Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  ‘Awesome,’ said Alex.

  Adrian looked at his watch. ‘Well. I’ve got a kid coming in for a guitar lesson in a little while. But I could make some coffee if you want.’

  They went into the little kitchen off the church hall, the actors throwing them suspicious looks. ‘It’s not just you, James,’ one of them was reading solemnly. ‘We men have to tackle our sexism as a group! And we’ll do it as a group!’

  ‘There’s an idea,’ said Adrian, pushing the kitchen door closed. ‘We could do that.’

  ‘Is two men enough of a group?’

  ‘I’ve never been part of a bigger one.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m up to heavy-duty tackling, though.’

  ‘Oh well. Another great opportunity lost.’ Adrian reached up into the cupboard. ‘Is instant okay? ’Cause if not there’s, well, nothing actually. Maybe a teabag.’

  ‘Instant’s fine. By the way, your cupboards are full of herbal shampoo.’

  ‘I know. Crazy Larry’s been dumping his hot goods on us again.’

  ‘Is this a routine thing with churches? Receiving stolen goods?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah. I mean, the general public would be surprised.’ Adrian set a kettle onto the burner. ‘So, there’s a fire burning at a warehouse out in Scarborough,’ he added. ‘They were talking on the radio about evacuating people. Chemical fumes. There’s a theory it was set on purpose.’

  ‘By who?’ asked Alex.

  ‘The Mad Poisoner, I guess. He’ll be dropping acid in the reservoirs next. Do we have reservoirs? I’m not sure.’

  ‘We have Lake Ontario.’

  ‘Yeah. That’d kind of dilute it, I suppose. When you were a kid, did you get those scenarios about the Russians putting LSD in the water supply?’

  ‘Not that I can remember,’ said Alex.

  ‘Okay. Maybe I just had weird parents. Anyway, the thing about the Scarborough fire, everyone in Scarborough is just sitting in their houses waiting to be told what to do. We don’t have much of a gift for chaos.’ A twist of steam rose up from the kettle, and he poured the water over coffee crystals in two white mugs. ‘I don’t think people are as scared of LSD these days,’ he went on. ‘So it’d have to be something else in the water. PCP, would that scare people?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex, taking one of the mugs. ‘Chemical warfare stuff. Or maybe disease. Ebola. Smallpox.’ The imaginary doctor, pouring a test tube of cloudy liquid into a vat at the R. C. Harris Filtration Plant. Putting a match to a pile of rags in a suburban warehouse. Thinking of love.

  Adrian poured sugar into his coffee from a tall glass dispenser on the counter, and stirred it again, hiking himself up onto one of the counters. ‘That’s true. It’s an infection-based paradigm.’

  ‘You like the word paradigm, don’t you?’

  ‘I like that it’s gone out of fashion. Slightly obsolescent terminology is my deal.’ He blew on his coffee. ‘I could say they’re just worried about nothing, but maybe that’s the thing precisely. Nothing can be extremely disturbing.’

  Alex sipped the coffee, which tasted of little except a certain artificial bitterness. ‘I was listening to one of your old tapes the other night,’ he said.

  ‘Huh. That’s something I don’t hear very often.’ Adrian looked down at his mug. ‘I put too much sugar in this. Anyway, infection. It’s all about people touching each other, isn’t it? Proximity. Half the congregation won’t drink out of the common cup any more. I’ve been counting.’

  ‘Susie, Suzanne, she’s planning to write an academic paper about it. But she thinks she has to talk to the girls from that first incident. Which I doubt she’s going to be allowed to do.’

  ‘Proximity’s a difficult issue for people,’ said Adrian. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and then spoke quickly. ‘You should have kept in touch, Alex.’

  Alex leaned back against the other counter. ‘I thought I did,’ he said softly.

  ‘When you moved? You never told me, remember that? I tried to call you and your number was disconnected, you didn’t even have a message with the new one. So you can see, you know… yeah, I could’ve looked up Deveney in the phone book, but it seemed like you were sending a kind of signal there.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I just forgot.’

  ‘Well. I guess that’s kind of true.’

  ‘It is true. I mean, I don’t even remember now, honestly. But I’d know if I’d done it on purpose.’

  Adrian nodded. ‘Okay. That’s okay.’ He looked up, took another sip of coffee and grimaced. ‘It’s really bad with all this sugar.’

  ‘You could pour some water into it. But I don’t suppose that’d solve anything.’

  ‘So which tape were you listening to, actually?’

  ‘The live one. Remember? You can hear Harold Kandel yelling in the background?’

  ‘Oh yeah. He had this plastic bag with a radio in it. And when I asked him to turn it off he went into this thing about Minnie the Moocher. How she was a low-down hoochie-koocher and so forth. But I knew he was trying to be supportive.’

  ‘It was meant as political commentary, I think.’

  Adrian stirred his spoon around the oversweetened coffee. ‘I did kind of like that tape.’

  ‘It was good. Your songs are good.’

  ‘I guess. In their way.’ Adrian checked his watch. ‘I should get back. I don’t want my student being forced to tackle sexism as a group. But it’s nice to see you.’

  He let Alex out by the church door, and as Alex left he looked back and saw him standing in the doorway with his hands tucked into his armpits, watching down the street for his student, small and quiet, perfectly alone.

  At the corner of Yonge and Gerrard, four men sat on the ground in handcuffs, in a ring of police and campus security. Two of them, manic and agitated, were arguing about who had hit who first, while the other two leaned back against the wall with a strangely cheerful air, as if this were an interruption in the daily routine staged only for their entertainment.

  ‘He’s a fucker, that guy,’ commented one of them.

  ‘He’s a bum,’ said the other. He laughed languidly. ‘But hell, so am I.’

  ‘He’s fucking screwed.’

  ‘I didn’t hit fucking nobody.’

  ‘Me neither, man. Didn’t lay a hand.’

  ‘He’s a fucker.’

  In the business district, figures in coats hurried across a windy corner below a looming pixelboard display, a loop of stock prices and headlines and weather reports. Suspicious fire of unknown origin. Security Council negotiations. The cold front stationary, hovering like a hawk above the city.

  A man walked through a corridor, quickly, thinking of events set in motion. On the twenty-third floor of a half-empty office tower, a woman backed away from a wrinkled envelope that had been pushed beneath the door, a piece of paper marked with the type-written words THIS IS NOT ANTHRAX. Backed away, hands shaking, from the threat understood in the denial of threat. Reached for a phone.

  When the fire trucks arrived the alarm system was activated, the building emptied. The workers from the twenty-third floor hosed down, their clothes dripping, inside a white tent in the icy chill. In the surrounding apartments, people came to the windows and saw them filing into the street, evacuees. A woman in a nearby church sat in the centre of a meeting room, huddled in a chair, hearing the sound of the alarms gliding up and down in the air.

  A tall man stood under the freezing spray, his feet in a plastic pool, water cascading from his dark suit, and felt suddenly emptied of everything, staring along the winter buildings outside the door of the tent and into a clear blank freedom.

  Some distance away, a rock smashed through the window of a shop at Coxwell and Gerrard, scattering glass across the display counter, the bright-coloured honey-and-milk array of sweets. A television over the counter played on to no one, the news crawl picking up the rumours of anthrax, the hazmat team on the screen with their purifying hoses.

  ‘You’
ll probably hate this place when it’s finished,’ said Alex. ‘It’ll all be very expensive. But I thought you’d like it right now.’

  He stood with Susie in a long channel of mud, under the heavy brown-brick walls of the abandoned Victorian factories, slabs of wood laid over the wet dirt where there would someday be cobbled walkways. The sun came over the high buildings in shards of cold brightness, breaking out from a soft dense sky. It was a good day for light, slightly diffused through cloud, not too harsh.

  Here and there, new businesses had already opened – a coffee shop, a microbrewery, a small art gallery. But most of the space was still inchoate, forming itself out of the memories of fallen industry, sweat and dust and darkness. Susie looked around intently, and Alex supposed she had a theory, she always had a theory, but she only nodded, apparently pleased. They walked up a temporary wooden stairway to a metal door, set in a massive brick wall, and Alex took a set of keys out of his pocket.

  ‘Are you really supposed to be in here?’ she asked.

  ‘I know people.’ He turned the key and pushed the door open. ‘It’s going to be artists’ studios in this building. And if I say I need it for a photo shoot, they know I’m not really going to bring in twenty friends and a keg of beer.’ He motioned for Susie to come inside. ‘The thing is there’s no heat. And no artificial light, but I know where there’s a good exposure.’

  The hall they entered was dark and wet, but the spiral stairway to the next level had already been built, and he led her down a corridor of drywall and metal spars, into a half-finished room where a large south-facing window filled most of one wall.

  ‘I think there’s a photographer going to rent this one,’ he said. ‘It’d be good. If you wanted to have a studio in a fashionable place, I mean.’

  Out of the wind, it was not quite as cold, but the chill was damp and clinging. Susie put her red hat into her pocket but left her coat on, over a black sweater and jeans.

  ‘Do you think you could take your coat off?’ he asked. ‘It’s okay if not. It’s not exactly warm in here.’

  She blew out a small puff of visible breath and smiled, but shrugged the coat off and left it in a corner. ‘Just don’t take forever, all right?’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  He bent down and opened his camera bag, took out the Leica and selected a lens. It had to be the Leica, but he was glad that she didn’t understand how much that meant to him.

  ‘Let’s try near the window,’ he said. ‘You could just stand over there.’

  He didn’t do a lot of portraits. A hand spot and an umbrella would have been useful, but he would have needed to rent them. He hung the Leica around his neck and got out his light meter.

  ‘Could you lean against there, by the window?’ he suggested. ‘Yeah. That’s good.’

  He loved the way this camera felt in his hands, the gentle action of it. The planes of her face, her hair loose around her neck, the sharp corners of the window frame.

  Part of the trick was shooting around the eyes, those dark-chocolate eyes, not letting them dominate her face entirely. Get light on the cheekbones, the rather thin pale lips, the slight emerging grooves from her nose to the edges of her mouth.

  ‘So what’s up with the dissertation?’ He was forcing conversation, he knew; if he didn’t get her to talk, she’d end up with that awful rigid portait face you so often saw. He took in the rough texture of her sweater, almost feeling the thick knots of black wool, synaesthetic. ‘Arms down a bit? Thanks.’

  ‘Oh. Um, working on a chapter about homeless youth.’ She looked out the window, moving her face into three-quarter profile, and licked her lips once, nervously. ‘No one makes things these days, do they?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I’m just thinking about this place. The city used to be about manual labour, didn’t it? Making things, tangible things. Now it’s all service industries. It’s all, do you want fries with that?’

  ‘Well, they made whiskey. It’s not exactly, I don’t know, like hammering stone.’

  Light spreading, honey-yellow, across her body, her left breast edged with shadow, outlining the soft shape. A rectangle of sunlight on her right hip, against the broken plaster wall.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ she said. ‘It’s as if there’s no such thing as primary production here anymore.’

  ‘The terminal stage of capitalism?’

  She smiled a bit, self-conscious but not as much so, the tension in her arms beginning to release. ‘You’ve been talking to Vojcek, haven’t you? He’s a bright guy, but I think his theoretical framework’s kind of outdated.’

  He adjusted the focus. The strong line at the side of her cheek, a wedge of shadow between her face and the window frame. She was quite objectively beautiful. It probably hadn’t made her life any easier.

  ‘Sit down now?’ he suggested, gesturing towards a wooden spool with insulated wire curled around it. He was concentrating too hard, he was making her nervous. ‘Or you could just do whatever. Pretend I’m not here.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Susie, and this finally got her to laugh, he took a series of shots quickly, didn’t want to lose this chance. ‘This is such a natural location.’ She sat down on the spool, good, her movements were less constrained now, she was adjusting to the camera.

  ‘Could you turn your head that way? Yes. Thanks.’ Loose strands of fine hair along her neck, the inch of exposed skin pale with cold. He sat back on his heels, reaching into the camera bag for a second roll of film.

  ‘You’re not digital?’

  ‘I’m digital at work. I’m kind of a luddite personally.’ He checked the light meter again. His shirt was damp at the armpits. ‘I don’t know where that puts me in terms of, ah, types of production.’ Susie shifted on the spool. Folded up her legs, her hands around one ankle, her thighs a complex swell like a pool of water. He checked his light meter and moved further to one side. The action of the Leica under his fingers.

  ‘This is kind of weird,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to, I don’t know, I’m not used to this.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Photo sessions, they’re a funny thing, they’re…’ he ran out of words. She smiled, and pushed at her hair as it slid back over her ear.

  ‘I trust you, though,’ she said. Pale hand resting on her knee, the pattern of wear in the fabric of her jeans, the sun-filled hollows in the curves of her legs. He picked up the light meter and walked around the room, his eyes off her for a moment, half dizzy.

  ‘Could you stand over here?’

  She stood up from the spool and crossed the room again, stood awkwardly against the unfinished wall.

  ‘It’s okay. Relax. Just stand normally.’ She bent one leg and put her hands behind her back, leaning her head against a spill of light, a good accident.

  ‘This isn’t really normal.’

  ‘It’ll do.’ He went down on one knee and held the camera upwards. She tipped her head slightly to the side, suggestion of tendon along her neck, a shadow on the opposite cheekbone.

  ‘I hope you’re not thinking of exhibiting these.’

  ‘They’re yours.’ He leaned back. ‘They’re completely yours. I’ll give you the negatives if you want.’

  ‘I was kind of kidding, actually.’

  She swept her hair over her ears with both hands, letting it down in front of her shoulders. Folded her hands loosely in front of her, cupped low on her stomach, her wrists resting above the small protrusions of her hipbones. The inevitable upwards tension of her legs, the bowl of her hands.

  ‘The police are going to come and accuse you of making nerve gas in here,’ she said.

  He adjusted focus, still kneeling in front of her, and moved the shot in tight to her face. The fine crinkling of the skin around her eyes, the maple-syrup fall of hair, indirect light on the golden strands within the soft brown. The small space of floor between them, the lens of the camera. The way the Leica felt, like a human response.

  ‘Okay.’ He put the camera down, starin
g at the floor and feeling the pulse of blood in his head. ‘I think that’s enough.’ He looked up at her, and tried to smile casually. ‘You’re free to go.’

  This was the strangest moment for the person being photographed, he knew, suddenly released from the control of the lens and unsure how to move. There was always that second of forced informality, a small nervous laugh. He took a deep breath and wiped his forehead. Susie shook out her hands, more shy now than when he was photographing her, and then walked across the room for her coat, pulled her hat down over her ears, and sat down not far from him.

  At that moment he was prepared to give in completely, to let her eat him alive if that was what she wanted. He blinked at the skittering hint of a floater in one eye, and swallowed.

  They sat on the floor, across from each other, in the frozen half-built room.

  ‘I’m not really a terminal case,’ he said. ‘I’m not really going to end up blind tomorrow.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It’s a thing I have to do. It’s not anyone’s good scenario.’

  Outside the window the sun broke through cloud, a broad slab of light suddenly detailing the flawed uneven plaster of the wall, the unsanded wood floor. She stood quickly and walked from the room, and it seemed to Alex as if her image in the doorway froze in a hanging moment of time, her head in profile. Susie leaving.

  She must have expected that he would follow, shivering with the bright cold and the need of her; and in the dark hallway at the bottom of the spiral stair she reached out for him, the chill of her hands like needles on his skin, the rough grain of the brick wall scraping the fabric of his coat as his body rose to hers, her heat pouring into him. But the image was as fixed in his mind as any picture, the sequel to every photograph he had ever taken of her. Susie turning away.

  A woman fell down at Glencairn, the long sweep of her coat spreading over the tiles of the floor. A few hours later, the police entered the back room of a pizza restaurant on Ossington and arrested a Nigerian man who had been seen near the warehouse before the fire, taking a picture with a disposable camera.