Up and Down
Authors: Terry Fallis
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
M
5C 2V6
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
David Stewart Fallis
(1967–1986)
Hugh Percival Ham
(1905–1984)
“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.