Girls Fall Down

by Maggie Helwig

  But she would not say that she fell because of this. Her account was simple – she smelled a smell like roses, then she started to feel dizzy and sick, as if she had been poisoned, and began to vomit, and didn’t feel better until she was carried into the open air on the street. She hadn’t been ill before that, she didn’t have a cold or an upset stomach, she was a healthy girl. She didn’t know about the panics on the London Underground, the rumours of cyanide. She hadn’t read the stories about what happened in Tokyo in 1995, when a group of elite sons and disaffected mathematicians decided to kick-start the apocalypse; never saw the pictures of people staggering out of the subway exits, clawing at their eyes.

  So why would she imagine such a thing? Why would anyone?

  The first girl who fell, on the day it began.

  She had come out of school with her friends, in her kilt and tie and red wool jacket, her thigh still feeling intangibly damp where the geography teacher had put his hand on it after class.

  ‘Sid the Squid,’ snorted Lauren as they walked down the steps.

  ‘God, he’s so gross. He’s just made of gross. And his wife is a hog and a half, seriously, I mean, she weighs like a thousand pounds.’

  ‘She totally could sink the Titanic with her ass. I’m not kidding,’ said Tasha.

  The strangeness of adults, their clenched little needs.

  ‘Yeah, can you imagine them in bed?’ said Lauren. ‘Oh, oh, darling, argh, I can’t breathe!’

  She hated her thighs anyway, they were rounded and fat, swelling against the hard chair.

  ‘He’s repellent,’ said Lauren. ‘Hey, you know what, you know the Starbucks at Yonge and St. Clair is giving away free mochaccinos?’

  ‘No way,’ said the girl, taking a tube of pink glitter lipstick from her backpack and opening her mouth slightly to apply it. She wouldn’t stay after class anymore, not without Lauren, not without somebody. ‘No way they are.’

  ‘Yeah, because they had a sign in the window. But only till four.’

  ‘I don’t even think.’

  ‘Come on, then. I’ll prove you they are.’ Lauren pushed her hair back from her shoulders, and led them onto Yonge Street, into the shine and flutter of retail, the glimmering windows, people pushing past them with briefcases and plastic bags. The girl had a black canvas bag over her shoulder, with a yellow pin on it showing a rabbit holding a PEACE placard, and a pink pin that said It IS All About Me, Deal With It.

  ‘I just feel so cheated,’ Tasha was saying. ‘Because every year after sports day they had pizza, like every year, and then our year we just have chips and Coke. Literally like a single chip each. And you expect you’re going to have pizza, you know?’

  ‘I know, it’s so cheap,’ said the girl. ‘It’s like, hey, we’re saving five cents, we’re so awesome!’

  ‘To me it’s like a betrayal,’ said Lauren.

  Starbucks really was giving away mochaccinos, and the lineup stretched halfway down the block, some of the other girls from their own school, and kids from the local high school in jeans and T-shirts, their coats slumping off their shoulders. The girl checked her reflection in the glass door, wondering fretfully if she had gained more weight, if there was a visible roll of fat at her waist. Joining the wave of young bodies, pushing and giggling. Contact in the crowd between hips, legs, the bare skin of a stranger’s arm, and she slid into the high bright relief of noise.

  ‘I so need caffeine right now,’ said Tasha. ‘Or I’m physically dying.’ They reached the counter, and the desperate boy pushed forward another half-dozen cups. Each of them grabbed one, pressing through the aisle towards the exit, sipping the foaming liquid, bitter and milky. Aware of the public school boys, watching them from under their messy bangs. She met the eyes of one boy, a nice-looking boy, someone she would probably never see again, and his look slid down her.

  When they walked east along St. Clair they had become a group of five, Megan and Zoe joining them as well.

  ‘I have to write an assignment about Guinevere,’ moaned Zoe. ‘Who I just hate so much. Did you read it? She’s so unloyal. She’s like this crazy old bipolar bitch.’

  ‘We’re not doing that one, though, we’re doing that other one.’

  ‘Well, God, you’re so lucky. It’s like a million pages of poetry. It’s diseased, if you want to know.’

  ‘Is your class raising money for the global, the African thing?’

  ‘I think. But I’m not sure what we’re doing yet.’

  The girl adjusted the gold barrettes in her hair with one hand, rolled up her skirt so that it brushed high on her legs, her bare skin goosebumped with cold, thinking about the boy from the public school, with a vague distaste and a wish that he would follow them. He might have been a nice boy.

  ‘What I think, we need to have a slave auction,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because it’s so the best kind of fundraiser.’

  ‘We should make the teachers be the slaves,’ said Megan, giggling. ‘We should make Mr. Sondstrom be a slave. We so should.’

  The girl frowned and wiped mochaccino from her pink lips, swallowing against the heat in her throat. ‘Mr. Sondstrom’s too gross to be a slave even,’ she said. Megan didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault. ‘He’s just a squid. Sid the Squid.’

  ‘Totally,’ said Lauren, bumping her shoulder supportively. The girl finished her mochaccino, crushed the paper cup in her hand.

  Turning off St. Clair, they walked past the frost-brown gardens of the residential streets, wet leaves in the gutters, heading towards Chorley Park, where there were boys playing soccer sometimes, or sometimes they would just sit on the benches and talk, their park, their place.

  ‘But I’m going to the Eaton Centre later on,’ said Megan. ‘I need a new pair of shoes so bad. It’s a critical situation.’

  ‘You know the place called Rebels? They have the best shoes.’

  ‘Megan buys her shoes at Sears,’ said Tasha.

  ‘I do not, you liar.’ Megan, a year younger than the others, her position in the group subject to question.

  ‘You totally do.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Zoe broke in, laughing nervously. ‘I have to tell you about my brother. I have to tell you about my psycho brother, okay? I mean, he’s got all these, like, warfare scenes in his bedroom, like, the little guys with their spears and shit. Which is spaz enough, right? But he’s now he’s like, okay, it’s, like, this warfare is all over, it’s modern times, and I’m going to do a terror gas attack, and kill them all. And I’m like, God! They’re a bunch of toys! But he’s, no, I’m gonna make a poison chemical from like Clorox and bleach and I’m gonna kill everybody, and I’m like, it’s a toy, Jordan, you mutant.’

  ‘God,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. ‘That is so random.’

  ‘’Cause he’s like, it happened in, in the Japan subway, and all these people died, so he’s like, I can totally do this at home.’

  ‘What happened in Japan?’ asked Tasha, her eyebrows pinched.

  Zoe shrugged. ‘I dunno. Terrorists or whatever. Jordan’s like Mutato-Boy, so, I mean, what does he know about it? I bet he dreamed the whole thing.’

  ‘Would you believe,’ said the girl, ‘when I was a kid I was in that big subway crash at Dupont? Oh God, that was so scary.’

  ‘Oh my God! You were really?’ gasped Lauren, and the girl’s face shone with gratified horror.

  ‘I totally was,’ she said. ‘I nearly died.’

  ‘Oh my God! That must have been so traumatic!’

  ‘Seriously,’ said the girl; though in truth her memories were vague, barely existing at all. There had been smoke, at some point – when she was being taken out of the car, there had been smoke. Before that she had been pressed against her mother, and there was some other woman pushing against her from the other side, and that woman was wearing too much perfume, floral, clotting in her throat. The lights had gone out.

  ‘No, but I think monkeys are more morally superior than people,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because m
onkeys don’t use, like, landmines and stuff, do they?’

  ‘Unless they were really horrible monkeys,’ said Tasha, and then they were at the park.

  ‘Well,’ said Lauren. ‘This is pretty random.’

  And what happened in the green space of the park was something the girl didn’t much want to talk about.

  Things that Girls Do

  I

  He knew how it would go, Alex told himself as he walked up Bathurst Street. They would start out tentative and hopeful, full of kind feelings about the past. They would talk for a while about safe and neutral memories, about shared acquaintances, and then slowly the evening would shrivel into the dry, polite awareness that they had nothing in common anymore, maybe never had. It might be embarrassing and a bit sad, but they would walk away from it unharmed, freed from certain things. That was the way these things went.

  He knew, in fact, not much about her. Once he had thought that he wanted to know her, wanted nothing more in the world, but it had never been true; whatever he had thought he felt, Susie had finally been not much more than a blank screen for his own longings. And he, presumably, had been the same for her, had acquired what identity he had from being simply not Chris.

  BIRD FLU EPIDEMIC COULD KILL MILLIONS, said a headline in a newspaper box. Maybe this would replace the fainting girls, then; that would be a relief. He bent down, glancing at a photograph of the mass extermination of chickens in Hong Kong. The story stressed that the world was overdue for an epidemic. The virus biding its time, waiting to make a grand appearance.

  She was in the restaurant already when he arrived, but she stood up from the table as he came in, and there was a moment of awkward shuffling as they tried to decide whether they would hug. They did not. It had crossed his mind that he might not recognize her; but of course that was impossible. He sat down at the other side of the table, under a tourist-office poster of Bangkok.

  ‘Alex,’ she said. ‘You look good.’

  He was stung by the cliché, but this was what people said. He should have let it pass, said the same thing in return. He smiled a bit crookedly. ‘I look ten years older than my age.’

  She tipped her head to one side and raised her eyebrows, not insulted or taken aback. Almost amused.

  ‘The grey hair’s hereditary,’ he added, feeling foolish now. ‘Other-wise it’s just my misspent youth.’

  Her own face had lost the soft prettiness he saw in his old pictures, was angular and serious, her skin textured and finely lined, her eyes still large and very dark. Her hair, which he’d been genuinely curious about, was longer, past her shoulders, and a deep red-brown that was possibly her natural colour, though more likely not. A fine, complex face, a good face to photograph. But he couldn’t say anything about how she looked; he had managed to ensure that it would not be neutral or safe.

  The next few minutes were temporizing, the business of studying menus, ordering, a pause in which neither of them had to think about what to say next. The waiter came, and left, and space opened up again.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that I phoned,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Of course not. Why would I mind?’ He played with his cutlery, not meeting her eye and thinking, How long have you been back, and never called me? Why did you look for Adrian and not for me, never for me? He was more angry than he had realized.

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Quite a while. I didn’t know you were even back in the city.’

  ‘Yes. Well.’

  ‘I didn’t have any way to know, did I?’

  Or maybe this was just the edginess of an impending hypo. He’d taken his insulin before he left home, and his blood sugar must be getting quite low by now. He picked up his glass of juice and drank half of it quickly.

  ‘Actually, I am in the phone book,’ said Susie.

  ‘Ah. Well, so am I. As I guess you found out this week.’

  ‘I can see where you wouldn’t have thought to look, though.’

  ‘I didn’t especially assume you’d be back.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He could, yes, feel his anger diminishing, independent of Susie or anything about her, as the sugars in the mango juice settled his blood. Sometimes it was no more than that, a process of the body, disengaged from other people.

  ‘Alex,’ she said suddenly. ‘What are you actually thinking?’

  He took another sip of juice. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Alex.’

  ‘Nothing. I just was wondering about the difference between emotions and chemicals.’

  Again she seemed prepared to accept his bizarre conversational gambits. ‘None, if you ask a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s all blood sugar and serotonin reuptake.’

  ‘Trick of the light?’

  He thought of Walter’s delicate cardiac work. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Is that what you believe?’

  This had become a discussion about something else, where either a yes or a no would have intentions that he didn’t want. ‘I don’t know what I believe,’ he said. ‘I was just wondering.’

  The waiter returned with their food, chicken fried rice for Susie and vegetarian pad Thai for Alex. ‘You still don’t eat meat?’

  ‘I’m hardcore. In my way.’

  ‘You really are the most incongruous vegetarian, though.’

  ‘Well, the insulin comes from a lab now. Don’t have to slaughter livestock for it anymore.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘On the other hand, I’ve taken pictures of doctors cutting open freshly killed pigs, so I’m still fairly compromised.’ He wound the broad noodles around his fork; the sauce was sweet and ketchupy, entirely North American. ‘It keeps me from thinking too well of myself.’

  ‘Good Lord. That must be a fun way to spend your day.’

  ‘I don’t mean all the time. Not very often, really.’

  If she had asked him what he did that involved pig autopsies, it might have gotten things back onto a normal course – professional information followed by edited personal details, a socially appropriate exchange. ‘Do you have to watch them kill the pigs?’ she asked, and he realized that Susie really was quite as odd as he remembered her being. Although he wasn’t presenting a very convincing picture of normalcy himself.

  ‘Well, yes. But it’s not particularly graphic. The doctor gives it an injection and it just dies kind of quietly.’ He poked a piece of tofu with his fork. ‘I’m a medical photographer,’ he added desperately, trying to steer the conversation onto solid ground. ‘It’s a research hospital, so they do have an animal OR. But it’s a very small part of my job.’

  ‘Huh. How did you end up doing that?’

  Alex breathed a small sigh of relief. ‘I don’t know, because hospitals are like a second home to me? Basically, the job was advertised and I needed work. I still do other things, but I’ve stayed at this for quite a while now. It’s a pretty good way to make a living.’

  ‘And that’s it?’ She lifted a bit of chicken to her lips, watching him as he tried to keep his eyes on his plate. ‘That’s all it is?’

  He felt another quick burn of irritation, but something else as well, the memory of her, knotty and actual, the girl with pink hair and erratic boundaries. ‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘No. I guess it’s not. It’s also a privilege, isn’t it? I mean… if you’re not a doctor, you don’t usually get to see, say, a person’s cerebral arteries being cut and repaired. Or a heart, the actual thing, the way it moves… I’m allowed to see this, I’m allowed to see this kind of extremity. And there is something in it – something beautiful.’ It was possible that he sounded crazy. He was increasingly unsure. ‘I don’t mean to be so dramatic. Lots of times I’m just taking pictures of electron microscopes for the brochures, or, you know, doctors pretending to discuss charts with each other on the cover of the annual report.’ He ate another forkful of noodles. ‘You call yourself Suzanne now?’

  ‘Susie’s okay.’

  ‘Yeah, but
mostly.’

  ‘Mostly Suzanne.’

  Have you ever seen a pig being killed? he thought of asking. Have you ever seen anyone die? Why can’t I decide if I’m angry at you or not?

  Her eyes weren’t young anymore. They were deeper and shadowed, grown-up, the skin around them creased, and for just a moment he felt almost unbearably close to her.

  ‘So what are you doing now?’ he asked instead.

  ‘I ask people peculiar questions,’ said Susie.

  ‘Well, yes, I see that. I mean for a living.’

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘What, and you get paid for this? By the Question Fairy?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’ She ate a forkful of rice. ‘Okay. I’m actually a sociologist. Or nearly. I’m working on my doctorate.’

  ‘You’re an academic? Jesus.’

  ‘Come on. It could be worse.’

  ‘I guess. It’s not organized crime.’

  ‘It’s not international finance. It’s not the arms trade. Or retail sales. It’s really quite harmless, I get my doctorate and then I go and teach other people till they get their doctorates and go teach other people. It’s a little self-contained closed system, like a terrarium or something.’

  ‘An academic. Man. What a thought.’

  ‘You know, usually people just ask why I don’t have a real job at my age.’

  ‘I’m hardly one to be asking that,’ said Alex, and then realized that he did have a real job, had done for quite some time, though it had somehow never managed to penetrate his self-image.

  He could have asked her what she’d been doing in the meantime, but it was exactly that meantime that he didn’t want to touch, how she went away and came back, the old scars. Behind his back he heard the sheer whistle of rising wind, outside the glass wall.

  ‘So you’re writing a thesis or something?’