Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘I hate this fucking neighbourhood,’ said Susie, still giggling, as they left the bridge and continued north, past wide yards filled with trees outlined in fairy lights. ‘I just want to scrape the paint on their Mercedes with my house keys.’

‘Oh yeah. Resort to vandalism. That’s always good.’

At the end of Glen Road they turned and took another short street into a park, walked across the grass until they had passed through a fence of bushes and found themselves at the top of a steep hill. Alex turned on the flashlight and scanned the bushes until he found a narrow track leading downwards into the shadows. He started to scramble down, his boots sinking in the slippery mud, but Susie tripped and fell almost immediately. ‘Goddamn,’ she moaned. ‘This is my only good dress. Look at this.’ Her stockings were covered with mud, and there was a large smear across the front of the dress; clearly not thinking, she wiped her caked hands on the sleeves of her jacket.

‘Okay, c’mere.’ He stretched out his hand, and she took it and and stumbled towards him, the shock of her body against his, and he thought, O h shit. Oh no . He caught his breath, his arm moving around her waist to pull her closer, Oh no. Then, bracing his feet, he steadied them down the long slope to a forking path at the bottom.

‘I think we’re on level ground from now on,’ he said, though she continued to lean against him, her hand pressing into his back. He didn’t take his arm away. They turned to the right, the mud sucking and clinging to their boots. The wind was muffled by the wooded hills on either side of them, but his ears and fingers were stinging with the cold. He aimed the flashlight ahead, and then swung it to either side, looking for any signs of habitation.

‘Wait for me a sec.’ He let go of her and walked off the edge of the path, into the snow beneath the trees, circling the flashlight around him, trying to see into the woods as far as he could, but he wasn’t good with darkness, he couldn’t see much. She probably didn’t remember that either. He stood at the edge of a deep gully, hearing water running below; came back to Susie, and she leaned into his chest again, wrapping both her arms around him.

They walked on, and then he saw a signpost on his left, between two hills. ‘Okay. That’ll be the brickworks.’ He led her off the main track to a smaller path that ran sharply downwards, and he could make out the shape of the old brickworks now, and a smaller building at the side lit up with orange security lamps. They crossed a concrete plaza, ponds and wetlands spreading out around them, and then they were beside the great hulk of the abandoned factory, which had been haphazardly tidied and repaired, a strangely inaccessible cultural monument. The wind was worse here, howling around them in the broad exposed flat.

Susie shook her head. ‘This doesn’t look right,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he’d live near a, an attraction. And it’s not far from the road, listen.’

‘Well, it’s maybe not a very successful attraction. But I don’t know. Anyway, it sounded like he was a ways behind it.’

He turned the flashlight into the factory hall, picking out the blurry shapes of men in sleeping bags among the twisted piles of old machinery, and pointed to them wordlessly. Susie left his arm and moved skittishly towards the men, veering at an angle, but then she saw empty bottles lying by the sleeping bags and shook her head and returned.

‘They were drinking,’ she said. ‘Derek doesn’t drink.’

‘He could’ve started.’

‘No. He wouldn’t. Anyway, they’re just crashing. Your guy said he had a tent, right? He’s settled in.’

There was another mud path, narrow and sloping upwards, leading on beside a fence. It ran by the parts of the brickworks that had never been restored, that were smashed and boarded up and covered with graffiti. There were no lights here; Alex turned the flashlight on again. Susie tripped on a tree root and fell again, and cut her knee, and he bent and took her back into his arms. Thistles bit and lodged in their clothes.

The path led them around a corner, to the back of the vast dark walls. In the beam of the flashlight Alex saw a sign with a hazard symbol and the words Asbestos and silica contaminated area. Do not enter. They passed the warning, around the corner of a barbed-wire fence into a clearing. Not far beyond them was the railway overpass, towering on massive concrete pilasters, reaching up far above their heads, far beyond where he could see.

He stopped, and lowered the flashlight. ‘Susie. Look.’

Somewhere up the hill was another light, distant, below the railway bridge, a small wavering point.

‘Oh,’ whispered Susie. ‘Oh dear. I think it is.’

‘We’re going to have to get up the hill.’

At first it was thick with dried grass and weeds, waist-high for Alex, nearly chest-high for Susie, a crackling barricade. He couldn’t climb up with his arm around her, but he stretched out one hand behind him, and she held it and followed him, stumbling through the vegetation. They reached the first concrete foot of the underpass, and here the slope turned muddy, and much steeper, clogged with fallen trees and stones.

Alex released her hand and grabbed on to the branches of the dead trees to pull himself along, bent over, fighting gravity. Susie, beside him, was on her hands and knees now, unable to get up the hill any other way. He slid and fell onto his hands himself, dragged himself upwards on another branch.

He reached the next concrete foot and boosted himself onto it, then stretched down and grabbed Susie’s arms, hauling her awkwardly up.

Anchoring himself against a tree stump, he turned to look up the last expanse of slope. The light had gone out. Alex aimed the flash-light that way, and it illuminated the outline of a tent. A green tent, just like the man had said.

‘He must have heard us coming,’ said Susie.

The tent was pitched under the last wall of the underpass, where it drew even with the top of the hill. There was a small level area around it, scraped clean, and two milk crates holding something, he couldn’t see what. The slope where they were was steep, precipitous; they struggled further up, mud-covered, scraped, and then, some yards from the tent, Susie put her hand on his arm.

‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to stay here.’ She squeezed her eyes tight shut and opened them again. ‘I have to do this.’

He stayed on the hill, in the wind, leaning against the broken trunk of an old tree. And he watched her, Susie, on her hands and knees in the mud, crawling unsteadily up the hill, over the rocks, towards the doorway of the green tent.

She stopped outside the front flap, still on her knees. The person in the tent must know she was there.

‘Derek?’ he heard her whisper shakily.

There was no answer from the tent right away.

‘Derek?’

‘Is that Susie-Paul?’

‘Of course it is.’ She sat down in the mud and wrapped her arms around her legs.

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Derek. Who else would climb all the way up here just to look for you?’

The light came on inside the tent, and then a man opened the flap and crept out, holding a lantern in one hand and a book in the other. ‘Well, hello then,’ he said.

He didn’t look much like the man in the photo. He was horribly thin, emaciated really, and he had mouse-coloured hair down to his shoulders and a straggly beard, a scabbed-over cut on his forehead. He bobbed one leg nervously as he sat, tapping the book against his knee. The glasses were gone, and his eyes, Susie’s deep brown eyes, looked freakishly large in his sunken face.