Girls Fall Down (9 page)

This wasn't where anything began, of course, or for that matter ended. It was a nearly random piece of that summer in
1989
, an unfastened bit of memory. Alex had been the lead photographer at
Dissonance
for a year already, though in
1988
he hadn't seen much of Susie-Paul, or hadn't paid much attention. He worked part-time in the darkroom at SuperPhoto, and arrived at the office in the late afternoon during production week, developing the film and doing some of the layout. For the rest of the month he took assignments as they came from Chris, going out to clubs to photograph concerts, setting up portraits to run alongside interviews. This was maybe where he first learned to move invisibly through the room as a receptive camera eye, backstage at Ildiko's or the Horseshoe, the musicians sweat-drenched and giddy with adrenalin, their hands bleeding, torn by the strings, the blur of cigarettes and beer and hash, or the bands slightly higher up the scale who could afford lines of coke. The guitarists crashed out on smack, the skinny introverted vocalists who drank mineral water and stared at the floor, all of them pinned in the flash of his camera at this high wild vulnerable moment, the second after the applause was over. Alex crouching down in the corner, the watcher.

He wore earplugs so he could sleep at night through the non-stop party upstairs, or lay on the floor with his head between the speakers of his sound system, smoking pot and listening to his own music – cassettes that he knew to be just slightly dated, odd in a way that wasn't the cool kind of odd, Jesus and Mary Chain, the Violent Femmes, Dagmar Krause singing Brecht. He took photographs of the heating pipes and the baseboard, feeling their textures with lights and lenses; of the girls who sat on the curb outside, braiding bits of multicoloured wool into each other's hair; of his vials of
insulin and the drop of blood at the tip of his finger, the thick pads of Queen Jane's paws, the dresses hanging on the racks outside Courage My Love, their folds and textures; of the dirty snow in the gutters, streaked with mud and gravel. He was careless about his blood sugar; he knew it swung wildly up and down, that he miscalculated dosages, got times mixed up. He would go late at night, in the snow, to Sneaky Dee's, a narrow little bar that never closed, that smelled of spilt beer at dawn and served tortilla chips and coffee to derelicts all night, and sit in a corner booth and drink Coke and eat nachos, and forget again to test his glucose levels.

He could have gone to his parents' house for Christmas, there was no real reason not to, but he hadn't for years now. He could go back to a place where he was the invalid son, the permanent sick child, or he could wait here in the city. Because he did believe he was waiting for something, though he had no idea what it was. He sat in the basement late at night, listening to the wind, filled with inarticulate expectation, as if he needed only to stay here long enough, to be infinitely patient, infinitely open to the vacancies of the city, and it would reveal itself to him, would hand him something, something vital. If he only made enough space in his life, if he only cleared enough away.

Early in January, he was standing outside the New Moon Café on Harbord Street, camera strung round his neck, warming his hands around a styrofoam cup of coffee while a police car glided slowly past him, banners and waving arms reflected in its windows.

‘They call it Operation Mountain Rescue,' said Chris, coming out of the restaurant with a hot chocolate. ‘I don't know where they think the mountain is.'

‘I heard it's a guy's name,' said Adrian.

They were on the north side of Harbord, with the other journalists and the curious residents of the neighbourhood, and people going in and out of the restaurant for coffee and warmth. About halfway into the road, the police had set up a line of metal barricades, and behind them was the second circle of people, waving signs and
chanting, pushing each other, breaking into sporadic scuffles. The third, innermost circle was behind a wooden fence, in the yard and on the steep stairway of a narrow Victorian house with hanging plants in the window, a crowd packed so tightly they were almost immobile, sudden earthquake shifts coming from nowhere that would send some of them tumbling down the stairs or clinging to the banister. The people pressed up against the fence were pushing for space to breathe, their faces pinched with cold and pain. Somewhere in that third circle was Susie-Paul, who that morning was not someone he noticed especially was Chris's pretty girlfriend, a colleague at the paper whose reviews reflected a frightening interest in critical theory, a nice enough person overall.

‘It started out about six this morning,' said Chris. ‘At first you had the people from the clinic guarding the door and the anti lot pushing in from the yard, but I think they're all mixed up together now.'

Adrian, who was wearing fluffy pink gloves and a scarf with airplanes on it, sat down on the restaurant steps. ‘Sometimes I wonder if we just ignored them they'd all go away. Like kids with tantrums, you know?'

‘I don't think that's how they work.'

The owner of one of the little groceries had come outside and was taping a sign to his window, a piece of cardboard with the printed message PRO-CHOICE, PRO-LIFE, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! DEMONSTRATE AT QUEEN'S PARK AND LEAVE US ALONE! Someone behind the fence started singing ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children,' and a part of the crowd on Harbord took up the song.

Alex wandered for a while around the edge of the outer ranks, taking some casual shots but seeing nothing that wasn't a predictable demo picture, so after a few minutes he swung his legs over the barricades and pushed deeper into the crowd. Everyone inside the barricades was chanting or shouting, and taking occasional swings at each other with mittened hands. Alex was shoved from behind and ended up on his knees, but he realized this might be a more interesting angle anyway, so he fired off a series of shots, a baby with a PRO-CHOICE sign pinned to its snowsuit, a man waving a Bible over the heads of the crowd.

‘Brothers and sisters!' shouted a red-haired woman out the window. ‘All of today's procedures have been moved to the Scott Clinic. They
will
see all patients scheduled by us today. If you are waiting for a procedure, please do
not
stay here, please go to the Scott Clinic. Supporters, I repeat, DO NOT come over the fence!'

Alex pulled himself up on one of the fence pickets, shouldering a space for himself, and stared into the tightly packed mass of people in the yard, who were swaying slightly, struggling for footholds, a flash of pink hair near his shoulder.

‘Hey. Susie-Paul?'

She lifted her head and managed, with some difficulty, to turn in his direction. ‘Oh. Hi there, Alex.'

‘Not the church and not the state!' shouted someone into his ear.

‘So how's it going?'

‘Women must control their fate!'

‘I think I have a broken rib,' said Susie, wrapping her arms around a railing post and biting her lip with the effort of hanging on. ‘Otherwise I'm good. There are people actually underneath my feet, you know.'

‘Jesus loves the little children,' sang a woman softly, sliding down the steps and vanishing under someone else's legs. Somewhere up towards the door Alex could see the two policemen who had been caught in the crush elbowing each other and giggling. ‘Wait'll you tell your wife you spent the whole day pressed up against a bunch of women, eh?' one of them was saying. Then the radio at his belt crackled into life, and he lifted it, and slowly raised the other hand to his nightstick.

What happened after that was so fast, so unexpected, that Alex didn't register much of it at the time. He was twisting around by the fence, framing another shot, when he heard sirens, and then half a dozen police cars and a paddy wagon swept around the corner and uniformed men and women leapt out, formed a wedge and slammed into the crowd, pulling the barricades down and tossing them into the road, shouting, ‘
Go! Go! Go!
' Alex was knocked off his feet, face down into the pavement, his hands dragging against the snow and gravel as he rolled, blue legs and black boots pounding past him, and they
began pulling people over the fence and throwing them onto the sidewalk, forcing their way to the door. He saw a nightstick swing into a man's head. The man howled, his face ribboned with bright red blood.

‘Clinic volunteer!' a woman inside the fence was screaming, holding her hands in the air. ‘Clinic volunteer! Don't hit me!' Others were shouting now too, clustering into a corner, one woman sobbing. Bodies were flying over the banister, and Alex saw Susie-Paul clinging to the railing, her feet kicking helplessly in the air. The woman who had been singing was lying prone on the stairs, a policeman bending her arms behind her. He realized that there was a rough selection happening, that the clinic volunteers were not being smacked with the nightsticks but herded into the far part of the yard, and they themselves had understood this now too, holding up their hands before the police and shouting, ‘Clinic! Clinic!' Then a policeman grabbed Susie-Paul by the collar of her coat and yanked her up, half over the banister, and she gave him a wild look and her lips pinched closed and she said nothing, nothing at all. She folded her arms around her body and he lifted his nightstick.

It couldn't have been more than a few seconds, it couldn't really have been as long as it seemed that she was hanging there in midair; almost immediately, someone else was grabbing her leg and shouting, ‘She's with us, she's with the clinic, she's with the clinic!' But for a moment Alex didn't even think; he vaulted over the fence into the yard, half-emptied now, and ran towards her, and as the policeman let her drop he arrived below the stairs and she fell against him. He sat down under the sudden weight, leaning back against the bricks of the building and tightening his arms around her.

‘Oh Christ,' she said miserably. ‘There was no reason for them to hit people like that, Alex.' She clenched her fists and leaned into his chest. ‘They shouldn't fucking hit people like that.'

He tried to catch his breath, thinking suddenly, impossibly,
You are mine.

Someone was running up the stairs, unlocking the clinic door, and he heard a siren wind slowly around the corner. He could smell the sharp sweat on her face, feel the feathery edges of her hair.
You are mine.
He knew it wasn't true. But he was happy.

Adrian and Chris were coming through the gate. He touched one hand quickly to the back of her neck and let it drop, and then she stood and walked towards Chris. Alex wished that he had seen Chris hesitate for a moment, a flicker of jealousy, but he didn't. Why should he? Someone should have caught her, and Alex was nearest, it wasn't a problem. Alex wasn't a problem.

‘What the hell was that all about?' said Adrian, staring around the yard at the huddles of confused and trembling volunteers. ‘Did something actually cause that, or did the cops just have some kind of collective brain aneurysm?'

Alex got up, still feeling that strange shimmer of happiness that seemed not to depend on anything real. ‘You're okay?'

‘I hurt, but I'm okay,' said Susie-Paul, standing lopsided against Chris's shoulder. ‘I think everything's just bruised, not broken.'

‘Maybe it's legal to blockade a building till one p.m., and then after that it's a felony? Is that their thinking?' said Adrian. ‘I mean, I'd just like to know what went on here, because that was fucking weird.'

‘At least they arrested them. Eventually.'

‘Alex, are you all right?' asked Chris.

‘Yeah,' said Alex, leaning back against the building, smiling slightly. ‘Yeah, I'm good.'

They walked up Spadina, the four of them, and ate lunch at a greasy spoon on Bloor Street. Then Chris had to meet someone at the paper, and Susie wanted to go home and lie down. Alex walked to the subway station with Susie and Adrian, and as they went inside he turned, and then turned back again.

‘Susie-Paul? Hang on.'

Adrian waved and went through the turnstile, and Susie came back out the glass doors.

‘Can I take your picture?'

‘Sure,' she said. ‘If you want.'

So he stepped back and raised the camera, light pouring into the lens, and there was this picture of Susie-Paul, still a bit shaky, quizzical, her features outlined with shadow, her dark eyes on Alex, open. He pressed his finger down and the camera snapped, the last frame on the roll.

‘Okay. That's good.'

He lowered the camera, and she smiled and shrugged.

‘I own your soul now,' he said softly.

‘Really?'

‘Mmm-hmm.'

She paused as if she were considering this, smiled at him again and went into the station.

On Monday morning, two girls fell down just inside the front hall of Jarvis Collegiate, their lips turning blue, and as they were taken away to the hospital the school was closed and emptied, the students sent out to cluster on the sidewalks, uncertain if they would be going back in; and this time the television cameras arrived as well, leaning in to record the faces of the girls as they were lifted into the ambulance.

The hazmat teams knelt in the hallways, their swollen white hands lifting paper and dust from the floors. The girl in the stretcher covered her face, a ring of braided wool around her wrist, a picture that would play on the news again and again.

In another school, further to the north, the first girl who had fallen stood on the basketball court, her hair tied back; she dashed forward, grabbing for the ball, and felt her own athletic body as a betrayal, the movement of her breasts an intrusion, the softness of her thighs, no longer the simple child's body she could trust without thinking. This body that bled and ached and fell. She ran down the length of the gym, the ball smacking against her hands, dodging outstretched arms, heat pulsing under her skin.