Street Symphony (5 page)

Ella showed her membership card at the desk, rejected the offer of an audio guide and made her way to the exhibit with its murmuring sounds and soft roars. She was again taken aback by the size of the beasts. Even on this island they, or at least one, had existed, perhaps making the journey from the Badlands in seven-league strides. It was hard to imagine them in the flesh with eyes and tongues. Patient and dextrous fingers had assembled these bones, aligning the labelled vertebrae, setting each one in place. Reflected
in glass, she imagined a diorama, millennia hence: herself and Sam and the children and their skeletons exhibited for the new inhabitants of the world to study.
What kind of animals were these?

A man standing beside her was murmuring softly.

“It is amazing,” he said to her, “seeing these creatures. What appear to be their remains. It’s salutary to stand here, thinking that we’ll be history in time. Perhaps that’s the point of all this fakery.”

She smiled at him and moved on. She knew and feared what he was going to say next. Like a messenger from the gods in Homer, he was going to tell her in an oblique way to hop into bed with Paul while she still had the breath and strength to do so. She got out her notebook and sat down to write that the theropod’s egg looked like a large baked potato. The man sat beside her.

“With none of our so-called advantages,” he said, rubbing at the sleeve of his worn leather jacket, “the early people were able to carve and build and hunt. They at least were real.”

Ella wished she’d paid for a guiding headset.

“Do you believe?” he asked.

In God, in you, in what?

“That those grotesques ever existed? Could exist? Scientists have talked of cloning them from some mysterious egg. What then?”

“We’d have to learn to cohabit.”

He laughed.

The place was meant to make her calm, but this guy was bothering her. Probably he was lonely and hadn’t talked to anyone since Friday. No kids. Or, like hers, distant. She moved on to stare at the canoe, a work of art, a simple, perfect vessel. When she walked into the café, the man was nowhere to be seen. She chose cream of broccoli soup.
Warmth! Warmth, that’s what I need. No cuddling in the grave, the poet said. No warm man waits there for you. Grab hold of one while you can.
What a leap! From soup to sex in seconds. Come on, Ella! Consider the dinosaur and his ways.

“Bread with that?”

“Please.”

She paid and took her tray to the corner near the store. There was such a lot of world to consider. Tragedies and joys and devastation. At this very moment, ancient cities were being destroyed by man himself, and people were killing each other in more places than anyone could count. Maybe the dinosaurs had self-destructed, destroyed each other’s habitats and, through greed, eaten all their means of survival. This might be the future of the human race too. Epitaph: They never learned.

There he was again, the man in the jacket. He set his tray, coffee and a cheese sandwich, on her table. “Do you mind?” he asked and, before she could say yes, went on. “If you took a saw to the dinosaur’s leg bone, any one of them, dollar to a dime you’d find it’s plastic.”

“They have to fill in the gaps. Finding a whole one is rare, I believe.”

“Rare? Impossible! They never existed.”

So the poor fellow was mad. Ella looked around for a guard.

“I’d like to eat my lunch in peace,” she said to him. She, who believed in being polite even to the difficult, scowled and took her bowl of soup to the table nearest the exit.

“Read the Bible. Read that.” He followed her and handed her a leaflet. “Those bones are the devil’s work put there by people who don’t want you to know the truth.”

“Please leave me alone.”

“The only truth!” He walked back to his sandwich.

On the front of the leaflet was a picture of a young man, reddish-blond hair and beard, fair complexion: Jesus turned into a corn-fed North American. In her days of faith, she might have been upset by the image, but now she only shook her head. The truth, according to the words on the page, was that the world was a recent creation and that the other story was a satanic invention. Her quiet contemplation of prehistory spoiled, she left the rest of her soup and headed for the bus stop.

At home she took out her sketch pad and drew a frame for a human diorama. No trees, but an array of tables with white cloths. She left out the other diners and focused on one table for five. There she was, wearing a new black sweater with her silver necklace. Sam next to her already looking thin. Donna leaning towards him across the table as though she were trying to hold him back. Graeme and Holly. All of them aware that this anniversary was the last. She froze them all in that good family moment before Holly threw her wine across the table, splashing her mother’s jacket, and
shouted, “This is false. This isn’t right.”

She drew the shady outline of another person standing behind Sam’s chair, and no, it wasn’t the waiter or a hooded, faceless person with a scythe. It was a woman called Glynis. The children had known all about her and kept quiet. Sitting there, dabbing at her jacket, she felt betrayed by all four of them, her “nearest and dearest”. Then she’d walked away from the table and away from them knowing, as no doubt they also knew, that she would return and nurse Sam to the end. As she had done, trying not to be tight-lipped, not to cry, not to blame. Failing some days. When he died, she’d collapsed into the embrace of grief.

Dinosaurs had small brains, but maybe when a mate died or a child suffered, their hearts ached and they roared in pain.

The phone rang. “I have voted,” she said, and pressed the OFF key.

She and Paul always exchanged a little kiss when they met. Over coffee and cookies or muffins, they talked of so many things that the time passed quickly. If they got involved in too much discussion of the current state of the world, the never-ending wars, greed and destruction, the government’s harsh policies, a depressed silence overcame them and they had to rally themselves with a glass of wine. After that they talked of hockey or their grandchildren. And they shared laughter.

Early on, Ella had given Paul the
Sequence
to read as a token of trust and he hadn’t let her down. His response had been gentle and he’d made two good suggestions about Rosemary’s one-way trip to Holland. Jody, the so-called editor at The Grove, had only been useful in reverse, like the negative of an old-fashioned photograph. The opposite of whatever she suggested worked best. She hadn’t pressed her published books on the others. They were prose writers, after all.

“You don’t need to go on a course, Mum,” Donna had said when she told her about it. “You’ll be with real amateurs.” But they were serious people, intent on their work. Iain had set off down that long road to find a future. Marina, the nurse, returned to the comfortable past. Aritha! Who could tell what had driven her to leap on Iain that night? Or, come to that, why had Ilsa laughed as the Coke dripped down Aritha’s face? Clever and attractive, Jody had sat there, a spectator, as if this was a normal end to a writing week.

So what had that few hundred dollars and six days of veggie meals and editorial care done for her, for Ella herself? “What did you get out of it?” was Graeme’s question, and it was hard to explain.
Just the sense that life goes on? That people will never give up trying to interpret the world?
“I met some interesting people” didn’t justify the expense of his Mother’s Day gift, so she added that it had refreshed her mind and given her many new ideas and had been a real holiday and she would certainly do it again.

But she’d got a better idea from the dinosaurs and perhaps too from the man who denied the visible truth. There was, really, only now. Only this day, this hour. This particular hour, she was sitting beside Harriet Cherton, reading to her. Harriet, lying very still, might live for a week or a day. The nurse brought in tea and went out again. Ella wondered what kind of words she would ask for on the last part of her journey. It would be poetry. Some patients asked for books they’d loved as a child. For others it was the repeated comfort of an old friend.

“‘The evening ended with dancing. On its being proposed, Anne offered her services as usual…’”

“Do you think she was stupid,” Harriet asked slowly, perhaps her final question, “to let herself be persuaded and lose eight or nine years of happiness?”

~ • ~

When Paul came on Wednesday at five,
he brought Ella a guide to Seattle and returned the copy of
Apparatus
she’d lent him. She looked the man over and certainly he was, for his age, quite trim, quite mobile. His face was lined but not aged-looking and his eyes were clear and kind. His hands were mottled like her own, but they were soft hands, not at all skeletal. “Come and sit beside me,” she said to him, opening the guide. “So shall we go on the Clipper? Or we could take the ferry to Vancouver and drive.”

~ • ~

It was never totally dark in hotel rooms.
Streaks of light shone round the edges of the drapes and from under the door. Ella looked at Paul asleep now in the other bed. It would be better next time when he wasn’t so shy. She sat up and took a sheet of paper from the phone pad, and the pen, and finished the poem she’d begun to write last week.
Syllabic prints on tiles Become pebbles. Cyrillic shapes bearing Positive messages Undermine wallpaper With hints of passing time.

Woman at the Bar

Young woman at the bar,
red dress covering breasts but bare to waist at back. Men perched on stools either side leaning in towards her. Hungrily? Not quite. Table near exit, older woman in yellow knitted vest, odd garment, wispy reddish hair destroyed by too many chemicals, sits alone with glass of red. Music loud enough to drive out thought. Hockey playoffs on three large screens. Loud groans as puck bounces off the post. Two women side by side at same table, eyes glued to laptops, not speaking to each other. One of them takes out cell and talks on it while still tapping keys. Mid-life Vancouver. This is me, now, here.

Jody picked up her glass of Pinot Blanc, swirled the liquid round and poured some into her mouth. It was vacation time. There’d be another glass. Maybe two. One evening away from editing the latest manuscript from Higson, from news, from calls, from making up her mind. And she would try to drown out the sound of Aritha screaming, “I’ll kill you!”

The week at The Grove had been another delaying tactic. Busy days. Nice surroundings. Healthy meals. Decent, searching people. “Beyond my competence,” she’d said to Anja before she went, but Anja had replied, “It’s all words. And you’ve seen plays. You’ve read poems. Go do it.” Four paying customers and one freebie. No one else applied. Hard financial times. Odd mixed bag. No surprise if they’d all asked for their money back last Sunday when they left. Instead, despite their minimum talent and her sparse encouragement,
they’d all gone away satisfied if not exactly happy. Lives appeared to have been changed. Any day now though, light bulbs might flash on and they’d realize they’d been had. Aritha, fifty-something, crazy, falling over her own cleverness, might publish a few more stories. Keep your day job! Not likely to get rich soon.

Well now. Woman enters, very chic, long blond hair, long black jacket, asks if she can share table. Bar crowded, orders bottle of wine. One glass. Gets out iPad. Won’t want to talk. Good. No telling, but she might have a manuscript in that costly briefcase. Nearly everybody has one hidden somewhere. Why did she not at least ask if I’m expecting someone?

“Are you expecting someone?”

“I was but I just had a call. He’ll be late.”

Lies. Was chic blond going to drink that whole bottle alone?

Jody sat back and tried to let her mind settle. This contained
panorama was not the right place for concentrated thought. Better
to have gone to Chez Laura. Always quiet there. So few customers, she and Bill thought it must be a laundry. Dirty dollars in, clean dollars out. So what had she come in here to think about anyway? Her long-term future, that was all. Three roads were open to her right now, but any one of them could be closed due to repairs by next week. The pattern of her life so far was always to choose the counterproductive sidetrack and follow the sign that pointed to
Nice View This Way
instead of continuing straight on to the main attraction. The job at The Grove, last minute because flu had felled the regular mentor, was another cul-de-sac. That cheque was hard-earned though. Poetry and drama! Iain on his way to Mexico now – or not. She’d rejected his invitation to share the journey maybe too sharply, but without emphasizing their age difference. His loneliness was apparent in the sad little note he’d left her. But she had, he wrote, given him a great idea for his play.

The woman in the red dress slipped off the bar stool, put a scarf round her naked shoulders, picked up her large leather bag and left the two men to stare after her as she walked out.

Roland’s goodbye hug had been strangely emotional. The old man was almost in tears and had thanked her as if she’d given him a million bucks. His story, if he lived long enough to write it, was a neat piece of history: the hope of the emigrant widower with kids that success would be ensured in the new land.
The return of the failure.
And how many men in the century before last had gone on that hard sea trip and returned sans cash, sans every damn thing?