Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

He reached up and put his hand on her arm.

‘Susie-Paul,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re angry at me. I’m not even sure why, but I know there are reasons. But just – try to understand this.’

She looked down and shook her head, and didn’t speak for a while. ‘I guess I should go,’ she said at last. ‘I have to go and eat hors d’oeuvres with the big shots.’

‘I’m sorry, Susie. Don’t go yet.’

She sat down on the step. ‘I think I should.’

He was leaning on the railing, drained, waiting for her to move. She would walk away this time, he thought, and that would be the end, and he wasn’t even sure how that made him feel. But she was still on the step when he became aware of a noise, and then realized, to his astonishment, that his beeper was sounding.

‘Good Lord.’ He reached into his pocket. ‘That’s got to be the first time in two years this thing has gone off.’

‘You have a beeper?’

‘I do shifts on call sometimes. But it never actually goes off. I mean, how often do they need an emergency photo session?’ He pushed a button on the beeper, turning the noise off, and breathed out heavily. ‘Well, it means they’re expecting criminal charges. It’s got to be. God. I hate forensic.’

‘Charges?’

‘Maybe it’s a car accident,’ he said, thinking, Assault. Rape . ‘I need to find a pay phone.’

‘You can use my cell.’ She reached into her jacket and took out a small phone, and he punched in the hospital number, spoke quickly to the dispatcher at the other end.

‘I have to go,’ he said, handing the phone back to her. ‘I’m really sorry. They want me as soon as I can get there.’

‘It’s okay. I need to be at this party.’

‘We have to talk, Susie.’

She shook her head, noncommittal. ‘Sometime. Some other time.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Yeah.’ She stood up and walked down the stairs. ‘Whenever.’

But they couldn’t say goodbye then, they had to ride the subway north together, awkward, edgy, until she got off at Rosedale, making uncertain promises to call.

Two people on the train were wearing surgical masks, and someone else had a scarf wrapped over his mouth. Alex stayed on until Davisville, and walked out of the station into a cold night wind. He stopped at a little restaurant, bought a falafel and ate it on the way to the hospital, tahini sauce leaking out over his fingers. Maybe he wouldn’t see her again. He thought that at least, out of all of this, he knew where to find Adrian now, and that was something. It was definitely a good thing. Arriving at the hospital, he washed his hands with antibacterial soap and then called an internal number, was told to pick up his equipment and go to the burn ward.

It was going to be even worse than he had expected.

Outside the burn ward he found Janice Carriere, in her green scrubs, mask hanging down over her chest. ‘What am I going to be seeing?’ he asked.

She sighed. ‘It looks like assault. What we’ve been told, he was beaten up first, then someone took a lighter to his clothes. Maybe they didn’t intend to do this much damage.’

‘Oh, shit. Is he… ’

‘I think he’ll make it, but it’s not pretty.’

‘Is it a gang thing? Do you know?’

‘Well, a group thing anyway. Gangs or not – I haven’t got a lot of details. The police are over that way,’ she waved vaguely, ‘I had to send them out of the ward. He can’t talk right now.’

‘Is it a good time for me to go in?’

‘Good as any. There’s no procedures underway at the moment.’

He went into the scrub area, put on the gown, the mask, the gloves. You had to be especially careful in the burn ward; these were the most vulnerable of patients, their whole flesh exposed to the infective air. He adjusted his camera lens and took a breath. Bodies in space , he told himself, and entered the room. He smelled meat and scorched hair.

Fire flays the skin, stripping it back off the muscle in brittle charring. And this was not something he could do quickly, however much he wanted to. He had to move slowly around the bed, the nurse stepping aside for him, making sure that it was all on film, the exact degree of harm. The arms, the legs, the hands, the torso. Black, scorched red, the parched white of dead tissue.

You could look worse. You could look worse and live, and be basically all right, after a while. You could look much better than this and still die. The man would need intravenous fluids, antibiotics, skin grafts, he would be mapped with scars like a lunar surface, but he might well live.

There would be pain. It was too soon now, the man was in shock, and drugged unconscious, but he would wake to pain, and the knowledge that his skin had been peeled back by fire.

Alex left the room, and put his hands over his eyes in the scrub area. The grilled-meat smell clung round him. He took off the sterile gown and went back to the hallway. Janice was talking to a police-woman, down past a line of empty stretchers. He signalled to her that he was finished, and she broke off her conversation and came back towards him.

‘The photos can be on the hard drive more or less instantly. You want me to print them out right now?’

‘That might be best.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor bugger.’

‘You know any more about what happened?’

‘You aren’t even going to believe this.’ Janice stretched out her hands and cracked her knuckles. ‘Apparently he was standing by the subway station talking to himself and carrying a sports bag, and a bunch of drunk teenagers decided he was the subway poisoner.’

‘Oh God, no.’

‘That’s what the police say. One of the kids also said the guy “looked Muslim,” though another one is apparently calling him “the Jewish guy.” So they’re pretty clear that they’re into hate crime, they just can’t decide who it is they hate.’

‘But, is he… what was in the bag?’

‘Dirty socks. Running shorts. I mean, I think he is a bit peculiar, talking to himself out loud and all, but…’ She rubbed the back of her neck. ‘It wouldn’t have been so bad except that while they were hitting him, they spilled their booze on him. So when the lighter came out it had an accelerant. It’s all just a mess. Anyway, if you can get the photos for the police, that’d be great.’

He went to his office, and while the photos were printing he put his head down on his folded arms, thinking about the burned man whose name he didn’t know, thinking about Susie on the bridge in the city’s hidden garden.

He felt nervous on the subway on the way home, anxious, as if someone were about to hit him in the back of the head or push him on the tracks. There was no reason for this, but it didn’t seem familiar any longer, the empty cars estranged from him. The platforms echoing and deserted at College as he left the train and transferred to the streetcar, though it was not yet close to midnight, and the station should have been full of people, coming home from restaurants and meetings and sports events, going out to late-night clubs and parties. A man was standing at the corner of College and Yonge holding what seemed to be some kind of protest sign, a large piece of brown cardboard on which he had scrawled GEORGE BUSH TEXAS NORTH MURDER MORON BASTARD AMPHIBIAN, WE ARE NOT A MORON AT ALL.

Alex rode the streetcar to Grace, got off and crossed the street, and the man being held hostage came down the street to meet him. ‘Sir, I hate to bother you, sir, you’re always so kind… ’

‘Sure. Okay.’ He took a two-dollar coin from his pocket and handed it over.

‘Thank you so much, sir. I wouldn’t ask… ’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’ He didn’t want to hear any more about this, about terrorists, or people falling from the sky, or blood coming out of the ears.