Girls Fall Down (12 page)

Susie nodded and wrote something on her clipboard. ‘And does he know that other guy you were telling me about, that Steve guy?' Then she noticed Alex, and gestured him over with her pencil.

‘It's okay,' said Alex. ‘I'll wait.'

‘I'm nearly finished.'

The man in the baseball cap was holding on to a clear plastic cane filled with dried roses, petals of faded red and yellow and cream, packed tightly together. Nearby, a grey-haired woman was pacing in
tiny wired circles, strung out, shaking, oblivious to the world – crack or crystal meth, he thought. On the
TV
screen, the steerage passengers on the Titanic were singing and dancing and demonstrating their working-class virtues.

‘Filtered water,' said the man in the baseball cap. ‘That's what I told him. You drink filtered water, the skin problems clear right up. This lady gave me one of them filters for the tap in the rooming house, but the schizophrenic guy took it off because he thought somebody was watching him through it. Mr. Sandman, he tells me. Watching him through the water filter.' He shook his head. ‘You could write a book, darling, I'm telling you.'

Susie made a note on her clipboard. ‘So, is the lady someone we've talked about before?' she asked.

‘No – no, I guess not. So she'd be another one on the chart, eh?'

‘Yeah … you know what, are you going to be up at Bloor tomorrow? Somebody's waiting for me right now.'

‘Okay, well, thank the people here very much for the delicious meal, and I'll see you then.' The man tipped his baseball cap, then stood up and left the hall, leaning on his flowering cane.

‘Joseph's quite interested in the project,' said Susie, coming over to Alex. ‘And he's got a social network like you wouldn't believe. I could spend a year just mapping his contacts.'

‘Ah,' said Alex.

‘We can go if you want. I think Adrian's busy talking to Luis.' She pulled the door open and waved at Adrian, who glanced briefly away from the tearful man and nodded quickly.

‘Luis gets very angry at Thomas Aquinas,' Susie explained as they went down the steps. ‘He's an ex-seminarian or something. He'd really rather talk to Evvy, but Adrian can handle him. Me, I just wave my hands around.'

‘What did Thomas Aquinas do to make him angry, then?'

‘I told you, it's all beyond me. He's just like, fucking Aquinas, I hate the stupid fuck, and I'm like, sure. You bet.'

‘Maybe they had a fight about a girl.'

They stopped at the traffic light at Augusta, just north of Kensington Market. ‘Do you want to get something to eat?' asked Susie.

‘No, I ate at home. Just a coffee shop's fine.'

‘We could go someplace in the Market, if you wanted. I think the Last Temptation's still there.'

‘Oh God. Please, let's not.'

‘Your old house is a vintage clothing boutique now,' said Susie, pressing the button for the light. ‘But you know what? They've still got that crazy painting you did in the basement.'

‘They must be ill,' said Alex, though what he wanted to ask was why she had gone to his old house, how she had ended up in the basement there anyway.

‘How come you never did more paintings?' They crossed College Street and went into the Second Cup.

‘Because I suck. Taking photos is the only thing I'm good at.'

He ordered a camomile tea, wanting something as pale and bland and harmless as possible, determined not to be put off balance.

‘So, how are you?' she asked, stirring cream into her coffee.

‘I saw my ophthalmologist,' he said, and then clenched his nails into his hand, immediately regretting the words.

‘Yeah?'

‘I don't know. Nothing much to say. She's making an appointment for this,' he cleared his throat, ‘this laser thing, but I'd actually rather … I'd rather not think about it too much.'

‘Okay.'

‘The only … there's a small risk of a hemorrhage in the meantime. But that's treatable. More or less. And it really is a small risk.'

‘If there's anything I can do … '

‘There's nothing anyone can do. It's a bit like death that way.' He stared down at the hot golden liquid. ‘I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be going on like this.' He was starting to feel as if his identity was coming apart. The cool, dry, solitary person he had become was a real Alex, was perhaps always the part of him that had taken the photographs, but the hungry chaotic Alex that she had known had been real too, and seemed closer now than for quite a long time.

‘No, please. I mean, I'm glad you're telling me things now. You used to worry me so much, you know. You remember when you had that seizure on Bathurst? Seriously, I thought you were dying.'

‘Oh. That time.' He bent a stir stick in his fingers, searching the blank spot in his memory between the Bathurst streetcar and a hospital bed, the late spring night when his high-wire act with his blood sugar finally crashed. ‘Well, honestly, I don't. Remember it, I mean. You know, insult to the brain and all. But I guess I could have been dying – I mean, I could have died – if you hadn't been there. So I probably owe you some kind of apology.'

Susie picked up her coffee and sipped it carefully. ‘Less than twenty years late, eh?' she said with a faint smile. ‘No, really, thanks, Alex. I mean that.'

He did remember waking up, not knowing why he was in that bed but knowing he had gone somehow way too far. That whatever he had done, it had been partly because she was there, because she was all sugar and danger to him, and he pushed every limit when he was near her. ‘What happened, even?' he asked. ‘I mean, I know in general what happened, but I don't think we ever talked about it. Did we?'

‘I did tell you after,' she said. ‘I told you in the hospital. You don't remember?'

‘The whole night's kind of spotty. I'm sorry.'

‘I don't know. I probably should've noticed something earlier, but there were a bunch of us in this club – I was at the other side of the room, I think – and it seemed like all of a sudden you kicked over a table. There was just this crash. You were shouting, I'm not sure what, pretty loud, and kind of staggering – I figured you were on something, maybe. Or just really drunk. And it was weird because, you know, you were stoned all the time anyway, and I'd seen you drunk before, and you never got mean, so I was confused. Anyway, I thought the bouncer was going for you, so I took you outside. And I was trying to talk to you, but you weren't making much sense, or actually any sense at all, and then you just slid down the wall and started seizing.'

‘Fuck. I
am
sorry.'

‘I was still thinking drugs at that point. I didn't even notice your medic-alert bracelet till the ambulance got there. So I guess I could've done better. Given you some glucose or something, if I'd known what it was. Heck of a way to find out, by the way.'

‘Wow. I mean, I sort of knew about this, but – hell.' He picked up his cup of tea. ‘So, I never really asked you, why did you even do that? I mean, why you specifically? You didn't have to.'

‘I did have to, I think. That's what … okay, this is going to sound like I'm changing the subject, but I'm not.' She raised her thumb to her mouth and began to chew the edge of the nail. ‘See, I didn't tell you the whole truth about why I'm doing what I do. My research, why I do it. I've been thinking about that. It bothered me.'

‘Okay.'

‘I mean, not that I have to tell everybody about everything, but it seemed like … it's been bothering me is all.' She bent down to her shoulder bag, where it lay against the chair, took something out and slid it across the table towards him.

‘This is my brother,' she said.

It was a cheap snapshot, overexposed. Susie with a version of her hair that he'd never seen, longer and brilliant red, sitting at a table with a man in a denim shirt and glasses. He looked rather like her, though without the brightly dyed hair, of course; his features differently proportioned but the dark eyes much the same, his expression somehow familiar. But something about him was wrong, the strained effort in his smile, the way his eyes evaded the camera. There was a birthday cake in front of them, and a single half-deflated balloon pinned to the wall.

‘Actually he's not just my brother. He's my twin. Which you would think would be weird enough for one lifetime, but no. Because the other thing is, he has a major mental illness. He's schizophrenic, I mean, very seriously, for a long time. It's been relatively unresponsive to treatment.' She picked up the photo again, turning it in her hands. ‘This is our thirtieth birthday. It was taken on a closed ward at Queen Street. Good times.'

Alex set his spoon down on the table. ‘How long?' he asked softly.

She nodded, hearing the unspoken part of the question. ‘Yeah. He had his first psychotic break a while before I met you. When we were twenty, I think. Maybe twenty-one? It's hard to remember exactly.'

‘You should have told me.'

‘Oh sure. Because I was really comfortable sharing it with people. Because nobody ever reacts badly when you tell them you have a schizophrenic twin.'

‘I wouldn't … ' he started to say, but stopped himself; of course he had no idea what he would have done, and it would be stupid to pretend he did. He felt the whole shape of the past trembling in his mind, like a picture turning animated, in jerky stop-motion. Susie at the pay phone, up the street from the office, biting her lip. ‘Still,' he said. ‘Still. You should have told me.'

‘Okay. Maybe I should have. Anyway, I'm telling you now. So you see what I mean? I couldn't just say, oh, Alex is flipping out, someone else should deal with that. It was just – something I was kind of used to. It's what I did. It was already what I always did.'

‘Where – ' he started, and then thought that was probably the wrong way to ask the question. He didn't know how you asked this kind of question. ‘How is he doing now?'

She tore a strip of thumbnail off with her teeth, then seemed to notice suddenly what she was doing and put her hand down on the table. ‘I shouldn't have brought this up,' she said.

‘Is it … I'm sorry. I don't know what you want me to ask.'

‘I just don't want you to – I'm not looking for sympathy, okay?' She picked up her coffee cup. ‘Okay, short version. He's disappeared. But I'm working on it. I'll find him. It'll be okay.'

Alex frowned, running the bent stir stick in automatic circles through his tea. ‘I don't think I'm quite getting this. Have you talked to the police?'

‘You know what? They really don't want to know. You'd be amazed how much they don't want to know about, about crazy people. Like you're supposed to just, like it's a usual thing to just lose track of them.'

‘How long has he … '

‘Three months, give or take. After our mother – she had cancer, she died last spring. A little after that, Derek went off his meds, and he, he just got worse and worse, and then he was gone. He's been on and off the street before, and he hadn't spoken to either of our parents for years before they died, but he never cuts me off. Never.'

She put the cup down again. ‘He's my twin, Alex. He doesn't cut off from me.'

‘You mean he hasn't before.'

‘Let me tell you. When I went to Vancouver? He phoned me every day. Sometimes three, four times. In the middle of the night, whenever. He's always – he phones me, he comes to my house, God, I used to wish he
would
leave me alone. I mean, Derek didn't break up my marriage, I did that all by myself, but it can't be much fun having your brother-in-law going through the fridge throwing out all the food that's been injected with mind-control chemicals. But the point is, Derek does not cut me off. If he has – well, he has, this time he has, and that's got to mean it's really bad. I have to find him.'

Alex stared at the table and took a breath. He thought of not saying what came next, what was obvious. ‘You realize,' he looked up at her, ‘that he could be dead.'

She looked back, not angry, just very concentrated, very precise. ‘Yes. Of course I do. I know that he hasn't picked up his disability cheques. And it's not like I have these twin-magic superstitions, like I would automatically know if he died. But if he were dead there would be a body. There'd be an unidentified body of the right age, with the right dental work, and I do have a missing-persons report in. If he were dead, I think I would have found him. I think he has to be alive to hide this well.' One hand moved back towards her mouth, but she stopped it, and gripped the coffee cup instead. ‘I will find him. That's not even the part that bothers me. I'm just – honestly, Alex, I'm scared. This is different than it's been before. I don't know what sort of shape he'll be in, I don't know what to expect.'

Their hands were very close on the tabletop. She wouldn't ask him for what she wanted. He would have to say it himself. And of course he would say it.

‘I could help you.'

She pinched her lips together, as if this were something she wanted so much she could hardly agree to it.

‘Really?' she said softly.

‘Sure. I could come with you. I don't mind.'

‘God, Alex. Thank you.'

‘I mean, if you want me to.'

‘Yes. I really do.'

‘Well. Then obviously.'

He knew he was a bad choice, a foolish complicating choice. He thought of Evvy and Adrian, the people who understood these things, who would have useful ideas. But he knew well enough why she hadn't gone to them. Evelyn would have been perfect, she would have dealt with it calmly and efficiently and kindly, and she would have done it exactly the same way for anyone, anyone at all who walked through the door. Alex would do this, if he did it, not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was for Susie. Because still, even now, he would do anything she needed.