Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘Is this good or bad?’

‘I’m really not sure.’

Alex moved his hand towards the letter and looked at her, and she nodded, so he pulled the papers over to his side of the table. The script was slanted, rushing forward on the page so that words ended up on top of other words, lines snaking up and down the margins. There seemed to be no salutation, nor anything resembling the beginning of a thought.

i was talking to the doctor that time and he said have you thought about your hostelity, I could use the help. because the hired help, yes they do, the hired, the hived, the halt, the lame, they are always helping. okay that was not my point. so he said that about the hostile and i said, what the fucking shit, i can get hostile on your ass if you keep going on about it. so he fucked me up the ass that’s all the doctors do every day they’re back at it. i was bleeding from my anal passage because of the fucking of the doctors and that’s why I got the cancer in there and my penis also.

but you find a safe place and be in it. because the sodium pentothal and others you may not beawar of, hypnium oxygenatium and also wood alcohol derivatives as such. this is why the kalorie intake. you see it is kalorie, not calorie as they tell you, kallos = beautiful but it’s a risk you take. but you find a safe place.

baby sister we were born together in one bloody body and they say it isn’t the same dna but that’s a lie, on top of me and because they say we are not, no no, go away, but i look after you. they tried to do it again to you but i put my mysterious protection in place. you are very beautiful susie-paul. i will make it all right.

not even to get into the subject of the suicide missions they are asking me to undertake, but i say, no, we are not going in that direction. to the undertaker ha ha. all in little pieces. with involvement of the following persons, mr kofi annan, mr vladimir putin = whore, mrs margaret thatcher + tony blair, mr president of the united stated union of holy matrimony which is to say fucking in the bleeding orifices. the oval orifice. ha ha ha.

but it’s not my point okay okay. but only if you would come here and stay with me. that would be better.

once upon a time there was a little girl. and the birds ate up her eyes. but she lives happily ever after at the end, this is my mystery power.

but stopping the crying is a problem of our time, he cries too much.

There was more, but Alex couldn’t keep reading. He turned the papers over in his hands and briefly thought that he might cry himself, watching Susie eating her french fries, eyes on her plate.

‘He spends a lot of time writing,’ she said. ‘This is on the coherent side.’

Alex slid the papers across the table. ‘He’s in love with you,’ he said quietly.

Susie shrugged. ‘That’s not the form of words I’d choose to describe it. I’d say I’m the focus of a lot of his obsessions. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s not much different from what normal people mean by love.’ She pushed back her hair, and Alex bit his lower lip. ‘He wants me in there with him, you know. I mean, not so much in the tent or wherever. In his world. With the plots and the brainwashing chemicals, inside that system. I even feel guilty sometimes that I’m not.’

‘Oh God. Susie.’ He wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, given the conversation up to that point, but he reached across the table for her hand. She moved away, in what might have been an accidental gesture, and he took a french fry from her plate instead.

‘But I’m not inside it, am I? And poor Derek’s not my bad angel. I have my own ordinary failures, and that’s a big thing, really. People don’t know.’

There was nothing he could say – there was nothing he could do, short of kneeling and putting his head in her lap – so he said nothing. A flicker crossed the path of his sight, and he moved his head, and caught himself making a brushing motion at one of the floaters. She noticed the gesture, but she didn’t know what it meant, it had no implications for her. My eyes are bleeding.

‘Anyway. What’s the news in your life, aside from magic stars?’

‘Nothing much. Day-to-day stuff at the hospital.’

My eyes are bleeding because of you.

‘I don’t want to keep you if you’re busy.’

‘No. I’m not.’ He watched the shifting highlights in her hair and wondered how long he would be able to see them. That was the kind of detail he might lose. ‘I got a good run of photos at the church.’

They sat without speaking for a while, Susie eating her fries with her fingers.

‘I’d like to photograph you sometime,’ he said.

‘You already have. A bunch of times.’

‘Yeah, but ages ago.’

Slowly, Alex was becoming aware of noises behind them. Voices at another table growing louder and more agitated.

‘Come on. I know you were taking pictures of me last week.’ He shrugged; it was true, though he’d been only half aware of it at the time. Susie in the darkness of the Cloud Gardens, looking at the ground. ‘But I mean properly.’

‘Yeah, okay. Sometime.’

He saw movement, real movement, not black spots, from the corner of his eye, and heard a woman’s voice, high and scared, saying something about roses. ‘Oh man,’ he said, and turned his head in time to see her – in her thirties probably, in a furry green coat – crash heavily to the ground beside the door. Alex stood up from the table.

‘Shit,’ said Susie, and they both started to move towards the woman, but half a dozen other people had already reached her. As someone tried to lift her up, she vomited onto the floor, splashing her coat and a man’s shoes. Alex heard her saying the word poison, the word terrorist.

‘Let’s just go,’ he said. Another man was clinging to a table, his heavy shoulders hunched over as if he were barely supporting himself, red blotches appearing on his face. But Susie’s expression was lit up with professional fascination. ‘Oh no,’ she said, excited. ‘I have to stay, I have to watch this.’

An ambulance had already arrived, then a fire truck. Two more people were sitting on the floor holding their heads. The paramedics were wearing masks that covered their faces, blue gowns over their uniforms and green plastic gloves, and they lifted the woman carefully to her feet. She staggered and fell against one of them, and he turned his head to the side as he held her up. Strips of bacon, neglected on the grill, began to shrivel and blacken, harsh smoke curling into the air around the counter.

‘This is really, really interesting,’ said Susie, moving closer to the centre of activity.

The paramedics led the woman and the blotched man out of the restaurant, the firemen passing oxygen masks out among the crowd. The scorched bacon was spitting fat, and Alex felt a heave of nausea. A dark-haired waitress ran back behind the counter and scraped the strips of bacon off, tossing them into the sink. The deep fryer and the coffee maker were smoking as well, she turned them off, unplugged the coffee maker and threw it hastily into the sink. Susie moved back a step, took Alex’s arm and pulled him forward. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking he was about to be sick, a horribly familiar smell of burned meat in his nostrils.

‘Here’s what I want to know,’ she whispered. ‘Do the ERTS think this is a poison gas? What procedures are they employing for these incidents?’

‘I just don’t want to be taken in for decontamination or whatever.’

‘See, look at this, the medics have the masks but the firefighters don’t, and that doesn’t make rational sense. But it’s like… they have a kind of ambiguous response to this. Like it’s, hmm, liminal between real and imaginary, you know?’