Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

Of course there was no one there. Please step away from the car , the alarm repeated. It was parked near the subway station, he could see now; someone must have brushed against it on the way in. A woman with a sky-blue helmet rode a bicycle onto the viaduct and spun quickly out of sight. Beyond the traffic island, someone pulled open the door of the station and entered.

He had never really thought there would be anyone there. He had never really supposed there was anyone waiting, but he stood at the edge of the sidewalk for a while, looking across at the subway entrance, and no one came.

He wouldn’t see her again, he thought. That was what it meant, that he had looked for her at the top of the hill and she wasn’t there. He needed sleep so badly. He would have a bowl of soup, he would lie down and rest, his cat curled up against his legs, and Evelyn would guard the secrets of the world, and that would be enough.

He walked across the traffic island, kicking at the snow, crossed the street and entered the station. Inside, a skinny old man stood in the corner leaning on a cane, wearing a bright red coat and a baseball cap with a large Molson Canadian sticker on the front. At his feet, a mechanical clown doll was jerking and gesticulating frantically, reaching out from a paper bag. Someone had scribbled the word FEAR on the glass wall in black marker.

Maybe she was right that he had chosen to live his life so much alone, though it wasn’t a choice he remembered making. But it hadn’t saved him anyway from the network of debts and payments. It hadn’t saved him at all.

The doll stretched out its palsied arms to Alex as he passed, as if it were begging him for rescue.

He was waiting on the platform at Castle Frank, leaning against the wall, when he saw a young man, mid-twenties maybe, with wire-rimmed glasses and a small goatee, sliding an oversized black marker into the pocket of his army jacket and exchanging a covert glance with the woman beside him. She was tall and athletic-looking, dressed in a short black skirt and rainbow tights, her long hair a bright lime green. She was carrying a canvas backpack, and as she turned to look into the tunnel for the lights of the train, Alex could see the top of a can of spray paint. He smiled to himself. So these were the city’s editorialists, then. He was relieved to discover that they were not people he knew, that the FEAR graffiti was in no way connected with him, that there were still a few people around with whom he did not have complicated emotional ties.

He would have liked to signal to them somehow that he was on their side, a supporter of graffiti in general and largely in agreement with their message. But they would never believe that – he was too old, and despite his current slept-in state too respectably dressed, outside of their world, a stranger. It didn’t stop him from privately wishing them luck.

The train pulled into the station, and he and the young people got into different cars. He had managed to walk into the morning rush hour, so there was no chance of a seat, but he was pressed so tightly against the people around him that it seemed almost relaxing, as if he were not wholly responsible for supporting himself, and he closed his eyes, one hand on the metal bar, a dark velvet blanket of exhaustion surrounding him. The train swayed through the tunnel, hot and close and filled with intimate bodily smells; and though he had not really decided if he was going to change at Yonge or stay on until Bathurst, he found himself conveyed almost automatically out with the wave of other passengers at the Yonge/Bloor station, onto the narrow platform of the east-west line. He blinked, his eyes watery, and looked up and down for the sign pointing him towards the southbound train, got onto the escalator, wanting to sit down on the metal steps and see if he could sleep for the few seconds it would take to travel upwards.

The boy with the goatee and the green-haired girl got off at Yonge as well, and moved quickly through the crush onto the north-south level, then up another flight of stairs and through the turnstile into the mall. Near the drugstore, in front of a large poster advertising a new perfume, the girl turned and raised her eyebrows interrogatively. The boy frowned, doubtful, but she nodded her head, and he slid the marker carefully out of his pocket and into her hand, taking up a position in front of her as she slipped the backpack off and he hooked the straps over his own shoulders. Holding the marker below chest level, she began to slash it across the glass case that housed the poster, moving it in quick rapid strokes, but then the boy’s hand shot out and grabbed her arm, and she stopped, the marker uncapped in front of her, the letters FE scrawled on the glass, and a security officer a few feet away, his mouth opening in a sharp command.

They both knew what you did in this case. You dropped your eyes, you handed over the marker, the spray can, you apologized, possibly cried a bit if you were a girl. You went with the officer, you said you’d never do it again. They both knew this. So there was no explaining what the girl did next, why she suddenly grabbed her marker and ran, the boy coming after her, encumbered by the backpack, the security man chasing both of them. She dashed down the stairs to the subway level, and then reached the turnstile, launched over it with her hands and landed in a neat crouch on the other side, a transit guard appearing out of a booth as the security officer fumbled with the gate and shouted, ‘Stop her!’ The girl bounced up and ran for the escalator, and the transit guard followed.

‘Sasha, come back!’ called the boy, as the girl leapt from the bottom of the escalator into the mass of commuters on the platform, colliding with a man in a duffel coat and then springing away, dodging into the crowd, head down. The man’s briefcase crashed to the tiled floor and he made a grab for the girl’s arm but she was long gone, her swift feet skating over the fake marble, people pulling away from her on either side. As the boy reached the bottom of the escalator the transit guard overtook him.

She was weaving now, through the mass of bodies, putting them between herself and the guard, her rainbow legs and flying hair darting in and out of sight. The guard moved fast and heavy in a long-legged run, reaching for her as she sped along the edge of the platform. ‘Leave her alone!’ shouted someone, while someone else tried to take hold of her arm, and she jumped sideways, away from his hands.

The lights of a train swept through the tunnel in the distance as it swung in towards the station. And the girl was going the wrong way, one long leaping step threw her onto the yellow line, and her own momentum was moving her forward.

‘Jesus, stop, stop!’ yelled the transit guard, throwing his hands out towards her. Her lead foot crossed the edge of the platform.

‘Shit, oh shit, oh shit!’ cried the guard. She tried to turn but the turn itself threw her off balance, and she was rocking on the edge, her arms spiralling, her green hair fanning out in the wind of the approaching train, and the lights of the train were washing her out in a haze of white, her mouth wide open and soundless. And now people were running towards her, a dozen people had realized what was happening and broken into action, converging on the girl from every side. A man in a knitted Rasta cap reached her first, jumped out of the crowd, grabbed at her wrist, and pulled.

A man in a dark coat pushed past Alex, holding a package wrapped in brown paper. He looks like the doctor , Alex noted, a quick twitch of fear, but the doctor was imaginary, of course. Like most of his problems. His own imagination and his own damn fault.

That man’s going to drop the package and poison us all , he thought. He was thinking this on purpose, wasn’t he? A weird variant on punishing himself, and he reached the top of the escalator and walked onto the platform.