Pride and Joy

This is an excerpt from Rose Fortune’s explosive new memoir Life … in Transition. In this passage, the recently named Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, widely seen as the Liberal leader in waiting, recounts a story from the tumultuous 2030s told to her by her father.

The photo was from 2012. The world was supposed to end that year, for fanatical reasons that escaped his memory now. Something to do with the Mayans. I’m eight in the photo, almost too heavy for piggy-back rides which is apparent in the slight grimace on his face, but a fact he won’t let me know for at least another two years. Despite the discomfort, it’s joy that radiates from the picture. That “those were the days” type happiness that stung him every now and then when stumbling upon the picture. The nostalgic pain was being overshadowed now with the distinct slice of glass across his heel as he stepped backwards onto the broken frame.

He cursed, under his breath at first and then louder after remembering he was alone. The glass didn’t go deep, just scratched the surface of his calloused foot. Harmless but enough to piss him off more than he already was. 

The generator had been down for almost 6 hours. When it first went out, he was only slightly annoyed, believing that it would be an easy fix, that the mechanical skills he obtained during his first year of college at the car shop down the street from him would make this task a breeze. A part of him even looked forward to it, the thrill of working with his hands was not one he felt very often in his world of finance. After about fifteen minutes of tinkering the thrill was replaced with annoyance, and annoyance replaced shortly after with deep irritation. He pulled out his phone, typing the long name of his supposed state-of-the-art generator into the search bar and then stared at a blank screen, followed by You are not connected to the internet. Fuck, of course. An hour had gone by now and the heat seeping in from the summer day had drenched him in sweat. Every summer was the hottest summer on record now. He didn’t know why they continued to make it a headline. 

The salve for his heated frustration was waiting for him about twenty minutes away at Malone’s, the bar he frequented the most due to its dive-y theme and the fact that they were, “the only people in this god-damn city who can pour a Guinness properly,” a quote I was accustomed to hearing and one that made me constantly roll my eyes when we used to drink together on Tuesdays after my classes. Malone’s minimal customer base meant their generator could maintain the couple of regulars that hobbled in during the blackouts. 

Climbing into the front seat, he was quickly reminded that the car was dead. An empty battery shape blinked at him slowly before he fully sat down behind the wheel. Right. He remembered now, thinking he would have time to charge the thing this morning before his 11 am staff meeting. Of course, this blackout had thrown a wrench in more than one plan. He was trapped. Sitting in the front seat of his now useless electric car, he took a moment to pity himself, and another to think of his daughter. He knew I would have so much to say right about now. About the consequences of the climate which led to this situation, about how he was so stuck in his ways, all the other arguments we used to lob back and forth between us until I told him not to contact me anymore. I had quoted similar ultimatums in the past, but this time I was serious. It had been 6 months since we spoke. Maybe, partially, because I was no longer dependent on his financial support. This was the fact he shot at me in the text messages I did not reply to, but he knew that it was more than that. He knew I was passionate. I believed in what I was doing, in the strikes, the protests, the violence, all for a cause he did not believe in and ridiculed me for. It was his fault, he would tell me later. He’s the one who raised me to never put out that fire on my tongue. He could picture me now with that determined smirk on my face, crossing my arms and relishing in winning this round of arguments. He dragged his hand across his forehead in an attempt to prevent the droplets of sweat from burning his eyes. His hand was equally sweaty, causing a collision of moisture that made his discomfort even worse. 

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he heard my voice in the back of his mind. Not that he would ever admit it, but I was right. 

More and more moments like this had been happening to him lately. He recently turned off news notifications on his phone. The constant barrage of climate related deaths and various horror stories were getting harder to ignore. The worst was almost a year ago now when a young activist died outside his building. She had set herself on fire, protesting the company’s most recent investment in a green initiative that was, according to the group occupying his lobby, contributing to early extinction. I had called him that morning, spewing the facts he had known about when he approved the board’s decision to go through with the investment. I told him he had blood on his hands. He told me I was ungrateful and wrong. A few hours later, the distinct sound of shrieking interrupted his one on one with a new intern: a Rotman business school grad who was obviously very nervous, the shrieking only making him more so. The two of them rushed to the window and saw the flames, the height of his office likening the sight to a collection of ants swarming a tiny bush fire. His phone lit up with a text from his fellow exec. We gotta get out of here. 

I had known the girl who died. I used to babysit her on Friday nights, her parents’ fellow Rosedale neighbours. Scrolling through his phone that night before bed, photos of the girl popped up on his feed, a memorial written by her father. Words like, “proud” suffixed “devastated.” One of the photos shared was from an old neighbourly get together. The little girl in the photo beamed beside her dad, and in the background, slightly out of focus was the distinct red of my hair. He put his phone down, feeling sick. He texted me, I love you Rosie girl. I didn’t answer, and he did not sleep for two days. 

He was not a climate change denier. There weren’t many of those left, given the atrocities of the past decade. But he was not impressed with the lengths that activists like his beloved daughter had gone to. Certain systems could not simply be replaced, he would tell me. The government knows what they’re doing and amazing progress is being made. I would scoff, and tell him about the climate refugees I met at the shelter that day, recounting their nightmarish stories, their newfound health issues and watching their family homes disappear before their eyes. He would shake his head, “What do you want me to do?” He had an electric car; in fact he was one of the first in his company to make the investment back in 2023. He taught me how to drive in that same early model that wowed his peers. He was the head of the Green Energy Initiative at his office, pouring millions of dollars into remodeling low-income homes to use green energy. I didn’t care. 

“Your company still invests in the oil sands, for fuck’s sake! Who is still investing in that shit?” I would say. At that point he would argue with me about how it is an ethical oil sands initiative unlike the previous industry. “Green Oil Sands” was the term for it. People still needed energy somehow. At this point the argument would devolve into unproductive anger. Shouting and door slamming. I even attempted to jump out of his car once, before he grabbed my arm and yanked me back in. A move he once pulled on his own father over some argument about differing opinions. He could only be so angry; he gave me the blueprint after all. 

After pouring some ice water into a bucket to accompany him, he returned to the garage in an attempt to fix the generator again. He tinkered away, believing with each successful whirr and click that he was getting somewhere. Hours went by with little success until what was ice water started to warm in the heat. He had spent the past unsuccessful hours wondering about his daughter, and where I was during the blackout. I used to stay with him sometimes when they happened. He would make smash burgers and we would re-watch The Wire, a habit that slowly morphed into smash veggie burgers paired with documentaries I chose that were deeply uncomfortable for him to sit through, and usually sparked a fight before they even finished. 

It was at this point he found himself inside, trying to haul one of his coolers out of the closet to fill with ice and keep beside him while he refused to give up on the generator. It was in this quest that he knocked the photo of me and him off its resting place and onto the ground, the frame shattering and the glass slicing his foot. He cursed, quietly and then with anger. 

He stood there and let himself bleed, staring down at the old picture, the urgency of having glass in his foot didn’t bother him. He crouched to pick up what was left of the frame, glass shards falling at his sides while he brought the image closer to his face, the tiny bits of battery powered light falling across the old print. He was not an emotional man, or at least, not in the way anyone would suspect. He was overwhelmed to feel his eyes well up, a feeling that was intensely unfamiliar. The little girl in the photo had grown up to be exactly who he raised her to be. Grounded in her values and unable to accept defeat. He had been fighting for her future through money, making so much that she would never have to worry about a thing, never have to grovel to abusive bosses or work a double or break her body just to make ends meet. But she was fighting for a different future. Money would mean nothing in a world where you couldn’t even breathe for God’s sake. 

He was crying now, loudly, heaving deep sobs as his foot continued to bleed onto the hardwood. I was right, he knew I was, deep down, but to admit that would be to admit his own failure, acknowledge his complacency in the decay of the world he was leaving me with. He thought of the girl on fire outside his office. How the whole building went home, his colleagues muttering about what an inconvenience her death was for them. He nodded along with them, bitched about the media flurry that would probably lose them a bundle in revenue as a result. He felt the shame overwhelm him, the wetness of the blood pooling around his foot. 

Suddenly, the lights were on. He heard the whirr of the air conditioning, the buzzing of the fridge and the TV blared to life on CBC, he was watching some segment on the potential for a blackout this week given the heat levels when it happened. 

In the light he could see the photo clearly, a few drops of blood had dripped onto the gloss, covering my little face. He felt breathless. He pulled himself up and ran across the living room back into the garage where his generator was sitting, useless, and grabbed his phone, the “how to fix your generator” page loading instantly. He dialed me and waited for my inevitable voicemail. His pride did not even occur to him. 

“Rosie girl, you’re right.” 

Rose Fortune