Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘That’s where he is, right?’ she asked. Alex stood up and looked where she was pointing.

‘Yeah. That’s it.’

‘There’d be much easier access from Bayview, wouldn’t there? I’ll try that next time.’

Alex frowned. ‘You’re going back?’

She looked up at him, surprised. ‘Not this minute. But yes. Of course I am.’

‘Do you think that really makes sense?’

She opened her mouth, then looked away quickly. ‘Well, it’s not like you have to come with me,’ she said.

‘That’s not what I meant. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea.’

She picked up her coffee cup with both hands and bent her head to drink. Her hair was wet and shining, the desk lamp picking out erratic highlights, a dark syrup stream. ‘That’s not your problem, is it?’

Alex tried not to feel as if he had just been punched in the stomach.

‘I don’t want you getting hurt is all,’ he said.

‘Schizophrenics are rarely violent. That’s a TV myth.’

‘I didn’t mean physically.’

‘I told you. It’s not your problem.’

He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling tension gathering in the air. This was bound to happen, he’d known that; the history and the hurt would come rushing back. They couldn’t talk about anything without the static in the way.

‘I’m sorry I involved you at all, okay?’ she said. ‘It wasn’t fair. I can deal with this myself, I always have.’

‘Susie-Sue. That’s really not what I meant.’

‘I know what you meant. You meant that I should just leave him there.’

‘Not exactly. No. I just don’t see why you have to go up there yourself. It’s too hard on you.’

‘And who the hell else do you think is going to? The prime minister? God? No one cares about him but me, Alex. No one else even tries.’

‘Okay, okay.’ He walked a few steps around the room, not sure where he was going, and stopped in front of a picture pinned to the back of the door, a child’s drawing, a stick person with strangely angled arms under a huge sun.

‘Miriam did that,’ said Susie. ‘Evvy’s little girl. Years ago, of course. It’s supposed to be me.’

‘I should think that’s an honour.’

‘Not really. Kids’ll draw anyone who passes by at the right moment.’

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I should go with you. You shouldn’t be alone.’

She shrugged. ‘That’s up to you. I’m all right on my own.’

‘You didn’t think so before.’

‘Yeah, well, that was stupid. I shouldn’t have asked you.’

‘Yes, you should. Of course you should.’

She sat under the desk lamp, broken reflections of light moving on the surface of her coffee, bright threads in her hair trailing down past her angular cheekbones. Her head turned away from him.

‘Maybe I should go home now,’ he said.

‘Maybe.’

‘I have to feed my cat.’

She nodded.

‘Will you tell me when you go to see Derek again?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I want to come. Really.’

‘Yeah, okay.’ She got up from the chair and hugged him. Her hair left a damp patch on his shirt.

‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ he said, his fingers digging into the fabric of her sweater.

‘Well, it’s all right. I should work for the rest of the weekend. I’m writing this paper for a journal.’

‘But soon.’

‘Sure. I’ll call you. Or you can call me. Whichever.’

Saturday evening on College Street, the sidewalks busy despite the snow, despite even the falling girls, people still determined to prove that they were the kind of people who went to College Street on Saturday night. The lights of the clubs and restaurants glowing against the cold as Alex sat on the streetcar, looking at the burned man’s face in a discarded newspaper. He thought again about phoning Janice, just to ask. Otherwise he might never know.

This seemed to be his place in the life of the city, and in Susie’s life too, somehow, a devoted observer at the margins of the crack-ups, the big stories. Susie and Chris, Susie and Derek. At least he had managed to miss the episode of her marriage, whatever that had been about. Someone else had presumably held her hand for that one.

… which could indicate the presence of a viral infection, said a side-bar to the story. The possibility of a large number of casualties , it said, in the hypothetical case of the deliberate release of H5N1 influenza, or bird flu. But the chances of such a release being successful are far from clear.

He imagined his murderous doctor striding through the snow with an oily package, thinking of love and killing, elegant, serious, sometimes uncertain. How many people in the street were carrying their own terrorists in their heads, and what shape did they take? Foreigners and police, dark men and angry children.

On College, a block from his house, the window of the little grocery was broken, chunks of safety glass swept into a pile on the sidewalk. It could have been a child playing ball, but everything now seemed to assimilate to the city’s larger narrative, and he assumed it was a crime of fear. The owners of the grocery Lebanese maybe, or Iranian, or mistaken for whatever.

Maybe it was just an accident.

For a little while he studied some contact sheets that he had left out on his desk, but the floaters were bothering him. And he was very tired, that alone was putting his eye off. He took a cassette out of the cupboard and slid it into the machine. One of Adrian’s old tapes – how long had it been since he’d listened to Adrian sing? It was another regression to the past, maybe, but one that at least wasn’t confusing or dangerous, just Adrian’s odd propulsive wandering songs, his inscrutable lyrics.

Queen Jane crawled up onto his chest, the weight of her pulling him down towards sleep. He shouldn’t really sleep on the couch, he’d just end up with a stiff neck, but he was disinclined to move. The tape clicked and began to replay. He should go by the church and see Adrian sometime, he thought, as he slid into a disordered space of dreaming.

The snow stopped that night, but the temperature kept dropping for days, the wind howling in white swirls up and down the streets. The floaters were persisting. Alex told no one at work, but it was a constant low-key struggle not to raise his hand to brush them away, not to blink and shake his head every few minutes; they were in the way of his focus, distracting him. And reminding him, reminding him as long as his eyes were open, of that bleak space breathing in from the future.

But they would recede, maybe they were already receding a bit, it was hard to tell. This time, next time, they would still go away. Probably damage to the retina would be minimal, for now.

On Monday night he was walking west on College, towards his apartment, with his hat pulled down to his eyebrows and his scarf over his nose, and then sirens were coming from all directions at once, and the street became a sea of red light, fire engines and ambulances and police cars all meeting at a point on the north side, a restaurant with a broken window. He didn’t want to know what it was about. In between the emergency vehicles were little groups of people, hugging each other and crying, and broken glass on the road. A man was holding up his hand, thin streams of blood running down his arm.

Alex didn’t want to know what it was about but he was reaching into his camera bag nevertheless, he’d need a long exposure for this, the light would be tricky to handle. He took a picture of the bleeding man, of the police entering the restaurant.

And he was packing his camera away when something came towards him out of the dark, shining and unpredictable, a fluttering thing, and before he knew what he was doing he had put out his hand and caught the string of a gold foil balloon in the shape of a star.