Her eyes were bright and shining in that way they had when she was fighting for something. She was really pleading with him, and this shifted the balance between them in a way that he hadn’t expected. He felt wanted, and he remembered how the two of them had once been: him and this smart, fierce, restless Englishwoman. He remembered a time right back at the beginning when she put her arms round him under his jacket, walking out of a bar in New York: ‘You know what, Rick? I can’t believe just how much more interesting you are than anyone else I’ve ever met.’
Holly was still talking. ‘...and I’ll ask for a vacation soon after the election,’ she was saying. ‘We can get to know each other again. And then, well, you wouldn’t need to move to DC, you know. I’m going to earn a whole pile of money. I can rent a decent-sized apartment down there with room for both of us, and we can keep this place as well. I’ll come up here regularly, and you can come down and spend time there whenever you feel like it. I know it’s going to be hard, but please let’s give it a go. Don’t make me choose between you and the most amazing career opportunity I’ll ever have in my life.’
She came over to him, she took his hand, she reached up to kiss him.
Around him in the room were the familiar objects that framed their lives together: the reading lamp, the glass door out onto the yard, the broadscreen with the loose wire, the cream-colored sofa...All these things were sitting there as if this was just another ordinary moment in Richard and Holly’s home, and time was still rolling peacefully forward. They were there to tell their usual story, the same as every other day.
I slept with Alice, was all he had to say, and all of this would end.
Two whole worlds lay before him, one a continuation of the world he knew, the other tantalizingly new, only to be reached through an inferno of rage and disintegration. Four words, two seconds, that was all it would take to move from one to the other, to step into the fire.
But he found he couldn’t say them.
‘Okay,’ he told her, ‘it sounds hard, but let’s try to make it work.’
CHAPTER 44
Johnson Fleet
Senator Slaymaker called me personally after they shot Karla at Peace Arch. He asked me all about her. He wanted to know about Jade and how she was doing. And he asked me why we’d chosen to come to Peace Arch. I told him about the flood, and about how I couldn’t get the money to rebuild my business. He promised me that when those new towns started being built, the ones in the US and the ones up in Canada, I would have top priority for a home there, and there’d be government money to help me to get established.
He stuck to his word, too. First priority for those places normally went to homeless folk from the trailer parks, but there was a special exception made for me and Jade. I opted for Canada because it was a completely new start. We needed something like that to get us through. And, when the new cities started to take shape, it turned out that car mechanics were badly needed in America City.
So we relocated to America City. Jade started high school there. I set up a new garage with that government money. New robots, new diagnostics, everything.
AC wasn’t much of a place back then, just mud, and cranes, and scaffolding, and sad little saplings stuck into the ground here and there, but it was a new beginning, and all of us who lived there knew we were going to build it up into something, I guess like when the first settlers came to America. Outside of the town they were planting out trees for forestry, and there was a cattle ranch, and hundreds of greenhouses. Inside the town, the government had put in that big deep-drill thermal power plant, street after street of pre-built houses were being laid out, and a couple of factories had moved in, attracted by federal grant money: one making lithium batteries for cars, another making parts for cristals. Not bad for a city that hadn’t existed a year and a half ago!
There was one thing about AC I didn’t like, though. We were all Americans there, and that was good – we used American dollars, we flew the American flag – but as far as the law was concerned we were in Canada. The city was a free-trade zone, but we had to pay income tax to the Canadian federal government and to the territory government up in Iqaluit, which, as far as I could tell, gave us back diddly squat in return. Man, those Inuit people up there had made such a fuss about us coming to live in their land, and all the Canuck politicians in the territories were yelling and screaming that the federal government mustn’t let us Yanks have Canadian citizenship, mustn’t let us vote, mustn’t let us do shit. But they sure as hell didn’t mind taking our money.
Not that I wanted their damn citizenship anyway. I hated the Canucks – nobody in AC liked them, but I had more reason than most – so why would I want to be one of them?
And what really stuck in my craw was the police. We couldn’t have our own American police. We had to have Mounties. They were pretty much the only Canucks in town, but they were still the ones who enforced the law. So I was an American, in an American town, and yet I had to see those people every day strutting round the streets, coming in and out of their station near the city hall, in the very same uniform as the bastards that murdered my wife.
A bunch of people in all three cities set up an outfit called the Pioneers’ Union to give a voice to us American settlers, and one of my customers told me I should go along to one of their meetings, seeing as I felt so strongly. I guess there were about fifty people there when I first went and they were all sorts: men, women, older folk, young people, Mexican Americans from way down along the southern border, storm people from Delaware. Everyone had their own story about how they ended up here in America City. But what hit me was that we were all Americans. It took being on our own there in the middle of Canada for us to be able to see it. We were Americans, up here in our little towns, and we needed to stick together now we had great big Canada all around us.
The guy who invited me was called Pete Suarez and I guess he and his wife Tracey were kind of an example of what I’m saying. I guess if I’d met them back in Idaho, I’d have just dismissed them in my mind as a couple of dusties from the trailer parks. They’d been farmers in Southern California. Twenty-five years ago, they’d managed to get a mortgage to buy their own farm, the first ones in their family to achieve that. They could only afford it because of falling land prices, and I guess that might have given them a clue, but they decided they’d make a go of it somehow. They did alright at first, too, but then the rain stopped coming when it should, and in the end they’d just had to walk away. And now they’d swapped sunny California for Nunavut wilderness, borrowed government money just like I did, and spent it on greenhouses and lights. They were growing peppers and tomatoes, right up in the north of Canada.
Tracey had made me sit at the front, and when the meeting started, she stood up and introduced me as the new guy, suggesting I share a few things about myself and how I got to be in America City. Jesucristo, that was not an easy thing to do. I couldn’t tell my story without mentioning Peace Arch and when I got to that bit, I just couldn’t hold it in any more.
Well, they all stood up, every single one of them, and the woman who’d been sitting next to me came right up and hugged me. She came from Delaware, a friend of Tracey’s whose name was Rosine, and I guess a lot of people would have called her storm trash. I would have myself back in Dickensville.
‘Well, you’re not on your own any more, you hear me?’ she said. ‘You’ve got yourself a whole big bunch of friends right here.’
Not everyone there had lost a wife, of course, and I kind of stood out because I was the only one whose wife had been killed by the Canuck cops. But every single person there had lost something: a home, maybe, or a business, or a marriage that fell apart under the strain. At least three women had had husbands who’d killed themselves when they couldn’t see any way forward. We’d all suffered, and we were struggling still as we built this city up. We were in no mood to let a bunch of Canucks stand in our way. Like Pete Suarez said, this place was a wasteland before America City. We were the o
nes who’d made it into something. And that made it damn well ours.
We’d been there nine months when the bomb went off. My garage was up and running by then, with robots and diagnostics paid for with government grants and low-interest loans. Jade was making new friends at school. I’d just started to date a lovely woman from New Mexico called Coral: her husband had committed suicide when his business went bust. And, in the middle of all that, the so-called North Canadian Army blew the front off the city hall.
And these were the facts about the NCA. First off, they were one and the same thing as the North Canadian Front, a completely legal party in Canada that was part of the government in all three of the Arctic territories. Second, it was an open secret that the guy in charge of the NCA had been a colonel in the Canadian army. Seriously! The Canucks tried to deny it, but it was a plain fact, straight from a Canuck news hub.
So I wasn’t having any of that shit about the NCA being a tiny minority, and the vast majority of the Canadian people being totally opposed to violence, blah-blah-blah-fucking-blah.
No. Crap. Utter horseshit. The murderers in the NCA and the murderers in the Mounties were all in it together. And yet we were expected to believe that the Mounties were going to get to the bottom of this and bring those killers to justice!
Well, we talked in the AC Pioneers’ Union, and we talked with the PU people in Lincoln and Jefferson, the other two cities, and we agreed two things. One: we had to have our own American police force. Two: we had to have full representation for Americans in the territory legislatures. No taxation without representation. Isn’t that the principle America was built on? We were just three little towns surrounded by a great big country, but we were not going to be pushed around by Canucks.
We printed banners and we got ourselves organized. We got tens of thousands out in the streets, day after day, surrounding the Mountie police stations, and the offices of the Commissioners from Ottawa, demanding they fuck off out of our towns.
And I was right up there in the front. I was full of rage, and rage turned out to be pretty powerful stuff. Those damn Mounties could shoot me if they wanted, like they shot Karla, but I wasn’t about to back away. There were thousands of us and only a few of them, and they knew if they tried anything, we’d string them all up. We just needed to hold together.
People sensed something in me. I felt my PU friends around me watching me, waiting for me to take a lead.
CHAPTER 45
The single handwritten page was obviously just notes that Jed had jotted down for his own use. Under the title at the top of the page was a list headed ‘Spending Options’:
Pioneers’ Union: Key. Essential continue to give all support poss. Not technically a political grouping at all, just a mouthpiece for settlers, so US gov may give freely/openly, particularly as it is v popular with US voters. But obvs v political, in fact. Funds and advice will fully professionalize this group, encourage emergence of leaders, develop policy.
Our Canada Party: Very valuable to us as a divisive force. Can be relied on NOT to offer deals. Well worth stepping up funding through third parties for final days of election.
North Can. Front/NCA: Obvs any investment by US gov would be very risky, and require super-careful management through many intermediaries, but potentially huge benefits, because NCA prevents compromise, encourages settler separatism, and promotes anti-Can feeling in US.
And that was the end of the page, though it was clearly the first of more than one. Holly read it through a second time, checking that it really said what she thought it said, then went back to the Oval Office. Werner, the president’s business manager, stopped her outside the door.
‘Sorry, Holly, but he’s onto the next thing.’
‘Okay, but I think he’ll want to see me anyway. Just go in, will you, and tell him I’ve got something that won’t wait.’
Slaymaker was by his desk. He’d just put on a tie and was straightening the knot. She’d caught him at a moment when he hadn’t expected to see her, and his face seemed different, unfamiliar, as if he’d laid down the mask he wore in her presence and put on another one in its place.
She held up Jed’s notes. ‘What in hell is the Texas Option?’
‘Holly, I’m going to be heading off to meet the prime minister of Denmark in about five minutes. Straight after that, I’m going to fly up to America City, but then—’
‘Are you going to tell them up there that you’re thinking of giving money to the people who’ve just killed twenty-seven of their neighbors?’
He reached out for the paper she was holding, took it from her, and laid it on his desk. Slaymaker never showed his anxiety, but Holly could tell he was going to get that piece of paper shredded as soon as she left the room.
‘I’m not going to tell them that because it’s not going to happen,’ he said. ‘It was just one of Jed’s rattlesnake ideas. In fact, I think he was probably kidding, though he was a damn fool to write it down.’ He touched her hand. ‘Listen, Holly, I really do want to talk to you about this. After I’ve been up to AC, I’m planning to spend the weekend in the Cascades with Eve. Why don’t you come over there and we can have that ride we’ve been promising ourselves?’
Werner came in again. ‘We need to go, Mr President. The drig’s about to land.’
Jed had gone to work at home. She’d never been to his place before. It turned out to be quite a modest little brownstone house across the river. Everything was very neat and contained: a couple of rather nice paintings, a ceramic piece here and there, all very tasteful but rather cold and sterile. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected but it wasn’t this. It made him seem more fragile somehow.
He was a kind of delicado himself, she thought, a dark delicado, his nihilism the product of a kind of squeamish fastidiousness. This was a new insight, and with it came a whole chain of others, appearing more or less instantaneously in her head, as if they’d been taking shape for a while in some obscure workshop in her brain. Like Holly, Jed had learnt at some point in his life to be suspicious of claims people made about caring. (Perhaps his parents paid for his expensive schooling, bought him everything he needed, told him they loved him, but yet he felt no love?) He’d come to understand people’s claims to care about things as a pretence, a performance, a made-up story. But he’d gone way beyond Holly’s idea of a third dimension that was out of reach. He’d decided he didn’t believe in caring at all. Or that was the story he’d chosen to tell himself. Shockingly, perversely, as it seemed to her now, he’d chosen to confine himself completely to two dimensions, a decision that, weirdly, was both difficult and cowardly.
It was a warm day, and Jed had been working in his tiny backyard. There was a table and a couple of chairs out there on the pink concrete patio that constituted the entire yard, along with a dozen or so shrubs in glazed pots. Jed’s cristal lay on the table. She sat down on the spare chair, brushing aside his offer of coffee.
‘I saw some notes you wrote. The Texas Option. What in hell does that mean?’
Jed winced slightly but summoned a half-hearted version of his trademark wolfish grin. ‘Ah, well, you grew up in England, so I guess maybe you don’t know that much American history? You see, Texas—’
‘And what the fuck were you thinking about, suggesting we give money to the NCA?’
He sighed. It was just such a waste of time, his sigh said, having to attend all the time to the silly foibles that other people thought of as their principles.
‘Well, that was basically an extension of your own original idea, Holly. You pointed out we needed an enemy, someone external to ourselves to be angry with, and, Jesus, were you ever proved right! That Canada idea of yours was quite literally the most amazingly successful political move I’ve ever seen. But we’d have still more leverage if Canada got even easier to hate. The NCA have already massively helped us with that by letting off this bomb, so I figured maybe we could build up the NCA even more, while simultaneously identifying it with—’ He broke of
f. ‘But, wait, I don’t need to tell you all this, do I? You know it already! Every damn day, you’re putting those rumors out there about the NCA being in cahoots with the Canadian government. You must know that the nastier the NCA becomes, the better it is for us.’
‘So you were proposing to fund a group that has already blown up a bunch of people, simply because you thought we could turn that to our advantage?’
‘People are going to get killed in this process, however we handle it. After all, you’ve already drawn blood yourself at Peace Arch.’
She winced. There was no doubt that those three people who died at Peace Arch would still be alive if she hadn’t organized that rally.
‘But it was just a suggestion,’ Jed told her. ‘Nothing more. It’s a move that’s been played many times in history, but I really didn’t expect Steve to go for it, even though, like I say, it would really just be an—’
‘An extension of my idea? No it damn well wouldn’t be! I said we should make demands of Canada. That’s all. Demands. I said we should make Canada take some of the pressure.’
‘Okay, but how about the Canuck jokes, eh? What about the time you told Slaymaker to rile the Canadians as much as he could? How about the lies about Canada – let’s call them what they are for once! – you have your feeders pump out every day? Trillions of dollars’ worth of lies. And you’ve even got feeders that pretend to be Canadian, haven’t you, whipping up the Canucks as well. Well, it’s only one step from that to—’
‘We play pretty dirty, I’ll admit that. I don’t like it, but everyone else does and we have to do it to keep in the game. But it’s more than one step from that to giving money to people who want to kill us.’
Jed shrugged and made a rather elaborate show of politely stifling a yawn. People pretended to care when they really didn’t, Holly knew that, but it seemed that not caring was also a performance. ‘Well, whatever,’ he said. ‘It’s academic anyway because, as you might expect, Slaymaker wasn’t having it. He agreed with you. He thought my idea was just “plain wrong”.’
Let Us Be True Page 23
