Free Street Symphony by Rachel Wyatt Page B

isn’t well this morning,” he said. “He’s had to go home. He feels responsible for this problem as he checked the credentials himself. The police are looking for Harvey now.”
    “I’m sorry about O’Brien,” the one called Davis said. “Good that you’re on it, McDowell. Now if we could check the figures.”
    Bart looked beyond them at the streaky glass that had separated Arvin O’Brien from the rest of the staff. He knew now that some things could never be sorted out and that a man must go through life aware that all the walls in all the world were transparent.

Street Symphony

    Pedestrians turned away from her and Joy didn’t blame them. Let them live their lives in a cloud of ignorant satisfaction. Complacency and their wrongness about existence and the reason for it would, according to Errol, catch up with them one day. This was the last day of her self-imposed task to stir, to waken, to discomfit, to send people home to their cosy boltholes dissatisfied and even, maybe, a little bit afraid. A few smiled at her and nodded, and now and then someone gave her money. Last Friday she’d seen Grant coming towards her and, in trying to avoid him, she’d tumbled into a doorway on top of a man who was crouched there with his dog. He was surprised and pleased when she handed him a twenty-dollar bill.
    Two boys pointed at her sign and shouted, “Yes we are!” One day, maybe in ten years’ time when they were hanging around bars jobless, aimless and useless, the kids would remember her. Meanwhile, they jogged on their way unaware. The danger of being recognized was slight. People saw what they wanted to see, and no one she knew would expect to come upon Joy Reilly walking about town holding up a placard. In any case, she could always hide her face behind it. Now it was time to take the board off its short stick and put the two pieces into her gym bag. Bus drivers didn’t stop for sign-wielders, especially if they didn’t like the message.
    She sat with nine other passengers passively rolling past houses and the ends of roads that were not theirs, waiting to pull the cord for the stop that meant home. She was reluctant to get off on this night. She wanted to ride on and think about all the Thursday evenings she and Grant had spent drinking wine and making plans and having sex. In their first years together, he’d taken Fridays off so that he could spend three days building his boat, and she made sure her last student had left by five. They’d spread out the large-scale map and pinpoint islands they wanted to visit when the boat was ready. Now, given that his current partner was a high-price real estate agent, he likely spent the evenings at home alone.
    Home! Stop Requested. Home now: a small room in a house that time and weather and neglect had combined to beat into a depressed state. Errol would be in his cubbyhole printing out exhortations and slipping bits of paper into envelopes that he pushed through the mail slots of certain houses. His intent was to inform, to encourage, to enlighten, to give people a chance to change. He never mentioned Gadarene swine, but that was how he saw the inhabitants of the is land in general and some in particular. He talked in that preacherly baritone as if he were the first person in the world to understand that making people think was the best thing you could do for them. Joy didn’t tell him that every teacher in just about every classroom in the entire universe knew that. It was a great gift, better even than love, Errol said, because love can change. He was always bitter when he talked about love. His sister Annie told them both they were wasting their time: “You can’t convert the inconvertible.”
    Joy walked slowly down the short street. Some days her feelings of despair sank into her feet. But today even the yard looked cheerful. Rain had encouraged the weeds. Three scrawny pumpkins flourished where they’d only expected two. A police car went screeching by,