Finally, there was a stock photo of disgraced former Finance Minister and Cumberland-Prescott MP, the Honourable Eric Cameron, likely taken after presenting his last federal budget and well before the cataclysm of a couple of months ago.
 
Lindsay stirred beside me, then was still again.
 
It was surreal to see my own name in a Globe and Mail headline.
 
McLintock and Addison – Cutting a new path in politics
 
It was a bit over the top in my view. Then there was the subhead to fill in the holes in the headline.
 
Behind the partnership that brought down a government
 
Please. It made us sound so much more purposeful and calculating than we had actually been. Really, I’d had very little to do with it all. The Tories had gambled that the snowstorm of the decade would maroon most MPs in their ridings. It was Angus who had rocketed up the frozen Ottawa River in Baddeck 1 all the way to Parliament Hill. I was just a spectator in the gallery when he burst onto the floor of the House, his wild grey hair and swirling beard in full fright, just in time to cast the deciding vote. But like the intoxicating aroma that often leads me three blocks out of my way to the nearest Cinnabon outlet, the headline and subhead are intended to seize your attention.
 
I settled in to read the piece. Lindsay still looked as if she were asleep beside me but her roving hands beneath the comforter told a different story. Focus, Daniel, focus. André’s story covered the whirlwind of the last two and a half months, including my abrupt resignation from my speech-writing gig in the Liberal Leader’s office and my guilt-driven promise on my way out to find a Liberal candidate to run in my new home riding of Cumberland-Prescott. Never mind that it was the safest Conservative seat in the land.
 
As I feared, André revealed the bargain I had struck with my new landlord, Angus McLintock. I’d admitted nothing in my interview, but honest Angus had freely confessed he agreed to let his name stand as the no-hope Liberal sacrificial lamb only after I promised to teach his English for Engineers class, a quadrennial duty he absolutely loathed. I was surprised to see that André had included a nice quotation from my PhD thesis supervisor noting how pleased he was that I’d agreed to join the English faculty at Ottawa U.
 
Lindsay’s sub-sheet ministrations moved quickly from distracting to arousing, but I had almost finished the story. The hint of a smile on her tranquil face confirmed that she was not in the throes of some strange, yet wholly satisfying, sleep disorder.
 
“Just a couple more paragraphs, Linds, and I’m all yours. I’m just getting to the good part.”
 
“Me too,” she whispered, still smiling.
 
She redoubled her efforts as if I’d said nothing at all, which, frankly, worked out pretty well for me.
 
André had some fun with the leather-studded late-campaign stunner, describing how the wildly popular incumbent MP and Finance Minister Eric Cameron inadvertently went public with his S&M secret. You don’t often see words like “alligator clip” and “crotchless rubber suit” living in the same sentence alongside “Finance Minister.” So I savoured the moment. Even Muriel made it into the article. André described her as the spirited eighty-something Liberal warhorse who had stood for the Liberals against the Tory tide in C-P for five elections in a row. Nicely put. I wondered how Lindsay’s grandmother would take the “warhorse” reference, before deciding she’d probably wear it with pride.
 
By this time, Lindsay had shed any pretence of sleep and thrown herself into her work. She was quite good at it, too. My concentration flagged as I tried to make it to the end of the article while also thinking hard about baseball. And hockey, and football. Did I mention baseball? Almost there. Just a few more paragraphs. Bear down, Daniel. Down.
 
The article couldn’t quite capture the full impact of Angus McLintock’s stunning upset and his honest, forthright, and refreshing approach to public service. Yet it was all true. Against all odds, against more than a century of local political tradition, and definitely against the wishes of Angus McLintock, it was all true. Despite outward appearances of a carefully orchestrated grand plan, we’d simply been lurching from one issue to the next, trying to do the right thing. Who could have foreseen Angus McLintock’s Midas touch? I certainly hadn’t.
 
The last line of the feature really said it all.
 
“With the government defeated and another election looming, the burning questions are: Will Angus McLintock seek re-election for a job he never wanted in the first place? And will Daniel Addison still be at his side?”
 
“No and no,” I intoned out of nowhere, in a louder voice than I’d intended.
 
Lindsay clearly wasn’t taking no for an answer, and launched into new techniques well beyond my thin playbook. I do have my limits. I jettisoned the paper as if it were on fire.
 
An hour later, when we’d both finished, the Globe story I mean, Lindsay set down the paper.
 
“Well? Did André nail it?” she asked.
 
“He got the history right, but he’s got the future all wrong,” I replied. “As far as I’m concerned, Angus and I are heading back to the peace and quiet of the university. He didn’t want to win. I didn’t want him to win. The collapse of the government just means we can now go back to our regularly scheduled lives.”
 
Lindsay smiled and looked down. I thought I might even have detected a faint shake of her head.
 
“I’m with Grandma. I think Angus was surprised to discover that he actually liked being an MP. And I think you actually quite liked being his EA.”
 
“Despite what Muriel and you believe, I think I know Angus pretty well. He will not run again,” I concluded. “You can flip us both over and grab the barbecue sauce, we’re done.”
 
We lay in peace for a time.
 
“What a wonderful few weeks it’s been,” Lindsay sighed and rested her head on my chest. No one before her had ever rested her head on my chest. I liked it.
 
 
December had certainly packed a punch, and I don’t just mean weather-wis...