Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘The maids hand around the backbiting?’

‘They might as well. The upper classes can’t do a thing for themselves.’

‘Sounds fantastic. Don’t let me keep you from it.’

‘I wish you could. But I have some time before it starts.’

Outside St. James’ Cathedral, a Mennonite family was handing out pamphlets in the dusk – a man in a broad hat, three small girls in calico dresses and aprons, and a pregnant, tired woman wearing a bonnet. Alex took a pamphlet from one of the girls, and after a short negotiation with the father was permitted to take a picture of them, posed stiffly in a group, their papers clutched to their chests.

Alex studied the pamphlet as he picked up his camera bag. WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? it read on the front.

‘See, this is a question I ask,’ he said. They walked by the cathedral garden, brown now and shrivelled, the dried seedheads covered with the powdery snow that had fallen during the night. ‘What would Jesus do? Would he be a fireman? A circus acrobat? I mean, you hang out in churches, you tell me.’

‘Something weird, I think,’ said Susie. ‘This is what I’m starting to pick up, that he was a very odd guy. He’d be sitting on the church steps telling a story about mustard. He was always on about the mustard.’

‘You’re making that up.’

‘No, really. I definitely have heard about mustard.’

‘I’m going to check with Evelyn before I accept that.’

‘Feel free.’ Susie looked up and around at the office towers. ‘Damn, we’re in the business district again.’

‘We should turn this way,’ said Alex, pointing to a pillared corridor between two glass walls.

‘I got a letter from my ex-husband today.’

‘Oh?’

‘He says I was a bad wife. I mean, I know I was a bad wife, it’s his fault he married me in the first place. I just don’t see the point of bringing it up now.’

‘Well. Sorry.’ He had no idea what his response to this was supposed to be. He and Amy exchanged polite and impersonal Christmas cards every year, and he could hardly imagine her mentioning their relationship, much less critiquing it.

‘Forget it,’ said Susie. ‘It’s a crappy day all over.’

They went on through the back streets, under grey walls, and then across Yonge and into a gravelled lot, entering an empty glass walkway and crossing out the other side, onto the little stub of Temperance Street. ‘There,’ said Alex, pointing across the road. ‘That’s the Cloud Gardens.’

Behind a five-storey building, the cold waves of a waterfall poured down the wall, reflecting coloured lights from a theatre marquee across the street. The brilliant water dove into a stone channel, framed as it fell by stepped and ragged limestone terraces and a network of metal bridges. To the side of the cascading waves, a long red oxide steel grid held squares of etched glass and beaten copper and pale concrete, rippled aluminum, green and gold metals. In the square below, curving stone walkways ran between bare oak and ash, banks of snow-covered shrubs.

‘Who even knows this is here?’ said Alex, waving his arm as they walked onto the largest path. ‘No one even knows it’s here at all.’ Though this was clearly not quite true, as the bridges and terraces were dotted with clusters of teenagers, sheltered in pockets of darkness. The sharp smell of pot smoke was drifting down over the water.

‘I’m thinking that’s why they call it the Cloud Gardens,’ said Susie, nodding her head towards them.

‘Kind of takes you back, doesn’t it?’ said Alex, and then put down his camera bag and began moving through the paths, turning in a circle with his camera and causing some consternation among the pot-smoking teens. He had been taking pictures for a few minutes, and had climbed up onto one of the terraces, focusing down on the lights that flickered on the swift run of the water, when he saw that Susie was sitting on a rock, staring down and picking at her fingernails. ‘Hey,’ he called to her. ‘You could come up here.’ She shrugged and walked slowly towards him.

‘There’s something else I wanted to show you,’ he said. He led her up another terrace and over one of the metal bridges to a glass door. ‘It’s closed right now, but look.’

Inside the glass, barely visible, was a dense foam of broad, deep-green leaves, tree trunks hanging with vines, cut through by more bridges. ‘It’s the top of a rainforest,’ said Alex. ‘They built a rainforest under glass here, over a parking garage. Just because. Just so it would be there. And no one even knows.’ She had folded her arms and pursed her lips. ‘This is a human thing, Susie, and I love it. You can tell me it’s pointless if you want. You can tell me it’s built on exploitation and I partly believe that. But you can’t tell me it isn’t beautiful.’

‘Alex,’ said Susie sharply. ‘Would you quit with the lectures already?’

He stepped away from the glass. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m sorry, but you don’t know what I’m thinking, do you? You have no idea what I was was going to say about this rainforest. For some reason you’re trying to make it out like I’m all theory and no humanity, but you don’t know who the hell I am. And you’re hardly one to talk about what’s more human.’

He lowered his camera and stared at her, as she kicked fretfully at the bridge with her leather boots. ‘That’s not fair,’ he said.

‘It damn well is,’ said Susie. ‘You’ve always been… you block yourself off. You always did. At least you’re not permanently stoned anymore, but there’s still always something in between you and the world, this weird obsessive project of yours or whatever. And you try to tell me about what’s human? I don’t get you sometimes.’

‘This is ridiculous.’ He ran a hand over his hair. ‘I’m as much in the world as anyone. I’ve got a job, I’ve got people I know. Hell, I had a girlfriend until a couple of months ago.’

‘Had would be the key word there.’

‘Well, so what? It wasn’t working out, I broke it off. It happens.’ He could have said more hurtful things, and he thought of them – you’re going to lecture me about busted relationships? – but he didn’t want this to go so bad, so fast, he didn’t want that.

‘Yeah, because why exactly? You needed more time to wander around taking pictures of metal structures?’

He turned away from her. ‘How about because I may be going blind, Susie? How about because it’s not so easy to say to somebody, by the way, I may be blind soon, is that a problem for you?’

‘So you’re going to deal with that by cutting yourself off even more? Alex, you live with a cat .’

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ He slammed his fist on the railing of the fence, hard enough to hurt. ‘You, you of all people are talking to me about being isolated? You never even told me you were back. You never told me for eleven fucking years, so fuck you!’ He ran down one short flight of steps, but then he stopped, breathing hard, unable to sustain anger.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. Distantly, he heard water tossing in the stone channel.

‘I care about you, Alex,’ said Susie quietly. ‘I really do. But you’re already mixing me up.’

‘I need to take these pictures.’ He turned to look at her, standing on the bridge. Her face was half obscured by shadows. ‘I need this. I know I can’t do what I want to. I want to take pictures that will change people’s lives, and I know I won’t be able to, I know I’m not that good. But I can’t help wanting it.’ He walked up the steps towards her. ‘This isn’t about theory. This is about me. This is about me haemorrhaging inside my eyes. This about me losing the one thing I’ve ever had. This is about how I’m supposed to survive.’