Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  Lauren said that hope was the most powerful thing in the world, and the girl thought, You don’t even know what you’re talking about, and,

  Everything you’re saying is a lie.

  She had stood up and walked quietly to the supervising teacher, and said she had her period and had to go to the washroom. Outside in the hallway, she listened to Lauren’s voice. In the background, the receptionist’s radio whispered about the girls at Jarvis Collegiate falling down, about poison. Women in Africa, stringing tiny beads. The shudder of her own nerves.

  Nicole sprang towards the basket and the ball fell heavily home, into the net and down. The girl bent over, hands on her knees, breathing heavily, her face flushed.

  Everything you’re saying is a lie.

  You know that.

  The ball was coming her way again, the other team moving down the court; she dodged, underestimated, missed. Ran alongside, loping, feinting, pulling air into her lungs as a thin pain shot up her side, her neck hot and damp.

  Thought about the girls at Jarvis, what had brought them down. She supposed that these girls had secrets of their own. That all girls had secrets of some kind.

  In the hallway, listening to the receptionist’s radio, she had walked to a window and looked out at the small line of trees that surrounded the school grounds, the busy street beyond. Similar to the incident several days earlier, said the radio.

  The girl thought that someone could live in the woods at the back of the school grounds. Maybe they could. She wasn’t sure.

  What it would be like, out there in the cold.

  They were under the net again, her legs aching, she saw an opportunity and dashed forward and the ball met her hands, solid, that satisfying weight. She spun on the balls of her feet and passed it to Kirsty, and Kirsty grabbed the ball and leapt, her arms arcing high, high into the air.

  Snow was mounded up in the gutters and against the walls of buildings, streaked grey and brown. In his office at the hospital, unaware of the falling girls at Jarvis, Alex stood up from his computer and looked out the window, his arms folded.

  Susie hadn’t called him, of course, and he almost didn’t want to admit how relieved he felt. He’d woken on Saturday with a hangover not so much physical as emotional, the cloying sickness that came from an excess of closeness, from saying too much, feeling too much. He spent the day walking by himself in the snow, breathing in the bright chilly air, silent, not even taking pictures; and when he came home and there was no message on the machine, his chest felt suddenly light, something like fear lifting away. On Sunday he took a pile of clothes to the laundromat, and then went so far as to phone Kim, who told him to fuck off, a response he found oddly cheering.

  He turned back to his computer, to the pictures of a rose-coloured circle of exposed brain tissue framed by green sheets, silver instruments smeared with blood, and he thought about the intricacy of the vessels, the exchange of fluid and the electric life of nerves.

  The person he really had to call was his ophthalmologist. He had to tell her about the floaters, he’d put it off too long already.

  He thought of Susie at the bar in the Cameron House, wearing black tights and an emerald-green sweater that came down to her knees, the sleeves falling loosely over her hands, turning away from him in the swirl of noise and music to smile at someone else; and went back to the photos, clicking ahead in the sequence, a walnutsized tumour in a metal bowl.

  Later, as he walked through Davisville Station on his way home, he saw a woman in a tailored coat wearing a surgical mask over her mouth, and on the train, which was not as full as usual, another mask on the face of a man holding a newspaper. But otherwise the journey was normal, someone eating french fries from a cardboard container, someone reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, everyone pretending not to notice the man in the mask.

  He played with his idea of the imaginary doctor, imaginary terrorist, leaving the cherished packet of chemicals under the seat. The man would wear an expensive coat. The umbrella, too, would be expensive. Had he already begun to talk to his patients, in some veiled strange form, about the attractions of death? Written for them prescriptions more powerful than they needed, or simply given them mad unworldly advice, to drink glasses of vinegar, to consume silver foil? But the man is not just mad, he does not act alone, he is part of something large. He loves this thing that he is a part of, and he believes that he loves people too, specific individual people, maybe his parents, a wife, a mistress. He desires for all of them the end that will come.

  This was a fairy tale, of sorts, Alex thought. The bad wizard. It happened to be a fairy tale that sounded true to him – or not so much true, he didn’t think it was something that was really happening in this city, but somehow credible, appropriate. The man in the mask must have a narrative of his own that he believed, other people on the subway told themselves other particular stories. The man on his street told a story about cleaning systems, and it might be a useful story, in its way.

  He got off the train at College, moving in the swaying stutter of the crowd, past tables where people in Cancer Society T-shirts were selling pizza slices. And he was thinking of her again. The ridiculous ease with which she could have moved back into the centre of his life and tossed it all up into the air like paper, the quiet safe place he had so strenuously constructed for himself.

  On College the pigeons wheeled in the upper air, seeking shelter for the night, as the streetcar pulled up to the curb, and the slanting red light of sunset caught their wings, a shimmer of brightness and shadow, and Alex felt suddenly stabbed through the heart.

  He came home and fed his cat, put on a scarf and gloves and a black wool cap and walked east, past Yonge and into Allan Gardens, where a few men were lying curled on benches under the walls of the conservatory, broken glass and torn paper around them. In the doorway of a blank concrete building, a young girl with round cheeks and a short blue skirt, orange highlights in her teased dark hair, was standing with her legs in that angled posture that meant invitation, that meant commerce; Alex lifted his camera, and then lowered it again. The girl scratched the back of her arm and shivered. But she might be older than she looked, her youth an illusion of cosmetics and distance; it might be so.

  He walked north on Parliament and came within a few minutes into Cabbagetown – the shops along Parliament a weird jumble of discount outlets and expensive cafés, a doughnut store with the window half boarded up, a shop that sold designer pet supplies. He went into another doughnut store and got a cup of tea, warming his hands around it at a little table. Angry men were playing cards and drinking coffee, and Alex faced away from them and took pictures of their reflections in the glass.

  And it didn’t surprise him, it didn’t surprise him even a bit, that the phone rang almost as soon as he walked in the door of his apartment, while his fingers were still stiff and white with cold. It seemed like something already agreed, that it would be Susie’s voice at the other end of the line, asking him to meet her the next evening.

  IV

  I own your soul now, Alex had said, and she had seemed to believe it. She had been so young, after all, and more uncertain than he had ever realized.

  There was a day he’d been taking photographs, as the clinic escorts and the patients dashed through the gauntlet of screaming protesters, Susie-Paul holding her coat over a patient’s head as she ran, flinching as some small hard object hit her cheek. On the final sprint to the steps of the clinic, Alex slipped and fell, and cut his hand open on a rock. It wasn’t serious, but it was a dirty cut and it bled quite a bit, smears of blood on his sleeve, not what anyone needed to be looking at in the pastel waiting rooms with the twining plants. He went into the kitchen at the back of the house, where one of the staff members was making tea and a security guard was monitoring the closed-circuit camera feed, and washed his hand in the sink. He was scrubbing it under the running water, watching the red drizzle spiral down, when Susie came in with cotton and gauze.

  ‘Let m
e do it for you,’ she said. She was quick and efficient about wrapping it up and taping it, but then she didn’t let go of his hand.

  ‘You’re all right?’ she asked, and she was holding his hand in both of hers.

  ‘Oh yeah. Nothing to it.’ He felt perfectly calm and perfectly safe, and without much thought he leaned down and kissed her forehead, and she laid her head against his chest. At that moment, he was sure, he might have put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips, but there were still facts out there – he was in a room with other people, people who were now watching them, in a place where they had to deal every day with certain extreme consequences of human behaviour, and there was blood on his shirt. She lives with Chris.

  He watched her through bulletproof glass as she walked down the wooden steps to the tiny yard, her boots over frozen mud while a line of protesters tossed pamphlets and plastic embryos at her head. A heavy man threw himself into an icy puddle in front of her, clutching his chest and crying, ‘Don’t kill your baby! Don’t kill your baby!’, his voice audible even through the thick window as Susie sidestepped him, refusing to run, walking carefully and deliberately into the alley and away.

  Susie at the pay phone up the street, biting her lip, one hand pressed against the glass. He shouldn’t have been watching her, but he was. Whoever she was talking to. He had no way of knowing.

  Susie standing on a chair in his darkroom, in the red light, a marker in her hand, writing on the walls.

  ‘You need something in here, is all. I mean, you nearly live here, you might as well decorate.’

  ‘It’s not even our wall. It belongs to the university paper. They’re not going to love this.’

  ‘They can cope,’ said Susie. Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams, she wrote, under a string of New Order lyrics. Alex imagined a sketch he could add. Maybe he had done it later, with paper and pencil, back in his apartment. But if he ever did draw it, he lost it later on.

  Spring night, late spring, the dark air mild. Alex was high and euphoric, dazzled. He’d been smoking hash, and drinking too much beer, which wasn’t a good idea, he wasn’t in control of his blood sugar, but he was trying to balance it out by eating french fries and ketchup. Walking on a wire. Out on the dance floor of a club on Bloor Street, a bit unsteady on his feet, the flash on his camera going off in chains of light as the keyboard player climbed up onto his Casio, sweat dripping from his forehead and soaking his shirt, and began to play the heating pipes with a pair of drumsticks. Alex firing off another shot, knowing that by some process he himself didn’t understand, he would come out of this with pictures that were clear and dry and precise, recognizable Alex Deveney photos, all this heat and desire purified into an image, a hieroglyph of objective thought.

  The band left the stage and the taped music came on, the bass shuddering up through his feet in time with his pulse. He leaned against the wall near Adrian’s table, wiping his face with the neck of his T-shirt.

  Adrian had brought Evelyn with him, and she was sitting beside him, reading a book in the flickering light; this was a bit of an event, since none of Adrian’s friends could remember having ever seen Evelyn before, and some of them had recently expressed the opinion that she was imaginary. They were in the middle of a conversation which was incomprehensible to Alex, but evidently intense and somehow entertaining.

  ‘So I told my supervisor about it,’ Evelyn was saying, ‘and he said to me, “You used the word apophatic, didn’t you?” and I said, “Yeah. I guess I did.” “Well, serves you right, doesn’t it?” he said.’

  ‘Did you say affective, too?’ asked Adrian.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Probably.’

  Adrian lit a cigarette and held the pack out towards Alex, who hardly ever smoked tobacco, but that night he wanted cigarettes with the same hunger he wanted everything, dope, music, love. He pulled one from the pack and took out his lighter, squinting down at the fire. He seemed to be having trouble getting the flame to connect with the end of the cigarette.

  ‘Alex. Man,’ said Adrian. ‘You’re really shaking.’

  ‘I’m okay.’ He managed to light the cigarette and lift it to his mouth.

  ‘I don’t think you are, actually. I think you’re going hypo.’

  ‘I told you, I’m okay,’ said Alex impatiently, and started to walk away, but he lost his footing and nearly fell, and Adrian grabbed hold of his arm.

  ‘That’s it. Come with me.’ He steered Alex towards the vending machine by the bar, the lights moving dizzy against the walls.

  ‘You have money?’

  ‘Of course I have money. Jesus.’

  ‘Can I trust you to buy yourself a chocolate bar?’ asked Adrian, glancing back at Evelyn sitting with her book. ‘Or do I have to stand here and watch you?’

  ‘I will buy myself a chocolate bar, mother. Scout’s Honour, okay?’

  Adrian went back to the table, and Alex put a hand on the vending machine to steady himself, blinking a few times until his vision cleared. The machine had several kinds of candy, but he realized now that he was both very stoned and very shaky, and somehow it seemed impossibly hard to operate. He pulled a handful of change out of his pocket, but when he tried to work out what he needed the numbers kept blurring in his mind, breaking up along the shiny glittering edges of the coins under the flickering bar lights, too damn complicated, and then it was quite difficult to get them into the narrow change slot, he didn’t know why they made those slots so narrow anyway. So he didn’t notice the voices behind him until he was fishing out his chocolate bar and heard a glass smashing to the ground; and even then, working the complicated foil wrapping off the candy, he didn’t pay attention until he heard Susie-Paul, on the verge of tears, shouting, ‘Fuck you, then! Just fuck you!’

  His mouth full of chocolate, he turned and saw Susie-Paul and Chris, their faces pale and angry. He couldn’t tell which one of them had thrown the glass. They were close together, facing each other across the glittering shards.

  ‘You’re behaving like a child,’ said Chris, the words hissing between his teeth. ‘Grow up, will you?’

  ‘Do not, do not, patronize me like that, I will not put up with that,’ wept Susie, and raised one hand, her arm flexed, palm open. Chris grabbed her wrist and pushed her arm down. ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘calm down, nobody wants to see a scene in a bar here.’

  ‘Fuck what they want!’ She pulled her hand away from him. ‘You can’t just blame this on people, you have to talk to me!’

  Alex pressed his own fists against his mouth and swallowed, trying to fight back an explosion of anxious laughter. They hadn’t seen him. This was something arcane and private, and he shouldn’t be watching it.

  ‘I do talk to you, I talk to you all the fucking time, what the fuck do you want me to say?’

  ‘Don’t ask me what I want, this is not about what I want. Don’t fucking make this be about me, because this is not my problem.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know whose problem it is, then, because frankly you’re the one acting like you’re crazy.’

  ‘How DARE YOU!’ screamed Susie. She was suddenly moving, she slammed her hands against his chest and he stumbled backwards. ‘How dare you say that! Get the fuck away from me, you fucking shithead!’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Chris swept a pile of napkins off the bar with his arm as he tried to regain his balance. ‘I might as well, ’cause there’s no fucking point to this.’

  ‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!’ Susie shouted, and shoved him again, hard. He grabbed at the bar to steady himself, then turned and stalked towards the door and out, and he didn’t look back at her as he left.

  The rest of the chocolate bar was melting in Alex’s hand. He took a short step forward, then back, his ears ringing with the music surrounding them. He could feel the shakiness of the hypo subsiding, but he was still dizzy. His head filled with space. She was sitting on a bar stool sobbing, and her hair was the colour of cotton candy, her dress
was peppermint, green crushed velvet, ragged and soft. She would never cry like that because of Alex. He knew this, and the knowledge hurt him. She dried her eyes with a napkin, and he could see the dark smear of her mascara on the paper.

  She got down from the stool and walked slowly back towards the dance floor, and as she passed she saw him. She gave him a small vague nod of recognition but nothing happened in her eyes at all. He didn’t matter in this, not even a bit. There was no reason that he should.

  Alex stood by the wall and closed his eyes, hearing the shift in sound as the tapes ended and another band came out onstage. Looked across the room and saw her kneeling down by Evelyn’s chair, Evelyn shaking her head and putting one hand softly on Susie’s back. Susie wiped her eyes, said something to Evelyn, stood up and shrugged and moved onto the dance floor.

  He wrestled a second chocolate bar from the machine, broke off a piece and ate it, and went to the bar and ordered another beer. He understood precisely how dangerous this was, but he needed to drink, he needed to be more drunk, as far outside himself as he could get.

  He slumped into a chair beside Adrian and watched Susie-Paul out on the floor, tossing her head furiously, light and shadow moving across her body, the sway of her hips, the sinuous arch of her pale bare arms. Nothing made sense. The singer edged anxiously around his microphone, thin and awkward, belonging here as little as anyone else, in a swirl of rising music.

  The bar was emptying out, gradually, the lights turned on to reveal puddles of beer and smashed bottles across the dance floor. It was more than an hour after last call, and Evelyn was nearly at the end of her book. Alex was rolling an empty beer bottle around on the table, watching the yellow smears of light in the amber glass and, at the edge of his vision, Susie-Paul, standing near the stage talking to a little group of Dissonance people. Most likely he could have stood up and joined them. The bottle slid off the table to the floor. Then the soft green folds of her dress as she moved away from the group, and he lifted his head and wondered how he could ever have doubted. She would come after all. She always would.