Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘That’s so not true,’ said Alex, thinking he was talking to himself.

‘What isn’t?’ said Susie beside him.

‘Oh. I thought you were still at the table. I mean the blood tests.

The blood tests were fine. People are just making shit up.’

‘This is the poisoned girls?’

‘So-called. Yeah.’

‘It always starts with girls. They’re like a highly reactive compound.’

Alex walked back towards the table with her. ‘I’m very interested in teenage girls, actually,’ she went on. ‘Oh my God, that sounded bad. I hope no one was listening.’

‘Don’t worry. Sex panic is over. It’s totally nineties.’

‘You’re sure they weren’t really poisoned?’

‘I was there. Like I keep telling everyone, I was there. I’m not poisoned, so you tell me what’s going on.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe there was poison in the air and you just got lucky and missed it. Or maybe not. Like you said, what’s the difference between emotions and chemicals? Something knocked them down. Who am I to tell them what it was?’

‘But you don’t believe it was some kind of actual chemical, do you?’

‘I believe that belief in poisoning is moving through population groups. I believe there are actual chemical changes involved in belief.’

He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘Honestly, I’m tired of the whole thing.’

‘Okay by me.’ Susie shrugged, sipping her beer. ‘So, this project of yours.’

‘Yes?’

‘You go out and do this every night?’

‘One or two nights I stay home developing. Weekends I go out in the day, it’s not that I’m doing night shots on principle.’

‘And the idea is what? A book of some kind? A show?’

‘There isn’t an idea as such.’ He swirled what was left of the beer in his glass. He didn’t have to say any more. He shouldn’t. ‘I just want to get as much of the city on film as I can.’ He paused, glanced up at her. ‘As many parts of it as I have time for.’

‘Time?’

He had gotten too close to stop. ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to work,’ he said, and finished the glass quickly.

She was waiting for him to go on, but he couldn’t, not on his own.

‘That doesn’t make sense to me,’ she said at last. ‘Alex, is something wrong?’

He looked down at the table, folding his hands into fists. He was at the verge of it now, the worst thing in the world, worse than anything she or anyone else had ever done to him, and he had never said this aloud to a human being before.

‘It’s called diabetic retinopathy,’ he began slowly. ‘It’s… it’s an eye condition that varies a lot in severity. The capillaries in the eye, well, they overgrow, and the excess ones, they’re very fragile, they, ah, they can break or, or hemorrhage pretty easily. Most people have some background retinopathy when they’ve had diabetes as long as I have. It doesn’t – if it’s just minor, it doesn’t do anything really. But in my case it’s started progressing. Apparently fairly quickly.’ She was watching him, her face still. He couldn’t lift his head.

‘I, ah, I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s not affecting my vision very much yet, but when it does, it can be fast. I mean, it’s always different but, well, this is potentially the bad kind. The kind people go blind with.’ He stared at his hands, knuckles pale and knotted. ‘There are, ah, laser treatments that can slow it down quite a bit. You can’t stop it, but you can slow it down. But, see, there’s a cost, you’re, well, basically buying some central vision by losing peripheral. Maybe some colour perception too, maybe some night vision – well, I’ve lost some of that already from the condition itself. Maybe after the treatment somebody can’t see in very bright light either, or maybe sight’s just generally less acute. And you, you don’t do the lasers once, see. You stop the deterioration for a bit, and then it comes back and you start, ah, bleeding inside your eyes again, and you have to do the lasers again, and you lose more peripheral, more acuity… What they tell you is, they can keep you from going blind now, and it’s true, they mostly can, but… I mean, they’re trying to preserve enough vision that you can read a bit and basically walk around. Not enough that you can, that you can drive a car, say. Or, say, be a photographer. That’s the bottom line here.’ He realized that he was breathing heavily, his voice sounding choked and strange. ‘I’ve started seeing floaters,’ he said, resting his forehead on his hands. ‘The little black spots, you know? They’re blood spots, actually. It means there’s bleeding inside the retina. Not a lot. It hasn’t got in the way of anything yet. But it’s… you know, there’s no way out here. There’s just not a way out of this.’

‘Alex.’

Don’t try to touch me , he thought. But she put her hand on his arm, and he flinched away.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered.

‘I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to be running around when I was ninety. I always knew that. Diabetes… it’s a chronic condition with a reduced life expectancy. Prospects are getting better, but that’s what it is, and you know my blood sugar control was a problem for a long time. Partly my own fault. Whether you have complications… glucose control counts for a lot, and then some of it’s just luck. And I’m not very lucky. It happens to be my eyes.’

He watched her hands, on the table near his own, and noticed for the first time that she bit her nails; they were short and uneven and ragged. There was a scar across the back of her right hand, a soft puckering of the skin, and he thought he remembered it from the days at Dissonance , her fingers resting on the keyboard of the old type-setting machine. She wanted to take his hand right now, he knew that, wanted to hold his hand in hers or put her arms around him, because that was what people did. People who had known each other, a long time ago.

‘I can’t talk about it, Susie. I’m sorry, but I just can’t talk about it.’

‘No. It’s all right.’

Tell me a story , he thought.

‘So this thing about teenage girls. You know, when I was a teenage girl I wanted to be a prophet,’ she said slowly, almost as if she’d heard him. ‘Which is pretty funny, because I wasn’t any more religious then than I am now. But I really wanted to, I wanted to be seeing lights on the road to Damascus and getting the word straight from God.’

‘What was God going to say to you?’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? I never did get the word. Basically I just wanted everybody to stand around and marvel at me.’

‘Oh, they probably did anyway.’

‘Sure. Whatever.’ She shifted in her chair. ‘You want another beer?’

He paused and then nodded. Susie came back into his life, and instantly he started taking chances with his blood sugar. He couldn’t let this go much further. But one more beer was not a big risk.

‘Evelyn’s got the word from God, you know,’ said Susie, when she came back to the table with the glasses.

‘This we always knew.’

‘Did Adrian tell you what she’s doing? She’s a priest now, isn’t that something?’

‘Can women do that?’

‘With the Anglicans they can.’

‘And do the people marvel at her?’

‘Honestly? I don’t see how they couldn’t.’

These are some things that girls do.

In this city and in other cities, there are girls who cut their arms with the blades of razors. In the moment before they strike, all the anger and confusion in the world crumples up into their hands, sweat beading on their foreheads, and the blade slides into the skin with a sharp and accurate pain. The thick line of blood pours out like peace.