Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

A fireman stretched an oxygen mask towards them, but Alex waved it away. He was afraid that Susie was going to put on a choking fit in order to get into one of the ambulances – there were two outside now – but she was busy with her clipboard and pen. Police cars pulled up at the curb, and then everyone inside the restaurant was being led out, standing for one shocking moment outside without coats, pressing against the wall for shelter.

‘They’re not sure what they’re doing,’ said Susie. ‘A lot of this is improvised.’ Policemen began coming out with armloads of winter clothes, purses and bags, dumping them on the sidewalk. He pulled his coat on, and his scarf, but he couldn’t find his hat. Susie had brought her bag outside with her, but she still had no coat, was hunched over and windblown, scribbling notes. A heavy man leaning against the wall seemed to have a nosebleed; he was clutching a wad of bloody tissue to his face, his mouth wide open. A cyclist with dreadlocked hair rounded the corner, staring at the crowd as he passed, and shouted, ‘Valium! Take Valium!’ as he sped into the darkness along College.

‘Susie. Aren’t you freezing?’

‘Just a second.’ She wrote another sentence, then bent down to a pile of clothes on the sidewalk and tugged her coat out. The woman who had fallen was being lifted into the ambulance.

‘… set up a decontamination tent?’ he heard one of the firemen saying, and then another fire truck arrived, and a white-suited hazmat team climbed down. A woman stood with her mouth partly open, pinned down by the sight of these swollen figures moving clumsily towards the door of the restaurant. Alex grabbed the sleeve of Susie’s coat and pulled her along the street, out of the light from the windows.

‘Can we go now? Please?’ He stood behind a newspaper box, separated from the crowd, his hands in his pockets. Susie looked back almost regretfully, but Alex started walking quickly west on College, and she came with him, trotting to keep up.

‘I’m glad I saw that,’ she was saying. ‘It really is a thing that’s worth studying.’

‘I just don’t want it happening around me all the time, is what I want.’ He took a breath, and the exhaust-filled air seemed clean in comparison, his nausea subsiding.

‘You notice it’s always just one or two people? It’s like a mass phenomenon that’s at the same time highly atomized, I think that’s almost unique. I wonder what they were talking about just before she fell.’

‘It seemed to come out of nowhere, more or less.’

‘Nothing comes out of nowhere, believe me.’ She blew on her hands again, rubbing her knuckles.

‘And why does that sound like a pop lyric?’

He was walking more slowly now, safely away. As she drew level with him he reached out almost absently, and his fingers touched her shoulder and then moved back.

‘I’d like to talk to that first girl. She’s the real key to all this.’

‘She looked pretty ordinary, I have to tell you,’ said Alex, shrugging. ‘I don’t know, I think one of her friends had a pierced navel, if that’s any use.’

‘Gotta be useful to someone.’

‘I wouldn’t count on that.’

They had gone by Palmerston now. As they passed the streetcar stop Susie paused and made a small uncertain gesture.

‘Well,’ said Alex, ‘I live over by Grace. It’s just a few blocks.’

She nodded, and as they crossed the street his arm moved around her waist, his hand running up and down the soft curve of her hip as she leaned into him for warmth. He could have told her that it wasn’t a good time, that he needed to be at work in the morning. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about going to bed with Susie knowing that her twin brother’s chronicles of anal rape were folded away inside her shoulder bag. But it was like this, it would be like this, he had never been truly alone with her.

Inside the apartment she stretched up on her toes, trying to touch the gold balloon above her head, car alarms going off on College Street.

The fear had been always visible, the men with instruments appearing on television almost as soon as the first girl fell. But when real disease awoke in the city, it happened so quietly that hardly anyone noticed.

It woke, like the fear, in the body of a girl, though a very different girl, a strung-out child with a push-up bra and a chronic cough and track marks, two miniskirts and some fishnet stockings and undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. This girl began to feel sick, as if she had the flu. For a while she kept working, and it wasn’t so bad as long as she could get a line of coke from the guy who ran her, back in the parking lot behind the Salvation Army building, or even just some booze, but then he didn’t like his girls to be that far out of it, he’d smack you around if you got too wasted, but it was hard to work otherwise when she felt this sick. And then it got worse, and then a lot worse than that.

She was lying in her bed and she couldn’t even tell if she was cold or hot except that it hurt, whatever it was, it was hurting. And bad dreams. Choking in her sleep, down her throat, jamming it, couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t get away from it, and she wanted to scream, but she was pinned down, too heavy, but it just hurt so much. Dirty girl. And some of the johns were freaks. The things they wanted her to do. The light scooping into her eyes like a jackknife, it was in her head now, it was all pain blowing up her head, and it was too heavy, she couldn’t move her, her, it hurt too much. And what they wanted her to do. Perverts. But when you spread your legs. Dirty girl. And it hurt, in her, in, in, and in her body, and it was shredding into black, dark dark, and her neck snapped back, and her body turned to stone.

The guy who ran her came in, and then left. By the time her friend found her, hours later, and called an ambulance, she could no longer be woken. The ambulance came and took her away; and in the hospital she died.

As she was still dying, the procedures for a meningitis outbreak were set into motion.

The staff at Public Health acted quickly when the hospital phoned them. They placed a story in the local paper, they put up flyers in the neighbourhood where the girl had been working. But the desires of the street move so strangely, so covertly, and they follow no reliable pattern. The public health officers knew they would not reach everyone they needed to, and perhaps not anyone they needed to, but there was not much else they could do.

The other girl, the first girl who fell, walked quietly into the kitchen of her house and opened the cupboards, searching through the canned goods, turning the tins around in her hands as if she were considering something. Tomato soup, stuffed vine leaves. A jar of peanut butter. She wasn’t sure how much she could take without an explanation, and she didn’t think that she could explain why she needed to do this. A tin of coconut milk. Finally she took two cans of tuna, hesitated, and put one of them back on the shelf.

She picked up her coat, a rather expensive leather coat, and slid the can into her pocket.

Just going for a walk, she said, poking her head around the door to the sitting room. She’d be back by ten to finish her homework. Anyway, there was a TV show she wanted to watch. Her father nodded, and she checked for her keys, her cellphone, and went out into the wind.

She walked around to the back of the house and looked down into the ravine, but there was no one there. It would have been strange if those people had been there anyway, that green-haired girl and her friend. They had come, and performed their task, and vanished.

The fence had been painted over, but she could see the shadow of the word FEAR, a grey shape underneath the white paint.