Street Symphony Read Online Free PDF Page B

room at any moment. Ella had tried to nurture him, if that was the right word, and felt able to share her poem with him because he was in a sensitive state, almost raw, and would understand. When he said goodbye, he’d hugged her and whispered into her hearing aid, “Thank you very much.” For what? They’d agreed to meet without setting a date or place. As promised, she’d sent him the rest of The Rosemary Sequence by email. And that was that. No reply. After that awful last evening, she knew she’d hear nothing from the others. She’d tried to put the image of Aritha dripping wet and shrieking about her hair right out of her mind. When a person is hysterical, water often helps, and the only thing to hand, to Ella’s hand at any rate, had been her glass of Coke. Ilsa had supplied the water. Playing the truth game at night was dangerous.
    She got off the bus and crossed the road to stand for a quiet moment in front of the Carillon Tower. A gift from the Dutch community to Canada in gratitude for their country’s liberation, the bells were a reminder of those who had suffered and died. Dwarfed by the great totem poles, Ella tried to imagine the forest as it had been, centuries ago, undisturbed, unravished. The carved poles had stood outside homes and villages as warning, as narrative. Uprooted from their natural place, they served now as a welcome to the Royal BC Museum.
    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