Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

And it didn’t surprise him, it didn’t surprise him even a bit, that the phone rang almost as soon as he walked in the door of his apartment, while his fingers were still stiff and white with cold. It seemed like something already agreed, that it would be Susie’s voice at the other end of the line, asking him to meet her the next evening.

I own your soul now , Alex had said, and she had seemed to believe it. She had been so young, after all, and more uncertain than he had ever realized.

There was a day he’d been taking photographs, as the clinic escorts and the patients dashed through the gauntlet of screaming protesters, Susie-Paul holding her coat over a patient’s head as she ran, flinching as some small hard object hit her cheek. On the final sprint to the steps of the clinic, Alex slipped and fell, and cut his hand open on a rock. It wasn’t serious, but it was a dirty cut and it bled quite a bit, smears of blood on his sleeve, not what anyone needed to be looking at in the pastel waiting rooms with the twining plants. He went into the kitchen at the back of the house, where one of the staff members was making tea and a security guard was monitoring the closed-circuit camera feed, and washed his hand in the sink. He was scrubbing it under the running water, watching the red drizzle spiral down, when Susie came in with cotton and gauze.

‘Let me do it for you,’ she said. She was quick and efficient about wrapping it up and taping it, but then she didn’t let go of his hand.

‘You’re all right?’ she asked, and she was holding his hand in both of hers.

‘Oh yeah. Nothing to it.’ He felt perfectly calm and perfectly safe, and without much thought he leaned down and kissed her forehead, and she laid her head against his chest. At that moment, he was sure, he might have put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips, but there were still facts out there – he was in a room with other people, people who were now watching them, in a place where they had to deal every day with certain extreme consequences of human behaviour, and there was blood on his shirt. She lives with Chris .

He watched her through bulletproof glass as she walked down the wooden steps to the tiny yard, her boots over frozen mud while a line of protesters tossed pamphlets and plastic embryos at her head. A heavy man threw himself into an icy puddle in front of her, clutching his chest and crying, ‘Don’t kill your baby! Don’t kill your baby!’, his voice audible even through the thick window as Susie sidestepped him, refusing to run, walking carefully and deliberately into the alley and away.

Susie at the pay phone up the street, biting her lip, one hand pressed against the glass. He shouldn’t have been watching her, but he was. Whoever she was talking to. He had no way of knowing.

Susie standing on a chair in his darkroom, in the red light, a marker in her hand, writing on the walls.

‘You need something in here, is all. I mean, you nearly live here, you might as well decorate.’

‘It’s not even our wall. It belongs to the university paper. They’re not going to love this.’

‘They can cope,’ said Susie. Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams , she wrote, under a string of New Order lyrics. Alex imagined a sketch he could add. Maybe he had done it later, with paper and pencil, back in his apartment. But if he ever did draw it, he lost it later on.

Spring night, late spring, the dark air mild. Alex was high and euphoric, dazzled. He’d been smoking hash, and drinking too much beer, which wasn’t a good idea, he wasn’t in control of his blood sugar, but he was trying to balance it out by eating french fries and ketchup. Walking on a wire. Out on the dance floor of a club on Bloor Street, a bit unsteady on his feet, the flash on his camera going off in chains of light as the keyboard player climbed up onto his Casio, sweat dripping from his forehead and soaking his shirt, and began to play the heating pipes with a pair of drumsticks. Alex firing off another shot, knowing that by some process he himself didn’t understand, he would come out of this with pictures that were clear and dry and precise, recognizable Alex Deveney photos, all this heat and desire purified into an image, a hieroglyph of objective thought.

The band left the stage and the taped music came on, the bass shuddering up through his feet in time with his pulse. He leaned against the wall near Adrian’s table, wiping his face with the neck of his T-shirt.

Adrian had brought Evelyn with him, and she was sitting beside him, reading a book in the flickering light; this was a bit of an event, since none of Adrian’s friends could remember having ever seen Evelyn before, and some of them had recently expressed the opinion that she was imaginary. They were in the middle of a conversation which was incomprehensible to Alex, but evidently intense and somehow entertaining.

‘So I told my supervisor about it,’ Evelyn was saying, ‘and he said to me, “You used the word apophatic , didn’t you?” and I said, “Yeah. I guess I did.” “Well, serves you right, doesn’t it?” he said.’

‘Did you say a ff ective , too?’ asked Adrian.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Probably.’

Adrian lit a cigarette and held the pack out towards Alex, who hardly ever smoked tobacco, but that night he wanted cigarettes with the same hunger he wanted everything, dope, music, love. He pulled one from the pack and took out his lighter, squinting down at the fire. He seemed to be having trouble getting the flame to connect with the end of the cigarette.

‘Alex. Man,’ said Adrian. ‘You’re really shaking.’

‘I’m okay.’ He managed to light the cigarette and lift it to his mouth.

‘I don’t think you are, actually. I think you’re going hypo.’

‘I told you, I’m okay,’ said Alex impatiently, and started to walk away, but he lost his footing and nearly fell, and Adrian grabbed hold of his arm.

‘That’s it. Come with me.’ He steered Alex towards the vending machine by the bar, the lights moving dizzy against the walls.

‘You have money?’

‘Of course I have money. Jesus.’

‘Can I trust you to buy yourself a chocolate bar?’ asked Adrian, glancing back at Evelyn sitting with her book. ‘Or do I have to stand here and watch you?’

‘I will buy myself a chocolate bar, mother. Scout’s Honour, okay?’

Adrian went back to the table, and Alex put a hand on the vending machine to steady himself, blinking a few times until his vision cleared. The machine had several kinds of candy, but he realized now that he was both very stoned and very shaky, and somehow it seemed impossibly hard to operate. He pulled a handful of change out of his pocket, but when he tried to work out what he needed the numbers kept blurring in his mind, breaking up along the shiny glittering edges of the coins under the flickering bar lights, too damn complicated, and then it was quite difficult to get them into the narrow change slot, he didn’t know why they made those slots so narrow anyway. So he didn’t notice the voices behind him until he was fishing out his chocolate bar and heard a glass smashing to the ground; and even then, working the complicated foil wrapping off the candy, he didn’t pay attention until he heard Susie-Paul, on the verge of tears, shouting, ‘Fuck you, then! Just fuck you!’

His mouth full of chocolate, he turned and saw Susie-Paul and Chris, their faces pale and angry. He couldn’t tell which one of them had thrown the glass. They were close together, facing each other across the glittering shards.

‘You’re behaving like a child,’ said Chris, the words hissing between his teeth. ‘Grow up, will you?’