Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

The kitchen at the end of the hallway was small and cramped and rather untidy, but there was a large window looking out onto the backyard and the alleyway beyond. A dirty dish and cup in the sink, a kettle on the counter, a coffee maker; some bits of paper stuck to the refrigerator door, reminders about dental appointments and books due at the university library. Tentatively, he opened the fridge. A bottle of cranberry juice and a carton of milk, takeout containers with noodles and leftover chicken wings inside, part of a loaf of rye bread, a cinnamon bun in a paper bag, plastic-wrapped chunks of havarti and feta cheese, some organic rhubarb jam from a health-food store. On a shelf nearby, a jar of peanut butter and a tin of cocoa. He took the peanut butter down and made himself a sandwich, poured a glass of juice. He would have liked some hot chocolate, but he thought he should cause a minimum of disturbance, he shouldn’t seem to be laying claim to her kitchen.

About ten-thirty, according to the clock on the stove. He sat down at the table and looked out the window into the backyard, chewing the bread and peanut butter. It was a very clear, still morning, the sky a low field of white cottony snow falling slowly. Someone ran along the alleyway with a dog. Looked like a Labrador. Some kind of big dog, anyway.

Floaters. He’d noticed them already, of course, though he couldn’t say exactly when. Sometime after he came out into the light. Floaters, impossible to count how many, dancing like burnt-out novas at the margins of his field of vision. Tiny hemorrhages, the possible forerunners of something much worse; stress-induced explosions of the proliferating blood vessels. He couldn’t let this go on, couldn’t go on doing this to himself. He had to tell her that this was impossible, he wasn’t able to climb into ravines in the middle of the night or crash his normal routines without warning, he had to stop following her everywhere. Even if every minute that he wasn’t touching her was a kind of disaster. Suzanne Rae, his personal crack cocaine.

He was still eating the sandwich when the bedroom door opened, and adrenalin shot through his body so he could barely swallow. She walked uncertainly into the room in a bathrobe, and he couldn’t make out her face when she saw him – she was grimacing against the light, one hand shielding her eyes. She went to the sink, took down a glass from the shelf and ran the tap.

‘I don’t normally drink like that,’ she said with her back to him, and swallowed the water quickly, leaning on the sink.

‘Yeah. I can tell.’

She turned around, biting her lip and frowning. ‘Oh. I didn’t mean to imply…’ She pushed a matted bit of hair from her face. ‘Alex, I’m really glad you stayed,’ she said shakily.

‘I’m sorry about…’ he waved vaguely at the sandwich. ‘I had to eat. I know it’s not very good manners.’

‘Sure. Much better you should just drop dead.’ She walked to the fridge and took a can of coffee from the freezer compartment. He could see her breasts moving under the bathrobe, pale skin half-shadowed and secretive. She fumbled with the can and started to spoon coffee into the machine, and then halfway into the process she dropped the spoon on the counter and put her face in her hands.

‘I’m so fucked up right now,’ she said.

He stood and put his hands on her shoulders, touched the back of her neck. She smelled of sex and stale alcohol, and she had bits of twig in her hair. There was no limit to this.

‘I guess it’s just as well you met Derek. It helps if you know.’

‘I don’t understand everything.’

‘No. Nobody could.’

His skin was goosebumped, without a shirt in this cold room. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the floaters, and crossed his arms under her breasts, holding the warmth of her against him, the curve of her back pressed into his stomach.

‘Tell me something pretty,’ she said.

‘Tell me about one of your places.’

‘I’m not good at describing things. That’s why I take photographs.’

‘But try?’

‘I don’t know. Have you seen the terraced garden in High Park?’ She shook her head, and he felt the movement against his lips. ‘There’s these waterfalls,’ he said, keeping his eyes closed. ‘They built this series of waterfalls and pools down one side of the valley. It feeds into Grenadier Pond. There’s stone bridges over the pools, and this stone pagoda where the ducks live, little brown mallard ducks. And flowers growing in the rocks all down the hill. There’s, well, I don’t know the names of all the flowers. Lilies I know. Some of them are kind of pumpkin-coloured, and others are more yellowy, like, like the inside of a nectarine. And there’s, um, these pale flowers, white with a kind of wash of purple or pink, on long stalks, and the ones like bottlebrushes, bright red and yellow. And green, all this green falling down the rocks, little tiny green leaves and blue flowers, and I think some pine trees? I don’t know if I’m remembering the pine trees or making them up. I guess it’s actually kind of fakey and pretentious. But it’s still nice.’

She took hold of his hands and moved them further down, the robe parting slightly so he was holding the soft drift of hair and wet flesh. ‘Oh,’ he said, as she pressed back harder against him, and he felt his knees loosen as he dipped his head and sucked on the small lobe of her ear, his tongue against a nub of scar tissue where a piercing had healed badly. She turned around in an awkward tangle of legs and fingers, and he lifted her onto the counter as she reached for the zipper of his jeans.

Her body had no overlay of memory for him; that one sad stoned trembling night had been too brief, too long ago. His head bending down to her, mouthing her dark pink nipple, this was now, this existed for itself. The salt slickness of her cunt. Not the body of a girl, but a woman at the end of her thirties – a woman who had never had children, who was strong and fit, but adult, aging, skin and muscle loosening. Immediate and real.

They lay down on her bed, exhausted. Her eyes were bloodshot, and he was nursing a cramp in his calf. Skin on skin, clammy with sweat in chill air, and he felt the heat from her flushed shoulders like a coil of wire.

‘I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ said Susie. ‘Back at the rainforest place.’

‘The Cloud Gardens. It’s okay. You had a point.’ Though he could not even clearly remember, right now, what they had said to each other. ‘It’s a very tiny rainforest,’ he said, spreading his hand over her ribs. ‘Like, in an elevator shaft. It’s the oddest thing.’

She kissed him again, and even the sour taste of her mouth was too much for him, he wanted to draw every bit of her inside him, into his blood. Over and over, she could break him down.

The light was fading already in mid-afternoon, and snow was still falling, soft and slow, the kind of snowfall that never seemed heavy at any one time but accumulated into thick billows and drifts, pressed down on the sidewalk by pedestrians and melted into shades of tan and deep brown by the cars on the road.

Alex sat on the floor of Susie’s living room, drinking coffee and staring at a newspaper, where a picture of the burned man dominated the lower part of the front page. The man was, as it turned out, neither Muslim nor Jewish but a Portuguese Catholic, and was described by his family as ‘odd.’ He thought of phoning Janice Carriere to see what was happening, if the man was still stable, if he was awake at all.

Susie came into the room, dressed now in a sweater and skirt, and sat down in an office chair at a worn wooden desk with a rather expensive laptop resting on it. Ikea bookshelves around the walls, and a large map of the city taped up near the desk, with annotations in green and red ink, a scatter of shelters and homeless communities – the Scott Mission, Seaton House, the cardboard neighbourhood under the arc of Bathurst where it rose, just past the Gardiner. Bastard Bridge , she had written here. A yellow post-it note read prelim interviews only, revisit . On the desk, a thick sheaf of papers, several different pens including some stolen from hotels, a glass paperweight with a sea urchin inside it. She looked up at the map.