Girls Fall Down (33 page)

Megan turned. ‘What's your
problem
, Zoe? You in love with this guy or what?'

The girl looked at her hand.

‘I just think it's stupid, it's … what's the fucking point, Lauren? I'd rather go to the mall.'

‘You like him, don't you? You wanna marry him? The sick pervert?'

‘Oh, fuck you,' said Zoe.

‘I think,' the girl started to say, her hand held awkwardly in the air, and her legs began to shake; but Lauren glanced at Zoe and said, ‘Go ahead, then. Go to the mall yourself. We're
busy
.' And Zoe yelled, ‘Fuck you, Lauren, fuck you!' and ran weeping out of the park.

The man had his head between his knees now, his hands folded above them, but the circle of girls had been broken, the shivery current was dissipating. The girl wiped her mouth, tasting sweat from her palm. She had a pain in her stomach.

She stepped backwards. The man glanced up, and she didn't want to look at him but she did, the trapped grimace of his mouth, grotesque. Broken man. The dark hurt eyes.

‘Zoe's a moron,' said the girl. But she was moving, suddenly, drawing the others with her, away from the man, laughing and pushing each other.

They were moving away. She was taking them away. ‘God,' said Lauren. ‘That is so random, letting him be in that park.'

‘He was so
weird
,' said Tasha.

‘Yeah,' said the girl. ‘Yeah.' And she laughed, a strange high forced laugh, and walked fast towards the sidewalk, and they followed her. She was doing this. She was taking them away.

‘Stupid pervert.'

‘Sick bastard.'

And when they got on the subway she was thinking
wrong
, she was thinking that certain things were wrong, were very wrong, and she thought
somebody could hurt me
.

They could, they could do that, though she didn't know who they were or what they might do, but there was hurt in the world and she was just too close.

She was thinking
wrong
, she was thinking
I don't feel well
.

‘He was such a pervert,' said Lauren.

‘I bet he goes home and jerks off all night long,' said Tasha, and the girl laughed her high stretched laugh again.
Wrong
. And her own half-distorted memories of being pulled from the subway car in the darkness, and trying to understand what she had done to make this happen. Bodies falling around her. As if it were a war.

You could get hurt. People could hurt you. People could hurt you for no reason, to make you scared, to make you go away.

It wasn't right.

Because she
had
done something wrong. Or something was wrong, near or around her. But she had. And you couldn't get away with it. You couldn't. The man's eyes, black, his twisted mouth.

‘I don't feel very good,' she said.

‘What?' said Megan. ‘You feeling all upset for him? You wanna marry him too?' But Lauren looked at her coldly, this was too much. Megan never knew when to stop.

‘Shut up, Megan,' Lauren said.

‘I just don't feel good,' said the girl.

‘I feel … I feel really weird.'

‘Jesus,' said Lauren. ‘You look sick. You're scaring me.'

‘Oh my God,' said Tasha, her eyes expanding. ‘Did you smell anything? Is there anything wrong?'

‘I don't know,' said the girl. ‘I don't know.' And then she did, there was a smell all over the car, it was like roses, it was everywhere.
Somebody could hurt me.
And her throat started heaving, and then vomit was pouring out of her mouth, burning, violent.

‘Oh my God!' cried Lauren. ‘Oh God, oh Jesus!' The girl was dizzy, she bent down, nearly collapsing, her skin starting to itch and redden, and the others gathered around her but she couldn't make out their individual words, and then the train pulled into the station, jerking her back against the wall, and a grey-haired man walked over to them and asked, ‘Does she have an EpiPen?'

Girls fall down because they have come to know too much, and have no words for that knowledge. Sometimes girls fall down and bring chaos to the city, not just because of the bad things around and outside them. Sometimes girls fall down because of a tiny emergent good.

You should go home,' said Susie, curled up in a waiting-room chair, an old copy of the
New Yorker
lying unread in her lap. There was no expression on her face that he could read.

‘I guess.'

‘Or are you supposed to go to work today?'

‘I'm not sure. I think I took today off. I can't really remember.'

And he should have gone home, he meant to go home. There was no reason to think she wanted him there. He left her his beeper number, but he didn't expect her ever to use it.

It wasn't much of a way to leave, but he wasn't sure that mattered.

He went down into the dim lobby, and even here there were traces of the night, shadowy worried figures drifting back and forth in the darkness, lost relatives maybe, wandering patients, doctors who had been working for thirty-six hours. Outside, he saw another ambulance pulling around to the emergency bay.

There was a cab parked near the entrance, a warm orange light on the silent street, and he sank gratefully into the soft fake leather of the back seat. He did mean to go home. It was just that he could see the sky starting to fade from black to a dull lead blue, the suggestion of bare tree branches emerging, and he thought of something that needed to be done.

The driver looked at Alex skeptically as he stood on the shoulder at Bayview and Pottery Road, counting out the fare. Nearly morning now, the streetlights glowing pale and redundant under the wet clouds. ‘What you planning to do here, man?' he asked. ‘Nothing here at all. You sure you got the right address?'

‘It's okay,' said Alex. ‘Really. I know what I'm doing.'

A police car came speeding around the curve in the opposite lane, siren wailing. ‘I take you where you want to go, you know,' shouted the cab driver over the noise. ‘You tell me where you need to go, I be happy to take you.'

‘This is where I want to go. Honestly.'

‘You got something to do, I wait for you and drive you on.'

‘I'll be okay. Thanks, but I'm fine.'

‘I'm a good driver.'

‘I'm sure you are. I just, this is where I need to be, that's all.'

‘Things pretty crazy on the subway, you know. Better not rely on that.'

‘I'll keep it mind. Thanks.'

‘Your business, man. But you know, this very strange behaviour, I must tell you.'

He waited until the cab pulled away – slowly, and with obvious reluctance – before he began to climb the hill, fearing that otherwise the driver might come after him, furious with an insistent mixture of concern and the desire not to lose a fare.

Something, a raccoon or a skunk, had been in Derek's tent already. The sleeping bag was torn, half the stuffing pulled out; the opened tins of Ensure had been scattered. He pushed through the mess, leaving his gloves on, kicking aside a small pile of dirt-stiffened clothes. There were some bottles of water, some Ensure tins that were still sealed, but nothing worth saving. By the side of the bed he found a few ragged books, university textbooks. Physics, chemistry. An edition of Chaucer. He opened one and looked at the copyright page. Yes. About twenty years old. They were the talismans of Derek's life before madness, maybe the last things he had owned in the daylight world. Alex searched among the contents of the tent for a plastic bag – there had to be a plastic bag, there was always a plastic bag, all human activity seemed to generate plastic bags – and put the textbooks in it.

Maybe there was a health card somewhere. It seemed vastly improbable, but there could be something, maybe medical records, something with Derek's health number on it. He came out of the tent and looked into the first milk crate.

It was lined with more plastic bags, then a pile of crumbling bricks. From the old brickworks, he supposed. For a minute he thought there was nothing there but bricks; then he realized that there were two layers, and in between them a thick sheaf of papers, lined three-hole pages torn from notebooks.

Dear Mr. Kofi Annan, I am writing to inform you. FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT CRAP FUCK. the laws against the evil thing 1) avoiding
the touching 2) periodic table equated with hyposodium = GHB tranks. But he had the knife but it didn't go like that snick snick.

once upon a time there was a little girl

Derek would want these, he thought, and put them as neatly as he could into the plastic bag, beside the textbooks.

The other milk crate was filled with more books, water-bloated and smelling of decay. These seemed to be a selection of whatever Derek had been able to scavenge – a Gideon Bible, a novel by Leon Uris, two copies of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. He didn't think many of them were going to be worth saving, but he began to sort through them, checking to see if there was anything beyond the standard leavings of rummage sales. As he took them out and piled them up beside him, he noticed that there was something else at the bottom of the crate. He shifted another stack of books and saw a photo, an old snapshot, sealed in a clear plastic folder.

It wasn't a posed shot exactly, but a bit of a coerced family group, some aunt or uncle behind the camera marshalling the four of them together momentarily in front of a Christmas tree, two adults and two children, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, sitting on the carpet. It was the worst picture of Susie-Paul he could imagine (was she Susie-Paul then? He had never known where that odd nickname came from, though he'd always assumed she had come up with it herself – it wasn't her parents, he was sure of that. But Derek called her Susie-Paul, so it must go back some way. It occurred to him for the first time that it might have been Derek who gave her the name). Her eyes were half-closed from the flash, her skin blotchy and her face sullen; her brown hair was pulled back tight in an unflattering ponytail. She could not have communicated more clearly that she wanted to be somewhere, almost anywhere, other than this. The spectacled boy beside her was smiling, embarrassed; he looked scholarly and gentle, held a book in his lap. They were very like each other, the same hair, the same features, both wearing jeans and plaid wool shirts, Derek's in blue, Susie's red. Derek's shirt was tucked in neatly; Susie's was far too large for her, the sleeves hanging down over her hands. Derek had scribbled over his parents' faces with a ballpoint pen, so Alex couldn't make out
much about them, except that they were old to be the parents of teenagers.

It told him nothing, really. That she had been an unlovely girl who didn't like having her picture taken. There was nothing here that could explain it to him, what had happened to these children to make them so alone in the world together, to leave them so terribly bound to each other. Nothing that predicted Derek's long ordeal, or Susie on the hillside, his heart in her hands.

He touched the girl's face through the plastic, and put the folder carefully into his camera bag.

He sat under the bridge for a while, watching the edges of objects grow slowly definite as the light crept down the hill. There was some shelter from the wind here; at moments it seemed almost warm. But every safe thing is taken from us in the end, and maybe he was not so different from Derek sometimes, their lives a long training in how things went away. He came out from under the bridge into the open plain of snow at the top of the hill, and walked over to the edge of the slope.

It was a white cold morning now, the sky a scrambled mixture of dark cloud banks and sun. And someone had parked a bike at the foot of the hill and begun to climb. This seemed like such an insane development that he could not immediately think how to react, and by the time he had decided that he should go down towards this person, she was already nearly at the top, and he could see that it was Evelyn, in a black toque and duffel coat.

‘Alex, how are you?' she said, as she pulled herself up and stood. ‘You look tired.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Alex. ‘But this is too much. I think I'm finding this too much to deal with.'

‘I came to get Derek's stuff.' She looked at the plastic bag. ‘I guess you thought of that already.'

‘Did Susie call you?'

‘No,' said Evelyn. She dusted snow from her arms and took a breath. ‘Derek – Derek's awake. He asked the nurse to phone
the church. He's, well, I know him, is all. I've known him for years, actually.'

‘Oh. Susie didn't tell me.'

‘No. She wouldn't. She doesn't know. I, well, I've spent a lot of time working in the shelters. For a while I didn't even know he was her brother. But, yeah. After a while I knew.'

Alex felt his shoulder muscles lock. ‘Fuck,' he said softly.

‘I'm sorry. But he asked me not to tell her. I have to respect that.' He looked at Evelyn's serious kind face, and thought that she was in some ways a very disturbing person. ‘You should have said.'

‘I couldn't. I really couldn't. I am sorry.' ‘I mean, what, does he have a whole social circle that she doesn't know about?'

‘No. Just me. As far as I know.'

‘Why would he … oh, never mind. There's no point getting into his motivation, is there?'

‘It might not make much sense to the general public, if that's what you mean,' said Evelyn with a small shrug. ‘I keep saying I'm sorry. I really am.'

Alex lifted a hand and rubbed his eyes. ‘You shouldn't be telling me this, should you?'

‘No. I certainly shouldn't.'

‘You must know that I'll tell her.'

‘Just don't say that, all right? Just – pretend you didn't say that.' She tugged at one finger of her woollen glove. ‘He's in five-point restraints already, you know,' she said sharply. ‘I mean, he hardly woke up and they put him in restraints. But he was pulling the
IV
lines out, so I suppose they had limited choices.'