Street Symphony (9 page)

Tuesday dawned. The sun rose. Glenda rose. Arvin had argued and shouted and cried. “She means nothing to me, darling.” “Then you’re a pig, Arvin.” She began to pack. By the time the boys came down to breakfast, she had the pancake mix ready, the blueberries, the maple syrup. Marty and Evan, her fine and loving sons, were six foot two and six foot one respectively. They had bulky shoulders from playing basketball and football respectively. Certainly they were fit to take on the responsibility of making their own meals for the next week, of doing laundry and, if necessary, of listening to their father whining.

“I’ve something to tell you,” she said as she turned on the hotplate.

“If it’s about his affair –” Marty said.

“Hey,” Evan cried protectively.

“It’s about me,” their mother replied.

~ • ~

Sitting outside O’Brien’s office, waiting,
Bart felt as though he’d been through a paper shredder. Bank detectives were examining the details of his daily life from some central computer-base. City cops wanted to talk to him about criminal damage. His mother had been through his emails again. And now, as he sat in this lowly chair, nodded to knowingly by colleagues who were going to their desks without guilt, shame or fear, he began to feel the return of his pre-fish-tank-smashing courage. He had done nothing wrong. “Brazen” was the word.
I will brazen this out.

The boss was walking down the corridor towards him as if he had weights on his feet. Maybe he’d had a heavy night with the “woman not his wife,” as they referred to her in whispers at the bank. He should have been smiling, leaping, happy that at his age he could have such sexual delight.

“Oh, it’s you, Bart,” he said.

“You asked me to be here, to be prepared for the guys from head office.”

“Yes, well, head office. Come in.”

They both sat down. Arvin O’Brien, tired, years older than yesterday, began to speak as though the words were coming from far back in his brain.

“Never assume, Bart. Never believe that there are secrets. There’s always somebody who knows what you’re doing. Like a giant eye, or a big ear. A nose, a head.”

“I don’t know anything about the money.”

“Nothing is hidden. You might go into a dark place and whisper a few words and lock the door to keep those words trapped inside, but they will get out. Let me assure you, they will get out. They get out into the daylight. It’s not just the cameras in every doorway, like the ones we have here in the bank, it’s the way everything you key into your computer can be discovered…”

“I know I shouldn’t have been looking at those sites –”

“Every phone conversation can be retrieved. In Bangladesh, someone hears your replies to the telemarketer and writes them down and builds a profile and knows exactly what kind of person you are, your desires, your little perversions…”

“They’re not –”

“At Sunday school the old guy used to say, ‘Be ye sure your sins will find you out.’ How can sins find you out? They’re not living things with legs and brains. But my wife found out. She found out, all right. Who told her? Who in the world, or in this town, could have known? I’ve been so careful. And now she’s going to leave me. And besides, my sons…” He began to cry.

Bart hesitated, and then he went to the man and put his arm round him. He gave him a Kleenex and said softly, “Go home, Arvin. You don’t want them to see you like this. I’ll tell them you’ve got flu.” As he watched the boss walk away, he understood the meaning of
tragedy
. The missing money was nothing. The ruined fish tank was nothing. Wars in the Far and Middle East were distant horrors. Right here at home, a man’s life had broken.

When the dark-suited men from Toronto arrived, Bart led them to Arvin’s office.

“Mr. O’Brien isn’t well this morning,” he said. “He’s had to go home. He feels responsible for this problem as he checked the credentials himself. The police are looking for Harvey now.”

“I’m sorry about O’Brien,” the one called Davis said. “Good that you’re on it, McDowell. Now if we could check the figures.”

Bart looked beyond them at the streaky glass that had separated Arvin O’Brien from the rest of the staff. He knew now that some things could never be sorted out and that a man must go through life aware that all the walls in all the world were transparent.

Street Symphony

Pedestrians turned away from her
and Joy didn’t blame them. Let them live their lives in a cloud of ignorant satisfaction. Complacency and their wrongness about existence and the reason for it would, according to Errol, catch up with them one day. This was the last day of her self-imposed task to stir, to waken, to discomfit, to send people home to their cosy boltholes dissatisfied and even, maybe, a little bit afraid. A few smiled at her and nodded, and now and then someone gave her money. Last Friday she’d seen Grant coming towards her and, in trying to avoid him, she’d tumbled into a doorway on top of a man who was crouched there with his dog. He was surprised and pleased when she handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

Two boys pointed at her sign and shouted, “Yes we are!” One day, maybe in ten years’ time when they were hanging around bars jobless, aimless and useless, the kids would remember her. Meanwhile, they jogged on their way unaware. The danger of being recognized was slight. People saw what they wanted to see, and no one she knew would expect to come upon Joy Reilly walking about town holding up a placard. In any case, she could always hide her face behind it. Now it was time to take the board off its short stick and put the two pieces into her gym bag. Bus drivers didn’t stop for sign-wielders, especially if they didn’t like the message.

She sat with nine other passengers passively rolling past houses and the ends of roads that were not theirs, waiting to pull the cord for the stop that meant home. She was reluctant to get off on this night. She wanted to ride on and think about all the Thursday evenings she and Grant had spent drinking wine and making plans and having sex. In their first years together, he’d taken Fridays off so that he could spend three days building his boat, and she made sure her last student had left by five. They’d spread out the large-scale map and pinpoint islands they wanted to visit when the boat was ready. Now, given that his current partner was a high-price real estate agent, he likely spent the evenings at home alone.

Home!
Stop Requested.
Home now: a small room in a house that time and weather and neglect had combined to beat into a depressed state. Errol would be in his cubbyhole printing out exhortations and slipping bits of paper into envelopes that he pushed through the mail slots of certain houses. His intent was to inform, to encourage, to enlighten, to give people a chance to change. He never mentioned
Gadarene swine, but that was how he saw the inhabitants of the is
land in general and some in particular. He talked in that preacherly baritone as if he were the first person in the world to understand that making people think was the best thing you could do for them. Joy didn’t tell him that every teacher in just about every classroom in the entire universe knew that. It was a great gift, better even than
love, Errol said, because love can change. He was always bitter when he talked about love. His sister Annie told them both they were wasting their time: “You can’t convert the inconvertible.”

Joy walked slowly down the short street. Some days her feelings of despair sank into her feet. But today even the yard looked cheerful. Rain had encouraged the weeds. Three scrawny pumpkins flourished where they’d only expected two. A police car went screeching by, adding more notes to the crotchets and quavers of the day, the cacophony of sound she hoped to use in a new creation.

The front door wasn’t locked, but only a desperate burglar would look for spoils in this place. Joy called out, “Hi!” No reply. She set the bag down in the hall and went upstairs to hang her jacket in the curtained-off makeshift closet in the corner of her room. In the last three years, her personal space had shrunk, as if she herself had shrunk. Her worth too had shrunk as the market for her particular skills declined. Kids were learning music en masse at school. And meanwhile she had no piano. But the time had come for confrontation with Grant and with herself. Twice lately she’d walked past the fine house that had been hers for nine years and two months and three days. She’d turned the sign to face the front window as she went by and had felt gleeful. Deanne the therapist had told her she should be doing better by now, but Deanne had a way of using her own life as a template. She also had no idea of what it took to make a person like Joy happy.

Soon after she’d moved in with the Bardens, Joy had picked up the sign from the hall and wandered down the street with it for amusement. Persuaded by Errol that it was a small way of changing the world, she’d started to walk round the city as a missionary on two afternoons a week and had begun to pick up the rhythm of the streets, the low hum of traffic on Blanshard Street, the seagulls’ cries, the variety of voices, high and low. Sometimes she felt like dancing to the offbeat tune of the crowd.

That “Yes, we are” still grated on her mind and Joy knew she’d suppressed a moment of violence, a moment when she’d wanted to hit the larger youth, a clever-looking boy with his hat on backwards, to teach him a lesson. But her time for teaching that kind of lesson was over. She had a shower and put on her robe, the honeymoon robe. Ragged now at the edges, the blue faded, it was still a snug, comforting garment. She plugged in the coffee machine and checked the fridge. Annie would be weary. Errol would be in a hurry. There was leftover pasta and some salad that could be encouraged with a
little dressing. She poured herself a glass of juice and jotted down the day’s catch: running footsteps, ferry hooter’s long B-flat, trombone played by girl outside post office, angry barking dog.

Errol came out of his lair, a pile of unaddressed envelopes in his hand. “I’ll have time to deliver a few of these,” he said. “The first couple of hours are always slack.”

“Do you really think people pay attention?”

“I think that if they simply decide to look up the quotation in the Bible, if they have a Bible,” he said, “and if the words bother even two, even one, then I’ve got somewhere.”

He was fiftyish, greyish, not overweight. Too religious for her, though he clearly didn’t follow all the precepts in the Old Testament. The idea of revenge, for instance, was anathema to him.

Annie came in complaining. “They get in the cab. I take them all the way to Langford. Decent-looking couple, not that young, not kids. They get out of the cab, come round to my side, hand me a five through the window and run off laughing. That’s a thirty-five-buck ride. There is no fucking decency!” She threw the car keys on the table.

“I guess they don’t see it as stealing,” Errol said as he pocketed the keys. “I’m off. I’ll get a burger when I’m hungry. Did you fill ’er up?”

Joy had been pleased to find such cheap accommodation last year when she’d decided to get on with her life, to “pick up the pieces,” as her mother and friends admonished her to do. The rent was cheap and she needed to save. Even the undeserved coins from kindly people on the street were added to her stash. Errol and Annie weren’t too inquisitive, liked the fact that she cooked, and she adapted to their ways. The house, due to be torn down next year, was allowed to dilapidate without repair.

~ • ~

Judy said, “she was here again,
the woman with
the sign.”

Grant said, “What sign?”

“I told you.
Are you content to be nothing?
She goes by the window with the words facing in. Twice now when I’ve been sitting at the computer checking the listings.”

“I haven’t seen her. I don’t want to see her. And that’s meaningless anyway.”

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Why did you say that?”

“No reason. Just a remark.”

“Don’t make remarks then. And you should move the computer away from the window. I thought you used your Pad.”

“Shut up, Grant. I suppose I could tell her to go away, but we don’t exactly own the sidewalk.”

As she got into her SUV, Judy looked at her own signs in the back. None of them carried any other message than For Sale or New Listing. She needed to have a few more with Sold written across them, but the market was slow. People were wary of mortgage rates. They were buying nothing. Nothing again! That “nothing” on the woman’s placard irritated her. She didn’t believe she was
nothing
. She spent her days trying to match clients to houses that would suit their needs and hardly ever persuaded them into a home beyond their budget.
You will come to love this place.
Besides that, she nurtured her relationships with family and friends and never, hardly ever, deprived a colleague of a sale. If she died tomorrow there would be tears. That was not
nothing
.

And she was strongly hoping that her relationship with Grant was not about to become
nothing
. Love and excitement there had been. Delight. But he was a slow man, and in a sense she’d been in the market, if that wasn’t a crass way to put it, for comfort. Dynamic Dan, her previous partner, had been a little too much of an adventure in the end. Grant was a relief. Lately he’d been disappointed about the boat. Twelve years of work, of adjustments and
of – it had to be said and she had said it expense – and the thing would barely float. His work clearly wasn’t going well either. Since the crash in ’07, fundraisers had become a desperate tribe. Many of them were fighting for the same buck like dogs over a bone. He appeared to have come to a standstill. Ah, but here were her clients, waiting on the step. Hope made her leap from the car smiling and apologising for being thirty seconds late.