Sussex Drive: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

Manson’s sea-damaged squint—”give my love to Laura.”
    He took her hand and squeezed it firmly against his damp heart. She didn’t let go.

3
 
    “L ISE, TU LES AS TROUVÉES?”
    Lise dug through the storage bin on the deck.
“Un instant.”
She was still pre-caffeine and hunting for her hiking boots. They’d been muddy and she’d left them outside, but the help had moved them when restocking the rustic Seven Dwarves–sized cottage.
    René, her husband, tousled and purposely unshaven, waved acknowledgement from the patio flanking their cottage. He was languid in the hot summer morning air, enjoying his own post-coital perspiration. Niko fidgeted beside him, swatting at a frenzy of bugs with his red hippie bandana.
    “Maman, maintenant.”
Niko’s voice was as low as an elephant seal’s.
    Her son, her sixteen-year-old only baby, now seemed to be growing by centimetres hourly, akin to a cinematic alien infant time-lapsed into a six-foot filial aberration, with hairy dirt on his upper lip and a bouquet of taut whiteheads onhis chin that pierced any person’s train of thought with their eminent squeezability.
    “Race you,” René said, and they took off out to the road, where Becky and her boys, and other rock-climbing types, were to meet them at eight sharp. It was 8:05.
    Lise wandered back inside and found her boots under the kitchen table. She sat to lace up. Slumming it in this cottage, with its kitschy mix of Moroccan carpet and Kirkland kitchen mats, and now gulping that first bullet of bitter espresso Lise was relieved to be away from 1 Sussex Drive, the Governor General’s official residence—hers—in Ottawa. Not because she found the thirty or so hectares of Rideau Hall—a Victorian villa with ice rink, tennis court, toboggan slide, rock and other gardens, art collection, and what René called a wet dream of a wine cellar, with vintages as tenderly aged as him—onerous or tiring, what with the constant glad-handing, flag-waving, flower-sniffing and air-kissing, and the pressure of back-door intelligence-gathering and deal-making, but because it was a boon to be utterly free of a certain newly installed staff member. Miss Margaret Lee Yeung.
    And to be able to walk around naked, if so inclined, and think a wholly banal thought.
    “Maman!”
    Lise grabbed the insecticide and headed back out the door. Niko was impatient, and it was unlike Becky to be late, she who didn’t even seem to make a pee stop that was unscheduled or non-tactical. But they’d all been stirred by a helicopter or two, earlier, and Lise surmised that somethinghad come up for the Prime Minister. Trade glitch? Border skirmish? Bee sting and anaphylactic shock?
    “Je m’en viens,”
Lise said.
    Before Niko could bellow again, René started chasing him around an archaic maple.
“Je vais t’attraper, Niko man.”
He grabbed at his shirt, ripping it, and wrestled him to the ground.
    “René!” Lise called.
“Sa chemise!”
But she wasn’t mad at all.
    Niko turned onto his back, regained his own two feet and returned the favour; René was pinned under his stepson.
“Y’m faut un stunt double! Un stunt double!”
    Niko exploded with happy guttural honks and this brought such pleasure to Lise.
    For the camaraderie was new, born from Niko slowly accepting the loss of his own father, Brett Neeposh, the Cree academic and environmental activist who’d mysteriously drowned seven years ago. They’d been inseparable. Brett had been raised near Lake Mistassini, on the land, but had also snagged a degree in environmental law along the way and a gig at McGill. On Niko’s sixth birthday, Brett had paddled with his son, leading a convoy of canoes, down the Ottawa River to Parliament to protest a uranium find on their trapping grounds.
    Lise had been moved by Niko’s ever so gradual gravitation toward René, her second husband and a Québécois movie star (who’d scored as an undercover drug and arms dealer in a César-, Silver