Street Symphony

by Rachel Wyatt

  Freedom Shireen had now, and some wealth. The emergency credit card wouldn’t be stopped for a day at least. If questioned, if found, she would say that the insults of Ursula Conrad had gone deep and she was returning home and had no idea of the old lady’s death. Once in Vancouver, she could make her next plan. There were many hotels in that large city and the Conrads, even if they figured out where she was, would have to call each one to find her.

  “Thank you,” Shireen said as she paid the driver, feeling better, feeling a little bit rich, feeling like an escaped prisoner.

  An ambulance was standing by the airport entrance. Shireen shuddered. It was there to receive the body. She moved away. Then she heard a familiar voice, a loud, crackly voice. “I do not need an ambulance. I can walk. I do not…” And a louder voice saying, “Now, Mother…”

  Shireen hesitated. Her own mother seemed, as usual in these situations, to be perched on her shoulder like an owl, hooting, Do the right thing for once, dooo. She resented that “for once”. She could get a cab back to the hotel and check in again. The diamonds? The money? There was no way back. It was a pity really that she would miss the wedding and not get to wear her red dress. But the old lady was alive and she was glad.

  In the terminal building, she decided to call and say Ms Conrad’s attitude had been too much to bear and she was going to return home alone. She got out her cellphone and dialled the number that had been given her in case of trouble. A recorded voice asked her to leave a message. She spoke her lines in a teary voice and ended by saying that she hoped the sun would shine on the wedding day. Then she went to buy a ticket to Vancouver. In Vancouver she would decide whether to go back to South Africa or home to North Bay or to some place in Europe where she could sell a diamond.

  “Your passport, please.”

  “I can get a job anywhere and I might go back to school,” she told the owl on her shoulder.

  “Madam, how old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “This passport says you’re eighty-eight.”

  Tons of bricks fell on Shireen’s head! Before the woman behind the desk could suggest that she’d stolen the passport, she snatched it back and said, “Oh my goodness, I’ve picked up my grandmother’s by mistake. I must rush.”

  She was out of the airport in seconds and into a taxi. All the way back to Victoria, she was working out words of explanation and ways to be meek. It was time to eat humble pie. She would stick with Dora VK and take her home again. Her mother had been right: One day, you will run up against something…

  The luggage was gone from the Conrads’ front step. She pressed the bell. Ms Conrad opened the door. “You, how dare you come here, you, you criminal? My mother could have died. As it is she’s exhausted. And I suppose you want this. Forgot it, did you, you freaking bitch?” She threw the shoulder bag at Shireen and closed the door.

  Shireen stood there for a moment, thinking, before she banged on the glass panel in the door nearly hard enough to shatter it.

  “What now?” the angry daughter demanded.

  “Your mother might need these, Ms Conrad.” Into the woman’s hands she piled the passport, the medication, the Kindle, the return ticket and some of the money. Finally she gave her the little package and said, “Take care of these diamonds. They’re probably worth a fortune. And do read the directions on those pill bottles. Your mother should take two of the white ones now. Please give my best wishes to her. By the way, she’s due for an injection at five. And don’t give her any grapefruit juice.”

  “Shireen!” the voice was soft now. “Shireen?”

  ~ • ~

  Shireen spent the night in the airport hotel in Vancouver. She had a large glass of red wine with her dinner and chatted to a man who said he’d often been to South Africa. They talked of Johannesburg, of mines, of the sad plight of squatters. He said he was the representative of a diamond consortium. She told him she was going to Nice to take part in an international drama conference.

  Early next morning she went across to the airport to pick out her next destination. Air Canada offered flights to Montreal, Ottawa, London, Paris, Frankfurt. Why not Germany? She could get a job there, and Frankfurt was perhaps a good place to sell a diamond given her by a dear uncle. There was the return ticket to South Africa that she could change to another destination. But there was son Edward who could probably track her down. She called her sister and told her she had a couple of weeks to spare. “Come here,” Rosheen said, sounding generous, kind.

  Shireen offered the desk clerk the Van Klees credit card but then took it back and handed over her own. “Right,” she said to the owl. “I will do this. I will call the Conrads and tell them I’ll come back to take Dora to Jo’burg. I’ll meet them in Vancouver.” On the way to North Bay via Toronto, she considered the diamonds in her jacket pocket. They have most likely been counted or weighed. Was that her mother’s voice hooting at her again? Next time she and Miriam were on volunteer duty at The Red House, she would drop one in the donation box. The other was a kind of insurance. Next year she might take a trip to Frankfurt. Meanwhile, at the lake, she would finally silence the owl.

  If a Tree Falls

  “That tree was a home to birds,” Xan Grosjean said.

  “Birds are dropping out of the sky because of fumes from the train wreck.”

  “They said the stuff’s harmless.”

  “I bet people said that about Chernobyl.”

  “And I bet all that wood’s in the Bales’ shed.”

  “Sparrows used to wake me up in the morning with their cheeps and squawks.”

  The neighbours were looking at branches and dead leaves scattered over the road, and a section of the trunk lying on the grass around the jagged stump of the maple. Alec Behrens, just back from his night shift in the ER, stood on the edge of the grass island and shouted, “How could you let this happen?”

  “We didn’t,” Jane Suskind answered.

  Wayne Corwin said, “We have to call the city. It’s their tree.”

  “The police!” Sue Corwin said. “This is a crime. Call the cops. Look, I’ve got to rush, but we should have a meeting. Someone, Jane, you set it up. Our house’ll be fine. Say eight o’clock. Make sure there’s enough coffee, Wayne, honey.” She closed her car door and drove slowly to the end of the street.

  Wayne saluted and said, “Okay, boss,” to the departing vehicle. And then, “Let the city call the cops. I’m going to call whoever’s in charge of trees.”

  Xan went back into her house shouting, “This is war!”

  Jane sighed. War? It was at any rate an assault, a blow to comfort, as if in all the world, this little enclave, these eight families plus one lodger, had a particular right to safety. She’d despised gated communities, but now she wanted a wire fence, a wall with glass fragments on top, fierce dogs, armed guards and a canopy overhead to protect them from the toxic cloud approaching from a place near Kelowna. Dave put his arm round her and said that the tree might not have lasted much longer anyway.

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “Someone was here in the night. And even a handsaw makes a noise.” He kissed her on the cheek and said he might be home early. “Yes,” she said, and waited for him to turn and wave at the end of the street, but he strode on to his world of oil and strife without looking back.

  Dave felt his wife’s eyes on him and was glad she couldn’t see into his mind. He should have told her his secret but didn’t want to worry her while there was a shred of hope. From day to day, the rumours at ConFuel changed and yesterday’s lies were often today’s facts. But if it turned out that after twenty-one years this was the last of his days in the building on Johnson Street, then he’d be like the tree, cut down, shorn of purpose, small. Religion had lost its meaning for him years ago, and the phrases that lurked in his head offered no comfort but only a sense that whatever he was about to get, he deserved. The admonitions had often begun with Verily, I say unto you, and as a kid he’d wondered who poor Veri
ly was that he had to be said unto so often. “Shit,” he said unto himself, aware that there was likely to be no laughter in his day. And Jane, having spent her sympathy on the tree, might have little left for him when he got home that night. There was Merkin waiting at the corner in his BMW, early for once.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. You?”

  “Today’s the day.”

  They drove on in silence for five minutes.

  “Someone came in the night and cut down one of those trees in the middle of my street.”

  “Who would do that?”

  Dave could think of several people who might, out of misplaced envy or downright nastiness, “do that”. “You, maybe,” he said.

  Sam Merkin laughed. “Right! But still. It’s a bad thing. Didn’t any of you hear anything?”

  “That’s what’s weird. A chainsaw makes a helluva racket.”

  “Maybe you were all drugged.”

  ~ • ~

  The three trees on the grassy island in the centre of the cul-de-sac had made a pleasant screen separating the three large houses on one side from the five smaller ones on the other. Last year, the city had chopped down the largest one, a birch, because it was no longer stable; disease had weakened its roots. Now, Jane watched as her shy Connor and noisy Sharon and five other kids danced in a circle round the one remaining tree as if it were a maypole. When they heard the pied piper’s horn, the kids ran to the end of the street followed by cries of “Have you got your lunch?” “Good luck on your test.” The yellow bus carried them all away except for the Griffons’ Essie, who sat by the stump of the maple till her granny came and took her into the house.

  Jane was tempted to go across the road and look in the backyard of number forty for incriminating scraps of bark, chips, branches. Don and Donna Bales had moved into the last of the five, with its pie-shaped lot, a year ago and had seemed friendly enough at the time. The neighbours had watched as modern furniture was carried into the house, cubes of glass, chairs of wood and leather, followed by two handsome children, a boy and a girl, aged ten and twelve. All IKEA-perfect. Donna and Don had painted the outside walls a polite shade of grey and highlighted the window frames and door in red.

  The welcome cake and invitations to coffee had been accepted with restrained grace, but a few weeks ago something had changed. A shift had taken place in the atmosphere of the harmonious little street. It happened in a single day, maybe an hour, a minute. Timmy Bales took in his hockey net and he and his sister stopped playing outside with the others. Don and Donna returned from work in the evening without a friendly wave or gesture to anyone.

  At the time, Jane had thought nothing of it. It was odd, that was all. The eight houses on Wildfeld Crescent provided shelter for seventeen adults and nine children, a private and select community. Twice a year the householders got together: On Labour Day weekend, a potluck supper on the green under the trees, and on Canada Day, a party with hot chocolate for the kids, beer and wine for the adults. This past July, Olya, who lived in the Grosjeans’ basement suite, had delighted them with an illicit pyrotechnic display. She let the kids hold sparklers, and lit homemade miniature fireworks. She called out a running commentary and set off each piece with a grand flourish. “There will be stars.” And there were stars. “There will be flowers.” And there were flowers. After that, the neighbours crowded onto the Griffons’ deck to eat pizza and watch the shooting arcs of light from the bigger display downtown: We’re a happy, tight-knit group.

  Sitting at her desk later that morning, Jane couldn’t interest herself in the current vagaries of the stock market; the piece she was writing for Wednesday’s Gazette had no relevance. The destruction of the maple, not just because it was a lovely thing, filled her with dread. In the dark, if the Bales were not to blame, strangers had invaded this little haven, hooded people who worked in the night like bats. She went out onto the porch and wondered whether chemical fallout from the train wreck was already affecting her soft tissues.

  Wayne strolled across the grass. He and Sue occupied number thirty-eight opposite the Suskinds, sandwiched between the Bales and the oldest inhabitants, Mary and Paul Driver, who’d lived on the crescent since the houses were built in the sixties. An informal neighbourhood watch made sure to check that the old couple’s drapes were drawn back each morning and that they were seen to be all right. Wayne cut their lawn and Dave or Terry Grosjean could be called on to help with small household problems.

  “Guess what, Jane,” Wayne said as he walked into the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “I’ve found something out about Donna Bales.”

  “Did you check on the chemical cloud?”

  “It’s a zillion miles away. Listen. Donna Bales is not what she seems. I looked her up. You know how cagy they’ve been about where they lived before. He said Chicago. She said Toronto.”

  “They explained that.”

  “I think she’s an undercover cop.”

  “For heaven’s sake! Don’t you have work to do?”

  “I’ve just finished a long and very tedious report. I deserve some recreation.”

  “Then let’s dance, Wayne. You’ve got less than two weeks to the Ball, Cinderella.”

  “Sue’ll be surprised. She thinks I’ll be treading on her toes as usual.”

  “Ready?”

  Jane put the CD into the player and let the sensuous notes of “Begin the Beguine” invade the morning. Her partner had trouble with the long gliding step and was slow to follow as she swung him round. “Now look, be the man,” she said. “Imagine you have a rose between your teeth.”

  “Thorns,” he muttered.

  After a few more steps, Jane cut the music. “It’s the tree,” she said. “I can’t concentrate. It’s no use pretending a tree that size was cut down with a handsaw. There had to be a chainsaw. And none of us heard it.”

  “I looked at the stump on my way over. The cuts are jagged. It could’ve been two guys with a bucksaw.”

  “There’d still be sound.”

  As she ground Fair Trade coffee beans, she looked at the picture on the packet, the happy worker now able to send her child to school. How happy? What kind of poverty? The simple life of a bean-gatherer without the weight of the world on her shoulders. Oh right! She wondered just how fair the trade was to the men and women who gathered the beans and what they did when the harvest was over.

  Wayne sat at the kitchen table, agitated. “I left a message at city hall. No reply yet. I guess one tree isn’t very important. We could turn them in, the Bales.”

  “We don’t know it was them.”

  She watched him go to the window to stare at the crime scene. He had a nice body. His jeans fit closely and his blue shirt was loose across his shoulders. “How do I know you and Wayne aren’t having an affair?” Dave had asked in a joking kind of way. “Because he isn’t my type.” “So if he was?” “There’s only one of you in the whole world,” she’d answered. And he’d accepted that as truth and kissed her cheek. It only takes two to tango.

  Afterwards, she had no real memory of that afternoon. She must have eaten lunch because she always ate lunch. She must have prepared dinner because she always prepared dinner. Apparently she’d baked chocolate chip cookies for when the kids got home. It was as if the shock had knocked time askew, and no hours had passed between Wayne leaving her house at noon and the arrival of the unexpected visitors at half past three. Jehovah’s Witnesses, today of all days!

  Jane watched the couple chatting to Mary Driver. They knocked in vain at the Corwins’. Wayne didn’t respond although she knew he was home. They didn’t bother to knock on the door of number forty. Perhaps they knew that the Bales kids were at music practice on Thursdays and that Don and Donna didn’t get home till seven. Jane waited on her doorstep ready to tell them to go away. But this man and woman offered her no leaflets, no promise of a ticket to heaven. They smiled official smiles, looking beyond her as if there might be a criminal in her ho
use. She let them begin, not speaking, just giving them an enquiring look.

  The woman said, “It’s about your neighbour.”

  “We all felt he, well they, might have cut the tree down but everyone’s innocent till proven guilty, aren’t they, and we didn’t see any signs of debris at their place. It must have been some stranger. Of course we’re all upset about it. You can see the difference. There’s only the one tree left and now I’m looking directly across into the Drivers’ yard. Before, we had some privacy.”

  “We’re here about the person who calls herself Olya Makarova.”

  “Just because she’s from Russia doesn’t mean she’d go out in the night and cut down a tree.”

  “Her real name is Gina Downing and she’s no more Russian than you are, ma’am.”

  “I don’t understand. She has an accent.”

  “May we come in?”

  “I’d like to see some identification, please.”

  They each brought out a small leather case revealing an apparently real badge and followed her into the living room, filling it with their authority. The next few minutes passed in a daze. Olya liked fireworks, yes. Canada Day was a treat. The kids loved her. She worked part-time at a bakery. No, they said, she didn’t. In fact, she was a member of a dissident cell. They’d had a tipoff. In her basement suite there were various bomb-making components.

  “I really can’t believe this.”

  “Have you any idea where she is?”

  A loud, scrunching bang shook the windows. The three of them rushed outside. Olya/Gina was standing on the little grassy oval shouting, “There will be chaos!” They looked up at the sky as a shower of pink and blue and white stars fell to earth. “There will be revolution.” And a large Catherine wheel began to spin round on the stump of the maple. The cops were moving towards her when Olya pulled a gun from her bag and shouted, “There will be death!”

  The gun was small. The sound was sharp. And the woman fell and lay still. Granny Griffon ran over and knelt down and put her face to Olya’s. Essie cried, “Granny kissing. Kissing.” The policeman told her to move back.