Toby Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the same height as Dwayne. A young red-haired woman hustled beside him.
    “No one else showed up?” The candidate’s teeth had been bleached for the campaign.
    His handler adjusted the Conservative Party button on his lapel. “What he means to say is thank you so much for coming.” The woman caressed her leather portfolio as though it held her up, and shook her head with affectionate exasperation.
    Bruce mumbled into the small microphone on the collar of his Century News leather jacket. He kept one eye on Toby, and it was squinting.
    “I’m fine, Bruce.” The old trees in the schoolyard, with their naked branches, beckoned. To climb the closest one, to be caressed by its fat limbs and there to sleep. He introduced himself to the candidate, a Conservative running in a safe Liberal riding. A sacrifice of some sort, to demonstrate loyalty and sincerity. It was a non-story, filler. Not long now.
    “Thirty seconds,” said Bruce.
    Isidore. The man’s name was Isidore. Toby meditated on it, so he would not forget in the middle of the interview. Dwayne and Alicia, images of them entwined in her bed, in the Jacuzzi—wet!—in his office, on his desk, that striking skin contrast, poked through his fatigue. Good, healthy, right, strong. Isidore, Isidore.
    An elderly couple, the last of the true democrats, clutched each other for support as they took tiny steps toward the school. “Are you well, Mrs. Twiss?” said the gentleman. He wore a thick, bread-coloured three-piece suit for the occasion. It had surely fit him, once.
    “I am well, Mr. Twiss. This breeze is something.”
    “Ten seconds.”
    Toby watched the Twisses all the way to the door, as Bruce counted down. He turned back to the candidate, who suffered from razor burn in the same manner as Dwayne. Dee-wayne, a hillbilly name. Under what circumstances had his parents found it appropriate?
    “Five.” Bruce counted down silently to one with his fingers.
    Toby introduced himself to the camera and briefly described his location. “I am here with Stéphane Isidore, the black candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada inWestmount-Ville-Marie.” Toby put on his smile. “Monsieur Isidore, whom did you vote for this morning?”
    “Uh, can we start over?”
    “Actually, we can’t. We’re already in the living rooms of Montreal.”
    “Well, then. I voted for myself, of course. A Conservative candidate who happens to be black. What you said—”
    “It’s interesting you bring that up, Monsieur Isidore. This is a great time, I would think, to be black and in politics. Or African-American. African-Canadian. Do we say African-Canadian?” The words arrived before Toby had a chance to filter them through the tiny engine of blandness, of artificial enthusiasm, that a television reporter cultivates. That engine, and the tone it created, was the source of his only relevant talent. And it seemed to have shut down, along with his short-term memory. Who was this man again, and why were they here? Toby was, briefly, freezing cold. Then hot. He struggled to remain standing. A squirrel flitted about on a nearby maple. To be a squirrel, just now. Looking for a nut. Dwayne and Alicia. The first time Toby and Alicia had made love, in the master bedroom of her handsome brick house in Westmount, he was shocked to hear her speak. He was not naturally inspired to speak during sexual intercourse, and up until that point he had seemed to attract only the quiet, smouldering ones. But he did not want Alicia to feel he was ignoring or abandoning her. On that first afternoon, skylight sun lent an auspicious golden tone to her skin. Toby’s skin against her skin. An unidentifiable streak of bodily fluid shone on her stomach.
    “Give it to me hard,” she said, at approximately the midpoint of their activity.
    The polished bed frame was clearly an antique, and it groaned beneath them. Toby wanted to match Alicia’s vigour, to engage her in a spirit of competition and fellow