Girls Fall Down (8 page)

‘But do you like it? Is it what you want to be doing?'

‘It is, I think. Yes.' She ran her finger around the inside of the bag to capture the last of the salty dust, then licked it off, delicately, with the tip of her tongue. ‘To me, it seems like a good thing. I don't know why. But I'm surprisingly happy as an academic.'

‘That's good. It really is.'

There was something she wasn't saying. How did he know her well enough to know that? He shouldn't be able to tell these things, but he could.

‘Maybe it's not so different, what we're doing,' she said. ‘Putting together pieces of the city.'

‘Mmmm. I don't know if I put them together, though. I think I just … watch them.'

‘Well, that's all right. That's all right too.'

An hour or more after midnight, the rhythms of the city change, the last subway trains running almost empty, the night buses beginning their schematic crossings of the major corners; the streets still crowded where there are clubs and bars, and elsewhere quiet, single figures walking alone, the streetlights detailing their clothes and hair.

Before the final train set out for its run to Kipling, a man walked by the McDonald's inside Dundas West station, his pockets filled with sweet crumbling cookies flavoured with rosewater, and stood on the platform, his face shadowed with thought. In Kensington Market, a white limousine crept silently along the narrow street like a dog tracking a scent, gliding up to a house with darkened windows, a world of illegal need.

At Spadina, the police rolled up their yellow tape, the white powder pronounced harmless though of uncertain identity, icing sugar from a spilled box of doughnuts according to one report, though this could not be confirmed. The city's sadness left untreated.

Alex couldn't remember the last time he'd had to leave a bar because it was closing. It had started snowing again while they were inside, and the clusters of young people coming out of the clubs up and down the street were obscured by the white blur.

‘So where are you living, anyway?'

‘Danforth and Pape,' said Susie, pulling her red hat down over her ears.

‘Yikes. That's a long way to go this time of night. You should've told me, I wouldn't have kept you out so late.'

‘It's okay. There's buses.'

‘You don't want to get a taxi?'

‘I'll walk up to College with you. I'm fine with the College streetcar.'

The snow surrounded them, sealing them in a soft enclosure, so that anyone more than an arm's length away was part of a separate world, the traffic hushed and smooth.

‘It's not that I didn't think about you, Alex,' Susie said, her voice low. ‘All this time. I did. I hope you believe that.'

They stopped at College and Spadina, where he had to turn west, and stood on the concrete island where the streetcar would arrive, shifting from foot to foot. There was an edge of danger in the air, as if anything, absolutely anything, could happen next. He bent down so their faces were close together, his hand hovering near her shoulder – she was a tiny woman, really, though most of the time she made you think that she was taller somehow. He felt a rush of heat in his chest, a memory of desire nearly as strong as desire itself, the girl with candy-coloured hair who stood on a stool and wrote on the walls of his darkroom with a black marker,
Watch Out, The World's Behind You
.

‘Call me,' he said.

‘I will.' She pushed back a bit of her hair, this new glossy mahogany, almost natural. ‘I'll call tomorrow.'

‘Goodnight, Susie-Sue.'

She smiled. ‘I always used to know you were really wasted, when you called me that.'

‘I'm fairly sober right now.'

‘I know.'

There was no good way to leave, but he saw the light turn green and moved quickly, walking almost backwards and waving. ‘I'll talk to you.'

‘Yes. Goodnight, Alex.' Then he reached the sidewalk at the south side of College and the lights of the streetcar were arriving from the west, and he turned away, his hands in his coat pockets.

He had reached his house and was putting his key in the door when the red-haired man scuffled up the sidewalk towards him. ‘Excuse me? I hate to trouble you, sir, but I'm being held hostage by terrorists, would you happen to have any spare change, sir?'

‘Yeah, I must have something.' He rummaged in his pockets for change and found a two-dollar coin.

‘Thank you very much, sir. I wouldn't ask, only I'm being … '

‘Yes. It's all right. How are you doing?'

‘Oh, I'm doing okay, sir. I could be much worse. But I think maybe there was a breakdown in the system a while ago. Like a malfunction, if you know what I mean.'

‘Really?'

‘Yeah, because it was a while ago, I know that, but normally the cleaning systems should prevent that kind of thing. I think the government's working on it, though.'

‘I expect they are, in their way.' ‘Because you don't want that kind of malfunction if you can avoid it.'

‘No.'

‘But I'll tell you what confused me, sir. What really confused me was when the pretty people were falling from the sky. We need to think about that in an analytical way.'

‘Yes,' said Alex, suddenly so tired he could hardly stand, supporting himself with one hand on the brick wall of the building. ‘I'm sure we do.'

‘Anyway, thank you very much for the help, sir. Because you've got to add it up, you know? And when you get five dollars and seventy-six cents, that's a very good one, because when you've got that you can get a breakfast. I'll let you go now, sir.' And he turned and walked away, his ankles collapsing in his ludicrous women's boots, under the veil of the snow.

The Susie year, he sometimes called that time in his life; and he hadn't thought of it all that often, not recently, but there were pieces of memory, now and then, so bright and clear they were almost like fiction.

He remembered this, waiting in the parking lot behind the newspaper office, Susie and Chris inside, fighting again about something. It was a warm September night, the sky clear, the noises of the street at a distance. He sat down on the hood of Chris's old car and fished a joint out of his pocket, lit it up and waited. There was a steel band practising somewhere, and pop music leaking out of one of the student pubs, and if you listened to them long enough they gradually melted together into some quite new and original style, full of offbeats and strange harmonies.

He wasn't sure how long he waited. He never paid attention to how long it took, because he knew that she'd come in the end. That she always did. He'd finished the joint and was reaching for another when he heard the soft thud of the back door, and Susie-Paul walking across the asphalt towards him. His medic-alert bracelet flashed dull copper in the small flame from his lighter.

‘When's the last time you checked your blood sugar?' she asked, pulling herself up to sit beside him.

He passed her the joint, exhaling. ‘This afternoon.'

‘You gonna check again soon?' She took a drag and handed it back.

‘I'm not sure it's necessary. It was fine in the afternoon.'

‘Check it, Alex. You're working into the middle of the night. And you know you don't notice when you're going hypo.'

‘That's not even true.'

‘It's true enough. Jesus Christ. One ambulance ride was enough for me, thank you.'

‘I have no memory of this.'

‘Of course you don't. You were having a fucking hypoglycemic seizure in an alleyway off Bathurst, for God's sake.'

‘Oh well. That was like months ago.' He sucked in the harsh burn of the smoke. ‘Anyway, my brain's been through lots of stuff.'

She leaned back on the car hood. ‘Chris is such a prick sometimes.'

‘Mmm.'

‘Yeah, well. Never mind.' She took the joint from him and held it up between her fingers, against the dark sky. ‘So, I got these two press releases today. One was from the police union saying this year's Our Cops Are Tops parade is on the
27
th. Which, imagine them sending this to us, I just don't know. The other one was from some of the communists, a talk they're having about how great everything is in Albania. On the
27
th. What this says to me is that a frighteningly large part of the population is actively longing for a police state.'

‘Mmmm,' said Alex.

‘We could declare a day.'

‘We could what?'

‘Declare a day. You know, like an annual thing. We Want A Police State Day.'

Susie laughed. ‘No, it has to be more obsequious. Please sir, may we have a police state? Please May We Have A Police State Day. We could have T-shirts.'

‘A logo.'

‘Press releases from an untraceable fax number.'

‘I can quote you under an assumed name. You can be Ramona Albania.'

‘Excellent.'

He exhaled slowly, watching a small blue drift of cloud move behind the trees.

‘Hey,' she said. ‘I have something for you.'

‘Mmm?' He turned his head towards her as she reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a tiny origami fish, made from multi-coloured paper.

‘I found it someplace. I just thought you might like it.'

‘Hey. Thank you.' He sat up and took the fish in one hand, its fragile brightness against his palm. ‘That's beautiful. Thank you.'

‘Yeah, it's nothing much.'

‘No, it's lovely.' He passed her what was left of the joint and sat with the fish cupped in his hands. For a while he said nothing, breathing the scent of leaves and tar in the air, the night moving like syrup,
the slow stoned feeling that everything was surrounded with a penumbra of meaning, secretly connected at some deep level he could almost, almost grasp. She reached out and brushed her hand against his, the light touch moving through his whole body as she withdrew.

And then just as suddenly she was gone, dropping the roach to the pavement, the shades of pink in her hair shifting in the small light as she walked away. Up the street to the pay phone, Alex still lying on the hood of the car, watching her in the aura of a street lamp, glowing at a distance. It was always that quick. He saw her pick up the receiver, dialling someone. Someone else.

You can be sure of the presence of danger, but you can never guarantee its absence.

She cheated on Chris, everyone knew that and presumed that Chris knew as well; there had been someone named Gord, someone else named Mike Cherniak. Not Alex. Never Alex.

Some days she would flirt with any random freelancer or bike courier who came into the building. He could see her turning it on like a power switch, the shimmer, subtle but radiant, the way she brushed back her hair, the arch of her neck. And there wasn't any purpose to it; the next time the same man showed up she was likely to be absent and distracted, as if she had proved that this was within her power and had no more need of him.

Alex didn't think that it was the same with him, he thought that there was something different between them, sharper and more actual. But he knew he was probably wrong.

Inside the production room – was he remembering the same night, some other night? Did it matter? – he squeezed a drop of blood from his thumb onto his glucometer. ‘It's a bit low,' he admitted. ‘Not so bad, though. Not really.'

‘Lemme see.' Susie reached over and took the glucometer from his hands, studied the numbers. ‘You liar,' she said, pushing a box of Smarties across the desk towards him.

Alex rolled his eyes, but took a handful of the candies and ate them.

‘You need to eat a meal is what you really need.'

When Alex was fifteen, he had learned that he would be sick for the rest of his life, entirely dependent for his survival on hypodermic needles and bottles of clear liquid. Before he was twenty, he had been told that his statistical life expectancy was under fifty years – later, someone else told him this wasn't quite true; they told him a lot of things, but mostly that he would never be well. That his body had identified a part of itself as a foreign invader and destroyed it. That he could never be far from his insulin kit, that each mouthful of food should be scheduled and calculated, that he could not live like other people. That he had no choices.

It had occurred to him that he let himself edge near hypoglycemia just so that Susie would worry about him, would pay attention. But there was more to it than that, some clear wild feeling of precision and marginal risk, playing the numbers, jumping at danger and backwards, always escaping, always still alive.

It was late, past midnight, but Spadina was still busy, filled with the smells of food and car exhaust. They walked down into Chinatown, to a little restaurant with ducks roasting in the window, skin sizzling under a lurid orange sauce, and Susie-Paul ordered something identified on the menu as mixed meat, a pile of mushrooms, soy sauce and fried internal organs. Stoned and light-headed, he imagined what the deep musky tastes must be like, the feel of the tough bits of flesh between her teeth, salt and crisped fat. She speared a bit of unidentifiable animal protein and he shook his head.

‘God, Susie. You're eating, like, bits of lung and thyroid there. I don't even want to watch.'

‘Yeah, and you inject yourself with animal insulin three times a day.'

‘Which I'm not happy about, believe me. But it's not like I'm stuffing the whole pancreas into my mouth.'

‘Am I giving you a hard time about your food?'

‘It's rice and vegetables, what is there to say?'

‘I think it's morally wrong to be a vegetarian, if you must know. I think you should admit that you too have known sin.'

Alex looked at her sideways. ‘You have no idea, Suzanne,' he said quietly.

She picked up another piece of meat on her fork and bit into it, her teeth meeting between the thick fibres, a piece of a body, a piece of a heart.