A Truth Made of Lies

A Truth Made of Lies: Part Eight

Even with both of my parents (although if you asked my father, it’d just be one parent) making decent incomes, we could only afford a modest home in suburbs of Gatineau that sprung around the nation’s capital and incidentally, almost the country’s most expensive real estate. If my father couldn’t afford to even live in Ottawa on lawyer’s salary, the size of Claudine’s house made me start to wonder what she actually did for a living. She was a lawyer like my cousin Mike was supposedly a union boss in Montreal. Not only did she live in Ottawa proper, something which was either reserved for the bums in the downtown or the diplomats and statesmen in the uptown, but the house made 24 Sussex Drive seem like a humble cottage.

            One of the things that always struck me about the way that homes were built on the east and west coasts was the way in which east coast homes reserved space. They were characterized by staircases that led to right to the door, no toilet in the basement, a simple water closet on the main floor, perhaps a shower on the second floor and sparing bedrooms. None of these things were present in Claudine’s home. I had always assumed that fancy cars were something reserved for the overly productive imaginations of men, but the Porsche parked outside seemed to lead rather to the contrary. The car was the gutter of the house. It sparkled and dazzled more than a twice polished pearl in the Caribbean sun. It was a sprawling mansion that grew on the once empty hillside like a strangely beautiful but equally cancerous tumour. A five kilometre radius of Ottawa had been declared a green zone; hence the reason so many had flocked to Gatineau and other suburbs far from the city. It seemed that Claudine’s house was either a lucky exception to the rule or just an incredibly unusual oversight. This gave me my second bit of worry.

            I tried to appear as if such wealth was commonplace and led Claudine to the door like the gentleman I was pretending to be. With a house of such size I was amazed that the key to enter it wasn’t a giant sword, but with the exception of a peculiar gleam, it seemed similar to most others of its kind. It certainly betrayed nothing about to the door to which it unlocked. It was only when Claudine entered her home and set to work disabling various alarms that I realized the protection of so valuable an asset was not intrusted to a simple piece of metal alone.

            I stepped in, placed my boots on a rack that was nearly completely covered in shoes unsuited to the season and lost myself in a closet, looking for a hanger amongst a ridiculous variety of coats. I walked back out into the foyer and let the house soak in. This was what a home without younger siblings looked like. Not just a pile of wood clumped together around endless stacks of toys and filth, but a real house where real people could live! There weren’t any boogers hidden in the cushions of the sofas. There were no screaming competitions in the kitchen or botched violin practices that made one curse the day humans developed eardrums. The walls were free of crayon imitation cave drawings. The stereo was liberated of infantile music. The kitchen cabinets were unfettered by child-proof locks. Some of the various artifacts and decorations that lay about the house had sat so long that a thin layer of dust had been permitted to develop on them. I nearly kissed the clean floors on which I stood.

            Claudine gave me no time to worship. “Here, I have something to show you,” she said and grabbed my arm. She led me up her staircase, which I could see fully agreed with the principles of both Feng Shui and interior designing for multi-gazillionaires. The second floor was just as capacious as the first, only somehow the height made it seem grander. That why I was confused when she pushed me through the door of a plain, padded room.

            “It’s sound-proofed,” she said, somewhat conspiratorially.

            This would be my third feeling of doubt. I was wondering if she was planning on chopping me up into little pieces or performing painful genetic experiments on me. I started making for the door, hoping that she hadn’t locked it behind here. But first, I played coy.