Girls Fall Down (11 page)

‘That's it. Come with me.' He steered Alex towards the vending machine by the bar, the lights moving dizzy against the walls.

‘You have money?'

‘Of course I have money. Jesus.'

‘Can I trust you to buy yourself a chocolate bar?' asked Adrian, glancing back at Evelyn sitting with her book. ‘Or do I have to stand here and watch you?'

‘I will buy myself a chocolate bar, mother. Scout's Honour, okay?'

Adrian went back to the table, and Alex put a hand on the vending machine to steady himself, blinking a few times until his vision cleared. The machine had several kinds of candy, but he realized now that he was both very stoned and very shaky, and somehow it seemed impossibly hard to operate. He pulled a handful of change out of his pocket, but when he tried to work out what he needed the numbers kept blurring in his mind, breaking up along the shiny glittering edges of the coins under the flickering bar lights, too damn complicated, and then it was quite difficult to get them into the narrow change slot, he didn't know why they made those slots so narrow anyway. So he didn't notice the voices behind him until he was fishing out his chocolate bar and heard a glass smashing to the ground; and even then, working the complicated foil wrapping off the candy, he didn't pay attention until he heard Susie-Paul, on the verge of tears, shouting, ‘Fuck you, then! Just fuck you!'

His mouth full of chocolate, he turned and saw Susie-Paul and Chris, their faces pale and angry. He couldn't tell which one of them had thrown the glass. They were close together, facing each other across the glittering shards.

‘You're behaving like a child,' said Chris, the words hissing between his teeth. ‘Grow up, will you?'

‘Do not, do
not
, patronize me like that, I will
not
put up with that,' wept Susie, and raised one hand, her arm flexed, palm open. Chris grabbed her wrist and pushed her arm down. ‘I told you,' he said, ‘calm
down
, nobody wants to see a scene in a bar here.'

‘Fuck what they want!' She pulled her hand away from him. ‘You can't just blame this on
people
, you have to
talk
to me!'

Alex pressed his own fists against his mouth and swallowed, trying to fight back an explosion of anxious laughter. They hadn't seen him. This was something arcane and private, and he shouldn't be watching it.

‘I
do
talk to you, I talk to you all the fucking
time
, what the fuck do you want me to
say
?'

‘Don't ask me what I
want
, this is not about what
I want
. Don't fucking make this be about me, because this is not
my
problem.'

‘Well, I don't know whose problem it is, then, because frankly you're the one acting like you're crazy.'

‘How DARE YOU!' screamed Susie. She was suddenly moving, she slammed her hands against his chest and he stumbled backwards. ‘How
dare
you say that! Get the fuck away from me, you fucking shithead!'

‘Jesus Christ!' Chris swept a pile of napkins off the bar with his arm as he tried to regain his balance. ‘I might as well, 'cause there's no fucking point to
this
.'

‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!' Susie shouted, and shoved him again, hard. He grabbed at the bar to steady himself, then turned and stalked towards the door and out, and he didn't look back at her as he left.

The rest of the chocolate bar was melting in Alex's hand. He took a short step forward, then back, his ears ringing with the music surrounding them. He could feel the shakiness of the hypo subsiding, but he was still dizzy. His head filled with space. She was sitting on a bar stool sobbing, and her hair was the colour of cotton candy, her dress was peppermint, green crushed velvet, ragged and soft. She would never cry like that because of Alex. He knew this, and the knowledge hurt him. She dried her eyes with a napkin, and he could see the dark smear of her mascara on the paper.

She got down from the stool and walked slowly back towards the dance floor, and as she passed she saw him. She gave him a small vague nod of recognition but nothing happened in her eyes at all. He didn't matter in this, not even a bit. There was no reason that he should.

Alex stood by the wall and closed his eyes, hearing the shift in sound as the tapes ended and another band came out onstage. Looked across the room and saw her kneeling down by Evelyn's chair, Evelyn shaking her head and putting one hand softly on Susie's back. Susie wiped her eyes, said something to Evelyn, stood up and shrugged and moved onto the dance floor.

He wrestled a second chocolate bar from the machine, broke off a piece and ate it, and went to the bar and ordered another beer. He
understood precisely how dangerous this was, but he needed to drink, he needed to be more drunk, as far outside himself as he could get.

He slumped into a chair beside Adrian and watched Susie-Paul out on the floor, tossing her head furiously, light and shadow moving across her body, the sway of her hips, the sinuous arch of her pale bare arms. Nothing made sense. The singer edged anxiously around his microphone, thin and awkward, belonging here as little as anyone else, in a swirl of rising music.

The bar was emptying out, gradually, the lights turned on to reveal puddles of beer and smashed bottles across the dance floor. It was more than an hour after last call, and Evelyn was nearly at the end of her book. Alex was rolling an empty beer bottle around on the table, watching the yellow smears of light in the amber glass and, at the edge of his vision, Susie-Paul, standing near the stage talking to a little group of
Dissonance
people. Most likely he could have stood up and joined them. The bottle slid off the table to the floor. Then the soft green folds of her dress as she moved away from the group, and he lifted his head and wondered how he could ever have doubted. She would come after all. She always would.

‘Alex,' she said softly, sitting down across from him. ‘I'm sorry I didn't say hi before.'

‘No. 'Sokay,' he said. He had a vague awareness that he was smiling at her like an idiot. ‘You were busy.'

‘Not so much. It was just too noisy, you know?'

‘I just said. It's okay.' He reached across the table and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back and didn't let go. Adrian picked up his guitar and started to fiddle with the tuning.

‘I should've talked to you sooner.'

‘You can talk to me whenever you want.' Alex no longer had a clue what was going on, but he wasn't sure he cared. Her hand small and hot and soft in his.

‘I guess you saw … ' she waved her free hand in the air.

‘Mmmm.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I don't care, Suze,' he said, slurring a bit on her name. ‘It doesn't matter at all.'

‘I'm not really like that.'

He drew slow circles on the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘It's okay, Susie-Sue. It's okay.'

The bartender had put on a tape, some kind of quiet folk music that was meant to get people out of the building; it was playing behind them now. And then, without calling any attention to herself, Evelyn put her book down on the table, walked out onto the floor, and began to dance, alone among the broken glass. Dark and slender, a strange formality in her movements, her toes pointed, as if she might have studied ballet years ago. For a moment Alex felt like there were two different screens in front of him, foreground and background fluctuating, Susie's eyes, her fingers touching his palm, and Evelyn dipping and bending at a distance on the empty dance floor, Adrian watching her intently and making no move to join her. The room filled with mystery. A slick sheen of light on Susie's gold-painted fingernails, the barely audible singer on the tape invoking lies and dreams and windmills.

‘I'm glad you stayed.'

‘Of course I did.'

‘It would've been awful if you hadn't stayed.'

Heat gathering between their two hands, a film of sweat.

‘I don't want you to think …' she went on.

‘Shhh. You don't need to talk about it.'

The song ended, and Evelyn walked off the floor, self-contained, silent, and Adrian put his guitar back in its case and got up. She stood in front of him and they looked at each other, nothing else, and left the room together.

The bartender turned the tape off and began to collect empty bottles from the tables, the clatter of glass sending back a hollow echo. Alex sat very still, hardly breathing, his ears still humming in the absence of music.

‘They're going to kick us out of here soon,' said Susie.

‘We could go somewhere,' he said softly. ‘If you want.'

She hesitated, putting her other hand over his and stroking his thumb with her own.

‘I think I should go home,' she said at last.

‘Are you sure?'

‘No.' She drew her hands back, their fingertips still touching. ‘But … I think I should go home. I need to go home.'

At the bus stop he put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. ‘Susie-Sue,' he whispered, as the Bathurst bus arrived, filled with the lost and desperate flotsam of the night city. She climbed on board and rode away. Alex found the pole where he'd chained his bike, fumbled with the lock until it came apart, and kicked off, weaving along the road. In a final grand gesture of self-destructiveness, he reached his house and passed it, kept riding into the blurred and shining night, further and further south until he reached the lake, passing empty buses and street-sweeping machines spraying water on the road, grinding their huge black brushes, spinning in darkness.

It was nearly dawn, and he was halfway sober again, when he rode back along King Street and saw that he was, without any conscious intention, riding by the house where Chris and Susie lived. The light was still on in their apartment. He stopped for only a minute, one foot on the sidewalk, looking up at the window and thinking of their lives, of a deep and complex privacy that was going on without him, that he would never be able to enter.

When the bright young men released sarin on the Tokyo subway, the gas soaked into the clothes of the passengers. Many of them pulled themselves out of the subway and went to work, their pupils contracted, their breathing restricted, sarin leaking from their jackets into the office air. Others were lifted into cars and ambulances and sent to the hospital, and the nurses and doctors who treated them found their own eyesight growing dark, their own muscles weakening. This is mentioned as a risk in the literature on chemical incidents.

The girl with the braided wool bracelet who had fallen on the steps at Jarvis Collegiate sat up in her hospital cot and watched a resident walking away from her stumble suddenly, grab for the wall to support herself, and slide to the ground.

The young resident's pupils didn't contract. Her blood tests didn't show the low cholinesterase that would signal sarin, or the blood acidosis of cyanide. Her white cell count was perhaps slightly elevated. Some of the others who worked on the girl said later that they felt sort of ill, not exactly sick, but not quite well.

The resident had dyed blonde hair and long thin fingers and no known allergies or medical conditions. When she tried to describe the smell she spoke at first about exhaust fumes, and then about water and metal, but finally she could only say that it was not quite like that, that it was a smell like the absence of smell. The precise smell of nothing.

Susie was doing interviews at the drop-in at a church on College – not far from his house, she told him. He knew the place, of course, a little red-brick building with a low slanted roof, but he'd never been inside. All things considered, he shouldn't really have been surprised to arrive and find Evelyn, who seemed scarcely to have aged at all and was looking not especially priestly in jeans and an old duffel coat, coming out the side door.

‘Alex? Suzanne told me she was meeting you here. How are you?'

‘Okay,' he said nervously. ‘Yeah. Not bad. You?'

‘I have to go to a meeting right now, I'm sorry, but everybody's inside.' She swung a backpack over her shoulders and climbed onto a bicycle. ‘Call Adrian sometime,' she said, kicking off the curb. ‘He needs a peer group, nobody knows how to talk to him.' But she disappeared into the traffic before he could think of a response.

He opened the door that he'd seen her coming out of, and walked into a small hall filled with dishevelled men and a few women, lying or sitting on mattresses, a pile of folding tables stacked against one wall. There was a
TV
set in the corner playing
Titanic
, and some of the men were watching this and drinking from styrofoam cups, others reading crumpled copies of the
Sun
or
Employment News.
One man was sketching tiny painstaking patterns into an old notebook. Pinned on the wall was a bad drawing of Archbishop Romero, and pieces of cardboard with phrases written on them in capital letters. PLEASE SPEAK SLOWLY. I AM LEARNING ENGLISH. CAN YOU HELP ME FIND THIS ADDRESS? There was a strong smell of unwashed bodies in the air, cut through with overbrewed coffee.

Adrian was sitting cross-legged on one of the mattresses, talking gently to a man with a twisted, tearful face and unpredictably moving hands; in the kitchen, a woman who looked roughly a hundred years old was slowly cleaning a pile of roasting pans, and a frizzy-haired girl, probably the Pereira-Sinclair child, was sitting on a stool frowning over a copy of
Harriet the Spy.
There was something bizarrely domestic about the whole scene, Alex thought. Dinner with friends in Bedlam.

Susie was in a corner of the room, sitting on a folding chair with a clipboard and talking to an old man in a baseball cap. ‘So you'd say he's a close friend?' he heard her asking. The man shook his head.

‘Not close so much. But I'd say reliable, when he isn't drinking.'