Up and Down Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE BEST LAID PLANS

  “Amusing, enlightening – and Canadian, it deftly explores the Machiavellian machinations of Ottawa’s political culture.”

  – Globe and Mail

  “A new brand of political satire – the most irreverent, sophisticated, and engaging CanLit has seen since Stephen Leacock.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “Brisk and humorous.”

  – Ottawa Citizen

  “This is a funny book that could only have been written by someone with firsthand knowledge of politics in Canada, including its occasionally absurd side. This is a great read for anyone thinking of running for office, and especially reassuring for those who have decided not to.”

  – The Hon. Allan Rock, former Justice Minister

  and Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations

  “Bravo! This is a wonderful book with a clever and funny storyline. Humour and heart run through these pages. The parliamentary setting and the backroom shenanigans reel you in.”

  – The Hon. Paddy Torsney, veteran MP

  and Parliamentary Secretary

  “Terry Fallis’s novel has two things that kept me hooked: characters who I cared about and a story that made me want to find out what would happen next. And often, very often, there was a line that made me laugh aloud or think twice – sometimes at the same time.”

  – Mike Tanner, author of

  Acting the Giddy Goat

  “Terry Fallis has found the cure for Canada’s political malaise: a stubborn, old, irreverent Scotsman with nothing to lose. Until Angus McLintock walks out of fiction and into public office, where he would surely save the nation, the only place to find him is right here among The Best Laid Plans.”

  – Tom Allen, CBC Radio host and

  author of The Gift of the Game

  PRAISE FOR

  THE HIGH ROAD

  “The High Road will surely make you laugh. There will be snickers, occasional snorting and hooting, and almost certainly rip-roaring belly laughs.”

  – Halifax Chronicle Herald

  “Fallis writes in pictures … that the mind’s eye can see clearly.… An easy-reading page-turner.”

  – National Post

  “Terry Fallis scores again with The High Road.”

  – Guelph Mercury

  “In a perfect world, the federal government would establish a Ministry of Humour and put Terry Fallis in charge of that department. The High Road is brilliantly written and hysterically funny.… Do yourself a favour and pick up this book, find a quiet place to read it, and enjoy … you will laugh out loud on almost every page.”

  – Ian Ferguson, author of Village of Small Houses

  “Doing battle with the prigs and prats that rule the halls of power has never been more enjoyable since … well, since The Best Laid Plans. Thought provoking and funny.”

  – Jim Cuddy, singer/songwriter, Blue Rodeo

  Also by Terry Fallis

  The Best Laid Plans

  The High Road

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY TERRY FALLIS

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fallis, Terry

  Up and down / Terry Fallis.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-4797-8

  I. Title.

  PS8611.A515U73 2012 C813′.6 C2012-900973-3

  Quotes appear in the text from the following works: The Sign of Four (1890) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; His Last Bow (1917) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street,

  Suite 300

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  David Stewart Fallis

  (1967–1986)

  Hugh Percival Ham

  (1905–1984)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 3

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 4

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part 5

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 6

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgements

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  “Welcome to the dark side.”

  Diane Martineau smiled as she said it, but still, those were her words. It was my first day in the Toronto office of the international public relations agency Turner King, and I was already tired of hearing my new profession linked with Lucifer, lord of the underworld. The general manager released my hand and waved me into a chair as she climbed up into hers. She was petite, très petite. I put her at barely five feet. In her mid-forties, with shortish dark brown hair, she wore a simple, even drab, tailored black pant suit with a white collarless “top.” In the clothes context, I was uncomfortable with the word “top.” It didn’t spill naturally from my mouth or, for that matter, from almost any guy’s. And to be clear, I don’t really know what “tailored” actually means, but the jacket curved in at the waist. When she was seated, her tiny black shoes dangled an inch off the floor, leaving her marooned a good two feet from where she wanted to be. No matter. She convulsed twice, her feet flipping up and torso snapping forward, to propel her chair across the black marble floor, gliding perfectly into position. “Docking procedure” may be the better way to describe the manoeuvre that rolled her up to the streamlined chrome and glass desk that would not have looked out of place on the bridge of a Federation starship. I half-expected an order to lay in a course for the Vega system. She caught my stare.

  “I know. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said, running her hand across the gleaming elliptical surface. “The jackass before me was into sci-fi and spent an obscene sum redecorating before New York toasted him last year. Now I’m stuck with it.”

  “Well, it’s a little much, but hardly a firing offence,” I replied, my mouth working faster than my brain. She smiled again and I exhaled.

  “There were other factors,” she said. “Anyway, it’s nice to have you at TK, David. We’ve got something big going on and your background should put you in the middle of it. So you’re going to hit the ground running.”

  “Well, I guess that’s better than just hitting the ground. I think. Um, you do know I’ve never worked at an agency before, right?”

  “Ah, but you have spent three years working the press gallery for the Science and Tech Minister. That makes you valuable to us on this big pitch, particularly your work with the Canadian Space Agency,” she replied. “Don’t worry about life in a PR agency, we’ll show you the ropes and try not to let you hang yourself in the first few weeks.”

  “So, is there anything I should know before, you know, hitting the ground … running?”

  “Oh, there’s a ton of stuff you should know, but like most big, unwieldy, hidebound global PR agencies, we have no well
-established and effective orientation program to bring you into this foreign land in a logical and orderly fashion. So you’ll get the same treatment everyone else gets. I’ll introduce you around, then we’ll throw you in the deep end and occasionally toss you an anchor to see if you can adapt and evolve. We’ll know pretty quickly if you’re going to survive. You’ll know slightly sooner, if you’re as smart as we think you are.”

  “That’s very comforting,” I said. “I’m not sure Darwin would be pleased to see his theory exploited in this way.”

  The GM leaned towards me, her forearms resting on the cool glass next to a clean steel tray of some kind that I thought might be for serving drinks or cheese. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was actually a MacBook Air computer. I’m not sure I’m as smart as they think I am. But I sure wanted one of those.

  “Just before our walk-around, let me offer a few words of advice that you may or may not need to hear.” She stared me down, so I stared right back. “In the early going, listen more than you talk. Your nice-guy personality and the chemistry you should be able to establish with colleagues, clients, and new business prospects will take you further than almost anything else. It’s one of the reasons I hired you. But we also need you to think, write, and speak with clarity and conviction. If necessary, you can fake the conviction part till it comes, but the clarity needs to be there right out of the gate. Clients deserve your best advice, particularly when they learn your billing rate is $225 an hour. Thankfully, the age of spin is over, or at least on the wane. So always tell the truth and do the right thing, but with care and sensitivity. The idea is to keep the clients for as long as we can. You probably already know this, but at TK, the centre of the universe is New York. When our arrogant U.S. colleagues deign to acknowledge our backwater existence up here, they invariably believe they’re far ahead of us—a dubious conclusion when most of them have their heads stuck well up their own arses. So beware. Finally, we exist to make money. We must make money. This desk won’t pay for itself.” She patted it respectfully. “So always, always use PROTTS to track your time daily on client projects.”

  I made it almost to the end.

  “PROTTS?” It sounded like the intestinal strife tourists suffer after a two-star Mexican getaway.

  “Public Relations Online Time Tracking System. Use it, or there’ll be no invoice to send at the end of the month—and your tenure with TK will be very, very short.”

  I nodded. She then reached under some papers on her desk, pulled out one of the most outrageous pairs of glasses I’d ever seen, and put them on. Think 1970s Elton John, with a dash of Dr. Seuss. I’m not sure I can even describe them, but words like “fluorescent,” “creepy,” and perhaps even “exploding” would only tell half the story. Her specs looked like a bizarre little abstract-post-modern sculpture, with corrective lenses. Since it was my first day at a new job, I managed to keep that observation to myself. Unfortunately, the look on my face was still shouting “Just what exactly is resting on your nose instead of glasses?”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to my eyewear,” she said with a smile. “It’s kind of my thing. I find it adds a few inches to my presence and makes a very personal fashion statement.”

  Fashion statement? More like a declaration of war. But I suppose there are worse vices than bizarre specs, though very few that are quite so … visible. She then slid forward in her chair, made the perilous descent back to the floor, and glided out of the room, dragging me in her wake to circumnavigate the TK offices. Over the next hour, we met the seventy-five PR pros who were now my colleagues.

  Diane introduced me to the creative director, several designers, the consumer products team, the health care/pharma team, the issues and crisis team, the government relations unit, the market research department, the digital and social media group, the financial services team, the technology team, and what she referred to under her breath as the “office overhead,” including accounting, IT, the mailroom, and human resources.

  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.