Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

Alex pulled himself up on one of the fence pickets, shouldering a space for himself, and stared into the tightly packed mass of people in the yard, who were swaying slightly, struggling for footholds, a flash of pink hair near his shoulder.

‘Hey. Susie-Paul?’

She lifted her head and managed, with some difficulty, to turn in his direction. ‘Oh. Hi there, Alex.’

‘Not the church and not the state!’ shouted someone into his ear.

‘So how’s it going?’

‘Women must control their fate!’

‘I think I have a broken rib,’ said Susie, wrapping her arms around a railing post and biting her lip with the effort of hanging on. ‘Otherwise I’m good. There are people actually underneath my feet, you know.’

‘Jesus loves the little children,’ sang a woman softly, sliding down the steps and vanishing under someone else’s legs. Somewhere up towards the door Alex could see the two policemen who had been caught in the crush elbowing each other and giggling. ‘Wait’ll you tell your wife you spent the whole day pressed up against a bunch of women, eh?’ one of them was saying. Then the radio at his belt crackled into life, and he lifted it, and slowly raised the other hand to his nightstick.

What happened after that was so fast, so unexpected, that Alex didn’t register much of it at the time. He was twisting around by the fence, framing another shot, when he heard sirens, and then half a dozen police cars and a paddy wagon swept around the corner and uniformed men and women leapt out, formed a wedge and slammed into the crowd, pulling the barricades down and tossing them into the road, shouting, ‘ Go! Go! Go! ’ Alex was knocked off his feet, face down into the pavement, his hands dragging against the snow and gravel as he rolled, blue legs and black boots pounding past him, and they began pulling people over the fence and throwing them onto the sidewalk, forcing their way to the door. He saw a nightstick swing into a man’s head. The man howled, his face ribboned with bright red blood.

‘Clinic volunteer!’ a woman inside the fence was screaming, holding her hands in the air. ‘Clinic volunteer! Don’t hit me!’ Others were shouting now too, clustering into a corner, one woman sobbing. Bodies were flying over the banister, and Alex saw Susie-Paul clinging to the railing, her feet kicking helplessly in the air. The woman who had been singing was lying prone on the stairs, a policeman bending her arms behind her. He realized that there was a rough selection happening, that the clinic volunteers were not being smacked with the nightsticks but herded into the far part of the yard, and they themselves had understood this now too, holding up their hands before the police and shouting, ‘Clinic! Clinic!’ Then a policeman grabbed Susie-Paul by the collar of her coat and yanked her up, half over the banister, and she gave him a wild look and her lips pinched closed and she said nothing, nothing at all. She folded her arms around her body and he lifted his nightstick.

It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, it couldn’t really have been as long as it seemed that she was hanging there in midair; almost immediately, someone else was grabbing her leg and shouting, ‘She’s with us, she’s with the clinic, she’s with the clinic!’ But for a moment Alex didn’t even think; he vaulted over the fence into the yard, half-emptied now, and ran towards her, and as the policeman let her drop he arrived below the stairs and she fell against him. He sat down under the sudden weight, leaning back against the bricks of the building and tightening his arms around her.

‘Oh Christ,’ she said miserably. ‘There was no reason for them to hit people like that, Alex.’ She clenched her fists and leaned into his chest. ‘They shouldn’t fucking hit people like that.’

He tried to catch his breath, thinking suddenly, impossibly, You are mine.

Someone was running up the stairs, unlocking the clinic door, and he heard a siren wind slowly around the corner. He could smell the sharp sweat on her face, feel the feathery edges of her hair. You are mine. He knew it wasn’t true. But he was happy.

Adrian and Chris were coming through the gate. He touched one hand quickly to the back of her neck and let it drop, and then she stood and walked towards Chris. Alex wished that he had seen Chris hesitate for a moment, a flicker of jealousy, but he didn’t. Why should he? Someone should have caught her, and Alex was nearest, it wasn’t a problem. Alex wasn’t a problem.

‘What the hell was that all about?’ said Adrian, staring around the yard at the huddles of confused and trembling volunteers. ‘Did something actually cause that, or did the cops just have some kind of collective brain aneurysm?’

Alex got up, still feeling that strange shimmer of happiness that seemed not to depend on anything real. ‘You’re okay?’

‘I hurt, but I’m okay,’ said Susie-Paul, standing lopsided against Chris’s shoulder. ‘I think everything’s just bruised, not broken.’

‘Maybe it’s legal to blockade a building till one p.m., and then after that it’s a felony? Is that their thinking?’ said Adrian. ‘I mean, I’d just like to know what went on here, because that was fucking weird.’

‘At least they arrested them. Eventually.’

‘Alex, are you all right?’ asked Chris.

‘Yeah,’ said Alex, leaning back against the building, smiling slightly. ‘Yeah, I’m good.’

They walked up Spadina, the four of them, and ate lunch at a greasy spoon on Bloor Street. Then Chris had to meet someone at the paper, and Susie wanted to go home and lie down. Alex walked to the subway station with Susie and Adrian, and as they went inside he turned, and then turned back again.

‘Susie-Paul? Hang on.’

Adrian waved and went through the turnstile, and Susie came back out the glass doors.

‘Can I take your picture?’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If you want.’

So he stepped back and raised the camera, light pouring into the lens, and there was this picture of Susie-Paul, still a bit shaky, quizzical, her features outlined with shadow, her dark eyes on Alex, open. He pressed his finger down and the camera snapped, the last frame on the roll.

‘Okay. That’s good.’

He lowered the camera, and she smiled and shrugged.

‘I own your soul now,’ he said softly.

‘Really?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

She paused as if she were considering this, smiled at him again and went into the station.

On Monday morning, two girls fell down just inside the front hall of Jarvis Collegiate, their lips turning blue, and as they were taken away to the hospital the school was closed and emptied, the students sent out to cluster on the sidewalks, uncertain if they would be going back in; and this time the television cameras arrived as well, leaning in to record the faces of the girls as they were lifted into the ambulance.

The hazmat teams knelt in the hallways, their swollen white hands lifting paper and dust from the floors. The girl in the stretcher covered her face, a ring of braided wool around her wrist, a picture that would play on the news again and again.

In another school, further to the north, the first girl who had fallen stood on the basketball court, her hair tied back; she dashed forward, grabbing for the ball, and felt her own athletic body as a betrayal, the movement of her breasts an intrusion, the softness of her thighs, no longer the simple child’s body she could trust without thinking. This body that bled and ached and fell. She ran down the length of the gym, the ball smacking against her hands, dodging outstretched arms, heat pulsing under her skin.

Lauren reached towards her and she twisted away, a quick stab of anger, unexpected. Early in the morning she had sat in the assembly hall and watched Lauren walk out onto the stage, tall and confi-dent, her skin clear. Lauren started to read, and it was something about remembering what was right in the world. Women in Africa doing whatever. Making jewellery or something.