Street Symphony (13 page)

“Thank you,” Maura replied, too gratefully maybe. On the other hand, in the world of job seeking, there were times when crawling was the only way. The handbook called it due deference, but Maura liked to know people before she deferred. There was something slithery about kowtowing to the unworthy.

On the local radio, the tragedy was slotted in between the prosecution of an elderly man for drunk driving and a rise in the theft of small electronic devices. It did mention that the fallen girl was from a town called Subotica and that the police were trying to contact her family. Maura found Subotica on the map very close to Hungary. The evening TV news was packed with explosions, sad lines of refugees, soldiers in combat, civilians in combat and the sinking of a giant cruise ship. That night in bed, she hugged Harold and said she would never get over it, the horror of that body lying there. He stroked her shoulders and told her to go to sleep, but in her sleep she saw a body falling and sometimes it was hers.

On Friday morning, the
Herald
headlined the story: Woman dies in freak accident. A breeze, a loose tile had perhaps caused the victim to slip.

“She was pushed, I tell you,” Maura insisted. “There was someone up there.”

But Harold, in his usual way, scoffed. “You imagined it. You always extrapolate.”

“Harold,” she said, “what have I seen in you? Why have I just made breakfast for you?”

“That is one question too many. Possibly an existential question. I can’t answer it at this time of day.” He went out chewing on the last piece of toast.

She imagined
him
falling from a taller building, ten storeys, or even twelve. Taking her mug of coffee to the brown leather chair, she sat down to stare at the picture framed in the window, trying to recall exactly what she’d been looking at yesterday in the moments that preceded the terrifying fall. Robins had been hopping around the white lilac as they were now. The mailman going up the path at 2023 had stopped when the woman fell and then walked back towards 2013, perhaps to see if he could help. Then, because the mail can’t be delayed, he’d continued on his route. Now he was skirting yellow crime tape, glancing down as if there might be another body.

Maura looked up. There was a figure standing on the edge of the roof! She ran out of the house to yell up to it, “Life is good. Don’t jump.”

“Police,” the man called back. “Please move beyond the tape.”

Feeling like a scavenger, a vulture, a paparazza, Maura returned to her house and sat on the front porch. Was there, she wondered as she looked across the road, a difference in the way a person landed according to whether she jumped, fell or was pushed? A difference in which bones broke or how the limbs were splayed? And was the woman dead before she hit the ground?

The man now walking up the path towards her wasn’t a stranger. She’d seen him occasionally on the street leaving the building opposite in the mornings about eleven o’clock. Clearly not an early starter. Some kind of soft office job for sure. Yet he looked like a fighter, rolled from side to side a little when he walked, arms slightly akimbo, hand maybe ready to reach for a gun.

“I heard what you said to that cop yesterday,” he said. “You saw someone on the roof?”

Maura was about to invite him inside but instead she stayed where she was and said, “Did I? I might have, yes. It was a terrifying moment. I’ve never seen anyone fall like that. I don’t suppose many people have. I was in shock. I’m still shaken. I could have made a mistake.”

“I look across from my window on the fourth floor and I see you, where you sit in the same chair every morning.”

“But I don’t,” she began to say and then held back. Because that was a clue. He was lying. Unless he had a magic periscope and could see across the living room to the red chair, there was no way he could see her in her
usual
place.

He didn’t move. Maybe he expected coffee.

“Has your husband left already?”

Without replying, Maura went into the house and closed the door. A moment later she saw the man walk down the path, cross the road and go back inside the beige building. Curious! She wanted to consider the meaning of his visit. Sinister, that’s what it was. No question. Was he the person who ran across the roof yesterday? The murderer?

She tried to shake the thought from her mind. It was time to get out of her robe and change. Time to imagine that today she would be told she was exactly the right person for the job on offer. She wanted to greet Harold that evening with the smile of a successful woman. Her interview outfit, navy skirt and jacket, white shirt, was “brightened”, as fashion writers said, by a red scarf. She focused on professional matters and put on her shoes with hope.

As she opened the door, she was startled to see a woman on the step, a woman dressed like herself, but without the red scarf. “I haven’t time,” she said. “Whatever it is, I have to go.”

“I’m from the
Herald
. I just want to ask you a few questions about yesterday.”

“I’m in a hurry. I have an interview.”

“TV? Radio?”

“A job.”

“Well, look, can we talk?”

“I have a bus to catch.”

“I’ll drive you.”

~ • ~

If anyone had asked his occupation that morning,
Harold would have replied that he was a tightrope walker. He trod a thin wire that stretched between his work, his home and his future. It was unwise to look down or to either side. He had only to keep going forward, eyes front, placing one careful foot in front of the other like Blondin when he walked above Niagara Falls, and he would reach the other side not only intact but possibly flourishing. To say that he himself was taut was an understatement. A wrong move on an inauspicious day, a slack rope, and it would be over.

In his sleep he heard the words “making ends meet” and thought of the two ends of the rope coming together: a circular, never-ending, dangerous ring of wire, and himself a miserable hamster on a horizontal treadmill. When he told Maura that he was going to the office, he didn’t say that the office was a small room in the back of the AllWin Casino where his job was to keep quiet, to count money, to lie and to lie low. He did his best to ignore the foreign girls who slipped into his office occasionally to ask what the English words were for
leave, card, money.
Maura, his still unemployed wife, thought he went to the insurance company each day where he’d earned an honest salary for seven years. Until the crunch came. Until the roof fell in. Until he’d set his foot upon the wire.

In the small room, he sat in front of a computer screen hiding from the people who ran the casino, two men he was sure he’d seen in the
Goodfellas
movie. Had he been a woman, he might have fallen for their strong, silent approach. As it was, he’d become their accountant. So far they were pleased with him. He dreaded the day when they were not. And dread had sucked out his enjoyment of life. Baseball had lost its glow. All food tasted like dry toast. Delight in Maura, in love, in Skyler, his remote-control plane, had declined to near zero. And they’d talked of starting a family next year. Family!
Famiglia!
He shuddered. Those skimpily dressed kids Rolf employed in the “shop” had to be somebody’s daughters. Did their parents know where they were?

He’d have to tell Maura soon. He was tired of leaving the house an hour earlier than necessary as if he were still working at his old job. One of these days she might bump into one of his ex-colleagues in the street or worse, with her scattershot approach to job seeking, be invited to an interview at SafetyNest:
Branches everywhere. Feel safe with us. You can be sure when we insure.
Her reaction to his present occupation would be shriek, howl, get out of there.

And yesterday the body of a girl had fallen from the building across the road. A freezing hand had clamped onto his spine when Maura told him about it. He’d poured each of them a glass of the whisky they kept for his dad’s visits, and tried to comfort her. “Don’t get involved,” he’d said. “Please.”

~ • ~

The interview left Maura feeling hopeless.
“What,” the superior woman behind her large desk had asked after twenty minutes of serious questions to which Maura knew she’d responded well, “do you think of country and western music?” Since the job on offer was to do with the evaluation and assessment of educational statistics, Maura was thrown off track and became wary. “Not a great deal,” she’d answered, not meaning disrespect but that she hardly ever thought about it at all.

The response from Ms Kazlak was a significant “Ah!” It was over.

She left the building considering better replies. Love it. Hate it. Mention a name. Merle Haggard. Only one she knew. Could have sung, “I turned twenty-one in prison.” She stood still and wanted to go back. Clearly it was a trick. She should have said,
Why do you ask?
Shown some initiative. Maybe she should have said right away,
Look, I saw a woman die yesterday. I’ve maybe talked to a murderer and I’m afraid,
and given herself an excuse for any missteps. And then she saw Harold. He was coming out of an alley beside the casino. He looked furtive. She dodged into the Wholesome Bakery and watched as he went to the bar next door. Another man who looked very like the man from the beige building, possibly the killer, also emerged from the alley and also went into the bar.

She had instant choices. The accidental meeting:
What a surprise!
The confrontation:
What are you doing here?
Or thirdly, home. She chose home. It would give her time to sort out her thoughts. As she hurried along to catch the number seven by McDonald’s, Maura was disturbed. The universe had tilted. Two days, two shocks. The bus seemed to take forever and by the time it reached her stop, she’d convinced herself that Harold was plotting with that man, perhaps to lure
her
up to the roof of the beige building. For the past few weeks there’d been little response from Harold about anything at all. Even sex, his favourite leisure pursuit after the remote plane club, failed to interest him. And the other man? What if he was the culprit and knew she was Harold’s wife? Or had Harold joined a group whose members routinely pushed people off tall buildings? Maybe he’d taken up gambling to make up for her loss of income and had remortgaged the house or even lost it.

Again she had options but decided to watch and wait. And not, on any account, to be lured onto a roof. Nonsense, her common sense told her. Coincidence. Go slow.
All will become clear:
her mother’s mantra. Mother, now in the Bahamas, would have been no help here. Sorting out these two mysteries required more than a clean cloth and a bottle of Windex.

“I’m sorry it’s only salad again,” she said to Harold at dinner as she sliced the remains of the pork roast.

“I like salad,” he replied. “How was the interview?”

“I thought it best not to mention the other person on the roof. I only told her about seeing the woman fall. She was really interested in that and kept asking more questions. It upset me all over again so when I got to the office I was kind of shaky.”

“Just a minute. I’m lost here.”

“A reporter from the
Herald
turned up. In fact she drove me out to Everstone.” Maura wondered for a moment whether the woman in the navy blue outfit really was a reporter. “But the job thing. I don’t know.”

“You have to keep trying.”

She was surprised at the forceful way he spoke.

“I do keep trying.”

“Something will come along.”

“A man from the building opposite came over this morning to ask what I saw yesterday. Why I said I’d seen someone else on the roof. It gave me a creepy feeling. I shut the door on him. Do you think he was the pusher? ”

“Drugs. Are you talking about drugs?”

“I mean, was he the person who pushed the woman over the edge, the killer?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, do you have to make everything into a drama? Suppose it was the woman’s husband, grieving. You should have been kind to him.”

“It said in the paper she was from Serbia, Maja Markovic, a music student sharing the apartment with three other girls. Only nineteen. Came to Canada a year ago, her friend said. Maybe she couldn’t speak the language and gave the wrong answer to someone. Or she was working undercover in some kind of spy ring. I mean, I don’t ever recall her and a group of teenagers going in and out of there. I told the radio woman that. And besides, those apartments aren’t cheap.”

“Leave it, Maura. She probably got depressed. Students do. Look. I might have to go back to the office for a couple of hours this evening. The books, I mean, it’s a busy time of year.”

That was too much. Maura lost her resolve and brought out the Windex. “I saw you,” she said. “You’re gambling.”

“Oh.”

He took a good look at his wife. What kind of truth would be acceptable here? And now? There she was. Vivid. Bright. Greatly alive. Lovely hair. Brown eyes. He looked at her soft hand holding the carving knife. Every step on his tightrope had been another step away from her. Rolf had bought him a drink in the bar that afternoon, pressed an envelope into his hand and said, “You’re doing a great job. By the way, there’s something you can do for me.” And the rope beneath Harold’s feet had twanged.