Up and Down (2 page)

Almost everyone wore black. I’d missed the agency dress code memo and was attired in one of my standard-issue Parliament Hill grey suits. I looked a little out of place, perhaps even from
another planet. I took off the tie halfway through our tour and stuffed it in my pocket. Even though everyone seemed friendly, with some veering dangerously close to bubbly, I forgot each person’s name the instant Diane uttered it, probably because I was still searching for adjectives to describe her glasses. Towards the end, she could see that I was reeling just a bit from the tour.

“I know it’s a lot to take in on the first pass,” Diane offered. “But it’s important to accept that the modern
PR
agency is a universe unto itself. It is a hydra. When the economy is booming, the multiple heads actually work with one another and sometimes even like one another. But in bad times, it’s every head for itself, and decapitations are common,” she explained.

I’d heard the word “silos” used to describe the various groups inside an agency, but “hydra” works, too, I guess.

“One last stop,” Diane added as we walked into a nice office with lots of glass. I could see people bustling along Bloor Street, ten floors below us.

“Amanda Burke, meet David Stewart.”

I stepped forward to shake hands with a tall, lean, very attractive blonde woman, dressed in, yes, a black dress. She was tall to begin with and gained more altitude with four-inch heels that tapered nearly to pinpoints. Diane stayed back a ways so that she wasn’t speaking directly into Amanda’s shiny belt.

“Amanda runs the corporate comms group and is just back from two weeks in France.” She turned to Amanda. “Welcome back, Amanda. This is David’s first day.”

“I wasn’t aware we’d hired anyone new,” Amanda said without looking at me. “I’ve been trying to get approval for a new hire for months.”

“I would have involved you in this had you been here, but New York and Washington have really been putting the screws to us to deliver on Project Crimson, and David brings some expertise to the table that is really going to help us win.”

“I’ve got Crimson well in hand, Diane, and I told my team about it last week from Provence. We’re all pumped about it, whatever it is. We’re good to go, and I think adding a new player at this late stage is a bit of a risk to the chemistry.”

I can’t always tell the difference between
concerned
and
pissed off
, but with Amanda, the distinction was quite clear. I just looked around the office, moving my head casually, trying not to acknowledge that Amanda considered me an unwanted, unnecessary interloper, or perhaps even unfit for continued life.

“Calm yourself, Amanda. You’re running the Toronto end of the Crimson show. David will report to you on a trial basis. If we don’t win Crimson, you can keep him – or he can report directly to me until we find the right place for him.”

The voice inside my head was screaming “Hello, I’m standing right here!” but I kept my yap shut and continued my careful examination of the wheat-coloured carpet.

“Diane, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I be involved in hiring new members of my own team.” Amanda still hadn’t even looked at me. Yes, wheat was the right description.

“Under normal circumstances, you’re absolutely right. But we’re being squeezed by
D.C.
and New York and you were away. I had to move. Let’s keep our eye on Crimson right now. We can talk more about where David lives afterwards,” Diane said, signalling that this part of the conversation was over. “David will participate in the briefing and brainer this afternoon and we’ll finally all know what we’re dealing with. See you then.”

Diane handed Amanda my resumé and then caught my eye and cocked her head towards the door. The meeting was over. Amanda was just standing there looking like the victim of a purse-snatching. Our eyes finally met as I turned to follow Diane back out into the corridor. I offered what I hoped was an apologetic shrug before I was out the door.

“That went well,” I ventured when we were down the hall a ways. “She’s clearly been waiting her entire career just for me to arrive.”

“Don’t worry about Amanda,” Diane replied. “She’ll warm to you. She’s a real pro, works very hard, and is very good at her job. But she also has a bit of a control problem. I’ve heard some of her colleagues refer to her as ‘Commanda.’ ”

“Nice. So is someone going to tell me what Crimson is all about before I’m supposed to hit the ground running?”

“We won’t know much until the briefing this afternoon, but I do know the potential client is
NASA
.”

I had just moved back to my hometown of Toronto after three years on Parliament Hill. I’d headed up to Ottawa right after earning my Honours B.A. in the history of science from McMaster University. I’d always been a space nut, so I wrote my thesis on the societal impact of the manned space program, covering the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. I had no idea what my degree was preparing me for, but nearing the end of my fourth year, the planets seemed to align. My thesis supervisor passed my name along to a contact in Ottawa on the political staff of the Minister of State for Science and Technology. They were looking for a communications assistant to handle liaison between the minister’s office and the Canadian Space Agency. Because I could write and was familiar with such space terms as “escape velocity,” “perigee and apogee,” “orbital decay,” and “angle of re-entry,” I got the job and moved to the nation’s capital.

When I started, I knew next to nothing about dealing with the vipers’ den of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I’ve always believed that you learn much more from your mistakes than from your victories. Let’s just say that I learned a lot in those early months, and I learned fast. I liked my minister but I didn’t see very much of her. My role was a little ill-defined at the outset but I found my place eventually. I was one-third intermediary between the media and my minister, and two-thirds the minister’s eyes, ears, and sometimes voice, in our dealings with the Canadian Space Agency. The
CSA
was an arm’s-length but publicly funded agency of the federal government responsible for developing and guiding our
indigenous space program and our key space partnerships with
NASA
, the Russians, the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese.

I had a blast. It was right up my alley. I seemed to be able to get along with nearly everyone and managed to navigate the labyrinth of international relationships that fuelled space diplomacy. I’m still amazed just how far you can go relying only on curiosity, writing skills, manners, and the ability to connect with different people. It kept me moving up the ladder for three years, until my mother’s cancer returned.

My father died of a heart attack five years ago, shortly after my mother’s first brush with breast cancer. She recovered, from the cancer at least. I’d come home on summer vacation and some weekends to try to do my part and stay connected, but my older sister, Lauren, shouldered most of the burden. Then six months ago, what we thought had been defeated returned with reinforcements, and the siege began once more. Siege was an understatement. My mother’s lungs were so riddled with the invader that surgery was not even in the play. Despite my sister’s protests that she had everything under control, I resigned from the job I loved and moved back to Toronto. I’d been feeling guilty for three years about my rather carefree existence in Ottawa while Lauren looked after our mother. Now there really wasn’t much time left.

My job in Ottawa had been all-consuming, so I was still very much single. It was hard to sustain a meaningful relationship while working in the pressure cooker of national politics. I did have a few less-than-meaningful relationships during my time on
the Hill, but they were mercifully short. On a more positive note, I’d banked a whack of dough. Within a week of moving back to Toronto, I made a down payment on a condo across the road from the St. Lawrence Market, on Front Street. It was built in the eighties, a few years before developers discovered that people were prepared to live in 575-square-foot condos. So my unit was 1,120 square feet with a spacious living room and bedroom, and a den of sorts that I turned into a library. As something of a bibliophile, I had collected many history books about science and the space program, lots of novels, and dozens of volumes related to Sherlock Holmes, including several editions of the stories and novels themselves. I loved Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing and the characters he immortalized in what were arguably the most famous tales in the world. I often tried to think like Sherlock Holmes when faced with complex problems in my own life, but found I could seldom rise above the Hardy Boys.

When unpacked and settled, I was very happy with my first stab at home ownership. It was only a block from one of Toronto’s most beautiful bookstores, and it took me just a ten-minute subway ride north to reach the family homestead near Yonge and St. Clair.

Did I mention that my sister is a saint? Like most saints, she was still single at twenty-eight, and worked part-time at the Deer Park branch of the Toronto Public Library. Most of the librarian stereotypes fit, but not all of them. Lauren moved back into the family home when the cancer moved back into our mother.
Taking care of someone in the final stages of cancer is not a great gig. It leaves next to no time for anything else. When I first visited my mother after moving back to Toronto, I was shocked to see the deterioration since I’d last seen her, two months earlier. She was gaunt and weak, seemed resigned to her fate, and hoped it would come sooner rather than later.

My sister kicked off the visit by chewing me out a bit for abandoning my dream job in Ottawa just to assuage my guilty conscience. I tried to argue that I was acting responsibly and that she deserved help with Mom’s care. She snorted a saintly snort. She was so good with Mom. While I flailed around cracking jokes and dodging the big malignant elephant in the room, Lauren knew just exactly what to do, what to say, when to stay, and when to leave.

There were about eight people in the boardroom and, it sounded like, plenty more on the speaker phone when we gathered at 2:30 p.m. for the conference call “briefing and brainer.” After Googling “brainer,” I’d learned that it was
PR
agency slang for “brainstorm.” Got it. I sat down in one of the few remaining plush leather chairs and rolled as far away from the centre of the action as possible while still staying in the boardroom. Several of the folks I’d met earlier in the day on my little tour nodded to me. I nodded back. Diane sat at the midpoint of the boardroom table. Amanda was right next to her, staring into the
speaker phone as if it were a crystal ball. She looked a little tense, which for all I knew was how she always looked.

A voice boomed through the static on the line at ear-bleeding volume.

“Okay, let’s get started!”

I had an inkling Amanda was startled by the voice by the way she jerked her whole body up and off the chair, before placing her hand on her sternum and breathing heavily. Diane calmly leaned over the speaker phone and dialled back the decibels to prevent any further hearing loss among the Toronto team.

“Hi, Crawford. It’s Diane. Go ahead. We’re all assembled here in Toronto,” said Diane.

“New York is all set, too,” piped in another disembodied voice.

“Okay. Thanks for coming together on this, everyone. For those of you I haven’t yet met, I’m Crawford Blake,
GM
here in Washington. I’ve got with me several of my very smart colleagues. We’ve got New York on the line and Toronto, too. Rather than taking the next twenty minutes for round-table introductions, let’s just introduce ourselves when and if we have something to say. This project, when we win it, will be led out of
D.C.
, with Toronto handling the Canadian component. New York will be hovering around the edges to help out, but it’s really a
D.C.
–Toronto play.”

I’d never heard of Crawford Blake, so I pulled out my iPad and Googled him as his pronounced southern drawl draped itself over the meeting. According to the bio that appeared on the
TK
site,
Crawford Blake, forty-one, was a Washington insider who had worked for three Republican congressmen and served a stint at the Republican National Committee. He was born in, yes, rural Mississippi and had earned a law degree from Alabama State next door. I tuned back in.