Street Symphony (18 page)

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 Verily 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 house. 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.

“You could have stopped her,” Jane said to the policewoman.

Paul Driver came out leaning on his cane. He moved to the body and knelt down as best he could. Pushing Granny Griffon and the cop away, he put his hand on Olya’s neck and said, “There’s a pulse.” The policeman picked up the gun.

“It’s a toy. Sound effects only,” the old man said.

Olya stood up and waved to the people on the street.

“Goodbye,” she said, her English perfect. “You! You and your smug little lives. What have you done to deserve all this? You have money, you have comfort. You don’t know anything. Someone comes in the night and cuts down your stupid fucking little tree. Just to show you. So look after your kids ’cos you have no idea who’s out there. No idea what goes on while you sleep!”

She went with the two cops to their unmarked car and climbed inside in a leisurely way, as if the three of them were going out to dinner together. And, in a sense, they were.

Xan Grosjean came to Jane and hugged her. “I was renting that suite to a terrorist,” she sobbed. “She was so good. Quiet. No loud music. She put the garbage out. I had al Qaeda in my basement? She was buying stainless steel pots and other kitchen appliances to set up her own café. Oh my god! They’ll think we went along with it. Me and Terry. We could die in jail.”

Wayne said, “Come to my place, everybody. Tell the others. We all need a drink.”

Jane said, “I thought the cops were coming to tell us to move because of the fumes.”