Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  Susie covered her face with her hands. Slowly, quietly, Alex moved towards them. Derek rocked back and forth and seemed not to notice him, and he knelt in the frozen mud beside Susie and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up, and for a second bent her head to the side so that her cheek touched his fingers.

  ‘Derek,’ she said, her voice steady. ‘I understand that you’re sad. My concern right now is the weather. It is too cold to be living outside.’

  Derek wiped tears and mucus from his face and took several deep, shaky breaths. ‘Will you introduce me to your friend?’ he said.

  Susie glanced at Alex and shrugged. ‘Derek, this is Alex Deveney. Alex, Derek Rae.’

  He stretched out his hand. Alex slid off his glove and took it, and they shook briefly. Derek’s hand was trembling, and it felt wet and clammy and very cold.

  ‘I don’t think you can take proper care of my sister,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t suppose I can.’

  ‘I’m a grown woman, Derek. I take care of myself.’

  Derek frowned. ‘But you’re still very little. You’re my baby girl.’

  ‘Let’s talk about this housing problem.’

  ‘They won’t let me come inside,’ said Derek. ‘You know that. They never let me come inside. They make me go out.’

  ‘Well, I’m trying to find a place that won’t make you go out.’

  He shook his head. ‘They always make me go out. They tell me about the behaviour. They don’t understand my parameters.’

  ‘If you’d take your medication, we wouldn’t have so many problems with your parameters.’

  Derek scowled and looked sideways, towards the concrete wall, twitching a bit. ‘We’ve discussed this before. I don’t need medication. I have my own self-regulatory system.’

  ‘Oh yeah. That’s why you’re starving to death in the snow under a bridge.’

  ‘Baby girl.’ Derek lifted his eyes to Susie, and crept slowly towards her, his voice suddenly dreamy, his tongue moving back and forth across his lower lip. ‘Remember when you were bitten by the snake? I saved your life. I sucked the poison from your blood.’

  Susie made a small noise, and Alex put his hand back on her shoulder.

  ‘You were lying dead on the ground. You were so pale. You had no heartbeat. I picked you up in my arms and sucked the poison from your blood. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘That isn’t what happened,’ said Susie. She reached up to her shoulder and held on to Alex’s hand with her own.

  ‘I saved your life a hundred times. It was so hard. They kept trying to kill us, but I protected you. I will always protect you if you let me.’ He touched her knee with his hand. ‘Mom and Dad put the snake in your bedroom.’

  Alex felt Susie’s nails through the back of his glove. ‘You know that it didn’t happen like that,’ she said weakly.

  ‘They tried to kill you so many times. Then they realized they’d have to kill me first. But I won’t let them, baby girl.’

  Susie shook her head, exhaling hard.

  ‘The snake was five feet long and golden, and it sank its teeth into your little thin arm, your poor little arm, while you were sleeping in your innocent bed. The poison went straight to your heart and you died. You died in my arms.’

  ‘Derek.’ Susie pushed herself backwards decisively, and her voice was sharp and businesslike. ‘Forget the damn snake. I never died of snakebite. Let’s talk about your medication.’

  Derek sat up, his legs going into a nearly convulsive twitch. ‘Susie-Paul, I don’t want to hear any more of these dangerous ideas. You know that I regulate my own fluid patterns. I had a buildup of semen this week and I dealt with it by my own measures.’

  ‘Oh God. Not this again.’

  ‘It was semen of a particularly thick and corrosive nature. Building up and expressing itself into my penis and interfering with the release of urine. It was quite urgent to find a means to discharge it.’ His hands were twining and untwining, his voice getting higher, more anxious.

  ‘Cut it out, Derek. Drop the subject now.’ She looked up at Alex. I’m sorry, she mouthed.

  It’s okay, he mouthed back.

  ‘It was building up from my penis and testicles and entering my kidneys. It could have been very very hazardous. There was a leakage of semen from my penis on a regular basis.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, would you please shut up about this? I have a friend here.’

  Derek rolled his head slowly from side to side. ‘Oh. Oh dear. It’s a problem. It’s a serious problem.’

  ‘Shit,’ murmured Susie, and motioned Alex away; he backed off a couple of feet, still within the circle of pale light. Derek was rocking and wringing his hands, his tongue working at one side of his mouth.

  ‘And they say, and they say, we can’t tolerate this, no no, we can’t tolerate this, but I never did the crime. I never did.’

  ‘Derek. Derek. Listen to my voice. Calm down.’

  ‘And you say, oh God, and oh God, but what kind of God is that? When they do these things? This is what kind of God. And why did they want to hurt you? I don’t understand, and I say, I don’t understand, but why would you hurt her, and I tried to protect you, baby, I tried and tried.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Susie. ‘Please don’t do this. Just calm down, can’t you calm down?’

  ‘Fucking hate, fucking hate, fucking hate this, but I never did the crime, did I, so why do I, why do I, why the hell, oh God, why do I have to live like this?’

  Susie stretched out her hand and tried to touch him, but he was a dystonic scatter of movements, unpredictable. His own hands flew up and began to claw around his eyes, saliva trailing from his lips, and she seized his wrists and pulled them fiercely down. He crashed into her lap in something like a spasm and threw his arms around her, wailing, ‘Why don’t you stay with me? Why don’t you ever stay?’

  ‘Derek, please.’ Susie fell backwards under his weight, thrusting one arm into the mud to support herself, as Derek pressed his head against her chest, sobbing, his hands grasping up to her face.

  ‘Oh God, oh Jesus, what did I ever do to deserve this? They say I did the crime and they have to kill me, but I never did it, baby, I never did.’ Susie was almost flat on the ground now, dangerously close to the edge of the hill, Derek’s mouth on her neck, his body covering hers, and for a moment her arms seemed to go limp, helpless. Alex started forward.

  But then she was moving again, she struggled free, and Derek slid down in a heap, his hands in his hair, a high hollow wail pouring out of his throat. Susie scrambled in the mud and pulled herself up, pressing her fists against her eyes.

  ‘I know, Derek. I know you didn’t,’ she said, fighting for breath. ‘It’s all right. Just please. Try to calm down.’

  ‘They poison me and fuck me up the ass until I bleed.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘They want control of my mind so they can make me do the evil thing.’

  Her face tense with effort, Susie leaned back towards him and rested her hands on his head, pulling his fingers out of his hair. ‘Oh, Derek. It’s okay. It’s okay.’

  ‘I’m not the bad garbage,’ he said, his voice a thin whine.

  ‘No. No, you’re not. Sit up now, please. Sit up, Derek.’

  He lifted his head, pulling his shoulders up until he could look in her eyes, wiping mud from his face.

  ‘Will you talk to me, Derek, about coming inside?’

  ‘No. No no. It’s not a good choice. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Then I have to leave now. I’ll come back another day. I could bring you, I don’t know, a warm blanket or something?’

  ‘I have my resources. I’m not in need.’

  ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Will you give me a kiss before you go?’

  Susie frowned, a deep furrow between her eyes, and bit at her thumbnail.

  ‘Please, little sister?’

  She leaned towards Derek, and briefly, s
oftly, touched his wet lips with her own.

  ‘I won’t let them hurt you,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes, Derek. Thanks. I appreciate that.’

  She came back to Alex, and they scrambled up the short slope and crossed the railway track. Susie didn’t hurry across, he noticed; she saw that there were no lights, there was no sound of an approaching train, and walked over it at a normal speed, unafraid. She put her hands in her coat pockets and stood at the top of the hill, her jeans dark with mud and melted snow, staring across the ravine.

  He remembered that night in the bar, all that time ago, when he had watched her crying, and he thought now that it had never been because of Chris at all, not Chris and not him, none of the things that had seemed so important.

  ‘I’ve been the lucky one, Alex,’ she said softly. ‘Just lucky. That’s all.’

  The door of the Donut Wheel’s smoking room opened and then shut nearby, and the smell of cigarettes drifted around them at their table.

  ‘I don’t know what options I have. He hasn’t done anything that could be grounds for involuntary hospitalization.’ Susie ran her finger over a bead of moisture on her beer bottle. ‘I don’t think I’d want to do that even if I had grounds. There’s – there’s trust issues here. It’s just I’m really worried… I don’t think it’s an accident he’s living so close to the railway tracks. He’s tried to hurt himself before.’

  The alcohol seemed to be affecting Alex disproportionately; he felt nearly drunk already after a single beer, and so drained and tangled up in confusion and, God help him, a sick kind of jealousy, that he could hardly put words together. ‘Aren’t there social workers? Anybody?’

  ‘Well, what are they going to do with a guy under a bridge who won’t talk to them? I mean, in a bizarre sort of way he’s quite functional right now. Except for the not eating and the freezing to death.’ She picked at a maple-glazed doughnut, rolling bits of white pastry between her fingers. ‘I’ll call up social services, though. Maybe one of these days they’ll have a useful idea.’

  Alex went to the counter and bought two more bottles of beer, thinking that she would kill him yet. Watched her pretty mouth on the brown glass, the slight movement of her throat when she swallowed. His mind full of serpents and severed heads, and the things that can happen to children.

  ‘I don’t know anything about you,’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘You know more than most.’

  He took a long drink of beer and shook his head. ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Oh well.’ She broke a fragment of icing off the doughnut and licked it from the end of her finger. ‘It’s probably not worth knowing.’

  Outside on Broadview, in the cold, he slid his arms clumsily beneath her unbuttoned coat and kissed the side of her mouth – he really was drunk somehow, it was ridiculous. She took one of his hands and pressed the knuckles to her lips, but he could see that this was already a movement away; he knew before she said it that she wouldn’t want him to come to her house that night.

  ‘But, you know, Sunday, if you want to do the photo thing.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

  ‘Take me somewhere you know about,’ she said. ‘Some weird hidden place. Show me the city. I promise not to criticize.’

  ‘It’s okay if you do. It’s your job in a way.’

  He walked down to the Danforth where the street signs were all in Greek, and he might as well have been in a foreign country, he knew so little, he was so far away.

  Teenagers and old men wrapped scarves over their faces, picked up canvas bags and set out on newspaper routes with the early editions. One of the papers carried an article on the front page reporting, disapprovingly, the release on bail of the suspected terrorist, the man who had been parking his bicycle, now charged with assaulting a police officer.

  On the next page, an article about the girl who had died of meningitis, the number to call if you had known her, the symptoms you should fear.

  And at five in the morning Alex was walking around the west end, in the rising chill before dawn, his ears numb with cold and his blood sugar off, wondering why he couldn’t stop doing this, surfing these waves of self-destruction, wanting her with the sick pain of a physical lack, the skin-twitch of hunger as her hands withdrew. And his eyes went on bleeding.

  Derek Rae beneath his bridge, writing on scraps of paper, trying to bring back the numbers he once knew.

  Remember this.

  A boy and a girl, dark-eyed and small. The grass of the lawn is cut short, a perfect chemical green.

  Listen, says the boy. I will save you. I will always save you. He pokes branches into the earth, a pattern, a star or a helix. I will learn about the nature of time, he says. I will learn how to change the world.

  The girl, even now, understands that he will fail. But she loves him. There is no one else. The girl knows too much, for a child this small, about having no choices.

  Gusts of dirty smoke unrolled across a landscape of broken glass, in the bleached light of a winter dawn, and between the smoke, parting it like curtains, the white figures moved, flames at their feet. Raised arms to signal to the others, the masks over their faces smeared with black dust, their breathing harsh. The strange cracked sounds of fire.

  The hoses stretched out, long paths of canvas, and the firefighters, masked as well, their uniforms coated with ash, directed the streams of water towards the windows of the warehouse, and the smoke turned heavy and dark, clotted clouds hanging low to the walls.

  The white figures moved in the doorway, bloated and clumsy, turning in gradual motion. Within the doors of the warehouse, a livid blackness. They held up their ashen hands, their instruments, their mysterious process. Their slow-dance liturgical beauty.

  The smoke divided, inside the warehouse, and revealed the signs on the walls, on the yellow barrels, the chemical hazard signals.

  Bioterrorism, said someone, standing a street away. That’s what I heard.

  I don’t think so

  , said somebody else.

  I’m just telling you. That’s what they say.

  Coming back inside from hours of cold was more than a shock; it was an unpredictable series of pains as Alex hung up his coat and sat down on the sofa in his apartment, a swelling ache at the back of his sinuses, fingers and ears burning, lightning darts of pain through clenched muscles, even the cuts on his scalp beginning to throb again as blood flooded the extremities of his body. Jane pulled herself heavily up into his lap as the shimmery waves of hurt subsided, and he shivered and held on to her gentle mammal warmth. Reached over to turn on the radio, the mildly eccentric music of the early morning, avoiding any stations where they might break in with news.

  When he had stopped shivering, he checked his blood sugar, worked out the dosage he’d need to balance it this time, and decided to make himself a bowl of porridge and a pot of tea with cream, invalid food, soft and soothing. He sat on the couch watching the golden swirls of melting butter through the oatmeal, the thick caramel lumps of brown sugar, and then slept for a little while, Queen Jane on the bed draped over his legs. When he woke up, he drank a cup of black coffee and thought that, after all, this might be a good time to visit Adrian.

  He was uncertain what went on in churches on Saturday afternoons, and was afraid he might interrupt something or walk in on a service, but when he opened the side door to the hall, all he found was a small group of people sitting on the floor in sweatshirts and tights, reading from bound scripts.

  ‘But in what other way can we exist, in this consumer society?’ recited one of them.

  ‘No!’ cried someone else. ‘I don’t accept this solution to our crisis!’ A man with a thin red ponytail looked up at Alex. ‘Excuse me? We’re rehearsing here?’

  ‘I was looking for Adrian Pereira,’ said Alex. The man nodded his head towards the back of the room.

  ‘Through that way,’ he said. Alex stepped carefully past the circle of performers and down a narrow hallway. There
were doors leading in several directions, but he could hear the faint sound of a guitar coming from one of them, so he opened it and found himself in the church proper. It was dark; the first thing he made out was a wooden altar at the front, with a stained-glass window, the spiky outlines of figures he couldn’t recognize. A circle of empty chairs, and in a far corner, by himself, Adrian playing a guitar and singing very quietly.

  His voice had lost a bit of its upper register maybe, but it was still clear and oddly weightless. A voice that it was never really possible to sell, not a successful voice. He wasn’t singing one of his own songs, and he wasn’t singing a hymn either, though Alex briefly thought he was, and was made nervous by that; it was just one of those old odd floating songs about cryptic love.

  Build me a castle

  Forty feet high,

  So I can see him

  As he rides by.

  sang Adrian, who did sometimes sing songs meant for women’s voices without bothering to change the pronouns.

  As he rides by, love,

  As he rides by.

  So I can see him

  As he rides by.

  Alex sat down in a chair, trying not to make any noise, but Adrian noticed him, of course, lifted his head from the guitar and stopped singing.

  ‘Well. Hi there.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Alex.

  ‘Waiting for someone?’

  ‘No. Just hanging out.’

  Adrian nodded and put the guitar down into its case. ‘Okay.’ He snapped the case closed and seemed to be thinking for a moment.

  ‘You want to see our miraculous lightbulb?’ he said at last. ‘It’s been burning for more than eighty years without ever being replaced. The angry little old lady wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury about it.’

  ‘Did he come and see it?’

  ‘He never wrote back. I think she was pleased, it gave her something else to be mad at. “There’s no excuse for this! Doesn’t he open his mail?”’ Adrian stood up and led Alex over to a niche in the wall that held a baptismal font and a small light with a red glass shade. ‘Now, you understand I can’t personally verify that it’s been burning for eighty years. All I know is that we haven’t replaced it in the two years we’ve been here. But I’m firmly told that it’s been the same lightbulb as far back as the oldest person in the parish can remember.’