Maggie Helwig - Girls Fall Down

A teenage girl sits in front of the laptop in her bedroom. She is no longer pointed out as the first girl who fell. Now she is waiting to see who she will become.

She looks out the window at the letters on the wooden fence, at the ravine beyond, and imagines walking out there, what she might find. She believes there will be a change, someday, not now, but someday soon.

This girl wears pink glitter lipstick and silver bangles, and rolls up her skirt when she leaves her school. She sits in class folding the corners of pages, aware of an absence.

This girl knows a few things. This girl knows more than she thinks she knows.

Fear will find its own directions. Girls will keep falling, at least for a time; the subway will stutter and stop, and the hazmat teams will come. Men will stare at blisters on their hands and think about anthrax and death. But no particular contagion lasts forever. Troops will move at borders, and other shapes will form.

It is raining outside Derek’s window, winter rain, sudden and thick, that will melt down the drifts and fill the gutters with dark streams, leaving mounds of impacted snow on the city’s lawns and the slopes of the ravines. Small ribbons of ice crack from windowsills, and reach the ground as water.

Later, the water will freeze back into ice, treacherous slicks on the pavement and shimmering film on the branches of trees. These are only the early days of winter, still. It will last a long time.

The men with the masks across their faces arrive, and tighten the bands that restrain him. They hold him down and inject him with chemicals. He tries to think clearly but his mind is clogged, polluted. They move their hands around his body. He cannot stop them from touching him. He does not know what they intend to do to him. He thinks he may die here.

Derek Rae understands that he is travelling through hell.

He knows that this is his duty, to be a prisoner in this long and shadowed war.

He has heard rumours, outside the door of his cell, about troubles in the city, but he can tell that these are transient disruptions. The struggle in which Derek is engaged is longer, and deeper, and impenetrably secret.

They touch his body, preparing him for rape. They have infected him already, but they just can’t stop. They just can’t get enough. They will lead him back and forth like a creature and rape him in the night, their poisonous sperm contaminating his blood.

But he will bear it. He will endure.

In the muddy ebb tide of drugs, Derek’s mind wallows in waking dreams. He dreams of the chemists in their secret laboratories, burning sperm and tumours on their blue flames, slitting the necks of thick writhing snakes so the corroding blood runs out, oozing over their instruments.

He dreams of lying in the earth, finally alone.

Of twin children in a pale suburban yard, playing games of escape with branches and bits of cloth, the hungry birds waiting above them.

And he dreams of the white horse that came one day, long ago, to him and his sister, as she knelt in a corner weeping. Of how it bent down, its muzzle sweet and smooth, and opened its mouth and gently spoke. A voice like cream, the girl’s tears drying. The white horse spoke to them of safety. It told them no time is eternal, and all things die. It told them that there was a coming day when they would be loved.

He knows that the horse was slaughtered in a bloody feast, its head torn away. But on certain days he thinks that if only he can wait forever, perhaps it will come back to him then.

The train moves slowly through the black tunnel. Water runs in cold rivulets down the walls. Like a bird in the night, the train flies through darkness, alone. As it passes, men in safety vests stand to either side, poised on ledges, motionless, holding up implements.

In front of the train, a space of light opens up. Then the light expands, surrounds it, draws it in. The platform is bright and open. A man is playing music on a steel guitar. Beyond him, the bright colours of magazines, of candies and juices. Fruit gels, Life Savers, Aero bars and cinnamon-flavoured gum, cough drops with lemon and mint. The deep tawny apple juice, the ruby translucence of cranberry. There are muffins and cookies. There is warmth, the warmth of artificial heat and the warmth of bodies, moving near each other, the silky hair of young women. People speak, sometimes they touch. Some of them are tired, some are smiling, some are at peace. The doors of the train open, widely, softly.

And then this moment passes.

There is a three-note chime, and the doors close. The train moves back into darkness.

The lyrics on pages 115 and 116 are from the Leslie Spit Treeo songs ‘UFO’ and ‘Heat,’ by Laura Hubert, Pat Langner and Jack Nicholsen, © 1990, Spittoons. Used by permission.

For information on my characters’ professions, thanks to Rob Teteruck, Senior Photographer, Hospital for Sick Children, and Dr. Metta Spencer, Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Toronto.

Alex’s imaginary terrorist actually closely resembles Ikuo Hayashi of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. My information on Hayashi and Aum is derived from Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It , Henry Holt & Co, 1999, and Haruki Murakami, Underground , Random House/Harvill Press, 2000. Murakami’s extraordinary book is also responsible for making me think about subways in the first place.

Alex’s hospital is a fictional institution; to the best of my knowledge, no Toronto hospital has experienced a pigeon attack. Evelyn’s church on College Street is also fictional, but it shares the physical location, and some of the characteristics, of St. Stephen’s in the Fields Anglican Church. Thanks to St. Stephen’s, and to St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, Huron Street; also to Sneaky Dee’s, The Cameron House, Lee’s Palace, and The Nerve.

Thanks for many and varied reasons to Andrea Budgey, Maria Erskine, David Helwig, Kate Helwig, Nancy Helwig, Bill Kennedy, Jude MacDonald, Katherine Parrish, Claude Royer and Ken Simons; and also to Alan, Frank (Sasquatch), George, Joanne, Manny, Miroslav, Paul and the other Friday-afternoon folks at St. Thomas’s. Special thanks to Erika Peterson, without whom this book would never have been finished.

Special thanks as well to Alana Wilcox, my editor, for taking on this strange book, reading it deeply and well, and making it possibly even stranger; and to everyone else at Coach House, especially Christina Palassio, Evan Munday and Stan Bevington.

Thanks also to my agent Lesley Thorne, to the Leighton Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and to the Ontario Arts Council for financial support.

Apologies to Columbanus for the unflattering reference to hedgehogs, and thanks for the advice on vestments and other matters. And acknowledgements to the Venerable Bede, source of the book’s final image.

Maggie Helwig has published six books of poetry (most recently, One Building in the Earth ), two books of essays, a collection of short stories and two previous novels, Where She Was Standing and Between Mountains . She is the associate director of the Scream Literary Festival. She also works for the Social Justice and Advocacy Board of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto.

copyright © Maggie Helwig, 2008

first edition

This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 076 5.

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.