Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘Oh, oh, and another thing, sir?’

‘Mmm?’ He kept walking towards his doorway.

‘The lady’s brother, sir. The man you were trying to find. I made some calls to the important people. I can tell you where he is now, sir.’

A woman walked down Woodbine Avenue, carrying a slice of pizza in a greasy paper bag, and singing ‘Life During Wartime’ under her breath, a love song about tapped phone lines and vans full of guns. A woman alone at night, hypervigilant, listening for footsteps behind her, she sang to herself about burning her notebooks. Outside a subway station, municipal workers cleaned away scraps of scorched cloth and skin, while the burned man lay in isolation, his heart stuttering and slowing as the nurses ran lines of fluid into his bloodstream, fighting off shock, pulling him upwards as his body plunged down.

Two slight figures in leather jackets and fingerless gloves stopped in an alleyway near King and Bay. While one of them watched the passing traffic for police cars, the other pulled a can of paint from a scuffed khaki backpack and sprayed FEAR on the wall in black letters. They caught the King streetcar three blocks away, rode it to Spadina, and stopped in front of a blocky old office building, once again spraying FEAR against the bricks.

Across the city, harmless bacteria passed between individuals, carried by airborne particles or traces of saliva or the touch of a hand, our lives marked always by the proximity of others. And on this night or some night quite close in time, a germ woke up and began to inhabit someone’s blood, in a way that was no longer innocent.

The girl who fell sat in her room in front of her laptop, frowning over an essay.

Lord of the Flies

contains numerous characters which are all young boys. William Golding uses the characters to present many themes and big ideas that give the reader a lot to think about. So each of these characters has a very distinct personality.

She leaned back from the keyboard, playing idly with a bangle on her wrist. On the bulletin board above her desk, beside a picture of last year’s basketball team, she had pinned a postcard from a peace group, something she’d picked up outside the Eaton Centre; you were supposed to sign it and mail it to the prime minister or someone, but she wanted to leave it where it was, the hard-edged sketch of a hand, Say No printed across it in red.

Simon is in the choir but helps out differently to the others.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement beyond her window. Someone was out there in the dark. She leaned closer to the glass, and for a moment she saw the two people in leather jackets, a boy and a girl, she thought, slipping between the posts of a fence and into the ravine. One of them carried a can of spray paint, and her hair had come loose from underneath her cap and swung down her back, dyed a startling green. She moved with quick precision over the stones at the edge of the slope.

What were they doing, those two, down in the ravine, those hidden, knowing people? The girl tried to imagine being out there in the dark, elusive and daring. The vivid figures, alone together, definite somehow in their mysterious task. She caught a vanishing glimpse of long green hair between the black branches of the trees.

This could never be her life. She could not be that kind of girl. She turned back to the laptop.

Simon is very good and pure. He meets up with a pig’s head skewered on a stick, which becomes known as the Lord of the Flies.

She didn’t much like this assignment. She didn’t want to think about this, poor Simon crawling from the jungle into the circle of boys. Boys did that kind of thing, tearing butterflies to pieces, stomping on each other. What girls did was different.

She wondered if there was a book about what girls did, how you could talk about it. She imagined starting to write that book, what you can do with fingernails, what you can do with secrets.

She looked out the window again to see if the people with the spray paint were still visible. Nothing moved in the darkness, but written across the bars of the fence she saw a single word, painted in thick fast strokes. FEAR.

Alex took the wooden footbridge over Rosedale Valley Road, walking level with the tops of the bare broken trees, and turned onto one of the winding streets of Rosedale. Small cedars lined the sloping walkway to the house, behind a stone wall landscaped with climbing vines; there were rosebushes by the door, and holly trees, sprinkled with tiny Christmas lights, which he feared might have been planted specifically for the season.

Susie had been right about the Filipina maids; one of them opened the door when he knocked, and took his coat before he could stop her, and another immediately tried to offer him a glass of wine, smiling with the faded intensity of someone who had been smiling for many hours.

‘I’m just here to pick someone up,’ he said, and she showed him through the hallway, past a Chinese stone horse, a crackle-glaze vase.

There were little groups of people scattered around the sunken living room, under a Kurelek painting that he presumed to be original. But whatever the art on the walls, the late stages of every party were fearfully similar. Glasses sat abandoned on tables and mantlepieces with the acidic dregs of red wine clinging to them, in a litter of broken crackers and olive pits. On one side table, a tray holding a scatter of cheese rinds, three half-rotten grapes and a single curl of smoked salmon. Someone smoking by an open window.

From an adjoining room he could hear an emotional, muffled discussion; in front of him, people huddled on sofas, their heads bent together to exclude the other groups from their conversation. That time at the burnt-out end of the evening, the sudden intimacies and old resentments gathering like piles of cigarette ash. Susie was sitting alone in a chair by the fireplace, gripping a glass of wine. He crossed the room and knelt down beside her.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner. I had to feed my cat.’

‘Your guy was really sure about this?’

‘It was pretty detailed. Now, remember, this comes from a man who thinks that terrorists are trying to kill him because he has too much knowledge about the components of the body. You can decide how much faith you want to put in it.’

She laughed, a bit wildly. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes too bright. ‘This is insane. I’ve been interviewing people on the street for months. And you talk to one guy. One guy. Fuck. Just… fuck.’

He put his hand on her knee without really thinking. ‘Are you all right? Don’t get too fixed on this, Susie. It might not even be true.’

‘We’ll need a flashlight,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know if there’s going to be anyplace open to buy one, is the problem.’

‘Oh, Susie, no. We can’t go right now.’

‘Yes. We can. We have to.’ She drank the rest of the wine in her glass. ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll never go.’

‘We can’t. It’s not safe.’

‘It’s fine, I’ve been down there before. There’s a whole community by River Street, I’ve done interviews there.’

‘Yeah, but not at midnight.’

‘So he told me he wanted to see me incorporate Aristotle’s Poetics ,’ said a woman on the couch, her voice rising passionately. ‘Never mind that my entire argument is anti-Aristotelian! I mean, honest to God!’ She broke off as if she were about to start crying.

‘I can’t stand it here much longer, Alex,’ said Susie. She stood up, and he followed her through a hallway and into the kitchen, where a particularly well-dressed group was clustered at a granite-topped island, debating something in low voices. ‘It’s supposed to be a big honour for me to be invited at all, you know.’ She found an open bottle of wine and poured herself another glass. ‘You want a drink?’ He shook his head. ‘Because I’m just a grad student. There aren’t many grad students here.’ She leaned against the counter, her arm touching his. ‘I should be honoured, right? Instead I just think, I can’t deal with this world. I don’t even mean Rosedale. I mean anyone who doesn’t have a brother living in a ravine.’