Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

The PA system was explaining that delays on the Yonge line had now been cleared but that normal service might take some time to resume. Passengers might experience longer than usual waits between trains. All right. He put his head back against the wall, retreating again into something near a dream, only his commuter reflexes still awake, attending for the sound of a train arriving.

Then everything fell apart.

He heard a shout, somebody screaming, and his head jerked up. The mass of people on the platform had fragmented, beginning to run in different directions, and an alarm going off. Emergency.

The man with the package. For one terrible moment, only half awake, Alex believed that he had done this, somehow he had done this, he had thought it and it had come to be.

A wave of people parting at the edge of the platform. Uniforms at the edge, on the stairway. He held the camera bag against his chest, and as he tried to step forward the glare hit his eyes and obscured the space ahead of him. He blinked again, dizzy, shook his head, and he saw a series of frozen pictures, like screen captures flashing in front of him. The man with the package opening his hands and letting it fall. An old man with a baseball cap, his eyes wide with terror. And then he saw her, the green-haired girl flying forward towards the edge of the platform, and this much he understood, that whatever else was happening this girl was in danger, and someone at his shoulder began to run an instant before he moved forward himself.

At the edge of the crowd, a woman sprinted to the wall. She was a woman who worried, her brain wired for anxiety, a woman who watched for pay phones and emergency buzzers wherever she went, and she knew the location of the subway’s red button, she knew how to cut the power. This was the moment she had waited for all her life. She slammed her fist into the button, once, twice, finally useful, finally justified.

The girl’s hair a wild swathe of brilliant lime as she pitched forward, lifted off her feet by the force of the man’s arm, her muscular body colliding with his at the edge of the platform, both of them hitting the ground.

The situation at the edge was a blur of colour and light, and Alex was still running and someone beside him running, when he lost his footing, and staggered for a moment, and a heavy man pushed past him and knocked him backwards and he felt the impact of metal on his skull, reached out for a wall, there was suddenly a wall in front of him, but it banked at an angle and then sped towards him, and the tiles struck him in the face as he fell.

Somewhere, people are talking.

An alarm goes off for an indefinite period of time. Somewhere there is the gentle continuous action of gravity, and the hard push of tile on the body’s weight.

‘He’s got a medic-alert bracelet,’ said a man’s voice.

After what seemed like some time, Alex realized that the man must be talking about him, that there was a hand on his wrist and another on his forehead. He should really open his eyes.

‘It says he’s diabetic. Do you think it could be insulin shock?’

Alex cleared his throat and looked up, an unfamiliar face leaning in towards him anxiously. ‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Not insulin shock.’ He lifted a hand and wiped his eyes, and he could see that the girl was sitting on the platform, quite near him. If he had blacked out at all, it could only have been a matter of seconds. ‘I think I just, ah, just sort of lost it. I’m all right.’

‘He hit his head,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘On the pillar there. He could have a concussion.’

‘Should we call an ambulance?’

The girl was holding her forehead, dazed, and the boy with the goatee had pushed his way towards her now. Another group had formed around the man in the Rasta cap, who was waving them away, laughing, his hands trembling. The train was sitting still, frozen halfway into the station, the conductor leaning out the window.

The transit guard took a step towards the girl, his face stern, but a shiver of energy suddenly went through the people around her. Alex heard someone shouting, Ain’t you scared her enough for one day, man? The guard tried to speak, but he was cut off by someone else. Leave her alone. Jesus Christ.

And Alex saw what was happening now. It could have gone in any direction, she could have been their enemy, their terrorist threat. But the crowd, that strange volatile creature, had decided on protection, a soft animal embrace. For no reason, for this moment only, it had adopted the girl, the two fallen men; they were its wounded young.

He felt a man’s arm behind him, supporting him as he sat up. A curly-haired woman was at his shoulder. ‘I do think we should get you an ambulance.’

‘No, honestly. I’m fine now.’

‘At least a cup of tea.’

‘I have a glucometer in my bag. I need to check my blood sugar. But I really think I’m okay.’

Someone pulled the bag over to him and began lifting items out, a light meter and several lenses, before finally locating the insulin kit.

‘Can I help?’ asked the woman.

‘Thank you. But not really.’ They had found a thermos of tea, somehow, somewhere, and were carrying the plastic cup to each of the casualties in turn, the girl, the man in the cap, and then Alex. He sipped the tea, a man holding the cup to his lips; it was hot and sweet, and he was aware of an extraordinary feeling of comfort, which confused him, because he hated being looked after, he had hated it all his life.

The man with the Rasta cap was the first to stand, exchanging handshakes with some of the people around him and heading towards the stairway for the east-west line. The train had pulled fully into the station now, and people were coming off, a bit bewildered, moving in a slow arc around Alex and the girl and those who were still surrounding them, checking them for injuries, offering them mobile phones to call home, one elderly woman pulling a thick brown herbal remedy out of her purse. Eucalyptus, thought Alex, eucalyptus and something else, the smell dark and weedy and medicinal, weirdly pleasant. It was not clear if he was supposed to drink it or rub it on his skin; he settled for inhaling deeply above the bottle, and this seemed to be satisfactory.

The boy had found the felt marker – the girl must have dropped it at some point in her dash down the platform – and he handed it over to the security guard, eyes lowered, then sat by the girl and muttered, Fucking fascist’s mad at the world because he couldn’t even be a proper cop.

Somehow Alex, on his feet now, was being led past a line of transit staff and up to the street, still accompanied, wrapped in the foolish kind concern of the crowd, and he hated this sort of thing, he really did, but this was so purely impersonal, so nearly abstract, as they hailed a taxi for him and helped him into the back, that he could almost accept it as a kind of joy.

You could stand on the upper level of the subway and look at the letters FE scrawled on the tile poster glass, and not have any idea what had gone on below. You would assume that it was someone’s initials, probably.

Above, in the shopping mall, exchanges of goods and currency continued unbroken, the inhabitants of the city purchasing candied pineapple and disposable razors and stocks and bonds and geranium-scented shower gels. A woman at a corner of the street hummed under her breath, sipping from a small paper cup of espresso. A driver climbed down from his streetcar to switch the tracks. White birds fell from the cold air towards the rooftops, and men and women crossed at the flashing lights, their selves a silent accidental balance, norepinephrine and serotonin, infinite tiny adjustments. These are the actions of the world, the small repetitions by which it runs.