Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

He was on his knees beside her instantly, his feet tangling into the mess of Chris’s bicycle beside her, the tires slashed, the chain ripped off. She was covered with the oil from the chain. And he knew that he would have forgiven her anything, anything at all, there was nothing she could do that he had not in advance forgiven.

‘Susie.’

He pulled her into his arms, and she came, smearing oil in his hair, on his neck, the exacto knife falling to the ground.

‘I killed his bike,’ she said.

He kissed her then, really kissed her for the first time, their tongues pressing hard into each other’s mouths. They fell together in the shadow of the wall, the hot asphalt scraping his knees, her body moving against his, their legs entangled. But she slid away from him. She pulled herself up and staggered backwards, tugging down her dress, her lips swollen.

‘I can’t. Alex, no. I can’t do this right now.’

He sat on the asphalt breathing hard, smelling of WD-40. He wanted to say something ugly and childish – you could do it with Mike Cherniak – and it wasn’t love or kindness or even common sense that prevented him, just inarticulacy. But this too he had forgiven her, had forgiven her long ago. There was nothing else he could do. He was helpless.

There was no particular reason that Alex painted a giant bird across one wall of his room. He had been very bored one evening, and he had paint and brushes still lying around from his short-lived experiment with art school a few years before.

‘Is it a phoenix, then?’ asked Adrian.

‘No. It’s just a bird.’

‘Bird of prey? Migratory bird? Pelican? The pelican is Jesus, you know. Though if I were Jesus I might be offended by that. Well, obviously it’s not a pelican.’

‘I don’t know. It’s a bird. It looks like a fierce bird.’

‘I think it’s an osprey.’

‘If you say so. I was just thinking Jane would like to have a permanent bird to chase, but this one’s awfully big. I don’t think her visual field is up to it.’

‘There’s not a wide symbolic network around the osprey. I wonder why that is.’

‘I’m thinking now I could make Jane a little bird mobile, but it wouldn’t last long.’

It was a white bird with black and brown edging on its feathers, and a jagged turquoise line marking it off from the grey concrete wall, and it was somewhat larger than Alex himself. He didn’t much like it; there was nothing in it that was original or real. He’d never had the right kind of eye to be a painter.

‘What would you do for me?’ Susie said. She was lying on his bed, wearing a white lace dress and black tights with runs in them, smoking hash, and Alex was stretched on the floor, leaning his head against the mattress. He could hear Queen Jane growling in the far corner of the room, doing battle with a sock. ‘If I asked you. What would you do for me?’

‘Anything,’ he said. He didn’t know why she was there, she had turned up at his door, it happened sometimes. He didn’t ask.

‘But that’s not true,’ she said, exhaling and handing him the joint. ‘You wouldn’t kill somebody, for instance. And that’s good, I mean, I wouldn’t want that. But really. What would you do?’

I would sit here for hours and never touch you , he thought, sucking the smoke into his lungs. I would let you pull me towards you and then push me away again. What more do you want?

He held the smoke in for as long he could before exhaling, leaned his elbow on the mattress and looked at her, a distant and slightly mad expression on her face that was not just the hash. He could see the dark lashes surrounding her bottomless eyes; he was close enough to count every one of them.

‘I would stop taking photographs,’ he said.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘I think I would.’ He passed the joint to her. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘No.’ She took a long drag, and a slow trail of smoke spun out from her lips in a complex spiral. ‘If I was very sick, if I needed someone to look after me, would you do it?’

He lay his head on the mattress, pushing his hair from his face. Patterns of light from the cars that passed outside shimmered across the wall. ‘Sure. I guess. I’m not a doctor.’

‘Not like that.’ She stared at the ceiling. ‘What if – what if I was sick in a way that changed me? If I wasn’t the person you knew. Would you still look after me then?’

‘But that won’t happen.’

She closed her eyes. He sucked the last of the smoke from the roach and dropped it into an ashtray. Her hair in the light of his desk lamp was a hundred shades of pink and gold.

‘You’ll always be Susie-Paul,’ he said. She shook her head slowly. ‘I know who you are. I will always know who you are.’

‘You don’t know, Alex,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t understand.’

He felt a faint creep of apprehension. ‘Is there – Susie, is something wrong?’

‘No. Nothing’s wrong. Not with me.’

She lay with her eyes closed for what was probably a long time.

‘You still want to go hear the Spits?’ she asked at last.

‘If you do,’ he said.

‘Sure. Let’s.’

They walked up Bathurst Street in a cutting November wind, icy puddles soaking in through his boots. She was very quiet, and he knew that he had let her down in some way, but he didn’t know what he could say to make it better.

And then they were in the heat and crush of the basement, the music hugging them in, pools of brown water on the floor and the room filled with bodies, sweating, moving, someone climbing onto a table to dance, and the band almost invisible because there was no stage, only a strip of masking tape marking them off from the dance floor. They had a drummer and a bass player now, and the guitars were loud, high metal in his ears. He stood against the wall with Susie, sharing a bottle of beer and feeling the music shake through his body, wondering what it meant that they were there together, clearly together, and yet not really. The singer’s voice rising on a long line, sweeping him upwards.

The next song he recognized – it wasn’t a slow song exactly, but less fast – a song about UFOs and longing, about lights on the asphalt and aliens and escape, and Susie-Paul reached for his hand and led him onto the floor, and he wrapped his arms around her as she rested her head on his chest, swaying not quite in time with the music. And he knew this was something in her that was sad and nearly self-destructive; it wasn’t what he wanted.

Take me away

Take me away

The first set was over, and they walked outside again, to the sheltered yard of St. Peter’s Church where the sound of the traffic on Bloor Street was faint, like falling water.

‘I have to tell you something,’ said Susie.

‘I figured you did.’

‘I’ve decided to go away. I’m going to Vancouver for a while.’

He turned from her, leaning into a corner of the limestone wall. ‘How long?’

‘I don’t know.’

He ran his finger across the rough edges of the stone. It was almost glowing, in a diffused beam of light from somewhere. ‘Will you come back?’

‘I don’t know.’

He walked a few nervous steps in the frosted grass. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said, ‘but I will always know who you are.’

She shook her head. ‘You think that, Alex. But you don’t understand.’

And when they went back inside, the bass player was leaning down, relentless, and the music crashing against the walls, fast and angry, the singer stretching out her arms and dancing, that ragged extraordinary voice.

Follow the light to where the little ones lie

Watch their faces disappear in the sky