Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(28)
“Morgan! A little help here!” Silverson vaulted the counter, found temporary refuge behind his desk. Morg rushed in, pried her off the counter, twisting her arm in a half-nelson. She continued vigorously to express her devotion to Silverson as she was wrestled from the room.
Arthur took a few moments to do a reality check. Her distant cry: “I love you!”
“That was Martha. She has . . . issues.” Silverson no longer seemed on charisma overload, and was breathing heavily. “She’ll be fine. She was in the ecstasy of the moment. Normally, it doesn’t . . .Well, sometimes things happen.” He failed to make eye contact this time, focussing instead on the purple stain on Arthur’s pants, crotch to knee.
§
Arthur waited in Taba’s pickup as she exchanged hugs with Felicity. His detour to this fantasy land had lasted too long — his pants were soaked with gupa, the sun had long set, and Niko and Yoki had invited him to dinner. He still couldn’t get a fix on what was going on here but was sure there was hidden mischief, likely involving Silverson’s pursuit of . . . what? Money? Sex?
Taba agreed. “That prick set this up so he can get his rocks off ten times a day.”
As they drove off, the peasants were descending from the fields. There was the cycling L.A. osteopath, cleansing layers of negative patterns by watering the kale. And his nutritionist partner working out her unfinished parental issues by shooing robins from the strawberries.
Again, there came over Arthur, unexpectedly, that odd pleasant feeling that had captured him on the weekend. It continued to build into something approaching gaiety, and he struggled to fight it. Had he inhaled gupa from the mug? Had it seeped through his skin?
He couldn’t overcome his merriment and was suddenly giggling, then laughing, unable to stop.
“What’s so fucking funny, Arthur?”
“The look on Silverson’s face, when she . . .” He sputtered, mimicking. “‘I love you! You are my reason for being!’”
It wasn’t the gupa. He was merely in the ecstasy of the moment.
THE DRONE AND THE SCRUM
An expectant calm had settled on the House, the calm that comes with high tension. Margaret doodled stick figures, hanging men. Other members fiddled and messaged and tweeted.
No one was paying much attention to the backbenchers enjoying their brief moments in front of the C-SPAN cameras. One of them introduced a mother of thirteen who’d won a fertility award from a pro-life group. From the Conservative backbench came loud applause and huzzahs for that splendid contribution to world overpopulation.
It was Thursday of an epically hectic week, and Margaret had resigned herself to an enduring state of frazzle. It was her default condition anyway, ever since entering politics, but it had been driven to new heights by the disappearance of Lou Sabatino. Compounded by her inability to do much about it should she find herself in full campaign mode.
With the non-confidence vote the first item of business, the chamber was filling quickly, party whips ensuring seats were filled with bottoms. But the twenty-four Liberal chairs were empty — the caucus was still in a heated divide over whether to force an election and risk their own annihilation. Shouts had been heard from their caucus room.
An old moose from the far backwoods of the government side introduced a group of wriggling fifth-graders who’d earned a trip to Ottawa. A reward for some exemplary deed — Margaret wasn’t plugged into the interpreters and didn’t get it all. Her French was barely passable. Jennie Withers, beside her, was fluent in both official languages and a couple of Algonquian dialects. But with an election in the offing, the deputy leader, to give her credit, had reined in her supporters, the nervous Nellies keen to toss their impetuous leader.
“What’s your bet?” Jennie said.
“The Drone knows he’ll lose his seat in an election. He’ll chicken out.” They called him the Drone — Xavier Martineau, the Liberal leader — because he droned on, had trouble ending his sentences.
Jennie disagreed. “I think his troops are revolting.”
“The mice. They are revolting.”
Jennie laughed. They were getting along fine, now that Margaret had made a soft landing over that appalling clanger with the hot mike. Four days now since her breathless tittle-tattle to Pierette. Nothing in the media about the Chief Whip playing horsey with a dominatrix. Nothing in Christie Montieth’s weekly column in the Ottawa Sun or on her blog, aside from some caustic crap about Margaret’s limp efforts at the WWF convention, how she’d wisely yielded the stage to her smart, attractive rival Jennie Withers. But nothing that might cause Emil Farquist to suspect he’d nearly been spectacularly outed.
There he was, front row, hands clasped across his broad belly, wearing an even broader smile. And why wouldn’t he smile? Were his government to go down, a leadership convention would soon follow. Humourless, charisma-challenged Win Fowler wasn’t exactly the most popular jock in the Conservative locker room, and Farquist was widely regarded as the deserving and rightful heir. The Tory backbenchers were beholden to him, as Government Whip. Margaret shuddered at the prospect. Prime Minister Farquist, of the well-paddled bottom, a fascist fetishist running the country.
Pierette had sleuthed out that he did own a small chalet, on Lac Vert in the Gatineau Hills — an hour’s drive north of Ottawa. Bought two years ago, according to the Quebec land register. Four acres, a mortgage on it. Loyal, resourceful, indispensible Pierette had taken the week off, playing detective, and was now in Montreal in a last-ditch effort to track down Sabatino. Margaret feared he’d had a change of heart; not a lot of backbone there.