The Governor of the Northern Province (26 page)

For Jennifer, who had gone along uninvited to the St. John's event and been unmovable and smiling from just behind Madame GG's right shoulder the entire time they were on the tarmac, the second takeoff had been too much, too fast. The plane suddenly kicking up and galloping forward and then rearing back and buckling a little from the westerly winds and banking to the left but then righting its course and climbing, climbing, shuddering from a last little bit of rough air, and then a static-clung cockpit apology for the takeoff
but nobody said it was easy visiting Newfoundland let alone leaving it,
which brought off a good laugh in the main cabin save row 11 where Bokarie, who seemed self-lashed to his seat, wondered at this observation before deciding to laugh along. To keep up appearances. Afterwards he sighed and slumped and started readying his faces afresh. Meanwhile, Jennifer was grateful for the cabin full of laughter. It drowned out her catch and hiccup and retch.

At first she had been worried about whether her face was showing it to others. Showing that she didn't belong up here, this far along in her career, this far away from the Ottawa Valley. A strong case could have been made in the spit-strung aftermath of her stomach's knotting and unknotting, during which Bokarie had moved off, smiling and springing over her and into the aisle, where he was immediately snapped up by Madame GG, who beckoned him forward for a little chat.

II.

Wiping the last bits of wet chunk from her cheek and then from her hand, Jennifer peered around once more and noticed that the rest of the flight—the Governor General's staff, the reporters brought along to document historic handshakes and hopefully a few cultural gaffes, the businessmen practising the place names they were looking to invest in, plus Bokarie, now front cabin and seated beside Madame GG herself—none of them, Jennifer sensed, were paying her any attention. Right now, this was fine. She didn't even mind Bokarie getting prime-time face time without her. It couldn't help but reflect back positively, provided he was his usual self. She leaned forward to watch and listen in a bit, just to make sure he was.

He was doing fine, giving a little crook of the neck and an interested grin and half-moony eyes while the Governor General recounted the story of the novel she had been just absolutely consuming!
Prester John
, by John Buchan. Written by one of her predecessors, a former head person of Canada himself. The story was of a Biblequoting rebel African king who took a simpleton white man prisoner while trying to conquer a nation with his loyal followers, only to get outsmarted by the white man and done in for his efforts.

Bokarie cracked up at this, a short hot HA! HA! HA! that shot through the cabin. Madame GG pulled back quickly, as if the standard poodle she'd been biscuit-feeding turned out to have distemper. The others in the cabin noticed and waited for more of an exchange before deciding on whose behalf to be offended, while Jennifer started fumbling with her buckle so she could intervene and stow Bokarie with the luggage. But then he apologized extravagantly.

“Please, Your Excellency, your forgiveness. I forgot myself. But my noise only meant I don't think this
Prester John
book to be a very realistic story. People in Africa aren't so easily persuaded to follow men who speak from the Bible. I know this to be true, from my own life story.”

Madame GG put a hand on his wrist and cocked her head sideways, empathetically cutting him off to assure him she knew this, and further that she wasn't endorsing Buchan's views, only learning from the past so as not to repeat it. Bokarie nodded and then thanked her for sharing and the two were fast friends once more. She noticed that Bokarie wasn't wearing a new pink wristband yet and asked an aide for an extra and fastened it onto him to immediate hums and quick-focus flashes from the seats around them. Bokarie smiled violently for the cameras and was encouraged to tell the story of how pink meant the colour of the dawn where he came from, which he did with the vacant enthusiasm of a tour guide stuck on his last group of the day. Madame GG repeated the lines as instructed, working them into her inventory for coming conversations. Who would remember “Ich bin ein Berliner,” she thought, had an aide said it for Kennedy, even if it were a returning native? When she was finished with him, he was excused to another empty seat, where he curved against the window. He smiled out at everyone watching him and nodded his head in meekness and agreement, but behind this was something indeterminate. The others left him alone and went back to studying their host-nation cheat sheets, trying to keep straight their cultural and medicinal do's and don'ts with respect to local food and drink.

Jennifer didn't mind that Bokarie didn't come back to be beside her. Probably because of the smell, she thought. No matter. He could report later on the conversation with Madame GG and also account for his laughing out. Fortunately, it had resolved itself quickly, before she had needed to intervene.

And anyway Jennifer liked this having more time and space to herself. She needed it foremost to do something about the sick bag, which she briskly marched to the bathroom with an in-flight shopping magazine draped over it. She also needed to start reading through her prep materials for the mission; she had the same sheaf the others had been given, which included the latest edition of
Africa for Dummies
, complete with a chummy grave foreword by Bono and Paul Volcker, and also a Coles Notes guide to Joseph Conrad. But more than anything else, she needed to get over her habit of returning homeward when she felt unsure of herself. All this thinking about Mum and Dad and how things were done in town, as if this could help her anywhere else. She'd been doing this since the baggage check, or really since her dad had cupped her cheek and left her at her new Ottawa apartment that day he drove them down.

She had to put all of this behind her, even, she decided, her WWLBJD questions. Johnson never went to Africa. He'd probably barely heard of it, being not just American but Texan. If she was going to get anywhere and anything more than ribbon cuttings and baitfish, she had to be past him, and past her parents, and past the riding and past the embarrassment of the sick bag and past all the rest of it now. She had to be for the here and the forthcoming. Her instincts in first coming to Ottawa had been right: that there was always more waiting to be had in the time to come. She grinned back at that moment in her bedroom when the results had been announced, at what she'd wanted then, how it had been so strange to feel as if that was enough. That with victory, things were wrapped up, over, done with, ended, and she had been happy about it, not wanting more than she already had. She was busting through that small-town politeness and Middle Canadian modesty, too.

Her stomach settling, the warm little heavy bag gone, and munching vacantly on a business-class sugar cookie to freshen up her breath, Jennifer congratulated herself. She was a few months in Ottawa and only nine hours, according to the blipping monitor, from her next get: a trade and aid mission to Africa, with a returning native as her chief attachment no less. So Jennifer had answered What Now. It was directly in front of her, a whole continent waiting for her to swoop in with her dawn-coloured bracelets.

And beyond that, beyond that— She stopped herself from picking out the pie tin before finishing a second piece. Too much sweetness too fast would leave a belly in rot for no good reason other than wanting more than could be swallowed down. Her stomach was empty now and calmly so and would stay that way until they reached Africa, at which point she would get her fill.

III.

From the first moment, the smell and touch of the place was confirmation Jennifer had arrived somewhere she understood. Everything was thick with mushy heat and ripe with the tang of gasoline. While the rest of the Canadian party wilted their way through the welcome proceedings, Jennifer soaked in it, the white-clad schoolgirls' singing both national anthems in all official languages, the elaborate presentation of cola nuts, the equally elaborate sweetgrass ceremony by one of the Governor General's attendants. Then the back-and-forth introductions of the main players while the respective seconds hung back and waited somewhere between nervous and desperate to be recognized and called forward.

Jennifer had planned to ask Bokarie to kiss the ground for the cameras, but then she noticed Madame GG look their way. Look for her, at her, at Jennifer, to come forward. So she pushed past. Dropped him like a slug. She marched over to join the Governor General and the already backslapping business leaders in meeting the always smiling President and his attendants and advisers, who were to a man Wharton-educated and returned home because that's as far as they had to go to find employers still impressed by MBAs. There were reciprocal bows and scrapes and
no, after you
's to the canopied car lane.

The short walk over was quietly humming with repeated requests for pronunciation and reminders of how long the flight was and re-clarifications about the time difference. Nothing much. Jennifer decided she could bust through and better all of this and so leave her mark on this mission from the start. She had devoured the prep materials as if she was night-before studying for an end-of-the-year final. But she had even more than that to work with, and not from Bokarie. She'd finally found her ideal audience.

Her lips opened.

“Mr. President, I believe we have something in common.”

He laughed heartily and nodded repeatedly, as did his advisers. A jovial way to avoid anything unnecessary or complicating coming up.

“Yes, we do. We were both recently elected to our offices. Congratulations. Though I must confess, thinking about my election experiences, I envy you.”

Even more intense laughter and nodding and a signal to bring the cars around and send the luggage on later because the heat was clearly getting to everyone and best let's continue this wonderful conversation over air conditioning and cool tropical drinks. But Jennifer went on, hard-target in sight.

“Because, you see, the first time I ever ran for president—now of course this was back in a Canadian high school, not a nation rebuilt from the ashes for the fourth consecutive decade, like yours—but I did it just like you. I ran for president against no one. Only I lost.”

Absolute belly-busting bedlam and then immediate dispersal. Jennifer was invited to ride privately with Madame GG, who commended her on such a fine opening with the local leadership and then gave her a list of the leaders they were to meet. Many of whom, Madame GG assured her, would find her election confession equally endearing.

As they sped along the empty eight-lane highway from the airport to their hotel, their car's wheels sticky from the freshness of the tar, Madame GG went in for more specific plans for the conference. She'd been thinking.

“Perhaps, Jennifer, when the opening speeches are done and we go into the one-on-one sessions, you can use that line to break some ice now and then, or reserve it for when they ask for something and I need some time to mull. And also, let's plan to end with the presentation of the pink bracelets. By the by, having chatted with him in the plane, I don't think we'll need your Bokarie with us during the private meetings. Together we know enough of his moving backstory to explain why we're thinking the colour we are. Just follow my lead in there. Fill in when I turn and smile at you like this. Understood?” This close to the Governor General, she could see how tight her face was, like dough stretched thin over a baking tin. Jennifer nodded at the bared bonded whites.

“Oh good, I'm glad you're with me. Some members can be so possessive about their bring-alongs, they cry when I tell them they can't have them in high-level meetings. Like babies denied their soothers! Yes, he'll be good for the standard delegation pictures and maybe we'll bring him along to a few minor receptions and perhaps have him share his thoughts for the home crowd when we get back. But you know, he got a little snappish at one point when we were talking on the flight over and frankly that makes him something of an unknown sum. In fact, Jennifer, why don't you just remand him to his hotel room—suggest that it's because you need someone you can trust on call in case there's a situation. Call it the war room or the hardware store or the engine house. Men who work beneath women need packaging like that to keep them proud and happy to be there.

“Because as you can see, Jennifer, out your window, this certainly isn't Ottawa, and that's the last thing we need, an incident, involving one of ours who's also one of theirs no less. Our press would
love
that, especially the reporter from the
Progress
. You know that poor newspaper was just bought by that American, Twin Chambers? You've no doubt heard what that right-wing radical corporate media mogul has already done to the newsroom and editorial. Cultural and intellectual butchery I call it, off the record of course. And you also must know how he's gone on about replacing my position with a battery-operated ribbon-cutter and bilingual applause machine and said he's allowed to say that because he's a fellow Canadian. Calling himself that because he's one-eighth Saskatchewan. A travesty of our funding formulas for underserved minorities. Anyway, he'd just love for something to go wrong on this trip for us, which I think of as an opportunity to show Canada and the world just what a Governor General can do for both. So let's not give him pleasure, understood?”

Jennifer nodded again and liked this
for us
. But she also wondered where Bokarie was. Probably in one of the other cars. She hadn't thought about him much since they dropped down and she was pulled up beside Madame GG for the introductions. Given how things were going so far and her wanting Madame GG to bring her along wherever she went, his getting left out, confined to the hotel, this was fine. All the more for her.

To pass the rest of their drive to the conference site, Jennifer joined Madame GG in marvelling at how efficient the country's highway system was, how wonderful if this was an indication of Africa's progress! Their driver nodded and smiled vigorously in the rear-view to encourage them to say more. As instructed.