Street Symphony (19 page)

~ • ~

The neighbours were still gathered in the Corwins’ front yard,
glasses in their hands, nibbling on chunks of cheese, when the school bus drew up and released its cargo. The kids smelled cordite and saw the paper debris and Connor yelled, “Who’s set off the fireworks?” Jane closed her eyes. It was a movie, a shift in time; tomorrow the tree would be whole, the deadly cloud would be sucked back into the tankers and Olya would be sitting on the Grosjeans’ front porch entertaining the kids with stories about life on the steppes. She looked down at her glass of wine and saw that her hand was shaking. She’d aged ten years in day. Olya’s words had made her afraid. What right had these few people to safety and comfort? And who was it who’d prowled the street in the dead of night?

Granny Griffon was saying, “No more, thanks. I have to drive home later.”

Paul Driver was sitting on the rocker beside the front door, playing his guitar. Sue Corwin drove into the carport. She got out of the car and came to stand on the path in her smart skirt and jacket, holding her briefcase, and stared.

“I thought I said eight o’clock.”

“Change of plan, sweetheart,” Wayne said as he took her hand and led her into the house.

Helping herself to another glass of Pinot Blanc from the bottle on the top step, Jane tried to assure herself that in spite of today’s shocking events, everything would return to normal – except the tree. She and Wayne would continue to tango, the market would rise and fall and next week she would make Thanksgiving Dinner for the in-laws and her parents and sister. It was time too, to make reservations at the Chateau for the winter skiing trip to Quebec. Then she saw Dave walking down the road carrying a box with his briefcase balanced on top.

“Why is the street blocked off?” he called out.

“Something awful’s happened.”

“So you know,” he replied.

And she did know. She went to him because she knew that the box, the look on his face and his slow tread meant despair. There’d be no skiing vacation in Quebec this winter.

~ • ~

Overnight, a cyber-tsunami of words rushed from house to house
and beyond the street to relatives and friends and to their relatives and their friends. The local newspaper next morning gave copious coverage to
Suspected terrorist arrested on quiet crescent,
but there was no mention of the tree. On page seven, a small paragraph was devoted to the receding toxic cloud. The Bales kids came out of number forty and raced to the end of the street with the others. All the children were excited; they had a story to tell.
That was our street. We knew her.
They would be heroes for a day.

Jane stood on the sidewalk and watched the yellow bus carry them away. She looked at the stump of the tree cut down in the dead of night before its time, and at the firework fragments on the grass. Fear and uncertainty had invaded this innocent street. Would it ever be normal again? Wayne was picking up glasses and bottles from his lawn.

She called out, “Shall we dance?”

He walked across to her. She put her arm round his waist, he took hold of her other hand and they tangoed up one side of the crescent and down the other.

Shelter

It had all begun to go well.
Andrea stroked the length of the cat’s tail. “Yes,” she said, “We can do this, Oliver. Yes, it will work.” The cat was darkly noncommittal as she pushed him to the floor. The past months had been a downward slide played to the rattle of wheels falling off wagons, the broken hum of wires disconnecting and the smell of burning bridges. In other words, there was zero interest in her work. Elise at Galerie Nouvelle had suggested, gently, that she try a different medium. The thought balloon over her dad’s head contained the words, “It’s time you got a full-time job.” Josh brought her cups of coffee and small attempts at cheer, “Something will turn up, Mom.”

The dark time had begun on the day of the incident at Glen Haven. She understood then that there was no such thing as a safe place. The killing had taken away the meaning of words like
refuge
and
asylum
, and the whole concept of
shelter
, her chosen theme, had been shaken. Andrea had been trying to follow a thought thread that could lead either to a hungry Minotaur or to something magical. She couldn’t recall any instances of rewards or pots of gold in mazes but she knew that there was, with luck, always a way out. She’d hoped the thread would lead to a stunning idea for expressing the human need for safety. She’d sat in bus shelters that were small stages for a variety of actors: Elderly people who’d given up driving, the beautiful young on their way to school, the damaged in their wheelchairs for whom the bus
knelt
. She’d visited houses, condos, containers adapted for student living, and thought she’d struck gold when she volunteered at Glen Haven. And then, just when she was
home
, the thread snapped.

But yesterday, six weeks before the big event, a magician had appeared on her doorstep, or rather on the mat outside the apartment. Janitor or genie, wearing jeans and stressed leather jacket, he handed her a parcel and said, “It came yesterday when you were out.” Jim, young to have taken up such a dead-end profession, smiled at her and asked after the cat and would have come inside if she’d suggested coffee.

Inside the padded envelope was a collection of photos from cousin Emmett in Calgary who was clearing out the family archive.
Thought you might like these. Also the big recliner is yours if you pay for getting it out there.
Andrea had sifted through the pictures. Some in sepia and curling up at the edges, some of family outings to Banff and Lake Louise. Christmas dinners. A few were nearly a century old. There was Great-Great-Uncle Jason in uniform, standing with his parents the day before he left for France. Grimly they posed in the garden, the three of them. They weren’t supposed to smile in photos then. But it was when she saw the picture of her mother aged ten or eleven, lying with her friend Margery on a blanket in a kind of cage in the dining room of Twenty-Three Barnett Avenue, Leeds, in October 1942, that her heart leapt. She stared at metal and wire and knew. This was it.

There was no one alive now who could tell her whether the girls were playing a game that day or whether the siren had sounded and the bomb that demolished the house next door was about to fall. What mattered was that someone had taken the time to pick up a camera and photograph the two children in that moment. So was it a happy record of kids at play or a parent thinking, this might be the end of us? Did the photographer then climb into the cage with the children and listen with horror to the crash that meant the end of Margery’s parents and all that belonged to them and to her?

She watched the cat pad to the kitchen. Feeding time. For him, for her. “There are people without food,” she told the cat as he sniffed disdainfully at the canned tuna in his dish. Guilt had made her bulimic in her teen years and she still hated the fact that food was so poorly distributed throughout the world. Carlo, the first of her disasters, had told her that to eat was to help the world economy and that no way was the food she refused going to help one single starving person in India, in Africa, or in any other place. But her early sculptures had been sought-after. The human figures constructed from frozen-food packets, Italian Medley, Diced Squash, Peas in Sauce, and labelled,
The Green Dwarf
, sold well and had been copied many times. Since then, she’d moved on to space and to safety. Why do so many have so much of it when others have none?

At Glen Haven, she’d lurked unhelpfully in the corners, watching the homeless, trying to build bridges, talking to the good Adrian who spoke the language of the deprived. “You can help better if you’ve been one of them,” he told her, but it was an option she couldn’t take. She saw the solitary men and women and kids who lived without roots, and despair turned her tongue to stone. She tried to smile as she handed out food and coffee and bottles of water and prayed that Josh would never end up in place like this. Then when she’d turned up on a Monday two months ago, Adrian was at the door warning her to go away, pointing to yellow police tape.

Shelter:
a noun of “uncertain origin”.

The knifing of one sad person by another at the Haven had for the time being shut down her muse, her sense that anything was grist for the artistic mill. But now she knew she’d found the right unsafe place. The girls in the photo were inside a Morrison shelter, an object that made sense of the word itself. Early in the war, as planes chugged overhead, it was decreed in Britain that every subject should have a safe place to hide during air raids. They became, some families, a population of moles. In London, many spent smelly
nights in Underground stations while the earth shook. Householders
with good cellars made them comfortable for sleep and were sometimes buried in them. When the siren sounded, others ran to their Anderson shelters: dugouts in the garden covered with corrugated metal that in turn was covered over with sod. Damp in the winter, sometimes waterlogged, they weren’t popular.

“Your great-grandparents, perhaps because their name was also Morrison, opted for this kind,” she said to her son, showing him the cage as part of his heritage. “I don’t know whether it was delivered
like an IKEA table with instructions. If the owners put it together themselves and missed a bolt or two – Imagine that metal top falling onto a family. A can of sardines in tomato sauce.”

“Mom!” Josh said. Player of violent games, watcher of horror movies, he disliked hearing his mother in her creative mode. Then, taking a closer look at the picture, he asked, “Why are they in a cage?”

“Some families drew up their chairs to that kind of metal table to eat their meals. When there was an air raid, they crawled underneath it, perhaps carrying their plates, pulled down the mesh siding and remained inside till the all-clear sounded.”

“Sci-fi, Mom. Not your thing.”

For weeks before the parcel arrived, Andrea had nursed a feeling of longing, a feeling of sadness about her undistinguished life. Walking along the streets of this city, watching the variety of people following each other to work purposefully as if what they did mattered, had dulled her mind. The woman walking around holding a sign that said,
Are you content to be nothing?
depressed her further. Her work had become drab. Elise told her she was not “speaking” to her customers. No one had bought a single one of her sculptures since last January. The six wood-and-bronze miniatures she’d made of lightly disguised celebrities at work were standing in the corner of her bedroom emanating reproach. But now she had the image she’d been seeking.

“We often look without seeing,” she said to Oliver,” and then it hits us in the face. Wham! A race against time. We’ll start tomorrow.”

She hadn’t been able to find out what became of the metal and wire when the bolts were unscrewed and the pieces of the shelter were carted away. Had the metal been made into saucepans, into ploughshares, or simply sold for scrap. Who over there in England, in some branch of the civil service, would know or care now? And of what use would it be to her anyway? She had to concentrate.

Josh resented being woken at seven on a Saturday, but garage sale hunters were early birds. He helped her load two easy chairs and a couch into the pickup. They drove to the dump and threw out the cushions and covers. “Bedbugs can live on metal,” Josh said, but that was simply revenge.

“I’ll need help to assemble it.”

“Hockey practice. Big game next week. I’ll help you after.”

It would be her biggest piece yet. No more small, subtle figures or tableaux that left something to the imagination. This was going to hit people in the face full on. Every evening, she was exhausted as if she hadn’t taken a breath all day. Her hands were covered in dust and fragments of metal. She built a frame for the wire and made an open-ended cage. That was the easy part. The family inside had to have character, each one different. She made a hand and attached it to the mesh wall.

Graham came over on Friday to drive Josh to the game and said, “It looks like a nightmare. That hand on the wire. Like something out of Edgar Allen Poe.”

“Thank you! There will be an arm attached to the hand, a body. And don’t keep him late. ”

“He’s with me this weekend.”

“That’s right.” She couldn’t admit that her work had taken her mind away from her beloved child’s routine. Images of the sad young guys in the Haven raced through her head. When he came downstairs with his bag, she hugged him until he said, “Okay, Mom. See you Sunday.”

Her grandparents and her mother were made of patches. Linen worked for their pale wartime faces. Their expressions were not happy. She worried for a whole day about their hair. Wool was wrong. Kitchen string was wrong. In the end, she used strands of embroidery thread and gave her mother pink ringlets.

“I’ll need you to help me set it up,” she said to Josh.

“There’s no end. They’re not shut in. They could escape,” he said.

“Aha!” Andrea replied.

She made some small cushions and bought a dolls’ tea set and a TV and a radio and computer. She hung cellphones and earbuds from the wires and put in a tiny bath and wash basin and toilet.

“Those things are out of proportion and there weren’t cellphones then,” Josh said.