Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

‘Derek, please .’ Susie fell backwards under his weight, thrusting one arm into the mud to support herself, as Derek pressed his head against her chest, sobbing, his hands grasping up to her face.

‘Oh God, oh Jesus, what did I ever do to deserve this? They say I did the crime and they have to kill me, but I never did it, baby, I never did.’ Susie was almost flat on the ground now, dangerously close to the edge of the hill, Derek’s mouth on her neck, his body covering hers, and for a moment her arms seemed to go limp, helpless. Alex started forward.

But then she was moving again, she struggled free, and Derek slid down in a heap, his hands in his hair, a high hollow wail pouring out of his throat. Susie scrambled in the mud and pulled herself up, pressing her fists against her eyes.

‘I know, Derek. I know you didn’t,’ she said, fighting for breath. ‘It’s all right. Just please. Try to calm down.’

‘They poison me and fuck me up the ass until I bleed.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They want control of my mind so they can make me do the evil thing.’

Her face tense with effort, Susie leaned back towards him and rested her hands on his head, pulling his fingers out of his hair. ‘Oh, Derek. It’s okay. It’s okay.’

‘I’m not the bad garbage,’ he said, his voice a thin whine.

‘No. No, you’re not. Sit up now, please. Sit up, Derek.’

He lifted his head, pulling his shoulders up until he could look in her eyes, wiping mud from his face.

‘Will you talk to me, Derek, about coming inside?’

‘No. No no. It’s not a good choice. I’m sorry.’

‘Then I have to leave now. I’ll come back another day. I could bring you, I don’t know, a warm blanket or something?’

‘I have my resources. I’m not in need.’

‘Well, I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Will you give me a kiss before you go?’

Susie frowned, a deep furrow between her eyes, and bit at her thumbnail.

‘Please, little sister?’

She leaned towards Derek, and briefly, softly, touched his wet lips with her own.

‘I won’t let them hurt you,’ he whispered.

‘Yes, Derek. Thanks. I appreciate that.’

She came back to Alex, and they scrambled up the short slope and crossed the railway track. Susie didn’t hurry across, he noticed; she saw that there were no lights, there was no sound of an approaching train, and walked over it at a normal speed, unafraid. She put her hands in her coat pockets and stood at the top of the hill, her jeans dark with mud and melted snow, staring across the ravine.

He remembered that night in the bar, all that time ago, when he had watched her crying, and he thought now that it had never been because of Chris at all, not Chris and not him, none of the things that had seemed so important.

‘I’ve been the lucky one, Alex,’ she said softly. ‘Just lucky. That’s all.’

The door of the Donut Wheel’s smoking room opened and then shut nearby, and the smell of cigarettes drifted around them at their table.

‘I don’t know what options I have. He hasn’t done anything that could be grounds for involuntary hospitalization.’ Susie ran her finger over a bead of moisture on her beer bottle. ‘I don’t think I’d want to do that even if I had grounds. There’s – there’s trust issues here. It’s just I’m really worried… I don’t think it’s an accident he’s living so close to the railway tracks. He’s tried to hurt himself before.’

The alcohol seemed to be affecting Alex disproportionately; he felt nearly drunk already after a single beer, and so drained and tangled up in confusion and, God help him, a sick kind of jealousy, that he could hardly put words together. ‘Aren’t there social workers? Anybody?’

‘Well, what are they going to do with a guy under a bridge who won’t talk to them? I mean, in a bizarre sort of way he’s quite functional right now. Except for the not eating and the freezing to death.’ She picked at a maple-glazed doughnut, rolling bits of white pastry between her fingers. ‘I’ll call up social services, though. Maybe one of these days they’ll have a useful idea.’

Alex went to the counter and bought two more bottles of beer, thinking that she would kill him yet. Watched her pretty mouth on the brown glass, the slight movement of her throat when she swallowed. His mind full of serpents and severed heads, and the things that can happen to children.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ he said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘You know more than most.’

He took a long drink of beer and shook his head. ‘Nothing, really.’

‘Oh well.’ She broke a fragment of icing off the doughnut and licked it from the end of her finger. ‘It’s probably not worth knowing.’

Outside on Broadview, in the cold, he slid his arms clumsily beneath her unbuttoned coat and kissed the side of her mouth – he really was drunk somehow, it was ridiculous. She took one of his hands and pressed the knuckles to her lips, but he could see that this was already a movement away; he knew before she said it that she wouldn’t want him to come to her house that night.

‘But, you know, Sunday, if you want to do the photo thing.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

‘Take me somewhere you know about,’ she said. ‘Some weird hidden place. Show me the city. I promise not to criticize.’

‘It’s okay if you do. It’s your job in a way.’

He walked down to the Danforth where the street signs were all in Greek, and he might as well have been in a foreign country, he knew so little, he was so far away.

Teenagers and old men wrapped scarves over their faces, picked up canvas bags and set out on newspaper routes with the early editions. One of the papers carried an article on the front page reporting, disapprovingly, the release on bail of the suspected terrorist, the man who had been parking his bicycle, now charged with assaulting a police officer.

On the next page, an article about the girl who had died of meningitis, the number to call if you had known her, the symptoms you should fear.

And at five in the morning Alex was walking around the west end, in the rising chill before dawn, his ears numb with cold and his blood sugar off, wondering why he couldn’t stop doing this, surfing these waves of self-destruction, wanting her with the sick pain of a physical lack, the skin-twitch of hunger as her hands withdrew. And his eyes went on bleeding.

Derek Rae beneath his bridge, writing on scraps of paper, trying to bring back the numbers he once knew.

Remember this.

A boy and a girl, dark-eyed and small. The grass of the lawn is cut short, a perfect chemical green.

Listen, says the boy. I will save you. I will always save you. He pokes branches into the earth, a pattern, a star or a helix. I will learn about the nature of time, he says. I will learn how to change the world.

The girl, even now, understands that he will fail. But she loves him. There is no one else. The girl knows too much, for a child this small, about having no choices.

Gusts of dirty smoke unrolled across a landscape of broken glass, in the bleached light of a winter dawn, and between the smoke, parting it like curtains, the white figures moved, flames at their feet. Raised arms to signal to the others, the masks over their faces smeared with black dust, their breathing harsh. The strange cracked sounds of fire.

The hoses stretched out, long paths of canvas, and the firefighters, masked as well, their uniforms coated with ash, directed the streams of water towards the windows of the warehouse, and the smoke turned heavy and dark, clotted clouds hanging low to the walls.

The white figures moved in the doorway, bloated and clumsy, turning in gradual motion. Within the doors of the warehouse, a livid blackness. They held up their ashen hands, their instruments, their mysterious process. Their slow-dance liturgical beauty.