Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  Girls Fall Down

  Maggie Helwig

  Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto

  A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour.

  Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.

  Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. This is a remarkable novel: romantically and politically charged, utterly convincing in its portrait of our individual and societal instability, and steadfast in its faith in redemption.

  Maggie Helwig

  GIRLS FALL DOWN

  for David Barker Maltby,

  photographer

  Bodies in Space

  I

  The city is a winter city, at its heart. Though the ozone layer is thinning above it, and the summers grow long and fierce, still the city always anticipates winter. Anticipates hardship. In the winter, when it is raw and grey and dim, it is itself most truly.

  People come here from summer countries and learn to be winter people. But there are worse fates. That is exactly why many of them come here, because there are far worse fates than winter.

  It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground. It has built strata of malls and pathways and inhabited spaces like the layers in an archaeological dig, a body below the earth, flowing with light. People turn to buried places, to successive levels of basements, lowered courtyards, gardens under glass. There are beauties to winter that are unexpected, the silence of snow, the intimacy with which we curl around places of warmth. Even the homeless and the outcasts travel downwards when they can, into the ravines that slice around and under the streets, where the rivers, the Don and the Humber and their tributaries, carve into the heart of the city; they build homes out of tents and slabs of metal siding, decorate them with bicycle wheels and dolls on strings and boxes of discarded books, with ribbons and mittens, and huddle in the cold beside the thin water.

  It is hard to imagine this city being damaged by something from the sky. The dangers to this city enter the bloodstream, move through interior channels.

  The girl was kneeling by the door of the subway car, a circle of friends surrounding her like birds. Her hands were over her narrow face, she was weeping, and there were angry red welts across her cheeks, white circles around them. Her friends touched her back, her arms, their voices an anxious chirp. There was a puddle of vomit at her feet, and she lowered one hand to wipe her mouth, leaning against the door.

  A space had already cleared around them. Some of the passengers in the nearby seats held hands or tissues discreetly over their mouths, but as if this were incidental, as if they weren’t quite aware of anything. As the train rocked through the tunnel, a bubble of light between the dark walls, a few people got to their feet and moved down the car.

  The train came into Bloor station and jerked to a stop, and the girl leaned backwards, the pool of vomit spreading, her friends lifting up their feet with little cries. As the door opened, a mass of people on the platform surged forward, then stopped, moved back into the crush and towards another car, their eyes turned politely away.

  A grey-haired man in a dark coat stood up and walked to where the girls were standing. ‘Does she have an EpiPen?’ he asked.

  ‘A what? What’s that?’ A tall girl brushed blonde hair from her eyes. Another girl was hanging on to the metal pole, resting her forehead against it, her red tie hanging straight down, her plaid kilt rolled up at the waist, brushing her thighs. The train wasn’t moving on.

  ‘An EpiPen. For allergies.’

  ‘I’m not allergic,’ said the sick girl. The man bent down to look at her rash, keeping a slight distance between them. ‘She smelled something,’ the tall girl said. ‘There’s a gas in the car or something. They should tell somebody.’ She kept talking, but at the same time the PA system gave a quick shriek, and a distorted voice announced that the train was out of service. Beyond the door of the subway car, the crowd began to move like a huge resigned sigh, pushing towards the stairways.

  ‘They’ll have paramedics here soon,’ said the man. He was about to leave, it seemed, when the dark-haired girl who had been holding on to the pole suddenly swayed and put out one hand, falling to the muddy floor. The other one, the tall blonde, dropped to her knees beside her friend, crying her name.

  The man knelt down, frowning. ‘If you want, I could call –’ ‘Go away,’ whimpered the first girl, dabbing at tears on her welt-covered face. ‘Go away, it’s too awful. It’s not right.’

  ‘It’s poison,’ cried a girl with curly rust-coloured hair. ‘Somebody put a poison in the train.’

  The girl who had just fallen lay with her eyes closed. She too was covered with a rash, but a different one, a red prickly flush all over her face and hands.

  ‘Someone put a poison gas on the train,’ shouted the tall girl, trying to lift up her friend. The crowd outside the train heard her, and the volume of their voices increased, heads turning, some people stopping where they were. The man held his breath for a second; then, as if seized by an uncontrollable impulse, he sniffed the air, deeply.

  ‘What was it like, the smell?’ he asked the kneeling girl.

  The station was being cleared now, the crowd on the platform fragmenting, breaking into individuals, a blur of brown and beige skin tones, splashes of bright-coloured fabric, patterns and stripes. Announcements were sounding over the PA system, men in uniform appearing, moving people quickly to the exits. A slender woman with plastic bags in her hand stood still and stared at the train, her mouth partly open.

  The girl who had fallen was sitting halfway up, clinging again to the pole. ‘Roses,’ she said. ‘It smelled like roses.’

  A heavy-set man sat down hard at the top of the stairs, his face suffused with blood, gasping for breath, and a stranger took hold of his arm and pulled him along as far as the fare booth, where he stumbled and fell.

  The girl was creeping towards the door of the train, stopping to wipe at the smears of vomit on her legs, and her friend was sitting up, dazed, leaning her head against the tall girl’s chest. On the level above, a woman took off her parka and bundled it underneath the head of the man by the fare booth.

  The man in the dark coat started to put a hand out towards one of the girls, and then pulled it back. He looked up and saw the security guards arriving. ‘They’re coming now,’ he said, ‘you’ll be okay,’ and left the train, heading for the stairs. As he went up, the first team of paramedics pushed past him, carrying an orange stretcher, a policewoman watching from the upper level.

  ‘They smelled a gas,’ someone was saying at the top of the stairs. The paramedics lifted the first girl onto th
e stretcher. ‘Roses,’ she said.

  One of the girls said, ‘Poison,’ again. The woman with the plastic bags was still frozen on the platform. Then she swayed, fell to her knees.

  ‘Jesus!’ crackled the voice on the PA, someone forgetting he was in front of a live mike. ‘There’s four of them down now. What the hell’s going on here?’

  The man at the fare booth told someone that he thought it was his heart, he was pretty sure it was his heart, but when he thought about it he did remember the smell. Yes. The smell of roses.

  As more paramedics arrived, a policewoman placed the first call for a hazmat team.

  The corridor was narrow and badly lit, the arms of the mall branching off in odd directions, and the stairs were filled now with more police and paramedics coming down, wearing face masks, as the crowd, expelled from the subway, made their way up. No one was paying attention to Alex, as he slid through the turnstile and up the stairs to the mall – and why should they, he was ordinary and forgettable, a thin man who looked much older than thirty-nine, wearing a reasonably good dark coat, his prematurely grey hair cut short. He ducked into the drugstore on his right, hoping it would carry disposable cameras – pieces of shit, they were, he’d never get a decent picture, but at least he’d have a camera-like object in his hands, at least he’d be able to think.

  He was not the only person who had broken away from the crowd; in front of him, while he waited at the checkout with a disposable that doubled as a coupon for a Shrek hand puppet, were several people with their arms full of what seemed to be anxiety purchases, vitamin C and ginseng tablets, plastic gloves, antibacterial handwipes. Last year when the buildings fell in New York, in the midst of the aftershock a day or two later, he’d gone into the SuperSave on Bloor and watched people hoarding, all of them apparently unaware of what they were doing – smiling, chatting, walking calmly through the aisles, and at the same time piling their carts full of toilet paper and canned tuna and bags of pasta. Commenting cheerfully on the weather to the sales clerks while stacking up boxes of cheap candles at the cash register. Because you didn’t admit to fear, not up in this country; it would be disruptive and far too personal, and not very nice for everyone around you. He used to consider this an appalling attitude, but lately he thought he was coming to see some virtue in it; the gentle restraint of people who live close together in the cold, and know that they must be patient.

  He stepped out onto the seething pavement, between the concrete buttresses of the mall. People were standing at the curb waving for taxis, the line stretching down the block; in front of him at the corner they crowded together, surrounding the hot-dog vendor, covering all of the broad sidewalk and spilling into the street. A city bus arrived, running west, and was surrounded, rushed by a frantic swarm, a few of them making it inside, cramming up against the entryway until the doors groaned closed, and the bus swayed with the weight and set out slowly into the gridlock of taxis on Bloor Street. Another bus was creeping southwards towards them on Yonge – both lines were shut down, then.

  He scrambled up against a buttress, bracing one leg at an angle and getting his head above the crush. It was nearly dark. He knew this camera couldn’t really handle the complex light of the swiftly falling evening, but he turned west, tried to frame a shot of the buses, then eastwards, the spire of the Anglican church black against the ink-blue sky and a smoke of charcoal cloud, the line of raised arms hailing taxis down Bloor, an echo of upward movement. Dropping down again, frustrated by the shadows, he slid towards the curb and hopped delicately out into the road, firing shots off quickly in a flurry of car horns as the lights from the stores washed over the traffic, a choppy lake surface. Then, swinging one foot back onto the sidewalk, he realized that the viewfinder was framing the narrow clever face of Adrian Pereira.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, lowering the camera.

  ‘Alex Deveney?’

  ‘Yeah. Adrian.’ He was still standing with one foot in the road, the traffic motionless now. He stepped back up onto the sidewalk. Adrian Pereira, observant and amused, older, his curly black hair thinner, but unmistakably himself. ‘Man, it’s been about a million years.’

  ‘Give or take.’ Adrian pushed a small pair of wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. ‘So I hear we’ve had an airborne toxic event.’

  ‘That’s from a book, right?’

  ‘Also latterly from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s multivalent.’

  ‘I was there, actually. I mean, I think I was. I was right by these girls who were fainting, anyway, if that’s what started all this.’

  ‘Oh yeah? So you’re, like, laden with anthrax spores?’

  ‘That’s what I figure.’ He wondered if he was handling this properly. If he should say more, or less, shake hands perhaps, or apologize for something. Or say something about those times, when they were young and anxious and the world was wide open. A quick sense memory of smoke and music flickered over him.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ Adrian looked around, ‘I heard there was a gas on the train. A chemical leak, maybe?’

  Alex pushed the disposable camera into his pocket. ‘Honestly, I don’t think so. It just, it didn’t look like that to me. It was a weird set of symptoms, it didn’t look like anything that made sense. And I was right there, it’s not like I’m dropping on the pavement.’ He looked at his wrists. ‘I keep thinking I’m getting a rash, but it’s just a nervous twitch.’

  ‘You should talk to one of those guys,’ said Adrian, waving his arm at the three ambulances which had now stationed themselves at the corner.

  ‘I’m not attached to spending a whole night in the hospital so they can tell me I’m fine. I figure I’m being a good citizen by saving them the trouble.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  They wove through the seething stationary traffic, crossing from the northeast corner to the northwest. Alex supposed that he was deciding to walk home; where Adrian was going, he didn’t know.

  Adrian pulled his jacket around himself. ‘Do you still see anyone from the paper?’

  ‘Me? No.’ Alex bent forward under a gust of wind, the sky fully dark now. ‘I’m right out of touch with the world. Are you still playing?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ Adrian shrugged. ‘Now and then. Here and there. Mostly teaching guitar to little kiddies, actually. I feel they should have the opportunity to waste their lives in turn.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Alex saw a mass of people at the next corner, pouring out from the Bay station, waving at the bus as it rocked perilously through the stream of stalled cars. Behind them, the imploring wail of the ambulances.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve been infected with smallpox,’ suggested Adrian.

  ‘Yes, very likely. Or maybe the plague. Plague would be good.’

  ‘I’d take some Tylenol if I were you.’

  One of the ambulances had forced itself through the traffic, its blue light splashing against the glass walls of the Gap.

  ‘I see Suzanne now and then,’ said Adrian.

  ‘Suzanne.’ No one called her that, back then. Except maybe Alex.

  ‘Susie-Paul.’

  He kept his voice casual, he thought. ‘She’s back in Toronto?’

  ‘Did she leave?’ Alex stopped walking and stared at Adrian, who put a hand to his forehead. ‘I’m sorry, Alex. Of course she did, I forgot. But yeah, she’s been back a long time. She was wondering if you were still around, actually.’

  ‘Well, obviously I’m still around. I mean, people can look in the phone book if they’re so damn curious.’

  ‘I guess that’s true. Nobody thinks of the phone book nowadays, do they? It’s like, that’s a land-based life form, we’ve moved on.’

  ‘Well. I’m in the phone book, as it happens. Lumbering towards Armageddon.’

  ‘Yeah, okay, ’cause she might want to know that.’

  ‘It’s not a question of knowing, is it, it’s like, you open up the book and see it or not. I mean, if you want to know, it’s not like it’s an actual difficulty.�
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  ‘Yeah, okay.’ He nodded towards the corner. ‘I have to go north here.’

  ‘Oh, well, okay.’ Alex shifted from foot to foot, wondering if he should ask for a phone number, if that would seem too demanding.

  ‘Good to see you and all.’

  ‘You too, Alex. Who knows, maybe I’ll see you the next time they poison the subway.’

  Adrian turned and started to walk up the street. ‘Hey,’ Alex called suddenly. ‘Hang on a sec?’

  ‘Yeah?’ He turned again to face Alex.

  ‘What’s she doing now?’

  ‘Oh. I don’t know exactly.’ He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Something intelligent. You know.’ And then he was gone, into the laneways and expensive boutiques of Yorkville, the crowd swelling on the street behind him.

  At Yonge and Bloor, bloated figures in papery white suits crept down the stairs, breathing through masks, holding up instruments with lights and dials. The security guard who remained in the station held a towel across his face as he led the white figures towards the train. Behind smoky glass, another guard sat with his head down, trying to breathe, his hands damp.

  Decontamination, said a white figure, its voice obscured by the air filter.

  The guard nodded.

  What about the girls? said a figure.

  Telephone the hospital, said another.

  Just precautionary. That’s all. Can’t be too careful.

  After the Bloor/Yonge station was cleared at both levels, the trains stopped running north up as far as Eglinton, and south to Union; the eastbound line halted at St. George and the westbound at Broadview. And at every stop along the route the people of the city spilled out, onto subway platforms, into underground walkways and shopping malls, onto the sidewalks and roads, driven upwards into the air. At Queen, as the train pulled into the station, a forty-year-old bass player with thinning red hair, dressed entirely in black leather, was saying to his companion, ‘Drummers. They’re like a different breed, man, eh? Seriously, drummers are a whole different breed.’