by Rachel Wyatt
He tried to recall other times in his life when he’d known for certain that tomorrow was not going to be a better day, but mostly they’d been to do with undone homework or dental appointments.
“They used to send convicts from the UK to Australia,” he said. “I’ve seen a rock in the sea near Sydney where they used to chain the bad ones and leave them there to bake to death in the sun. Do you want dessert?”
She stopped herself from crying by smiling grimly and saying, “We could share the tarte Tatin.”
“I could leave town, leave the country.”
It wasn’t, in banking terms, a huge amount and it was not up to him to replace it. But three million dollars had disappeared from the account of the rich client while he – Bart, jokingly and amiably, till now, called “Simpson” at the office – was training the new employee. And on Friday, Finn Harvey, a bright young man with fine references and a “future”, had also vanished. His future would likely now be spent on some sunny island off the coast of Spain, surfing, snorkelling or indulging in whatever watery pursuit pleased him.
This couldn’t happen. Could never happen. Should never have been allowed to happen. The policemen had been polite in the temple of money that morning, as if overawed by the aura of wealth. Bart replayed the scene that was now stamped on his memory. The boss, two cops, himself, all standing up. Himself the prisoner in the dock. Today, Monday, eight hours ago, 10:30 a.m. The beige walls of the office had closed in round him. Were the cops looking at his new grey jacket and thinking he’d spent part of the loot on it? “We’ll need to look at your computer. Your cellphone, please. We’ll be checking everyone who’s had contact with Mr. Harvey. He appears to have changed his number and shut down his email account.”
His own future, moving from junior manager to senior and then to a bigger branch in a bigger city, shrank in that moment, and fear cast its paralysing net over him. Had the other three in that office seen him as villain or incompetent idiot? He looked again at Roseanne as she turned to speak to the waitress.
He truly wanted to be alone with the dilemma without the need for explanations, sympathy or deep delving into the reasons for this breach of security and trust. It had all begun to go wrong, he thought, and stopped. What a ridiculous phrase. Who knew about first causes? Maybe Harvey’s mother had slapped him once too often when he was ten. Maybe Darya, his last girlfriend, had never got over her failure to graduate. Even the death of a beloved dog could drive a person to strange deeds. But he was sure that the makings of disaster went further back, all the way back to the very beginning. In the womb! That’s where it all began to go wrong.
But there was nothing wrong. Except that three million bucks had disappeared. And he was being unfair to Roseanne. She wanted to help him, to reassure him. Her own knowledge of finance meant that she understood the problem and wanted to talk about it. She loved him and would do her best, but right now all he wanted to do was go to Mr. O’Brien and say, “I wasn’t the only one who checked the guy’s references.” But it was Monday evening and Mr. O’Brien would likely not be home.
She was saying, “I know something about fish.”
His new cellphone rang. We’ve found the money. It was all a mistake. But it was the boss asking him firmly to make sure he’d be in early tomorrow to talk to the people from head office who were flying in to look at the problem. “Yes, sir. For sure.” If I haven’t fled to some fertile part of the Interior to grow pumpkins and salad, maybe moving on eventually to grapes and starting a winery now that my promising career as a banker is over.
If he went to Spain to track Finn Harvey down, they’d think he had gone to claim his share of the cash. And Harvey could have chosen any place in the world. Why was Bart thinking of Spain? It’s where I would have gone.
The waitress said to Roseanne, “It’s nothing to do with me. You want to speak to the manager.”
Of course the bank will repay you, Mr. Orlafson. The money will be in your account tomorrow. Plus the interest, naturally.
“It’s not natural,” Roseanne said.
She was still going on about the dirty water. He was thinking about his computer.
“You don’t look well,” she said.
“It’s not a crime,” he said.
“I only meant…”
But Bart had been responding aloud to the detective who had no doubt by now found the pictures he’d meant to delete last week. They were only naked, and partly naked, women, all gorgeous, all – well. It was truly stupid to check into that stuff at work. The boss would find out. There would be no more friendly Simpson jokes.
“Shut up,” he said to himself.
“Hey!”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
She looked around, but there was no one else close by.
~ • ~
1605 Perryvale Avenue. Such a nice address, Elsie McDowell had thought when she moved in two years ago. A ranch-style house built in the fifties, one in a curving line of similar houses, each one with its own green patch of lawn. A few ornamental cherry trees gave shade to people who walked along the sidewalk with their dogs and kids. After the divorce when it seemed that life would never be real again or the least bit pleasant in any way, her good son had found this small home for her, and partly for himself.
“Bart isn’t here,” she said to the nice-looking young fellows on the doorstep. “He lives with his girlfriend most of the time. If you’re collecting money, I gave a few months ago. His computer? He carries his laptop about. Or one of those Pads. Never without it. It’s what they do nowadays, isn’t it? PCs, desktops are outdated, aren’t they? Young people need to be texting and tweeting all the time or they feel out of it. If you can’t find him at work, he often works late, then he’s with his girlfriend. She’s a nice girl but not what I expected really. But are they ever? If you have kids, you’ll know. Especially with boys. What mother ever really likes her son’s choice of woman? Are you married? Why don’t you come back when he’s here? Tomorrow, maybe.”
She was proud of herself as she closed the door. Chatter as weapon had triumphed once again. Her art had been honed on the righteous, on political canvassers, and especially on those who asked for money. The two policemen returned to their car and drove away.
But why had they come looking for Bart? She went to his room to see what she could find on his sleek new screen. It was a week since she’d logged on. She supposed all men liked to look at naked women. Pathetic really. These sites full of “sights” must be affecting the trade in porn magazines. The little email sign popped up. It was wrong, she knew, to read his messages, but her own were usually boring stuff about meetings of the volunteer society, choir practice, or when can we meet for tea. Once again she invaded her son’s privacy. But he was her son, so privacy had no real meaning.
She could only look at the subject and name on each message. If she opened them, he’d know they’d been read. Though he’d suspect some outside spy, anyone else in the world except his loving mother. What kind of mother would she be though, if she couldn’t figure out her child’s password?
From: fh, Subject: cash. She deleted that one and deleted it from the delete file too. Dates for hockey practice. That time of year, already? Nothing there.
She tried to call his cellphone, but the line was dead.
~ • ~
After he’d made the call to Bart, Arvin O’Brien said to his mistress, “He’s good. I mean he’s good at his job. But there’s the money.”
“You said he didn’t take it.”
“Not personally but he let it go.”
“So he didn’t profit from the crime.”
Putting his trousers back on, Arvin admired Madeline’s thought processes. In fact, young Bart “Simpson” had done the opposite of profit. He was now part of the investigation and his future looked murky.
“The question is,” Madeline went on, lying there nakedly, “do you still trust him?”
Driving home, Arvin put that question squarely
to himself and considered the largeness of the word trust. Bart had trusted Finn Harvey, who had turned out to be totally untrustworthy. Therefore, when it came to evaluating others, Bart had let the bank down and was not to be trusted. To be fair, he had read the résumé and the references himself and found no fault. But Bart had strongly recommended the guy. That was the point Arvin would have to make clear.
~ • ~
“Coffee?” the waitress asked.
Bart nodded. Yes, he would have coffee. Yes, he would eat pie. While O’Brien, as everyone at the office knew, was with his mistress on Mondays, Fridays and Sunday afternoons, he was sitting here in this crummy restaurant, not sure whether the tuna salad he’d eaten was fresh, wondering whether to brave things out or go into the office crawling or be righteous like his father, now living in Iowa with Brian this-is-best-for-all-of-us McAllister. After all, why should his life be ruined because he’d unknowingly encouraged a crook? Ignorance was no excuse, some sanctimonious person had said. But in this case, it was. Finn Harvey was an open-faced twenty-four-year-old who’d seemed eager like a friendly dog, anxious to learn, allowed therefore to see files that might better have been kept from him. Anyone could have been deceived. Anyone! And it was not, repeat not, his fault. He would walk into the office and say, “Look, Arvin, this is as much your responsibility as mine and I refuse to carry the can for it –”
Roseanne was saying loudly to the manager, “Your fish are not happy.”
“Fuck the fish!” Bart yelled. He picked up the water jug and smashed it against the tank.
He walked away, leaving Rosanne and the waitress to pick up the slithering fish from the floor and put them into a bucket. The manager followed him out to the street.
~ • ~
“I wasn’t expecting you this evening, dear,” his mother said. She waited till he’d changed from his wet and smelly jacket before she told him about the cops.
“Did they look at the computer?”
“I told them you didn’t have one.”
He went to his room, lay down on his bed and listened to U2 singing “Where the Streets Have No Name”. For once, it sounded like a good place to be.
~ • ~
Glenda O’Brien was proud of her ability to pretend that everything in the garden was lovely. She was biding her time till she could find an affordable place in Vancouver. Due to the downturn, real estate was moving with the speed of a drugged snail, and she wanted to have enough money for Marty and Evan so that they didn’t feel deprived by the change. Arvin would come in soon from “working late” with that silly smile on his face. A smile, she well knew, that spoke of sexual satisfaction. But this time he walked through the hall and into the living room frowning. Perhaps all was not well with the Madeline arrangement.
“Trouble at the office?” she asked.
“You could say that.”
“I did say it.”
“Sorry, Glennie. There’s some money missing.”
“Oh dear. An inside job?”
“Seems so.”
“Did you have anything to eat at the – office?”
“Not really.”
Glenda wasn’t sure why, and she knew it was unkind to hit someone who was already down, but anger, long dormant, surfaced like a hungry shark.
“She doesn’t feed you?” she shouted. “You fuck her and then you come back here for dinner. And you want sympathy besides. I’m being extremely calm and reasonable and I’m going to move out. I hadn’t planned to go till after the boys were back at school but you leave me no choice, Arvin. This is the absolute end.”
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
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br /> 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.