Street Symphony (27 page)

He wanted a moment of leaping joy, one that was all his own. He would cherish it as
a male penguin cherishes his egg. His own cherished chick had fled to a dark country infested by death and cruelty. “Your Emma will be perfectly safe,” the Director of Hands-On Charity had assured James and Teresa. “We take good care of our volunteers.” But was she and did they?

Teresa said, “I begin to think you don’t care any more.” She looked at him standing there as if he had some secret, hidden laughter perhaps. She felt flattened, punched down like bread dough. She had loved him. There’d been passion in the mornings once. Or was that only lust? The guests had filed out soon after the strangers even though she’d tried to explain that this was no letting down of standards: They were a couple James had met at the university and invited out of kindness. But by 6:45, there was no one left. And not a single person had commented on the blini cones filled with sour cream and dotted with caviar. Admittedly, it wasn’t the best at fifty thousand dollars a kilo but it was, dammit, caviar. Somebody had taken a daffodil arrangement as if it were a party favour. There was a splash of red wine on the linen cloth.

“I don’t waste my time with that sort of thing,” Teresa had said many times about Facebook and Twitter, but words were uncontrollably out there: Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk had made the world an immediate and uncertain place. What were they saying to each other, the guests, as they texted to the universe on their way home? Maybe they’d hurried off in order to get to their iPads, phones, computers, and send messages beginning,
Really odd party at the Smith-Hunter’s…

James began to move around the room snuffing out the candles, and she knew before he spoke that he was about to lie and tell her that it was a success, that the evening was not wasted, that their subjects were still in thrall to them.
Everyone had a good time.
But the words that came out of his mouth were, “You’re sitting on salmon.”

~ • ~

Nothing had ever mattered so much,
not the first and last days, nor the line moving slowly towards the truck. What mattered was the damp letter in the grubby hand of the man in front of her.

“No stamp you see,” he said. “You must pay.”

“You are not a post office,’’ she said. “You picked it up when I dropped my bag. Give it to me.”

“Three American dollars.”

The food pile on the truck was diminishing, but she stayed where she was and shouted, “Why are you doing this? You have no right!”

The man was about to repeat his words when a woman, tall, haggard, snatched the letter and said, “Four dollars now.”

Torn between anger and a desire to sit down and cry, Emma chose the former and flailed at the man and woman with her stick. The letter dropped back into the mud. She snatched it up and ran to the van.
Two days ago I was a civilized person, now I’m behaving like an animal, ready to kill for food, for space, for my rights.

The barefoot kid in front of her was wearing a T-shirt that read,
I love New York
. People were shoving each other to get at the last of the rice and beans. All of them ducked when a helicopter swung around overhead. The sea had pushed in and upward bringing mud and debris, sweeping away the aid station, and Jan and Hendrik. Communication lost, purse lost, everything except the precious letter.

She tried to tell the woman doling out food that she was an aid worker but was pushed out of the way. Her language had no meaning here. She took her portion of food in its paper container and went to sit behind the van. Hungry though she was, she first had to open the letter. It was from the real world, from yesterday’s life.

Darling,
her mother had written two weeks before,
I do so miss you when it’s party time. I’m planning the usual spring gathering. I’d give it up but it means a lot to people and reinforces the community feeling that’s so important right now. I’m thinking small bunches of daffodils around the living room.

Emma considered tearing the pages into little pieces but then, as she looked around at the desolate landscape, she decided to keep them. Two sheets of paper could come in very useful. After she’d eaten her meal, she went to help the men and women who’d descended from the UN helicopter. “Aid worker, me,” she said slowly and loudly to the one in charge, pointing to herself. “Great,” he replied. “Do you know how to set up a tent?”

~ • ~

Beside a hotel pool, Meg was saying,
“Gerry, I think you should look at this.”

He came to sit beside her on the swing-seat. “Oh,’’ he said, gazing at the tiny screen. “Well now. Same surname. Wrong location. Is the girl okay?”

“Hard to say.”

“Sins of the parents?”

“A lot of people got swept away.”

“Sad. Another drink?”

“Time for us to move on. There’s to be a gathering of opponents to the company’s plans in a house in West Vancouver.”

“Reliable information?”

“Of course.”

“And the Island?”

“The machines are on their way.”

~ • ~

The machines were already destroying the strip mall.
Not only was the monster box store to be built, but people they knew, people who had been invited to her soirées, would shop there and buy shares in the conglomerate. James was no doubt advising colleagues to get in on the ground floor. But Teresa didn’t care. Two weeks after that awful
cinq à sept
, a tsunami had flooded Akeli. In days that seemed like decades, she had cried, shrunk and become dependent on the kindness that washed over her and James: Voices, embraces, messages of hope not only from her family and his but from people they hardly knew, including the uninvited. Some had even brought food to the door, and flowers.

Encouraged, Teresa had set foot into cyber-world and started a blog. Emma became the daughter of the Island. The response to last week’s
She is safe
, was a flood of congratulations, of what seemed very nearly like love. It took all her spare time to read the messages and reply to her new friends. With tears of gratitude in her eyes, she glanced up from the computer screen and looked through the window. The hammering continued. In the right-hand corner of the backyard, James was building himself a shed.

acknowledgements

It has been a privilege
to work with Edna Alford once again. I’m deeply grateful for her keen eye and rigorous editorial approach. We met in Calgary and worked on the manuscript through my birthday and Thanksgiving It was a splendid way to spend the weekend. We had fun – and fine Alberta beef.

Many, many thanks to Nik, Susan, Amber, Mackenzie and Tania at Coteau for all the care and attention they have devoted to these stories, and for putting up pleasantly with my lack of computer skills.

And a special thank you to Jack Hodgins who spoke the four magic words over tea in the “Caffè Italia” that induced me to begin this collection.

about the author

Rachel Wyatt
is an award-winning author of novels, short fic
tion, stage and radio plays, and non-fiction works. Her fiction includes the novels
Letters to Omar, Suspicion
(published by
Coteau Books) and
The Rosedale Hoax,
and the short story collections
The Magician’s Beautiful Assistant
and
The Day Marlene Dietrich Died.
Her stage plays have been produced across Canada and in the US and the UK. She has also had over 100 plays produced by CBC and BBC radio. Rachel was director of the Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts during the 1990s. She was awarded
the Order of Canada in 2002, the Queen's Jubilee Medal in 2003 and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.