Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel(46)
They seemed reasonably together. No hundred-mile stares. But Arthur couldn’t get past the niggling concern that their supposed initiation had involved a trespass upon them.
“Sorry, but I have to ask. Did Jason touch either of you?”
“Of course,” said Niko. “I touch him too.”
“What is meaning, touch?” Yoki asked. “Everyone touch.”
“More than that. Intimately, I mean.”
“Intim . . .” Yoki grappled with the word and failed. “What you mean, Arthur?”
“Like sex?” said Niko. “Is sex what you thinking? We are shock.”
“Very shock,” said Yoki.
“Sorry,” said Arthur.
TWEETS
Pierette was staring glumly at her iPhone. “Houston, we have a catastrophe.”
They were flailing, lost in space. Margaret had a vision of herself plummeting earthward in flames.
“Let us pray,” said Jennie, an atheist. She was sharing a laptop with Margaret, scrolling through Twitter feeds.
It was Tuesday afternoon, June 24. They were in Margaret’s home, a converted coach house in Rockcliffe Park, in a small study with wide windows that looked out over the Rideau River and the spires of Parliament Hill, now just vague shapes in the lashing rain. The river was swollen and grey and forbidding. A thunderstorm was happening. Metaphorically too.
They’d gathered here hurriedly after the most recent tweet showed up. The first one had appeared three days ago, on Saturday, but they had dismissed it as a typical slur from one of the Greens’ many trolls. Margaret “Loose Lips” Blake has blown it this time. Her slip is showing, her ship sinking. Posted by @BDsmother, the Twitter handle of a sourpuss who made sure it got to the Green Party by adding its hashtag.
Margaret was troubled by the author’s clever phrasing — it seemed carefully crafted, polished. Also sinister was that BDsmother had joined Twitter only that very Saturday. One follower retweeted, maybe accidentally: @Big_Al_23, a fat, frowning biker, fan of a band called Shit in Your Face.
But BDsmother, in typical trolling fashion, was incognito: no photo, no profile, no link. B.D. Smother? B.D.’s mother?
Margaret had tried to laugh it off and almost succeeded until Pierette, after a squint-eyed study, deciphered the handle. BDSM — bondage-dominance-sadism-masochism. “BDSM fused to Mother, get it? As in, ‘Spank me, Mother, I’ve been a bad boy.’” Words that, twenty days ago, Margaret had gleefully shared with Pierette and a live microphone.
Margaret had quickly got a headache. She’d finally convinced herself she was out of danger, but here was the almost unassailable truth that Christie Montieth, the right-wing bloghead, had heard all. She must be BDsmother.
Still, there was zero proof, and Margaret hadn’t dared mention the tweet to Arthur during her rattled talk with him on Sunday. But then a second tweet, more explicit and volatile, showed up today. Also from BDsmother, also tagged #GreenPartyCanada. Ongoing cat fight between Loose Lips and Enviro Minister has got down and dirty. Sour and malicious, Ms. Blake? Is that you?
A twist on Pierette’s live-mike jest about S and M: “Sour and malicious, right?”
Scores of retweets poured in. Mostly from anti-Greens and Conservative hacks with malice in their hearts. One of them had created the hashtag #SourAndMalicious.
Ongoing cat fight. Down and dirty. Margaret, Pierette, and Jennie agreed this was Christie Montieth’s blog voice. Their worst fear was that the indelicate exchange at the WWF panel had not only been heard by her, but recorded on her iPhone.
“It’s as if she wants us to know,” Pierette said.
“The question is,” said Jennie, “how far will she go with this?”
Pierette had a shrewd theory: “She’s beating the bushes for reaction. She took it to her editor, and they brought in the lawyers and decided it was too hot to touch. They embargoed it until she could come up with something hard. We know she tried to hunt down Svetlana.”
Jennie let out a whoop. “Gather around, ladies, here’s a new one.” They huddled close around the laptop, as if for safety. Another from BDsmother, under the SourAndMalicious tag: a response to the many who were clamouring for details, stalwarts such as Hardnosed Harry and Tax My Ass: Stay tuned. Here’s a clue: Sour and Malicious = S and M.
Christie Montieth was building an audience. The tweets were coming fast. SandMLover: Are you out? Want to get together? PainMaker31: First consultation free. Find your own level. Click here. George Figelhof, a known Tory operative: If the GP leader likes getting her ass whipped, she’ll really enjoy the next election. A knee-jerk assumption that Margaret was the whipee in an S&M relationship.
“Okay, let’s think,” Jennie said. “Christie’s opened the floodgates, and now this alleged defamation is being spread to the entire known universe. She must be pretty dense not to know that a Twitter pseudonym won’t save her from being sued for libel. She doesn’t know about the video, right?”
“No way she could,” Pierette said.
“So, who else knows? Besides Svetlana and Sabatino, wherever the fuck they are.”
“Arthur,” Margaret said. “Francisco Sierra.” Who preferred to grow roses than get involved. They would never find a private investigator as competent, and she could be facing a huge defamation suit with no clear way to prove her innocence.