if she’d given a different answer when he told that her wanted to run; when he asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She had said, ‘It’s what you’ve always wanted’, and now she thinks that saying that wasn’t really an answer at all.
Laurence’s team takes a detour to Nassawa after the speech is done, already arranged but spontaneous-seeming. This is the start of the process: a meeting with Laurence’s current constituents, the beginning of the handshaking and baby kissing. They stop off at the town hall, and they walk in, unannounced, and the people working there laugh and smile and take photos. Somebody from the Nassawa Tribune comes down and writes an article, takes a short interview with Laurence.
‘Earlier on, your speech? Seemed like you were hinting at a bigger platform for your message. Any chance you can confirm, absolutely, your intentions of running for office?’ the interviewer asks, and Laurence almost laughs at their moxie, at their attempt to get an answer far bigger than their paper probably would usually get. Despite what others are saying, he hasn’t shown his hand yet. Everyone in the room smiles; they all know what the reporter is asking.
‘Not a chance am I answering that one,’ Laurence says, with a smile, and that gets a laugh; and he shakes the journalist’s hand and grins for another photograph. They move on, to a local café, and they eat lunch with the locals there, and Laurence fields questions about the current government, the policies being pushed through. He takes his platform stands: he believes in free healthcare for all, and he believes in the right to a free education that stands head-to-toe with the best that private education can offer. That’s where money should be going. He wants to siphon off far more money from the richest 0.5% – this isn’t about the 1%, he says, it’s those earners who manage to somehow take in the bulk of the country’s income in one fell swoop – and put that back into the country itself. ‘If you’ve got an income that would allow us to give everybody in the country a personal doctor and teacher, why shouldn’t we be taking more from you? If you’ve got money you won’t miss, that you won’t even notice is gone from your accounts, why shouldn’t you help where you can?’ That gets applause, the people cheering over their sandwiches and salads. When they’re done they go to the local high school, and there’s a buzz because this doesn’t happen often – Nassawa isn’t big on the map, one school and one hospital – so there’s an impromptu assembly, all the kids brought into the gym for the chance to ask Laurence questions. He’s one of them, and he sells it like that. He grew up in the city, sure, but he lives in the sticks now – ‘The boonies,’ he says, and that gets a laugh, because he’s old and he’s using language like that – and he answers more questions. One younger boy asks if he wants to be President somebody. ‘Someday, sure,’ Laurence says. ‘That, and an astronaut. But President most of all.’
When he’s done, Laurence calls home.
‘How did it go?’ Deanna asks.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Met some people. All very nice.’
‘That’s what it’s about,’ she says.
‘It is. Love you.’
‘Good luck tomorrow,’ she says.
‘With the big shots? They’ll take what they can get, I’m sure.’ He breaks everything down to casual dismissals. ‘We should go out for dinner when I get back. A proper night: dinner and drinks. A hotel. Maybe a weekend away, before this goes insane.’
‘It’s not insane already?’
‘It’ll get worse.’
‘I don’t even know who you are any more,’ she jokes.
‘Probably for the best,’ he replies. ‘We have a party tonight, for the team.’
‘Party hearty,’ she says, ‘then get some sleep.’
‘Yes, boss,’ he replies.
The party runs all night. Laurence’s people have hired a bar in Midtown, taken the entire place over, and they’ve had a cocktail created for the occasion, some luridly blue thing called the Walker All Over ’em, that tastes like Jolly Ranchers and the cheap flavored wine that teenagers drink. Laurence necks two before he’s even found a seat, and then is handed a third when he’s asked to make a speech. This, he’s told, is the speech for them. Not self-aggrandizing: boosting the troops. He drinks faster as he starts to slur his words (‘Couldn’t have done this all without all of you,’ he says, letting the façade slip only slightly) and then a fourth. There’s an area at the back with a dance floor and somebody puts on some new song that’s been a huge hit pretty much across the world, music made for memes, and he’s dragged out to dance, which he does. Amit stands at the side and watches and laughs, and he takes a photo – expressly banned at the party, because this stuff lingers on the Internet, and there’s always somebody on one of the political blogs who’s desperate to print anything that looks as if it could be the start of a scandal – and shouts that he’ll use it as leverage.
‘You ever fuck up, guess what’s being sent to TMZ?’ he says, and his whole team laughs.
Deanna has trouble sleeping. It begins to rain, and the weather’s so close that she can barely stand it, even with the air-con jacked up as high as it will go. It’s something about the sort of humidity they get here, because at its worst it’s a warm breeze off the top of the lake, dragging along whatever from the base of the mountains, the warm smell of somewhere else entirely, somewhere with a logging industry and factories and a whole other way of life.
She gets out of bed and goes downstairs, and she opens her laptop and the file for what’s meant to be her new novel, years in the making. It’s a book that’s three years late already, if only by her own deadlines rather than those of a publisher that it doesn’t yet have, and she’s so behind. It used to be that she could sit at a table and just write the things, and the words would come out exactly as they were always meant to: from her head to the page, in the right order, the way that she had imagined them (for better or worse). But this one has become stuck, and she can’t move past it until it’s done. She can’t abandon it, that’s for sure. She never gives up on anything. When she first hit the wall she was frustrated: a year of struggling against certain words, of rearranging sentences until they fit the best they could into what was inside her head. After a while, she almost got used to being blocked. The wall was there every time she tried to write, and it never left. Some writers she knows have cats that sit with them while they work; she has the wall.
She tells herself to not rush, because there’s no contract. She never had a real audience, the previous books appearing on shelves one day and then slowly fading from them, until you had to go online to track them down; and how would you even know to? Her agent emails every so often, asking how the book is, how life is, if she’s still writing, and she says that she is. She tells him that she’s working on it, that it’ll be worth it when she’s done. But then she hits send and looks at the word count: not quite static, but close. A few words here and there, up and down. She thinks that she should give up almost every day of her life. Laurence tells her that it’ll be different when he’s done whatever it is he’s going to do. He laughs that people will be desperate for a novel written by the First Lady. It’s only half a joke. She wonders if that’s the pressure that she needs: that maybe the scrutiny of her earlier books, people tearing them apart, looking for truth between the words, might actually drive her to finish this one. And maybe that’s why this book has been so hard, she thinks. It’s more personal than anything else she’s ever written. It’s part of her, in places: of her childhood, and about her sister Peggy, who has been missing ever since she was a small child. It’s about family, mostly, and she knows what will happen to it. The women will be read as proxy for her, the men for Laurence. She wonders if that’s
