Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

Zoe, who hadn’t spoken to any of them since the day in the park, was sitting against the wall of the gym and drawing on her hand with a ballpoint pen. She must have begged off with cramps, Zoe was always doing that.

The girl jumped towards the basket, feeling the flex of her long legs, the pull of her breath. The ball touched the rim and bounced back, someone else leapt and caught it, and the mass of bodies was moving down the gym again; she wiped the back of her neck and turned with them.

Lauren, on the assembly-hall stage, saying that people could always do something to make their lives better, no matter what. And the girl had thought of what she had seen in the park.

She’d thought she couldn’t stay in this room anymore. Didn’t want to see Lauren ever again.

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.