Street Symphony

by Rachel Wyatt

  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 island 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.

  ~ • ~

  When Annie had gone to choir practice, Joy lay down on the futon couch and considered the move she’d been planning for eighteen months. She’d got beyond downright revenge and only wanted to make the unfairness of the settlement clear to Grant. Truly it had been wrong to slap him in front of his colleagues that evening, but when, for about the twentieth time, he’d said, in that smirking, patronizing way, “My wife’s something of a musician,” she’d lashed out. She didn’t have to say, as he stood there holding his bloody nose, “My husband’s something of an asshole.” But she did. Why he couldn’t have simply got over it and moved on in a decent, mature way was a mystery.

  It was time to go and put on makeup and the not-so-little black dress: her evening uniform. The hotel guests who came and leant on the
bar’s baby grand to make jokes and leave meagre tips would never recognize her as the street evangelist. As she listened to the undercurrent of chat and laughter, she played the kind of wallpaper music that allowed the customers to imagine they were having a good time. Now and then she interjected a classical fragment, and a face here and there would light up with pleasure. When she took a chance and sang, very softly, one of her own lyrics, a man came across from the bar and said, “That’s Adele. One of hers.” Joy smiled and nodded and asked if he had any favourites. It’s what she was paid for, to pander.

  Annie thought she and Errol were messianic idiots. It was not as though their admonishments to the public even came under the heading of “someone has to do it”. She didn’t understand either why it had taken Joy all this time since the divorce to get herself together. But Joy saw the steps she’d taken in that direction as a progression. The work at the women’s shelter, baking bread for the desperate, trying to learn French. Carrying Errol’s sign about had also helped with her recovery and had the added bonus of research. She hadn’t expected it to be inspiring too. She’d listened as she walked, and absorbed the rhythms of the street: footsteps slow and quick, broken phrases, impatient engines, a woman yelling at a TV set in a store window. It was a gift, and now all she wanted was time to make it hers. It wouldn’t be as short as a song. Once she had her piano, the form would impose itself on the music.

  Someone was saying, “Come on, Joy. You’ve been playing that same tune over and over.” It was Evan, who sometimes stayed behind to drive her home. The bar was empty.

  She went to bed and repeated her prayer. I will have a better home, a better bed, a piano. Grant’s lawyer had been too quick and sly for poor Richard. Never employ a friend as your representative in court! Shakespeare must have written that warning somewhere in his vast work.

  On Saturday she left the sign behind and took the bus to Ferndale. She watched Judy come out of the house that had been her house: high-heeled boots, swirly orange cape, briefcase. Joy turned away till the Hyundai had gone past and then she walked up the path and rang the bell. Grant opened the door and tried to close it when he saw her. She pushed him hard and he fell back. She was inside. He cowered.

  “What have you done? “ she said. “The wallpaper? That ugly mirror?”

  He held the door open and said, “Get out. You. You’ve been annoying my wife. I saw you in town. I’ve seen you in the bar. What do you want?”

  She moved into the living room that now appeared to be an office. “For one thing, Grant, I want my piano. I doubt that Judy has time to play it.”

  “You’re stalking. I’ll call the cops.”

  “Please do. It’ll take them some time to get here and I have a lot to say.”

  “I won’t listen to you.”

  “This room is a mess. What happened to comfort?”

  “We’ve made the spare room into a lounge.”

  “Can I see?”

  “No!”

  She went upstairs and found the room. Functional furniture. Stark colours.

  “How about coffee, Grant?” she shouted down the stairs. “We have some things to discuss. I have a better lawyer now but I’d rather not get him in on this unless I have to.”

  He returned with two mugs. No sugar. No milk.

  “I’d like you to taste mine first.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Joy.”

  “You didn’t have to make such a fuss.”

  “You could’ve broken my nose.”

  “It was your fault. I was aiming for your cheek. You moved.”

  ~ • ~

  “We’ll miss you,” Errol said to Joy the following month.

  “I’ll miss your cooking,” Annie said. “Come back and visit before we’re thrown out.”

  Joy left the stick behind but took the piece of hardboard with her to the new apartment on Cook Street. She hung it on a nail in the back of her clothes closet. Every now and then she’d catch a glimpse of the words that were, really, she knew, directed at herself. Carrying the sign around had been a penance for being feeble and stupid. The piano was hers again. She sat down and played a few bars of Beethoven’s Ninth to celebrate her new life. Then she tried out that defiant refrain, “Yes, we are.” It was a start. Everything she’d heard and learned as she’d walked round town in the last few months would be poured into the notes of her own composition: Street Symphony.

  Ash

  “If you hadn’t turned the car in, Agnes.”

  “If I’d only known, dear, I’d’ve asked for an amphibious one.”

  “I’m only saying we could’ve driven to Paris and then taken the train.”

  “Listen, Belle. Look at all these people. We are all, literally, in the same boat. Right now, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “It’s all very well for you. You’ve no one waiting for you at home.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Dawn looked at them, these two strangers who were her sisters, standing together on the deck. Agnes tall and managing to look smart in her beige slacks and jacket, her scarf perfectly tied in spite of the hours on the crowded train, the waiting, the lack of a proper bed for two nights in a row. Belle, on the other hand, looked appropriately rumpled. Her navy coat was creased and her blond hair hung in limp strands round her thin face: a castaway. Dawn pictured a remote island, the three of them hoarding food, building a shelter, a raft: separate huts, single-seater rafts. Who took the last coconut? She listened to them, the oldest sister and the youngest, arguing the way they’d done all their lives.

  “We could have done this at home.”

  “He thought it would be a nice trip, a vacation.”

  “Well, we should have waited.”

  They had waited. They’d waited at the airport in Quimper for two days expecting that at any moment planes would take to the air again. They’d waited for a train. They’d waited for a bus. They’d waited at the ferry terminal and rejoiced when they were allowed to board the second one of the day, the Angelique. They had even been happy to queue for coffee and a snack. But now they were stranded on a stationary ship in the middle of the ocean.

  “I think this must be where the Atlantic meets the English Channel,” Agnes said, as if there were a visible boundary, a line where the sea changed colour.

  A man near the lifeboats was giving his wife hell as if it were her fault the ship wasn’t moving. His words floated up towards the circling seabirds and then fell back down around them: Would have. Should. Mother. Who could have? Why?

  “Dad wanted us to have an adventure. So here we are,” Belle said.

  “I don’t think, in his most malicious moments, he would have wanted this.”

  “Dad was not malicious. Mischievous now and then, okay.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  Crackling noises introduced the captain: “Hello everyone. Another boat is on its way from Plymouth. The engines…” The crackling sound erupted again. “And we have alerted other vessels. The engineers are hopeful that…”

  The crowd’s moans drowned him out. “Ship was overloaded.” “That’s why it’s broken down.” “Weight wouldn’t affect the engine.” “They don’t take on more than is legal.” “Wanna bet?”

  “I am calm,” Dawn said to herself. “Calm in my becalm-ment. Unwashed, unkempt, longing to sleep in a real bed and stuck on a ferry halfway between Brittany and Devon. Three hours away from England. Thousands of miles from Canada, from home.”

  Belle said again, “Why did we come all this way?”

  “We came because we could. Not everyone has the luxury, the money to take off and travel to Europe on the whim of a dead man.”

  “He was alive when he wrote his will. And are you saying it’s better to be poor?”

  “I’m saying poor people have no choices. No options. Their lives are fixed on survival.”

  Like that village, Dawn thought. Trees. Men and women and children, nearly naked, li
ving in tree houses at dizzying heights above the ground and spending their days tracking down food including live grubs to stave off starvation. No question there about which school to send their kids to or how to keep Johnny from spending sixteen hours a day texting and twittering. It must have been the damn American missionary who’d introduced the camera into their lives. By what right was he there at all? And why had the villagers not eaten him? Anthropologists, missionaries: There must be a ring in hell for the most intrusive ones. She began to feel furious about it all over again and stopped herself. Energy had to be conserved.

  “If we drown, I will agree that we had a choice,” Agnes was saying. “Because we could afford it, we chose death.”

  “Well, we are poor. Poor now. Because we have no choice except to wait and hope we get rescued before this crate sinks.’’

  “The ocean isn’t a vast empty space. There are thousands of ships and this one is light years from being a ‘crate’.”

  But on all sides, all points of the compass, to the dim horizon, Dawn could see nothing, not a light anywhere. Only hovering birds. And the darkening sea around them did indeed look like a “vast empty space”. If their father had been here, he would first have suggested that they go below and sit in comfort. The crew was competent. The ship was sturdy. The preacher in him would have pointed out that it was an opportunity to learn patience. But then he might have laughed. She pictured his face, that grin, when he saw the absurd in a situation, or an argument. You are stuck here because of me, girls. Ha ha!